Birds of a Feather Flock Together

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

If you want to know whether the inhabitants of a certain country share a common sense of national solidarity, a good way to find out is – oddly enough – to look at where their emigrants have settled.

That’s because people from the same geographic area will, for either positive or negative reasons, not necessarily live together as immigrants in a new country. Ethnic and religious diasporas are often an indicator of differences back home.

Positive reasons may revolve around religious institutions and practices. Negative ones are usually the result of some form of oppression or persecution in the country of origin. Often both are involved.

Let’s look at immigrants from France. Historically, French Catholics, as part of the ruling group in France, founded royal colonies, such as today’s Quebec. On the other hand, French Protestants, known as Huguenots, fled the country following the mass murders known as the St. Bartholemew’s Day Massacre in 1572; at least 25,000 were slaughtered.

They ended up in Calvinist settlements, such as Protestant Ulster, Presbyterian Scotland, Calvinist Holland, Puritan New England, and the Afrikaaner settlements in South Africa. Many anglisized their names – Paul Revere, of American Revolution fame, was from a Huguenot family. His father had changed his name from Revoir to Revere.

It was religion, not language or place of origin, which determined where they settled. (Indeed, French Protestants were not even permitted in New France.)

Most so-called “Lebanese” diasporas are actually made up of Lebanese Christians, mainly Maronites. Arabs from Lebanon, if they emigrate, will move into “Arab” areas.

The same holds true for people from the ethnically contested island of Cyprus. “Cypriots,” who settled in many areas of the British Empire, including London, were usually Greeks, and Greek Orthodox in religion. Turkish Cypriots, less mobile, settled in their own neighbourhoods if they left Cyprus, or in larger Turkish ones.

Armenians, especially following their genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks during the First World War, fled to secular nations like the United States, or settled among fellow eastern rite Christians in places like Lebanon. Coptic Christians from Egypt have also followed the same pattern.

The “overseas Chinese,” from countries like Malaysia or Indonesia, have often been the victims of pogroms at the hands of Muslim Malay peoples. In sectarian violence in Malaysia in 1969, sources put the death toll at close to 600 Chinese; in anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia in 1998, more than 2,000 people died.

They settle in Chinese neighbourhoods when they come to the Americas. The last placed they’d want to live are in neighbourhoods inhabited by non-Chinese people from their countries of origin. Tamils and Sinhalese from war-torn Sri Lanka also live in separate ethnic enclaves.

Countries such as Fiji, Guyana, Mauritius, and Trinidad have large South Asian populations who are often at odds with African-origin citizens (or, in Fiji, indigenous ethnic Fijians). When these people move to North America, they typically live within larger Hindu and Sikh districts – though immigrants of Muslim Indian ancestry from those countries may choose to live elsewhere.

The diasporic people par excellence are the Jews, who have lived among – and often suffered abuse from – various nationalities all over the world.

Most North American Jews, if originally from Europe, arrived from today’s Belarus, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Ukraine. But when they came to Canada or the United States, these Ashkenazic Jews did not settle among the non-Jewish ethnic groups from those places. Instead, they lived in Jewish areas. This also holds true for Jewish citizens who settled in Argentina and Uruguay.

They may have identified themselves as Hungarian Jews, Polish Jews, Romanian Jews, and so on, but they did not consider themselves to be Hungarians, Poles or Romanians. Those were Christian peoples, who in turn also rarely considered the Jews as fellow compatriots.

The same is the case for Sephardic Middle Eastern Jews in North America or western Europe. They live apart from Muslim Arabs and Iranians.

Some diaspora communities maintain strong political ties with their homelands. This is particularly the case when they retain economic links and have advantages of language, culture and personal ties in doing business with compatriots in their country of origin.

But this is rarely true of those minorities escaping injustice. Jews are typically more concerned with Israel than with the countries which they left.

So if you want to get a picture of ethnic or religious differences “back home,” look to the diasporas of these peoples in their new places of residence.

Songs of War and American Culture

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

You can tell quite a bit about a country’s political culture by the songs it produces during wartime.

In the United States, the trajectory has been from songs celebrating religious patriotism through nationalistic tunes to more nuanced views of conflicts to outright anti-war lyrics.

The American Civil War produced the stirring Protestant anthem “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” American writer Julia Ward Howe wrote the lyrics after visiting a Union Army camp on the Potomac River near Washington D.C. in November 1861 and they were first published in February 1862.

The song is full of Biblical imagery. Here are the first and fifth stanzas and the chorus:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He has loosed the fateful lightening of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free,
While God is marching on.

Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Our God is marching on.

The popular martial song “Over There,” penned by George M. Cohan in April 1917 as the United States was entering the First World War, was designed to galvanize American young men to enlist in the army and fight Germany. The two stanzas are aggressively buoyant, patriotic but not particularly religious:

Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun.
Take it on the run, on the run, on the run.
Hear them calling you and me,
Every Son of Liberty.
Hurry right away, no delay, go today.
Make your Daddy glad to have had such a lad.
Tell your sweetheart not to pine,
To be proud her boy’s in line.

Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun.
Johnny, show the “Hun” you're a son-of-a-gun.
Hoist the flag and let her fly
Yankee Doodle do or die.
Pack your little kit, show your grit, do your bit.
Yankee to the ranks from the towns and the tanks.
Make your Mother proud of you
And the old red-white-and blue.

The refrain sends out a warning to America’s enemies:

Over there, over there,
Send the word, send the word over there
That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming
The drums rum-tumming everywhere.
So prepare, say a prayer,
Send the word, send the word to beware
We’ll be over, we’re coming over,
And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there.

Second World War songs are less nationalistic and more sentimental. “When the Lights Go on Again,” written by Bennie Benjamin, Sol Marcus and Eddie Seiler in 1942 is wistful, making no mention of German “Huns” or other enemies. The song, made famous by Vaughn Monroe, expresses the hopes for an end to the war.

When the lights go on again all over the world
And the boys are home again all over the world
And rain or snow is all that may fall from the skies above
A kiss won’t mean “goodbye” but “Hello to love”

When the lights go on again all over the world
And the ships will sail again all over the world
Then we’ll have time for things like wedding rings and free hearts will sing
When the lights go on again all over the world.

By the 1960s, an unpopular conflict led to the predominance of anti-war songs.

The poignant ballad “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” became a hit during the Vietnam War. The first three verses were written by Pete Seeger in 1955, with further verses added by Joe Hickerson in 1960. It was popularized by, among others, the folk song group Peter, Paul and Mary.

The first stanza asks:

Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the flowers gone?
Young girls have picked them every one.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

And it slowly works its way up to the “message,” in stanza four:

Where have all the soldiers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the soldiers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards, every one.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

By 1967, the Kingston Trio had performed it on NBC-TV, one of the many indications that the American public was turning against the war.

All these songs can be heard on You Tube.

It’s interesting that the Afghanistan and Iraq wars have produced no songs of note – perhaps because these conflicts, fought by an all-volunteer military, have had little impact on average Americans.

The Rush to Make Russia a Pariah

Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald

The tragic downing of a civilian Malaysian airliner over Ukraine on July 17, presumably by so-called pro-Russian “rebels” or “separatists,” which resulted in the loss of 298 lives, has, predictably, further intensified hostility towards Russia. 

On July 21, an editorial in the Washington Post carried the headline “The West needs a strategy to contain the world’s newest rogue state -- Russia.” Calling Moscow’s policies regarding Ukraine “barbaric,” it asserted that Vladimir Putin now heads a “dangerous outlaw regime that needs to be contained.”Two days earlier, an article in England’s Daily Telegraph by John Kampfner called Putin a “pariah” who “must now be treated as such.”

But such rhetoric is truly alarming, the tropes reminiscent of anti-Soviet statements at the height of the Cold War. Is Russia now to be consigned to a new “axis of evil,” in the company of regimes such as the one in North Korea?

The Russians are being accused of presenting propaganda to justify their actions, but we’re not getting the whole story.

The Ukrainians are bombing civilians in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kramatorsk, and Slovyansk. There are probably several hundred thousand refugees that have left these cities. The Kyiv government’s “anti-terrorist” campaign against its own citizens is virtually unreported in the U.S. media.

