The New Nation - Internet Edition

Environmental approach to security

AS changed climate conditions pose a strong challenge to mankind, new approach to security concerns is needed to cope with its impacts. But without a shift from the prevailing practices this objective is unlikely to be achieved. A five-point strategy proposed at a two-day conference on security and environment in Singapore highlights this.

Huge greenhouse gas (GHG) emission is seriously affecting the climate. Natural calamities like cyclones accompanied by tidal bore, floods and droughts are hitting with increased frequency and ferocity and leaving behind trails of destruction. Least developed countries (LDCs) suffer the most. The twin floods and the super cyclone Sidr that raged over Bangladesh last year and the cyclone Nargis that swept over Myanmar in the recent past showed the scale of destruction. Such calamities bring about untold humanitarian disaster including severe food crisis. Thus poverty, diseases, climate change and food scarcity are security concern of affected countries. Traditional approach to security usually overlooked those factors.

An appropriate means to address these concerns were in the five-point strategy proposed by Bangladesh. Four of the points are concerned with climate change. The Foreign Affairs Adviser who addressed this meet underscored the need for a balanced approach to climate change debate, which would emphasise both reduction of emission and adaptation to changed conditions. He asked for rewarding those countries that make insignificant carbon emissions. He proposed the setting up of a 'technology transfer board' in any post-Kyoto protocol agreement to facilitate environment friendly policies by LDCs. To tackle food scarcity, he proposed the establishment of an International Food Fund with 'special drawing rights' for food deficit countries. Dhaka should build on this strategy to deal with climate negotiations in future.

Blow to world economy

THE feared super-spike in crude oil prices that appears to be underway could deal a crippling blow to a global economy as reported by the media quoting analysts. Crude prices last week soared past the level of US$ 130 a barrel for the first time, more than doubling in one year. The jump was in line with predictions from a Goldman Sachs analyst that oil prices could reach US$ 150 to 200 a barrel. The reality of sky-high energy costs could mean a darker outlook for the US and global economy, by raising the price of a variety of goods and services.

The notion of a quick recovery of the struggling US economy would likely be in doubt, and the rest of the world would suffer as well. A global economic downturn would be the most likely outcome, led by a longer and deeper recession in the US. The airlines industry, already reeling from the surge in the past year, is feeling even more pain. The airline industry, as it is constituted today, was not built to withstand oil prices at US$ 125 a barrel and certainly not when record fuel expenses are coupled with a weak US economy, according to an expert.

But some are of the opinion that oil is a bubble waiting to burst and that prices could fall sharply as supply and demand come into balance. The world is consuming 87 million barrels per day of oil while producing only 82.6 million barrels. There is a concern about the possibility that a euphoric investment mentality is beginning to overtake the oil market. An oil price mania is a particularly dangerous type of excess since it has the potential to generate severe economic, inflationary or political dislocation. The strain on economies like Bangladesh is particularly difficult to manage.

The war against tolerance

Chris Hedges

Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem and Zachariah Anani are the three stooges of the Christian right. These self-described former Muslim terrorists are regularly trotted out at Christian colleges-a few days ago they were at the Air Force Academy-to spew racist filth about Islam on behalf of groups such as Focus on the Family. It is a clever tactic. Curly, Larry and Mo, who all say they are born-again Christians, engage in hate speech and assure us it comes from personal experience. They tell their audiences that the only way to deal with one-fifth of the world's population is by converting or eradicating all Muslims. Their cant is broadcast regularly on Fox News, including the Bill O'Reilly and Neil Cavuto shows, as well as on numerous Christian radio and television programs. Shoebat, who has written a book called Why We Want to Kill You, promises in his lectures to explain the numerous similarities between radical Muslims and the Nazis, how "Muslim terrorists" invaded America 30 years ago and how "perseverance, recruitment and hate" have fueled attacks by Muslims.

