Over 16,000 Christians Want Franklin Graham Fired for 'Helping Incite' Capitol Riot


More than 16,000 Christians have signed a petition calling for evangelical leader Franklin Graham to be fired as the head of Samaritan's Purse and his father's namesake non-profit Billy Graham Evangelistic Association after he endorsed President Donald Trump's conspiracy theories that the election was "rigged or stolen."

© Drew Angerer/Getty Thousands of Christians have signed a petition calling on Samaritan's Purse and BGEA to fire Franklin Graham, son of the late evangelical Christian leader Billy Graham. In this photo, Franklin Graham pre-records his invocation to the Republican National Convention at the Mellon Auditorium on August 27 in Washington, D.C.

Graham said in December that he believed Trump when he said that the election was "rigged or stolen." Graham later tweeted his support for Republican lawmakers planning to object to the certification of President-elect Joe Biden's win in multiple battleground states. The petition argues that Graham's support of Trump's false claims helped to incite the mob of the president's rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol while Congress convened to count the Electoral Votes on January 6.

"As long as Samaritan's Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association stand by Franklin Graham, it must be said that these once-vaunted organizations have forgotten their original Christian missions, abandoned the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and are complicit in the spread of dishonest, discredited election conspiracy theories and the deadly, unpatriotic, white-nationalist terrorism at the U.S. Capitol incited by those lies," the petition launched by Faithful America says.

"Our faith in Jesus Christ demands that we do better than this. Your fellow Christians from across the country call on you to fire Franklin Graham, or to resign from the Board in individual protest," the signatories add. The petition will be sent to board members of both organizations.

Faithful America describes itself as the nation's largest online community of Christians organizing for social justice. The organization, backed by thousands of supporters, previously called on Samaritan's Purse to remove Graham as its CEO after he prayed at the Republican National Convention in late August of last year.

"The petition is in response to Graham's discredited and incendiary claim that the 2020 election 'was rigged or stolen,' the type of misinformation rhetoric that inspired the failed coup of January 6 and likely contributed to the presence of signs like 'Jesus 2020' and 'Trump is my savior, Jesus is my president' at the preceding 'Stop the Steal' rally," Nathan Empsall, Faithful America's campaigns director, wrote in a Tuesday email to Newsweek.

Newsweek reached out to Samaritan's Purse, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Graham for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

Samaritan's Purse was founded in 1970 and provides disaster, medical and other humanitarian relief in countries around the world. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association was founded in 1950 by Graham's father, the legendary American evangelist Billy Graham, who died in 2018. Graham serves as both organizations' president and CEO.

White evangelical Christians were a key base of support backing Trump in the 2016 presidential election and throughout his tenure in the White House. Exit polls from the 2016 presidential election showed that about eight in 10 white evangelicals voted for Trump. In 2020, the results were similar, with exit polls showing somewhere between 76 and 81 percent of white evangelicals supporting a second Trump term.

Although the president and many of his supporters continue to claim the election was stolen by Biden, there is no evidence to support this extraordinary allegation. More than 50 lawsuits contesting the election results brought by Trump and his supporters have failed in state and federal courts. Even judges appointed by Trump and other Republicans have emphasized in their rulings that lawyers did not provide evidence to support the claims of widespread voter fraud.

In November, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security, which was led by a Trump appointee, asserted that "there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised." The federal agency described the 2020 election as "the most secure in American history."

Former Attorney General William Barr, who was widely viewed as one of Trump's most loyal and effective Cabinet members, said in early December that there was "no evidence" of fraud that would change the election outcomes. Recounts and audits—including hand recounts—have verified the results in multiple battleground states disputed by Trump.

Trump became the first president in U.S. history to be impeached a second time last Wednesday for his role in inciting the January 6 insurrection against the U.S. Capitol. Ten Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump alongside their Democratic colleagues, while a number of other Republican lawmakers condemned the president's actions and said he should be held accountable.

Graham condemned the Republican members of Congress who voted to impeach a president of their own political party. The prominent evangelical compared them to Judas, the Biblical disciple who betrayed Jesus ahead of his execution.

"Shame, shame on the ten Republicans who joined with Speaker Pelosi & the House Democrats in impeaching President Trump yesterday. After all that he has done for our country, you would turn your back & betray him so quickly?" Graham wrote in a Facebook post.

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CANADA

Tory caucus to meet Wednesday to determine fate of MP Derek Sloan: sources

© THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick 

Conservative MP Derek Sloan arrives to a meeting in Ottawa on Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2020.

The Conservative Party of Canada's caucus will be holding a vote on Wednesday to decide whether to remove MP Derek Sloan, sources say.

The party's leader, Erin O'Toole, had called for his removal on Monday, after a report from Press Progress surfaced revealing the member of parliament for Hastings–Lennox and Addington accepted at $131 donation from a man who has been described as a neo-Nazi.

Read more: O’Toole seeks to boot MP Derek Sloan from Conservative caucus over donation

A Conservative source told Global News many members of caucus are frustrated that Sloan doesn't act like a member of the team, and does not show any remorse or understanding about the effects his behaviour has on his colleagues.

Wednesday's vote will be about the cumulative effect of Sloan's behaviour, not just about the issue of the donation, the source said.

Another source confirmed to Global News the meeting will take place at 11 a.m. ET.

However, in an interview on Tuesday, Sloan dismissed the calls for his removal as “trumped-up charges.”

