See How a Controversial Female Imam Is Fighting Muslim Patriarchy

Singer/songwriter Ani Zonneveld is one of the few female imams (Muslim religious leader) in the world. She is the founder and president of Muslims for Progressive Values, and insists that the Qur’an is a progressive text which presents an egalitarian view of Islam. In addition to advocating for universal human rights and interfaith initiatives within Islam, she works to create music to counter both Islamic extremism and Islamophobia. Despite her efforts she is met with resistance, including vocal opposition from many fellow Muslims and even death threats. With unprecedented access to Zonneveld’s daily life, al imam presents a personal view of her work and beliefs, examining what it means to stand up for what you believe in the face of great resistance.

al imam was directed by Omar Al Dakheel and fully funded by USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Each semester, advanced graduate students are invited to pitch short documentary projects to faculty in a competitive process. Three films are selected to be developed, produced, and completed with crew comprised entirely of students under the guidance of faculty.


The Short Film Showcase spotlights exceptional short videos created by filmmakers from around the world and selected by National Geographic editors. We look for work that affirms National Geographic's belief in the power of science, exploration, and storytelling to change the world. To submit a film for consideration, please email sfs@natgeo.com. The filmmakers created the content presented, and the opinions expressed are their own, not those of National Geographic Partners.

How the fear of death makes people more Right-wing

Bobby Azarian

is a cognitive neuroscientist, a researcher in the Visual Attention and Cognition Lab at George Mason University, and a science writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times and Scientific American, among others. His research has been published in journals including Cognition & Emotion and Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. He also runs the blog Science Is Sexy.
Published on Aeon

A string of terror attacks across the globe have shaken the world’s most powerful nations to their core. As a result of these tragic events, and the fear-mongering from politicians hoping to exploit them, many feel that an existential threat is nigh.

To make matters worse, a highly influential and experimentally verified theory from social psychology predicts that, as long as an existential threat looms, the world will grow ever more divided and increasingly hostile. Terror management theory (TMT) explains how and why events that conjure up thoughts about death cause people to cling more strongly to their cultural worldviews – siding with those who share their national, ethnic or political identity, while aggressively opposing those who do not.

Consequently, sharp increases in deadly terror attacks around the world serve to create a sweeping psychological condition that sets the stage for waves of far-Right nationalist movements that encourage prejudice, intolerance and hostility toward dissimilar others.

Europe’s nationalist surge, Brexit in the United Kingdom and the presidency win for Donald Trump in the United States are just the most recent demonstrations of TMT, first proposed by social psychologists in the 1980s and derived from cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work of philosophy and psychology, The Denial of Death (1973).

Becker’s big idea was that much of human action is motivated by a fear of death. Unlike other animals, which lack higher cognition and the ability to reflect, humans recognise the inevitability of their own death. The conflict that results from this realisation and the natural desire to live produces cognitive dissonance that causes profound terror and anxiety. According to Becker, humans invented culture as a buffer for the terror. By adopting cultural worldviews that instil life with meaning and value, one can effectively manage the subconscious dread that is always bubbling below the surface.

While religions offer a path to literal immortality through the belief in an afterlife, non-religious cultural worldviews – such as political ideologies and national identities – provide paths to symbolic immortality. Symbolic immortality refers to being part of something larger that will ultimately outlive the individual, such as a great nation or a movement with a collective identity and pursuit. Much of human effort is dedicated to acts that might help one be remembered by groups or society long after death.

Of course, no matter how logical or intriguing a theory might sound, it is merely speculation if it makes no testable predictions that can be confirmed or disproven by experiment and measurement. What might be most impressive about TMT is how much success it has had in the laboratory. Hundreds of empirical studies have provided support for the theory by confirming something called the mortality salience hypothesis.

According to this hypothesis, if we do in fact adopt cultural worldviews to curb a fear of death – as TMT posits – then reminders of our mortality should produce actions that serve to strengthen faith in our worldviews. Specifically, death reminders should motivate individuals to invest more in groups to which they belong and, conversely, to act more aggressively towards those with different cultural worldviews and national or ethnic identities.

A particularly amusing experiment used hot sauce to measure the phenomenon. Students were broken into two groups and asked to write an essay about their own death or another, more benign topic. They were then presented with someone who did or did not disparage their political views, and asked to decide on the amount of mouth-burning hot sauce that person should have to consume. In line with TMT and the mortality salience hypothesis, participants who’d written about death allocated a large dollop of hot sauce to those who didn’t share their worldview, while those in the control condition did not.

Another mortality salience study on aggression conducted on both Iranian and US college students shows disturbing results. One group of students was asked to ‘jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die,’ and to describe the emotions aroused. Participants in the control condition were given similar questions related to dental pain. The results showed that Iranian students who were made to think about death were more supportive of martyrdom attacks against the US, while those in the control condition opposed them. Similarly, death reminders made US students who identified as politically conservative more supportive of extreme military attacks on foreign nations that could kill thousands of civilians.

From these findings, it is easy to see how nations under attack can quickly grow more divided and increasingly hostile towards those from outside cultures. In fact, studies have shown that mortality salience can amplify nationalism and intensify bias against other groups. Evidence suggests that reminders of death can even influence elections, pushing voters to favour candidates on the Right. Five weeks before the 2004 US presidential election, scientists conducted studies on New Jersey voters to see whether mortality reminders influenced voting directly.

Participants were given the same questions about death as the Iranian students in the previously mentioned study, while those in the control condition received parallel questions about watching television. What they found was pretty astonishing. Those voters prompted to think of death said they intended to vote for George W Bush, the hawkish conservative president, by a three-to-one margin; those prompted to think about TV strongly favoured the Left-wing challenger, John Kerry. Such results could help to explain why, after the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, Bush went from having some of the lowest approval ratings ever to being extremely popular with both Republicans and Democrats.

So what does this all mean for the world today? If massively destructive terror attacks continue, terror management theory predicts that societies will grow exponentially more chaotic and divided. Heightened aggression towards dissimilar others produces a tendency to favour war over peace. Right-wing nationalism will thrive along with prejudice and intolerance. Islamic fundamentalism will flourish while terror attacks grow more frequent. Raised tensions between nations, ethnicities and political groups will lead to further conflict, creating a devastating feedback loop of suspicion and violence.

But it is critical that we not lose optimism in these challenging times. By becoming cognisant of the inflammatory and divisive effect that death reminders and perceived existential threat have on all of us, we can begin to take steps toward defending against it. After each terrorist attack we must actively work to unite groups with different nationalities, ethnicities and cultural worldviews. We must help build bridges between dissimilar communities, and discourage ideas such as immigration bans. And we must be conscious of the way some politicians use fear-mongering and propaganda to manipulate voters. Such efforts, combined with a calm and cool temperament, can help manage the terror of mortality in ways that preserve rationality, compassion and peace.

In Germany, a new ‘feminist’ Islam is hoping to make a mark

By Anthony Faiola and Stephanie Kirchner

BERLIN — Inside the red-brick building that now houses the German capital’s newest and perhaps most unusual mosque, Seyran Ates is staging a feminist revolution of the Muslim faith.

“Allahu akbar,” chanted a female voice, uttering the Arabic expression “God is great,” as a woman with two-toned hair issued the Muslim call to prayer. In another major break with tradition, men and women — typically segregated during worship — heeded the call by sitting side by side on the carpeted floor.

