Are Trump, Sanders Channeling Roosevelts?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the two “outsiders” contesting, respectively, the Republican and Democratic nominations for the American presidency, each seem to be channeling a President Roosevelt – just different ones.

Trump is an economic nationalist who advocates a robust and nativist foreign policy – a platform very similar to that of President Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican in the White House from 1901 to1908.

Sanders wants to recreate the liberalism of Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1930s “New Deal.”

The multimillionaire Trump comes out of the early 20^th century “titans of industry” tradition, while the socialist Sanders is the child of the 1960s New Left, which was itself an attempt to recreate earlier American revolutionary movements for economic, racial and social change. 

While at the University of Chicago, Sanders joined radical student organizations like the Young People’s Socialist League and the Congress of Racial Equality.

Both New York-born men are secular and neither makes much use of religious imagery. 

Trump battles socially conservative evangelical Christians like Ted Cruz and “establishment” figures like Jeb Bush. Sanders has single-handedly taken on the well-oiled Hillary Clinton political machine, with only “grass roots” financial backing. 

Trump, who has never held elected office, is no dyed-in-the-wool Republican. He espouses socially liberal positions at odds with many in his party – indeed, his views have been sneered at by Cruz as being “New York values.” 

Like Teddy Roosevelt, Trump portrays himself as a “man of action.” (TR was a soldier in the 1898 Spanish-American War and one of its most conspicuous heroes.) Fred Trump, Donald’s father, told his three sons to be “killers.”

Trump supports the capitalist system but, again like Roosevelt, sees it as being in need of reform, in order to “make America great again.” 

Theodore Roosevelt believed that America should “speak softly and carry a big stick” in the realm of international affairs and that its president should be willing to use force, clearly something Trump agrees with.

Trump accuses the country’s elites of selling out America’s economic interests on behalf of a vague notion of “globalization” – one that has devastated domestic industries and has cost millions of workers well-paying jobs.

A populist, Sanders wants to revitalize the left and advance equality in the country. He also wants to reduce the power of the financial plutocrats on Wall Street who now dominate the economy and “buy” politicians through contributing billions of dollars in campaign donations. 

Sanders is the only candidate who prioritizes campaign finance reform and appeals to those who feel the entire democratic system has broken down.

As well, Sanders advocates major reforms, including making public colleges and universities tuition-free, instituting universal health care, and transforming a criminal justice system that over-incarcerates people. 

On foreign policy, Sanders is a “dove.” He advocates abandoning policies that favor unilateral military action and pre-emptive war, ones that make the United States “the de facto policeman of the world.”

In effect, both men are independents. Teddy Roosevelt left office after 1908 but, displeased with his Republican successor, William Howard Taft, in 1912 he bolted to form the Progressive (“Bull Moose”) Party. (Roosevelt had once referred to himself as being “as strong as a bull moose.”) This split the Republican vote, resulting in victory for the Democrat Woodrow Wilson. 

Trump, too, often seems a bull in a china shop, his loyalty to the Republican Party paper-thin. Might he, like Roosevelt, do the same if he loses the nomination?

As for Sanders, he was not even a member of the Democratic Party until last November. His political career in Vermont began with the Liberty Union Party, which grew out of the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. 

Either of these candidates, if successful, may overturn the American political system as we know it.

Haiti's Dysfunctional Political System

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

As President Michel Martelly of Haiti left office on Feb. 7, due to term limits, his people were worse off than before the January 2010 earthquake that devastated the country.

The transition to a new chief executive has been anything but smooth. A presidential election held last Oct. 25 saw Jovenel Moise leading with 32.8 per cent of the vote, and Jude Célestin second, with 25.2 per cent. Other candidates took the rest.

With no one obtaining a majority, a second round of balloting was necessary.

But there were allegations that the first round was marred by rampant fraud favoring Moise. Célestin condemned the results as a “ridiculous farce” and refused to campaign further.

As thousands of Célestin’s supporters took to the streets, the run-off was cancelled.

Haitian leaders finally installed an interim president, Jocelerme Privert, on Feb. 14, to oversee new elections April 24.

Situated on the western third of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, Haiti became the second independent country in the Western Hemisphere, established in 1804 as the result of a successful slave revolt against its French plantation overlords.

But its 10.6 million people remain the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, mired in poverty, poor education and health care. Nearly half are illiterate, and only one in four has access to proper sanitation.

The country remains unable to house the 60,000 people still stuck in camps in appalling conditions.

Inflation has risen by six percentage points since last April to 12 per cent and Haiti’s currency, the gourde, has lost a quarter of its value in the past year.

The United Nations Human Development Index, a composite statistic that measures life expectancy, education, and income in a nation, places Haiti in the “low” category, at 163rd of 188 countries.

Since 1986, when president-for-life Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier fled a revolt, Haiti has struggled repeatedly to hold credible elections.

In 1990 and again in 2000, a left-wing priest and reformer, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, won the presidential election. But he didn’t last long either time, forced out of office through violence.

Martelly, a singer known as “Sweet Mickey” before entering the political arena, has been accused of enriching himself while in office.

Cronyism, a chronic problem in post-Duvalier Haiti, reached new heights. One official at the Interior Ministry admitted that she was encouraged to add ten per cent to each contract to allow for graft.

