The Intercept: Saudi Arabia Planned to Invade Qatar Last Summer. Rex Tillerson's Efforts to Stop It May Have Cost Him His Job

But in the months that followed his departure, press reports strongly suggested that the countries lobbying hardest for Tillerson’s removal were Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both of which were frustrated by Tillerson’s attempts to mediate and end their blockade of Qatar. One report in the New York Times even suggested that the UAE ambassador to Washington knew that Tillerson would be forced out three months before he was fired in March. [...]

In the days and weeks after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and closed down their land, sea, and air borders with the country, Tillerson made a series of phone calls urging Saudi officials not to take military action against the country. The flurry of calls in June 2017 has been reported, but State Department and press accounts at the time described them as part of a broad-strokes effort to resolve tensions in the Gulf, not as an attempt by Tillerson to avert a Saudi-led military operation. [...]

Pressure from Tillerson caused Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the country, to back down, concerned that the invasion would damage Saudi Arabia’s long-term relationship with the U.S. But Tillerson’s intervention enraged Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and effective ruler of that country, according to the U.S. intelligence official and a source close to the Emirati royal family, who declined to be identified, citing concerns about his safety. [...]

If the Saudis had succeeded in seizing Doha, they would potentially have been able to gain access to the country’s $320 billion sovereign wealth fund. In November of last year, months after the plan collapsed, the Saudi crown prince rounded up and detained dozens of his relatives in the Ritz-Carlton Riyadh, forcing them to sign over billions in privately held assets. The government justified the detentions as a corruption crackdown, but it allowed the state to recoup billions in assets for government use.

read the article

Politico: Spain’s Franco plan: Bring up the body

His decision to move Franco’s tomb is on firmer political ground. It is in line with the 2011 recommendations of a national commission endorsed by the United Nations, and a decision by parliament in 2017. [...]

“A country that looks to its future needs to be at peace with its past,” Sánchez told parliament in June. “Wounds have remained open for many years, too many, and it’s time to heal them. Our democracy will have symbols that unite citizens, not ones that separate them.”

But Sánchez’s decision still carries risks. It leaves him open to accusations that while he claims to be healing the wounds of the past, he is actually reopening them by harking back to a dark and divisive period in Spain’s history. [...]

Francisco Ferrándiz, a researcher at the National Council of Research (CSIC) who has studied repression under Franco, said he often guides foreign guests around the complex. He always includes a daily mass celebrated in honor of Franco by Benedictine monks who live in the attached abbey and whom he described as hardline Franco supporters. Many visitors, he said, can’t believe their eyes. [...]

A major CIS study from 2008 — the most recent on the issue — showed most Spaniards supported actions such as excavating mass graves to give victims of Franco a proper burial, getting rid of symbols glorifying the dictator and annulling the verdicts of political trials. But efforts to investigate human rights violations or put on trial perpetrators of abuses didn’t gather the same level of support.

read the article

Aeon: There is no Muslim world

Such remains the dominant Western view of Pan-Islamism, expressed in the phrase common to punditry and journalism – ‘the Muslim world’. Yet, contrary to this dominant view of an eternal clash with the Christian West, Pan-Islamism is in fact relatively new, and not so exceptional. Closely related to Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism, it emerged in the 1880s as a response to the iniquities of European imperialism. Initially, the idea of global Muslim solidarity aimed to give Muslims more rights within European empires, to respond to ideas of white/Christian supremacy, and to assert the equality of existing Muslim states in international law. [...]

Nearly a fifth of the way into the 21st century, however, Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism seems to have vanished but Pan-Islamism and the ideal of Muslim world solidarity survives. Why? The answer lies in the final stages of the Cold War. It was in the 1980s that a new Muslim internationalism emerged, as part of a rising political Islam. It was not a clash between the primordial civilisational traditions of Islam and the West, or a reassertion of authentic religious values. It wasn’t even a persistence of early 20th-century Pan-Islamism, but rather a new formation of the Cold War. A Saudi-US alliance began promoting the idea of Muslim solidarity in the 1970s as an alternative to the secular Pan-Arabism of the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose country allied with the Soviet Union. Any ideas of an ‘Islamic’ utopia would have floundered if not for the failures of many post-colonial nation-states and the subsequent public disillusionment of many Muslims. [...]

The term ‘the Muslim world’ first appeared in the 1870s. Initially, it was European missionaries or colonial officers who favoured it as a shorthand to refer to all those between the ‘yellow race’ of East Asia and the black race in Africa. They also used it to express their fear of a potential Muslim revolt, though Muslim subjects of empire were no more or less rebellious to their empires than Hindu or Buddhist subjects. After the great Indian Rebellion of 1857, when both Hindus and Muslims rose up against the British, some British colonial officers blamed Muslims for this uprising. William Wilson Hunter, a British colonial officer, questioned whether Indian Muslims could be loyal to a Christian monarch in his influential book, The Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen? (1871). In reality, Muslims were not much different from Hindus in terms of their loyalty as well as their critique of the British empire. Elite Indian Muslims, such as the reformist Syed Ahmad Khan, wrote angry rebuttals to Hunter’s allegations. But they also accepted his terms of debate, in which Muslims were a distinct and separate category of Indians.

read the article

National Public Radio: Catholic Church Now Formally Opposes Death Penalty In All Cases

The Catholic Church now formally considers the death penalty "inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person" and is pledging to work for its abolition worldwide. 

It's a shift for the church, which used to consider the death penalty a "means of safeguarding the common good" in response to "certain crimes." The update to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the book of official teachings of the church, was announced Thursday. [...]

The Vatican catechism also cited "a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state." It also notes that "more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption."

read the article