BEIRUT — Our continued focus on resolving the facts of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last month is important for four reasons that will impact the fate of the Middle East and U.S. policies there for years to come. We will know soon if the killers are held accountable or the world loses attention, succumbs to the allure of the fortunes of oil and gas, and leaves largely unchanged the current power structures of our region. Which of those routes we take will determine whether we generate a more decent, participatory, accountable, and just region, or fall into a death maelstrom of unchallenged and cruel autocracy where money and guns rule, and citizens enjoy neither rights nor humanity.

The first critical issue is the moral need to identify who ordered and conducted the Khashoggi assassination, hold the criminals accountable, and develop mechanisms that minimize such inhuman deeds in the future. If such a grotesque crime as this is allowed to pass unpunished, the dark quarters and busy killers and jailers of the Arab and Middle East region will continue their deathly deeds with total impunity — and almost always with the explicit or quiet support of major foreign powers like the U.S., UK, France, Russia, Iran and others.

The second important dynamic is the tiny window that has been opened into the shadowy world of decision-making inside Saudi Arabia (and in most other countries in the region, to be fair). For the first time in recent memory, intense discussions are taking place in world capitals to determine who inside the Saudi system did this deed and how to punish them, especially if a direct line of culpability to the office or the person of the Saudi crown prince is identified beyond doubt, including how the crown prince might be relieved of his authority. This has momentous implications in several realms. One is the unprecedented new levers of external accountability that could shape power inside the kingdom, and another is the consequences for regional political contests if the crown prince’s current Saudi domestic and regional policies should suddenly stall or disappear if he is diminished or dismissed.

This touches the third dynamic, which is the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia. One part of this is the bilateral relationship where Washington must determine if it cares to do anything meaningful to show its disagreement with incidents like the Khashoggi murder, or, rather, if it is perfectly satisfied with a symbolic but meaningless slap on the wrist to the Saudi leadership and only some minor adjustments in Saudi policies.

The second, more significant, part of the U.S.-Saudi relationship ties the possibility of the crown prince’s wings being clipped, or he is retired, to the fate of Trumpian Washington’s fantastic grand strategy for Middle Eastern politics and pressures on several fronts simultaneously. This is because in the fantasy world of Kushner-Trump Middle East policy, Saudi Arabia (often in alliance with Israel) is the vital lynchpin around which revolve all major U.S. policies, of which four are paramount: a) the dreamland “deal of the century” for Israeli-Palestinian peace; b) the coordinated Arab-Israeli front to “roll back” Iran in the region; c) the Saudi-led coalition of Arab-Islamic states, with U.S. and foreign support, to fight terrorism (delusionally called the “Arab NATO”); and, d) the policy since 2012, in the wake of the Arab Uprisings, to support autocratic Arab governments and ruling elites that kill any movement towards freedom of expression, participatory and pluralistic politics, free elections, accountability of power, citizenship rights, and an independent civil society. All four of these American core policies across the Middle East region will come crashing down if the Saudi crown prince comes crashing down, which would vilify some Saudis as criminals, and certify the Trump-Kushner team as immature and greedy fools.

The fourth and perhaps most interesting aspect of the post-Khashoggi murder dynamics is the face-off between Turkey and Saudi Arabia. This is both a vicious battle for ideological, cultural, and geo-strategic dominance in the region, and also an old-fashioned negotiation between two wily bazaar merchants trying to outwit each other. In the month since Khashoggi’s murder, the Turks have seriously outwitted the Saudis by using numerous tools in their deep reservoir of nuance, tactics, bargaining, and statecraft that have accumulated in that materially and culturally fertile Anatolian Plain for the past, oh, 4,000 years; while the Saudis have looked like hapless amateurs, as they offer lie after lie and keep changing their story, thereby totally destroying their credibility and stature, and opening themselves up to the sorts of pressures on their internal governance system that are now being examined by many foreign quarters, including the U.S. Congress.

