Far Right Gains in Germany

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

 

As was widely predicted, Angela Merkel has won a fourth term as Germany’s chancellor in the Sept. 24 Bundestag election. But it’s a victory that feels like a loss.

Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and its allies won less than 33 per cent of the vote, good for 246 seats, but sharply down from 41.5 per cent in 2013. It’s the lowest result for them since she became leader.

The Social Democrats, who had been in a “grand coalition” with the CDU, slumped to 20.5 per cent, a new post-war low, for 153 seats. They too came up short, their vote down from 25.7 per cent four years ago.

The populist Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) comfortably took third place in the election, ahead of parties like the Free Democrats, Alliance 90/the Greens, and the Left.

With almost 13 per cent of the vote, the AfD gained 94 seats in the 598-seat federal parliament. A far-right party has now entered parliament for the first time in seven decades.

Each person casts two votes in a Bundestag election, to allocate the 598 seats. Half of these seats are individual constituencies , where candidates win in first-past-the-post contests.

The remaining 299 are for party lists, allocated near-proportionately to the party vote share in each of Germany’s 16 federal states. 

To be included in this process, a party must achieve at least five per cent of the national vote. 

There has been some disarray in the AfD, and one of its most prominent figures, Frauke Petry, has left the caucus and announced she would sit as an independent.

She championed a course that aimed to make the party more amenable to moderate voters, while more radical party members insist the AfD’s job is to remain an opposition party outside the centrist politics practised by Merkel and Social Democratic leader Martin Schulz.

The AfD’s leading voices now are a study in opposites. Representing the far-right is 76-year-old Alexander Gauland, a critic of Petry’s. He is a lawyer and journalist who was a member of the Angela Merkel’s own Christian Democratic Union for 40 years. 

The more moderate faction will now be led by 38-year-old economist Alice Weidel, who lives at least part-time in Switzerland with her female partner and two children.

Weidel said Petry’s walkout was “hard to beat in terms of irresponsibility” and urged her to leave the party altogether “to prevent further harm.”

The AfD has vowed to shake the consensus politics of Germany. Gauland told party supporters after the results, referring to the CDU: “We will go after them. We will claim back our country.”

The AfD got its start in 2013 as a rebellion against European Union plans to bail out debt-stricken Greece. In that year’s German parliamentary vote, the AfD won 4.7 per cent, nearly meeting the five per cent threshold to win seats.

But it was the backlash against Merkel’s response to the 2015 refugee crisis that came to define the AfD’s image, and that pushed its support to 15 per cent or more in polls taken early last year. 

So, while the AfD did well in this election, its support is still slightly down from last year. That’s because Merkel stopped the continuing flow of migrants into the country, making it less of an issue, as things quieted down. 

Sensing that the anti-immigrant right was stealing her thunder, she tightened up asylum rules. The number of refugee arrivals plummeted and the crisis began to fade.

Following her victory, Merkel attacked “illicit migration” and said “internal and domestic security” would be one of the focuses of coming months.

Still, the more than 1.5 million already there won’t be going away. So for the anti-immigrant sector of the population, frustrations will remain.

The Social Democrats have now formally ruled out the possibility of a new “grand coalition” with the Christian Democrats, in order to prevent the AfD from becoming the official opposition.

Indeed, Schulz told Merkel on live television that she was the election’s “biggest loser.” 

He’s right. 

Low unemployment and a strong economy were apparently not enough for voters to forgive Merkel for her handling of the refugee crisis.

Should the economy start to lose steam, this might propel the AfD to even better results in 2021.

Yemen's Civil War "Humanitarian Crisis"

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

 

For two and one half years, Yemen has been torn by a civil war in which its internationally-recognized government of President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, backed by a coalition supported by the United States and Great Britain, is trying to roll back the Iranian-aligned Houthi rebels who control most of northern Yemen, including the capital Sana’a.

The Saudi-led coalition intervened in Yemen in March 2015 and includes Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Morocco, Senegal and Sudan.

The Huthis belong to a branch of Shi’a Islam and are allied with supporters of Yemen’s former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The anti-Huthi forces in the Saudi Arabian-led coalition are mainly Sunni.

Today the country remains split between Houthi-controlled territory in the west and land controlled by the government and its Arab backers in the south and east. Peace talks brokered by the United Nations have stalled, and none of the warring parties has indicated much willingness to back down. 

As well, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula controls some of southern Yemen, including areas of Shabwa and Hadhramaut provinces. Earlier this summer, a government offensive in Shabwa, with help from United Arab Emirates and American forces, has tried to drive the militants out. 

The war against the Houthis has killed more than 12,000 people, displaced more than three million and ruined much of the impoverished country’s infrastructure. Public and private services have all but disappeared. 

Repeated bombings have crippled bridges, hospitals and factories. The Saudi-led coalition has also kept the international airport in Sana’a closed to civilian air traffic for more than a year. 

The fighting has left 20.7 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, including 10.3 million who require immediate help to save or sustain their lives. More than 17 million people in Yemen, 60 per cent of its total population, are currently food-insecure.

