Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Across a wide swath of North Africa and the Sahel countries, the United States has assumed an old European role: combating Islamist jihadis.
The situation has become worse since the overthrow of Libya’s brutal dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011; many of his former mercenaries, along with their large stockpile of weapons, are now active in this vast region, especially in Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger.
Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), founded in Algeria in 1998, and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), a splinter group formed in 2011, took control over a large part of Mali in early 2012; they captured Mali’s three largest northern cities, Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu, imposing draconian versions of sharia law. They also damaged or destroyed a number of historical sites on the grounds that they were idolatrous, particularly in Timbuktu.
In January 2013, the old colonial power, France, began operations against the Islamists, aided by African Union troops. The Islamists were pushed into the barren northern deserts but they still remain a danger.
The Central African Republic has also experienced horrific violence, after the mostly Muslim Séléka rebel group seized power in March 2013 in the majority Christian state. They were dislodged by 1,600 French soldiers along with a 6,000-man African Union force, but the violence has continued.
Former colonial power France has done most of the heavy lifting in these former colonies, but the United States has now also become a major presence. In Mali, for instance, American aircraft airlifted the French troops and their vehicles and provided intelligence.
In 2003, the Pan-Sahel Initiative was developed by the U.S. to enhance security in Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. Two years later, Washington announced the creation of the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative/Partnership to prevent terrorists from establishing a foothold in Africa; it eventually included ten countries.
Its first project, Exercise Flintlock, involved U.S. Special Operations forces training 3,000 soldiers in seven Saharan and sub-Saharan countries. This year it involved soldiers from 18 countries.
In 2007, the Pentagon established its Africa Command (Africom) because, it asserted, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, al-Shabaab in Somalia, and Boko Haram in Nigeria were increasingly trying to coordinate and synchronize their operations on the African continent.
Today the Pentagon is spending nearly $70 million on training, intelligence-gathering equipment and other support to build a counter-terrorism battalion in Niger and a similar unit in nearby Mauritania. The U.S already launches unarmed surveillance drones from Niger to fly over Mali in support of French and United Nations troops.
Washington also operates a base in the small Red Sea country of Djibouti, adjoining Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somaliland. Camp Lemonnier, with about 4,000 troops, is used to launch counter-terrorism missions, including drone strikes, in Yemen and the Horn of Africa.
“My job is to look at Africa and see where the threat to the United States is,” Brigadier- General James B. Linder, who commands U.S. Special Operations forces in Africa, said in a recent interview with the New York Times. “We have a real global threat,” he continued. “The problems in Africa are going to land on our doorstep if we’re not careful.”
When the European powers divided Africa among themselves in the late 19th century, opposition typically came from Muslim peoples. In the Sudan, a fiercely fundamentalist state was established in 1885 when Muhammad Ahmad, who called himself the Mahdi (the Redeemer), defeated a British army at Khartoum. It lasted until 1898.
Further west, in what is now Chad, one of the Mahdi’s disciples, Rabin ibn Fadl Allah, led the resistance against the French. On his death his son followed in his footsteps and fought the French for 15 more years until he died in 1901.
In what are now parts of Mali and Burkina Faso, an Islamic theocratic state known as the Tukulor Empire flourished in the 19th century and successfully held off French military incursions until its defeat in 1893.
A more formidable enemy of the French was Samori Ture, the founder of the Wassoulou Empire, an Islamic state that resisted French colonial rule in West Africa from 1882 until 1898.
MUJAO claims to be a successor to Usman dan Fodio, a 19th-century reformer who waged jihad across West Africa to purify Islam and founded the Sokoto Caliphate in what is now northern Nigeria.
There is nothing new in the Sahel region when it comes to militant insurgencies against non-Muslims, as the European knew and the Americans are learning.
Professor Henry Srebrnik
Monday, June 30, 2014
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan Gains Upper Hand over Military
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
Last week we saw something unprecedented in Turkey: In a landmark decision meant to curb the power of the country’s massive military establishment, a court sentenced two top former generals, army chief Kenan Evren and air force head Tahsin Sahinkaya, to life imprisonment for leading a 1980 coup that resulted in widespread torture, arrests and deaths.
Evren, who then served as president of Turkey from 1980 to 1989, claimed the coup had saved Turkey from anarchy after thousands were killed in fighting between militant left-wingers and right-wingers.
Is the Republic of Turkey, the resolutely secular state founded in 1923 by Kemal Ataturk on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, undergoing a fundamental transformation?
Ataturk reformed everything from dress codes to the alphabet during his 15-year reign as president. He even moved the country’s capital from Istanbul, the old imperial capital, to Ankara, in the heart of Anatolia.
And his legacy was guarded for decades afterwards by the Turkish Army. They carried out three coups between 1960 and 1980 and pushed an Islamist-led government led by Necmettin Erbakan from power in 1997. In 1998, his Welfare Party (RP) was banned.
But things have been changing. Since the 1990s, the revival of a Sunni-infused sense of nationalism is transforming the country.
The old republican verities have been challenged, especially by the current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, himself a former member of the Welfare Party, who has been in office since 2003. He has now even taken on the generals, something earlier rulers did at their peril.
His popularity -- he has won three elections in a row -- has afforded him protection while he moved to break their power. His Justice and Development Party (AKP) holds a majority of the seats in parliament.
Erdogan, who was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994, was himself arrested four years later, sentenced to 10 months in jail for “inciting religious hatred.”
He had publicly read an Islamic poem including the lines “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.” Because of his criminal record, he was barred from standing in elections or holding political office until 2001.
In another case, 230 army officers who were convicted in 2012 in the so-called “Sledgehammer” trial, accused of taking part in in an alleged plot to topple Erdogan, have been released.
Turkey’s Constitutional Court ruled that the officers’ rights had been violated in the handling of digital evidence and the refusal to hear testimony from two former top military commanders, as requested by defendants.
So the prime minister is not yet home free, though he himself recently began discrediting the convictions, because many of the prosecutors and investigators are followers of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic preacher who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania. He was once Erdogan’s ally but now opposes him.
As well, could the country’s so-called “deep state” return? The term refers to a supposed clandestine network of military officers and their civilian allies who, for decades, suppressed and sometimes murdered anyone thought to pose a threat to the secular order.
Human rights groups accused them of thousands of political deaths and disappearances during the 1990s.
It’s no secret that Erdogan plans to run for president this coming August, when Turkey’s head of state will be directly elected by the people, for the first time ever.
Will there now be genuine civilian oversight when it comes to the armed forces? Has Erdogan actually managed to tame the Turkish military, or will he meet the fate of earlier civilian rulers unseated by coups? Right now, he does seem to have the upper hand.
Last week we saw something unprecedented in Turkey: In a landmark decision meant to curb the power of the country’s massive military establishment, a court sentenced two top former generals, army chief Kenan Evren and air force head Tahsin Sahinkaya, to life imprisonment for leading a 1980 coup that resulted in widespread torture, arrests and deaths.
Evren, who then served as president of Turkey from 1980 to 1989, claimed the coup had saved Turkey from anarchy after thousands were killed in fighting between militant left-wingers and right-wingers.
Is the Republic of Turkey, the resolutely secular state founded in 1923 by Kemal Ataturk on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, undergoing a fundamental transformation?
Ataturk reformed everything from dress codes to the alphabet during his 15-year reign as president. He even moved the country’s capital from Istanbul, the old imperial capital, to Ankara, in the heart of Anatolia.
