The president has been indicted for abusing his powers and for obstructing justice. News from Washington this morning is that Donald Trump is seething about the stain of impeachment on his presidential legacy. That’s a very, very polite way of putting it.

The truth is less courteous. The truth, I think, is that the president has been cut in ways he’s never been cut. No matter how bad he has behaved, no matter how weak he has appeared, the president has been able to act like nothing can touch him. This ability has led even the most cynical reporter to believe he’s encased in Teflon, as if he really could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and none of his supporters would balk.

But those supporters yesterday saw something new. They saw the president being held accountable for his constitutional crimes. They saw the president’s defenders in the House try desperately to stop it, but fail. It wasn’t the first time House Speaker Nancy Pelosi handed his ass to him. She has done that repeatedly. But it was probably the first time the president’s supporters were closely paying attention when she did it.

Sure, they hate her. They’ve always hated her. That’s nothing new. What is new, however, is the president’s weakness. The Democrats cut Donald Trump, and now he’s bleeding.

The thing about authoritarian-minded Americans is that authority is the thing. Their authority. What Trump does and says — the substance of his conduct — doesn’t matter. He looks strong. He acts strong. He campaigned on that perception of strength. Trump punches down, sure. That’s cowardly, yes. That’s beside the point. To the authoritarian mind, appearingstrong is strength. And if Trump appears strong, they are strong. If he appears weak, they are weak. Such is the bond between cult followers and cult leaders.

The news out of Washington this morning is that the president is seething about the stain of impeachment on his presidential legacy. Ha! Donald Trump is a nihilist. There is no tomorrow! “Legacy” means nothing to someone with zero sense of shame. What makes Trump seethe isn’t damage to his historical reputation. What makes him seethe is what makes all con men seethe. Once the spell is broken, there’s no going back. Trump’s spell has been looking invincible. But now he’s cut, and he’s losing blood.

He won’t die, of course. He could be reelected! Trump’s ego won’t stand for it, though. The president must stop the bleeding. His allies say impeachment is a distraction from carrying on with the people’s business. Impeachment, however, will be the president’s singular obsession from now on. He must prove he’s still invincible. And he’ll need help.

That’s where the Senate comes in. Only acquittal will stop Trump’s bleeding. Acquittal means the Congress was wrong. It means the president isn’t weak. It means his supporters aren’t weak. Authoritarians always sound like they are rugged individualists. They always sound like they don’t need approval from anyone. But authoritarians like Donald Trump and the 34 percent of Americans constituting his hard base of power desire approval above all. House Democrats cut. Only Senate Republicans can heal. A mountain is about to fall on top of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s head.

I don’t think he knows it yet. McConnell said this morning that Pelosi was playing games. She did not immediately send two articles of impeachment to the Senate. She said she wouldn’t do that until she got assurances that the Senate would conduct a fair and constitutional trial. She said she won’t remit when the foreman of the Senate jury (McConnell) has said he’s already made up his mind. McConnell, for his part, said her refusal to remit is proof that the House impeachment process was “shoddy work.”

She has the leverage. He doesn’t. I know it looks like the reverse. It looks like Pelosi is saving the Senate Republicans from taking the worst vote of their lives. It looks like Pelosi is playing “constitutional hardball” without any tangible objective. But McConnell will want to acquit more than she wants to remit. The mountain won’t fall on her. The president’s desire for exoneration to recast his invincibility spell before a chunk of supporters stop paying attention is only starting to mount. The longer Pelosi waits to send the articles, the more likely McConnell is to give in her to demands.

Authoritarians always sound like they don’t play by anyone’s rule. But rules are how they get what they want. They get what they want when their opponents obey the rules while they cheat. Pelosi, in not sending the articles right away, is playing by her own rules now. She’s therefore pinned McConnell between the House and the president.

The longer McConnell dithers, the more the president bleeds.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 December 2019
Word Count: 794
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Today is the day the full House debates two articles of impeachment before voting on them. Already, the Washington press corps is asking what impact the vote might have on the 2020 presidential election. My take? Now’s not the time for that question.

For one thing, the election is still far away. For another, we can’t know until we get there. So everything written and said between now and then is speculation. It is speculation, however, that has immeasurable impact on what eventually transpires. Put another way, the press corps, in asking the question, manufactures an outcome.

Now’s not the time for that question because now’s not about normal politics. Once Donald Trump is indicted, he will stand accused of abusing his power to defraud the American people of their right to informed consent to his governance. He will stand accused of mounting the greatest effort to obstruct justice in American history. He will stand accused of violating his oath of office and perverting the Constitution.

Attempts to speculate about the impact impeachment will have on the next election are attempts to minimize the seriousness of what’s happening. That, of course, is precisely how the Senate Republicans hope the Washington press corps spends its time: overlooking the gravity of the moment in favor of normal partisan politics.

With the press corps speculating, it doesn’t seem unseemly to amplify the naturally partisan aspects of the impeachment process. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, is confident he can work openly with the president’s attorneys without raising suspicion of a rigged Senate trial. Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will handle the impeachment trial, believes he can end it without calling a single witness. Both men stand ready and willing to violate their oath to “do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws: So help me God.”

Now, no one expects 100 Senators to be truly impartial. I don’t think the framers were that dumb. It is, however, important to say one is acting impartially. To say one is acting impartially is to behave in accordance with a constitutional standard of conduct. For impeachment trials, the framers required a special oath in which Senators vow to “do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws.” That’s in addition to the regular oath of office all Senators swear to. That an impeachment trial requires a double oath tells us how important it is to appear to maintain the highest standard.