Another employee of the Interior Ministry, with a salary of about fifteen hundred dollars a month, had six cars and seven bank accounts.

Given all of this, Haiti is effectively a ward of the international community. The army was disbanded in 1995 and a UN Stabilization Mission, today comprising some 5,000 troops and police, now keeps the peace.

Many normal governmental functions are handled by NGOs funded from abroad; they are the only organizations that perform properly. The private sector, for example, runs eighty per cent of Haiti’s schools.

Martelly complained that, due to the foreign presence in Haiti, he actually wielded little power. Though billions of dollars poured into the country after the earthquake, Haiti had little say in how they were spent.

Three Caribbean Women Leaders

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

In the past 20 years, three Anglophone Caribbean countries, former British colonies, have been governed by women. Two of the nations are island states, while the third, on the South American mainland, faces the sea.

One woman has African ancestry, another is of South Asian background, and the third was American-born and Jewish.

Portia Simpson-Miller is currently the prime minister of Jamaica and leader of its left-of-centre People’s National Party (PNP), which currently holds 42 of the 63 seats in the House of Representatives.

Simpson-Miller has called an election for Feb. 25. Her government has attracted more than $1.1 billion in foreign direct investment since 2012. In addition, the country has been enjoying a period of low inflation, though the high unemployment rate remains a worry.

She pointed to her government’s “painful economic adjustments, including taming the monstrous debt” she inherited from the previous Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) administration.

Simpson-Miller has also stated that she hopes to make Jamaica a republic, replacing the British monarch as head of state, as the country this August will celebrates 50 years of independence.

Simpson-Miller was first elected to parliament in 1976. She served as a cabinet member in various PNP governments, under Michael Manley and P.J. Patterson, between 1989 and 2006.

She became party leader, and prime minister, in March 2006 upon the Patterson’s retirement. However, she lost power to the rival JLP a year later, and served as leader of the opposition until winning the December 2011 election.

In Trinidad and Tobago, the People’s Partnership Party (PNP), an alliance of smaller groups led by United National Congress (UNC) which is supported by Indo-Trinidadians, won a landslide victory in May 2010 against the incumbent, largely Afro-Trinidadian, People’s National Movement (PNM).

The PNP won 29 seats against PNM Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s 12, making Kamla Persad-Bissessar Trinidad’s prime minister. She had defeated the UNC’s founder, and former prime minister, Basdeo Panday, for leadership of the UNC four months earlier.

For decades, both government and opposition politics were dominated by men who came to be viewed as insensitive and out of touch with the people. In the run-up to 2007 election, won by the PNM, Persad-Bissessar had been marginalized by the UNC “boys club,” even though she had served as minister of education and then attorney-general between 1999 and 2001 in Panday’s 1995-2001 government.

Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar established a Ministry of the People, “where groups of concerned citizens can take their grievances and be heard” rather than having to resort to “demonstrating on the streets.” Also, a new Ministry of Food Production was created to help struggling farmers.

Persad-Bissessar was voted out of office last September, as the PNM won 23 of the 41 seats in the House of Representatives under their new leader, Keith Rowley. She is currently leader of the opposition.

Janet Rosenberg Jagan, who died in 2009, was president of Guyana from December 1997 to August 1999. She was the wife of Cheddi Jagan, an Indo-Guyanese politician who was premier of British Guiana from 1961 to 1964, prior to independence.

He would later serve as president from 1992 to 1997, and upon his death was succeeded by his wife.

But Janet Jagan was not simply a spouse inheriting her late husband’s position. She took part in labour activism along with her husband and was a co-founder of the Marxist-oriented People’s Progressive Party (PPP), serving as its general secretary from 1950 to 1970.

The other main party, the People’s National Congress (PNC) was dominated by Afro-Guyanese.

She was elected to the colonial House of Assembly in 1953, but she and Cheddi were jailed by the British authorities, who were concerned about their alleged Communist sympathies.

Janet Jagan was elected to Guyana’s parliament in 1973, eventually becoming its longest-serving member.

Cheddi Jagan became president of Guyana in 1992. Upon his death in March 1997, Janet became leader of the PPP and won the December 1997 presidential election in her own right. She resigned due to ill-health in August 1999.

Last May David Granger, an Afro-Guyanese running for the Alliance for Change, won the presidency, ending 23 years of rule by the PPP.

All three women have made significant impacts on their respective nations while in office.

What Happened to Arab Spring?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 
Five years after the Arab Spring raised so many hopes for a new dawn in the Middle East, Libya, Syria and Yemen have descended into chaos and civil war.

Syria has become the battleground for proxy wars involving Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and even Russia and the United States. President Bashar al-Assad hangs on to power while at least 250,000 Syrians have been killed and millions more have fled the country.

Pro-democracy protests had erupted in March 2011 in the southern city of Deraa after the arrest and torture of some teenagers who painted revolutionary slogans on a school wall.

This triggered nationwide protests demanding Assad’s resignation. The government’s use of force to crush the dissent led to armed rebellion. Fighting had reached the capital, Damascus, and the city of Aleppo, by 2012.

The war acquired sectarian overtones, pitting the country’s Sunni Muslim majority against the president’s Shia Alawite sect.