And his legacy was guarded for decades afterwards by the Turkish Army. They carried out three coups between 1960 and 1980 and pushed an Islamist-led government led by Necmettin Erbakan from power in 1997. In 1998, his Welfare Party (RP) was banned.
But things have been changing. Since the 1990s, the revival of a Sunni-infused sense of nationalism is transforming the country.
The old republican verities have been challenged, especially by the current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, himself a former member of the Welfare Party, who has been in office since 2003. He has now even taken on the generals, something earlier rulers did at their peril.
His popularity -- he has won three elections in a row -- has afforded him protection while he moved to break their power. His Justice and Development Party (AKP) holds a majority of the seats in parliament.
Erdogan, who was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994, was himself arrested four years later, sentenced to 10 months in jail for “inciting religious hatred.”
He had publicly read an Islamic poem including the lines “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.” Because of his criminal record, he was barred from standing in elections or holding political office until 2001.
In another case, 230 army officers who were convicted in 2012 in the so-called “Sledgehammer” trial, accused of taking part in in an alleged plot to topple Erdogan, have been released.
Turkey’s Constitutional Court ruled that the officers’ rights had been violated in the handling of digital evidence and the refusal to hear testimony from two former top military commanders, as requested by defendants.
So the prime minister is not yet home free, though he himself recently began discrediting the convictions, because many of the prosecutors and investigators are followers of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic preacher who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania. He was once Erdogan’s ally but now opposes him.
As well, could the country’s so-called “deep state” return? The term refers to a supposed clandestine network of military officers and their civilian allies who, for decades, suppressed and sometimes murdered anyone thought to pose a threat to the secular order.
Human rights groups accused them of thousands of political deaths and disappearances during the 1990s.
It’s no secret that Erdogan plans to run for president this coming August, when Turkey’s head of state will be directly elected by the people, for the first time ever.
Will there now be genuine civilian oversight when it comes to the armed forces? Has Erdogan actually managed to tame the Turkish military, or will he meet the fate of earlier civilian rulers unseated by coups? Right now, he does seem to have the upper hand.
So What if Iraq Splinters?
Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been asking Washington to intervene in his war against Sunni insurgents. U.S. President Barack Obama should take a pass.
I was somewhat agnostic about the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. I wasn’t ready to believe Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, nor that he was a major danger to the Middle East.
It seemed to me he was more of a caged beast after the 1991 Gulf War.
Still, I thought, there’s no harm in removing such a tyrant, even if, unlike the fantasists who hoped this would bring democracy to Iraq, I was certain his successors would be little better.
All this proved to be true. America’s attempt at “nation building,” in a place where there is no “nation,” failed, of course. It couldn’t have been otherwise.
Now it looks as if no lessons have been learned in the past decade. I’m old enough to remember the endless propaganda during the Vietnam War about the necessity to “save” South Vietnam – from whom? From themselves, it turned out!
Those of us who felt the United States should simply get out were derided as “defeatists” and “simpletons” who “didn’t understand” the intricacies of international politics, and so on. More than 58,000 American (and millions of Vietnamese) deaths later, it turns out we were right.
The U.S. is again “saving” people who don’t want to be saved. For some reason, it has become paramount, for the “best and the brightest” in Washington, to try to hold together an artificial state created by the British after the First World War, incorporating three groups who clearly have little use for each other – and never have. (Read a history book to see if I’m right.)
Do they really plan to use air power against the Sunnis on behalf of a puppet Shi’ite regime in Baghdad that is beholden to Iran, the most dangerous state in the region? Is America about to become Tehran’s air force?
Let us assume the Sunnis in central Iraq regain control of that part of the country, while the Kurds hold the north, and a rump Shi’ite state emerges in the south. So what? There are already numerous states in the Middle East, why would a few more matter? After a few years, no one will remember this was once a so-called country.
Partition is the worst possible outcome – save for all the others! Or do you think Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis would have been better off in a united India, or Arabs and Jews in one-state Palestine? Would you like to put the Yugoslav and Soviet empires back together? Actually, all these peoples would be at each others’ throats.
Good fences may not always make good neighbours; sure, there are still problems between these now separate countries – but having no fences would be even worse.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been asking Washington to intervene in his war against Sunni insurgents. U.S. President Barack Obama should take a pass.
I was somewhat agnostic about the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. I wasn’t ready to believe Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, nor that he was a major danger to the Middle East.
It seemed to me he was more of a caged beast after the 1991 Gulf War.
Still, I thought, there’s no harm in removing such a tyrant, even if, unlike the fantasists who hoped this would bring democracy to Iraq, I was certain his successors would be little better.
All this proved to be true. America’s attempt at “nation building,” in a place where there is no “nation,” failed, of course. It couldn’t have been otherwise.
Now it looks as if no lessons have been learned in the past decade. I’m old enough to remember the endless propaganda during the Vietnam War about the necessity to “save” South Vietnam – from whom? From themselves, it turned out!
Those of us who felt the United States should simply get out were derided as “defeatists” and “simpletons” who “didn’t understand” the intricacies of international politics, and so on. More than 58,000 American (and millions of Vietnamese) deaths later, it turns out we were right.
The U.S. is again “saving” people who don’t want to be saved. For some reason, it has become paramount, for the “best and the brightest” in Washington, to try to hold together an artificial state created by the British after the First World War, incorporating three groups who clearly have little use for each other – and never have. (Read a history book to see if I’m right.)
Do they really plan to use air power against the Sunnis on behalf of a puppet Shi’ite regime in Baghdad that is beholden to Iran, the most dangerous state in the region? Is America about to become Tehran’s air force?
Let us assume the Sunnis in central Iraq regain control of that part of the country, while the Kurds hold the north, and a rump Shi’ite state emerges in the south. So what? There are already numerous states in the Middle East, why would a few more matter? After a few years, no one will remember this was once a so-called country.
Partition is the worst possible outcome – save for all the others! Or do you think Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis would have been better off in a united India, or Arabs and Jews in one-state Palestine? Would you like to put the Yugoslav and Soviet empires back together? Actually, all these peoples would be at each others’ throats.
Good fences may not always make good neighbours; sure, there are still problems between these now separate countries – but having no fences would be even worse.
Monday, June 23, 2014
Kurds Capitalize on Iraqi Chaos
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Iraq is imploding. The Sunni jihadis of the group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have moved to within sight of Baghdad, while the Shi’ite government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki becomes more dependent than ever on Iran.
More and more, even Americans – who suffered tens of thousands of soldiers killed and wounded during their occupation of the country between 2003 and 2011-- are staring the obvious in the face: Iraq is really composed of three mutually hostile groups: Arab Sunnis in the center, Arab Shi’ites in the south, and Kurds in the north.
With talk of partition, has the moment of historical opportunity finally arrived for the Kurds, the largest ethnic group in the world without a state of its own? Will one of the results of the current chaos be the formation of a sovereign entity on Kurdish territory?
After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the United States and Great Britain established a so called “no fly zone” above the 36th parallel in northern Iraq, allowing Kurds in that region to establish a de facto autonomous jurisdiction.
The defeat of Saddam Hussein by the United States in 2003 enabled the Kurds to strengthen their hold. Though divided into two major political groupings, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which were often at odds, the Kurds presented a united front in their efforts to gain control of northern Iraq.
Iraqi Kurdistan is now virtually independent, with its own flag, executive, legislature, and judiciary. Its capital is Erbil (sometimes spelled Arbil).
