Archive 1986 – 2017

LONDON – Even Jimmy Carter, who single handedly (without much Jewish appreciation) has done more to make Israel secure than any other living person, can’t change the march of demographics. Within the boundaries of the state of Israel and the Occupied Territories there are 5.4 million Jews and 4.6 million Palestinians. The Palestinian birth rate is almost three times that of the Israeli Jews. If anything the Jewish population is starting to fall as an increasing number of Jews decide that Israel has no future for them and in significant numbers emigrate. The far seeing Richard Nixon, when asked by Patrick Buchanan and his wife, how he saw the future of Israel, turned down his thumb “like a Roman emperor at the gladiators’ arena”. Perhaps we are witnessing the death of Israel by a thousand cuts, the attrition of conflict and the attrition of population. Maybe after all the rabbis...

24. april, 2008 Fatuma Ali Jeg har boet og arbejdet i Grønland i 8 år fra 1997 og til 2005. I de 8 år har jeg været almindelig overlæge i 3 år og administrerende overlæge resten af tiden. Fra 2005 og indtil 2006 har jeg arbejdet for det grønlandske sundhedsvæsen men boet i DK. Ifølge min kontrakt skulle jeg fortsat koordinere den psykiatriske indsats på kysten, være fysisk til stede i Grønland i 1 måned i hvert kvartal og ellers være til rådighed for netkonsultationer hele året. Netkonsultationerne handlede udelukkende om kendte og diagnosticerede patienter, hvor der var behov for at optimere den medikamentelle behandling eller supervisere den psykiatriske sygeplejerske. Jeg tror, at mit største bidrag til den grønlandske psykiatri  har været opbygningen af distriktspsykiatrien i det meste af  landet. Med opbakning fra det politiske system og mine overordnede var det lykkedes at etablere psykiatrisk behandling i patienternes nærmiljø således...

By Jonathan PowerApril 24, 2008 LONDON – If May ’68 in Paris was a turning point in European-American culture, which I doubt, when did the mood begin? With the songs of the Beatles who started in 1961? (And to my mind the most enjoyable film of the last decade, “Across the Universe”, makes that claim as well as it can be made.) Or was it the founding of Amnesty International in the same country also in 1961 which brilliantly merged the growing post war sense of the importance of the individual with the urge to browbeat the collective will of both left and right wing governments? Or was it Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in 1963 when he said, “I have a dream”. Or was it earlier in 1955, the year of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott that first precipitated Dr King to fame and which was catalyzed by...

By Jonathan PowerApril 17, 2008 LONDON – If the U.S. prosecution system wasn’t so generally competent I would advocate referring the U.S. to the International Criminal Court so that senior figures in the Bush Administration could be arrested and tried for crimes against humanity, in particular the use of torture. But it is competent, although it has been hamstrung by the clever legal footwork of the Bush administration plus the use of the presidential veto – as with the recent veto of legislation that would have required the CIA and all intelligence services to abide by the restrictions contained in the U.S. Army Field Manual on holding and interrogating prisoners. We all know that the U.S. practices torture against terrorist suspects – water boarding or simulated drowning is clearly that – and we all know that when a new president is elected, given the clear statements of the remaining three...

By Jonathan PowerApril 11, 2008 NAIROBI – Africa is in danger of getting itself a bad name again, just when a lot of things have been going very well. The rather similar disputes in Zimbabwe and Kenya over who really won the election, if prolonged much further, risk blunting the wave of economic confidence that has swept through black Africa in the last three to four years. Investors have been pouring in. Some countries have even been able to issue well-subscribed bonds. The terms of trade, after 40 years or more of angst, have moved in their favor. Indeed, if these countries have the guts to allow higher food prices be passed on to their farmers, rather than wailing about the poor urban consumer, then Africa’s belated agricultural revolution could begin and then indeed Africa’s fortunes would be transformed within the next decade. But if Kenya blows and if Zimbabwe...

April 9, 2008 Vicky Samantha Rossi This article is written with a view to addressing some of the challenges faced by persons experiencing mid-term to long-term unemployment. It is an attempt to understand the emotional and mental repercussions of this kind of experience – with a particular emphasis on the notion of self-worth. It is the author’s intention to transfigure the perceived negativity of unemployment through a consideration of the potential for self-development inherent in its more transcendental purpose. Who am I? What is my worth? The question, “What is the meaning of life” goes hand in hand with the question, “Who am I?” In modern day Western society, this latter question is often answered with a reference to a person’s professional activity. What’s more, in Western society we have created a hierarchy of professions which we consider to be more or less “valuable” – and therefore the person practising...

