Do American Values Stem from Judaism?

Henry Srebrnik, Calgary Jewish Free Press

The American presidential election is now in full gear, with Barack Obama and Mitt Romney debating, among other things, what the United States should look like in coming years.

The citizens of very few countries examine their ideological “essence” in the way Americans do.

Michael Lind, author of The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution, has noted that many American theorists posit a view of the United States as not a nation-state but an idea-state, based on the philosophy of liberal democracy in the abstract. There are no American people as such, but rather an American idea.

Yale University professor David Gelernter goes further, stating that the American world-view emerged not just from the Bible, but especially from the Hebrew Bible, via those English Protestant Calvinists known as the Puritans, who looked to the “Old Testament” for their values.

Puritanism would turn into “Americanism.” In a sense, Gelernter asserted in “A Religious Idea Called ‘America’,” a lecture he gave at the American Enterprise Institute in 2006, “the molten bronze of Puritanism became the solid metal of the American Religion.”

As such, the “American creed” is derived from biblical Zionism, “which is based on two ideas: a chosen people and a promised land,” he maintained. “Both elements were understood by the biblical prophets to imply privileges and duties. The chosen people is closer to God than any other and is held to higher standards. The promised land flows with milk and honey and must be made by its inhabitants into a beacon of sanctity for the whole world.”

The community as a whole conceived itself as having a covenant with God, or a vow agreed to by both sides. The Puritans who came to America on the Mayflower in 1620, known as the Pilgrims, signed such as compact before landing at Plymouth. Many consider it the seed of American democracy. American Puritans often described their settlements as covenant communities. “We are the children of Abraham; and therefore we are under Abraham’s covenant,” declared one early settler.

The Puritans had fled a “house of bondage” in Europe, as it seemed to them, and made a dangerous journey to a pagan land where they struggled to establish themselves. They were forming a “new Zion” in the Americas. “American Puritans thought of themselves as ancient Israel reborn, and said so often,” stated Gelernter. And liberty, equality, and democracy all had Biblical roots, so far as the Puritans understood them. “Biblical passages dealing with man and the state and the organization of a state -- such as they are -- are mainly located in the Hebrew Bible,” he said.

It was these “founding ideas,” as enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution -- human equality, natural rights, civil liberty, democracy, and constitutional government – that made people into Americans. “American-ness,” in this view, is less membership in a national community than a belief in a secular political faith -- the religion of democracy.

Is the United States an "Idea-State"?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

The American presidential election is now in full gear, with the Republican national convention having opened in Tampa on Aug. 28, and the Democrats meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina Sept. 3.

Both parties will debate, among other things, what the United States should look like in coming years.

The citizens of very few nations examine their “essence” in the way Americans do.

Michael Lind, author of The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution, has noted that many American theorists posit a view of the United States as not a nation-state but an idea-state, based on the philosophy of liberal democracy in the abstract. There are no American people as such, but rather an American idea.

The American struggle for independence would create a different kind of nation. Declared the radical pamphleteer Tom Paine in his call to arms, Common Sense, in 1776: “We have it in our power to build the world over again.”

It was the founding ideas of the American Revolution -- human equality, natural rights, civil liberty, democracy, and constitutional government – that would make people Americans. “American-ness,” in this view, is less membership in a national community than a belief in a secular political faith -- the religion of democracy.

For such thinkers, the country is a post-national idea-state (as opposed to a multicultural federation of ethnic groups, the view on the left.) It is defined only partially by language and culture, and not at all by race or religion.

As the journalist Cokie Roberts has stated, “We have nothing binding us together as a nation -- no common ethnicity, history, religion, or even language -- except the Constitution and the institutions it created.”

This has led to the idea of “American exceptionalism” -- the belief that the U.S. is not only different from other countries but superior in morality and institutions. It also gave rise to the expansionist notion of “Manifest Destiny.”

The historian Paul Johnson has defined the U.S. as “a unity, driven by agreed assumptions, accepting a common morality and moral aims, and able therefore to marshal and deploy its forces with stunning effect.”

For American exceptionalists, politics since the 1776 Declaration of Independence has been the gradual, sometimes painful, working out of the ideas of the Founders. There has been only one constitution since 1789, the dominant parties have been in place since the 1850s, and even the state boundaries have remained fixed.

This formal constitutional and political continuity of course has disguised the many political upheavals -- often violent -- in American life, including the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Revolution.

But the powerful set of ideas enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution has served as ideological glue and unifying principle for the people of the United States.

California Doesn’t Loom Large in the 2012 Election

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Prince Edward Island has had a glorious summer this year. Yet, when friends invited me to spend two weeks in Los Angeles earlier this month, I couldn’t pass it up.

Needless to say, the climate in southern California was also excellent. But what of the political climate?

California is, politically, a deep shade of “blue,” so neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney will spend much time campaigning here, even though, as the largest state in the country, with a population bigger than all of Canada’s, it delivers 55 electoral votes to whoever wins it in November. It’s not a swing state.

Obama will carry California easily on Nov. 6. He beat John McCain by more than 24 per cent here in 2008.

One of the state’s two U.S. Senate seats is being contested. Veteran Democratic incumbent Dianne Feinstein, first elected to the Senate in 1992, is being challenged by Elizabeth Emken.

The Republican candidate opposes abortion and same-sex marriage. She also wants the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) repealed, even though she helped shape parts of the act that apply to autism.

Emken thinks that her career in business, along with her background in autism advocacy – her son is autistic -- makes her a strong candidate for legislator.

“My dual career creates what you want for someone in government. You don’t typically see someone like me that has both backgrounds,” she said. Though she says she would seek to cut down government spending, she does not want that to fall on the backs of those that need help.

“California needs to become economically competitive again, but with an eye for the truly vulnerable,” she has said.

But hers is an uphill battle against a well-financed, well-known and well-liked incumbent, and she has little chance of pulling an upset. Feinstein has built statewide name identification and a multimillion dollar campaign war chest in her two decades in the U.S. Senate.

In 2006, Feinstein won 59.43 per cent of the vote against Republican Richard Mountjoy’s 35.02 per cent. Two years ago, California’s other Democratic senator, Barbara Boxer, beat challenger Carly Fiorina by ten per cent.

Of California’s 53 members of the House of Representatives, 34 are currently Democrats and 29 Republicans. Most Democratic districts are along the coast and in the big cities; Republicans are stronger in the interior. In the Los Angeles region, 13 of the 18 representatives are Democrats.

Something new will be shaping the outcome in the House races. In 2010, Californians approved a measure, Proposition 14, which requires that all candidates in a Congressional district run in a single primary election open to all registered voters.

Voters can choose any candidate without regard to the political party affiliations of either the candidate or the voter. The top two candidates, regardless of party, face each other in the November general election.

As a result of this “blanket primary,” which took place in June, a number of California’s 53 congressional districts will have same-party candidates battling each other in the Nov. 6 general election.

The economy remains the main issue in the Golden State. Unemployment stands at 10.7 per cent in California, with underemployment estimated at 21 per cent. California has eight of the top 10 worst unemployment and foreclosure areas in the country.

Three cities, unable to pay their bills, have recently declared bankruptcy; Stockton is the largest American city to ever acquire that unenviable distinction. More than a dozen other cities are facing the financial strains of rising pension costs and declining revenue, forcing them to slash staff and basic services such as police and fire protection and library hours to keep up with the payments.
                                               
Yet, despite such economic problems, only 13 congressional districts in California may be competitive this year, according to a Cook Political Report analysis, because most districts have been gerrymandered to create safe seats. So, once again, California will send a largely Democratic delegation to Congress.


           

Is Islam Inherently Anti-Jewish?

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Certainly, in comparison with classical Christianity, the answer is no. There is less of a theological basis for opposition to Judaism. Islam does not see itself as being the successor to the covenant between G-d and the children of Israel, as the Church did. Nor, of course, were “the Jews” ever considered responsible for deicide.

