Calls in the US to ban Hamas from Twitter

An evangelical Christian group in the United States has filed a petition calling for Twitter and the US government to “ban Hamas from Twitter”.

The group argues that Hamas, the hardline Palestinian group currently ruling the Gaza Strip, is listed as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” by the US government, and federal law prohibits providing “material support” to such groups.

The group, Christians United for Israel (CUFI), says that “when it comes to Israel’s military campaign, there is little that we here in America can do to help. But when it comes to this second conflict – the so-called ‘twitter war’ – there is something important we can do.”

This follows a letter sent by seven Republican congressmen in September, calling on the FBI to order Twitter disable accounts affiliated with Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Shabaab, which operates in Somalia.

The recent conflict in Gaza led Congressman Ted Poe, who represents a district in eastern Texas, to claim the congressman’s request had been vindicated, according to The Hill, a political newspaper focusing on the US Congress. “Allowing foreign terrorist organizations like Hamas to operate on Twitter is enabling the enemy,” he wrote in an email on Wednesday.

Gaza tweets

Both Hamas and the Israeli military were highly active on Twitter during the recent conflict in Gaza. The Israeli military used Twitter to explain their operations, even tweeting a link to a video showing its assassination of Ahmed Jabari, Hamas’ military chief.

Although Hamas does not have an official Twitter feed, its military wing, Al Qassam Brigades, does. ”We told you #IDF that our blessed hands will reach your leaders and soldiers wherever they are, ‘You opened the Gates of Hell on Yourselves’”, reads one such tweet.

David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University’s law school, suspects that CUFI may have a strong legal case. In an article for the Daily Beast, he wrote that “the ‘material support’ law is written so broadly that it makes virtually anything one does to or for a designated group a crime, even if it has no link to terrorist activity of any kind.”

Cole, who frequently writes on civil liberties issues, argues that “the more appropriate campaign should be directed at Congress, to amend the ‘material support’ law to limit its draconian reach”.

Terrorism “experts” cause fear-mongering hysteria over tweets

The Obama administration and The New York Times are teaming up to expose and combat the grave threat posed by a Twitter account, purportedly operated by the Somali group Shabab, and in doing so, are highlighting the simultaneous absurdity and perniciousness of the War on Terror. This latest tale of Dark Terrorist Evil began on December 14 when the NYT‘s Jeffrey Gettleman directed intrepid journalistic light on the Twitter account maintained under the name “HSMPress,” which claims to be the press office of Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahedeen, the Shabab’s full name. Gettleman’s article included this passage early on in its account:

But terrorism experts say that Twitter terrorism is part of an emerging trend and that several other Qaeda franchises — a few years ago the Shabab pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda — are increasingly using social media like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter.

That has to be the single most amusing phrase ever to appear unironically in the Paper of Record: Twitter terrorism. And, of course, the authority cited for this menacing trend is that ubiquitous sham community calling itself “terrorism experts,” which exists to provide the imprimatur of scholarly Seriousness on every last bit of inane fear-mongering hysteria. That cottage industry (like the government’s demands for greater power and Endless War) remains vibrant only if Terrorism does (that is, Terrorism by Muslims: a propagandistic redundancy). Thus, with Osama bin Laden dead, a full decade elapsed since the last successful Terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and the original Al Qaeda grouprendered inoperable, these experts are now warning the nation about lurking sleeper tweets.

In that original article, Gettleman detailed the taunting Twitter messages directed by this account at the Kenyan Army, which has responded in kind. The exchanges sound exactly like every other petty, schoolyard Internet spat that has ceaselessly sprouted up in every cyber crevice for the last two decades. After quoting a Terrorism expert from Rand on the menace of social media Terrorism, Gettleman provided just a small taste of the frightening threat posed by this innovative vehicle for jihadism:

For the Shabab, this often translates into pithy postings, like “Europe was in darkness when Islam made advances in physics, Maths, astronomy, architecture, etc. before passing on the torch,” and sarcastic jabs at the Kenyan Army. Kenya’s military spokesman, Maj. Emmanuel Chirchir, is also a loquacious writer of posts, and the result is nothing short of a full-on Twitter war.