So the airplanes the “rebels” have been shooting down are Ukraine’s military warplanes that have come to bomb the women and children of these cities; hence the Malaysian Airlines disaster.

In 1999, an American-led alliance bombed Serbia for 78 straight days, in order to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, to topple Saddam Hussein, accused of harboring “weapons of mass destruction.” These countries were thousands of miles from American shores, nor were any Americans there in danger. 

I don’t recall any American newspapers calling the U.S. a rogue state.

Eastern Ukraine, on the other hand, borders Russia, and has a substantial population of ethnic Russians who fear the new nationalistic regime in Ukraine. And they have reason to do so.

The Russians must rue the day when they allowed NATO to move eastwards after the collapse of the Soviet Union, incorporating not just former Warsaw Pact countries but even the Baltic states, formerly part of the USSR itself.

While the Ukrainian military shells towns and drops bombs in eastern Ukraine, the West considers the “separatist” militias in the east Moscow’s pawns and holds Putin responsible for the carnage. Double standards anyone?

The Problematic Identity of Israel's Arab Citizens

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The current Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza, the third in six years, has resulted in Israeli Arab protests, led by Balad (National Democratic Assembly), Hadash (Democratic Front for Peace and Equality), and the Islamic Movement in Israel, in various cities and towns.

Some of the protesters were reported to have waved Palestinian flags as they chanted slogans welcoming Hamas rocket fire at Tel Aviv.

Haneen Zoabi of Balad, the first Arab Israeli woman to represent an Arab party in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, has been in the forefront of the recent demonstrations and has called on Palestinians to continue fighting, besiege Israel and refuse to negotiate.

In turn, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman and Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch have campaigned to oust Zoabi and her Balad Party from parliament.

All this points to the growing anger and frustration among Arab citizens of Israel, who feel sympathy for their fellow Palestinians and growing alienation from their fellow Israelis. As one person put it, “My state is at war with my nation.”

After all, when someone speaks of an Israeli, what comes to mind is someone Jewish. And no wonder: Israel considers itself the “state of the Jewish people”; its flag, coat of arms, constitution, Hebrew national anthem, monuments, and other iconography all stem from Jewish culture, history and religion.

The Law of Return allows virtually any Jew in the world to become an Israeli citizen as soon as he or she enters the country. The Zionist project involved the “negation of the diaspora” and the “ingathering of the exiles,” after the loss of Jewish sovereignty some 2,000 years earlier.

When the Jewish community declared its independence by creating the new Jewish state of Israel in most of Palestine, resulting in a war, the vast majority of Arabs fled or were driven away.

But a remnant, today’s Israeli Arabs, remained within the borders of the Jewish polity. Although they have full civil and political rights, they are, not surprisingly, alienated from the majority Jewish population.

Today, the Israeli Arab population of 1,658,000 represents about 21 percent of Israel’s more than eight million citizens.  Muslims, including Bedouins, make up 82 percent of the Arab population in Israel, the remainder Christians and Druze (an offshoot of Islam).

Acre, Haifa, Lod, Nazareth, Ramle, and other cities have substantial Arab inhabitants; much of the Galilee has a majority Arab population. The co-called “Triangle,” an area in central Israel adjacent to the West Bank, is also populated by Israeli Arabs: the towns of Umm al-Fahm and Tayibe are the social, cultural and economic centres for residents of the region.

Israeli Arabs tend to be poorer, and their cities and towns receive a lesser share of state spending on infrastructure, education, and other services. Arabs are also underrepresented in higher education and most industries.

However, Israeli Arabs are not just a “minority.” They are the kith and kin of the Palestinian Arabs across the 1967 borders, in Gaza, the West Bank, and neighbouring states such as Jordan and Lebanon.

And their Palestinian (and Muslim) consciousness, dormant in the first decades after 1948, has been growing.

Israeli Arabs in the past have backed various iterations of Communist parties, which had Israeli Arab leaders. Today, twelve Israeli Arabs, representing various parties, including Balad, Hadash, and Ra’am (United Arab List), sit in the Knesset. They seek to transform Israel into a “state for all its citizens,” rather than a solely Jewish one. But no Arab parties have ever been part of Israel’s coalition governments.

The rising sense of Arab consciousness has also led to the establishment of distinctly anti-Israeli groups, in particular the Islamic Movement in Israel, founded in 1971 by Abdullah Nimar Darwish. Today, he remains the spiritual leader of the more moderate southern branch of the movement, which participates in the Israeli electoral process, as part of Ra’am.

Sheik Raed Salah is head of the more radical northern branch, which opposes Israel’s existence. He served two years in an Israeli prison for raising millions of dollars for Hamas.

The northern branch sponsors an annual rally where it claims that Israel plans to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to have it declared an illegal organization.

Various Israeli politicians have raised the idea of transferring parts of the territory in the “Triangle”-- along with the 300,000 or so Israeli Arab citizens who live there -- to a future Palestinian state in return for annexing West Bank territory, including Jewish settlement blocs.

But right now this is a far-fetched possibility. In the meantime, Israeli Arab anger and frustration grows.

Yemen is a Chaotic and Failed State

Henry Srebrnik. [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Yemen, the poorest Arab state, with a gross domestic product per capita of little more than $1,400 a year, remains a country in political crisis.

Located at the south-western edge of the Arabian peninsula, the present-day Republic of Yemen  was formed in 1990, when the north, an ancient Arab kingdom and then a republic, united with the south, the former British colony of Aden and later a Marxist-ruled “people’s democratic republic.”

Ali Abdullah Saleh, who took power in the north in 1978, ruled the loosely unified Republic of Yemen since its formation, until ousted three years ago.

Yemen is a small petroleum producer, but output from the country’s oil fields is falling and they are expected to be depleted by 2017 -- a major concern, since crude oil exports finance up to 70 percent of its budget.

Yemen’s income from oil exports tumbled by over 64 percent to $73.4 million in May from a year ago, due to attacks on an export pipeline, and the central bank’s foreign asset reserves shrank to their lowest since the end of 2011.

As a consequence, Yemen has relied heavily on aid from multilateral agencies to sustain its economy. It is hoping to get a $550 million loan from the International Monetary Fund this year that could help unlock more donor funds.

Yemen was swept up by the turmoil that spread across the Arab Middle East in 2011. It led to the ouster of President Saleh in February 2011. Vice president Abd Rabbu Mansur Hadi then assumed power.

Hadi was the sole candidate in the presidential election that was held a year later. His candidacy was backed by the ruling General People’s Congress as well as the parliamentary opposition.

Hadi had first served as a military officer in British-run Aden in the 1960s, then under the southern People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, and finally, after a 1986 split within the southern regime, in the armed forces of Saleh’s pre-unification Yemen Arab Republic.

Hadi has tried to unify the fractured country. He organized a National Dialogue Conference, a 10-month-long series of peace talks that concluded this past January.

It led to an agreement that Yemen would shift to a federal model of government in the future.

Hadi has also restructured the military, which included the removal of Saleh’s son Ahmed Ali from the head of the powerful Republican Guard.

But fighting in the northern provinces of Sa’ada and Amran, between Shia Houthis, Sunni Salafist fighters, and northern tribesmen continues. On July 8, Houthi fighters captured Omran, one of the main cities in northern Yemen, from Sunni tribesmen.

Meanwhile, another tribal uprising, in the province of Hadramout, and continued fighting in Al Dhale province, underscores the continued secessionist feelings in southern Yemen.

And then there is Ansar al-Shari’a (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula), formed in January 2009 from a merger of al-Qaeda’s Yemeni and Saudi branches.

It claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in the centre of the Yemeni capital that left nearly 100 people dead in May 2012. In December 2013, an attack on the Yemeni Defence Ministry in Sana’a killed at least 56 people.

The United States has been launching drone attacks against the militants. In September 2011 two high-profile members, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, both U.S. citizens, were killed in an air strike.

This past April, dozens of fighters were killed in the latest in a string of strikes. They came just days after al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released a video showing its leader, Nasir al-Wahishi, speaking before dozens of followers.

