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aidenborst

Israeli opposition parties strike coalition deal, paving the way for Netanyahu's exit -... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics Israel Netanyahu US crisis Culture policy Israel-Palestine Government

shared by aidenborst on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • A coalition of Israeli political parties announced Wednesday night they had agreed ​to a deal to form a new government, paving the way for the exit of Israel's longest serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
  • Yair Lapid, leader of the centrist Yesh Atid party, notified Israeli President Reuven Rivlin that he had managed to cobble together a coalition less than an hour before the midnight deadline.
  • In a statement, Lapid said the "government will work to serve all the citizens of Israel including those who aren't members of it, will respect those who oppose it, and do everything in its power to unite all parts of Israeli society."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The new government ​consists of a number of parties from across the political spectrum, from the left-wing Meretz to Bennett's right-wing Yamina party. In a historic moment, the small Islamist party United Arab List also decided to join the coalition, the first time an Arab-Israeli party has joined a coalition. The party is unlikely to have a minister in the government, but will have negotiated with the coalition on issues important to them.
  • Bennett is the son of American immigrants and a former elite commando in the Israeli military who made millions in the Israeli tech industry.
  • Bennett once led a West Bank settler organization and has previously said he did not believe in a two-state solution that would establish a state for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
rerobinson03

U.S. Covid Vaccine Donations Will Go to 'Wide Range' of Nations - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nations-coronavirus-biden.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The White House, besieged with requests from other nations to share its supply of coronavirus vaccine, announced Thursday that it would distribute an initial 25 million doses this month across a “wide range of countries” in Latin America and the Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa, as well as the Palestinian territories, war-ravaged Gaza and the West Bank.
  • Thursday’s announcement comes a week before Mr. Biden leaves for Cornwall, England, to meet with the heads of state of the Group of 7 industrialized nations, where the global vaccine supply is certain to be a topic of discussion. Officials said the Biden administration would donate additional doses throughout the summer as they become available.
  • Some African nations have less than 1 percent of their populations partly vaccinated, according to data from the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford, and the percentages of vaccinated people in Honduras and Guatemala are around 3 percent of the population.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Mr. Biden’s pledge to donate 80 million doses this month involves vaccines made by four manufacturers. Besides AstraZeneca, they are Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, the last three of which have received U.S. emergency authorization for their vaccines.
  • The president has described the vaccine donations as part of an “entirely new effort” to increase vaccine supplies and vastly expand manufacturing capacity, most of it in the United States. To further broaden supply, Mr. Biden recently announced he would support waiving intellectual property protections for coronavirus vaccines. He also put Mr. Zients in charge of developing a global vaccine strategy.
ethanshilling

Before diplomacy begins, Israel opts for brute force against Hamas. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...brute-force-against-hamas.html

israel palestine biden

shared by ethanshilling on 14 May 21 - No Cached
  • As United States and Egyptian mediators headed to Israel to begin de-escalation talks, the antagonists were weighing delicate internal considerations before agreeing to discussions on ending the violence.
  • Early Friday, Israeli ground troops shelled Gaza — a potentially major move of escalation against the Hamas militants who have been launching hundreds of rockets at Israel.
  • Hamas argues that it is the only Palestinian faction that, with its large stockpile of improved missiles, is defending the holy places of Jerusalem, turning Mr. Abbas into a spectator.
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  • President Biden has spoken to Mr. Netanyahu and repeated the usual formula about Israel’s right to self-defense. The American leader also dispatched an experienced diplomat, the deputy assistant secretary of state Hady Amr, to urge de-escalation on both sides.
  • In Washington, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, when asked about American objections to a Security Council meeting, told reporters on Thursday that “we are open to and supportive of a discussion, an open discussion, at the United Nations,” but wanted to wait until early next week.
  • “This, I hope, will give some time for the diplomacy to have some effect and to see if indeed we get a real de-escalation,” Mr. Blinken said.
Javier E

