Category Archives: Issues

Racism by any other name

Vann R. Newkirk II writes: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Barack Obama’s election as the first black president was supposed to usher in a golden “post-racial” age but instead was met with racial conflict, a battle Obama failed, in his role as conciliator-in-chief, to either predict or control. The conflict has blossomed into a war, producing Donald Trump’s racial-angst-fueled campaign and the anger of Black Lives Matter protesters. At the heart of this racial conflict is Obama’s divisive presidency.

If that storyline sounds familiar, it’s the tack that many analyses have taken as they try to tease apart the interconnected issues of race and politics. It’s an exercise––an important one––that writers attempt every few months. Two years ago, commentators chronicled “unrest over race” in Obama’s legacy, and even before that speculated at racial tensions or unrest that might ensue should he ever lose an election. One recent column by Peniel Joseph in the Washington Post chronicles Obama’s failure to stop the “open warfare” of racial conflict during his term in office.

One reason these attempts to grapple with race and Obama’s presidency recur so often is that they usually can’t quite pull together a unified theory. Perhaps the moving pieces are just too complicated to analyze while they are still moving; perhaps they appear deceptively simple. But maybe some of the difficulty in talking about race today is attributable to the unhelpful euphemisms of “racial conflict,” “racial tension,” and other phrases that suggest an equal amount of instigation across racial groups, if not a perfectly balanced battle. But not all “racial conflicts” or “racially fraught” sentiments are the same. Equating them even via casual euphemism dilutes the potency of a truth that has undergirded every aspect of American society for as long as American society has existed.

It is tempting to try to conceptualize American culture as a theater of war, with battles fought between well-equipped factions over the future of the dominant identity. This conceptualization of political conflict animates arguments about everything from political correctness on college campuses to the tensions at the heart of Bernie Sanders’s political revolution. And at some level, especially when discussing differing factions of white men, it works. But the idea of political conflict as a pitched battle proves inadequate when it fails to take into account the power gradients that have been woven into the fabric of the country. That is especially true of race. [Continue reading…]

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In Aleppo, we are running out of coffins

Osama Abo El Ezz writes: Last week, Syrian or Russian jets bombed Al Quds hospital, in the eastern part of the divided city of Aleppo. At least 50 people lost their lives, and some 80 more were injured.

Among those killed in the attack was my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Muhammad Wassim Mo’az, a kind man who cared deeply for his patients and his community. He slept in the hospital in case there was an emergency and he had to rush to treat babies and children. He was the last pediatrician in Aleppo.

Another friend, Dr. Mohammed Ahmad, was also killed in the airstrikes. Dr. Ahmad was beloved by colleagues and Aleppo residents. He used to volunteer with children, teaching them how to prevent dental disease during wartime. He was one of the 10 dentists remaining in eastern Aleppo.

Dr. Wassim and Dr. Ahmad join hundreds of my Syrian colleagues who have been killed during the last five years of civil war. Physicians for Human Rights has counted at least 730 murdered medical professionals. Deliberate attacks on hospitals and medical workers have become the norm. Just one day after the bombing of Al Quds hospital, a primary care center that treated more than 2,000 people a month was destroyed by another airstrike. In the last week, schools, clinics and mosques have been deliberately bombed, too.

As one of the few remaining doctors in Syria, I have watched the “cessation of hostilities” that was agreed on in February crumble. Imperfect though it was, it offered Syrian civilians a brief respite from five years of violence. People had begun to recover during the truce, to get their lives back. But we are now seeing a level of destruction that will leave an already battered city in ruins. [Continue reading…]

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Wildfire near Canada’s oil sands may have been fueled by global warming

Brian Kahn writes: An unusually intense May wildfire roared into Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, on Tuesday, forcing the largest wildfire evacuation in province history. The flames rode the back of hot, windy weather that will continue through Wednesday and could pick up again this weekend.