Ates, a self-proclaimed Muslim feminist and founder of the new mosque, then stepped onto the cream-colored carpet and delivered a stirring sermon. Two imams — a woman and a man — later took turns leading the Friday prayers in Arabic. The service ended with the congregation joining two visiting rabbis in singing a Hebrew song of friendship.

And just like that, the inaugural Friday prayers at Berlin’s Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque came to a close — offering a different vision of Islam on a continent that is locked in a bitter culture war over how and whether to welcome the faith. Toxic ills like radicalization, Ates and her supporters argue, have a potentially easy fix: the introduction of a more progressive, even feminist brand of the faith.

“The intention is to give liberal Islam a sacred space,” Ates said. “I feel very discriminated by regular mosques where women have to pray in ugly backrooms.”

The subject of withering criticism as well as hopeful support, the house of worship is part of a small but growing number of liberal mosques founded all or in part by women.
Seen by their backers as an antidote to gender bias that often leaves Muslim women praying in smaller spaces, the new kind of “feminist mosques” amount to a rallying cry for change, observers say.

In London, for instance, the female-founded Inclusive Mosque Initiative opened its doors in 2012. Female imams routinely lead prayers in spaces that welcome male and female Muslims of any sect — gays and lesbians included. More recently, mixed-gender or all-female prayers have spread to boutique mosques from California to Switzerland to Denmark.

Women and men traditionally pray separately in mosques for reasons of modesty. Some argue that the Koran does not explicitly call for separation, but others say that female voices should not be heard during prayer.

Nevertheless, women are said to have served as imams in ancient Islam, and female Muslim activists have been challenging the norms surrounding the religion for decades. Notable among these activists is Amina Wadud, an American who famously delivered a Friday sermon at a South African mosque in 1994.

Enter Ates, who opened the Berlin mosque largely through donations. A 54-year-old Turkish Kurd, she is both well known and polarizing in Germany’s Muslim community of more than 4 million. As a student, she narrowly survived a gun attack at a counseling center for Turkish women. And after years of fighting for women’s rights, repeated death threats forced her to close her legal practice in 2006.

The debut of her mosque brought a round of fire on social media from critics. “#Mosque without #Islam. Those who know Ates know that she is in favor of an Islam that is not based on its sources,” tweeted the advocacy group Generation Islam.

Burhan Kesici, chairman of the Islamic Council for the Federal Republic of Germany, dismissed her house of worship as a fad.

“We’re observing this and are wondering . . . how what is happening there is supposed to be rooted in Islam at all,” he said.

He added, “Of course women are equal. That there’s a separation in religious practice doesn’t mean that they’re not equal. I’m curious how long this congregation will last. . . . It seems a random conglomerate of different Islam critics.”

At the inaugural service Friday, the mosque housed inside an old theater space of a Protestant church lured more journalists than worshipers, as well as a significant security presence. Among the young Muslims attending was Haithm al-Kubati, 26, a Yemeni who moved to Germany six years ago.

It was, he said, his first time praying in a mosque with women.

“It still takes a bit of getting used to. But it’s often the case when something is new that it is a bit strange, perhaps even a bit scary. But I am sure that this is the way of the future,” he said.

Elham Manea, the female imam who shared in leading the Friday prayers, said mixed worship is an issue of equality.

“How and when a woman is asked to pray mirrors her social status within her community,” Manea said. “She is asked to pray separately from men, to cover her hair during prayer . . . and to stop praying during the days of her menstruation. . . . All these restrictions are imposed on her because they mirror the social conviction that a woman is not fully complete and perfect like a man and [that] she without doubt isn’t equal.”

“I understand that change is hard, because one is used to doing the same thing for centuries, and it will of course be difficult to change it. But still the time for change is now. . . . And we’re calling for it respectfully.”

The West's Dilemma: Why Assad Is Uninterested in Defeating Islamic State

By Christoph Reuter
Source: Der Spiegel

In the fight against Islamic State, the West is considering cooperating with the Syrian army. There's a hitch though: Assad's troops aren't just too weak to defeat IS -- they also have no interest in doing so.

Sunday, Nov. 29, was market day in Ariha, a small city located in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib. In May, various rebel groups had taken control of the town, which is legendary for its deep-red cherries. Ariha is located far from the front, and even further away from areas under the control of Islamic State (IS). But the Russian air force bombed it anyway.

The people shopping at the market didn't stand a chance. Just seconds after the roar of the approaching Russian Sukhoi fighter jet first became audible, the first bombs struck. They killed passersby, vegetable sellers and entire families. "I saw torn up bodies flying around and children calling for their parents," said a civil defense rescuer hours after the attack. One day prior, just before 10 a.m., it was the turn of Safarana, a small city northeast of Homs. A first barrel bomb, dropped out of a Syrian regime helicopter, killed a man and a young girl and injured more than a dozen others. The victims had hardly been delivered to the clinic when two more barrel bombs exploded in front of the hospital, operated by Doctors without Borders, killing patients and paramedics who were caring for those who had just arrived.

Such attacks are nothing new in Syria. Jets from both Syria and Russia continue unhindered to bomb markets, hospitals, bakeries and pretty much any other place where people gather in the provinces that are under rebel control. Two years ago, Russia voted in favor of United Nations Resolution 2139, which was supposed to bring an end to attacks on Syrian civilians. But that hasn't prevented Russia from flying hundreds of exactly those kinds of bombing raids itself since the end of September. And that, in turn, hasn't prevented France from talking to Russia about the possibility of conducting coordinated air strikes and joining together in the fight against Islamic State.

Just three weeks after the terror attacks in Paris, Europe has prepared itself for entry into this war against Islamic State. But it is a war that unites many radically divergent elements -- and one for which there is no strategy. French jets, joined recently by British warplanes, are now flying sorties against IS in Syria. And Germany will soon join them. German Tornado jets, equipped with high-resolution imaging technology, are to help identify targets while A-310 aircraft will refuel warplanes in the air. In addition, a German frigate is to provide protection to a French aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean.

Partnership with the Dictator
 
But beyond Germany's limited contribution to the air war, Berlin and Paris are discussing a vastly more sensitive and extremely uncertain engagement on the ground. Meanwhile, the French government -- which had long been a vocal opponent of Syrian President Bashar Assad -- recently introduced the idea of a possible partnership with the dictator and his troops in a joint alliance to fight IS.

German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen recently said somewhat awkwardly of Syria: "There are parts of the troops, that one could very well -- like in the Iraq example, where the training of local troops was very successful -- emulate here too." Her spokesperson quickly made it clear that such a concept doesn't apply to troops under Assad's command. But the idea of cooperating with Assad is one under discussion: Islamic State terror in Europe would seem to have partially rehabilitated the dictator.

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier even proposed that fighting between the Syrian opposition and regime troops could be "discontinued, for a start." Steinmeier's words reveal his frustration at the fact that the two sides are engaging each other in a war of attrition instead of joining forces against IS. But the reality on the ground refuses to conform to his aspirations.

Indeed, it is increasingly difficult to identify such a potential partner for Europe on the Syrian battlegrounds. Assad's official army is now just one of many fighting forces on the side of the regime -- and is also suffering from poor morale and a lack of soldiers. For many young Syrians from areas under government control, forced conscription has become the most significant motivator for embarking on the refugee trail to Europe. 

