Reactions
February 10, 2010
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A Crisis in Trans-Atlantic Relations: Why Obama Is Ignoring Europe
February 10, 2010
The US president is traveling a lot these days — and a clear pattern has emerged. The deeper into the United States it takes him, the better — be it Nashua, New Hampshire or Tampa, Florida. The issue is always the same: How can Barack Obama create more jobs.
Little time remains to travel abroad — particularly not to Europe. The White House recently cancelled Obama’s visit to the EU-US summit in Madrid, scheduled for May. The president’s schedule, White House European policy coordinator Phil Gordon said, was “full.”
The message, though, couldn’t have been any clearer. The president has plenty of time in his schedule to visit Australia and Indonesia in March. The Wall Street Journal recently sneered that the Europeans, so enamored of Obama, must be missing the Bush years. Bush, at least, diligently attended each EU-US summit. As the Washington Post wrote, though: “Unlike most of his predecessors, Obama has not forged close ties with any European leader.”
Obama Has No Need to Talk To Europe
Obama may have made six brief trips to Europe during his first year in office, but the European Union has slipped far down on his priority list. The Europeans are none too pleased. Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero defiantly told a confidant that the US shouldn’t forget that Europe is “an economic power and an important political actor.”
But Obama’s decision to cancel is hardly surprising. For starters, there are no fires in Europe right now that Obama needs to attend to. With his popularity falling at home, Obama needs to focus on delivering results in the US. Right now, the last thing he needs is more European photo ops without concrete results.
From Obama’s perspective, that is exactly what the EU-US summit would have been like. “The Europeans shouldn’t be surprised,” says Annette Heuser of the Washington office of the Bertelsmann Stiftung, a German think tank. “They turned this summit into a show rather than finding issues — like energy policy — where both have a common interest in working together.”
Who Gets To Shake Obama’s Hand First?
All too often, Europe gets lost in diplomatic protocol. The issues up for discussion between US and EU leaders can become secondary. Most seem primarily concerned with who gets to shake Obama’s hand first or who will sit next to him during the meal. Such questions are debated for weeks among protocol-obsessed bureaucrats in Brussels…
Europe seems intent on using etiquette to compensate for its diminishing role on the world stage. No one wants to admit what everyone can see: Europe’s voice doesn’t move anyone at the moment — neither future major powers, like India and Brazil, nor leaders in Washington, Moscow or Beijing. And how could it? The EU may be a successful economic community, but it is just as deeply divided on questions of foreign and security policy as it is on issues like climate change and inner security.
When it comes to foreign policy, each member state is looking out for its own interests. This is particularly clear when it comes to relations with the United States. The Brits continue to guard over their “special relationship,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy always tries to edge his way to Obama’s side in group photos — and then the Spaniards wanted to use the US-EU summit to bask in the spotlight.
Now officials are searching for a substitute date for the EU-US summit — possibly in the autumn, when Obama plans to fly to Portugal for a NATO summit. But the more important question is whether European leaders have really listened to the “wake-up call for Europe” that many EU observers are speaking of following this American affront.
The first reactions haven’t been very encouraging. Zapatero traveled to Washington right after Obama’s cancellation. The Spanish prime minister didn’t manage to get an official appointment with the US president, but he did meet with him briefly at the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual event held in a large hotel in the US capital with thousands of participants. To add insult to injury, not even Vice President Joe Bidden had time for him.
“The Europeans,” said trans-Atlantic expert Annette Heuser, “are pleased to get breakfast appointments in Washington these days. But when it comes to important lunches and dinners, they are no longer present.”
To Israel with hate—and guilt: Why Europe, unlike America, finds it so hard to love Israel
February 10, 2010
THE ugly little mid-summer war that has just ended in Lebanon spilled over into the parliaments, streets, television studios and dinner parties of Europe. By and large, Israel got the worst of it.
The Council of Europe said that Israel’s response to Hizbullah’s cross-border attacks was “disproportionate” and accused Israel of “indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets”. Romano Prodi, Italy’s prime minister, called Israel’s reaction “excessive”. In Norway, Jostein Gaarder, the author of “Sophie’s World”, accused Israel of ethnic cleansing and murdering children, and said that the Jewish state had forfeited its right to exist. In many capitals, anti-war protesters marched under Hizbullah flags. When Britain’s Tony Blair tried to explain things from Israel’s point of view—and failed to call for an immediate ceasefire—his political stock took another tumble.
Mr Gaarder was prodded into a half-hearted apology. But the truth is that, far from being extreme, these criticisms of Israel convey the mood of millions of Europeans, rooted in what polls suggest is a hardening attitude. A YouGov poll in Britain, taken in the first two weeks of the conflict, found 63% of respondents saying that the Israeli response to Hizbullah’s attack was “disproportionate”; a similar German poll had 75% saying so.
Such reactions reflect a wider European view of Israel that contrasts sharply with America’s. In a Pew Global Attitudes survey earlier this year, far more Europeans sympathised with the Palestinians than with Israel (see chart). These findings come on top of a European Union poll in 2003 that had 59% of Europeans considering Israel as a greater menace to world peace than Iran, North Korea and Pakistan.
