the human province

The news here is that the Levant is due for a tsunami, which reminds me of reactions that I got after the big one in Indonesia. It was obviously an American/Jewish underwater tsunami bomb, I was told by one Pakistani guy. When I asked why "the Jews" and "the Americans" would do that, he looked at me as if I had just asked the stupidest question on earth: "To kill Muslims, obviously!"

According to the Algerians (via the Arabist), things are just warming up:

La protection civile algérienne a annoncé, mercredi 8 août, la mort de douze baigneurs emportés par une vague géante sur une plage de Mostaganem, dans l'ouest algérien, vendredi. L'origine de la vague est inconnue et nourrit les débats des scientifiques et de la population locale.

L'hypothèse d'un essai scientifique en Méditerranée effectué par des pays de l'autre rive, comme l'Espagne, l'Italie ou la France est avancée. "On peut supposer qu'il s'agit d'une expérience scientifique d'armes conventionnelles", explique le professeur Loth Bonatiro, spécialiste d'astronomie et de planétologie au Centre algérien de recherche en astronomie, astrophysique et géophysique (Craag), cité dans les colonnes du quotidien algérien L'Expression.

L'hypothèse d'un mini-tsunami avancée par les habitants semblait peu plausible, dans la mesure où la vague n'a touché qu'une seule plage, celle dite du Petit-Port.

Une secousse sismique d'une magnitude de 4,6 sur l'échelle ouverte de Richter avait été enregistrée vendredi à 21 h 08 en plein milieu du bassin méditerranéen par le centre de Strasbourg, mais pas par le Craag, qui évoque un possible problème technique.

Sometimes I wonder if I've become too acclimated to the local weather of conspiracy theories, but when things like this come up, I know that I've still got a long way to go. 

I've recently remarked that ignorance about the Middle East and Islam is a bipartisan affair in the US. But it this ignorance isn't, of course, limited to Americans.

Marianne brings it to our attention that Nicolas Sarkozy, possibly the next president of France and the current Minister of the Interior, doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia. Nor can he tell us which sect al-Qaida belongs to:

"Al-Qaida, are they Shia or Sunni?" This is the question with which Jean-Jacques Bourdin amused himself by trapping his guest this morning on RMC, none other than Nicolas Sarkozy. "We cannot qualify al-Qaida like that!" the Minister of the Interior defended himself before kicking the ball out of bounds. Faced with the insistence of the host, he even dug himself in even deeper, protesting that one mustn't reduce the debate to the membership of "an ethnicity." A Pity: these two movements are not ethnicities but branches of Islam. ... When will a test of Trivial Pursuit be necessary to qualify for the second round of presidential elections?

The whole exchange is available for you to listen to here. As usual, Sarkozy comes off as arrogant and pedantic, even when he's demonstrably wrong. He stresses that one can't "reduce al-Qaida to an ethnicity" (sic), and tries to back himself up by bringing up the GSPC and remarking that the Algerian group had recently joined al-Qaida. Of course, if Sarkozy understood the groups he's talking down to us about, he'd know that the Algerian Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat, like the rest of al-Qaida, is virulently Sunni.

It is ironic that Frederick Vreeland's op-ed piece on the Western Sahara should have the word "freedom" in the title, since at no point does he mention the Sahrawi people's right to full self-determination.

He repeats Moroccan talking points that hold that the Polisario Front is but an arm of Algerian foreign policy, despite the fact that the Front was engaged in fighting for Sahrawi independence against the Spanish well before Algerian involvement.

But he mentions neither Morocco's 1200-mile militarized separation wall built in the Sahara nor its historical expansionist plans, which at one point included not only the Western Sahara, but also parts of Algeria and the whole of Mauritania. Nor does he mention the 1975 ruling by the UN International Court of Justice, which found no reason to disregard the "decolonization of Western Sahara and, in particular ... the principle of self-determination through the free and genuine expression of the will of the peoples of the Territory."

Rabat has constantly blocked the free expression of the will of the Sahrawi people to decide whether they would prefer integration into the Kingdom of Morocco or to become citizens of the independent Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.

While Vreeland repeats many reasons why he thinks the Western Sahara should remain a part of Morocco, the will of the Sahrawi people is not one of them.

For more reading, check out this and this.