This is also one reason why Russia's initial strategy for Syria is not finding success. Moscow had been hoping that massive air strikes would force rebel fighters in opposition-held areas to abandon the fight. That would then pave the way for Assad's ground forces to advance and take back those regions. But in October, when Assad's tank units rolled into those areas that Russian jets had previously bombed, they didn't get very far. Instead of fleeing, rebels there had dug in instead.

Syrian Fighting Force?
 
Using TOW anti-tank missiles supplied by the US, in addition to Russian anti-tank weapons that had been captured or acquired from corrupt officers, the rebels struck some 20 tanks before the others turned back. The army's ground offensive south of Aleppo likewise quickly ground to a halt. Meanwhile, rebels near Hama were able to finally take control of a long-contested city.

Assad's army isn't just vulnerable, it also isn't strictly a Syrian force anymore. For the last two years, the forces on his side have increasingly been made up of foreigners, including Revolutionary Guards from Iran, members of Iraqi militias and Hezbollah units from Lebanon. They are joined at the front by Shiite Afghans from the Hazara people, up to 2 million of whom live in Iran, mostly as illegal immigrants. They are forcibly conscripted in Iranian prisons and sent to Syria -- according to internal Iranian estimates, there are between 10,000 and 20,000 of them fighting in the country. The situation leads to absurd scenes: In the southern Syrian town of Daraa, rebels began desperately searching for Persian interpreters after an offensive of 2,500 Afghans suddenly began approaching.

It is the first international Shiite jihad in history, one which has been compensating for the demographic inferiority of Assad's troops since 2012. The alliance has prevented Assad's defeat, but it hasn't been enough for victory either. Furthermore, the orders are no longer coming exclusively from the Syrian officer corps. Iranian officers control their own troops in addition to the Afghan units, and they plan offensives that also involve Syrian soldiers. Hezbollah commanders coordinate small elite units under their control. Iraqis give orders to Iraqi and Pakistani militia groups. And the Russians don't let anyone tell them what to do.

The odd alliances aren't just limited to the Shiite fighters. Anti-Assad rebels were recently surprised to see American Humvees -- a vehicle that quickly became a symbol of IS attacks after the Islamists captured hundreds of them in Iraq in summer 2014 -- rolling towards them from government-controlled territory. "We thought only IS had captured Humvees, but the Shiite militias fighting alongside Assad use them too," said Osama Abu Zaid, a local legal advisor to various groups belonging to the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Elsewhere, attacks by Assad supporters and by Islamic State have likewise taken place with astonishing temporal and geographic proximity to each other. Near the northern Syrian city of Tal Rifaat in early November, for example, an IS suicide attacker detonated his car bomb at an FSA base, though without causing much damage. Just half an hour later, two witnesses say, Russian jets attacked the same base for the first time.

Unsurprising Cooperation
 
Was it a coincidence? Likely not. There have been dozens of cases since 2014 in which Assad's troops and IS have apparently been coordinating attacks on rebel groups, with the air force bombing them from above and IS firing at them from the ground. In early June, the US State Department announced that the regime wasn't just avoiding IS positions, but was actively reinforcing them.

Such cooperation isn't surprising. The rebels -- in all their variety, from nationalists to radical Islamists -- represent the greatest danger to both Assad and IS. And if the two sides want to survive in the long term, the Syrian dictator and the jihadists are useful to each other. From Assad's perspective, if the rebels were to be vanquished, the world would no longer see an alternative to the Syrian dictator. But the rebels are also primarily Sunni, as are two-thirds of the Syrian populace -- meaning that, from the IS perspective, once the rebels were defeated, the populace would be faced either with submission and exile, or they would join IS.

In short, a Syria free of rebels would put both Assad and Islamic State in powerful positions, though not powerful enough to defeat the other. Still, such a situation would be vastly preferable to the alternatives: Being toppled from power (Assad), or being destroyed (IS).

Relative to those two camps, the Syrian opposition in the West is hardly being paid attention to anymore. That is in part a function of their confusing structure: There are dozens of larger rebel groups and hundreds of smaller units, mostly at a local level. They cooperate, but alliances often crumble due to the ideological differences of their foreign supporters.

British Prime Minister David Cameron presented numbers last week indicating the existence of some 70,000 moderate rebels. In addition, he said, there were two large Islamist groups: Ahrar al-Sham in the north, with 15,000 fighters; and Jaish al-Islam north of Damascus, with 12,500 militiamen -- and the al-Qaida-allied group Nusra Front, with its 6,000 to 10,000 men. Cameron had hardly finished reciting the numbers before questions were raised as to whether the 70,000 he cited were prepared to partner with the West in the battle against Islamic State. They have, though, been fighting against Islamic State since January 2014 -- but have primarily focused their fight on Assad.

Significant Moral Question
 
Sending ground troops into such a situation, or even lending legitimacy to the Russian-Syrian offensive, would unwittingly transform Europe into Assad's vassals. Beyond that, the dictator would have to be given troop reinforcements so that he could halfway successfully advance against the enemy.

Even if one were to ignore all of the military problems, there is also a significant moral question: Would the West really want to go into battle with a regime that has used, aside from nuclear weapons, pretty much every weapon imaginable against its own populace in an effort to cling to power? And once Islamic State is defeated and driven away, what should happen with the cities -- such as Raqqa, Deir el-Zour, al-Bab, Manbij and Abu Kamal -- that they now hold? All those cities had been take over by local rebels long before Islamic State moved in. Who should such areas be given to?
Certainly not to Assad. That would merely turn the clock back on this war by three years. Rebel groups would once again try to throw out Assad's troops -- and ultimately Islamic State would strike again.

Making matters even more complicated is the fact that IS, the declared enemy-number-one of international efforts, is receding from the focus of two major foreign actors in Syria. Ever since Turkey shot down the Russian jet, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Vladimir Putin have been engaged in a proxy war in the Aleppo province, a conflict which has seen Kurdish IS-opponents exchanging fire with Sunni IS-opponents in recent days. Furthermore, Russian jets have stepped up their bombing campaign against Syrian settlements along the border with Turkey while the Turkish secret service is sending weapons and ammunition into the fight against the Kurds. Both presidents have fragile egos, and Syria has emerged as the perfect playing field for them to get Kurdish YPG units and rebel groups -- both of which had thus far focused their efforts on Islamic State -- to fight against each other.

And Islamic State? The jihadists had been facing significant pressure in recent months from ongoing air strikes launched by the US-led coalition. Not because it had lost ground, but because it had been unable to continue its advance. The group's exploitative economy and its propaganda image both make a steady stream of victories necessary. The "caliphate" is facing financial difficulties and is also having trouble recruiting more foreign fighters. An expansion of allied air strikes could likely increase the pressure, while cooperation with Assad would put Islamic State in a perfect strategic position.

But for as long as Islamic State's enemies are busy fighting each other, the Islamists can carry on as before. Like last Wednesday, when the jihadists took over the small city of Kafra north of Aleppo -- not long after it had been bombed by Russian jets.

