Saturday, November 28, 2015

Is Saudi Arabia Changing?

Is Saudi Arabia changing?  Thomas L. Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times thinks so, after spending an  evening talking with Mohammed bin Salman.

Friedman, in whom hope springs eternal, during a visit to Saud Arabia, sensed a great reservoir of energy for change, coming from a large young population, many Saudi educated in the United States, and a great enthusiasm for facebook and twitter.

"What’s been missing", writes Friedman,  "was a leadership ready to channel this energy into reform. Enter the new King Salman’s son, Mohammed bin Salman, the 30-year-old deputy crown prince, who, along with the moderate crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef, has embarked on a mission to transform how Saudi Arabia is governed."

Friedman's article is printed below.  Form your own opinion about how the 30-year-old deputy crown prince would "transform how Saudi Arabis is governed."  Grounds for optimism are slight.

One discouraging thing to note is that the deputy crown prince is also the Minister of Defence of theThe Royal Saudi Armed Forces.  In that capacity, this 30-year-old lad is in charge of the genocidal bombing of Yemen.  There is no strategic advantage to Saudi Arabia in this war against Yemen; Yemen poses no threat to Mohammad's government.  Mohammad alleges that Iran backs the Yemen opposition but with the complete blockade of Yemen by the Saudi navy it is hard to see how Iran can provide vital aide.

The genocidal bombing is obviously carried out to consolidate new King Salmon's standing with the ultra-conservative clergy.  That is not a good model for change, if change is desired.

For more bad news on Yemen, see

Emirates Secretly Sends Colombian Mercenaries to Yemen Fight.

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The New York Times
Letter From Saudi Arabia
NOV. 25, 2015 346 

Thomas L. Friedman


RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi Arabia is a country that is easier to write about from afar, where you can just tee off on the place as a source of the most austere, antipluralistic version of Islam — the most extreme versions of which have been embraced by the Islamic State, or ISIS. What messes me up is when I go there and meet people I really like and I see intriguing countertrends.

Last week I came here looking for clues about the roots of ISIS, which has drawn some 1,000 Saudi youth to its ranks. I won’t pretend to have penetrated the mosques of bearded young men, steeped in Salafist/Wahhabi Islam, who don’t speak English and whence ISIS draws recruits. I know, though, that the conservative clergy is still part of the ruling bargain here — some of the most popular Twitter voices are religious firebrands — and those religious leaders still run the justice system and sentence liberal bloggers to flogging, and they’re still in denial about how frustrated the world is with the ideology they’ve exported.

But I also ran into something I didn’t know: Something is stirring in this society. This is not your grandfather’s Saudi Arabia. “Actually, it’s not even my father’s Saudi Arabia anymore — it is not even my generation’s Saudi Arabia anymore,” the country’s 52-year-old foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, said to me.

For instance, I was hosted by the King Salman Youth Center, an impressive education foundation that, among other things, has been translating Khan Academy videos into Arabic. It invited me to give a lecture on how big technological forces are affecting the workplace. I didn’t know what to expect, but more than 500 people showed up, filling the hall, roughly half of them women who sat in their own sections garbed in traditional black robes. There was blowback on Twitter as to why a columnist who’s been critical of Saudi Arabia’s export of Salafist ideology should be given any platform. But the reception to my talk (I was not paid) was warm, and the questions from the audience were probing and insightful about how to prepare their kids for the 21st century.

It appears that conservatives here have a lot more competition now for the future identity of this country, thanks to several converging trends. First, most of Saudi Arabia is younger than 30. Second, a decade ago, King Abdullah said he’d pay the cost for any Saudi who wanted to study abroad. That’s resulted in 200,000 Saudis studying overseas today (including 100,000 in America), and now 30,000 a year are coming back with Western degrees and joining the labor force. You now see women in offices everywhere, and several senior officials whispered to me how often the same conservatives who decry women in the workplace quietly lobby them to get their daughters into good schools or jobs.