The wildfire is the latest in a lengthening lineage of early wildfires in the northern reaches of the globe that are indicative of a changing climate. As the planet continues to warm, these types of fires will likely only become more common and intense as spring snowpack disappears and temperatures warm.

“This (fire) is consistent with what we expect from human-caused climate change affecting our fire regime,” Mike Flannigan, a wildfire researcher at the University of Alberta, said. [Continue reading…]

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‘Nauseating trends’ in Israel briefly remind military chief of hatred in Nazi Germany

The Guardian reports: The deputy head of the Israeli military has been forced to backtrack after appearing to compare some attitudes in present-day Israel to “nauseating trends” in 1930s Germany.

In a hard-hitting Holocaust memorial day speech on Wednesday evening, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) deputy chief of staff, Maj Gen Yair Golan, made remarks that he felt compelled to clarify overnight on Thursday, insisting he had not “intended to compare Israel to Nazi Germany”.

Both the timing – on the day that marks the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis – and the perceived comparison, touch on the most sensitive of issues in Israel.

Golan told an audience including a government minister and survivors of the Holocaust: “The Holocaust must lead us to think about our public lives, and even more than that, it must guide anyone who has the ability, not only those who wish to bear public responsibility.

“Because if there is anything that frightens me in the remembrance of the Holocaust, it is discerning nauseating trends that took place in Europe in general, and in Germany specifically back then, 70, 80 and 90 years ago, and seeing evidence of them here among us in the year 2016.

“After all, there is nothing simpler and easier than hating the foreigner, there is nothing easier and simpler than arousing fears and intimidating, there is nothing easier and simpler than becoming bestial, forgoing principles and becoming smug.” [Continue reading…]

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Across Europe, anti-Jewish violence is at its lowest level in a decade

Leonid Bershidsky writes: The record influx of Muslim refugees last year coincided with a sharp decline in the number of violent anti-Semitic incidents in major European countries, many of which bore the brunt of the refugee crisis.

The wave of so-called new anti-Semitism of recent years largely stemmed from anti-Israeli rather than racist beliefs, and had often been linked to the persistence of such attitudes among the growing Muslim population. Yet data from the 2015 report on global anti-Semitism, published on Wednesday by Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, clearly show that as the refugees started coming in by the tens of thousands per day starting about a year ago, Europe became a safer place to be Jewish.

According to data collected by the Israeli demographer Sergio DellaPergola, France, the U.K. and Germany are the European countries with the biggest core Jewish population, defined as people who describe themselves as Jews. In France, the number of major violent anti-Semitic attacks dropped to 72 last year from 164 in 2014. The U.K. saw a similarly steep decrease, to 62 from 141. In Germany, there were 37 attacks, down from 76. Throughout Europe, anti-Jewish violence is at the lowest level in a decade. [Continue reading…]

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Electing Sadiq Khan as mayor of London would be the terrorists’ worst nightmare

Londoners

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes: The whole universe may be found in a grain of London life,” wrote Peter Ackroyd. Sadiq Khan knows the grainy, multifarious life of the capital intimately. He is a real Londoner, and that is why he is the best choice for mayor. It matters more than his race, religion or class. Khan’s Pakistan-born father was a bus driver, his mother a seamstress. They had eight children, seven of them boys. The parents saved up to buy a home, and sent all their children to university. Khan has lived in public housing, used public transport, known deprivation, and epitomises urban aspiration.

Zac Goldsmith was born in London yet he could never acquire the same sensibility, or even pretend to know what it means. Goldsmith has never had to strive, and his privilege shows in his lack of passion, his lack of the kind of energy that drives most true Londoners.

