Really? After months of investigation, the paper found the interviewee is to blame? Apart from the rhetoric, it really merely walked back on its earlier decision to still use the podcast but edit it. Now it’s saying no, we’ll retract it, and everyone is supposed to applaud.
For an brief on what is the real trouble here, follow this thread (
[the problem is much deeper, it’s systemic & there are real-life effects to journalism led by ignorance + arrogance, despite repeated warnings of the damages it had caused.]
By the way, that’s one issue all respected watchers in the world agree on. It’s a consensus issue. The only people I’ve seen push back against it are people who are part of her circle & who share the same affiliations. That’s apparently more important to them than proper work.
Important: A breakthrough in the Gulf rift in the coming hours, sources tell Al Jazeera aja.me/b5k8f
Kuwait is to issue a statement about a "breakthrough" in the Gulf rift, between Saudi Arabia & Qatar. The breakthrough will be a set of confidence-building measures before a full end of the crisis that began June 2017. Moves to resolve the Saudi-Qatari dispute started last fall.
The gist of it: the imminent breakthrough is to allow Qatari flights over Saudi Arabia, which the US hopes will rattle Iran’s economy. Currently Qatar pays millions of dollars to route over Iran.
Doom & gloom within Arab regime circles about reports of a Biden win. They were hoping Trump would win.
Even if they don’t think Biden would actively be against them, they get how their detractors will have space & multiple advantages perhaps unprecedented in recent decades!
In 2016, it was a whole different world: Arab dictators and their circles were simply intoxicated with their love of the incoming Trump presidency. They saw historic opportunities, and they were right to a certain degree but not entirely.
These regimes will always have friends in DC but things, and they may think their puppets are doing a great job at placing op-eds or forming partnerships here & there; but there are parallel things happening both inside the US & when it comes to their detractors they can’t stop.
Two weeks before the anniversary of the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdad, ISIS is releasing a new statement from the media outlet specializing in top leadership releases.
ISIS releases a statement by its spokesman Abu Hamza al-Qurashi titled "So recount the tales"
In the first 5 minutes, he speaks about the Salafist tenet "obedience to rulers" and attacks it as un-Islamic. He also talks about clerics that preach against rebelling against rulers.
[A key part of why jihadism is part of a theological revolution, just a violent version]
Wow, super embarrassing! This story was the basis of a whole series produced by the NYT, the "award-winning" Caliphate.
The sad thing is: it's not the 1st time @rcallimachi falls into fake stories. This could be avoided by having someone able to vet sources & spot discrepancies
Last October, she ran an article with claims that anybody who knows this subject would immediately dismiss as implausible. As we found out, it was based on faked documents supplied by dodgy sources.
More damning (if we put the lack of expertise aside) is that she misrepresented quotes by an expert to make it sound like he was vouching for their veracity, even though he'd raised concerns.
Until recently, the US, Iraq & the UN all thought the current leader (Hajji Abdullah or Abdullah Qardash) wasn't really a Quarashi, that he was a Turkoman, and that he was a 'placeholder' until ISIS would appoint an Arab of Qurashi origins per its ideology
In ~5 years, and don’t hold any of this against me:
• Israel will have its 1st base in the Gulf
• Turkey will control a zone from northern Iraq to northern Syria
• Turkey will expand Libya presence
• Egypt & Sudan will form something along the lines of a “Nile Confederation”
A military base in the Arab side of the Persian Gulf.
The normalization with tiny countries in the Gulf may indeed seem to be non-events. But, in that bubble, I think this process will produce interesting changes in the future. Normalization will have a snowball effect that’ll drag with it both Saudi Arabia & Qatar as party to it.