Finally, just as this youth bulge exploded here, so did Twitter and YouTube — a godsend for a closed society. Young Saudis are using Twitter to talk back to the government and to converse with one another on the issues of the day, producing more than 50 million tweets per month.

What’s been missing was a leadership ready to channel this energy into reform. Enter the new King Salman’s son, Mohammed bin Salman, the 30-year-old deputy crown prince, who, along with the moderate crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef, has embarked on a mission to transform how Saudi Arabia is governed.
Mohammed bin Salman.CreditKenzo Tribouillard/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

I spent an evening with Mohammed bin Salman at his office, and he wore me out. With staccato energy bursts, he laid out in detail his plans. His main projects are an online government dashboard that will transparently display the goals of each ministry, with monthly K.P.I.s — key performance indicators — for which each minister will be held accountable. His idea is to get the whole country engaged in government performance. Ministers tell you: Since Mohammed arrived, big decisions that took two years to make now happen in two weeks.

“The key challenges are our overdependence on oil and the way we prepare and spend our budgets,” Mohammed explained. His plan is to reduce subsidies to wealthy Saudis, who won’t get cheap gas, electricity or water anymore, possibly establish a value-added tax and sin taxes on cigarettes and sugary drinks, and both privatize and tax mines and undeveloped lands in ways that can unlock billions — so even if oil falls to $30 a barrel, Riyadh will have enough revenues to keep building the country without exhausting its savings. He’s also creating incentives for Saudis to leave government and join the private sector.

“Seventy percent of Saudis are under age 30, and their perspective is different from the other 30 percent,” said Mohammed. “I am working to create for them the country they want to be living in in the future.”

Is this a mirage or the oasis? I don’t know. Will it produce a more open Saudi Arabia or a more efficient conservative Saudi Arabia? I don’t know. It definitely bears watching, though. “ “I’ve never been more optimistic,” Mohammed Abdullah Aljadaan, chairman of the Saudi Capital Market Authority, told me. “We have a pulse that we’ve never seen before, and we have a [role] model in government we thought we’d never see.”

Bottom line: There are still dark corners here exporting intolerant ideas. But they seem to now have real competition from both the grass roots and a leadership looking to build its legitimacy around performance, not just piety or family name. As one Saudi educator said to me, “There is still resistance to change,” but there is now much more “resistance to the resistance.”

Mohammed has had the important backing of his father, King Salman, who has replaced both the key health and housing ministers with nonroyal business executives as part of a broader shift to professionalize the government and stimulate the private sector to take a bigger role in the economy. The new health minister was the most important C.E.O. in the country, Khalid al-Falih, who was running the national oil company, Aramco.

Streamlining government, Mohammed said, is vital to “help us fight corruption,” which “is one of our main challenges.” Moreover, only by phasing out subsidies and raising domestic energy prices, he added, can Saudi Arabia one day install “nuclear power generation or solar power generation” and make them competitive in the local market. That is badly needed so that more Saudi oil can be exported rather than consumed at home, he said.

But this will all be tricky. Saudi workers pay no income tax. “Our society does not accept taxes; [citizens] are not used to them,” said Mohammed. So the fact that the government may be increasing taxes in some way, shape or form could have political ramifications: Will the leaders hear declarations of “no taxation without representation”?

How far things will go in that direction — Saudi Arabia already has municipal elections where women can run and vote — is unclear. But the new government does seem to intuit that to the extent that its welfare state has to be shrunk, because of the falling price of oil, its performance and responsiveness have to rise.

“A government that is not a part of the society and not representing them, it is impossible that it will remain,” said Mohammed. “We saw that in the Arab Spring. The governments that survived are only those that are connected to their people. People misunderstand our monarchy. It is not like Europe. It is a tribal form of monarchy, with many tribes and subtribes and regions connecting to the top.” Their wishes and interests have to be taken into account. “The king cannot just wake up and decide to do something.”