LONDON – First it was Mitt Romney who wrote in Foreign Affairs that “radical Islam’s threat is just as real as that posed before by the Nazis and the Soviet Union”. And now, last week, it was John McCain saying the U.S. needed a leadership “to confront the transcendent challenge of our time: the threat of radical Islamic terrorism”. To realize what poisonous nonsense this is you only have to turn back a page to the time of the Palestinian liberation movement, whose daring terrorism at the Munich Olympics and constant plane hijackings kept the world as jittery as it is now with Al Qaeda. The IRA managed, together with its Protestant opposite numbers, to hold hostage to violence a whole province of the United Kingdom, beside murdering the queen’s uncle and nearly succeeding in murdering the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. These were very disturbing events, and if the terrorists...

March 28, 2008 Jonathan Power DAR ES SALAAM – For once the optimists have been proved right – and it’s happening in that “dark, backward” continent, Africa. The ex British colony of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, renamed Tanzania after their union in the 1960s, is exceeding by a significant margin the economic projections of the International Monetary Fund made a mere three years ago. That was towards the end of the term of former socialist journalist, Ben Mkapa, the president who dug Tanzania’s capitalist foundations. Jakaya Kikwete has been president barely two years but in that time the economy has jumped from an annual growth rate of 6% to 7.5%. David Robinson, the resident head of the IMF, expects it to hit 8% before long, which would be higher than any other country in the world, except China and India (and Angola which is almost exclusively an oil economy). In fact mainstream...

LONDON – In the Chinese government’s eyes it has two rebellious provinces on its plate – Tibet and Taiwan, and both are in a volatile state. In Tibet protestors are clashing with police and soldiers. In Taiwan there is no occupation but 1000 Chinese missiles are pointed at its heart. The Tibetans, by and large, no longer try and argue for independence, but even the notion of autonomy is not acceptable to Beijing. In marked contrast, while confronting Taiwan and its significant independence movement, the Chinese offer autonomy as long as Taiwan will accept sovereign rule from Beijing. At the moment, however, there are no takers, neither in the outgoing government of President Chen Shui-bian’s Democratic Progressive Party, which likes to talk about independence and membership of the UN, nor in the opposition party descended from the Nationalists of China, settled by a retreating General Chiang Kai-shek, which for historical...

Niels Harrit, Associate professor, PhD, Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen When viewed in the rear-view mirror of history, the attack on USA on September 11th, 2001 (9/11) might very well prove to be the single most important political event since World War II. It sparked the so-called “war on terror”, which has left a trail of casualties and refugees, with numbers running into the millions. Military expenses and security budgets have soared. As have the number of terrorists. Civil rights have been curtailed for everybody. Fear is prevalent. Our children and grandchildren are left with a less secure world – and a mountain of debt. In spite of this profound impact, the physical and technical realities of 9/11 have never been satisfactorily explained by the US Government. Before considering this claim and its consequences, it is worthwhile reminding ourselves of the “scientific method”, which has served our western societies...

March 12, 2008 Jonathan Power LONDON – So what if the phone rings in the new American president’s bed room at 3am! It can only be because the radar has picked up a flock of geese. The chances of Russia attacking the U.S. with its missiles is as close to zero as one can get without falling off the graph paper. Ditto China, Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea. As for the putative Iranian bomb, at best within 10 years it could reach Europe in some primitive rocket but by then the White House will have changed ownership again. Mrs Hillary Clinton’s jibe, suggesting that Barack Obama wouldn’t have the experience to deal with a night time emergency, is so wide of the mark and so anachronistic that it should be relegated to the basement of the Imperial War Museum. If anyone tries to make a nuclear explosion in an American...

LONDON – It is almost unbelievable that Senator John Cain has tried to play the Al Qaeda card against Senator Barack Obama. Cautiously, Obama had said that “if” Al Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq then the U.S. will have to take action. McCain seized on the word “if” to scorn Obama’s ignorance. But Obama was exactly right to talk carefully and McCain, who appears to want more war and the extension of war to Iran, was very much off the mark. Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) had nothing to do with 9/11. It is a consequence of an American/British invasion based on a misleading reading of the intelligence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. AQI is not popular in Iraq and if the American forces withdrew, Sunni insurgents, who loath the organization because it has brought in foreign jihadists and massively attacked civilians, would probably drive it out. According...