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Is Russia Immune to Anti-Semitism?
by Philippa Kaur 22 December 2020, 18:03
A new report on anti-Semitism in Russia for June-September 2020 was published in Moscow in October by the independent Center for Information and Analysis, SOVA. A month earlier, another study by a Russian think tank specializing in public opinion polls, the Levada Center, analyzed Russian attitudes to national minorities as well as to labor migrants. The quarterly report on anti-Semitism, as well as monthly monitoring by SOVA, indicate that Russia will register a similar number of anti-Semitic displays as in 2019 and 2018. In general, offenses related to anti-Semitism have been declining in the country for almost 10 years in a row.
Indeed, judging by this latest data, from January to September, there have been no attacks on Jews in the country, with only a minimal number of anti-Semitic statements made on social media and in the mainstream press. The attempted murder of Rabbi Yuri Tkach, the head of the Jewish community in Krasnodar, would probably be the hate crime of the year. The plot was hatched by activists of a cartoonish and unregistered organization, Citizens of the USSR, who do not recognize official Russian documents, carry old Soviet Union passports and refuse to obey Russian laws. The core of its activists are retired women. All of this has contributed to the fact that the police and the wider society did not take the group seriously.
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Nevertheless, according to the investigation, two Citizens found a potential assassin in September, providing Tkach’s personal data as well as an assembly knife and promising a high position in their organization in case of a “successful liquidation of the rabbi.” Although the assassination attempt was interrupted at this stage — the “killer” turned out to be an operative working undercover — the order itself can be considered real, given that the Soviet Citizens in Krasnodar had previously been distinguished by aggressive anti-Semitism and marginality.
Desirable Minority
In late July vandals damaged over 30 tombstones in the Jewish section of the January 9th Memorial Cemetery in Petersburg. In September, a drunken hooligan shouting anti-Semitic slogans failed to enter the premises of the Shamir community in the east of Moscow, threw a Hanukiah from the porch, tore down the sign with the name of the organization, broke the mailbox and knocked the license plate off the rabbi’s service car. To put these attacks in context, over the same time period, dozens of vandals attacked World War II memorials, monuments to Vladimir Lenin (that still decorate many squares in Russian cities) and even the statue of the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin in Orsk.
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Overall, the number of anti-Semitic incidents is lower than over the same period last year. All indications are that in 2020, there will also be fewer convictions for crimes previously committed on the grounds of anti-Semitism. On average, this picture is consistent with the previous two years.
The September report by the Levada Center shows that Jews are becoming a more desirable minority compared to other groups like the Chinese, Ukrainians, Chechens, immigrants from Africa, Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as Roma and migrant workers. The social distance between Jews and the ethnic majority is steadily shrinking. Its coefficient, in which higher values indicate social distrust, is 4.23 points. For comparison, Ukrainians, traditionally close to Russians, score 4.67, with Chechens at 5.21 and 5.83 for the Roma. The positive dynamics of the different components of this coefficient are also impressive. For example, the number of people willing to see Jews as their family members increased by more than six times and as close friends by three.
Of course, there is still a domestic anti-Semitism in Russia, which sometimes slips out even in the utterances of state officials. But today, the harsh insults have been replaced by other, more subtle ones that could even be taken as a sign of respect. Russian journalist Anna Narinskaya gives an example of a Jew promoted in a commercial company “because your nation knows how to [handle] money.” This is an improvement on past attitudes when Jews were not hired or admitted to university because Russians didn’t want to study or work with the “people with such surnames.”
This is all the more surprising because the level of nationalism in Russia decreased by only 2% in 11 years. While in 2009 the number of those who would like to implement the idea “Russia for Russians” was 18% and the number of those who were ready to support it “within reasonable limits” was 36%, in 2020 these figures were 19% and 32%, respectively. In this context of a relatively high prevalence of ethnic-majority nationalism, the number of anti-Semitic crimes in Russia has been steadily declining despite the decrease in the number of convictions. Unlike the trends in the West, levels of xenophobia against the Jewish minority are also decreasing.
How can this phenomenon be explained, and why are attitudes toward Jews undergoing such a change? Have people in Russia really become kinder and more tolerant of Jews? And if so, why?
Tolerance and Democracy
The first reason behind this trend is stricter punishment for extremism crimes that has emerged over the past decade. This is an extremely important factor that has replaced impunity of hate-motivated attacks, which prevailed in the Russian public consciousness until the end of the 2000s. This led to a decrease in the number of hate crimes in the country as a whole as well as a lower level of xenophobia.