I moved to London, from Oxford, in 1978 with my mum, ex-husband and a six-month-old baby. Exiles from Uganda, we had little money then, and lived in a one-bedroom flat near Shepherd’s Bush. It had rats, damp, a bath in the kitchen and broken furniture. My boy was starting to crawl, and one day picked up some rat droppings. I sobbed. But on the common, in the evening, surrounded by lights and sounds, we felt we had arrived. Eating a Wimpy burger from a box was the biggest treat. Upstairs lived Noreen, a young woman from Kent who had escaped from a violent husband. Next door was Elsa, a sweet Jamaican granny who made excellent gingerbread in an oven with a broken door. The building belonged to a shady man who had several such properties. He got rich and fat, and died of a heart attack. Noreen found a new man, a Yorkshireman who was training to be a bespoke tailor. Elsa started selling her gingerbread to neighbours, and moved to a better place. My ex-husband and I found good jobs and bought our first flat, where I still live.

This is what London ever was, and still is: big, busy, mysterious. By turns miserly and bountiful, chaotic and serene, shockingly unequal yet welcoming: a tough place that is always changing but where a future is always possible. This is where the British dream can come true. London belongs to no one, and so everyone can at least hope to claim a place in it. It is a hub, a fabulously diverse ecosystem that draws in people from other parts of the kingdom and the globe. [Continue reading…]

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Hillary Clinton and the engine of war-making

Given the ubiquity of the phrase, perpetual war, it’s clear that many Americans believe that a powerful faction at the heart of government has such an insatiable appetite for war that if all the conflicts the U.S. is currently entangled in were to unexpectedly find peaceful resolution, then Washington would seek out, engineer, or in some other way precipitate new wars, because this has become America’s core business: war-making.

Among those who subscribe to this view are at one extreme the Truthers who believe 9/11 was an “inside job” carried out as a pretext for a never-ending war on terrorism. At the other end of the spectrum are those with a less conspiratorial perspective who simply observe that the military–industrial complex generates its own political and commercial momentum which fosters geopolitical conditions that make wars more rather than less likely.

The decisive factor seen as most likely to tip the balance in the future is the hawkishness of the president.

Hillary Clinton is constantly being branded as a hawk, but most of these assessments of her appetite for war-making seem to be based on judgments about her character and her track record rather than on plausible predictions of the actual scenarios in which this destructive appetite will continue to be satisfied.

Aaron David Miller writes:

Mrs. Clinton may have more hawkish instincts than President Obama, but there is little reason to doubt that her preference for U.S. engagement in the world is through diplomacy, political and cultural soft power, and economic strength. She led the “reset” with Russia (though later soured on it), advocated using negotiations to address North Korea, campaigned for a nuclear agreement with Iran, and preferred regional diplomacy to counter Beijing’s military moves in the South China Sea. She also supported the President’s Cuba initiative. Mrs. Clinton has long championed negotiating an end to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Unlike many of her Republican rivals, who bluster against engagement in favor of force and tough responses, Mrs. Clinton has been a cheerleader for negotiations on the campaign trail, a predisposition likely to follow her into the White House.

“There’s no doubt that Hillary Clinton’s more muscular brand of American foreign policy is better matched to 2016 than it was to 2008,” her close aide, Jake Sullivan, told Mr. Landler. The rise of Islamic State and the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino last year bolster that argument, certainly when it comes to protecting the homeland. Shortly after the attacks in Paris, a CNN/ORC poll found that 53% of Americans supported sending ground to Syria or Iraq to fight ISIS. But as time passes after attacks, support for deployments falls. Gallup polling in February found that Americans were divided on U.S. military involvement in Syria, with 34% saying more involvement is needed, 29% saying the current level of engagement is about right, and 30% saying that the U.S. should be less involved. Should a Brussels-style attack be carried out in the U.S., support for a large military response would grow, as would any president’s options to authorize it.

What is perhaps the greatest constraint on a putative President Clinton’s hawkishness? The bad options that exist for projecting military force, particularly in the Middle East. Mrs. Clinton’s strategy toward ISIS doesn’t differ much from President Obama’s: She has talked about creating a partial “no-fly” zone, though it’s hard to see how this would improve the situation, and it risks conflict with Russia. It’s likely that as president Mrs. Clinton would try to work with Moscow to deescalate the situation in Syria through diplomacy. She is highly unlikely to deploy thousands of additional ground troops to Iraq or Syria, though she talks about using special forces more–something President Obama is already doing. Meanwhile, as a staunch defender of the international agreement over Iran’s nuclear program, she is not looking for a fight with Tehran.