Last September, Iraqi Kurdistan held its fourth legislative election for the 111-seat Kurdish National Assembly, with the KDP winning 38 seats to the PUK’s 18. A new opposition group, Gorran (the Movement for Change), which split off from the PUK, took 24, while two Islamic parties won another 16.
However, since the parliamentary elections of 2005, the KDP and PUK have ruled the Kurdish region as a united government, though the KDP has had the upper hand. Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish Region and son of the famed rebel leader Mustafa Barzani, heads the KDP. The PUK’s leader is Iraq’s President Jalal Talabani, who has been ill and holds little power in that largely ceremonial position.
Taking advantage of the turmoil in Iraq, the Kurdish military, known as the Peshmerga, has now seized large tracts of Kurdish-populated territories that had remained disputed and outside its control, including Kirkuk, which the Kurds see as a future capital.
Capturing the city and its huge oil reserves, just outside the area controlled by the Kurdish regional government is a huge achievement.
In Mosul, Sunni insurgents have gained control of the area on the west bank of the Tigris River, the Kurds on the other side.
Will the Kurds be able to gain -- and retain -- cities such as Kirkuk and Mosul, surrounded by oil-rich areas that would enable a Kurdish state to become economically self-sufficient, indeed wealthy? In two decades of de facto autonomy in Iraq's north, the Kurds have proved they can run a civil state.
The Kurds have also benefitted from improved relations with Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Ergogan, a religious Sunni, is no friend of the Shi’ite regime in Baghdad.
So Ankara and Erbil have built strong economic and diplomatic relations; they have signed a 50-year energy deal and Kurdish oil is being exported via a pipeline that connects the autonomous region to the port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. Turkey is now the KRG’s main business partner.
Last November Erdogan met with KRG President Barzani in the largely Kurdish-populated city of Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey. The city was adorned with Turkish and KRG flags.
Earlier this month, Huseyin Celik, a spokesman for Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), declared that the Kurds of Iraq have the right to decide the future of their land. “Turkey has been supporting the Kurdistan Region,” he said, and will continue to do so.
This is probably the best chance the Kurds have had in 80 years to form a sovereign state in at least a part of their historic patrimony. They are certainly laying the groundwork for it to come to pass.
Iraq is imploding. The Sunni jihadis of the group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have moved to within sight of Baghdad, while the Shi’ite government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki becomes more dependent than ever on Iran.
More and more, even Americans – who suffered tens of thousands of soldiers killed and wounded during their occupation of the country between 2003 and 2011-- are staring the obvious in the face: Iraq is really composed of three mutually hostile groups: Arab Sunnis in the center, Arab Shi’ites in the south, and Kurds in the north.
With talk of partition, has the moment of historical opportunity finally arrived for the Kurds, the largest ethnic group in the world without a state of its own? Will one of the results of the current chaos be the formation of a sovereign entity on Kurdish territory?
After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the United States and Great Britain established a so called “no fly zone” above the 36th parallel in northern Iraq, allowing Kurds in that region to establish a de facto autonomous jurisdiction.
The defeat of Saddam Hussein by the United States in 2003 enabled the Kurds to strengthen their hold. Though divided into two major political groupings, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which were often at odds, the Kurds presented a united front in their efforts to gain control of northern Iraq.
Iraqi Kurdistan is now virtually independent, with its own flag, executive, legislature, and judiciary. Its capital is Erbil (sometimes spelled Arbil).
Last September, Iraqi Kurdistan held its fourth legislative election for the 111-seat Kurdish National Assembly, with the KDP winning 38 seats to the PUK’s 18. A new opposition group, Gorran (the Movement for Change), which split off from the PUK, took 24, while two Islamic parties won another 16.
However, since the parliamentary elections of 2005, the KDP and PUK have ruled the Kurdish region as a united government, though the KDP has had the upper hand. Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish Region and son of the famed rebel leader Mustafa Barzani, heads the KDP. The PUK’s leader is Iraq’s President Jalal Talabani, who has been ill and holds little power in that largely ceremonial position.
Taking advantage of the turmoil in Iraq, the Kurdish military, known as the Peshmerga, has now seized large tracts of Kurdish-populated territories that had remained disputed and outside its control, including Kirkuk, which the Kurds see as a future capital.
Capturing the city and its huge oil reserves, just outside the area controlled by the Kurdish regional government is a huge achievement.
In Mosul, Sunni insurgents have gained control of the area on the west bank of the Tigris River, the Kurds on the other side.
Will the Kurds be able to gain -- and retain -- cities such as Kirkuk and Mosul, surrounded by oil-rich areas that would enable a Kurdish state to become economically self-sufficient, indeed wealthy? In two decades of de facto autonomy in Iraq's north, the Kurds have proved they can run a civil state.
The Kurds have also benefitted from improved relations with Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Ergogan, a religious Sunni, is no friend of the Shi’ite regime in Baghdad.
So Ankara and Erbil have built strong economic and diplomatic relations; they have signed a 50-year energy deal and Kurdish oil is being exported via a pipeline that connects the autonomous region to the port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. Turkey is now the KRG’s main business partner.
Last November Erdogan met with KRG President Barzani in the largely Kurdish-populated city of Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey. The city was adorned with Turkish and KRG flags.
Earlier this month, Huseyin Celik, a spokesman for Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), declared that the Kurds of Iraq have the right to decide the future of their land. “Turkey has been supporting the Kurdistan Region,” he said, and will continue to do so.
This is probably the best chance the Kurds have had in 80 years to form a sovereign state in at least a part of their historic patrimony. They are certainly laying the groundwork for it to come to pass.
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Reminiscing About Israel, Then and Now
Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune
In 1972, while a graduate student at Brandeis University outside Boston, I spent the summer at the Mount Scopus (Har ha-Tsofim) campus of the Hebrew University, which had been an enclave within Jordanian east Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967 and was not reopened until after the Six-Day War. (When the Jordanians denied Israeli access to Mount Scopus, a new campus was built at Givat Ram in western Jerusalem; it was completed in 1958.)
I used to walk down the hill from the campus, through east Jerusalem and the Old City, into West Jerusalem, with its cafes and museums – sometimes even in the evening.
That same summer, I visited the West Bank, including Ramallah, now the capital of the Palestinian Authority. Along with graduate student friends, I travelled down to Sharm el-Shek, the resort at the southernmost tip of the Sinai Peninsula, then occupied by Israel (the town had been renamed Ofira). We slept on the beach at night. Could anyone imagine doing that now?
Israel had come into possession of all these territories in the 1967 Middle East War, and a feeling of elation enveloped the country. During the so-called War of Attrition between Israel and Egypt in the years immediately following the war, Israeli aircraft bombed targets deep within Egyptian territory.
Some of the aerial dogfights that ensued involved Russian pilots flying Egyptian planes. Defence minister Moshe Dayan boasted that Israel could even defeat Egypt’s then ally, the Soviet Union.
Prior to 1967, Israel had been a small country that, unlike today, wasn’t in the news day and night. Tel Aviv looked like a modest European city. (I was there just after the war.) The country had been established by European Jewish pioneers who founded kibbutzim and labour unions.
It had been governed, from independence in 1948 on, by the semi-socialist Labour Party, and secular Haifa was more important than Jerusalem. Most non-Orthodox diaspora Jews did not regard Israel as the very center of their religious or cultural identity.
Israel had not yet become the focus of a global attack by its enemies, many of whom today consider it the very embodiment of evil, a state that must be destroyed.