So even if 53 Republican Senators have in fact already made up their minds, they should not, as Lindsey Graham did, say publicly that he’s already made up his mind. Even if a Republican Senator is not in fact an impartial juror, he should not, as Mitch McConnell did, say publicly that’s he not an impartial juror. On the contrary, both men should push their colleagues toward a fair, thorough and complete trial. They should allow House managers to call witnesses. They should allow Trump’s counsel to cross-examine. They should enter into evidence what the House found. They should do what the Democrats did: maintain at least the appearance of a constitutional standard.

The Democrats have had some success in accusing McConnell, Graham and the rest of violating their oath to do impartial justice. But little has been said about the other way they are planning to break their promise. They are supposed to do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws. This part of the oath stands in direct conflict with the Republican effort to spin the impeachment process as just more partisan politics. This part of the oath stands in direct conflict with the press corps’ horse-race reporting. An impeachment trial is indeed the ultimate political remedy for a criminal president. But it is not random. It is not unchained. An impeachment trial is bound to the Constitution and laws, because the US Constitution is law. It is the highest law.

Impeachment is law.

An oath is law.

A purely political process would not be what we saw in the House. What we saw in the House was orderly, deliberate, transparent and lawful. A purely political process would be what the Senate Republicans are preparing to present to us, a process in which rules of evidence don’t matter, in which standards of conduct don’t matter, in which burdens of proof don’t matter, in which nothing really matters but power. It’s no wonder when you think about it that Rudy Giuliani has been saying publicly and loudly to anyone who will listen that the president approves of his going to Ukraine to dig up more dirt on the Democrats. If nothing matters but power, corruption can flourish out in the open.

If an oath is political, anything is permissible.

Alas, the Washington press corps is not having this discussion. It’s too hard. It’s easier, and more profitable, to wonder how impeachment will affect 2020. It’s speculation, but it is not benign. In asking the question, the press in fact manufactures an outcome.

An outcome favorable to the Republicans.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 December 2019
Word Count: 841
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The past few days brought one of the more moving examples of the interconnectedness of our world and the irreducible core of the eternal human quest for justice, Gambia’s case accusing Myanmar of genocide of the Rohingyas has begun at the International Court of Justice. Days later, it ended with the somewhat flat expectation that a ruling on the allegation of genocide could take years.

Even so, the case is significant. When Gambia filed its lawsuit, having received the formal backing of the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), there was surprise.  Why would a small country in West Africa be taking another, half a world away, to court?

The Rohingyas are mostly Muslim but is that enough to prompt such a profoundly empathetic gesture from another mainly Muslim but relatively poor and unregarded country 11,500km away? What would be gained and by whom?

More to the point, what credibility did Gambia have in pursuing this particular case? It is hardly a template for systemic justice and human rights. Struggling to get to grips with decades of violence under Yahya Jammeh, the dictator who ruled the country for 22 years before fleeing after surprise election defeat to Equatorial Guinea in 2017, Gambia’s Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission began hearings this year into alleged human rights abuses by Jammeh. It’s proving to be a painful and partial process. Reconciliation is a long and hard road; reparation is an aspiration.

In addition, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) typically addresses disputes between signatory states and has no jurisdiction over proceedings in Myanmar, which is not an ICJ member. Some have said that Gambia’s lawsuit at The Hague was an act of frivolous and ostentatious attention-seeking, to no particular end.

That last point was addressed by the fact the ICJ took up the case. Its 15 judges can rule on disputes stemming from the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which applies to the killing of “in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” Both Gambia and Myanmar are signatories to the pact.

What of the broader issue about the wisdom and purpose of bringing such a case? Gambia’s lawsuit is a stirring story that underlines our shared humanity, the enormous power of the lessons of history and that coincidences sometimes have huge consequences.

First to the coincidences. It was an unlikely coincidence that Gambia’s foreign minister pulled out of the OIC annual conference in Bangladesh last year and sent Justice Minister Aboubacar Tambadou instead. It was a further coincidence that the OIC conference included a tour of Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar. The third coincidence was that Tambadou spent more than a decade prosecuting cases from Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. When he heard the Rohingya refugees’ stories in Cox’s Bazar, he said he “saw genocide written all over” them.

Another coincidence of a sort was that Tambadou was from a country that suffered from both the violence of the Jammeh years and international indifference to its misery. As Tambadou explained: “Part of the reason we were motivated to be involved in this case was because of our own experiences. Had the international community took up this responsibility at the time and condemned the former president, I don’t think we would have gone through two decades of terrible atrocities.”

Never mind the eventual outcome of Gambia’s lawsuit against Myanmar on behalf of the Rohingyas, a stateless minority that the Myanmar authorities routinely call “terrorists.”

Never mind the reality that no ICJ ruling can change the fact the Rohingyas were stripped of citizenship in 1982 by the country formerly known as Burma on grounds they are not one of its so-called national races. Consider the momentousness of what Gambia achieved in simply filing a lawsuit that stresses justice and a belief in the essential humanity of us all.

The case refocused attention on the plight of the Rohingyas, some 700,000 of whom have been forced by Myanmar’s military to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh in the past few years. At the Hague hearing, Gambia asked the ICJ to approve temporary measures to protect the Rohingyas.

These may prove unenforceable but John Packer, Neuberger-Jesin professor of International Conflict Resolution at Ottawa University’s law faculty, said, “Genocide is considered an injury against everybody — a general wrong — which allows any state to take this up. Little Gambia is acting for the whole world.”

In a sense, Gambia’s attempt to hold Myanmar accountable for the Rohingyas’ suffering tells an exhilarating story about multilateralism and international rule of law. Perhaps what it really says is: When the richest, most powerful countries look away from injustice, it falls to small and seemingly inconsequential ones to remind us of the difficulty — and necessity — of being good.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 December 2019
Word Count: 793
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Alexander Heffner, host of The Open Mind on PBS, has a clever and thoughtful piece in this morning’s USA Today worth considering on this dreary gun-metal-gray Monday.