Second, Russia doesn’t harbor an anti-Israel sentiment, characteristic of Western societies — what can be called the new anti-Semitism. As Narinskaya writes, a decent person in the West cannot say “Jews are inherently bad people,” but they can easily say that “Israel is the creator of the new Holocaust, and Jews all over the world are loyal to it, so I don’t like them.” In Russia, a doctor can legally refuse to admit a woman wearing a hijab, but the story of an Austrian doctor refusing to admit a patient wearing a Star of David “until you equip hospitals in Gaza” would be impossible, according to Narinskaya.
Finally, the third and most important reason is the position of the president. Vladimir Putin, unlike all the previous leaders of the country, has a respectful attitude toward the Jewish community. He publicly congratulates Jews on their religious holidays, has authorized the annual erection of Hanukkah menorahs in Russian cities, including Moscow, and meets regularly with Jewish leaders.
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The latest study on Jewish life in Russia also points to this factor. Its author is the sociologist Alexei Levinson, the head of the sociocultural research department at the Levada Center. Levison writes that the attitude to the Jews in Russia “has become so liberal that they [Jews] have reached the highest echelons of Russian society.” However, “Jews today are not at all euphoric. The community’s fears are based on Russian history, when they were subject to the whims of whoever was running the country.”
“Anti-Semitism goes hand in hand with the history of Jews for ages and ages, and they think these days are just a short interruption of this tradition,” Levinson told The Media Line. He attributes the current decline in anti-Semitic actions by the state to Putin’s personal position, suggesting that Jews in Russia “think that if he changes his mind, or if another less tolerant person takes his place, the whole state apparatus and the public will revert to the usual anti-Semitism.”
Such an eventuality will also remove the restrictive framework in situations involving domestic anti-Semitism, the potential for which is still great and even growing insignificantly. This is indirectly confirmed by Rabbi Alexander Boroda, the president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia. In June, he stated that he was concerned about the level of latent anti-Semitism in the country. Boroda says that the US State Department report on religious freedom indicates a relatively high level of latent anti-Semitism in Russia, stressing that in 2017-19, the number of Russians who declare themselves as anti-Semites was already at 15%-17%. However, at the moment, these people, for the reasons mentioned above, prefer not to advertise their views in public.
Nathan Sharansky, the former chairman of the Jewish Agency and a political prisoner in Soviet times, believes that “Putin is not suited to Russian democracy, so Jews and other citizens of Russia may be disappointed by the restrictions on freedom.” It is difficult to disagree with him that, in the event of a change in leadership, “anti-Semitism returns to the level it was at for 1,000 years … today’s positive societal views of Jews won’t be enough to stop it. The democratic composition of the country has to be strong enough to fight these pressures.”
*[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
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What Should Business Expect From Bolivia’s New President?
by Philippa Kaur 21 December 2020, 18:36
On October 18, the Bolivian public went to the polls and elected Luis Arce Catacora as the country’s 67th president in a surprise result that returned the socialist party of former President Evo Morales to power. Morales had previously ruled Bolivia as the leader of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) between January 2006 and November 2019, when he resigned from office and fled the country under pressure from the military following a controversial general election.
The closeness of that contest — in which the conservative candidate Carlos Mesa missed forcing a runoff against Morales by 0.58% of the official vote tally — meant that 2020 was also expected to be a tight race. In the event, this year’s election saw Arce gain over half a million more votes than Morales had the previous year, with a similar amount bled away from Mesa’s 2019 total, handing Arce an outright victory without the need for a run-off.
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While it would be tempting to see the Arce administration as a continuation of the Morales era, on the campaign trail, the new president repeatedly stated, “I am not Evo Morales.” Since being elected, Arce has made clear that Morales would have “no role” in his government. Nevertheless, with Arce serving as minister of economy and public finance for most of Morales’ tenure, any consideration of what to expect from the new president must take into account his predecessor’s record.
Business Under Morales
The Morales administration presided over a period of considerable economic growth and social development, which saw the rate of extreme poverty drop by more than half, from 48% in 2006 to 23% in 2018, while gross national income (GNI) per capita — a general indicator of prosperity among the population — more than tripled to reach $3,530 in 2019. GDP growth was also continuous and relatively consistent during this period, fluctuating between 3.4% and 6.8% until 2019, when it dipped to 2.2%. Those figures made Bolivia one of the fastest-growing countries in the region for much of Morales’ presidency.