Today, Sunni Islamic State fighters have taken control of huge swathes of territory across northern and eastern Syria, establishing a “capital” in Raqqa. Meanwhile, attempts by outside parties, including Moscow and Washington, to broker an end to the war have so far failed to stem the violence.

U.N.-hosted peace talks now underway in Geneva envision a ceasefire followed by an 18-month timetable for a political transition in Syria, including the drafting of a new constitution and elections.

But most opposition groups have refused to attend until their demands are met, including an end to Russian and Syrian bombardment of regions controlled by them.

Elsewhere, Libya and Yemen have imploded, their central states replaced in whole or part by warring militias, some backed by foreign powers, some flying the flags of al-Qaeda or the Islamic State.

The demise of Libya’s quixotic but ruthless dictator, Moammar Gadhafi in October 2011, left a political vacuum in the country that has been filled by rival militias, Islamist followers pledging allegiance to the Islamic State, and rival governments.

Two administrations have been competing for control of Libya since mid-2014: the internationally recognised government based in Tobruk in the east, and the unofficial Government of National Salvation based in the capital, Tripoli. Each has its own parliament and a host of militias fighting on its behalf.

The creation of a unity government, the culmination of a year-long process of UN-sponsored negotiations between representatives of the rival administrations, was announced on Dec. 17, but it has now fallen afoul of quarrels between the two camps.

The Islamic State’s followers have created their own base in Sirte, Gadhafi’s former home, and several other towns. They have carried out a number of strikes against the country’s oil infrastructure.

Yemen, too, goes from bad to worse. The nine-month war between Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who belong to the Zaidi Shia sect and are backed by Iran, and the government of President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, supported by a Saudi-led military coalition that has been conducting an aerial campaign against the rebels since March, shows no signs of abating.

The conflict has left some 6,000 people dead in what was already the Arab world’s poorest state.

Hadi had assumed the presidency on Feb. 27, 2012, replacing the autocratic Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had ruled the country since 1990 (and had previously served as president of North Yemen for 12 years). Saleh was forced out after months of massive nationwide protests.

Pledging to support efforts to rebuild the country reeling from months of violence, Hadi however soon found himself running a failed state that shows little sign of recovery.

The old order embodied by the secular dictators has been shattered. As the state system splinters in the Middle East, the instability in the region will be chronic.

The big winner in all of this has been Iran, which has taken advantage of the turmoil in the Arab world to strengthen its alliances with Shiites in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

Eastern Europe Remains Fearful of Russia

Henry Srebrnik [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

With Vladimir Putin engaged in great power politics in former Soviet regions like Ukraine, nations on Russia’s borders, especially the Baltic states and Poland, have asked NATO for more military support.

The United States plans to substantially increase the deployment of heavy weapons and other equipment there.

Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s newly-elected Law and Justice Party government in Warsaw is far more assertive than its predecessors in its relations with Moscow.

When Law and Justice was in the opposition for eight years, it agitated repeatedly for fresh investigations into the 2010 crash of a plane in Smolensk, Russia, that killed 96 people, including Kaczynski’s twin brother, Lech Kaczynski, then the country’s president, as well as top Polish politicians, generals, social activists and artists.

Some party officials, including a few with top positions in the new government, suggested that the crash might have been orchestrated and covered up by the Russians.

The new foreign minister, Witold Waszczykowski, has called on Russia to cooperate in a fuller investigation of the crash.

Estonia, a former Soviet republic, has had a tense relationship with its Russian population, who make up a quarter of its people. Fearing that Putin may use them to destabilize the country, the Estonians recently held their largest-ever war games and are one of the few countries to meet its NATO commitment to spend two per cent of GDP on defence.

In Russian-populated cities such as Narva, near the border with Russia, more than 80 per cent of the population is ethnically Russian, and they rely largely on news from Russian state media. So the Estonians have also launched a campaign to bolster what they call the country’s “psychological defences” against Russian misinformation.

Neighbouring Latvia, too, worries about threats from Russia. Its easternmost region, Latgale, has a large population of ethnic Russians, especially in Daugavpils, its largest city.

Russian nationalists see this region -- about a quarter of the country-- as fertile ground for their machinations to divide and weaken NATO’s easternmost fringe.

Janis Sarts, the state secretary for Latvia’s Defense Ministry, noted that regular rotations of NATO troops and aircraft through Latvia had sent a firm message to Moscow that “the risks would be tremendous” if it tried to foment discontent.

Last spring Latvian soldiers and the local police held a joint exercise in Rezekne, the Latgale region’s historical and cultural capital, in a show of defiance.

In a new development, troops from Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine will form a new brigade, scheduled to be operational in 2017. It would comprise 4,000 troops and would work to strengthen defence and act as a possible deterrent force in the region.

“The multinational brigade is a sign, symbol and very clear signal to anyone who would want to undermine peace in Europe,” said Polish Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz.

The brigade will be headquartered in Lublin, Poland. Lithuania and Poland are both members of NATO and the European Union, while Ukraine is not, though the Kyiv government has expressed its desire to join both organizations.

NATO is scheduled to meet in Warsaw in July for a summit and Polish officials are expected to again ask for the permanent presence of NATO troops on their territory.

Things Worsen in Parts of the Globe

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer 

“Why is everybody rushing towards religious obscurantism?” the eminent British political theorist and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin asked in 1986, as he entered his twilight years. 

