Israeli soldiers run to throw a tear gas grenade during clashes in the West Bank village of Sureef, April 13.

If you are a young Muslim American and head off to the Middle East for a spell in a fundamentalist “madrassa,“ or religious school, Homeland Security will probably greet you at the airport when you return.
But if you are an American Jew and you join hundreds of teenagers from Europe and Mexico for an eight-week training course run by the Israel Defense Forces, you can post your picture wearing an Israeli army uniform and holding an automatic weapon on MySpace.
The Marva program, part summer camp part indoctrination, was launched in Israel in 1981.
It allows participants, who must be Jewish and between the ages of 18 and 28, to fire weapons, live in military barracks in the Negev desert and saunter around in an Israeli military uniform saluting and taking long hikes with military packs. The Youth and Education Corps of the Israel Defense Forces run four 120-strong training sessions a year.
“Upon arrival, the participants experience an abrupt change into army life: wearing uniforms, accepting army discipline, and learning the programs and lessons integral to the program,“ the Let Israelis Show You Israel Web site reads.
“The program includes military content such as: navigation, field training, weapons training, shooting ranges, marches and more, as well as educational content such as: Zionism, Jewish Identity, history and knowledge of the land of Israel. All of this is taught in Al-Khalil in an intensive eight weeks.“
“The participants finish the program after completing a short, intensive, exhilarating military experience that allows them to taste Israel in a way that they never could before-as part of the Israel Defense Forces,“ the site reads. “They leave the program with a feeling of belonging and a strong connection to Israel, and many return to Israel to continue the connection that was created in the framework of the Marva course.“
There are, of course, gushing testimonials about the program.
“I spent the first few days of Marva doubting my decision, wondering why I had come, wondering if there was any way out. With all of the running, yelling orders, discipline and Al-Khalil, I felt horribly out of place,“ writes Canadian David Roth of his summer. “It was a completely different world from the one I was used to. All that changed, though, by the end of the first week. We had our first ’Masa’ (Hike). It was very hard, but at the end, we all knew, our M16s were waiting for us at the ’tekes’ (Ceremony). We got through the 8 kilometers and had our ’tekes’ and got our guns. It felt amazing, and from that point on Marva was incredible.“
How have we reacted when we discovered that American Muslims were being taught in a foreign country to fire machine guns at paper figures and simulate military maneuvers? And what about the summer schools in Gaza organized by Islamic Jihad designed to train young Palestinians in the basics of military life? These Gaza camps, uncovered in 2001, were widely denounced by Israel as proof that the Palestinians were teaching their children to hate and kill.
The argument in favor of camps in Israel, as opposed to camps in Pakistan, is that these young men and women are not going to come back and use what they have learned to harm Americans. They are not terrorists. Muslims, however, have not cornered the market on terrorism and violence. Radical Jews have also been involved in terrorist attacks in Israel and the United States.
I discovered an American in Israel in 1989 named Robert Manning. A huge, burly man, Manning was living in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Kiyrat Arba. When I found him he was carrying a pistol, a large knife strapped to his leg and an M-16 assault rifle. He was part of a Jewish terrorist group called Committee for Protection and Safety of the Highways that set up ad hoc roadblocks and pulled Palestinians from cars to beat and often shoot them. He was a follower of Meir Kahane, the leader of the Jewish Defense League, who was implicated in terrorist attacks in the United States and Israel. Manning served as a reservist in the Israel Defense Forces in the West Bank.
Manning was wanted in California for murder. He had been charged in a 1980 mail-bomb killing as part of his involvement in the Jewish Defense League. The bomb was intended for the owner of a local computer firm, but the package holding the device was opened by the firm’s secretary, Patricia Wilkerson, who was killed instantly by the blast.
Chris Hedges
PRESSTV.COM

A fellow Hungarian shares the following story. “We Hungarians were the most free of all the peoples in Eastern Europe during communist times. Once in three years we could travel out of the country without any restrictions.“
When a former Yugoslav hears this, his or her eyes open wide in bewilderment. Due to former Yugoslavia’s geopolitical position during the Cold War, and the much gentler grip of its regime, compared to the countries from the Soviet bloc (Yugoslavia was nonaligned), its citizens were by and large free to roam the world in the post-World War II period. Before that, it hardly mattered in today’s sense of the word.
But now tables have turned. The former poor Eastern Europeans the Yugoslavs pitied--turned European. And before too long, they forgot how it was to be trapped inside.