“This is infighting and it's not good for the future of conservatism in Canada,” he said.

Sloan also maintained that he did not know of the donation from Paul Fromm before Monday, adding that he condemns racism and hatred.

“I don't know much about Paul Fromm,” he said. “I understand that he's affiliated with racist groups. I condemn that, I condemn racism. I condemn hatred.”

“That's certainly something I'm proud to say.”

Video: MP Derek Sloan says he condemns racism, hatred after donation scandal

Sloan said his leadership campaign team did not have the manpower to conduct background checks on each individual donation, saying they received over 13,000 individual donations.

Earlier on Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he was "pleased" with O'Toole's move to begin the process of removing Sloan.

“The Liberal Party has been calling for Erin O’Toole to remove Derek Sloan from caucus for many, many months now following a number of unacceptable comments that he has made,” Trudeau said.

“We are pleased that Erin O’Toole has finally decided to take leadership and we’ll see how that unfolds.”

On Monday, O'Toole issued a statement calling Sloan's acceptance of the donation "far worse than a gross error of judgment or failure of due diligence."

The leader said he had initiated the process to remove Sloan under the Reform Act, and would bar him from running as a candidate for the party.

Read more: O’Toole seeks to boot MP Derek Sloan from Conservative caucus over donation

"Racism is a disease of the soul, repugnant to our core values." he said in the statement.

"It has no place in our country. It has no place in the Conservative Party of Canada. I won't tolerate it."

However, in a statement Monday evening, Sloan claimed Fromm had applied and was accepted as a member of the party last summer amid the party's leadership race.

He said this means scrutineers for the campaigns of O'Toole, Peter MacKay and Leslyn Lewis also overlooked Fromm's application.

“Therefore the Party, and the O’Toole campaign, failed to uphold the same standards to which they are now applying to me,” he said.

But, in an email to Global News, a spokesperson from the Conservative Party said it was Sloan’s campaign that sold Fromm a party membership in May.

“Mr. Sloan’s campaign accepted the donation from this individual in August,” the email read. “We are revoking this membership. We are remitting the funds.”

A majority vote of the party caucus would be required to remove Sloan.

It was not immediately clear how members planned on voting, though at least one has publicly called for his ouster.

In a tweet on Monday, MP Eric Duncan said he has "had enough too."

"There is no room for this garbage in our Party," he wrote. "Good riddance."

Trudeau ‘pleased’ Erin O’Toole removing Derek Sloan from Conservative caucus

Former Conservative MP John Baird also shared his thoughts on Twitter, saying he has "worked well with many social conservatives in our party over the years."

"They are welcome in our party, but Derek Sloan’s behaviour is not. I am fully supportive of @erinotoole's strong leadership," he wrote.

Sloan, meanwhile, has said he has heard from some members of the party who have offered their support.

“I don’t want to highlight anybody in particular, but you know, I think many people that I’ve spoken to, frankly, understand that this can happen to anyone,” he said.

This is not the first time members of the party have called for Sloan to be removed from caucus.

Last year he faced calls for removal after he questioned whether Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa was working for China amid the novel coronavirus pandemic.

However, Sloan insisted he was not questioning Tam’s loyalty to Canada, and ultimately remained in the party’s caucus.

— With files from Global News' Amanda Connolly

Keystone XL pipeline: Biden administration to rescind permit on Wednesday, sources say

By Dan Merica and Gregory Krieg, CNN 

President-elect Joe Biden's incoming administration plans to rescind the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office, two sources familiar with the decision tell CNN, delivering a win to an array of progressive organization and rolling back one of President Donald Trump's earliest moves.

© Andrew Burton/Getty Images Miles of unused pipe, prepared for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, sit in a lot on October 14, 2014 outside Gascoyne, North Dakota.

The decision was not included in a memo from incoming Biden chief of staff Ron Klain released on Saturday, but sources familiar with the move tell CNN that the Biden team intends to make the executive order one of the President-elect's first climate crisis actions.

The pipeline has long been a political hot button and Trump made it a political issue during the 2016 general election. The Keystone pipeline system current stretches more than 2,600 miles, carrying crude from Alberta, Canada, through Manitoba, Canada, and down into Texas. The Keystone XL portion, which has been protested and opposed by numerous indigenous groups, would run from Alberta to Nebraska and cut through Montana and North Dakota.

The Supreme Court delivered a substantial blow to the project in 2020 when it cleared the way for several pipeline projects to be receive fast-tracked permits, but excluded the Keystone XL pipeline from that order.

The decision on put a block on the cross-border pipeline was first reported by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, citing a presentation that included "Rescind Keystone XL pipeline permit" in the list of environmental executive actions Biden would take on his first day.

The Biden transition declined to comment on the plans. A source familiar with the decision, however, said that the presentation reported by the CBC was weeks old.

Trump signed executive actions at the outset of his administration that approved the Keystone XL pipeline, dispensing with plans from the Obama era to block construction.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday authorized the declassification of a set of documents connected to the investigation of his 2016 campaign’s contacts with Russia.

© Alex Brandon/AP Photo President Donald Trump gestures as he boards Air Force One last week in Harlingen, Texas.

Trump has long declared his intention to make public more of the sensitive materials underlying the probe, which he has maligned as a “witch hunt,” despite findings that his campaign sought and relied upon materials obtained by Russia to aid his campaign against Hillary Clinton.