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These changes were partly the result of a policy of nationalizing the petroleum, telecommunications and mining industries, enacted by decree early in Morales’ first year in office and less than two years after 92% of Bolivian voters had supported the nationalization of hydrocarbons during a compulsory referendum. While the country’s revenues from hydrocarbons increased dramatically and provided the funds to support poverty alleviation programs, that approach did not lead to a dramatic fall in foreign direct investment (FDI) in oil and gas extraction or mining, as many expected. In fact, both industries saw significant increases in FDI, which subsequently declined again but never below the levels seen before Morales came into office. Throughout this time, it was Arce overseeing these programs and investment, as well as a process of agricultural development and rural land redistribution, which was followed by both a significant increase in cereal and fisheries production.
It is important to note that a major policy shift occurred toward the latter years of the administration, with Arce himself stating during Morales’ final term that “our nationalisation agenda is over. … we need FDI, and we respect genuine, new private investment. Today FDI makes up 2 percent to 3% of our GDP. We want to double that by 2020.” In 2017, the country signed deals with foreign investors for hydrocarbon exploitation worth $1.6 billion, supplemented by a further $2.5-billion deal the following year.
The fact that the interim presidency of Jeanine Añez, who occupied the office between Morales and Arce, largely coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic makes it incredibly difficult to properly assess its performance, given the massive economic upheaval experienced throughout the region. While the interim government ordered an audit of the previous administration early on, it was soon forced to focus on implementing a range of measures designed to address the closure of businesses and an increase in unemployment.
In October, the interim government reported that the economic damage caused by the pandemic totaled around $5 billion, with an economic contraction of at least 4% expected by the end of 2020. While this unprecedented situation might make an assessment of the interim government difficult, it at least provides some important context for Arce’s approach to business and investment, which will be framed by the need to address the deep economic wounds caused by the pandemic.
Arce’s Approach to Business
As a candidate, Arce highlighted the efficacy of the economic policies pursued during the Morales administration and his intention to continue them. While this has been met with concern among some commentators, the more FDI-friendly latter years under Morales should give some cause for hope for investment in the country. Arce has proposed a drive for industrialization to replace importing foreign products in order to stimulate the internal market and generate more opportunities for locally-based companies. He has also said that he wants to encourage new company formation in Bolivia in order to stimulate employment.
Yet Arce has also said that some form of austerity to deal with the country’s economic woes will be needed, even as he has pledged not to reduce public expenditure. In a sign of his pro-FDI approach, he has also highlighted his desire to tap into Bolivia’s massive and unexploited lithium reserves, at a time when demand for the mineral is skyrocketing in the face of the shift toward electric vehicles. Arce has stated that exploitation of those reserves will demand the help of a “strategic partner” and could pour an additional $2 billion into state coffers over the course of his five-year term.
With the economic uncertainty that continues to swirl due to the ongoing pandemic, it is difficult to draw concrete conclusions about what to expect from the Arce administration, given that it is impossible to know what challenges and obstacles may present themselves in the coming months or years. Nevertheless, his early moves have pointed to a clear desire to stimulate business, with measures taken to provide for deferred credit, refinancing and rescheduling of debts, as well as forbidding additional interest being added to such credit by banks.
What is abundantly clear is that Luis Arce understands how critical FDI is to Bolivia’s future development, and that understanding will surely only have deepened in the context of the economic turmoil that has traversed the globe. With Bolivia boasting a host of investment opportunities and unsaturated markets, and with the new president already highlighting his desire to bring foreign investment into Bolivia’s massive untapped lithium reserves, it seems reasonable to expect that his administration will pursue a significant deepening of FDI even while he maintains the high levels of social spending seen under Evo Morales.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Was It Wise for India to Reject the RCEP?
by Philippa Kaur 21 December 2020, 16:38
Last month, 15 Asia-Pacific countries formed the world’s largest trading bloc. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is China’s response to the US jettisoning the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) under President Donald Trump. The deal excludes both India and the US. Though the RCEP is not as comprehensive as the TPP and does not cut tariffs to the same degree, its members comprise a third of the world’s population and of the global GDP. Given international attention on Xinjiang and Hong Kong, pulling off the RCEP is a major feather in China’s cap.
Is India Missing the Boat?
Many blame India for not joining the RCEP, suggesting it is missing out on access to a big market. Indian policymakers take a different view. They realize that countries like South Korea, Vietnam and China have terrific manufacturing capabilities. Opening markets to their goods could damage India’s industry. India could risk that blow if it could sell services to manufacturing powerhouses and earn a net benefit in the process. However, the RCEP focuses on goods, not services, giving India little incentive to sign on.