In some ways, 1967-1973 was a golden age for Israel, but the dangerous sense of hubris set the stage for the catastrophe of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the ideological and political retreats that would follow, and that now place it in grave danger.
In 1972, while a graduate student at Brandeis University outside Boston, I spent the summer at the Mount Scopus (Har ha-Tsofim) campus of the Hebrew University, which had been an enclave within Jordanian east Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967 and was not reopened until after the Six-Day War. (When the Jordanians denied Israeli access to Mount Scopus, a new campus was built at Givat Ram in western Jerusalem; it was completed in 1958.)
I used to walk down the hill from the campus, through east Jerusalem and the Old City, into West Jerusalem, with its cafes and museums – sometimes even in the evening.
That same summer, I visited the West Bank, including Ramallah, now the capital of the Palestinian Authority. Along with graduate student friends, I travelled down to Sharm el-Shek, the resort at the southernmost tip of the Sinai Peninsula, then occupied by Israel (the town had been renamed Ofira). We slept on the beach at night. Could anyone imagine doing that now?
Israel had come into possession of all these territories in the 1967 Middle East War, and a feeling of elation enveloped the country. During the so-called War of Attrition between Israel and Egypt in the years immediately following the war, Israeli aircraft bombed targets deep within Egyptian territory.
Some of the aerial dogfights that ensued involved Russian pilots flying Egyptian planes. Defence minister Moshe Dayan boasted that Israel could even defeat Egypt’s then ally, the Soviet Union.
Prior to 1967, Israel had been a small country that, unlike today, wasn’t in the news day and night. Tel Aviv looked like a modest European city. (I was there just after the war.) The country had been established by European Jewish pioneers who founded kibbutzim and labour unions.
It had been governed, from independence in 1948 on, by the semi-socialist Labour Party, and secular Haifa was more important than Jerusalem. Most non-Orthodox diaspora Jews did not regard Israel as the very center of their religious or cultural identity.
Israel had not yet become the focus of a global attack by its enemies, many of whom today consider it the very embodiment of evil, a state that must be destroyed.
In some ways, 1967-1973 was a golden age for Israel, but the dangerous sense of hubris set the stage for the catastrophe of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the ideological and political retreats that would follow, and that now place it in grave danger.
Czech People Face Adversity Throughout History
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
The Czechs may have the saddest history of any European people. At many times, they have been thwarted in their desire for freedom and independence.
The years 1415, 1620, 1938, and 1968, in particular, were disastrous.
The historic lands of Bohemia and Moravia in central Europe have been home to the Czech people since the Middle Ages and an independent Bohemian kingdom existed from the ninth century until 1306, when it became a component, but distinct, kingdom within the Holy Roman Empire.
A full century before Martin Luther inaugurated the Protestant Reformation, a Czech theologian, Jan Hus, was burned at the stake for heresy, setting off decades of warfare. Following his execution in 1415, the Hussite movement continued to advance the Czech cause.
The Protestant Reformation gained support in the 16th century; soon some 90 per cent of the Czech population had become Protestant. But in 1620, two years after the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants throughout Europe, the Protestant Czech landowners were defeated by the Imperial Habsburg armies at the Battle of the White Mountain, and Bohemia lost its autonomy.
Now part of the Habsburg Empire, the country for the next three centuries would be ruled from Vienna. Czechs were forced to convert to Catholicism or leave Bohemia and Moravia. Many of the cities became culturally and ethnically German.
Perhaps this is why the Czechs, unlike their Catholic Slavic neighbours in Poland and Slovakia, have worn their religion lightly and have not fused it with their national identity.
Following the defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary in the First World War, a new state, Czechoslovakia, a union of the Czech and Slovak peoples, emerged. However, it also contained the Sudetenland, with its three million Germans, almost one-quarter of the country’s population, and this would lead to disaster two decades later.
At the infamous Munich meetings held in September 1938 between Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and Edouard Daladier of France, the Sudetenland was handed over to Nazi Germany, leaving Czechoslovakia virtually defenceless.
Hungary and Poland also bit off small chunks of the country. (My father was part of the Polish army that occupied the Zaolzie region of Cieszyn Silesia.)
In March 1939 Hitler completed the destruction of the country. Slovakia became a separate puppet state, while the Czech lands were incorporated into Nazi Germany, as the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.”
The Nazi occupation lasted for most of the war; Prague was not freed until May 8, 1945.After the German defeat the Czechoslovak state was reconstituted and its German inhabitants, now considered “fifth columnists,” were expelled. Three years later, though, the country fell under Soviet domination.
In the 1960s the tight grip of the Communist apparatchiks began to loosen. In January 1968 a reformer, Alexander Dubcek, became the country’s leader. A program adopted in April 1968 set guidelines for a modern, humanistic socialist democracy that would guarantee freedom of religion, press, assembly, and speech, as well as abundant consumer goods. It would be “socialism with a human face.”
But in August 1968 Warsaw Pact troops snuffed out Dubcek’s attempt to liberalize Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev claimed that the country was falling into the hands of “western imperialists” and following Dubcek’s overthrow the Soviets installed a regime loyal to Moscow.
Those who could not be intimidated into collaborating were punished or marginalized. When I visited Czechoslovakia in July 1977, I was struck by the contrast between the beauty of the country, Prague in particular, and the despondency and sadness of its inhabitants. The heavy hand of Communist repression was evident everywhere – this was only nine years following the dashed hopes of the “Prague spring.”
However, dissidents regrouped, led by human rights activists and intellectuals such as Vaclav Havel; they founded the group known as Charter 77, which in the 1980s became the Civic Forum, an umbrella group championing bureaucratic reform and civil liberties.
By the late 1980s Communism was a discredited ideology throughout eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia, the “velvet revolution” of November-December1989 – a very secular affair – would be followed by the “velvet divorce” of January 1993, which split the country into Czech and Slovak states. Following the collapse of the Communist regime, Havel had become president of the country.
Today’s Czech Republic is a homogenous, liberal multi-party parliamentary democracy, and a member of both the European Union and NATO. The current president is Milos Zeman, of the Party of Civic Rights. The prime minister, Bohuslav Sobotka of the Czech Social Democratic Party, heads a three-party coalition government. The Czechs, it seems, have finally overcome their sad history.
The Czechs may have the saddest history of any European people. At many times, they have been thwarted in their desire for freedom and independence.
The years 1415, 1620, 1938, and 1968, in particular, were disastrous.
The historic lands of Bohemia and Moravia in central Europe have been home to the Czech people since the Middle Ages and an independent Bohemian kingdom existed from the ninth century until 1306, when it became a component, but distinct, kingdom within the Holy Roman Empire.
A full century before Martin Luther inaugurated the Protestant Reformation, a Czech theologian, Jan Hus, was burned at the stake for heresy, setting off decades of warfare. Following his execution in 1415, the Hussite movement continued to advance the Czech cause.
The Protestant Reformation gained support in the 16th century; soon some 90 per cent of the Czech population had become Protestant. But in 1620, two years after the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants throughout Europe, the Protestant Czech landowners were defeated by the Imperial Habsburg armies at the Battle of the White Mountain, and Bohemia lost its autonomy.
Now part of the Habsburg Empire, the country for the next three centuries would be ruled from Vienna. Czechs were forced to convert to Catholicism or leave Bohemia and Moravia. Many of the cities became culturally and ethnically German.