Why has Europe become so reflexively anti-Israel, just when America has become so reflexively pro-Israel? Europe has no equivalent of America’s powerful AIPAC Israeli lobby, and it also has a disgruntled (and growing) Muslim population. But neither is enough to explain all the difference in attitude. Indeed, many Muslims in Europe now feel beleaguered and can only dream of wielding AIPAC’s clout.
Some Americans blame rising anti-Semitism in Europe, which they also attribute in part to its growing Muslim population. But there is a difference between being anti-Semitic and being anti-Israel. And in any case, it is not obvious that anti-Semitism is a big factor. In central Europe, for example, there seems to be both greater anti-Semitism and more support for Israel. And some polls suggest that more Americans think Jews have “too much influence” in their country than do Europeans.
It is also often the right in Europe, linked with anti-Semitism in the past, that is most supportive of Israel today. Britain’s Conservative Party, for instance, not always known for its admiration of Jews or Israel, is now the most pro-Israel party. In Italy, which invented fascism, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and Gianfranco Fini’s formerly neo-fascist National Alliance, are more pro-Israel than the government. In Spain, the centre-right opposition was highly critical of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Socialist prime minister, when he donned an Arab headscarf to show solidarity during the Lebanon war.
Understanding Mahmoud
February 10, 2010
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It Was A Cold Snowy Night…
February 10, 2010
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The Coach
February 9, 2010
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Google develops phone-call language translation
February 9, 2010
Google has announced ambitious plans to combine its voice recognition and text-translation software to develop a smartphone that can instantly translate foreign languages – meaning people who do not share the same tongue will be able to talk by phone.
The concept is reminiscent of the fictional ‘babel fish’ that appears in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The new phone is unlikely to be available any time soon, but the company says it hopes to have a version ready in “a few years”.
Translation services have proved notoriously difficult to develop in the past for a number of reasons. First the software must be able to understand what the speaker is saying in his or her own language before it is translated. Getting a machine to recognise words is a problem that many people using relatively old-fashioned technologies like ‘voice-dial’ still face.
Google says it has been working on eliminating the problem and is developing voice-recognition technology that can learn and adapt to the accent and pitch of the speaker.
Another problem, familiar to anyone who has used a translation service, is capturing the actual meaning of what it being said. The sheer number of words in any language and the alternative meanings and nuances that can be attached to them make it notoriously difficult for automatic translation devices to render an accurate representation of what is being said…
Hearts, Minds, and the Satellite Dish: America’s televised message in the Arab world is dull and poorly managed
February 9, 2010
CJR:
The United States government has on occasion distressed over the nature of TV news in the Arab world and its perceived negative effect on public attitudes toward America.
During the Bush years, American officials repeatedly criticized Al-Jazeera for inciting anti-Americanism, and for its alleged flirtations with Al-Qaeda. In 2004, the United States launched its own Arabic news channel, Al-Hurra, to compete with the established satellite networks in the Arab world.
This December, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution encouraging the president to label satellite providers that carry TV networks of terrorist organizations as terrorist entities themselves. Those providers offering networks like Al-Manar and Al-Aqsa—run by Hizballah and Hamas, respectively—would be designated terrorist outfits.
While these measures may appear proactive and meaningful, they aren’t. The United States’s televised message in the Arab world is dull and poorly managed, and the measures the government has taken to change this have yielded little perceptible benefit.
Consider Al-Hurra, a failure by any meaningful measure. I’m an Arabic-speaking American and I can’t even stand to watch it. The programming is boring, and the graphics and studios are often reminiscent of a 1970s game show.
Most damning for Al-Hurra, though, is the fact that many Arabs don’t know it exists; many of those who do believe it’s a PR tool for the U.S. military. This assumption is false, but not unreasonable, given that the network was conceived to improve America’s image in the Arab world following the Iraq invasion.
I recently conducted a survey of news use and attitudes toward the U.S. government among 321 young adults in Jordan, and just one person named Al-Hurra among the news networks they occasionally watch. The study, research for my Ph.D. dissertation at The University of North Carolina, found that young Jordanians mostly rely on Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, the latter a Saudi-owned network, for their televised news. Al-Hurra was a non-entity as far as these young Arabs were concerned.
Al-Hurra, Arabic for “the free one,” is not at all free, costing U.S. taxpayers about $100 million a year, and it isn’t warming the hearts and minds with which policymakers are concerned. It’s an expensive project that isn’t part of the Arab conversation.
The United States’s image in the Arab world isn’t unsalvageable. With some necessary foreign policy modifications and a greater presence on Arab airwaves, America can shore up its image in a region sharply vital to national security. While funding its own Arabic TV network and targeting the portals of Hamas and Hizballah won’t earn the United States much affective capital in Arab countries, dispatching more Arabic-speaking U.S. officials to Arab news networks to discuss a number of specific changes in American foreign policy would…
Who Says It Won’t Work?
