Friendship under occupation

Ramzi Ajamiah, 17, and Issa al-Muti, 16, have been best friends since the first grade.

Jaclynn Ashly -9 December 2018

The pair can often be found with their arms wrapped around one another, wandering through the narrow, graffiti-filled alleyways between their homes in the Dheisheh refugee camp near the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem.

The teenagers’ friendship grew deeper after Israeli occupation forces shot both of them in the legs, causing each severe injuries.

“Our relationship is tied with a solidarity of pain. He is injured and I am injured. We have the same suffering,” Ramzi told The Electronic Intifada.

“[Our friendship is] like a stone. We have unity in pain.”

Shared pain

Issa was the first to be injured, at just 12 years old.

In September 2015, protests and confrontations with the Israeli army erupted in northern Bethlehem. After learning that his younger brother went to the protests, Issa hurried there to look for him.

Issa frantically searched for his brother, dodging tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets shot by Israeli forces. “In that moment, an [Israeli] soldier opened fire at us,” Issa said.

“I was shot with four bullets in my leg. My leg turned black, blood wasn’t reaching it,” the teen told The Electronic Intifada.

An Israeli ambulance brought Issa to the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem where he spent about three months – one of which he was handcuffed to the hospital bed.

Israeli bullets severed blood vessels in Issa’s right leg, causing gangrene to spread. Doctors were forced to amputate part of the leg.

Residents in Dheisheh held a funeral for Issa’s severed leg, carrying it through the camp and burying it in the camp’s Cemetery of Martyrs, where Palestinians who have been killed by Israeli forces are laid to rest.

It took Issa time to come to terms with his situation.

“I was devastated when I lost my leg,” he said. “But after some time I grew to accept it. I have more power than you think.”

“The [Israeli] occupation is the one who is weak, so I will never be weak,” Issa added.

Issa traveled to the United States to receive additional treatment for his injury in 2016. When Issa returned to Dheisheh, he found Ramzi, then 14, in the hospital. Israeli forces had shot Ramzi in both his legs during an army raid in the camp.

Issa remained by his best friend’s side during the month he spent hospitalized.

“I received treatment for my injuries, so now thank God I can walk. But it has been almost two years, and I still need more treatment,” Ramzi said.

The teen said his recovery was disrupted two weeks after he was released from the hospital when Israeli forces detained him in an overnight raid on his home.

Ramzi subsequently spent two weeks in Israel’s Ofer military prison near the West Bank city of Ramallah, where he says the prison authorities intentionally neglected his wounds, causing his injuries to worsen.

They killed my dream

To this day, Ramzi’s wounds still hinder him.

“It’s hard for me to work or hold a job because of my injuries. Especially during the winter, the pain affects me so much,” Ramzi said.

After being injured, Ramzi found solace writing poetry, he told The Electronic Intifada. Meanwhile, Issa dreams of becoming a musician.

“I love music the most,” Issa said. “Don’t say that my injury affected me much because it didn’t. What affected me is that I love to play football. I can no longer play football.”

The two friends were forced to drop out of school due to their injuries after missing several years to seek treatment.

“They killed my dream,” Issa said. “I should be studying and getting a school certificate.”

Palestinian children and teens who experience Israeli prison or violence often drop out of school, Brad Parker, international advocacy officer for Defense for Children International Palestine, told The Electronic Intifada.

“The course of a Palestinian child’s life can and often is significantly altered by coming into direct contact with Israeli forces, whether being detained in a night raid or injured with live ammunition or rubber-coated metal bullets,” Parker said.

“In refugee camps like Dheisheh, lack of accessibility further compounds the impact an injury has on a child and their family,” he added.

Constant bombardment

Despite their lives completely transforming in the few seconds it took Israeli soldiers to shoot them, Ramzi and Issa are thankful to be alive.

Israeli raids in Dheisheh camp are a near nightly occurrence, and have left scores of residents with temporary or permanent disabilities. Sometimes the injuries are fatal.

The latest child victim of Israel’s routine violence in the camp was 14-year-old Arkan Mizher. The teen was shot in the chest during an early morning raid in the camp in July.

According to DCI-Palestine, Palestinian ambulances were prevented from entering the camp, forcing a camp resident to rush Mizher in a private car to a hospital in nearby Beit Jala. Mizher was pronounced dead after arriving at the hospital.

Last year, 22-year-old Raed al-Salhi – a good friend of Ramzi and Issa – was also killed after being shot several times during a predawn Israeli army raid in the camp.

“Captain Nidal”

At the time, reports emerged that an officer of Israel’s Shin Bet secret police assigned to the camp, known as “Captain Nidal,” had threatened youth in Dheisheh that he would permanently disable them.

“He promised all of us that we would become disabled,” Ramzi told The Electronic Intifada. “It’s not fair. This affects our lives and it increases the hatred we feel inside us.”

“It’s continuously happening,” he added. “They target the children with their bullets. It doesn’t matter if you are a child or an adult.”

“They look at us like we are animals. When they shoot at us, it’s like a game to them.”

These routine raids in Dheisheh camp are meant to “break down Palestinian communities and families,” Parker told The Electronic Intifada.