Still, long before the birth of the modern Zionist movement, there was already a centuries-old tradition in Islam of treating Jews in a subservient, even derogatory manner – although this was true of the way a triumphalist Islam deal with other faiths as well.

During the Muslim prophet Muhammad’s life, thousands of Jews lived in the Arabian peninsula, especially in and around Medina, the city to which in 622 Muhammad was forced to migrate from Mecca.

Muhammad’s early teachings appeared to borrow from Jewish tradition. However, once it became clear the Jews would not accept him, Muhammad began to minimize or eliminate the Jewish influence on his beliefs.

In fact, campaigns against Jews would become part of the very genesis of Islam. One of the first examples was the murder of Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf, a Jewish poet who lived near Medina. He wrote verses satirizing Muhammad and incited Meccans against the new faith, and as a consequence was assassinated in 624 by followers of Muhammad.

In 627, the Muslim armies defeated a tribe of Jews, the Banu Qurayza, following the Battle of the Trench between the followers of Islam in Medina and their opponents. The bulk of the tribe’s men, apart from a few who converted to Islam, were killed, while the women and children were enslaved.

Two years later, the Battle of Khaybar was fought between Muhammad’s followers and the Jews living in the oasis of Khaybar, 150 kilometres from Medina.

Khaybar’s Jews made their living growing date palm trees, as well as through commerce and craftsmanship, accumulating considerable wealth.

The Muslims won, and the victory in Khaybar greatly raised the status of Muhammad among his followers and local Bedouin tribes, who, seeing his power, swore allegiance to the new prophet and converted to Islam.

The captured booty and weapons strengthened his army, and he captured Mecca in 630, two years before his death.

The story includes an example of “Jewish treachery.” As the Jewish leaders of Khaybar went to Muhammad to negotiate the terms of surrender, Zeynab bint al-Harith, a Jewish woman whose husband had been killed in the battle, enquired about Muhammad’s favourite food. Hearing that it was shoulder of lamb, she offered him a poisoned meal. A companion died, but Muhammad did not; Zeynab was executed.

The Jewish community in Khaybar was eventually expelled by Caliph Umar in 642.

In succeeding centuries, Jews were periodically the victims of mob violence against their communities in the Arab world.

The conquest of Morocco and Al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) by the Muslim Berber Almoravids in 1040 and by the Almohades 81 years later, caused destruction and suffering to their Jewish communities. In 1066, a massacre of the Jewish population of Granada saw thousands killed. In Fez, 6,000 Jews were massacred in 1035 and mobs slaughtered thousands more in 1465. There were pogroms in Tetuan in 1790 and 1792.

In the 16th century, the Jews of Tunis were subjected to anti-Jewish policies and forced to live in ghettos. In 1869 anti-Jewish riots broke out, and the rabbis and leaders of the community of Tunis appealed desperately to French officials, informing them that “in the face of Muslim ferocity, 18 Jews have fallen to the knives of the fanatical murderers.” (Tunisia became a French protectorate in 1881.)

Elsewhere in North Africa, Ali Burzi Pasha murdered hundreds of Jews in Libya in 1785. Jews were also massacred in Algiers in 1805, 1815 and 1830.

Things did not improve in the 20th century. As H.E.W. Young, the British Vice-Consul in Mosul, present-day Iraq, wrote in 1909, “The attitude of the Muslims toward the Christians and the Jews is that of a master towards slaves, whom he treats with a certain lordly tolerance so long as they keep their place. Any sign of pretension to equality is promptly repressed.”

More than 1,000 Jews were killed in anti-Jewish rioting during the 1940s in Arab countries.

On June 1-2, 1941, during Shavuot, riots against Jews in Baghdad, Iraq, resulted in about 180 Jews killed and 1,000 injured, in what became known as the farhud (Arabic for “violent dispossession”). Looting of Jewish property took place and 900 Jewish homes were destroyed.

This followed the April 1941 coup that temporarily overthrew the pro-Western regime and installed Rashid Ali al-Gaylani as prime minister, with Nazi support and financing. He was finally ousted by British forces by the end of May.

On Nov. 2, 1945, anti-Jewish riots broke out in Egypt. Organized by the ‘Young Egypt’ group, Jewish-owned department stores in Cairo were looted, and a synagogue, Jewish hospital, and old-age home were set on fire. In Alexandria, six Jews were killed and 200 wounded.

Three days later, in a two-day pogrom, more than 140 Jews, including 36 children, were killed and many more injured in Tripoli, Libya.

On Dec. 2, 1947, Arab rioters, assisted by the local police force, engaged in a bloody pogrom in Aden, in today’s Yemen, that killed 82 Jews. Four synagogues were burnt to the ground and 220 Jewish houses were burned and looted or damaged.

All of this, of course, preceded the creation of Israel. No wonder hundreds of thousands of Jews fled these countries in the decades that followed.

Is an Indian-Israeli-Russian Entente Being Formed?

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Is it too far-fetched to imagine an Israeli-Indian-Russian alliance some day?

If one were to take seriously political scientist Samuel Huntington’s famous “clash of civilizations” theory of international relations -- that people’s cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the 21st century -- then clearly, given how Israel is surrounded by a mostly hostile Islamic world, its “natural” allies would be those countries whose interests also collide with the Muslim world.

Of these, the major ones are India and Russia.

Orthodox Christian Russia lies north of the Islamic civilization in the Caucasus and central Asia. It has already retreated from the five Muslim states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Russia has fought two bloody wars to maintain control of Chechnya. Terrorism remains a constant there and in neighbouring Dagestan and Ingushetia.

The Indian subcontinent has been the scene of Hindu-Muslim clashes for more than a millennium, and even its partition into the two states of India and Pakistan in 1947 has not ended the enmity.

They have gone to war three times and came close to engaging in major hostilities many times more. The Muslim-majority but Indian-ruled state of Kashmir remains a major bone of contention. Tens of thousands of people have been killed there in the years of strife.

(China, too, faces an independence movement, by the Muslim Uighur people in Xinjiang, but it is too far removed from the Middle East to matter.)

Since the 1960s, Israel’s main ally has been the United States. During much of that period, a Communist Russia and a left-leaning India supported the Arab world against Israel. But the end of the Cold War terminated most of those ideologically-based alliances.

The United States remains Israel’s most important friend, founded on a common Judeo-Christian affinity, true. (It also helps that there is an influential Jewish diaspora in America.)

But it has often been said that states have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests. Geopolitically the U.S. is far away from the Middle East and has fewer fundamental disputes with the Muslim world. One might say that its support for Israel is “voluntary” and not based on national interest or realpolitik -- in fact the U.S. would be much better off, from that point of view, in abandoning the Jewish state.

After all, it causes America complications it would otherwise not have when dealing with the vast arc of Islamic states that stretches from Morocco in the west to Indonesia in the east. The Islamic world encompasses more than 50 countries and makes up over 23 per cent of the world’s population.

Israel can’t depend forever on an America that wouldn’t suffer politically, and indeed might gain, by abandoning it -- whereas India and Russia, even if they didn’t really care about Israel, are in the same political boat with it.

Again, applying Huntington’s formulation, Jewish civilization is distinct and so Israel has no “natural” allies -- the way Scandinavians or Latin Americans may feel some affinity towards each other. And in fact the Zionist movement sought support from various countries in the past -- Germany before the First World War, Great Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, France after the Second World War, and the United States since the late 1960s. So this may shift yet again.

Given all of this, it is interesting to observe that Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Israel in late June. (President Barack Obama has yet to visit Israel.)

Russians have long suffered from terrorism and extremism at the hands of Islamists in the northern Caucasus. Zvi Magen, a former Israeli ambassador to Russia, recently told the BBC that President Putin fears the events of the Arab Spring “might inspire similar developments in Russia’s soft belly -- the Caucasus.”