Hillary Clinton knows the consequences of using force in Iraq and Libya absent a political strategy, and she knows that the Middle East won’t be “fixed” by U.S. military power alone. She may have hawkish instincts, but if she is in the Oval Office next year, she may be as reluctant to use force as Barack Obama has been.

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How Donald Trump won the GOP nomination

John Cassidy writes: Despite the best efforts of the Never Trump movement, it has been clear for some time that Donald Trump is destined to be the Republican candidate for President in 2016. His sweeping victory in New York, a couple of weeks ago, confirmed his popularity among the white suburban voters who make up the key voting bloc in the G.O.P. And his decisive win in Indiana, on Tuesday, more or less settled things. Ted Cruz, in suspending his candidacy, was only accepting the inevitable.

I noted a couple of months ago that one of the big problems with the Never Trump movement was that it didn’t have a credible candidate. Once Marco Rubio flamed out, its only options were John Kasich, who had won but a single state (his own), and the stridently reactionary Cruz. Republican primary voters have their idiosyncrasies and prejudices, but in one respect they are just like other Americans. Presented with a choice of voting for Cruz or A.N. Other, a majority of them opted for the latter — a fact that played greatly to Trump’s advantage.

Still, even Trump appeared to be surprised by his sixteen-point margin of victory in the Hoosier State. In a speech at Trump Tower, Trump said that he hadn’t expected Cruz to drop out just yet. The Texas Senator’s decision occasioned a rhetorical flip-flop on Trump’s part. Earlier in the day he had suggested that Cruz’s father, Rafael, who is now an evangelical preacher, had aided and abetted Lee Harvey Oswald, a claim arising from an article that had appeared in the National Enquirer. In his speech, Trump now paid tribute to Cruz’s “whole beautiful family.”

It has been evident ever since Trump announced his candidacy, eleven months ago, that there was virtually nothing he wouldn’t say to tar his rivals or anyone else who dared to challenge him. This is the candidate who referred to Rick Perry as a dimwit; criticized Carly Fiorina’s appearance; claimed that John McCain wasn’t a war hero; appeared to suggest, during a televised debate, that Megyn Kelly was menstruating; and compared Ben Carson to a child molester. Ultimately, none of these statements did much damage to Trump’s campaign. Arguably, they enhanced it.

Historians and political scientists will be debating for decades how Trump got to this point, but any convincing explanation must acknowledge his talents as a demagogue and pugilist. Speaking on CNN last night, David Axelrod, one of the many commentators who initially dismissed Trump’s candidacy, said, “He’s proven himself to be very resourceful and very skilled.” Axelrod pointed, in particular, to Trump’s mastery of television and social media. On Fox, Rich Lowry, the editor of the National Review, which has been in the vanguard of the Never Trump movement, said, “I have to tip my hat to what Trump has achieved.” Citing the fact that Trump didn’t have any pollsters or, until recently, any political organization to speak of, Lowry added, “It is completely incredible.”

That it is. But there are two factors in Trump’s rise that help to account for it: the febrile environment he has been operating in, and the potency of his message. [Continue reading…]

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Israel-Palestinian tensions return to boiling point

Jeremy Bowen writes: In the week or so I have been back in Jerusalem, a few people have asked me what it is I am here to cover. I thought it should be obvious.

The violence. Repeated attacks on Israelis by Palestinians, and the response by Israeli security forces.

But I have had quite a few bemused shrugs from journalist colleagues. Why now, when it has been going on since last October?

I was in Jerusalem last autumn reporting on it. What has changed? The longer something goes on the more it tends to slip down the news agenda.

But the point is that violence that becomes part of the scenery is just as dangerous as when first it grabs headlines.