Trump has spent his final weeks in office seeking to erase any vestiges of the investigation, pardoning key figures such as George Papadopoulos, the 2016 campaign aide whose interactions with a Russia-linked professor helped ignite the probe, known as Crossfire Hurricane.

It’s unclear which documents Trump has ordered declassified less than 24 hours before he leaves office. He cited the decision as based on the results of a Dec. 30 review he asked the Justice Department to perform. The department presented him with a “binder of materials” that remain classified, he said in a memorandum issued on Tuesday. Trump said he then asked for the documents to be declassified to “the maximum extent possible.”

The FBI responded that it believed that all of the materials should remain classified, but that some were particularly crucial and should at least be redacted.

“I have determined to accept the redactions proposed for continued classification by the FBI in that January 17 submission,” Trump said in his memo. “I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder. This is my final determination under the declassification review and I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy.”

It’s unclear when the newly declassified documents will become public. But Trump’s decision represents a sharp walkback from two previous assertions that he would declassify every document related to the probe, a longtime demand of his political allies, who have amplified his denigration of the investigation.

A war on ‘domestic terrorism’ would be a disaster for US minorities



WAQAS MIRZA
11 JAN 2021

In the aftermath of the Capitol Hill riot, empowering the national security state to wage a war on ‘domestic terror’ is likely to result in marginalised communities being disproportionately targeted.

As denunciations of the storming of Capitol Hill continue to pour in, the political consensus is seamlessly settling into labeling the act as “domestic terrorism.”

Joe Biden condemned the mob as “insurrectionists” and “domestic terrorists”. The soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, and even ‘Squad’ member Ayanna Pressley joined the chorus. Seemingly oblivious to his own role in contributing to the bungled putsch, Republican Senator Ted Cruz also called the attack “a despicable act of terrorism.”

As of today, at least 25 domestic terrorism cases have been opened in connection with the January 6 violence, according to US Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy.

While the the violence in Washington DC may or may not meet one of the many formal definitions of terrorism in the US, there has been a concerted effort among many Democrats to label the act as such and enact new legislation that would make it easier to prosecute the perpetrators.

This push for new legislation and more funding for law enforcement agencies comes amidst a growing recognition among Democrats that the far-right, among them many white supremacist and ethnonationalist groups, comprise a significant portion of Trump’s base and have increasingly turned to violence to seek their objectives.

In November 2020, for example, a working group advising the incoming Biden administration urged the President-elect “to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.” After the violence on Capitol Hill, according to the Wall Street Journal, Joe Biden “plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism.”

In Congress, too, there is talk of domestic terrorism. A letter signed by Democratic leaders of five House committees asked the FBI Director Christopher Wray to “leverage all available assets and resources” to ensure the perpetrators of the domestic terrorist attack were brought to justice.

Empowering a bloated security state

While the renewed focus on the far-right is understandable given the violence in DC, the reinforcement of the “terrorism” framework raises critical questions regarding the threat to civil liberties and racial and religious minorities that it continues to pose.

The ACLU opposed House Resolution 4192 on those grounds, calling it “unnecessary” as “the offenses it creates largely duplicate existing crimes” as well as “harmful because it expands authorities that law enforcement has abused to target marginalized communities.”

Consider, for example, the No Fly List, a secret government list based on unknown criteria that comprises tens of thousands of individuals prohibited from boarding a plane. It has long been evident that the list is discriminatory, disproportionately targeting Muslims, based on a highly arbitrary criteria without any transparency, and once included a 4-year old child. The list contained only sixteen names on September 11, 2001 but has since bloated to include more than 81,000 names.

Expanding the list to to include the perpetrators of the Capitol Hill attack, as chairman of the Democratic House Committee on Homeland Security recently called for, will not change the arbitrary and secretive basis for punitive state action that the list represents.

Similarly, the vast surveillance apparatus propped up to target American Muslims and the mass surveillance programs established by the National Security Agency, will continue to be detrimental to free speech and political organising when broadened to include even more communities or infused with additional resources and funding.

The demand for a more expansive application of the “terrorism” designation is explicitly a call for more punitive measures, which have been previously been pursued in an arbitrary and discriminatory way and without transparency or hope for redress. It further empowers and expands the national security state, contributing to bloated budgets for law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and border patrol, which disproportionately target Muslims and other people of colour in any case.

It is a call for far more widespread surveillance powers being granted to agencies which have a proven record of abusing those powers. It leads even more to legal innovations which continue to constrict the many rights and civil liberties which have already become strained during the war on terror.

This demand is also predicated on the mistaken belief that there can, somehow, be an objective definition of terrorism which would capture perpetrators of ideologically-motivated violence regardless of race, religion, or political use.

The infinite malleability of terrorism

Terrorism, however, is an infinitely malleable category. Even if an objective application was possible, law enforcement and intelligence agencies enjoy wide discretion in deciding who to surveil, investigate, and prosecute.

Given their history, it is not difficult to guess which populations they would target.

This is not mere speculation. The authority granted to local police forces and the FBI to combat the terrorist threat has routinely been used to target innocent individuals as well as non-violent protests and social movements.

The “unnecessarily and dangerously militarized” police force for example, which has been present in full force to crush the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests from 2016 onwards, was the product of the Department of Defense’s 1033 Program. While the program pre-dates 9/11, it was ramped up in response to the war on terror.