Perhaps this is why the Czechs, unlike their Catholic Slavic neighbours in Poland and Slovakia, have worn their religion lightly and have not fused it with their national identity.
Following the defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary in the First World War, a new state, Czechoslovakia, a union of the Czech and Slovak peoples, emerged. However, it also contained the Sudetenland, with its three million Germans, almost one-quarter of the country’s population, and this would lead to disaster two decades later.
At the infamous Munich meetings held in September 1938 between Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and Edouard Daladier of France, the Sudetenland was handed over to Nazi Germany, leaving Czechoslovakia virtually defenceless.
Hungary and Poland also bit off small chunks of the country. (My father was part of the Polish army that occupied the Zaolzie region of Cieszyn Silesia.)
In March 1939 Hitler completed the destruction of the country. Slovakia became a separate puppet state, while the Czech lands were incorporated into Nazi Germany, as the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.”
The Nazi occupation lasted for most of the war; Prague was not freed until May 8, 1945.After the German defeat the Czechoslovak state was reconstituted and its German inhabitants, now considered “fifth columnists,” were expelled. Three years later, though, the country fell under Soviet domination.
In the 1960s the tight grip of the Communist apparatchiks began to loosen. In January 1968 a reformer, Alexander Dubcek, became the country’s leader. A program adopted in April 1968 set guidelines for a modern, humanistic socialist democracy that would guarantee freedom of religion, press, assembly, and speech, as well as abundant consumer goods. It would be “socialism with a human face.”
But in August 1968 Warsaw Pact troops snuffed out Dubcek’s attempt to liberalize Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev claimed that the country was falling into the hands of “western imperialists” and following Dubcek’s overthrow the Soviets installed a regime loyal to Moscow.
Those who could not be intimidated into collaborating were punished or marginalized. When I visited Czechoslovakia in July 1977, I was struck by the contrast between the beauty of the country, Prague in particular, and the despondency and sadness of its inhabitants. The heavy hand of Communist repression was evident everywhere – this was only nine years following the dashed hopes of the “Prague spring.”
However, dissidents regrouped, led by human rights activists and intellectuals such as Vaclav Havel; they founded the group known as Charter 77, which in the 1980s became the Civic Forum, an umbrella group championing bureaucratic reform and civil liberties.
By the late 1980s Communism was a discredited ideology throughout eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia, the “velvet revolution” of November-December1989 – a very secular affair – would be followed by the “velvet divorce” of January 1993, which split the country into Czech and Slovak states. Following the collapse of the Communist regime, Havel had become president of the country.
Today’s Czech Republic is a homogenous, liberal multi-party parliamentary democracy, and a member of both the European Union and NATO. The current president is Milos Zeman, of the Party of Civic Rights. The prime minister, Bohuslav Sobotka of the Czech Social Democratic Party, heads a three-party coalition government. The Czechs, it seems, have finally overcome their sad history.
Monday, June 16, 2014
Le Pen, the National Front, and France
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Who is Jean-Marie Le Pen? This is no idle question, as he is the founder of a French political party that has been making significant gains in recent years and, as such, he remains an important figure in his country.
Capitalizing on anti-Muslim sentiment and anger about the state of the French economy, the party he created, the National Front (NF), came first in French balloting for the European parliament elections held this past May, with a full 25 per cent of the vote.
Born in 1928, Le Pen led the NF from its foundation in 1972 until 2011. His longevity in politics and his five attempts to become president of France have made him a fixture on the political right.
Le Pen’s political career began in Paris in 1956, when he was elected to the National Assembly as a member of Pierre Poujade’s populist party, the Union de Defense Commercants et Artisans. Le Pen was a deputy until 1962, and again (for the NF) from 1986 to 1988.
In 1984, Le Pen won a seat in the European Parliament and has been continuously re-elected since then, though in 2000 he was banned from public office and stripped of his seat for one year, following a 1998 conviction for assaulting a Socialist politician the year before.
In the 2002 presidential election, he obtained 16.86 per cent of the votes in the first round, good for second place, before losing badly to incumbent Jacques Chirac in the run-off. He finished fourth in the 2007 election. His daughter Marine Le Pen, who has headed the party since 2011, finished third in the 2012 presidential election, with 17.9 per cent of the vote.
Ever since the French Revolution, France has been divided by two ideological strands: the first is the Jacobin republicanism of liberty, equality, fraternity, the second the organic Catholic nationalism and monarchism that morphed into fascism and racism in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
The former championed secularism, universalism and anti-clericalism. Its advocates prevailed in the famous Dreyfus case at the turn of the 20th century, when a Jewish army officer who had been falsely imprisoned as a German spy by anti-Semitic elements in the general staff was exonerated. The issue divided France from the affair’s inception in 1894 until its resolution in 1906.
The right-wing tradition culminated in the Nazi collaborationist Vichy government in the Second World War under Marshal Philippe Pétain, when some 90,000 Jews were sent to their deaths.
The decades preceding the 1940 defeat of republicanism saw the rise of fascist movements and ideologues.In January1934, fascist groups in Paris rioted trying to overthrow the Third Republic.
Writers such as Edouard Drumont, Maurice Barrès, Drieu La Rochelle, and Charles Maurras presented a resurgent clericalism and a heightened xenophobia as the solution to France’s malaise, in opposition to the Enlightenment rationality of the left.
The Vichyites, defeated in the Second World War, lost their ideological and political power, and their ideas became anathema to most. Upon his conviction in 1945 for “complicity with the enemy” during the German occupation, Maurras exclaimed: “It’s Dreyfus’s revenge!”
But has the National Front emerged out of this tarnished tradition? Le Pen himself certainly has. Already in the 1960s, he called for the rehabilitation of collaborationists, asking “Was General de Gaulle more brave than Marshal Pétain? It was much easier to resist in London than to resist in France.”
Le Pen was fined by a French court in 1996 for saying that the gas chambers used to kill Jews in the Holocaust were “merely a detail in the history of the Second World War.” Three years later a German court fined him for a similar comment judged to have minimised the Holocaust.
In 2004 France’s highest court convicted him of inciting racial hatred for telling a newspaper in 2003 that Muslims would one day run France and strike fear into the hearts of the non-Muslim population.
Marine Le Pen has modified the party’s positions while remaining opposed to the European Union. She also favours a “radical change of politics” in order to drastically reduce the influx of illegal immigrants towards France, as well as a moratorium on legal immigration.
The NF leader maintains that the party resolutely “condemns any form of anti-Semitism in the strongest terms.” She has rebuked her father for recent remarks many construed as anti-Semitic. Indeed, she even hopes the NF gains some Jewish support, since the main danger to the French Jewish community now comes from Islamist radicals.
Who is Jean-Marie Le Pen? This is no idle question, as he is the founder of a French political party that has been making significant gains in recent years and, as such, he remains an important figure in his country.
Capitalizing on anti-Muslim sentiment and anger about the state of the French economy, the party he created, the National Front (NF), came first in French balloting for the European parliament elections held this past May, with a full 25 per cent of the vote.
Born in 1928, Le Pen led the NF from its foundation in 1972 until 2011. His longevity in politics and his five attempts to become president of France have made him a fixture on the political right.
Le Pen’s political career began in Paris in 1956, when he was elected to the National Assembly as a member of Pierre Poujade’s populist party, the Union de Defense Commercants et Artisans. Le Pen was a deputy until 1962, and again (for the NF) from 1986 to 1988.