But drones alone are unlikely to eradicate the threat the group poses to Yemen. Analysts contend that they will remain a serious menace unless the government can address challenges such as poverty, corruption, and inadequate security forces. Also, the deaths of civilians often leads to increased support for the militants.

“There are many reasons for the increase of membership of al-Qaeda, but we cannot rule out that the use of drones and the popular backlash it produced has increased the recruitment opportunities of al-Qaeda,” Yemeni political scientist Abdulghani al-Iryani told the Reuters news agency.

As for Hadi, he plans to run for re-election next year and will no doubt win. But Saleh left behind a failed state which has little prospect for a transition to democracy and Hadi, despite his efforts, will do no better.

The 2003 Iraq Invasion Was Welcomed by Many

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

For decades I have kept files on virtually every country in the world. They consist mainly of magazine and newspaper articles, and students find them handy when researching term papers.

My filing cabinets would soon have no room for new pieces if I didn’t occasionally thin them out, and last week I was doing so with the Iraq files.

It was an interesting exercise, especially when I came across articles on the American invasion in March 2003, because today many read like fantasy and wishful thinking.

As early as Dec. 28, 2001, the National Post printed an article by Rich Lowry, “The Liberal Case for Attacking Iraq.” Lowry, editor of the conservative American magazine National Review, called on even “owlish professors and liberal columnists” to become “left-wing hawks.”

He provided six reasons: Saddam Hussein was flouting numerous UN resolutions (including the calls to destroy his “weapons of mass destruction”); women had little freedom in Iraq; 500,000 children had died since 1991 due to UN sanctions, so the “truly humanitarian position” was to overthrow Saddam, thus eliminating this problem; it was also necessary for effective arms control, would allow Muslims to practice their religion in peace; and allow for proper nation-building.

On Aug. 15, 2002, TV personality Ezra Levant, in another National Post column, “Why Canada Should Declare War,” chided “our pusillanimous European allies” as a bunch of fearful pacifist appeasers. And he accused then Liberal foreign minister Bill Graham of hiding behind the UN, instead of following the lead of the United States.

As war loomed, the National Post’s Andrew Coyne on March 7, 2003, in “12 Arguments Against the War; Rebutted,” did Lowry six better. It would not be a unilateral American action, he wrote, since “more than 30 countries” had declared their support. It met the standards of international law, since Saddam had failed to comply with at least 17 UN Security Council resolutions, and Iraq had never “produced a scrap of evidence to suggest it had destroyed” its “massive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.”

Four days later, also in the National Post, University of Toronto political science professor Clifford Orwin made the case for a pre-emptive war. In “America is Justified in Striking First,” he suggested that, because of Iraq’s links with militant groups, the “military aspect of the war on terror does not lend itself to other means.”

Orwin warned that Saddam’s very possession of biological and chemical weapons “qualifies as a global threat. He has used these weapons before and he foresees using them again.” Saddam was, he contended, “a menace to international society.” Finally, the continued oppression of the Iraqi people would end with “their liberation at the hands of the Americans.”

In a follow-up article published on March 21, “The Uncertainty of War,” with the invasion already underway, Orwin remained steadfast in his support and criticized Canada for having “abdicated all responsibility” by refusing its assistance.

Finally, National Post journalist George Jonas, in his March 12, 2003 commentary “Why This Kosovo Dove Became an Iraq Hawk,” also pointed to Iraq’s many violations of UN resolutions, especially Security Council Resolution 1441, passed unanimously on Nov. 8, 2002, which had offered Iraq “a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations.”

As the war was winding down, Washington Post correspondent Antony Shadid filed an article on April 10, 2003, “Hussein’s Baghdad Falls,” in which he wrote of thousands of its residents pouring into the streets “to celebrate the government’s defeat and welcome the U.S. forces in scenes of thanks and jubilation.” They were greeted with “flowers, candy and occasionally, kisses.”

An article in the Globe and Mail of Sept. 23, 2003, “Iraq Makes New Pitch for Foreign Investors,” by Mona Megalli, assured readers that security conditions were improving, and that Iraq was “throwing its doors open to investment.”

University of Calgary political scientist Tariq Ismail was so optimistic that he planned to help found a new international university in Baghdad, reported the Calgary Herald on Jan. 24, 2004. It would become, he told reporter Robin Summerfield, “one brick in the foundation to rebuild civil society in Iraq.”

But the real war was just beginning. How did so many get it so wrong?

The Canadian-U.S. Border: Assymetrical, Long, and Peaceful

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Do we now live in a postmodern “borderless” world? Not really.

Most borders have not crumbled like the Berlin Wall. Instead, many boundaries have emerged as a so-called “third space” in between countries, occupied by heterogeneous and hybrid cultures, and inhabited by “halfway populations.” The border between Mexico and the United States is one example.

What about the very long border between Canada and the U.S.? The entire boundary, including small portions of maritime boundaries on the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic coasts, as well as the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River, is 8,891 kilometres long, including 2,475 kilometres shared with Alaska.

It is our only land border, and Canada is by far the largest nation having a land border with only one country. Unlike most boundaries, it has been one of amity and peace for more than a century.

One of the foremost students of the border is Roger Gibbins, long-time professor of political science at the University of Calgary and now a Senior Fellow at the Canada West Foundation.

In his 1989 monograph “Canada as a Borderlands Society” he examined the differences between the way Americans and Canadians see themselves vis-à-vis the boundary. Gibbins concluded that while the international border had “very limited penetration into American society,” for Canadians “the border looms very large indeed, and its effects are felt not only in communities proximate to the border but also throughout the country.”

He highlighted the asymmetry of the border relationship, which sees most Canadians living relatively close to the border and thus affected by it, whereas most Americans live far away from the border and do not concern themselves with it.

From Maine in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west, the land border on the American side is sparsely populated. States like Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana have very few people in their northern areas adjacent to the border.

The only places where Americans live close to Canada in this region are some cities along the water boundary between Ontario and the states of New York and Michigan in the Great Lakes region, where major bridges and tunnels connect Fort Erie and Buffalo, Windsor and Detroit, and Sarnia and Port Huron.

It’s a different story on the British Columbia-Washington State line along the 49th parallel. Vancouver is virtually on the border, and on the American side cities like Bellingham and even Seattle aren’t that far away.

However, as Gibbins found out in a study of two neighbouring towns only 10 kilometres apart on either side of that border, the Canadians were far more aware of American culture and politics than the reverse.

Sometimes ethnic groups and communities span the border, especially Aboriginal peoples who predated the formation of the two countries. Native peoples such as the Mohawks do not consider the border as applying to them. The Mohawk First Nation of Akwesasne straddles the intersection of the American-Canadian international border as well as the Ontario-Quebec provincial border, on both banks of the St. Lawrence River.

Most of the land is in New York state, where it is known as the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation. Although divided by borders, the residents consider themselves to be one community. The Mohawks view their territory as a “sovereign nation.”

After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, the boundary between Canada and the United States became more apparent. The line itself did not change, but crossing the border became more protracted, less civil and generally more complex.

This “thickening” of the border resulted in delays at many checkpoints, as crossings were placed on alert, and measures were taken to enhance security. I was on an airplane flying between Winnipeg and Montreal that set down in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., on Sept. 11, 2001, where I spent the next three days.

The international bridge linking it to its neighbour on Michigan’s upper peninsula, also named Sault Ste. Marie, was shut and I couldn’t cross into Michigan.

Even so, the Canada-U.S. border remains one of the least militarized in the world.

Do Elections Help in Divided Societies?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The following countries have held parliamentary or presidential elections so far this year: Afghanistan, Algeria, El Salvador, Guinea-Bissau, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Malawi, Mauritania, Panama, Thailand, and Ukraine.

So what? you might remark. After all, that’s quite a rogue’s gallery.

Yet for many people, elections have become the sine qua non of democracy. Our television screens show us people lined up at polling stations, eager to cast their ballots, and commentators usually let us know how excited these voters are to “finally” have a say in the governance of their country.

But in fact, in states without a robust civil society, the rule of law, protection of human rights, and a political culture that tolerates diversity of opinion, elections may even exacerbate, rather than resolve, deep cleavages within the policy – even if they have been relatively free and honest.

