The man behind AirAsia: Flamboyant chief executive Tony Fernandes | By Elahe Izadi December 28. 2014

AirAsia Group chief executive Tony Fernandes speaks at a news conference in Tokyo in July. (Issei Kato/Reuters)

AirAsia was failing and falling ever deeper into debt in 2001 when Tony Fernandes bought the carrier from Malaysian conglomerate DRB-Hicom for a single Malaysian ringgit — worth less than 35 U.S. cents at the time, according to the Reuters news agency.

Fernandes, a flamboyant Malaysian-born, British-educated former Warner Music executive, had dreamed of operating his own budget airline since he was in school, he said in 2010 to the BBC.

Fernandes, 50, built the small, heavily indebted company into a dominant player in Southeast Asia with a low-cost model that focuses on short and cheap flights. He then started AirAsia X, which focuses on long-haul flights.

“Now everyone can fly,” became AirAsia’s motto. Since then, the airline has won numerous accolades as one of the world’s leading low-cost carriers. AirAsia, which started with two planes when Fernandes bought it, now operates a fleet of more than 160 AirBus A320 aircraft, according to the company.

As a young boy, Fernandes dreamt up the idea of cheap flights across Asia while he attended a boarding school in England and couldn’t frequently visit home because of the high cost of travel.

“For my first ever flight in AirAsia X, I refused to do the launch to Australia and China, and everyone thought it was a bit odd,” Fernandes told the BBC in 2010. “But I wanted my first flight to be London-Kuala Lumpur.”

Fernandes now faces his biggest crisis as AirAsia’s chief executive. After AirAsia Flight QZ8501 lost contact with air traffic control on Sunday, Fernandes took to Twitter to express support for his employees:

To all my staff Airasia all stars be strong, continue to be the best. Pray hard. Continue to do your best for all our guests. See u all soon

— Tony Fernandes (@tonyfernandes) December 28, 2014

“I as your group ceo will be there through these hard times,” he also tweeted. “We will go through this terrible ordeal together and I will try to see as many of you.”

Seen as the Richard Branson of Southeast Asia, Fernandes seems to have also adopted the Virgin airline owner’s public, larger-than-life persona.

Fernandes even once worked as an accountant for Branson’s Virgin company, and the two are now close friends. Last year, Fernandes — who is known to prefer jeans to suits — became the host of Apprentice Asia, a reality game show.

In 2013, Branson dressed up as an AirAsiaX female flight attendant after losing a bet to Fernandes over a Formula 1 race.

“He is an entrepreneur, visionary, knight and adventurer. Sir Richard can now also add AirAsia flight attendant to his long list of credentials,” Fernandes joked aboard that flight.

Fernandes has an estimated worth of $650 million and is the 28th-richest person in Malaysia, according to Forbes. The airline’s revenue increased by 3 percent in the most recent quarter compared with the same time last year, the company reported, although its profits have fallen by 14 percent as the political unrest in Thailand affects its flights there.

The region’s airline industry has already been hit with two major disasters this year; in March, a Beijing-bound Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared with 239 on board and still remains missing. Then, in July, 298 people aboard a Malaysia Airlines flight died when it was shot down over Ukraine.

An article in an AirAsia in-flight magazine that went to press before the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing boasted that AirAsia pilots would never lose a plane because of their “continuous and very thorough” training. “Rest assured that your captain is well prepared to ensure your plane will never get lost,” the column said, according to the Associated Press.

In April, AirAsia executives apologized for the article, and copies were pulled after a social media backlash, AP reported.

“Once again, apologies,” Fernandes tweeted then. “It has been a difficult time for all in the industry.”

J. Freedom du Lac contributed

ISIS, BOKO HARAM, AND THE GROWING ROLE OF HUMAN TRAFFICKING IN 21ST CENTURY TERRORISM | BY LOUISE I. SHELLEY12.26.2014

The list of atrocities committed by ISIS continues to grow, with the latest being a chilling pamphlet that details the organization’s policy on treating the women they kidnap and then use as sex slaves. This is the latest account of ISIS’s dealings in kidnapping and human trafficking in which they target women and children, often from the minority Yazidi religion, and sell them for as little as $25 or keep them as slaves.

