Monthly Archives: July 2022

The Liberation of the Arabs From the Global Left – Tablet Magazine

Posted: July 13, 2022 at 8:24 am

After the Great War, Arab societies, like many others, for the first time came to know politics as a modern mass phenomenon in which modern communication technologies are used for mass political mobilization. For the first time, intellectuals, journalists, poets, and men of letters of all sorts replaced the old classes of religious scholars by becoming the source of moral knowledge and ethical education for the public. The new trend of inspiring people with a total philosophical vision, the conversion of artistic sensibilities into populist political symbols, and the pooling of mass support into a demand, symbol, or figure that could be converted to power became the mainstays of Levantine and Egyptian politics. At the heart of this new trend were the two most transformative revolutionary ideologies German philosophy has produced: romantic nationalism and Marxism, and their struggle against the common postwar enemy of Western imperialism.

Nationalism as a romanticist literary and artistic phenomenon could be discerned in late-19th-century Arabic writing and art, yet it was not until the interwar years that nationalism mattered as a mobilizing revolutionary impulse around which political movements could form and as a literary genre of romantic imagination. The revolutionary impulse that started to ferment during the Great War and accelerated after its end was a generally anti-imperialist fervor without ideological content or clear direction. It is best to imagine it as a primordial pool to which intellectual and political developments in Europe, such as Marxist-Leninism, fascism, Nazism, and antisemitism constantly flowed, and from which the political movements that shaped the region today emerged.

Arab nationalism was the first and earliest idea which articulated a cohesive ideology for the region in the works of its intellectual father, Sati Al-Husri (1880-1968). A former Ottoman officer, Husri became one of the first modern Arab educators for whom education meant the mission of preparing and producing nationalist youth and endowing it with a Prussian militant sense of historical mission. The idea that the Hegelian conception of the political community as a historical protagonist whose members form an organic unity with a transcendent salvific mission inside history could find its inevitable realization only in the establishment of a state. The outright rejection and delegitimation of current reality in favor of a supposedly historically inevitable future which is the only legitimate reality possible is a prerequisite of Hegelian revolutionary action. Those who defend the present naturally become an obstacle and enemies of history itself.

Constricting the idea of natural political legitimacy, in itself a modern philosophical concept, to a political reality that must be identical to an abstract and ideal notion of a great Arab or Islamic nation, embodying a certain mystical essence, naturally led to complete delegitimation of any political reality short of such ideal while establishing legitimacy, and not sovereignty, as the criterion of political truth. Actual, lesser nation-states were delegitimated as artificial products of European colonialism, a view enshrined in the fictitious and ideological treatment of historical episodes such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Such philosophical conception can be clearly grasped in all modern Middle Eastern political ideologies; it can be discerned, for instance, in the Baathist slogan, One Arab nation with an eternal mission, or in that of the Muslim Brotherhood, Islam is the solution, or in the propaganda of ISIS which named the video of its deceleration as The End of Sykes-Picot.

As Hegelianism and its ideologies were shaping Arab thought, a new generation of men of letters emerged, primarily in Egypt and the Levant, whose work valorized self-expression, the quest for authenticity, romantic ideals, and artistic subjectivity as a sense of mystical duty toward some absolute spirit. The sense of romantic struggle provided a literary fantastic view of a heroic self, encircled by a world of hostile forces; seeking to overcome such a world by unlocking the authenticity of ones most inner self naturally intersected with a new kind of political activism centered on deeply mystical notions of nature, blood, soil, liberation, death, regenerative violence, and armed struggle. European phenomena such as cultural salons, secret societies, and militant youth groups led by intellectuals, self-identifying as vanguards, with unique colored shirts and carrying slogans referring to death, iron, and fire proliferated.

It was therefore inevitable that such intellectual and psychological conditions would lead to consequences not too dissimilar from the consequences of such conditions in Europe; the appearance of popular political movements carrying devotional romantic symbols founded by self-styled fuehrers who embodied the potent Leninist mix of intellectual-politicians leading a vanguard in the final phase of a historical struggle toward an inevitable salvific future in which all contradictions will be resolved. In the interwar years in Egypt and the Levant, communist, Arabist, Egyptianist, Syrianist, and Islamist groups proliferated and created an ideologically competitive mimetic contagion. Together, those groups formed a common space where the abstract ideas of German philosophy, nationalism, socialism, unification and European revolutionary thought combined and recombined along with the local symbols of Islam and Arab culture and altered the entire substructure of Arab thought.

If the arrival of the Arabic printing press in the 19th century allowed literary nationalism and romanticist ideas to proliferate among the new educated classes, the shortwave radio brought a new phase of possibilities carrying on its waves the thunderous voices of mass mobilization. The new possibilities of the new technologies were first fully realized in the Middle East by the two protagonists of the global European revolution known as WWII, Italy and Germany. The former established its Arabic Radio Bari station in 1934 and the latter, the Voice of Berlin in Arabic, in 1939. Together, they filled the airwaves with Arabic propaganda of the most sensationalist kind mixing Islamic motifs and symbols with anti-Westernism, antisemitism, and incitement to mass violence. Radio Bari and the Voice of Berlin championed the national liberation of all the Arab and Muslim peoples and warned against the conspiracies of imperialist powers and the Jewish States of America, and called for a revolution against the West.

Many of the antisemitic catchphrases and conspiracy theories still found in Arabic culture today can indeed be traced to the legacy of the Voice of Berlin and its Iraqi anchor, Yunis Bahri. According to the British propaganda official, Nevill Barbour, The Nazis had the skill or luck to find and employ an Iraqi, Yunus al-Bahri, who had a remarkable talent for the sensational type of broadcasting which they favored. Berlin Radio was bound by no scruples and cared nothing for factual accuracy it, therefore, used every device to inflame Arab resentment against Britain for favoring Zionism, to exploit every conceivable suspicion regarding British actions, and to sneer at Arabs who publicly declared their support of the British connection. The Berlin Radio announcer, for instance, used regularly to refer to Prince Abdallah as Rabbi Abdallah.

Nazism and fascism served as an inspiration and a prototype to many aspiring movements such as the Syrian Socialist National Party and the Muslim Brotherhood. The excitement in the prospects of a German victory brought, along with Arab intellectual affections to German philosophy, can be clearly read in almost all the memoirs of those who came to political age during the period including Presidents Nasser and Sadat in Egypt and Antun Saadah in Syria. More significant than politicians, in my opinion, are those who would become the founders of Arab and Muslim modern thought, such as the Egyptian thinker Abdulrahman Badawi, the first modern Arab philosopher, a figure of utmost importance, whose memoirs show deep sympathies with Germany and Nazism and a near-pathological obsession with Jews. Or the most prominent Algerian thinker of the era of national liberation, Malek Bennabi, who was accused later by France of having been a Nazi collaborator.

During the war, the minority of Arab intellectuals and thinkers who firmly opposed Nazism and fascism belonged to either the older generations of the pro-British or else were young communists. Otherwise, it is not an exaggeration to say that the overwhelming majority sympathized with Germany and the Axis and encouraged the population to do so. The political fervor of the time was primarily anti-British, anti-French, and anti-Jewish, and in favor of revolutionary mobilization; the question of ideology was secondary at best. That is why qualifiers of ideological identity added to famous figures of the period, such as Haj Amin el-Husseini, often oscillate between describing him as an Arab nationalist and or as an Islamist.

By the end of the 1940s and as the Cold War started, the atmosphere of struggle had permeated the minds of the most modern Arab societies and they were ripe for the beginning of their revolution. In retrospect, it seems only fitting that the end of the colonial era in the Middle East was ushered by a sequence of events that was the culmination of the story outlined above and the foreshadowing of the decades to come; the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and the mass expulsion of Jews from Arab ruled lands, the coup detat in Syria in 1949, and the coup detat in Egypt in 1952.

The revolutionary wave which has been fermenting for decades in the primordial soup of revolutionary ideas burst forth as the sun was setting on European colonialism to carry the mission of national liberation and decolonization in Egypt, Syria, Algeria, and Iraq. The revolutionary milieu which oversaw the establishment of the Syrian Republic included Baathists, Syrian nationalists, proto-Islamists, and communists. Similarly, the 1952 coup in Egypt followed by the rise of Nasserism, was a collective project in which all revolutionaries supported and participated. In other words, the revolutionary wave was the practical embodiment of the primordial pool of ideas mentioned earlier. It formed, in the beginning, a unified revolutionary milieu from which a process of mitosis led to its later fragmentation into the distinct yet interconnected movements of Nasserism, Baathism, Islamism, the Arab new left, and Palestinian nationalism in which the potent mixture of revolutionary nationalism, revolutionary socialism, anti-Westernism, and antisemitism dominated.