After Major Chirchir wrote that the Shabab might be transporting weapons on donkeys and that “any large concentration and movement of loaded donkeys will be considered as Al Shabaab activity,” the Shabab responded: “Like bombing donkeys, you mean! Your eccentric battle strategy has got animal rights groups quite concerned, Major.”

Major Chirchir fired back, “Life has better to offer than stonning [sic] innocent girl,” a reference to the Shabab’s penchant for harsh Islamic punishments like stoning.

The Shabab have teased Major Chirchir for his spelling mistakes and have tossed around some SAT-quality words.

“Stop prevaricating & say what you really think, Major!” the Shabab wrote. “Sure your comments will invite derision but try to muster (or feign) courage at least.”

Other messages disseminated by the dastardly masterminds behind this Twitter account include things like this:

As CNET‘s Declan McCullagh noted: “For scary Somali militants, the folks behind @HSMPress have a fine appreciation of Starbucks’ caramel macchiatos” (undoubtedly, Terrorism experts would quickly admonish McCullagh that this is no laughing matter, as tweets of this sort — innocuous though they may appear to the untrained, non-expert eye — could contain coded directives to activate plots against the West).

Toward the end of the article, Gettleman tacked on what he and his editors apparently considered to be an unimportant afterthought: “Of course, it is impossible to know who exactly is operating the Twitter account.” Of course: but there’s no reason to let that small fact deter anyone.

All of this would be worth nothing more than a few moments of entertaining ridicule if not for the reaction it has spawned. Gettleman is back today with a new article detailing the response of the U.S. Government to his exposé. Headlined “U.S. Considers Combating Somali Militants’ Twitter Use,” the article reports:

The United States government is increasingly concerned about the Twitter account of the Shabab militant group of Somalia, with American officials saying Monday that they were “looking closely” at the militants’ use of Twitter and the possible measures to take in response. . . .

[S]ome American officials said the government was exploring legal options to shut down the Shabab’s new Twitter account, potentially opening a debate over the line between free speech and support for terrorism. . . .

American officials say they may have the legal authority to demand that Twitter close the Shabab’s account, @HSMPress, which had more than 4,600 followers as of Monday night.

So the U.S. Government believes it may have “legal authority” to compel Twitter to close accounts. From where does that authority derive? Presumably, the Obama administration could consider Twitter’s providing of a forum to a designated Terrorist organization to constitute the crime of “material support of Terrorism.” That raises a variety of questions: is the NYT guilty of that crime by quoting some of those tweets and promoting the account (since the first NYT article was published, the number of people following @HSMPress has significantly increased and is almost certain to increase more as a result of today’s article). Can one be guilty of that crime if one re-tweets any of their messages? How about if one defends their right to have a Twitter account?

What is more likely than compulsory action is thuggish extra-legal intimidation aimed at Twitter to “voluntarily” close the account. That path is less overt but just as insidious, if not more so. That is how government officials such as Joe Lieberman succeeded in cutting off all of WikiLeaks’ funding sources and web hosting options without the bother of charging that group with a crime: by demanding that Amazon, Master Card, Visa, Paypal and others “on their own accord” terminate WikiLeaks’ accounts and refuse to provide the group with any services. As EFF’s Trevor Timm asked today: “How fast does Joe Lieberman release a statement today saying we should censor the Net in the name of national security? I bet before noon.”

Are there really people who want the U.S. Government empowered to dictate who can and cannot have social media accounts to communicate ideas? Two weeks ago, the London Police characterized the Occupy movement as a “Terrorist” group alongside Al Qaeda and FARC. The Kenyan Army spokesman engaged in the “Twitter war” with the Shabab account today wrote: “Al Shabaab needs to be engaged positively and twitter is the only avenue.” Having the government shut down social media accounts is laughably ineffective — it would take Shabab about 30 seconds to open a new one — but the theories embraced to justify that power are purely tyrannical.