The repercussions of the Khashoggi murder may be with us for years to come, but their full scope and impact will only be known after the facts of the case are verified beyond a doubt, which is what the entire world now should keep working to achieve — because the murder of an innocent man is unacceptable, as is the virtual imprisonment and immobilization of 400 million Arabs who continue to strive for their rights as human beings and citizens of their countries.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow, adjunct professor of journalism, and Journalist in Residence at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2018 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 November 2018

Word Count: 863

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The short answer to the question is neither. As I write, one week before definitive counts in the U.S. elections, the consensus seems to be that they are too close to call. Most analysts believe this is a Trump election in two senses:

First, most voters are choosing their candidates for senator, representative, governor, or lesser offices as a function of their feelings for Donald Trump.

Secondly, the outcomes will affect profoundly Trump’s further political strength.

If the Republicans keep the Senate, they will be able to fill federal judicial offices with probable control for a long time to come. For the anti-Trump coalition this represents catastrophe.

If the Republicans keep the House, even by one vote, they will be able to ensure a fiscal program of their preference. In addition, a Trump victory would make far easier repressive behavior that the anti-Trump forces see as the great danger — another catastrophe.

If Republicans win the gubernatorial elections, they will be able to gerrymander electoral choices to their benefit for at least a decade — a third catastrophe.

Inversely, if the Democrats win the Senate, they can force more so-called moderate nominees to be appointed — ending a dream of the pro-Trump coalition.

If the Democrats win the House of Representatives, they can pursue harassing investigations of Trump and his people, thereby gaining more strength in the presidential elections of 2020 — catastrophe for the pro-Trump forces.

If the Democrats win gubernatorial elections, they can reverse much gerrymandering of the past to their benefit.

Of course, there could be results that are a mixture of these results, with uncertain consequences. Any loss for Trump will weaken still further his power within the Republican Party.

What is wrong with these analyses is the assumption of long survival of the victorious electoral behavior. Office-holders die. People are chased from office. The economic realities change drastically and with such change there often follows a change in political atmosphere, despite previous electoral results.

We must not forget that we are living in the chaotic fluctuations of a structural crisis of the modern world-system. Wild fluctuations are the basic reality. Nothing lasts too long. Catastrophe today, salvation tomorrow. Catastrophe then again.

To be sure, we must still vote as we think best to prevent short-term negatives. But the victories are necessarily short-term — important but never decisive.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2018 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 November 2018

Word Count: 387

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Do you get angrier and angrier with every lie and cover-up on the killing of Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi government, its Arab allies and paid foreign propagandists, and the American president? If you do, I suspect this is because Khashoggi achieved in his life and death something that nobody else in modern history has been able to achieve: Ordinary people, media figures, and politicians throughout the world now appreciate how it feels to be treated like a helpless idiot by an Arab power elite that believes it can manage its citizens with brutality and disdain, without any accountability or consequences.

The intense and escalating political anger around the world about the Khashoggi assassination and cover-up reflects something far more profound than routine lying by public figures. I believe this is because the reaction is really about ourselves — all of us, everywhere — and our feeling of being  insulted, humiliated and dehumanized by power elites that treat us and their own citizens like cattle, idiots who have no rights. We can take a lie, but we cannot take being taken for total, helpless fools.

It is profoundly significant that people around the world now understand a little better what ordinary Arab men and women have endured for the past half a century: the daily, numbing feelings of helplessness, voicelessness, and hopelessness, in almost every walk of life, in the face of power elites that monopolize wealth, rights, and opportunities, and also use violence against anyone who dares to defy them.

It is even worse than this, though, and this captures what Jamal Khashoggi and thousands of other brave Arab men and women have struggled for unsuccessfully in the past 50 years, since security and military officers fully captured power in Arab states around 1970-75: The ghastly reality of modern Arab governance is that the power elites not only want to define what we citizens are allowed to do; they also want to control what we think, feel, and speak. The modern Arab security state has disfigured the dignity and ancient nobility of Arab-Islamic culture by giving incompetent, uncaring thought control colonels the authority to attempt to re-wire our brains, restrict our minds, dictate our identities, and turn us all into servile, mindless, heartless robots. We can handle their taking our money, but we cannot handle their taking our humanity.