The news here is that the Levant is due for a tsunami, which reminds me of reactions that I got after the big one in Indonesia. It was obviously an American/Jewish underwater tsunami bomb, I was told by one Pakistani guy. When I asked why "the Jews" and "the Americans" would do that, he looked at me as if I had just asked the stupidest question on earth: "To kill Muslims, obviously!"

According to the Algerians (via the Arabist), things are just warming up:

La protection civile algérienne a annoncé, mercredi 8 août, la mort de douze baigneurs emportés par une vague géante sur une plage de Mostaganem, dans l'ouest algérien, vendredi. L'origine de la vague est inconnue et nourrit les débats des scientifiques et de la population locale.

L'hypothèse d'un essai scientifique en Méditerranée effectué par des pays de l'autre rive, comme l'Espagne, l'Italie ou la France est avancée. "On peut supposer qu'il s'agit d'une expérience scientifique d'armes conventionnelles", explique le professeur Loth Bonatiro, spécialiste d'astronomie et de planétologie au Centre algérien de recherche en astronomie, astrophysique et géophysique (Craag), cité dans les colonnes du quotidien algérien L'Expression.

L'hypothèse d'un mini-tsunami avancée par les habitants semblait peu plausible, dans la mesure où la vague n'a touché qu'une seule plage, celle dite du Petit-Port.

Une secousse sismique d'une magnitude de 4,6 sur l'échelle ouverte de Richter avait été enregistrée vendredi à 21 h 08 en plein milieu du bassin méditerranéen par le centre de Strasbourg, mais pas par le Craag, qui évoque un possible problème technique.

Sometimes I wonder if I've become too acclimated to the local weather of conspiracy theories, but when things like this come up, I know that I've still got a long way to go. 

I've recently remarked that ignorance about the Middle East and Islam is a bipartisan affair in the US. But it this ignorance isn't, of course, limited to Americans.

Marianne brings it to our attention that Nicolas Sarkozy, possibly the next president of France and the current Minister of the Interior, doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia. Nor can he tell us which sect al-Qaida belongs to:

"Al-Qaida, are they Shia or Sunni?" This is the question with which Jean-Jacques Bourdin amused himself by trapping his guest this morning on RMC, none other than Nicolas Sarkozy. "We cannot qualify al-Qaida like that!" the Minister of the Interior defended himself before kicking the ball out of bounds. Faced with the insistence of the host, he even dug himself in even deeper, protesting that one mustn't reduce the debate to the membership of "an ethnicity." A Pity: these two movements are not ethnicities but branches of Islam. ... When will a test of Trivial Pursuit be necessary to qualify for the second round of presidential elections?

The whole exchange is available for you to listen to here. As usual, Sarkozy comes off as arrogant and pedantic, even when he's demonstrably wrong. He stresses that one can't "reduce al-Qaida to an ethnicity" (sic), and tries to back himself up by bringing up the GSPC and remarking that the Algerian group had recently joined al-Qaida. Of course, if Sarkozy understood the groups he's talking down to us about, he'd know that the Algerian Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat, like the rest of al-Qaida, is virulently Sunni.

It is ironic that Frederick Vreeland's op-ed piece on the Western Sahara should have the word "freedom" in the title, since at no point does he mention the Sahrawi people's right to full self-determination.

He repeats Moroccan talking points that hold that the Polisario Front is but an arm of Algerian foreign policy, despite the fact that the Front was engaged in fighting for Sahrawi independence against the Spanish well before Algerian involvement.

But he mentions neither Morocco's 1200-mile militarized separation wall built in the Sahara nor its historical expansionist plans, which at one point included not only the Western Sahara, but also parts of Algeria and the whole of Mauritania. Nor does he mention the 1975 ruling by the UN International Court of Justice, which found no reason to disregard the "decolonization of Western Sahara and, in particular ... the principle of self-determination through the free and genuine expression of the will of the peoples of the Territory."

Rabat has constantly blocked the free expression of the will of the Sahrawi people to decide whether they would prefer integration into the Kingdom of Morocco or to become citizens of the independent Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.

While Vreeland repeats many reasons why he thinks the Western Sahara should remain a part of Morocco, the will of the Sahrawi people is not one of them.

For more reading, check out this and this.