At this point, there is an almost perfect inverse relationship between the seriousness of the Terrorist threat and the severity of the powers the U.S. Government claims in its name. The Washington Post today has a long and quite good article by Karen DeYoung entitled “Secrecy defines Obama’s drone war.” It describes how the Obama administration claims the right to kill anyone designated by the President as a Terrorist anywhere in the world, in total secrecy and without any checks, and how the administration refuses to account to anyone for what it does, who makes those decisions, and on what basis:

Since September, at least 60 people have died in 14 reported CIA drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal regions. The Obama administration has named only one of the dead, hailing the elimination of Janbaz Zadran, a top official in the Haqqani insurgent network, as a counterterrorism victory.

The identities of the rest remain classified, as does the existence of the drone program itself. Because the names of the dead and the threat they were believed to pose are secret, it is impossible for anyone without access to U.S. intelligence to assess whether the deaths were justified.

In outlining its legal reasoning, the administration has cited broad congressional authorizations and presidential approvals, the international laws of war and the right to self-defense. But it has not offered the American public, uneasy allies or international authorities any specifics that would make it possible to judge how it is applying those laws. . . .

“They’ve based it on the personal legitimacy of [President] Obama — the ‘trust me’ concept,” [American University Professor Kenneth] Anderson said. “That’s not a viable concept for a president going forward.”

That is the heart and soul of the U.S. Government’s framework: we can do what we want, in total secrecy and with no checks, including to U.S. citizens, and you don’t need to know anything about it and we need no checks: you should just trust us. That, of course, was precisely the rationale long offered by the neocon Right to justify the radical, transparency-free powers of detention, surveillance and militarism seized by the Bush administration: maybe these powers could theoretically be abused one day by a Bad Leader, but right now, we have a good, noble, Christian family man in office who only wants to Keep us Safe, so we can trust him. That has now been replaced by: maybe these powers could theoretically be abused one day by a Bad Leader, but right now, we have a good, noble, urbane, progressive Constitutional scholar and family man in office who only wants to Keep us Safe, so we can trust him (see, for instance, CAP’s Ken Gude dismissing concerns about the indefinite detention bill by expressly invoking the Goodness of President Obama: “if the president does not believe it is necessary or appropriate to order military operations in the United States, then there is no military detention authority in the United States”; “President Obama has made clear he does not want military detention in the United States. . . . Yes, a future president may interpret that authority differently, but that is [] a fight for another day . . .”).

The powers with which the U.S. Government has vested itself would be disturbing and odious no matter the magnitude of the highlighted threat. But the fact that they’re now reduced to bottom-of-the-barrel screeching about Twitter Terrorism — while simultaneously claiming the “legal authority” to force the closing of social media accounts — reveals just how wide is the gap between the magnitude of the powers they seek and the magnitude of the threat they cite to justify them. As always, the War on Terror is not a means to an end; it is the end in itself.

UPDATE: That HSMPress Twitter account today tweeted this:

That link goes to this article. Perhaps a zealous U.S. prosecutor could use this as evidence to allege that I have materially supported Terrorism (though theNYT should be first in line to be so accused, given that this Twitter feed has gained another 1,000 followers today as a result of that newspaper’s highlighting of it). On a related note, Mother Jones‘ Adam Serwer looks at a conviction today to document a very ominous trend, one I’ve written about several times: the way the DOJ and courts are jointly converting pure free speech into the crime of “material support for Terrorism.”

Fear-mongering stops Aussie Islamic School

Plans to establish a new Islamic school in Mernda, a suburb in Australia’s south-eastern state of Victoria, have received a knockout for reasons seen as resulting from the growing anti-Islam sentiments in the society.

“They were afraid there was going to be a mosque there or noise from call to prayers or whatever,” Councilor John Fry, who supported the plan, told the Herald Sun newspaper on Tuesday, March 27.