In 1984, Le Pen won a seat in the European Parliament and has been continuously re-elected since then, though in 2000 he was banned from public office and stripped of his seat for one year, following a 1998 conviction for assaulting a Socialist politician the year before.
In the 2002 presidential election, he obtained 16.86 per cent of the votes in the first round, good for second place, before losing badly to incumbent Jacques Chirac in the run-off. He finished fourth in the 2007 election. His daughter Marine Le Pen, who has headed the party since 2011, finished third in the 2012 presidential election, with 17.9 per cent of the vote.
Ever since the French Revolution, France has been divided by two ideological strands: the first is the Jacobin republicanism of liberty, equality, fraternity, the second the organic Catholic nationalism and monarchism that morphed into fascism and racism in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
The former championed secularism, universalism and anti-clericalism. Its advocates prevailed in the famous Dreyfus case at the turn of the 20th century, when a Jewish army officer who had been falsely imprisoned as a German spy by anti-Semitic elements in the general staff was exonerated. The issue divided France from the affair’s inception in 1894 until its resolution in 1906.
The right-wing tradition culminated in the Nazi collaborationist Vichy government in the Second World War under Marshal Philippe Pétain, when some 90,000 Jews were sent to their deaths.
The decades preceding the 1940 defeat of republicanism saw the rise of fascist movements and ideologues.In January1934, fascist groups in Paris rioted trying to overthrow the Third Republic.
Writers such as Edouard Drumont, Maurice Barrès, Drieu La Rochelle, and Charles Maurras presented a resurgent clericalism and a heightened xenophobia as the solution to France’s malaise, in opposition to the Enlightenment rationality of the left.
The Vichyites, defeated in the Second World War, lost their ideological and political power, and their ideas became anathema to most. Upon his conviction in 1945 for “complicity with the enemy” during the German occupation, Maurras exclaimed: “It’s Dreyfus’s revenge!”
But has the National Front emerged out of this tarnished tradition? Le Pen himself certainly has. Already in the 1960s, he called for the rehabilitation of collaborationists, asking “Was General de Gaulle more brave than Marshal Pétain? It was much easier to resist in London than to resist in France.”
Le Pen was fined by a French court in 1996 for saying that the gas chambers used to kill Jews in the Holocaust were “merely a detail in the history of the Second World War.” Three years later a German court fined him for a similar comment judged to have minimised the Holocaust.
In 2004 France’s highest court convicted him of inciting racial hatred for telling a newspaper in 2003 that Muslims would one day run France and strike fear into the hearts of the non-Muslim population.
Marine Le Pen has modified the party’s positions while remaining opposed to the European Union. She also favours a “radical change of politics” in order to drastically reduce the influx of illegal immigrants towards France, as well as a moratorium on legal immigration.
The NF leader maintains that the party resolutely “condemns any form of anti-Semitism in the strongest terms.” She has rebuked her father for recent remarks many construed as anti-Semitic. Indeed, she even hopes the NF gains some Jewish support, since the main danger to the French Jewish community now comes from Islamist radicals.
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
The Revolt in China's Uighur Autonomous Region
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in the far west of the People’s Republic of China is more than 1.6 million square kilometres in area.
An arid region that historically was called East Turkestan, it is the homeland of the Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim people. In recent decades, though, Han Chinese moved in and took the better jobs and housing.
Today it is estimated that Uighurs make up only about 45 per cent of its 22 million people. Most of Xinjiang's Uighurs live in the southwestern portion of the region, in the Tarim Basin.
The influx of Chinese settlers has sparked resentment and calls for an independent Uighur state. But the Uighur struggle to assert a right to national self-determination is a difficult one. Unlike most formerly colonized peoples around the world, the Uighurs have never benefited from the fruits of de-colonization, since they were absorbed by a non-western neighbouring state, China.
Beijing refuses to acknowledge that it acts as a colonial power in the region; after all, it considers itself as having also been historically a victim of imperialism.
A Uighur Empire stretched from the Caspian Sea to Manchuria from 745 to 840 but it fragmented into smaller kingdoms and eventually came under Mongol control. Originally Buddhists, the Uighurs were converted to Islam by the beginning of the 16th century.
Xinjiang was conquered by the Qing (Manchu) dynasty in the mid-18th century and the Uighurs became subjects of the Chinese emperors.
Since then, there have been periodic uprisings against Chinese domination. In 1933 and 1944, the Uighurs temporarily gained their independence from Nationalist China, backed by the Soviet Union. The second East Turkistan Republic lasted from 1944 to 1949.
In 1949, the Chinese Communists took over the territory and declared it a Chinese province. In October 1955, Xinjiang was classified as an autonomous region.
There are ideological divisions among the Uighur nationalists. Some Uighurs call for an Islamic state, while others support a more ethnically independent and self-governing East Turkestan.
In July 2009, ethnic tension between the Han Chinese and Uighurs led to severe riots in the capital city of Urumqi. According to Chinese state media, almost 200 people were killed, and more than 800 injured.
There has been an upsurge in violence since then. In June 2012, six ethnic Uighur men tried to hijack an aircraft heading to Urumqi, but failed after passengers and crew resisted and restrained the hijackers. A year later, 27 people were killed in disturbances in the township of Lukqun; 17 of them were killed by rioters, while the other ten were alleged assailants who were shot dead by police.
At least 29 people were killed in early March in an attack at a railway station in the Chinese city of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. It was an organised, premeditated assault by knife-wielding Uighur assailants, according to the Chinese Xinhua news agency.
In late May, attackers in two cars ploughed through shoppers while setting off explosives at a busy street market in Urumqi, killing 39 people. The Xinjiang regional government, which is Chinese-controlled, said in a statement that it was “a serious violent terrorist incident of a particularly vile nature.”
In response, China’s president Xi Jinping has called for moving more Uighurs to inland areas of China in order “to enhance mutual understanding among different ethnic groups and boost ties between them.”
All told, at least 180 people have been killed in attacks across China over the past year. But the anti-colonial goals that motivate Uighur nationalists to work to construct a modern Uighur nation remain unfulfilled. The plight of the Uighurs should command more attention.
The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in the far west of the People’s Republic of China is more than 1.6 million square kilometres in area.
An arid region that historically was called East Turkestan, it is the homeland of the Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim people. In recent decades, though, Han Chinese moved in and took the better jobs and housing.
Today it is estimated that Uighurs make up only about 45 per cent of its 22 million people. Most of Xinjiang's Uighurs live in the southwestern portion of the region, in the Tarim Basin.
The influx of Chinese settlers has sparked resentment and calls for an independent Uighur state. But the Uighur struggle to assert a right to national self-determination is a difficult one. Unlike most formerly colonized peoples around the world, the Uighurs have never benefited from the fruits of de-colonization, since they were absorbed by a non-western neighbouring state, China.
Beijing refuses to acknowledge that it acts as a colonial power in the region; after all, it considers itself as having also been historically a victim of imperialism.
A Uighur Empire stretched from the Caspian Sea to Manchuria from 745 to 840 but it fragmented into smaller kingdoms and eventually came under Mongol control. Originally Buddhists, the Uighurs were converted to Islam by the beginning of the 16th century.
Xinjiang was conquered by the Qing (Manchu) dynasty in the mid-18th century and the Uighurs became subjects of the Chinese emperors.
Since then, there have been periodic uprisings against Chinese domination. In 1933 and 1944, the Uighurs temporarily gained their independence from Nationalist China, backed by the Soviet Union. The second East Turkistan Republic lasted from 1944 to 1949.