His argument is that the Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are right to impeach the president. Foreign interference, he said, is precisely what the framers feared most. In protecting the US Constitution, he said, they have begun a new era of “liberal originalism to safeguard law and order in America. By “liberal originalism,” he means interpreting the Constitution in the fullness of its context, past and present.

What makes Heffner’s piece clever is its turnabout. It’s the Republicans who are supposed to be defenders of the Constitution, not the Democrats. It’s the Republicans who are supposed to be “constitutional conservatives,” as we heard so many times during Barack Obama’s presidency. But now, under Donald Trump, we have a GOP standing against limited government, state’s rights, fiscal responsibility and the rest. We have a GOP, Heffner said, fully “cannibalized” by “Trump’s authoritarianism.”

But this turnabout works only if one accepted the premise that it’s the Republicans who are supposed to be all the above things. It works only if one believed that the Republicans meant what they said and that the party is now a “cannibalized” victim of the president’s authoritarianism. Moreover, it works only if one already believed that the Democrats were notdefenders of the Constitution. All of which is to say: it works if GOP propaganda equals truth. Things look different if you are someone, like me and other liberals, who already believed that what we are currently seeing in the GOP has always been there. It’s been hidden by layers of spin, equivocation, falsehood and lies.

Heffner’s turnabout does imply a philosophical truth I’d like to amplify, which is that the Democrats are conservative ideologically. Now, I don’t mean “conservative” in the way Republicans mean it (whether or not they believe it.) I mean “conservative” in the way Edmund Burke and others meant it. There’s no need to change things merely for the sake of changing things. Change must arise from a pressing need, and even when there is a pressing need, change must come from majoritarian will and the democratic process. In this sense, every single member of the Democratic Party is an arch ideological conservative. What makes them different from Republican “conservatives” is that they will change when it’s necessary. The Republicans won’t do that. They will blow up the political order if that’s what it takes to prevent change from happening.

Which is why they are radicals, not “liberty-loving” conservatives. True liberty is rooted in a system in which everyone is accorded the same rights and everyone has the same political obligations (i.e., voting). But the Republicans don’t really care about equality. Therefore, they don’t really care about liberty in any small-r republican sense.

To be sure, they care about their liberty, just not yours. Liberals often make the mistake of accusing Republicans of hypocrisy. Liberals often complain they are acting in bad faith. But, again, these allegations rest on a core presumption: that Republican behavior is based on a shared system of morality, justice and political values. It isn’t. There’s one system for them. There’s one system for the rest of us. Critics like Max Boot and Jonathan Capehart allege the Republicans are no longer principled. Not so. They are highly principled. The principles animating Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham are the same principles that animated John Calhoun and George Wallace.

Heffner is right to say that the Democrats are behaving as the framers would have wanted. But it’s not because they are more conservative than the Republicans. It’s not because they are more liberty loving. I think it’s because they are more republican.

More republican than the Republicans? Yes. To be republican (small r) during the founding meant having a vision of the Good Life, and creating public mechanisms by which citizens could empower themselves to pursue happiness on their own terms. The Good Life excluded women. It excluded slaves. It excluded children. It excluded this continent’s original peoples. But it was a principle, nevertheless, that informed the framers’ understanding of the world, and that shaped much of our founding document.

The Democrats, I’d argue, are more republican than at any time in my adulthood. To be liberal used to mean neutrality in public affairs. It used to mean “negative liberty” (the absence, not presence, of the state). It used to mean pretty much anything that was not Big Government control. But since 2000, and especially since 2016, more Democrats realize that’s not enough. The common good has been neglected. It’s now desiccated. The common good needs replenishing. It needs republican Democrats.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 December 2019
Word Count: 861
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For decades the United States has been the world’s leading safe-haven destination for refugees.

In 1980, the refugee cap was set as high as 231,000 people. Every year since 2000, the average annual figure was 70,000-80,000. At the height of humanitarian disasters in Syria and Myanmar, former US President Barack Obama’s administration set the 2017 cap at 110,000.

This year, however, is expected to see the fewest applications granted — 30,000 — since the United States’ refugee programme began in 1980. A lower figure is expected to follow for next year.

In September, the White House announced plans to admit 18,000 people under the programme in 2020. Initially, it wanted to admit zero refugees in the coming year but was walked back by Republican and Democratic politicians.

Approximately 4,000 of those places will be taken by Iraqis who helped or otherwise worked with the US military, 5,000 for people fleeing religious persecution and 1,500 for at-risk Central American migrants.

“The current burdens on the US immigration system must be alleviated before it is again possible to resettle large numbers of refugees,” the US State Department claimed in September.

It added it has been forced to deploy its workforce to deal with asylum applications coming through on the United States’ southern border but, in a callous and thinly veiled reproach, stated: “Prioritising the humanitarian protection cases of those already in our country is simply a matter of fairness and common sense.”

Observers and immigration specialists know that’s an argument that holds little water.

Let’s put the global threats facing persecuted people in context: There are around 2.5 million people in Syria’s Idlib province, where Syrian government and Russian bombardments from the air are a harrowing aspect of everyday life.

Yet, this year, just 563 Syrian refugees are to be resettled in the United States. Muslims and Christians are being affected alike. From 2016 until this year, Muslim admissions plunged 87%, to 4,943 people, while for Christians the figure declined 37%, to 23,754.

This is happening at a time when the number of refugees globally is at an all-time high of around 26 million people, half of whom are children.

The non-partisan Migration Policy Institute said the steep decline “has not affected all refugees equally” and “refugee admissions from particular countries, most notably from the Middle East, with an attendant plunge in the resettlement of Muslim refugees.”

