Lebanon's Minister of Justice  on Aug. 30 called for the "sternest punishments" for the individuals in Beirut who burned the flag of the militant groups ISIS and the Nusra Front. It is reported that Minister Ashraf Rifi issued a highly criticized statement which has urged the Lebanon state prosecutor to bring charges against the individuals who participated in the public flag-burning at Sassine Square in Beriut. Minister Rifi claims that the flag-burning was insulting to the faith of Islam because inscribed on the ISIS flag includes the Shahada or declaration of Muslim faith, "There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet." Under Lebanese law, it is illegal to defame religious symbols. Pictures of the individuals burning the fags were discovered on Facebook. The action was a response to the recent beheading of a member of the Lebanese armed forces by ISIS.

Fresh evidence uncovered by Amnesty International indicates that ISIS has launched a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Iraq, carrying out war crimes, including mass summary killings and abductions, against ethnic and religious minorities. The Sept. 2 briefing, "Ethnic cleansing on historic scale: Islamic State's systematic targeting of minorities in northern Iraq," presents a series of accounts from survivors of massacres, detailing how dozens of men and boys in the Sinjar region were rounded up into pick-up trucks and taken to village outskirts to be massacred in groups or shot individually. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of women and children from the Yazidi minority have also been abducted since ISIS took control of the area. "The massacres and abductions being carried out by the Islamic State provide harrowing new evidence that a wave of ethnic cleansing against minorities is sweeping across northern Iraq,” said Donatella Rovera, Amnesty's senior crisis response adviser currently in northern Iraq. "The Islamic State is carrying out despicable crimes and has transformed rural areas of Sinjar into blood-soaked killing fields in its brutal campaign to obliterate all trace of non- Arabs and non-Sunni Muslims."

Border Guard patrols along Saudi Arabia's rugged mountain frontier with Yemen report mounting interceptions of hashish, weapons and other contraband. Over the past nine months, interceptions at the Najran border post alone netted four tons of hashish, as well as explosives, hand grenades, firearms and ammunition. Some 250 smugglers and 25,000 "infiltrators" were also detained at the post, and several vehicles impounded. But Border Guard officials admit that on several occassions the smugglers got away into the wilderness, with agents firing after them. At the Wadi post, to the east of Najran, border guards last month confronted six "infiltrators," killing five and capturing the survivor. Four tons of hashish were confiscated along the border just during the holy month of Ramadan, which ended with the Eid al-Fitr festival July 28—possibly because smugglers thought patrols would be slacking off. On the contrary, Saudi forces beefed up patrols.

US forces carried out air-strikes against Shabab leader Ahmed Abdi Godane, with casualties reported but uncertainty over the fate of the main target, Somali officials said Sept. 2. Godane was traveling in one of two vehicles hit in apparent drone strike, a member of the Islamist group said. The spokesman would not say whether Godane was among the six militants killed. The two vehicles were heading toward the coastal town of Barawe, Shabaab's main base, when they were hit. The Pentagon confirmed the US military carried out an "operation," and that it was "assessing the results." The US has a large drone base at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, and also flies surveillance drones over Somalia from a base in Ethi­o­pia. The Pentagon quietly deployed a small team of advisers to Somalia last October to coordinate operations with African troops fighting to wrest control of the country from Shabab.

We have been noting, with growing unease, a phenomenon we call the Paradoxical Anti-Fascist Rhetoric of Contemporary Crypto-Fascism—witnessed both in the stateside far right Hitler-baiting Obama, and (more disturbingly) in the increasingly fascistic Vladimir Putin Nazi-baiting the Ukrainians. Now the websites Human Rights in Ukraine and Kyiv Post report on a far-right summit just held at Yalta (yes, in recently annexed Crimea, and the site of an Allied summit in World War II), attended by representatives of such unsavory entities as Hungary's Jobbik party, Belgium's Parti Communautaire National-Européen, and the British National Party—and overseen by Sergei Glazyev, a senior adviser to Putin, and Maxim Shevchenko, a member of Putin's human rights council (sic!). Predictably, this assemblage of neo-fascists discussed forming an "Anti-fascist Council" to oppose the "fascist junta in Kiev." Many of the Russian militants in attendance are said to have been followers of the Eurasia Party of Alexander Dugin—seemingly a key ideologue of Putin's Eurasian Union project.

Israeli authorities on Aug. 31 announced the confiscation of around 4,000 dunums (1,000 acres) of private Palestinian land south of Bethlehem in the southern West Bank. Palestinian owners of the land were given 45 days to submit formal objections in Israeli courts, otherwise all confiscated lands would automatically become Israeli government property. Mayor of the nearby Palestinian town of Surif, Muhammad Ghuneimat, told Ma'an News Agency that Israeli forces posted signs in private olive tree orchards in the area warning that they have been confiscated by the Israeli government. Ghuneimat added that the confiscated fields belong to Palestinians from the towns of Surif, Husan, al-Jabaa and Bethlehem.

An Israeli court on Aug. 29 extended the detention of a Palestinian activist who was detained for political activities on Facebook for a week, a Ma'an News Agency reporter said. An Israeli court in Petah Tikva extended the detention of Suhaib Zahida, 31, until Sept. 4, after he was arrested on Aug. 28 for creating a page on Facebook called "Intifada of Hebron," in addition to leading a campaign for the boycott of Israeli products. Zahida had previously participated in several nonviolent campaigns opposing the Israeli occupation and was an active member of groups working to oppose the recruitment of Palestinian citizens of Israel to the Israeli military. Palestinians inside Israel have been previously detained for short periods of time and questioned regarding their political activities on Facebook, but such arrests rarely occur in the West Bank. In October, Israeli authorities arrested Palestinian citizen of Israel Razi al-Nabulsi, 23, for a week as a result of Facebook posts they argued constituted "incitement."

ISIS fighters massacred 700 Turkmen civilians—including women, children and the elderly—in a northern Iraqi village last month, a UNICEF official reports. Marco Babille, the UN Children's Fund representative in Iraq, said that fighters carried out the massacre in Beshir village (Sulaymaniyah governorate) on July 11 and 12. Speaking to Italian news agency ANSA, he said the information came from witnesses who had fled the village. Calling for a "humanitarian D-Day" for the 700,000 refugees estimated to have fled ISIS violence in northern Iraq, Babille said the international community should establish a "safe haven" protected by peacekeeping forces. He also called for a "systematic air bridge from Europe" to help Kurdish forces, who he described as "the only bulwark of human rights" in Iraq, giving shelter to displaced people irrespective of ethnicity or faith. (Turkish Weekly, Aug. 27)