The Warped Vision of "Anti-Racism" - Persuasion - 0 views

www.persuasion.community/...e-warped-vision-of-anti-racism

anti-racism woke Critical Theory

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • What kind of monster doesn’t support “anti-racism”? Who would put themselves on the other side of “social justice”? How could you be opposed to the notion of “racial equity”?
  • what began as a collective yen for racial equality—long overdue in our nation—has devolved into something dangerous that is actually undermining its own noble goals.
  • as high-minded as these ideas sound, they mark a shift away from the values they purport to represent—equality before the law; the consent of the governed; even democracy itself—and toward the opposite, with people ranked by immutable characteristics and ruled by a tiny elite.
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  • Those who disagree—most crucially, millions of working-class Americans of all ethnicities—are excised from the public square.
  • The social-justice movement comes at the expense of justice; “anti-racism” ends up exacerbating racism.
  • How could this be? It’s difficult to stand against “social justice,” especially for those of us who are deeply concerned about inequality. We feel humility toward activists, writers and politicians who take up the language of racial justice, given how urgent the cause is.
  • The basis for today’s social-justice movement is a deep skepticism about liberal values like equality, justice and democracy. This is rooted in an academic discipline known as “critical race theory,” which takes elements from Hegel and Marx, along with postmodernists like Foucault and Derrida, to assemble a worldview that does not accept that equality can exist.
  • Napoleon Bonaparte, and he was taking a victory lap through a German university town after defeating the Prussian army, when he happened to ride past a German philosopher with writer’s block, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
  • a key element of his work became associated with the concept of mastery and domination, of one man exerting his will over others.
  • Society, culture and history were produced in the back and forth, or “dialectic,” between the powerful and the powerless—the master-slave dialectic, as Hegel’s pairing became known in subsequent iterations.
  • When Marx articulated his thesis of class conflict as the basis for all modern social existence, he was—in the view of Jean-Paul Sartre among others—expanding on the master-slave dialectic.
  • And if history progressed through a changing cast of masters and slaves for Hegel, or class struggle for Marx, for critical race theorists and their “anti-racism” inheritors, it’s white people and people of color in a binary that gives one side all the power and the other side none.
  • Over time, three other key ideas were grafted onto the master-slave dialectic:
  • false consciousness
  • a belief that the ideals of a society mean less than do the exceptions to those ideals
  • and a commitment to undermining the grand narratives that a society relies upon.
  • “False consciousness” was an attempt by Marxists to explain why the working class wasn’t buying into their worldview.
  • It turns out that working-class people are often conservative, a fact that has never ceased to bedevil and infuriate educated leftists trying to impose their desire for revolution. Instead of trying to understand the preferences of the working class, Marxists asserted that the poor workers were merely deluded, in the grip of a “false consciousness,” instead of a revolutionary one.
  • You can see the concept of false consciousness—and the condescension that is its hallmark—everywhere in critical race theory.
  • Its proponents classify people of color who don’t have radical views on race or who vote Republican as the handmaidens of white supremacy;
  • The idea of false consciousness is everywhere in the work of Robin DiAngelo, a prominent proponent of “anti-racist” ideology whose book White Fragility has sold close to a million copies. DiAngelo contends that white people who cry when accused of being racists actually prove their bigotry via these “weaponized tears,” which she deems “white racial bullying.”
  • If a society claims as its foundation a narrative that some members are excluded from, then the true meaning of that narrative is found in the exception, rather than the rule.
  • Postmodernist philosophers added to this a mistrust of the ideals that society claims to be built on:
  • postmodernists argued that the explicit mores of a culture have no objective value, but are instead a way for one group to benefit at the expense of another.
  • From this perspective, the Constitution isn’t a document that established the United States on principles of equality and freedom that the country failed to live up to.
  • Instead, the Constitution is a document fundamental to denying rights to those deemed ineligible, and justifying the ownership of enslaved persons.
  • Your symbol of freedom and equality is nothing more than a tool of repression, postmodernists argue. Failures, even at the margins, expose the hypocrisy of the whole, and define it as a lie.
  • You can see this at work in The New York Times Magazine’s Pulitzer-prize winning “The 1619 Project,” which marks the year that the first African slave was brought to American shores.
  • argued that, while history teaches 1776 as the year of our nation’s founding, we should consider whether “the country’s true birth date, the moment that our defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619,” as the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jake Silverstein, put it in an introduction.
  • It can’t be that America was founded on values like equality and liberty and democracy that it imperfectly embodied and has subsequently strived to correct.
  • It must be that the true founding was slavery, its true nature revealed by this failure.
  • This is why the social-justice movement cannot recognize the huge gains that have been made in this nation on the question of race; if there is even one instance of racism left in America, it is proof again of this true nature.
  • As with America, some on the left find it impossible to see Israel as a flawed nation imperfectly striving toward the ideals of its founding. The occupation of the Palestinians can’t be a disastrous injustice. It must be that Israel’s foundation is defined by this injustice, that “Zionism is racism.”
  • the real threat here is not just mangled logic. It’s the erasure of the possibility of equality, of a common humanity, that requires we treat each other as equals before God and before the law.
  • Today’s progressive left, whose ideas have become prevalent in much of the American establishment that is now repeating its incantations, simply does not believe equality is possible, instead differentiating people by how much power they supposedly have, with no common humanity to call upon.
  • since the social-justice movement recognizes only power, every one of its proposals is designed not to create a more equal society, but to transfer power from oppressors to oppressed—while allowing those designated as victims to maintain claim to the status of oppressed.
  • Race is immutable, so it doesn’t matter how much real power a person of color wields; their race means they will never be anything but oppressed.
  • You might be wondering why this view, which erases equality and cites oppression as the root of everything, has mainstream appeal
  • It seems to me that progressive elites, despite their pieties, don’t really want to live in a more equal society. They prefer the imperfect meritocracy we live under—the rule of the smart, the talented and the rich, most of whom traffic in the fiction that their status was earned.
  • progressives see themselves as compassionate. What they needed was a way to explain the inequality found in the meritocratic system they hold dear, a way that made them feel they were still on the side of the good without having to disrupt what is good for them.
  • This is not the way to a more equal society. We cannot right the wrongs of racial inequality—an urgent task—by erasing the ideal of equality
  • Nor can we allow the fact that equality has been unequally enforced throughout most of our history to provide an excuse to throw it away, and build a newly racialized America.
  • the clues are elsewhere. At first, one notices them like glitches in the matrix. Maybe you read an unorthodox remark on Twitter, and watch as its author is insulted in the cruelest terms by thousands of people, many with words like “social justice” or “diversity and inclusion” in their bios
anniina03

'What Is Going to Happen to Us?' Inside ISIS Prison, Children Ask Their Fate - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-children-ask-their-fate.html

crisis politics

shared by anniina03 on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • NORTHEASTERN SYRIA — The prisoners cover the floor like a carpet of human despair. Many are missing eyes or limbs, some are bone-thin from sickness, and most wear orange jumpsuits
  • Upstairs, jammed into two cells with little sunlight, are more than 150 children
  • Their parents brought them to Syria and ended up dead or detained. The children have been here for months and have no idea where their relatives are or what the future holds.
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  • As the Islamic State's self-declared caliphate collapsed in Syria, tens of thousands of men, women and children who had lived in it ended up in squalid camps and crowded prisons run by the Kurdish-led militia that had partnered with the United States to defeat the jihadists.
  • But now that a military incursion by Turkey against Kurdish forces has set off a new wave of violence and weakened their control over the area, uncertainty has grown over the fate of the huge population of people who survived the toppling of the Islamic State and have been warehoused since then in prisons and detention camps.
  • Most of their home countries have refused to take them back,
  • their governments have instead chosen to leave them in the custody of a Kurdish-led force that lacks the resources to house, feed and protect them, much less to investigate the adults and provide the children with education and rehabilitation.
  • The detention crisis in northeastern Syria is a bleak byproduct of the war against the Islamic State.
  • Mr. Polat’s prison is a converted industrial institute that now holds more than 5,000 people. One-quarter of them are Syrians, the rest hailing from 29 other countries, including Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Afghanistan, the Netherlands and the United States.
  • Most of the 400 men in a vast medical ward wore them. Many of them were sick or wounded. Men with metal braces holding broken bones in place lay on thin mattresses, while others shuffled to the bathroom on crutches or dragged their legs on the ground behind them. A few were so emaciated that their cheekbones stuck out and their legs were as thin as arms. When one man made the call to prayer, many of the prisoners prayed sitting down because they were too injured or ill to stand.
  • The Kurdish guards assumed that most of the men had been fighters and still followed the Islamic State’s ideology, but the prisoners themselves played down their roles in the world’s most fearsome terrorist organization.A Palestinian man with a broken leg said he had come to Syria because he “wanted to help.” A mechanic from Trinidad said he had not fought because he had been too busy fixing cars. A tall, muscular Russian said he had been a cook — in an elementary school.In dozens of interviews in two prisons, no one admitted to being a fighter.
  • The boys in prison said they received almost no services.“The situation is pretty bad here, so if they could hurry up and decide,” said a 16-year-old boy from Mauritius. “Months like this without knowing what is going to happen, people could start going crazy. They could say these guys were terrorists before with ISIS, but they are still human.”
Javier E