February 9, 2010
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Ho Hum
February 9, 2010
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Do Tell
February 8, 2010
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How Can I Make You Understand?
February 8, 2010
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The Deadly Price of Pursuing Peace
February 8, 2010
When the Oslo process began in 1993, one benefit its adherents promised was a significant improvement in Israel’s international standing. And initially, it seemed as if that promise would be kept: 37 countries soon established or renewed diplomatic relations with Israel; a peace treaty was signed with Jordan; five other Arab states opened lower-level relations.
But 16 years later, it is clear that this initial boost was illusory. Not only is Israel’s standing no better than it was prior to the famous handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat on the White House Lawn in September 1993, it has fallen to an unprecedented low. Efforts to boycott and divest from Israel are gaining strength throughout the West, among groups as diverse as British academics, Canadian labor unions, the Norwegian government’s investment fund, and American churches. Israeli military operations routinely spark huge protests worldwide, often featuring anti-Semitic slogans. References to Israel as an apartheid state have become so commonplace that even a former president of Israel’s closest ally, the United States, had no qualms about using the term in the title of his 2007 book on Israel. European polls repeatedly deem Israel the greatest threat to world peace, greater even than such beacons of tranquility and democracy as Iran and North Korea. Courts in several European countries, including Belgium, Britain, and Spain, have seriously considered indicting Israeli officials for war crimes (though none has actually yet done so). And in October, when the United Nations Human Rights Council overwhelmingly endorsed a report that advocated hauling Israel before the International Criminal Court on war-crimes charges, even many of Jerusalem’s supposed allies refused to vote against the measure. In academic and media circles, it has even become acceptable to question Israel’s very right to exist—something never asked about any other state in the world. None of these developments was imaginable back in the days when Israel refused to talk to the Palestine Liberation Organization, had yet to withdraw from an inch of “Palestinian” land, and had not evacuated a single settlement.
Yet even today, conventional wisdom, including in Israel, continues to assert that Israel’s international standing depends on its willingness to advance the “peace process.” That invites an obvious question: if so, why has Israel’s reputation fallen so low despite its numerous concessions for peace since 1993?
The answer is unpleasant to contemplate, but the mounting evidence makes it inescapable: Israel’s standing has declined so precipitously not despite Oslo but because of Oslo. It was Israel’s very willingness to make concessions for the sake of peace that has produced its current near-pariah status.
Why should this be so? There are several reasons.
Threat from ‘Generation Jihad’ could last 20 years
February 8, 2010
Britain is facing a generation of ‘jihad’ from extremists which could last up to 20 years, one of the country’s top police officers warned last night.
Sir Norman Bettison, chief constable of West Yorkshire Police, said the Muslim community could do more to help identify would-be jihadists.
‘I think it’s a generation of treatment to prevent the infection spreading and I think that will take us probably 20 years,’ he said.
Sir Norman, the Association of Chief Police Officers’ representative for policy on tackling violent extremism, said he was conscious that there was a fine line between winning the Muslim community’s support and alienating it.
But he warned there was also a need for the community to work with the police.
‘I’m looking for the community to work much more closely with the police in identifying young people that they have concerns about in terms of the people that they’re mixing with, the sort of websites that they’re going on to and the material that they’re reading,’ he said. ‘That information can only come from the community itself.’
Predicatable
February 8, 2010
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Barack And The Beanstalk
February 8, 2010
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The Obama Generation Grows Up
February 7, 2010
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Obama Announces New Space Program
February 7, 2010
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ON THE face of it the world’s big and publicly quoted oil companies should be celebrating some pleasing results this week. Royal Dutch Shell unveiled its results on Thursday February 4th, reporting that it had made $9.8 billion in 2009. Two days earlier BP boasted profits of $14 billion for the same year. Yet these billions are a disappointment compared with the bonanza of previous years (Shell, for example, raked in $31.4 billion in 2008 alone) when soaring oil prices pulled profits ever higher.
In the long term, however, the firms’ success depends on sustaining reserves. The big western oil companies are trying to expand through acquisitions and investment, but the opportunities do so are becoming scarcer. The firms are spending where they can. Exxon Mobil, the biggest listed oil company, says that exploration and capital spending hit $27.1 billion in 2009, 4% higher than in 2008. The company expects to spend $25 billion to $30 billion annually to the same end over the next five years. BP intends to spend some $20 billion this year on investment in new projects and drilling, roughly the same level as last year.
But there are limits to what money can buy. State-controlled rivals—in the Middle East, Russia and beyond—jealously guard oil reserves on their home patches. Few new big fields of oil, at least those that are easy to reach and cheap to exploit, have been discovered in recent years. And where new opportunities emerge, such as in Iraq, Western oil giants are scrambling to pay big sums at auctions for drilling rights in territory where the local government tightly limits their returns. Even then, competition from Chinese, Russian and other state-run oil firms can be severe. National oil companies will often pay prices that would alarm shareholders in the big listed oil companies…
I’m Sorry, So Sorry
February 6, 2010
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