“Living under more than 50 years of Israeli military occupation has created a hyper-militarized environment where disproportionate physical and psychological violence is routinely inflicted on Palestinian children,” he said.

Many of Ramzi and Issa’s friends have been imprisoned, injured or killed by Israeli forces.

“We are all under the occupation’s bullet. Those who are awake and those who are asleep. In the refugee camp we are all under the occupation’s bullet.”

“He could become a martyr,” Ramzi said, gesturing to a young friend who arrived to greet him. “Maybe Issa will be killed tomorrow, or tonight.”

Video by Jaclynn Ashly, Soud Hefawi, Alaa Amr and Hisham Al-lahham.

Opposition could get a boost as Modi looks set to lose state votes

FILE PHOTO: India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi attends a presentation of a joint statement with Russian President Vladimir Putin after their delegation level talks at Hyderabad House in New Delhi, India, October 5, 2018. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi/File Photo

Krishna N. Das-DECEMBER 10, 2018

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - When Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party won a landslide in India’s last general election, in 2014, it grabbed almost all the parliamentary seats in the heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.

But his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) could be about to lose power in the three states - results of recent state assembly elections will be announced from early on Tuesday - which would raise huge questions over Modi’s bid for re-election in polls due by May.

Analysts say a big loss for the BJP in the states would indicate rural dismay and could help unite opposition to Modi, whose personal popularity remains high despite criticism he has not been able to keep a promise of creating jobs for young people and improving the lot of farmers.

Indian share markets .BSESN .NSEI and the rupee INR=D4 have already turned nervous, falling on Monday, the first trading day since exit polls said the BJP would lose Rajasthan, with the other two going down to the wire.

Equity analysts said the surprise resignation of the Reserve Bank of India governor, Urjit Patel, late on Monday after a long tiff with the government could send the markets crashing.

“As the three erstwhile BJP states have a large agrarian population, the BJP’s drubbing could be interpreted to mean that farm unrest is real, and the much vaunted increase in farm minimum support prices haven’t yielded material political dividends,” Nomura said in a research note.

“A rout of the BJP on its home-ground states should encourage cohesion among the opposition parties to strengthen the non-BJP coalition for the general elections.”

The central states of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, and the western state of Rajasthan, together account for 65 of the 543 seats for the lower house of parliament. Several research firms have said markets could fall sharply if the BJP loses all the three states currently held by them.

Regional parties are likely to retain two other smaller sates, Telangana in the south and Mizoroma in the northeast, that also report results on Tuesday, the polls show.

The main opposition Congress party, led by Rahul Gandhi of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, has been trying to form a coalition of various regional groups, some headed by experienced firebrand, ambitious politicians.

Congress has already said it would not name Gandhi, who is seen as lacking experience, as a prime ministerial candidate, keeping in mind the “aspirations” of other opposition parties.

OPPOSITION GATHERING

Leaders of 21 opposition parties, including Gandhi and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, also of the Congress, met in New Delhi on Monday as they sought to strengthen their stand against Modi.

In a likely boost for the opposition, a federal minister, Upendra Kushwaha, said on Monday he would pull his small party out of the BJP-led coalition.

Media has speculated he would join Modi’s opponents ahead of the general election.

The BJP says the planned opposition alliance would be fractious, would struggle to find focus and would be riven by competing interests.

The BJP has also cast doubt on the exit surveys, saying they have underestimated its performance in the three states.

While analysts have been warning it would be a mistake to rule out BJP wins in all main Hindi-speaking states, they have also warned that the party has lost the narrative to an extent.

Sriram Karri, a political strategist and author, said the BJP government was losing its sheen because it was afraid to take “big bold moves”, like including fuel in a unified goods and services tax and cutting income tax.

Reporting by Krishna N. Das, additional reporting by Savio Shetty in MUMBAI; Editing by Robert Birsel

Could the Huawei arrest threaten Trump’s trade truce?

Razor wire is seen on a fence at the Alouette Correctional Centre for Women, where Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou is being held on an extradition warrant, in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, Canada December 8, 2018. Source: Reuters/David Ryder

By Emma Richards | 10th December 2018 | @EmmaRichards85

THE arrest of one of the world’s biggest tech top executives is certainly newsworthy in itself and has understandably grabbed headlines across the globe. But the extradition request for Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, following her arrest in Vancouver on Dec 8, has implications beyond just one woman’s legal battle.

The United States wants to try Meng over allegations she covered up links to a subsidiary doing business with Iran, effectively breaching US sanctions. The case for her deportation to the US has been adjourned until Monday. If successful, and Meng is found guilty, she faces up to 30 years in prison.

It’s not the first time the Chinese tech giant has had a run-in with the US authorities. In 2012, the company was identified as a security risk, and only this summer US President Donald Trump signed a bill forbidding the US government from doing business with Huawei.

SEE ALSO: Trade: G20 statements show US, China are on different pages 

Huawei is one of the world’s biggest suppliers of network technology that underpins phone and internet communications, but its close ties to the Chinese government have been cause for concern.

China says Meng has done nothing wrong and has demanded her release. But her arrest has ratcheted up tensions further between two superpowers already embroiled is an escalating trade war.

