Category Archives: Government Oppression

Ali Khamenei and IRGC Commanders

The political system in Iran is unique in terms of theory and inner organization. In fact,the word Islamic Republic could be replaced withthe keywordRepublicof Sultans,because from any aspect we look at the mullahs regimein itsentirety, we see plenty ofinstitutions creating and raising corruption.

Corruption has been defined in various waybut Transparency Internationaldefines corruption as the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.Corruption is like a disease in the political, economic andadministrativestructures and institutions. Researchers havedivided corruptioninto different aspects.They includepolitical, economic and administrativecorruption;structural and behavioral corruption;orsingle and systematic corruption as well as other divisions.

The Iranian regimes structural corruptionis currentlythe most devastating form of corruption. If structureis an almost durable relationship betweenthe members and components of a wholeunder a collectionofvalues, principles, rules and etiquette, the Iranian regimes structure,which is inseparable from corruption, hasravished the entire social and economic system.

The emergenceof vast corruption within the regimesgoverning pillars, the publishing of its news evenby the state-run media, people publiclysensing discrimination,thehugegap between social classes,andtheaccumulation of some privileged individualswhilemost ofthepopulationliveunder the poverty line are undeniable truths.Therefore, the army of unemployed and hungry peoplecould be seen both within andaround the cities.

The governing bodys insufficiency and economic problems, such as inflation andunemployment, systematic corruption of all the institutions includingthegovernment, parliament, Judiciary and military institutions, implementing harshand inhumane rules onlifestylewhich havelimited social freedom, highsocial dissatisfaction andviolence used against it such as the one used during Iran protests in November and January,thecover-up anddeceitwhich could be seen during the Ukrainian passenger jet downingand all the social classes disappointmentare the least achievements of the inglorious RepublicofSultans.

Clearly, all the regimestheoristsatdifferent levelsgive warnings in this regard.

SaiedHajarian,a reformisttheorist who was unsuccessfully assassinated by the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) forces on March 12, 2000, and is currently atop theorist to the regimesso-called reformist faction, in an articletitled Forty years, the beginning oftheend or a fresh beginning, published onJanuary 26, 2019, wrote:

It seems that if we continue our path inthefuture with the samemethodthatwe did within the last forty years, we will fall into the valleyof downfall and deterioration.Therefore,we should have a new plan. Themain noble human life index inIran warnsus. Abiding by law, unemploymentand inflation rate, economic growth rate,GDP, transparency, democracy, corruption,environmental pollution, inequality and socialharm, piles of judiciary cases etc. do notpromise an honorable human life, and we know that we cannot rely on oppression for handling the situation.

Byemphasizingindicatorsof an honorable life which has been deprived from the Iranian people,Hajarianconfirmedthat the Republic ofSultans is about to collapse.Although this security element of the regime has no worries for the Iranian peoples freedom and lives,and he only caresfor the regimes survival.

Ina part of hisarticletitledThe third way: enriching institutions publishedonMarch 2, 2019, hewrote:

Indicatorsand statistics are foretelling an undesirable situation for future generations. Such a situationwill result inareductionofreserves, over increasing ofmigration and slum-dwellersand finallysocial harms such as coercion,beggary and depravity. As I previously wrote, ourgovernment simultaneously facestests oflegitimacy andefficiency, and if it does not resolve these two issue the situation will be thesame; and administrative corruption,rent distribution and patronage willeatatthe government lie a termite.

AlthoughHajarianaddressedthe regimes current government, he clearly sawthe so-called termite attackonthe entirerotten regime and warnedabout it.

Besides the admission of the regimes securityelements, a quick glimpseatthe news and density of arrests by the regimes judiciaryconfirms how corruption has spread across this system.Therefore,discoveringand executionvariousSultans within the last few years was not irrelevant.

The CoinSultan and the BitumenSultan were executed; and theSultansof sugar, oil, carpet and gas, rice,iron and even diapers and medicine were one after another exposed in the state-run media.

TheseSultansfish introubled waters.The existence,increaseand levelof their successis because of the regimes lack of transparency, rents, critical situation andinefficient rules, full ofpolitical and economicwavers. TheseSultanssurvival is conditioned to the existence of a security umbrella, which is provided by the Revolutionary Guards.

Some of theseSultansare direct and close relatives of some of the regimes politicians.Theirgrowthwithout supportfromthose holdingontopower and richness in society is amythand unrealistic. The corruption of some of the regimes officials and their children,wining extrajudicialpoints within the last few years, have become a groundforgrowth and boastingbytheseSultans.

Therefore, using the word Republic ofSultans isnot irrelevant.

The IRGCs military interventionand its oppressive support of theseSultansand their deeds have createda supercritical situation for the regime. A supercritical situation which increases monthly anddeclines Irans national wealth.

Therefore, making the effort to expose parts of this collapsing bodycould portray a clear image of thefuture of theRepublic ofSultans.

To finda comprehensive image in different parts, it has been tried toput the regimes extensive corruptioninto order. Although the chaos of this system has made it difficult to find aprecise and detailed method of searching this corrupted system, buthopefully it will shed light on the situation for everyone.

More here:

Corruption in the mullahs' regime ruling Iran-Part 1 - NCRI - National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI)

2084: Paramount is preparing a new science fiction movie inspired by George Orwells classic 1984

Paramount is set to travel to the future with 2084, a science fiction movie by long-awaited The Batman writer Mattson Tomlin. The project is presented as a spiritual sister to George Orwells classic 1984. The script is also described as having a tone similar to Matrix and Inception.

The production will be carried out by Lorenzo di Bonaventura and, although there is little information about it, it is a project that generated interest among filmmakers eager to get involved after checking Tomlins writing skills. 1984 is, of course, George Orwells classic on government oppression, totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and a host of other things that seem uncomfortably familiar to us in the 21st century.

The play was previously adapted into a 1984 film starring John Hurt and Richard Burton, but it also had an earlier version directed by Michael Anderson in 1956. Influential like few others, Orwells novel served as inspiration for many other films, such as Equilibrium or Equals. Most of the time, the themes of the novel tend to mix cinematically alongside title ideas like A Happy World and Fahrenheit 451, which also deal with future totalitarian societies. It is almost as if all the writers of the past warned us that the future, our present, would be a constant nightmare.

Giving the film the title 2084 and connecting it to 1984 really suggests that this will end up being an updated and more futuristic version of Orwells story, but its time to wait and see how the matter progresses. Tomlin has directed several short films and has written several scripts, but his work on The Batman with Matt Reeves is likely to be the definitive springboard. He is also currently working on a script based on the video game Mega Man.

Read the original post:

2084 A Sequel To 1984 Is On The Cards! Heres What You Should Know - The Digital Wise

Iraqi Prime Minister-designate Mustafa al-Kadhimi delivers a speech during the vote on the new government at the parliament headquarters in Baghdad, May 7, 2020. (Iraqi Parliament Media Office/Handout via Reuters)Why Iraqis sometimes say one thing but do another

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLEIn 1951, a young Iraqi scholar named Ali al-Wardi published The Personality of the Iraqi Individual (shakhsiyat al-fard al-iraqi). This work of social psychology is still readily available at the bookshops of Iraq, and widely recommended by Iraqis when I have asked for book suggestions. When he wrote the book, al-Wardi had just completed his Ph.D. at the University of Texas in sociology, and was starting what would be a long career at the University of Baghdad. In the book, al-Wardi sought to analyze the cultural traits that make Iraqis distinct and to address some of the key defects he saw in Iraqi social life.

The key point al-Wardi tries to make in the book is that Iraqis live a sort of duality or dual personality (izdiwaaj, in Arabic) in both their public and private lives. At the most abstract level, al-Wardi identifies a grand historical (civilizational, as he calls it) narrative for this duality: For thousands of years, Iraqs society has been shaped by two competing, often contradictory, systems of thought and values. Iraq Mesopotamia is the birthplace of civilization and settled urban life. At the same time, for its entire history, it has been surrounded by nomadic tribal culture, which has consistently conquered and imposed itself on the settled, civilized culture. As a result, al-Wardi says, these two systems create, deep in Iraqi society, a contradictory understanding of social norms and values. The Iraqi is both the oppressor the Bedouin warrior ravaging the settlements of Mesopotamia and the oppressed victim of that oppression. The Iraqi is a masochist when confronted with someone stronger, he suggest, and a sadist when confronted with someone weaker quick to cry oppression, and quick to oppress.