In most such places, though, opposition parties often boycott what they consider to be a foregone conclusion; or, if they do contest the election, they invariably claim – usually correctly – that widespread fraud, intimidation, and other irregularities have rendered the result invalid. In many countries, furthermore, so many parties are in the running that no one ever wins a convincing mandate.

Also, only too often, governments brought to power are fairly quickly dispatched in coups (Thailand), or themselves become highly autocratic and sectarian (Iraq). Some countries seem to be in a permanent state of alternation between civilian and military-authoritarian  rule (Nigeria, Pakistan), or are such failed states, with component groups fielding their own armies, that elections are completely meaningless (Lebanon).

In yet others -- Central American oligarchies such as Guatemala and Honduras – incredible inequality makes for continuous political and criminal violence. Elections are irrelevant, held merely to please some foreign capital like Washington.

Political parties are typically simply the vehicles for non-democratic elements to gain control and impose their own brand of autocracy (and, not coincidentally, gain access to the state’s resources).

Elections can’t paper over issues of what political scientists Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan called problems of “stateness” in places where “there are profound differences about the territorial boundaries of the political community’s state and profound differences as to who has the right of citizenship in that state.”

These are matters relating to the very definition of the country and usually revolve around deep-seated class, ethnic, religious, and/or regional conflicts, often involving repression of aggrieved minorities without a share of power. Each group votes for its champion, so, as political scientist Donald Horowitz has written, elections are little more than a census count. Demographics neatly predict party support levels.

For example: Although Sri Lanka has never ceased to be an electoral democracy, the lack of genuine political power by the minority Tamils led to a vicious decades-old civil war in which tens of thousands of people were slaughtered. In pre-1974 Cyprus, ethnic bloc voting by Greeks meant that the Turks, with fewer people, could never hold power. It ended with partition.

In Africa, political violence broke out after the adoption of democracy in various countries, including Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, and Togo, as different ethnic and religious groups vied for power.

Such issues even affect states such as Canada, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and have led to violence, despite the fact that they are, unlike our earlier examples, robust democracies.

So, as author and journalist Robert Kaplan has observed, in many states without a genuine sense of national consciousness, what is left when authoritarian rulers are deposed are tribes, clans, and sects; they have now, for instance, become the most important actors in entities like Libya and Yemen.

Libyans went to the polls June 25 to elect a new parliament. But one of Libya’s most prominent human rights activists, Salwa Bugaighis, was assassinated in her home in Benghazi -- shortly after she had voted.

To make my point at its most basic level, ask yourself this: would you rather have lived in a colony without any internal self-rule at all, but with the rule of law, like pre-1990s Hong Kong, or in a sovereign state with “elections,” like Zimbabwe?

You know the answer.

A Sunni State in the Fertile Crescent?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The various Sunni jihadist groups, in particular the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), who are battling the Shia regimes in Iraq and Syria, are attempting to carve out a Sunni emirate in parts of both countries (and possibly also in Jordan).

ISIS formally declared the creation of an Islamic State on June 29, its territory stretching from the northern Syrian province of Aleppo to the eastern Iraqi province of Diyala. Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi is its new leader.

But this should come as little surprise. These countries are all artificial creations, the fruits of French and British imperialist cartography following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War.

Syria and Iraq (then known as Mesopotamia) were little more than geographic expressions prior to the 20th century. But the Allies would give them definite boundaries, which more or less remained stable until recent years.

In a secret 1916 accord between a British colonel, Sir Mark Sykes, and a French diplomat, François Georges-Picot, London and Paris agreed upon the division of Ottoman territories should the Turks lose the war.

They were believers in the notion that the people of the region would be better off under the European empires.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement carved up the Fertile Crescent. France obtained Lebanon and Syria, while Britain took Iraq and Palestine (today’s Israel and Jordan). Needless to say, no Arabs were consulted.

The deal was formalized by the newly-formed League of Nations after the war; it allocated these territories as “mandates” to be governed by France and Britain. Though the new Iraq was officially designated a kingdom, it was also effectively under British control.

The colonial powers lumped together Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, Christians, and other minorities, with little regard for the animosities these groups had felt towards each other for many centuries.

From the 1950s through the 1990s, pan-Arabists sought to unite the Arab world into one super-state. This failed miserably. Since then, sectarian forms of Islam have replaced secular nationalism as a rallying cry, leading to the present discord in the region.

ISIS’s emergence can be traced to al-Qaeda in Iraq, which arose in response to the American invasion in 2003. The group was active in the insurgency in Iraq, but when civil war broke out along sectarian lines in Syria in 2011, many ISIS members crossed the border to fight with other al-Qaeda-affiliated groups against the Shia Alawite regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Now they are back in Iraq again. One of the reasons they were able to easily take cities like Mosul and Tikrit is because these are fundamentally Sunni cities that feel marginalized by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shia. Many ordinary Sunnis describe this as a popular revolution against a Shia-led government, not a terrorist onslaught.

Given the growing Shia-Sunni war throughout the region, other states and groups have also lined up with ISIS. A large part of their financing comes from wealthy benefactors in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf states.

On the other hand, Assad and Maliki depend on arms and money from fellow-Shia Iran. In little Lebanon, itself a microcosm of the region, the country’s Shia militia, Hezbollah, is fighting alongside Syria’s army, while Sunni Lebanese provide aid to the rebels.

The conflicts in Iraq and Syria are to some extent proxy wars that pit Saudi Arabia against Iran.

It seems the arbitrary borders created by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the product of a now long-discredited zeitgeist, may soon themselves become little more than history.

Why Putin is no Hitler

Henry Srebrnik [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

At his own request, the upper house of the Russian parliament has revoked President Vladimir Putin’s authorization to invade Ukraine. The Federation Council voted 153 to 1 to cancel its resolution of March 1 allowing Putin to send Russian troops to Ukraine.

Yet American officials remain unconvinced that he has backed up words with deeds. They considered the move positive but symbolic, assuming that it was really meant to undercut European support for additional sanctions. Instead, they mocked Putin by calling it a “charm offensive.”

Ever since the crisis in Ukraine began, with the overthrow of the legally elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, war drums have been beating in the West.

They have defined as “aggression” Putin’s attempts to make certain Russian-speakers and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine don’t get trampled by the nationalist Ukrainians in the west – the heirs of those who fought alongside Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union in World War II.

To add to the insult, people like Hillary Clinton and Prince Charles, who should know better, have glibly compared Putin to – wait for it – Adolf Hitler! I guess even a lesser tyrant like Benito Mussolini, the fascist leader of pre-war Italy, or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad won’t do.

The comparison was due to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. But that’s a special case.
The great majority of the population of the peninsula, almost physically cut off from the rest of the country, is ethnically, linguistically, and religiously Russian. The majority of its population prefers to be ruled from Moscow rather than Kyiv and it has been part of Russia for centuries.

So why has it been Ukrainian? The answer: a dead dictator’s whim.  Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev 60 years ago detached Crimea from the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic and gave it to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, without consulting anyone – including the population of the peninsula.

It didn’t matter much anyhow, as in reality everyone in the Soviet Union was ruled from the Kremlin anyway. But after 1991, when the USSR collapsed, the Russians in the Crimea found themselves under Ukrainian sovereignty.

At least this time there was a referendum – the result overwhelmingly favourable to rejoining Russia.

But American observers insisted this annexation, which righted an historical injustice, was only the first step on Moscow’s part to grab more Ukrainian territory. CNN for weeks ran almost daily “breaking news” alarmist clips warning of Russian troop movements near the Ukrainian border – as if there was something illegal about a country moving its forces around within its own territory.

In fact, it’s the outgunned “rebels” in the east, not the Ukrainian army, that have been suffering most of the casualties, and have begged Putin to intervene. The Ukrainian military has been using air strikes and artillery attacks against them.

Unlike Hitler, Putin hasn’t sent forces across the border, though there has been enough provocation for him to invoke an international norm like R2P (“responsibility to protect”) to do so.

Instead, he keeps calling for substantive negotiations between the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and the new president, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko – who was elected with virtually no ethnic Russian support.