“Colonels, terrorists, tyrants, ayatollahs, moral majorities” were, he wrote, creating a “growing darkness” in the world.

Three decades later, things are even worse. During the Cold War, a certain civility and rationality was practiced, even between the western and the Communist worlds. As the movie “Bridge of Spies” has shown us, there was even the possibility of enemy spies being exchanged.

One couldn’t imagine this happening today between the United States and the Islamic State. Captured prisoners are more likely to be beheaded, without even the pretense of show trials.

Entire areas of the world, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, have become zones of conflict between rival religious ideologues, rebels, terrorists, criminal gangs, and the remnants of states. Some countries have become violent political vacuums – think of the Congo, Libya or Somalia, where there is virtually no effective political system.

In most of these “shatter zones,” as Robert Kaplan called them in his book The Revenge of Geography, the states are the 19^th and 20^th artificial creations of European colonial powers. 

In the Middle East, this would be true of Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Iraq, for instance. In Africa, virtually all of its post-colonial states have little relation to ethnic, geographic, linguistic, or religious boundaries already in place prior to the partition of the continent in the late 19^th century. 

Indeed, they often include historically antagonistic peoples, while other groups are divided between countries that are just the legacy of empire-building by Europeans. 

Africa’s arbitrary boundaries divide almost 180 different ethnicities into two or more countries. Four in ten Africans belong to a group that has kin across borders. The Malinke in west Africa are among the most partitioned of peoples, split among six different states. 

Ethnic fragmentation across sub-Saharan Africa is so pervasive that on average just 28 per cent of the total population of a given country belongs to the majority group.

Canadians extol “diversity,” by which they mean the integration of immigrants, but in multinational states where it has always existed, it can be, at best, a mixed blessing.

In such polities, democracy can be a challenge, since parties are usually simply the vehicles of various ethnic groups, and government is little more than the victory of the larger against the less numerous.

Precisely because these types of states seemed almost designed to fail, nationalists in the colonial world often wished to sweep them away and recreate what they considered more “natural” (and stronger) units; hence the “pan” movements, such as pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism.

Yet they did not succeed.  Even supposedly weak states that perhaps make no sense have proven to be remarkably resilient institutions. Successful secessions, even in Africa, have been few -- only Eritrea and South Sudan come to mind. The Igbo attempt to carve Biafra out of Nigeria failed, as have numerous other efforts.  

On the other hand, states that are really the expression of peoples with a common, often very old, culture, can be quite formidable. Their populations do not waste energy and resources squabbling among themselves, as do the heterogeneous multinational polities.

Instead, their efforts are directed towards common economic, military and political goals, making them durable entities. This is the case regardless of whether they are autocracies, democracies or theocracies. China, Iran, Israel, and Vietnam are examples of these. 

They are far stronger than their merely “objective” metrics, such as size, population, natural resources, and other factors, would indicate.

Egypt’s Arab Spring Just a Memory

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Five years on, the Arab Spring has turned to winter, its bright hopes dashed in all but Tunisia, and the Arab world is worse off than ever. Egypt has come full circle, once again chafing under an authoritarian-military dictatorship.

On Jan. 25, 2011, following upon the ouster of Tunisian strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali eleven days earlier, demonstrations erupted against Egypt’s long-serving autocrat, Hosni Mubarak.

On Feb. 11, he stepped down from the presidency after three decades, forced to give way to the massive protests that had raged throughout the country, and in particular in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

But now the anniversary of that event has been marked by sullen resignation. For the few who turned up to remember the occasion, they faced thousands of police officers patrolling the streets of Cairo and public squares.

Chanting “Down with the tyrant!” against President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, they were soon dispersed.

In advance of the anniversary, a crackdown by security forces saw activists rounded up, art houses closed and the administrators of opposition Facebook pages detained. “The security and stability of nations are not to be toyed with,” Sisi had warned Egyptians in a speech.

A retired field marshal, Sisi had led the military in ousting Mubarak’s Islamist successor, Mohammed Morsi, in 2013 following mass protests, a year after the Muslim Brotherhood leader had become the country’s first democratically elected head of state.

After his overthrow, Morsi faced several charges including inciting the killing of opponents, espionage, and terrorism, and was sentenced to death, along with other defendants, last May. The sentence is being appealed.

Meanwhile, Sisi had himself elected president in 2014. Since he came to power, more than 1,000 people have been killed and 40,000 are believed to have been jailed in a sweeping crackdown on dissent.

Most of them have been supporters of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, but secular activists have also been prosecuted. Meanwhile, Mubarak and his cronies, not to mention the police responsible for killing hundreds in the clashes of 2011, are all out of jail.

Amnesty International has stated that Egypt is now “mired in a human rights crisis of huge proportions” as the country “reverts back to a police state.” Sisi’s new constitution grants sweeping powers to the president and the army, while “peaceful protesters, politicians and journalists have borne the brunt of a ruthless campaign against legitimate dissent by the government and state security forces,” according to Said Boumedouha, Amnesty’s deputy Middle East and North Africa director.

There have been cases of of so-called “enforced disappearances, ” where people have disappeared into a network of secretive detention centers, where they are held without charge or access to a lawyer, for weeks and sometimes months. Some turn up dead, their bodies dumped in morgues.