In the past, free trade agreements with Asian economies have yielded limited benefits in terms of economic growth, increased investment or geopolitical heft. Instead, they have led to a surge of cheap imports that have decimated India’s inefficient domestic industry. India’s goal is to make its industry more efficient instead of deindustrializing prematurely.
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While many experts and much of the media predict doom and gloom in a post-RCEP world, both foreign direct investment (FDI) and foreign portfolio investment (FPI) are flooding into India. The country received a record-high FDI of $35.37 billion in the first five months of India’s fiscal year starting on April 1. The November FPI of $8.5 billion exceeds FPI inflows of the past two years combined. Clearly, investors envisage a different reality than the pessimists.
The pessimistic outlook on India in the post-RCEP world comes from the fact that India missed the free-trade boat earlier and stagnated in the 1970s. Starting in 1969, India lurched to hard-line socialism under Indira Gandhi, the daughter of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. She began by nationalizing 14 of the largest private banks in the country. After her reelection in 1971, Gandhi nationalized the coal, steel, copper, refining, cotton textiles and insurance industries.
Apart from going on a nationalization spree, Gandhi gave unbridled power to bureaucrats, who strangled businesses with red tape. She championed public sector behemoths that turned out to be corrupt, inefficient and uncompetitive. Arguably, she did more to destroy private industry than 190 years of British rule.
Silver Linings to Staying Out
There are key differences between the 1970s and today. Indian conglomerates such as Reliance Industries and Adani Enterprises have their flaws, but they are not as inefficient as the public sector. In the services sector, India has managed to provide for American and even European markets. Doing business is much easier than in the 1970s because the political elite and the colonial bureaucracy are not as capricious, arbitrary and toxic to private enterprise. So, staying out of RCEP is unlikely to lead to a 1970s-style stagnation.
There is another tiny little matter. Many economists are blinded by the dogma of free trade. As one of the authors has argued in the past, trade invariably produces winners and losers. Recent press reports reveal that Hershey used financial instruments called futures to squeeze cocoa farmers in West Africa. This is part of a centuries-long pattern. Trade has not necessarily proven to be good to countries exporting commodities from Ghana to Bolivia. On the other hand, countries such as South Korea, Vietnam and, above all, China, that have industrialized, developed technologies and moved up the value chain have done quite well out of trade.
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The US itself became a major industrial power through a policy of protectionism. Alexander Hamilton took the view that economic independence was as essential as political independence. The US Congress’s first piece of legislation was the Tariff Act of July 4, 1789, which protected American infant industries from ruinous British competition. Many others, including East Asian tigers, emulated American industrial policy.
There is a strong argument to be made that India’s economic failure came not from protectionism but socialism. By giving colonial bureaucrats the commanding heights of the economy, Nehru and his daughter cut India off at its knees. Economic liberalization in 1991 unleashed growth, but competition from East Asia prematurely deindustrialized India, robbing it of productivity growth.
Badly burnt, Indian policymakers are trying something different. Like South Korea in the past, India is favoring its own version of chaebols. The country is embarking on an indigenous form of protectionism, so the RCEP is not on the cards. Furthermore, thanks to fear of both China and Pakistan, India has thrown in its lot with the US. Just as the country once traded preferentially with the Soviet Union, India now aims to do so with its new ally. Already, India exports services and people to the US and gets revenue and capital in return.
The RCEP, as it stands, has little upside for India. Besides, some of its members like China and Australia have increasingly fraught relations with each other. Key details of the RCEP are yet to be worked out, and reality might turn out to be very different from the hype. Doomsayers damning India might not quite be right. Staying out of the RCEP could well turn out to be wise.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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When Bad Customers Love Your Brand
by Philippa Kaur 18 December 2020, 12:11
A curious situation concerning Donald Trump’s beloved Proud Boys highlights several novel trends in US culture. A clothing supplier has expressed its consternation because of the public behavior by some of its paying customers. The story demonstrates how the quintessentially American science of branding has reached a new level of sophistication.
In an article with the title, “LGBT-owned kilt maker denounces kilt-clad Proud Boys,” the BBC reports the disgust of a Virginia kilt company with the fact “that their yellow kilts were worn by the far-right Proud Boys.” Most people would be surprised to learn that there are companies producing kilts in Virginia, but globalization and identity politics have produced all kinds of fascinating examples of what some might indignantly call cultural appropriation. So far, the Scots have not reacted to this incident, possibly because the American idea of cultural appropriation hasn’t yet penetrated their psyches.
