A Divisive Election

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

In all too many countries, elections culminate in a “January sixth” – the day in 2021 when Donald Trump supporters who refused to accept the official result of the U.S. presidential election rioted in Washington. A recent African example of this comes from Senegal, on the west coast of the continent.

Senegalese President Macky Sall’s coalition United in Hope (Benno Bokk Yakaar) has lost its absolute majority in parliament by a single seat in the July 31 election, winning 82 of the National Assembly’s 165 seats, down from the 125 it gained in 2017.

The main opposition coalitions, Liberate the People (Yewwi Askan Wi) and Save Senegal (Wallu Senegal), running in an alliance, won 56 and 24 seats, respectively, for a total of 80. Save Senegal is led by ex-president Abdoulaye Wade.

The remaining three seats were split among smaller parties and coalitions.

FIRST BIG LOSS

This is the first time since independence in 1960 that a ruling party has lost an absolute majority in Senegal. For Sall, who has been accused by the opposition of wanting to break the two-term constitutional limit and run for president again in 2024, the disappointing legislative results could curb any such ambitions.

The president, who was elected in 2012 for seven years and re-elected in 2019 for five years, has so far remained vague about his future plans.

Sall’s supporters argue that changes to the constitution in 2016, which shortened presidential terms from seven to five years, reset the clock on his term limits, allowing him to run for another mandate in 2024.

Making the best of the loss, Sall praised the Senegalese people for the “exemplary nature of our democracy, the credibility of our electoral system.”

CLAIMS DISPUTED

Not everyone agreed. Senegal’s opposition leaders maintained that they had defeated the government coalition. Barthelemy Dias, head of Liberate the People, disputed the government’s claims.

“The people will respond,” he warned. “You lost this election at the national level. We will not accept it. This abuse will not pass,” said Dias, who is also the mayor of Dakar.

Widespread protests had erupted this past June in Dakar and around the country in the lead-up to the vote, when the candidate list for Liberate the People was thrown out by the constitutional council, leaving high-profile candidates such as Ousmane Sonko, a 2019 presidential contender, off the ballot.

Police were seen barricading Sonko’s house, preventing him from attending the demonstration. Three people were killed. Sonko had been arrested in March of 2021 on charges of rape; he has denied the allegations, calling his arrest politically motivated.

An estimated 14 people were killed and approximately 590 injured during demonstrations by his supporters, which were characterized by high levels of violence against protesters by security forces. Human rights organizations accused the police of using “excessive force.”

Liberate the People had to run a substitute list this July, largely composed of political outsiders.

Other opposition figures were also prevented from running, including Abdoulaye Wade’s own son Karim.

WIDESPREAD CORRUPTION

On Aug. 11, Liberate the People announced it would not appeal the election results.

“We think that there is no point in going to the Constitutional Council to lodge an appeal because it is not at the level of the Constitutional Council that these three deputies will be returned to us,” explained Dethie Fall.

Corruption remains a serious problem in Senegal, and high-level officials often act with impunity. Anticorruption laws are unevenly enforced and enforcement actions are sometimes viewed as politically motivated. Corruption cases are widely perceived as a means to neutralize the president’s most powerful opponents.

A controversial law enacted in January 2021 also allows for prison terms of up to two years for defamation and three years for publishing “fake news” likely to “discredit public institutions” or “prejudice public decency.”

“We are in a very volatile subregion. Democracy is at risk, and Senegal is supposed to be a beacon of democracy,” said Hawa Ba, head of the Senegal office at the Open Society Initiative for West Africa. “It’s supposed to be a country that’s pulling the region and the continent upwards. And what we are witnessing is Senegal’s democracy sliding back since a few years now.”

Political analyst Maurice Soudieck Dione told Agence France-Presse that “The ruling coalition is out of breath.”

 

Kaliningrad a Pawn in the Ukraine War

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

The Russian oblast, or province, of Kaliningrad has become is a pawn in the proxy war between Moscow and the European Union.

It is an exclave, a portion of a state that is geographically separated from the main part by the surrounding territory of one or more nations.

Situated on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, it spans an area of 15,000 square kilometres and has a population of roughly a million. It is sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland, both of which are EU and NATO members. It receives much of its supplies via routes that pass through Lithuania and Belarus.

Kaliningrad, then know as Konigsberg, was part of Germany until the Red Army seized control of it from the Nazis in 1945 and it was ceded to the Soviet Union after the war.

 It remained part of the Russian Federation when the three Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – as well as Belarus became sovereign countries in 1991. Though isolated, that didn’t matter that much when relations with Russia were fairly good.

Kaliningrad is strategically and militarily important. The Russian Baltic Sea Fleet is headquartered there – it is the only port that doesn’t freeze over in winter, unlike the ones closer to St. Petersburg. Its radar systems provide surveillance of central Europe.

As well, the Kremlin has placed nuclear weapons in the exclave. In May Russia carried out simulated nuclear missile strikes, with “electronic launches” of Iskander mobile ballistic missile systems, near its borders with Lithuania and Poland.