It makes the deadly atmosphere between Israelis and Palestinians even more toxic. The attacks have become almost routine. Except for those who are caught up in them. [Continue reading…]

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UK’s claim Saudi Arabia hasn’t breached humanitarian law in Yemen adds to ‘anything goes’ attitude, say MPs

The Guardian reports: The British government’s claim that Saudi Arabia’s bombing campaign in Yemen has not breached international humanitarian law is “deeply disappointing” and contributes to an “anything goes” attitude from the opposing sides in the conflict, the international development select committee has said.

The finding comes as a rebuke to the foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, who made the assessment despite a UN-sponsored report and many charities presenting evidence to the contrary. The Conservative-dominated committee said the Saudi inquiry into the Yemen campaign, supported by the Foreign Office, was inadequate and called for an independent inquiry.

“It is deeply disappointing that the UK government does not accept that breaches of international humanitarian law have taken place in Yemen,” the committee said in a report. “The failure to hold parties to the conflict to account for their actions appears to have contributed to an ‘anything goes’ attitude by both sides to this conflict.” [Continue reading…]

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Lakota lead the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline

Jason Coppola reports: As the start of 2016 shatters last year’s record as the hottest year on record, the Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires of the Great Sioux Nation) once again find themselves on the front lines of the battle against the fossil fuel industry.

Members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe have established a Spirit Camp at the mouth of the Cannonball River in North Dakota as a means of bringing attention and awareness to a proposed pipeline and act as an enduring symbol of resistance against its construction.

The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) is set to cut through several US states, delivering hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil from the Bakken and Three Forks oil fields in North Dakota to Patoka, Illinois.

The Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners pipeline will cross the Ogallala Aquifer — a million-year-old shallow water table spanning eight US states, which provides fresh water for drinking and agriculture — while twice crossing the Missouri River and running alongside the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.

A spill could contaminate the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the worlds largest, which is already in crisis and under threat of running dry in the coming decades. [Continue reading…]

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Why a British fight over Israel and anti-Semitism matters to the rest of us

Robert Mackey writes: At first glance, the heated argument two members of the British Labour Party conducted in front of reporters’ iPhones on Thursday, sparked by accusations that one of their colleagues posted anti-Semitic comments on Facebook, seems like a story of interest mainly to political junkies in London.


When the debate is unpacked, however, it becomes clear that what’s at stake is something much broader: whether critics of Israel, who question its government’s policies or its right to exist as a Jewish state, are engaged in a form of coded anti-Semitism. That matters because attempts to disqualify all critics of Israel as racists are widespread across the globe.

In the United States, for instance, supporters of a movement to boycott Israel until it grants Palestinians full civil rights have recently been condemned as anti-Semites by Hillary Clinton; last month, the University of California adopted a policy on discrimination that implies anti-Semitism is behind opposition to Zionism, the political ideology asserting that the Jewish people have a right to a nation-state in historic Palestine.

But how did this issue come to dominate the political debate in Britain, a week before important local elections? [Continue reading…]

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The American Jewish scholar behind Labour’s ‘antisemitism’ scandal breaks his silence

Jamie Stern-Weiner writes: Norman Finkelstein is no stranger to controversy. The American Jewish scholar is one of the world’s leading experts on the Israel-Palestine conflict and the political legacy of the Nazi holocaust. Apart from his parents, every member of Finkelstein’s family, on both sides, was exterminated in the Nazi holocaust. His 2000 book The Holocaust Industry, which was serialised in the Guardian, became an international best-seller and touched off a firestorm of debate. But Finkelstein’s most recent political intervention came about by accident.

Last month, Naz Shah MP became one of the most high-profile cases to date in the ‘antisemitism’ scandal still shaking the Labour leadership. Shah was suspended from the Labour party for, among other things, reposting an image on Facebook that was alleged to be antisemitic. The image depicted a map of the United States with Israel superimposed, and suggested resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict by relocating Israel into the United States. It has been reported that Shah got the image from Finkelstein’s website. I spoke with Finkelstein about why he posted the image, and what he thinks of allegations that the Labour party has a ‘Jewish problem’.

