Comments on reads 10/10

Jonathan Tobin: Global Hypocrisy Watch: Syria, Kurds and Palestinians

The assassination of a Kurdish opposition leader in Syria may lead to more violence as protests against the Assad regime escalate. But it should also serve as a reminder of the hypocrisy of much of the world’s attitudes about the Middle East.
While most of the world has been obsessing about the alleged wrongs of the Palestinians, few seem to think it’s worth caring about the fact Kurds remain the object of violent suppression in both Syria and Turkey. Yet as we saw this past week, when Russia and China vetoed United Nations resolutions condemning the crackdown against dissent in Syria, few among the globe’s chattering classes seem willing to condemn any nation in the world other than Israel. Nor do many seem concerned with the plight of any national or ethnic group demanding sovereignty or rights other than those seeking to do so at the expense of the globe’s only Jewish state.
The focus of global attention in recent weeks has been the attempt of the Palestinians to get the United Nations to give them statehood without first having to make peace with Israel. This has resulted in an orgy of rhetoric about the right to self-determination of all peoples. But the plight of the Kurds, who have arguably suffered far more than the Palestinians or any other stateless people, doesn’t move the international community. Indeed, the only reason this latest outrage committed against the Kurds in Syria is getting any attention at all has been because it comes in the context of efforts by the Assad clan and its Alawite allies to hang on to power in Damascus.

FP: Exactly the sort of thing which confirms my argument that declarations and delusions notwithstnding, the world is not pro-Palestinian or pro-human rights, but rather anti-Semitic.

Jerusalem: Stones hurled at Light Rail, bus

Jerusalem's public transport system under attack: Stones hurled at Light Rail in Shufat; none injured. Simultaneously, rocks thrown at bus near Old City. Driver loses control of vehicle, sustains light wounds. Police launch search
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Last week, two Palestinians were arrested on suspicion of throwing stones in an attack which killed Asher Palmer and his infant son Yonatan near Kiryat Arba. Police are checking whether the two are also behind 17 other cases of stones hurled at vehicles.

FP: Let’s give them a state.

PowerLine: The lonesome death of TiZA

We’ve written a lot about the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy K-8 public charter school in suburban St. Paul. Given its recent demise, we can write of it in the past tense. It was a school that appears to have been operating illegally at taxpayer expense. You might have said that the school was Islamic in all but name, except that even its name was Islamic.
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According to the department, TiZA’s departure from the straight and narrow came as a surprise. The department sounded a little bit like Captain Renault in Casblanca. It was shocked, shocked to discover that, when its back was turned, Islam had been taught at a school headed by an imam and named for a great Muslim conqueror. Even Inspector Clouseau might have been able to crack this case, at least with a little help from Katherine Kersten.

FP: As I keep arguing, the problem is not the Islamists, it’s the West’s failure to realize the dangers of Islamist infiltration and defend itself properly.

Financial world dominated by a few deep pockets

Conventional wisdom says a few sticky, fat fingers control a disproportionate slice of the world economy’s pie. A new analysis suggests that the conventional wisdom is right on the money.
Diagramming the relationships between more than 43,000 corporations reveals a tightly connected core of top economic actors. In 2007, a mere 147 companies controlled nearly 40 percent of the monetary value of all transnational corporations, researchers report in a paper published online July 28 at arXiv.org. …This network takes on a bowtie shape, with a large number of diffuse actors in the wings and a few major players tangled up in the tie’s knot. So while it’s true that ownership of publicly held corporations is broadly distributed, says complex systems scientist James Glattfelder, a coauthor of the new work, “take a step back and it’s all flowing into the same few hands.”

FP: Like communism, capitalism has its own built-in seeds for self-destruction, one of which is stratospheric concentration of corporate wealth which ends up in kleptocratic alliance with a (corrupt) political system, resulting in the corporate welfare state. We see its consequences today. I recommend 9 Wall Street Execs Who Cashed In on the Crisis which relates their hauls of hundreds of millions to the hundreds of billions in taxpayers’ bailouts. No society can withstand this.