Perhaps the intense anger against the Saudi and American leaderships for their grotesque cover-up and lies about the Khashoggi killing mirrors the similar reactions across the Arab region to the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in southwestern Tunisia some eight years ago, which sparked a pan-Arab uprising of citizens who demanded their human dignity along with their citizenship. Now millions around the world understand how, why, and when something in that inviolable sacred space between our gut and our heart that makes us fully human refuses to be totally silenced, whether by the foolishness of ministers of information, the ignominy of unqualified presidents, or the macabre handiwork of bone saw operators.

Our gruesome, painful legacy of foreign-backed, long-running Arab authoritarianism must be shattered and buried. It is clear now that only a combination of Arab public activism with allied international solidarity will get this job done. Interested observers therefore might ponder the four critical dimensions of the Khashoggi situation.

First is the attitude of the Saudi Arabian government to deal with its citizens with brutality, disdain and lies, and cover up its crimes with lying propaganda and commercial inducements — all of which reflects a wider Arab problem that has reached breaking point. Second is the terrifying specter of alliances among governments like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and the Trumpian United States to camouflage criminality and emasculation of the citizenry by appeals to unproven “security” imperatives and commercial gain. Third — the nightmare for the 400 million Arabs who will continue to suffer these agonies well after the West loses interest — is the confirmation yet again of the combination of authoritarianism, militarism, cruelty, and utter, sustained, incompetence that defines the governance legacy of most Arab power elites and governments. Fourth is that these destructive hereditary Arab autocracies are explicitly supported by Western, Asian, and non-Arab Middle Eastern governments that value arms sales and strategic transit routes for their imperial interests above anything else, including the 400 million mangled, mind-shriveled Arabs who refuse to cede their humanity to the rule of the bone saw.

Millions of people and many officials around the world, for the first time ever, now feel in their bones these same sentiments that have turned many Arab societies into dysfunctional, dilapidated wrecks — where 260 million of the 400 million Arabs live in poverty and vulnerability, unable to buy essential survival goods for their families that are doomed to chronic poverty and marginalization for generations to come. Jamal Khashoggi would be pleased to learn one day that his life and death might have sparked that global coalition of sensible people who can work together to transform the Arab region into stable, prosperous, and decent societies — ones that could be freed once and forever of the symbols of the bone saw, the torture rooms, the jailed tweeters, the disappeared human rights activists, and the mind-control colonels who manage these gut-wrenching new symbols of Arab mis-governance that pierce that inviolable space between our gut and our heart, whose agonies are now heard and shared around the world.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow, adjunct professor of journalism, and Journalist in Residence at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2018 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 October 2018

Word Count: 896

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BOSTON — I have followed closely in the United States the unusually sharp reactions to the apparent abduction and possible murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. This is as heartening as it is unusual. It may also miss the point about the deeper meaning of Jamal Khashoggi’s life and work.

We have never seen such an outpouring of public and political anger in the United States that now demands answers from the Saudi Arabian government about what happened to him. Yet I fear this also encapsulates a deep, dark, black hole of selective, occasional, and personalized moral and political outrage that ignores — and perhaps perpetuates — the true crimes and pressures that plague all journalists and ordinary citizens across the Arab world.

The Khashoggi case is only the latest and most severe of tens of thousands of cases of Arab men and women who have been detained, imprisoned, tortured, and in some cases killed by their own governments or domestic political movements — usually for the “crime” or “security threat” of speaking their mind independently, offering views that differ from the state’s positions, or simply refusing to parrot the government’s propaganda.