In 1949, the Chinese Communists took over the territory and declared it a Chinese province. In October 1955, Xinjiang was classified as an autonomous region.
There are ideological divisions among the Uighur nationalists. Some Uighurs call for an Islamic state, while others support a more ethnically independent and self-governing East Turkestan.
In July 2009, ethnic tension between the Han Chinese and Uighurs led to severe riots in the capital city of Urumqi. According to Chinese state media, almost 200 people were killed, and more than 800 injured.
There has been an upsurge in violence since then. In June 2012, six ethnic Uighur men tried to hijack an aircraft heading to Urumqi, but failed after passengers and crew resisted and restrained the hijackers. A year later, 27 people were killed in disturbances in the township of Lukqun; 17 of them were killed by rioters, while the other ten were alleged assailants who were shot dead by police.
At least 29 people were killed in early March in an attack at a railway station in the Chinese city of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. It was an organised, premeditated assault by knife-wielding Uighur assailants, according to the Chinese Xinhua news agency.
In late May, attackers in two cars ploughed through shoppers while setting off explosives at a busy street market in Urumqi, killing 39 people. The Xinjiang regional government, which is Chinese-controlled, said in a statement that it was “a serious violent terrorist incident of a particularly vile nature.”
In response, China’s president Xi Jinping has called for moving more Uighurs to inland areas of China in order “to enhance mutual understanding among different ethnic groups and boost ties between them.”
All told, at least 180 people have been killed in attacks across China over the past year. But the anti-colonial goals that motivate Uighur nationalists to work to construct a modern Uighur nation remain unfulfilled. The plight of the Uighurs should command more attention.
Monday, June 09, 2014
Pope Francis in the Middle East
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
Pope Francis I visited Jordan, the Palestinian West Bank, and Israel in May. The three-day pilgrimage was his second trip outside Rome since becoming head of the Roman Catholic Church.
In Bethlehem, Francis called for “a stable peace based on justice, on the recognition of the rights of every individual, and on mutual security,” and for intensified efforts for the creation of two states, Palestinian and Israeli, before moving on to Israel.
He also invited Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas, the Israeli and Palestinian presidents, to pay a symbolic visit to the Vatican to pray for peace.
To say that the Church historically had a contentious relationship with the Jewish people is an understatement.
For some two millennia, the Church considered itself the successor to the Biblical covenant between the Israelites and God and, as the “new Israel,” the proper heir to the “promised land.”
The Jewish people were doomed to a diasporic existence; their very lives would be circumscribed and they would remain at the mercy of their Christian neighbors.
Clearly, for the Church, the rise of Jewish nationalism in the 19th century, with its program of reconstituting a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, was theological anathema.
But the Zionist movement sought allies wherever it could find them, and the founder of the World Zionist Organization, Theodor Herzl, even made entreaties to the Vatican. In 1904, he asked Pope Pius X for help in his efforts to establish a modern Jewish state in the historic homeland of the Jewish nation. Pius rejected the request.
At the time of the 1947 UN decision to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, the Vatican expressed its support for Jerusalem to become a “corpus separatum” under an international regime. And when Pope Paul VI visited Israel 50 years ago he never once uttered the name of the Jewish state, preferring to call it the Holy Land. He avoided meeting with Israeli statesmen.
But things would begin to improve. “Nostra Aetate,” the “Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions,” was passed by the Second Vatican Council in 1965. The document absolved the Jewish people as a whole of deicide: “The Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God,” it asserted.
This theological pivot led to a sea change in Church relations with the Jewish state, especially under John Paul II, the Polish pope. In 1985 the State of Israel was for the first time mentioned by name in a public Vatican document, and the Holy See established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1993.
By 2000 John Paul had prayed at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, and visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. He met with the president, the prime minister and the chief rabbis of Israel. In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI followed the same itinerary.
In February 2013, a papal conclave elected the Argentinian Jesuit Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, as Benedict’s successor.
As archbishop, the future pope had cultivated closer relations with Argentina’s large Jewish community. He attended services at a synagogue in 2007 and told the congregation that he was there to examine his heart “like a pilgrim, together with you, my elder brothers.”
In 2012 he hosted a Kristallnacht memorial event at the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral, commemorating the Nazi destruction of Jewish lives and property in Germany in November 1938.
As Francis I, the pope has followed in the footsteps of his two predecessors. Addressing a delegation in Rome in June 2013, Pope Francis described “Nostra Aetate” as a “key point of reference” for Catholic relations with the Jewish people.
“A Christian cannot be anti-Semitic,” he declared, due to “our common roots” with the Jewish people. And he has praised the Jews for remaining faithful to God “despite the awful trials of these last centuries.”
In Jerusalem, Pope Francis laid a wreath on the grave of Theodor Herzl. The symbolism was evident to all.
Pope Francis I visited Jordan, the Palestinian West Bank, and Israel in May. The three-day pilgrimage was his second trip outside Rome since becoming head of the Roman Catholic Church.
In Bethlehem, Francis called for “a stable peace based on justice, on the recognition of the rights of every individual, and on mutual security,” and for intensified efforts for the creation of two states, Palestinian and Israeli, before moving on to Israel.
He also invited Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas, the Israeli and Palestinian presidents, to pay a symbolic visit to the Vatican to pray for peace.
To say that the Church historically had a contentious relationship with the Jewish people is an understatement.
For some two millennia, the Church considered itself the successor to the Biblical covenant between the Israelites and God and, as the “new Israel,” the proper heir to the “promised land.”
The Jewish people were doomed to a diasporic existence; their very lives would be circumscribed and they would remain at the mercy of their Christian neighbors.
Clearly, for the Church, the rise of Jewish nationalism in the 19th century, with its program of reconstituting a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, was theological anathema.
But the Zionist movement sought allies wherever it could find them, and the founder of the World Zionist Organization, Theodor Herzl, even made entreaties to the Vatican. In 1904, he asked Pope Pius X for help in his efforts to establish a modern Jewish state in the historic homeland of the Jewish nation. Pius rejected the request.
At the time of the 1947 UN decision to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, the Vatican expressed its support for Jerusalem to become a “corpus separatum” under an international regime. And when Pope Paul VI visited Israel 50 years ago he never once uttered the name of the Jewish state, preferring to call it the Holy Land. He avoided meeting with Israeli statesmen.
But things would begin to improve. “Nostra Aetate,” the “Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions,” was passed by the Second Vatican Council in 1965. The document absolved the Jewish people as a whole of deicide: “The Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God,” it asserted.
This theological pivot led to a sea change in Church relations with the Jewish state, especially under John Paul II, the Polish pope. In 1985 the State of Israel was for the first time mentioned by name in a public Vatican document, and the Holy See established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1993.
By 2000 John Paul had prayed at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, and visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. He met with the president, the prime minister and the chief rabbis of Israel. In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI followed the same itinerary.
In February 2013, a papal conclave elected the Argentinian Jesuit Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, as Benedict’s successor.
As archbishop, the future pope had cultivated closer relations with Argentina’s large Jewish community. He attended services at a synagogue in 2007 and told the congregation that he was there to examine his heart “like a pilgrim, together with you, my elder brothers.”
In 2012 he hosted a Kristallnacht memorial event at the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral, commemorating the Nazi destruction of Jewish lives and property in Germany in November 1938.
As Francis I, the pope has followed in the footsteps of his two predecessors. Addressing a delegation in Rome in June 2013, Pope Francis described “Nostra Aetate” as a “key point of reference” for Catholic relations with the Jewish people.