This may be spreading. Recently, assassins attacked two prominent Muslim opponents of religious extremism, in Kazan, a city on the Volga River that is the capital of Tatarstan, far from the Caucasus. It has been a center of Islamic culture since the 10th century.

In 2010, during a meeting of Russian Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov and his Israeli counterpart Ehud Barak in Moscow, an agreement was signed to boost military ties between the two nations, to help them fight common threats, such as terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Putin attended the inauguration in Netanya of a new monument commemorating Red Army soldiers who fought against Nazi Germany in the Second World War. For the Russian soldiers who liberated the Nazi concentration camps, Israeli President Shimon Peres told Putin, “the Jewish people owe a historical ‘thank you’ to the Russians.”

India, too, has strengthened ties with Israel. It formally established relations in January 1992 and ties between the two nations have flourished since, primarily due to common strategic interests and security threats. Indian foreign minister S. M. Krishna visited Israel last January and called for increasing counter-terror and economic cooperation between the two countries.

A study conducted a few years ago by an international market research company, found 58 per cent of Indian respondents showed sympathy to the Jewish state.

It’s possible we might be witnessing the beginnings of an informal triple entente.

The Future of Sovereign Nation-States

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In the last 30 years or so, a consensus has emerged among our political elites, in Europe and North America, regarding the proper character of the state. They increasingly have come to regard as illegitimate states that are founded on the basis of ethnic or religious nationhood, as opposed to the civic-territorial or multicultural model.

They have come to define nationalism itself as a variant of racist intolerance, indeed a political pathology that leads inexorably to the narrowest of so-called 'tribalism'. The older paradigm of nationhood, one grounded in an exclusionary ethno-nationalism, has been largely discredited, perhaps due to the excesses of fascism and ultra-nationalism before the Second World War. In its stead has arisen the paradigm of a state with a universalist vision based on international human rights ideology.

This ideal state should preferably not be linked to any ethnic group per se but should adhere to a civic and political, rather than ethnic, concept of nationhood: the United States or Australia are examples. And even if it remains, historically and still predominantly, the homeland of one ethnic group it should live up to the same standards, the way Holland or Sweden do.

The traditional definition of a nation, to quote the political scientist Walker Connor, "is a group of people whose members believe they are ancestrally related. It is the largest group to share such a myth of common descent; it is, in a sentient sense, the fully extended family."

This sense of kinship, of separate origin and evolution, whether historically accurate or fictive, is, he writes, "the glue of the national bond."

While objective criteria such as common language, religion, territory, and the like, help define an ethno-national community, its essence is a psychological bond that joins it and "differentiates it, in the subconscious conviction of its members, from all non-members in a most vital way." And it also, Connor indicates, accounts for the emotional depth - call it irrationality - which it inspires, "the fanatical sacrifices which have been made in its name."

Even more important for ethnic survival, and perhaps long-range success, argues the British theorist Anthony Smith, is the need to cultivate the myth of ethnic election. Even in those instances where political independence was lost (as in the case of the Armenians and Jews), the moral community and the sense of divine mission, "the passionate attachments to sacred lands and centres, and the abiding imprint of sacred languages and scriptures proved to be an enduring legacy for many peoples." It nurtured their hopes for political restoration to the ancestral homeland.

Studies of nationalism by Conor Cruise O'Brien and Donald Akenson, Irish and Canadian scholars, respectively, have also emphasized the religiously based nature of national identity among peoples such as the Afrikaaners, Ulster Protestants and Jews.

Their complex foundation myths and territorial claims involve covenants with God, "promised lands" for "chosen peoples," which served as crucibles of national evolution. Arabs, Japanese, Russians, Poles, Serbs, and many other peoples have also asserted a special relationship with a transcendental deity.

But modern western political theory has become increasingly critical of the classical nation-state, especially of the notion that each self-defined group is entitled, as part of its patrimony and place in the world, a particular space it can call its own homeland.

Rationalist intellectuals are, needless to say, even more skeptical of theologically-based claims to particular territories. Antipathy to such notions gained ground over the past two centuries; today, the proponents of multicultural secularism are opposed as a matter of principle to homogenous ethnically-based statehood.

Europe's dominant paradigm now is post-nationalist as opposed to the retrograde nation-state. In their version of the ideal polity, the nation is the territory, not the people.

Are these modern leaders really nostalgic for such failed testaments to multi-nationalism as the old Austro-Hungarian, tsarist Russian, and Ottoman Turkish empires?

Albania Has Come a Long Way This Decade

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Paul Theroux’s The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, published in 1995, is a wonderful glimpse into the political cultures of the peoples who inhabit its shores.

However, the small Balkan country of Albania, which had only a few years earlier emerged from almost five decades of ultra-Communist isolation, shocked him.

Desperate and ravaged Albania seemed worse than most third world countries. There was poverty and paranoia everywhere.

Albania was still recovering from the legacy of Enver Hoxha, the ruthless dictator who had ruled for 40 years, until his death in 1985.

Under Hoxha, Albania’s only friend, half a world away, was Maoist China, and even it abandoned Albania in the 1970s. Albania had been officially declared an atheist state, cut off from neighbouring Greece and Yugoslavia – both considered enemies. Hundreds of mosques and churches were destroyed. Hoxha had banned private automobiles because he didn’t want people leaving the country.

Hoxha was succeeded by Ramiz Alia, who tried to preserve the Communist system while introducing gradual reforms in order to revive the economy. But as the rest of eastern Europe threw off Communist rule, Albania followed.

In March 1992 a decisive electoral victory was won by the anti-Communist opposition, and Alia resigned as president.

The years that followed were, as Theroux observed, even worse. By 1997 the country was in the throes of outright rebellion, following the collapse of the economy in the wake of pyramid schemes and widespread corruption.

The severe social unrest led to more than 1,500 deaths and the widespread destruction of property. Most Albanians lost what little savings they had and thousands emigrated.

A UN Multinational Protection Force, led by Italy, was sent to help restore law and order. But putting the country back on its feet would take time.

For the past decade, Albania has made it a point to integrate into the wider European economic, military and political space.

In 1998, Albania’s three million citizens ratified a new constitution, guaranteeing the rule of law and the protection of fundamental human rights and religious freedom. Today, the government is headed by Prime Minister Sali Berisha, whose Democratic Party won the most seats in the legislative elections in 2005 and 2009.

Albania is now a member of NATO, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Council of Europe, and the World Trade Organization. It formally applied for membership in the European Union in 2009.

Free market reforms, under the tutelage of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, have opened the country to foreign investment, especially in the development of energy and transportation infrastructure. Reforms in tax collection, property law, and business administration are also progressing.

With help from EU funds, the government is taking steps to improve the national road and rail network, a long-standing barrier to sustained economic growth. Even tourism now accounts for an increasing share of the economy.

Although Albania's economy continues to grow, the country does still remain one of the poorest in Europe.

Will Israel Turn to Russia?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Is it too far-fetched to imagine an Israeli-Russian alliance some day?

If one were to take seriously political scientist Samuel Huntington’s famous “clash of civilizations” theory of international relations -- that people’s cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the 21st century -- then clearly, given how Israel is surrounded by a mostly hostile Islamic world, its “natural” allies would be those countries whose national interests also collide with the Muslim world.

One of these might be Russia.

Mainly Orthodox Christian in religion, Russia lies north of the Islamic civilization in the Caucasus and central Asia. It has already retreated from the five Muslim states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Russia has fought two bloody wars to maintain control of Chechnya. Terrorism remains a constant there and in neighbouring Dagestan and Ingushetia.

Since the 1960s, Israel’s main ally has been the United States. But geopolitically the U.S. is far away from the Middle East and has fewer fundamental disputes with the Muslim world.

Israel can’t depend forever on an America that wouldn’t suffer politically, and indeed might gain, by abandoning it -- whereas Russia, even if it didn’t really care about Israel, is in the same political boat with it.