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Allister Greenbrier, the owner of Verillas, proudly claims that his kilt company is “LGBTQ owned.” It has obviously become important to establish the sexual preferences of the owners of American enterprises. Greenbrier doesn’t require that his customers be LGBTQ, but he objects to the idea that paying customers might wear items from his collection in public while displaying views contrary to the values of his brand.
The BBC article explains an important feature of contemporary US culture that may not be evident to anyone not immersed in the culture, including the BBC’s British audience: “Extremist groups in the US often adopt or appropriate items of clothing as quasi-uniforms that indicate their allegiance and make them recognisable to others.”
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Quasi-uniforms:
Articles of clothing that, when worn by more than one person at a public event, identify the wearers as belonging to a particular cultural or ideological grouping, thereby creating the impression that the article has become the group’s, and not the manufacturer’s, brand.
Contextual Note
For ages, the proverb existed in the English language that clothes don’t make the man. Apart from the fact that if anyone were to cite the proverb today, they would be obliged to make it gender-neutral, the idea behind the proverb appears to have disappeared and been replaced by its opposite. Today, clothes identify. If, in former times, the choice of apparel demonstrated class origins, in our evolved post-sexist society, a person wears the clothes (and body art) that advertise that individual’s social identity.
The owner of Verillas complained when he realized the Proud Boys were all wearing exactly the same kilts. The fact that it was the same kilt made it a quasi-uniform: “I was appalled, angry and frustrated because they are the opposite of everything our brand stands for.” Had each Proud Boy been wearing a different style kilt, Greenbrier probably would have thought more highly of them, respecting each individual as someone who displayed his personal “values.” It became an existential problem for Greenbrier when the entire group wore the same kilt. In the age of conspiracy theories, people might suspect collusion.
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The reigning ideology is built on a basic premise of the consumer society, that what an individual does is meant to be an expression of personality and individuality. What a group does expresses allegiance to a worldview.
The borderline between a personal statement and wearing a uniform has become so vague that we can now categorize clothes as belonging to one of three categories: personal style, uniform (imposed by an institution) or quasi-uniform (adopted by members with shared identity). Clothing has always sent messages about social status, but now it has become an active vector of meaning in personal strategies of advertising. Behind the idea of quasi-uniform lies the conviction that all people belong to separate and possibly multiple categories of identity, which they are required to display in public. Whether it’s a kilt, a medieval tunic or tattoos, people increasingly feel impelled to wear their brands.
Like everything else in US culture, at some point, this cultural distinction becomes not just a political or ideological problem, but also an economic one. Greenbrier explains: “I can’t control who buys my product, but if they’re buying our product, they’re putting their money towards a good cause and I think they won’t be too happy when they find out they accidentally bought from a company that’s really fighting for the opposite of what they believe in.” Spending and the way one spends have become central to defining one’s relationships with others.
Historical Note
When, at the beginning of the 16th century, Renaissance princes and their courtiers rivaled amongst themselves to put on display their most expensive and sophisticated finery, England’s Lord Chancellor and humanist philosopher Thomas More offered his critique of the role of fashion in his famous work, “Utopia”: “Throughout the island they wear the same sort of clothes without any other distinction except what is necessary to distinguish the two sexes and the married and unmarried. The fashion never alters, and as it is neither disagreeable nor uneasy, so it is suited to the climate, and calculated both for their summers and winters. Every family makes their own clothes.”
More’s idea of dressing, not to impress, but to carry on one’s life as pragmatically as possible, was actually a sophisticated attempt to reconcile simplicity and the rejection of ostentation with freedom of personal expression. The latter would be the consequence of every family making its own clothes. Clothing would be neither a tool of self-advertising, as it was at the English court, nor a standardized uniform imposed by authority.
For the following five centuries, the ruling classes and the commercial classes that emerged subsequently in Europe blissfully ignored More’s advice. French King Louis XIV’s court pushed extravagance to an unparalleled extreme, partly as a strategic move to ensure that other aristocrats would follow rather than try to lead, but also to put pressure on their budgets, forcing them to invest in fashion rather than military capacity that might serve to overthrow royal authority. The uprising of La Fronde had made Louis fearful of revolt.
The bourgeois society that emerged in Europe in the 19th century discovered the value of permanently evolving fashions that stimulated demand over time from the same customers. Fashions themselves, combined with the new capacity for mass industrial production, induced entire populations to adopt conformist behaviors serving to affirm one’s status as a respectable consumer as well as advertise the emerging cultural notion of “being with it” or keeping up with the trends.
