Month: May 2017

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Israel

According to Wikipedia, Jewish geography is a popular “game” sometimes played when Jews meet each other for the first time and try to identify the people they know in common.

Depending on your definition, there are between 14 million and 20 million Jews worldwide. One-third in Israel, one-third in the United States and the remainder spread throughout the rest of the world. One third of the US Jewish population lives in New York.

David Friedman, the new US ambassador to Israel, is an orthodox Jew from New York, a bankruptcy lawyer and a business associate and personal friend of Donald Trump.

Friedman, who is a fluent Hebrew speaker, owns a home in Talbeyeh, a neighbourhood in Jerusalem from which Palestinians were expelled in 1948, and is known for his support of the more extreme elements of Israel’s settler movement.

Friedman was an active fundraiser for and donor to Ateret Cohanim, a far right Israeli group which settles Jews in key locations in East Jerusalem, and the president of the American Friends of Beit El, a settlement of religious extremists on unlawfully seized Palestinian land near Ramallah.

Friedman joined the Trump election campaign as an advisor on Israel. Fiercely opposed to a Palestinian state, he erased any mention of a two-state solution from the Republican platform.

Five former US ambassadors to Israel, two of whom were Jewish, wrote to the Senate committee urging them to block President Trump’s nomination of David Friedman because his “extreme views, divisive rhetoric and dangerous positions … would undermine our national security by further inflaming tensions in the region”.

Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, was born in Miami Beach where his father and brother were both mayors. Dermer, an orthodox Jew, moved to Israel in 1996 and gave up his American citizenship to become the Israeli economic envoy to the US before becoming Israel’s ambassador there in 2013.

Dermer is reputedly the closest senior advisor to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and played a key role in having Netanyahu address the US Congress on Iran – famously without President Barack Obama’s prior knowledge.

Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, also an orthodox Jew, is a New York real-estate investor and developer. The designer of Trump’s online campaign, Kushner managed to assemble a presidential campaign on a shoestring budget which won the election for his father-in-law.

Kushner a long-time family friend of the Netanyahus, is reported to have negotiated directly with Lockheed-Martin (the world’s largest arms manufacturer) on behalf of the Saudis when they turned up at the White House this year (2017) with a shopping list for planes, ships and precision-guided bombs.

Speaking in Riyadh, President Trump described the common cause of the US and Saudi Arabia as fighting the “threat” posed by Iran. There was no mention by Trump of the economic reliance of the US and its “51st state” Israel on the arms trade.

In 2007, Israel handled 10 percent of the arms and security trade and 2014 was the world’s sixth largest arms exporter – not bad for a country with 0.1 percent of the world population.

After signing the biggest arms deal of all time in Saudi Arabia ($US110 billion) President Trump took the first direct flight between Saudi Arabia and Israel (the two countries do not have diplomatic relationships).

The Saudi arms deal was about providing work for the US military-industrial complex and would have had the blessing of Ron Dermer, David Friedman, Jared Kushner and Benjamin Netanyahu.

A few days earlier, 30 C-170 military aircraft arrived in Israel laden with vehicles and military equipment for Trump’s visit and 233 rooms in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel were occupied by Trump’s entourage. Trump’s suite was built to withstand virtually any threat, including building collapse.

The planes that took down the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001, were not hijacked by Iranians – they were flown into the Twin Towers by Saudi Arabians.

Iran being used here as a bogeyman by Trump and Netanyahu to justify the Saudi arms deal.

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Bali

Millisphere, n. A discrete region populated by roughly one thousandth of the total world population; a bit over seven million people (but anywhere between 3.5 and 14million will do); a lens through which to study human geography.

When I first sat down and divided the world into millispheres Bali was just under my cut-off limit of 3.5 million people. Now, a decade later, Bali’s population stands at nearly 4.5 million. Indonesians coming to take advantage of Bali’s inexorable growth in tourism have been the main driver of this recent population spurt.

Before 1963 there were only three hotels in Bali. In 1963 President Sukarno (who was Javanese but whose wife was Balinese) built the Bali Beach Hotel in Sanur (the first hotel on Bali’s South Coast).

During the 1960’s hippies, travelling by bus, train and ferry through Indonesia, discovered Kuta Beach before there were hotels there, staying in Losmans (traveller accommodation, usually attached to a the family home). These days Kuta Beach is lined with concrete hotels, not dissimilar to Australia’s Gold Coast.