One of the prominent members of the revolutionary milieu was none other than Sayyed Qutb, a literary critic who later came to be remembered as the ideological founder of Islamist jihadism. Qutb was part of this revolutionary milieu and an insider in the halls of revolutionary power. His later fallout with Nasser turned him into a kind of a Muslim Gramsci or Trotsky, with which a mixture of revolutionary existentialism, Leninism, and a literary romanticist conception of Islam came to be identified. One way to understand Qutbs work is to see it with the eyes of a literary critic turned revolutionary, an attempt to extrapolate the literary sensibility of Islam, i.e., divine subjectivity, and use it to existentially shape ones self in an environment of sensory isolation. Such a process would be followed by the creation of the vanguard which will proceed to realize the spirit of Islam in history.

The revolutions of national liberation led to the establishment of one-party populist states of which Egypt was the largest and most important. The period was that of the euphoric mass sentiment of absolute unity between the people, the state, the heroic leader, and the intellectuals, which was celebrated as true popular democracy. A large public sector, large state investments, and a state-led economy were the essence of Arab socialism. The holy trinity of unity, Arabness, and socialism, the invention of the Baath, became the creed of the new Arab secular political religion. The massive projects of postcolonial modernization, meant heavy investment in literacy programs, free education, and more extensive higher education to produce the needed administrative skills for the new massive state bureaucracies and security apparatus. The confiscation of foreign and Jewish property provided the needed capital for many such projects.

Decolonization and nationalization did not just target industrial assets and land ownership. They also naturally extended to all aspects of cultural life, as the urban cosmopolitanism of the colonial era was to be replaced by a centralized Arab urban culture. In Egypt, the state gradually took control of all educational institutions, secular and religious, all media, print, and radio, record companies, as well as the Egyptian movie industry, which at the time was one of the largest in the world. The progressive Arab left then proceeded to mass radicalize all of society and culture.

Above the reshaping of popular culture, and within the global context of the Cold War, sat a new high Arab culture that was changing its orientation from the fascism and the Nazism that inspired its roots toward Marxism, the Soviet orbit, and specifically the French left, which at the time was wallowing in postwar pessimism that lost hope of revolution in Europe and looked to the former colonies for salvation. By the early 1960s, Jean-Paul Sartre was the most widely read, in-vogue intellectual in the Arabic language, and Arab students and intellectuals found a second home in Parisian cafes. In 1955, Raymond Aron made note of this in his Opium of the Intellectuals and warned the French left against indoctrinating Arab and African young students into ideologies that were not suitable for their societies. Yet the Sartrean combination of valiant existentialism, Marxism, and decolonization along with the French conception of the public intellectual as the lodestar of sacred struggle continued to shape the culture of youth in Cairo, Alexandria, Damasus, Beirut, and Baghdad. His books sold like bread, wrote George Tarabishi, one of Sartres Arabic translators.

The new generation of revolutionary intellectuals started decolonizing intellectual life by replacing the older generation of men of letters who had dominated under the British and French influence such as Taha Hussein and Abbas Aqqad with politically committed authors. In this, the Arab revolutionary intellectuals were following the steps of the French left who sought to repudiate the spirit of seriousness of traditional European philosophy as well as of European bourgeois culture. The Sartrean concept of Commitment was widely enforced, meaning that anyone who wanted to participate in cultural production or public life had to be committed to revolutionary politics. Under the auspices of Commitment, Arabic culture became a culture of struggle. In the autobiographical formula of veteran Lebanese communist Fawaz Taraboulsi, everyone was, Communist poetically, Arabist politically, Socialist economically, and existentialist philosophically. If revolutionary romantic heroes were the mimetic contagion of the interwar year, the left-wing existentialist smoking in a cafe, holding a Sartre or a de Beauvoir book, and making pronouncements that are as deeply shallow as they are superficially profound was the mimetic contagion of the 50s and the 60s. Literary existentialist feminism, of unprecedented sexual expressionism, appeared in the writings of figures such as Laila Baalbaki and Nazik Al-Malaika.

Suhayl Idris is a case in point. Born in Lebanon in 1925 to a religious Sunni family, Idris proceeded to obtain classical Islamic education in religious law in Beirut. After graduation, he turned secular, obtained a Ph.D. from the French Sorbonne in literature in 1953, and returned to Lebanon to establish the leading Arabic literary periodical and publishing house of the time which translated the works of Sartre, Camus, Isaac Deutscher, Rosa Luxemburg, Gramsci, Marx, and others. Idris literary style was the furthest possible from the religious style. In 1956 he wrote, Today, the Arab writer cannot but put his feather pen in the fountain of the blood of martyrs and heroes so when he may lift his pen, it drips with the meaning of revolution against imperialism. And in 1958, objecting to the anti-Soviet, anti-Nasser Baghdad Pact he wrote, We Arab Nationalists are objecting to the policies of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan despite being Muslim countries if Islam indeed supported imperialism we would have fought against it!

Intellectuals with more sophisticated Marxist inclinations had to follow the Soviet line which gave predominance to the revolutionary intersection between the struggle of ruling nationalist petit bourgeois against Western imperialism and the Marxist struggle against capitalism. It encouraged Arab Marxists to focus their analytical works on Western imperialism and not on analyzing the class structure of their own societies. This influence kept Marxism constricted in two areas, polemics against wealthy classes, and a political view of international relations that complemented romantic nationalism.

Sayyed Qutb behind bars in 1966, afer he was convicted of plotting the assassination of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. He was hanged, and later came to be remembered as the ideological founder of Islamist jihadis.AFP/Getty Images

The Marxist inevitability of revolution and overthrow of Western capitalism created an Arab sense of inevitable triumph against the West and Israel which in turn led to unquestioning support of the revolutionary regimes despite their accumulating record of failures, excesses, abuses, and idiocies. Thus, Arab communists overwhelmingly supported the leadership of Nasser even as they were being tortured in his prisons. A rare exception was the Iraqi Marxist intellectual Ali Al-Wardi, whose sociological studies in Islamic history in the 1950s attempted to provide a historical materialist analysis emphasizing class warfare as the historically meaningful factor in the development of Islamic beliefs.

The ideological developments and transmutations of the periods can be seen in the lives of many figures of the period such as Fayez Sayegh, who was the first Arab intellectual to apply Sartres critique of racism and neocolonialism to Israel. He argued that what applies in Congo and Vietnam also applied to Israel, and he was also the principal author of the 1975 U.N. Zionism-is-racism resolution. Sayegh, born in Syria to a Presbyterian minister in 1920, started his active life in the 1940s by joining the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a Syrian imitation of Nazism under the leadership of the Fuehrer Antun Saadeh. During the time Sayegh wrote and spoke for the SSNP about the danger of Zionism on civilization and the soul, as well as the dangers of the Jewish psyche. After the turn to the left, Sayegh became an Arab existentialist authority on Sartre and Fanon. In 1965, during his tenure at Stanford, he wrote the booklet Colonialism in Palestine which was published by the PLO and then translated to a dozen of languages and distributed globally by the Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Organization (AAPSO). His booklet was the birth document of the global cause for Palestine as it hit all the major notes played by the international leftracial supremacy, segregation, exclusion, civil rights, emancipation, anti-capitalism, self-defense, human rights, and resistanceinvoked Algeria, African Americans, Congo, and Vietnam, and used existentialist ideas of otherness. It was Sayegh who inserted Palestine into the anti-Western canon of the international left. The later anti-Zionist works by major figures of the French left such as Maxime Rodinson would only continue Sayeghs work.

The new textbooks, movies, magazines, songs, and literature produced in such an intellectual environment were all tasked with shaping the Arab masses and its new generations ideologically. This was the moment of birth of Arab modernity. Together, the committed new intellectuals and cultural figures produced an entirely committed revolutionary anti-Western and antisemitic reading of Islam. During such a foundational movement of modern Arab mass culture, movies, radio shows, plays, school textbooks, and more enforced and homogenized this new reading of Islamic history, which merged what is gnostic and religious in Hegelian revolutionary thought with what is religious and mystical in Islam. In this new reading, the possibility of transcendence outside history was reworked into the possibility of transcendence inside history through revolution. Salvation was secularized, and atheized, into temporal salvation brought on by a political collective will. That Islam is a philosophical totality to be achieved through national liberation and socialism, and progressive revolution against the forces of colonialism, Judaism (particularly as embodied in Israel), and reaction (embodied in conservative pro-Western Arab monarchies), became the generic message.

For a newly established Arab mass culture, the rewritten career of Muhammad as a revolutionary who came with a message of social justice clashing with a reactionary ruling elite of the Arab bourgeois merchant class and their misanthropic Jewish allies was the foundational historical treatment of Islamic history. Nassers minister of propaganda, Fathi Radwan, a former member of the quasi-fascist organization Young Egypt, wrote and distributed the book Muhammad the Great Revolutionary, extolling the supposed revolutionary merits of the prophet. The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, Mustafa al-Sibai, wrote Socialism in Islam which was printed and mass-distributed by the United Arab Republic in an act of ideological balancing against communists. Historical Muslim figures were lionized and revolutionized in state-produced films with massive budgets. In 1961, the Egyptian state produced the blockbuster film Oh Islam, in which an Egyptian leader of the Arabs is looking for his lost beloved, named Jihad, with which he is able to defeat the Mongol invasion. Another historical epic of medieval Islamic decolonization jihad followed in 1963 in Saladin, a film with a massive budget portraying a proto-Nasser medieval sultan waging secular anti-imperialist jihad against blond and redheaded European colonizers in alliance with reactionary Arab forces.

The new cinematic and literary treatments of Muhammads career presented the prophet as a revolutionary leader leading a group of the downtrodden, the oppressed, and the enslaved to resist the capitalism of Meccas reactionary merchants and their evil Jewish allies. The pre-Islamic period is portrayed as that of maximum economic exploitation, social corruption, and political chaos. The wealthy, corrupt, and immoral infidel are a feudal class who commissions the local Jews, evil creatures of the night, to do their dark deeds.A dialectical struggle between the two parties, the believers and the infidels, climaxes into the triumph of the Muhammadan revolution and the resolution of all contradictions.

One consequential literary transfusion of such treatment was substituting piety with social justice, substituting religious transcendence with the historical transcendence of a historical stage, and substituting spiritual redemption with socioeconomic and political redemption. However, the most consequential of all substitutions, which will become an insurmountable conceptual foundation in modern Arab culture, is the displacement of the very concept of meaning itself from religion proper and placing it into history. A salvation which meant the total transformation of national political and economic conditions which are in turn assumed to be the human condition. The salvific goal of history substituted an otherworldly salvation that is the goal of God leading to a theological relationship with components of historical movement.

Muhammad, the Great Revolutionary, written by Fathi Radwan, a former member of an Egyptian fascist organization is an example of a flood of literary production offering a revolutionary treatment of MuhammadCourtesy the author

The union between Marxism and Arab nationalism against the enemies of imperialism, reaction, Zionism, and capitalism left its indelible mark on both. Marxism provided the intellectual cohesion and idiom required for any modern political endeavor to be respectable while Arab nationalism provided the medium in which Marxist ideas could be presented to the Arab masses. Arab Marxism also connected Arab nationalism to the dynamic world of Third Worldism but most importantly to the international left, especially in Western capitals and universities, giving it critical prestige, international legitimacy, and an aura of noble-savage romantic heroism. Arab national liberation, decolonization, and the violence that accompanied them, were the empirical verification of the writings of Sartre and Fanon. The gnostic sense of the historical inevitability of the overthrow of capitalism, and the dogmatic faith in holding the final moral truth emboldened an Arab culture with already weak ties to reality to mistake the predictions and prophecies of leftist intellectuals as historical promises, and to sail the ship of Arab dreams ever farther away from the shores of reality, into the ocean of phantasmic self-aggrandizement. A complete belief in the inevitable superiority of the USSR led to betting the future of entire societies on its radical triumph coupled with an adamant denial of Jewish historical reality, seeing Israel only as an ephemeral Zionist entity that would soon be blown away into oblivion by the battle cry of the awakened Arab giant.

Yet when the dust settled in 1967 after the sweeping defeat of the forces of Arab nationalism at the hands of Israel, it settled on a transformed landscape. The radical masses intoxicated by the tall and dark handsome Egyptian leader and the assured prophecies of intellectuals with superior knowledge had been robbed of their innocence. Narratives of the essential aggrandized self were inverted into narratives of essential victimhood, and the cult of the hero was inverted into a cult of the martyr. Even the direction of the prevalent antisemitism was inverted: Zionism, once seen as merely a ploy in the hands of Western imperialism came to be seen as the original superpower from which all evil flows. The work of the public intellectuals once focused on counting the virtues of the Arab nations and the vices of the West and Israel, turned into that of a professional mourner weeping over the ruins of a lost innocence. Arab culture fell into the self-made trap of solipsism.

The inversion was of such a severe magnitude that the unified culture of the Arab left, in which the state, the people, the culture, the intellectuals, and the leader were perceived as being in a state of ecstatic unity, shattered into fragments, with each going in a different direction. The unity between Arab nationalism and Marxism, which was once asserted by many intellectuals, was dissolved. Nasserism was discredited, Baathism split between Syria and Iraq. The Palestinians started their own revolution inside the revolution. Eventually, the Arab left split into three new circles: The old left, the new left, and the Islamic left leading a revolution against the revolution.

The intellectuals, journalists, and writers who still served the standing pro-Soviet progressive Arab republics came to be generally known as the old Arab left, of which the official intellectual of the Egyptian regime Mohamed Hassanein Heikel was the most famous. The only way this group was to defend the legitimacy of the humiliated states in front of radicalized Arab masses was through the almost endless inflation of their enemies to cosmic proportions that only increased the nobility of their victims. In 1968, Heikel published his first book after the defeat, titled We and America, which portrayed the 1967 war as an American conspiracy to assassinate the young Egyptian revolution. The victimhood escalator ultimately led to ever more pathological antisemitism, a wolfish view of an unforgiving and cruel world, as well as a mystification of victimhood into a sense of cosmic pain so vast as to dissolve any observable reality.

In 1969, the Egyptian states largest film production was, Al-Ard (The Land), in which the audience was treated to a final scene where the courageous Egyptian masculine hero, played by superstar Mahmoud Miligy, is standing alone in the middle of his cotton field after being abandoned and betrayed by everyone, sacrificing his life defending his land from a British-feudal conspiracy. He is seen being cut and slashed in slow motion, splashing his blood on the cotton flowers, while a chorus is dramatically chanting in the background, If the land is ever thirsty, I shall irrigate it with my blood. This was a major reversal of the pre-1967 production which typically ended in a resounding victory for the hero. If Arab mass culture had no ties to reality before the war, now it had declared war against it.

The Arab new left was made of former Arab nationalist intellectuals and cadres who decided to exit the old left and make a sharper turn to the left. We were determined to commit to Communism as a final break between ourselves and the nationalist past of the petit bourgeoises, wrote one intellectual. This coincided with the May 1968 student movements in Europe, the U.S. cultural revolution with its Marxist overtones, and the rise of the global new left which radicalized the global high culture. The first young intellectuals to make this turn were Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm, who in 1968 published his debut book, Self-Criticism After Defeat, and Yasin Al-Hafiz, who published The Defeat and the Defeated Ideology in the same year. Together, Azm and Hafiz would intellectually jump-start the new Arab left and in their new analytical works would imitate the positions of European postwar leftist thought. They rejected Baathism and Nasserism as petit bourgeois ideologies that were as a matter of fact backward-looking, reactionary, and fascist and must be replaced with scientific Marxism.

The post-1967 Arab intellectual life was that of collective neurosis, in the words of former Marxist intellectual George Tarabishi. The first self-object of neurotic obsession was Arab culture and Islam. Imitating the Frankfurt Schools analysis which exonerated revolutionary thought from the possibility that it produced Nazism and fascism and instead identified them as manifestations of the latent violence and mythological thinking in European and Christian culture, so did the intellectuals of the new Arab left identify Islam and Arab culture as the source of the regions own latent reaction and oppression. The 1967 defeat was blamed not on what is gnostic and religious in revolutionary thought, or the Fanonian valorization of brutal violence as a spiritually redemptive act, but on traditional culture. The new leftists doubled down on Marxism and revolutionary thought and placed the entire blame squarely on the irrationalism of traditional culture and religion.

The most important work of the genre, and by far the most influential Arab intellectual work of the 20th century, was the four-volume Critique of Arab Reason, an obvious play on Kant, by Moroccan thinker Mohamed Abed Al-Jabiri. In his work, Jabiri provided a systematic analysis of foundational Islamic texts showing that everything from Arabic grammar to Islamic law contained the nucleus of irrationalist and magical thinking. His work was a triumph for the calls for more Enlightenment-style rationalism, generally understood as a refined Marxism with clearer atheistic presuppositions. The second most prominent intellectual of the genre was Algerian French Sorbonne professor Mohamed Arkoun. If Jabiri wanted to follow the Frankfurt Schools lead and push revolutionary thought toward Marxisms roots in Enlightenment rationalism, Arkoun wanted to go the other way, following the lead of postmodernism, in rediscovering Marxisms other roots in Romanticism. Arkoun brought Derrida and Foucault, without ever saying so explicitly, to bear in excavating Islamic Arab epistemology to uncover its deep layers of power relations obscured by myth and Quranic semiotics. Jabiri and Arkoun still occupy the center of Arab high culture intellectual life.

Below the high culture and sophisticated analysis of the new left, a populist new left emerged, primarily centered in Lebanon, fueled by the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Ali Ahmed Esber, known by his pagan pen name Adonis, and by the writings of Ghassan Kanfani. The rising Palestinian guerrilla groups, Fatah and the PFLP, a splinter Marxist group from the quasi-fascist Arab Nationalists Movement, managed to overthrow the old left from the leadership of the PLO and took its placea development which was seen as an inspiration to all the Arab new left forces dreaming of overthrowing and replacing the Arab old left. The Palestinian guerrilla groups, inspired by Rgis Debray, were making a revolution inside the revolution, a natural outcome of the urge to invert devastating defeat into a decisive victory.

This revolutionary subversion inside the Arab revolutionary movement managed to invert the conception of the Palestinian cause. Pre-1967, Arab nationalism held that Arab unity was the road to Palestine. Post-1967, the Palestinians inverted this Hegelian motto by turning the salvific dream of a destroyed Israel and a liberated Palestine into the essence of the revolutionary mission itself. Palestine is a revolution, became the new self-conception of the rising Palestinian factions, adding it to the ranks of a transnational anti-capitalist revolutionary movement that included Vietnam, Cuba, Black Power in the U.S., German Marxist terrorism, and others. After their expulsion from Jordan, Palestinian groups declared their plan was to turn Lebanon into an Arab Hanoi from which a popular liberation war and a total revolution would revolutionize the entire Middle East. This was the decade in which Palestinian groups laid the grounds for international terrorism of plane hijacking, assassinations, and bombings.

It is important to mention here that in all the ideological tracts and literature of the Palestinian groups, the works of French and communist intellectuals were continually quoted. The first Fatah newsletter after the Munich Olympic Village terrorist attack featured quotes from Fanon on its cover.

To the right of the new Arab left was the Islamic left, a group of committed Marxist intellectuals who decided to apply Maoist principles of popular mobilization and saw Islam as the most suitable vehicle to do so. It was not uncommon for Arab Marxist Christian intellectuals, such as Munir Shafiq, to convert to Islam and become Islamic Marxists. In Egypt, the strongest base of the Islamic left, this milieu of intellectuals was led by Abdul Wahab Al-Missiri, Hassan Hanafi, Mohamed Imara, Adel Hussein, and Nasr Abu Zayd. Missiri, a student of Nazi sympathizer Abdulrahman Badawi, focused entirely on synthesizing a Marxist-Islamic critical theory of Zionism and Judaism, depending on Lukacs, Marcuse, but above all Mannheims sociology of knowledge in producing a seven-volume critical deconstruction of all of Jewish history and culture, revealing its inherently colonialist, imperialist, and dehumanizing nature. When Missiri was once asked about what remained from the Marxism of his youth, he answered, Nothing and everything my Marxism dissolved into Islamic humanism. Others, such as the Islamic thinker Hassan Hanafi, who is the teacher of the current generation of Egyptian intellectuals, maintained that Marxism is identical to Islam.

By the time of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, in which Khomeini demanded dissolving all ideologies in Islam, there was enough public interest in a potent mixture of Islamic fundamentalism, existentialism, and Marxist revolutionary thought embodied in intellectuals like Ali Shariati for a wave of conversion to political Islam to overtake the ranks of Maoist and Marxist Lebanese and Palestinian militants and intellectuals, for whom Islam would become the gateway back into the embrace of the masses.

In Egypt, Nassers successor, Anwar Sadat, had the ambitious plan of ending Egypts leftist and pro-Soviet orientation and transforming Egyptian politics and culture to fit inside the Western camp. This ambition was centered around the achievement of recognition and peace with Israel, to which the population and the intellectuals were opposed. The fierce resistance Sadat met from the hegemonic establishment of Nasserist and leftist intellectuals led him to resort to two strategies: political repression of intellectual life, and a restoration of Islamic conservatism, and even fundamentalism, in order to maintain popular support for the state.

Unbeknownst to Sadat, by that point, religious thought had completely dissolved into revolutionary thought to an extent that made it impossible to provide a nonrevolutionary reading of Islam. In turn, the definition of intellectual life itself had been profoundly altered to exclusively mean leftism. Egyptian intellectuals, poets, and journalists filled Egyptian culture with anti-Sadat, anti-American, and antisemitic works. Folk poets wrote songs mocking Coca-Cola and the American lifestyle. Young novelists such as Sonallah Ibrahim wrote novels about a protagonist eating himself into annihilation because of the invasion of Coca-Cola capitalism. Amal Donqol, a talented poet, wrote his infamous poem No reconciliation, exalting the eternal worship of vengeance upon Israel.

Shortly before his assassination by Islamic revolutionaries, Sadat signed an order to arrest over a thousand Egyptian intellectuals. After his successor, Mubarak, came to power, and with the dangers of an Iranian-styled Islamo-Marxist revolution ever closer, he released the imprisoned intellectuals, made peace, and restored them to their various chairs heading the universities and media agencies. A division of labor was established where the state would deal with Israel and the U.S., while intellectuals were responsible for maintaining an anti-American and anti-Israel national culture, a situation recognized today in Egypt as the cold peace. Hamas, Hezbollah, 9/11, Baathist Iraq, the Arab Spring, and the Islamic State are all downstream from this intellectual story.

Leftist intellectuals such as Judith Butler and Noam Chomsky are therefore not wrong when they declare that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are part of the international left. A journey of philosophical inversions started from a Hegelian inversion of Christian theology, then a Marxist inversion of Hegelianism, a fascist-Nazi inversion of Leninism, the globalization of European thought, the conversion into Arab nationalism, its fragmentation into Arab Marxism and Palestinian radicalism, and their inversion back into theology, creating an ideological tornado with antisemitism as its vortex. The aggregate result was the gradual decivilization, and moral and social erosion, of entire Muslim and Arab societies, many of which collapsed unto themselves in spirals of self-destruction.

The dissolution of religious thought of otherworldly transcendence into a political transcendence inside history fundamentally transformed and restructured the identity of Islamic religious piety into the piety of struggle. Muslim identity was remolded into an eternal struggle that in its origin is not the jihad of classical texts, but the German dialectic world made by Marx. A religious doctrine of martyrdom and eternal life in the hereafter merged into a cult of the eternal revolutionary glory and hero worship of the Che Guevara type. This is the best explanation one could offer for the peculiar phenomenon of Muslim societies becoming more religious since the late 1970s in a way that only translated into more rage, more rebellion, less moral restraints on violence and sexuality, and conspicuous pagan worship of pain, blood, and misery. This is also the best explanation for why the societies of the Arab Gulf, which did not modernize during the 20th century, seem to have a much smoother transition away from antisemitism into social liberalization and peaceful worldviews.

Lets assume Im correct, and Islamists got this idea by way of a global revolutionary culture that got it from Lenin who got it from Marx who got it, not by way Plato as Popper assumed, but by way of rediscovery through inverting Hegels inversion of Christian theology. Doesnt this theory naturally fall right back into the religious dogmatism that is associated with Marxist intellectuals? Raymond Aron rightfully thought so in his Opium of the Intellectuals. Theory then reverts into a theology that becomes a political religion waging religious wars, schisms, ancestral worship, and textual fanaticism. Theology made philosophy by Hegel, philosophy made politics by Marx, and then politics was made into a religion. So naturally, Qutbs and Khomeinis conversion of the Marxist inversion reverted back into theology. But what does theology lose by this double inversion and what does it gain? Much. It becomes a religion of atheistic politics. It loses all its basis of religious justification and with it its entire moral structure and becomes an immanentist atheistic theology that leads to no redemption, no transcendence, and nowhere.

I want to emphasize what this article is not saying. Im not saying that any form of Islamic fundamentalism could be attributed to modern revolutionary thought. Indeed, all religions have their own forms of modern fundamentalism as a response to modern liberal social organization. But Islamic fundamentalism proper means a rigid and ultra-conservative social ethos that is resistant to social change, as best exemplified in the Salafism that until recently dominated the Arab Gulf.

What the union of imported European ideologies like Marxism, Nazism, and existentialism with Islam accomplished was to profoundly alter the entire conceptual scheme and epistemological foundations of Arab societies so that even Islamic fundamentalism, unbeknownst to itself, could no longer provide a pre-revolutionary reading of Islam. European moral philosophical traditions and their language managed to make a tectonic shift that resulted in the development of a modern Islamic political theology that is totalitarian, dystopian, and revolutionary. The Islam of Iran, ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaida is simply a regional variant of progressive Western revolutionary thought.

Yet I am not saying that the West is to blame for this development. For if this article seeks to affirm anything it is that the West-Islam dichotomy is not only meaningless but delusional. Cultural and moral relativism are meaningless when the foundation of all our modern moral and political thinking comes from the same place. Europe has managed to create a truly global human culture that no longer has ideational barriers and in which fashion, style, fads, and ideas form global mimetic contagions.

This is a story of a global nightmare constructed by intellectuals from all religious and national backgrounds. The Enlightenment and its aftermath are now just as solidly a part of Islamic intellectual makeup as they are in Western cultures, and if the Muslim world is to move forward it would be through the recognition and not the denial of this fact. If the moral and social destruction of the region resulted from incompetent Arab intellectuals sleepwalking in the orbit of a global culture, the solution is competence. The exploitation of the intellectual, social, and political energies of impoverished and pre-modern societies for use as cannon fodder in the great ideological battles of the Western left has had disastrous effects on the social, economic, and political development and progress of many Arab and Muslim societies. In this regard, the Western lefts theology of how the West destroyed other societies has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, from which it is now our duty and obligation to liberate ourselves.

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The Liberation of the Arabs From the Global Left - Tablet Magazine

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Tech Companies Will Cover Abortion Travelbut Not for All Workers – WIRED

Posted: July 11, 2022 at 4:10 am

Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Uber also rely on large pools of TVCs or gig workers and have announced abortion travel benefits for their employees. When asked if nonemployee workers were covered, Microsoft spokesperson Michelle Micor declined to answer; the other three companies did not respond.

Ironically, the workers being shut out of abortion travel benefits are probably more likely to need it than full-time tech employees, given their generally lower compensation. In 2015, the Brookings Institution found that people with a family income below the federal poverty line, who tend to have less access to contraception and family planning education, were 5 times more likely than more affluent people to experience unintended pregnancy. Black and Hispanic people are overrepresented amongst abortion seekers.

People with lower incomes are also less likely to have health insurance that covers abortion. In 2014, the latest year for which the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion policy nonprofit, has data, only 31 percent of people seeking abortion care had any private health insurance at all. Another 35 percent were covered by Medicaid, which excludes most abortion coverage in 34 states that wont fund it.

Experts say there are many ways tech companies could support TVCs and gig workers in the post-Roe US, should they want to. Shelley Alpern, director of corporate engagement at Rhia Ventures, a social impact investment firm that submits shareholder resolutions pressing companies to support reproductive rights, says those steps include seeding a travel fund that temps and contractors could use, suspending political donations to anti-abortion politicians, and contacting lawmakers to oppose anti-abortion policy. Big companies are like sleeping giants on this issue, Alpern says.

Other options for corporations that want to make a difference include donating to local abortion funds in places they do business or have employees, says Liza Fuentes, senior research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute. That is pretty low-hanging fruit, and its desperately needed, Fuentes says. She says tech companies could work with the National Network of Abortion Funds, which lets donors earmark funds for specific communities, and groups like the Brigid Alliance, which arranges and funds abortion care and travel for people in need.

Some permanent employees inside tech companies have been pressuring their own bosses to take some of those steps to support abortion access. The Washington Post reported last month that workers inside Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have circulated petitions and internal messages calling on their companies to pledge to protect the privacy of users who seek abortions.

In her statement calling on Alphabet to extend abortion travel benefits to TVCs, AWUs Koul said the company should also end donations to anti-abortion politicians and establish privacy protocols to protect Google users seeking information about abortion access. History has proven that the Supreme Courts ruling will not stop abortions, it will only stop safe abortions, she wrote. Google can do more to ensure all workers and users have the information and resources necessary to safely access reproductive health services.

A day after the AWU made its statement public, Google announced its privacy updates, which include the deletion of abortion clinic visits from users location history. Software engineer and executive council member Ashok Chandwaney acknowledged the changes but reiterated that the company must go further in protecting user and worker privacy and expand abortion access for all of its workers. Our organizing will continue, he wrote.

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Battle over Big Tech bills goes down to the wire – The Hill

Posted: at 4:10 am

Lobbying both for and against legislation to crack down on U.S. tech giants is intensifying as the Senate enters a critical month for the antitrust bills.

All eyes are on Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who will need to decide whether to prioritize measures to regulate Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta over other key bills prior to the August recess.

Much of the lobbying in recent weeks has centered around the Senates limited floor time before lawmakers leave town next month. Congress isnt expected to make much progress on major legislation after returning from their break, when lawmakers typically shift their attention to the November election.

In an effort to run out the clock, the big four tech firms and their Washington allies are warning Senate Democrats that their voters expect progress on other pressing issues entering Novembers elections.

Smaller companies that support the bills, however, are making the case that regulating Big Tech is a winning midterm issue.

Its basically a fourth and one situation right now, said Matt Fossen, the U.S. communications manager for Proton, a privacy-focused email service that supports the legislation.

Were incredibly close, we think, to getting this over the goal line, but its still a really tight window of opportunity, Fossen said. We simultaneously feel optimism and urgency.

The two bills, expected to be packaged together, take aim at the gatekeeper power of dominant tech companies.

The American Innovation and Choice Online (AICO) Act would bar tech giants most likely only those big four firms from giving preferential treatment to their own products and services on the platforms they operate.

The Open App Markets Act is more narrowly focused on mobile application stores. It would bar Apple and Google from favoring their own apps in stores, requiring developers to use their payment services or preventing users from downloading apps from third-party distributors.

Both measures advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in March, but momentum has stalled as industry lobbyists have bombarded senators with emails, calls, meetings and Washington-centric ad blitzes opposing them.

The coalition of medium and small businesses, civil society groups and pro-competition think tanks pushing the pair of bills have been arguing that they would result in both positive policy results and helping candidates going into the midterms.

Supporters argue that the legislation would get Big Tech off the back of American businesses and boost competition, ultimately improving the cost and quality of services available to consumers.

Theres a policy argument to be made that this is good policy it will unleash innovation, it will give a benefit [to] developers and consumers but theres also a political argument to be made, and were pushing that as well: Good policy makes good politics, said Rick VanMeter, executive of the Coalition for App Fairness.

Much of the focus in the home stretch has been on Schumer, given his ultimate say in bringing the bills to a floor vote.

The digital rights group Fight for the Future has had two mobile billboard trucks at the Senate leaders New York and D.C. residences all week playing a John Oliver segment about the antitrust bills.

That was our tongue-in-cheek idea to try to get his attention, said Evan Greer, the groups director. And Im sure it has gotten his attention.

Some proponents have been focusing their efforts on senators outside of the Judiciary and Commerce committees who are less well-versed on antitrust issues and therefore more susceptible to industry talking points.

When we meet with them, were often talking about really basic things about how were being affected, said Kate McInnis, senior public policy manager at the search engine DuckDuckGo. Then we get to the bills and they often are very, very surprised and interested to learn how we and other tech companies like ours have been affected by Big Techs encumbrances to competition and to user choice.

Big Tech allies argue that the bills would harm data security and privacy, limit access to popular features such as Amazon Prime, constrain content moderation efforts and undermine U.S. competitiveness and national security by weakening the nations tech giants.

As were talking with legislators and their teams and helping them better grasp the ramifications of this legislation, theyre realizing its not ready for prime-time, Matt Schruers, president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, an advocacy group backed by the big four tech giants that spent more than $10 million on ads opposing AICO.

Competing forces are seeking to influence Schumers priorities as the majority leader confronts a packed agenda that includes a bipartisan measure to boost U.S. competitiveness with China, the annual Pentagon spending bill and a party-line budget reconciliation package that aims to lower drug prices and potentially address climate change.

A recent poll from the Coalition for App Fairness found that 79 percent of swing state voters support the Open App Markets Act, and 68 percent said that Big Tech firms have too much power.

That came after the tech-backed Chamber of Progress released a poll finding that tech regulation is toward the bottom of the priority list for voters compared to other issues such as controlling inflation and lowering prescription drug prices.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), a top proponent of tech regulation, has said that both bills would win the support of 60 senators if they were to receive a floor vote.

Still, lobbyists with tech clients say that some senators would push for amendments to earn their vote, likely complicating the process. While Senate Republican leaders havent been rallying their ranks to oppose the antitrust bills, they would likely take advantage of the deliberative process to slow down other Democratic priorities, they say.

Leader Schumer supports the legislation and is working with Senator Klobuchar and others to get the necessary support to pass it, a Schumer spokesperson said in an email, referring to the antitrust bills.

Tech giants ramped up their lobbying spending to record levels as the antitrust bills gained traction earlier this year. Apple shelled out more than $2.5 million on lobbying in the first three months of 2022, up 71 percent from the same period last year. Meta and Amazon spent $5.4 million and $5 million, respectively, both first-quarter highs.

Dozens of Washington advocacy groups and think tanks that receive funding from tech giants, including liberal and conservative organizations, have spoken out against the antitrust bills. Former national security officials with ties to Big Tech are urging lawmakers to delay AICO to examine its impact on U.S. security.

Chief executives of Google, Amazon and Apple have personally met with Senate leaders to discuss their issues with the bills and suggest potential changes in the event that Schumer moves forward with them.

Tech executives are also writing large checks. Schumers campaign is the top recipient of donations from Apple employees, bringing in nearly $102,000 during the 2022 election cycle, according to research group OpenSecrets. His campaign received $170,000 from Google employees and its PAC. Most of those funds came from the tech firms executives and lobbyists.

Although they may not have the same financial muscle to flex, CEOs of smaller supportive tech firms have also been holding numerous meetings in Washington. Proton CEO Andy Yen, for example, will be returning for a second visit to the nations capital later this month in an effort to push the bills across the finish line.

Theres overwhelming consensus that people want these big tech companies reined in, Greer said. The feeling here is that this should be inevitable and if it doesnt happen in the coming weeks its going to be because of the corrupting influence of corporate lobbying and money in Washington, D.C.

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Tech giants like Meta and Snap are facing a ‘perfect storm’ of weak growth prospects that could lead to limite – Business Insider India

Posted: at 4:10 am

Even after a more than 50% year-to-date decline, the going could get even tougher for digital advertising platforms like Meta, Snap, and YouTube, according to a note from Barclays.

The Wall Street firm said "a perfect storm" has arrived for the digital advertising space that could translate into limited upside for the companies impacted in the near-term.

That perfect storm encompasses a three-part combination of factors that are adding to Barclays' concerns about the advertising space. According to Barclays, those factors include:

1. "A step-down in spend and conversions across the whole internet ecosystem (ex-travel) in the second quarter."

2. "Ascending trajectory from new challengers like TikTok and Apple, which are taking share at a time when macro is weakening materially."

3. "The obvious tough comparisons which are well documented."

"We think this cocktail of events is likely to generate the lowest growth rate for the sector in years," Barclays said, adding that current valuations only partially reflect this scenario. Barclays expects 3% year-over-year growth for the industry this year.

That's a marked slowdown from prior years when strong consumer spending habits drove strong demand for different advertising solutions. But as fears of an economic recession continue to rise, this years-long trend is starting to slow down.

Barclays expects second-quarter earnings from digital advertisers to see muted reactions from investors, and lowered its price target considerably for Meta, Snap, Alphabet, and Pinterest.

"Is there enough ad spend to go around in 2022? We think no," Barclays said, arguing that strong growth from TikTok's and Apple's budding advertising businesses will capture 33% of every incremental ad dollar in 2022.

Apple's advertising business, which includes its app store ad placements, has grown to about $7 billion, while TikTok is on pace to grow its advertising revenue from $4 billion to more than $12 billion this year, according to the note.

"This begs the question of who is slated to lose out? We think it's likely 'everyone' with growth figures from Snap, Meta, YouTube and the open web already reflecting some of the beating," Barclays said.

Barclays cut its price target for Meta and Snap to $280 and $20, respectively. Those levels represent limited upside for the stocks, and are nowhere near their peaks in 2021.

Tech giants like Meta and Snap are facing a 'perfect storm' of weak growth prospects that could lead to limite - Business Insider India

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Engage with tech giants on foreign policy or risk national security, MPs tell government – IT PRO

Posted: at 4:10 am

Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee has branded the government's response to the challenges posed by emerging technologies as "incoherent and muted".

The report, produced by a cross-party handful of MPs,highlights the actions of threat actors originating from 'authoritarian' countries such as Russia and China,accusing these nation states of actively undermining the rules by which international systems are run.

The tech sector, the committee argues, is a key frontier which is at risk of being exploited by malign actors, unless the UK government works with other nation states to regulate activity within it.

It further acknowledges that emerging technologies in the private sector are intrinsically linked to this activity, and that the government needs to do much more to meaningfully engage with tech firms on matters of privacy and national security.

Multinational cooperation has been lacking under current government guidance, the report also states. This refers not only to governments but also non-state actors such as the worlds largest technology companies, with social media firms being given as an example of private bodies that hold great economic and social power.

It's immensely important to spark communication between the government andbig tech firms in order to maintain economic and national security, according to the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Togendhat MP.

Data is the most powerful new currency and never before have private companies had access to such a wealth of information on individuals. The products and platforms of Tech Giants permeate every aspect of modern life," he said.

Major tech companies have geopolitical influence that vastly outstrips many nation-states. If the UK is to shape the future, the conversation cant just be with other states. We need to bring in input from tech companies themselves, both big and small."

Social media platforms are now the key actors facilitating the dissemination and internationalisation of narratives that shape global political, social and diplomatic discourse," the report added, citing an example for how big tech firms are exerting power on the global stage.

To this end, the report makes clear that national security measures must not only be discussed through global diplomatic channels, but also through frank and transparent communication with leading tech firms.

The major role tech firms play in global events, such asMicrosoft supporting Ukraine following Russias invasion of the country, showcase thepower held by private firms. National security leaders recently warnedthat the war in Ukraine could form a playbook from which future threat actors draw their tactics, so the importance of tech firms combating cyber crime in the conflict speaks to their increasing role in international relations.

In light of this change in international power balance, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has been urged to acknowledge it needs to be involved in the regulation and governance of global tech going forward.

The Government now needs to extend the UKs influence within the global technology landscape, to ensure that future technologies are developed and used in ways that align with our values and, crucially, uphold the rights and freedoms of people in the UK and across the world, the report said.

The committee also recommends that a minister should be appointed to oversee this remit, with the individual then identifying work to be shared between departments when appropriate.

Further to this aim, the report argues there's an urgent need for the government to properly outline its position on data sharing and privacy regulations, to provide a strong foundation from which further discussions with the EU and US on such issues will be possible. Current confusion over biometric regulations in the UK have prompted calls for more oversight by cross-party MPs.

Pending parliamentary acts such as the Online Safety Bill, which was first published as a draft in May 2021, still hasn't passed into law and there are concerns that the final draft might not be enforced until 2024. Uncertainty over critical digital legislation like this, alongside the Data Reform Bill, has been exacerbated by the announcement this week that as caretaker prime minister, Boris Johnson will not enforce major legislation changes.

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Apple’s Lockdown Mode: Why There’s a New Level of Security for Your iPhone – CNET

Posted: at 4:10 am

This story is part of Focal Point iPhone 2022, CNET's collection of news, tips and advice around Apple's most popular product.

Apple will be offering a new "Lockdown Mode" for its iPhones, iPads and Mac computers this fall. It's designed to fight advanced hacking and targeted spyware like the NSO Group's Pegasus.

The move is Apple acknowledging, in a way, that the threat is serious and growing. Pegasus was used by repressive governments to spy on human rights activists, lawyers, politicians and journalists.

Cybersecurity watchers believe Apple may push customers and competitors to take stronger security postures. Ultimately, the way we all use technology may have to change.

Three years ago, Apple put up an ad in Las Vegas, showing the backside of one of its devices, with the phrase "What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone." It was a bold, if cheeky, claim. But Apple is increasingly living up to it.

The tech giant has been ramping up its commitments to privacy and security with a string of new features that cybersecurity experts say are amounting to more than a bullet-point feature to differentiate its products from Samsung gadgets and other devices powered by Google's Android OS. Instead, Apple's moves have sent ripples through the advertising world and upset government officials -- signs, tech watchers say, that Apple is following through on its promises.

That's why many cybersecurity experts took notice of Apple's Lockdown Mode when it was unveiled last Wednesday. The feature isdesigned to activate "extreme" protections for the company's iPhones, iPads and Mac computers. Among them, Apple's Lockdown Mode blocks link previews in the messages app, turns off potentially hackable web browsing technologies, and halts any incoming FaceTime calls from unknown numbers. Apple's devices also won't accept accessory connections unless the device is unlocked. (Here'show to use Apple's Lockdown mode on an iPhone.)

Apple's cheeky ad in Las Vegas, in 2019.

Of the people using its roughly 2 billion active devices around the world, Apple said few would actually need to turn the feature on. But cybersecurity experts say these types of extreme measures may need to become more commonplace as governments around the world broaden who they target while stepping up their frequency of attacks.

In just the last week, the FBI and Britain's MI5 intelligence organization took the rare step of issuing a joint warning of the "immense" threat Chinese spies pose to "our economic and national security," and that its hacking program is "bigger than that of every other major country combined." Other government agencies have made similar warnings about hacking from other adversaries, including Russia, which the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in 2017has targeted think tanks and lobbying groups in addition to the government and political parties.

And unlike widespread ransomware or virus campaigns, which are often designed to spread as quickly as possible, targeted attacks are often designed for quiet intelligence gathering, which could lead to stolen technology, exposed state secrets and more.

Susan Landau, Tufts University

Apple itself said last week that it's tracked targeted hacking efforts toward people in nearly 150 countries over the past eight months. Apple has already begun a program of warning people when they may be targeted. When Lockdown Mode is released in the fall, cybersecurity experts say, it'll represent an escalation on Apple's part, particularly because the feature will be available to anyone who wants to turn it on.

"There were a number of attempts over the years to make highly secure devices, and it's great to have those things and having them put out there, but we haven't seen widespread adoption," saidKurt Opsahl, deputy executive director and general counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for privacy and other civil liberties in the digital world. And though Opsahl believes an up-to-date phone is probably good enough for the average person, he said that any way Apple can raise the cost of hacking a phone helps protect the devices.

"Make no mistake about it, Lockdown Mode will be a major blow," saidRon Deibert, a professor of political science and director of the Citizen Labfor cybersecurity researchers at the University of Toronto.

Much of Apple's approach to cybersecurity can be traced back to 2010, when company co-founder Steve Jobs discussed his view of privacy on stage at D8 conference.

"Privacy means people know what they're signing up for, in plain English, and repeatedly," Jobs said. "Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you're going to do."

It was a departure from other internet giants, such as Facebook, whose co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was listening in the audience. Google, Facebook and Amazon largely make their money through targeted advertisements, which are often at odds with user privacy. After all, the more targeted the ad, more relevant and effective it likely is.

Apple, by comparison, makes little of its money from advertisements. Instead, the iPhone, iPad and Mac computers made up more than 70% of its sales last year, adding up to over $259 billion combined.

Accordingly, Apple offers security features by default across the board to all its users. When people download Facebook for the first time and start using it on their phone, they're quickly greeted with popups asking whether they want to give the app access to their microphone or camera.

Jeff Pollard, Forrester

Last year, Apple took it a step further, asking if people wanted to stop companies from tracking them across websites and apps, a feature Apple calls App Tracking Transparency. Research surveys suggest nearly all people answer thatthey don't want to be tracked, a move that Facebook owner Meta said hasmeaningfully hurt its finances, costing as much as $10 billion in lost sales this year. "It's a substantial headwind to work our way through," Meta CFO David Wehner said in February.

But offering effectively a new mode on iPhones altogether is an entirely new approach. When people activate Lockdown Mode on their device, by flipping a switch in the settings app, it then needs to restart -- effectively loading a new set of code and rules under Apple's "extreme" security measures.

"Apple is ultimately making it as easy as possible to make choices about security and privacy," saidJeff Pollard, a Forrester analyst who focuses on cybersecurity and risk. Pollard said this approach offers an opportunity for Apple to test the waters between usability and security, while following through on its promise to continually improve on Lockdown Mode over time. "We have to make it easier to do, so our adversaries have to try harder."

Lockdown Mode may be one of Apple's most significant security moves to date, but the company still has more it needs to do. Craig Federighi, Apple SVP and head of software, testified to a courtroom last year that his company's Mac computers face a "significantly larger malware problem" than its iPhones, iPads and other devices.

"Today, we have a level of malware on the Mac that we don't find acceptable," Federighi said during testimony defending Apple in a lawsuit with Fortnite maker Epic Games. Each week, Apple identifies a couple of pieces of malware on its own or with the help of third parties, he said back then, and it uses built-in systems to automatically remove malicious software from customers' computers. The nasty programs still proliferate, though. In the year ended last May, Federighi said, Apple had fought 130 types of Mac malware, and one program alone infected 300,000 systems.

Lockdown Mode doesn't directly address widespread malware issues, but it could end up forcing hackers to put even more time and resources toward finding security flaws they can exploit.

"Something has to be done," said Betsy Sigman, a distinguished teaching professor emeritus at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, in 2010

An alarming problem to Sigman is that malware developers stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars from targeted hacks like Pegasus. The groups that have sprung up to fight them, meanwhile, are much smaller and need funding both to fight the threat and to help protect and educate potential victims.

"It's going to cost a lot of money," Sigman said. Apple pledged a grant of at least $10 million to theDignity and Justice Fund, which was established by the Ford Foundation, to help support human rights and fight social repression. Sigman said much more investment will be needed. "I hope Apple will get together with other high-tech companies and work together on this."

Meanwhile, many cybersecurity experts, including Susan Landau, are looking forward to trying out Lockdown Mode when Apple releases it in the fall, along with its annual set of major software upgrades. A cybersecurity and policy professor at Tufts University, and a former employee at Google and Sun Microsystems, Landau is already careful about what websites she visits and what devices she uses. She keeps a separate Google Chromebook for handling her finances, and she refuses to download most apps to her phone unless she knows she can trust the company that made them.

"It's convenience versus security," she said. Landau follows these protocols out of principle, because she -- like nearly all of us -- doesn't have the time or capability to validate every app or website's safety. Apple and Google both have established security tests for their respective app stores, but Landau said the new apps, capabilities and upgrades that arrive each year can make them more vulnerable. "Complexity is the bane of security."

To her, Lockdown Mode may help us all begin to understand the balance between gee-whiz features and security, particularly as state-sponsored hackers step up their attacks. "People have gotten used to the convenience without understanding the problems," Landau said. "The convenience we've all grown accustomed to has got to change."

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Seeking nominations for the marketing tech companies who are leading the industry in 2022 – Business Insider

Posted: at 4:10 am

Insider is looking to identify the hottest marketing-tech companies.

We will publish our fourth annual list of martech leaders later this summer and need your help identifying the companies taking on cloud giants and solving big problems for marketers. Maybe they're offering privacy-safe ways to handle consumer data, helping marketers retain the new customers they got during the pandemic, or building out ecommerce capabilities for small businesses.

Click here to see last year's list: Meet 19 execs at companies like Adobe and Shopify who are shaping the future of marketing tech

Please submit your nominations here by July 15. We will not be accepting acceptions after that date, and we will publish the list in August.

We're looking to identify a diverse group of companies shaking up industries like retail, TV, and technology.

We'll consider company revenue, headcount and funding as well as interesting business models and the scope of each company's ambitions.

Nominations should include examples of the company's performance with quanitative results. You should also be able to list some clients, and explain what problem your company solves in plain language.

This list is specific to marketing-tech companies and separate from an annual list Business Insider will publish later this year of the hottest adtech companies of 2022.

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The Fight Over Truth Also Has a Red State, Blue State Divide – The New York Times

Posted: at 4:09 am

To fight disinformation, California lawmakers are advancing a bill that would force social media companies to divulge their process for removing false, hateful or extremist material from their platforms. Texas lawmakers, by contrast, want to ban the largest of the companies Facebook, Twitter and YouTube from removing posts because of political points of view.

In Washington, the state attorney general persuaded a court to fine a nonprofit and its lawyer $28,000 for filing a baseless legal challenge to the 2020 governors race. In Alabama, lawmakers want to allow people to seek financial damages from social media platforms that shut down their accounts for having posted false content.

In the absence of significant action on disinformation at the federal level, officials in state after state are taking aim at the sources of disinformation and the platforms that propagate them only they are doing so from starkly divergent ideological positions. In this deeply polarized era, even the fight for truth breaks along partisan lines.

The result has been a cacophony of state bills and legal maneuvers that could reinforce information bubbles in a nation increasingly divided over a variety of issues including abortion, guns, the environment and along geographic lines.

The midterm elections in November are driving much of the activity on the state level. In red states, the focus has been on protecting conservative voices on social media, including those spreading baseless claims of widespread electoral fraud.

In blue states, lawmakers have tried to force the same companies to do more to stop the spread of conspiracy theories and other harmful information about a broad range of topics, including voting rights and Covid-19.

We should not stand by and just throw up our hands and say that this is an impossible beast that is just going to take over our democracy, Washingtons governor, Jay Inslee, a Democrat, said in an interview.

Calling disinformation a nuclear weapon threatening the countrys democratic foundations, he supports legislation that would make it a crime to spread lies about elections. He praised the $28,000 fine levied against the advocacy group that challenged the integrity of the states vote in 2020.

We ought to be creatively looking for potential ways to reduce its impact, he said, referring to disinformation.

The biggest hurdle to new regulations regardless of the party pushing them is the First Amendment. Lobbyists for the social media companies say that, while they seek to moderate content, the government should not be in the business of dictating how thats done.

Concerns over free speech defeated a bill in deeply blue Washington that would have made it a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail, for candidates or elected officials to spread lies about free and fair elections when it has the likelihood to stoke violence.

Governor Inslee, who faced baseless claims of election fraud after he won a third term in 2020, supported the legislation, citing the Supreme Courts 1969 ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio. That ruling allowed states to punish speech calling for violence or criminal acts when such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

The legislation stalled in the states Senate in February, but Mr. Inslee said the scale of the problem required urgent action.

The scope of the problem of disinformation, and of the power of the tech companies, has begun to chip away at the notion that free speech is politically untouchable.

The new law in Texas has already reached the Supreme Court, which blocked the law from taking effect in May, though it sent the case back to a federal appeals court for further consideration. Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed the legislation last year, prompted in part by the decisions by Facebook and Twitter to shut down the accounts of former President Donald J. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, violence on Capitol Hill.

The courts ruling signaled that it could revisit one core issue: whether social media platforms, like newspapers, retain a high degree of editorial freedom.

July 8, 2022, 5:01 p.m. ET

It is not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in a dissent to the courts emergency ruling suspending the laws enforcement.

A federal judge last month blocked a similar law in Florida that would have fined social media companies as much as $250,000 a day if they blocked political candidates from their platforms, which have become essential tools of modern campaigning. Other states with Republican-controlled legislatures have proposed similar measures, including Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa and Alaska.

Alabamas attorney general, Steve Marshall, has created an online portal through which residents can complain that their access to social media has been restricted: alabamaag.gov/Censored. In a written response to questions, he said that social media platforms stepped up efforts to restrict content during the pandemic and the presidential election of 2020.

During this period (and continuing to present day), social media platforms abandoned all pretense of promoting free speech a principle on which they sold themselves to users and openly and arrogantly proclaimed themselves the Ministry of Truth, he wrote. Suddenly, any viewpoint that deviated in the slightest from the prevailing orthodoxy was censored.

Much of the activity on the state level today has been animated by the fraudulent assertion that Mr. Trump, and not President Biden, won the 2020 presidential election. Although disproved repeatedly, the claim has been cited by Republicans to introduce dozens of bills that would clamp down on absentee or mail-in voting in the states they control.

Democrats have moved in the opposite direction. Sixteen states have expanded the abilities of people to vote, which has intensified pre-emptive accusations among conservative lawmakers and commentators that the Democrats are bent on cheating.

There is a direct line from conspiracy theories to lawsuits to legislation in states, said Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director of voting rights at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan election advocacy organization at the New York University School of Law. Now, more than ever, your voting rights depend on where you live. What weve seen this year is half the country going in one direction and the other half going the other direction.