News of the arrest sent shockwaves through global financial markets that were just starting to recover after a dinner between Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping at the G20 Summit appeared to call a truce on their trade spat.

According to the Guardian, Wall Street suffered early losses on Wednesday following news of Meng’s detention.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (L) and Meng Wanzhou, Executive Board Director of the Chinese technology giant Huawei, attend a session of the VTB Capital Investment Forum “Russia Calling!” in Moscow, Russia October 2, 2014. Picture taken October 2, 2014. Source: Reuters/Alexander Bibik

Shanghai and Tokyo markets also experienced falls of two percent overnight and the sell-off spread to Europe, where markets saw losses of more than three percent.

It was a sharp downturn after an optimistic start to the week due to Trump and Xi’s meeting. The pair agreed to hold off on any further tariff hikes on Chinese goods for 90 days. And made headway in closing America’s US$350 billion trade deficit. The positivity from both sides following the dinner buoyed markets that had been volatile in response to the uncertainty of the tit-for-tat dispute.

But this friendly atmosphere appears to have been short-lived with Meng’s arrest once again shining a spotlight on the fraught relationship.

Huawei is a jewel in China’s glittering tech crown, being the world’s biggest producer of telecom equipment, employing over 180,000 people and operating in over 170 countries and regions. This year, it beat out Apple to move into the spot of second largest smartphone maker.

SEE ALSO: Are Trump’s trade talks dead before they begin?

The company was founded in 1987 by none other than Meng’s father, Ren Zhengfei; making the 46-year-old CFO’s arrest very significant.

While her arrest is unlikely to derail the 90-day truce agreed at the G20, it will probably make it harder to reach an agreement in the allotted timeframe.

While it appears that the timing of Meng’s arrest was coincidental, this is not the impression in Beijing, where the move is seen as a political play to create leverage on trade or cripple Chinese technology companies.

“Huawei is a symbol of pride and success in China, in much the same way as Apple and Microsoft are in the US. Many in China see this [Meng’s arrest] as the US trying not to compete but to disable its competitor. Others see it as another distraction to change the narrative in DC away from Trump’s legal and political troubles,” Einar Tangen, a China political affairs analyst, told Al Jazeera.

Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou (L), who was arrested on an extradition warrant, appears at her B.C. Supreme Court bail hearing in a drawing in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada December 7, 2018. Source: Reuters/Jane Wolsak

“Meanwhile, Huawei has been consistently singled out by America and its security allies as a national security threat – adding these things together makes this look questionable, at best.”

This drive from the US to stop Huawei’s sales has gone international with some of its closest and biggest allies being pressured to stop buying from the company. The governments of the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand have all moved to prevent Huawei technology being used in their future 5G mobile phone networks.

Meng’s arrest is another jab in a wider attack and if China feels it’s being unfairly targeted, it’s only a matter of time before they impose some kind of retaliatory measure, according to Kerry Brown, associate fellow for the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House.

“For the moment, it seems that there is no immediate impact but these things linger in the system,” he told Al Jazeera.

“I don’t think the Chinese would be so sophisticated as to just respond directly, overtly and explicitly. They probably will take their revenge in other ways, which are not so straightforward.”

Israeli press review: New poll shows rampant racism in Israel

Meanwhile, bill calls for increasing size of villages that can implement 'admission committees' to keep out non-Jewish residents

A man in the Bedouin village of Abu Nuwar in the occupied West Bank with the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim in the background (AFP/File photo)

New poll shows racism rife amongst Israelis

Monday 10 December 2018

A new poll by Israeli Channel 10 TV revealed that deep prejudice against Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, is still the norm amongst Israeli Jews.

Over three-quarters of respondents said they would object to their child forming friendships with Palestinian youth of the opposite sex, and more than half of Israeli Jews in the study said they would be disturbed if their child formed friendships with Palestinian youth of the same sex.

Forty-three percent of respondents said that they were disturbed or very disturbed to hear people conversing in Arabic in a public space, and 42 percent said they believe that Jews should be hired for work over Arabs.

Exactly 50 percent of respondents said it would bother them to have a Palestinian neighbour; half of respondents also said they would not rent an apartment to a Palestinian citizen of Israel.

Some of Channel 10’s questions were designed to replicate those asked in a CNN poll and published in November in an attempt to measure levels of anti-Jewish racism amongst non-Jewish Europeans in Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

To mirror the CNN question of whether European respondents were fearful of Jewish prominence in certain professions, the Channel 10 poll asked Israelis how they felt about Palestinian prominence in the country’s health care industry.

Thirty-seven percent of respondents reported discomfort over a high number of Palestinian pharmacists, and 40 percent reported discomfort over the prominence of Palestinian doctors and nurses. By contrast, the CNN poll found that 28 percent of European respondents expressed discomfort over the prominence of Jews in global finance.

Government backs measure to keep out non-Jews

The Israeli government voted on Sunday to support a bill that would increase the size of villages that may legally implement “admission committees” to weed out Palestinian citizens of Israel and others individuals deemed undesirable, Israel’s Channel 13 Reshet reported.