How the Gun-Rights Lobby Won After Newtown

Watch Frontline Gunned-Down and read How the Gun-Rights Lobby Won After Newtown. How American politics is controlled by National Rifle Association (NRA)!

by Sarah Childress
 

Even by the standards of mass public shootings in America, what happened last year at Sandy Hook Elementary School was staggering. Twenty-six victims, most no older than seven, were gunned down in their classrooms days before Christmas.

For gun-control advocates, Newtown offered an unprecedented moment to push to reform the nation’s gun laws. The day of the shooting, a visibly moved President Barack Obama called for “meaningful action.” One month later, a coalition of grieving Sandy Hook parents vowed to fight nationwide for “sensible solutions to prevent gun violence.” Some politicians with top ratings from the National Rifle Association (NRA) even indicated they’d be willing to consider new laws.

It didn’t quite work out that way.

In the wake of Sandy Hook, the gun-rights lobby outspent, out-organized and out-maneuvered gun-control advocates at both the state and federal level. A FRONTLINE examination of state legislation and federal lobbying expenditures shows that gun-rights groups outspent gun-control backers by nearly $10 million, and that around the country, states passed more than twice as many laws expanding gun owners’ rights than they did gun-control measures.

Representatives of the two top national gun lobbying organizations declined to talk to FRONTLINE about their efforts this past year. But records show that since Sandy Hook, 27 states have passed 93 laws expanding gun rights, including measures allowing people to carry concealed weapons in churches, public parks and schools, and to accept gun permits from neighboring states. In Congress, gun-rights lobbyists helped defeat the most comprehensive reform bill proposed in nearly two decades.

What happened?

“As upset as people who don’t own guns are about the misuse of guns — and of course gun owners are too — at the end of the day, they aren’t going to vote for or against you on the basis of what you do on this issue,” said Richard Feldman, president of the Independent Firearms Owners Association, who advocates what he calls “effective solutions” on guns. “Gun owners are going to vote, and they care deeply about this issue.”

Gun-control advocates say that they’re just beginning to gain momentum to challenge the well-funded and organized gun-rights movement. But they’ve also run up against the current political reality of guns in the U.S.

“These Are Good Bills”

Within three months of the shooting, states were consider more than 1,000 pieces of legislation — about half to expand gun rights, and the other half to curtail them.

By the end of 2013, only 43 gun-control laws had passed, nearly one-quarter of them in California.

Colorado legislators passed four laws, including expanded background checks and a ban on most magazines with more than 15 rounds. But the outcry among gun-rights supporters was so great that two senators who voted for the measures were recalled in September, and another stepped down last month to avoid being ousted. Gov. John Hickenlooper, who is running for re-election next year, is also struggling to stay ahead in the polls.

In Rhode Island, gun-rights advocates successfully lobbied to modify proposed gun-control bills until they felt they didn’t impose on firearm owners’ rights. The Providence Journal documented the House vote:

“They’ve been kind to us gun folks,” said Rep. Doreen Marie Costa on the House floor. “I want to make sure the NRA people and the [Federated Rhode Island Sportsmen’s Club] can hear this,” Costa added, as the lobbyists and gun-rights advocates watched from the balcony. “These are good bills.”

A New Gun-Rights Power

In January, President Obama announced 23 executive actions intended to strengthen the enforcement of existing gun laws. Last month, he touted some progress, including improving the national background-check database and appointing a director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, a post that’s been vacant for seven years.

But the administration’s major effort to pass what would have been the most sweeping reform in nearly two decades — new legislation that would have expanded background checks to include gun shows and online sales — failed within months in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

The legislation was staunchly opposed by gun-rights groups, including a powerful newcomer in the federal arena.

The National Association for Gun Rights, or NAGR, which considers itself to the right of the powerful NRA, spent nearly $6 million in lobbying this year through September 2013 — more than double what the NRA paid out and far more than any other group on either side of the debate.
The NAGR was founded in 2001, but until this
 year it focused mainly on advocacy, keeping local groups apprised of gun legislation in their states. The source of its funding isn’t clear because as a 501(c)4, the NAGR isn’t required to disclose its backers.

The group’s leadership has ties to former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The group’s executive vice president, Dudley Brown, declined to talk to FRONTLINE for this story. But earlier this year, Brown told the Center for Responsive Politics that the Sandy Hook shooting prompted the group to get involved on the federal level.

“We had not hired a federal lobbyist previous to that point, and we immediately started seeking one out after Connecticut,” he said. The group gained notoriety for running attack ads again Republican members of Congress, including Eric Cantor, the House majority whip, accusing them of supporting the president’s gun-control initiatives.

The “Connecticut Effect”

Gun-control advocates have never been as organized, as wealthy or as motivated as gun-rights groups, so even with the newfound momentum that some have called the “Connecticut effect,” they’re working at a disadvantage.

But in 2013, gun-control advocates marked several victories, including in Connecticut, one of the few states to pass comprehensive gun control legislation. After the shooting, gun-control groups in the state gained thousands of new members. Suburban moms speed-dialed legislators every Friday at 9:30 a.m., the moment the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary began. Other groups formed to march against gun violence, and advocates showed up at legislative hearings to counter pro-gun supporters.

That kind of grassroots power is new for the gun-control movement — and something they admit will take years to replicate nationwide. The goal: create enough baseline support for legislators so they can vote for gun-control measures without fearing for their political lives.

“A year ago, not only were we swimming against the tide, there wasn’t much hope at all that people felt in terms of passing laws that would actually save lives,” said Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Now, he said, “We’re on the right trajectory. Every day that we wake up, we’re focused on continuing that momentum that we’ve established, with grassroots organizing across the country, new levels of membership, and funding that this issue hasn’t seen in years. It all is headed in the right direction.”

The question now is what happens next year, as the 2014 midterm elections approach. Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the largest gun-control group in terms of lobbying expenditures, plans to continue to back politicians who side with them and attack those who don’t. The Brady Campaign says it’s working with federal lawmakers to craft a new background-check bill, although they declined to name names on a recent conference call with reporters.

“It will take us awhile to match what the NRA has accomplished in two decades, but I think it’s happening a lot faster than anyone thought it would,” said Mark Glaze, Mayors’ director.

But the gun-rights movement isn’t likely to lose its momentum, either. The NAGR rallied its supporters this week to oppose Congress’ extension of a ban on plastic guns that can avoid detection by airport security. Although the bill passed, it lacked new restrictions proposed by gun-control supporters.

And, the NRA, which plans to reintroduce gun-rights legislation that failed at the state level, has billed 2014 as the “biggest battle for gun rights in our lifetime.”

Identity and Exile

Al Jazeera's Matthew Cassel examines why so many American Jews defend Israeli policies regardless of the issue or cost.

Source:Al Jazeera 

Identity and Exile: an American's struggle with Zionism is a two-part series following Al Jazeera's Matthew Cassel.

In part one, he asks why so many American Jews defend Israeli policies regardless of the cost. In part two, he travels to the Middle East to examine what effect Israel's policies have had on people in the region.

Part one

Part Two

In the 19th and 20th centuries, millions of Jews migrated from Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia to the US, settling across the country's big cities including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago where they found opportunity and established strong communities. Those communities continued to grow in the subsequent decades as more Jews fled anti-Semitism across Europe.