The FBI’s identification of a spurious “Black Identity Extremist” threat in 2017 also follows the precedents of the war on terror. It echoes the category of “pre-crime,” established to identify terrorist threats before they materialise through specious theories of radicalisation -- dutifully provided by a cottage industry of terrorism experts -- which would feed the preventive prosecution of individuals who had never committed a crime.

Activists from BLM, Occupy, and indigenous rights movements have repeatedly found themselves at the crosshairs of local and federal agencies, empowered by the funding, resources, and broad authority granted to them under the aegis of the war on terror. Innocent Muslims have also remained a primary target.

As the visibility and threat posted by far-right groups continues to grow, it will be increasingly tempting to reinforce the framework of the war on terror and increase law enforcement and intelligence agencies’ funding and authority to suppress its growth.

An expansion of the national security state and further entrenchment of its authoritarian elements, however, would only result in the continuing repression of already marginalised communities.

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT World.

AUTHOR
Waqas Mirza @waqasahmi is a writer and activist based in Massachusetts. His work focuses on US foreign policy, War on Terror, Islamophobia, surveillance, policing and development.

IT'S TOUGH IN A CHRISTIAN DOMINATED SPORT

How Robert Saleh became the NFL’s first Muslim coach

15 HOURS AGO

The son of Lebanese immigrants, the significance of Saleh's hire as the New York Jets head coach extends beyond the sport.

By signing a five-year contract with the New York Jets last week, Robert Saleh etched himself into the history books by becoming the National Football League’s (NFL) first Muslim-American head coach.

The hiring of Saleh, who is of Lebanese background, on a team in the world’s biggest media market, is a landmark moment for a country embroiled in a reckoning around racial justice and a league fraught by a visible lack of diverse organisational appointments.

“We welcome this development as another sign of the increasing inclusion and recognition of American Muslims in our diverse society,” Ibrahim Hopper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said in a statement.

“I think he’s just a trailblazer for a lot of coaches who are Muslim, to let them know that they do have a chance to be a head coach,” said Detroit Lions offensive lineman Oday Aboushi, one of the Muslim players currently in the NFL.

Saleh joins the Jets after spending the last four years as a defensive coordinator for the San Francisco 49ers, which he transformed into one of the NFL's elite units. He is now tasked with overhauling and transforming the Jets, one of the worst teams in the NFL, into a contender under the intense scrutiny that inevitably comes with coaching any franchise in the Big Apple.

And Saleh appears primed for the challenge.

A fiery and charismatic figure, Saleh is known to be a player’s coach and frequently lauded for his leadership skills. Notably bald, his jubilant flexing and celebratory theatrics on the sidelines during games has grown memorable with audiences.


“He’s a leader of men,” Robert Sherman, the star 49ers cornerback, said in a press conference upon Saleh’s departure from the team. Sherman noted he deserved a ton of credit for never making excuses for the injuries the unit suffered the past season and still managing to field a top-5 defense.

A trailblazing path

Son of a construction worker, the 41-year-old Saleh is a native of Dearborn, Michigan, a blue-collar community home to the largest Muslim population per capita in the US. On the margins of Detroit, Dearborn was a place where many Arab refugees who fled war found stability by integrating themselves into the auto industry.

Fordson High School, which Saleh’s attended – with a 95 percent Arab student body – was where his passion for American football was fueled alongside his working-class grit. Abed Ayoub, the legal and policy director for the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, who grew up near Saleh in Dearborn, called him a “natural-born leader” whose “humility is what sets him apart, and what makes him an embodiment of our working-class Arab American community.”

Having stopped playing football after his tenure at Northern Michigan University, he had a comfy job in finance and appeared to have a secure future ahead of him. What then led him to forge a different career path in the NFL occurred on the morning of 9/11.

On that fateful day, David, his older brother, had begun induction for a new job at Morgan Stanley on the 61st floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. After hearing the North Tower was hit, David frantically managed to escape the building just as terrorists flew another plane into the South Tower.

It was an event that shook Robert – highlighting the precarity of life and pushing him to leave his credit analyst role at Comerica to chase his passion for football as a coach.

His first break came with the Houston Texans in 2005 as an intern, which subsequently opened the door for further coaching opportunities as he enjoyed stints as an assistant coach in Seattle and Jacksonville before being hired by San Francisco as a defensive coordinator in 2017.

Defensive Coordinator Robert Saleh of the San Francisco 49ers talk with the linebackers on the sideline during the game against the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIV at Hard Rock Stadium on February 2, 2020 in Miami, Florida. (Michael Zagaris / Getty Images)

On the heels of last year’s Super Bowl when the 49ers prepared to face off against the Kansas City Chiefs, Saleh spoke to the Washington Post on what his presence meant at the pinnacle of America’s sporting spectacle. He traced his family’s roots back to his immigrant Lebanese grandfather and how that generation laboured on factory assembly floors without being able to advance because of the language barrier.

“For me to have the opportunity to coach, and kind of create another trail, has been good,” he said. “That is pretty cool.”

In the same article, Dawud Walid, executive director of CAIR’s Michigan chapter, highlighted the importance of Saleh’s cultural impact.

“The sports world has perhaps a much larger effect on pop culture than those other avenues of influence,” Walid said.