There were other little things that caught my eye on this visit — like the Western symphony orchestra playing on Saudi state-run television one afternoon and the collection of contemporary paintings by Saudi artists, including one of a Saudi woman by a Saudi woman, on display in the Ministry of Information.

As for ISIS, Mohammed disputed that it is a product of Saudi religious thinking, arguing that it was in fact a counterreaction to the brutalization of Iraqi Sunnis by the Iranian-directed Shiite-led government in Baghdad of Nouri al-Maliki and to the crushing of Syrian Sunnis by the Iranian-backed government in Damascus.

[Per contra, see

in this blog.]

  “There was no [ISIS] before America departed from Iraq. And then America leaves and Iran enters, and then ISIS appears,” he said.

He complained that at a time when ISIS is blowing up mosques in Saudi Arabia in an effort to destabilize the regime, the world is accusing Saudi Arabia of inspiring ISIS: “The [ISIS] terrorists are telling me that I am not a Muslim. And the world is telling me I am a terrorist.” [Blog author's comment:  ISIS and Saudi Arabia are Wahhabist States than take the literal interpretations of the Quran with greater seriousness than any other group of people. Their mode of punishment is similar, though ISIS is more extrem.  ISIS is clearly a terrorist organization, though with many members with honest religious convictions. Saud citizens have contributed millions to terrorist Salafi fighters in Syria, also Wahhabist, are hoping to establish a Wahhabist government there.  The Saud are ,to that extent, a teoerist organization and should be listed as such by the US.] government.

This is the legacy, though, of decades of one part of the Saudi government and society promoting Salafist Islam and the other part working with the West to curb jihadists. As I said, the world has been frustrated with that dichotomy.

Mohammed argued that the ISIS narrative is beamed directly to Saudi youth via Twitter, and that the message is: “The West is trying to enforce its agenda on you — and the Saudi government is helping them — and Iran is trying to colonize the Arab world. So we — ISIS — are defending Islam.”

He added: “We don’t blame the West for misreading us. It is partly our fault. We don’t explain our situation. The world is changing rapidly, and we need to reprioritize to be with the world. Today the world is different. You cannot be isolated from the world. The world must know what is going on in your neighborhood, and we must know what is going on in the world — [it’s] a global village.”

In Yemen, a Saudi-led Gulf coalition has been fighting a coalition of Houthi militants and rebels loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who are backed by Iran. The rebels pushed the official Yemeni government out of the capital, Sana, in March and the Saudi coalition is trying to restore it to power. So far, the U.N. reports, some 5,700 people have been killed, many of them civilians. Saudi officials made clear to me that they are ready for a negotiated solution, and don’t want to be stuck in a quagmire there, but that the Houthis will get serious only if they keep losing ground, as they have been.

“The other side has trouble reaching a political consensus,” said Mohammed, who is also defense minister. “But whenever they sustain loses on the ground and international pressure, they get serious [about negotiating]. We are trying to bring this to an end.”

Like just about every official I spoke with on this trip to the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, Mohammed voiced a desire for America not to abandon the region. “There are times when there is a leader and not a leader [in the world], and when there are no leaders, chaos will ensue.”

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The Saud Royal Armed Services.  Per Wikipedia: 
 In 2012 the armed forces had the following personnel: the army, 75,000; Royal Saudi Air Force, 20,000; air defense, 16,000; Royal Saudi Navy, 13,500 (including 3,000 marines); and the SANG had 75,000 active soldiers and 25,000 tribal levies.[6] In addition, there is a military intelligence service, the General Intelligence Presidency (GIP).
All of the Saud Armed Services is devoted to protecting the Kingdom, except the airplanes, which are on genocidal missions in Yemen. None of the many ground troops are made available to war on ISIS.  The deputy crown prince gave Friedman no explanation.

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YEMEN OVER THE THANKSGIVING WEEK:









 CO-CONSPIRITORS






Monday, November 23, 2015

Thanksgiving Dinner with these studly guys

These studly guys . .