On a social level, al-Wardi criticizes the strict gender segregation of Iraqi social life. Men interact with other men in the caf, while women entertain other women in the home. Children are left to their own devices and play unsupervised in the street. They quickly learn the laws of the jungle: The strong eat the weak. They also learn that, in front of their parents, they are expected to behave as though they are the ideal child. And so a contradiction grows between words and action. They are the politest children around their parents friends, while beating up on the neighborhood kids, unsupervised by any adults, five minutes later down the street. Theyve learned to repeat an unattainable ideal, while acting in the opposite manner, knowing they will not be held to account for the contradiction. The Iraqi child also develops a strong sense of tribalism in this environment, always favoring the children of his neighborhood against those of another neighborhood. As children grow into adults, this expands to tribalism, regionalism, and sectarianism. Genders remain segregated, so young men learn to suppress their natural desire to interact with women, which would be socially inappropriate; as a result, they develop a resentment toward women. Even after marriage, a man is looked down on for spending too much time at home with his wife.

Living the duality between word and action, Iraqis criticize one another strongly for things they also do themselves. A mid-level bureaucrat complains about the corruption of the senior official while accepting bribes himself. The gravest sin one can commit is not to do the wrong thing, but rather to say the wrong thing. As to whether this contradiction exists in other societies, he writes:

I dont deny that this duality is a general phenomenon present in a diluted form in every [place] where humans are found, but I affirm to you that this duality in us [Iraqis] is concentrated and embedded in the depths of our souls. The Iraqi, God forgive him, is more than others enamored with the high ideal, and with advocating for that high ideal, in rhetoric and writing. At the same time, the Iraqi is among the most to deviate from this high ideal in the reality of his life.

Al-Wardi even shows this contradiction in the very language Iraqis speak. Classical Arabic of the purest quality is the expected form of official communication, where minor grammatical and stylistic errors are caught and corrected. The content, however, is of secondary importance; this form of rhetoric is entirely removed from the Iraqi dialect of Arabic spoken by people in their daily lives.

Al-Wardi acknowledged that his book is not the last word on the topic, and he was hoping that other Iraqi scholars would pick up where he left off. He did identify three steps not comprehensive that could address some of the negative consequences of this duality. First, he advocated an expanded role for women in life outside the home. Iraqis should be more comfortable in settings where men and women mix. Second, Iraqis should be encouraged to write in a style that more accurately reflects how they actually speak in other words, to bridge the gap between written Arabic and spoken Arabic. Last, al-Wardi thought that organized sports for children would provide the discipline and order that they have lacked.

Seventy years later, one wonders what al-Wardi would think of Iraqs current state of affairs. Was his original thesis right, and does it still hold today? As Iraq debates the presence of U.S. troops in the country, it will be interesting to watch events unfold with these questions in mind. The parliament voted in January to remove U.S. troops from the country, but the decision has not yet been implemented. The caretaker prime minister at the time, Adel Abdel Mahdi, said he would leave that responsibility to the next government.

Since February, Iraq has gone through three prime ministers designate. The second prime-minister designate, Adnan al-Zurfi, announced that U.S. troops would be departing Iraq soon. I talked to the U.S. ambassador and coalition officials in Iraq about a schedule for coalition-troop withdrawal from Iraq, he said in a TV interview. Half of the U.S.-led coalition troops will withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2020, while the other half will leave Iraq after we agree on a schedule by the beginning of next year. Iraq does not need foreign troops on its soil. Al-Zurfi ended up withdrawing from his nomination to lead a government, and since then the U.S. has turned over some military facilities to the Iraqi government but appears set to maintain several facilities in the country. Will the slow withdrawal of U.S. troops continue to be pushed down the road? Will rhetoric match reality?

Haidar al-Abadi, the prime minister in 2014 when U.S. forces returned to assist with anti-ISIS counterterrorism operations having withdrawn in 2011 released a statement in February saying that the decision to allow the U.S. back in was taken by Nouri al-Maliki when he was still prime minister. No one wants to take responsibility for the decision publicly, but there was no chance that Iraq could have defeated ISIS without additional U.S. support. Well see if any prime minister is willing to either force U.S. troops out, or expressly announce that they are staying. It may be, following al-Wardis thesis, that prime ministers continue to say that U.S. troops will depart, while not taking any concrete action to achieve that goal. Iraqs government has a habit of announcing decisions that are never implemented: Alcohol was banned in 2016, and the video game PUBG was banned in 2019. Neither ban is widely enforced. It is almost as if, la al-Wardi, no one can be caught on record supporting, say, the continued illicit status of alcohol, but no one is willing to actually enforce a law banning it. Even in the law, rhetoric and action need not align.

A clearer example that perfectly demonstrates al-Wardis thesis is in neighboring Syria. Indeed, al-Wardi said in the book that his analysis applied to other Arab countries as well, though his focus was on Iraq. Just a few years before al-Wardi published his book, on December 1, 1947, the Syrian parliament met to discuss the developing situation in Palestine. Two days before, the U.N. had recognized the partition plan, dividing up the territory that had formed the British Mandate in Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish. Thirty members of parliament presented a letter to the speaker of Syrias parliament declaring that they would volunteer with the Ministry of Defense to fight against the partition plan alongside the Arab Palestinians. According to Abdul Salam al-Ojeili, then a member of Parliament representing Raqqa whose name was on the letter, he hadnt even been asked to sign the letter himself, but colleagues signed in his behalf because they assumed he would support it. In the end, however, only three of the 30 members of the parliament went to Palestine to fight: Abdul Salam al-Ojeili, Akram Hourani from Hama, and Ghalib Ayashi from Idlib. From what I can tell, the other 27 faced no backlash over signing the letter but not going to fight. This follows al-Wardis logic perfectly: The gravest sin one can commit is to say the wrong thing (in this case tacitly supporting the partition by not signing the protest letter) rather than to do the wrong thing (in this case not going to fight despite having promised to do so). Many of al-Ojeilis colleagues encouraged him to stay in Damascus rather than fight, according to his memoirs.

Al-Wardis book helped me clarify a certain phenomenon Ive experienced again and again while living in Iraq. Anyone who has taken a taxi in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, will know that a surprising number of Kurds say that life was better when Saddam Hussein ruled the country. This does not compute with what outsiders assume are the fault lines within Iraqi politics. The first time I heard it was just after George H. W. Bush passed away, shortly after moving to the country. I thought about writing an article on reactions to his death in Iraqi Kurdistan. Agence France-Presse and other outlets had published some man-on-the-street interviews in Baghdad, where Bush 41s role in the sanctions imposed on Iraq in the 1990s made him a very unpopular figure. I thought it would be interesting to add a Kurdish perspective to this. But I interviewed three separate people, all Kurdish, who told me that life was better under Saddam, and therefore they didnt particularly love George Bush anymore (nor did they hate him; they were simply ambivalent). I realized that the story was not as straightforward as I had understood it before. To be clear, most Kurds I speak to are happy to be rid of Saddam, and they thank me, as an American, for saving the Kurds from Saddam Hussein in 1991 (as if I had much to do with it while sitting in kindergarten class learning the alphabet). But the dissenting opinion is alive and well also, expressed in a nostalgia for Saddam Hussein.

On another recent occasion, I was visiting a Syriac Orthodox monastery in northern Iraq, accompanied by a Syriac Catholic driver. I commented that the monastery was beautiful, and he scowled, saying that their Syriac Catholic monasteries were much nicer, and it would have been better if ISIS had killed all the Syriac Orthodox and destroyed the monastery. I didnt even know how to respond. Again, the words he was saying almost didnt compute. You cant actually mean that, I thought. I assumed I had misunderstood his Arabic. But no; on repeating, he said the same thing, this time with a gentle smirk.

Reading Ali al-Wardi, I can perhaps start to piece together an explanation for this, one that at least assures me that my Syriac Catholic driver didnt actually want all Syriac Orthodox dead, or that, if given the choice, a significant percentage of Iraqi Kurdistans population would prefer Saddam Hussein over the current situation. I may just be trying to rationalize something that doesnt fit a narrative I want to believe. Nonetheless, al-Wardis analysis of his own society rests on the contradiction in Iraqi life between what is said and what is done. I now think this is at least in part a rhetorical tool used to make a strong point. The young Syriac Catholic driver doesnt actually want the Syriac Orthodox all dead. But how can he show how much he dislikes them? By using the worst experience all Iraqi Christians recently suffered, that of ISIS, and wishing it upon them. Likewise, how can Kurds demonstrate just how unhappy they are with their current system? By saying that even Saddam Hussein, who tried to kill them, would be a better alternative. Because in the end, its not about the action the Syriac Catholic guy is not going to communicate with ISIS sleeper cells and coordinate attacks on the Orthodox, and Kurds who want a change in the system arent going to cooperate with a new Arab strongman in Baghdad and try to get him to impose dictatorial rule again throughout the country. Its merely a rhetorical device to show how disgusted they are with the way things are.