A growing number of Jews also migrated to Palestine at the turn of the century, part of a nascent Zionist movement. Migration to Palestine increased after World War I. At the end of World War II, following the horrors of the holocaust, the state of Israel was created in what had previously been British-controlled Palestine. In the process, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee their homes, exiled into neighbouring countries and refugee camps.

 The Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the land continues to this day. How does this contentious issue affect Judaism in the US? Why is there such strong support for Israel in the US irrespective of the issue or cost? 

Al Jazeera's Matthew Cassel travels back to his native Chicago where he was raised Jewish. He talks to local rabbis, friends and family about why so many in the Jewish-American community believe it is important to maintain support for Israel … no matter what. 

And he travels back to Palestine to retrace his steps as a young man. At that time, during the second Intifada, he was shocked to discover the impact Israeli policies were having on Palestinians. 

He tries to understand how Jewish religious beliefs have turned into a political cause that he does not agree with - but that the US actively accepts and supports.

Hope in Montreux? A Starting Point for Peace in Syria

By Christoph Reuter
Violence in Syria has been appalling in the run up to this week's peace talks in Switzerland, where rebel and government representatives are to sit down together. Secret meetings in recent months give cause for hope.

A bag filled with pieces of bread is dangling from a pole jutting from a house in the Damascus neighborhood of Yarmouk. Rebels control the neighborhood, but the Syrian army has had it sealed off from the outside world for months. The rebels suspect that the bag of bread is bait, part of trap designed to lure starving Yarmouk residents out into the open -- and into the range of fire of army snipers
 
Dozens have already died of starvation in Yarmouk. The last remaining cats, birds and dogs were eaten long ago. Cactus leaves and grass are still growing. Bread would be a luxury.

Putting out bait for starving civilians is a despicable tactic. But barbaric methods have been commonplace in the Syrian war for some time, partly because it's a conflict that neither side can currently win. To resolve the stalemate, representatives of the government and the rebels will begin seeking a political solution in talks set to begin on Wednesday in Montreux, Switzerland. There have also been talks behind the scenes, both between the two sides and between the United States and Russia. Still, civilians are now even worse off than before.

"It's to be expected that both sides would try to strengthen their initial position by military means prior to negotiations," says a Western diplomat in Washington involved in the preparations for Montreux. But the wave of attacks being launched by the army, which has been dropping so-called barrel bombs -- barrels filled with explosives and metal fragments -- onto the city of Aleppo from helicopters, is pure terror, adds the diplomat.

'Creating Political Leverage'
 
"Most of all, by doing this (President Bashar) Assad is making it all but impossible for the opposition to get to the negotiations. It's the most murderous form of creation of political value," says the diplomat. The rebels, he says, will lose their popular support if they negotiate with a regime that is taking such a drastic and murderous approach.
Washington and London, on the other hand, have threatened to freeze the already scant aid they provide to the opposition should they not appear. After almost three years of violence, 130,000 dead and appeals that fall on deaf ears, it seems that many in the West view the mere fact that the conference is taking place as a success, regardless of its outcome. "The important thing is to start negotiating," says a German diplomat. "No one has had any better ideas."

Talks notwithstanding, top regime officials in Damascus are beginning to feel nervous, which likely has to do with the precipitous decline of the al-Qaida linkedIslamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS). Thus far,Assad has tried to impress upon Western governments and intelligence services that his regime is the lesser evil. His mantra has been that if his regime falls, al-Qaida will take over the country.

For a few months at the end of last year, it did seem as if the ISIS combatants could gain control over large parts of northern Syria. But then, after fierce fighting in January, the Syrian rebels forced ISIS out of Idlib in northwestern Syria. Now the rebels continue to fight on two fronts: against Assad's troops and against the al-Qaida extremists who have retained control over the provincial capital of Rakka.

Regime troops, on the other hand, have conspicuously avoided attacking the al-Qaida linked fighters. When ISIS was fighting the rebels in the towns of Jarabulus and Anadan, for example, Assad's air force bombed the rebel positions but not those of the al-Qaida fighters. In addition, government aircraft have for weeks been heavily bombarding residential neighborhoods in Aleppo, and yet neither the local ISIS headquarters nor the organization's other strongholds have been struck, despite being clearly recognizable from the air.

Joining Forces
 
What the threat posed by the al-Qaida affiliate has done is prompt the large rebel groups in Syria, encouraged by Saudi Arabia, to join forces.

Following what is expected to be an unsuccessful first round of negotiations, several options will be available. If Washington adheres to its strategy of forcing the opposition to reach an agreement with Assad, the war will continue. Regime forces are playing for time and expect to emerge victorious, while the rebels feel newly strengthened by their unity. No one is likely to give up soon.

A second option has quietly taken shape on Lake Geneva. Since October, influential Syrians on both sides have been meeting at Château de Bossey near Geneva to search for solutions. The talks were arranged by the Swiss Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, which has explored compromises in Sudan, Indonesia, Nepal and other countries, with varying degrees of success -- and without the crippling effect of government negotiating machinery. United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, an American, and UN Special Envoy to Syria Lakhdar Brahimi, of Algeria, have been consistently in the picture during the current talks.

It was a tricky experiment in which people close to the regime and the rebels sat face-to-face and eventually found common ground.

"We fought on the first day, talked to each other on the second day and went shopping together in Geneva on the third," says one participant. "Then a former adviser to Assad said, okay, we're going to fight each other to the last building in Damascus, but what then? The country will be ruined, and neither side will emerge victorious or be able to stop fighting."

The killing will only end, says the man, if the United States and Russia come to an agreement. And the fighting is unlikely to stop unless the two nations exercise their authority, partly because foreign interests dominate the situation in Syria.

A Starting Point?
 
"The Saudi Arabians and the Qataris are using our revolution in their proxy war against Iran," says one of the opposition members at the Swiss chateau.

"The Iranians and Hezbollah treat us like their colony," complains a delegate for the regime, which is being supported by Iran, Iraq and Hezbollah, and would lose the war without their military aid.

While negotiations were underway at Château de Bossey, there were also talks between Washington and Moscow. Both sets of negotiations revolved around the same model for achieving a peace treaty: The Syrian government, army and notorious security forces would remain in place, while military power would be transferred to an extremely difficult merger of the army and rebel groups. Assad would be sent into exile or would lose his effective power. It would be a starting point.

The decision as to whether to pursue the model apparently lies currently with Moscow. An insider familiar with the talks says that to secure the Kremlin's approval, any future Syrian regime would likely have to guarantee continued military cooperation with Russia and the repayment of billions in Syrian debt. It would also have to ensure that an agreement reached with Moscow in late December on the exploration of oil and natural gas deposits off the Syrian coast be upheld.

It is not very likely that all parties will agree to this model. According to a member of the Damascus elite who emigrated from Syria, there is one potential obstacle: "The intelligence chiefs won't allow Assad to leave, unless they receive the same exile guarantees for themselves and their families."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sulta

Report: Syria tortured and executed 11,000 (Video)

Evidence from defector alleges systematic torture and "industrial-scale" killing of prisoners by Assad's regime.

Video

Source:Al Jazeera and agencies 
The government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has systematically killed and tortured about 11,000 people, according to a reported based on the evidence of a defector and produced by three former international prosecutors.

The report, commissioned by the government of Qatar and released on Tuesday, examined thousands of pictures said to have been smuggled out by a former military police photographer.