On July 2, the World Health Organization reported a cholera outbreak in the country. It has killed more than 2,000 people and infected 540,000, one of the world’s largest outbreaks in the past 50 years.

Shortages in medicines and supplies are persistent and widespread and 30,000 health workers, including doctors, have not been paid salaries in nearly a year. There are no doctors left in 49 out of 276 districts. 

“Thousands of people are sick, but there are not enough hospitals, not enough medicines, not enough clean water,” stated WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

“With the malnutrition we have among children, if they get diarrhea, they are not going to get better,” remarked Meritxell Relano, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) representative in Yemen.

Apart from disease, children are also being killed by the bombing. Human Rights Watch released a study Sept. 12 documenting the deaths of 26 children killed in five airstrikes since June. The group said that despite promises by the coalition to abide by international law, the airstrikes have failed to do that.

“The Saudi-led coalition’s repeated promises to conduct its air strikes lawfully are not sparing Yemeni children from unlawful attacks,” stated Sarah Leah Whitson, its Middle East director. 

“Yemen is a humanitarian disaster of really epic proportions,” added Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth. “What is striking to me is the incongruity between the severity of the disaster and the weakness of the response by the UN Human Rights Council.”

Meanwhile, Canada and the Netherlands are spearheading a bid to push a resolution through the UN Human Rights Council this month on creating an International Commission of Inquiry to investigate abuses in Yemen.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, has urged it to order such a probe.

Chinese Agricultural Aid Programs in Africa

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

During the Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in 2006, the Chinese government pledged to build 10 agricultural technology demonstration centres, or ATDCs, across Africa. Funded by China’s Ministry of Commerce, the figure has now risen to 25.

The mission of these centres is to modernize African farming while also giving Chinese companies a foothold in new markets. 

Chinese commitments to African agriculture are growing fast; they increased almost five-fold between 2000 and 2013, to more than $300 million, according to estimates by AidData, which tracks development funds around the world. 

Each year around 10,000 African officials are trained in China, and agriculture and development policy are prominent.

The ATDCs “highlight the Chinese approach to development cooperation that does not separate aid, diplomacy, and commerce,” according to Ian Scoones, who researches agriculture and development at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in England.

They provide alternative development pathways for agricultural technology cooperation in Africa, and a very different vision to established western bilateral aid programs.

Why are African countries interested in partnering with China in agricultural development? 

Isaac Lawther, who teaches in the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo, maintains that they seek to partner with China because Beijing can offer intermediary agricultural technologies that enable them to implement aspects of their own domestic agricultural development plans. 

At the ATDC in Huye, Rwanda, Chinese agronomists teach local farmers the benefits of mushrooms. They grow quickly, even in bad soil, and don’t take a lot of room. They are rich in protein and other nutrients. 

At the end of five days of training, the students take a cooking class where they learn how to make things with mushrooms, which have not been part of the traditional diet of most Rwandans.

“Western countries donate money; this is what we do,” Hu Yingping, director of the centre, told Lily Kuo, a reporter for the digital global business news publication Quartz, last year. Hu and his team have already trained more than 1,000 Rwandans.

Eventually these mushrooms will be sold to surrounding African countries as well as Europe and China. And the companies selling them will be Chinese, or Rwandese companies working with Chinese partners.

The ATDC in Ethiopia is located at Ginchi. Chinese staff workers sent by the Guangxi Bagui Agricultural Technology Co. work together with Ambo University, the Ambo Agricultural Science and Technology Institution and other organizations.

The Ethiopian centre is teaching agricultural mechanization, soil improvement, water conservancy irrigation, seedling cultivation, and fish farming.

In 2016 Debont Co. Ltd., the Chinese agricultural company running the five year old Gwebi ATDC, signed an agreement with the Zimbabwe Ministry of Agriculture in Harare to set up eight satellite agricultural demonstration centres and experimental farms across the country for the sharing of farming expertise and providing training to locals.

An estimated 3,000 hectares of land would be cultivated by local farmers trained by Chinese and equipped with farming facilities including the irrigation system and made-in-China tractors. Some 10,000 local farmers wil be trained to use the farming facilities.

“We will promote the use of solar-powered irrigation facilities as a way to help local farmers cushion the impact of abnormal weather patterns, so they can make the migration to modern farming which relies less heavily on weather,” Debont’s project manager Yu Xianzeng explained.

In Tanzania, Chinese experts from the ATDC centre located in Dakawa, have been carrying out collaboration trials in the field of rice and maize, in partnership with scientists from Tanzania's Ministry of Agriculture, Food Security and Cooperatives. 

Most of its agricultural experts come from China’s Chongqing Academy of Agricultural Science.

Dakawa is one of Tanzania’s major areas of rice production. The Chinese farming techniques have resulted in a 20 to 30 per cent improvement in productivity for the local rice varieties, compared to traditional methods. 

The ATDC’s manager, Professor Chen Hualin, added that the Chinese rice varieties not only have high yields, but also have good tastes.

These agricultural centres, then, serve a dual purpose, observed Kuo: they promote China’s image in Africa as a partner that encourages self-reliance, while also providing a training ground for Chinese companies looking to expand.