Moreover, “overall, refugee admissions fell from most countries from Fiscal Year 2016 and Fiscal Year 2019 but the majority of the drop is attributable to three countries: Syria (from 12,587 to 563), Iraq (from 9,880 to 465) and Somalia (from 9,020 to 231), three of the countries labelled “high-risk.” Taken together, admissions from these 11 designated high-risk nations have fallen 95%,” the institute said.

Refugees, of course, have long been an easy scapegoat for right-wing politicians and nativists who claim that immigrants take jobs and profits out of the hands and mouths of “real Americans.”

However, it’s long been established that refugees and immigrants, in general, do exactly the opposite — they create jobs, revive blighted neighbourhoods and fuel local economies.

In addition to the tens of thousands of desperate people around the world now left to deal with persecution and poverty without the prospect of resettlement in the United States, thousands more working in refugee assistance fields inside the country could lose their jobs as well. That’s because the much-reduced number of approved refugee applications require fewer workers to process those cases.

It is on the global stage, where the fallout will be felt most keenly and not where you may expect. US generals and leaders in the US Defence Department have long viewed the refugee programme as a means to strengthen the United States’ political and diplomatic standing around the world.

For example, if the United States agrees to unburden the cash-strapped Lebanese government of thousands of Syrian refugees, it gives Americans an “in” concerning Lebanese political affairs. Accepting refugees doesn’t just help desperate civilians but also has a huge weighty political dimension.

Unlike the exchange of goods and services between countries (in which trade deals can be formed with relatively little fuss once negotiation has been successful), the exchange of people is much more complicated since human lives don’t stand still.

Desperate refugees don’t — can’t — end their quest for a safe haven just because the United States has shuttered its doors. That means that Canada, the European Union and European countries are better placed to reap the economic benefits of refugees and command influence and better political ties, especially with Middle Eastern countries.

The sum fallout of the refugee cutback is that the United States’ global standing vis-a-vis the refugee programme is to suffer more in the Middle East than in any other region. The big question for Arab countries amounts to: “Does America even matter anymore?”

Stephen Starr is an Irish journalist who lived in Syria from 2007 to 2012. He is the author of Revolt in Syria: Eye-Witness to the Uprising (Oxford University Press: 2012).

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 December 2019
Word Count: 802
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The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is the Gordian knot of modern-day politics. The more levels you untie, the more problems there seem to be.

The Middle East has stumped and confused the brightest of minds with intricate knowledge and understanding of the area, its people, its culture and its problems. From the brightest of politicians to the wisest of scholars, all come up a shekel short or a day late.

So imagine how much more complex this conflict must seem to outsiders lacking the in-depth knowledge of the land and without the understanding of what motivates the people in this conflict.

Lacking the needed experience in resolving such conflicts, Trump administration negotiators will find themselves in this bottomless pit that has dragged every politician who has tried to mediate in the dispute since Gunnar Jarring’s first stab at negotiating peace between the Arabs and the Israelis in 1967.

What makes this more worrisome is the arrogance of the current White House resident, who lacks experience in mediating a barroom brawl, let alone one of the world’s longest-running and most complex conflicts.

US President Donald Trump wrongly believes that his decisions may be advancing the peace process. In reality, he is adding to the problem.

Trump believed he could advance the dormant peace process but his interjecting edicts, as when he ordered the US Embassy transferred to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv or when he declared that Israel could annex the Golan Heights, set the potential for a peaceful resolution further back.

Trump believes he and his close associates, mainly his son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, can succeed where others failed. So far, they have only succeeded in alienating the Palestinians, who refuse to negotiate with Trump.

The United States had supported the idea of a two-state solution but, in view of Pompeo’s statement concerning Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the United States is making a major reversal of the long-standing policy and legal opinion that deemed settlements inconsistent with international law.

The two-state solution was based on a set of trade-offs: the Palestinians reclaiming their land in exchange for Israeli security and peace and the Palestinians accepting a formula of no right of return to Israel in exchange for Jerusalem as their capital.

However, the move by the Trump administration buries the idea of two states existing side by side and leaves a one-state solution as the only alternative, one in which the Arabs would comprise roughly 50% of Israel’s population, an unfortunate alternative for both Israelis and Palestinians.

The Israelis, far more than the Palestinians, reject the one-state solution because, if Palestinians are absorbed into Israel, it would, within a very short time, leave Israelis as a minority in their own country.

A few years ago, following another failed attempt at bridging the gap between the Israelis and the Palestinians, some young Palestinians floated the idea of accepting the one-state solution.

“I am tired of being treated as a second-class citizen. I am tired of the occupation and the manner in which we are treated by the Israelis,” said a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation negotiating team. “Make us citizens of a one-state solution with equal rights and let’s forget about having an independent state of Palestine.”

The first blow to a two-state solution came when Trump declared Jerusalem as the legitimate capital of Israel without also stating the same for the Palestinians.

The Trump administration then stated that the only right of return for Palestinians should be for those who originally left Israel more than 70 years ago, not their offspring, totally ignoring international rights of return and property ownership for family members.

Now comes the fatal blow — Pompeo stating that Israel has the right to take Palestinian land in the West Bank to accommodate the expansion of its citizenry. Pompeo ignored the fact that the settlements have been deemed illegal.

“Now that the US has declared Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, settlements in the West Bank as legal and the US statements on limiting rights of return, there is little reason for either side to negotiate a peaceful and final agreement of a two-state solution,” said Edward M. Gabriel a former US ambassador to Morocco and currently president of the American Task Force for Lebanon.

Claude Salhani is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly.

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 December 2019
Word Count: 714
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Because everything is so Trumpian these days, there’s less air or space for the only other mass entertainment that promotes tribalism and toxic masculinity while keeping violence in vogue: football.

In the age of The Donald, it’s hard to remember that football was once the nation’s greatest television reality show. Because real people actually got really hurt in real time, you could be sure it wasn’t fake news. Now, football is just another runner-up to President Trump, whose policies actually get people killed.