The news here is that the Levant is due for a tsunami, which reminds me of reactions that I got after the big one in Indonesia. It was obviously an American/Jewish underwater tsunami bomb, I was told by one Pakistani guy. When I asked why "the Jews" and "the Americans" would do that, he looked at me as if I had just asked the stupidest question on earth: "To kill Muslims, obviously!"

According to the Algerians (via the Arabist), things are just warming up:

La protection civile algérienne a annoncé, mercredi 8 août, la mort de douze baigneurs emportés par une vague géante sur une plage de Mostaganem, dans l'ouest algérien, vendredi. L'origine de la vague est inconnue et nourrit les débats des scientifiques et de la population locale.

L'hypothèse d'un essai scientifique en Méditerranée effectué par des pays de l'autre rive, comme l'Espagne, l'Italie ou la France est avancée. "On peut supposer qu'il s'agit d'une expérience scientifique d'armes conventionnelles", explique le professeur Loth Bonatiro, spécialiste d'astronomie et de planétologie au Centre algérien de recherche en astronomie, astrophysique et géophysique (Craag), cité dans les colonnes du quotidien algérien L'Expression.

L'hypothèse d'un mini-tsunami avancée par les habitants semblait peu plausible, dans la mesure où la vague n'a touché qu'une seule plage, celle dite du Petit-Port.

Une secousse sismique d'une magnitude de 4,6 sur l'échelle ouverte de Richter avait été enregistrée vendredi à 21 h 08 en plein milieu du bassin méditerranéen par le centre de Strasbourg, mais pas par le Craag, qui évoque un possible problème technique.

Sometimes I wonder if I've become too acclimated to the local weather of conspiracy theories, but when things like this come up, I know that I've still got a long way to go. 

I've recently remarked that ignorance about the Middle East and Islam is a bipartisan affair in the US. But it this ignorance isn't, of course, limited to Americans.

Marianne brings it to our attention that Nicolas Sarkozy, possibly the next president of France and the current Minister of the Interior, doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia. Nor can he tell us which sect al-Qaida belongs to:

"Al-Qaida, are they Shia or Sunni?" This is the question with which Jean-Jacques Bourdin amused himself by trapping his guest this morning on RMC, none other than Nicolas Sarkozy. "We cannot qualify al-Qaida like that!" the Minister of the Interior defended himself before kicking the ball out of bounds. Faced with the insistence of the host, he even dug himself in even deeper, protesting that one mustn't reduce the debate to the membership of "an ethnicity." A Pity: these two movements are not ethnicities but branches of Islam. ... When will a test of Trivial Pursuit be necessary to qualify for the second round of presidential elections?

The whole exchange is available for you to listen to here. As usual, Sarkozy comes off as arrogant and pedantic, even when he's demonstrably wrong. He stresses that one can't "reduce al-Qaida to an ethnicity" (sic), and tries to back himself up by bringing up the GSPC and remarking that the Algerian group had recently joined al-Qaida. Of course, if Sarkozy understood the groups he's talking down to us about, he'd know that the Algerian Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat, like the rest of al-Qaida, is virulently Sunni.

It is ironic that Frederick Vreeland's op-ed piece on the Western Sahara should have the word "freedom" in the title, since at no point does he mention the Sahrawi people's right to full self-determination.

He repeats Moroccan talking points that hold that the Polisario Front is but an arm of Algerian foreign policy, despite the fact that the Front was engaged in fighting for Sahrawi independence against the Spanish well before Algerian involvement.

But he mentions neither Morocco's 1200-mile militarized separation wall built in the Sahara nor its historical expansionist plans, which at one point included not only the Western Sahara, but also parts of Algeria and the whole of Mauritania. Nor does he mention the 1975 ruling by the UN International Court of Justice, which found no reason to disregard the "decolonization of Western Sahara and, in particular ... the principle of self-determination through the free and genuine expression of the will of the peoples of the Territory."

Rabat has constantly blocked the free expression of the will of the Sahrawi people to decide whether they would prefer integration into the Kingdom of Morocco or to become citizens of the independent Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.

While Vreeland repeats many reasons why he thinks the Western Sahara should remain a part of Morocco, the will of the Sahrawi people is not one of them.

For more reading, check out this and this.