. . . deprive women of all rights.  Why?  What moves them?  What goes on in their heart of hearts?  Why do they ignore the introspective demand of jihad?

It is journalistic jargon to refer to the Islamic State as an "extremist" group.  The pictured guys are religious, carrying out the Muslim duty of jihad as they understand it, as prescribed in the Quran.  If we don't see them as religious, motivated by impulses similar to the impulses that motivate Baptists at revival meetings even today -- that cause preachers in a Des Moines Republican rally to stoutly declare that Gays should be killed -- we will never understand them and their motivations, nor how to live with them.  They are out kith and kin.  They share Thanksgiving dinner with us.  We must invite their women to the dinner table, even though it makes for an uncomfortable meal.


Thursday, November 12, 2015

The Genocide of Rohingyans: Patriotism is the world's most powerful aphrodisiac

It does not matter what religion you profess, what economic theory governs you, when something universal lights a spark, you will kill whom you see as your enemy.

"Patriotism" is a generic name for the spark.  Patriotism is the most powerful of human emotions, and the most overlooked by psychologists.  It is not even mentioned on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of he APA.

Until we find a powerful alternative to patriotism, we will will continue to kill our kith and kin.

Patriotism is the world's most powerful aphrodisiac: the more we kill, the more we give birth to.

I would like to know how to end the so-far eternal cycle.

Mobs of young Buddhist men on motorcycles roamed the streets of Lashio, Myanmar, on Wednesday, brandishing sticks and metal rods and throwing rocks. Photo courtesy Gamunu Amarasinghe/Associated Press  Columbia Telegaph

Dalai Lama tells Suu Kyi to do more to protect Rohingya - Al Jazeera English
HUMANITARIAN CRISES
Myanmar's Nobel Peace laureate urged to oppose persecution of Muslim minority that has led to mass migration crisis.28 May 2015 13:53 GMT | Humanitarian crises, Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar, Asia

Thousands of Rohingya migrants are feared trapped in boats after fleeing Myanmar [AFP]

Thousands of Rohingya migrants are feared trapped in boats after fleeing Myanmar [AFP]The Dalai Lama has urged fellow Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, a main opposition leader in Myanmar, to do more to help protect the persecuted Muslim Rohingya minority in her country amid a worsening migration crisis.Despite thousands of Rohingya fleeing on harrowing boat journeys to Southeast Asia to escape a wave of deadly attacks and discriminatory treatment by the country's Buddhist majority, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has yet to speak out against their plight.The Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader said on Thursday she must voice her opposition to the persecution, adding that he had already appealed twice to her in person since 2012, when deadly sectarian violence in Myanmar's Rakhine state pitted the Rohingya against local Buddhists, to do more on their behalf."It's very sad. In the Burmese (Myanmar) case I hope Aung San Suu Kyi, as a Nobel laureate, can do something," he told The Australian newspaper in an interview in advance of a visit to Australia next week."I met her two times, first in London and then the Czech Republic. I mentioned about this problem and she told me she found some difficulties, that things were not simple but very complicated. But in spite of that I feel she can do something," he added.Analysts have attributed her silence to fears about alienating voters in the lead-up to elections set for November.Global spotlightThe Rohingya crisis was thrown into the international spotlight this month when thousands of the minority group, together with Bangladeshi migrants, were rescued on Southeast Asian shores after fleeing by boat.It has drawn attention to the dire conditions and discrimination faced by the roughly one million Rohingya in western Myanmar, a group widely seen as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.The Dalai Lama, perhaps the world's most famous refugee, added from his exile in the Indian Himalayas that it was not enough to ask how to help the Rohingya.

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Remember, ye Patriotic Americans, these are the dreaded Muslim ye are taught to hate. . . .

















Sunday, November 8, 2015

A way to avoid a worldwide bloody revolution

There but for the grace of God, go I.

Allegedly from a mid-sixteenth-century 
statement by John Bradford
"There but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford",
 in reference to a group of prisoners 
being led to execution.
From Wikipedia.