“There didn’t seem to be an understanding of what the actual proposal was.”

An Islamic school was proposed to be built on a heritage site in Mernda by the Great Prophet Center, an Iraqi community group.

But residents objected the Islamic school plans, correcting 2,000 signatures to veto down the proposal.

Only 75 objections came from Mernda area, while more than 90 percent of the total objections were coordinated through a group called Friends of Mernda Heritage Site, according to a report by the council planning officers.

“The Friends group has advised planning officers that many of the objections from those not residing in the area have typically been signed by friends and family of those living in proximity to the (heritage) area … and individuals having an interest in the heritage precinct or heritage issues more generally,” it said.

Though the council’s planning officials recommended building the school, the council rejected the proposal.

Councilor Fry confirmed that the 125-student school was barred due to anti-Muslim sentiments stirred by ignorance.

“There is an unfortunate thing that people who don’t understand different cultures can react negatively,” he said.

However, councilor Pam McLeod, who voted against the Muslim school proposal, said it was all about traffic and heritage matters.

“Nothing that was put in front of me had any element of racism that I could see,” she said.

“We are one of the most multicultural communities in terms of a municipality in Victoria so how could you possibly be racist or favoring one group over another. It’s just not on.”

Scaremongering

But Victoria Muslims accused opponents and council officials of discrimination.

“We believe that strong objections against the school were because of our background,” Great Prophet Center spokesman Hassan Al Khirsany told The Herald Sun.

Al Khirsany portrayed the issue as “fear mongering” by anti-Muslim groups, arguing that if this plan were for a catholic school, it would not have met any objections.

“Signatures were collected by old generation people who were telling others that this school might turn into a mosque and the call for morning prayer will cause lots of noise,” he said.

Islamic Council of Victoria spokesman Nazeem Hussain said it was puzzling that the council had rejected the advice of its own staff on the feasibility of the project.

“It would be upsetting and unfortunate if the basis for these objections was due to anti-Muslim undercurrents,” he said.

“Given that many of these objections came from outside of the Mernda area, it would suggest that there has been a concerted effort to not see this project come to fruition, as opposed to there being bona fide traffic or planning concerns.”

He added that Victoria was a vibrant multicultural society that shouldn’t “succumb to ideas that divide us”.

Muslims, who have been in Australia for more than 200 years, make up 1.7 percent of its 20-million population. Islam is the country’s second largest religion after Christianity.

In post 9/11 Australia, Muslims have been haunted with suspicion and have had their patriotism questioned.

A 2007 poll taken by the Issues Deliberation Australia (IDA) think-tank found that Australians basically see Islam as a threat to the Australian way of life.

A recent governmental report revealed that Muslims are facing deep-seated Islamophobia and race-based treatment like never before.

UK Catholic primary school set to convert to Islamic faith school

A Roman Catholic primary school in the heart of an Asian community in Lancashire, England looks set to become the first in the country to convert to an Islamic faith school.

Just a decade ago, Sacred Heart RC Primary School in Blackburn was a flourishing Catholic community, with 91 per cent of its pupil intake professing the faith. Now that number has dwindled to no more than 3 per cent.

As a result, the Diocese of Salford – which is responsible for the running of the school – has concluded it is no longer “appropriate” for the Catholic Church to remain in charge. Instead, its future is the subject of a consultation, with the local mosque a leading contender to take over the day-to-day running of the school.

The 197-pupil school is in the centre of Blackburn and its pupils are largely from ethnic minority groups, with Indians and Pakistanis in the majority. In all, around 97 per cent of its intake is Muslim. Nearby, there is already an established and successful Muslim secondary, the Tauheedul Islam Girls’ High School, which caters for 383 pupils and is repeatedly listed in the top 10 non-selective state schools based on its exam performance. It has already expressed an interest in taking over Sacred Heart.

Whether this would mean running it as a Muslim faith school or in partnership with another institution has yet to be determined.