Did you create the controversial image that Naz Shah reposted?

I’m not adept enough with computers to compose any image. But I did post the map on my website in 2014. An email correspondent must have sent it. It was, and still is, funny. Were it not for the current political context, nobody would have noticed Shah’s reposting of it either. Otherwise, you’d have to be humourless. These sorts of jokes are a commonplace in the U.S. So, we have this joke: Why doesn’t Israel become the 51st state? Answer: Because then, it would only have two senators. As crazy as the discourse on Israel is in America, at least we still have a sense of humour. It’s inconceivable that any politician in the U.S. would be crucified for posting such a map.

Shah’s posting of that image has been presented as an endorsement by her of a ‘chilling “transportation” policy’, while John Mann MP has compared her to Eichmann.

Frankly, I find that obscene. It’s doubtful these Holocaust-mongers have a clue what the deportations were, or of the horrors that attended them. I remember my late mother describing her deportation. She was in the Warsaw Ghetto. The survivors of the Ghetto Uprising, about 30,000 Jews, were deported to Maijdanek concentration camp. They were herded into railroad cars. My mother was sitting in the railroad car next to a woman who had her child. And the woman – I know it will shock you – the woman suffocated her infant child to death in front of my mother. She suffocated her child, rather than take her to where they were going. That’s what it meant to be deported. To compare that to someone posting a light-hearted, innocuous cartoon making a little joke about how Israel is in thrall to the U.S., or vice versa…it’s sick. What are they doing? Don’t they have any respect for the dead? All these desiccated Labour apparatchiks, dragging the Nazi holocaust through the mud for the sake of their petty jostling for power and position. Have they no shame? [Continue reading…]

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‘Generalizations about anti-Semitism in Europe are dangerous’

On November 30, 2011, the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, spoke to a conference of lawyers organized by the European Jewish Union. His remarks have some renewed relevance now as Britain’s Labour Party is suffering multiple accusations that it harbors antisemites.

Gutman said:

There is and has long been some amount of anti-Semitism, of hatred and violence against Jews, from a small sector of the population who hate others who may be different or perceived to be different, largely for the sake of hating. Those anti-Semites are people who hate not only Jews, but Muslims, gays, gypsies, and likely any who can be described as minorities or different. That hatred is of course pernicious and it must be combated. We can never take our eye off it or just dismiss it as fringe elements or the work of crazy people, because we have seen in the past how it can foment and grow. And it is that hatred that lawyers like you can work vigilantly to expose, combat and punish, maybe in conjunction with existing human rights groups.

I have not personally seen much of that hatred in Europe, though it rears its ugly head from time to time. I do not have any basis to think it is growing in any sense. But of course, we can never take our eye off of it, and you particularly as lawyers can help with that process.

So in some sense, that is the easy part of the analysis.

Let’s turn to the harder and more complex part.

What I do see as growing, as gaining much more attention in the newspapers and among politicians and communities, is a different phenomena. It is the phenomena that led Jacques Brotchi to quit his position on the university committee a couple of months ago and that led to the massive attention last week when the Jewish female student was beaten up. It is the problem within Europe of tension, hatred and sometimes even violence between some members of Muslim communities or Arab immigrant groups and Jews. It is a tension and perhaps hatred largely born of and reflecting the tension between Israel, the Palestinian Territories and neighboring Arab states in the Middle East over the continuing Israeli-Palestinian problem.

It too is a serious problem. It too must be discussed and solutions explored. No Jewish student – and no Muslim student or student of any heritage or religion – should ever feel intimidated on a University campus for their heritage or religion leading to academic leaders quitting in protest. No high school or grammar school Jewish student – and no Muslim high school or grammar school student or student of any heritage or religion – should be beaten up over their heritage or religion.