While the overall direct impact on agricultural development in Africa still appears limited, the training programs build relationships with African officials, and so project “soft power” in Chinese foreign policy.

The NDP is a Fading Force in Quebec

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

 

The New Democrats are in the final stretch of electing a new leader, following the resignation of Tom Mulcair after their disastrous showing in the 2015 federal election.

Under his leadership, the party dropped from its 2011 total of 103 seats, 59 of them from Quebec, to 44 seats, just 16 from that province.

What caused such a stunning rise, and precipitous decline – one that seems likely to continue? 

In 2011, when Jack Layton, originally a Quebecer, was leader of the New Democratic Party, Quebec nationalists in effect took over the NDP. 

It became a vehicle for them to support Layton’s Sherbrooke Declaration, the NDP document that stated that the party would recognize a “majority decision (50 per cent plus one) of Quebec people in the event of a referendum on the political status of Quebec.”

For that reason, and to help defeat the detested Stephen Harper, they were willing to desert their long-time home, the Bloc Québécois.

But they have no real allegiance to the NDP. Neither under Layton nor another Québécois, Mulcair, did they “convert” to federalism. Their first loyalty is to the Quebec nation, and certainly not to Canadian “multiculturalism.”

Three of the contenders, Charlie Angus, Niki Ashton, and Jagmeet Singh, are all, from the vantage point of Quebec nationalists, “anglophones” or “English Canadians,” regardless of their ethnic background, and they all hold views antithetical to Quebecois nationalists, particularly when it comes to immigration and the politics surrounding Muslims.

The three disapprove of a bill currently under debate in Quebec’s National Assembly that would prevent individuals wearing face coverings from dispensing or receiving public services –which would, especially, impact Muslim women who wear niqabs or burkas.

For “Charter” Canadians elsewhere in the country, it is a question of fundamental religious accommodation and minority rights.

But in Quebec, it’s a different matter. Caught in the middle, the Quebec wing of the party is rapidly disintegrating. 

MP Pierre Nantel told the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir recently that he, as well as others in the caucus, might prefer to sit as independents rather than to serve in the House of Commons under any of these three.

He also remarked at the final NDP debate that he didn't think Singh, a Sikh who represents one of southern Ontario’s most diverse ridings in the provincial assembly, could connect effectively with Quebec voters because he wears a turban.

The only Quebec politician running for the federal leadership, MP Guy Caron, has said that he would respect the will of the National Assembly on the matter, adding that there is a political consensus among leading right- and left-wing parties in the province when it comes to the open display of religion.

He insists that the party must recognize the province’s distinct history and its “authority” to legislate on issues of secularism, or risk becoming irrelevant in francophone ridings outside greater Montreal.

Quebec and Canada remain very far apart when it comes to identity politics. The Québécois as has been the case throughout their history, worry that in an increasingly diverse Canada, they stand to lose their language and culture.

But this is something that other Canadians have been told by their political elites, in no uncertain terms, not to fear, lest they be called out as “racists” and shunned in polite society.

The NDP, stuck in the middle, will probably revert to being what it always was – a left-of-centre party of “progressive” Canadians, of some consequence in the rest of the country but virtually none in Quebec. And the Bloc will welcome many prodigal Québécois back to their political home.

Will Increase in Religious Observance Lead to More Violence?

By Henry Srebrnik, Canadian Jewish News

If people become less religious, does it follow that crime will skyrocket, violence will rise, and life will degenerate into immorality and depravity? Many people think so, but is it true?

While most American politicians maintain that robust civil societies can only exist on a strong bedrock of religious values, statistics don’t confirm this. In actual fact, those societies today that are the most religious – in places like Nigeria, Uganda, the Philippines, Pakistan, Morocco and Egypt -- tend to have the highest violent crime rates. 

Meanwhile those societies in which faith and church attendance are the weakest (the most secular societies today include Sweden, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Japan, Britain and France) tend to have the lowest crime rates. Generally speaking, religion is more important to people in poorer countries than in richer ones, though the United States bucks the trend with the highest percentage of people who are religious out of all economically advanced nations.

The Global Peace Index, an annual report that provides a comprehensive analysis on the state of peace in the world and is issued by the Institute of Economics and Peace based in Sydney, Australia, lists the degree of peace in the world’s nations, based on the level of safety and security in society, the extent of domestic or international conflict, and the degree of militarisation.

According to the 2017 Index, the 10 most peaceful nations are Iceland, New Zealand, Portugal, Austria, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Canada, Switzerland, and (tied for tenth) Ireland and Japan. All are largely secular societies, with virtually no religious conflict.

By contrast, Syria is the least peaceful country in the world for the fifth year running, followed by Afghanistan, Iraq, South Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, the Central African Republic and Ukraine. They all have very severe ethno-religious divisions.

True, there are multiple and complex factors, including economics, geography, politics, and history, that are involved in determining levels of violence in states. But it is clear that a strong or increased presence of secularism isn’t as damaging a threat as many claim it to be. And as political theorist Michael Walzer notes in his 2015 book The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions, many noble, secular, and even socialist projects of national emancipation have foundered on the rocky shores of religious extremism.