From the outside, it would be easy to draw a sweeping and simple conclusion based on al-Wardis book: All Iraqis are liars. Many Iraqis say exactly that about their fellow countrymen. But the question isnt one of dishonesty. Its about what language communicates. Iraqis know that U.S. troops are not going to leave Iraq in the near future, regardless of what the prime minister says. But the prime minister probably cant say that he supports a continued U.S. presence, which many Iraqis see as an occupation. That would be a worse sin than to actually allow that occupation to continue. A citizens understanding of the situation depends on knowing that the prime minister is not being forthright, though we have yet to see how the new prime minister will navigate this in both rhetoric and policy.

This is not to say that the dichotomy between language and action is without consequence. Al-Wardi himself saw this as a fundamental factor in many of Iraqs social problems. A great nostalgia exists throughout the Middle East for supposedly happier times. In Iraq, this is for the era before either Saddam Hussein or the U.S. invasion. In Lebanon, its before the civil war that ended in 1990. In Syria, its either before 2011 or before the Baath Party took over the country in 1963. But al-Wardi is a good reminder that at least one Arab thinker had long ago identified fundamental cultural problems that Arabs felt were holding back the progress of their people, and he foreshadowed the social breakdown the region is now experiencing.

This is now a frequent topic of debate within Arab intellectual life. But in al-Wardis day and before, the focus was more on the external enemy (the Ottoman Empire, then European colonialism, then Israel, etc.) than on the internal foes. Syrian writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh contends that one of the most serious defects in Arab intellectual life is a lack of effort put toward understanding the current reality as it is, not as we want it to be. Al-Wardi is a clear exception. He was looking very closely at the reality of Iraqi society. He was ahead of his time in anticipating the problems, and particularly the internal divisions, that plague the region today.

Hearing about Ali al-Wardi, many Americans here might say: Well, our politicians all lie, too. True. But, unlike in Iraq generally speaking there is at least an expectation that when politicians say one thing and do another, they will be held accountable or at least exposed as hypocrites.

I often talk with Iraqis about the intentions of the United States in 2003, when we invaded their country and removed Saddam Hussein. They simply do not believe me when I tell them that the Bush administration believed its own rhetoric. The administration truly believed as did many others in the U.S. and abroad that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. It would seem, looking back, that the administration was terribly blinded by ideology and saw what it wanted to see in the evidence, based on a certain assumption of Saddams intentions. It was wrong, but that is different from deliberately lying. Likewise, I think the Bush administration sincerely believed that Iraqis would flourish under a democratic, post-Saddam order. That was obviously based on a wholesale misunderstanding of Iraqi society (clearly no one had read Ali al-Wardi, for one thing). But it was nonetheless sincere, in my estimation. Iraqis I talk to refuse to believe this, saying that America as the most powerful country in the world must have known what would befall Iraq after Saddam was removed. So they cite some other justification for the invasion, usually protecting Israel or stealing Iraqs oil (which is not to say that oil or our relationship with Israel played no role in the decision to invade Iraq, but in my view they were secondary).

But I think that misunderstanding comes from Americans expectations about what politicians mean when they speak, as opposed to Iraqis expectations. Al-Wardi himself contrasted Americans and Iraqis concerning the difference between talk and action. He mentions in a footnote of the book his surprise, during his years of study in Texas, at how rarely Americans talked about serving their country, but that when the time came, they would leave their lives behind and serve (again, he was writing in 1951). Iraqis, in contrast, were quick to talk about serving their nation and slow to actually do so in times of need.

This all leads to a particular confusion over current U.S. policy in the Middle East, especially in Syria. After two withdrawal announcements first in December 2018 then in October 2019 the U.S. still has troops in northeastern Syria. I think that is a good thing our presence is helping prevent the resurgence of ISIS in the area. Our military says the same thing. Our president, however, says that we are there for the oil. Personally, I think hes saving face. Most observers probably agree. He became convinced that it would be unwise to withdraw from Syria, and he has used taking the oil as the ostensible justification for staying. This means, however, that for the first time I can remember, I am relying on the assumption that the president does not actually mean what hes saying. I assume we are staying there to prevent ISIS from coming back and to help our partners, the Syrian Democratic Forces, fend off their enemies just as they helped us fend off ours. I assume we are not engaged in more frequent and more dangerous standoffs with Russian troops in order to take oil from its rightful owners. I will sympathize, more than ever, with Iraqis if the newly appointed prime minister says he will work to remove U.S. troops from Iraq, knowing he will do nothing of the sort.

The rest is here:

The Contradictions at the Heart of Iraqi Society - National Review

Sir, We are writing to you as concerned Israeli citizens to urge you to ensure that the enactment of the Occupied Territories Bill is included in the next programme for government in Ireland.

Recent political agreements in Israel as part of our own coalition government negotiations have paved the way for de jure annexation of large segments of the West Bank, such as the Jordan Rift Valley and all the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

This is a matter of grave concern to all of us who believe in a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict based on the two-state solution, leading to peace, security and prosperity for all. Needless to say, unilateral annexation will lead to escalating crises in Palestine, Jordan, and the entire region, and runs the risk of turning Israel into an apartheid state.

We were heartened by the recent statement of Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney, who correctly underscored that annexation of territory by force is prohibited under international law, including the UN Charter. We welcome Mr Coveneys affirmation of Irelands commitment to a negotiated two-state solution that ends the occupation that began in 1967, with Jerusalem as the capital of both states, on the basis of international law, the internationally agreed parameters and relevant UN Security Council resolutions.

Notable among them is UN Security Council Resolution 2334 of December 2016, which underlines that it will not recognise any changes to the June 4th, 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations.

We believe that Ireland is uniquely positioned to challenge the incoming Government of Israels ominous plans for annexation, uphold respect for international law, and protect the two-state solution by enacting the Occupied Territories Bill as part of the programme for government for the 33rd Dil ireann.

This will send a clear message to the government of Israel and the Israeli public at large that Ireland will work to ensure that the EU and the international community stand behind EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission Josep Borrells warning that annexation will not go unchallenged.

For too long the world has sufficed with issuing condemnations in response to the government of Israels ongoing breach of international law and its human rights violations against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

We firmly believe that now is the time for action from the international community to prevent Israel from proceeding with annexation, which will doom generations to come to more oppression, injustice and violence. Yours, etc,

COLETTE AVITAL,

Former Israeli

ambassador to Portugal,

consul general in New York,

and member of Knesset;

ILAN BARUCH,

Former Israeli ambassador

to South Africa, Namibia,

Botswana, and Zimbabwe;

SUSIE BECHER,

Managing editor,

Palestine-Israel Journal;

AVRAHAM BURG,

Former speaker

of Knesset

and head of the

Jewish Agency;

ZEHAVA GALON,

Former member of Knesset and chair of Meretz Party;

Prof DAVID HAREL,

Vice-president of the

Israel Academy of

Sciences and Humanities,

Israel Prize recipient (2004), EMET Prize

recipient (2010);

Prof MOTY HEIBLUM,

EMET Prize

recipient (2014), member

of the Israel Academy

of Sciences and Humanities;

Prof YEHOSHUA

KOLODNY,

Israel Prize recipient (2010);

MIKI KRATSMAN,

EMET Prize

Laureate (2011);

ALEX LEVAC,

Israel Prize recipient (2005);

Prof YEHUDA

JUDD NEEMAN,

Israel Prize recipient (2009);

MOSSI RAZ,

Former member of Knesset;

TZALI RESHEF,

Former member of Knesset;

Prof DAVID SHULMAN,

Israel Prize recipient (2016)

and EMET Prize recipient (2010);

Prof ZEEV STERNHELL,

Israel Prize recipient (2008),

Jerusalem.

Visit link:

The Occupied Territories Bill - The Irish Times

Shahmir Sanni explains how the only way Muslims can defeat the far-right who demonise them is by joining forces with the LGTBQ community.

There are plenty of resources available on Islam and homosexuality. I dont want to talk about sexuality, academia or the interpretation of the Quran; explain how you can be gay and Muslim; or debate whether it is possible. The fact is: queer Muslims exist whether you like it or not.

No matter what you believe, there are people in this country who are in love with those of the same gender and also in love with Allah living, praying, fasting, performing Hajj, touching the Kaaba. Fundamentally, you are not Allah and so do not have the power to claim whether one is a believer in the eyes of God, and who is not. For Shirk is the gravest sin.