ISIS is not the only terrorist group to engage in kidnapping and trafficking. Just a few days ago, Boko Haram kidnapped 200 villagers and killed dozens more in Nigeria, further terrorizing the already tormented community. Indeed, human trafficking plays a growing role in the operation of 21st-century terrorist organizations.

Several years ago I gave a public lecture on the topic and mentioned a case that is in the first chapter of my new book, Dirty Entanglements: Corruption, Crime and Terrorism. The White Lace Case in Los Angeles involved women from the former USSR trafficked into high-end prostitution. Many of the women arrived in the United States as part of sports and religious delegations. In order to extend their legal residence in the United States, they had to obtain other visas. One of the leaders of this trafficking ring registered the trafficked women as students at a language skills school, thereby obtaining “student visas” for the prostitutes in her organization. The language school did not focus on providing instruction but instead was a visa mill. This same language school also provided visas to the 9/11 hijackers. In other words, the 9/11 hijackers and the trafficking victims shared the same “facilitator.” This facilitator was a point of intersection of crime and terrorism.

When I finished this talk, a government official approached me. He informed me that he was on a task force studying human trafficking and his role was to find the links between trafficking and terrorism. In his months in this position, he had not found a single example such as this. He asked how I found it. I answered that I had gone and talked to many members of law enforcement who through their investigations understood these links.

At that time, pre -9/11, the links were more subtle and had to be hunted down. But this case, already 15 years ago, shows that there were links at that time between human trafficking and terrorist activity even in the United States. Today they are more direct, especially in many conflict regions of the world. Yet policymakers focus nearly all their attention on more visible crime-terrorism links—primarily drug trafficking—and miss the important links between human trafficking and terrorist organizations.
Human trafficking now serves three main purposes for terrorist groups: generating revenue, providing fighting power, and vanquishing the enemy. For terrorists, human trafficking is a dual-use crime like drug trafficking and kidnapping. It not only generates revenue, but it decimates communities. As we see in Nigeria and Iraq today, trafficking intimidates populations and reduces resistance just as enslavement and rape of women were used as tools of war in the past.

Trafficking and smuggling are part of the business of terrorism, and constitute one activity in the product mix of terrorist groups. Terrorists smuggle drugs, arms, and people. Maoist insurgents in Nepal have exploited the long-standing trade of young girls taken from their country to the brothels of India to finance their activities. Evidence suggests that the LTTE smuggled Sri Lankans to finance their activities and the PKK exploited the porous mountain borders in eastern Turkey to facilitate human smuggling from countries in the Middle East and South Asia. Cells of the Ulster Volunteer Force of Northern Ireland received narcotics as payment from Chinese “snakeheads” in support of their smuggling networks. German authorities in 2006 arrested an Iraqi and a Syrian who smuggled individuals from their home region and were suspected of having links with the Ansar al-Islam terrorist network.

While trafficking and smuggling does generate revenue, they are not central money-making endeavors for terrorists and are committed primarily for other reasons. Pakistani terrorists buy children to serve as suicide bombers. Rebels in Africa trade in children to fund their conflicts and obtain child soldiers. More recently, Boko Haram shocked the world by kidnapping 276 female students and threatened to traffic them. ISIS members have taken young Azidi girls, raped and sold them off for trivial prices. The girls and women may sell for as little as $25 and sometimes even less, suggesting that this is not a revenue-generating operation when a million dollars daily is gained from oil sales. Rather, human trafficking, like slavery in the past, is a way of demoralizing the conquered.

Those not in the direct sight of terrorist groups may also become victims of human trafficking, even as they flee to safety. People displaced by terrorists are vulnerable to trafficking—both sexual and labor. Young girls fleeing with their families from the Syrian conflict today have been trafficked in Jordan and other neighboring states, just as occurred with earlier waves of refugees from Iraq. In Turkey, crime groups in border areas are exploiting the labor of Syrian male refugees who cannot find legitimate employment. Many more illegal migrants face labor trafficking in Europe as they flee the conflict regions of North Africa and the Middle East.

Human trafficking was once a crime associated primarily with a range of small to large crime groups. But as terrorist groups begin to function more as businesses, we unfortunately observe the expansion of terrorist groups into this criminality. Historically, conquering armies have seized inhabitants of conquered areas and enslaved them. But what is different is that traditional practices of the past have been combined with the business acumen of terrorist groups today. In their effort to diversify their revenue, they have capitalized on traditional practices to new advantage. Women and children are disproportionately victims, but they are not alone. Exploitation of trafficking victims may be most acute in conflict and adjoining regions, but it is not confined to these areas.

