Group items tagged

Definition Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).

B. Israel and Palestine: examples that, on the face of it, are antisemiticApplying the symbols, images and negative stereotypes of classical antisemitism (see guidelines 2 and 3) to the State of Israel.Holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s conduct or treating Jews, simply because they are Jewish, as agents of Israel.Requiring people, because they are Jewish, publicly to condemn Israel or Zionism (for example, at a political meeting).Assuming that non-Israeli Jews, simply because they are Jews, are necessarily more loyal to Israel than to their own countries.Denying the right of Jews in the State of Israel to exist and flourish, collectively and individually, as Jews, in accordance with the principle of equality.

C. Israel and Palestine: examples that, on the face of it, are not antisemitic(whether or not one approves of the view or action)Supporting the Palestinian demand for justice and the full grant of their political, national, civil and human rights, as encapsulated in international law.Criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism, or arguing for a variety of constitutional arrangements for Jews and Palestinians in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. It is not antisemitic to support arrangements that accord full equality to all inhabitants “between the river and the sea,” whether in two states, a binational state, unitary democratic state, federal state, or in whatever form.Evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state. This includes its institutions and founding principles. It also includes its policies and practices, domestic and abroad, such as the conduct of Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, the role Israel plays in the region, or any other way in which, as a state, it influences events in the world. It is not antisemitic to point out systematic racial discrimination. In general, the same norms of debate that apply to other states and to other conflicts over national self-determination apply in the case of Israel and Palestine. Thus, even if contentious, it is not antisemitic, in and of itself, to compare Israel with other historical cases, including settler-colonialism or apartheid.Boycott, divestment and sanctions are commonplace, non-violent forms of political protest against states. In the Israeli case they are not, in and of themselves, antisemitic.Political speech does not have to be measured, proportional, tempered, or reasonable to be protected under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and other human rights instruments. Criticism that some may see as excessive or contentious, or as reflecting a “double standard,” is not, in and of itself, antisemitic. In general, the line between antisemitic and non-antisemitic speech is different from the line between unreasonable and reasonable speech.

a project of modern coexistence that not only had to be imagined and designed, but also built

to trace how an extraordinary idea of Muslim and Christian and Jewish civic and political community rooted in secular equality went from unimaginability to ubiquity in the course of a single century, and nowhere more so than in the Arab East after 1860

subject to conflicting interpretations that valorized “real” religion and demonized sectarianism, often in contradictory and conservative modes, but also in more liberal and even radical ways

The Orientalist view of sectarianism frequently analogizes sect as “like race” and, furthermore, it assumes that sectarian differences are inherent cultural and political differences similar to race. What do you think is the relationship of sect to race?  How should race figure in the story of coexistence you relate?

the Orientalists idealize the West in order to Orientalize the East. Second, as you suggest, this view transforms religious pluralism in the Middle East into a structure of age-old monolithic antagonistic communities so that one can speak of medieval and modern Maronites, Jews, Muslims and so on as if these have been unchanging communities and as if all ideological diversity in the Middle East ultimately is reducible to religion and religious community

The religious sect is conflated with the political sect; the secular is understood to be a thin veneer that conceals the allegedly “real” and unchanging religious essence of the Middle East. This view is dangerous, misleading and tendentious.

both race and sect urgently need to be historicized and contextualized—race belongs to US (and Western) political vocabulary; sect to Arab political vocabulary. Both the notion of age-old sects and that of immutable races are ideological fictions that have been manipulated to serve power

US scholars Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields have suggested we think of “racecraft” rather than “race relations” to underscore the ideological fundament of racist thinking that appears totally natural to its proponents. As I allude to in my book, so too might we think of “sectcraft” rather than sectarian or communal relations, both to underscore the ideological aspect of sectarianism and to emphasize the amount of work that goes into making sectarianism appear to be inherent, inevitable and unchangeable

Tribalism, communalism and sectarianism all refer to parallel formations in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East respectively that assume an unchanging essence that separates members of a single sovereignty or putative sovereignty. They are all static ideological interpretations of pluralism, and have all, to a greater or lesser degree, been massively influenced and even in many ways formally classified and invented by Western colonial powers

many scholars gravitate toward using categories and experiences that emerge in the US context and apply them, sometimes indiscriminately and often very problematically, to other parts of the world. I think it is important at some level to respect the fact that in the modern Middle East, progressive scholars and laypeople, men and women belonging to different religious communities, have throughout the twentieth century typically described and conceptualized their struggles against injustice and tyranny as struggles against sectarianism and colonialism, but not necessarily as a struggle against racism.