“Why,” he asks, “have the leaders and militants of secular liberation not been able to consolidate their achievement and reproduce themselves in successive generations?” Indeed, why were they replaced by those who look backward rather than forward? One reason: they did not understand religious passion. This perhaps explains why countries like Bangladesh, India, Israel and Myanmar have been reverting to religiously based national narratives.

The Changing Global Religious Landscape, a study released by the Pew Research Center earlier this year, projects that, with the notable exception of Buddhism, all of the world’s major religious groups are poised for at least some growth in absolute numbers in the coming decades. By 2050, Christians and Muslims will make up, between them, more than 60 per cent of the world’s population, with Islam as the fastest growing faith.

So the study appears to indicate that sectarianism, confessional identities, and loyalties have not been superseded by globalization. 

And it may follow that if religion does correlate positively with violence, we can expect a more volatile world in the coming decades, because the world is becoming more religious. In this brave new world, highly secularized countries may tend to fare the best, while those nations with the highest rates of religiosity will be the most problem-ridden when it comes to violent crime and corruption.

Attacks on Myanmar's Rohingya May Lead to Wider Conflict

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

In Myanmar (Burma), Buddhist animosity towards an ethno-religious Bengali Muslim minority, the Rohingya, has led to massive violence.

The Rohingya, who number some 1.3 million people, less than five per cent of the country’s population, live mainly in Myanmar’s far western Rakhine State, adjacent to neighbouring Muslim Bangladesh. 

Most were stripped of their citizenship under a 1982 law enacted by the military junta that used to rule Myanmar, and they have suffered decades of repression under the country’s Buddhist majority.

Indeed, the term “Rohingya” is itself highly contested, because it is perceived as a claim of indigenous ethnic status by a community most Buddhists regard as immigrants from Bangladesh, and who link their arrival to the first British incursion into Burma in 1824. They therefore prefer to refer to the Rohingya as “Bengali.”

“Location and lack of integration have helped to fuel views of Rohingya as illegal immigrants and made them more susceptible to false portrayals as a rapidly growing existential threat to Buddhist Burmese culture,” stated Dan Sullivan, a senior advocate at the humanitarian organization Refugees International.

In Southeast Asia, both Western and internal colonialism have been instrumental in the legal and political construction of indigeneity and its application to specific populations, according to Oona Paredes, a cultural anthropoogist at the National University of Singapore. 

Indigenous concepts of indigeneity typically diverge widely from state definitions, especially where territorial sovereignty is at stake, she contends.

The Rohingya population has seen its rights progressively eroded, and its gradual marginalisation from social and political life. This has become particularly acute since 2012 anti-Muslim violence in Rakhine State. 

Disenfranchisement prior to the 2015 elections severed the last link with politics and means of influence, and an increasing sense of despair has driven more people to consider a violent response.

On Aug 25, militants from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked police posts and an army base, killing more than a dozen. 

In response, the Myanmar military began destroying entire villages, aided by Buddhist vigilantes supportive of the extremist 969 Movement. 

The stream of refugees has crossed into Bangladesh, which is itself poor and overcrowded. Around 400,000 Rohingya fleeing violence already lived there before the exodus. This new influx could soon add at least another 400,000 refugees.

The ARSA was formed from remnants of earlier movements, including the Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front (ARIF) and the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO). Arakan is the former name of Rakhine State.

The insurgents are led by a committee of Rohingya émigrés in Saudi Arabia and commanded on the ground by Rohingya with international training and experience in modern guerrilla war tactics. They enjoy considerable sympathy and backing from Muslims in northern Rakhine State.

Muslim states are taking notice. Protesters in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, demanded that their government put pressure on Myanmar.

Foreign Minister Retno Marsud visited Myanmar and urged Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the civilian leader of the country, to end the ongoing violence. 

But, though the country’s nominal leader, she has little control over the military. The armed forces are run by Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing.

In the Russian republic of Chechnya, tens of thousands protested against what its leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, called Myanmar’s “genocide” against the persecuted Rohingya minority.

A senior leader of al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch, Khaled Batarfi, called on Muslims to support their Rohingya Muslim brethren against the “enemies of Allah.”

Suu Kyi has come under fire for failing to speak out against the mass killings and displacement of Rohingya, particularly given her previous image as a champion of human rights.

Now she has gone further. In a telephone call with Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan, she claimed that Myanmar is the victim of “misinformation” that was being distributed to benefit “terrorists.” She added that her government was fighting to ensure “terrorism” didn't spread.

Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her decades-long campaign against Myanmar’s military junta, but now many critics have called for it to be revoked.

But liberal globalists conflate two different things. Perhaps her apparently inconsistent behaviour can better be understood, not through the prism of human rights, but that of ethnic conflict – a very different, and uglier, matter.

In her battle against the military that ruled the country, she was fighting what was in effect an internal struggle within the Buddhist Burman majority, which considers itself the “owners” of the country, their “homeland.” 

But the Rohingya are to her a “foreign” community, especially “dangerous “as their kith and kin live in neighbouring Bangladesh. She probably to some extent agrees with the narrative propounded by the nationalists. Therein lies the problem.