Often, we as Muslims, forget that there is more to us than our identity. To compensate we make our understanding of our religion so concrete in our heads that even if we are met with a quote or study that contradicts our own understanding of Islam, we meet it with anger and resilience. When, if we truly followed Allahs guidance, which was Iqra! Iqra! Iqra!, we would be able to accept change and interpretations and critique as being the very bedrock of Islamic theology. I have been privy to this concrete nature, too.

But again, I am not here to talk about good Muslims versus bad Muslims. We have all sinned. And we have all sought forgiveness from the All-Forgiving. The reason I say this is because I dont want you to have this conversation based on assumptions about a person before you have met them or got to know them. Just because their perceived values do not match your perceived sense of self this does not mean that they do not deserve your ear or time.

I grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. I went to a good school, went to Jummah prayers every other Friday with my best mates, became infatuated with men, went to dhaabas (street-side cafes) to eat. Fell in love (with girls) and out. Passed and failed and passed exams. Bitched about the girls, played with the girls. Had parties with my family and dealt with the chaos of a large family home. Hated my dad, loved my dad. Was told to be a man. Defended my mum. Spent every Eid eating more than I could fit, and spent lots of nights smoking hash with the boys.

I played football, got bullied, bullied others and talked about boobs with my mates, did sheesha at 13 and started smoking cigarettes when I was 14. Moved to Britain at 15. My family and friends back in Pakistan were Muslim, I am Muslim too.

Our lives were nuanced, complex, dynamic. Islam remained the base. When I moved to Britain, I studied and worked and entrenched myself within the deepest corners of the British political establishment. I saw things I still can not talk about for fear of my life, and the things I did talk about led to the British Government outing me as a gay man to my family, my family and friends back home in Pakistan, and to everyone else. My homosexuality was weaponised because the Government understood what it would mean for someone brown and Muslim like me. But I am no different to your brother, your uncle your son, your cousin, your lover, your friend.

My childhood was Islam, it was Pakistan, it was full of love and lust and desire and sadness. Like all of you.

But entering the most powerful halls as a gay, Muslim, Pakistani immigrant to Britain helped me understand the grave problems rooted within my community here, but more importantly, how the British Muslim community was being seriously (forgive me for the insult) f*cked over. Worse was realising that the British Muslim community was many times unaware of the intricacies of structural oppression, not out of ignorance or lack of education. But out of an apathy that has been built from decades of systemic trauma.

Which brings me to my warning.

The British Muslim community has failed to understand the complexities of our own people. We are an entrepreneurial people, an ambitious people, but we are also a persecuted people. We have failed to tackle the crises stemming from Islamophobia because we have failed to build a community that wants to correct it.

Our people live in the poorest wards of this country. Pakistani/Bangladeshi boys are not getting employed. Young Muslim men are the least likely demographic to graduate in this country. Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Somalis remain the most economically suppressed people in Britain.

Yet, while other communities make strides in a system built to keep them at the bottom (the same system we are oppressed by), we have categorically failed in liberating our communities. This is not because we have not tried, but it is because we have failed to employ the right methods of justice and community action against this system. We have failed to fight alongside the people fighting the same policies that keep us at rock bottom. Because thats where our community is in Britain, rock bottom.

We are the most uneducated minority. We are the poorest minority. We are at risk of violence and every single day policies are brought in across the globe that specifically harm us here and our families abroad.

We have watched the world employ specific tactics that weaponise our perceived barbarism in order to mobilise millions of people against people like us. Modi in India, the Uyghurs, the Rohingya, Trump, Fox News, Boris Johnson, the Conservatives and in dozens of European countries. We are categorically losing. And we have no way of winning because the lens of our religion is blinding us to the reality of our situation.

That Muslims across the world have been dying in the millions, by our own hands and others. Some of us have spoken up about Islamophobia. But most of us have been sidetracked or blocked in the justice conversation because we are unable to extend our hands to people we dont believe can be or are a part of our community. Whether they be black, Jewish, trans, gay or lesbian. There is a categorical failure in understanding that the system other people are fighting is the exact same fight for us. And that our allies are not other Muslims across the globe, but the communities here in Britain that are doing the work. Specifically, communities like the LGBTQ community.

Some will say our liberation comes with economic empowerment and though this may be true, economic empowerment does not mean individual success, it means bringing forward policies that support our communities but also protect them. And so, understandably, we stay within our communities, we stay within our spaces, and even online: we only discuss things that matter to us, the British Muslim.

This self absorption as a means of protection is totally justified, but also incapable of making any difference. Change comes through the community, it comes through action against harmful policies and legislature. But most of all, it comes from putting aside personal opinions and beliefs and centring a greater cause. Islam, can not, and will not ever be the greater cause because this country is not a Muslim country.

And so if we want to be safe in Britain, if we want to truly not face the violence of Islamophobia, if you do not want to be called a Paki on your way to workyou must work in tandem with the LGBTQ community. Because the LGBTQ community is working hard (harder than British Muslims) to stop the rise of far-right governments that areonlyin power because they weaponised the hate people have for us (the Muslim).

Ive seen how the right work, witnessed them first-hand weaponise the hatred our community has for queer people in order to attain further control of their electorate. And this weapon is strong because at times it is true. We have a homophobia problem and so our reluctance to love LGBTQ people reinforces all the systems that keep us at the bottom. Because if we can not show that we are capable of loving others, irregardless of whether they have sex with the same gender, then in this white, Christian country, we will never truly feel safe and protected. Our children will live in a country that hates them and will never be able to succeed to their full potential

I want to make this clear.The far-right across the globe have used the assumed barbarism of the Muslim community to win elections, and start wars. From Iraq and Syria, to Myanmar, to India, to America, to Britain, to most of Europe. Islamophobia is the bedrock of this new age of fascism and you, the British Muslim, know this better than anyone else.

One must only watch one episode of Question Time on the BBC, pick up an article from the Spectator, watch the Prime Minister in Parliament or speak to a neighbour. Islamophobia, the fear of Muslims, has embedded itself within British politics and culture. From Home Office projects like Prevent, to education projects about British values, there is a systemic and institutional effort to reinforce the subjugation of Muslim people in Britain.

I want to make this clear. That if the British Muslim community does not work in tandem with the LGBTQ community, the Conservative government and the far-right will win this fight, and we as a whole community will remain the victims of violent Islamophobia for decades more.

Our community is failing in fighting Islamophobia because we have failed to understand that the most powerful gun held to our own head is our own reluctance to allow our community to include and love LGBTQ people and other marginalised communities within the western world.

Fundamentally, the liberation of queer people relies on support from the Muslim world, and vice versa: the liberation of Muslim people from Islamophobia relies on support from the LGBTQ community. It is the exact same fight. It is trans and gay men that are standing up and fighting Modi. It is lesbian women that are fighting against Trumps Islamophobia. It is black gay men speaking up for the persecution and incarceration of black Muslims. It is queer Muslims going on TV and making films and producing music that continues the legacy of Islamic art and culture, whether you know they are queer or not, they are people who you have already invited in your homes and in your lives.

I write with urgency because I am seeing online and offline the right-wing islamaphobes weaponise homophobia and use it as a way to garner more support for wars in Iraq, and to garner more support to persecute Palestinians, among many other policy changes. The world and culture is changing. If we do not adapt to it, we will be failed by it. We are already being failed by it. Modi, Bolsanaro, all over Europe, in China, in Iraq, in Sub-saharan Africa, and here in Britain and America. Were losing and were losing hard. If we do not adapt our methods, join forces with other communities, will continue to lose.

We are dying because of the violence of islamophobia and we are being kept poor because of it. Embrace those who are dying from the violence of homophobia, transphobia, anti-blackness and misogyny. And our community will have an economic base, a social base and a cultural base on which we no longer will have to rely on hardships and struggles to build character but on happiness and joy.

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The Rohingya, Uyghurs, Shiites, Ahmedis and the Homosexual: A Warning to British Muslims - Byline Times

Hollywood actor Adam Driver wasn't born when William Morgan blazed a path across Cuba with a band of guerrillas, helping Fidel Castro seize control of the country during a critical period of the revolution.

But when Morgan's widow learned last week that 36-year-old Driver was starring in a movie to be made about her late husband, the memories came flooding back from a conflict that forever changed their lives.

"This is history," said Olga Morgan Goodwin, a Cuban native who met her husband during the fighting in 1958. "He wanted the freedom for my country. He gave his life for my country."