the national polities of the post-Ottoman period in the Arab East were established by European colonial powers. These European powers massively distorted the ecumenical trajectory evident in the late Ottoman Arab East. First, they broke up the region into dependent and weak states, and second, they divided the region along explicitly sectarian lines

the colonial dimension is crucial, and it clearly separates the US and the European period of nationalization from that of the colonized Middle East

why the investment in and privileging of certain epistemic categories of domination as opposed to others? The question of migrant labor illustrates how race and class and geography and history are intertwined in very specific ways—the Middle Eastern cases (whether the Gulf or in Lebanon) are indeed different from that of the history of migrant labor in the United States, which has always been implicated in settler colonialism.

One key difference, of course, between modern Western colonialism and early modern Islamic empires is that the latter, like their early modern Christian counterparts, did not pretend to uphold liberal representation, political equality or self-determination. So, temporality is one essential difference: ethnic, racist or sectarian discrimination in the Islamic empires was not justified or imagined as a benevolent burden to uplift others into an ostensibly equal level of civilization. There was no pretense of a colonial tutelage to help natives achieve independence in the fullness of time

In the Ottoman Islamic empire, there were indeed professions of Islamic superiority, notions of ethnic, tribal and religious discrimination, forms of bondage and slavery, and myriad chauvinisms and prejudices tied to kinship, geography, language, culture and ethnicity and so on, but not a notion of biological racism or the obsession with racial segregation and miscegenation that has been the hallmark of modern Western colonialism

a new and distinctive defensiveness among leading Muslim Arab intellectuals—that is, their need to defend Islam and Islamic society from missionary and colonial assault whilst also embracing or reconciling themselves to compatriotship with Arab Christians and Jews. This defensiveness persists

the great problem of scholars and governments in the West who have long instrumentalized and Orientalized discrimination against non-Muslims to suggest that there is some peculiar problem with Islam and Muslims

I think that scholars of gender and women’s history have a lot to teach us in this regard: that is Arab, Turkish, Iranian and other scholars who have explored the long history of gender discrimination—who have defied the fundamentalists—without succumbing to racist Orientalism or self-loathing

really historicize! It really is an effective antidote in the face of those who peddle in chauvinism, racism, sectarianism, tribalism and communalism

The profile of the Macron-appointed author of the report gives a clue as to why it is so one-sided. Historian Benjamin Stora is an academic based in Paris, not Algiers. Moreover, he comes from a family that fled Algeria along with hundreds of thousands of European colonists in 1962. Like almost all the one million settlers of European origin, who were known as pieds–noirs (Black Feet), Stora’s family was ultimately displaced by members of the indigenous Arab Muslim and Berber communities who continue to inhabit Algeria to this day.

This caricature goes back to the early days of colonization, when Arab Muslims were considered morally inferior to Christians.

in the introduction to his supposedly historical inquiry, Stora focuses not on colonial-era savagery, but on the brutal recent attacks carried out in France by Islamist terrorists. He specifically refers to heinous crimes that are wholly unrelated to Algeria, including the beheading of a schoolteacher by a Russian passport-holder in a Paris suburb, and three killings of Roman Catholic churchgoers by a Tunisian immigrant in the southern city of Nice.

What Stora is doing is echoing a contentious Macron speech on what the president calls Islamist “separatism” from last October, in which he spoke about “the traumas” of France’s “colonial past”—and particularly the Algerian War—“feeding unspoken resentments,” which allegedly radicalize youths and lead to terrorist attacks.

Macron considered Stora to be the right scholar to shed light on a vexed subject that still affects those living in the largest country in Africa by land mass, and their diaspora, which is estimated at about 800,000 in France.

an unrelenting conflict that became a full-blown war in 1954. Algerians estimate that it claimed 1.5 million of their citizens, including those fighting with the FLN, or National Liberation Front. The dead included men, women, and children who were indiscriminately obliterated by French carpet-bombing.

Of the 1.5 million military personnel mobilized throughout the War, the French lost some 25,000 soldiers, as well as up to 3,000 pieds-noirs militias and as many as 150,000 Harkis (Algerians who collaborated with the colonizers).

