1.Jerusalem Post (http://www.jpost.com)
Environment
by Ariel Ben Solomon, Sharon Udasin
11 May 2015
Daniel Pipes to ‘Post’: Only Israel, with its cutting-edge scientific prowess, can offer assistance to the region.
War, chaos and terrorism may be rampant in the Middle East, but the situation could become much worse as a catastrophe looms out of the regional water crisis.
“The Middle East suffers from so many obvious problems – despotism and anarchy, civil wars and refugees, misogyny and jihad – that the looming desertification of the region tends to slip into the background,” Daniel Pipes, scholar and president of the Middle East Forum think tank, told The Jerusalem Post.
“Yet, the prospect of agricultural collapse and massive dislocation of peoples looms over this as an ultimate catastrophe,” he said.
“Historically, living in an arid region inspired peoples of the Middle East carefully to husband their water sources over the long term,” said Pipes, adding, “Only in the past half century or so has this caution been discarded in favor of a mentality of reckless short-term exploitation.”
Asked if it is more likely that the EU would come to the region’s aid since Israel’s involvement would be unwelcome, he replied: “With the exception of Spain, the countries of the European Union have too much water to be of much help to the Middle East; only Israel, with its similar circumstances and its cutting- edge scientific prowess, is in a position immediately to offer assistance to the region.”
According to research by Pipes and published in an article in the Washington Times on Friday, Israel is the only exception to the regional water shortages because of its desalination, conservation, recycling and innovative agricultural techniques.
“I find particularly striking that Israel can desalinate about 17 liters of water for one US penny; and that it recycles about five times more water than does second-ranked Spain,” wrote Pipes.
However, Israel aiding most countries in the region, like Iran or Iraq, is not a politically viable option at this time.
“Desperate neighbors might think about ending their futile state of war with the world’s hydraulic superpower and instead learn from it,” he commented.
More than 50 percent of Israel’s water comes from man-made resources, such as desalination and sewage recycling.
This has allowed the Water Authority to significantly reduce its pumping of natural fresh water resources, such as those in Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), a Water Authority spokesman told the Post as the rainy season subsided last month.
Desalination is expected to account for about 600 million cubic meters of the country’s annual water production once an additional facility in Ashdod opens later this year.
Leading the world in reclaiming wastewater, it treats more than 90% of its sewage – most of which is then reused for watering agricultural fields.
Pipes mentioned a report in Al-Monitor a couple weeks ago in which an Iranian agricultural expert, Issa Kalantari, was quoted as warning that because of a water shortage, up to 70% (or 55 million out of 78 million) of the population would “have no choice but to leave the country.”
“With the state of our foreign policy, which countries are ready to accommodate 30 to 50 million Iranians?” he asked.
Pipes said that Iran’s Lake Urmia, the largest lake in the region, has lost 95% of its water since 1996.
In Yemen, where a civil war is raging, drinking water “is down to less than one quart per person per day” in many mountainous areas, he said, citing water expert Gerhard Lichtenthaeler.
In Iraq, “The April 25 seizure of the Tharthar Dam and opening of one of the dam’s gates demonstrates the growing prioritization of water infrastructure in Islamic State’s strategy,” wrote Allyson Beach on the Council on Foreign Relations website last week.
Beach called on the US to prioritize the protection of Iraqi water infrastructure.
Aiming to help curb some of the region’s water challenges, Israel and Jordan signed a historic water swapping deal on February 26. According to the approximately $800 million agreement, Jordan and Israel will share the potable water produced by a future desalination plant in Aqaba, from which the residual brine will be piped to the Dead Sea.
In return for its portion of the desalinated water in the South, Israel will be doubling its sales of Lake Kinneret water to Jordan on the countries’ common northern border.
At the time the agreement was signed, Jordanian officials stressed to the Post how sorely water is needed in the country’s north. In part, this situation has resulted from the heavy influx of refugees from Syria to Jordan.
As a result of the ongoing wars plaguing Syria and Iraq, not only have the aging water and sanitation infrastructure in these countries been impacted, but the movement of displaced people to neighboring countries has taken a toll on resources in these states as well, a March report from the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed. All in all, some 4 million displaced Syrians have ended up relocating to Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey, the report said.
In contrast to Israel’s ability to quench its country’s thirst by means of the vast array of man-made solutions, the 1.8 million residents of the Gaza Strip still face a severe shortage in their water supply.
Aiming to improve the situation there, Israel’s Office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Unit announced a decision in March to double the territory’s allocation of water from 5 m.cu.m. of water to 10 m.cu.m.
At the time, Prof. Uri Shani, former commissioner of the Israel Water Authority and an expert in soil and water sciences, told the Post that in addition to the quantity of water Gazans receive from Israel, about 60 m.cu.m. accumulates as groundwater each year there. Nonetheless, Gazans consume much more water annually than what accumulates in their underground reserves – about 120 m.cu.m. according to Israeli estimates and about 150 m.cu.m. according to Gazan estimates, Shani said.
The resultant over-exploitation of groundwater resources there has caused the water table to deplete and led to a situation in which seawater mixes in with that supply, he explained. Households using instruments to desalinate their home water supply then release resultant brine back into the groundwater, exacerbating the poor situation, he said.
2.Sydney Morning Herald（http://www.smh.com.au/national）
Believe me, it's all a conspiracy theory, everything, 16 May 2015
by Andrew Masterson
Talk of a New World Order is a conspiracy theory that moves with the times and is completely resistant to requirements for any evidence whatsoever.
A poll taken in 2013 revealed that some 12 million Americans believe Barack Obama is a lizard from outer space. This may go some way towards explaining Maurice Newman.