According to a current Israeli law passed in 2013, municipalities with up to 400 families may form boards that may bar others from moving in. Without any requirement to be transparent about the criteria used, these committees can deny an applicant admittance by claiming that his or her lifestyle is incompatible with life in the village.

Under the new bill - proposed by far-right  lawmaker Bezalel Smotrich and approved on Sunday by the Ministerial Committee on Legislation - villages with up to 700 families would be permitted to form such boards to keep out potential residents. The proposed number may drop to 500 or 600 before the bill is passed into law.

The legislation came under harsh criticism from Tamar Zandberg, leader of the liberal-Zionist Meretz party, who argued that the bill would result in more municipalities refusing to admit not only non-Jewish applicants, but also Jews of Arab ethnicity, disabled citizens and members of the LGBT community.

“Not only should acceptance committees not be expanded, but they must be abolished,” Zandberg told the ministerial committee.

Smotrich’s bill follows another recent effort to expand the scope of Jewish-only settlements inside Israel’s internationally-recognised borders. The controversial Nation-State law, passed in July, originally contained language mandating the construction of Jewish-only communities, but the provision was dropped before the bill was voted into law.

The original Admission Committees law was passed in order to circumvent a decision by the Israeli High Court, which ruled in 2000 that the rights of a family of Palestinian citizens of Israel had been violated when an Israeli village refused to let them live there because they were Palestinian.

Israel minister threatens Lebanon

An senior Israeli minister and member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet says he is confident that once the Israeli army has a pretext for a war with its neighbour to the north, it “will return Lebanon to the Stone Age”, Channel 10 News reported.

Responding to a panelist who questioned whether the recent alleged discovery of tunnels on the Israeli side of the border with Lebanon might mean that Israeli deterrence power has decreased, Construction Minister Yoav Galant threatened to destroy Lebanon itself – not only Hezbollah.

“I presume that when we have the reasons, then we will know what to do,” said Galant, a former top general in the Israeli army. “I propose that we trust in the IDF and in its power; we know what to do. That doesn’t mean that we want a battle or a war everyday. But if, regretfully, we get to war, we will return Lebanon to the Stone Age – no less than that.”

Asked if he meant Lebanon, the country, or Hezbollah, Galant said: "Both of them. It is unacceptable [that] Israeli citizens, Israeli children, Israeli women are threatened in our cities, and in Lebanon, it’s business as usual. When I say to return the Stone Age, I mean what I say."

When the show’s host pivoted to Galant’s political patronage, the minister affirmed he was still number two on the list of the Kulanu faction of the government, but hinted that he might switch to Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, since he shares its hawkish views on security.

"I never hid that my opinions on politics and security are identical to those of the Likud. And by the way, I’m the not the only one in the Kulanu party who holds those views," Galant said.

Israeli Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz similarly threatened to send Lebanon back to "the Stone Age" in 2014 and to "the age of cavemen" in April of this year, according to Israeli reports.

5000 Bedouin may lose their homes

Five-thousand Bedouin citizens of Israel may be forced off their land so that an arms factory can be built on it, the financial journal Calcalist reported.

In the government’s zeal to remove the residents, it announced the plan to the press as a fait accompli, although it has yet to be officially approved.

Instead of waiting to consider complaints against the plan, including from residents who would displaced, the Israeli Authority for Resolving Bedouin Settlement in the Negev issued a statement to the press claiming that the objections had already been overruled.

The citizens who may be displaced currently live in unrecognised Bedouin villages, as well as in Abu Qureinat, Wadi al-Mashash, Wadi al-Na’am, Abu Talul and Sowaween.

Representatives of the 1,000 Bedouin families who currently live in the northern Negev desert area say the state-owned arms maker, Ta’as, known in English as IMI Systems, never presented its construction plans to them, or made any effort to find an alternate solution.

When the families pointed out that their grievances had not been heard, the government authority said “an error in transmitting information resulted in presenting the present stage as if the decision which is very likely to be accepted, was accepted".

Belgium: How do they survived without Govt.

by Raymond A. Smith- Dec 10, 2018

Dec 10, 2018

(December 10, 2018, Boston, Sri Lanka Guardian)

In 2010-2011, Belgium had a political crisis that prevented formation of a government for 589 days. What may be most surprising, though, is that the Belgians found a way to keep their government programs and services running without serious interruption.

Belgians are far more divided than Democrats and Republicans in the U.S., split between a wealthier Flemish-speaking north with 60 percent of the population and a less prosperous French-speaking south. The cultural distinctions, linguisticantagonism, and regional separation between the two halves of the nation havelong made it difficult to create a coherent majority in a parliament full ofmultiple small parties split along communal lines.

But the nation’s long-running divisions hit an all-time-low when the prime minister resigned in April 2010 and no new parliamentary majority could be established. Round after round of fruitless negotiations went on for the rest of 2010 andmost of 2011. No faction or party was willing to compromise, nor could anysingle politician emerge as a unifying figure.