But this second problem is in my opinion different in many respects than the classic bigotry – hatred against those who are different and against minorities generally — the type of anti-Semitism that I discussed above. It is more complex and requiring much more thought and analysis. This second form of what is labeled “growing anti-Semitism” produces strange phenomena and results.

Thus for example, I have been received well by Belgians everywhere in this country. I always get polite applause and sometimes more.

But the longest and loudest ovation I have ever received in Belgium came from the high school with one of the largest percentages of students of Arab heritage. It was in Molenbeek. It consisted of an audience dominated by girls with head scarves and boys named Mohammed, standing and cheering boisterously for a Jewish American, who belongs to two schuls and whose father was a Holocaust survivor. Let me just share a minute or two with you of a video clip from that visit.

These kids were not anti-Semitic as I have ever thought of the term. And I get a similar reaction as I engage with imans, at Iftars, and with Muslims communities throughout Belgium.

And yet, I know and I hear at the same time that the cheering occurs for this Jew, that within that same school and audience at Molenbeek, among those at the same Iftars, and throughout the Muslim communities that I visit, and indeed throughout Europe, there is significant anger and resentment and, yes, perhaps sometimes hatred and indeed sometimes and all too growing intimidation and violence directed at Jews generally as a result of the continuing tensions between Israel and the Palestinian territories and other Arab neighbors in the Middle East.

This is a complex problem indeed. It requires its own analysis and solutions. And the analysis I submit is not served simply by lumping the problem with past instances of anti-Jewish beliefs and actions or those that exist today among minority haters under a uniform banner of “anti-Semitism.”

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Decent Tories must speak out against their party’s Islamophobic London mayoral campaign

Owen Jones writes: peak out now, decent Tories, or forever be damned for your complicity. Zac Goldsmith is gratuitously exploiting anti-Muslim prejudice in order to win this Thursday’s London mayoral election. His campaign has secured its place in the history books, joining a political hall of shame along with the Tories’ infamous racist 1964 Smethwick byelection and the homophobic Liberal Bermondsey byelection campaign in 1983. There are no excuses. Lifelong Conservative Peter Oborne has described Goldsmith’s campaign as “the most repulsive I have ever seen as a political reporter”. Former Conservative candidate Shazia Awan has denounced the campaign as “racist”. “This is not the Zac Goldsmith I know,” says Tory Baroness Warsi. “Are we Conservatives fighting to destroy Zac or fighting to win this election?” A number of erstwhile Conservative voters have contacted me to share their revulsion. For other Tories not to follow their lead leaves them sharing the blame.

Confronting those on your own side is not easy, but it is sometimes necessary. For the last few days I have been pilloried as an establishment lackey, a stooge of the Israeli government, a rightwing careerist and a sell-out. Why? Because I condemned what Jeremy Corbyn rightly described as Ken Livingstone’s “unacceptable” comments, backed the leadership’s suspension of the former London mayor, and supported their commendable decision to launch an inquiry into antisemitism. I do not turn a blind eye to allegations of antisemitism because they involve my own political tribe. The vast majority of leftwing activists I know are violently opposed to antisemitism, but the left can have no complacency when it comes to the menace of racism.

Racism is not an issue of point-scoring to me. It is deadly serious. I do not look at Goldsmith’s poisonous campaign and feel any pleasure, any excitement that its bigotry can be used for political advantage. I am left deeply frightened by it. Frightened because the Tories wouldn’t be doing it unless focus groups and polling suggests it works. Frightened because it’s happening in 2016. Frightened because of the hurt it is causing to Muslims, the damage it is inflicting to community cohesion, and that a horrible lesson is being taught about what happens when a Muslim stands for prominent public office – which will undoubtedly only aid recruitment efforts by extremists. [Continue reading…]

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In race for London mayor, Trump’s anti-Muslim playbook seems to be failing Zac Goldsmith

Robert Mackey writes: Stop me if you’ve heard this one: An outsider politician who owes his station in life to the hundreds of millions he inherited from his father is running a failing campaign for office based on stoking fear of Muslims.