Tom Stoddart. Sudan. 1998  
Highly recommended




There because of the  malicious cruelty 
of  Omnipotent, Nonexistent god, 
goes this young man.




There because of the merciless indifference of 
the Universe, 
goes this young man






There is plenty of food in the world 
to feed all. 
 There because of the selfishness of the masters of the world's food distribution systems and the deliberate cruelty of men who murder
those who try to feed the starving . . .
 (Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, the country's economy destroyed and several regions pushed to the brink of famine.  Khaleej Times)

goes this young man.




Because of the 
unconscionable failure 
of the world's richest men 
gathering annually at the World Economic Forum in the remote safety of Davos, Switzerland . . .
to heed the demands 
of the many who urge a more equitable distribution of wealth . . . 

 (and see New Oxfam report says half of global wealth held by the 1%)

billions of us live with hunger, pain, death.





Each one of the suffering billions 
 is kin to each one of us, 
separated by no more than 
six degrees of separation.




Bill Gates, the world's richest man, . . .

 in an address to the Harvard faculty and students:
 I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global health panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one person's life – then multiply that by millions. … Yet this was the most boring panel I've ever been on – ever. So boring even I couldn't bear it. . . .  
Members of the Harvard Family: Here in the Yard is one of the great collections of intellectual talent in the world. 
What for? There is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, and the benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improve the lives of people here and around the world. But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate its intellect to improving the lives of people who will never even hear its name? Let me make a request of the deans and the professors – the intellectual leaders here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, award tenure, review curriculum, and determine degree requirements, please ask yourselves: Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems? Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world's worst inequities? Should Harvard students learn about the depth of global poverty … the prevalence of world hunger … the scarcity of clean water …the girls kept out of school … the children who die from diseases we can cure? Should the world's most privileged people learn about the lives of the world's least privileged? These are not rhetorical questions – you will answer with your policiesMy mother, who was filled with pride the day I was admitted here – never stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days before my wedding, she hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud a letter about marriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of the letter she said: "From those to whom much is given, much is expected." When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given – in talent, privilege, and opportunity – there is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from us. In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue – a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But you don't have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them. Don't let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. As you leave Harvard, you have technology that members of my class never had. You have awareness of global inequity, which we did not have. And with that awareness, you likely also have an informed conscience that will torment you if you abandon these people whose lives you could change with very little effort.You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer. Knowing what you know, how could you not? And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world's deepest inequities … on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity. 

This is the result of the present failure of the folks at Davos 
to heed Gates' wise words:


——————————

The overdevelopment of condos for the very rich on my home Island in the middle of thePacific Ocean has driven housing prices absurdly high.  

I have failed over time to do more to halt excessive development on Oahu. 

Many to whom Hawaii has been home for untold generations, where the bones of the Ancestors are buried, now go homeless in their own homeland.

Many of the homeless men and women are bright, capable persons who work at the best jobs available to them, and they cannot afford a place to live.  Many are depressed, suicidal, enraged, desperate; many are determined to retake their homeland.
  
There, because of my inattention and failure to work with more vigor to stop excessive development, go these:











Timor mortis, conturbat me.

The fear of death may confound you, too, as you approach the time to 
 "enter again the round Zion of the water bead  /And the synagogue of the ear of corn".
Dylan Thomas, Refusal to Mourn 

Especially confounding may be knowing that you could have done more to ease the suffering of  kith and kin.  It is so for me.

Do what is in your power to do to end wealth inequality.  Do it for your own sake.  Do it for those you love.

Wealth is now more unevenly distributed than it was before the bloody French Revolution, which saw the wealthiest beheaded.  

Help to change the was wealth is distributed,
 to avoid the gathering storm of bloody revolution.

Or become the 
Worldwide Revolution.

The alternative -- a static, unchanging, brutal worldwide bureaucracy serving the uncaring few, is not to be tolerated.

Thanks!