So it is interesting to observe that Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Israel toward the end of June. (President Barack Obama has yet to visit Israel.)

Iran’s nuclear program, Syria’s civil war, and the Muslim Brotherhood victory in Egypt’s presidential election were topics of discussion.

Zvi Magen, a former Israeli ambassador to Russia, told the BBC that President Putin fears the events of the Arab Spring “might inspire similar developments in Russia’s soft belly -- the Caucasus.”

Russia is also interested in helping Israel develop its natural gas fields in the Mediterranean and in tapping into an emerging alliance being developed between Israel, Greece and the Greek Cypriots to offset tensions with Turkey.

Putin told his hosts that the two countries have deep economic and cultural relations bolstered by the more than one million Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union who live in Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet has several Russian speakers, including Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

Putin said that he felt he was “among friends,” adding that the ties between Israel and Russia were ones of “deep friendship, not something that will pass, and that will endure in the future.”

Putin attended the inauguration in Netanya of a new monument commemorating Red Army soldiers who fought against Nazi Germany in the Second World War. For the Russian soldiers who liberated the Nazi concentration camps, Israeli President Shimon Peres told Putin, “the Jewish people owe a historical ‘thank you’ to the Russians.”

Is it possible we might be witnessing the beginnings of an informal entente?

Does Rejection of Israel in the Muslim World Have Religious Roots?

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

There are so many ways in which Israel’s relationship with its Arab citizens differs from the way the former apartheid regimes in South Africa and the old Rhodesia treated non-whites that I won’t repeat them here. Readers of the Jewish Tribune are already aware of these.

But there is another fundamental difference, one often overlooked, which makes Arab antagonism in the Middle East towards the Jewish state quite different from the interaction between native African peoples and white settlers in southern Africa during the age of European imperialism. And that is the role of religion.

The peoples in southern Africa had no animosity towards, indeed didn’t even know the existence of, the various Europeans who arrived in their homelands and eventually came to dominate them. There was, by definition, no theological animus towards European whites in the belief structures of the Shona, Ndebele, Tswana, Xhosa, Zulu and other peoples in the region.

And when most of these ethnic groups became Christians of one denomination or another, they then shared a common faith with the conquerors, one which could be used to shame those who had subjugated them.

So the struggle that eventually resulted in freedom from white minority rule was a political one. It was, basically, a fight against inexcusable racial discrimination and oppression.

But it was a very different matter when Jews began to resettle and eventually create a state in their ancient homeland.

Starting with some of the verses in the Koran and the hadith (the deeds and sayings attributed to the prophet Muhammad), there was already a centuries-old tradition of treating Jews in a subservient, even derogatory manner, by a triumphalist Islam, the faith that had supplanted Jewish (and later Christian) sovereignty in the Middle East.

During Muhammad’s life, Jews lived in the Arabian peninsula, especially in and around Medina, and interacted with the peoples who had accepted the new faith. But as was the case centuries earlier in regards to Christianity, most Jews did not convert to Islam.

So, while Jews were acknowledged as People of the Book by Muslims, and were better off than their coreligionists in the far more anti-Judaic Christian lands, they were considered dhimmis – second-class people – and subject to a host of humiliating laws and restrictions.

At various times and in various places, the restrictions on Jews included payment of higher taxes; being forced to wear clothing distinguishing them from Muslims; and being barred from holding public office, bearing arms or riding a horse. Jews could be prevented from repairing existing or erecting new places of worship (and no synagogue could stand taller than a mosque). Of course proselytizing on behalf of any faith but Islam was barred.

When they met on board an American ship in the Suez Canal in February 1945, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, ruler of the region’s most fundamentalist Arab state, told US President Franklin Roosevelt that he was “unwilling to have any dealings with Infidels, not to say Jews.”

Imagine then, the anger among those who had always considered themselves superior to Jews, to find the tables suddenly turned, and a people who used to “know their place” in the religious universe of the Middle East now had the chutzpah to re-establish a state in Palestine, right in the centre of the Arab world.

This has not been an easy pill to swallow, since it calls in question a centuries-old worldview regarding Jews. We still don’t know whether this will remain a bedrock religious problem that, today, prevents much of the Islamic world from recognizing Israel, regardless of its borders or policies.

Was The War of 1812 An American Religious Crusade?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

This month we commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the start of the War of 1812. The conflict began on June 18, when President James Madison formally declared war on Great Britain.


Madison told Americans that he was committing the new republic “into the hands of the Almighty Disposer of Events” and announced that Aug. 20 would be a national fast day of thanksgiving and prayer.


Two centuries ago, the new United States, born out of a revolution against royalty and Catholic “Papism,” was a devoutly, even fanatically, Protestant country. And this shaped its foreign policy decisions, including the waging of war.


So contends historian Andrew Preston, in his magnificent book Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy.


It documents the way Protestantism, in particular the Calvinist theology of an elect people chosen by God to better mankind, propelled the British settlers in the North American colonies in their wars against the French and Spanish empires throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, and later against the mother country itself.


This was particularly the case in New England, founded by Puritan dissenters who were not only fiercely anti-Catholic, but also looked askance at the established Church of England and rule by a British monarch.


Catholicism, they asserted, “was an inherently authoritarian system that created political despotism wherever it predominated.”


When the hated French were finally defeated and forced to relinquish the colony of New France in the Treaty of Paris in 1763, it was for the New England colonists a sign of “divine providence.”


But they were sorely disappointed when the Royal Proclamation of 1763 created a boundary line between the British colonies on the Atlantic coast and aboriginal territories west of the Appalachians. Britain hoped in this way to gain the loyalty of native nations. Most had been French allies. 


And the American colonists felt further betrayed by the mother country when the French inhabitants of Quebec were allowed to retain their language and Catholic religion after the Quebec Act was passed by the British Parliament in 1774. This was viewed as an affront to the Protestant faith.


 Not only that, but the boundaries of Quebec were expanded to include land that is now southern Ontario and a huge portion of what is now the American Midwest, further blocking westward expansion by the American colonies.


It took just two more years for these, and other frustrations, to come to a head; the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776. America, the “city on a hill,” would be a beacon of liberty.


The victorious colonists who founded the new United States of America gained control over almost all the lands east of the Mississippi River and westward expansion, part of the “manifest destiny” of the United States, was underway.


The new nation, though, felt there was still unfinished business between itself and Great Britain. Americans were encountering strong resistance from native peoples in their push westward, and believed that the British were encouraging Indian opposition. As well, there was still the matter of a Catholic Quebec, whose inhabitants continued to live in darkness, oppressed by a church that many in the United States continued to view as the “Antichrist.”


So, though many Americans were opposed to war with Great Britain, others, particularly in the newly settled states, wished to “liberate” the remainder of British North America-- and also end native opposition.


The final straw was the British Navy’s boarding of American ships to forcibly enlist any sailors of British origin and its attempts to prevent the United States from trading with Napoleon’s France, at the time the master of Europe.


(The U.S. remained neutral in that European conflict.)


An American army under General William Hull invaded Upper Canada on July 12. “You will be emancipated from Tyranny and oppression and restored to the dignified status of freemen,” he proclaimed. But Hull was surprised by the resistance he encountered. The United Empire Loyalists, who had fought for the Crown during the American Revolutionary War, opposed the American invasion.


As for Lower Canada, the French inhabitants found the anti-Catholic stance of the United States threatening. They feared that an American conquest would force Protestantism and Anglicization on them; attempts to capture Montreal failed.


Concerned about American westward expansion and encroachment onto Indian lands, most aboriginal peoples also supported the British, in the hope that a British victory would assure the Indians of possession of their lands.


The Shawnee leader Tecumseh had created a native confederacy, which fought on the British side and was a key factor in many of the British successes. But he was killed in battle and the dream of a sovereign native nation never came to pass.