In 1970 the international airport was built near Denpasar, opening the floodgates to national and international tourists. Bali now receives over 3.5 million foreign tourists and 5 million Indonesian tourists every year, but it has come at a cost to their environment.

Bali is still rated the highest for water quality of all of Indonesia’s 33 provinces but because of overexploitation by the tourism resorts 200 out of Bali’s 400 rivers are dry before they reach the sea. On the Bali’s South Coast, where most of the five star hotels and million dollar mansions are, there are now water shortages.

The profligate use of water in the tourist resorts stands in marked contrast to the Balinese Subuk water management system. Developed in the 9th century, the Subuk irrigation system is a complex, pulsing ecosystem administered by the priests from Bali’s Hindu temples. Based on a triumvirate of humans, earth and gods the Subuk system starts with the management of the forests where the waters originate. The water then flows through canals, tunnels, weirs, villages and temple water-gardens before supplying 1200 collectives, of up to 500 farmers each, with water to irrigate their rice terraces.

Tourists, with their natural suspicion of Third World water, demand their drinking water in plastic bottles, which end up in the 20,000 cubic metres of rubbish produced by the tourist resorts of Bali every day. Seventy-five percent of Balinese rubbish dumps are “informal” and during the rainy season plastic discharges into the sea and washes up on the tourist beaches.

It is estimated that, for every one foot (300mm) of coastline in the world, three singlet bags full of plastic rubbish ends up in the sea every year. Last year on holiday in Northland I discovered a line of multi-coloured plastic particles along the high tide mark all the way up the West Coast above Auckland.

From the 24th to the 27th of February this year the World Ocean Summit was held in Bali to discuss, amongst other things, the amount of plastic waste that ends up in the sea. Optimistically subtitled: “bridging the gap between sustainability and economic growth,” this talkfest was held in the five star Nusa Dua Beach Resort on Bali’s South Coast. Their topic for discussion could equally have been: “are we part of the problem?”

Enjoying their time in Bali’s tropical paradise were business leaders, representatives from the United Nations, NGOs and governments and a handful of academics. Eighty-six percent of them came from North America and Europe with only ten percent from the Asia/Pacific (many of the rivers of Asia are clogged with plastic). Fully ninety-six percent of the attendees surveyed said that the conference had been enjoyable and “very useful”.

We tourists are not the only ones to blame. Not too long ago most of the rubbish we humans produced was organic and biodegraded. Now plastic is everywhere and it’s hard to buy even the simplest food item that doesn’t come on a styrofoam tray and wrapped in polythene.

Once, while waiting to board a plane at Denpasar International Airport, I idly counted the number of times the plastic wrapping machine went around a suitcase belonging to one of a group of chattering Australian tourists – it was an astonishing seventeen times.

Eavesdropping I learned that the Australians had enjoyed their time at Kuta Beach. “Jeez we had fun, got peesed every noight,” one said … leaving the locals to pick up their empties and their rubbish.

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Hong Kong

Leo Hollis in Cities Are Good For You (Bloomsbury 2013) sets out the counterintuitive argument that cities are good for the environment for several reasons – the more dense the population, the less impact per head of population.

One of the world’s densest concentrations of humans is in the Chungking Mansions; six city blocks covered with twelve storey buildings at the bottom of Nathan Road in Hong Kong, China.

Built in the 1960s as apartments, they were on-sold first block-by-block, next the floors and then even the rooms were sold, so that now no one has clear title.

The tiny guest houses there are some of the cheapest places to stay in Hong Kong and it is well worth experiencing what Time Magazine called: “The best example of globalisation in action”.

Described as a “postmodern Casablanca, all in one building” and “the ghetto at the centre of the world”, an anthropologist discovered that people from 120 countries pass through every year and that 20 percent of sub-Saharan cellphones have passed through the Chungking Mansions. You can find pretty much anything there including an Aussie from Adelaide running a dairy.

Hong Kong (population 7.2 million) is a perfect millisphere. While the millisphere of Helvetia (Switzerland) has the highest wealth per capita, Hong Kong has the highest average per capita income – as well as severe income inequality (work that out).

Hong Kong is a major global economic node, has the world’s fastest internet download speeds and is one of the People’s Republic of China’s two Special Administrative Regions (SAR). Under China’s “One country, two systems” arrangement, Hong Kong continues to run (for another 30 years at least) its own currency, civil service, police and courts, which follow English common law.

Hong Kong residents travel on a Hong Kong SAR passport but China is responsible for foreign affairs and defence and  has a garrison of the People’s Liberation Army stationed at the Hong Kong barracks.