And yet football is still here, in plain sight, waiting to resume its cultural dominance once Trump is gone.

To avoid any further erosion of its base, it is cosmetically modifying itself at every level with “reforms” focused on the image of increased safety. From small rural high schools to the Fifth Avenue offices of the National Football League (NFL), plans are being generated to protect America’s most popular and prosperous sport from the two things that could destroy it — the players’ mortal fear of having their brains scrambled and the fans’ moral fear of awakening to their complicity in such a process.

The players, mostly black and conditioned to believe football is their best ticket out of modern Jim Crow, have not yet fully awakened. But fans, despite being conditioned to believe that supporting your local team is little short of a civic responsibility, have more options. They are, after all, mostly white and not as likely to need to sacrifice their health for their short-term livelihood. There’s hope that, in the end, those fans will come to understand, for example, that watching the Super Bowl is casting a vote for the values that have helped bring us the show most dangerous to our survival as a civilization, the Trump administration.

Football’s playbook As a voter’s guide, here are the six ways in which football groomed us for Trumpball and is still trying to keep us in its grasp:

1. Inflame Racial Divisions: Helping to spread America’s primary disease, racism, is Trump 101, but the NFL got there first. Seventy per cent of its players are African-American. At the start of this season, only four head coaches and two general managers of the 32 teams were men of color. Only two owners were not white men: the Jacksonville Jaguars’ Pakistani-American Shahid Khan and the Buffalo Bills’ Korean-American Kim Pegula (a woman).

So, who would have thought that the same year — this one! — would mark not only the 100th anniversary of the NFL but the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans on the soil of what became the United States of America? Somehow, neither milestone has been celebrated all that much this year — and never together. In his indispensable book on race and sports, Forty Million Dollar Slaves, former New York Times columnist William Rhoden maintains that, by cutting off black athletes from their history and communities, the sports industry has managed to control them. “The power relationship that had been established on the plantation,” he wrote, “has not changed even if the circumstances around it have.”

To make sure the NFL owners would stand firm against players kneeling during the national anthem, President Trump called Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to say, according to a sworn deposition given by Jones and reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, “Tell everybody, you can’t win this one. This one lifts me.”

No wonder that these days, whole teams or many members of them refuse invitations to the White House.

2. Crush Dissent: The CliffsNotes saga of former San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick is pretty straightforward — a star (though not a superstar) refuses to stand for the pre-game national anthem as a protest against racism, particularly of the white-police variety. His act is spun as disrespect to the nation and its flag. Thereafter, no team will hire him because he would be a “distraction.” That was three years ago and, ever since, Kaepernick has kept himself in playing shape, becoming a martyr to some, a loser to others, and one of the genuine heroes of this generation of racial activists. He has collected millions of dollars (and given away more than a million of them) from both a Nike campaign and a settlement with the NFL in return for withdrawing a collusion case he had brought against the league. More recently, a league-sanctioned open workout, hastily organized for him to audition for a new quarterback job, collapsed amid bad intentions and confusion.

Perhaps most interesting is the striking lack of support Kaepernick has received from many of his fellow players. Are they against his demonstration or fearful of antagonizing their owners and endangering their own jobs (which only last, on average, slightly more than three years)? After all, at a 2017 rally, Trump told those same owners (a striking number of them donors of his) that they should respond to protesting players by saying, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. He’s fired. He’s fired!”

He really didn’t have to tell them. They understood that holding the line against the Kaepernicks of this world means keeping the progressive barbarians at bay, something already baked into the game. The canceling of the Other, of anyone not on the team (so to speak), be they rivals, uncooperative college faculty, or most women who aren’t moms, cheerleaders, or girlfriends who understand that the team comes first, remains the norm.

3. Normalize Brutality: Football was born in brutality. In 1909, the year 26 football players died, former Confederate colonel John Mosby reportedly called the sport a “barbarous amusement” that “develops the brute dormant in man’s nature and puts the player on a level with… a polar bear.” This from a cavalry raider once known as the “Gray Ghost.”

Although the game has since been made safer, it’s always been a contest battled out man-to-man and based on the violent aggrandizement of territory. Attempts to create rules to avoid, say, crippling blocks and tackles have generally been met by howls of anguish from chickenhawk fans who cried out: don’t sissify football.

Particularly in the warfare between offensive and defensive lines, football is a game of domination by bullies. The most notorious of contemporary bullies (and yes, he’s a Trump supporter) is Richie Incognito. As an all-star offensive lineman at Nebraska, he picked fights that probably would have ended his career at most other universities. But he was such a good player that Nebraska sent him to the Menninger Clinic for anger-management counseling. This, however, proved no cure for the six-foot-three-inch, 300-pounder and Incognito eventually was kicked off the team. While some pro teams refused to draft him on the basis of “character” issues, the St. Louis Rams did so in 2005. He played well (and with bad character). He was routinely picked for all-pro teams, while, in 2009, being voted the “dirtiest player in the league.” In 2013, he bullied a fellow 300-pound Dolphin, Jonathan Martin, off the team and eventually out of football.

Not surprisingly, the NFL is as practiced when it comes to reaching out to bad boys as the present administration is. (Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, one of three SEALs tried for war crimes, whom President Trump intervened repeatedly to protect, has been referred to as the Richie Incognito of the SEALS.) Incognito, who continues to pile up a police record, played this season with the Oakland Raiders while Martin, a Stanford graduate, still struggles with his depression.

4. Sustain Inequality: Recent legislation in California allowing college athletes to share in any profits from the sale of their images has been both hailed and attacked as revolutionary. It’s the beginning of a fair new deal in the saga of the “unpaid professionals” and the end of amateur sports as we knew it. There was always a very good reason for keeping jocks on an unguaranteed dole called “scholarships”: control. But an even better reason was keeping all the profits for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the colleges, the apparel companies, and the retailers.