The report shows explicit evidence of starvation, strangulation and beatings, and features pictures of emaciated corpses with livid wounds.

The pictures show ... the systematic murder of detainees by starvation, by torture ... the mutilation of bodies.

Desmond de Silva, former chief prosecutor of the special court for Sierra Leone.
The release came a day before talks were due to begin in Switzerland aimed at negotiating an end to Syria's bloody civil war.

The Syrian denies torturing detainees.

The report was written by Desmond de Silva, the former chief prosecutor of the special court for Sierra Leone; Geoffrey Nice, the former lead prosecutor in the trial of former Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic; and David Crane, who indicted the Liberian president, Charles Taylor.

It features evidence from a forensic pathologist, an anthropologist who investigated mass graves in Kosovo and an expert in digital images.

De Silva said the report was the "smoking gun" showing evidence of "industrial-scale" killing by the Syrian regime.

The defector, identified only as "Caesar", presented about 55,000 images of 11,000 dead prisoners since the start of the uprising in Syria in March 2011.

The evidence was viewed by forensic experts commissioned by a London legal firm representing Qatar.

The defector claims that the victims all died in captivity before being taken to a military hospital to be photographed.

"The pictures show over a period of years the systematic murder of detainees by starvation, by torture, the gouging out of eyes, the hideous beating of people, the mutilation of bodies," De Silva said.

Evidence of starvation

The report says that all but one of the victims were male. Most appeared to be aged between 20 and 40 and a "very significant percentage" showed evidence of starvation.

The defector "informed the inquiry team that there could be as many as 50 bodies a day to photograph which required 15 to 30 minutes of work per corpse", the report said.

He said the purpose of the photos was firstly to be able to issue death certificates - falsely saying that the victims had died in hospital - and secondly to confirm to the regime that executions had been carried out.

The bodies would then be buried in rural areas.

The authors of the report said they found the informant and his evidence to be credible after subjecting them to "rigorous scrutiny" and have made their findings available to the UN, governments and human rights groups.

The fact that the defector had not claimed to have actually witnessed any of the killings added credibility to his story, they said.

He later escaped from Syria fearing for the safety of his family.

"There came a point a few months ago where he decided that he couldn't take it anymore, so he decided to defect and he left. He could well have gone to Qatar, yes," said De Silva.

Crane called the evidence "amazing" and suggested there was a strong case for prosecution.

"Now we have direct evidence of what was happening to people who had disappeared," he said.

"This is the first provable, direct evidence of what has happened to at least 11,000 human beings who have been tortured and executed and apparently disposed of."

Identity and Exile (Video)

Al Jazeera's Matthew Cassel examines why so many American Jews defend Israeli policies regardless of the issue or cost.

 

Part One

Source: Al Jazeera

In the 19th and 20th centuries, millions of Jews migrated from Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia to the US, settling across the country's big cities including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago where they found opportunity and established strong communities. Those communities continued to grow in the subsequent decades as more Jews fled anti-Semitism across Europe.

A growing number of Jews also migrated to Palestine at the turn of the century, part of a nascent Zionist movement. Migration to Palestine increased after World War I. At the end of World War II, following the horrors of the holocaust, the state of Israel was created in what had previously been British-controlled Palestine. In the process, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee their homes, exiled into neighbouring countries and refugee camps.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the land continues to this day. How does this contentious issue affect Judaism in the US? Why is there such strong support for Israel in the US irrespective of the issue or cost?

Al Jazeera's Matthew Cassel travels back to his native Chicago where he was raised Jewish. He talks to local rabbis, friends and family about why so many in the Jewish-American community believe it is important to maintain support for Israel … no matter what.

And he travels back to Palestine to retrace his steps as a young man. At that time, during the second Intifada, he was shocked to discover the impact Israeli policies were having on Palestinians.

He tries to understand how Jewish religious beliefs have turned into a political cause that he does not agree with - but that the US actively accepts and supports.

Part Two

Obama’s moving eulogy for Nelson Mandela (Video/Tanscript)

PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Thank you.  (Applause.)  Thank you so much.  Thank you.  To Graça Machel and the Mandela family; to President Zuma and members of the government; to heads of states and government, past and present; distinguished guests -- it is a singular honor to be with you today, to celebrate a life like no other.  To the people of South Africa -- (applause) -- people of every race and walk of life -- the world thanks you for sharing Nelson Mandela with us.  His struggle was your struggle.  His triumph was your triumph.  Your dignity and your hope found expression in his life.  And your freedom, your democracy is his cherished legacy.

It is hard to eulogize any man -- to capture in words not just the facts and the dates that make a life, but the essential truth of a person -- their private joys and sorrows; the quiet moments and unique qualities that illuminate someone’s soul.  How much harder to do so for a giant of history, who moved a nation toward justice, and in the process moved billions around the world.

Born during World War I, far from the corridors of power, a boy raised herding cattle and tutored by the elders of his Thembu tribe, Madiba would emerge as the last great liberator of the 20th century.  Like Gandhi, he would lead a resistance movement -- a movement that at its start had little prospect for success.  Like Dr. King, he would give potent voice to the claims of the oppressed and the moral necessity of racial justice.  He would endure a brutal imprisonment that began in the time of Kennedy and Khrushchev, and reached the final days of the Cold War.  Emerging from prison, without the force of arms, he would -- like Abraham Lincoln -- hold his country together when it threatened to break apart.  And like America’s Founding Fathers, he would erect a constitutional order to preserve freedom for future generations -- a commitment to democracy and rule of law ratified not only by his election, but by his willingness to step down from power after only one term.

Given the sweep of his life, the scope of his accomplishments, the adoration that he so rightly earned, it’s tempting I think to remember Nelson Mandela as an icon, smiling and serene, detached from the tawdry affairs of lesser men.  But Madiba himself strongly resisted such a lifeless portrait.  (Applause.)  Instead, Madiba insisted on sharing with us his doubts and his fears; his miscalculations along with his victories.  “I am not a saint,” he said, “unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.”

It was precisely because he could admit to imperfection -- because he could be so full of good humor, even mischief, despite the heavy burdens he carried -- that we loved him so.  He was not a bust made of marble; he was a man of flesh and blood -- a son and a husband, a father and a friend.  And that’s why we learned so much from him, and that’s why we can learn from him still.  For nothing he achieved was inevitable.  In the arc of his life, we see a man who earned his place in history through struggle and shrewdness, and persistence and faith.  He tells us what is possible not just in the pages of history books, but in our own lives as well.

Mandela showed us the power of action; of taking risks on behalf of our ideals.  Perhaps Madiba was right that he inherited, “a proud rebelliousness, a stubborn sense of fairness” from his father.  And we know he shared with millions of black and colored South Africans the anger born of, “a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments…a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people,” he said.

But like other early giants of the ANC -- the Sisulus and Tambos -- Madiba disciplined his anger and channeled his desire to fight into organization, and platforms, and strategies for action, so men and women could stand up for their God-given dignity.  Moreover, he accepted the consequences of his actions, knowing that standing up to powerful interests and injustice carries a price.  “I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination.  I’ve cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and [with] equal opportunities.  It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve.  But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”  (Applause.)

