Daniel Lubetzky

Bahraini king selects Jewish ambassador

Bahrain’s state news agency says that King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa issued a royal decree appointing a female Jewish lawmaker to the post of ambassador. "It is a great honor to have been appointed as the first female ambassador to the United States of America, and I am looking forward to meeting this new challenge," Nonoo told AP by telephone.

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According to my commodities futures trading genius friend Stanley Haar, this is a silly scapegoat because:

True manipulation involves buying both futures contracts and hoarding the physical commodity, as attempted by the Hunt Brothers in the silver market years ago. I don’t believe this is happening now in the oil market or any other market. Blaming speculators (like shooting the messenger) is always popular, as it is easier than finding real solutions like conservation and adjusting to a lower standard of living.

The Economist agrees with him:

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To handle the energy, the scarcity of natural resources from food to raw materials, the dangers of increasing waste and overflowing landfills, and to slow down the threats of climate change, a wide range of measures are being discussed, from tech and scientific progress to come up with cleaner renewable energies, to carbon-trading, resource-planning, energy conservation, etc. etc.

But what policy makers don’t talk about and which our world needs to come to terms with is that we need to learn to live more modestly! So much waste in every aspect of our lives.  SUVs drive me nuts.  The digital economy could not arrive soon enough – more consumption will increasingly be digital, which takes less space and energy, hopefully.

Is a slow-down in consumerism going to lead to "economic pain" from less economic growth? And if so, isn’t that a price we should need to accept as a condition to continue inhabiting this planet?

Goldman Sachs reckons consumers are handing over $1.8 trillion a year to oil producers.

-The Economist

These states include Iran, Venezuela, Russia…  No wonder "authoritarian-driven economies" have looked so good over the last few years.  No wonder Iran and Venezuela can afford divisive hegemonic policies.

It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own.

-Herbert Clark HOOVER
31st President of the United States (1874-1964)

This, indeed, is one of the paramount challenges faced by democratic systems.  Democracy cannot exist without freedom of expression.  And yet how can it safeguard from demagogic populists who once in power may seek to dismantle democratic systems? Nowadays it is fashionable to criticize democratization efforts in the Middle East – after all, look at what Hamas is doing in Gaza, and what is going on in Lebanon with Hezbollah, and the rise of salafis and fatalists wherever any openness is shown. 

There are three keys to a successful democratic system:

• Security By A State Accountable to the People – so people can act on their beliefs without intimidation or coercion, and so militias cannot enforce their will and bully others – think of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine;
• Freedom of Expression and Thought – so all arguments can be truly exposed to scrutiny and thought
• Repeat Election Cycles – so if people make mistakes as they are apt to do, they can undo those who governed badly in the next election cycle – as they did to Hamas the sole time that the people saw them govern and had a chance to vote again; this is the big achilles heel to democracy in the Middle East, as Bernard Lewis commented that fundamentalists had used democracy as "one man, one vote, one time" – and once in power done away with future free elections; this is the problem in Iran, but also in places like Chavez’s Venezuela, and of course Gaza and Lebanon.

• and to be fair in the analysis, a variation of the problem also exists in the West Bank; on one side those in control of the PA

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Did you see the latest ad from iTunes, promoting Coldplay’s new album?!

How does Apple do it? Their ads are always so fresh, so ahead of the pack, so audio-visually on the cutting edge of art and pop. 

"The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy".

- Montesquieu

With regards to the Hezbollah-Lebanon-Doha debacle, and the article by Barry Rubin that I blogged about here, I received some interesting comments from Ami Isseroff, who runs MideastWeb and who I consider one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking analysts on the Middle East:

There is no use comparing everything bad that happens to Munich. This was more like Abbyssinia – including the toothless sanctions. Iran can only be stopped in Iran. Nothing could be done in Lebanon. As for us [in Israel], we have Iran in the north and Iran in the south. There cannot be peace as long as Hamas exists. Your Gaza correspondents are right, and the Palestinian public opinion surveys confirm that Hamas have little support. But in elections, it doesn’t matter what people think. It matters who has the most guns and counts the votes. Read the book Point of No Return about Iran/Hezbollah by Ronen Bergman . …Iran cannot be negotiated with. They will not give up until they are confronted with overwhelming and decisive force. A blockade by sea and air at least,

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A major challenge to letting democracy and freedom take root in the Middle East is that the region’s politics are submerged in an overwhelming culture of resistance.  For decades, Arab rulers have fed the Arab street with anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Israel epithets to such pathological degree that now every movement is defined through this prism.  Those who oppose or attack Israel and the US are instant heroes of the street.  It is hard for progressive reformers to gain traction in Arab elections.  It is either the status quo of corruption and authoritarianism or revolutionary anti-Western opposition.  Thus, according to Yasser Abu Hilala writing in Al Ghad, in Kuwait’s recent elections, the winners were Salafis and Shiia candidates who eulogized Hezbollah’s Imad Mughniyeh.  The situation is so extreme, that reporters who even just interview President Bush are considered infidels and threatened with their lives, and calls abound for countries like Egypt to break all relations with the US and Israel.