Putin said that declaring a cease-fire and asking the rebels to disarm without addressing their long-term political grievances would yield nothing. The separatists want increased autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk.

 “If we see there are substantive talks, so that people in eastern Ukraine can finally understand how their legal interests will be guaranteed, then there is a high possibility of success,” Putin indicated.

He also charged that Kyiv not done enough to disarm an anti-Russian group called Right Sektor. Without that, it did not make sense to call on the militias in the east to disarm.

The Ukrainian president has now also signed a sweeping trade deal with the European Union that calls for the establishment of a “deep and comprehensive free-trade area.”

Russia sees the agreement as a serious threat to its own historically close ties to Ukraine. “The anti-constitutional coup in Kiev and attempts to artificially impose a choice between Europe and Russia on the Ukrainian people have pushed society toward a split and painful confrontation,” Putin said. But again, there has been no threat of military action by Moscow.

If only Hitler had been more like Putin! The Second World War might never have occurred.

Back to the Future? Battling Jihadis in Africa

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Across a wide swath of North Africa and the Sahel countries, the United States has assumed an old European role: combating Islamist jihadis.

The situation has become worse since the overthrow of Libya’s brutal dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011; many of his former mercenaries, along with their large stockpile of weapons, are now active in this vast region, especially in Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), founded in Algeria in 1998, and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), a splinter group formed in 2011, took control over a large part of Mali in early 2012; they captured Mali’s three largest northern cities, Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu, imposing draconian versions of sharia law. They also damaged or destroyed a number of historical sites on the grounds that they were idolatrous, particularly in Timbuktu.

In January 2013, the old colonial power, France, began operations against the Islamists, aided by African Union troops. The Islamists were pushed into the barren northern deserts but they still remain a danger.

The Central African Republic has also experienced horrific violence, after the mostly Muslim Séléka rebel group seized power in March 2013 in the majority Christian state. They were dislodged by 1,600 French soldiers along with a 6,000-man African Union force, but the violence has continued.

Former colonial power France has done most of the heavy lifting in these former colonies, but the United States has now also become a major presence. In Mali, for instance, American aircraft airlifted the French troops and their vehicles and provided intelligence.

In 2003, the Pan-Sahel Initiative was developed by the U.S. to enhance security in Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. Two years later, Washington announced the creation of the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative/Partnership to prevent terrorists from establishing a foothold in Africa; it eventually included ten countries.

Its first project, Exercise Flintlock, involved U.S. Special Operations forces training 3,000 soldiers in seven Saharan and sub-Saharan countries. This year it involved soldiers from 18 countries.

In 2007, the Pentagon established its Africa Command (Africom) because, it asserted, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, al-Shabaab in Somalia, and Boko Haram in Nigeria were increasingly trying to coordinate and synchronize their operations on the African continent.

Today the Pentagon is spending nearly $70 million on training, intelligence-gathering equipment and other support to build a counter-terrorism battalion in Niger and a similar unit in nearby Mauritania. The U.S already launches unarmed surveillance drones from Niger to fly over Mali in support of French and United Nations troops.

Washington also operates a base in the small Red Sea country of Djibouti, adjoining Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somaliland. Camp Lemonnier, with about 4,000 troops, is used to launch counter-terrorism missions, including drone strikes, in Yemen and the Horn of Africa.

“My job is to look at Africa and see where the threat to the United States is,” Brigadier- General James B. Linder, who commands U.S. Special Operations forces in Africa, said in a recent interview with the New York Times. “We have a real global threat,” he continued. “The problems in Africa are going to land on our doorstep if we’re not careful.”

When the European powers divided Africa among themselves in the late 19th century, opposition typically came from Muslim peoples. In the Sudan, a fiercely fundamentalist state was established in 1885 when Muhammad Ahmad, who called himself the Mahdi (the Redeemer), defeated a British army at Khartoum. It lasted until 1898.

Further west, in what is now Chad, one of the Mahdi’s disciples, Rabin ibn Fadl Allah, led the resistance against the French. On his death his son followed in his footsteps and fought the French for 15 more years until he died in 1901.

In what are now parts of Mali and Burkina Faso, an Islamic theocratic state known as the Tukulor Empire flourished in the 19th century and successfully held off French military incursions until its defeat in 1893.

A more formidable enemy of the French was Samori Ture, the founder of the Wassoulou Empire, an Islamic state that resisted French colonial rule in West Africa from 1882 until 1898.

MUJAO claims to be a successor to Usman dan Fodio, a 19th-century reformer who waged jihad across West Africa to purify Islam and founded the Sokoto Caliphate in what is now northern Nigeria.

There is nothing new in the Sahel region when it comes to militant insurgencies against non-Muslims, as the European knew and the Americans are learning.

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan Gains Upper Hand over Military

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Last week we saw something unprecedented in Turkey: In a landmark decision meant to curb the power of the country’s massive military establishment, a court sentenced two top former generals, army chief Kenan Evren and air force head Tahsin Sahinkaya, to life imprisonment for leading a 1980 coup that resulted in widespread torture, arrests and deaths.

Evren, who then served as president of Turkey from 1980 to 1989, claimed the coup had saved Turkey from anarchy after thousands were killed in fighting between militant left-wingers and right-wingers.

Is the Republic of Turkey, the resolutely secular state founded in 1923 by Kemal Ataturk on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, undergoing a fundamental transformation?

Ataturk reformed everything from dress codes to the alphabet during his 15-year reign as president. He even moved the country’s capital from Istanbul, the old imperial capital, to Ankara, in the heart of Anatolia.

And his legacy was guarded for decades afterwards by the Turkish Army. They carried out three coups between 1960 and 1980 and pushed an Islamist-led government led by Necmettin Erbakan from power in 1997. In 1998, his Welfare Party (RP) was banned.

But things have been changing. Since the 1990s, the revival of a Sunni-infused sense of nationalism is transforming the country.

The old republican verities have been challenged, especially by the current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, himself a former member of the Welfare Party, who has been in office since 2003. He has now even taken on the generals, something earlier rulers did at their peril.

His popularity -- he has won three elections in a row -- has afforded him protection while he moved to break their power. His Justice and Development Party (AKP) holds a majority of the seats in parliament.

Erdogan, who was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994, was himself arrested four years later, sentenced to 10 months in jail for “inciting religious hatred.”

He had publicly read an Islamic poem including the lines “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.” Because of his criminal record, he was barred from standing in elections or holding political office until 2001.

In another case, 230 army officers who were convicted in 2012 in the so-called “Sledgehammer” trial, accused of taking part in in an alleged plot to topple Erdogan, have been released.

Turkey’s Constitutional Court ruled that the officers’ rights had been violated in the handling of digital evidence and the refusal to hear testimony from two former top military commanders, as requested by defendants.

So the prime minister is not yet home free, though he himself recently began discrediting the convictions, because many of the prosecutors and investigators are followers of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic preacher who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania. He was once Erdogan’s ally but now opposes him.

As well, could the country’s so-called “deep state” return? The term refers to a supposed clandestine network of military officers and their civilian allies who, for decades, suppressed and sometimes murdered anyone thought to pose a threat to the secular order.

Human rights groups accused them of thousands of political deaths and disappearances during the 1990s.

It’s no secret that Erdogan plans to run for president this coming August, when Turkey’s head of state will be directly elected by the people, for the first time ever.

Will there now be genuine civilian oversight when it comes to the armed forces? Has Erdogan actually managed to tame the Turkish military, or will he meet the fate of earlier civilian rulers unseated by coups? Right now, he does seem to have the upper hand.

So What if Iraq Splinters?

Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been asking Washington to intervene in his war against Sunni insurgents. U.S. President Barack Obama should take a pass.

I was somewhat agnostic about the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. I wasn’t ready to believe Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, nor that he was a major danger to the Middle East.

It seemed to me he was more of a caged beast after the 1991 Gulf War.

Still, I thought, there’s no harm in removing such a tyrant, even if, unlike the fantasists who hoped this would bring democracy to Iraq, I was certain his successors would be little better.

All this proved to be true. America’s attempt at “nation building,” in a place where there is no “nation,” failed, of course. It couldn’t have been otherwise.