The word “failing” — as in 20 points down in the polls days before the election — is a clue that we are speaking about someone other than Donald Trump.

In this case, the politician’s name is Zac Goldsmith, and he is the millionaire scion of a prominent British family. He was thought of, until recently, as a mild-mannered Conservative member of Parliament, known mainly for his environmentalism and his sister’s friendship with the late Princess Diana.

For the past two months, however, he has generated waves of disgust and, polls suggest, not much sympathy, by pursuing a mayoral campaign filled with racially divisive innuendo about the supposed danger of electing his Labour Party rival, Sadiq Khan, a son of Pakistani Muslim immigrants.


Things reached something of a crescendo over the weekend, when Goldsmith — advised by a political consultant whose website boasts that he was “described by Newt Gingrich as the U.K.’s own ‘Lee Atwater’” — published a dog-whistle appeal to voters in the Mail on Sunday, a right-wing tabloid, that implied Khan, a moderate member of Parliament, would somehow fail to defend the British capital from Islamist terrorists. [Continue reading…]

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Trump, Le Pen and the enduring appeal of nationalism

Mark Mazower writes: The nation-state is basically no more than two centuries or so old, and in some places it is much younger than that. Yet the ideal of sovereign independence and political community it enshrines retains enormous appeal even in the face of the economic threat posed by globalisation. The new nationalisms seek to defend against this threat. The liberalisation of trade and capital flows may have started to equalise wealth across continents but they have brought a new degree of inequality within countries, eroded the prospects of middle-class life and finished off what was left of working-class communities in the old 19th-century industrial heartlands of the west in particular.

This is why today’s nationalist revival is so prominent in the west itself and why on both sides of the Atlantic the answer, if there is one, to the new sirens of nationalism will be found not in decrying it as a form of political idiocy — populism by another name — but rather in developing alternative visions of national wellbeing. In particular we need to recover the capacity to see the national and the international as necessary complements. The pro-European nationalist and the patriotic internationalist will then perhaps re-emerge as possibilities, rather than the contradictions-in-terms they presently seem.

Ironically, it is the parties of the far-right in the EU that come closest to this — coalescing around the slogan of a “Europe of fatherlands”. The real problem is not so much with the idea as with what they in particular would do with it. Their version is heavy on anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric; the alternative is not European federalism but something that stresses economic rather than racial solidarity, a return to some form of role for national governments in long-range investment planning, and a return to fiscal instruments for economic recovery rather than the current total reliance on central banks. That too would be a form of nationalism, internationalist in spirit, ethnically inclusive rather than repressive, and — as it happens — much closer than anything currently on offer to the mix of policies that underpinned European integration in its early and highly successful decades. [Continue reading…]

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A surprising number of Americans dislike how messy democracy is. They like Trump

John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse write: Donald Trump’s candidacy – or more to the point, his substantial and sustained public support — has surprised almost every observer of American politics. Social scientists and pundits note that Trump appeals to populists, nativists, ethnocentrists, anti-intellectuals and authoritarians, not to mention angry and disaffected white males with little education.

But few have noticed another side of Trump’s supporters. A surprising number of Americans feel dismissive about such core features of democratic government as deliberation, compromise and decision-making by elected, accountable officials. They believe that governing is (or should be) simple, and best undertaken by a few smart, capable people who are not overtly self-interested and can solve challenging issues without boring discussions and unsatisfying compromises.

Because that’s just what Trump promises, his candidacy is attracting those who think someone should just walk in and get it done. His message is that our country’s problems are straightforward. All we need is to get “great people, really great people” to solve them. No muss, no fuss, no need to hear or take seriously opposing viewpoints. Trump’s straight-talking, unfiltered, shoot-from-the-hip style promises a leader who will take action – instead of working toward a consensus among competing interests. That sounds perfect to the millions of Americans who are just as impatient with standard democratic procedures. [Continue reading…]

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