It Wasn't a Hopeless Dream After All

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

 

May 3 is Poland’s national day. The holiday celebrates the Constitution of May 3, 1791, promulgated to save what was left of Polish independence following the two partitions of 1772 and 1793. 

It came too late, and in 1795, with the third partition, Poland disappeared from the map, divided up by Austria, Russia and Prussia until after the First World War.

It was once again the country’s national day after 1919, until Poland was attacked and again partitioned, between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, in 1939.

Following the defeat, much of the Polish Army was evacuated to France and then Britain, where it was reconstructed as the Polish Armed Forces in the West, under the command of General Wladyslaw Sikorski. 

Following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, other Polish soldiers, who had ended up as prisoners in Russia, were organized in 1941 into the Polish Armed Forces in the East, under General Wladysław Anders. They made their way westwards to fight under British command.

The post-war pro-Soviet Communist regime replaced the May 3 holiday with July 22, commemorating the 1944 Manifesto of the Polish Committee of National Liberation, which established the Moscow-dominated regime after 1945. 

This effectively delegitimized the pre-war republic, whose government-in-exile had operated from London during the Second World War.

The Poles who now settled in western countries refused to recognize the Polish People’s Republic and continued to observe the May 3 date, but to the rest of the world, this was forgotten.

In 1966-1967, after graduating from McGill University, I worked as a reporter in the Montreal bureau of the Canadian Press.

On April 30, 1966, the Sunday before May 3 of that year, a group of Polish war veterans, who had served with the Allied forces during the war, gathered at the Cenotaph in Dominion Square to honour the pre-Communist state.

I covered the event, which to me seemed like a quixotic gesture by people living in the past. Communist states occupied a third of the globe and seemed to be going from strength to strength, under the tutelage of Moscow. 

It seemed that, at the very least, they would remain a force to be reckoned with. And Poland was Moscow’s most important satellite state and crucial to its geopolitical and military survival.

We need to remember that for four decades, competition between the Warsaw Pact and NATO shaped international relations. The Cold War was our reality, and a large percentage of the intelligentsia in the west supported these Communist regimes. 

So this memorial service seemed somewhat pitiful to me. The last sentence of my article called it a gathering of people passed over by history, reliving their “lost causes and hopeless dreams.”

The story went out over the Canadian Press wire but I never did learn if or where it was published by one of the many newspapers that subscribed to the CP. In those days, there was no internet, no “on-line” publications, and no one in the CP office kept track of such things. 

It’s a shame I have no copy of it.

As we know, the Communist regimes in eastern Europe imploded in the late 1980s. In Poland, round-table talks among the Solidarity trade union, the Communists and the Roman Catholic Church paved the way for the fall of Communism. 

Partially free elections in 1989 saw a landslide win for Solidarity, and Tadeusz Mazowiecki became the first non-Communist Polish prime minister since 1946. Soon enough, the entire Communist apparatus was dismantled.

Poland had regained its independence and May 3 is once again the country’s national day. I remembered my article when I spent three weeks in Poland earlier this year.

As the song says, “you never can tell.” I hope some of those old soldiers lived to see that day.

American Democracy in the Age of Trump

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

 

Everyone knows that Donald Trump is a narcissistic boor, and has been so forever. Fine. So no one needs be surprised. That isn’t even the problem. 

The real issue is this: How did the United States get to a confluence of factors that led to his election as president, a most improbable, if not astounding, outcome? It clearly represents a meltdown of the American political system.

“Donald Trump’s election was possible because both political parties mistakenly decided several decades ago to have binding primary elections determine presidential nominations,” argued Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University near Boston, in his July 2 New York Times  article, “The Problem with Participatory Democracy is the Participants.”

Rather than having party leaders vet candidates for competency and sanity, as most democracies do, “our parties turned the nomination process into a reality show in which the closest things to vetting are a clap-o-meter and a tracking poll.”

This is true, but then who gets to “vet” the party leaders? Are they somehow more competent than the general electorate? They may be determined people with their own hobbyhorses who have come up the ranks from municipal and state contests, which most voters care little about. 

Unlike for most “jobs,” there are no criteria for those who get these positions. After all, that’s democracy. Otherwise, we would need specialists, philosopher-kings, or a mandarinate, to govern us. Maybe even political scientists!

What democracy really needs is a well informed population that can tell the difference between propaganda and facts, between politicians who are just hungry for power and those who genuinely wish to dedicate their lives to improving the country for the common good.

So the real question should be this: how did the Democratic Party become so alienated from the white lower-middle and working class, such that it became an alliance of liberal oligarchs and so-called ethnic and sexual “minorities?”

Why was it so beholden to big money that it was able to beat back any attempts (not just those of Bernie Sanders) to prevent the nomination of an utterly mendacious Hillary Clinton -- arguably the only person in America who could have lost to Trump? That’s what we need to ask ourselves. 

After all, as Globe and Mail columnist Lawrence Martin in his Aug. 30 article “Clinton Should do Her Party a Favour – And Vanish,” remarked, “she can't live with the embarrassment of losing to a carnival barker.” 