About 41% of the global population are under 24. And they're angry… | Opinion... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...e-up-established-order-protest

protest activism youth generation global dissent culture politics

shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Are we entering a new age of global revolution? Or is it foolish to try to link anger in India over the price of onions to pro-democracy demonstrations in Russia?
  • recent upheavals do appear to share one key factor: youth. In most cases, younger people are at the forefront of calls for change. The uprising that unexpectedly swept away Sudan’s ancien regime this year was essentially generational
  • while younger people, in any era, are predisposed to shake up the established order, extreme demographic, social and political imbalances are intensifying present-day pressures
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  • There are more young people than ever before. About 41% of the global population of 7.7 billion is aged 24 or under. In Africa, 41% is under 15. In Asia and Latin America (where 65% of the world’s people live), it’s 25%.
  • In developed countries, imbalances tilt the other way. While 16% of Europeans are under 15, about 18%, double the world average, are over 65.
  • Recession, stagnant or falling living standards, and austerity programmes delivered from on high have shaped their experience
  • a common factor is the increased willingness of undemocratic regimes, ruling elites and wealthy oligarchies to use force to crush threats to their power – while hypocritically condemning protester violenc
  • they’re connected. More people than ever before have access to education. They are healthier. They appear less bound by social conventions and religion. They are mutually aware. And their expectations are higher.
  • thanks to social media, the ubiquity of English as a common tongue, and the internet’s globalisation and democratisation of information
  • younger people from all backgrounds and locations are more open to alternative life choices, more attuned to “universal” rights and norms such as free speech or a living wage – and less prepared to accept their denial
  • It is difficult, if not perverse, to watch protesters risking torture and death by challenging Egypt’s dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and not relate their daring both to Hong Kong and, say, to Kashmiris’ efforts to throw off the yoke imposed by another “strongman”, India’s Narendra Modi. When Palestinian youths taunt the Israel Defence Forces with flags and stones, are they not part of the same global fight for democratic self-determination, basic freedoms and human rights espoused by young Muscovites opposing Vladimir Putin’s cruel kleptocracy?
  • Any government, elected or not, that fails to provide jobs, decent wages and housing faces big trouble.
  • Another negative is the perceived, growing readiness of democratically elected governments, notably in the US and Europe, to lie, manipulate and disinform
  • disbelief is the new spirit of the age
  • The stifling silence that hangs over North Korea’s gulag, China’s Xinjiang and Tibet regions, and dark, hidden places inside Syria, Eritrea, Iran and Azerbaijan could yet descend on us all. What helps protect us is the noisy, life-affirming dissent of the young.
mattrenz16

How South Africa is viewing Trump vs. Biden (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • South Africans are painfully aware that their country generally does not loom large, if at all, in the awareness of most Americans, nor in the policies of their government.
  • But that doesn't mean they're not waiting with keen interest to see the outcome of Tuesday's race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
  • US involvement in South Africa peaked during the Cold War.
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  • During the apartheid years, the White minority governments aligned themselves with the Western nations and leveraged SA's militarily strategic position to maximize British and US support.
  • The government's views tend to be at odds with those of President Donald Trump's administration over Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Iran, the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and the seemingly intractable issue of Palestinian statehood, of which Ramaphosa's government is a vocal supporter.
  • There was anger when he tagged all of Africa, along with Haiti, as "shithole" countries, causing an affronted South African administration to summon the US chargé d'affaires for a dressing down.
  • This support, articulated by President Ronald Reagan as "constructive engagement," alienated the oppressed Black majority and left a lingering bad taste with many in Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, which has been the ruling party since South Africa's first democratic election in 1994.
  • President Cyril Ramaphosa's government seized on the #BlackLivesMatter protests to lament George Floyd's "regrettable death" and condescendingly observed that the incident "[presented] the USA with an opportunity to address fundamental issues of human rights."
  • Privately, it has a preference for Biden, with a government analyst telling me that South Africa believes the Democratic candidate would return to the multilateralism that Trump has scorned and is expected to be less protectionist and isolationist when it comes to China.
  • South Africa is dependent on a strong economic relationship with the US. There are around 600 US firms here, with many making SA their springboard to the rest of Africa.
  • The US is South Africa's third-biggest export destination and the country benefits from the Generalized System of Preferences trade program and the country hopes to continue to benefit from the US African Growth and Opportunity Act, currently under review.
  • Trump's stance on Israel has also drawn strong but quiet support from some sectors of South Africa's shrinking Jewish community, which numbers barely more than 50,000, equivalent to only 0.1% of the country's population of 58 million.
anonymous

Trump Hosts Israel, UAE and Bahrain in Signing Ceremony - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...el-peace-emirates-bahrain.html

politics policy trump

shared by anonymous on 16 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • “the dawn of a new Middle East,” but some analysts said his claims were overblown.
  • but one that failed to address the future of the Palestinians.
  • decades of division and conflict, we mark the dawn of a new Middle East
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  • open embassies and establish other new diplomatic and economic ties, including tourism, technology and energy.
  • e since 1994,
  • other countries very, very soon” tha
  • This day is a pivot of history,” he said. “It heralds a new dawn of peace
  • end the Arab-Israeli
  • launching rockets into Israel from G
  • there’s going to be peace in the Middle East,”
  • t 800 people, many of whom did not wear masks
  • military, security, diplomatic, economic —
  • hich played a key role in bringing the parties together, analysts said.
delgadool

The Breonna Taylor Decision: Live Updates and Analysis - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-taylor-decision-verdict.html

politics police justice

shared by delgadool on 24 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • A grand jury didn’t charge any officers with shooting Ms. Taylor in her Louisville apartment. A former officer, accused of firing recklessly, was indicted on three counts of “wanton endangerment.”
  • “If we simply act on outrage, there is no justice — mob justice is not justice. Justice sought by violence is not justice. It just becomes revenge.”
  • Many legal experts said before the charges were announced that indictments for killing Ms. Taylor would be unlikely, given the state’s statute allowing citizens to use lethal force in self-defense. John W. Stewart, a former assistant attorney general in Kentucky, said he believed that at least Sergeant Mattingly and Detective Cosgrove were protected by that law.
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  • “It tells people, cops can kill you in the sanctity of your own home,” Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian-American activist, said as she wiped tears from her face.
  • After protesters marched loudly but peacefully through the streets for more than two hours, they were stopped by a line of officers in riot gear in the Highlands section of town.
  • 2a”If anyone can get killed how Breonna got killed by the police, there’s no way we should live in a society where that’s possible,” he said.
  • “our criminal justice system is fundamentally broken.”
  • Under Kentucky law, a person is guilty of the crime when “under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life, he wantonly engages in conduct which creates a substantial danger of death or serious physical injury to another person.”
  • For months, Ms. Taylor’s death has been a rallying cry. Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, called out her name during the Democratic National Convention. Oprah Winfrey paid for billboards demanding the officers be charged, writing in her magazine, “We have to use whatever megaphone we can.”
rerobinson03

