Syria

60 Minutes on ISIS

/ Matthew Clemente / Leave a comment

This Sunday, 60 Minutes devoted two segments to ISIS.  The first chronicled ISIS from the ground in Iraq.  Here how that segment began:

Today, America’s top military officer, General Martin Dempsey, said the U.S. and its allies will attack ISIS from many directions. “We want them to wake up every day realizing they’re being squeezed,” he said. American pilots have hit the Islamic extremist group in Iraq nearly 200 times now, and soon the U.S. will be bombing ISIS in Syria.

America was drawn back into war when ISIS began to overrun part of northern Iraq called Kurdistan. Kurdistan is semi-autonomous with its own military called the Peshmerga. With American air support, the Peshmerga are holding a tense front line against ISIS.

Earlier this month, we started our reporting on that front line to explain ISIS; what it is, where it came from and how it blitzed through two countries. In June, the leader of ISIS declared himself ruler of a new nation, which he calls The Islamic State.

The second segment discussed the “repercussions” of ISIS with former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and King Abdullah II of Jordan.  Here is how that segment began:

President Obama’s plan hinges on arming and training moderate Syrian militias to defeat ISIS. The president has been criticized for not doing that sooner. You’re about to hear from two men who saw the threat early, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and King Abdullah II of Jordan.

Jordan is a moderate, American ally, nearly surrounded by war, with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its west, Syria to its north and Iraq to the east.

Today we spoke to King Abdullah in New York before this month’s U.N. General Assembly meeting. For hundreds of years, his family ruled the holiest shrines in Islam. And the king was nearly at a loss for words today when we asked him about the head of ISIS, who claims to lead all Muslims.

60 Minutes on ISIS

/ Matthew Clemente / Leave a comment

This Sunday, 60 Minutes devoted two segments to ISIS.  The first chronicled ISIS from the ground in Iraq.  Here how that segment began:

Today, America’s top military officer, General Martin Dempsey, said the U.S. and its allies will attack ISIS from many directions. “We want them to wake up every day realizing they’re being squeezed,” he said. American pilots have hit the Islamic extremist group in Iraq nearly 200 times now, and soon the U.S. will be bombing ISIS in Syria.

America was drawn back into war when ISIS began to overrun part of northern Iraq called Kurdistan. Kurdistan is semi-autonomous with its own military called the Peshmerga. With American air support, the Peshmerga are holding a tense front line against ISIS.

Earlier this month, we started our reporting on that front line to explain ISIS; what it is, where it came from and how it blitzed through two countries. In June, the leader of ISIS declared himself ruler of a new nation, which he calls The Islamic State.

The second segment discussed the “repercussions” of ISIS with former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and King Abdullah II of Jordan.  Here is how that segment began:

President Obama’s plan hinges on arming and training moderate Syrian militias to defeat ISIS. The president has been criticized for not doing that sooner. You’re about to hear from two men who saw the threat early, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and King Abdullah II of Jordan.

Jordan is a moderate, American ally, nearly surrounded by war, with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its west, Syria to its north and Iraq to the east.

Today we spoke to King Abdullah in New York before this month’s U.N. General Assembly meeting. For hundreds of years, his family ruled the holiest shrines in Islam. And the king was nearly at a loss for words today when we asked him about the head of ISIS, who claims to lead all Muslims.

Dead Giraffes v. Dead Syrians: Which Is More Outrageous?

/ Matthew Clemente / Leave a comment

Dead Giraffes v. Dead Syrians: Which Is More Outrageous?

Clearly, the answer is Syrians.  However, if one were to use media coverage as a barometer, one would think that the death a Marius the giraffe, a Copenhagen giraffe killed and butchered in front of a crowd, is more important than the Syrian genocide.  The video of Marius’s murder went viral and created widespread outrage.  The Syrian genocide is a horrible abstraction, the stuff below the fold in the New York Times. Recently, the Freakonomics Radio podcast investigated the phenomenon of selective outrage.  Although not explicitly about public policy, it is not hard to see how selective outrage has ramifications in political and public policy debates.  