Though movie productions have been shut down because of the coronavirus, filming for the Yankee Comandante is tentatively set for 2021, with director Jeff Nichols attached to a feature film that resurrects the life of an American who helped lead a revolution that changed the course of the Cold War.

In an exclusive interview with BuzzFeed News, 84-year-old Goodwin said she was heartened by the news last week, but admitted she has never heard of Driver, who starred in the Star Wars sequel trilogy and has twice been nominated for an Academy Award. "I don't watch a lot of TV," said Goodwin, who now lives in Ohio. "I just don't have the time."

Though two books and a PBS documentary have been created about Morgan, a former gun runner for the mob whose life changed dramatically when he arrived in Cuba, Goodwin said she hopes the movie will reveal to a larger audience a compelling figure who had once disappeared from the archives of history.

William Morgan with Olga in a TV studio in Havana, August 1959.

The rights to the movie by Imperative Entertainment come eight years after Focus Features optioned the story with George Clooney as the director, but never moved forward with the filming. The movie is based on an article in the New Yorker by David Grann.

In the late 1950s, Morgan cut a swashbuckling figure who captured international attention in the media as well as the FBI, CIA, and the Kennedy White House after he led his rebel unit to a remarkable series of victories over the Cuban army at the height of the revolution. At the time, the guerrillas led by Fidel Castro had promised reforms and elections once they ousted the corrupt regime of Fulgencio Batista, who seized power years earlier in a coup.

A strapping figure with blonde hair and blue eyes, Morgan, the so-called Yanqui Comandante, turned up in the mountains for adventure, but quickly became serious as he witnessed atrocities carried out by government soldiers against the farmers.

A native of Ohio, Morgan was featured in the New York Times, which published a statement he wrote on behalf of his guerrilla unit that embraced the principles of democracy but criticized the United States for backing the Batista regime.

By late 1958, he and his men cleared the central mountains of soldiers so that Castro and Che Guevara, the legendary Argentine revolutionary, could sweep to victory at a time when Cuba just 90 miles from Florida was pivotal in the balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Though Castro promised to step down as temporary leader, he later canceled elections and forged ties with the Soviets prompting Morgan to turn against the Cuban dictator and raise a small army to take control.

William Morgan, with his arms crossed, questions one of Castro's prisoners, Sidifredo Rodriguez Diaz (right center), in Havana, in August 1959.

Goodwin said her husband grew angry over the executions ordered by Guevara, a key supporter of Castro, even after the enemy soldiers surrendered. "Right away, they started attacking people. No court. Nothing," she said.

After running guns to the mountains for a counterrevolution, the 32-year-old Morgan was arrested by Castro's agents, stood trial, and was ordered to be shot during a dramatic execution witnessed by an American priest.

Led to the execution wall, Morgan refused to be blindfolded and proceeded to hug the head of the firing squad before he was lined up and killed. "He died for my people," said Goodwin.

While Morgan is the focus of the movie, Goodwin's own harrowing ordeals after his death have become a part of his story.

Just days after his execution, Goodwin was captured and sent to prison, where she led women inmates in protests for better conditions. After waging hunger strikes, she was beaten and frequently thrown in solitary confinement, where she would be fed scraps of bread and rice and woken up by rats crawling over her body, she said.

In 1971, she was released after a decade, but could not return to her family home in central Cuba because the secret police would show up. So she ended up living in a convent in Havana while her parents took care of her two daughters from her marriage to Morgan.

"Olga paid the price," said Adriana Bosch, an award-winning filmmaker who produced the first documentary about Morgan, American Comandante, for PBS in 2015. "They both had that strong romantic streak. That same streak would account for their love and it's the same streak that would account for their tragedy."

Goodwin was able to escape from Cuba in a scene that rivaled some of the battles in the mountains years earlier. She hopped on one of the last boats leaving the island during the infamous Mariel boatlift in 1980, barely making it to the US shore after the Cuban navy fired shots into the hull.

Instead of settling in Miami, she moved to Toledo to be near Morgan's mother, Loretta, and later met her current husband. During those years, she became close to her mother-in-law and eventually made two promises to her that Goodwin would carry the rest of her life.

First, Goodwin pledged to restore Morgan's US citizenship, which was stripped in 1959 after he had helped Castro take power. The other promise was to bring back his remains to the US for reburial in Ohio.

Though Morgan was criticized by a senior member of Congress for helping Castro and was targeted by FBI and CIA investigations, Goodwin argued her husband fought to help free Cuba from oppression and ultimately died fighting the same enemy that threatened his native country: communism. He loved this country, she said.

With the help of a local lawyer, Gerardo Rollison, the State Department granted her request in 2007, but when it came to returning his body, it was a far more daunting task. Goodwin and her lawyer have written letters to presidents Bush and Obama, Pope Francis, and the Castro government, pleading for his remains.

Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio met with then-president Castro in 2002 to ask for the remains. Nine members of Congress wrote a letter to then-president Raul Castro in 2009. But so far, Cuban leaders have not budged. To this day, Morgan remains buried in a remote corner of the Colon Cemetery in Havana.

Enrique Encinosa, a Cuban historian and Miami radio show host, said Morgan is revered among thousands of Cubans in the exile community of Miami because he gave his life for them. But to the Cuban government, hes still considered an enemy. "[They] don't want to leave a place where people can put flowers for a martyr," said Encinosa.

William Morgan with Fidel Castro's forces in Cuba's Las Villas province, 1959.

Goodwin said she will continue to fight. The Cuban government is "waiting for me to get older and older and older," she said.

She said her late husband remained loyal to the cause of freedom in Cuba, and held no grudges against the people who put him to death. In a letter he wrote to her that was smuggled out of La Cabana prison shortly before he was executed, he said that Cuba would solve its own problems.

"I do not want blood spilled over my cause," he wrote. "Those who are putting us on trial and condemning us have their job to do, and are acting according to the conditions set out by today's politics. So if they are guilty of so many injustices, leave it to history to straighten out such faults. Revenge is not the answer. It's better that I die because I have defended lives."

Encinosa, who has written extensively about the Cuban revolution, said Morgan remains an admired figure to Cuban Americans, not just because he was a formidable leader, but because of his own personal transformation.

He said Morgan arrived in Cuba with a checkered past. He had been booted out of the US Army and had worked for the Ohio mafia. But by the time he died, he had "found himself as a human being," said Encinosa.

As he rose into leadership, he witnessed the farmers being beaten by government soldiers and discovered for the first time that he could help the Cuban people. "A guy who was a loose cannon with a criminal record," he said. "He became a hero."

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Her Husband Fought For And Then Against Fidel Castro. Now Adam Driver Is Starring In A Hollywood Movie About Him. - BuzzFeed News

In this season of infection, the stock market little more than a twitching corpse, in an atmosphere of alarm and despondency, I am reminded of the enlightenments of the strict curfew Uganda endured in 1966. It was, for all its miseries, an episode of life lessons, as well as monotonous moralizing (because most crises enliven bores and provoke sententiousness). I would not have missed it for anything.

That curfew evoked like today the world turned upside-down. This peculiarity that we are now experiencing, the nearest thing to a world war, is the key theme in many of Shakespeares plays and Jacobean dramas, of old ballads, apocalyptic paintings and morality tales. It is the essence of tragedy and an occasion for license or retribution. As Hamlet says to his fathers ghost, Time is out of joint.

In Uganda, the palace of the king of Buganda, the Kabaka, Mutesa II also known as King Freddie had been attacked by government troops on the orders of the prime minister, Milton Obote. From my office window at Makerere University, where I was a lecturer in English in the Extra Mural department, I heard the volleys of heavy artillery, and saw smoke rising from the royal enclosure on Mengo Hill. The assault, led by Gen. Idi Amin, resulted in many deaths. But the king eluded capture; he escaped the country in disguise and fled to Britain. The period that followed was one of oppression and confusion, marked by the enforced isolation of a dusk-to-dawn curfew. But, given the disorder and uncertainty, most people seldom dared to leave home at all.

The curfew was a period of fear, bad advice, arbitrary searches, intimidation and the nastiness common in most civil unrest, people taking advantage of chaos to settle scores. Uganda had a sizable Indian population, and Indian people were casually mugged, their shops ransacked and other minorities victimized or sidelined. It was also an interlude of hoarding, and of drunkenness, lawlessness and licentiousness, born of boredom and anarchy.

Kifugo! I heard again and again of the curfew a Swahili word, because it was the lingua franca there. Imprisonment! Yes, it was enforced confinement, but I also felt privileged to be a witness: I had never seen anything like it. I experienced the stages of the coup, the suspension of the constitution, the panic buying and the effects of the emergency. My clearest memory is of the retailing of rumors outrageous, frightening, seemingly improbable but who could dispute them? Our saying then was, Dont believe anything you hear until the government officially denies it.