These men are frauds, but this is not the point. They are part of a dark and frightening war by the Christian right against tolerance that, in the moment of another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil, would make it acceptable to target and persecute all Muslims, including the some 6 million Muslims who live in the United States. These men stoke these irrational fears. They defend the perpetual war unleashed by the Bush administration and championed by Sen. John McCain. McCain frequently reminds listeners that "the greatest danger facing the world is Islamic terrorism," as does Mike Huckabee, who says that "Islamofascism" is "the greatest threat this country [has] ever faced." George W. Bush has, in the same vein, assured Americans that terrorists hate us for our freedoms, not, of course, for anything we have done. Bush described the "war on terror" as a war against totalitarian Islamofascism while the Israeli air force was dropping tens of thousands of pounds of iron fragmentation bombs up and down Lebanon, an air campaign that killed 1,300 Lebanese civilians.

The three men tell lurid tales of being recruited as children into Palestinian terrorist organizations, murdering hundreds of civilians and blowing up a bank in Israel. Saleem says that as a child he infiltrated Israel to plant bombs via a network of tunnels underneath the Golan Heights, although no incident of this type was ever reported in Israel. He claims he is descended from the "grand wazir" of Islam, a title and a position that do not exist in the Arab world. They assure audiences that the Palestinians are interested not in a peaceful two-state solution but rather the destruction of Israel, the murder of all Jews and the death of America. Shoebat claims he first came to the United States as part of an extremist "sleeper cell."

"These three jokers are as much former Islamic terrorists as 'Star Trek's' Capt. James T. Kirk was a real Starship captain," said Mikey Weinstein, the head of the watchdog group The Military Religious Freedom Foundation. The group has challenged Christian proselytizing in the military and denounced the visit by the men to the Air Force Academy.

The speakers include in their talks the superior virtues of

Christianity. Saleem, for example, says his world "turned upside down when he was seriously injured in an automobile accident." "A Christian man tended to Kamal at the accident scene, making sure he got the medical treatment he needed," his Web site says. "Kamal's orthopedic surgeon and physical therapist were also Christian men whom over a period of several months ministered the unconditional love of Jesus Christ to him as he recovered. The love and sacrificial giving of these men caused Kamal to cry out to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob acknowledging his need for the Savior. Kamal has since become a man on a new mission, as an ambassador for the one true and living God, the great I Am, Jehovah God of the Bible."

This creeping Christian chauvinism has infected our political and social discourse. It was behind the rumor that Barack Obama was a Muslim. Obama reassured followers that he was a Christian. It apparently did not occur to him, or his questioners, that the proper answer is that there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim, that persons of great moral probity and courage arise in all cultures and all religions, including Islam. Christians have no exclusive lock on virtue. But this kind of understanding often provokes indignant rage.

The public denigration of Islam, and by implication all religious belief systems outside Christianity, is part of the triumphalism that has distorted the country since the 9/11 attacks. It makes dialogue with those outside our "Christian" culture impossible. It implicitly condemns all who do not think as we think and believe as we believe as, at best, inferior and usually morally depraved. It blinds us to our own failings. It makes self-reflection and self-criticism a form of treason. It reduces the world to a cartoonish vision of us and them, good and evil. It turns us into children with bombs.

These three con artists are not the problem. There is enough scum out there to take their place. Rather, they offer a window into a worldview that is destroying the United States. It has corrupted the Republican Party. It has colored the news media. It has entered into the everyday clichés we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. It is ignorant and racist, but it is also deadly. It grossly perverts the Christian religion. It asks us to kill to purify the Earth. It leaves us threatened not only by the terrorists who may come from abroad but the ones who are rising from within our midst. (Truthdig)

(Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times.)

Entorcing tobacco control strategies in Bangladesh

Bobby Ramakant

Bangladesh and other countries in the world need to scale up the cost-effective, proven and WHO recommended strategies to reduce the number of deaths attributed to tobacco use. The World Health Statistics Report (2008) of WHO released 10 days before this year's World No Tobacco Day (31 May) ups the urgency to scale up quality interventions to control tobacco use.

About half of all countries in the world implement none of the recommended tobacco control policies, despite the fact that tobacco control measures are cost-effective and proven. Moreover, not more than 5% of the world's population is fully covered by anyone of these measures.

World Health Statistics Report (2008) had further confirmed that heart disease, obesity, and tobacco use were

among the leading causes of deaths worldwide. The number of deaths from non-communicable chronic conditions, the risk to which is exacerbated by tobacco use, is alarmingly rising far more than the number of deaths from communicable diseases like HIV, TB or Malaria.