“If God be for us, who can stand against us?” asked one American preacher. However, though a Vermont newspaper insisted that Americans had fought “a holy war, for the Lord has fought for us in battles, and given us the victories,” in actual fact the conflict ended inconclusively in 1814.


The United States had been unable to conquer the remaining British colonies in North America. Five decades later, these would be united in a new Dominion of Canada.

A Tale of Two Provincial Identities

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The book Banal Nationalism by Michael Billig, published in 1995, calls attention to the “everyday representations of the nation which build an imagined sense of national solidarity and belonging.”  It asks us to look for our sense of identity in mundane as well as big events.


So let’s compare two sets of people angry with their provincial governments. In Quebec, as everyone knows, students and their supporters have been demonstrating in Montreal for weeks, protesting about a government decision to raise fees for college and university students.


On Prince Edward Island, there has been dissatisfaction with many recent decisions by the provincial government, with a number of protests taking place in front of the legislature in Charlottetown recently.


A rally against plans to implement a harmonized sales tax, replacing the GST and provincial sales tax, brought out a crowd the evening of June 7. The Charlottetown Guardian of June 8 printed a large front page picture of the event.


I counted 13 Canadian Maple Leaf flags being held by protestors in the photo, and only two provincial ones, even though this is a provincial, not federal, issue. Undoubtedly there were many more.


On the other hand, I have read in various accounts that the Québécois marchers have carried aloft, along with various banners and placards, numerous Quebec fleur-de-lys flags – but apparently no Canadian ones. (If there were any, they’ve certainly been overshadowed.)


Former premier Jacques Parizeau, who led the separatist Parti Québécois from 1988 to 1996, chortled that this demonstrates that Québécois know where their primary loyalty lies. (Virtually all the striking students are enrolled in francophone institutions.)


“It’s absolutely fascinating because I’d never seen this before where over 200,000 people could demonstrate in Quebec without waving a single Canadian flag,” Parizeau told a pro-sovereignty meeting late last month. “These demonstrations have certainly settled the issue of Quebec’s identity.” Is he right?

The Old and New Lefts in America

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

This past May, I attended a conference on “Jews and the Left” held at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. It dealt with Jews in both the old and new lefts of the 20th century, and the role of Jewish women in these movements.

A few days later, I took in the play “4000 Miles,” by Amy Herzog, at the Lincoln Centre. It’s the story of the 91-year-old widow of a once-celebrated Communist writer and activist and her 21-year-old grandson, whose life has been shaped by post-1960s culture.

All of this got me thinking about the political link between the two left-wing movements. The so-called “Old Left” was led by the Communist Party (CPUSA) and that organization almost collapsed after 1956, when its members learned, to their sorrow, that the Soviet state they had been worshipping for decades was, under Joseph Stalin, actually a murderous tyranny.

The political space the Communists left behind would, within a few years, be filled by a less dogmatic “New Left,” led by student radicals in groups like SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society, founded just four years later.

But the two are more of a seamless web than many people realize, despite the fact that the newer radical movement showed disdain for the hide-bound old Communists.

The connecting thread is the Jews of New York.

In 1939, according to Professor Harvey Klehr of Emory University, some 40% of the 39,000 CPUSA members were Jewish, and concentrated in big cities, New York in particular. Half of the party’s cultural apparatus, centred in New York, was Jewish, added Tony Michels of the University of Wisconsin.

When Henry Wallace he ran for president on the Communist-inspired Progressive Party ticket in 1948, about one third of his vote came from Jews.

The Communist Party collapsed in the 1950s, and by 1960 had just 3,000 members. But the children of Jewish Communists, so called “red diaper babies,” would fill the ranks of the leadership of the New Left.

People like Mark Rudd, who led a student revolt at Columbia University in 1968, were typical.

Of the 59 individuals who gathered  in Port Huron, Michigan in June 1962 to issue the SDS Port Huron Statement, the most influential manifesto that ever came from the student left, between one-third to one-half were Jews, according to Columbia University professor Todd Gitlin, a former president of SDS.

We can see how the one movement morphed into the other by looking at two seminal cultural events: the Peekskill riots of 1949 and the iconic Woodstock music festival twenty years later.

The catalyst for the Peekskill rioting was an announced concert by African-American singer Paul Robeson, known for his Communist affiliations. The concert, organized as a benefit for the Civil Rights Congress, a Communist directed group, was scheduled to take place on August 27 just north of Peekskill, NY.

Before Robeson arrived, a mob of locals attacked concert-goers with baseball bats and rocks. The local police arrived hours later and did little to intervene. Thirteen people were seriously injured, Robeson was lynched in effigy and a cross was seen burning on an adjacent hillside.

Many of those who came were Jews in various Communist-front organizations. This was the era of McCarthyism and the Communist Party was on the defensive.

There was yet more violence when the concert was rescheduled a week later. Even police and New York state troopers were caught on film joining in the beatings of concert goers.


Fast forward 20 years to August 15-18, 1969 and the height of the counter-culture. The Woodstock Festival, like the Peekskill concert, was held outside New York, in the Catskills, long a Jewish vacation area. (In the 1940s, many of the resorts were frequented by the same left-wing Jews who were at Peekskill.)

The venue where it took place was owned by Max Yasgur, a Jewish farmer born in New York City, whose parents were East European Jewish immigrants. Most of his non-Jewish neighbors opposed the festival, but unlike in 1949 at Peekskill, there was no violence.
 
And the folk-song movement, exemplified by people like Bob Dylan, who for a time lived in the town of Woodstock, also straddled the line between old and new left.
 
So there was more of a Jewish connection to Woodstock than people remember. It too had a Jewish flavour; many of the singers and groups were Jews.

The amorphous New Left, with its music and literature, had penetrated more deeply into the American mainstream than its predecessor. After all, it was not bound to the Soviet Union and had no need to apologize for that country’s misdeeds.

Montreal Then and Now

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer


On Victoria Day weekend, I attended my 50th year high school reunion in Montreal. Outremont High had been an English-language Protestant school and, with the outflow of Anglophones from Quebec after the 1970s, it no longer exists.


It was amazing to see the 200 or so graduates who returned after five decades. We even toured the old school, now a French education centre.


The school had always been a first-rate institution, and most of us seem to have done quite well in life; many of us are academics, doctors, lawyers, business people, and other professionals. At least half are retired. Only about half still live in Montreal, the rest scattered in the rest of Canada, the United States and even Europe. And the children of those still living in the city are also mostly gone.


But things are not going that well for others in Quebec. A three-month-old student strike by college and university students against the Quebec government’s plan to raise tuition fees has almost brought the city to its knees.


Students in Quebec pay by far the lowest fees in the country and as a result Quebec’s institutions are underfunded compared with those elsewhere in North America. Currently, annual tuition is $2,168 – the lowest in North America. The increase would bring tuition to $3,946 by 2019.


The additional sum the students were being asked to pay was just a small percentage of what the government itself pays for higher education. Yet this was met with massive opposition.


There have been nightly marches and demonstrations, and in some cases students opposed to the strike were harassed and forced out of classrooms by militants.


As well, in various neighbourhoods, people who support the students go outside and start banging saucepans and skillets every evening at eight o’clock. It can last anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour.


The campaign was inspired by the pot-banging protests that shook the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile in the mid-1980s.


(In this and many other ways, Quebec has become more of a Latin or Mediterranean society than a North American one.)


In response, on May 19 Jean Charest’s governing Liberals brought in a law to bring the student strike to an end. As well, Montreal’s city council passed an anti-mask bylaw.


Bill 78 imposes fines of $25,000 up to $125,000 against student associations and unions. They could be charged if they do not stop their members from protesting within university and college grounds.


During a street demonstration, the organization that plans the protest will be penalized if individual protesters stray from the police-approved route or exceed the time limit imposed by authorities. Student associations and unions are also liable for any damage caused by other marchers during a demonstration.