Early Muslim Conquests (622-656 CE) - Ancient History Encyclopedia - 0 views

www.ancient.eu/...ly-muslim-conquests-622-656-ce

shared by rerobinson03 on 31 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Islam arose as a religious and socio-political force in Arabia in the 7th century CE (610 CE onwards).
  • The Islamic Prophet Muhammad (l. 570-632 CE), despite facing resistance and persecution, amassed a huge following and started building an empire
  • After he died in 632 CE, his friend Abu Bakr (l. 573-634 CE) laid the foundation of the Rashidun Caliphate (632-661 CE), which continued the imperial expansion.
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  • The Islamic Prophet Muhammad started preaching a monotheistic faith called Islam in his hometown of Mecca from 610 CE onwards.
  • Equality, egalitarianism, equal rights for women (who had been hitherto considered “property” by the Meccans), and the prospect of heaven attracted many towards Islam.
  • Despite putting forth strict persecution of the new religion and its preacher, Meccans failed to contain the Muslim community.
  • Medina offered Prophet Muhammad sovereignty over the city, making him the first ruler and king (r. 622-632 CE) of what was later to become the Islamic or Muslim Empire. The city-state of Medina soon came into conflict with Mecca, and the latter was conquered, after years of warfare, in 629/630 CE.
  • At the morrow of Prophet Muhammad’s death, the Islamic Empire slid to the brink of disintegration, as many advocated pre-Islamic home-rule system. This threat, however, was averted when Abu Bakr (r. 632-634 CE) proclaimed himself the Caliph of the Prophet and the first supreme ruler of the Islamic realm.
  • Abu Bakr now sought to expand his realm beyond the Arabian Peninsula. The Muslim Empire bordered two superpowers: the Byzantine Empire (330-1453 CE) and Sassanian Empire (224-651 CE) to the north-west and north-east respectively. These two colossal powers often clashed violently in prolonged wars, had exhausted their resources, and severely repressed Arabian tribes living in the Middle East in the course of pursuing ultimate power. For Abu Bakr, this was an opportune moment, although he may not have known that.
  • Never content with wasting an opportunity, the Caliph sent Khalid, who had now distinguished himself as a war hero, to raid Iraq (633 CE). The duo stuck to the western side of the Euphrates, where they enjoyed much success, employed eager locals in their ranks, and countered Sassanian advances towards the conquered territory.
  • Abu Bakr died in 634 CE, and his successor Umar ibn al-Khattab (r. 634-644 CE) took charge as the second caliph of the Islamic Empire and the "commander of the faithful". Caliph Umar reinforced the Iraqi front with fresh troops under the command of a reputable companion of the Prophet: Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas (l. 595-674 CE).
  • With this defeat, Sassanian control over Iraq was shattered, the Rashidun troops soon swept over the land and even took Ctesiphon – the Persian capital, ironically located far off from their power base in Khorasan, the eastern province – located in modern-day Iran.
  • Umar’s successor Uthman (r. 644-656 CE) continued the military expansion undertaken by his predecessors. Yazdegerd III, who had escaped to the eastern parts of his kingdom, was murdered by a local at Merv in 651 CE.
  • Abu Bakr sent four divisions under Shurahbil ibn Hasana (l. 583-639 CE), Yazid ibn Abi Sufyan (d. 640 CE), Amr ibn al-As (l. c. 573-664 CE), and Abu Ubaidah (l. 583-639 CE) to raid Syria and the Levant.
  • The Rashidun forces continued to advance northwards in the Levant and Syria. They took Damascus in 634 CE, either through an assault or treason, defeated the Palestinian imperial division in the Battle of Fahl (Pella; 635 CE).
  • Honed for their shipbuilding skills, the Syrians were employed to create a formidable Rashidun fleet to challenge Byzantine authority in the Mediterranean. After defeating the Byzantine fleet attempting to retake Alexandria (646 CE), the Muslims went on the offensive. Cyprus fell in 649 CE, followed by Rhodes in 654 CE, and in 655 CE, the Byzantine naval authority was crushed with a victory at the Battle of the Masts. Muslims held uncontested control over the Mediterranean and sent raiding parties as far as Crete and Sicily.
  • At its peak, the realm of the Rashidun Caliphate spread from parts of North Africa in the west to parts of modern-day Pakistan in the east; several islands of the Mediterranean had also come under their sway.
  • The Byzantines and Sassanians were superpowers of their time but years of warfare had weakened the two colossal titans
  • Moreover, Arabs were never expected to pose any threat to them, these disunited desert dwellers did not have the numbers or the will to face an empire. This, however, changed as the Arabian Peninsula was united under the banner of Islam by 633 CE. Freed from the infighting that had plagued them for centuries, the Arabs directed their potential towards their neighbors. They considered a just war as a holy struggle and if death was to embrace them, they would be immortalized as martyrs.
  • Such a strong resolve, however, was lacking in their foes. Both empires employed mercenaries, and these men did not feel similar passion for their client state as the Arabs did for the Caliphate. Moreover, a multiethnic army lacked the coherence imparted by a single faith and unified national sentiment, but perhaps the most destructive penalty that these empires faced was because of how they treated their people in their provinces.
Javier E

Laugh? We nearly all died - why my US failed state Twitter thread went viral | US elect... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ction-joe-biden-twitter-thread

US 2020 international perspective failed election satire

shared by Javier E on 15 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • In 2016, the Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, may have exaggerated somewhat when he declared: “The world is laughing at us. They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity.” No longer. As counting in the crisis-wracked North American state entered its 10th day, around the world it had become the butt of many jokes. After decades of enduring its hubris and condescension, many are happy to see the self-anointed “shining city on a hill” and self-proclaimed “greatest country in the history of the world” knocked down a peg or two.
  • For a long time, America has been to the world what Trump has been to America – a bull in a china shop. Rich, entitled, brash, over-confident and often downright stupid, since the end of the cold war the country has traipsed around the world, breaking stuff as it went, throwing its weight around, and playing fast and loose with cherished global norms. Its journalists and moviemakers (and president) rarely missed the opportunity to stress just what an uncivilized “shithole” the rest of the globe was and how much we needed the enlightenment offered by the Peace Corps.
  • Like Trump, America’s successes were primarily economic and its monumental failures, in places like Vietnam and Iraq, cost hundreds and thousands of lives. It had a complicated relationship with the truth as exemplified by Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations, laying out the Bush administration’s rationale for war in Iraq. Like Trump it cozied up to dictators in Africa and gave a wink and a nudge to the apartheid regimes in South Africa and in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Inevitably perhaps, America’s excesses inspired a rival. Today, America finds itself as a bull in China’s shop. It has slowly been eclipsed in many areas where it was once dominant, especially in trade and lately in technology. And America has reacted much like Trump to the loss of its position as top dog – it is throwing a tantrum. From inciting a trade war to trying to wreck global alliances and treaties, to undermining the multilateral system, the US is showing that it will not go quietly into the sunset.
  • The election and four years of Trump have shown that far from being a paragon of democracy, the US has not only neglected its decaying democratic institutions at home, but has also incubated a dangerous authoritarianism. As the US fixes itself, the rest of us too need to reform the international system which for too long has operated on the mistaken belief that the US is what it claimed to be. The Trump presidency should be the wake up call we all need to build a better world
cartergramiak