Should Finland and Sweden join NATO, its importance to Moscow will only increase, because the Baltic Sea would essentially become a NATO “lake,” with only Russia as a non-NATO country there.

But Kaliningrad also creates Western vulnerability. There is a sliver of territory along the border between Poland and Lithuania called the Suwalki Gap, with Russian ally Belarus on one side and Kaliningrad on the other.

The area has long been viewed as the Achilles’ heel of NATO’s eastern defences, owing to the relative ease with which Russia could seize it by launching a pincer assault between Kaliningrad in the northwest and its client state, Belarus, in the southeast, cutting off the three Baltic states from the rest of NATO territory.

There are also large numbers of ethnic Russians in the Baltic region. In both Latvia and Estonia, they comprise about one quarter of each country’s population. Russian President Vladimir Putin has mentioned Narva, right across the border in Estonia, where ethnic Russians comprise almost 90 per cent of the city, as really part of Russia. And that, of course, wakens all sorts of concerns.

So the Baltic states, always fearful of Moscow, are among Ukraine’s loudest supporters. On June 17, Lithuanian state rail operator LTG began to bar the transit through the country of Kaliningrad-bound goods sanctioned by the EU, including coal, metals and construction materials.

Only flows of passengers and cargo not subject to EU sanctions would continue. According to Kaliningrad Governor Anton Alikhanov, around half the items imported by his region would be affected.

The Kremlin called the move “unprecedented and illegal” and Russian security council secretary Nikolai Patrushev on June 17 warned it would have a “serious negative impact on the population of Lithuania.”

Germany also was unhappy. Berlin reportedly viewed the transit being blocked by Vilnius as “transport from Russia to Russia,” which should be allowed. The German magazine Der Spiegel suggested that Olaf Scholz’s government also worried that Moscow could use force to secure a land corridor to Kaliningrad by blocking the Suwalki Gap.

Perhaps the Russian threat worked, because on July 13 the EU said the transit ban only affected road, not rail, transit, so Lithuania should allow Russia to ship concrete, wood and alcohol across EU territory to Kaliningrad. Lithuanian Railways resumed transporting goods to the exclave on July 22.

Meanwhile, Russia had begun closing down Lithuanian cultural institutions in the oblast. The children's folklore ensemble Malunėlis, which has been active in Kaliningrad for 10 years, was banned from representing the region at a Russian Folk Festival. The Lithuanian Language Teachers’ Association was also shut. The ripple effects of the war extend across Europe.

 

An Angry Putin Becomes a Problem for Israel

 Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax] Chronicle Herald

Often, when there’s trouble somewhere in the world, Jews find themselves in the middle of it. However, when it comes to the current war in Ukraine, this time it could have been avoided.

Writing of Vladimir Putin’s “warm and conciliatory gestures” toward the Jewish state, in Everybody Loves Israel, an article published Nov. 7, 2016 in Mosaic, an online magazine of Jewish ideas, religion, politics, and culture, Arthur Herman, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, noted that Israel was the first foreign country Putin visited after his re-accession to the Russian presidency in 2012, “going so far as to don a kippah on his visit to the Western Wall in the company of Berel Lazar, Russia’s chief rabbi.”

In Russia, Herman continued, “Putin makes a point of attending Jewish functions, including the opening of a Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, to which he contributed $50 million in state funds and personally donated a month’s salary.”

In his June 2012 visit to Israel, Putin remarked 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, then Israeli president Shimon Peres told Putin, “the Jewish people owe a historical ‘thank you’ to the Russians.”

Prior to his June 2016 trip, Putin dramatically announced that he was restoring to Israel an old tank, a Magaḥ-3, captured by Syrian forces in the 1973 Yom Kippur war and subsequently donated by Syria to Moscow’s military museum.

Putin and then Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu met many times, and they spoke on the phone 11 times in 2018 alone.

Such behaviour would have been unimaginable from any of the tsars or Communist party secretaries who preceded Putin. But now there is increasing chilliness between Moscow and Jerusalem. What happened?

The Washington administration put strong pressure on the weak interim Israeli government led by Prime Minister Yair Lapid to take sides in the Ukraine war.

The result? An angry Putin, who feels his relatively proisraeli policies have gone unappreciated, is closing down the Jewish Agency in Russia — the organization that has helped countless Jews from around the globe immigrate to the Jewish homeland.

Jerusalem should have realized this would lead to trouble for the still substantial Russian Jewish community, which number some 150,000 people. “Putin wants the respect he deserves from Israel,” a senior Israeli diplomatic source told the Al-monitor news agency. “He is unwilling to overlook Israeli declarations that deviate from the semi-objective, or at least polite stand adopted by former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.”

Last month, Russian authorities petitioned a Moscow district court to halt its activities, claiming the organization, which facilitates and encourages Jewish immigration to Israel, had violated local laws. Belatedly, Israeli President Isaac Herzog called Putin on Aug. 9 at the request of Lapid and in co-ordination with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to negotiate a compromise with Moscow.

Earlier in the month, Israel’s ambassador to Russia, Alexander Ben Zvi, met in Moscow with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov to discuss the Jewish Agency’s future in Russia. The issue remains unresolved; a court hearing is set for Aug. 19, during which the judges may ban the agency’s activity.