The crushing economic inequality in college athletics (especially in football and basketball, the so-called revenue sports) has been justified by the “free” education that “student-athletes” — a term concocted by former NCAA Executive Director Walter Byers — receive, if indeed they go to class and graduate. If indeed they even have time.

The ripping-off of college athletes has been carefully ignored by legislators, universities, and fans. Later in life, Byers would aptly call the NCAA “a nationwide money-laundering scheme,” but this phenomenon runs through all of sports. The 32 NFL teams collect more than $13 billion in revenue annually and protect themselves with elaborate “salary caps,” so that no team can start spending too wildly on players or launch the football equivalent of an arms race. Of course, by the time you turn pro, the least you can make is $495,000 (this year’s rookie minimum) with millions more for first-round draft picks.

As Colonel Mosby pointed out so long ago, the real problem still begins in college. As he put it, “It is notorious that football teams are largely composed of professional mercenaries who are hired to advertise colleges. Gate money is the valuable consideration.”

5. Apply the Lie: In the deadly tradition forged by Big Tobacco and climate deniers, the NFL relentlessly insisted that there was no relation between brain trauma and the game, even as middle-aged former players slipped into early dementia, Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), and Parkinson’s disease. For years, the league was dismissive and stonewalled on the issue. In all of this, the media and a cult of faux masculinity were accomplices. Those head-banging hits you’ve been wincing at on TV? Just dingers a real man should be able to shake off.

It took a young New York Times reporter, Alan Schwarz, a young pathologist, Bennett Omalu, and the brothers Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru-Wada, with the help of a PBS Frontline documentary, “League of Denial,” to finally get the story out in full. And it would prove a particularly hard sell for fans invested in the game. They generally didn’t want to give up their viewing pleasures, however guilty, and tried to justify them by claiming that the players were well aware of the risks and well compensated for them, even if the settlements crafted by NFL lawyers have never seemed adequate to the damage done.

As Americans learned that the damage was usually caused by thousands of hits to the head — from pee-wee football through high school and college — youth football participation started to drop. Even successful pros began to say that they wouldn’t allow their sons to play football.

More troubling yet to the NFL have been decisions by stars like Andrew Luck, a 29-year-old quarterback who quit while he could still walk and think.

6. Control the Media: Covering football from high school to the pros can be a walk in the park or a slog through hell, depending on whether the reporter is considered part of the booster squad or a “ripper,” out to score his or her own points in opposition to the team’s brand image. Admittedly, even in this heightened moment for sports journalists, few reporters have been physically attacked by coaches or athletes, although intimidation, micro-aggressions, and attempts at shunning have always been common. Lately, real-time access to key players has been harder to come by and has led to more speculative coverage, which, in turn, often results in adversarial writing, sometimes in defiance of media employers.

Not surprisingly, then, leading a recent “stick to sports” campaign have been football’s media partners, not its players or fans. Anything that seems remotely political, even if posted on private social-media platforms, has been subject to being shut down. Jemele Hill, an ESPN star now writing for the Atlantic, may be the most striking example so far of a good journalist ousted in this way, but many have also been lost to devastating lay-offs at ESPN, Deadspin, and other sports sites where real coverage has been giving way to cheaper, uncontroversial puff pieces.

Ultimately, in such a climate, political figures, too, may feel ever more comfortable expressing themselves aggressively to journalists on critical coverage. Here, as David French described it, is a possible harbinger of such a future:

“In 2017, the congressional candidate Greg Gianforte ‘body-slammed’ the Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs after Jacobs tried to ask him questions about health-care policy. It was a cowardly, criminal act. Not long after, Trump praised him. At a campaign rally, the president of the United States said of Gianforte, ‘Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind of — he’s my guy.’”

“My guy,” by the way, went on to win his Montana seat in the House of Representatives.

For those who remain unconvinced that an unqualified vote for football is a vote for Trump, the Jock Culture Department of TomDispatch suggests you follow Richie Incognito to the Menninger Clinic. For those who promise to at least remain open on such subjects, however, we’re prepared to look the other way while you watch the Super Bowl in a SportsWorld made ever more toxic by the racism, sexism, classism, and violence encouraged, or perhaps more accurately, marketed by Donald Trump. And while you’re watching the festivities (and the head-banging to follow), hang on to the possibility that this will be the president’s last Super Bowl as national head coach.

Robert Lipsyte writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He was a sports and city columnist for the New York Times. He is the author, among other works, of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland.

Copyright ©2019 Robert Lipsyte — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 December 2019
Word Count: 2,236
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There is a difference between lies and malicious lies. One can lie while knowing the facts. One can lie while knowing the facts for the purpose of doing harm. The latter is what the president and the Republican leadership did Tuesday. I want to talk today about a more sinister level of mendacity: lying to injure one’s own country.

The inspector general of the US Department of Justice said Monday that the FBI was right to open an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. There was no spying. There was no attempted coup. There was nothing political going on. Yes, mistakes were made, but they were within the bounds of good-faith behavior. More plainly, the narrative the Republicans had been peddling, about a “deep state” in league with the Democrats and former Obama administration officials, was false.

Donald Trump and Steve Scalise, to name only two Republicans, said the opposite. They claimed the IG report didn’t debunk their fictional narrative. It proved it. They lied knowing the lie would injure our faith in truth. They lied with malicious intent.

That, however, was nothing compared to what Bill Barr did. The US attorney general made clear Tuesday in a series of statements during an interview with NBC News he was leading a concerted effort to validate — to make real — the Republicans’ malicious lie: that a “deep state” was out to get the president. Barr made clear he was part of a concerted effort to defraud Americans of their right to know the truth about 2016, and of their right to call on the government to prevent the same from happening again.