Opinion | The New World Order That President Biden Will Inherit - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-international-relations.html

US culture history Policy biden politics

shared by cartergramiak on 16 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • President-elect Joe Biden has signaled that he will move swiftly to restore dignity to the badly sullied image of the United States; respect for the professionals of America’s diplomatic, intelligence and military services; and a more predictable, nuanced and sympathetic approach to foreign relations.
  • At the same time, he will seek ways to revive the nuclear deal with Iran, and agree with Russia to extend the New START treaty on limiting strategic nuclear arms. Hopefully, Mr. Biden will terminate American support for Saudi Arabia’s terrible war in Yemen.
  • Whatever hold President Vladimir Putin may have had on Mr. Trump almost never translated into a lifting of sanctions, and Democrats are not likely to seek a reset with Russia. Mr. Trump’s bromance with Kim Jong-un did little to change the U.S. stance on North Korea. Mr. Trump’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was decidedly one-sided, yet there had been no movement toward a two-state settlement in the years before Mr. Trump became president, and there is little indication that any such movement is imminent no matter who’s in the White House — or where the U.S. Embassy is.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • These are all welcome signs of America’s imminent return to a role in the world that better reflects our historical values.
  • In short, the world is not what it was in 2016, nor can it go back to the status quo ante. China is considerably more assertive, and countering Beijing’s aggressions while recognizing its legitimate demands and seeking its help in containing North Korea or reducing carbon emissions will require creative new approaches. So will dealing with a right-wing president in Brazil or a tenacious dictator in Venezuela, or negotiating further nuclear arms reductions with Russia while maintaining sanctions, or trying to placate Israel and several Gulf Arab states while reviving a deal with their archenemy Iran.
  • Simply abandoning Mr. Trump’s approach is immeasurably important for America and the world. The strength of the United States has always derived as much from the soft power of its democracy, freedoms and values as from its battleships and drones. That strength is multiplied by America’s alliances among democracies in the East and West.
  • President-elect Biden has signaled that he intends to lead America back into the international arena, and whatever their qualms or doubts, America’s friends and allies should not wait to join forces in tackling the business of the day — a global pandemic and the future of the planet, to name just two items on the agenda.
saberal

Morocco Joins List of Arab Nations to Begin Normalizing Relations With Israel - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...israel-morocco-trump.html

politics US history policy

shared by saberal on 10 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Morocco follows Bahrain, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates in setting aside generations of hostilities toward the Jewish state, part of a major foreign policy effort of the Trump administration.
  • WASHINGTON — The White House said on Thursday that Morocco had agreed to begin normalizing relations with Israel, becoming the fourth Arab state this fall to do so and advancing a major foreign goal for President Trump as he nears the end of his administration.
  • Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu made the so-called Abraham Accords — normalized relations between Israel and Muslim states that long have been aligned with the cause of the Palestinians — a focus of their respective campaigns to hold onto power.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • He said more than one million Israelis are descended from those who originally lived in Morocco.
  • The United Nations and much of the rest of the world refused to affirm Morocco’s claim over the area, and the United States had supported a 1991 cease-fire between the kingdom and the Western Sahara’s pro-independence Polisario Front.
  • After a border incident last month, the Polisario declared war on Morocco, shattering a three-decade cease-fire and threatening a full-blown military conflict in the disputed desert territory in northwest Africa.
  • The deal is likely to be highly popular in Israel,
  • By contrast, Sudan has stopped short of declaring full and normalized relations with Israel and recently threatened to withdraw from the agreement if Congress does not give it immunity from terrorism lawsuits that families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks want to bring against the country for harboring Osama bin Laden years before the attacks.
woodlu

What Happens When Everyone Is Writing the Same Book You Are? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...of-the-covenant-jerusalem.html

social Culture history

shared by woodlu on 01 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • It was as if the story were floating in the air, waiting to be rediscovered. And by coincidence, a handful of writers came across it at the same time.
  • Montagu Brownlow Parker. Known as “Monty,” he was my great-great-uncle.
  • That was nearly everything I knew of him. All my family had left of his adventure in Jerusalem was a black box of papers telling a captivating tale.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • an encounter between Monty and an eccentric Finnish scholar, Valter Juvelius, who claimed he had identified ciphers in the Old Testament that showed where the ark was hidden in Jerusalem. He wanted to go and find it;
  • Monty, a veteran of the Boer War and a son of a wealthy politician, had the connections and credibility to make it happen.
  • Monty gathered investors, permissions and a team, and in 1909 the “Parker expedition” started digging in Jerusalem for the ark, a holy relic whose value — immeasurable — Monty promised to split with the Ottoman government.
  • A mosque attendant, appalled, caught the diggers in action and rumors began to fly, scandalizing members of the city’s various faiths.
  • I started to research the story, not knowing that my explorations made me a member of a curious, modern-day venture that paralleled its historical counterpart: the Parker expedition writers.
  • the events of the expedition’s aftermath — including the revelation, shocking to Jerusalem’s Muslim residents, that corrupt Ottoman officials were aiding the British explorers — add depth to our understanding of the factors influencing the emergence of Palestinian nationalism.
  • My grandfather gave her a few photos and documents, and in 1996 she staged an exhibition on the Parker expedition, her paper on it making her a key contact for everyone who came to the story later, looking for sources.
  • She welcomed each of us who wrote to her as though she were our party host, passing on news of our fellow expedition explorers and enjoying the coincidence that these books were all happening at once.
  • I felt my loose connection to Great-Great-Uncle Monty shift into possessiveness:
  • Nirit emailed with a smiling emoji about “the new guy in town”: Brad Ricca, an author in Cleveland who writes books that blend fact and fiction. And four months after that, my dad was sitting down for dinner one evening when Nirit rang to introduce him to Lior Hanani, a young Israeli software developer who chose the expedition as the basis for his debut novel.
  • Graham shared a scoop he’d found in the British archives: Monty had a diagnosis of neurasthenia, what we’d now call PTSD.
  • In 1995, Nirit, then early in her career but with characteristic resolve, tracked down a box of glass negatives from the expedition, enlisted a student to locate the great-grandson of Valter Juvelius in Finland and reached out to my grandfather in England.
  • The expedition may have had an impact on British foreign policy in the region, Andrew said when we talked, and it helped spawn the world’s ongoing fascination with the ark of the covenant (and Indiana Jones). It illustrates how people at the time viewed the Bible, science and chronology, Timo explained over Zoom, and why secret ciphers might have made sense to them.
criscimagnael

