A Visit to the Spanish Balearic Islands

By Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press

The Spanish Balearic islands, located in the western Mediterranean, are off the eastern coast of mainland Spain. 

The archipelago forms an autonomous community and a province of Spain. The 2007 Statute of Autonomy declared the Balearic Islands as one nationality of Spain.

The four largest islands are Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera with Palma de Mallorca as the capital. There are some 1.116 million residents on the Balearics.

I visited Mallorca, the largest of islands, in early May. While on Prince Edward Island, the leaves had barely come out on the trees, here a warm sun blanketed Palma de Mallorca, the capital and largest city.

The islands have been ruled by successive empires dating back to Carthaginian and Roman times. In the year 707 the islands submitted to an Umayyad Arab fleet and began to be governed by a Muslim caliphate.

In 902, the Emirate of Cordoba, a successor to the Ummayads, invaded and incorporated the islands into their state. However, the Cordoban emirate disintegrated in civil war and partition in the early eleventh century, breaking into smaller states.

The islands were then conquered by the Almoravids, a Berber Moroccan people, followed by rule by a rival Moroccan dynasty, the Almohads.

The Balearics finally came under Christian control between 1229 and 1235, becoming a vassal state of the Kingdom of Aragon.

When the various Spanish entities were united under Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469, the islands became part of the modern Spanish state.

Today Palma de Mallorca, a coastal city of about 400,000 residents, is one of Spain’s most cosmopolitan places. Mallorca now receives more than 10 million tourists annually.

Tourism changed Mallorcan society, which for centuries had been rural with strong isolationist tendencies.

The earliest evidence for the presence of Jews on the island during the Muslim period is from 1135, when Ramon Berenguer III, count of Barcelona, took some Jews of Mallorca under his protection.

In Palma a residential area eventually was set aside for Jewish settlers in the fortress of Almudaina which was later known as “the fortress of the Jews.”

They engaged in the international maritime trade and supplied goods from North Africa to the Spanish mainland.

Yet 600 years ago, the islanders were among the first in the Spanish lands to embrace persecution of Jews. Members of that minority were slaughtered here a century before the official implementation of the Inquisition in 1492.

Mallorca was one of four Spanish regions where Jews were murdered on the street in the 1391 pogroms, and the slaughter was accompanied by anti-Jewish measures that would culminate in the Inquisition. The Jewish community dwindled to almost nothing after that.

Last year, local authorities unveiled a memorial plaque at the square where 37 people were publicly burned alive in 1691 for being Jewish in what is locally known as “the bonfire of the Jews.”

Following resistance to the plaque by some residents and municipal leaders, the unveiling was the first recognition of its sort of the murders that transpired here.

In 2015, the city helped build a tiny Jewish museum in what used to be the Jewish quarter. The Jews are gone, but the buildings that once housed their three synagogues in Palma are still around and in good condition. One of them, a small space with two entrances for security reasons, used to be a bakery. Another is a church.

In March, the city for the first time sponsored a memorial ceremony for Jews who in 1688 tried to escape the island on a ship but were caught and tortured.

A large metal anchoring ring stands today outside the Bahia Mediterraneo restaurant near the marina, where many believe the ship used to stand.

“I think that in the past few years we finally and suddenly reached the point where Mallorca is ready to remember,” said Dolores Forteza Rei, a member of the Memoria de la Carrer association that is dedicated to the preservation of this heritage.

Rabbi Joseph Walles, a descendant of Rabbi Rafael Valls, the last Jew burned at the stake in Mallorca in 1691, visited Mallorca in February to meet with members of its Jewish community.

“Laced into the history of this island is the determination of its Jews to stay Jewish at the face of one of history’s most brutal attempts to eradicate Judaism,” Walles remarked.

Can Libya's Post-Gadhafi Chaos End?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

Following Moammar Gadhafi’s ouster in 2011, the United Nations, after four years of anarchy, endorsed an interim Government of National Accord (GNA) to bring peace and stability to Libya.

Though it has, on paper, been recognized the legitimate authority in the country, the GNA, under Prime Minister Fayez Mustafa al-Sarraj, barely functions and many see it as an authority imposed on them by outside powers, and heavily influenced by Turkey and Qatar.

The heavily-armed militias, who have carved the capital into fiefdoms, dominate the government through their control of key ministries and elements of the financial system, through which they plunder the state’s coffers. as well as by in the capital.

Through a coalition called the Tripoli Protection Force, they command the banks and other prized real estate, like airports, ports, and government buildings.

At least one of them, the Special Deterrence Brigade, is also composed primarily of hard-line Islamists.

The tensions in Tripoli emboldened General Khalifa Haftar, who established a separate government in eastern Libya that does not recognize the GNA.

During Gadhafi’s dictatorship, the general, a former supporter of the regime, became a dissident living in the United States.

Amid the post-Gadhafi anarchy, in May 2014 Haftar led a group of disaffected army units and local tribes in a military assault on Islamists and jihadists in the eastern city of Benghazi.

Haftar is now the leader of the Libyan National Army (LNA) and head of the House of Representatives in his eastern capital, Tobruk.

Further operations by Haftar’s LNA has allowed him to assume control over almost two-thirds of the country and all its oilfields. 

The power struggle between the GNA and the LNA has left the country’s vast desert south a lawless region. 