The ghastly kidnapping and/or killing of Khashoggi — especially if it has been ordered by the Saudi leadership, which remains an unconfirmed accusation — absolutely deserves the international attention it is getting. Yet this attention will remain transient, deeply flawed, and lacking credibility if it does not translate into a more serious effort to join hands with brave Arab men and women across our region who continue to struggle for the freedoms, rights, and basic dignities that are denied to us by those very governments that the U.S. and other world powers support almost absolutely.

This is a pivotal moment because of both the nature of the crime and the nature of the victim. The single most important basic human right that has been denied the Arab citizen, in my view, has been the right of freedom of expression. It is telling that many reforms across the Arab region in administrative, commercial, judicial, educational, gender, and, even occasionally, security sectors have not touched the home-based Arab mass media, which remains under the licensing and legal thumbs of governments and security agencies.

Consequently, the Arab security state’s insistence on treating its nationals like robots and parrots may well have been the single greatest detriment to the normal, stable, equitable national development of our Arab countries since the 1950s — when army officers seized power and gradually steered the region towards its current fate of tensions, violence, disparities and mass emigration of tens of thousands of our brightest young people, who refuse to acquiesce in their own dehumanization and mass mind control experiments.

Khashoggi would not quietly accept life in an Arab region of 400 million people who are not allowed by their governments to use their entire brain for cultural, political, intellectual, scientific, discovery, or just entertainment purposes. He understood that Arabs who could speak their minds and debate their common public conditions would eventually play the major role in ending the multiple economic and political miseries that plague us today.

Societies wither and states fragment and collapse when their human element shrivels because it is not allowed to use its brain to express opinions, engage in public discussions, and offer suggestions for how to resolve the few problems we faced before we entered the era of the security state some half a century ago. Freedom of expression does not mean political opposition plots, security threats, or sinister foreign conspiracies, as most Arab governments frame the accusations they make against those citizens whom they torment, deter, detain, expel, imprison, indict, and, in some cases, torture and kill.

The added dilemma is that Arab governments that prevent their citizens from thinking and speaking freely do so by following their own laws, which allow them to abuse citizens in the ways that prevail today. Jamal Khashoggi understood this and sought in vain to find a way to achieve normalcy, dignity, integrity, and fraternity in our Arab societies, working within the established state system. For years he worked within the limits of what his Saudi government deemed permissible, cooperating closely with government officials and organizations to try to achieve a more equitable society that treated all its citizens decently. He fled abroad when he realized he could not achieve his goals, and felt his life was in danger.

I am sure that if Jamal Khashoggi could speak today, he would ask those individuals and institutions in the world that genuinely care about his fate and legacy to do this: Turn your faces towards those masses of ordinary Arab men and women who are suspended in the impenetrable zones of their own dehumanization, at the hands of those state powers that are vehemently supported by the American, British, Israeli, Iranian, Turkish, Russian and many other foreign governments.

I suspect he would remind those who now clamor for information about him that this case is not mainly about him. He is just the most visible and tragic — but heroic — tip of the iceberg of hundreds of millions of Arab citizens who are denied their voice, and therefore their humanity, but who persist in their struggle to regain that humanity. They languish in Arab jails in their tens of thousands in most Arab countries, and in their tens of millions they wander across Arab lands like mindless robots, comprising that deep, dark hole where the selective, occasional moral and political outrage we hear today from the U.S. and other lands refuses to tread.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow, adjunct professor of journalism, and Journalist in Residence at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2018 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 October 2018

Word Count: 922

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For rights and permissions, contact:

rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757

Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, The Arab Weekly and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.

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The only one who cares if Kavanaugh is appointed is Kavanaugh himself, who has wanted this job all his life. For everyone else, he’s just a pawn in what the others — Republicans and Democrats alike — really care about, which is the Senatorial elections this coming November.

The crucial thing is to have a majority in the Senate in order to appoint or not appoint a right-wing Republican to this lifelong job. If Trump or the Republicans in the Senate have to sacrifice Kavanaugh to achieve this, they will do it. What everyone is trying to figure out is what will swing a small number of voters in a small number of states, such that their party’s candidate will win a majority in the Senate. There is no consensus on the tactics required to do this.