32 Years After Civil War, Mundane Moments Trigger Awful Memories - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ebanon-civil-war-memories.html

shared by criscimagnael on 15 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • When you’re a child, how do you get through a war?A lot of Monopoly, Scrabble, card games, candles and windowless bathrooms turned into family bomb shelters, almost like a big sleepover — if you can ignore the hard tiles and loud shelling of some group trying to kill you for reasons you don’t quite understand.
  • We grew up during Lebanon’s civil war and are now adults trying to live normal lives, raising our own families as the country crashes and burns yet again.
  • For my generation, emotional minefields can surround the most mundane activities even 32 years since the war ended.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • “Candles give me anxiety. We spent so much time studying by candlelight after school.”
  • “It’s a collective trauma in Lebanon, and a complex trauma, because we aren’t talking about one thing, but many events that people have lived through,” said Ghida Husseini, my former therapist in Lebanon who specializes in trauma. “It’s the war, it’s the stress of losing your livelihood and not feeling secure.”
  • The war lasted for 15 years, until 1990. Tired of waiting, the nation accepted a blanket amnesty for a shaky peace. We watched as militia leaders traded in their blood-soaked fatigues for designer suits and started running the country.
  • Now we find ourselves waiting, again, as those war criminals-turned-politicians have mismanaged the country — an ongoing banking crisis has seen the currency shed over 90 percent of its value — and skirted responsibility for an explosion at Beirut’s seaport in the summer of 2020.
  • Reminders of a past war are now staples of the present decay.
  • “I remember sitting on a mattress as a kid, surrounded by candles. There’s a feeling of being trapped. There is no TV. No music. No electricity. You can’t go outside, it’s too dangerous. All there is — is cards.”
  • One night, as Raoul slept — his bedroom window had the dining table nailed to it, to protect against snipers — bombing started. His mother cried out for him, looking frantically until they found Raoul, then 5, crying while hugging a framed photo of the Virgin Mary that had fallen from the wall, praying for his life. He developed a stutter after that.
  • Yet every summer, no matter what happened — an Israeli invasion, the suicide bombing that killed hundred of U.S. Marines — we went back, to be with our family, to hold their hands and say: We have not abandoned you. It was the most twisted of survivor’s guilt
  • Many are left wondering how their adult lives would be better if their childhoods had been different.
  • Decades later, sunsets are one of the sources of trauma for him, still.
  • Because it meant night was coming. And nighttime meant shelling.
  • “I could have been a better person, a stronger person, maybe wiser, with less fear,” he said. “Especially the fear. Because fear is trauma. I’m a grown man and I'm afraid to walk in the dark. Because to me, the dark is war.”
Javier E

Netanyahu's Dark Worldview - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...675406

netanyahu AI realism musk crisis

shared by Javier E on 24 Sep 23 - No Cached
  • as Netanyahu soon made clear, when it comes to AI, he believes that bad outcomes are the likely outcomes. The Israeli leader interrogated OpenAI’s Brockman about the impact of his company’s creations on the job market. By replacing more and more workers, Netanyahu argued, AI threatens to “cannibalize a lot more jobs than you create,” leaving many people adrift and unable to contribute to the economy. When Brockman suggested that AI could usher in a world where people would not have to work, Netanyahu countered that the benefits of the technology were unlikely to accrue to most people, because the data, computational power, and engineering talent required for AI are concentrated in a few countries.
  • “You have these trillion-dollar [AI] companies that are produced overnight, and they concentrate enormous wealth and power with a smaller and smaller number of people,” the Israeli leader said, noting that even a free-market evangelist like himself was unsettled by such monopolization. “That will create a bigger and bigger distance between the haves and the have-nots, and that’s another thing that causes tremendous instability in our world. And I don’t know if you have an idea of how you overcome that?”
  • The other panelists did not. Brockman briefly pivoted to talk about OpenAI’s Israeli employees before saying, “The world we should shoot for is one where all the boats are rising.” But other than mentioning the possibility of a universal basic income for people living in an AI-saturated society, Brockman agreed that “creative solutions” to this problem were needed—without providing any.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The AI boosters emphasized the incredible potential of their innovation, and Netanyahu raised practical objections to their enthusiasm. They cited futurists such as Ray Kurzweil to paint a bright picture of a post-AI world; Netanyahu cited the Bible and the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides to caution against upending human institutions and subordinating our existence to machines.
  • Musk matter-of-factly explained that the “very positive scenario of AI” is “actually in a lot of ways a description of heaven,” where “you can have whatever you want, you don’t need to work, you have no obligations, any illness you have can be cured,” and death is “a choice.” Netanyahu incredulously retorted, “You want this world?”
  • By the time the panel began to wind down, the Israeli leader had seemingly made up his mind. “This is like having nuclear technology in the Stone Age,” he said. “The pace of development [is] outpacing what solutions we need to put in place to maximize the benefits and limit the risks.”
  • Netanyahu was a naysayer about the Arab Spring, unwilling to join the rapturous ranks of hopeful politicians, activists, and democracy advocates. But he was also right.
  • This was less because he is a prophet and more because he is a pessimist. When it comes to grandiose predictions about a better tomorrow—whether through peace with the Palestinians, a nuclear deal with Iran, or the advent of artificial intelligence—Netanyahu always bets against. Informed by a dark reading of Jewish history, he is a cynic about human nature and a skeptic of human progress.
  • fter all, no matter how far civilization has advanced, it has always found ways to persecute the powerless, most notably, in his mind, the Jews. For Netanyahu, the arc of history is long, and it bends toward whoever is bending it.
  • This is why the Israeli leader puts little stock in utopian promises, whether they are made by progressive internationalists or Silicon Valley futurists, and places his trust in hard power instead
  • “The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.”
  • To his many critics, myself included, Netanyahu’s refusal to envision a different future makes him a “creature of the bunker,” perpetually governed by fear. Although his pessimism may sometimes be vindicated, it also holds his country hostag
  • In other words, the same cynicism that drives Netanyahu’s reactionary politics is the thing that makes him an astute interrogator of AI and its promoters. Just as he doesn’t trust others not to use their power to endanger Jews, he doesn’t trust AI companies or AI itself to police its rapidly growing capabilities.
Javier E