They become as relentless as the old members of the club they joined were, if not more.
Former Yugoslavs, on the contrary, got the other end of the stick. A few bloody succession wars and raging nationalism resurrected the images from the beginning of the 20th century: the “powder keg,“ bloodthirsty tribes slaughtering each other, ethnic feuds. Southeastern Europe turned into “the Balkans.“
In parallel, two other major trends were happening. The first one was the end of the bipolar freeze, which brought about the issue of migration globally.
The second one was the expansion and ever-closer integration of the European Union, which exacerbated the regional dimension of the same issue.
On Jan. 1, 2007, with the last EU enlargement (adding Bulgaria and Romania) the people of the Western Balkans (except Croatia) woke up to realize that they are completely surrounded by the thick walls of Europe. They woke up to realize they could not move out.
The wall was not built over night. In the beginning, it was the Schengen Agreement. Then the subsequent enlargements that installed new and ever more complex restrictions, as the new member states were compelled by the old EU to protect the new outer borders.
All until this year, when the Balkans found itself completely surrounded.
It would be far too tedious to try to explain the complexity of this new political reality for the people from the Balkans. Instead, let’s just say that it imposes a heavy to impossible transaction cost to the functioning of the Balkan economy.
A businessperson planning a business trip through a few new EU member states and a few of the old ones would have to spend a month (at least) obtaining visas. Anyone confronted with such a challenge, realizing on top of that the amount of working hours he or she would have to spend in all the different consulates, would simply give up. And let’s not forget the cost. Many estimates have pointed out that a significant share of the financial aid the EU gives to these countries is offset by what they spend on visas.
Why not simply reduce or completely withdraw aid in exchange for lifting of the visas? The governments of the Balkans would instantly agree to such a deal.
In the meantime, bureaucrats in Brussels cry their lungs out with the worn our phrase of how regional integration of the Balkans is critical for its rapprochement with the EU. Can there be a better example of how much political rhetoric can be divorced from political reality? Can there be a blunter instance of how deeds defy words?
How can a state integrate regionally if it cannot move out?
Visa prices and the example of the difficulty of travel above are merely the tip of the iceberg. The long-term economic cost will far outweigh the short-term one, which is nevertheless gigantic.
How can these countries have a shipping industry for example? Their truckers lost their businesses. Customers want reliability; they do not want to hear that the consular clerk (who gets to decide) had a bad day. How will companies promote their exports and fight for a market abroad? And in a longer term--how will they ever integrate?
How can the young Balkan businesspersons of today be expected to create a way for the global integration of their economies when they are likely not to be able to find their way around a larger international airport? How would they, when they have never seen one?
In addition, is the economic argument really necessary in order to explain why the revoking of an essential political freedom, which a people had enjoyed largely throughout modernity, is simply historically unjust?
EU officials denounce Balkan nationalism but turn their heads at the statistic that over 70 percent of young people in the region have never travelled abroad. Not exactly the prerequisite for a cosmopolitan mindset.
WORLDPRESS.COM

Once again there is political debate over military-related legislation under the shadow of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, and once again it has revealed confusion over the international law and constitutional issues involved.
The debate is over the extension of the Antiterrorism Special Measures Law (ATSML), which is the legal authority under which the Maritime SDF (MSDF) is providing logistical and intelligence support in the Indian Ocean for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) operations in Afghanistan.
The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has announced its opposition to extending the law while the governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has committed itself to either extending the ATSML or passing a new law in its place.
The confusion revealed by their arguments has serious ramifications not only for the decision on the ATSML, but also for the broader discussion on constitutional reform.
There are a number of aspects of the debate that reveal this confusion, but here let us focus on just one--the significance of U.N. authority for the operations in Afghanistan.
The DPJ has argued that Japan should no longer provide support for the security operations in Afghanistan because they are collective self-defense operations and not authorized by the United Nations.
It has more recently tried to refine this position, suggesting that NATO operations in Afghanistan could be supported, since they are U.N. authorized, but that U.S. operations ought not to be supported since they are not so authorized.
The government in turn, in its response to these arguments, has similarly given credence to the importance of U.N. authority.
These arguments of the DPJ are in fact factually inaccurate, but more fundamentally important is that the suggestion that U.N. authority is somehow significant to the question of whether Japan may support the operations suggests a serious misunderstanding of the legal issues involved and how they apply to Article 9 of the Constitution.