I know everyone says that a defeat of Kavanaugh will be a great victory for the Democrats, and so it seems. But if they don’t gain the majority in the fall elections, Trump will simply nominate another ultra-rightist person. And if they do win the majority, Trump will have to appoint a more “moderate” person or he will not pass.

Kavanaugh knows this, which is why he’s so angry. And Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer knows it too, which is why he’s being so cautious.  In the meantime, everyone is shouting loudly with rhetoric in which they half believe. But behind rhetoric there is always reality. And the reality is that Kavanaugh is just a pawn.

Did he engage in drunken attempted rape when he was 17, and did he then lie about it? The evidence that he did seems to me pretty strong.

But so what? If Trump appoints another ultra-rightist who is pure as the driven snow, will that be better? I don’t think so. So, as always, let us keep our eyes on the ball and not on the diversions.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2018 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 October 2018

Word Count: 318

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For rights and permissions, contact:

rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757

Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, The Arab Weekly and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.

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The sacking of a German domestic intelligence chief over his public comments on far-right unrest underlines the extent to which the migration debate is roiling Europe. It is turning governments, state agencies, cities, communities and family units into camps — Us versus Them, anti-migrant versus pro-migrant.

The rivalry is over the merits of non-white, non-Christian migration to Europe and the morality of white ethno-nationalism.

In the Us or anti-migrant camp should probably be counted Hans-Georg Maassen, who, until September 18, led Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. It was founded after the second world war to prevent the rise anew of ideologically racist political forces such as the Nazis.

Though Maassen’s job was to surveil the far-right, he seems to have been surprisingly well-loved by them. Alexander Gauland, co-leader of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, described Maassen “as a very good top official” and praised him for having the “courage” to criticise German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “misdirected asylum policy.”

The reference was to Maassen’s public contradiction of Merkel, who condemned far-right harassment of dark-skinned people in Chemnitz in eastern Germany. Chemnitz, where the Nazi concentration camp of Flossenburg was located, has been in a ferment since August 26. After a German man was stabbed to death allegedly by an Iraqi and a Syrian, the far-right began protesting, in ever more baleful ways. There have been numerous accounts from Middle Easterners in Chemnitz of vigilantes throwing bottles, firecrackers and insults at them.

The targeting of dark-skinned people in Chemnitz is similar to the rash of attacks on Moroccans, Senegalese and other immigrants in Italy after the far-right League party entered the government. Anti-racism groups in Italy say there were 12 shootings, two killings and 33 physical assaults from June 1-August 1 compared to nine attacks but no shootings or deaths for the same period in 2017.

In Germany, Merkel has been trying to prevent such behaviour from becoming normalised. She criticised the “hounding” of migrants in Chemnitz, only to be contradicted by Maassen, who said such videos were “targeted misinformation.” Maassen earned fulsome praise from the far-right as a “rare, responsible” voice of “truth” while moderate German politicians questioned his neutrality.

Also in the anti-migrant Us camp, for reasons that have everything to do with base electoral politics, is German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer. He has supported Maassen in the public spat with Merkel by finding him a plum new job as his deputy.

Seehofer’s motives are obvious. Migration is a hot-button issue on his Christian Social Union party’s home turf, Bavaria, which goes to the polls October 14. Bavaria was one of the main entry routes to Germany for Syrian refugees in 2015 and 2016 and the AfD is constantly reminding Bavarians of that.

Polls suggest the AfD will do well enough to enter the Bavarian parliament and that Seehofer’s party will lose its legislative majority. This is why Seehofer is determined to talk and act tough on migration, leaning as far to the right as he dares without fusing with the AfD.

It is not just electoral politics that is fundamentally altered — even disfigured — by tensions over migration at every level of society and government.

