5: 

Trump Proposes Database to Track All American Muslims

Meanwhile, Donald Trump took calls for a religious test on incoming refugees one step further, when an NBC reporter asked whether Trump would implement a database to track all American Muslims.

Donald Trump: “There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases. I mean, we should have a lot of systems. And today you can do it. But right now, we have to have a border, we have to have strength, we have to have a wall. And we cannot let what’s happening to this country happen any longer.”

NBC reporter: “But that’s something your White House would like to implement?”

Donald Trump: “Oh, I would certainly implement that. Absolutely.”

Democracy Now!

4: 

Community interest sought for state housing

The government is seeking expressions of interest from community organisations to take over state houses being sold in Invercargill and Tauranga.

It is currently selling 348 properties in Invercargill and more than 1100 in Tauranga.

The minister responsible for Housing New Zealand, Bill English, said the government was looking for community providers to support the tenants and manage the properties.

“We are looking for providers of social housing services who can bring innovation to how social housing tenants are supported and properties are managed,” Mr English said.

RNZ

3: 

‘Beyond terrifying’: Muslim Americans shocked by Trump and Carson quotes

Prominent Muslim Americans have reacted with anger and dismay to the incendiary remarks of Donald Trump, the leading Republican candidate in the 2016 presidential race who called for a database of all Muslims in the country to be set up, in order to track their movements.

Trump’s comment was compared by several Muslim-American groups to the branding and forced identification of European Jews that paved the way to the Holocaust.

Muslim leaders told the Guardian they were shocked that a public figure who is the current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination would utter such an inflammatory idea in the wake of the Paris attacks, when relations were already fraught.

“This is beyond terrifying, any student of history knows what special IDs did in Europe,” said Nihad Awad, executive director of the largest Muslim advocacy group in the US, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair). “In 20 years I have not heard such intolerance and hatred from political leaders in this society.”

The Guardian 

2: 

Bombs will ‘absolutely not’ beat ISIL: Ex-M16 offical

A former senior intelligence officer in Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency says airstrikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) will “absolutely not” eliminate them.

Richard Barrett, who also served as head of the UN’s Monitoring Team on Al Qaeda and the Taliban between 2004 and 2013, instead believes that defeating ISIL needs a war of ideas.

“There’s actually no point in destroying it,” Barrett told Al Jazeera English’s Mehdi Hasan, urging a political solution to the Syrian conflict.

“It is possible to think that you could go in there and you could just knock them out, you could weaken them so much that they would just have to go underground,” he said, during his appearance on the Upfront programme.

“But the idea that ISIL thrives on – the idea behind ISIL – I don’t think is going to be defeated any time soon at all, that requires much more work and a much longer term, much more generational-type struggle.”

Aljazeera

1: 

OUTSIDE POWERS MUST END THEIR PROXY WARS IN SYRIA

A FRENCH NEWS CAMERAMAN burst into the bar of Beirut’s Commodore Hotel, where his colleagues gathered most evenings, on November 17, 1983. “At last,” he shouted, cupping both hands upward, “someone with balls!” French warplanes had just bombed the town of Baalbek, site of magnificent Roman ruins but also of a Shiite Muslim militant barracks. This was France’s revenge for the killing of 58 French troops by a suicide bomber four weeks earlier. On the same morning the French died, the United States had lost 241 American service personnel, most of them U.S. Marines, to another suicide bomber. So far, Washington had not responded. We learned later that Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who was against sending Marines to Lebanon in the first place, had dissuaded President Ronald Reagan from bombing Lebanon until there was evidence to prove who had done it.

France’s bombardment satisfied one French cameraman. It changed nothing, except for the civilians and militants who died in Baalbek. When the U.S. finally bombed eastern Lebanon in December, Syrian air defenses downed a Navy A-6 Intruder. The pilot, Lt. Mark Lange, died when his parachute malfunctioned. The navigator-bombardier, Lt. Robert O. Goodman, became a prisoner for 31 days until the Syrians released him to Reverend Jesse Jackson. And that was that.

By April 1984, the French and American forces of the ill-advised Multinational Force had left Lebanon. French President Francois Mitterrand’s promise to remain in defiance of those who had murdered his soldiers was forgotten, as was President Reagan’s commitment to peace in Lebanon. The civil war, already in its eighth year, did not end until 1990. The parties behind the bombing of the French and American troops, the Hezbollah militia and its backers, Iran and Syria, emerged more or less victorious. In fact, Syria had proven itself so powerful in Lebanon that the U.S. approved its military occupation to keep order. Syria went too far by assassinating former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in February 2005, and its troops were forced to evacuate the country two months later.

Supporters of American, French, and British bombing in Syria at this time may exult that these Western powers are displaying their “balls,” but there is every probability that they will balls it up. They have made a mess of Syria since they involved themselves there in the vain attempt to bring down President Bashar al-Assad in 2011. Islamic State fanatics emerged as the dominant power within the anti-Assad forces. They are not anti-dictatorship so much as anti-minority, particularly the ruling quasi-Shiite Alawite minority. The Western powers tolerated ISIS’ crimes, until ISIS turned from its bases in Syria and seized about a third of the American protectorate of Iraq. It was then that the U.S., to save the Kurdish capital at Erbil and the national capital of Baghdad, first bombed ISIS positions. Since then, other countries, including the Russians who sought to save their Syrian protectorate, have joined the crusade against the Islamic State.

The Intercept