Religion Without God | DEC. 24, 2014

THIS Christmas our family will go to church. The service is held in a beautiful old church in the charming town of Walpole, N.H., just over the border from Vermont. The Lord’s Prayer hangs on the wall behind the sanctuary. A lectern rises above the nave to let the pastor look down on his flock. The pews and the side stalls have the stern, pure lineaments suited to the Colonial congregation that once came to church to face God.

Except that this church is Unitarian. Unitarianism emerged in early modern Europe from those who rejected a Trinitarian theology in preference for the doctrine that God was one. By the 19th century, however, the Unitarian church had become a place for intellectuals who were skeptical of belief claims but who wanted to hang on to faith in some manner. Charles Darwin, for example, turned to Unitarians as he struggled with his growing doubt. My mother is the daughter of a Baptist pastor and the black sheep, theologically speaking, of her family. She wants to go to church, but she is not quite sure whether she wants God. The modern Unitarian Universalist Association’s statement of principles does not mention God at all.

As it happens, this kind of God-neutral faith is growing rapidly, in many cases with even less role for God than among Unitarians. Atheist services have sprung up around the country, even in the Bible Belt.

Many of them are connected to Sunday Assembly, which was founded in Britain by two comedians, Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans. They are avowed atheists. Yet they have created a movement that draws thousands of people to events with music, sermons, readings, reflections and (to judge by photos) even the waving of upraised hands. There are nearly 200 Sunday Assembly gatherings worldwide. A gathering in Los Angeles last year attracted hundreds of participants.

How do we understand this impulse to hold a “church” service despite a hesitant or even nonexistent faith? Part of the answer is surely the quest for community. That’s what Mr. Jones told The Associated Press: “Singing awesome songs, hearing interesting talks, thinking about improving yourself and helping other people — and doing that in a community with wonderful relationships. Which part of that is not to like?”

Another part of the answer is that rituals change the way we pay attention as much as — perhaps more than — they express belief. In “The Archetypal Actions of Ritual,” two anthropologists, Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw, go so far as to argue that ritual isn’t about expressing religious commitment at all, but about doing something in a way that marks the moment as different from the everyday and forces you to see it as important. Their point is that performing a ritual focuses your attention on some moment and deems it worthy of respect.

In Britain, where the rate of atheism is much higher than in the United States, organizations have now sprung up to mark life passages for those who consider themselves to be nonbelievers. The anthropologist Matthew Engelke spent much of 2011 with the British Humanist Association, the country’s pre-eminent nonreligious organization, with a membership of over 12,000. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, a prominent atheist, is a member. The association sponsors a good deal of anti-religious political activity. They want to stop faith-based schools from receiving state funding and to remove the rights of Church of England bishops to sit in the House of Lords. They also perform funerals, weddings and namings. In 2011, members conducted 9,000 of these rituals. Ceremony does something for people independent of their theological views.

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Moreover, these rituals work, if by “work” we mean that they change people’s sense of their lives. It turns out that saying that you are grateful makes you feel grateful. Saying that you are thankful makes you feel thankful. To a world so familiar with the general unreliability of language, that may seem strange. But it is true.

In a study in which undergraduates were assigned to write weekly either about things they were grateful or thankful for; hassles; or “events or circumstances that affected you in the past week,” those who wrote about gratitude felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic about the coming week. There have now been many such studies.

Religion is fundamentally a practice that helps people to look at the world as it is and yet to experience it — to some extent, in some way — as it should be. Much of what people actually do in church — finding fellowship, celebrating birth and marriage, remembering those we have lost, affirming the values we cherish — can be accomplished with a sense of God as metaphor, as story, or even without any mention of God at all.

Yet religion without God may be more poignant. Atheists trust in human relations, not supernatural ones, and humans are not so good at delivering the world as it should be. Perhaps that is why we are moved by Christmas carols, which conjure up the world as it can be and not the world we know.

May the spirit of Christmas be with you, however you understand what that means.

T. M. Luhrmann, a contributing opinion writer, is a professor of anthropology at Stanford University.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 25, 2014

Pope Francis, in Christmas Address, Focuses on Children’s Plight | By ELISABETTA POVOLEDODEC. 25, 2014

Pope Francis on Thursday used a traditional Christmas address to emphasize the plight of children in areas of conflict, pointing out their “impotent silence” that “cries out under the spade of many Herods,” a reference to the ancient king who slaughtered all the male newborns of Bethlehem, according to the New Testament.