The raging culture wars in Germany, which have drawn in everyone from the chancellor downward, have dangerous implications. The use of “fake news” as a label to dismiss evidence of far-right criminality erodes citizens’ trust in their government and security services. Merkel’s tenuous coalition gets steadily weaker. The proclivities of senior ministers and intelligence officials in Europe’s biggest economy start to seem suspect. So, too, the sympathies of a key domestic agency meant to prevent the shame and horror of a second Holocaust, this time, say with dark-skinned migrants and Muslims.

In Italy, Carla Nespolo, president of an anti-fascist group, has said it straight off: “Migrants in Italy have taken the place of Jews during fascism. This is one of the most far-right governments since the end of fascism.” As for Germany, Maassen’s AfD admirer, Gauland, has already referred to Nazi rule as a mere “bird poop” in history, an irrelevance.

Germany’s problems, just like those of Italy, cannot be seen in isolation and their response can no longer be dismissed as a temporary slide. Dark-skinned foreigners, whether seeking jobs or asylum, will continue to make for Europe. As a report from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation noted, by 2050, deprivation, violence and insecurity will have become worse in parts of Africa. This inevitably means a continuing, if not greater flow to Europe.

What happens then? Pitched battles in the streets? Concentration camps?

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

Copyright ©2018 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 September 2018

Word Count: 764

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LONDON — The results of the Swedish elections confirm that far-right, anti-migrant sentiment remains a force in Europe. With several important European elections, including in Belgium, Denmark and Finland, as well as European Parliament elections, scheduled for next year, the far-right anti-migrant populist wave has yet to break.

Preliminary results, which were being contested and recounted days after the September 9 election, the far-right Sweden Democrats won more than 17% of the vote, picking up 63 seats in the 349-seat Swedish parliament, the Riksdag.

This means the Sweden Democrats, a party that has roots in fascism and white nationalism and that campaigned on a strong anti-migrant and particularly anti-Muslim platform, is the third-largest party in the country.

The ruling centre-left coalition of the Social Democrats, Greens and Left Party won 40.6% of the vote. The opposition centre-right coalition, including the Moderates, the Christian Democrats, the Centre Party and the Liberals, claimed 40.3% of the vote. The split guarantees the Sweden Democrats a strong role in the negotiations over forming a new government in Sweden.

Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, leader of the Social Democrats, said he intended to remain prime minister. He called on other “responsible” parties not to engage with the Sweden Democrats, dubbing it “a party with roots in Nazism” that would “never offer anything but hatred.”

The Sweden Democrats’ policies focus on migration and the party campaigned for an overhaul of the immigration system, greatly reducing the number of immigrants entering the country and imposing a strict integration process on those who do. The party has also been outspoken regarding Islam, alarming Sweden’s Muslim community, which makes up an estimated 8% of the country’s 10 million population.

Sweden Democrats Chairman Jimmie Akesson, 39, previously described Muslims as the “greatest foreign threat” Sweden has faced since the second world war.

In recent years, Akesson has sought to clean up the image of the party, expelling members who openly espoused neo-Nazi views and changing the party’s logo from a flaming torch to a friendly blue and yellow flower. While this has paid dividends at the ballot box, Sweden’s mainstream political parties are loth to deal with the Sweden Democrats.

“We have a moral responsibility [not to ally with the Sweden Democrats],” Lofven said after the elections. “We must gather all good forces. We won’t mourn. We will organise ourselves.”

Both the centre-left and centre-right blocs confirmed they would refuse to consider the Sweden Democrats as a coalition partner. However, even if as seems likely the Sweden Democrats remain on the outside of government, the policies the party advocates, particularly regarding migration, have entered the mainstream.

Popular sentiment towards migration has shifted radically in Sweden over the last few years, particularly post-2015 when Sweden took in proportionally more refugees than Germany.

In November 2015, Lofven’s centre-left government-initiated curbs on refugee immigration, citing the unprecedented number of asylum applications it had received and the huge pressures Sweden’s social services were facing.

Prior to the 2014 influx, the party had advocated open borders. During the latest election campaign, the Social Democrats stumbled to articulate a clear message on migration, leaving the door open for the Sweden Democrats to monopolise the issue.