So now Israel finds itself at odds with Russia, as it has increasingly supported Ukraine, all the while seeking to maintain freedom of movement in Syria’s skies, which are largely controlled by Moscow.

Also, thanks to NATO’S role in the war, Russia is being driven into the arms of Israel’s existential enemy, Iran, which wants to destroy the “Zionist entity.” The Iranian-russian strategic relationship has grown following a visit by Putin to Tehran last month. Iran started transferring armed drones for Russian use against Ukraine. Putin also launched an Iranian satellite into orbit, reportedly on the condition that Moscow can gain Tehran’s support for Russian operations in Ukraine.

So if there’s a new war in the Middle East, which side do you think Moscow will be on? It won’t help a beleaguered Israel. And, brave as he is, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy won’t be able to, either.

The bottom line: Israel lives in a hostile neighbourhood and needs all the friends it can get, especially major powers. True, this is realpolitik, but unlike Canada, the country must protect itself daily against enemies. It doesn’t have the luxury of pursuing a moral course that may not serve its national security interests. So, when it came to this war, Israel should have kept a low profile and stayed out of it.

 

U.S. Jews Seek Response to Confluence of Hatred

 Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax] Chronicle Herald

Today, according to the founders of a new organization, American Jews face assaults simultaneously from four major ideological camps. White nationalists attack Jews the name of white supremacy. Radical black nationalists attack Jews in the name of black liberation and “equity.”

Many progressives and segments of the Democratic Party promote the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and anti-Jewish critical race theory, in the name of “social justice” and Palestinian nationalism. Finally, radical Islamists, many from anti-Semitic cultures, preach incitement against Jews.

Yet Jewish establishment organizations whose mission is the defence and well-being of the community -- the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Jewish Federations, and the networks of Jewish Community Relations Councils (JCRCs) -- are failing to protect American Jewry, they assert.

In response, therefore, in July Avi Goldwasser and Charles Jacobs, along with activists across the United States, launched a grassroots non-profit initiative, the Jewish Leadership Project (JLP), to demand that these major Jewish organizations cease subordinating the safety and welfare of the Jewish-American community to partisan ideology.

Much of the JLP’s analysis of failed Jewish leadership was recently featured in essays published in a 2022 issue of White Rose magazine, edited by Jacobs and Goldwasser, whose influential non-profit projects have ranged from highlighting the hostility faced by Jews on college campuses to exposing the threats Islamists pose in the United States.

For his work in helping to liberate thousands of Black slaves from jihadist raiders in Sudan, Coretta Scott King presented Charles Jacobs with Boston’s Freedom Award.

Jacobs and Goldwasser realize that efforts to combat external foes cannot prevail given the feckless leadership within Jewish organizations. “Jewish Americans are under siege,” stated Goldwasser. “Campuses are rife with Jew-hatred. Jews have been attacked on the streets of Boston, Brooklyn and Los Angeles, and murdered in Pittsburgh, San Diego, Monsey, and Jersey City. They have been defamed by media outlets such as the New York Times and CNN, and even maligned by members of Congress.”

Goldwasser asserted that “Many once-venerable Jewish organizations have primarily become front groups for progressive political interests. The significant danger
the Jewish community faces today is an indictment of these institutions and their leadership.”

“White supremacists are an immediate, lethal threat to the Jewish-American community, but the growing animus against Jews among black radicals, anti-Zionist leftists, and Islamic extremists constitutes the longer-term peril,” added Jacobs. “Unfortunately, establishment Jewish organizations are now led by individuals who refuse to recognize the nature of 21st-century Jew-hatred, let alone combat it, and so
have abdicated their responsibility to the people they are meant to serve. They have abandoned their missions, are losing credibility, and must radically change course or step aside before the Jewish-American suffers additional harm.”

Establishment Jewish leaders often seem more preoccupied by their social standing than demonstrating real concern for the Jewish community’s predicament. They also seem to have missed the dramatic shift in America’s cultural and political landscape, which has taken place over the last several decades.

Anti-Zionism in particular, has made Jew-hatred culturally and socially acceptable under the guise of human rights and free speech. Yet almost every major Jewish legacy organization failed to see the long-term consequences. This has especially been an issue on college and university campuses and has contributed to the fact that 50 per cent of American Jewish students now feel that “they must hide who they are out of fear,” according to an American Jewish Committee poll.

The survey was included in the Committee’s annual “State of Antisemitism in America” report, released on October 25, 2021.The report showed deep anxiety among Americans about its severity.

“We need strong, proud, and courageous leaders willing to confront those who would do us harm,” Jacobs asserted. “JLP is the first Jewish organization in America that not only recognizes the state of emergency, but also is mobilizing to carry out substantive change to counter the threats we face.”

As a vulnerable minority, Jews have usually made public criticism of their leaders a near taboo. But this must change. Jewish leaders need fresh ideas. The American Jewish community must engage in open discussions, by encouraging broad community participation about the crisis they face.

The JLP is already attracting supporters, having established over a dozen teams throughout the United States.