The single most preventable cause of death world wide, the report stated, is tobacco use. Tobacco use has been found to kill one-third to one-half of its users, according to this report.

Earlier in February 2008, WHO had released the World Tobacco Epidemic Report which underlines not only the evidence-based fact that tobacco epidemic is worsening but also recommends a comprehensive package of six effective tobacco control policies - clubbed as 'MPOWER' that have demonstrated results in helping countries stop the diseases, deaths and economic damages caused by tobacco use.

The MPOWER package includes:

M: stands for 'monitor' tobacco use and prevention policies. Assessment of tobacco use and its impact must be strengthened.

P: stands for 'protect' people from tobacco smoke. All people have a fundamental right to breathe clean air. Smoke-free places are essential to protect non-smokers and also to encourage smokers to quit.

0: stands for 'offer' help to quit tobacco use. Services to treat tobacco dependence are fully available in only nine countries with 5% of the world's population. Countries must establish programmes providing low-cost, effective interventions for tobacco users who want to quit.

W: stands for 'warn' about the dangers of tobacco use. Despite conclusive evidence, relatively few tobacco users understand the full extent of their health risk. Graphic warnings on tobacco packaging deter tobacco use, yet only 15 countries, representing 6% of the world's population, mandate pictorial warnings (covering at least 30% of the principal surface area) and just five countries with a little over 4% of the world's people, meet the highest standards for pack warnings. More than 40% of the world's population lives in countries that do not prevent use of misleading and deceptive terms such as 'light' and 'low tar'.

E: stands for 'enforce' bans on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship. Partial bans on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship, do not work because the industry merely redirects its resources to other non-regulated marketing channels. Only a total ban can reduce tobacco consumption and protect people, particularly youth, from industry marketing tactics. Only 5% of the world's population currently lives in countries with comprehensive bans on tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship.

R: stands for 'raised' taxes on tobacco. Raising taxes and therefore prices, is the most effective way to reduce tobacco use, and especially to discourage young people from using tobacco. Only 4 countries, representing 2% of the world's population, have tax rates greater than 75% of retail price.

"Reversing this entirely preventable epidemic must now rank as a top priority for public health and for political leaders in every country of the world" said Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General of the WHO in the summary.

However the global tobacco epidemic stands starkly apart from other conventional disease control programmes because of an aggressive tobacco industry that is hell-bent on protecting and expanding its markets globally, particularly in the developing countries of Asia and Africa.

Tobacco corporations across the world have not only been aggressively protecting and promoting their tobacco markets, particularly in the developing countries, but also trying their best to either abort or weaken the public health policies that begin to take shape in countries around the world.

"Big Tobacco's interference in health policy is one of the greatest threats to the treaty's implementation and enforcement. Philip Morris/Altria, British American Tobacco (BAT) and Japan Tobacco (JT) use their political influence to weaken, delay and defeat tobacco control legislation around the world. While the industry claims to have changed its ways, it continues to use sophisticated methods to undermine meaningful legislation" had said Kathy Mulvey of Corporate Accountability International at the recent meeting last year on the global tobacco treaty - the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).

The alert monitoring of tobacco corporations in Bangladesh and holding them accountable for violating existing health policies will further boost the impact of the WHO's recommended MPOWER package in reducing tobacco use globally.

Israel's American problem

Jeffrey Goldberg

WHEN the prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, arrived at an occupied Jerusalem ballroom in February to address the grandees of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations, he was pugnacious, as is customary, but he was also surprisingly defensive, and not because of his relentlessly compounding legal worries.

He knew that scattered about the audience were Jewish leaders who considered him hopelessly spongy - and very nearly traitorous - on an issue they believed to be of cosmological importance: the sanctity of a "united" Jerusalem, under the sole sovereignty of Israel.

These Jewish leaders, who live in Chicago and New York and behind the gates of Boca Raton country clubs, loathe the idea that Olmert, or a prime minister yet elected, might one day cede the Arab neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem to the latent state of Palestine.