Will the Democratic Party increasingly be one representing mainly this collection of identity groups, while Republicans become a “white” party? If so, then elections will be, as Donald Horowitz so aptly put it in his book Ethnic Groups in Conflict, a “census count.” 

Welcome to the way they work in places like Northern Ireland, Fiji, Guyana, Kenya, Ukraine, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sri Lanka, and dozens of other deeply divided plural (not “multicultural”) states.

In these countries, politics is a zero-sum, no-holds-barred, game, where the outcome is total victory for one side and total defeat for the over – often a prelude to violence. Let’s hope America does not continue to slide down that path.

Israel Today is a Country of Progress and Problems

By Henry Srebrnik, [Sumerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

 

In November I will be visiting Israel, a country I will barely recognize from the time I was last there, in the spring of 1977. 

I had previously been to Israel in 1967, as a volunteer on a kibbutz; in 1972, when I spent a summer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; and 1976, while a PhD student in England.

Back then, Israel was a quasi-socialist nation; it had been governed continuously by the left-of-centre Labour Party ever since it was founded in 1948.

Ten years after the 1967 Middle East war, it ruled over a restive Arab population in the West Bank and Gaza (as well as much of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Syria’s Golan Heights). 

The first Palestinian intifada was still a decade away, and the Oslo Accords granting Palestinians a measure of autonomy a further six years down the road. 

The movement of Jewish settlers into the areas beyond the 1949 armistice lines that served as Israel’s borders was still in its infancy. 

No one talked of a “two-state” solution – indeed, it was illegal for Israelis to have any contact with the Palestine Liberation Organization, at the time headquartered in Lebanon.

Things have, of course, changed utterly, beginning that very year. On May 17, Menachem Begin’s hawkish Likud Party won the country’s election, ending Labour’s rule. 

In November, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made a surprise visit to Jerusalem, beginning the process that would eventually culminate in a peace treaty with Israel, in return for Egypt regaining the entire Sinai. 

Sadat also called for the establishment of a Palestinian state. But he would be assassinated by extremists in Egypt four years later.

Inspired by the 1967 capture of the Old City of Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank of the Jordan -- the area known in biblical times as Judea and Samaria -- Israel experienced a rise in religiously-based nationalism.

The settlement of these areas by religious Zionists, who had been marginalized in pre-1967 Israel by the secular majority, now began in earnest.

The Jewish settlements in Gaza and on the West Bank, often in close proximity to Arab villages and towns, became a point of contention between Arabs and Jews. 

Among the most powerful political voices in the movement against territorial compromise was the messianic group known as Gush Emunim (the Bloc of the Faithful). 

Successive Israeli governments seemed paralyzed as more settlers moved across the old pre-1967 boundary known as the “Green Line.” 

However, then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did force the withdrawal of settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005.

A total of 8,000 Jewish settlers from all 21 settlements there were relocated, an action that proved quite traumatic. Hamas now rules that territory.

Today, the Labour Party is a shadow of its former self. In 2015 Israeli voters re-elected Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud for a fourth term. The public seemed to be impressed by his acceptance of expanding Jewish settlements in the disputed territories.

Three back-to-back victories of Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition shows how the majority of the country has turned towards the right. 

An annual survey carried out by Israel Democracy Institute confirms this development. Some 49 per cent of young Israelis describe their political views as right-wing, while 27 per cent view themselves as centrist and about 16 per cent say they lean towards the left.

An overwhelming majority of the country’s youth is now pessimistic about the chances of success of the Israel-Palestine peace process. 

By the end of 2016, the West Bank Jewish population, living in some 130 settlements, rose to 420,000, excluding East Jerusalem, where there were more than 200,000 Jews. In addition, there are dozens more outposts that are not officially recognized by the authorities. 

Israel’s population stands at 8,680,000. Jews in the country make up 74.4 per cent of all residents, while 1.8 million Arab citizens account for 20.8 per cent. 

Altogether, approximately 13 per cent of Israel’s Jewish population of 6,484,000 now lives beyond the 1949 borders. So, of course, do some two million Palestinians.

At an event August 28 celebrating 50 years of settlements in the West Bank, Netanyahu, now Israel’s second-longest serving prime minister, pledged that his government will never evacuate another settlement. 

“We are here to stay forever. There will be no more uprooting of settlements in the land of Israel.” The prime minister told his listeners that “this is the inheritance of our ancestors. This is our land.”

Diplomats and academics still hoping to find a way to resolve the issues standing in the way of Israeli-Palestinian peace clearly have their work cut out for them.

The Seemingly Endless Afghanistan Conflict

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

 

On Aug. 21 U.S. President Donald Trump put forward a plan for resolving the nearly 16-year-old conflict in Afghanistan, but he declined to specify the conditions by which he would judge the success of their mission there.

Trump declared that a rapid exit from the war-torn nation would leave a major power vacuum that would create a new safe haven for terrorists.

He is expected to send roughly 4,000 additional U.S. troops to the country, a recommendation made by the Pentagon. The decision will add billions of dollars a year to the already-towering war costs, which have topped $1 trillion in Afghanistan alone over the past 16 years.

The U.S. Agency for International Development has also spent tens of billions of dollars on projects in Afghanistan, many of which have failed.