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In America’s highly conformist consumer culture of the 1950s, the Beatniks initiated the counter-cultural movement and touted the theme of anti-conformism. But when most male beatniks grew long hair and beards, they were sometimes accused of being conformist themselves. With the hippies a decade later, the idea of personal expression based on chosen cultural signs — borrowed from cowboys, Native Americans, Asian religions and other exotic sources — came to dominate people’s ideas about the purpose of clothing as an expression of cultural values and identity.
The controversy about the kilts demonstrates how deeply ingrained all these contradictory instincts have become. Verillas appears willing to sacrifice revenue to defend the integrity of the brand’s association with one set of social values. That paradoxically appears to contradict the spirit of capitalism, where companies offer the same goods to all comers as they seek to exploit the full potential of the marketplace. But perhaps another principle is at work here, the factor of earned media. A story that can both make the news and serve to define a company’s social or moral identity is far more valuable than paid advertising.
The Verillas story includes an emotionally charged dramatic component: betrayal by one’s customers. But Verillas’ marketers undoubtedly realize that it serves very effectively to stir curiosity for its products from its targeted market segment. The company designed its image to appeal to proponents of the current vogue of identity culture associated with the left. Using an incident that highlights their opposition to a notorious right-wing movement is well worth sacrificing the income from the sale to bolster their brand identity. That kind of reasoning has become a quasi-uniform bit of marketing wisdom.
*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Washington’s Sanctions on Turkey Are Another Gift to Putin
by Philippa Kaur 18 December 2020, 10:45
The latest sanctions against Turkey introduced by Washington on December 13 were invoked under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, a US federal law that imposes economic sanctions on Iran, Russia and North Korea. The act came into effect in August 2017. This is the first time it has been used against an ally and, what makes it even more remarkable, an ally who is also a NATO member.
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As reported by AFP, “The sanctions target Turkey’s Presidency of Defense Industries, the country’s military procurement agency, its chief Ismail Demir and three other senior officials. The penalties block any assets the four officials may have in U.S. jurisdictions and bar their entry into the U.S. They also include a ban on most export licenses, loans and credits to the agency.”
Long Anticipated
The decision, long anticipated — and long resisted by President Donald Trump — came about because of Ankara’s refusal to back down from the purchase of the Russian S-400 missile defense system. Turkey announced back in 2017 it was going ahead with the deal, after feeling it had been rebuffed in its efforts to acquire the US Patriot system at what it considered a fair price and by the refusal of the US to allow for a transfer of the system’s technology.
Tied into the politics swirling around the S-400 is the F-35, the stealth fighter jet the sale of which to the United Arab Emirates has caused ripples of anxiety in Israel. And given the ambitions of and mutual animosities between Mohammed bin Zayed, the Abu Dhabi crown prince and de facto UAE ruler, and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, there are, without doubt, similar feelings of anxiety in Ankara, though for different reasons.
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The Americans took the sale of 100 F-35s to Turkey off the table because of concerns that the presence of the S-400 would potentially enable the Russians to acquire in-depth knowledge of the stealth fighter. In July last year, the White House released a statement that said, in part, that “Turkey’s decision to purchase Russian S-400 air defense systems renders its continued involvement with the F-35 impossible. The F-35 cannot coexist with a Russian intelligence-collection platform that will be used to learn about its advanced capabilities.”
It was a decision that President Trump, eyeing the half a billion dollars the deal was worth, only grudgingly agreed to. “It’s not fair,” he said. And he groused: “Turkey is very good with us, very good, and we are now telling Turkey that because you have really been forced to buy another missile system, we’re not going to sell you the F-35 fighter jets. It’s a very tough situation that they’re in, and it’s a very tough situation that we’ve been placed in, the United States.”
Trump, it hardly needs to be said, blamed the Obama administration, claiming his predecessor had blocked the sale. As ever with this president, that’s not true. (For readers who are interested in the actual story, the defense and security site War on the Rocks provides a blow by blow account which can be found here.)
More in Sorrow
Though Erdoğan and Trump have had a good relationship, the US president has no time now for anything other than his increasingly pathetic and forlorn crusade to stay in the White House. He couldn’t be bothered to veto the bipartisan decision to invoke sanctions on Turkey. It was left to the outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to try to paper over the cracks. In a statement couched in a tone of “more in sorrow, than in anger,” Pompeo said: “Turkey is a valued ally and an important regional security partner for the United States,” adding that “we seek to continue our decades-long history of productive defense-sector co-operation by removing the obstacle of Turkey’s S-400 possession as soon as possible.”