Hamid Patel, Tauheedul’s headteacher, said: “We are the only outstanding [as rated by Ofsted] Muslim school and we are the only outstanding secondary school in the area.

“We’re very keen on collaboration. We will consider both options [running it as a faith school or becoming a lead partner in the running of the school].”

According to a report presented to Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council’s executive, if Sacred Heart became a Muslim school it would “provide increased diversity… and offer a faith school that matches the population of the town”.

Just exactly who will end up running the school will be decided by open competition, a mechanism put in place by the previous Labour government to give parents more of a say.

France’s first private Muslim school tops the ranks

Averroès High School in Lille has been in the spotlight for a decade. Ten years ago, it was France’s first private Muslim school to follow the national curriculum. Now, it’s one of the country’s top-rated schools.

The classes may be a source of envy for many a harried high school teacher trying to instil discipline and impart knowledge to a roomful of teenagers interested in anything but spending their days in a classroom.

At the Lycée Averroès (Averroès High School) in the northern French city of Lille, the students – boys and girls, some of the latter veiled – assiduously concentrate on their classwork under the supervision of their teachers.

Over the past few days, the students’ concentration has not waned despite the presence of news cameras and crew at the back of some of the classrooms.

Averroès has been attracting a fair amount of attention in France after the private Muslim school ranked at the top of the regional list of quality schools and was among the top three on the national list.

While most French students are enrolled in state schools, around 15 percent of children in France attend some form of private school.

In theory, all public schools should provide the same quality of education. But as every French parent knows, that is not strictly true. The annual school ranking systems have long featured some of the better-known public high schools from across the country.

Over the past few years, private schools – either Catholic, Jewish or secular, with varying levels of state funding – have increasingly made their way to the top high-school rankings.

Averroès High School’s top ranking has raised eyebrows across France in part because it’s a private Muslim school that has been providing quality education to its students.

Home to Europe’s largest Muslim population, France has often been criticised in the international press for what many see as the country’s uncompromising commitment to laïcité – or secularism. A 2004 law banning the explicit display of religious affiliations in public schools was widely criticised in the international community, as well as by some minority groups inside France, although the vast majority of French people supported the ban.

Given France’s complex history of communal relations with its Muslim population, the success of the Averroès school has provided some welcome good news.

It’s something Averroès High School staff have grown used to over the past decade.

Thirty-four journalists for 11 students

In 2003, when the school opened, it was the first private Muslim school in France to follow the national curriculum. “On our first day, there were 34 journalists, including one from Japan – compared to only 11 students and 19 teachers,” said Amar Lasfar, rector of the Lille mosque and president of the Averroès school, in an interview with the leading French daily, Le Monde.

Ten years later, France’s first private Muslim school has grown to include more than 330 students and has left its old premises at the Lille mosque for a new building that can accommodate up to 600 students.

It’s a commendable rise for a school that has only been “sous contrat” (under contract) with the state since 2008. Under the French system, private schools are either “sous contrat” – with the government paying teachers’ salaries and the school following the national curriculum – or “hors contrat” – not funded by the government and therefore not obligated to follow any particular curriculum.

When asked about the secret to the school’s success, Lasfar is categorical: “Have faith – not necessarily religious faith, but believe in the project,” he told Le Monde.

At Averroès High School, students’ parents appear to believe in the project as much as the staff, with volunteer parents running the school cafeteria, for instance.

While most of the students are Muslim, the school is open to non-Muslims as well.

As for the students, the advantages of the school are numerous. Averroès graduates list the small class size, the studious atmosphere and the staff’s commitment to quality education as the school’s best features.

They also said they happened to have a lot of fun while they were at school.

Facebook and the disintegration of the human

According to a New York Times article by Jan Hoffman referencing a study of the Facebook profiles of 200 university students in the United States, approximately 30 percent of the students “posted updates that met the American Psychiatric Association’s criteria for a symptom of depression, reporting feelings of worthlessness or hopelessness, insomnia or sleeping too much, and difficulty concentrating”. These findings are said to “echo research that suggests depression is increasingly common among college students”.