Violence marked every night of the long Victoria Day weekend – we could hear it from our hotel on Sherbrooke Street -- and the first part of the week. The biggest demonstration yet drew 250,000 people on May 22, according to various estimates.


A day later, more than 500 people were arrested at another march, the 30th since the student protests began.


The march had been declared illegal by police the minute it was scheduled to start but was allowed to proceed for almost four hours before a line of Montreal riot police blocked part of Sherbrooke Street as the marchers approached. The arrests followed.


The student organizations have gone to court to try to get Bill 78 struck down. It continues to be flouted and some radicals have said that if talks fail they plan to disrupt various events planned for the summer tourist season. They predict a long, hot summer in Montreal.

The Jews, Israel and the Left

 Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Though the topic was billed as Jews and the left, the conference held at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York earlier this month became most contentious when the 240 participants, from as far away as Chile, Israel and Lithuania, dealt with the animosity towards Israel on the part of the left worldwide.

Among the most heated arguments was the one between two political scientists, Yoav Peled of Tel Aviv University and Mitchell Cohen of Baruch College in New York.

Peled argued that the Zionist enterprise in Palestine fit the “colonialist thesis,” albeit it was an unusual case, because it did not have a “mother country” to support it. Great Britain, although committed by the Balfour Declaration to Jewish settlement in Palestine, soon proved an unreliable ally.

Still, asserted Peled, Jewish projects in the country after 1920 marginalized and impoverished the Palestinian Arab peasantry, as Jews bought up land from absentee landlords during the Mandatory period, and directly expropriated Arab land after 1948. Also, many institutions such as the kibbutz refused to employ Arab labour.

Peled was taken to task by Cohen when the Israeli academic maintained that the 1967 Six Day War was not a defensive one but one initiated by Israel. Cohen challenged this statement, referring to Egypt’s massing of troops in Sinai and closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping.

Cohen also asserted that parts of the left “have swallowed anti-Zionism” and have “a Zionist problem.” Many see Hamas and Hezbollah as part of the “progressive movements” in the world. There is now an overlap between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, as more and more antisemitic motifs appear in the left’s critique of Israel.

Professor Ronald Radosh, author of a book on Harry Truman and the founding of Israel, concurred. The current left-wing delegitimization of Israel is, he remarked, the new “antisemitism of fools.”

The left’s attacks on Israel (and on the United States) also stem from their antipathy to globalization and western hegemony, remarked Moishe Postone, professor of modern European history at the University of Chicago, in his presentation. So, in Europe, the anti-globalist left now sees Israel as a centre of global evil.

The conference also dealt with Jews in both the old and new lefts of the 20th century, and the role of Jewish women in these movements. Among the distinguished speakers were Harvey Klehr of Emory University, Antony Polonsky of Brandeis, Riv-Ellen Prell of the University of Minnesota, Paul Berman of New York University, Alice Kessler-Harris of Columbia, and Michael Walzer of Princeton.

The final keynote address was delivered by Ezra Mendelsohn, the distinguished scholar from the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University.

He found it ironic that people on the left in the 1950s had believed that socialism had helped create Israel. “The kibbutzim and the Histadrut were thriving. Productive people were not exploiting others. The Arab minority was considered inconsequential.”

Yet now Israel is cast by the left as a nationalistic oppressor.

The Dual Functions of a University Professor

The Dual Functions of a University Professor

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI]  Guardian

These are tough economic times, and universities share in the pain. The University of Prince Edward Island is going to learn to live with cuts to its provincial funding.

As usual, there will be those who feel that professors "don't work hard enough" and shouldn't complain.

But the "job description" of a professor is unlike that of any other occupation.

Let's say you're an accountant or a salesperson. Your work - most likely done at the place of business - is fairly structured and set down by the people who employ you.

If you work at other things on your own and "off the clock," this would probably have no bearing on how well you perform on the job. Indeed, some employers might look askance at this, feeling you were spending too much time or effort on other matters, instead of on behalf of the company that pays your salary.

But things are very different for an academic. Teaching and administrative tasks are, obviously, done at the "firm" - in this case, the university. There are set schedules for classroom time, office hours, and the various other duties involved in running your courses.

This part of the job is similar to that which one finds in other professions.

But there is an entire second aspect to the work, one which many outside academia are less aware of, and which may, in the long run, be even more important: research and scholarship.

Other than providing a venue, and sometimes, grant money, the university itself has little to do with this. It is done mostly outside the formal university structure.

Presenting papers at conferences, publishing scholarly articles and books, editing journals, reviewing books, refereeing proposals, and interacting in a myriad of ways with others in one's field (scholars who can be anywhere in the world): this is to a large extent up to the individual professor.

There are no set rules or structures in place and much of it is done elsewhere - sometimes thousands of miles away.

In this part of the job, you're in effect an independent operator. By the same token, so is your colleague down the hall. You may have no idea what he's working on.

Yet not only does this part of the job have a bearing on how professors are evaluated, for tenure or promotion, but it might, in the long run, be the most important, and long-lasting, part of our work.

No academic should minimize the important of teaching students and imparting to them the knowledge that we, and our colleagues elsewhere, have worked so hard to create.

But nonetheless, few people, 30 years from now, will remember what we did in the classroom. However, they might still be reading, and learning from, the articles and books we produced as academics. Our true legacy will be our research.

Why the Republican Adulation of Ronald Reagan?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Not a day goes by without some aspiring conservative American politician calling himself an acolyte of Ronald Reagan. The 40th president of the United States has become an icon in the Republican Party.

It tells you how far the party has moved to the right ideologically. In the past six decades, there have been six Republican presidents: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Reagan, and the two Bushes. Yet few current Republican hopefuls running for office mention the other five.

Eisenhower, Ford and George H.W. Bush were too liberal by modern Republican standards, Nixon resigned in disgrace due to the Watergate scandal, and George W. Bush remains too “toxic,” thanks to the wars in the Middle East and the financial collapse of 2008.

Yet Reagan seems beyond criticism, a president who walked on water. To Republicans, he has become a secular saint.

Of course such adulation depends on political amnesia. I worked in the United States between 1982 and 1990, including four years as a journalist in Washington while Reagan was president, and I don’t recall him being idolized at the time.

Yes, Reagan helped end the Cold War. People still remember his 1983 speech referring to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” But what were his other foreign policy accomplishments? The record is, to say the least, mixed.

Take Lebanon: American forces had been sent there in September 1983 as part of a Multinational Force to help the Lebanese government during that country’s horrific civil war. On Oct. 23, 1983, truck bombs driven by suicide bombers attacked the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American servicemen. In early December, eight more U.S. Marines were killed.

At first, Reagan said the Marines would stay on. But as the civil war intensified, Reagan ordered the Marines to begin withdrawing from Lebanon; they were gone by Feb. 26, 1984. The American presence in Lebanon had accomplished very little.

Perhaps as a diversion, the president had also undertaken an invasion of the tiny Caribbean island nation of Grenada on Oct. 25, 1983, just two days following the debacle in Beirut. It was meant to overthrow a left-wing regime that, Washington feared, might become too friendly with Cuba, as well as, ostensibly, to protect American medical students enrolled at an island university. The action was criticised by the United Kingdom, Canada, and Trinidad and Tobago. The UN General Assembly condemned it as “a flagrant violation of international law.”

In April 1986 terrorists bombed the La Belle discotheque in Berlin. Two American soldiers were killed and more than 150 people were injured. Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi was blamed and the president authorized strikes against targets in Tripoli and Benghazi. Though Reagan at the time called Gadhafi “the mad dog of the Middle East,” no further action was taken against the Libyan dictator, who two years later would blow up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, murdering a total of 270 people.

One could also blame Reagan for the current mess in Afghanistan. After the Soviets became embroiled in that country, Reagan was the one who sent billions of dollars in military aid to the mujahideen fighting the “godless Communists,” including Stinger surface-to-air missiles to shoot down aircraft.