His statements weren’t just lies. They weren’t just malicious. They were treasonous.

Without citing any evidence of any kind, Barr said the IG report was incorrect and that the Department of Justice, led by his hand-picked investigator, would conduct its own investigation into the investigation. Barr said “there was and never has been any evidence of collusion and yet [Trump’s] campaign and the president’s administration has been dominated by this investigation into what turns out to be completely baseless.”

Yes, there was evidence of collusion. No, the investigation wasn’t baseless.

Bill Barr added that the FBI “jumped right into a full-scale investigation before they even went to talk to the foreign officials about exactly what was said. … They opened an investigation into the campaign and they used very intrusive techniques.”

All of which the IG report says didn’t happen. But here’s the worst, per NBC:

You see what he’s doing? He’s accusing the former Democratic administration of doing the same thing the House Democrats are accusing the current Republican administration of doing. It’s a terrible thing, Barr said, when the incumbent uses the state to rig an election’s outcome. It’s a terrible thing, Barr could have said, for an American president to extort a Ukrainian leader into announcing an investigation into his closest political rival. What the attorney general is saying without saying is that this is very, very bad when a Democrat does it, not so bad when a Republican does it.

Barr wants to conduct his own investigation. But actually investigating is less important than just saying he’s investigating. Actually unearthing evidence of wrongdoing is less important than just saying the IG’s report is wrong. And if this sounds like what Trump demanded of Ukraine’s leader, that’s because it is. The president didn’t want Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden. He just wanted Zelensky to say he was.

Barr saying an investigation into the investigation is underway gives Senate Republicans cover to do what GOP operative Matt Schlapp said they should do: “if impeachment comes to you, focus on how all this got started. Obama and Biden using their office to bring down Trump and to enrich the Biden family. Take the gloves off. Make it hurt.” Barr saying an investigation into the investigation is underway gives the Russians government lots of room to repeat its previous triumph. Barr’s lies are treasonous.

Indeed, Barr did for Trump what Yuriy Lutsenko and Viktor Shokin did for Trump. Lutsenko and Shokin are former head prosecutors for Ukraine (basically Bill Barr’s counterparts). Both gave Rudy Giuliani and his cronies what they desired: false statements claiming that Joe Biden was dirty and that Ukraine, not Russia, undermined US sovereignty in 2016. The difference? Lutsenko and Shokin were in Vladimir Putin’s pocket. Is Barr? Unlikely. But given the lengths he’s going to defend Trump and, by extension, the Kremlin, that may be a difference without a distinction.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2019 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 December 2019
Word Count: 823
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In recent years, a lot of people have been surprised at huge revenues drawn by film adaptations of comic books with age restriction that requires being at least 18 years old. Audiences love ultra-violent productions like Joker, which has surpassed the $1 billion line in sales, so it is natural that comic book concepts are affected as well. I understood this better on my last visit to New York.

In New York, you will find Midtown Comics, the world’s biggest comic book store and a sort of shrine for comic book lovers, where, as always, old and new comics alike are presented for fans’ enjoyment. While browsing newly-released series, what surprised me most was seeing DC Comics’ dark stories for adults released one after another.

One of these series published under DC’s Black Label is Tales from the Dark Multiverse. These take DC’s most well-known stories and give them new endings. Each of the single-issue releases is reminiscent of The Twilight Zone.

In the series, a character named Tempus Fuginaut appears at the beginning of each issue to briefly explain the Dark Multiverse. For people who have a passing familiarity with multiverse theory, or at least for those who have watched the Arrowverse series on TV, the theory states that the universe in which we live is not the only one. Some of these multiple universes are completely different while others are almost the same, and our heroes sometimes travel among these different universes as they run from one adventure to another.

Fuginaut explains that the known universes all have dark counterparts, and the adventures of those who live there have very different endings. Following this are versions of DC’s most well-known series with endings transformed in ways people have never heard before, like The Death of Superman, Batman — Nightfall, and Teen Titans — The Judas Contract.

As with The Twilight Zone, readers of the Dark Multiverse stories witness how human frailties bring unexpected bad endings to just about everything.

After reading these stories with extremely frightening and dark endings, people may sit and wonder whether everything is this way, if the stories with happy endings we have been told dozens of times in fact end differently, if everything we know is different and our universe is actually a dark one.

Frankly, when I turn on the TV and look at the news after having these thoughts, I start thinking we do not live in a universe where stories have happy endings. It’s as though life splintered off at some point, and the universe in which we find ourselves has suddenly become part of a dark universe.

These thoughts do not just arise from the news out of Turkey. In fact, they are a product of developments around the world because, for much of the world, it’s almost impossible to see good news.

When we look at Turkish society, we see that most people are used to child abuse and women getting murdered, and how it’s normal for babies and children to grow up in prison. There are times it strikes us as unusual when people who murder women receive severe penalties because we are so used to courts awarding these murderers with lighter sentences for “good behaviour”.

It has become normal for duly elected local mayors to be removed from their posts before their terms are even finished, only to be replaced by government-appointed administrators and then arrested. The number of people who see this practice as fair just cannot be underestimated.

There is not even a way for people to react to these legal scandals. Some people say “That’s good” when Selahattin Demirtaş, held in prison illegally, is taken to hospital after falling ill. When writer Ahmet Altan is thrown back into prison a week after his release, there are people who say that’s where he belongs. They do not know what will result from abandoning the rule of law and ignoring the Constitution.

There are similar situations in the United States, where a lot of people see the evidence emerging during the impeachment process of President Donald Trump as fabrications of the Democrats. In fact, impeachment only seems to increase Trump’s chances of being re-elected. Even if they see that he acted illegally, these people will not care.