Mandela taught us the power of action, but he also taught us the power of ideas; the importance of reason and arguments; the need to study not only those who you agree with, but also those who you don’t agree with.  He understood that ideas cannot be contained by prison walls, or extinguished by a sniper’s bullet.  He turned his trial into an indictment of apartheid because of his eloquence and his passion, but also because of his training as an advocate.  He used decades in prison to sharpen his arguments, but also to spread his thirst for knowledge to others in the movement.  And he learned the language and the customs of his oppressor so that one day he might better convey to them how their own freedom depend upon his.  (Applause.)

Mandela demonstrated that action and ideas are not enough.  No matter how right, they must be chiseled into law and institutions.  He was practical, testing his beliefs against the hard surface of circumstance and history.  On core principles he was unyielding, which is why he could rebuff offers of unconditional release, reminding the Apartheid regime that “prisoners cannot enter into contracts.”

 But as he showed in painstaking negotiations to transfer power and draft new laws, he was not afraid to compromise for the sake of a larger goal.  And because he was not only a leader of a movement but a skillful politician, the Constitution that emerged was worthy of this multiracial democracy, true to his vision of laws that protect minority as well as majority rights, and the precious freedoms of every South African.

And finally, Mandela understood the ties that bind the human spirit.  There is a word in South Africa -- Ubuntu -- (applause) -- a word that captures Mandela’s greatest gift:  his recognition that we are all bound together in ways that are invisible to the eye; that there is a oneness to humanity; that we achieve ourselves by sharing ourselves with others, and caring for those around us.

We can never know how much of this sense was innate in him, or how much was shaped in a dark and solitary cell.  But we remember the gestures, large and small -- introducing his jailers as honored guests at his inauguration; taking a pitch in a Springbok uniform; turning his family’s heartbreak into a call to confront HIV/AIDS -- that revealed the depth of his empathy and his understanding.  He not only embodied Ubuntu, he taught millions to find that truth within themselves.

It took a man like Madiba to free not just the prisoner, but the jailer as well -- (applause) -- to show that you must trust others so that they may trust you; to teach that reconciliation is not a matter of ignoring a cruel past, but a means of confronting it with inclusion and generosity and truth.  He changed laws, but he also changed hearts.
For the people of South Africa, for those he inspired around the globe, Madiba’s passing is rightly a time of mourning, and a time to celebrate a heroic life.  But I believe it should also prompt in each of us a time for self-reflection.  With honesty, regardless of our station or our circumstance, we must ask:  How well have I applied his lessons in my own life?  It’s a question I ask myself, as a man and as a President.

We know that, like South Africa, the United States had to overcome centuries of racial subjugation.  As was true here, it took sacrifice -- the sacrifice of countless people, known and unknown, to see the dawn of a new day.  Michelle and I are beneficiaries of that struggle.  (Applause.)  But in America, and in South Africa, and in countries all around the globe, we cannot allow our progress to cloud the fact that our work is not yet done.

The struggles that follow the victory of formal equality or universal franchise may not be as filled with drama and moral clarity as those that came before, but they are no less important.  For around the world today, we still see children suffering from hunger and disease.  We still see run-down schools.  We still see young people without prospects for the future.  Around the world today, men and women are still imprisoned for their political beliefs, and are still persecuted for what they look like, and how they worship, and who they love.  That is happening today.  (Applause.)

And so we, too, must act on behalf of justice.  We, too, must act on behalf of peace.  There are too many people who happily embrace Madiba’s legacy of racial reconciliation, but passionately resist even modest reforms that would challenge chronic poverty and growing inequality.  There are too many leaders who claim solidarity with Madiba’s struggle for freedom, but do not tolerate dissent from their own people.  (Applause.)  And there are too many of us on the sidelines, comfortable in complacency or cynicism when our voices must be heard.

The questions we face today -- how to promote equality and justice; how to uphold freedom and human rights; how to end conflict and sectarian war -- these things do not have easy answers.  But there were no easy answers in front of that child born in World War I.  Nelson Mandela reminds us that it always seems impossible until it is done.  South Africa shows that is true.  South Africa shows we can change, that we can choose a world defined not by our differences, but by our common hopes.  We can choose a world defined not by conflict, but by peace and justice and opportunity.

We will never see the likes of Nelson Mandela again.  But let me say to the young people of Africa and the young people around the world -- you, too, can make his life’s work your own.  Over 30 years ago, while still a student, I learned of Nelson Mandela and the struggles taking place in this beautiful land, and it stirred something in me.  It woke me up to my responsibilities to others and to myself, and it set me on an improbable journey that finds me here today.  And while I will always fall short of Madiba’s example, he makes me want to be a better man.  (Applause.)  He speaks to what’s best inside us.
After this great liberator is laid to rest, and when we have returned to our cities and villages and rejoined our daily routines, let us search for his strength.  Let us search for his largeness of spirit somewhere inside of ourselves.  And when the night grows dark, when injustice weighs heavy on our hearts, when our best-laid plans seem beyond our reach, let us think of Madiba and the words that brought him comfort within the four walls of his cell:  “It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”

What a magnificent soul it was.  We will miss him deeply.  May God bless the memory of Nelson Mandela.  May God bless the people of South Africa.  (Applause.)

Marco Rubio Raising Money for Group That Tries to Turn Gay People Straight

—By Tim Murphy

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) will speak at a fundraising dinner this week honoring Mat Staver, an ardent anti-gay activist who has defended Malawi's ban on homosexuality. Staver is suing New Jersey GOP Gov. Chris Christie for signing a law banning gay-to-straight conversion therapy, and has said that teaching gay rights in schools is tantamount to "sexual assault."

Rubio, a possible GOP presidential candidate in 2016, will deliver the keynote address at the annual fundraiser for the Florida Family Policy Council, a prominent social conservative organization that promotes so-called "conversion therapy" to help LGBT individuals become straight. Conversion therapy has been condemned as a form of abuse by psychologists. It is banned outright in a handful of states beyond New Jersey, including California. The American Psychiatric Association, which does not endorse conversion therapy, says the practice is at best ineffective and at worst can "reinforce self-hatred already experienced by the patient."

According to an invitation to the November 16 event, first reported by the progressive watchdog site Right Wing Watch, the dinner will honor Staver, dean of Liberty University School of Law and founder of the Liberty Counsel, which provides legal support to social conservative organizations. Staver's group filed a lawsuit against Christie last week alleging that New Jersey's new ban on gay conversion therapy prevented a couple from properly treating their son. Staver has a history of making incendiary claims about gays. In June, he claimed that the passage of the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, which would prohibit employers from discriminating against LGBT employees and applicants, would "result in significant damage and even death of some individuals." After the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act last summer, Staver suggested the decision would bring the nation closer to "the realm of rebellion."

John Stemberger, the Florida Family Policy Council's president, is also an anti-gay activist. He is chairman of Trail Life, the "moral alternative" to the Boy Scouts of America, which recently lifted its ban on gay Scouts. Trail Life won't accept openly gay boys as members, but offers counseling services to kids who suffer from "gender confusion."

"We're not going to tolerate somebody who's, you know, here and queer, loud and proud, all of that nonsense," Stemberger told social-conservative radio host Janet Mefferd. Stemberger, a lawyer, also triggered a minor international incident in 1999, when he sued Dollar rental car for negligence for renting a vehicle to an Irish tourist who got in an accident with his client. "Anyone who has studied Ireland knows it's just a fact: To the Irish, drinking and driving is not a big deal," he said at the time. The former mayor of Dublin told the Irish Times that Stemberger's lawsuit was "racist and absurd."