Now it looks as if no lessons have been learned in the past decade. I’m old enough to remember the endless propaganda during the Vietnam War about the necessity to “save” South Vietnam – from whom? From themselves, it turned out!

Those of us who felt the United States should simply get out were derided as “defeatists” and “simpletons” who “didn’t understand” the intricacies of international politics, and so on. More than 58,000 American (and millions of Vietnamese) deaths later, it turns out we were right.

The U.S. is again “saving” people who don’t want to be saved. For some reason, it has become paramount, for the “best and the brightest” in Washington, to try to hold together an artificial state created by the British after the First World War, incorporating three groups who clearly have little use for each other – and never have. (Read a history book to see if I’m right.)

Do they really plan to use air power against the Sunnis on behalf of a puppet Shi’ite regime in Baghdad that is beholden to Iran, the most dangerous state in the region? Is America about to become Tehran’s air force?

Let us assume the Sunnis in central Iraq regain control of that part of the country, while the Kurds hold the north, and a rump Shi’ite state emerges in the south. So what? There are already numerous states in the Middle East, why would a few more matter? After a few years, no one will remember this was once a so-called country.

Partition is the worst possible outcome – save for all the others! Or do you think Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis would have been better off in a united India, or Arabs and Jews in one-state Palestine? Would you like to put the Yugoslav and Soviet empires back together? Actually, all these peoples would be at each others’ throats.

Good fences may not always make good neighbours; sure, there are still problems between these now separate countries – but having no fences would be even worse.

Kurds Capitalize on Iraqi Chaos

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Iraq is imploding. The Sunni jihadis of the group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have moved to within sight of Baghdad, while the Shi’ite government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki becomes more dependent than ever on Iran.

More and more, even Americans – who suffered tens of thousands of soldiers killed and wounded during their occupation of the country between 2003 and 2011-- are staring the obvious in the face: Iraq is really composed of three mutually hostile groups: Arab Sunnis in the center, Arab Shi’ites in the south, and Kurds in the north.

With talk of partition, has the moment of historical opportunity finally arrived for the Kurds, the largest ethnic group in the world without a state of its own? Will one of the results of the current chaos be the formation of a sovereign entity on Kurdish territory?

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the United States and Great Britain established a so called “no fly zone” above the 36th parallel in northern Iraq, allowing Kurds in that region to establish a de facto autonomous jurisdiction.

The defeat of Saddam Hussein by the United States in 2003 enabled the Kurds to strengthen their hold. Though divided into two major political groupings, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which were often at odds, the Kurds presented a united front in their efforts to gain control of northern Iraq.

Iraqi Kurdistan is now virtually independent, with its own flag, executive, legislature, and judiciary. Its capital is Erbil (sometimes spelled Arbil).

Last September, Iraqi Kurdistan held its fourth legislative election for the 111-seat Kurdish National Assembly, with the KDP winning 38 seats to the PUK’s 18. A new opposition group, Gorran (the Movement for Change), which split off from the PUK, took 24, while two Islamic parties won another 16.

However, since the parliamentary elections of 2005, the KDP and PUK have ruled the Kurdish region as a united government, though the KDP has had the upper hand. Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish Region and son of the famed rebel leader Mustafa Barzani, heads the KDP. The PUK’s leader is Iraq’s President Jalal Talabani, who has been ill and holds little power in that largely ceremonial position.

Taking advantage of the turmoil in Iraq, the Kurdish military, known as the Peshmerga, has now seized large tracts of Kurdish-populated territories that had remained disputed and outside its control, including Kirkuk, which the Kurds see as a future capital.

Capturing the city and its huge oil reserves, just outside the area controlled by the Kurdish regional government is a huge achievement.

In Mosul, Sunni insurgents have gained control of the area on the west bank of the Tigris River, the Kurds on the other side.

Will the Kurds be able to gain -- and retain -- cities such as Kirkuk and Mosul, surrounded by oil-rich areas that would enable a Kurdish state to become economically self-sufficient, indeed wealthy? In two decades of de facto autonomy in Iraq's north, the Kurds have proved they can run a civil state.

The Kurds have also benefitted from improved relations with Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Ergogan, a religious Sunni, is no friend of the Shi’ite regime in Baghdad.

So Ankara and Erbil have built strong economic and diplomatic relations; they have signed a 50-year energy deal and Kurdish oil is being exported via a pipeline that connects the autonomous region to the port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. Turkey is now the KRG’s main business partner.

Last November Erdogan met with KRG President Barzani in the largely Kurdish-populated city of Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey. The city was adorned with Turkish and KRG flags.

Earlier this month, Huseyin Celik, a spokesman for Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), declared that the Kurds of Iraq have the right to decide the future of their land. “Turkey has been supporting the Kurdistan Region,” he said, and will continue to do so.

This is probably the best chance the Kurds have had in 80 years to form a sovereign state in at least a part of their historic patrimony. They are certainly laying the groundwork for it to come to pass.

Reminiscing About Israel, Then and Now

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

In 1972, while a graduate student at Brandeis University outside Boston, I spent the summer at the Mount Scopus (Har ha-Tsofim) campus of the Hebrew University, which had been an enclave within Jordanian east Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967 and was not reopened until after the Six-Day War. (When the Jordanians denied Israeli access to Mount Scopus, a new campus was built at Givat Ram in western Jerusalem; it was completed in 1958.)

I used to walk down the hill from the campus, through east Jerusalem and the Old City, into West Jerusalem, with its cafes and museums – sometimes even in the evening.

That same summer, I visited the West Bank, including Ramallah, now the capital of the Palestinian Authority. Along with graduate student friends, I travelled down to Sharm el-Shek, the resort at the southernmost tip of the Sinai Peninsula, then occupied by Israel (the town had been renamed Ofira). We slept on the beach at night. Could anyone imagine doing that now?

Israel had come into possession of all these territories in the 1967 Middle East War, and a feeling of elation enveloped the country. During the so-called War of Attrition between Israel and Egypt in the years immediately following the war, Israeli aircraft bombed targets deep within Egyptian territory.

Some of the aerial dogfights that ensued involved Russian pilots flying Egyptian planes. Defence minister Moshe Dayan boasted that Israel could even defeat Egypt’s then ally, the Soviet Union.

Prior to 1967, Israel had been a small country that, unlike today, wasn’t in the news day and night. Tel Aviv looked like a modest European city. (I was there just after the war.) The country had been established by European Jewish pioneers who founded kibbutzim and labour unions.

It had been governed, from independence in 1948 on, by the semi-socialist Labour Party, and secular Haifa was more important than Jerusalem. Most non-Orthodox diaspora Jews did not regard Israel as the very center of their religious or cultural identity.

Israel had not yet become the focus of a global attack by its enemies, many of whom today consider it the very embodiment of evil, a state that must be destroyed.

In some ways, 1967-1973 was a golden age for Israel, but the dangerous sense of hubris set the stage for the catastrophe of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the ideological and political  retreats that would follow, and that now place it in grave danger.

Czech People Face Adversity Throughout History

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The Czechs may have the saddest history of any European people. At many times, they have been thwarted in their desire for freedom and independence.

The years 1415, 1620, 1938, and 1968, in particular, were disastrous.

The historic lands of Bohemia and Moravia in central Europe have been home to the Czech people since the Middle Ages and an independent Bohemian kingdom existed from the ninth century until 1306, when it became a component, but distinct, kingdom within the Holy Roman Empire.

A full century before Martin Luther inaugurated the Protestant Reformation, a Czech theologian, Jan Hus, was burned at the stake for heresy, setting off decades of warfare. Following his execution in 1415, the Hussite movement continued to advance the Czech cause.

The Protestant Reformation gained support in the 16th century; soon some 90 per cent of the Czech population had become Protestant. But in 1620, two years after the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants throughout Europe, the Protestant Czech landowners were defeated by the Imperial Habsburg armies at the Battle of the White Mountain, and Bohemia lost its autonomy.

Now part of the Habsburg Empire, the country for the next three centuries would be ruled from Vienna. Czechs were forced to convert to Catholicism or leave Bohemia and Moravia. Many of the cities became culturally and ethnically German.

Perhaps this is why the Czechs, unlike their Catholic Slavic neighbours in Poland and Slovakia, have worn their religion lightly and have not fused it with their national identity.