There is no suggestion that Newman – either in private or in his professional capacity as chair of the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Council – believes the US President is in any way reptilian. However, his use last week of the phrase "New World Order" places him in uncomfortable proximity to a panoply of nutjobs who believe the global fix is in.
The world is controlled by a hidden hand, these people claim, belonging variously to groups of communists, Jews, bankers, atheists, Freemasons, the Knights Templar, diverse secret societies, the House of Windsor, or maybe space-goannas.
Newman's contribution to the subject is far from conservative. In fact, it represents a certain progressive modishness – the assignment of the role of villain in an otherwise ancient conspiracy theory to a new class of people. Goodbye Freemasons, hello climate scientists.
Not that he was the first to make the substitution. That honour goes arguably to a US Republican senator and leading light of the Tea Party, Paul Broun, who declared to the House in 2009 that climate scientists "want to change us to a New World Order … to destroy America, to destroy our freedom."
What is most interesting, however, about Newman's assertion that climate science is "about a new world order under the control of the UN" is that it illustrates the extraordinary robustness of a conspiracy theory that holds global centralised rule to be both possible and unwelcome.
With a faint whiff of irony, one of the most comprehensive overviews of this idea was written in the late 90s by another occasional contributor to The Australian, US historian Daniel Pipes. These days best known for his sometimes contentious critiques of Islamism in his journal Middle East Quarterly, in 1997 Mr Pipes wrote a masterful book called Conspiracy: how the paranoid style flourishes and where it comes from.
In it, he tracked the advent of the world-domination idea to the Crusades, starting in 1096. The Crusades themselves were overtly aimed at wresting control of the Holy Land from Moslems, but Pipes tracks a secondary objective – heading off a secret global takeover by Jews.
This idea, and the fear it engendered, became deep-rooted in European Christian discourse. In the 15th century, Protestantism was propelled by the anti-Semitic fear of a global conspiracy. Jews, thundered Martin Luther, act "with a view to finally overcoming us … and to strive for our final, complete, and eternal ruin!"
The first use of the term "new world order" in the modern era is often ascribed to US President Woodrow Wilson, who was instrumental in setting up the League of Nations in the wake of World War I. At the time, the phrase had only positive connotations – a global conference to prevent another slaughter. Within weeks, however, the New World Order was denounced by conspiracy fans as a plot perpetrated by the US Rothschild family.
Of course, in more recent times not all New World Order theorists are anti-Semitic – and Maurice Newman most certainly isn't. Indeed, since the 1960s, there has been a discernible drift in assigning the role of the hidden villain away from crude religious stereotypes towards boogey-persons in white coats and laboratories. And this is where it gets interesting: in its adaptability, this is a conspiracy theory that moves with the times and is utterly resistant to evidence.
The notion of the techno-baddie started to play in the late seventies, mirroring the growth of communications and computers. The explanations were often labyrinthine, but the central idea never varied: technological innovation was a tool created by secretive and powerful forces in order to bend the rest of us to their evil wills.
In 1998, British author Marina Benjamin wrote a study of apocalyptic movements, called Living At The End Of The World. The science-based New World Order conspiracy theories at the close of the 20th century, she noted, had yet to shed their religious roots.
"VISA cards, the bank accounts of multinational corporations, social security numbers, tax returns and fibre optics top the current hit list of the antichristian global economy," she wrote. "All are depersonalising, all are master-minded by a tiny elite of scientifically minded businessmen and most of them, somehow or other, implicate the demonic number 666."
The New World Order construct, however, is as attractive to paranoid atheists as it is to religious fruitcakes and business advisors. Thus, before long, signs of the hidden hand of the undeclared dictator were being detected in all sorts of new inventions: bar codes, CCTV cameras, satellites and so on.
"In the 1990s," wrote Daniel Pipes, "patriot groups found proof of imminent foreign invasion on the back of a Kix cereal box and worried about health food stores fronting for the dangerous New Age movement."
The historian quotes then-UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali showing an admirable sense of the absurd: "It's great to be back from vacation. Frankly I get bored on vacation. It's much more fun to work here, blocking reform, flying my black helicopters, imposing global taxes."
It's not surprising, therefore, that the latest bad guy role in the New World Order conspiracy is played by climate scientists. Near complete expert consensus on any matter – global warming, fluoridation, nuclear disarmament, vaccination – immediately produces a reaction among the paranoid.
It is a commonplace for US conservatives to denounce climate change as a UN-controlled hoax. Oddly, however, it is Maurice Newman who has re-introduced a strangely religious hue into what is largely a secular conspiracy theory. In 2014, he wrote that global warming mitigation was akin to "primitive civilisations offering up sacrifices to appease the gods."
Earlier, in 2012, he observed that "a new global warming religion was born, replete with its own church (the UN), a papacy (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and a global warming priesthood masquerading as climate scientists".
These are dangerous waters for a man like Newman – prime-ministerial adviser, former university chancellor and past chair of the ABC – to swim in. In so doing, he must swim close to other types of New World Order conspiracy believer: anti-Semites, racists, Tea Party fundamentalists, and people convinced that the world is run by extraterrestrial lizards.
The lizard thing is fascinating. It stems from a theory concocted by British conspiracist David Icke, who believes that most world leaders are alien reptiles in disguise. The idea has spawned a legion of observers, who study presidents and prime ministers for telltale reptilian traits, such as poorly concealed third eyelids, flicking tongues, or suddenly biting into an unpeeled onion without shedding a tear.
Oh, hang on …
(End)