The mainly Chinese residents of Hong Kong differentiate themselves from mainland China by language; speaking Cantonese and English versus the Mandarin spoken by Beijing.

Since the takeover by Beijing in 1997 there have been moves to screen Hong Kong leadership candidates along communist party lines. A 1200-strong election committee of pro-Beijing elites chooses the Hong Kong chief executive, though recently 325 pro-democracy activists secured seats on the election committee, their ultimate aim being universal suffrage.

Reporters Without Borders (RWB) this year (2017) ranked 180 countries for the freedom of their press. China ranked near the bottom at 176, Hong Kong was down 4 at 73, compared with Taiwan at 45 – up 6.

RWB concerns in Hong Kong were the sale of the liberal South China Morning Post to the Chinese internet giant Alibaba and “self-censorship” by reporters exposed to threats of violence by communist party henchmen.

Pro-democracy elected representatives Yau Wai-ching and “Baggio” Leung have been barred from taking office because they refuse to swear allegiance to Beijing and, in recent months, there has been harassment of pro-independence activists in the lead up to the expected visit by Chinese president Xi Jinping on July 1, 2017 to mark the 20th anniversary of Britain’s handover of Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is only one of the 200-odd millispheres of China. It is estimated that more than 200 million peasant farmers (say 30 millispheres) have moved from the countryside to China’s cities to provide labour for the booming export economy.

The Chinese are expected to register where they live and to seek permission before they move, but hundreds of millions of workers have moved without the “hukou” (government record of household registration), effectively making them illegal immigrants and subject to exploitation by employers, corrupt party officials and their enforcers.

Xi Jinping is facing pressure from Hukou reform at home and he certainly doesn’t want the millisphere of Hong Kong going it alone – that would send a signal that you can stand up to Beijing and get away with it.

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Tibet

Millisphere, noun. A ‘sphere of interest’ of roughly one thousandth of the world population. Around seven million people, but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million will do. A lens to study human geography.

The Dalai Lama suggests: One a year go someplace you’ve never been before. This year that place was the Beach Haven Community Hall, in Auckland, to hear Dr Lobsang Sangay address a meeting organised by the New Zealand Friends of Tibet.

The meeting was opened by Ian Revell, former National  MP for Birkenhead/Norcote (1990-99) who, at the time, had chaired the 40-member multi-party parliamentary lobby group for Tibet in 1990s. On a parliamentary trip to China he had the temerity to bring up the subject of Tibetan autonomy with the Chinese deputy foreign minister, who became very angry.

Dr Sangay told the meeting that he had been born in the Tibetan refugee community in Darjeeling, India, and grew up on “one acre, with chickens and two cows,” before winning a US Fulbright scholarship and gaining a PhD in Law from Harvard.

In 2011, when the aging Dalai Lama stepped down from his political role, Dr Sangay was elected the Prime Minister of the government-in-exile. He is now in his second term as PM-in-exile and on his first trip to New Zealand.

Dr Sangay restated the case for an autonomous Tibet. “The Chinese are like our parents, showering us with gold and silver, but what they want is our minerals to dig up, trees to cut down and rivers to dam.

“In Hong Kong, where politicians are being co-opted and activists are disappearing, the people are saying: ‘We don’t want to be like Tibet’,” he  said.

His message to New Zealand was: ”It happened to us, it can happen to you”.

There are about 7.8 million Tibetans worldwide, about 7.5 million of whom live in China. What the Chinese call Xizang, or the Tibetan Autonomous Region, has a population of only 3.2 million (90 percent of whom are Tibetan).

The Tibetan people have uniquely evolved to live at high altitudes, but the Tibetan Plateau is a harsh place to live and the Tibetans have traditionally spilled off the plateau.

For Tibet to qualify as a millisphere we would have to extend its boundaries into the surrounding Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan, and Gansu, all of which have sizeable Tibetan populations.

The lowland Han Chinese have built a railway line, over permafrost, to Lhasa from Qinghai in the north; they are building their sixth airport on the Tibetan Plateau and have just completed their first dam on the Brahmaputra River.

Nearly all the major rivers of Asia have their sources on the Tibetan Plateau – the water tower of Asia – and there are now plans to divert some of their headwaters to the China’s parched, polluted northeast.

The Tibetan Plateau has been described as “the third pole” because of the concentration of freshwater in its glaciers – which are now melting at an alarming rate. Chinese bottled water companies are harvesting from melting glaciers (including Everest) – marketing its purity. There are now concerns about changes in the jet stream over Tibet, which in turn is causing heat waves as far away as Europe.