Here is a description of the podcast from the Freakonomics blog: 

This week’s podcast is about selective outrage — why we get so upset over some things, and then not over others. It’s called “Which Came First, the Chicken or the Avocado?” . . . 

We start with Marius the giraffe. Marius lived at a zoo in Copenhagen. Zoo officials said he was a “surplus” animal: too genetically similar to other giraffes, and therefore he couldn’t breed. It was kinder, they said, to kill him. So they fed him some rye bread (“his favorite food”), shot him in the head, and dissected him in front of a crowd of onlookers, including kids. Next they fed his corpse to the lions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the world reacted with outrage.

 

How did this compare to the outrage expressed over the killing of more than 146,000 people during the ongoing civil war in Syria? Not quite commensurate. Ammiel Hirsch, senior rabbi at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, noticed this disparity, and he talks about it withStephen Dubner:

 

HIRSCH: If you recall there was saturation coverage of a Danish zoo that killed a giraffe in front of dozens of schoolchildren and fed it to the lions. And it struck me that that received so much attention and so much publicity — not that I’m in favor of killing giraffes, in general, or killing any animals, let alone in front of children — but it was at the time when there was such savagery around the word, and in particular, hundreds of people in that week were butchered in Syria, and there was such little coverage about that event, and so much coverage about the killing of one giraffe that it simply struck me that that probably says something about how we think and about the nature of our society.

 

Steve Levitt says that outrage over Marius’s death, and the increased level of compassion people have for animals, is overall a positive sign for society:

 

LEVITT: I think being nice to animals is a luxury good. I remember when I first went to China 14 years ago to adopt my daughter and we went to an open-air market. And the animals they had to eat and the circumstances of these animals were just, to a Westerner, outrageous… And then when I went back about five years later, to the same open-air market, what just amazed me is that suddenly they had a big section of the open-air market that was devoted to fish tanks. In just five years, China had boomed in wealth. [They went] from literally eating anything they could find, to deciding it was fun to have animals for pets.

 

You will also hear from Wall Street Journal reporter Jose de Cordoba, whose article about the Mexican avocado trade perhaps should have outraged people but didn’t. De Cordoba explains how most avocados eaten in the U.S. are “blood avocados,” made to pass through a criminal cartel that extorts, kidnaps, and kills.

 

And finally, big thanks to listener Rebecca Pearce. She wrote to us with a question that gets Levitt and Dubner wondering what’s more valuable: the life of a polar bear or the life of an economist.

New Report Says Syria Responsible for Death, Possible Torture of 11,000

/ David Kailer / Leave a comment

New Report Says Syria Responsible for Death, Possible Torture of 11,000
By
David Kailer
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-25836550
The BBC’s report tracks a report released on the eve of the “biggest diplomatic effort yet to end a three-year conflict that has left more than 100,000 dead and millions displaced”. The convention, commonly known as Geneva II, will convene to discuss resolving the worsening situation in Syria.
The report was comprised with the cooperation of a “defected military police photographer” known as “Caesar”, who was in charge of photographing the dead to assist in producing death certificates and to confirm that executions had been completed. “There could be as many as 50 bodies a day to photograph…” Many of the bodies show signs of beating and emaciation, the consistency over the corpses suggesting to Professor Sir Geoffrey Nice “that the scale and consistency of the killings provided strong evidence of government involvement that could support a criminal prosecution”.
The article also tracks a developing argument over the legitimacy of the report, whether the photographs were actually from within Syria, and whether the report was financed by the country of Qatar, which a spokeman for the Syrian Ministry of Information suggested should completely undermine the findings of the report because of Qatar’s interests in the region.
Marie Harf of the U.S. State Department was quoted as saying, “The situation on the ground is so horrific that we need to get a political transition in place, and we need to get the Assad regime out of power.”
Is American or United Nations intervention appropriate? If so, what form should it take? What concerns would you have about America getting involved in another political struggle abroad?