“A Christian cannot be anti-Semitic,” he declared, due to “our common roots” with the Jewish people. And he has praised the Jews for remaining faithful to God “despite the awful trials of these last centuries.”
In Jerusalem, Pope Francis laid a wreath on the grave of Theodor Herzl. The symbolism was evident to all.
Monday, June 02, 2014
Populist Anti-EU Parties Make Gains in Elections for European Parliament
Henry Srebrnik. [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
While much of the world’s eyes were on Ukraine, and wondering about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions, populist parties often tinged with xenophobic, racist and anti-Semitic beliefs, made gains in May’s elections to the European Parliament, the legislative body for the 28-member European Union.
Parties strongly opposed to the European Union performed well in several countries, including France, Denmark, Greece, and Britain.
Much of this was fuelled by opposition to Muslim immigration into the continent, and the feeling that EU apparatchiks in Brussels, rather than national parliaments, were increasingly in control of policies. Mass unemployment and economic austerity added to the discontent.
The 751- member European Parliament, which meets in Brussels as well as Strasbourg, seems remote from most voters, who still define themselves first and foremost as members of their respective nations rather than as abstract “Europeans.” Yet its principal concern, according to Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a London-based research group, “has been to get more power for itself and more money for the European Union.”
This does not go over well in hard economic times, and protest parties are making the most of the situation.
Most startling was the French result, where the far-right National Front (NF) won about 26 per cent of the vote, edging out the two major parties, President François Holland’s governing Socialists and the Union for a Popular Movement. The NF won 25 of the 74 seats allocated to France in the European Parliament.
The NF quadrupled its vote from the six per cent they won at the last European parliamentary elections in 2009. Its support has been driven by growing discontent with historically high jobless claims and an economy that has barely grown in two years.
Marine Le Pen, the NF’s leader, told supporters that “The people have spoken loud and clear.” They no longer want to be led “by those outside our borders, by EU commissioners and technocrats who are unelected. They want to be protected from globalization and take back the reins of their destiny.”
In Britain, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) won 28 per cent of the vote, ahead of both the Conservatives of Prime Minister David Cameron and the main opposition Labour Party. This almost doubled the 16.5 per cent the UKIP secured in 2009 and brought it 24 of the country’s 73 seats.
Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader, asserted that this would help those in Britain and elsewhere who want to slash the European Union’s powers and return decision-making to individual states.
“As members of this union we cannot run our own country and crucially, we cannot control our own borders,” said Farage. “I don't just want Britain to leave the European Union,” he added. “I want Europe to leave the European Union.”
The far-right Danish People’s Party became Denmark’s biggest party with 27 per cent of the vote and doubled its number of seats in the European parliament from two to four of Denmark’s 13 member delegation. It had campaigned to reclaim border controls and curb benefits to other EU citizens living in Denmark.
The anti-euro Alternative for Germany party won its first seats in any election in that country with seven per cent of the German vote, good for seven of Germany’s 94 seats. “It’s springtime in Germany,” leader Bernd Lucke told chanting supporters in Berlin. “Some flowers are blooming and others are wilting.”
In Greece, best by economic troubles and an unemployment rate of 27 per cent, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn picked up votes, while the far left made even greater gains. Golden Dawn will enter the European Parliament for the first time after winning nine per cent of the vote and three of 21 seats, a third place finish.
“I congratulate you for managing to resist the government’s terrorism and for not believing their lies,” Nikos Michaloliakos, the party leader, declared. “We are the only political power that actually stands up against our state being run by foreign powers.
In Hungary, the far-right Jobbik, also had some cause to celebrate. While it won 14.7 per cent of the vote, the same as in 2009, with its three of Hungary’s 21 seats it beat out the Socialists to become the country’s largest opposition party at the EU level.
“I have important news for you: today Jobbik is the second largest party in Hungary,” Gabor Vona, the Jobbik leader told cheering supporters. “We all want a common Europe, but a different one to what we have at the moment.”
While much of the world’s eyes were on Ukraine, and wondering about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions, populist parties often tinged with xenophobic, racist and anti-Semitic beliefs, made gains in May’s elections to the European Parliament, the legislative body for the 28-member European Union.
Parties strongly opposed to the European Union performed well in several countries, including France, Denmark, Greece, and Britain.
Much of this was fuelled by opposition to Muslim immigration into the continent, and the feeling that EU apparatchiks in Brussels, rather than national parliaments, were increasingly in control of policies. Mass unemployment and economic austerity added to the discontent.
The 751- member European Parliament, which meets in Brussels as well as Strasbourg, seems remote from most voters, who still define themselves first and foremost as members of their respective nations rather than as abstract “Europeans.” Yet its principal concern, according to Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a London-based research group, “has been to get more power for itself and more money for the European Union.”
This does not go over well in hard economic times, and protest parties are making the most of the situation.
Most startling was the French result, where the far-right National Front (NF) won about 26 per cent of the vote, edging out the two major parties, President François Holland’s governing Socialists and the Union for a Popular Movement. The NF won 25 of the 74 seats allocated to France in the European Parliament.
The NF quadrupled its vote from the six per cent they won at the last European parliamentary elections in 2009. Its support has been driven by growing discontent with historically high jobless claims and an economy that has barely grown in two years.
Marine Le Pen, the NF’s leader, told supporters that “The people have spoken loud and clear.” They no longer want to be led “by those outside our borders, by EU commissioners and technocrats who are unelected. They want to be protected from globalization and take back the reins of their destiny.”
In Britain, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) won 28 per cent of the vote, ahead of both the Conservatives of Prime Minister David Cameron and the main opposition Labour Party. This almost doubled the 16.5 per cent the UKIP secured in 2009 and brought it 24 of the country’s 73 seats.
Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader, asserted that this would help those in Britain and elsewhere who want to slash the European Union’s powers and return decision-making to individual states.
“As members of this union we cannot run our own country and crucially, we cannot control our own borders,” said Farage. “I don't just want Britain to leave the European Union,” he added. “I want Europe to leave the European Union.”
The far-right Danish People’s Party became Denmark’s biggest party with 27 per cent of the vote and doubled its number of seats in the European parliament from two to four of Denmark’s 13 member delegation. It had campaigned to reclaim border controls and curb benefits to other EU citizens living in Denmark.
The anti-euro Alternative for Germany party won its first seats in any election in that country with seven per cent of the German vote, good for seven of Germany’s 94 seats. “It’s springtime in Germany,” leader Bernd Lucke told chanting supporters in Berlin. “Some flowers are blooming and others are wilting.”
In Greece, best by economic troubles and an unemployment rate of 27 per cent, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn picked up votes, while the far left made even greater gains. Golden Dawn will enter the European Parliament for the first time after winning nine per cent of the vote and three of 21 seats, a third place finish.
“I congratulate you for managing to resist the government’s terrorism and for not believing their lies,” Nikos Michaloliakos, the party leader, declared. “We are the only political power that actually stands up against our state being run by foreign powers.
In Hungary, the far-right Jobbik, also had some cause to celebrate. While it won 14.7 per cent of the vote, the same as in 2009, with its three of Hungary’s 21 seats it beat out the Socialists to become the country’s largest opposition party at the EU level.
“I have important news for you: today Jobbik is the second largest party in Hungary,” Gabor Vona, the Jobbik leader told cheering supporters. “We all want a common Europe, but a different one to what we have at the moment.”
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