Hoffman’s point is that Facebook can therefore serve as an “early warning system for timely intervention” by parents and therapists. The article ends with a quote from a mother in Ohio: “Facebook might be a pain in the neck to keep up with… But having that extra form of communication saves lives”.

No mention is made of the obvious exacerbating influence of social networking sites when it comes to phenomena such as insomnia and concentration difficulty. Rather than promote Facebook as a life-saving tool, one could easily argue that such forums and other technological distractions in fact contribute to depressive trends.

Alienation from reality

The “Facebook Newsroom” currently lists developments such as “Today we’re rolling out improvements to timeline that help you express what’s important to you” and “Today we’re announcing a new version of Facebook designed to… focus more on stories from the people you care about”.

The attempted injection of human emotion into what is ultimately a dehumanizing experience is symbolic of a general estrangement from reality in which Facebook culture is both a cause and a symptom.

The detrimental effects of the conversion of emotion and empathy into a click on a computer or a mobile phone can be observed in the following anecdote from Hoffman’s article:

“Replying to questions posted on Facebook by The New York Times, Daylina Miller, a recent graduate of the University of South Florida, said that when she poured out her sadness online, some readers responded only with the Facebook ‘like’ symbol: a thumb’s up.

‘You feel the same way?’ said Ms. Miller, puzzled. ‘Or you like that I’m sad? You’re sadistic?’”

Similarly inauspicious examples of the constriction of empathy and warping of inter-human relations include the “liking” of death announcements.

On my own Facebook feed, I’ve witnessed friends post news of a parent’s death only to be bombarded with the thumb’s up and comments to the effect of: “Sorry man!”

In addition to a cheapening of sentiment, Facebook also encourages alienation from reality by displacing the space-time continuum: instead of experiencing events and thoughts as they occur in real-time, users are often distracted by how best to market these events and thoughts to their Facebook audiences.

The transfer of the self onto a computer screen is furthermore decentring given the attendant diffusion of identity. As for the conditioned need for personal validation in the form of little red notifications appearing at the top of one’s Facebook page, this is conducive to a state of perennial anticipation that is counterproductive to the functioning of the nervous system. Posts on bowel movements and the like are an extreme example of the need to reiterate, and obtain acknowledgement of, one’s fragmented existence.

Though the Internet may compound the schizophrenic nature of US society, there are clearly more established causes of dehumanization and individual alienation. The national glorification of violence and militarism, for one, abrogates realities of human suffering worldwide; in this context of dedicated estrangement from humanity, it is not overly surprising when citizens devoid of empathy perpetrate acts such as the 2012 Connecticut school massacre.

Mass attention deficit disorder

The ostensible function of social networking sites is, of course, to bring people closer together. The same function is attributed to the process of neoliberal globalization.

Despite obvious superficial increases in interconnectedness in both cases, however, the fundamental outcome is alienating. In the latter instance, ‘interconnectedness’ has been characterized by enhanced disparity in socioeconomic conditions and a crusade for profit at the expense of communal wellbeing. In the former, the face-to-face contact for which human beings are programmed is replaced with electronic exchanges incapable of satisfying innate communication needs.

Willful misinterpreters of contemporary history continue to argue that globalization constitutes the solution to the very global ills it creates. In vaguely similar fashion, Hoffman’s New York Times article portrays Facebook as a potentially useful aid in the quest to promote mental health when the two concepts appear to be inherently at odds.

The neoliberal experiment in the US has helped mold a society disconnected from the human condition, where oppression of the individual has aimed to thwart popular solidarity that might threaten the experiment. What should be a universal right to health care, for example, is instead wielded punitively against the population, and, as acclaimed journalist and radio host Doug Henwood points out, “Obamacare” will presumably result in a situation in which “scores of millions are thrown onto the private individual insurance market and forced to pay $1,000 a month for crappy coverage”.