Speaking for myself, as a traveler, any great crisis war, famine, natural disaster or outrage ought to be an occasion to bear witness, even if it means leaving the safety of home. The fact that it was the manipulative monster Chairman Mao who said, All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience, does not make the apothegm less true. It is or should be the subtext for all travelers chronicles.

The curfew three years into my time in Africa was my initiation into the misuse of power, of greed, cowardice and selfishness; as well as, also, their opposites compassion, bravery, mutual aid and generosity. Even at the time, 24-years-old and fairly callow, I felt I was lucky in some way to be witnessing this convulsion. It was not just that it helped me to understand Africa better; it offered me insights into crowds and power and civil unrest generally, allowing me to observe in extreme conditions the nuances of human nature.

I kept a journal. In times of crisis we should all be diarists and documentarians. Were bound to wail and complain, but its also useful to record the particularities of our plight. We know the progress of Englands Great plague of 1665 because Samuel Pepys anatomized it in his diary. On April 30 he wrote: Great fears of the sickness here in the City it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all! Later, on June 25, The plague increases mightily. And by July 26: The Sicknesse is got into our parish this week; and is endeed everywhere.

A month later he notes the contraction of business: To the Exchange, which I have not been a great while. But Lord how sad a sight it is to see the streets empty of people, and very few upon the Change, jealous of every door that one sees shut up lest it should be the plague and about us, two shops in three, if not more, generally shut up.

In that outbreak of bubonic plague, spread by rat fleas, a quarter of Londons population died.

My diary these days sounds a lot like Pepys, though without the womanizing, snobbery or name dropping. The progress of the Covid 19 pandemic is remarkably similar to that of the plague year, the same upside-down-ness and the dizziness it produces, the muddle of daily life, the collapse of commerce, the darkness at noon, a haunting paranoia in the sudden proximity to death. And so much of what concerned me as important in the earlier pages of my diary now seems mawkish, trivial or beneath notice. This virus has halted the routine of the day to day and impelled us, in a rare reflex from our usual hustling, to seek purification.

Still writing gives order to the day and helps inform history. In my journal of the Ugandan curfew I made lists of the rumors and tried to estimate the rate at which they traveled; I noted the instances of panic and distraction there were many more car crashes than usual, as drivers minds were on other things. Ordinary life was suspended, so we had more excuses to do as we pleased.

My parents habits were formed during the Great Depression, which this present crisis much resembles. They were ever after frugal, cautious and scornful of wasters: My father developed a habit of saving string, paper bags, nails and screws that he pried out of old boards. The Depression made them distrustful of the stock market, regarding it as a casino. They were believers in education, yet their enduring memory was of highly educated people rendered destitute college graduates selling apples on street corners in Boston! My mother became a recycler and a mender, patching clothes, socking money away. This pandemic will likely make us a nation of habitual hand-washers and doorknob avoiders.

In the Great Depression, Americans like my parents saw the country fail and though it rose and became vibrant once more, they fully expected to witness another bust in their lifetime. Generally speaking, we have known prosperity in the United States since the end of World War II. But the same cannot be said for other countries, and this, of course, is something many travelers know, because travel often allows us glimpses of upheaval or political strife, epidemics or revolution. Uganda evolved after the curfew into a dictatorship, and then Idi Amin took over and governed sadistically.

But Id lived in the dictatorship and thuggery of the Malawi of Dr. Hastings Banda (Ngwazi the Conqueror), so Ugandas oppression was not a shock. And these experiences in Africa helped me deconstruct the gaudy dictatorship of Saparmurat Niyazov, who styled himself Tukmenbashi Great Head of the Turks when, years later, I traveled through Turkmenistan; the Mongolia of Jambyn Batmnkh, the Syria of Hafiz Assad, the muddy dispirited China of Maos chosen successor, Hua Guo Feng. As for plague, there have been recent outbreaks of bubonic plague in Madagascar, Congo, Mongolia and China, producing national moods of blame-shifting and paranoia, not much different from that of Albert Camuss The Plague.

Were told not to travel right now, and its probably good advice, though there are people who say that this ban on travel limits our freedom. But in fact, travel produces its own peculiar sorts of confinement.

The freedom that most travelers feel is often a delusion, for there is as much confinement in travel as liberation. This is not the case in the United States, where I have felt nothing but fresh air on road trips. It is possible to travel in the United States without making onward plans. But I cant think of any other country where you can get into a car and be certain at the end of the day of finding a place to sleep (though it might be scruffy) or something to eat (and it might be junk food). For my last book, I managed a road trip in Mexico but with hiccups (bowel-shattering meals, extortionate police, bed bugs). But the improvisational journey is very difficult elsewhere, even in Europe, and is next to impossible in Africa. It is only by careful planning that a traveler experiences a degree of freedom, but he or she will have to stick to the itinerary, nagged by instructions, which is a sort of confinement.

In fact, most travel is a reminder of boundaries and limits. For example, millions of travelers go to Bangkok or Los Cabos, but of them, a great number head for a posh hotel and rarely leave: The hotel is the destination, not the city. The same can be said for many other places, where the guest in the resort or spa essentially a gated and guarded palace luxuriates in splendid isolation.

The most enlightening trips Ive taken have been the riskiest, the most crisis-ridden, in countries gripped by turmoil, enlarging my vision, offering glimpses of the future elsewhere. We are living in just such a moment of risk; and it is global. This crisis makes me want to light out for the territory ahead of the rest. It would be a great shame if it were not somehow witnessed and documented.

Paul Therouxs latest book, On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey, was published in 2019 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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Paul Theroux Recalls a Fear-Filled Lockdown - The New York Times

I, for one, dont necessarily welcome our technocratic overlords. Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Earlier this week, congressional Democrats and Republicans were locked in contentious negotiations over what the American public should ask of corporations before bailing them out. Conservatives contended that Uncle Sam should not interfere with these private enterprises internal affairs. After all, airlines, hotels, fast-food chains, and retailers didnt create the economic crisis that now threatens to bankrupt them. Rather, the governments failure to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic and the heavy-handed social distancing measures that its under-preparation necessitated robbed these companies of expected revenue. Thus, the state had an obligation to extend cheap credit to corporate America, no strings attached.

Progressives saw things differently. In their view, all corporations are, fundamentally, creations of the state. After all, it was our democratically enacted laws of limited liability that brought these institutions into being, and our publicly funded infrastructure, technology, education, and social services that undergird their profits. In recent decades, our corporate-funded political class had rewritten the rules of our market economy in a manner that redounded to the benefit of corporate executives and well-heeled shareholders thereby enabling the rich to commandeer the gains of economic growth. Now, in a context of neo-feudal levels of wealth inequality, the American people shouldnt be asked to stem the capitalist classs losses unless we get something in return: Bailed-out corporations should have to provide their workers with job security, collective-bargaining rights, board representation, and higher wages, and provide the broader public with voting shares.

And then while these factions were still arguing the Federal Reserve went ahead and started lending money directly to private corporations with no significant conditions.

The central banks unprecedented decision to start directly financing the real economy as opposed to lending to private banks came in the face of equally unprecedented conditions. The coronavirus pandemic hadnt just obliterated demand in the service sector. It had also indirectly threatened the ability of virtually all corporations to access affordable credit, even if their business models were somewhat insulated from the effects of mass lockdowns and social distancing. Investors had lost their appetite for all manner of corporate bonds. This was partly due to a self-reinforcing flight to cash: Once anxiety led some investors to shy away from bonds, other investors began to fear that, if they didnt also abandon the market, they would end up saddled with bonds that were impossible to resell without taking a steep loss. The Fed therefore moved to shore up liquidity (i.e., convertibility to cash) in the corporate-bond market through a relatively conventional intervention: It started buying corporate bonds from financial institutions at a rate intended to stabilize demand for such instruments. (The name for this program is the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility, or SMCCF.)

But investors skittishness about buying corporate bonds wasnt just about liquidity. It also reflected fears that a wide variety of companies might not be able to pay back their debts, given the COVID-19 crisis and its potential ripple effects. The Fed could not solve that dimension of corporate Americas funding woes by juicing demand for its bonds on secondary markets. Rather, this problem could only be significantly mitigated by providing cheap public credit directly to private firms. Which is, traditionally, the kind of thing that requires the approval of our governments elected branches. But the economy was imploding, and Congress was dilly-dallying and so the Fed just went ahead and established a Primary Market Corporate Credit Facility (PMCCF).