So what happened to the crucial work of Belgium’s government? Nothing much at all– things mostly went on as usual. The prior government stayed on in a“caretaking capacity” and the bureaucracy continued to hum along. As a reportin Time put it: ” the absence of a government makes little difference today-to-day life in Belgium…. Belgium deftly helmed the presidency of the E.U.in the second half of 2010, and the caretaker government last month headed offmarket jitters over its debt levels by quickly agreeing on a tighter budget.The country is recovering well from the downturn, with growth last year at 2.1percent (compared with the E.U. average of 1.5%), foreign investment doublingand unemployment at 8.5 percent, well below the E.U. average of 9.4%. ‘By andlarge, everything still works. We get paid, buses run, schools are open,’ saysMarc De Vos, a professor at Ghent University.”

Two Belgian scholars at the University of Leuven further noted that the government continued to make “legitimate decisions on urgent matters, such as complying with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) decisions to send troops to Libya, concluding deals to save banks, contributing capacity to support the euro, authorizing budgets for urgent needs (the prison crisis, shelters for homeless in winter time), and voting new migration legislation.” One of the major lessons learned, they concluded, was that “in mature democracies, a power vacuum is taken care of in a constructive, creative, and responsible way.”

The maintenance of services in Belgium was partly due to its extremely federalized and decentralized nature, with many tasks carried out by regions, provinces, and cities. (Much the same decentralization is serving as a buffer right now in the U.S.) But part of the explanation also lies in the healthy distinction that many European countries make between “the government” and the “state.”

Most Europeans understand “the state” to be the entity that represents a political community sharing a history and constitution, holding a seat at the U.N., and symbolically headed not by the prime minister but by a constitutional monarch or a ceremonial president. The military, the courts, and the administrative bureaucracy are all part of “the state” – and as such are apolitical and insulated from partisan rancor. By contrast, “the government” is the much smaller and more transient group of Cabinet ministers who happen to have support of a parliamentary majority at any time.

In the U.S., both in theory and in practice, the idea of the “the government” is stretched far beyond just the incumbent presidential administration to include the House and the Senate; the federal courts as a “third branch” of government; and also the huge bureaucratic infrastructure that runs the programs and services. Thus partisan tensions result not just in political stalemate but also complete “government shutdown.”

In December 2011, the Belgians were finally forced to end their squabbling by the emergence of the Euro crisis in the southern tier of the European Union. Although day-to-day administration had continued in Belgium, the caretaker government had been unable to make major new decisions or strike out in new directions. The threat of a collapse of the Euro forced Brussels – which is also the headquarters of the E.U. – to forge a consensus government, which has lasted until today. It may likewise take a crisis to force Republicans andDemocrats to achieve a reasonable compromise – though in this case, it will be a crisis of their own making.

Raymond A. Smith a Senior Fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, teaches political science at Columbia and NYU and is an investigator in the Division of Gender, Sexuality, and Health at the Columbia University Medical Center. He is the author of Importing Democracy: Ideas from Around the World to Reform and Revitalize American Politics and Government and editor of The Politics of Sexuality.  Courtesy: The Washington Monthly

Brexit explained: Could there be a second referendum?

10 Dec 2018

As the UK’s departure date from the EU draws nearer, we look at whether a second referendum is possible – and if so, how it might look.

No Brexit, No Exit From Brexit, and Nobody’s in Charge

The United Kingdom is in a mess of its own creation, and there's no way out.

Pro Brexit protesters demonstrate with placards outside the Houses of Parliament, Westminster on December 10, 2018 in London, England. (Jack Taylor/Getty Images)

BY GLEN O'HARA

 | DECEMBER 10, 2018, 12:47 PM

The United Kingdom is in a deep hole and still digging. Last week’s chaos was the culmination of a long series of blunders. Today’s ruling by the European Union’s Court of Justice, that the UK can simply and unilaterally reverse its decision to leave, has only added to the sense of crisis  by opening up a clear route to remaining in the EU, even after all that’s happened. Then the government stumbled again, pulling a vote on a proposed deal at the last minute after realizing it was doomed to failure. Britain’s friends everywhere are left shaking their heads. How did a relatively stable and for the most part well-governed country completely lose its political bearings?

At the heart of any answer is a clash of mandates. The 2016 Brexit referendum instructed the government to extract the U.K. from the EU. So far, so simple. But this was the first time that a plebiscite had ever instructed the House of Commons to act against the deeply held beliefs of its members.

The two previous U.K.-wide referendums, via which the country decided to stay in the then-European Economic Community in 1975 and rejected the “alternative vote” ranked-choice voting system for Parliament in 2011, resulted in decisions that most members of parliament agreed with. The potential conflict of sovereignties—the question of the people versus Parliament—was sidelined in 2016. Now it has blown up in everyone’s faces.

At the same time, the political parties that usually keep MPs in line are utterly divided on what should come next, while neither voters nor politicians are particularly impressed by either leadership. The Conservatives and the Labour party alike are divided more among themselves than with their usual opponents, the government and the legislature from which it is drawn differ fundamentally, and there are enough variants of a possible deal to throw each camp—Leaver or Remainer—into disarray.
As things stand, Prime Minister Theresa May’s proposed deal with the EU pleases no one very much. It relies on a two- to four-year transition during which the U.K. will follow most EU rules, so as to allow time for a deep and close trade deal to be drawn up. But there are two very big provisos lurking in the deal: the backstop and the future.