These are neighbourhoods that the Conference of Presidents could not find with a forked stick. And yet many Jewish leaders believe that a compromise on the boundaries of Jerusalem - or on nearly any other point of disagreement - is an axiomatic invitation to catastrophe.

One leader, Joshua Katzen, of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, told me, "I think that Israelis don't have the big view of global jihad that American Jews do, because Israelis are caught up in their daily emergencies."

When I asked him how his Israeli friends responded to this, he answered: "They say, 'When your son has to fight, you can have an opinion.' But I tell them that it is precisely because your son has to fight that you have a harder time seeing the larger picture."

When I spoke to Olmert a few days after his meeting with the Conference of Presidents, he made only brief mention of his Diaspora antagonists; he said that certain American Jews he would not name have been "investing a lot of money trying to overthrow the government of Israel."

But he was expansive, and persuasive, on the Zionist need for a Palestinian state. Without a Palestine - a viable, territorially contiguous Palestine - Arabs under Israeli control will outnumber the country's Jews.

"We now have the Palestinians running an Algeria-style campaign against Israel, but what I fear is that they will try to run a South Africa-type campaign against us," he said. If this happens, and worldwide sanctions are imposed as they were against the white-minority government, "the state of Israel is finished," Olmert said in an earlier interview.

This is why he, and his mentor, former prime minister Ariel Sharon, turned so fiercely against the Jewish settlement movement, which has entangled Israel unnecessarily in the lives of West Bank Palestinians. Once, men like Sharon and Olmert saw the settlers as the vanguards of Zionism; today, the settlements are seen, properly, as the forerunner of a binational state.

In other words, as the end of Israel as a Jewish-majority democracy. The former prime minister, Ehud Barak, told The Jerusalem Post in 1999: "Every attempt to keep hold of this area as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a nondemocratic or a non-Jewish state. Because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don't vote it is an apartheid state that might then become another Belfast or Bosnia."

The unsentimental analysis of men like Olmert and Barak came to mind last week as I spoke to Barack Obama about his views on Israel.

He spoke with seemingly genuine feeling about the post-Holocaust necessity of Israel, about his cultural affinity with Jews and about his adamant opposition to the terrorist group Hamas. He offered some mild criticism of the settlement movement ("not helpful") and promised to be unyielding in his commitment to Israeli security.

But after speaking with him it struck me that, by the standards of rhetorical correctness maintained by such groups as the Conference of Presidents and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, Obama is actually more pro-Israel than either Ehud Olmert or Ehud Barak. (To say nothing of John McCain and President George W. Bush, who spoke to the Knesset last week about external threats to Israel's safety but made no mention of the country's missteps.)

This is an existentially unhealthy state of affairs. I am not wishing that the next president be hostile to Israel, God forbid. But what Israel needs is an American president who not only helps defend it against the existential threat posed by Iran and religious fundamentalism, but helps it to come to grips with the existential threat from within.

A pro-Israel president today would be one who prods the Jewish state - publicly, continuously and vociferously - to create conditions on the West Bank that would allow for the birth of a moderate Palestinian state. Most American Jewish leaders are opposed, not without reason, to negotiations with Hamas, but if the moderates aren't strengthened, Hamas will be the only party left. And the best way to bring about the birth of a Palestinian state is to reverse - not merely halt, but reverse - the West Bank settlement project. The dismantling of settlements is the one step that would buttress the dwindling band of Palestinian moderates.

So why won't American leaders push Israel publicly? Why do presidential candidates dance so delicately around this question? The answer is obvious: The leadership of the organised American Jewish community has allowed the partisans of settlement to conflate support for the colonisation of the West Bank with support for Israel itself. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, in their polemical work "The Israel Lobby," have it wrong: They argue, unpersuasively, that American support for Israel hurts America. It doesn't. But unthinking American support does hurt Israel.

The people of AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents are well-meaning. But what's needed now is a radical rethinking of what it means to be pro-Israel. Barack Obama and John McCain, the likely presidential nominees, are smart, analytical men who understand the manifold threats Israel faces 60 years after its founding. They should be able to talk, in blunt terms, about the full range of dangers faced by Israel, including the danger Israel has brought upon itself. But this won't happen until AIPAC and the leadership of the American Jewish community allow it to happen.

(Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror")