Monthly Archives: May 2022

The Historic Montopolis Negro School Open House won first place in the category of "Event - Community Engagement Forum" at the National Association of Government CommunicatorsBlue Pencil and Gold Screen Awardson May 11, 2022. The Blue Pencil and Gold Screen awards recognize excellence in government communication at all levels of government across the nation. Listed as one of the 21 most coveted government leadership awards, the Blue Pencil and Gold Screen awards program has 51 categories in which communicators can submit work, reflecting the breadth of tactics employed by government communicators to deliver information to the public.

The City of Austin acquired the Montopolis Negro School in 2019 for the purpose of preserving and programming the building and site as a museum and tourist asset. The Montopolis Negro School operated from 1935 to 1962 and is among the last surviving rural schools that Travis County operated for African American children during the Jim Crow era of racial segregation. After the Austin School District integrated in 1962, the building served as the Montopolis Church of Christ until the 1980s.

Austin Parks and Recreation held an open house at the school property on November 6, 2021. Approximately 85 community members attended, some former students at the school in the 1950s. Several key community leaders attended and spoke to media present. Neighbors attended to learn the history, and some had artifacts from the school to contribute for preservation. The open house inspired community support for the project in a way that would not have been possible without seeing the space and feeling the surroundings.

"When we think of segregation as a country or as a city, we tend to feel the shame of the system we inherited," said Austin Parks and Recreation Director Kimberly McNeeley."However, our staff provided an opportunity to come to the site and remember the joys, the striving, and the hope that ran parallel and in the face of the pain of segregation. The department was also reminded that we are stewards of these spaces, and without community, we stand to solidify systems of oppression rather than working together to break them down."

"We are proud to recognize the excellent work that these award winners provided to their communities in 2021. There were so many compelling, creative and informative products submitted this year," said NAGC President Scott Thomsen. "As government communicators, we believe that every citizen has a right to equal, full, understandable, and timely facts about the activities, policies and people of the agencies comprising their government. The works submitted this year really embodied that belief. The example set by these government communicators is one we should all follow."

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Austin Parks and Recreation Wins an NAGC 2022 Blue Pencil & Gold Screen Award for the Montopolis School Open House - AustinTexas.gov

When former Army Capt. Matt Gallagher saw the video of former President Bush accidentally condemning the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the moment that cut the deepest was when Bush realized his mistake and laughed about it.

Bush had intended to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin during his speech on Wednesday in Dallas when he misspoke. Bush said that the Russian governments oppression of any political opposition has led to the end of checks and balances, And the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.

The former president immediately winced as he corrected himself and said, I mean: Of Ukraine. Then, he gave a very brief laugh, put his head down and said under his breath Iraq too, anyway. After his audience laughed, Bush then joked about his age and said, 75 and that elicited even louder laughter from those attending his speech.

To Gallagher, who served in Iraq, Bushs laugh was more revealing than the mistake itself.

I think the snicker conjured up a lot of old, buried feelings I once had of Bush at his worst the dismissive, cocky Decider-in-Chief who held little regard for nuance or critical examination, Gallagher told Task & Purpose of the war, which began when the U.S. military invaded Iraq in March 2003 because the American government suspected that dictator Saddam Hussein was secretly building weapons of mass destruction. It turned out Iraq had abandoned building those weapons after the Gulf War when Bushs father had been president.

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Thats the Bush I remember raging against, privately, in my college and ROTC [Reserve Officers Training Corps] days, the man who was determining my immediate future and that of my peers, and whose decisions ended up leaving some of them dead in Iraq, trying to make the best of his reckless, stupid war.

Now a published author, Gallagher was commissioned as an Army second lieutenant in 2005 after graduating from Wake Forest University in North Carolina. He was assigned to the 25th Infantry Division and then spent 15 months in Iraq as a scout platoon leader from 2007 to 2009. While he was deployed, Gallagher wrote an anonymous blog about his experiences, which he was eventually ordered to stop.

On Wednesday, Gallagher tweeted that he struggled to respond to Bushs accidental reference to the Iraq invasion. While he no longer hates Bush, the former presidents laugh stayed with him.

The snicker is just a couple seconds, sure, but its so instinctual on his end, Gallagher told Task & Purpose. He recovers after, to his credit, and we see a more reflective and human side come out, but I cant help but wonder how much of the other guy remains in there, still trying to justify his war of choice that took so much from both Iraq and America.

Bushs office did not respond to Task & Purposes requests for a statement to include in this story.

Sean Schofield, a Marine veteran who served in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 with the 1st Marine Division, said Bushs error is part of a pattern of the former president saying questionable things.

A former sergeant, Schofield is currently in Ukraine, where he is training Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces. On Thursday, Task & Purpose reached out to Schofield and asked for his reaction to Bushs Iraq comments.

I think this is just one more instance of him being his own worst enemy, Schofield said. Unfortunately, in this instance, hes saying that Americas military was party to an unjust and brutal invasion of a foreign country, and he seemed to lack the common sense to recognize the severity of the gaffe, and then added insult to injury by laughing about it.

Since President Bush first ordered the U.S. military to topple former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003, nearly 4,600 troops have been killed and more than 32,500 service members have been wounded while supporting operations in Iraq, according to the Defense Department.

Estimates for the numbers of Iraqi casualties since the 2003 invasion vary. Between 184,000 and 207,000 are believed to have been killed by 2019, according to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, R.I. As of 2020, 9.2 million Iraqis had either fled their country or were internally displaced, the institute also found.

Nothing about the invasion of Iraq or its aftermath is humorous, said retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, senior adviser to the liberal veterans group VoteVets.

Eaton, who helped to train Iraqi forces after the invasion, said he deeply regrets the U.S. governments decision to attack Iraq. It is an error the country needs to learn from.

He also said the failure of former Army Gen. Tommy Franks, then head of U.S. Central Command, as well as then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to plan for stabilizing Iraq after the invasion contributed to the loss of American and Iraqi lives.

Laughing it off as a gaffe was the worst part about it, Eaton told Task & Purpose. He [Bush] made a decision to go into Iraq. Not only did he make a very bad strategic decision to go to war with a country that we did not need to go to war over, but he did it badly. It was incompetently executed by the CENTCOM commander. The ill-advised humor from President Bush and those in the audience is simply appalling.

If there is to be a final epitaph for the Iraq War, then it deserves to come from a letter that Tomas Young wrote to Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney shortly after he entered hospice in 2013. Young joined the Army two days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In April 2004, he was shot in the spine while serving in Sadr City, a Shiite suburb of Baghdad. His wounds left him paralyzed from the waist down.

Written more than a year before his death in November 2014, Young wrote in his letter that Bush and Cheney had used, betrayed, and ultimately abandoned a generation of disabled veterans.

My day of reckoning is upon me, Young wrote. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

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President Bush may find it funny but the Iraq War is no joke - Task & Purpose

Welcome to Foreign Policys Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Tunisias largest trade union calls a strike over wages, a politician in Algeria seeks to criminalize normalization of relations with Israel, and the Meroe pyramids in Sudan are digitized.

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Africans Caught in the Geopolitical Crossfire

Proposed U.S. law seeks to punish African countries for aligning with Russia, declared the headline of a May 20 story in the Nigerian outlet Premium Times. The South Africa-based Daily Maverick warned it could see the continent caught in crossfire.

Both stories focused on the U.S. Congresss debate in April of a bill that would seek to counter the malign influence and activities of Russia and its proxies in Africa. The headlines offered great insight into how some African journalists and citizens view U.S. foreign policy in Africa as being primarily driven by geopolitical concerns about rivals Russia and China rather than the prosperity of Africans.

The proposed act, sponsored by Democratic Rep. Gregory Meeks, would allow Congress to assess the scope of Russian engagement on the continent, as well as monitor disinformation operations and the activities of Russian private military contractors. It passed the House of Representatives on April 27, with 415 members voting in favor and just nine against.

However, the bill is just one of many pieces of legislation, and the broader picture is worrying for African observers who fear the escalation of a new Cold War.

Even before details of the Meeks bill emerged, some had envisaged reprisals over African countries nonalignment. The United States expects other countries to fall in line, Nontobeko Hlela wrote in the Kenya-based Elephant, despite being systematically excluded from any decision-making.

The bill exists alongside the Strategic Competition Act, seeking to bolster the United States as it vies with China for influence, and the 2,900-page U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, also aimed at countering Chinaboth of which foreign-policy researchers Odilile Ayodele and Mikatekiso Kubayi have characterized as arguably Cold War-esque. That these large-scale projects prioritize China and Russia as a key focus speaks more about power than a genuine partnership with Africa, they wrote.

The bill does address real threatsand the relationship between Moscow and military governments in Sudan and Mali should not be overlooked. In Mali, suspected Russian mercenaries, alongside Malian soldiers, are accused of massacring an estimated 300 civilians in Marchthe worst single atrocity reported in Malis decade-long armed conflict, according to Human Rights Watch.

While the bill addresses Russias playbook of unfair extractive resource deals in exchange for weapons, it also requires the regular identification of African governments and officials that have facilitated payments and other prohibited activities that benefit United States-sanctioned individuals and entities tied to Russiaraising the question of whether a poorer African nation buying Russian oil from a sanctioned entity, for example, could then face sanctions.

Part of the problem, argue Zainab Usman and Katie Auth of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is that the United States and its allies have engaged with Africa for decades only on humanitarian and security concerns. On a continent that has the largest number of foreign military operations and outposts, Africas young and increasingly cynical population perceives U.S. policies focused on China and Russia, in which African countries are merely pawns in a so-called great-power game, as an objectionable way to build partnerships.

U.S.-Africa trade has continued to slide from $142 billion in 2008 to just $64 billion in 2021. While Africas relationship with China is highly unbalanced and has sparked repeated regional protests, U.S. diplomats often fail to acknowledge the infrastructural benefits it has brought to democratic countries such as Senegalwhere Chinas Belt and Road projects have funded highways and cultural centersand in the Seychelles, which actively courts Chinese investment as part of the countrys ambitions to be a financial hub.

In some countries, the Russia-Ukraine war has compounded the economic problems caused by the pandemic, Chinas economic slowdown, and climate change-induced drought. Egypt, the worlds largest importer of wheat, relied on Russia for around 50 percent and Ukraine for 25 percent of its grain supply. We will feel shame if we find that millions of people are dying because of food insecurity. They are not responsible for that. They didnt do anything wrong, Egyptian Finance Minister Mohamed Maait told the Financial Times.

Last week, as India banned exports of most of its wheat, Egypt asked to be exempt. A Russian blockade of Black Sea ports has stopped the export of some 25 million metric tons of Ukrainian grain that now cannot leave the country, according to the United Nations.

Some Western writers have sought to use food supply challenges as an argument for why African governments should condemn Russia, failing to understand the position that sanctions on Russia are the main driver for their economic turmoil. As Nic Cheeseman wrote in the Africa Report, the idea that economic injustices in the worlds most economically exploited regions should be used as a stick with which African governments can be hit to force them back into line, is equal parts perplexing and offensive.

Certain African governments have condemned Russias actions in Ukraine in strong terms. Kenyas U.N. ambassador, Martin Kimani, affirmed to the U.N. Security Council just days before Russias invasion that we must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression.

Therefore, it would be a mistake to view Kenya and many other nations abstentions as being pro-Russia. Kimani said Kenya abstained on votes to avoid being dragged into global power rivalry, stating that the Security Council in the future may appear weaponized.

Responding to questions about African neutrality, the United States ambassador to the U.N., Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said that we have to do additional work to help these countries to understand the impact of Russias war of aggression on Ukrainea comment that implied African leaders required education on their own sovereign decision-making.

As Ghanaian historian Samuel Adu-Gyamfi tells it, Western-imposed forms of democracy have failed the continent. In his view, economic reforms required by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have led to underdevelopment in African countries, as have more recent imports like lockdowns, travel bans and vaccine mandatespushed on Africa by Western-dominated institutions, he wrote in NewsAfrica.

Resentment of neocolonialism is also driving opposition to Western demands. Frances policies toward its former colonies have prompted growing backlash against the French government. A nine-year military engagement in Mali that failed to subdue violent extremists has brought frustration and accusations of civilian killings in drone attacks, while in Chad Frances support for the military regime has angered the Chadian people, who overwhelmingly want a democratically elected leader.

Africa, like much of the world, is not aligned with Washingtons framing of the war. As FP columnist Howard French wrote, Americas concern with containing the spread of Chinese or Soviet influence overrode considerations of governance and democracy for decades in Washingtons Africa policy.

Some things havent changed. In January, an op-ed in GhanaWeb suggested that [i]n most cases, the US government continues to support corrupt regimes, citing Ugandas Yoweri Museveni. Western powers continued to provide his regime with nearly $2bn a year, Cheta Nwanze noted in Al Jazeera.

If the West wants to bring African countries into the fold, it would do well to acknowledge and understand the legacy of its own policies in those countries while genuinely engaging citizens and providing incentives for leaders to get on board. New proposals that Africans perceive as punishment for exercising their own geopolitical agency risk undermining long-term U.S. goals on the continent.

Wednesday, May 25: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz ends his three-nation African visit in South Africa.

Global celebrations mark Africa Day, the anniversary of the formation of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963 and the African Union in 2002.

Thursday, May 26: Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi hosts Algerias president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, in Rome.

U.N. Secretary-General Antnio Guterres delivers remarks at the opening segment of the high-level policy dialogue of the Africa Dialogue Series 2022.

Ugandan detentions. Ugandan police have detained opposition figure Kizza Besigye in his home in the capital of Kampala after he called for street protests against rising food and fuel costs. The government has so far refused to intervene to address the rising cost of living; on Sunday, President Yoweri Museveni said government subsidies or removal of import taxes would collapse the economy.

Besigye, who has been under house arrest since May 12, has repeatedly campaigned against the government of Museveni, who has been in power since 1986 and was reelected amid accusations of vote fraud in January 2021.

Tunisia strikes. The main labor union in Tunisia, UGTT, said on Monday that it would hold a national strike over wages after rejecting participation in a limited dialogue proposed by President Kais Saied as he rewrites the constitution, in what critics have called a presidential coup.

UGTT has more than 1 million members and remains a powerful political force in Tunisia. Saied has ruled by decree for almost a year, since July 2021, when he dismissed the government and suspended parliament.

Ethiopia arrests. Ethiopian authorities have arrested more than 4,000 people in the northern Amhara region, local state media said on Monday, as part of a wider crackdown against militia fighters, the media, and critics. It followed the arrests of at least nine media workers in the region, according to the outlets that employ them, the Nisir International Broadcasting Corp. and Ashara Media.

Just a few days earlier, the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front, the rebel group fighting Ethiopias federal government, said on Twitter that it would release 4,208 prisoners of war as part of an amnesty agreement.

Algeria-Israel relations. Algerian members of parliament have submitted a bill that seeks to criminalize any normalization of relations between Algeria and Israel. The bill, proposed by opposition lawmaker Youssef Ajesa, may not win majority support. Algeria has maintained a pro-Palestinian stance and has so far not joined other Arab-majority nations in reestablishing diplomatic relations with Israel.

Sudans pyramids. The pyramids of Meroe, the last capital of the ancient Kingdoms of Kush, located in modern-day Sudan, can now be explored on Googles Art and Culture platform, including the chance to view carved hieroglyphics inside the sandstone tombs using panoramic imagery via Googles Street View.

Meroe, which was named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2011, was part of Sudans Nubian civilization that dominated around 2500 B.C. and left behind more than 200 pyramids.

In 1834, Italian explorer Giuseppe Ferlini began blowing up several pyramids in his search for Kushite treasures, leaving many of the tombs missing their pointed tops. The objects he found were sold to museums in Munich in 1839 and Berlin in 1844. (Those treasures had belonged to Nubian Queen Amanishakheto.)

The cursive and hieroglyphic scriptures within Meroe have long been considered a lost history of Black civilization because the Meroitic language they are written in is only partly deciphered. For years, European and American historians and archaeologists wrongly viewed the kingdom as an outpost of Egypt.

As Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet told Smithsonian Magazine, Western archaeologists were trying to find Egypt in Sudan, not Sudan in Sudan. As a result, much is still unknown about the empire, which would require a full understanding of the Meroitic language.

Tunisias inflation rate has passed its previous March 2019 peak. The countrys central bank has had to raise its key interest rate to confront high inflation amid a budget deficit that will expand to 9.7 percent of GDP this year due to the shock in grain and energy prices. The surge in prices has strengthened the U.S. dollar while pushing down the value of Tunisias dinar.

In HumAngle, writer Muhammed Akinyemi takes a deep dive into the illegal oil refining network that is causing health issues in Nigerias Port Harcourt, as well as irreversible damage to its environment. The country has very few refining facilities and relies on imported oil.

In Africa Is a Country, Marame Gueye recounts the heydays of Afro-Cuban music in West Africa during the 1960s and 1970s in a review of the film El Maestro Laba Sosseh, which documents the life of Senegalese salsa singer and composer Laba Sosseh.

Excerpt from:

How the West Lost Africa, Protests in Tunisia, and More News - Foreign Policy

AMAC Exclusive By Ben Solis

On May 11, Chinese authorities arrested 90-year-old Cardinal Joseph Zen, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Hong Kong from 2002-2009 and an outspoken critic of the Chinese Communist Partys oppression of Christians. In targeting Cardinal Zen, the CCP is continuing a long historical pattern of socialist regimes persecuting religious leaders in order to expand political and social control over a population.

In the charges brought against Zen, the CCP accuses him of breaking Chinas national security law for associating with the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, an organization which provided bail funds to protestors arrested during the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2019.

Though the organization is now defunct, Zen could face life in prison if convicted. Cantopop singer and actor Denise Ho, ex-legislator Margaret Ng, and academic Dr Hui Po Keung were also arrested and stand accused of similar charges. Many Catholics in Hong Kong affectionately refer to Zen as Grandpa Cardinal, and his arrest is sure to worsen an already tense situation between Beijing and the Vatican, as well as the international community.

Born into a Catholic Shanghai family in 1932, Cardinal Zen left for Hong Kong, then a British colony, in 1948, a year before the communists took over of the mainland. In 1989, Zen and others in Hong Kong watched the student-led pro-democracy protests unfold in China before a brutal military crackdown in Beijings Tiananmen Square left many dead.

That started Zen on a pattern of activism and speaking out against the Chinese government. Zen has repeatedly urged the Vatican to take a tougher stance toward the CCP, and has raised concerns about the Churchs willingness to compromise its independence in order to appease authoritarian leaders a criticism that echoes that of other church leaders in the 20th century, namely in Eastern Bloc countries under Soviet rule.

Indeed, Zens arrest bears eerie similarity to the targeting of religious figures by Moscow following World War II as Stalin and his successors tried to stamp out the light of Christianity on the continent.

In 1953, for example, the Polish Communist regime, a puppet of Moscow, arrested Cardinal Stefan Wyszyski, the Primate of Poland. As a Church canon law professor, a warrior who fought both the Nazis and the Red Army, and someone who risked his life to save Jews from the Holocaust, Wyszyski was a symbol of invincible and sagacious resistance.

When the Soviets took over following World War II, Moscow issued a decree that allowed it to appoint and dismiss officials in the Catholic Church administration, including parish priests. A Conference of Bishops led by Cardinal Wyszyski protested the decree, saying that we must not lay Gods matters on Caesars altar. For his transgressions, Wyszyski was imprisoned for three years and watched closely by the communist regime.

In Hungary, Moscow imposed a similarly brutal crackdown on the Catholic Church, nearly destroying it entirely. Soviet authorities secularized Catholic schools, censored the free press, and killed or arrested many priests.

In the face of this oppression, Cardinal Jzsef Mindszenty dared to defy the Soviets, urging resistance to the puppet government in Budapest. Like Wyszyski, Mindszenty was uncompromisingly anti-communist, with no illusions about the ulterior motives, designs, and nature of the Marxist adversaries. Especially when dealing with determined communists, a hesitant, irresolute attitude could prove disastrous, he wrote in his memoirs.

In 1948, Mindszenty was arrested, and after being tortured, pled guilty to treason and conspiracy. He was imprisoned for eight years before finally being freed and granted asylum at the U.S. Embassy in Budapest.

But while the persecutions of Wyszyski and Mindszenty were met with thundering condemnation by Pope Pius XII, Zens arrest has come with hardly a peep from Pope Francis. While the Vatican has said it is concerned about the arrest, it has neither said or done anything of real significance for fear of upsetting the Communist Party of China.

As Zen himself has said, compromise with evil will not save the Church in China, but only doom it to a more prolonged suffering and destruction. It has and always will be the faith of religious peoples which allow light to triumph over darkness. Todays Catholic leaders would do well to remember this truth and forcefully condemn Chinas crackdown on religion, lest the Chinese communists succeed in accomplishing what the Soviet Union unsuccessfully sought to do many decades ago.

Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian and researcher.

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China's Arrest of Heroic Cardinal Shows Vatican Must Stand Up to Beijing - AMAC

In the three months since Russia began its war of aggression, the character of the country has been changing before our eyes. Its much-vaunted military has been exposed as not only weak, disorganized, and corrupt, but also criminal, engaging in pillaging and the torture and mass slaughter of unarmed Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war. Resorting to a practice not seen since the Stalin era, Vladimir Putins government has also been deporting captured Ukrainians, apparently by the hundreds of thousands, to distant portions of Russia, first passing them through filtration camps where prisoners are interrogated for nationalist leanings and selected out for punishment. The Russian judicial system has been mobilized to crack down on dissent against the war; among other things, it is a crime punishable by up to 15 years in a labor camp to refer to it as anything but a special military operation. To the extent that there were independent media before the war, they have been shut down and the only voices now in print or on the air are official propaganda. Access to independent news sources on the internet has also been sharply restricted. In sum, Russia has taken a number of steps back toward the repression of the Soviet era.

But as draconian as these various measures all are, Russia is not yet properly called totalitarian as it rightly was during the reign of Joseph Stalin or even much of the Leonid Brezhnev era. About a century ago, Benito Mussolini called fascist Italy a totalitarian state, a concept that he defined with brilliant clarity: Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State. But whether the label of totalitarian actually applies to Mussolini-era Italian fascism, or, again, to Putins Russia today, is open to serious question. All-encompassing statism was more of an aspiration than an Italian accomplishment. Even the more thoroughgoing oppression of Nazi Germany did not quite fit the totalitarian model, at least according to the criteria set forth by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Carl Friedrich in their influential 1956 volume, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy.

To Brzezinski and Friedrich, totalitarian rule was an extreme form of authoritarianism possessing six characteristics: an all-encompassing ideology, a single party, a terroristic police, a communications monopoly, a weapons monopoly and a centrally directed economy. All six were necessary to fit the bill of totalitarian. Absent one, and the definition was not fulfilled. Stalins Soviet Union was the premier case. Nazi Germany, with its only partially centralized economy, was a close second. Putins Russia is moving alarmingly closer, but it still lacks some of totalitarianisms key features.

Here at home and in the West, the concept of totalitarianism came under assault as the Cold War consensus unraveled in the 1960s and 1970s. Revisionist scholars saw it as offering an intellectual foundation and implicit justification for the VietnamWar and the Cold War. A barrage of journal articles and books was launched in an attempt to demolish the construct. As the counterculture emerged, it became fashionable in some quarters of the left to identify the United States itself as totalitarian, or pre- or proto-totalitarian, on a plane with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In this, the novelist Norman Mailer was a pioneer, opining in his famous 1957 essay, The White Negro, that citizens were trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed. Herbert Marcuse, the political theory guru of the New Left, came next, arguing that all industrial societies, very much including the United States, were totalitarian. To some on the extremes, we were not America but Amerika, the spelling signifying a shared identity with Nazi Germany. We shall not defeat Amerika, proclaimed Abbie Hoffman, leader of the leaderless Yippies, by organizing a political party. We shall do it by building a new nationa nation as rugged as the marijuana leaf.

Today, in one of those remarkable inversions of history, the charge that the United States is totalitarian no longer comes from the left but the right, from Americas growing contingent of self-proclaimed post-liberal intellectuals.

To Rod Dreher, senior editor at the American Conservative and the author of a number of best-selling books, liberal democracy is degenerating into something resembling the totalitarianism over which it triumphed in the Cold War. To be sure, qualifies Dreher, [t]his totalitarianism wont look like the USSRs. Its not establishing itself through hard means like armed revolution or enforcing itself with gulags. Rather, it exercises control, at least initially, in soft forms. Dreher has in mind contemporary progressivism: Under the guise of diversity, inclusivity, equity, and other egalitarian jargon, the Left creates powerful mechanisms for controlling thought and discourse and marginalizing dissenters as evil.

Patrick Deneen, professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and the author of Why Liberalism Failed, maintains that U.S. constitutional libertiesfreedom of speech, freedom of association, free and fair elections, and freedom of religionhave become an empty faade: [O]ur capacity for self-government has waned almost to the point of nonexistence. We live under what he calls liberalocratic despotism, in which the liberal state expands to control nearly every aspect of life. Liberal totalitarianism is a phrase he has taken to employing.

To Yoram Hazony, the Israeli-American leader of the new U.S. national conservative movement, liberal democracy has become a kind of totalizing dictatorship: [T]he opponents of liberalism have been vanquished one by one, and universal liberal empire has seemed to come within reach. The consequence: There are increasingly insistent demands for conformity to a single universal standard in speech and religion. Liberalism has taken on the worst feature of the medieval Catholic empire upon which it is unwittingly modeled, including a doctrine of infallibility, as well as a taste for the inquisition and the index.

To Adrian Vermeule, an integralistthat is, an advocate of establishing a Catholic confessional stateand a chaired professor at Harvard Law School, communism and liberalism have far more in common than it would seem at first glance. According to Vermeule, [t]he stock distinction between the Enlightenments twinscommunism is violently coercive while liberalism allows freedom of thoughtis glib. Liberal society celebrates toleration, diversity, and free inquiry, but in practice it features a spreading social, cultural, and ideological conformism. And in his account, those who decline to conformilliberal citizens like himselflive much like refuseniks in the totalitarian USSR: They are trapped without exit papers, suffer a narrowing sphere of permitted action and speech, shrinking prospects, and increasing pressure from regulators, employers, and acquaintances, and even from friends and family.

What can one say about this vision of America as a repressive society?

One of the arresting features of the supposed American totalitarianism is that it is invisible. Dreher explains that, given its soft form, [i]ts possible to miss the onslaught of totalitarianism. To Deneen, liberalism is more insidious than its competitor ideologiesfascism and communismprecisely because, unlike highly visible fascist or communist repression, it is unseen: [L]iberalism is less visibly ideological and only surreptitiously remakes the world in its image. [A]s an ideology, it pretends to neutrality, claiming no preference and denying any intention of shaping the souls under its rule.

Of course, another obvious explanation, other than unwitting enslavement by an invisible tyranny, is that the contention that the United States is under totalitarian rule is simply false. The definition of an onslaught is a very violent or forceful attack. If it is possible simply to miss the onslaught of totalitarianism, as Dreher claims, perhaps it is not really much of an onslaught at all. If one considers the six characteristics enumerated by Brzezinski and Friedrich, not a single one of them obtains in the United States. There is no over-arching ideology to which it is mandatory to adhere. No single party dominates with an autocrat at its head. There is no government monopoly on communications or force. No secret police is hounding dissidents. No central economic planning is in place.

To assert, as Deneen does, that the liberal state expands to control nearly every aspect of life is to make a mockery of the real horrors of totalitarian societies, past and present, like North Korea, where such control is a grim reality. In lamenting the impossibility of obtaining exit papers and the narrowing sphere of permitted action and speech in which he and like-minded colleagues find themselves, Vermeule, a distinguished professor of law who prolifically expresses himself in public lectures, books, articles and even tweets, is doing nothing more than engaging in a vicarious form of victimhood. Likening his (highly privileged) position to that of someone trapped without exit papers is a particularly ugly exercise in America bashing, on a par with anything ever said or done by the Yippies. At any moment, of course, Vermeule is free to resign his Harvard chair and emigrate to the country of his choice; no exit papers are required. As for Drehers soft totalitarianism, on inspection it is a mere oxymoron, a nonsense phrase akin to gentle terror, that serves as a rhetorical grenade to toss in the culture war.

In characterizing America as totalitarian, post-liberals like Dreher are reacting to an over-bearing strain of American progressivism that travels under the name of political correctness and, lately, wokeness, a pejorative term that sheds more heat than light. Dreher would be on target if all he claimed is that some corners of the left have succeeded to a disturbing extent in putting in place mechanisms that attempt to control discourse in educational institutions and corporations. There is indeed a censorious cultural movement afoot that has spread widely, committing outrages along the way. But these outrages are overwhelmingly the handiwork of private actors, not overreaching government. Moreover, countervailing forces are in play: Organizations like the Academic Freedom Alliance and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education have sprung up to defend freedom of thought and expression. There is no shortage of thinkers across the political spectrumthe names of Jonathan Chait, Anne Applebaum and Robert P. George come to mindwho offer withering criticism of progressive authoritarianism without rushing to the conclusion that America has descended into some sort of totalitarian nightmare.

The fact of the matter is that in whatever direction one looks, the left-wing progressive agenda is in retreat. A dont say gay bill that bans discussion of sexual orientation in kindergarten through 3rd-grade classrooms has passed in Florida, and copies are under consideration in numerous other jurisdictions. Theres a well-publicized backlash to the participation of transgendered athletes in womens sports. The teaching of critical race theoryor just the perception of the teaching of critical race theoryhas provoked a backlash, leading to books being removed from school libraries, not by the left but by the right. Supposedly woke mega-corporations are under assault from lawmakers, their tax benefits targeted, their antitrust status questioned. The landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion is almost certain to be overturned, and one state after the next is subjecting the procedure to tighter restrictions if not an outright ban. If one looks at the composition of the Supreme Court, it appears that conservatives have been faring rather well. Whatever one thinks about any of these developments, they are not exactly the hallmarks of a left-wing dictatorship, let alone a totalitarian one.

Ironically, even as the post-liberals deplore their own countrys totalitarian character, they have a soft spot for genuine authoritarians. Putin has presided over a regime with a long record of murdering rivals and journalists and engaging in aggression against neighboring countries. This did not deter Dreher from piling praise on the Russian leader for his Christian virtues in articles with titles like Putin Gets It. Why Dont We and Putin, Our Tsar Protector. Only after Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine did Dreher evidently have a change of heart. Now his articles bear titles like Clarity About Russian Brutality, in which he expresses disappointment that the master of the Kremlin, his erstwhile hero of the culture wars, is an utter disgrace.

If the sun has set on one deity, it has long risen on another, namely Viktor Orbn, prime minister of avowedly illiberal Hungary. Hazony and Deneen have made pilgrimages to Budapest to pay homage to the Hungarian leader. At Orbns meet-and-greet with Deneen, reads the official press release, the American academic spoke highly of Hungarys family policy measures, stressing that the future would rest on local communities based on national and family values rather than on liberalism. To Dreher, who had gone to live in Hungary for a spell, Orbns election victory in early April was a moment of triumph: Make no mistake, Dreher pronounced in a tweet, #ViktorOrban is the leader of the West nowthe West that still remembers what the West is. Under Orbn, says Dreher, the Hungarians are defending democracy and national sovereignty over and against the culturally imperialistic liberals of the West.

Never mind that Hungary is a kleptocracy in which the media is overwhelmingly controlled by the state and the ruling Fidesz party. Never mind that Orbn has packed Hungarys courts with cronies. Never mind that, as Arch Puddington has shown, Orbn has adopted a fawning posture toward a true totalitarian state: the Peoples Republic of China. Never mind that Orbns party and government have engaged in a thinly veiled campaign of anti-Semitism, rehabilitating vicious Jew-hating fascist figures of the pre-war era, white-washing Hungarys extensive role in the destruction of Hungarian Jewry, and turning the Jewish Hungarian-born American philanthropist George Soros into a national bogeyman. Like Putins Russia, Hungary makes a show of upholding family values and Christianity, and what is a little state-sponsored anti-Semitism compared to that? Soft totalitarianism may be a self-refuting oxymoron, but a more useful analytical term, creeping authoritarianism, certainly applies to Drehers new political paradise.

What follows from the notion that America is a dictatorship? One logical conclusion would be that the tyranny must be brought down. It would be foolish in the extreme to maintain that the mob that swarmed the Capitol on Jan. 6 was inspired by post-liberal theorists. The chief inspirer was Donald Trump himself. But a climate has been created, and wild ideas are in circulation, which Trump exploited.

Deploying violent imagery, the post-liberal theorists are contributors to that climate. Vermeule calls for seizing a strategic position from which to sear the liberal faith with hot irons. Civility and decency are secondary values, says the integralist Sohrab Ahmari, another post-liberal and an editor at Compact magazine. It is necessary, Ahmari says, to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy. The goal of the war is to enjoy the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good. The common and the Highest Good are to be determined, of course, by Ahmari and his like-minded post-liberal comrades themselves. Ahmari, it is pertinent to note, is a supporter of Frances far-right Marine Le Pen, leader of a political party whose roots lie in French fascism.

If there is a whiff of fascism in the air or, perhaps, more precisely, a longing for a Franco or a Salazar, that is unsurprising. Ahmari and his fellow post-liberals hold liberal democracy in contempt. They despise the individualism that is liberalisms underpinning. They valorize national solidarity and cultural homogeneity. They exude a loathing of America as decadent and depraved. We are an evil civilization, and we will be judged, declaims Dreher in a tweet. They follow the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, who contended, as Deneen approvingly summarizes his view, that the great totalitarian threat of our age emanated not ultimately from the dictatorships of so-called communist regimes of the Soviet Union or China, but from the unfolding liberal logic of the West (emphasis added).

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them, said George Orwell. But the claim that the greatest totalitarian threat emanates from the unfolding liberal logic of the West is worse than stupid, it is morally despicable, standing on its head the epic struggle between freedom and barbarism while erasing memory of the millions who perished at communist hands. Just as there is something called Holocaust denial, there is something called Gulag denial, and this is an instance of it. It would be interesting to ask Deneen, who has a doctorate in political science, to compare the number of people murdered by the Soviet Union and China with the number murdered by governments operating under the unfolding liberal logic of the West. He would discover that the resulting ratiotens of millions of deaths on one side, zero on the otheris a telling measure of what constitutes a totalitarian threat and what does not. One is only left wondering why Deneen calls the Soviet Union and China so-called communist regimes. While tarring the liberal West as despotic, does he simultaneously harbor doubts about the communist character of these two countries?

Whatever lies behind such confusion (if that is what it is), both the post-liberals calumniation of their own country and their adoration of authoritarian leaders abroad seeps down from the intellectual sphere into the popular culture, where an entire ecosphere of illiberalsactivists, journalists, aspiring politicians, militia members, crackpots of various stripeshas been energized. While retaining his affinity for Vladimir Putin, Tucker Carlsonthe keynote speaker at Hazonys first gathering of national conservativeshas broadcast from Budapest, bringing the supposed virtues of Hungary to the broad masses of the Fox television audience. This very month, the Conservative Political Action Coalition (CPAC), hosted a convocation in Hungary in Orbns honor. A strange assortment of characters is now lauding Hungarys illiberal democracy, while lambasting America as a tyranny. Dictator Joe Biden started phase 1 of the Dems Communist takeover of America, is how Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene sees the world. The United States needs to be liberated like Ukraine, says Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert. Rod Dreher makes an excellent case that totalitarianism has just about arrived in the U.S., writes Abe Greenwald, an editor at conservative Commentary magazine, addingwith the self-indicting irony escaping himthat the label totalitarian is much abused.

A segment of the right is infected with arrant nonsense, but the content of that arrant nonsense did not spring from nowhere. At a moment when American liberal democracy is coming undone, a group of supposedly serious thinkers has been engaged in a travesty, slandering the United States while simultaneously trivializing the extraordinarily brutal history of 20th century totalitarianism. It is a scandalous falsehood, a perversion of language for political ends, to contend, as Dreher does, that American liberal democracy has degenerated into something resembling the totalitarianism over which it triumphed in the Cold War. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent much of his life caught in the maw of such a regime. His masterwork, The Gulag Archipelago, a chronicle of the torture and murder of millions, makes plain what totalitarianism is and what it is not. Live not by lies is Solzhenitsyns indelible admonition to those who would seek freedom. In a case of intellectual hijacking, Live Not By Lies is also the title Dreher gave to his most recent book. It is past time he and his fellow post-liberals began heeding Solzhenitsyns famous words.

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Is the United States Totalitarian? - Lawfare

Even before Between Two Knees starts, it is already making you laugh loud, think hard and question your values.

This show has the funniest pre-show announcements, and not in the usual funny voice or unwrap your candy now speech. The no photography allowed warning mocks the audiences misunderstandings of Native American culture (photographs take a piece of your soul) and the now-ubiquitous explanation that theaters exist on land stolen from Native communities descends into literal blah blah blah, saying that audiences never listen to it so the company has offered a map in the program showing who originally cared for all the land in Connecticut.

Prepare to be challenged, confronted, enlightened, shamed and, above all, amused.

Between Two Knees is a weighty, witty, mad dash through some abominable, almost unimaginable tragedies of American history. One where people are massacred for the land they live on or sometimes for no good reason at all. The play is bookended by the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 and the American Indian Movements occupation of Wounded Knee, which led to armed altercations with the federal government in 1973. A lot happens in between, including a few wars.

The laughs are constant and constantly uncomfortable. White guilt is a running theme. So are abuse of power, racism and classism. Organized religion is attacked. So is the military.

Between Two Knees was originally produced three years ago by comedy troupe The 1491s at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, with the same director and much of the same cast,but this is such a consummate Yale Rep-type show that its very difficult to believe it wasnt created here. It has well-crafted jokes, well-researched history, costumes that are not just practical (since each cast member makes dozens of costume changes) but really something to look at, props that makes jokes funnier, projections that transport the action into other worlds, an old-fashioned vaudeville stage outlined with giant Native caricatures like the Cleveland Indians mascot and the Land-o-Lakes woman and rigorous attention to every line, every joke, historical note and cry of anguish as another character is killed.

Justin Gauthier as Larry in "Between Two Knees" at Yale Rep, directed by Eric Ting. (T. Charles Erickson)

This play has five writers: Ryan Redcorn, Sterlin Harjo, Dallas Goldtooth, Migizi Pensoneau and Bobby Wilson. None of them appear in the show as performers because they are all currently shooting the second season of Reservation Dogs, a TV series Harjo co-created for the FX network.

So many hands on the script means that jokes have been finetuned for maximum impact. The many different playing styles are distinct and refined and work on their own terms.

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Director Eric Ting helmed some amazing productions at the Long Wharf Theatre when he was the associate artistic director there from 2004-15, but almost nothing that could be called comedy. Here, Ting proved not just as versatile as The 1491s, but a genuine team player who can find the heart of each scene.

[Native American historic satire Between Two Knees, from the writers of Reservation Dogs on FX, seeks to enlighten and amuse at Yale Rep]

At two-and-a-half hours, Between Two Knees takes all the time it needs to tell a multi-generational story about a Native American family, offering critical retellings of massacres and injustices. In the first half, there is a brief game show parody and a vaudeville comedy routine, both of which are simple and direct and also funny and deceptive. Layered light and dark routines anchor the second half, including a monologue about decades of degradation and distrust, told in a stand-up comedy style, and a family melodrama that ends with smoldering bodies.

From left: Shaun Taylor-Corbett and Wotko Long in a sketch from The 1491's "Between Two Knees" at Yale Repertory Theatre through June 4. (T. Charles Erickson)

Everyone in the cast seven Native American actors and one Chinese one (so they can make a joke about You know how hard it was to cast this?) has a range seldom required of performers in a single show. They clown, they die, they dance and they engage in long stage battles. One of them (Justin Gauthier) is the shows narrator named Larry who convincingly falls into a dozen other characters all also named Larry. Several players dazzle, including Shaun Taylor-Corbett, who plays an evil priest as well as one of the plays big heroes, William Wolf, Rachel Crowl, who sings, plays piano and gets some of the biggest laughs of the night as a 1960s New Age minister, and Sheila Tousey, the funniest wounded mother ever.

As impressive as individual characterizations are, whats most impressive is how well everyone works together, especially with hyper shifts in mood and style.

Theres a long tradition of thought-provoking, dark, topical and funny ensemble shows at Yale Rep. Between Two Knees raises the stakes and brings the house down.

Between Two Knees by The 1491s, directed by Eric Ting, runs through June 4 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St., New Haven. Performances are Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m., with Saturday matinees at 2 p.m. on May 28 and June 4 and a Wednesday matinee at 2 p.m. on June 1. $10-$65. yalerep.org.

Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com.

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'Between Two Knees' at Yale Rep is a dark, and unpredictably hilarious, response to a century of Native American oppression - Hartford Courant

I sat down today to write what will be my final piece for The Michigan Daily. Much of my content these last two years has been heavy. I was excited to use my last column to write something hopeful about how maybe our generation still has a chance to restore civility and decorum in our politics and society; how maybe we could be the generation that finally builds a diverse, prosperous, United States.

All of that will unfortunately have to wait, because on April 7, The Michigan Daily published an Op-Ed equating the Russian genocide in Ukraine to Israels actions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My gut reaction was three-fold: as a Jew, I was disgusted; as a student of history and politics, I was insulted; as a staff member of The Daily I dont even know where to begin. I have to be honest: I sat down to write an ad hominem attack against the author of that Op-Ed, but that wasnt going to help anyone. Yelling apartheid! and antisemite! back and forth at one another accomplishes nothing.

After addressing some of my concerns with the author of the Op-Ed, Jared Eno, it is clear that his intent is not to vilify the Israeli or Jewish people far from it: I feel a particular responsibility to speak out about the oppression of Palestinians because my grandfather was a Zionist who participated in the founding of Israel, he said in an email. The insult and disgust I felt at first read has largely gone away, and I am left with this striking realization: we can call Israel out for its indiscretions we can question any number of its actions in the Palestinian territories but we can also debate the solutions to that problem without spewing vitriol in each others faces. Nobody at The Michigan Daily is going to solve a decades-old geopolitical nightmare, but we can definitely find more constructive ways to talk about it.

Eno argued that the Palestinian struggle for self-determination is analogous to the Ukrainians fight to stave off a hostile foreign invasion. Therefore, he says, it is counterintuitive to support Ukrainians, but not Palestinians grouping them in the article under the umbrella of all oppressed peoples. Unfortunately, this is the same charge leveled in recent years by avowed anti-Zionist U.S. Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who used the term apartheid to describe Israeli actions in the Palestinian territories.

To get up on a soapbox and proclaim Israel to be a moral authority on Western democracy would be silly, but the word apartheid is loaded, and carries a unique weight when used to denigrate Israel. Israel has committed gratuitous acts of violence across the Palestinian territories for decades; this much is undeniable theyve done it in the last week. But one would be wise to remember where the word apartheid comes from, who we most commonly see using these terms and why its use in the context of Israel can (often accidentally) end up being used as a prop for antisemites to delegitimize the Jewish state.

The South African apartheid regime came to power in elections during the 1950s and early 1960s, supported exclusively by whites and with the stated goal of creating a white ethno-state built on the backs of an African subject class. This isnt conjecture it was the fundamental philosophy of Hendrik Verwoerd, the former South African State President and primary architect of apartheid. To claim that Palestinians, in fact, face discrimination in society would be like saying the sky is, in fact, up. But frankly, its a real slap in the face to Black South Africans to be compared to Palestinians, who, in spite of undeniable public discrimination, have their own autonomous governments in much of the West Bank and all of Gaza the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, respectively. Mere membership in Mandelas ANC party was a crime in South Africa until 1990.

While apartheid does have a formal legal meaning outside the context of South Africa, that use of the term hardly holds the place in our vernacular as does its South Africa-specific homonym. That broader definition, though, gives cover to those who accuse Israel of apartheid. While some people, such as Eno, are clear that they do not mean to apply the South African context to the word, it is still there. No amount of cognitive dissonance can stop a person from associating apartheid with the one country ever to openly implement it. Associating Israel with apartheid is associating it with the murderous South African regime, intentionally or otherwise, simply because of the connotation the word takes on in Western society.

It shouldnt come as a shock to hear that a country which was founded in large part as a safe haven for a people who survived a genocide would take particular offense to being branded an apartheid state. Israel does not grant full equal rights to Palestinians. Thats not a secret. But this is a people which has survived multiple attempts at ethnic cleansing in the past century. Suggesting that theyre perpetrating a similar offense to apartheid South Africa will not make Israel move on the Palestinian issue, and branding it as an apartheid state is not the same as or necessary for demanding reform. Words matter, and those words are both ineffective and patently untrue.

You dont have to take my word for it when I say that Ukrainians would not take kindly to a rejection of Israeli democracy. You can take the word of the leader of the free world, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (who, for the record, is a Jew, and a descendant of Holocaust survivors). Zelenskyy told an assembled press corps that Ukraine strove to be a big Israel with its own face, with soldiers in cinemas, supermarkets To the Western ear, that might sound kind of terrifying. Americans in particular are used to a society in which the military essentially does not play a role in daily domestic life.

But what Zelenskyy is proposing isnt a state of permanent martial law hes not going to preside over a post-war Ukrainian junta. Hes aligning himself with the Israeli vision of democracy, wherein the state security apparatus must be integrated into society in order to safeguard it. When Zelensky talks about a big Israel, hes not just talking about soldiers in the streets. Israelis have a bond with the Israeli Defense Forces few other countries share with their armed forces. Part of that comes from its compulsory service policy, but its also because the IDF have had to repel hostile combat forces from the Israeli homeland since the day Israel declared its independence.

Israelis feel so intertwined with the IDF because they have watched it defend them from neighbors who have denied Israels right to exist from the instant it left the British Empire. If that sentiment rings a bell, its because its exactly what Ukrainians have borne witness to for the last two months. After this war, Ukrainians will feel that same connection to their military as Israelis. They will not fear the military in society as an oppressive force they will welcome them as heroes and defenders of their freedom and safety, just as most Israelis do with the IDF.

Zelenskyys big Israel vision is one of the only direct link these two conflicts share. Israel has very little to do with Russias war in Ukraine (which Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has publicly and repeatedly condemned). There was no reason for Eno to bring Israel into this conversation. In doing so, he distracts from the far more pressing issues at hand the necessity of arming Ukraine to the teeth, and helping them fend off an unprovoked war of aggression. Coincidentally, thats exactly what the Russian government is trying to do by claiming that Israel is using the invasion of Ukraine to distract the world from the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Its Whataboutism 101 Yeah, Putin is a nightmare, but what about the Israelis? What about the Israelis, who have endured three major Arab terror attacks in the last month? What about Israelis, who have to fight an enemy known to use civilians as human shields, only to be lambasted as butchers for defending their innocent civilians from Hamas the internationally recognized terrorist organization and religious fanatic paramilitary that, de facto, has occupied a major portion of its territory for half of its 70+ year existence?

Israel has repeatedly raided the al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem in recent days, and news coverage has predominantly looked like this, noting in the headline the injury count for Palestinians and largely not even discussing the recent spate of random murders of Israeli civilians by Palestinian militants. It features prominently that those raids came during Ramadan, but largely neglects that the most recent outbreak of violence which has killed Israeli civilians is also occurring during Passover.

Part of Enos Op-Ed centers on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Its vital to dispense with his notion that BDS is not inherently antisemitic. BDS activists claim they are working to end international support for Israels oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law, by encouraging businesses and consumers alike to avoid financial interaction with Israeli-based entities as much as possible. So, Eno is technically right that, inherently and explicitly, the BDS movement does not present itself as antisemitic.

But that doesnt mean it cant be or isnt co-opted by people (like Omar and Tlaib) who simply loathe Israel. The Anti-Defamation League, one of the leading NGOs combating antisemitism, somewhat brushes off the word inherently as a technicality: Many of the founding goals of the BDS movement, including denying the Jewish people the universal right of self-determination along with many of the strategies employed in BDS campaigns are antisemitic. Many individuals involved in BDS campaigns are driven by opposition to Israels very existence as a Jewish state. If youre still not convinced, though, maybe you can be swayed by the government of Germany, which directly labeled BDS as antisemitic.

While it is clear in speaking to him that Enos support of BDS is genuinely rooted in his personal morality and not in opposition to the existence of a Jewish state, he is simply not the expert on antisemitism and anti-Zionism that the leaders of the ADL are. While his beliefs may be sincere and altruistic, he ignores the unfortunate reality that not everyone who agrees with him shares the purity of his intent. Eno cites the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which includes the statement, 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. Thats a valid argument. But where I take umbrage with BDS isnt in its explicit aims, but with how it can be twisted.

Boycott is a perfectly legitimate form of protest against a state. However, the current Western geopolitical climate revolves around collective anti-Russian sentiment, and youve probably seen reports about boycotts of Russian imports. While the point of these moves is to punish the oligarchs who fill Vladimir Putins war chest, scenes of ATM lines and supply shortages in Russia for the last two months demonstrate that boycotts and sanctions hit civilians harder than anyone else. If BDS wants to hit the Israeli government where it hurts, it should focus on exposing and holding accountable the rampant corruption in the Likud Party, which has dominated Israeli politics for much of the countrys recent history. That way, they wont giving them the benefit of the doubt accidentally leave millions of Israeli civilians in financial ruin.

This all leaves us with a difficult question: why are attempts to marginalize the Jewish people not granted the same scrutiny as similar attacks on other ethnic groups? We ostensibly live in a society built on mutual tolerance and respect, whether youre a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Russian, Ukrainian, Israeli, Palestinian or anything else, but antisemitic discrimination is rarely treated with the same outrage as other publicized incidents of prejudice. According to U-M Prof. Deborah Dash Moore, This requires a pretty long answer. When asked if antisemitism receives the same media/societal attention and concern as other forms of racial or ethnic discrimination (anti-Black, Asian, Latino, or Muslim) in the United States, Moore replied flatly, No it does not.

In an email, Moore provides a number of explanations: In part it has to do with Jewish efforts not to be racialized as other in the U.S., especially after the adoption of a multicultural model that drew attention to African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino/Hispanic Americans, Native Americans) that became law (e.g. in the census). The long and the short of it is this: white American Jews look and act just enough like white American Christians that when we are oppressed, persecuted or defamed, there is plausible deniability available for the malicious actor to pretend that it isnt really about Judaism. It is that plausible deniability that allows many BDS supporters to hide behind the veil of boycott as legitimate dissent, that allows for the perpetuation of the myth of dual loyalties that American Jews have toward the U.S. and Israel and that allows for whataboutism that uses Israel as a distraction from more pressing global crises.

I sat down to write a hit piece. I wont deny it; even though we wont get anywhere with the same charged rhetoric and insult-hurling that has ground the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a stalemate for years, I walked into this with the intention of doing just that. But out of that bitterness and resentment came an opportunity to discuss why its harmful to use words like apartheid when describing a country that rose from the ashes of genocide. Its an opportunity to talk about how BDS perpetrates dangerous antisemitic tropes even if it is not the intent of many of its supporters who firmly support Israels right to exist, but not some actions it takes to maintain that right. Its an opportunity to demand better of a Michigan congresswoman whos on the front lines of the fight against Israel, but remains conspicuously silent when an al-Aqsa Martyr guns down five innocent civilians in Bnei Brak, or why her campaign paid out $170,000 to a company whose leader openly accused Israel of ethnic cleansing. What started out in my mind as a heated, personal dispute has been resolved as a plea to lower the temperature of our dialogue and try to reach a consensus about an issue that has plagued the world for nearly 3,000 years. Not bad for my last piece after all.

Jack Roshco is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at jroshco@umich.edu.

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Let's leave Israel out of the war in Ukraine - The Michigan Daily

The international community was jolted, halted, dismayed and alarmed by the sudden news of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Aklehs death by an Israeli sniper in Jenin.

The news coverage, the outcry and the nature of the cold-blooded murder managed to momentarily shift the worlds disproportionate fixation on Russias invasion of Ukraine as other global conflicts continue to wreak havoc on humanity. Her role as a journalist highlighting the atrocities committed by Israeli forces led to her demise as the perpetrators sought to normalize the occupation of Palestinian territories by muzzling out freedom of speech once again. Here lies the truth.

As the old adage from French poet Jean Cocteau goes: True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.

The second part of this adage is important while analyzing Aklehs death at the hands of Israeli forces. Habitual behavior or habit in this case entails states, entities, politicians and demagogues preventing voices covering egregious human rights violations amid racism and state sponsored terrorism from reaching the global audience. In Shireens case, it must be considered habitual for the Israeli government to target voices of reason which seek to resist its decades old state sponsored policy of apartheid against occupied Palestinians.

To illustrate, the reaction of the IDF and Knesset to the murder was a deliberate attempt to twist the narrative and absolve itself from culpability by adding an element of obscurity regarding the cause of Aklehs death. The disinformation campaign unleashed by the Zionist regime managed to echo in global capitals and was reiterated by some of Israels staunchest supporters, including US State Department Spokesperson Ned Price. As international journalists railed against the spokespersons remarks in the aftermath of the killing his response was to claim that the US has utmost trust in the accountability process initiated by the IDF. Utmost trust in perpetrators seeking to stifle voices through force is perhaps what was meant.

To officially side with the narrative of the oppressor and muzzle dissenting voices of the oppressed, serves as a reminder that Aklehs death translates into freedom of speech continuing to be mercilessly suppressed by governments, entities and systems sanctioning oppression. The modus operandi of the Israeli government actually mirrors pre-1994 South Africa, where the then white minority government monopolizing resources in occupied territory would prevent the stories of oppression or resistance in segregated areas and Bantustans from reaching the international audience. Those revolting through peaceful protests would be met with crackdowns from the apartheid state, as witnessed during the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960. The difference between then and now however was that South Africa witnessed an economic and political boycott by the overwhelming majority of the international community who refused to recognize the white minority government for its crimes against humanity.

Fast forward to 2022, and Israel continues to operate with impunity with mild condemnation not translating into concrete action or accountability. It is with this historical baggage that voices such as Shireen Abu Akleh were silenced because they brought the truth before international viewers in a land witnessing the proliferation of illegal Jewish settlements, international apathy to the plight of Palestinians and the weaponization of Zionism from the Knesset. For a country which touts itself to be a democracy and brandishes its image of being a harbinger of freedom of speech, Aklehs murder demonstrates the narcissistic approach adopted by the Israeli security apparatus against voices of truth.

While working for Al Jazeera Arabic, Shireen exposed the violence perpetrated against the occupied force during the Second Intifada which saw Israel employing gunfire, aerial bombings and provocations with impunity as provacatuers such as former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon visited the Al Aqsa compound to ignite religious tensions. The ensuing 3,000 Palestinian deaths including that of a boy sheltering behind his father in the Gaza Strip to fight for freedom were stories which Abu Aklehs reporting encapsulated for a more informed audience. Her work was an alternate and correct view of the war crimes committed by a state sponsor of apartheid instead of a Jewish democratic state seeking to defend itself.

It was also during her 2005 interview of incarcerated Palestinian prisoners at the Shikma Prison that she attempted to uncover how inmates could possibly have been subject to sham trials and wrongful detentions. The result was the IDF seeking to target her on the premise of photographing security areas at the Shikma Prison. This was not about photographs by picturing and filming reality.

In 2022 not much has changed in Israel, its demagogic approach or its stifling of dissent through force. It has actually worsened with a series of right-wing, far-right governments coming to the helms of policy making over the past few years who have attempted to normalize oppression.

From the Naftali Bennet administration to his predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu, Zionist supremacy has been used as a policy tool to both expand domestic political clout and to carry out armed operations against a population not equipped to respond proportionally with impunity. This includes the 2021 Israeli Palestinian crisis which was triggered by unrest in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood with far-right bigots such as Itamar Ben Gvir advocating for apartheid unleashed on the local population. A year later, Shireen was found unveiling the truth of Israeli oppression as the IDF raided a house in Jenin when an incoming sniper led to her demise. Her injured producer Ali Samoudi corroborated the claims of witnesses that Israeli forces killed her. Nothing more is closer to the truth.

There can, hence, never be any moral or false equivalence on Shireens murder where the Israeli narrative is considered equally accurate or sacrosanct. Advocacy for the rights of Palestinian people as freedom of speech by figures such as Shireen was stifled deliberately to ensure that Israels war crimes as a source of international embarrassment never come to the fore. This is precisely why the Israeli army chief, Aviv Kochavi, claimed that it was difficult to determine the exact cause of her death or how Palestinian militants could be responsible instead.

The truth is that the occupation is in place, apartheid is being sanctioned and independent voices of freedom are being deliberately targeted through state sponsorship. That explains her demise.

The writer is a former visiting fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington DC and is a broadcast journalist.

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Normalizing apartheid - The News International

All the asylum seekers whom ministers want to send to Rwanda have been placed in detention centres after arriving in the UK on small boats, the Home Office has confirmed.

When the government announced its controversial plans last month to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, officials said some of those issued with notices of intent that they would be offshored would be served with the notices while living in the community and would have 14 days to appeal against the decision. About 100 asylum seekers are thought to have been issued with notices of intent so far.

However, the Home Office has confirmed to the Guardian that everyone they want to send to Rwanda has been locked up in detention centres, with the community option not currently being used.

Many who arrive on small boats are in poor physical and mental condition, and some charities have reported that those detained for offshoring are traumatised, bewildered and do not understand what is happening to them.

The news comes as the Mail on Sunday reported that 10 asylum seekers have withdrawn their asylum claims since the Rwanda plan was announced, in a development hailed by some government sources as a sign that the plan drawn up by the home secretary, Priti Patel, is having the desired deterrent effect.

However, there is little indication that the policy is having a deterrent effect in northern France, with about 9,000 asylum seekers crossing the Channel so far this year, including hundreds since the policy was announced in mid-April. More than 100 people have made the Channel crossing since Thursday.

Those detained so far for offshoring include a group of people from Sudan who crossed the Channel in a kayak on 9 May not using the people smugglers whose business model the home secretary has said she wants to smash some Albanian asylum seekers and at least one man from Afghanistan who arrived approximately a week ago in a small boat.

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Enver Solomon, the chief executive of Refugee Council, said: The government is now so determined to treat any person fleeing war or oppression, including those escaping Ukraine and Afghanistan, as a commodity to be shipped to Rwanda that it is choosing to detain them immediately. This is appallingly cruel and will cause great human suffering. We urge the government to immediately rethink its plans and focus on the workable alternatives clearly at their disposal. Safe routes including allowing people to apply for humanitarian visas is one important option.

Bella Sankey, the director of Detention Action, said: It seems that Priti Patels Rwanda expulsion policy is being used as justification to detain increasing numbers of traumatised people indefinitely in prison-like facilities. Weve heard reports of people confused about why they are detained and wholly unable to access legal advice.

A Home Office spokesperson said: Our new, world-leading migration partnership with Rwanda will see those who make dangerous, illegal or unnecessary journeys to the UK relocated to Rwanda and, if recognised as refugees, they will be supported to build a new life there. The government has the power to detain individuals for examination or pending their removal from the UK those who have been issued notices of intent are being detained under these existing powers.

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Home Office detains all asylum seekers it plans to send to Rwanda - The Guardian

Victor Ogunje in Ado Ekiti

In her attempt to mobilise women for the All Progressives Congress governorship candidate in the June 18 election, Biodun Oyebanji, the Ekiti StateFirst Lady, Erelu Bisi Fayemi, has told women to reject parties that lack policies that can protect their rights .

Speaking pointedly, Mrs Fayemi told the female folks to reject theSocial Democratic Party and the Peoples Democratic Party(PDP), describing them as bereftof policies that can uplift women politically, economically, socially, and educationally.

Mrs Fayemi applauded his husband, Dr Kayode Fayemi, for being a women -friendly governor, who had uplifted the female gender in all spheres, saying voting for the opposition parties would reverse the positive impacts the APC had brought to women in the state.

The First Lady said this in Ado Ekitiyesterday during a rally organised by a group named Ekiti Women inPolitics to mobilise support for Oyebanji ahead of the governorship election.

Addressing themammoth crowd of women that massed at the rally, held at the Fajuyi Pavilion, the first ladyharped on the need for the progressive policies initiated by the current government to outlive the present situation for womensbenefit .

She said: Our government under Governor Fayemi had done a lot for women. But my mind is at rest that Mrs Olayemi Oyebanji just like I have done will protect and prevent women from oppression in Ekiti.

This is the least we can do for you.

For this to be actualised, come out on June 18 and vote for Biodun Oyebanji. This election is a must- win for APC for the sake of Ekiti women. Dont fight, be focused in this campaign and deal with issues that will promote our candidate.

Before Fayemi came, our women were marginalised in politics. But today, we have provided opportunities for a lot of them. We give them business opportunities, support their education, give them appointments from the state to the ward levels and even at the party level.

I am passionate about women because

as someone who is a development practitioner, there is no way a nation, state or community can develop when women are sidelined.

Also speaking, the APC Deputy Governorship candidate, Mrs Monisade Afuye, said some of the positions being savoured by women under the present government could have been illusive, but for Mrs Fayemis persistence and steadfastness in her advocacy for the rights of women.

She said: Mrs Fayemi has rescued us from oppression and servitude. She worked hard to ensure that our government comply with the 35% affirmative action. We even got more than

35% in Ekiti. Women are no longer pushovers in politics and in governance.

Go out and mobilise your women counterparts to vote for APC. Go to all the nook and cranny and preach the gospel of good governance that APC represents in Ekiti.

When Segun Oni came in 2007, he nearly killed most of the civil servants. He asked them to get their primary six certificates and many of them had accidents and died on their ways. Dont let them return us to that era.

Lending credence to the fact thatAPC is the only party that has women-oriented

policies, the wife of the APC Governorship candidate, Dr. Olayemi Oyebanji, said no goverment has ever recognised women like Fayemi in the history of Ekiti.

Mrs Oyebanji promised to sustain the tempo of women empowerment and platforms created by the first lady and her husband to make the female gender relevant .

The First Lady had shown love and provided good platforms for women to thrive in politics. I will sustain all that Mrs Fayemi has beendoing for women, I will even surpass it. I plead with you not to allow anyone to stop your relevance in politics and governance, she advised.

Reeling out what Fayemi has done for women in term of appointments, the Director General, APC Women Campaign Council, Chief Oluremi Ajayi, said: Under this government, women produced 44 councilors, four Council Vice Chairmen, four assembly women, many commissioners, special advisers, board members and a national assembly member.

For this coming election, we also have a wowan Deputy Governorship candidate. Tell your people resident outside Ekiti to come home and vote in this governorship election. Go home and be good ambassadors to sustain the good policies we are enjoying under Fayemi.

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Ekiti 2022: Reject Parties that Lack Women-oriented Policies, Fayemi Tells Women - THISDAY Newspapers