“Journalists without borders” say it is more difficult to get into Tibet than it is to get into North Korea, and Freedom House ranks Tibet near the bottom, just above Syria. Recently all Tibetans, including nomads, were issued with biometric identity cards, which they have to swipe at the omnipresent checkpoints.

By 2006 nearly 300,000 Tibetan nomads have been forcibly relocated to villages and towns as part of “building a new socialist countryside”, and under the communist “comfortable housing” programme Tibetans are required to demolish their “substandard” traditional homes and rebuild, at their own cost, to the new communist standards.

Like the Buddhist monks in Vietnam in the 1970s, Tibetans are committing self-immolation as a protest against Chinese occupation. “Better to die a good death,” Dr Sangay thought. Next year – 2018 – would be a “gratitude year”, he said,  to thank all those who had supported the Tibetan cause and his government-in-exile would continue looking for the middle path to true autonomy. The present path was creating an environmental disaster, the alternative was to “be gentle with the earth” and work  towards a compassionate, non-violent solution, which included supporting the Chinese democratic movement within China itself, Dr Sangay concluded.

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Korea (ten millispheres)

Readers of this blog will know that I occasionally use the lens of the “millisphere” to examine the context of an international news story, a millisphere being a region with roughly 1000th of the world population.

An invaluable resource when writing a millisphere column is Wikipedia. The internet encyclopedia is the result of millions of contributions, subject to continuing editing by its online readers.

Up until now, spin and deliberate disinformation has been quickly edited out and corrected. As Wikipedia says: “With enough eyes all swamps are shallow”.

In recognition of the democratising power of reliable sources of information, I make an annual contribution to Wikipedia and I am watching with interest their recently signalled move into journalism with their venture, Wikitribune.

A small percentage of what passes for news these days actually includes primary research, whether it be an eyewitness account, an interview or digging up facts and figures that illustrate a news story.

The majority of news stories appear to be passed from one agency to another unaltered. This was highlighted for me when I did an internet search about the MOAB (mother of all bombs) that the United States dropped in Afghanistan on April 13, 2017.

Almost every international news agency carried the story word for word, based on an initial press release from the US Defense Department.

It was refreshing then to come across some left-field primary research by Murray Horton from Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) on the “militarisation” of Christchurch Airport.

Murray had asked the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade about the movements of US military aircraft passing through Christchurch NZ in the 2015-16 year.

Of the 26 flights – nearly all C-130s – five didn’t fly to and from Antartica. Their destinations included American Samoa, Hawaii and  the Richmond RAAF base near Sydney – en route to the American spy base in Pine Gap, Alice Springs.

Horton’s point was that because a MOAB was too heavy for a conventional bomber, and is transported by C-130s, there is no way the New Zealand government would know whether or not the MOAB passed through Christchurch on some circuitous route to attack Afghanistan. Personally I think the MOAD is most likely to have gone through Guam.

This week the American war machine is steaming towards the Korean peninsula.

The underlying philosophy of the millisphere is the notion that wars are primarily caused by competing empires.

The history of the conflict between North and South Korea goes back to World War II; at the end of the war, Japan, which had occupied the entire Korean peninsula since 1910, surrendered the north to the Soviet Union and the south to the Americans.

When North Korea attempted to occupy South Korea by force in 1950, the Soviets and the People’s republic of China supported the North and America and her allies supported the South, and we had the world’s first Cold War conflict.

After three years and over one million casualties, the two sides fought themselves to a standstill and a truce was called – although technically the two sides are still at war.

In recent times, the South Koreans have taken more responsibility for their own defense from their ally, America, and have initiated a peaceful dialogue with North Korea, but the North continues its warlike posturing towards South Korea and America, initiating the occasional skirmish.

One such “skirmish” was the reputed hacking of Sony’s Hollywood computers in retaliation for the movie The Interview – something the North Koreans have consistently denied.

Some say that the North Koreans didn’t have the technical ability and that it could have equally been the Russians or even a disgruntled former Sony employee.

Either way Sony got lots of publicity for what was a pretty ho-hum movie, which subsequently did better at the box office when it was finally released.

In this age of “false news”, the declining number of investigative journalists employed by the traditional print media, social-media echo-chambers and the endless propaganda from warring empires, it is hard to know what is real news and what is manufactured.

What the world doesn’t need though, is a unified Korean empire. Instead what the Korean peninsula needs is ten separate millispheres.