Henwood hopes that “this could vastly increase the constituency for a single-payer scheme, such as Medicare for All—assuming our rulers don’t destroy Medicare first”.

In the end, perhaps Facebook and similar phenomena have already contributed to solidarity on the health care front: in the very least, we’re united in mass attention deficit disorder.

Amerithology, the Middle East and becoming number two

Did anyone expect any positive peace-hopeful results from President Obama’s trip to Israel and his obligatory stops at the West Bank and Jordan? Perhaps some were, but only if demented, credulous simpletons, or trusting souls believing that there are people in Washington, elected or selected, with statesmanship and vision willing to risk their careers by promoting neutrality, rather than affection and solidarity for our congenital sister, Israel. Just how often must we be told that American foreign policy for the Middle East is for all intents and purposes drafted, approved or vetoed in Tel Aviv?

Obama may not be happy with this fact of American political life, but knows he must yield to an irrefutable truth that we no longer try to hide. One need but to look at the fate of the only American president who has advocated impartiality and a high degree of fairness in bringing permanent peace between Israelis and Palestinians: Jimmy Carter. We have consistently managed to ridicule and mock this honorable man. Barack Obama is not about to risk his place in history, as written by our historians, for he has proven time and again that he is no man of vision, just an articulate or even charismatic figure of our elected, self-serving political mediocrity.

Perhaps this meeting between Netanyahu and Obama as spring sprung, and the specter of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities grew near, yielded some time compromise from Israel of which we are not aware (or at what cost to the US). And Syria’s conflict, an open wound in the region requiring massive humanitarian aid, is no comfort to any country in the region. However, if Obama’s only notch for his expected influence is just an apology by Netanyahu to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the Mavi Marmarra incident of 2010, then we can safely say that his peacemaking trip was a failure in every regard for Palestinians and their Arab neighbors, and the future of peace in the Middle East.

If President Obama thinks his speech to Israeli university students, asking them to lobby with their elders for peace and compromise, or his oft-voiced disapproval of the indignities and pain being slapped on the Palestinians, is enough to maintain peace, he is living in fantasyland. Those things are meaningless, drowning in the obsequious symbolism that American politicians, including Obama, must constantly render Israel if they wish to remain in power.

Palestinians and their Arab brethren should understand once and for all that there isn’t enough money in the Saudi Kingdom or the Emirates to pay for an extended campaign in public relations that would make the slightest dent in countering Israel’s influence in this United States. Past PR efforts have been futile, and you can rest assured that future efforts would fare no better. To think of the US as a referee in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is chimeric, totally far-fetched… when the referee takes to the field wearing the Israeli colors, doing so without apologies.

More likely than not, a solution to a two-state Palestine will be found in the next decade, certainly within the next generation as the world enters a new phase of greater cooperation, emergence of new financial powers, and healthy multi-lateral dealings that will take away any one nation’s hegemony over the rest. Only then, and not under the auspices of US good offices and protection, will  a peace be found that provides security for Palestinians as well as Israelis.

We may have seen major global change come about in the last two decades, but change will be vertiginous in the next two. And the US government would be wise to prepare Americans for this upheaval in the world sure to bring new realities, including the emergence of new world powers such as India, Brazil and even a Pan-Arab federation. Of course, a new number one economy, China, will soon replace the United States. The psychological impact will probably be greater than the financial unless we prepare for it, and we deemphasize the Amerithology under which we have lived. The reality will be undeniably clear, for globalization and the maturing of other economies can be summarized in just one single statistic: the United States of America in mid-20th Century had approximately 50 percent of the world’s middle class; and 75 years later, our middle class is projected to be by most estimates under 10 percent of the world’s middle class.

World economics and multi-lateral relationships between nations will force major changes in the United Nations, likely making that world body more significant in bringing peace and fairness to displaced peoples and smaller nations. And that may be the only solution for permanent peace in the Holy Land, and not the good offices of the United States.