The centre-right opposition has also adopted an increasingly hard-line position on migration since 2015. In late 2014, Moderate Party leader Fredrik Reinfeldt called on the Swedish people to “open their hearts” to large-scale immigration. One year later, the party, the largest of the four parties in the centre-right bloc, completely shifted its position, advocating for tough new rules for immigrants, including stricter requirements for family reunification and cuts in welfare benefits.

Whether the far-right Sweden Democrats have become part of the mainstream or not is immaterial, anti-migrant sentiment is becoming increasingly normalised, across Europe.

Mahmud el-Shafey is an Arab Weekly correspondent in London. You can follow him on twitter @mahmudelshafey

Copyright ©2018 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 September 2018

Word Count: 622

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There are two things concerning Donald Trump about which everyone, friends and foes, seem to agree. No one can be sure what he will tweet next. And he wants to stay in power

Trump has made three risky geopolitical bets: He will get North Korea to denuclearize. He will be able to force Iran to renounce any attempt to have nuclear weapons. He will dismantle NAFTA to the benefit of the United States.

It is totally unlikely that he will achieve the first two at all. It is at best marginally possible that he will replace NAFTA with a more advantageous arrangement for the United States.

So then comes the second certainty. He wants to remain in power. If his bets all fail, what will he do to remain in power? Here there is no agreement, either among friends or foes. One group thinks he is pathologically mad and would pull down the world with him. The other group says that he would modify his priorities in order to remain in power.

So the risks turn out to be ours. Do we bet on his pathology or on his self-interest? If we choose the wrong one, we lose and lose in a big way. We cannot bet on both kinds of response from Trump. It is one or the other.

To resume: Trump will fail in his risky bets. He will respond in some way. But which? I tend to favor the self-interest prediction. But I’m frightened about being wrong.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2018 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 September 2018

Word Count: 275

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LONDON — With reports of a radical neo-Nazi group gaining strength in Nordic countries and recent far-right, anti-migrant protesters in Germany performing a Nazi salute, many expressed fears that neo-Nazism could be on the rise in Europe.

The neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM) has seen its profile raised after its protests and marches. The group, founded in Sweden 21 years ago, has chapters in Finland, Norway, Iceland and Denmark.

Increased scrutiny of NRM comes not just following reports of its members confronting — sometimes violently — migrants and refugees but because the group is to compete in its first elections in Sweden.

The group is open about its admiration for Nazism. NRM Swedish leader Simon Lindberg, in an interview with Russia Today, described Adolf Hitler as a “very, very good person for the German people.”

“He did what was necessary to secure his people’s freedom,” Lindberg said. “We’re National Socialists, as Hitler was, and we do whatever it takes to take our nation back.”

Researchers at the Centre for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo said NMR membership was relatively low but has been growing in recent years, possibly because of rising anti-migrant sentiment.

“The NRM has been growing slowly but surely since the group was established in the late 1990s. Until now, the group has not had any ambitions about growing fast. They have been more concerned with recruiting capable and dedicated members,” said Jacob Aasland Ravndal, a postdoctoral fellow at C-REX.

The NRM is to participate in Swedish elections on September 9. Although the party is not expected to pass the 4% threshold to enter parliament, many expressed dismay that a party that openly espouses neo-Nazi views is participating in elections.

“Whether this [recruitment] might change with [its] parliamentary debut is too early to conclude. My prediction would be that [NRM] might still grow a little but that [its] extreme, fundamentalist and highly conspiratorial worldview has limited appeal to a relatively well-educated and rather liberal and modern people,” Ravndal said.

He acknowledged that Swedish authorities faced a dilemma in how to handle NRM because banning the group would drive its members underground, giving them more legitimacy among supporters.

He said Swedish authorities should treat NRM as they would any other political group, as long as it acts within the law. “However, once it moves beyond that, which [the group does] frequently, swift reactions with clear consequences are needed,” Ravndal said.