The Soviets lost the war and left in 1989, but Reagan's “freedom fighters” would later morph into the Taliban, who eventually created one of the world's most repressive regimes -- plus providing a home for Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida.

Regan’s greatest foreign policy disaster became known as the Iran-Contra affair. It almost led to his impeachment and also resulted in the Republican Party losing its majority in the U.S. Senate in November 1986.

It started in 1985, when the administration secretly began supplying weapons, including missiles, to Iran, in hopes of securing the release of hostages held by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement in Lebanon. On account of the Iran-Iraq war, restrictions on arms sales to Iran were in place at the time.

The illegal sales, using Israel as a go-between, were carried out by members of the National Security Council, including two National Security advisors, Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter, and Lt. Col. Oliver North, an NSC staff member.

At North’s suggestion, the millions of dollars received from the weapons sales were then sent, also contrary to U.S. law, to the right-wing “Contra” guerrillas fighting the pro-Cuban Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

The Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa in November 1986 exposed the weapons-for-hostages deal.

A special review board created to look into the matter found Reagan accountable for a lax managerial style and aloofness from policy detail.

Though it could not prove definitively that Reagan had known about the secret arms transfers and Contra support, Congress on Nov. 18th, 1987 stated that he bore “ultimate responsibility” for wrongdoing by his aides, and that his administration exhibited “secrecy, deception and disdain for the law.”

McFarlane, North, Poindexter, and Reagan’s defence secretary Caspar Weinberger, all faced criminal charges as a result of Iran-Contra. North and Poindexter later had their convictions quashed, while McFarlane and Weinberger were pardoned by George H.W. Bush.

North, for one, always insisted that Reagan “knew everything” about the arms-for-hostages scandal and lied about it.

This is not exactly the stuff of greatness, but for some reason, Reagan has become a larger-than-life figure among Republicans. His failures and foibles have been shoved down the memory hole.

The Dismal History of Tropical Islands

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Our image of tropical islands tends to emphasize their beauty and serenity. They are vacation destinations, often referred to as “paradises.”

If you’ve ever visited one of these lush places, you know how delightful they can be. Sun, surf and sand – who could ask for more?

But for centuries many of them were ruled by powerful European empires that turned them into brutal plantation economies, where sugar cane, coffee, tobacco, and other crops were produced by a workforce of slaves transported from Africa.

The Iberian kingdoms of Portugal and Spain were first off the mark to exploit slave labour on plantations. In 1425 Madeira, off the coast of Morocco, was colonised by the Portuguese and by mid-century it had become the largest single producer of sugar in the Western world.

By the sixteenth century almost all of the Atlantic Islands -- the Azores, the Canaries, the Cape Verde Islands, São Tomé, and Madeira -- experienced sugar booms.

Once Spanish explorers reached the Caribbean, to be followed later by the British, Danes, Dutch, and French, islands such as Barbados, Cuba, Curaçao, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Martinique, and Trinidad also became plantation colonies worked by African slave labour.

By the end of the eighteenth century, literally millions of Africans had crossed to the Atlantic and Caribbean Islands and to the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and Réunion, as well as to the mainland of the Americas. British–ruled Jamaica and French Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) on Hispaniola had become the largest slave societies in the West Indies.

For many Africans the starting point for this crossing was an offshore African island – a place that made escape impossible while awaiting transport to the New World. The French-owned island of Gorée, off the coast of Senegal, became such a transit point.

The Atlantic slave trade came to an end in the early part of the nineteenth century. Slavery itself was abolished in the British Empire in 1833, in Danish and French possessions in 1848, in Dutch colonies in 1863, and in Portuguese ones in 1869.

On Hispaniola, the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue had won its freedom in a revolution that ended in 1804 and slaves in the Spanish part of the island (now the Dominican Republic) were also emancipated. Slavery was not abolished in the other Spanish islands until later: in Puerto Rico in 1873 and Cuba in 1886.

Off the eastern coast of Africa, the Indian Ocean islands of Unguja and Pemba, known collectively as Zanzibar, have an even more sinister past.

Ruled by an Arab dynasty from Oman on the Arabian Peninsula, Zanzibar was a slave entrepôt, where Africans from the interior of the continent were sold to buyers in North Africa and the Middle East. Merchants from Oman and India settled in Zanzibar to participate more directly. There was also an earlier Persian influence.

Captives who survived the long trek from the mainland were crammed into dhows bound for Zanzibar, and paraded for sale in the capital. The main island was East Africa’s main slave-trading port, and in the mid-19th century as many as 50,000 slaves were passing annually through its slave markets. Slaves also worked in the clove plantations on the island.

Zanzibar was, as journalist Ryszard Kapus'cin'ski described it in his 2001 book The Shadow of the Sun, “a sad, dark star.”

In 1890 Britain established a protectorate over Zanzibar and ended the slave trade. The British left in 1963 and local African revolutionaries soon thereafter overthrew the Sultan of Zanzibar and his mainly Arab government, killing thousands of Arabs and Indians.

Zanzibar is now an autonomous part of Tanzania, united with Tanganyika on the mainland.

Given their histories, these tropical islands have a complex mix of peoples, religions and cultures. For instance, in Robert Kaplan’s 2010 book Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, Zanzibar is seen as being “African, yet different from Africa. It is Arabian and Persian, yet different from Arabia and Persia; and Indian, yet different from India.”

Though often forgotten today, the former exploitation of these tropical islands and their unfortunate inhabitants remains a grim and violent page in world history.

Who Will Control the ‘World Island’?

Henry Srebrnik [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In a seminal article, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History', published in 1904, the British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, one of the prominent theoreticians of geopolitics, wrote that a country that gained control over the Eurasian heartland - what he referred to as the "pivot area" - would eventually gain hegemony over the entire globe.

Mackinder succinctly summarized his theory thus: "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island controls the world."

At the time, the vast and strategically important central regions of Asia were governed by the Russians in the north and the British further south.

The British had gained control over much of India by the end of the 18th century, and extinguished Muslim rule altogether when in 1857 they eliminated the Mughal Empire, which for more than three centuries had dominated most of the subcontinent.

Meanwhile, the Russian Empire had expanded into the Muslim regions of central Asia, inhabited mainly by Turkic peoples, in the mid-19th century.

Fabled centres of Islamic culture such as Samarkand and Tashkent fell to the Russians as the Emirate of Bukhara and the Khanates of Khiva and Kokand came under Russian suzerainty.

The British, fearful of Russian expansionism and seeking to protect their Indian empire, fought three wars in Afghanistan. The first war, from 1839 to 1842, led to a massive defeat of the British forces by Afghan warriors and a retreat back to India.

The Russians continued their advances in central Asia, prompting a second Anglo-Afghan war from 1878 to 1880, in which Britain gained assurances that the Russians would not be allowed to bring Afghanistan under its control. In 1887 Russia and Great Britain delineated the northern border of Afghanistan.

The final war, in 1919, settled the border between Afghanistan and British India. The British propped up Afghanistan as a buffer state, and the country, with no sense of national consciousness, would retain this role for decades.

But everything began to change after the Second World War.

By 1947, British India was no more, divided between the two new states of India, predominantly Hindu, and Muslim Pakistan, which bordered Afghanistan to its northwest.

Russia, meanwhile, had become a Communist state after the First World War and the new Soviet Union reorganized its central Asian holdings into five ethnically-based socialist republics: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the last three bordering Afghanistan.

By the late 1970s, though, Moscow's control over its central Asian republics was weakening, as local peoples became more assertive. In Afghanistan, meanwhile, increasing political turmoil led to concerns that a Soviet-friendly regime might collapse, prompting a Soviet invasion of that country in 1979.

It proved to be a disastrous decision. After a decade and more than 15,000 soldiers killed, the Soviets retreated, leaving Afghanistan to the mercy of the Taliban. Soon afterwards, the Soviet Union itself fell apart, giving birth to five new sovereign Muslim states in central Asia in 1991.