First, let us review briefly the facts regarding the operations in Afghanistan, the authorization for them and the inaccuracies in the DPJ arguments. There are two separate but increasingly integrated military operations being conducted in Afghanistan:
Operation Enduring Freedom commenced in October 2001, based on the right of individual and collective self-defense under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter. It predominantly, but not exclusively, comprises U.S. forces, and its focus is primarily counter-insurgency operations against Taliban and al-Qaeda forces.
The other operations are those of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), comprising the armed forces of 26 NATO countries (including those of the United States) and 11 other countries.
ISAF was established by authority of the U.N. Security Council with Resolution 1386 in December 2001. Its mandate is to assist in maintaining security in Afghanistan and is explicitly authorized to use force by Security Council resolution, pursuant to Article 42 of the U.N. Charter. It is a U.N. Collective Security operation that, among other nation-building activities, is also engaged in counter-insurgency operations.
The initial authority and mandates of the two operations were thus different, and in that the DPJ is correct.
However, the increased cooperation and integration of ISAF and Operation Enduring Freedom activities has been authorized and encouraged by the Security Council (Resolutions 1510, 1707 and others). Indeed, several countries, including Canada and the U.S., are involved in both operations. Operation Enduring Freedom has thus been endorsed by the U.N., and its operations actively supported by the U.N.-established ISAF.
In terms of authority for the support of operations, the Security Council has also specifically (Resolutions 1386 and 1707 among others) called upon member states to contribute personnel, equipment and other resources to ISAF.
Thus Japan’s logistical support for ISAF is clearly U.N.-authorized, and ISAF’s cooperation with Operation Enduring Freedom has been authorized and encouraged.
It is thus not accurate to say that U.S. operations in Afghanistan are entirely unauthorized by the U.N., or that Japanese support for those operations is unauthorized. And as a practical matter, trying to support the operations of one but not the other would be both difficult and contrary to the spirit of U.N. efforts.
Moving to the more fundamental issue, however, we find that U.N. authority is completely irrelevant to the constitutional issues in the ATSML debate. The fact that both sides are arguing about it reflects their apparent failure to understand the legal issues in play here.
JAPANTIMES.CO.JP

It does not matter how the Kurdish Regional Government justifies its implementation of the oil law it passed unilaterally in August and the 10 production agreements it has signed or is about to sign with international oil companies. These agreements are more than deeply unhelpful; they’re wrong.
The Kurdish administration of regional Premier Nechirvan Barzani maintains that it is assisting the central government and points out that 87 percent of the revenues will go to the Iraqi government as planned. Barzani also claims that the Kurds are only kick-starting the opening up of the Iraqi oil sector that is enshrined in the draft oil law that the Maliki government is due to present to the National Assembly sometime next month.
Yet what Barzani went on to say undermines this claim. The Kurdish leader was deeply critical of Iraqi oil ministries, past and present, was scathing about the government’s slow progress on the national oil law, and concluded significantly that he did not see why the Kurds should wait around while Baghdad decided how to manage “our“ resources.
It is open to conjecture whether that possessive referred to Iraqi or the Kurdish Regional Government’s hydrocarbons.
What is important here is the effect that the Kurdish action is going to have on the passage of the national oil law. Given that the Maliki national unity government is barely functioning, the parliamentary discussion of the draft bill was going to be difficult enough. Now a further layer of acrimony has almost certainly been added.
Non-Kurdish legislators are going to be demanding that the Kurds retreat from their action and abandon their separate legislation.
The Kurds will then be left with their new oil deals and the divisions in Iraq will have been deepened further. This really is not the way forward.
Thus far Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has been silent on the development. A Kurd and leader of one of the two main Kurdish political parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Talabani’s duty as state president is clear.
He must uphold the constitution and protect the interests of all Iraqis. Yet he may fear that condemning the rival Barzani clan and their KDP party will unravel the peace deal both men made in 2003 to create a Joint Higher Leadership in the Kurdish region.
Officially Washington condemns the Kurdish oil deals but there will be many on Capitol Hill, who will be sympathetic, not least those who backed the proposal of Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, that Iraq should be broken up into three federal regions with a weak central government.
Unfortunately, Iraq already has a weak central government and nothing that has been done by the Kurds in the north seems calculated to strengthen it. Indeed, there will be many observers who will believe that this move was designed to undermine Iraqi unity.
ARABNEWS.COM