Haftar in early April advanced further west to take Tripoli, saying he wanted to “cleanse” the country of “remaining terrorist groups.”

But Haftar’s troops have faltered, as apart from the Tripoli defenders, he also united the powerful militias from the western cities of Misrata and Zintan against him.

Haftar has the backing of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. They see the Haftar-led campaign as an effort to prevent Islamists from turning Libya into a base to pursue an agenda of conquest across the Middle East and North Africa.

The UAE and Egypt have helped Haftar with airstrikes and provided his forces with military equipment such as helicopters, even building an air base. UAE drones have mounted airstrikes on Tripoli.

On the other hand, Qatar and Turkey provide aid to the radical groups opposing him.  

Doha offers support to Ali Salabi, a Muslim Brotherhood member, and to Abdel Hakim Belhaj, chairman of Libya’s al-Watan Party.

Most European countries, including Libya’s former colonial ruler, Italy, continue to support the GNA. However, France, which has oil assets in eastern Libya, has provided military assistance in the past to Haftar, and is more tentative.

The Russian position is somewhat opaque. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said that a political settlement is the only solution to the Libyan crisis. 

But he also blamed the conflict on NATO for helping get rid of Gadhafi. The Russians consider NATO’s 2011 intervention to overthrow the dictator to have been an illegal act.

There is speculation that Moscow is quietly backing Haftar because it wants its navy to have access to the deep-water port of Tobruk, which is better positioned and equipped than Russia’s existing Mediterranean facility at Tartus in Syria, since it is on the doorstep of southern Europe.

Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump has endorsed Haftar’s campaign. The White House said the president recognized Haftar’s “significant role in fighting terrorism and securing Libya’s oil resources.” 

Ghassan Salame, the UN envoy for Libya, warned the Security Council on May 22 that the oil-rich nation “is on the verge of descending into a civil war.” 

More than 75,000 people have been driven from their homes in the latest fighting and 510 have been killed, according to the World Health Organization.

Libya seems able to sustain either anarchy or tyranny but nothing in between. It’s easier to depose a tyrant than to impose democracy.

One thing is certain: chastened by the consequences of their 2011 overthrow of Gadhafi, NATO countries will not intervene militarily this time.

Liberal Media's 'Right Thinkers' Suppress 'Wrong' Views at Their Own Peril

By Henry Srebrnik, Online article, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald 

The rise of U.S. President Donald Trump, Hungary’s prime minister Victor Orban, the right-wing Polish Law and Justice (PiS) ruling party, and Britain’s anti-EU Brexiteers, all falling under the rubric of “populism,” have unnerved establishment organs such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Globe and Mail, and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, among others.

They have become very shrill in “defending” a “free press” — as opposed to what they consider the “fake news” of anti-establishment “samizdats.”

But what they really mean is that they adhere to what French philosopher Michel Foucault called a country’s “truth regime,” that is, the ideologically acceptable views of its ruling elites.

In that sense, the Soviet flagship newspaper Pravda also was “free” — it could run debates within its pages about various policy differences within the nomenklatura, arguments about Marxist-Leninist theory and so forth.

But they could not challenge the overarching hegemonic power of the ruling communist circles. That remained off-limits.

The same holds true for “respectable” discourse in today’s Western mass media, which must adhere to a liberal-left political line and its pop slogans. In other words, there are certain parameters that define what is appropriate in public discourse.

Just as Pravda was not able to publish what communists would have considered “anti-socialist propaganda,” so today views not deemed “politically correct” are looked upon with disfavour.

At best, they are deemed “provocative,” “controversial” or “divisive,” and readers are alerted to be on the lookout so they may discount them should they appear in print.

Opinions not seen as worthy of serious consideration are often tagged with words such as “skeptics” (anti-European Union “Euroskeptics”), “deniers” (as in “climate-change deniers”), or “populists” (an elastic word that is applied to anyone the liberal media disparage).

Those who question policies around multiculturalism and immigration, and mantras such as “inclusion” or “diversity,” are written off or silenced, referred to as racists, xenophobes, and so on by those with the “proper” attitude. Such views are, to use religious language, heretical.

So today, many people increasingly distrust and resent the mainstream media. A major reason is that many journalists have crossed the line from reporting to advocacy.

They tend to share a uniform ideology, which originates in their university education, tightly-knit peer groups, and the influence of popular culture since the 1960s.

As a result, newsrooms are often out of touch with the communities they serve.

It gets worse.

Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced in November that the government was introducing $600 million in tax credits and incentives to help the media industry over the next five years.

A government-appointed panel would determine which organizations would be eligible.

“When the media, or media organizations, or in fact, individual journalist jobs are dependent on government subsidies, that is the antithesis​​ of a free and independent press,” remarked Conservative MP Peter Kent, a retired journalist himself.

This is bad news for journalists, and bad news for journalism. As people continue down the path of growing mistrust of the mainstream media, they will start looking for alternatives.

It also allows those like Trump, himself accused of spreading falsehoods, to portray the media that constantly attack him as themselves purveyors of “fake news.”

Trump in 2016, remember, ran against the entire political class, including the national political media.

It is time the journalistic mainstream addresses this problem. Motivated by good intentions, it has allowed a narrow orthodoxy to restrict debate about the burning questions that confront us today.