“So Coach Saleh doing what he does, and his affiliation with the NFL and having a high profile, will have influence, many of us believe, on how a number of Americans will perhaps look at Muslims in a different light.”

While preparing to bring his schematic prowess and larger-than-life presence to revive a once storied New York franchise, Saleh has made Dearborn – and Muslims across America – exceedingly proud.

Can the pandemic be a trigger to stop deforestation once and for all?



FRAN RAYMOND PRICE
4 DAYS AGO

The pandemic has wreaked havoc on forests, but it can also be the fulcrum which leads to an end to this scourge on our planet.

During its ongoing assault on our lives, the pandemic has often been hailed as a boon for the environment, if nothing else. Yet while it may have reduced air pollution or led to a resurgence in wildlife in some areas, when it comes to deforestation, the opposite is true.

In Brazil, the virus outbreak prompted the government to relax environmental regulations, causing the country to recently hit its highest level since 2008, amid an upsurge of illegal logging and forest clearing.

In Colombia, there was an explosion in forest fires in the Amazon as the government reduced monitoring and enforcement of forest crimes to focus on the virus. Madagascar, meanwhile, witnessed an uptick in clearing of the mountainous forests to the north of the country, as the economic pressures caused by Covid-19 created a desperate need for new sources of income that could be provided by fields of marijuana, vanilla, and rice. These are just a few examples – while the most up-to-date forest loss figures aren’t due until later this quarter, all signs point to the pandemic having worsened an already bleak picture across the world.

Global deforestation was already trending upwards well before the pandemic began, as WWF’s new report Deforestation fronts: Drivers and responses in a changing world illustrates. The report shows that an area roughly the size of California was lost to deforestation between 2004 and 2017 in the tropics and subtropics alone.

Commercial agriculture – a vital source of livelihood for millions – is the leading cause of deforestation globally, according to the report, with forested areas cleared to create space for livestock and to grow crops. Through deforestation, we are drastically imperiling every aspect of life on our planet. Is it really worth it? As the American biologist Edward Wilson once put it, “destroying rainforests for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.” 

Not only is deforestation one of the main causes of the 69 percent average decline in wildlife populations that we’ve seen in less than half a century, cutting trees is also a major contributor to climate change, adding carbon dioxide to the air and removing the ability for existing carbon dioxide to be absorbed. Deforestation can also disrupt the lives of local communities, sometimes with profound consequences.

Chela Umire lives in an indigenous reserve in the heart of the Colombian Amazon, where the deforestation rate in the first three months of 2020 exceeded the total for the whole of 2019.

“The jungle is very important to us because we depend on it,” she says. “We get the animals and our food is guaranteed, and so we can live from it and get useful things for our children. I think that in the future if we don’t look after the forest and all its natural resources, the Amazon will become a desert and rising temperatures will bring an end to human life.”

Ironically, given the surge in destruction of forests over the past year, we also know that large-scale deforestation is one of the biggest underlying causes of pandemics. The more we cut down, the greater the chance we’ll face another catastrophe like the one which continues to ruthlessly steal the lives and livelihoods of millions across the world, with the unfettered destruction of the Brazilian Amazon seen as the greatest risk.

However, there is reason for hope. As well as being a trigger for much of the recent acceleration in forest loss, Covid-19 could also prove to be the very fulcrum which leads to an end to this scourge on our planet once and for all.

Never has it been more urgent that we change our relationship with nature. As governments create policies to address the economic and social impacts of the global pandemic, they can choose to help prevent the next one by addressing over-consumption, and put greater value on health and nature. They can choose to adopt a ‘One Health’ approach to their decision-making and take seriously the links between human health and deforestation and other drivers of nature loss.

Since September 2020, more than 80 Heads of State and Government have pledged to take transformative action to reverse biodiversity loss and adopt a One Health approach. Leaders must now turn these commitments into action. It is encouraging to see the launch of PREZODE - the first global initiative to prevent the next pandemic by reducing pressures on biodiversity - at the One Planet Summit earlier this week. But much more action is needed.

Citizens everywhere can play their part by protecting nature where they live, avoiding products linked to deforestation and other forms of ecosystem conversion such as unsustainable meat, soy and palm oil products; and calling on their leaders to champion policies that halt deforestation, such as through the Together4Forests campaign in the European Union.

There’s still time for the pandemic to turn the tide for the world’s forests. It genuinely could, and should, serve as a trigger for greater action to protect them – and ultimately, us too.

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT World.

AUTHOR
Fran Raymond Price has spent her career working to protect forests and improve forestry around the globe. She joined WWF in June 2020 after 18 years at The Na-ture Conservancy (TNC). Fran has served on several boards and task groups, in-cluding the FSC International board (2013-2019) as Vice Chair from 2017 to 2019; FSC US board; the Tropical Forest Foundation board; High Conservation Value Re-source Network Steering Group; and WWF’s North American Forest and Trade Network Advisory Group.

The reckless pomposity of Mike Pompeo


TOM HUSSAIN

1 DAY AGO

As the curtain closes on his tenure as Secretary of State, Pompeo has cynically pursued a strategy of provocation to undermine the incoming Biden administration.

Some 23 years ago, senior members of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations paid a visit to Abu Dhabi. Over a lunch in which a whole camel - resplendent with glistening hump - was the pièce de résistance, they were pressed by senior Emirati officials over US policy on Iraq.