The Turks were having none of it. And from them, there was plenty of anger and no sorrow. Calling the decision “inexplicable,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry delivered a blunt rejoinder: “We call on the United States to revise the unjust sanctions (and) to turn back from this grave mistake as soon as possible. Turkey is ready to tackle the issue through dialogue and diplomacy in a manner worthy of the spirit of alliance. (The sanctions) will inevitably negatively impact our relations, and (Turkey) will retaliate in a manner and time it sees appropriate.”
Purring like the proverbial Cheshire cat was Vladimir Putin. The sanctions, though less harsh than might have been anticipated, play well to his strategy of pulling a NATO member, one with the second-largest standing army in the pact, closer to Moscow. Building on initiatives in Syria where Russian and Turkish forces are jointly policing a shaky ceasefire and on the deal the two countries brokered in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the Russian president has further strengthened his hand.
Faced with an already challenging Middle East portfolio, it is yet another Trumpian mess that the incoming president, Joe Biden, and his pick as secretary of state Antony Blinken, will have to contend with.
*[This article was originally published by Arab Digest.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Why Education Is Democracy’s Best Bet
by Philippa Kaur 17 December 2020, 19:23
Joyce Appleby, a renowned historian of the Founding Fathers and Republican ideology, wrote in her 2001 book “Inheriting the Revolution” that the first generation of Americans (1790-1830) believed a good education was a requirement for every responsible citizen. The majority of men, and notably a wide cross-section of women, in the early days of the republic viewed education as a “critical bridge to responsible citizenship,” according to Appleby. They admired the intellect of our Founding Fathers and felt a patriotic duty to elevate their knowledge so they could better understand the leaders and politics of the day, and thus become better citizens.
In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville captured his enthusiasm for America and its enlightened citizens in his famous book, “Democracy in America,” proclaiming that in the future, “all the world will be America.” How times have changed.
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Following Boris Yeltsin appointment of Vladimir Putin as his successor to the Russian presidency in 1999, after the death of China’s Deng Xiaoping in 1997 and, finally, at the end of the Arab Spring in 2012, the world has seen a reversal of democratic government and the rise of authoritarianism. More than a few Americans would say that had President Donald Trump been reelected to a second term, it is likely that many of our institutions and norms built to protect democracy would have suffered a similar fate. Many were already under assault in his first term, like the politicized Department of Justice.
For the first time in our history, we are witnessing something other than a peaceful, orderly transition of presidential power that was enshrined in our American memory beginning with Washington’s “Farewell Address” in 1796. We have never seen anything like Trump’s assault on the facts, the electoral process and the sacred nature of a free and fair vote for all Americans. How in the world can more than half of Republicans believe the election was rigged?
Disinformation and Lies
The answer — a campaign of relentless disinformation and lies, spread by social media and irresponsible cable TV and talk radio journalists, believed to be true by a large swath of the population, who apparently received little or no instruction in civics and US history. If this debacle teaches us anything it is that civics and history deserve a much bigger role in our primary and secondary education curricula, even at the expense of a reduced STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) curricula that has been over-emphasized for too long.
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Look at the voting process. Several recent surveys of Republican voters indicate that anywhere from 50% to 80% of them believe the 2020 presidential election was not free and fair. This despite the fact that Christopher Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure and Security Agency and a former Microsoft cybersecurity expert, stated that the recent election was “the most secure in US history.” Every state and every Republican and Democratic governor has certified their results with only negligible, immaterial changes in vote counts.
Yet we are witnessing a horrific display of threats against state officials — of both parties — who have certified the election results by those who do not trust the voting process. Why? Because they do not understand the voting process and how it is protected. Many do not understand the Electoral College either. This unacceptable in America. We are looking a lot more like a banana republic than the beacon of democracy to the rest of the world. Clearly America’s reputation has suffered terribly around the globe.
The vitriol and emotion, amplified and reinforced on cable TV and social media, builds continuously until it drowns out rational thought. These conditions — extreme ideologies, absence of compromise and bipartisanship and the threat of domestic terrorism created as a result — are a major threat to our republic. Left unchecked, the situation will worsen and could destroy us if we don’t act immediately. Let’s hope and pray that nobody gets hurt as a result of these mindless protests dangerously getting close to becoming violent.
There are some short-term political and economic solutions to mitigate our divisions. Not the focus of this essay, but initiatives like publicly-financed campaigns to take “dark money” out of politics will go a long way to bringing the parties together. Economic policies to rebuild the middle class and reverse the growth of inequality will foster a shared prosperity to reduce fear and anxiety amongst a large portion of our population.