The news here is that the Levant is due for a tsunami, which reminds me of reactions that I got after the big one in Indonesia. It was obviously an American/Jewish underwater tsunami bomb, I was told by one Pakistani guy. When I asked why "the Jews" and "the Americans" would do that, he looked at me as if I had just asked the stupidest question on earth: "To kill Muslims, obviously!"

According to the Algerians (via the Arabist), things are just warming up:

La protection civile algérienne a annoncé, mercredi 8 août, la mort de douze baigneurs emportés par une vague géante sur une plage de Mostaganem, dans l'ouest algérien, vendredi. L'origine de la vague est inconnue et nourrit les débats des scientifiques et de la population locale.

L'hypothèse d'un essai scientifique en Méditerranée effectué par des pays de l'autre rive, comme l'Espagne, l'Italie ou la France est avancée. "On peut supposer qu'il s'agit d'une expérience scientifique d'armes conventionnelles", explique le professeur Loth Bonatiro, spécialiste d'astronomie et de planétologie au Centre algérien de recherche en astronomie, astrophysique et géophysique (Craag), cité dans les colonnes du quotidien algérien L'Expression.

L'hypothèse d'un mini-tsunami avancée par les habitants semblait peu plausible, dans la mesure où la vague n'a touché qu'une seule plage, celle dite du Petit-Port.

Une secousse sismique d'une magnitude de 4,6 sur l'échelle ouverte de Richter avait été enregistrée vendredi à 21 h 08 en plein milieu du bassin méditerranéen par le centre de Strasbourg, mais pas par le Craag, qui évoque un possible problème technique.

Sometimes I wonder if I've become too acclimated to the local weather of conspiracy theories, but when things like this come up, I know that I've still got a long way to go. 

I've recently remarked that ignorance about the Middle East and Islam is a bipartisan affair in the US. But it this ignorance isn't, of course, limited to Americans.

Marianne brings it to our attention that Nicolas Sarkozy, possibly the next president of France and the current Minister of the Interior, doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia. Nor can he tell us which sect al-Qaida belongs to:

"Al-Qaida, are they Shia or Sunni?" This is the question with which Jean-Jacques Bourdin amused himself by trapping his guest this morning on RMC, none other than Nicolas Sarkozy. "We cannot qualify al-Qaida like that!" the Minister of the Interior defended himself before kicking the ball out of bounds. Faced with the insistence of the host, he even dug himself in even deeper, protesting that one mustn't reduce the debate to the membership of "an ethnicity." A Pity: these two movements are not ethnicities but branches of Islam. ... When will a test of Trivial Pursuit be necessary to qualify for the second round of presidential elections?

The whole exchange is available for you to listen to here. As usual, Sarkozy comes off as arrogant and pedantic, even when he's demonstrably wrong. He stresses that one can't "reduce al-Qaida to an ethnicity" (sic), and tries to back himself up by bringing up the GSPC and remarking that the Algerian group had recently joined al-Qaida. Of course, if Sarkozy understood the groups he's talking down to us about, he'd know that the Algerian Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat, like the rest of al-Qaida, is virulently Sunni.

It is ironic that Frederick Vreeland's op-ed piece on the Western Sahara should have the word "freedom" in the title, since at no point does he mention the Sahrawi people's right to full self-determination.

He repeats Moroccan talking points that hold that the Polisario Front is but an arm of Algerian foreign policy, despite the fact that the Front was engaged in fighting for Sahrawi independence against the Spanish well before Algerian involvement.

But he mentions neither Morocco's 1200-mile militarized separation wall built in the Sahara nor its historical expansionist plans, which at one point included not only the Western Sahara, but also parts of Algeria and the whole of Mauritania. Nor does he mention the 1975 ruling by the UN International Court of Justice, which found no reason to disregard the "decolonization of Western Sahara and, in particular ... the principle of self-determination through the free and genuine expression of the will of the peoples of the Territory."

Rabat has constantly blocked the free expression of the will of the Sahrawi people to decide whether they would prefer integration into the Kingdom of Morocco or to become citizens of the independent Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.

While Vreeland repeats many reasons why he thinks the Western Sahara should remain a part of Morocco, the will of the Sahrawi people is not one of them.

For more reading, check out this and this.