According to my sources in both camps, the veteran senators were asked why the US persisted with occasional airstrikes against Saddam Hussein's regime. The UAE had just embarked on the massive diversification programme which created the "Hong Kong West" the world is now familiar with. But the US policy of containing Iraq, heavily military defeated as it was after the Kuwait War, was muddying the waters.

As long as uncertainty prevailed about the security situation in the Gulf, the UAE's ability to attract foreign direct investment would be hamstrung. Why not just get rid of Saddam, the Emiratis asked.

Because, they were told by the senators, the US plans for the Middle East were not defined by the threat posed by Saddam. Iraq - and Syria - were the only two Arab states that were practically on an industrial and military par with Israel, they said.

When the US attacked Iraq, it would be with the aim of reducing it to a pre-industrial economy, one of the senators declared, rendering his hosts gobsmacked.

Five years later, whilst investigating US preparations for its invasion of Iraq, I came across evidence of what this would mean, in practical terms, for the people of Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries on Capitol Hill's hit-list.

My sources in the ports and shipping industry gave me good insights into, broadly speaking, what US government cargoes were being pre-positioned at ports in the Middle East as part of the logistical preparations for the ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign.

First, stockpiles were gathered at hub ports like Salalah in southern Oman and the UAE's Jebel Ali, and then were transhipped to ports in the northern Gulf, predominantly to Kuwait. Naively, I had expected the US and its allies to cater to the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people, seeing as most of them would welcome liberation from Saddam's clutches.

After six months of hopping around port cities in the region, I was mortified by my findings: not a single shipment of humanitarian aid had been shipped by the US. Literally, not one.

The World Food Programme had stockpiled dry food supplies in Jordan, but they were glaringly inadequate considering the scale of the humanitarian disaster that was bound to unfold.

Pompeo’s parting salvo

Since becoming the US Secretary of State in April 2018, Mike Pompeo has single mindedly pursued this destructive, soulless geopolitical agenda.

Seeking to create a fake legacy, Pompeo's tweets and actions on the world stage over the last few weeks have been truly despicable. Certainly, they have been on par with his Neocon responsibility for the fake news about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

I'll start with Pompeo's decision to lift decades-old restrictions on senior US officials visiting Taiwan. He even scheduled a trip to Taipei. There could only ever have been one response from Beijing to Pompeo's brazen attempt to end US adherence to the "One China" policy agreed on by President Nixon in 1972: back down or face a war, the Chinese state media threatened.

Undoubtedly under pressure from Congress and the Biden camp not to trigger World War 3, Pompeo ended his theatrics - much to Taipei's relief. Not, however, before he ensured the premature declassification of details about the Trump administration's policy for the so-called Indo-Pacific region. It confirmed what Beijing had claimed all along: Washington is working aggressively to contain China, up to and including erecting reluctant India as a regional policeman of sorts.

That was provocative, and aimed mainly at further poisoning a US-China relationship undermined by trade warfare before Biden could reset its tone.

But it pales in comparison to Pompeo's moves in the Middle East last week.

The State Department's declaration of Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi militia as a terrorist organisation has been greeted with horror and outrage because, if not reversed by Biden, it would exacerbate the world's biggest humanitarian crisis and cause the deaths from malnutrition and sickness of tens of thousands more Yemeni civilians.

Apparently, Pompeo is not satisfied that 85,000 children aged under five died between 2015 and 2018, the first three years of the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen. It is, as British politician David Milliband, the president of the International Rescue Committee, described it: "Pure diplomatic vandalism".

US Senator Chris Murphy called it an act of "mind blowing insanity" and demanded that the incoming Biden administration rescind it immediately upon taking office next week.

Pompeo's grand finale came after he had a conspicuously public dinner with Israeli intelligence chief Yossi Cohen at a popular Washington restaurant last Monday. Out of the blue, Pompeo declared that Iran had become the new "home base" for Al Qaeda, after Afghanistan.

He offered no new evidence about the complicated relationship between Iran's security services and exiles of the notorious terrorist organisation - just nonsensical spin.

The same spin, in fact, that was imparted to news of Israel's assassination of Al Qaeda's deputy chief Abu Muhammad al Masri in Tehran in July, when it was leaked by the US in November.

In reality, the relationship between Iran and Al Qaeda has been defined by expediency and betrayal, according to noted Iran-focused journalist and scholar Barbara Slavin. Stanford University scholar Asfandyar Mir has dismantled Pompeo's claims with his own previous statements, concluding that America's chief diplomat was not motivated by any fresh threat from Al Qaeda.

The same can be said of Pompeo's connivance with the Mossad chief in planning and executing the biggest Israeli airstrikes against Iran-backed militias in Syria.

Whilst there is no debating that a freshly-arrived cache of Iranian missiles was fair game for Israel, Pompeo's primary aim was to mine the waters for the Biden administration by making the prospective return of the US to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that much more difficult.

Indeed, if there is a legacy to Pompeo's term as US Secretary of State, it is one of provocation, instigation, demonisation, inhumanity and hypocrisy.

America and the world will be a far better place without him.

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT World.

AUTHOR
Tom Hussain @tomthehack is a journalist and analyst on Pakistan affairs and geopolitics in South Asia.

Sharing profitability with users may be the only way forward for Facebook

RAVALE MOHYDIN

If Facebook wants to maintain its status as the world's biggest social media network it will need to rebuild trust, yes, but more importantly it will need to share a piece of the pie.