Colonial repression tactics were imported from Algeria to mainland France when up to 300 Algerian men taking part in a peaceful pro-independence demonstration were shot, beaten up, and tortured to death or drowned in the Seine in Paris, many in full public view, by police on one night—on Oct. 17, 1961. Scores of lifeless bodies washed up for weeks afterwards.

Up until 1999, the French government was still calling the war itself “operations to maintain order” or merely “the events.” The problem, therefore, is acknowledging the evidence that exists, rather than “finding” it. The French have the complete archives, but object to full disclosure.

The Algerian government has asked Abdelmadjid Chikhi, the director general of the National Centre of Algerian Archives, to conduct his own inquiry alongside Stora and wants the restitution of their entire colonial archives from Paris.

Much of the opposition to rigorous research comes from those with a background in the Front National (FN), the far-right party founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, an Algerian War veteran who was linked to acts of torture and who is now a convicted racist and Holocaust denier.

Le Pen’s early political goal was to lobby on behalf of the hugely bitter pieds-noirs class who had swapped their colonial lifestyles for far more modest ones in mainland France. Such far-right nostalgists now rally behind Le Pen’s daughter, Marine Le Pen. She renamed the FN the Rassemblement National (RN), but it has lost none of its antipathy toward Algerians.

The toothless Stora report feigns an interest in justice while whitewashing colonial crimes; it shows Macron is doing everything to try to win over Le Pen supporters

the forces protecting the status quo, and thus Morocco’s ongoing colonization of Western Sahara, remain durable

If formal talks have been sporadic and often lacked clear outcomes, the parties have been pursuing other initiatives in the past few years. Polisario has achieved favorable outcomes in legal cases calling into question Morocco’s exploitation of resources from a non self-governing territory.[3] Morocco is focused on increasing its reach and influence in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa. In January 2017 the Kingdom rejoined the Africa Union, which it had left in protest at the admission of SADR in 1984.

Algeria not only hosts the exiled SADR government, but also the thousands of Western Saharans who were exiled by Morocco’s invasion in 1975 and who now number 173,000.

In the world after the September 11 attacks, the North Atlantic community, led by Paris and Washington, began to view the stability provided by the UN mission in Western Sahara as an end in itself. Since at least 2004, the Council—unable to take independence off the table (because of international law) yet unwilling to force Morocco to contemplate it (because of geopolitics)—has opted to keep the parties talking in the hopes that a new reality will someday emerge.

Facing a Moroccan military invasion of its desert colony and with the dictator Franco on his deathbed in October 1975, Spain abandoned its plans for a plebiscite and arranged for Morocco and Mauritania to divide the territory. Mauritania renounced its claim in 1979 and later recognized the government for Western Sahara which the pro-independence Polisario Front founded in 1976, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). War between Morocco, supported by France and the United States, and the Polisario Front, backed by Algeria, lasted until a ceasefire was established in 1991, which still holds today.

While this consensus-based process has been part of the dynamic reinforcing a status quo that has provided international political cover for Morocco’s ongoing colonization and economic exploitation of Western Sahara, it has rarely been met with anything short of a unanimous vote from the entire Security Council and especially the Permanent Five. In breaking with this tradition, the US resolution elicited almost unprecedented abstentions from two permanent members of the Security Council with little historical interest in the Western Sahara issue, China and Russia, as well as the de facto AU representative on the Council, Ethiopia, a state that also recognizes SADR.

Operating under Chapter VI of the UN charter, the only material leverage the Security Council has in Western Sahara is to tie the fate of MINURSO’s peacekeeping force to progress at the negotiating table. The Council, however, has always been loath to terminate a mission that appears to be keeping the peace in Western Sahara. In past few years, several nearby countries—Mali, Chad, Niger, Libya, and Nigeria—have witnessed increasing levels of terrorism and armed conflict which have raised international concerns about the possible destabilizing effects of a UN withdrawal from Western Sahara.

the new US attitude toward Western Sahara appears to be driven by John Bolton, who became Trump’s National Security Advisor shortly before the April vote on MINURSO. Bolton has a long history with the Western Sahara conflict, from his days in heading the State Department’s UN office at the end of the Cold War, to serving as an aide to Baker’s Western Sahara mission in the late 1990s, to his controversial interim appointment as the US representative to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006. It is no secret that Bolton has been sympathetic toward Polisario, a cause that became popular among the UN-bashing conservatives in the mid-1990s. While Bolton’s “get tough” approach to Western Sahara might be framed in terms of sensible UN cost-cutting, his recent statements on the issue, where he framed the Western Sahara question as a simple matter of organizing a vote on independence, have sent the Moroccan diplomatic corps, Washington D.C. lobbyists and media apparatus into a frenzy.