Narayana Kocherlakota, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, found this alarming, writing for Bloomberg View:

[T]he Fed shouldnt get in the business of lending directly to corporations through a vehicle like the PMCCF. Because the Fed is fixing the liquidity problems through the SMCCF, its direct loans are simply a way to assume default risk without receiving a compensatory return. This is simply a direct taxpayer subsidy to corporate shareholders.

Right now, there is a debate in Congress about the shape of a fiscal stimulus package. The administration clearly believes that corporate subsidies are desirable. Its Democratic opponents are much less convinced. By setting up the PMCCF, the Fed is using its independence to decide this important and necessary debate in favor of the White House. Congress would be doing the Fed a favor by eliminating its ability to make direct loans to nonfinancial corporations.

But Kocherlakota was lonely in his alarm. For understandable reasons, few lay news consumers took much interest in (or notice of) the central banks latest alphabet soup of inscrutable lending programs. And anyhow, days later, the Senate gave its formal blessing to the Feds direct lending to corporations. Democrats were able to attach a couple modest conditions to the loans. But the terms were far more lax than progressives had been calling for; the public will assume the risk of lending to embattled corporations without securing any significant claim on their future profits, or durable influence over their operations. Meanwhile, discretion over which businesses should and should not be bailed out was largely outsourced to the unelected bureaucrats at the central bank. Congress simply provided the Fed with a (largely symbolic) $454 billion pot of capital with which to backstop upward of $4 trillion worth of loans, leaving the central bank in charge of divvying up that credit between individual corporations, small businesses, and state governments. There is now a bipartisan consensus in favor of top-down economic planning just so long as that planning is done by officials who are less accountable to the median voter than to the median investment bank, debated far afield from the media spotlight, and articulated in acronym-laden jargon completely inaccessible to ordinary people.

Our elected officials havent just been contracting out wide swaths of economic policymaking to the Fed. Theyve also been letting the central bank make immensely consequential foreign-policy decisions with no public scrutiny or debate.

During the 2008 financial crisis, private banks all across the world suffered from a sudden shortage of U.S. dollars. Such institutions had financed hundreds of billions in dollar-denominated loans by borrowing U.S. currency on wholesale money markets; when investor panic depleted those markets, their funding suddenly dried up. The Federal Reserve came to their rescue. By establishing dollar swap lines with foreign central banks which is to say, allowing those banks to trade their own currencies for however many dollars their nations private banks happened to need the Fed effectively bailed out banks throughout Europe. This constituted nothing less than an epochal reformation of global economic governance, executed with virtually no democratic input or even public awareness. As the historian Adam Tooze summarizes the development, The central banks had, in other words, staged their Bretton Woods 2.0. But they had omitted to invite the cameras or the public, or indeed to explain what they were doing.

The Feds dollar swap lines like most of their crisis-fighting measures, both in 2008 and today were preferable to inaction. Few Americans (or humans more broadly) would have been well-served by cascading bank failures across the pond. But our central bank didnt just impartially stabilize the global financial system it decided which foreign nations central banks would enjoy privileged access to dollars and which would not. Western Europe was cut in on the deal; Eastern Europe was not. These policy choices had profound geopolitical consequences, and were made without any input from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, or any other elected body.

Last week, with global banks once again running short on dollars, the Fed reestablished unlimited drawing rights for all 14 of the central banks that had enjoyed such privileges 12 years ago. Whether the central bank sticks to that legacy system or extends its largesse to dollar-starved developing countries and/or China is a question with wide-ranging economic and geostrategic implications. And its one that none of our elected officials are publicly debating.

There is much to admire in how the Federal Reserve has conducted itself under chairman Jerome Powells leadership. After decades of prioritizing the prevention of hypothetical inflation over the elimination of actual unemployment, Powells Fed has kept interest rates historically low so as to facilitate genuinely full employment. After Alan Greenspan strong-armed the Clinton administration into deficit reduction, Powell explicitly encouraged House Democrats to go big on fiscal policy. And as Congress spent the past two weeks struggling to formulate a relief package remotely commensurate with the scale of the economic crisis, the Federal Reserve has taken a series of quick, ambitious, and creative actions to keep the financial system afloat.

But theres also much to lament about the outsize role that the Fed has come to play in governing our self-professed republic. For much of our nations history, questions of monetary policy which is to say, of how the money supply should be managed, and credit should be allocated were at the very center of democratic debate. In fact, the desire to secure monetary democracy was among the animating passions of the American Revolution.

In 1764, Britain forbade its American colonies from printing new paper money, a policy that produced a currency shortage and devastating deflation. As money appreciated in value faster than agricultural products, farmers struggled to pay back their existing debts, and were forced to accept onerous terms on new credit. In this context, popular control over the powers of money and credit creation became central to colonists conception of independence and self-government.

The historian Terry Bouton has detailed how radicals in revolutionary-era Pennsylvania sought to secure democratic control of what would later become the (putatively nonpolitical) Federal Reserves core functions.

To bring money and credit to the masses, Pennsylvanianscalled for the creation of a government-run loan office to offer ordinary folks low-cost mortgages as long as they owned a modest amount of land or propertyAt the time, most Pennsylvanians believed that privatizing finance turning control of money and credit over to private banks promoted inequality and oppression and, therefore, posed a threat to liberty every bit as dire as control by Britain. People viewed private banks (which did not yet exist in America) as dangerous institutions that undermined freedom by putting economic power in the hands of unaccountable men.

Once independence was secured, the revolutions merchant and planter wing beat back the masses calls for democratizing finance. But the ambition to exert popular influence over monetary policy remained integral to democratic movements in the United States for more than a century, animating the original Populist Partys calls for expanding access to money and credit through the unlimited coinage of silver.

Today, private finance reins supreme, and monetary policy has been depoliticized. Goldbug cranks, socialists, and MMTers may agitate against the Feds independence from popular influence. But for the median voter, monetary policy is neither salient nor readily comprehensible. Meanwhile, liberals and conservatives alike hail the central banks immunity from popular passions as a positive good. And not without reason.

These days, even a militant small-d democrat might have trouble getting worked up about the Fed impinging on this Congresss prerogatives. After all, our federal legislature routinely acts in blatant defiance of public opinion, allows the hired hands of well-heeled interest groups to write its laws, and spends much of its time soliciting campaign funds from plutocratic patrons. Our central bank may be a bit more insulated from democratic accountability. But at least its policymakers boast some genuine expertise, and are capable of responding to pressing challenges without first engaging in several days-worth of performative demagoguery. If our options are to be ruled by a blundering, pseudo-democratic body (a.k.a. Mitch McConnells Senate) or by competent, unelected technocrats one might reasonably prefer the latter.

And yet, Congresss present dysfunction is not extricable from the depoliticization of money and credit that such dysfunction now serves to justify. In truth, the past four decades of exploding inequality, trade-union decline and the plutocratic politics that these two developments have facilitated are in no small part attributable to the deregulation of finance and undemocratic monetary policymaking of the late 1970s. In that era, a crisis of low growth and high inflation had rendered credit scarce. And New Deal-era financial regulations politicized this scarcity: Congress found itself in the position of routinely needing to ration credit between its disparate constituencies; if it rewrote regulations to channel more lending towards businesses, it would threaten the availability of credit to homeowners, and vice versa. As Greta Krippner documents in her book Capitalizing on Crisis, Congresss embrace of financial deregulation was largely motivated by the desire to escape such difficult votes by letting the free market ration credit for it. This had the unintended consequence of making credit abundant albeit, for many working Americans, at usurious interest rates.

Meanwhile, under Paul Volckers leadership, the Federal Reserve chose to lick the countrys persistent inflation problem by giving price stability absolute priority over full employment. In the view of Volcker and his fellow technocrats, reducing price growth required reducing demand, which required reducing working-class wages. To achieve the latter, Volcker engineered a recession by raising benchmark interest rates to unprecedented heights. This policy had its intended effects along with a variety of others. The exorbitant price of credit in the early 1980s didnt just drive up unemployment (and thus, drive down workers bargaining power). It also gave large corporations an immense competitive advantage over less creditworthy small businesses, thereby fueling corporate consolidation. Meanwhile, sky-high benchmark interest rates combined with deregulated financial markets redistributed enormous sums of wealth from debtors to creditors. Add to all this Ronald Reagans regressive changes to the tax code and assault on organized labor, and you get a recipe for a neo-Gilded Age.

The coronavirus crisis is changing our world in many sorrowful respects. It has rendered our already atomized and aching society poorer, sicker, and lonelier than it was a few months ago. If this weeks bailout legislation plays out as some progressive analysts predict, the pandemics economic side effects will accelerate corporate concentration and income inequality.