The news here is that the Levant is due for a tsunami, which reminds me of reactions that I got after the big one in Indonesia. It was obviously an American/Jewish underwater tsunami bomb, I was told by one Pakistani guy. When I asked why "the Jews" and "the Americans" would do that, he looked at me as if I had just asked the stupidest question on earth: "To kill Muslims, obviously!"

According to the Algerians (via the Arabist), things are just warming up:

La protection civile algérienne a annoncé, mercredi 8 août, la mort de douze baigneurs emportés par une vague géante sur une plage de Mostaganem, dans l'ouest algérien, vendredi. L'origine de la vague est inconnue et nourrit les débats des scientifiques et de la population locale.

L'hypothèse d'un essai scientifique en Méditerranée effectué par des pays de l'autre rive, comme l'Espagne, l'Italie ou la France est avancée. "On peut supposer qu'il s'agit d'une expérience scientifique d'armes conventionnelles", explique le professeur Loth Bonatiro, spécialiste d'astronomie et de planétologie au Centre algérien de recherche en astronomie, astrophysique et géophysique (Craag), cité dans les colonnes du quotidien algérien L'Expression.

L'hypothèse d'un mini-tsunami avancée par les habitants semblait peu plausible, dans la mesure où la vague n'a touché qu'une seule plage, celle dite du Petit-Port.

Une secousse sismique d'une magnitude de 4,6 sur l'échelle ouverte de Richter avait été enregistrée vendredi à 21 h 08 en plein milieu du bassin méditerranéen par le centre de Strasbourg, mais pas par le Craag, qui évoque un possible problème technique.

Sometimes I wonder if I've become too acclimated to the local weather of conspiracy theories, but when things like this come up, I know that I've still got a long way to go. 

I've recently remarked that ignorance about the Middle East and Islam is a bipartisan affair in the US. But it this ignorance isn't, of course, limited to Americans.

Marianne brings it to our attention that Nicolas Sarkozy, possibly the next president of France and the current Minister of the Interior, doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia. Nor can he tell us which sect al-Qaida belongs to:

"Al-Qaida, are they Shia or Sunni?" This is the question with which Jean-Jacques Bourdin amused himself by trapping his guest this morning on RMC, none other than Nicolas Sarkozy. "We cannot qualify al-Qaida like that!" the Minister of the Interior defended himself before kicking the ball out of bounds. Faced with the insistence of the host, he even dug himself in even deeper, protesting that one mustn't reduce the debate to the membership of "an ethnicity." A Pity: these two movements are not ethnicities but branches of Islam. ... When will a test of Trivial Pursuit be necessary to qualify for the second round of presidential elections?

The whole exchange is available for you to listen to here. As usual, Sarkozy comes off as arrogant and pedantic, even when he's demonstrably wrong. He stresses that one can't "reduce al-Qaida to an ethnicity" (sic), and tries to back himself up by bringing up the GSPC and remarking that the Algerian group had recently joined al-Qaida. Of course, if Sarkozy understood the groups he's talking down to us about, he'd know that the Algerian Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat, like the rest of al-Qaida, is virulently Sunni.

It is ironic that Frederick Vreeland's op-ed piece on the Western Sahara should have the word "freedom" in the title, since at no point does he mention the Sahrawi people's right to full self-determination.

He repeats Moroccan talking points that hold that the Polisario Front is but an arm of Algerian foreign policy, despite the fact that the Front was engaged in fighting for Sahrawi independence against the Spanish well before Algerian involvement.

But he mentions neither Morocco's 1200-mile militarized separation wall built in the Sahara nor its historical expansionist plans, which at one point included not only the Western Sahara, but also parts of Algeria and the whole of Mauritania. Nor does he mention the 1975 ruling by the UN International Court of Justice, which found no reason to disregard the "decolonization of Western Sahara and, in particular ... the principle of self-determination through the free and genuine expression of the will of the peoples of the Territory."

Rabat has constantly blocked the free expression of the will of the Sahrawi people to decide whether they would prefer integration into the Kingdom of Morocco or to become citizens of the independent Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.

While Vreeland repeats many reasons why he thinks the Western Sahara should remain a part of Morocco, the will of the Sahrawi people is not one of them.

For more reading, check out this and this.