Bibi Netanyahu's Divisive Policies Are Behind Israel's Catastrophic National Security F... - 0 views

www.theunpopulist.net/...i-netanyahus-divisive-policies

netanyahu israel security hamas invasion 2023

shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • This is broadly what we know happened: Shortly after launching the intensive early-morning rocket attack, elite Hamas units simultaneously rushed multiple military outposts on the Gaza-Israel border. They quickly overwhelmed the posts, killing or kidnapping virtually all the soldiers in them. They then destroyed the observation and communications networks on which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) depended for identifying breaches of the border fence.
  • In parallel, Hamas launched an aerial and naval attack using several dozen motor-powered hang gliders, armed drones, and small speed boats. In the ensuing chaos, the fence was breached by bulldozers, explosives, and wire-cutters in up to 80 spots along the northern and eastern border between Gaza and Israel, facilitating the main thrust of the attack.
  • Over 1,500 armed militiamen on pickup trucks, motorbikes, and SUVs rushed across the border into adjacent Israeli kibbutzim, moshavim, and towns. Several dozen militiamen also headed to the scene of a youth music festival where around 3,500 revelers were camped in tents and cars. This became the epicenter of a massacre.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Over the next several hours, militants rampaged through around two dozen Israeli towns—killing, looting, burning, kidnapping, and reportedly raping civilians. They managed to penetrate as far as Ofakim, 20 miles into Israel. They effectively controlled several main roads, on which they gunned down passing traffic. It took the IDF 6 hours to begin seriously engaging the militants. 18 hours after the incursion began, fighting was taking place in 22 spots. It took over 48 hours before the last of the major clashes with this first wave of the militants’ incursion was over and the militants neutralized.
  • In total, as of the morning of October 11th, over 1,200 Israelis are confirmed killed, almost 3,000 wounded (hundreds critically), and somewhere between 100 and 150 kidnapped, including whole families with toddlers and senior citizens.
  • For months, Netanyahu has been cautioned that his divisive “governance reforms” represented a reckless gamble with the country’s national security. He received numerous private (and then public) warnings from every major security chief that his policies were eroding IDF preparedness and provoking Israel’s enemies to test its readiness. Netanyahu ignored, dismissed, or ridiculed every one of these warnings. He and his acolytes have systematically castigated those who voiced concern as disloyal “agents of the deep state” or, worse, “leftist traitors.”
  • The events of October 7th represented a colossal intelligence failure. With or without substantial Iranian assistance, it is now clear that Hamas had been preparing the attack for over a year. Astonishingly, it apparently did so without major leaks. The few tell-tale signs of an impending attack that did surface appear to have been ignored.
  • Taken by surprise, and made to fight for their lives in understaffed outposts, the IDF was operationally incapable of adequately responding to the militants’ land maneuver. Unarmed civilians were left to fend for themselves for long hours, with horrific consequences.
  • What will make October 7th uniquely egregious in the eyes of many Israelis (perhaps most) is the fact that events of this sort were not only reasonably foreseeable but were repeatedly foreseen and repeatedly ignored by Israel’s current leadership.
  • at least 950 Palestinians have been killed in retaliatory IAF air strikes.
  • As long as Israel faces immediate danger, all hands will be on deck and party politics largely put aside.
  • As long as the emergency continues, therefore, Netanyahu won’t have to face the pressure of public protests against his program to weaken the Israeli judiciary.          
  • But in the longer term, it is difficult to see how Netanyahu, the great political survivor, will survive the events of October 7th. His reputation as “Mr. Security” is in tatters and it is impossible to see how it could possibly recover.
  • Analysts keen to convey the magnitude of October 7th to American audiences have already tagged it Israel’s Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Neither label adequately captures the day’s true significance.
  • A more accurate name might be something like “Israel’s civic Yom Kippur.” Why? Because the very existence of the State of Israel was supposed to guarantee that a day like this would never happen. In the Yom Kippur War of October 1973—when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise assault—Israel lost some 2,700 soldiers, but it managed to effectively protect its civilian population. No Israeli towns or villages were ever breached. The social contract was honored, albeit at a terrible price.
  • On October 7, 2023, it was primarily civilians who were killed, maimed, and kidnapped. This was the day when the IDF wasn’t there to defend the people it was created to protect. This was the day when—livestreamed on social media—distraught family members saw their loved ones carried away, like livestock, into Hamas captivity in Gaza. This was the day when—in a horrifying echo of the Holocaust—defenseless Jewish mothers, citizens of a sovereign Jewish State, tried to keep their babies from crying as armed men lurked outside, listening to ascertain whether anyone was alive inside the home, before setting it on fire.
  • many Israelis, already mistrustful of their elected representatives and worn out by internal divisions, may have finally lost faith in their national leaders or, worse, in the core institutions of their nation state. Where was the army when murderous gunmen broke into our homes deep inside Israel itself?
  • Fifty years ago, in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel appeared broken, internally torn, and internationally isolated. Yet, it proved itself remarkably resilient. Can Israel gather itself again from the terrible blow it sustained on October 7th? I have no doubt that it can.
Javier E

Two Young Democratic Stars Collide Over Israel and Their Party's Future - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...aoc-torres-israel-gaza.html

party Democratic party israel Palestine politics

shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • t is a struggle not so much over traditional levers of power in Washington, but over who will shape the minds of a younger, diverse generation of voters that will soon steer the relationship to one of America’s closest allies.
  • As wartime passions splinter the left, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, whose boosters envision her eventually running for the presidency, is laboring to hold together a consequential but delicate coalition that has pushed the Democratic Party leftward on climate, policing and economics. Mr. Torres, talked about as a future senator or governor, appears intent on using the moment to smash that left-wing movement apart.
  • “What you are seeing here is really a question of vision for the future of the Democratic Party. Is it going to be the Ritchie Torres version or the A.O.C. version?”
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Though Ms. Ocasio-Cortez struggled early on to articulate her views on the Middle East and has never visited the region, the 34-year-old congresswoman has come to embody that generational shift.
  • She uses terms like “apartheid” and “oppression,” loathed by Israel’s defenders, to describe the treatment of Palestinians. Last week, she called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel lobby and one of Mr. Torres’s top campaign donors, “racist and bigoted.”
  • “This is pursuing a proven and failed strategy,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in a recent radio interview. “So why do it, why kill kids, why put people in danger, why perpetuate these cycles when we’ve done it so many times, and it’s never kept us safe?”
  • Mr. Torres has reserved special vitriol for the Democratic Socialists of America, the small but influential leftist group that has pushed for boycotts of Israel and counts Ms. Ocasio-Cortez as a member. In an interview, he said that the D.S.A. was trying to infiltrate the Democratic Party “to impose the ideological litmus tests on Israel” and “cleanse” those who disagree with them. He said he was on a “publicly stated mission” to undermine it.
  • “You can see how hard Alexandria is trying to listen compassionately across the lines of this conflict,” said Brad Lander, the left-leaning New York City comptroller who is the highest-ranking Jewish city official. “I’m not saying anyone is doing it perfectly, but there is a difference between trying and not trying.”
  • Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who did not agree to an interview, met in Washington last month with the families of Jewish hostages kidnapped by Hamas. She has repeatedly condemned the group and supports a two-state solution shunned by some on the left. And at a time when many liberal Jews feel they are being abandoned by the left, she has warned about “disgusting and unacceptable” antisemitism in a post to 8.4 million Instagram followers, saying, “No movement of integrity should tolerate it.”
  • “I do worry that the next generation is increasingly indoctrinated with anti-Israel hate so virulent that it renders them indifferent to the coldblooded murder of Jews in Israel,”
  • His views are no surprise to those who watched Mr. Torres, a proud college dropout and defender of public housing, evolve from left-aligned political upstart to more traditional Democratic congressman
  • It was his first trip abroad, and Mr. Torres said witnessing both the fragility of the frontier and Tel Aviv’s openness to gay life left him with “profound empathy” for Israel and a commitment to a two-state solution.
Javier E