But this disaster also offers a vital opportunity for beneficent forms of change. By accentuating the perversity of our nations employment-based health insurance model which is now causing millions of workers to lose coverage in the midst of a pandemic the crisis creates an opening for progressives to remake the politics of health reform. By spotlighting the indispensable labor that grocery store clerks and delivery drivers contribute, it could help unionists illustrate the markets unjust undervaluation of such low-skill work. And by politicizing just about every aspect of our economy which is to say, by forcing Congress to demonstrate the private sectors dependence on the state, and to allocate scarce subsidies and credit between corporations, small businesses, and individuals the crisis gives us a fighting chance to secure a more democratic and egalitarian form of economic governance.

Unless, ya know, we just throw up our hands, curse those clowns in Congress, and wait for Jerome Powell & Co. to restore some facsimile of the world we just lost.

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The Feds Response to COVID-19 Is Impressive and Alarming - New York Magazine

If you think the coronavirus pandemic is the worst thing you have experienced, you havent experienced the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which has been far more brutal and lethal than any virus could ever be.

I was in occupied Palestine during the First Intifada, writing on the resilience and strength of the Palestinian people in the face of Israeli military oppression. My family lives in East Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Beit Jala, Beit Hanina and Beit Sahour. I know what they are forced to experience every day by Israels oppressive government.

For many, the words and phrases most associated with the coronavirus outbreak lockdown, stay at home, and shelter in place may be new, but they arent to the Palestinians. They have lived with curfews, lockdowns and severe restrictions, and often been unable to buy groceries, get medical attention or even visit relatives for more than 70 years. They know what it is like to go without food, without schooling, without celebrations or events.

Israel has adopted more than 65 laws that discriminate against the Palestinian people simply because they are Christian and Muslim, rather than Jewish. One of the first grants immediate citizenship to any Jew from any country around the world and of any nationality or origin, but denies that same privilege to the Palestinians, who have been living on that land since time immemorial.

My family name, Hanania, is a Hebrew Word not Israeli, by the way. It means God has been gracious. My family, we believe, originated from the Hebrews and converted to Christianity in the first century, while even some converted to Islam in the seventh century. We have Christian, Muslim and Jewish relatives, so our history and rights are clear to everyone, except the Israelis. As heavily armed Israeli soldiers wandered through Palestinian cities and villages, we hunkered down eating mujaddara, the rice and lentil dish that became the symbol of Palestinian resistance to Israels brutality.

As I watch Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urge unity with his political rivals, I wonder where that has been in the countrys dealings with the Palestinians.

There have been so many Palestinian deaths over the years that the world has become desensitized to them

Ray Hanania

So far, there have been more than 420,000 cases of the coronavirus worldwide, and there have been about 19,000 deaths. But those numbers continue to change so, by the time you read this, they will be less than what is reality. And yet the Palestinians have seen even worse statistics that continue to increase daily. The deaths have been staggering over the years. Tens of thousands died during the war of 1947-49. More than 20,000 were killed during the Israeli assault on Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, including the civilians massacred under Ariel Sharons terrorist direction in Sabra and Shatila. Another 2,000 Palestinians were killed during the First Intifada, during which I secretly walked the streets at night with my cousins, collecting rubber bullets that were in reality lethal metal balls covered in a thin plastic coating. More than 2,300 were killed during Israels invasion of Gaza in 2014.

There have been so many Palestinian deaths over the years that the world has become desensitized to them. Palestinian deaths are little more than numbers in a news report, usually presented in such a way as to defend Israels extremist government. But those deaths are dwarfed by the injuries to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, maybe even millions.

This week, Israels government and the Palestinian Authority it controls issued orders to lock down citizens, block immigration and travel, and close all cultural and educational activities and events to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. But, when it is over, life will return to normal for the Israelis and Palestinians. The Israelis will be free to live a fantasy life of happiness, blocking the trauma they cause from their eyesight with an 8-meter-high concrete wall. The Palestinians will return to being oppressed, brutally beaten, and arrested by Israeli soldiers and the Shin Bet. They will continue to scramble for food, any work, and see power outages, restrictions on their movement, and punishments that range from beatings to killings for actions involving protest and militancy, which Israel labels as terrorism.

Pandemics are not as bad as occupation. If you want to know how to survive this coronavirus pandemic, take a look at how the Palestinians have managed to survive Israeli brutality. And why not take a minute to eat a plate of mujaddara with your family to show some solidarity.

What Palestinians have been forced to go through over the years under Israels oppression is no different than what the world is now going through as a result of the coronavirus. Although the truth is that Israels oppression has been far worse and there still is no antidote for that virus.

Ray Hanania is an award-winning former Chicago City Hall political reporter and columnist. He can be reached on his personal website at http://www.Hanania.com. Twitter: @RayHanania

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Ray Hanania is an award winning political and humor columnist who analyzes American and Middle East politics, and life in general. He is an author of several books.

Hanania covered Chicago Politics and Chicago City Hall from 1976 through 1992. He began writing in 1975 publishing The Middle Eastern Voice newspaper in Chicago (1975-1977). He later published The National Arab American Times newspaper (2004-2007).

Hanania writes weekly columns on Middle East and American Arab issues as Special US Correspondent for the Arab News ArabNews.com, at TheArabDailyNews.com, and at SuburbanChicagoland.com. He has published weekly columns in the Jerusalem Post newspaper, YNetNews.com, Newsday, the Orlando Sentinel, Houston Chronical, and Arlington Heights Daily Herald.

Hanania is the recipient of four (4) Chicago Headline Club Peter Lisagor Awards for Column writing. In November 2006, he was named Best Ethnic American Columnist by the New American Media. In 2009, Hanania received the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the recipient of the MT Mehdi Courage in Journalism Award. He was honored for his writing skills with two (2) Chicago Stick-o-Type awards from the Chicago Newspaper Guild. In 1990, Hanania was nominated by the Chicago Sun-Times editors for a Pulitzer Prize for his four-part series on the Palestinian Intifada.

His writings have also been honored by two national Awards from ADC for his writing, and from the National Arab American Journalists Association.

Click here to send Ray Hanania email.

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Palestinians all too familiar with oppression of lockdowns - The Arab Daily News

HOW might our government policies responding to COVID-19 effect women who are victims of domestic violence, where home is already an unsafe space?

Thats a question raised by CQUniversity domestic violence researcher Dr Brian Sullivan, who also asks how could our COVID-19 response embolden already abusing and controlling men?

Dr Sullivan has reflected on possible consequences but says these concerns are in no way meant to be definitive.

Enforced lockdown

If a woman is living with a coercive controlling abusive man, she and her life are already in lockdown she is microregulated in the home her movements and whereabouts are monitored she is living with an atmosphere of oppression and domination already under threat and under surveillance already, like a hostage.

A COVID-19 lockdown could limit her freedom even more and make him even more dangerous because her isolation is now government policy.

If services (government and non-government) are also in lockdown and services are running with skeletal staff, will this mean that womens support services are going to be harder to access? Will this mean that police response to domestic violence is going to be compromised? Will this mean that mens domestic violence intervention programs are no longer able to keep eyes on him and keep him motivated to change if groups are not up and running?

If hospitals are inundated with patients who have contracted COVID-19 and emergency wards are overloaded, will this mean that a woman who is a victim of domestic violence is unable to get the medical attention she needs and when she needs it?

Will womens domestic violence shelters be open and functioning and accessible? A womans pathways to safety may be roadblocked by enforced lockdown.

If churches, gyms, schools, kindergartens, etc are closed for business, are these other potential avenues of support for the woman that are now blocked for her?

Social distancing

If neighbours are in lockdown and social distancing is the expected behaviour, could that mean a woman who is a domestic violence victim is even more isolated and cut off from informal social and extended family supports?

We know that disasters can cause financial strains and this context can be where an already violent and abusive man can escalate his violence and abuse. How are our already stretched intervention systems going to be able to cope with this likelihood to keep women safe and perpetrators nonviolent?

There are many unknowns, unanswered questions and ongoing complexities in the current situation our society is trying to navigate, Dr Sullivan says.

What we do know is that when resources are low, and responses are slow then the safety of women and children is compromised and our ability to contain and constrain perpetrators is weakened. We need to be on guard and prepared for this contingency also.

If this article has raised concerns or you have experienced domestic or family violence, call 1800 RESPECT on 1800 737 732 (24/7 counselling).

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COVID-19 response and its impact on domestic violence - Daily Mercury