The region’s governments, Egypt’s among them, remain among the most corrupt on the planet. Respect for the rights of women and minorities has deteriorated since the Arab Spring catapulted some Islamist forces to power. Poverty remains widespread, and opportunity for economic advancement is nonexistent for huge proportions of unusually young populations.

The hopes raised by the Arab Spring for people who were hoping for more inclusive politics and more responsive government have been dashed.

Secularism in a Religious Age

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

One of the major debates of our time deals with the issue of religion and secularism in western societies. In democracies, should religion be forced into the private sphere with little or no public voice?

Sociologist José Casanova of Georgetown University in Washington contends that we are now witnessing a process of “deprivatization” of religion as a global trend.

The very notion of secularism derives from western Christian, that is, Roman Catholic doctrine, where the ecclesiastical and temporal domains were not fused but had dual spheres, unlike in Orthodox Christianity, Islam, and other religions.

This would eventually, in modern republican France, turn into laicité, a rigid form of secularism which is central to the attitude that the French state and the French people have come to hold towards religion.

This form of secularism, which is often termed anti-clericalism, aims to contain and marginalize everything religious, and ban it from any visible presence in the secular public square. It presumes that these older traditions have now, in the modern world, been transcended.

As William Connolly, a political theorist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has noted, laicité associates secularism with rational argument, tolerance, and the public interest. It considers itself neutral and value-free, while religion is associated with intolerance and violence.

Hence religion is forbidden to intervene in matters of state. Its place is in civil society, if at all. Hence the prohibition of headscarves and other religious symbols in public schools.

The Protestant form of secularism, especially in its so-called “Judeo-Christian” American version, is different. While there is strict formal separation of church and state, there is a blurring of the boundaries between faith and politics, resulting in a blending of the two, such that the religious becomes secular and the secular religious.

In this type of secularism, religion becomes a source of unity and identity, a “civil religion” that, according to a political scientist Elizabeth Hurd of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, emphasizes the connections between the moral values of religion and modern democratic governance.

So religion plays a role within secular politics, serving, writes Ted Jelen, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, as “the basis of an ethical consensus without which popular government could not operate.”

The objective is not to expel religion from politics in the name of an independent ethic, but to accommodate “a shared adherence to a shared religious tradition” in the body politic, one that rises above any specific church or creed. Religion is seen as foundational to American national identity.

“Religion shapes the nation’s character,” observes Walter Russell Mead, professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College in New York.

This type of secularism incorporates a watered-down, common denominator form of religious pluralism, one that does not privilege any particular denomination. Hence the use of a generalized faith-based terminology in American politics, something that does not occur in France.

Will the two main models of secularism be able to cope with community-oriented religions such as Islam, Hinduism, Sikkism, and very strict forms of Christianity and Judaism, as these become more prevalent in western countries?

These faiths, notes Rajeev Bhargava of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, demand greater public presence and even official recognition for themselves, in terms of diet, dress, and worship, among other issues.

The two main western forms of secularism, which view religion as mainly an individual, not collective, matter, were not designed for states with very deep religious diversity, he warns, especially when they include faiths in conflict with one another theologically and politically.

So they are ill prepared to meet the challenges posed by fundamentalist Islam in today’s “competition of beliefs,” argues Oxford emeritus political philosopher Larry Siedentop. We shall see.

Saudi Treatment of Women

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 

When it comes to women’s rights, Saudi Arabia is arguably the most repressive society on earth.

Most of the kingdom’s subjects are members of the Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam, often described as “ultraconservative” or “puritanical.” Known as Muwahhidun, they adhere to the strict Hanbali school of jurisprudence.

This form of Islam particularly affects the position of women.

A Saudi woman cannot leave her home without covering her hair and putting on a niqab to cover her face and a floor-length abaya. She cannot drive a car. Public transportation is segregated, as are beaches and amusement parks.

Since 2013, women have been allowed to ride bicycles, but only in designated parks and recreation areas, chaperoned by a close male relative. 

The guardianship system requires an adult woman to get permission from a male guardian -- typically a father, brother or husband -- before travelling overseas, opening a bank account, or seeking medical care. They must approve every move, including trips to neighboring women’s homes for tea.

It is a country where single people of opposite sexes cannot spend time together without risking arrest. Institutions and businesses that serve Saudi women are carefully guarded, so as to prevent ikhtilat, illegal gender mixing.

In general, women face more severe penalties for sexual transgressions than do men. Women who are seen socializing with a man who is not a relative, can be harassed by the mutaween, the country’s religious police, and even charged with a crime. 

In some cases, victims are punished for khalwa, being alone with an unrelated male, prior to an assault.

There are no male employees at girls’ schools or women’s colleges other than its security officers, who keep males from entering. 

In 2002, 15 girls died in a fire at a girls school because the mutaween at first kept male firefighters from entering the building. They also tried to keep the girls inside the burning school because they were not wearing headscarves and black robes.

Maintaining women-only bank branches, government offices, shops, and other businesses requires an entire infrastructure of segregation.

Companies that employ both men and women must create separate areas for female workers, allowing them to communicate with male colleagues without the risk of being seen by them.