The news here is that the Levant is due for a tsunami, which reminds me of reactions that I got after the big one in Indonesia. It was obviously an American/Jewish underwater tsunami bomb, I was told by one Pakistani guy. When I asked why "the Jews" and "the Americans" would do that, he looked at me as if I had just asked the stupidest question on earth: "To kill Muslims, obviously!"

According to the Algerians (via the Arabist), things are just warming up:

La protection civile algérienne a annoncé, mercredi 8 août, la mort de douze baigneurs emportés par une vague géante sur une plage de Mostaganem, dans l'ouest algérien, vendredi. L'origine de la vague est inconnue et nourrit les débats des scientifiques et de la population locale.

L'hypothèse d'un essai scientifique en Méditerranée effectué par des pays de l'autre rive, comme l'Espagne, l'Italie ou la France est avancée. "On peut supposer qu'il s'agit d'une expérience scientifique d'armes conventionnelles", explique le professeur Loth Bonatiro, spécialiste d'astronomie et de planétologie au Centre algérien de recherche en astronomie, astrophysique et géophysique (Craag), cité dans les colonnes du quotidien algérien L'Expression.

L'hypothèse d'un mini-tsunami avancée par les habitants semblait peu plausible, dans la mesure où la vague n'a touché qu'une seule plage, celle dite du Petit-Port.

Une secousse sismique d'une magnitude de 4,6 sur l'échelle ouverte de Richter avait été enregistrée vendredi à 21 h 08 en plein milieu du bassin méditerranéen par le centre de Strasbourg, mais pas par le Craag, qui évoque un possible problème technique.

Sometimes I wonder if I've become too acclimated to the local weather of conspiracy theories, but when things like this come up, I know that I've still got a long way to go. 

I've recently remarked that ignorance about the Middle East and Islam is a bipartisan affair in the US. But it this ignorance isn't, of course, limited to Americans.

Marianne brings it to our attention that Nicolas Sarkozy, possibly the next president of France and the current Minister of the Interior, doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia. Nor can he tell us which sect al-Qaida belongs to:

"Al-Qaida, are they Shia or Sunni?" This is the question with which Jean-Jacques Bourdin amused himself by trapping his guest this morning on RMC, none other than Nicolas Sarkozy. "We cannot qualify al-Qaida like that!" the Minister of the Interior defended himself before kicking the ball out of bounds. Faced with the insistence of the host, he even dug himself in even deeper, protesting that one mustn't reduce the debate to the membership of "an ethnicity." A Pity: these two movements are not ethnicities but branches of Islam. ... When will a test of Trivial Pursuit be necessary to qualify for the second round of presidential elections?

The whole exchange is available for you to listen to here. As usual, Sarkozy comes off as arrogant and pedantic, even when he's demonstrably wrong. He stresses that one can't "reduce al-Qaida to an ethnicity" (sic), and tries to back himself up by bringing up the GSPC and remarking that the Algerian group had recently joined al-Qaida. Of course, if Sarkozy understood the groups he's talking down to us about, he'd know that the Algerian Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat, like the rest of al-Qaida, is virulently Sunni.

It is ironic that Frederick Vreeland's op-ed piece on the Western Sahara should have the word "freedom" in the title, since at no point does he mention the Sahrawi people's right to full self-determination.

He repeats Moroccan talking points that hold that the Polisario Front is but an arm of Algerian foreign policy, despite the fact that the Front was engaged in fighting for Sahrawi independence against the Spanish well before Algerian involvement.

But he mentions neither Morocco's 1200-mile militarized separation wall built in the Sahara nor its historical expansionist plans, which at one point included not only the Western Sahara, but also parts of Algeria and the whole of Mauritania. Nor does he mention the 1975 ruling by the UN International Court of Justice, which found no reason to disregard the "decolonization of Western Sahara and, in particular ... the principle of self-determination through the free and genuine expression of the will of the peoples of the Territory."

Rabat has constantly blocked the free expression of the will of the Sahrawi people to decide whether they would prefer integration into the Kingdom of Morocco or to become citizens of the independent Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.

While Vreeland repeats many reasons why he thinks the Western Sahara should remain a part of Morocco, the will of the Sahrawi people is not one of them.

For more reading, check out this and this.