TechNet, the internet company lobbying group, has fought local proposals in dozens of states. The industrys executives argue that variations in state legislation create a confusing patchwork of rules for companies and consumers. Instead, companies have highlighted their own enforcement of disinformation and other harmful content.

These decisions are made as consistently as possible, said David Edmonson, the groups vice president for state policy and government relations.

For many politicians the issue has become a powerful cudgel against opponents, with each side accusing the other of spreading lies, and both groups criticizing the social media giants.

Floridas governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has raised campaign funds off his vow to press ahead with his fight against what he has called the authoritarian companies that have sought to mute conservative voices.

In Ohio, J.D. Vance, the memoirist and Republican nominee for Senate, railed against social media giants, saying they stifled news about the foreign business dealings of Hunter Biden, the presidents son.

In Missouri, Vicky Hartzler, a former congresswoman running for the Republican nomination for Senate, released a television ad criticizing Twitter for suspending her personal account after she posted remarks about transgender athletes. They want to cancel you, she said in the ad, defending her remarks as what God intended.

OnMessage, a polling firm that counts the National Republican Senatorial Committee as a client, reported that 80 percent of primary voters surveyed in 2021 said they believed that technology companies were too powerful and needed to be held accountable. Six years earlier, only 20 percent said so.

Voters have a palpable fear of cancel culture and how tech is censoring political views, said Chris Hartline, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

In blue states, Democrats have focused more directly on the harm disinformation inflicts on society, including through false claims about elections or Covid and through racist or antisemitic material that has motivated violent attacks like the massacre at a supermarket in Buffalo in May.

Connecticut plans to spend nearly $2 million on marketing to share factual information about voting and to create a position for an expert to root out misinformation narratives about voting before they go viral. A similar effort to create a disinformation board at the Department of Homeland Security provoked a political fury before its work was suspended in May pending an internal review.

In California, the State Senate is moving forward with legislation that would require social media companies to disclose their policies regarding hate speech, disinformation, extremism, harassment and foreign political interference. (The legislation would not compel them to restrict content.) Another bill would allow civil lawsuits against large social media platforms like TikTok and Metas Facebook and Instagram if their products were proven to have addicted children.

All of these different challenges that were facing have a common thread, and the common thread is the power of social media to amplify really problematic content, said Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel of California, a Democrat, who sponsored the legislation to require greater transparency from social media platforms. That has significant consequences both online and in physical spaces.

It seems unlikely that the flurry of legislative activity will have a significant impact before this falls elections; social media companies will have no single response acceptable to both sides when accusations of disinformation inevitably arise.

Any election cycle brings intense new content challenges for platforms, but the November midterms seem likely to be particularly explosive, said Matt Perault, a director of the Center on Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina. With abortion, guns, democratic participation at the forefront of voters minds, platforms will face intense challenges in moderating speech. Its likely that neither side will be satisfied by the decisions platforms make.

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The Fight Over Truth Also Has a Red State, Blue State Divide - The New York Times

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Why a higher inflation regime will eventually be good for investors – Financial Times

Posted: at 4:09 am

The writer is chief market strategist forEurope, Middle East and Africa at JPMorgan Asset Management

A fellow panellist at a recent conference proclaimed: The low inflation decades were a golden era for investors. The audience nodded furiously and then became increasingly glum as all panellists agreed this era was behind us.

In a similar vein, I often hear the argument that low or negative interest rates, and the other monetary tactics which central banks deployed to combat low inflation, boosted all asset prices. And so higher interest rates should naturally depress the valuation of all risk assets.

Both arguments sound compelling. But neither are necessarily right. Or perhaps I should say the low-rates-boosts-returns argument isnt right for all assets.

Some asset classes did benefit. Companies that produced decent earnings growth when their peers were languishing were able to command ever higher premiums. The global tech giants are the most obvious example. In the 2010s decade, when the US 10-year Treasury yield fell from nearly 4 per cent to about 2 per cent, the global tech sector produced an average annual return of 17 per cent.

This was partly due to strong earnings growth and also to investors willingness to pay higher valuation multiples. Low interest rates also made potential pay-offs in the distant future more attractive.

However, there were many segments of global asset markets that had a much more dismal time in the era of low inflation. These were the assets struggling with chronically weak demand and dismal pricing power.

Take the global energy and materials sector, for example, which suffered a decade of lacklustre or non-existent earnings growth and stock returns. This malaise served as a drag on entire benchmark indices for some regions. Europe is the prime example, where low nominal growth was at least part of the reason why the MSCI Europe index companies had average earnings growth of just 3 per cent and the average return of just 9 per cent in the 2010s. This is roughly half the growth of earnings and returns experienced in the 1990s when inflation was not so desperately low.

When one considers a multi-asset portfolio, its even more obvious that the low-inflation era was far from golden.

Persistently low inflation led to ever declining and, in some cases, even negative short and long-term bond yields. Bonds increasingly failed in the two functions they were supposed to play in a portfolio to provide a nice steady source of income and to diversify risk exposure by going up in price when stocks are falling. At such low interest rates, they were fulfilling neither function and investors had to suffer lower total returns and more portfolio volatility. In other words, less comfortable days, and potentially more sleepless nights.

To demonstrate, lets take a simple balanced portfolio comprised of 40 per cent UK gilts and 60 per cent FTSE 100 stocks. In the 1990s, a period in which inflation averaged 3.3 per cent, this portfolio gave you an average return of 14.5 per cent per annum in nominal terms and 11.2 per cent in real terms. In the 2010s that was just 7.2 per cent in nominal terms, and 4.9 per cent in real terms.

Many reading this will rightly point out that inflation isnt doing investors much good this year with both stocks and bonds experiencing double-digit declines in most sectors, regions and asset classes. This is where I need to clarify the type of inflation Im alluding to, because inflation comes in good and bad forms. Good inflation is a reflection of healthy demand, enough for companies to have a degree of pricing power and confidence to invest for expansion. Then there is bad inflation a cost shock which serves as a tax on growth.

While we are experiencing bad inflation now, I believe this cost shock should pass within a year. Moreover, inflation will probably settle at a modestly higher rate of good inflation since the cost shock will serve as a catalyst for more robust demand and healthier nominal growth in the future as it encourages households, governments and businesses to invest in labour and energy-saving technologies.

Contrary to popular opinion, the new inflation regime should eventually prove to be a good thing for investors. Stronger nominal demand will mean stronger earnings and sustainably higher interest rates. Multi-asset investors will benefit from stronger returns but only if they are brave enough to consider reorientating their portfolio towards those sectors of the economy that have languished for much of the last decade and away from those that needed economic stagnation to thrive.

The inside story at Meta as it moves beyond Facebook – Vox.com

Posted: at 4:09 am

The new season of Vox Media Podcast Networks award-winning narrative podcast Land of the Giants debuts next week, on July 13. This time, Recode senior correspondent Shirin Ghaffary teams up with her co-host, The Verges deputy editor Alex Heath, to tell the story of Meta, formerly known as Facebook, at a pivotal moment both for the tech giant and for the billions of people who use its products.

Under the leadership of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the same man who co-founded Facebook from his college dorm room in 2004, Meta is trying to transition away from its complicated legacy as a social media company to a futuristic metaverse vision that aims to reshape the future of the internet. This transition is happening while criticism from users, regulators, and even its own former employees is at an all-time high. They are worried the company and its products Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and others are harming society, from how global democracy functions to the mental health of teenagers. They think Meta is too big and too powerful and perhaps needs to be broken up. Meanwhile, Zuckerbergs business is under pressure like never before. Both Facebook and Instagram are quickly losing ground to TikTok, forcing Meta to rethink its approach to social media entirely.

The new season of Land of the Giants will bring you original reporting on Metas current challenges and the future its building; the show will also explore critical moments from its origin as a scrappy startup to its current status as a tech behemoth. Ghaffary and Heath will take you inside the company by talking to current and former executives, including Metas top policy executive Nick Clegg and head of WhatsApp Will Cathcart, as well as preeminent critics and leaders outside the company like whistleblower Frances Haugen and Zynga founder Mark Pincus.

The first episode of Land of the Giants: The Facebook/Meta Disruption comes out on July 13. You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to the trailer below.

The inside story at Meta as it moves beyond Facebook - Vox.com

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Monthly Archives: July 2022

The Liberation of the Arabs From the Global Left – Tablet Magazine

Tech Companies Will Cover Abortion Travelbut Not for All Workers – WIRED

Battle over Big Tech bills goes down to the wire – The Hill

Tech giants like Meta and Snap are facing a ‘perfect storm’ of weak growth prospects that could lead to limite – Business Insider India

Engage with tech giants on foreign policy or risk national security, MPs tell government – IT PRO

Apple’s Lockdown Mode: Why There’s a New Level of Security for Your iPhone – CNET

Seeking nominations for the marketing tech companies who are leading the industry in 2022 – Business Insider

The Fight Over Truth Also Has a Red State, Blue State Divide – The New York Times

Why a higher inflation regime will eventually be good for investors – Financial Times

The inside story at Meta as it moves beyond Facebook – Vox.com

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