Restaurants serving both genders must provide “family sections,” secluded areas for women where female diners who cover their faces can eat comfortably. Women need to enter and exit through special doors.

A woman’s testimony in court is, with few exceptions, valued at half that of a man. A homicide case, for example, normally requires testimony from two male witnesses; if only one is available, two female witnesses may be substituted for the other. 

The inheritance share of women in the country is generally smaller than that to which men are entitled.

The marriages of Saudi women are usually arranged, and girls can be forced into child marriages with old men. It remains extremely difficult for women to obtain divorces. These make up just over four per cent of the total. 

Most women are unsuccessful in their efforts to obtain one, and those who do succeed must, at a minimum, repay their dowries to their former husbands. On the other hand, for men – who may have up to four wives – divorce is a simple matter.

In short, women must be barred from exercising authority over men and from most public places where they might mix freely with men.

Some might argue that this separation of genders does at least prevent sexual harassment. But that’s not true. 

There are stories of children who have been raped by a relative or the family driver. Yet the victim’s parents declined to press charges. 

Parents, fearing ruined marriage prospects, chose silence, which meant that the men went unpunished. And for some of the girls the secrecy only amplified the trauma.

A few weeks ago Margot Wallstrom, the Swedish foreign minister, denounced the subjugation of women in Saudi Arabia. 

In turn, Saudi Arabia withdrew its ambassador and stopped issuing visas to Swedish businessmen. The Organization of Islamic Co-operation, which represents 56 Muslim-majority states, accused Sweden of failing to respect the world’s “rich and varied ethical standards.”

Will Non-Religious Jews Survive?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Can Jews remain Jewish without a belief in God?

The east European Jews who arrived as immigrants to this country and to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century were, in the main, steeped in traditional Judaism. They tried to hold onto their culture as tenaciously as possible.

Of course acculturation, and even total assimilation, into the dominant culture, does happen, though it often takes two or more generations. Many of their children left the religious fold, nor did they hold on to their lingua franca, Yiddish.

Today, Jews who are secular and feel Jewish only by ethnicity and memory may marry non-Jews; their children, and certainly grandchildren, will probably be lost to the Jewish people. I know many such cases.

The only Jews outside Israel of whom it can be said with some certainly that they will remain Jewish, barring some calamity, will be the Orthodox – and especially the so-called “ultra-Orthodox.”

They adhere to the totality of Jewish faith, the written and oral law (the Torah) as revealed to Moses by God at Mount Sinai, followed by the Talmudic and other commentaries through the centuries, and codified in the rules of Halakha. For them, the covenant with God, who “chose” them to bring light unto the nations, is permanent.

And for them the world will only be redeemed with the coming of the messiah, not through utopian political ideologies of various stripes.

Not until then will even the state of Israel be secure from destruction by its various enemies; these have been many in Jewish history.

Indeed, were Israel to cease to exist as a state, it is conceivable that much of its own secular Jewish population might relocate to the Torontos and New Yorks of the world.

Why not? Speaking Hebrew and living in Tel Aviv is not enough for one to remain Jewish; after all, one million Israeli Arabs speak the language – and they are most decidedly not Jews! Many Jewish Israelis already buy into the “post-Zionist” narrative and some even advocate a “state of the whole people.”

Of course nothing in the Orthodox world – the dietary laws, the various other commandments, the idea that Israel is the “promised land” -- makes any sense to “rational” people steeped in the ways of “modernity.”

But for the faithful, these rules, and the various biblical miracles, simply imply that God has intervened in human affairs. After all, God can do anything – this is the religious equivalent of political philosopher Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception.”

If there is some person or institution, in a given polity, capable of bringing about a total suspension of the law and then use extra-legal force to normalize a dire situation, argued Schmitt, then that person or institution is the sovereign in that polity.

“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” he wrote. In traditional Judaism, God fulfills that function.

For the truly religious, the Torah supersedes human-created legislation – even acts passed by the Israeli Knesset, which is for them, after all, merely a secular parliament.

BDS Gains Traction among Academics

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Like a snowball rolling downhill, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement aimed at Israel keeps growing – especially among those who teach at universities.

The global BDS movement was initiated by Palestinian organizations in 2005, and is coordinated by the Palestinian BDS National Committee, a group of 27 organizations established in 2007.

It urges various forms of boycott against Israel until it ends its occupation of the lands occupied in June 1967; dismantles the wall dividing the West Bank from Israel proper; and makes Arab citizens of Israel fully equal.

It also demands that Israel allow post-1948 Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to their homes and properties within present-day Israel, as stipulated in UN General Assembly Resolution 194, passed in December 1948 following the first Arab-Israeli war.

Were all of this to come to pass, it is highly unlikely that Israel would remain a Jewish-majority state, or even continue to exist at all.

Israeli academic institutions are particularly targeted due to what the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) calls their “persistent and deep complicity in planning, implementing and whitewashing crimes against the Palestinian people.”

Their demands are resonating in the United States. On Nov. 27, the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) voted to support the boycott; 653 people approved, while only 86 opposed.

One week earlier, the general conference of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) voted to boycott Israeli academic institutions. The resolution, which passed with 1,040 votes in favour and 136 votes against, will go to a vote of the full membership in the spring.