Opinion | The Right and Wrong Ways to Deal with Campus Antisemitism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ism-university-presidents.html

speech free speech protected campus academic freedom university culture crisis policy anti-Semitism

shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • the thing that struck me about the presidents’ answers wasn’t their legal insufficiency, but rather their stunning hypocrisy. And it’s that hypocrisy, not the presidents’ understanding of the law, that has created a campus crisis.
  • If Harvard, M.I.T. and Penn had chosen to model their policies after the First Amendment, many of the presidents’ controversial answers would be largely correct. When it comes to prohibiting speech, even the most vile forms of speech, context matters. A lot.
  • For example, surprising though it may be, the First Amendment does largely protect calls for violence. In case after case, the Supreme Court has held that in the absence of an actual, immediate threat — such as an incitement to violence — the government cannot punish a person who advocates violence. And no, there is not even a genocide exception to this rule.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • But that changes for publicly-funded universities when speech veers into targeted harassment that is “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit.”
  • The legal commentator David Lat explained further, writing: “If I repeatedly send antisemitic emails and texts to a single Jewish student, that is far more likely to constitute harassment than if I set up an antisemitic website available to the entire world.”
  • As a result, what we’ve seen on campus is a mixture of protected antisemitic (as well as anti-Islamic) speech and prohibited harassment.
  • So if the university presidents were largely (though clumsily) correct about the legal balance, why the outrage?
  • For decades now, we’ve watched as campus administrators from coast to coast have constructed a comprehensive web of policies and practices intended to suppress so-called hate speech and to support students who find themselves distressed by speech they find offensive.
  • The result has been a network of speech codes, bias response teams, safe spaces and glossaries of microaggressions that are all designed to protect students from alleged emotional harm. But not all students
  • Moreover, each of the schools represented at the hearing has its own checkered past on free speech. Harvard is the worst-rated school for free expression in America
  • So even if the presidents’ lawyerly answers were correct, it’s more than fair to ask, where was this commitment to free expression in the past?
  • That said, some of the responses to campus outrages have been just as distressing as the hypocrisy shown by the school presidents
  • Universities have censored conservatives? Then censor progressives too. Declare the extreme slogans of pro-Palestinian protesters to be harassment, and pursue them vigorously. Give them the same treatment you’ve given other groups who hold offensive views
  • But that’s the wrong answer. It’s doubling down on the problem.
  • At the same time, however, it would be wrong to carry on as if there isn’t a need for fundamental change. The rule cannot be that Jews must endure free speech at its most painful, while favored campus constituencies enjoy the warmth of college administrators and the protection of campus speech codes. The status quo is intolerable.
  • The best, clearest plan for reform I’ve seen comes from Harvard’s own Steven Pinker, a psychologis
  • He writes that campuses should enact “clear and coherent” free speech policies. They should adopt a posture of “institutional neutrality” on public controversy. (“Universities are forums, not protagonists.”) They should end “heckler’s vetoes, building takeovers, classroom invasions, intimidations, blockades, assaults.”
  • But reform can’t be confined to policies. It also has to apply to cultures. As Pinker notes, that means disempowering a diversity, equity and inclusion apparatus that is itself all too often an engine of censorship and extreme political bias
  • Most importantly, universities need to take affirmative steps to embrace greater viewpoint diversity. Ideological monocultures breed groupthink, intolerance and oppression.
  • Universities must absorb the fundamental truth that the best answer to bad speech is better speech, not censorship
  • do not protect students from speech. Let them grow up and engage with even the most vile of ideas. The answer to campus hypocrisy isn’t more censorship. It’s true liberty. Without that liberty, the hypocrisy will reign for decades more.
Javier E

Opinion | With War Raging, Colleges Confront a Crisis of Their Own Making - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...alestine-college-campuses.html

education university challenge customer model amusement academic freedom fragility coddle safety

shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Students, meanwhile, have blasted those administrators for saying too much or too little. They’ve complained about feeling stranded.
  • The tense situation largely reflects the intense differences of opinion with which many onlookers, including students, interpret and react to the rival claims and enduring bloodshed in the Middle East. But it tells another story, too: one about the evolution of higher education over the past quarter-century, the promises that schools increasingly make to their students and the expectations that arise from that.
  • Many students now turn to the colleges they attend for much more than intellectual stimulation. They look for emotional affirmation. They seek an acknowledgment of their wounds along with the engagement of their minds
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Also, college students aren’t full-fledged grown-ups. They do need guidance, and they benefit from it.
  • “The campus protests of the late 1960s sought in part to dismantle the in loco parentis role that colleges and universities had held in American life. But the past two decades have been shaped by a reversal of that, as institutions have sought to reconstruct this role in response to what students and parents paying enormous sums for their education have seemed to want.”
  • For us professors, the surrogate-parent paradigm means regular emails and other reminders from administrators that we should be taking our students’ temperatures, watching for glimmers of distress, intervening proactively and fashioning accommodations, especially if there has been some potentially discomfiting global, national or local news event
  • where does reasonable consideration end and unreasonable coddling begin? And what do validation and comfort have to do with learning?
  • Arguably, everything. If you’re not mentally healthy, you’ll be harder pressed to do the reading, writing and critical thinking at the core of college work
  • many schools have encouraged that mind-set, casting themselves as stewards of students’ welfare, guarantors of their safety, places of refuge, precincts of healing.
  • But are we responsibly preparing them for the world after college — and for the independence, toughness, resourcefulness and resilience it will almost surely demand of them — when we too easily dole out A’s, too readily grant extensions, too gingerly deliver critiques, and too quickly wonder and sound alarms about any disturbance in the atmosphere?
  • We keep witnessing episodes of students taking their colleges to task in ways that smack of entitlement and fragility and are out of bounds
  • Hamline’s president, Fayneese Miller, defended that sequence of events by saying that to not weigh academic freedom against a “debt to the traditions, beliefs and views of students” is a “privileged reaction.”
  • That’s a troubling assertion, as Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic: “If you don’t want your traditions, beliefs or views challenged, then don’t come to a university, at least not to study anything in the humanities or the social sciences.”
  • The school is a merchant, a kind of department store, or so a student could easily assume, based on the come-ons from affluent colleges competing with one another for applicants. They peddle tantalizing dining options, themed living arrangements, diverse amusements. They assign students the role of discerning customers. And the customer is always right.
  • But in an educational environment, that credo is all wrong, because learning means occasionally being provoked, frequently being unsettled and regularly being yanked outside of your comfort zone,
  • most students can handle that dislocation — if they’re properly prepped for it, if they’re made to understand its benefits. We shortchange them when we sell them short
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