Facebook has an identity crisis: is it a platform or a publisher?

For many people, Facebook is their primary news source. For the same people though, it is also a platform, through which they connect with family and friends, find reviews for restaurants and even buy or sell goods. For more than half of all Indonesians, Nigerians, Indians and Brazilians, it is the internet itself.

Facebook is many things to more than 2 billion people – however, its growth is slowing. For the first time ever, it reported a decrease in the numbers of daily active users in the US & Canada region in 2017 Q4.

The slowdown could be due to the changes introduced in 2017 to News Feed, Facebook’s most lucrative product, which changed the type of content shown to users, showing less viral videos that were likely to increase time spent on Facebook.

Facebook also announced that they would only promote content from trustworthy publishers, leading to a jump in the stock prices of media companies such as News Corp and the New York Times. But there is still time before these strategies bear fruit, and investors have decided— for now—to stay put.

In the tech world, however, a company’s valuation is based on how the company will do in the future, given its current state and trajectory. At this point, it looks like Facebook is no longer ‘cool’ to use, as more teenagers – who are the future, literally – in the US and UK are leaving in high numbers.

Facebook can, on the other hand, benefit from its gigantic international audiences: as of January 2018, India, Brazil and Indonesia alone had more than 500 million Facebook users. But here again, Facebook’s future is vulnerable, as foreign governments, along with companies, are beginning to worry about threats to national security, given the disastrous Facebook-Cambridge Analytica debacle.

Turkey, with its 51 million Facebook users, has already developed an alternative search engine. China never even let Facebook in.

The question remains: how does Facebook protect itself…from itself?

It appears that its own ad-driven business model, resulting in an insatiable appetite for users’ time and data without any consideration for societal costs, is going to be its Achilles’ Heel.

Do we need Facebook?

Facebook, as it is, does have its benefits though. It enables global economic activity by helping to unlock new opportunities through connecting people and businesses, lowering barriers to marketing, and stimulating innovation.

According to a Deloitte report, the ‘Facebook Economy’ resulted in global economic activity worth $227 billion and supported more than 4.5 million jobs in 2014 alone.

Additionally, social movements, such as the Women’s March held one day afer the inauguration of Donald Trump, are arguably more powerful today than they used to be because of Facebook.

Such a powerful platform took time and effort to develop, and no alternatives – with the same level of popularity – exist. Even if a more ethical alternative came into being right now, it will take a very long time to reach the scale at which Facebook has achieved user buy-in. It is important that the baby isn’t thrown out with the bathwater.

Facebook instinctively knows that its users’ “wellbeing” (read: engagement) is the currency that can sustain its continued growth, and is the right direction to take. However, its attempts to help users ‘spend more time meaningfully’ by using it as a platform to build and maintain social connections, feels like an attempt to fit into a dress that it outgrew five years ago.

A strategy that seems old, and at worst, painfully earnest and saccharine sweet – probably turns off many users (like me). Before that happens, Facebook needs to, yes, definitely go back to its roots, but in a stronger manner.

Without taking responsibility for all content on the platform, Facebook can never truly counter fake news. Without countering fake news, they will never be bona fide publisher.

Instead of trying to be something they are not capable of taking responsibility for (imagine monitoring and editing all content produced all day every day by all 2.2 billion users on Facebook), they should instead focus on what they are truly the best at: being a platform.

They can take it to the next level by allowing users to rent out their data to advertisers for a limited time, after which it self-destructs.

This is not an entirely new idea. Airbnb and Uber Technologies, part of the Sharing Economy, are already doing it, enabling users to rent out their homes and their cars, respectively. This is more sustainable than following a freemium pricing strategy – offering ‘premium’ features at a price – because that risks many users quitting or not upgrading, resulting in a drop in advertisement revenue.

Besides, it’s hard to determine what features would be included in the upgraded (paid) version (capping number of friends one can have? Limiting number of status updates? All these lead to less user engagement, an anathema for Facebook).

‘Steem’, a blockchain-based rewards platform for publishers to monetize content and grow community is already betting on people creating social data if they can profit from it.

In the Art of War, Sun Tzu writes ‘in the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity’. Facebook has the chance, once again, to make waves.

19 APR 2018

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT World.


AUTHOR
Ravale Mohydin @Ravale_Mohydin

 writes about media effects on society, public diplomacy and non conventional warfare. She is an alumna of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Lahore University of Managament Sciences. She currently works at TRT World Research Centre.

Imagining a socialist internet


FAHAD DESMUKH

Can we move toward an internet where your personal data isn't currency to be traded with advertisers, and where services exist for the common good? The good news is that it already exists.

There’s a massive elephant in the room, and the problem is far bigger than Facebook. It's capitalism, and how it manifests itself on the internet.

The solution? A socialist internet - in which the internet is a tool for common good rather than a vehicle for profit.

Guess what? That internet already exists.

Let's be clear on what the fuss is about. An external researcher harvested the personal details of 50 million Facebook users by getting them to use a "personality app".

He then gave the data to a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, without getting the consent of the users.

Cambridge Analytica has bragged about it’s role in the Trump campaign and was involved in the Brexit campaign – and the concern is that Facebook data may have been used to support these victories.

What we should be equally worried about is that Facebook already has the data of not just those 50 million users, but of all more than 2 billion active users, and in far greater detail.