Following the defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary in the First World War, a new state, Czechoslovakia, a union of the Czech and Slovak peoples, emerged. However, it also contained the Sudetenland, with its three million Germans, almost one-quarter of the country’s population, and this would lead to disaster two decades later.

At the infamous Munich meetings held in September 1938 between Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and Edouard Daladier of France, the Sudetenland was handed over to Nazi Germany, leaving Czechoslovakia virtually defenceless.

Hungary and Poland also bit off small chunks of the country. (My father was part of the Polish army that occupied the Zaolzie region of Cieszyn Silesia.)

In March 1939 Hitler completed the destruction of the country. Slovakia became a separate puppet state, while the Czech lands were incorporated into Nazi Germany, as the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.”

The Nazi occupation lasted for most of the war; Prague was not freed until May 8, 1945.After the German defeat the Czechoslovak state was reconstituted and its German inhabitants, now considered “fifth columnists,” were expelled. Three years later, though, the country fell under Soviet domination.

In the 1960s the tight grip of the Communist apparatchiks began to loosen. In January 1968 a reformer, Alexander Dubcek, became the country’s leader. A program adopted in April 1968 set guidelines for a modern, humanistic socialist democracy that would guarantee freedom of religion, press, assembly, and speech, as well as abundant consumer goods. It would be “socialism with a human face.”

But in August 1968 Warsaw Pact troops snuffed out Dubcek’s attempt to liberalize Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev claimed that the country was falling into the hands of “western imperialists” and following Dubcek’s overthrow the Soviets installed a regime loyal to Moscow.

Those who could not be intimidated into collaborating were punished or marginalized. When I visited Czechoslovakia in July 1977, I was struck by the contrast between the beauty of the country, Prague in particular, and the despondency and sadness of its inhabitants. The heavy hand of Communist repression was evident everywhere – this was only nine years following the dashed hopes of the “Prague spring.”

However, dissidents regrouped, led by human rights activists and intellectuals such as Vaclav Havel; they founded the group known as Charter 77, which in the 1980s became the Civic Forum, an umbrella group championing bureaucratic reform and civil liberties.

By the late 1980s Communism was a discredited ideology throughout eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia, the “velvet revolution” of November-December1989 – a very secular affair – would be followed by the “velvet divorce” of January 1993, which split the country into Czech and Slovak states. Following the collapse of the Communist regime, Havel had become president of the country. 

Today’s Czech Republic is a homogenous, liberal multi-party parliamentary democracy, and a member of both the European Union and NATO. The current president is Milos Zeman, of the Party of Civic Rights. The prime minister, Bohuslav Sobotka of the Czech Social Democratic Party, heads a three-party coalition government. The Czechs, it seems, have finally overcome their sad history.

Le Pen, the National Front, and France

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer 

Who is Jean-Marie Le Pen? This is no idle question, as he is the founder of a French political party that has been making significant gains in recent years and, as such, he remains an important figure in his country.

Capitalizing on anti-Muslim sentiment and anger about the state of the French economy, the party he created, the National Front (NF), came first in French balloting for the European parliament elections held this past May, with a full 25 per cent of the vote.

Born in 1928, Le Pen led the NF from its foundation in 1972 until 2011. His longevity in politics and his five attempts to become president of France have made him a fixture on the political right.

Le Pen’s political career began in Paris in 1956, when he was elected to the National Assembly as a member of Pierre Poujade’s populist party, the Union de Defense Commercants et Artisans. Le Pen was a deputy until 1962, and again (for the NF) from 1986 to 1988.

In 1984, Le Pen won a seat in the European Parliament and has been continuously re-elected since then, though in 2000 he was banned from public office and stripped of his seat for one year, following a 1998 conviction for assaulting a Socialist politician the year before.

In the 2002 presidential election, he obtained 16.86 per cent of the votes in the first round, good for second place, before losing badly to incumbent Jacques Chirac in the run-off. He finished fourth in the 2007 election. His daughter Marine Le Pen, who has headed the party since 2011, finished third in the 2012 presidential election, with 17.9 per cent of the vote.

Ever since the French Revolution, France has been divided by two ideological strands: the first is the Jacobin republicanism of liberty, equality, fraternity, the second the organic Catholic nationalism and monarchism that morphed into fascism and racism in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

The former championed secularism, universalism and anti-clericalism. Its advocates prevailed in the famous Dreyfus case at the turn of the 20th century, when a Jewish army officer who had been falsely imprisoned as a German spy by anti-Semitic elements in the general staff was exonerated. The issue divided France from the affair’s inception in 1894 until its resolution in 1906.

The right-wing tradition culminated in the Nazi collaborationist Vichy government in the Second World War under Marshal Philippe Pétain, when some 90,000 Jews were sent to their deaths.

The decades preceding the 1940 defeat of republicanism saw the rise of fascist movements and ideologues.In January1934, fascist groups in Paris rioted trying to overthrow the Third Republic.

Writers such as Edouard Drumont, Maurice Barrès, Drieu La Rochelle, and Charles Maurras presented a resurgent clericalism and a heightened xenophobia as the solution to France’s malaise, in opposition to the Enlightenment rationality of the left.

The Vichyites, defeated in the Second World War, lost their ideological and political power, and their ideas became anathema to most. Upon his conviction in 1945 for “complicity with the enemy” during the German occupation, Maurras exclaimed: “It’s Dreyfus’s revenge!”

But has the National Front emerged out of this tarnished tradition? Le Pen himself certainly has. Already in the 1960s, he called for the rehabilitation of collaborationists, asking “Was General de Gaulle more brave than Marshal Pétain? It was much easier to resist in London than to resist in France.”

Le Pen was fined by a French court in 1996 for saying that the gas chambers used to kill Jews in the Holocaust were “merely a detail in the history of the Second World War.” Three years later a German court fined him for a similar comment judged to have minimised the Holocaust.

In 2004 France’s highest court convicted him of inciting racial hatred for telling a newspaper in 2003 that Muslims would one day run France and strike fear into the hearts of the non-Muslim population.

Marine Le Pen has modified the party’s positions while remaining opposed to the European Union. She also favours a “radical change of politics” in order to drastically reduce the influx of illegal immigrants towards France, as well as a moratorium on legal immigration.

The NF leader maintains that the party resolutely “condemns any form of anti-Semitism in the strongest terms.” She has rebuked her father for recent remarks many construed as anti-Semitic. Indeed, she even hopes the NF gains some Jewish support, since the main danger to the French Jewish community now comes from Islamist radicals.

The Revolt in China's Uighur Autonomous Region

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in the far west of the People’s Republic of China is more than 1.6 million square kilometres in area.

An arid region that historically was called East Turkestan, it is the homeland of the Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim people. In recent decades, though, Han Chinese moved in and took the better jobs and housing.

Today it is estimated that Uighurs make up only about 45 per cent of its 22 million people. Most of Xinjiang's Uighurs live in the southwestern portion of the region, in the Tarim Basin.

The influx of Chinese settlers has sparked resentment and calls for an independent Uighur state. But the Uighur struggle to assert a right to national self-determination is a difficult one. Unlike most formerly colonized peoples around the world, the Uighurs have never benefited from the fruits of de-colonization, since they were absorbed by a non-western neighbouring state, China.

Beijing refuses to acknowledge that it acts as a colonial power in the region; after all, it considers itself as having also been historically a victim of imperialism.

A Uighur Empire stretched from the Caspian Sea to Manchuria from 745 to 840 but it fragmented into smaller kingdoms and eventually came under Mongol control. Originally Buddhists, the Uighurs were converted to Islam by the beginning of the 16th century.

Xinjiang was conquered by the Qing (Manchu) dynasty in the mid-18th century and the Uighurs became subjects of the Chinese emperors.

Since then, there have been periodic uprisings against Chinese domination. In 1933 and 1944, the Uighurs temporarily gained their independence from Nationalist China, backed by the Soviet Union. The second East Turkistan Republic lasted from 1944 to 1949.

In 1949, the Chinese Communists took over the territory and declared it a Chinese province. In October 1955, Xinjiang was classified as an autonomous region.