There has been no fundamental change to the basic geopolitical architecture of the conflict to suggest that Morocco and Polisario Front are more willing to accept an outcome they view as existential annihilation (respectively, independence for Western Sahara or some kind of political-economic integration with Morocco).

the Sahrawi nationalist movement benefits from a safe haven in Algeria, which serves as a base for pro-independence Sahrawi activism. Recent years have seen this activism flourishing beyond the refugee camps in Algeria: in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, in the Sahrawi diaspora, and in social media campaigns. The “supply” side of Sahrawi nationalist demand for self-determination seems assured.

France has supported Moroccan efforts to decouple MINUSRSO’s primary and secondary functions. Though MINURSO ostensibly exists to facilitate a political solution that respects Western Sahara’s right of self-determination, its secondary peacekeeping function has effectively provided international cover for Morocco’s ongoing colonization of the territory since 1991.

Sahrawi activists contesting Moroccan rule continue to provide substantive documentation, now easily circulated by social media, that the Moroccan authorities commit human rights abuses against nationalist Sahrawis.[4] Troublingly, MINURSO is one a few UN peacekeeping missions in the world whose mandate does not include a provision for human rights monitoring, due in large part to French protection on the Security Council. Similarly, some Sahrawis in the Moroccan-controlled territory continue to voice grievances that the economic investment and development of the territory under the auspices of Morocco does not benefit the Sahrawi population but instead go to Moroccan settlers, corporations, and political-economic oligarchs of the makhzan.

Kahanists are the FBI’s prime suspects in the 1985 assassination of popular Palestinian-American activist Alex Odeh who died in a bombing outside Los Angeles because he called for a two-state solution (which became the official policy of the US government less than a decade later).[2] Odeh’s murder had far-reaching implications, scaring off a generation of Arab-American activists from advocating on behalf of Palestinians.

even many sectors of the Israeli right were embarrassed by Kahane’s shameless racism, and by the end of his first term in 1988 he was banned from running again.

Six years later, in 1994, the Israeli government, then led by the Labor Party, declared his Kach party a terrorist organization. But by that point, the Kahane movement had already been active for over a quarter of a century, leaving a wake of destruction. To date it has produced more than 20 killers and taken the lives of over 60 people, most of them Palestinians.[3] Credible allegations put the death toll at well over double that number, but even the lower confirmed figure yields a higher body count than any other Jewish faction in the modern era.

For decades, Kahanists—as followers of Kahane are called in Israel—have repeatedly attempted to leverage their violence to trigger a wider war and bog Israel down in perpetual armed conflict with its neighbors. And once Israel’s military might is truly unassailable, Kahanists say, Jewish armies must march across the Middle East and beyond, destroying churches and mosques and forcing their Christian and Muslim worshippers to abandon their beliefs or die at the sword.

Just months after the Oslo Accords were signed in Washington, DC on the White House lawn, a former candidate for Knesset in Kahane’s Kach party, Baruch Goldstein, committed the largest mass murder by a single person in Israeli history, shooting dead 29 Palestinians and wounding over 100 more at a mosque in Hebron. During the protests that followed, the Israeli Defense Forces killed perhaps two dozen more Palestinians. Exactly 40 days later, at the end of the traditional Muslim mourning period, Hamas began its retaliatory campaign of suicide bombings. Over the next three years this campaign would claim over 100 Israeli lives and harden many Jewish hearts against the prospect of peace with Palestinians. Today, Kahanists can convincingly claim credit for crippling the fragile peace process while it was still in its infancy.