Rubio's office did not respond to a request for comment.

After 50 years together, same-sex couple says ‘I do’

Emma Margolin
Source: MSNBC

Although it’s been five decades, Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth still remember perfectly the night they met.

The two were in the Boulevard Lounge, a gay bar in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in the summer of 1963—six years before riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York City effectively launched the modern gay rights movement. Ted was a 27-year-old Ph.D. candidate at Louisiana State University. Claude was 18, home for the summer after finishing his freshman year at UCLA.
“He accuses me of robbing the cradle,” said Ted, now 77, in his Southern drawl. “It was pretty much love at first sight.”

As Claude tells it, the most important decision he anticipated having to make that summer was whether to major in English or pre-law. He never could have imagined the man who bought him a beer that night and talked to him about Tennessee Williams would eventually become his spouse.

On Thursday, nearly 50 years to the day after they first met, Claude and Ted are tying the knot. Not only will the wedding commemorate their golden anniversary—a time when most couples would be renewing their vows, not saying them for the first time—but it will also mark the Supreme Court rulings on two historic marriage equality cases.

For the couple whose relationship has spanned the entire gay rights movement, the decision to marry bridges the political with the deeply personal.

“We just decided that marriage was something both public and private,” said Claude, now 68, whose Louisiana accent rivals that of his soon-to-be spouse. “We don’t need the government for our private relationship, but we wanted to stand with our community and have our relationship honored the same way heterosexual relationships are.”

Claude and Ted are now back in Louisiana, retired after 30-year careers as English professors at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. But their wedding will be held in Provincetown, Massachusetts—the first state to legalize marriage equality through a state Supreme Court ruling nearly a decade ago. Though Louisiana does not recognize same-sex marriages, even those which took place in states that do, the decision to marry in Massachusetts seemed “very natural,” said the couple.

“I was struck by the Goodridge decision, in which the Massachusetts Supreme Court said there can be no second-class citizens, and therefore only marriage would suffice,” said Claude. “So we see it as not only public affirmation for our love to one another, but as a way of asserting our right to first-class citizenship.”

“There is value in having your relationship authorized, in a way,” said Ted. “Especially for gays, who have been denied that right. So that’s the thing I’m most happy about.”

Thursday’s wedding will gather about 40 friends from the couple’s happy life together.

Ted grew up in Homer, Louisiana, “one of the buckles on the Bible belt,” as he describes it. His mother found it hard to accept her son’s sexuality. She used to send Ted newspaper clippings of raids on gay bars. But Ted’s father was surprisingly supportive, even insisting that his son and Claude share a room the first time they came home together for the weekend.

“I never regretted being gay,” said Ted. “I thought everybody should just let me alone, and I’d let them alone.”

Claude, who grew up in Gonzales, Louisiana, said his mother was welcoming, too.
It wasn’t until after 1970 that the couple faced real homophobia that threatened the relationship. The pair was living in Chicago when Claude received a teaching job offer in California. Ted accepted a position there as well. But shortly after, Claude’s offer was rescinded when his employer found out about his sexuality, and the couple was forced to spend a year away from each other.

“I think that was the most difficult time,” said Ted. “Just being alone.”

Claude took a job at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and a year later, so did Ted. The two flourished there, even receiving a distinguished professorship as a couple after both were nominated.

“It worked out well for us, because we wound up being very happy at the University of Michigan-Dearborn,” said Claude. “We lived normally with a great deal of support. Beyond some isolated incidents, we thought we were very well accepted as a couple.”
In 2001, the pair retired to New Orleans, where they now live with two rescue beagles, who they reluctantly placed in a kennel for their wedding. Both are editors of glbtq.com, a website devoted to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer culture.

“We’ve been through it all,” said Ted. They’ve marched in gay pride parades from New York City to San Francisco and are pleased with the progress the gay rights movement has made.
“I’m not happy with how long it’s taken, but it’s certainly a lot better now than it was then,” said Ted. “I wish it would move faster.”

Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, a 1996 law which did not recognize same-sex marriages on a federal level. Writing the decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy said DOMA violated gay Americans’ equal protection under the law and is thus unconstitutional.

The Court ruling struck down the part of DOMA that prevented the federal government from giving same-sex couples access to thousands of federal benefits. Under this decision, Claude and Ted will now be entitled to receive some of those benefits, because they legally married in Massachusetts. But other benefits—such as tax breaks for married couples, and Social Security survivors’ benefits—depend on where the couple currently lives, which in Claude and Ted’s case is Louisiana. Since the Supreme Court did not issue a broad ruling in the Proposition 8 case, Louisiana will continue to not recognize Claude and Ted’s marriage, and they will lose out on some of those valuable federal benefits.

Nevertheless, the couple still believes their wedding will carry significant meaning and hope for the future.

“I don’t want to weep,” said Claude, trying to articulate how he will feel when finally marrying his partner of 50 years. “We know we’ve loved each other and have been able to do so without ever being married, but also having the community blessing that is involved in marriage adds something. It may be intangible but it’s real.”

Fires have burned 3 percent of Amazon rainforest in 12 years, NASA says

Scientists find that hard-to-track fires in forest ‘understory’ have done even greater damage to rainforest than traditional deforestation.

By Mark Trumbull, Source: © The Christian Science Monitor

The size of the Amazon rainforest has been shrinking – and not just because of traditional deforestation.

Fires that creep slowly and low in the forest understory burned nearly 3 percent of the world’s largest tropical rainforest in a little more than a decade, scientists at NASA say.

Because they are hard to measure from space, “we've never known the regional extent or frequency of these understory fires," said Doug Morton of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., the lead author of a study publicized by the space agency Friday.

RECOMMENDED: Think you know Latin America? Take our geography quiz.

 

The study estimated that between 1999 and 2010, understory forest fires burned more than 33,000 square miles (85,500 square kilometers), or 2.8 percent of the forest.

The fires are typically caused by human activities such as cooking, cigarettes, or agricultural waste burning.

But they’re not directly related to deforestation activity, which can include fires that Mr. Morton describes as “massive, towering infernos.” Rather, an important indicator of risk for understory fires is dryness.

Frequent understory fire activity coincides with low nighttime humidity, the NASA research found.

By contrast, in some of the peak years for forest-clearing activity (2003 and 2004), adjacent forests had low rates of understory fires.

In understory fires, flames generally reach only a few feet high. They often burn for weeks at a time, spreading a few feet per minute.

To gauge the scale of understory fire activity, Morton and colleagues used observations from early in the dry season, from June to August, collected by MODIS – the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument on NASA's Terra satellite.

The researchers tracked the timing of damage and recovery in various disturbed areas. Areas of deforestation lack signs of recovery for at least two years. But degradation from understory fires is visible in the year after the burn, then dissipates quickly as the forest regrows.

Separately, NASA and academic researchers on Friday released predictions that the 2013 fire season will be “considerably higher” than in 2011 and 2012 in many parts of the Amazon.

The scope of the understory fires doesn’t make deforestation less important, but it suggests that such fires “are important source of [carbon] emissions that we need to consider," Morton said.