The United States became the latest major power to get involved in the region's politics. Afghanistan, which had become a haven and source of support for al-Qaida under the protection of the Taliban, was invaded by American and other NATO forces following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

But after a decade of war, the American public is weary of the blood and treasure that has been spent in Afghanistan, with seemingly little effect. It's doubtful that U.S. forces will remain in the country for much longer.

And Afghanistan will probably devolve into civil war, as it did after 1989, with the Taliban again gaining control of the Pashtun-majority regions of the country.

Three great powers — the Americans, British, and Russians — will have abandoned central Asia. Might some other major state, such as China or India, move into the vacuum? Mackinder's question — who will control the Eurasian heartland? — for the moment remains unanswered.

When Will Afghanistan War End?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

The vast majority of Americans are sick and tired of the war in Afghanistan.

A recent New York Times/CBS News survey found that 69 percent of those polled indicated that the United States should end the 11 year old war sooner than the projected 2014 withdrawal of American forces.

This drop in support follows a number of incidents, including the inadvertent burning of Korans by American troops and the killing of 17 Afghan civilians in a village earlier this month by Robert Bales, an American staff sergeant.

The poll also follows a number of killings of American troops by their Afghan partners -- a trend that General John R. Allen, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, told the New York Times was likely to continue.

The same day Allen made his comments, three NATO soldiers were shot to death in two separate confrontations involving Afghan security forces.

As well, Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, has become increasingly erratic and is also suspected of trying to broker a power-sharing deal with the Taliban, behind NATO’s back. He even demanded that NATO troops leave the villages and confine themselves to major bases.

Those of us old enough to remember the Vietnam War sense a déjà vu quality to all this. Indeed, it brings to mind the satirical song, “Talking Vietnam Blues,” penned by the late anti-war activist Phil Ochs in 1964:

    Well they put me in a barracks house
    Just across the way from Laos.
    They said you’re pretty safe when the troops deploy
    But don’t turn your back on your house boy
    When they ring the gong, watch out for the Viet Cong.

The Afghanistan war has not seen the same groundswell of anti-war activism that was a hallmark of the 1960s, for two reasons:

Americans considered ridding the country of the Taliban, whose leaders had offered Al-Qaeda a base of operations, justified, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the world Trade Center and Pentagon.

And the U.S. military is today a volunteer force, so most Americans do not feel any personal    loss from the war; their sons and daughters have not been drafted to fight in a far-off land, as was the case with Vietnam.

Even so, Americans sense that by this point, there’s nothing more to be done in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda is long gone and Osama bin Laden is dead. And the attempts at democratization and nation-building have been abandoned as utopian dreams.

The war in Vietnam went on far too long, after it was clear that there would be no clear-cut victory over the Communists. President Obama should heed this lesson in regards to Afghanistan. Realpolitik dictates that it’s time to leave.

Were We Once the Stepchildren in the Canadian Family?

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Jewish immigration to Canada is the story, not only of the arrival and settlement of Jews in this country, but also of the way they were treated while attempting to adapt to their new home.

Negative attitudes towards Jews and Judaism, ranging from mild distaste to intense and pathological antisemitism, have shaped the contours of Canadian Jewish life, particularly in the periods of mass Jewish immigration and extending through the end of World War II and even into the 1950s.

Most Jewish immigration to this country occurred after 1881, and consisted, until the 1950s, primarily of east European Ashkenazim. In 1881, there were just 2,443 Jews in Canada; 40 years later Canada's Jews numbered 126,196.

Clearly, such a large influx of Jews elicited a variety of responses. While many welcomed Jews as hard-working immigrants, for others this immigration had created a "Jewish problem" on Canadian soil.

In the Anglo-Canadian world, Canada was seen as an outpost of British civility; for French Canadians, the upholding of the Catholic faith was a religious imperative. For both, therefore, Jewish immigrants threatened the very fabric of society. Jews were perceived as ethnic and religious undesirables with little economic utility and stood in direct conflict with the social and economic assumptions on which Canadian immigration policy was built.

Wrote Henri Bourassa, the French Canadian intellectual and journalist, in 1906: "The experience of every civilized country is that the Jews are the most undesirable class of people any country can have."

In 1923, the Canadian government closed the door to all unsponsored immigrants from central and eastern Europe except farmers. And then it moved to control those described as belonging "to races that cannot be assimilated without social or economic loss to Canada."

Jews were lumped into a Special Permit group. The only ones permitted into Canada would be those who could obtain special permits exempting them from the new regulations - and this required formal cabinet approval in each individual case.

Not surprisingly, only a trickle of individual Jews entered Canada annually during the next quarter-century. Immigration officials such as F.C. Blair, assistant deputy minister of immigration after 1924 and deputy minister after 1936, would see to that. Even German Jewish doctors willing to serve in Newfoundland's outports were refused admission.

The opposition to Jewish immigration in the '30s and '40s included Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King himself; he worried in private that letting in too many Jews would cause riots and undermine Canadian unity. And in this he reflected prevailing public opinion in this country: polls taken in the years before 1945 showed that, along with Asians, Jews were the least-wanted immigrants.

Quebec had a long and dishonourable tradition of antisemitism, which intensified with the rise of fascism in the 1930s. In June 1934, Samuel Rabinovitch, a Jewish medical student who had graduated first in his class at the Université de Montréal, was offered an internship at Notre Dame Hospital. All 14 other interns there walked out in protest, supported by interns from five other Montreal-area Catholic hospitals.

Who could blame them, asked the French-language Le Devoir? It would be repugnant to be treated - even touched - by a Jewish physician.

In the Laurentians, Jews were harassed, taunted and assaulted; hotels and other establishment proudly sported 'Gentiles Only' signs. The Achat chez Nous movement urged French Canadians to buy only from co-religionists and stay away from Jewish shopkeepers who, noted Le Devoir, "have cheating and corruption in their bloodstream."

Not surprisingly, Québécois politicians and clergy led the agitation against further Jewish immigration to Canada. As one Toronto rabbi, Maurice Eisendrath, said in June 1938: "In Quebec antisemitism is a way of life."

Maurice Duplessis, premier of Quebec after 1936, vigorously opposed the admission of Jewish refugees to Canada. During the 1944 provincial election, he spread stories about a supposed "international Zionist" plot to spirit 100,000 Jews into the province at the end of the war if the provincial Liberals would be returned to power.

Though Quebec was particularly bad, the rest of Canada was not free of anti-Jewish prejudice either.

Social Credit, the Orange Order, the Ku Klux Klan - these and many other groups were rife with antisemitic feeling. Three weeks after winning power in Alberta in 1935, new Social Credit Premier William Aberhart travelled to Detroit to discuss economics with Father Charles Coughlin, an antisemitic Catholic priest whose weekly radio broadcasts attracted millions of listeners.

Other Social Crediters spouted nonsense about "Jewish High Finance." Especially notorious was Norman Jaques, federal MP for Wetaskiwin from 1935 to 1949. He propounded Jewish conspiracy theories and in 1943 attempted to read from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the House of Commons.

Throughout Canada, quotas and restrictions were a way of life, and anti-Jewish bigotry sanctioned in press and pulpit. A Canadian Jewish Congress study commissioned in the late 1930s showed few Jewish teachers, and no principals, in Canadian schools. There was not a single Jewish university professor in the country.

Banks, insurance companies, and large industrial and commercial enterprises excluded Jews from employment. Jews were refused work even as salespeople in department stores. Restrictive covenants kept Jews out of "desirable" neighbourhoods as either tenants or homeowners.

And unlike today, the legal system provided little in the way of redress. There were few laws against discrimination, hatemongering or the like.

Redress had to await more enlightened times. Only in the 1960s could Canadian Jews consider themselves, and be considered by others, to be part of the Canadian family.