Germany is on the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of dealing with neo-Nazi groups. Despite that, far-right, anti-migrant protests in Germany have been much larger than similar events in Scandinavia, drawing thousands of supporters, including many who flashed illegal Nazi-era salutes.

Protests in Chemnitz in eastern Germany involved 6,000 people protesting the death of a German national in a fight involving foreign nationals. Two men — a Syrian and Iraqi — are in custody suspected of stabbing and killing a 35-year-old man.

Chemnitz has a strong presence of far-right anti-immigration parties and groups, including the Alternative for Germany party and the Pegida movement, supporters of whom flocked to rallies in the city.

The situation in Germany is far from clear-cut, with much being made about the fact that the victim of the stabbing was a second-generation immigrant of mixed German and Cuban parentage.

A half-Cuban woman who grew up with the victim, Nancy Larssen, complained that many in the media were misrepresenting the crime, fuelling the anti-migrant far-right protest.

“It’s sad that, in the media, they’re just saying that a German has died and that’s why all the neo-Nazis and hooligans are out but the media should describe who died and what skin colour he had because I don’t think they’d be doing all this if they knew,” she told Deutsche Welle.

Germany authorities sought to calm the furore in Chemnitz, including investigating protesters performing the Nazi salute and checking how arrest warrants in the stabbing case were leaked to the media.

A statement August 28 from the office of German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for calm.

“We don’t tolerate such unlawful assemblies and the hounding of people who look different or have different origins and attempts to spread hatred on the streets,” the statement said.

“That has no place in our cities and we, as the German government, condemn it in the strongest terms. Our basic message for Chemnitz and beyond is that there is no place in Germany for vigilante justice, for groups that want to spread hatred on the streets, for intolerance and for extremism.”

However, protests were still raging days later with demonstrators giving the Nazi salute and chanting “Germany for the Germans. Foreigners out.”

Mahmud el-Shafey is an Arab Weekly correspondent in London. You can follow him on twitter @mahmudelshafey

Copyright ©2018 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 September 2018

Word Count: 771

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Most of us receive daily news by reading some set of headlines available to us. We tend to classify these headlines as good or bad news about our local community, our country, or the world as a whole.

But what is good news or bad news? The most obvious question to ask is: good news or bad news for whom? It is not at all simple to answer that question.

If we discuss the daily news with someone whom we think shares our values, our multiple identities, and our socioeconomic status, we often discover that this very compatible friend or neighbor had drawn different conclusions about whether a particular piece of news is good or bad. Obviously this other is including additional measures.

There are many questions about any sort of measurement of goodness. First of all, we probably have an implicit scale of one to ten. We probably search for news that is very high or very low and dump the rest as not important, calling it the Establishment.

That still doesn’t get us very far. Let us say we want an answer in terms of a left-right scale. Within a large field on the right or the left, there are always people who denounce others that claim “extreme” positions as practicers of sham or pretense. There seem never to be secure holding of the position furthest to the left or to the right.

Take some recent debates. Is a denunciation of Pope Francis good news or bad news for the left?

Are the maneuvers of Lula’s supporters to get his name included on electronic ballots good or bad for the Brazilian or Latin American left?

Are the so far successful efforts in South Africa to limit the support to Julius Malema a victory for the left or right?

Are China’s attempts to build a single trade path across much of the world an effort of the left or the right?

Should the left be applauding Trump’s efforts to disband NAFTA, a structure that the left had previously denounced, or be dismayed because it furthers Trump’s objectives?

Is BREXIT a left operation or an ultra-right one?

Each of these issues merits a long, detailed, comprehensive analysis. But is it worth it? Does it matter?

It matters to all who believe that the world-system is in structural crisis and that therefore the highly volatile and analytically obscure chaotic realities are in fact the essential battleground of the world left and the world right. Analytic clarity makes more likely a victory in the battle. Just reading headlines is simply not enough.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).

Copyright ©2018 Immanuel Wallerstein — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 September 2018

Word Count: 430

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