The first sticking point for many members of parliament is the requirement that the U.K.’s land border with the Republic of Ireland has to be kept completely open under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement that brought an end to decades of pain in Northern Ireland: Both sides have promised never to build any sort of customs infrastructure there at all. That led to all parties agreeing on  the “backstop” in late 2017, an arrangement that means if there is no trade deal at all by the end of 2020 or 2022 will legally mean Northern Ireland continuing in some elements of the EU’s regulatory single market, and the U.K. as a whole continuing to adhere to the EU’s customs union governing physical trade. These legally enforceable pledges will prevent any new border in Ireland but constitute a straitjacket for future U.K. policy.

On top of that, the hardest negotiations are in the future—but under May’s deal, they have been corralled into a 26-page Political Declaration that mixes grand aspirations with almost deliberately opaque prose. Most experts argue that Parliament is being asked to vote on a deal that could actually lead to a whole range of possible end points for Britain’s service industries, and on more specific issues such as agricultural standards, intellectual property rights, security, and policing.

Selling this deal to a fractured and very finely balanced Parliament has proved almost impossible. The British government cannot simply sign treaties and expect them to be rubber-stamped if they are either controversial or necessitate large amounts of domestic legislation. Leaving the European Union involves both. Earlier this year, MPs considering the official Withdrawal Bill insisted that they be given a “meaningful vote” at the end of the process; since then, they have asserted their right to amend the government’s statement to Parliament on what they propose to do if they lose that vote.

This might still have been manageable if the government possessed a sizeable majority in the House of Commons. Unfortunately for May, her botched 2017 election campaign left her a few seats short of a majority at all, and she had to turn to Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party to see her through. Their commitment to the union between Northern Ireland and Great Britain means that they will never, ever accept a backstop that treats the former differently from the latter. The Republic of Ireland has no border controls with other EU states. The backstop blocks any between Northern Ireland and the republic. And the Democratic Unionist Party would block any between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K. May’s own Leave-backing backbenchers are meanwhile furious that the U.K. as a whole might get stuck in the EU customs union.

May could reach across the aisle to Labour MPs, themselves divided over Brexit’s future. But here’s where the declaration’s vagueness is a critical weakness. There are more than enough Labour MPs who represent Leave constituencies, who sympathize with her attempt to compromise on Brexit, or who simply want the whole thing over and done with to save the prime minister from her own side. But most feel that this is not a soft enough Brexit for them—and once the U.K. has left, it will possess even less leverage over the process, so any promises made right now might mean nothing. Risking their careers for some warm words looks like a cold prospect.

The House of Commons could probably just about unite around a relatively soft Brexit—softer than May’s deal, certainly, and probably involving long-term membership of the single market for services as well as goods. This end point, currently known as “Norway Plus,” might well still be Britain’s final destination.

But the debate is becoming ever more polarized, with the high stakes forcing Leavers and Remainers away from the middle ground, where they might find at least some form of agreement. Leavers are busy demolishing what is left of May’s Withdrawal Agreement; more recently, Remainers have begun indicating that they will not settle for Norway Plus but will only ever accept a second referendum with remaining in the EU on the ballot.

There is no hope of a clean exit resolution now.If May does eventually push her agreement through, Britain faces at least two, and probably four, years of further complex debate that could bring the government back to its knees at any point. A general election also seems like an unattractive option.

The British have become wearier and wearier of their febrile politics in the last few years. Most polling suggests that the result would be inconclusive and return a House of Commons that looks uncomfortably similar to the one sitting so uneasily in Westminster now. What, in any case, would be the point? Labour offers only an infinitesimally different version of May’s deal, mixed with a series of utterly unachievable fantasies such as a customs union with the EU under which the U.K. would have a say in external trade deals or a deal on Northern Ireland without a backstop. The party is of course spared by the convenience of being out of power from having to actually work for any of these unattainable goals.

Forget Parliament. What about the people? Suppose that Britain’s Euro-enthusiasts were to gain the right to hold—and then win—another referendum. A sizeable minority of the country, perhaps nearly half, would deeply resent having their victory taken away from them by (as it must seem) an alliance of professional politicians and metropolitan Remainers. And that supposes that the validity of another vote is even accepted. Leavers might decide to boycott another plebiscite, throwing the legitimacy of the whole process into doubt.

The Brexit crisis has turned the U.K. into a bitterly divided nation. The referendum itself turned old against young, city against town, and England and Wales (which chose to Leave) against Northern Ireland and Scotland (which voted Remain). The worst of it is that the splits do not appear along “normal” lines of Left and Right, Labour and Conservative: The country is more fragmented than riven.

Given this confusing and angry mosaic, no result at all—leaving with no deal, a deal along May’s lines, Norway Plus, a second referendum, or indeed in the end simply remaining—can be ruled out. For now at least, no one is at the steering wheel, the crew are mutinying, and the ship of state is on fire.