The AAA is the largest American academic association to date to pass an academic boycott resolution.

These two associations join a growing list of scholarly associations and academics which approve of this form of punishing Israel.

They include the American Studies Association, the Association for Asian American Studies, the African Literature Association, the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies, the Association for Humanist Sociology, and the Peace and Justice Studies Association.

Some American academics are pushing back. Led by Mark Yudof, president emeritus of the University of California system, and Kenneth Waltzer, former director of Jewish Studies at Michigan State University, the Academic Engagement Network (AEN) has been formed to combat what it calls “Orwellian efforts” to discredit Israel.

Stephen Trachtenberg, president emeritus of George Washington University in Washington, DC, described the network as a group of concerned academics who “have devoted themselves to making it possible for people from all points of view” to speak candidly and without disruption.

“We ourselves are critical of Israel. We don’t claim perfection for Israel and no one expects us to do that,” stated Trachtenberg. “We’re not afraid of fair criticism of Israel.”

Also, the BDS movement suffered defeat at the American Historical Association’s annual conference. On Jan. 9, by a vote of 111-51, the AHA’s business meeting rejected a resolution to sanction Israel over alleged violations of Palestinian academic freedom.

“They understood that this was part of a political campaign and an attempt to use the American Historical Association for political purposes, and they rejected that,” remarked Prof. Jeffrey Herf of the University of Maryland.

“The members of the AHA have very high standards. They were not going to vote for a resolution like this that was making factual assertions that they couldn’t verify themselves.”

Japan is Re-Emerging as an Asian Power

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 

Seven decades since its defeat in the Second World War, Japan is slowly re-emerging as an Asian power.

The war proved cataclysmic for the country; its major cities were firebombed, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered destruction by atomic bombs.

The country was occupied by the United States, and its armed forces dismantled. In 1951 the peace treaty between Japan and 48 Allied countries which had fought against it was signed, restoring Japan’s formal sovereignty. However, neither the Soviet Union nor China were a party to it.

 At the same time, the U.S. and Japan signed a security treaty making Washington responsible for Japan’s defence. It enabled U.S. troops to remain in Japan and opened Japanese facilities as a staging area and logistics base for American forces in the war then being waged in Korea. 

The threat of Communist expansion is mostly gone, yet the U.S. still stations some 47,000 troops in Japan, more than half of them on Okinawa, in the Ryukyu Islands. 

Discontent with the heavy American presence among the 1.4 million Okinawans has grown, especially after incidents of various crimes, including rapes, by American servicemen. 

The Chinese are hoping to exploit this, and some Chinese officials have gone so far as to claim that the entire Ryukyu chain, which was once an independent kingdom and a vassal state of China’s, should belong to them. The islands were annexed by Japan in 1879.

The pact between Japan and the U.S. allows Tokyo to review the amount it spends on the upkeep of the bases every five years. The current agreement is due to come up for renewal in March 2016. 

Tokyo wants to reduce its spending so the money can be used to help expand the country’s Self-Defense Forces.

Last September Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic-led government passed a law that will allow Japan’s military to fight in foreign conflicts, something forbidden until now. 

Critics contend that this violates Japan’s constitution and they fear that it will make the country America’s “deputy sheriff” in Asia and perhaps dragged into an American war.

“We must not become accomplices to murder,” declared Mizuho Fukushima of the Social Democratic Party during the acrimonious debate in parliament 

But Japan fears the growing military might of China and worries that China may be prepared to risk war to fulfill its territorial ambitions.

China is creating a deep-water navy with aircraft carriers and scores of submarines as part of a geopolitical strategy that is trying to reshape the power balance in Asia.

In the South China Sea, Beijing is dredging coral reefs to build eight artificial islands that could be turned into airfields in the disputed waters in the Spratly Archipelago. China insists it has “indisputable sovereignty” over the islands, a claim denied by other countries in the region.

They sit atop what are thought to be large pools of unexploited oil and gas, are surrounded by rich fishing waters, and situated astride some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

In the East China Sea, the two countries both claim some uninhabited islands the Japanese call the Senkakus and the Chinese call the Diaoyus. The Chinese government states that they are an integral part of China and has produced a timeline reaching back to the 15th century, with historical documents offered as proof of China’s claim.

In turn, the Japanese government has declared that “There is no doubt that the Senkaku Islands are clearly an inherent part of the territory of Japan, in light of historical facts and based upon international law.”

Prime Minister Abe met with Chinese president Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum last November, but they only noted that “different positions exist” regarding the issue, which remains unresolved. 

So Japan’s cabinet at the end of the year approved a record-high military spending plan of $42.1 billion for 2016, to counter China’s increasingly assertive activity.

Emotions Rule When Dealing with Refugees

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 

The refugee crisis now overwhelming Europe has led to the continent’s publics veering from one extreme to another, like a drunk driving a car erratically from side to side on a road, in their response to this ongoing catastrophe.

Last summer, three-year-old Alan Kurdi, a Syrian boy, washed up on a Turkish beach, drowned while his family was trying to reach Europe. 

Suddenly, there was a huge wave of sympathy for those trying to escape the horrific wars in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world.

On New Year’s Eve, a very large group of men, very many of them Middle Eastern asylum seekers, were involved in a wave of violent assaults on women in Cologne, Germany. Since then, similar incidents have been reported in other European cities. 