In Hebron in 1983, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, Kahanist Israel Fuchs sprayed a passing Palestinian car with bullets. In response, Israel’s defense minister ordered Fuchs’s Kahanist settlement razed to the ground. A decade later in 1994, when Goldstein carried out his massacre, also on Purim, Israel’s defense minister put Hebron’s Palestinian residents under curfew and ordered the local Palestinian commercial district locked and bolted. The market has been shuttered ever since. Last year, Israel’s defense minister announced that the market would be refurbished and repopulated—by Jewish residents. On the same day, the state renovated nearby Kahane Park, where Goldstein is entombed, and where Kahanists gather every year to celebrate Purim and the carnage Goldstein wrought.

Kahane had spent the previous 22 years calling for Israel’s parliament to be dissolved and replaced with rabbinic rule over a Jewish theocracy, based on the strictest interpretations of the Torah and Talmud. He openly incited the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians—and all other non-Jews who refused to accept unvarnished apartheid—from Israel and the territories it occupied. He outdid all other Israeli eliminationists with his insistence that killing those he identified as Israel’s enemies was not only a strategic necessity, but an act of worship.[1] His ideology continues to resonate: In the September 2019 elections to Israel’s parliament the explicitly Kahanist Jewish Power Party (Otzma Yehudit) got 83,609 votes, putting it in tenth place in a crowded field of over 30 parties.

Both American-born followers of Kahane, Leitner and Ben Yosef went from armed attacks against Palestinians to court room advocates for their fellow religious extremists. Both enlisted at Bar Ilan Law School after serving short prison sentences. Together with his wife Nitzana Darshan, who he met there, Leitner established the highly profitable Israel-based lawfare group Shurat HaDin or Israel Law Center (ILC). After Ben Yosef earned his law degree at Bar Ilan, his American allies founded the Association Center for Civil Justice (ACCJ), a US-based lawfare group that has earned millions of dollars and has for years funneled significant sums to Fuchs, Ben Yosef and other Kahanists.

After Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, his Labor-led government was replaced by the secular right-wing Likud party, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who promptly appointed ex-Kahanists Tzahi HaNegbi and Avigdor Liberman to cabinet positions. But that did not satisfy the appetite of the Kahanists, who resolved to coax the Likud even further to the right. Founded by longtime Kahane supporter Shmuel Sackett, the Likud’s Jewish Leadership faction succeeded in catapulting its candidate Moshe Feiglin into the role of deputy speaker of the Knesset where he called on the government to “concentrate” the civilian population of Gaza into “tent camps” until they could be forcefully relocated.

Today, prior membership in the Kahanist camp no longer carries any stigma within the Likud.

the original Kach core group has rebranded itself to sidestep Israeli law, now calling itself Jewish Power, and are consistently courted by the rest of the Israeli right

Kahanists have had even greater success penetrating the halls of power at the local level where their representatives on Jerusalem city council have been included in the governing coalition since 2013. In 2014, Kahanist Councillor Aryeh King—now deputy mayor—used widely-understood religious references to incite an assembly of religious Jews to kill Palestinians. Later that very night, a group of religious Jews did exactly that, kidnapping and beating Palestinian teen Mohammad Abu Khdeir, forcing gasoline down his throat and torching him to death from the inside out.

After Kahane’s death, top Chabad rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, also an American immigrant to Israel, inherited Kahane’s position as the most unapologetically racist rabbi in the country. In 2010 Ginsburgh helped publish an influential and vicious religious tract authored by one of his leading disciples called The King’s Torah, which sanctions organ harvesting from non-Jews and infanticide (if a Jew suspects that the child will one day constitute a threat).[9] Ginsburgh’s frequent tributes to Kahane’s memory, including repeated proclamations that “Kahane was right” have cemented the loyalty of third-generation Kahanists, including the latter’s namesake grandson, settler youth leader Meir Ettinger.

Thirty years ago, even if Israeli rabbis thought like Kahane and Ginsburgh they would not dare to speak these sentiments out loud, much less publish and promote them. Under Netanyahu’s rule, however, such sentiments are routinely supported financially and politically by the institutions of the Israeli state. In 2019, Israel’s education minister presented Ginsburgh with the Torah Creativity award at an annual event sponsored by his ministry.