Hong Kong fought 9,000 cyberattacks and lost $256.3m this year

By Soumik Roy | 10 December, 2018

HONG KONG is a thriving economy, which naturally makes it one of the top targets in the region when it comes to cybercrime.

According to latest reports, in the first nine months of this year, Hong Kong’s residents and companies sustained more than 9,000 cyberattacks and lost HK$2 billion (US$256.3 million) to hackers and cyber criminals.

Compared to last year, that’s a 55 percent jump in the number of attacks — and compared to 2012 figures, the first nine months of this year jumped 565 percent.

However, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that the numbers are actually much higher than reported.

It found that computers and mobile devices in the country sustained about one million cyberattacks on one digital security network alone over a period of three months from April to June this year.

Two of the biggest cybersecurity lapses report in Hong Kong this year — the one at Cathay Pacific and the other at Hong Kong Broadband Network — are therefore not isolated incidents.

There’s no doubt that cybercrime in Hong Kong is rising quickly. Both individuals and businesses are increasingly finding themselves more vulnerable to attacks — on their data and their finances.

Hong Kong Productivity Council (HKPC)’s General Manager of IT Wilson Wong Ka-wai told the SCMP that he believes its time for businesses to put more effort into protecting their systems and public websites.

Since there is no regulation in Hong Kong expressly stating that companies need to disclose breaches, reporting on cyberattacks is only voluntary at the moment.

As a result, most experts believe that the numbers are still grossly underreported.

Although large enterprise such as Cathay Pacific are at risk (increasingly), it is the small and medium enterprise that needs to be more cautious about cybersecurity as they’re usually ill-equipped to handle an attack and tend to be more susceptible to thefts and phishing attacks.

Just last year, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) issued about 54 warnings for phishing emails and reported on 56 cases of fraudulent bank websites set up as copycats to steal login credentials.

That number grew from the seven warnings about phishing emails for the whole of 2017 and 34 cases of fraudulent bank websites.

These simple tricks are usually enough to get SMEs to let their guard down and give away important information that can be used to break into their accounts and steal data and money.

In the coming months, Hong Kong needs to find more ways to simplify cybersecurity for SMEs and ensure there’s plenty of qualified talent in the market for larger enterprises — in order to protect and secure the country’s digital ecosystem and economy.

Immigration control & border security: Another distraction?

 Monday, 10 December 2018

From the US to Australia, and all Western democracies in between, immigration control and border security have taken centre stage in political campaigns. These issues are a 21st Century avatar conveniently discovered to distract from the growing public anger at the more fundamental problems such as economic inequality, human rights, global warming, political tyranny, social injustice and so on. This distraction follows on the heels of an earlier one, the so-called War on Terrorism, which has unceremoniously petered out without clear winners or losers. A brief historical background may help us understand these developments.
Neoliberalism and discontent

With the collapse of Keynesianism in capitalist economies and dirigisme in communist economies in the late 1970s and 1980s, the field was thrown open for the re-entry of neoliberal economics under the pompous banner of economic globalisation. A new and revolutionary wave of electronic and cyber technology aided the process of globalisation, virtually compressing the world into a global village with integrated economies and made geographical borders porous and artificial barriers meaningless. Economies came to be ruled not by the millions of Schumpeterian entrepreneurs but by a handful of transnational giant corporations calling themselves economies without fixed address.

The international managers of this global order such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO and Wall Street sang the glory of this new order as the only salvation to humanity to dwell in the Rostowian stage of ‘high mass consumption’ or economic Valhalla. The reality, however, has been quite different.
In the name of trade, competition, growth and democracy, income distribution was left to the caprice of markets, which only widened the existing gap between the rich and poor. The so-called middle class that thrived under Keynesianism slowly started disappearing, and societies split into the have-lots and have-nots. The ratio of 80:20 of the 1960s and 1970s where 80% of global wealth went to 20% of the world’s population worsened to 90:10 by the end of the century and continued to widen to reach 99:1 according to some estimates.

This growing economic injustice, in addition to other issues pointed out earlier, which are all linked to the ruling economic paradigm, created worldwide discontent and protest groups and under the banner of anti-globalisation demonstrated wherever and whenever world leaders met.

Starting in 1999 with the Carnival against Capitalism in London and Battle of Seattle in Washington, the anti-globalisation movement was threatening to spread worldwide to wreck corporate capitalism and its neoliberal order.

Some distraction was badly needed to turn the world’s attention away from globalisation and neoliberal economics. Bin Laden and his Al-Qaida came to the rescue. After the horror of the September 11th attacks in Washington, followed by George W. Bush Jr. declaring war on an undefined enemy called terrorism, all protest movements were taken aback and demonstrators faced the danger of becoming targeted as terrorists by peacekeepers of the new order. The military-industrial-congress-complex in the US and its counterparts in other industrialised nations became the guardians of this order and the War on Terrorism took care of any opposition. The anti-globalisation movement was forced to retreat and take a backseat.


War on Terrorism and Islamophobia

Apart from protecting the economic order, the US had its own agenda of expanding its imperial project of world hegemony. In the name of the War on Terrorism, that agenda opened its first chapter with the invasion of oil-rich Iraq and the bombing of poverty-stricken Afghanistan. These two countries that had nothing to do with the September 11th attacks were reduced to smithereens with the deadliest of weapons in a demonstration the US’ readiness to counter any challenge to its hegemony.