Vast numbers of children today are victims of violence, objects of trade and trafficking, or forced to become soldiers, and they need to be saved, he said.

The pope spoke of “children displaced due to war and persecution, abused and taken advantage of before our very eyes and our complicit silence.” He singled out “infants massacred in bomb attacks,” including in the Middle East and in Pakistan, where 132 children were killed in a Taliban attack on a school this month.

“So many abused children,” Francis said, in one of several off-the-cuff asides during the address, known as the “Urbi et Orbi” message — Latin for “to the city and the world” — that popes traditionally deliver to the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics on special occasions like Christmas.

In calling for global peace and for an end to violence and conflict in the Middle East, Ukraine and parts of Africa, Francis went off script to denounce “the globalization of indifference” that permits suffering and injustice to persist.

“So many men and women immersed in worldliness and indifference” are affected by hardness of the heart, he said, calling for reflection and change. And he chided the Vatican’s bureaucratic machine in another address this week for losing touch with its spiritual side in the pursuit of power.

As Christians exchanged gifts and shared family meals, the pope’s thoughts were with the world’s dispossessed; refugees and exiles; those suffering “brutal” ethnic or religious persecution; and those held as hostages or killed because of their religious beliefs.

“Truly there are so many tears this Christmas,” Francis said from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica before thousands of faithful in the square below. The address was also broadcast live on the Internet.

To underscore his closeness to those suffering religious persecution, a theme of his nearly two years as pope, on Christmas Eve, Francis spoke with displaced Christians who are in a tent camp in northern Iraq and told them that they were like Jesus. Many in the camps have been forced to leave their homes by militants of the Islamic State.

“You are like Jesus on the night of his birth when he had been forced to flee,” the pope told them in a telephone call broadcast live by an Italian Catholic television station. “You are like Jesus in this situation, and that means we are praying even harder for you.”

The pope also denounced abortion, and his thoughts turned to “infants killed in the womb, deprived of that generous love of their parents and then buried in the egoism of a culture that does not love life.”

In his message on Thursday, the pope said he hoped that the world would respond to the plight of the needy by increasing humanitarian aid, and he asked “that the necessary assistance and treatment be provided” for the victims of Ebola.

Closing the address, he called on Jesus’ strength to turn “arms into plowshares, destruction into creativity, hatred into love and tenderness.”

In Britain, the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, the spiritual leader of the Church of England, pulled out of the traditional Christmas Day ceremony at Canterbury Cathedral because of what his office described as a “severe cold.”

A draft of the sermon he had planned to deliver, and which was released on his website, reflected on the temporary truce on Christmas Day in 1914, early in the First World War, between British and German soldiers.

“The problem is that the way it is told now it seems to end with a ‘happy ever after,’” the draft said.

It added: “The following day the war continued with the same severity. Nothing had changed; it was a one-day wonder. That is not the world in which we live — truces are rare.”

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Welcome to Bethlehem, where Palestinian Santas are tear-gassed

BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — Israeli forces on Tuesday suppressed a peaceful march calling for “Christmas without occupation” in Bethlehem.

Demonstrators marched to the Israeli military checkpoint in northern Bethlehem to celebrate Christmas and hand out gifts to children in the area.

Marchers held up signs reading: “Jesus came with a message of: Peace, Freedom and Justice” and “We want Christmas without occupation.”

Israeli forces prevented demonstrators, some of whom were dressed as Father Christmas, from reaching the checkpoint and fired tear gas at the crowd.

Several people were treated at the scene for tear gas inhalation.

Mazen al-Azza, an activist with the Palestinian National Initiative, told Ma’an that the march had a peaceful Christmas message, but “Israeli soldiers did not miss the chance to suppress it by assaulting journalists and peaceful demonstrators.”

The ancient Palestinian city — said to be the birthplace of Jesus Christ — is now surrounded by illegal Israeli settlements on all sides.

Bethlehem is also cut off from Jerusalem, historically its twin city, by Israel’s separation wall, which runs along the northern side of the city.

Via Ma’an News

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More than 350,000 kids will have their first sip of booze this month

Via Washington Post