With this announcement, Trump deepened American involvement in a military mission that has confounded his predecessors and that he once called futile. Remember, Trump campaigned for the presidency promising to extricate the United States from foreign conflicts.

An estimated 8,400 American troops remain stationed in Afghanistan, most assigned to an approximately 13,000-strong international force that is training and advising the Afghan military. 

About 2,000 American troops are carrying out counterterrorism missions along with Afghan forces against groups like the Islamic State’s Afghan affiliate, the Islamic State in Khorasan.

But the regular Afghan police and army have been disappointing. The police are corrupt and ineffective, while the army is intent on staying in fixed positions rather than taking the fight to the Taliban. Trying to make soldiers out of Afghan recruits hasn’t worked.

The Bush administration claimed to have defeated the Taliban seven times from 2002 through 2005. So much for that! The country’s combination of state collapse, civil conflict, and ethnic disintegration has created a situation that may be beyond outside resolution.

Afghanistan’s ethnic diversity, though once stable, has provided another set of fault lines along which the country has atomized. Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Baloch, and  Hazara are among the 14 groups listed in the country’s constitution.

Amid collapse, communities have coalesced around local ethnic groups. As they fight for control, their divisions harden. This has deepened violence and created barriers to peace.

The U.S. has tried everything since 2001. Nation-building, large scale operations, troop surges, diplomacy, requests for help from neighbouring Pakistan – you name it. Yet the Taliban is stronger than ever, and Trump won’t change that.

The new approach appears to be a victory for Defence Secretary James Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, who urged Trump to take a more aggressive effort to fight terrorist groups in Afghanistan. Both are military men.

If war is too important to be left to the generals, as the saying goes, obviously Trump hasn’t received the memo. In fact, the military seems to be taking an independent stance these days.

The top officers of the Navy, the Marines, the Army, the Air Force, and the National Guard came out after the violence in Charlottesville last month to say that racism, hatred and extremism had no place in the military, and ran counter to its most important values. 

Though they did not refer specifically to Trump, the sharp contrast with some of the president’s comments was unusual.

They were reinforced by General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said it had been crucial that they speak out.

“They were speaking directly to the force and to the American people,” he said, “to remind them of the values for which we stand in the U.S. military.”

Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who was a national security official in the George W. Bush White House, said Trump was wise to take the hint, especially as he made a difficult case for increased involvement in Afghanistan.

Flags Are Iconic Symbols of Identity

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Canadians old enough to remember the great flag debate of the 1960s that gave us the Maple Leaf flag in 1965 know about the fierce debates that took place at the time.

The new symbol replaced a colonial-era banner, the so-called Red Ensign. Such British ensign flags were standard throughout the old British Empire, differing only in their background colour and their coats of arms. 

As former British colonies gained their independence, with most becoming republics, these flags were replaced by entirely new versions. 

But in the South Pacific four old ones have been retained, two in the old British dominions of Australia and New Zealand and another two, surprisingly, in the former colonies of Fiji and Tuvalu in Oceania.

The small South Pacific microstate of Tuvalu, formerly part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands protectorate, dropped the Union Flag (the proper name for the so-called Union Jack) from its flag in January 1996 but reinstated it 15 months later, after Bikenibeu Paeniu was elected prime minister.

It is again a light blue ensign with nine yellow five-pointed stars on the outer half of the flag, representing the islands of the archipelago.

“It’s the flag our people wanted in the first place,” he explained at the time. “The new flag was never taken to the people for their views. The flag is our symbol, a symbol of our unity.”

In Fiji, Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama’s plans to replace the ensign flag retained at independence in 1970 met with considerable opposition. 

The flag’s blue field incorporates the Union Jack at the upper left. The flag’s coat of arms includes a British lion, as well as panels displaying a palm tree, sugar cane, bananas and dove of peace.

In his New Year's Day address in 2013, Bainimarama announced that the flag would soon be changed so as “to reflect a sense of national renewal, to reinforce a new Fijian identity and a new confidence in being Fijian on the global stage.”

He announced that a national competition to design the new flag would be held, and over 2,000 designs were then submitted, before a final shortlist of 23 was selected by Fiji’s National Flag Committee in June 2015.

After much acrimonious debate, though, the plan was shelved in August 2016. Bainimarama maintained that, while he remained convinced personally that the country needed to replace its ensign with a genuinely indigenous expression of Fiji’s present and its future, it had become apparent that the flag should not be changed for the foreseeable future.

New Zealanders, too, after two years viewing more than ten thousand other options, voted to keep their current flag in March 2016, despite the assertion by then Prime Minister John Key that it symbolized a colonial era whose time had passed.

Four of the five final options to replace the old flag, which had been adopted in 1902, featured variations on a silver fern, a plant of symbolic importance in the native Maori culture. 

Supporters of a new flag called the blue ensign, with Britain’s Union Jack in the upper left corner and the four stars of the Southern Cross, a constellation in the southern hemisphere, in red on the right, an anachronism. 

But those opposed to changing the flag argued that soldiers had died fighting for it and that it represented history and tradition.