The consequence, however, was to set ablaze the entire world of Islam with an intense hatred of the US and its Western and Muslim allies. That anger burst into sporadic acts of violence in several parts of the West, though not on the 2001 scale, and were carried out mostly by a small fringe of Muslim extremists brainwashed by backyard preachers of Islam.

All such incidents, indiscriminately dubbed terrorism, helped the managers of the neoliberal order to distract the world’s attention from attacking the order and towards targeting Islam and Muslims. The so-called War on Terrorism sowed the seeds of Islamophobia. With the end of communism, Islam became the new adversary.

The victims of this wave of Islamophobia in the West are the Muslim communities that migrated and settled in that part of the world during the second half of the previous century, when Western industrialised nations were in need of cheap and mostly semi- or unskilled labour to man their factories and infrastructure projects. To these migrants, employment opportunities in the West provided an escape route from poverty in their native but overpopulated and underdeveloped lands. Muslims from Turkey, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and several others flocked to Britain, Germany, France, America and Scandinavian countries in search of greener pastures.

Although these Muslims were initially employed only temporarily, that temporariness, because of relaxed immigration rules and continuous demand for labour to meet high economic growth, became semi-permanent and eventually permanent, resulting in the growth of Muslim enclaves, notably in Britain, France and Germany. Yet, while wealthy nations were reaping the fruits of cheap Muslim labour, no attempt was made in any of these countries to integrate this community into the mainstream.

Voting behaviour in Western democracies such as the US, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark and Australia bear testimony to the fact that the far right is increasingly becoming popular and have improved their electoral position to become a balancing force between the centre right and left 

Integration and identity

Integration is a two-way process. While Western nations were expecting these migrants to assimilate into the mainstream, Muslim migrants in particular showed extreme reluctance to lose their religious identity through assimilation.

As a result, Muslim communities remained socially isolated, while public authorities remained negligent to care for the welfare needs, particularly education and housing, of these communities. As the Muslim population increased through new arrivals and natural growth, problems of overcrowding, unemployment and crime manifested disproportionately to the national average and maintaining law and order became a problem for authorities. Towards the end of the last century, as economic growth and prosperity dipped and economic difficulties became acute, Muslim immigrants, in the eyes of the far right, became scapegoats for all economic and social evils. The scene was set to place immigration control and border security at the centre of political platforms.

Centre right, left and far right

Between the end of the Second World War and end of the Cold War there were clear economic policy differences between the politics of the centre right and the left in all Western capitalist nations.  While the former was more biased towards supporting free enterprise and free markets, the latter was more in favour of a state-market mixed model. Between these two, the far right, with its ideology of national-socialism, became almost a political oblivion.

This situation changed however with the re-entry of economic neoliberalism under its banner of globalisation. The centre right and the left narrowed their traditional economic policy differences and embraced neoliberal economics. Any difference between the two is only marginal and both groups have become slaves to the market, the corporate sector and its international managers, the IMF, the World Bank, WTO and the Wall Street. Both sides cooperated to end the welfare state but at different speed and relegated the important issue of distribution to the market.

In the name of creative destruction, globalisation, free trade and competition, neoliberal economics has created unparalleled inequality, while financialising economic output, commodifying the environment and destroying social tranquillity.

It is this scenario in Western democracies that enabled the far right to re-emerge as a formidable challenge to the centre right and the left. The far right is a vigorous defender of corporate capitalism but its enemy are the foreigners who in its view are stealing national wealth and creating terror. Its obvious target are the Muslim immigrants and Islamophobia is its campaign chorus.

Islamophobia and traditional parties

Voting behaviour in Western democracies such as the US, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark and Australia bear testimony to the fact that the far right is increasingly becoming popular and have improved their electoral position to become a balancing force between the centre right and left.  The far right is invading into the traditional vote banks of established political parties. It is as a response to this threat that traditional parties have picked up immigration and border security as major campaign issues without openly condemning the Islamophobia which underlies those issues.

All three - the centre right, far right and the left - are in bed with neoliberalism and do not want to fight over the ills of its economic model. Just as Bin Laden provided a distraction in 2001 with terrorism, the far right now is doing the same with immigration and border security. How long will this distraction last?

Rebirth of anti-globalisation

The yellow vest protest movement in France against fuel taxes, which is escalating into a national rebellion against economic inequities, a similar protest in Jordan against unfair taxes, a demonstration against the G20 summit in Buenos Aires in Argentina, an attack on government buildings after the APEC Conference in Papua New Guinea for the non-payment of wages, demonstrations against global warming by schoolchildren in Australia and the migrant caravans from Central America are all indications that people protesting against economic inequities and social injustice which are re-emerging as global issues.

The grand failure of neoliberal economics was best illustrated by Greece only a couple of years ago. The so-called austerity measures endorsed by the IMF brought people to the streets, which had to be controlled by state terror. It is not immigration which itself is partly caused by economic injustice but a dubious economic model that is at the bottom of a global malaise.