The principles that Rabbi Meir Kahane popularized—that liberal democracy is an undesirable alien idea and that non-Jews must be driven down, and preferably out of Greater Israel altogether—have seeped deep into mainstream Israeli society.

the First Intifada, which had produced new forms of national and grassroots leadership inside the occupied territories, had gradually begun to marginalize the PLO leadership in exile. Threatened by this challenge, the PLO sought to reinstate its hegemonic position by capitalizing on the uprising and secretly negotiating a peace settlement with Israel

Such a conscious encounter between a national liberation movement and a colonial power is unprecedented in the history of anti-colonial struggles. The result has been disastrous on the Palestinian national fabric, depriving it of the capacity to resist Israeli policies, while granting the state a comfortable position from which to intensify the colonization of the occupied territories.

Almost all of the PA’s institutions, including its modes of governance and its economic policies, are specifically designed to play a counterinsurgency function to pacify Palestinians — a central task of local authorities operating under colonial rule

The most prominent cases of this mutual partnership are the killings of the Palestinian activists Basel Al-Araj and Nizar Banat: whereas Al-Araj was killed by Israeli soldiers in the heart of the PA-controlled Ramallah after being released from PA prison, Banat was killed by PA forces in an Israeli-controlled area of Hebron.

The United States and European Union helped to establish, train, and equip the security forces to focus on internal security; that is, to forcefully prevent any form of organized and effective Palestinian resistance

ensuring PA compliance with Israel unavoidably requires both corruption to financially incentivize the PA elite, and authoritarian rule to protect them from public opposition. The PA elite and its cronies saw in this reality a lucrative industry: foreign aid, Israeli-granted privileges, monopolies over resources, involvement in private businesses, and embezzlement of public funds became major sources of personal enrichment

engagement of Fatah party constituents in patronage networks

the PA cannot be reformed nor can it be changed; it was precisely created to function this way

Europe’s liberal luminaries like John Stuart Mill argued that “nations which are still barbarous have not got beyond the period during which it is likely to be for their benefit that they should be conquered and held in subjection by foreigners.”

What is most bewildering about Borrell’s speech is not its ignorance of colonialism and neocolonialism, of which he is evidently aware, but that he thinks they only affect the “jungle” but not the “garden”.

Like de Tocqueville before him, and even like Israel’s former prime minister, the Ukrainian-born Golda Meir (née Mabovitch), who was unable to sleep worrying about how many Palestinian children were being conceived or born every night, Borrell’s main worry is about the inhabitants of the jungle invading the garden.

"There is a big difference between Europe and the rest of the world – well, the rest of the world, understand me what I mean, no? - is that we have strong institutions. The big difference between developed and not developed is not the economy, it is institutions.”

Borrell used the Malthusian language of population control when he expressed his concern to Mogherini that "the jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough in order to protect the garden".

It seems that Europe’s own colonial and neocolonial institutions are not what made it possible to build the European "garden" - with the labour of immigrants from the “rest of the world” and with the stolen wealth of the "rest of the world". Rather, according to Borrell and the rest of Europe’s white supremacists, with the fantasised ingenuity of Europeans themselves.

It is colonialism and slavery that built the European "garden" - from Portugal to France, to Belgium and the Netherlands - and not Europeans’ ingenuity or goodwill. Borrell’s worry about a potential new European neocolonialism is nothing short of a smokescreen to cover up Europe’s ongoing and actual neocolonialism in Asia and Africa.

De Tocqueville, who was so enamoured of the US republic of slavery, which he dubbed a "democracy", wrote that white Americans have much "national vanity": "The Americans, in their intercourse with strangers, appear impatient of the smallest censure and insatiable of praise... They unceasingly harass you to extort praise, and if you resist their entreaties they fall to praising themselves. It would seem as if, doubting their own merit, they wished to have it constantly exhibited before their eyes. Their vanity is not only greedy, but restless and jealous." Europeans clearly suffer from a similar ailment. Borrell volunteers that: “The world needs Europe. My experience of travelling around the world is that people look at us as a beacon. Why [do] so many people come to Europe? Are there flows of illegal or irregular migrants going to Russia? Not many. No, they are coming to Europe but for good reasons." 

Those Asians and Africans who flock to Europe, and are able to jump over its high walls, are following their stolen wealth to be able to live.

“We are not a young people with an innocent record and a scanty inheritance... We have engrossed to ourselves an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us."

Borrell’s final clarion call to young Europeans that they must “keep the garden, be good gardeners. But your duty will not be to take care of the garden itself but [of] the jungle outside", is indeed nothing short of another directive for them to be better racists and colonialists. This is hardly a new call. Plus ça change!