They know who most of your friends and acquaintances are, how often you interact with them, what your likes, dislikes, hobbies and work interests are, where you live, where you travel, what your face looks like, your contact information, your phone and laptop model, your internet service provider (ISP), which websites you visit and much more.

We willingly give our private data to Facebook, and give Facebook the consent to use it to earn its annual net income of almost US $16 billion.

Without our consent, Facebook has also (willingly or unwillingly) shared large amounts of our data with government bodies such as the US National Security Agency.

Of course, none of this information is new, but it should make us realise that the Cambridge Analytica scandal is probably the least of our problems when it comes to privacy.

Facebook is just a symptom of a larger disease

The #DeleteFacebook campaign makes it seem like Facebook is an isolated case of an online business that has overstepped its boundaries.

However, most of us should be well aware by now that the problem isn't that of Facebook alone, but it is the business model shared by most internet behemoths controlling the most valuable online real estate, in which we are not the customers, but the commodity.

Facebook and other social media sites sell our eyeballs to advertisers so that we can buy their products. That is their business model.

This business model is novel in some ways, but in essence it is not different from traditional ad-based media. They give us free content to consume, and then sell some of our attention to businesses wanting to sell us things.

The key difference, as far as privacy is concerned, is that the internet allows the businesses to know far more about our personal lives and preferences than was the case for traditional media.

For example, a commercial radio station trying to sell an ad spot to an advertiser would only be able to provide the broad generalised demographics and preferences of its listeners, not the personal and granular details that Facebook offers. But if that radio station could do what Facebook can, then it would, because that is the model of success that we idealise – and it's called capitalism.

One way to describe capitalism is as an economic system in which things are produced not to meet a social need, but so that the capitalist can sell them for a profit. This is precisely what corporations have done to the internet – they have turned it in to a big marketplace to sell things that most people do not need so that a tiny privileged few can hoard more wealth.

As long as we are living in such a system, the pressure will always be on companies like Facebook to be as predatory as they can to maximise profits for its shareholders.

It is what drives capitalists to steal private data and sell it to the highest bidder, or to steal entire communities of humans and sell them to the highest bidder.

Those of us who believe that a better world can be created, in which poverty is eradicated and the caste system of worker and capitalist is abolished, are often accused of being dreamers and Utopians.

It's difficult to imagine that societies without capitalism have existed in the past, or that a world without capitalism is possible in the future, so, when it comes to privacy and social media, many people will just shrug and say that this is just how the world works. Since Facebook is offering us their platform, they will obviously take something from us in exchange.

However, when it comes to software and the internet, it shouldn't be so difficult to imagine a better world, because it already exists – and it’s a large eco-system of software developer communities that have defied the hegemony of capitalism to a large extent.

The open internet

Free and open source software (FOSS) is a category of software that anyone is free to use, modify and distribute without compensating the original developer – in essence, it is software that does not have a private owner.

The idea behind the free software movement is that society as a whole benefits from having software that is communally owned as it allows the public to use the software, and encourages software developers to improve on each other's work rather than re-inventing the wheel within the confines of private company walls.

In fact, much of the software that forms the backbone of the internet and the web today is a product of the FOSS movement, whether it is the operating system of a website server (Linux), the software that delivers a webpage to you (Apache or nginx), the platform used to manage a website (Wordpress) or the browser on your computer to view a website (Firefox).

There is also a benefit to privacy. Capitalist entities like Facebook and Microsoft keep the source code of their software a fiercely guarded secret, so that no one can examine how it works in order to prevent anyone from copying or modifying it.

This means that when Facebook or Microsoft tell us that their software is not spying on us or stealing data from us, we have no way of verifying this and just have to take their word for it. FOSS software, on the other hand, is transparent.

For many of us, it may still be hard to understand the economics of how or why anyone would work on building a product that they cannot sell. But one example of this is Wikipedia.

Not only is the software used to run Wikipedia FOSS, but crucially all of the articles on Wikipedia have been written by volunteers, and can be freely copied, improved and distributed by the public.

The volunteers contribute their time to Wikipedia not in order to make a financial profit, but because they believe that society can benefit from their knowledge, as they can benefit from the knowledge of others.

This idea of helping each other voluntarily (sometimes called “mutual aid”) is at the same time both intuitive and extremely alien. On the one hand, this is how we behave with our family and friends, yet it is alien because our interactions with the rest of society are not dominated by sharing.

So, the technological groundwork has already been laid for an internet which doesn't doesn't steal data or exploit its users. It now requires the political and moral will of the rest of society to adopt those tools and services. They don't have the massive marketing budgets that the corporations have so you have to search for them yourself. And they don't have all of the frills of commercial projects just yet, but as more and more people join and contribute the services will get better and will start looking more like what you’re used to.

So for example, an alternative to Facebook is the Diaspora social network, where the data of users is not in the possession of a single corporate entity. Instead, the data is distributed across several independently managed but federated “pods”, among which you can choose where put your data (or you can even set up your own pod if you have a bit of technical knowledge).

The FOSS movement has shown that the internet and information technology can serve a greater purpose than a marketplace in which the richest companies always win – often at the unknown expense of the public.

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT World.

26 MAR2018 

AUTHOR
Fahad Desmukh @desmukh
is a journalist and researcher based in Islamabad, Pakistan, and a member of the research collective Bahrain Watch.