In a referendum, voters were asked to choose between the so-called Silver Fern Flag or the ensign. They voted by a majority of 56.7 per cent to keep the old flag.

The Australian ensign has been in use since 1901. The Union Jack is on the upper left, above the seven-pointed Federation Star in the lower corner and to the left of the Southern Cross.

Australian nationalists, who have fought to turn the country into a republic, would prefer a new flag as well. They have so far been unsuccessful on both counts.

The primary arguments for keeping the flag cite historic precedence, while those for changing the flag are based around the idea that it does not depict Australia’s status as an independent and multicultural nation of both indigenous and British heritage.

A survey conducted last year found that 64 per cent of respondents believed the Australian flag should change. The most popular proposed alternative was the “Southern Horizon” flag, which removes the Union Jack, but retains the Southern Cross and Federation Star.

As Tim Marshall points out in his book A Flag Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of National Symbols, “flags are an emotive subject.” They provide a sense of cohesion – though not always, as these examples indicate.

American and Israeli Jews Are Drifting Apart

By Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press
 

A major schism is looming between the two largest Jewish communities in the world, those in Israel and the United States. Together they constitute some 85 per cent of the world’s Jews. For a number of political, religious and sociological reasons, they are drifting apart.

It isn’t the first time this has happened in the long history of the Jewish people. After all, arguably the most significant split occurred almost two millennia ago, between the followers of Jesus and those who rejected him as the messiah.

In our time, the future of world Jewry will likely be shaped by these two largest populations, and by the relationship between them. For that reason alone, the waning of attachment to Israel among American Jews, especially but not exclusively younger American Jews, has rightly become a matter of concern.

Some blame the growing estrangement on Israel, others on the American Jewish community.

Today, while most American Jews embrace a political theology of prophetic Judaism and exhibit consider themselves cosmopolitans, they see in Israel an ethno-national state” moving in an increasingly illiberal direction.

Others point the finger at American Jewry, noting the loosening of once-powerful communal bonds, as evidenced by the high rates of intermarriage and the move away from Jewish religious affiliation, as well as the erosion of communal memory, especially of the Holocaust era and the history of the state of Israel itself.

Increasingly, writes Professor Daniel Gordis of Shalem College in Jerusalem, author of the 2016 book Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn, the orientation of many American Jews toward Israel is one neither of instinctive loyalty nor of pride but of indifference, embarrassment, or hostility.

The findings of a 2013 Pew Center study, A Portrait of Jewish Americans, confirms this: While nearly 40 per cent of American Jews aged sixty-five or older continue to feel “very attached” to Israel, only 25 per cent of eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds feel the same way. 

At the opposite pole, of those not “very attached” to Israel, the gap is even wider, with twice as many younger as older Jews claiming that status.

Political views are another important variable. Half of Republican Jewish respondents describe themselves as “very attached” to Israel, but only a quarter of Jewish Democrats do so. On the other hand, while only two per cent of Jewish Republicans describe themselves as “not at all attached” to Israel, among Jewish Democrats the number is fully five times higher.

Along the religious spectrum, the same holds true: while 77 per cent of Modern Orthodox Jews describe themselves as “very attached” to Israel, on the left, the comparable figures are drastically lower: only 24 per cent for Reform Jews and 16 percent for those claiming no denominational affiliation.

The Reform movement, in particular, is a blend of liberal theology and progressive politics; one wag parodied it as “the Democratic Party with holidays thrown in.”

In brief, concludes Gordis, the group growing most disconnected from Israel is composed of younger, politically more left-leaning, and religiously less traditionalist American Jews.

For them, not just Israel’s policies, but its very essence is objectionable. As opposed to American universalism, ethnic particularism is at the core of Israel’s very reason for being. And the public square, rather than being religious neutral, is in Israel suffused with Judaism, something even most non-observant Israeli Jews accept.

Farther on the left, intersectionality is the dogma of the progressive left. In theory, it’s the notion that every form of social oppression is linked to every other social oppression. 

You might imagine that the Jewish people, age-old victims of anti-Semitism, might also be seen as victims.

You would be wrong. Why? Because of Israel, which progressives see only as a vehicle for oppression of the Palestinians.

 ”For progressive American Jews,” observed Barry Weiss in the June 27 New York Times, intersectionality forces a choice.  “Do you side with the oppressed or with the oppressor?”

Global Strategy Group fielded an online national survey of  Jewish college students at 282 different colleges from Sept. 23 to Oct. 31, 2016.

The research found that 57 per cent of Jewish college students support the Jewish state, but that is a decline of fully a third from 84 per cent in 2010.

So the chasm will continue to widen. After all, as the American-born Israeli novelist Hillel Halkin reminds us, the two populations live in different worlds, speak different languages, face different problems, have different life experiences, and adhere to different values. 

For Israelis, their Jewishness, notes the secular Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua, is something fixed and permanent, not something transient and only mobilized when convenient, increasingly the case for American Jews. 

When the Israeli cabinet recently froze a plan to designate a space for mixed-sex prayer at the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, in Jerusalem, a great many saw in this a rejection of American Jewry by the Jewish state. But the rejection may be mutual.