There are ideological divisions among the Uighur nationalists. Some Uighurs call for an Islamic state, while others support a more ethnically independent and self-governing East Turkestan.

In July 2009, ethnic tension between the Han Chinese and Uighurs led to severe riots in the capital city of Urumqi. According to Chinese state media, almost 200 people were killed, and more than 800 injured.

There has been an upsurge in violence since then. In June 2012, six ethnic Uighur men tried to hijack an aircraft heading to Urumqi, but failed after passengers and crew resisted and restrained the hijackers. A year later, 27 people were killed in disturbances in the township of Lukqun; 17 of them were killed by rioters, while the other ten were alleged assailants who were shot dead by police.

At least 29 people were killed in early March in an attack at a railway station in the Chinese city of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. It was an organised, premeditated assault by knife-wielding Uighur assailants, according to the Chinese Xinhua news agency.

In late May, attackers in two cars ploughed through shoppers while setting off explosives at a busy street market in Urumqi, killing 39 people. The Xinjiang regional government, which is Chinese-controlled, said in a statement that it was “a serious violent terrorist incident of a particularly vile nature.”

In response, China’s president Xi Jinping has called for moving more Uighurs to inland areas of China in order “to enhance mutual understanding among different ethnic groups and boost ties between them.”

All told, at least 180 people have been killed in attacks across China over the past year. But the anti-colonial goals that motivate Uighur nationalists to work to construct a modern Uighur nation remain unfulfilled. The plight of the Uighurs should command more attention.

Pope Francis in the Middle East

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Pope Francis I visited Jordan, the Palestinian West Bank, and Israel in May. The three-day pilgrimage was his second trip outside Rome since becoming head of the Roman Catholic Church.

In Bethlehem, Francis called for “a stable peace based on justice, on the recognition of the rights of every individual, and on mutual security,” and for intensified efforts for the creation of two states, Palestinian and Israeli, before moving on to Israel.

He also invited Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas, the Israeli and Palestinian presidents, to pay a symbolic visit to the Vatican to pray for peace.

To say that the Church historically had a contentious relationship with the Jewish people is an understatement.

For some two millennia, the Church considered itself the successor to the Biblical covenant between the Israelites and God and, as the “new Israel,” the proper heir to the “promised land.”

The Jewish people were doomed to a diasporic existence; their very lives would be circumscribed and they would remain at the mercy of their Christian neighbors.

Clearly, for the Church, the rise of Jewish nationalism in the 19th century, with its program of reconstituting a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, was theological anathema.

But the Zionist movement sought allies wherever it could find them, and the founder of the World Zionist Organization, Theodor Herzl, even made entreaties to the Vatican. In 1904, he asked Pope Pius X for help in his efforts to establish a modern Jewish state in the historic homeland of the Jewish nation. Pius rejected the request.

At the time of the 1947 UN decision to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, the Vatican expressed its support for Jerusalem to become a “corpus separatum” under an international regime. And when Pope Paul VI visited Israel 50 years ago he never once uttered the name of the Jewish state, preferring to call it the Holy Land. He avoided meeting with Israeli statesmen.

But things would begin to improve. “Nostra Aetate,” the “Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions,” was passed by the Second Vatican Council in 1965. The document absolved the Jewish people as a whole of deicide: “The Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God,” it asserted.

This theological pivot led to a sea change in Church relations with the Jewish state, especially under John Paul II, the Polish pope. In 1985 the State of Israel was for the first time mentioned by name in a public Vatican document, and the Holy See established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1993.

By 2000 John Paul had prayed at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, and visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. He met with the president, the prime minister and the chief rabbis of Israel. In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI followed the same itinerary.

In February 2013, a papal conclave elected the Argentinian Jesuit Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, as Benedict’s successor.

As archbishop, the future pope had cultivated closer relations with Argentina’s large Jewish community. He attended services at a synagogue in 2007 and told the congregation that he was there to examine his heart “like a pilgrim, together with you, my elder brothers.”

In 2012 he hosted a Kristallnacht memorial event at the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral, commemorating the Nazi destruction of Jewish lives and property in Germany in November 1938.

As Francis I, the pope has followed in the footsteps of his two predecessors. Addressing a delegation in Rome in June 2013, Pope Francis described “Nostra Aetate” as a “key point of reference” for Catholic relations with the Jewish people.

“A Christian cannot be anti-Semitic,” he declared, due to “our common roots” with the Jewish people. And he has praised the Jews for remaining faithful to God “despite the awful trials of these last centuries.”

In Jerusalem, Pope Francis laid a wreath on the grave of Theodor Herzl. The symbolism was evident to all.

Populist Anti-EU Parties Make Gains in Elections for European Parliament

Henry Srebrnik. [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

While much of the world’s eyes were on Ukraine, and wondering about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions, populist parties often tinged with xenophobic, racist and anti-Semitic beliefs, made gains in May’s elections to the European Parliament, the legislative body for the 28-member European Union.

Parties strongly opposed to the European Union performed well in several countries, including France, Denmark, Greece, and Britain.

Much of this was fuelled by opposition to Muslim immigration into the continent, and the feeling that EU apparatchiks in Brussels, rather than national parliaments, were increasingly in control of policies. Mass unemployment and economic austerity added to the discontent.

The 751- member European Parliament, which meets in Brussels as well as Strasbourg, seems remote from most voters, who still define themselves first and foremost as members of their respective nations rather than as abstract “Europeans.” Yet its principal concern, according to Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a London-based research group, “has been to get more power for itself and more money for the European Union.”

This does not go over well in hard economic times, and protest parties are making the most of the situation.

Most startling was the French result, where the far-right National Front (NF) won about 26 per cent of the vote, edging out the two major parties, President François Holland’s governing Socialists and the Union for a Popular Movement. The NF won 25 of the 74 seats allocated to France in the European Parliament.

The NF quadrupled its vote from the six per cent they won at the last European parliamentary elections in 2009. Its support has been driven by growing discontent with historically high jobless claims and an economy that has barely grown in two years.

Marine Le Pen, the NF’s leader, told supporters that “The people have spoken loud and clear.” They no longer want to be led “by those outside our borders, by EU commissioners and technocrats who are unelected. They want to be protected from globalization and take back the reins of their destiny.”

In Britain, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) won 28 per cent of the vote, ahead of both the Conservatives of Prime Minister David Cameron and the main opposition Labour Party. This almost doubled the 16.5 per cent the UKIP secured in 2009 and brought it 24 of the country’s 73 seats.

Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader, asserted that this would help those in Britain and elsewhere who want to slash the European Union’s powers and return decision-making to individual states.

“As members of this union we cannot run our own country and crucially, we cannot control our own borders,” said Farage. “I don't just want Britain to leave the European Union,” he added. “I want Europe to leave the European Union.”

The far-right Danish People’s Party became Denmark’s biggest party with 27 per cent of the vote and doubled its number of seats in the European parliament from two to four of Denmark’s 13 member delegation. It had campaigned to reclaim border controls and curb benefits to other EU citizens living in Denmark.

The anti-euro Alternative for Germany party won its first seats in any election in that country with seven per cent of the German vote, good for seven of Germany’s 94 seats. “It’s springtime in Germany,” leader Bernd Lucke told chanting supporters in Berlin. “Some flowers are blooming and others are wilting.”

In Greece, best by economic troubles and an unemployment rate of 27 per cent, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn picked up votes, while the far left made even greater gains. Golden Dawn will enter the European Parliament for the first time after winning nine per cent of the vote and three of 21 seats, a third place finish.

 “I congratulate you for managing to resist the government’s terrorism and for not believing their lies,” Nikos Michaloliakos, the party leader, declared. “We are the only political power that actually stands up against our state being run by foreign powers.

In Hungary, the far-right Jobbik, also had some cause to celebrate. While it won 14.7 per cent of the vote, the same as in 2009, with its three of Hungary’s 21 seats it beat out the Socialists to become the country’s largest opposition party at the EU level.

 “I have important news for you: today Jobbik is the second largest party in Hungary,” Gabor Vona, the Jobbik leader told cheering supporters. “We all want a common Europe, but a different one to what we have at the moment.”