Trump’s detention centres holding Latin Americans attempting to cross the border are rarely seen in the news. The inhumane conditions and children dying in these places are starting to be seen as normal.

Syrian children drowning, Kurdish children getting killed by soldiers, and Latin American children dying from the terrible conditions in detention centres are all still newsworthy, but when developments like these are reported in the papers, they do not garner more reaction than any other news.

If you happen to look outside of Turkey and the United States, for example to China, you will see that the rest of the world is inured to what is happening to the Turkic Uighurs there. When the New York Times published documents showing evidence of China’s “brainwashing operations” against the Uighurs, there was hardly a ripple around the world. Most people reading this news for the first time perhaps were a bit surprised and angry but forgot about it in a day or two.

A good part of the world has become somehow accustomed to reading news about death and lawlessness. Most people simply feel thankful that it’s not happening to them and get on with their lives. Fortunately, there are a few people who are trying to speak out against all of this. Although their voices are often drowned out by the angry mutterings of the new normal, they do give some hope for humanity.

Like the frog in a pot of water slowly being brought to a boil who does not notice the heat increasing until he is about to die, people do not notice how nationalist thinking, in the name of national security, is slowly erasing the possibility of a better world.

If we ignore the lawlessness suffered by the minorities of the world, and if we do not raise our voices against the worrying developments in other countries, we will eventually end up as part of the dark multiverse. Then maybe Tempus Fuginaut will tell about how not one person but an entire world was brought to its knees by human frailty. And who knows — perhaps we have already become a part of that dark and hopeless universe and just have not found out yet.

Ali Abaday is a freelance journalist based in New York.

Copyright ©2019 Ahval News — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 December 2019
Word Count: 1,079
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Most aspects of life changed in Iran after the Islamic Republic replaced the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979. Women’s bodies became the main battlefield for ideological wars.

Just two weeks after the success of the Islamic revolution, Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, cancelled the “Family Protection Act” — which made 18 the minimum age for marriage and imposed some restrictions on polygamy — and passed the compulsory veil law.

On the eve of March 8, International Women’s Day, of the same year, Khomeini said all female government employees would have to wear a veil if they want to go to work. His announcement triggered protests in the streets of Iran, and 5,000-8,000 women demonstrated at the University of Tehran.

Unfortunately, no groups supported those women, and Khomeini’s supporters attacked unveiled women in the streets, pushing pins into their foreheads.

Most left-wing activists at the time were only interested in class war. Fearing that a counter-revolution might erupt, they remained silent. Some of them went so far as to brand women’s demands for equality as “imperialist attempts” to undermine the young revolution.

During the reign of the Pahlavi regime, Western lifestyle and clothing were endorsed. Wearing a scarf was not forbidden but it was not tolerated in government institutions. Women were also objectified then but in a different way: sex and women’s bodies were used for profit.

Khomeini’s regime used images of women in the West to justify its compulsory dress code, which included not only the veil but also a full black cover for women in government intuitions. His regime’s reasoning was that women’s bodies are attractive and can distract men as well as cause people to sin.That was the logic that Khomeini used to objectify women.

Supporters of the Islamic Republic in the 1970s came mainly from conservative families. With new gender segregation regulations and a compulsory body cover in place, these families allowed their female members to participate in public life. But that did not mean women’s lives had improved — it simply meant that women who grew up conservatively were more empowered than other women.

Women with conservative views became members of parliament. Ironically, a female lawmaker Fatemeh Alia, said in 2014: “Women’s duty is to have and raise children; and take care of their husbands and not to watch volleyball.”

Her statement was in response to news of police using force to prohibit women from entering a stadium to watch a volleyball match between Iran and Italy. These women were not only forced to cover up but were denied entering a sports stadium to watch “men playing sports.” Thus women were denied access to public space.

Iran only began allowing women to enter sport stadiums last October after threats from football governing body FIFA over Tehran’s discretionary measures. It took the death of Sahar Khodayari (nicknamed Blue Girl), who set herself on fire in to protest against the ban, to spark international recognition of Iranian women’s plight.

However, the Iranian regime’s move to allow women to enter stadiums came with conditions that show its gender segregated system is still in place: seats, parking spaces, and entrances/exits were all segregated.

The regime uses the excuse that the public’s “culture” is not yet ready to accept women in stadiums. Using the word “culture” in this ambiguous way is a dangerous way to justify gender discrimination.

Unfortunately, these kinds of “cultural” excuses find support from some self-proclaimed “feminists” in academia. Some of them disregard the fact that families or political systems that force women to wear the hijab are a clear expression of patriarchy. They praise the “success” that women achieved in Iran in order to mask the fact that women are still fighting to be liberated from the dress code being imposed on them.

However, the Iranian regime has failed in its bid to hide its women. In the anti-government protests that kicked off in November, Iranian women — like their sisters in Lebanon and Iraq — played a big role, despite Tehran’s attempts to censor them.

Iran’s national television showed women being forced to confess they had received training from foreign countries. It was a clear attempt to try and portray women as lacking agency and as agents of foreign agendas.

Mahmoud Mohammadi Araqi, the representative of the supreme leader in the city of Qum, said Iran’s enemies are distracting Muslims with women and wine. This statement reduces women to an object, like wine, that can be used to manipulate men.

For forty years now, Iranian women have been on the forefront of the fight against the system. This uprising has shown that women will remain a part of the social movement. They are an active part of the community and not objects that others can decide whether to cover or uncover.

Iranian women’s campaign for “Optional Hijab” expresses the view that women have the right to self-determination and control over their bodies. Only women can decide whether they want to wear the hijab or not. It is not a decision men can make on their behalf.

Mona Silavi is an Ahwazi rights activist based in Brussels.

Copyright ©2019 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 December 2019
Word Count: 841
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