In response, many Europeans have reacted with hostility to all migrants entering Europe.

This form of political “bipolarity” appears to be an emotional, rather than rational, response, which to a large extent has been fuelled by the mass media, in particular television. 

Little Alan Kurdi pulled at people’s heartstrings because this is human nature. All children are innocents, of course, but many, due to their cultural, religious and social backgrounds, will not remain so. (Hitler and Stalin were once kids.)

On the other hand, the criminals engaged in sexual harassment and thievery in Cologne and elsewhere, are clearly a minority of the men coming to Europe seeking a better life, and to castigate an entire group because of them is clearly xenophobic.

Neither extreme makes sense, nor should either become the basis of a reasoned, calm debate about the larger issues facing Europe: how many people can the continent absorb without losing its historic cultural and ethnic makeup? 

Will such a large mass of people arriving in so short a time be assimilated into the norms and values of European democracy, including respect for gays, women and other minority populations? 

Will they embrace the liberal secular character of these societies, with their separation of religion and politics? 

In an opinion piece published in the New York Times on Jan. 9, Anna Sauerbrey, an editor on the opinion page of the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, asserted that “Integration will fail if Germany cannot resolve the tension between its secular, liberal laws and culture and the patriarchal and religiously conservative worldviews that some refugees bring with them. 

“We cannot avoid that question out of fear of feeding the far right,” she wrote. “But integration will also fail if a full generation of refugees is demonized on arrival.”

These are the questions that need to be addressed, and emotions in one direction or the other, dictated by specific events, should not affect the policies of decision-makers in governments.

American Jewish College Students Face Chilly Climate

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Pioneer Journal
 
There was an increase in anti-Israel activity on American college campuses during 2015, with over 150 explicitly anti-Israel programs, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Most were tied to the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement which seeks to delegitimize the Jewish state.

As pro-Palestinian groups proliferate, student protesters have taken to shouting down invited Israeli guest lecturers at various campuses and disrupting other events organized by Jewish students.

Anti-Israel activities to delegitimize Israel are increasingly crossing the line into anti-Semitism, in the form of hate speech, harassment and intimidation. Guerrilla theatre and public displays are among the tactics used.

In early November, Assi Azar, an Israeli television personality and LGBT rights advocate, was interrupted during a discussion of his film “Mom, Dad, I have Something to Tell You” at Goucher College in Baltimore.

Also in November, noted Israeli philosopher and professor Moshe Halbertal’s lecture at the University of Minnesota Law School was delayed 40 minutes by shouts and chants until protesters were escorted out of the lecture hall; eventually, three were arrested.

“This was not a West Bank settler, an Israeli soldier or a politician; this was a scholar, an ethicist, a writer. That is what’s distressing,” remarked Rabbi Alexander Davis of Beth El Synagogue in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. “This was not a demonstration or a rally; it was an academic lecture in a distinguished law school. That is what’s so troubling.”

Later that month, a confrontation occurred between members of the Palestine Solidarity Committee and Israel Studies professor Ami Pedahzur at an Institute for Israel Studies event at the University of Texas in Austin. The students broke up the gathering with shouts of “Free, Free Palestine” and “Long Live the Intifada,” and later accused Pedahzur of Islamophobia.

Pro-Palestinian groups participating in a student protest against tuition increases at the City University of New York in November blamed the high cost of education on “Zionists.”

 “The Zionist administration invests in Israeli companies, companies that support the Israeli occupation, hosts birthright programs and study abroad programs in occupied Palestine, and reproduces settler-colonial ideology throughout CUNY through Zionist content of education,” asserted Students for Justice in Palestine.

Pro-Israel advocates have been pointing for years to a decline of discourse on campus. Kenneth Marcus, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which works to protect the speech of pro-Israel students on college campuses, has spoken of the deteriorating environment Jewish students now face.

 “Universities should be oases of reason and tolerance, but they are not,” he has noted. “North American campuses often harbour radical left-wing movements that are hostile to Israel, Zionism, and the Jewish people.”

There have been several troubling incidents this year at University of California (UC) campuses.

The defacing of a Jewish fraternity house at UC Davis with Nazi swastikas took place last January. A month later, several student government leaders at UCLA questioned a student’s eligibility for a campus judicial panel because she is Jewish.

“She failed to pass the political litmus test that so-called progressive students see as their default position: namely, being pro-Palestinian,” wrote Richard Cravatts, president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.

In April, even a non-political exhibit offering information about Israel was too much for demonstrators at UC Irvine. Marching out of the Cross-Cultural Centre, they chanted slogans, drowning out the music and distracting attention away from the Jewish event. 

Responding to Jewish students who contend that some UC campuses have become a hostile environment for them, in September the university regents debated the vexing issue of how to allow for free speech while protecting students against intolerance and prejudice.

Jewish organizations have urged the regents to adopt the U.S. State Department definition of anti-Semitism that includes demonization of Israel and denial of its right to exist.

Other groups, however, have complained that the regents might go too far, repressing political debate and stifling dissent. The issue remains unresolved and the debate in California, as elsewhere, continues.

But one thing is certain: It’s going to become increasingly unpleasant for Jewish students at colleges across America.