However, these political and economic solutions will not take hold unless we begin to restore the health of our underlying culture and start to remember who we were as Americans, and who we need to be going forward. It starts and ends with an informed electorate. In times of crisis, we look to history — and those who made it into history books for all the right reasons — to instruct us in a time of need.
A Time of Need
The 19th-century thinker Horace Mann often called the founding father of public education in America called out the importance of an educated public to the health of a democratic government: “A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one.” Even before Mann, Thomas Jefferson offered similar wisdom: “Ignorance and despotism seem made for each other, [but if the new nation could] enlighten the people generally … tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of the day.”
Regarding the importance of a strong civics curriculum in our schools, we have George Washington stating, on the one bookend of US history: “A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country?”
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Echoing similar opinions some 244 years later as the world’s longest-enduring democratic, self-governing republic, is Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts: “But in the ensuing years [following the ratification of the Constitution], we have come to take democracy for granted, and civic education has fallen by the wayside. In our age, when social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale, the public’s need to understand our government, and the protections it provides, is ever more vital.”
This is quite a commentary on the importance of education generally, and civics specifically, to the health and continued survival of “American exceptionalism.” Beyond the voting process and the Electoral College, how well does the public understand how government is structured, how it works? The Annenberg Public Policy Center reported the results of a broad survey of Americans and found that only one in four Americans could name all three branches of the federal government. This an astounding discovery. The same survey found that fewer than 15% of the same cohort could name more than one First Amendment right, with only 37% of respondents able to name a single First Amendment right — their response, by and large, was freedom of speech.
How beneficial would it be to society if everyone knew that our federal government does not sanction any religion, nor prevent anyone from practicing their own beliefs, or not? Freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble and the right to petition the government round out all the First Amendment rights.
How are we doing in terms of education outcomes in this age of information overload, hyper-partisanship and emotion crowding out reason and thoughtful reflection? Not so great. According to DoSomething.org — a youth nonprofit whose corporate sponsors include 3M, Ford Foundation, Johnson & Johnson, Google and General Motors among many others — in 1985, the quantity and quality of high school graduates in the US as a group was ranked number one in the world. But by 2015, our high school population was ranked 36 in the world.
Michael Porter at the Harvard Business School has been conducting expansive and thorough surveys since 2011 of more than 2,000 senior-level business leaders, across a wide spectrum of industries in the US, regarding the competitiveness of the US economy. The conclusions of the study team strongly align with the findings of DoSomething.org noted above. Porter has concluded that shared prosperity is a key component of an economy’s competitiveness and that the US economy is failing to deliver shared prosperity to an ever-shrinking middle class.
More importantly, Porter has tied this economic failure to political and cultural failures. To find solutions to our political failures — climate change, inequality, health care and immigration — we must focus on revising election and campaign financing laws. To find answers to our cultural failures — systemic racism, increased polarization, domestic terrorism and crime — we must improve outcomes in K-12 public education as the most critical solution.
Restoring Trust
There is nothing more important to the long-term survival of our democracy than a large investment in education as well as in our defense and military capability. Turns out, that as a nation, we invest about the same amount annually in each, which is surprising to most people. The 2020 defense budget is projected to be about $750 billion, and total spending on public education — elementary plus secondary — in 2015 across the country, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, was $706 billion. The problem is that education is funded and administered locally and, as a result, there is a wide variation in the quality of its delivery as the DoSomething.org and the Harvard studies both demonstrate.
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The current noise and disinformation around election fraud — a president asking state legislators to overturn a popular vote in choosing electors to the Electoral College and how presidents can lose the popular vote of the nation and still be elected — threaten our democracy. How? In short, even more people begin to lose trust in our government to be fair, and “for the People.” Trust in Congress is already at an historical low point according to Pew Research.
How do we restore this trust? A strong civics education is a good start. Why is this so important? Here’s the deal: The 2016 presidential election came down to fewer than 80,000 voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Even though Trump lost the popular vote among over 125 million total voters, his narrow wins in these three battleground states gave him an Electoral College majority of 306 over Hillary Clinton’s 232.
This means that just 0.06% of all the voters in America determined the outcome of the 2016 election. In the 2000 presidential election, it came down to 537 votes in Florida. It is frightening to consider that so few voters could make such a difference, and how easily it might be to corrupt such a small number of voters. If that doesn’t argue for a strong civics curriculum in our schools, what does?
Education is the single most important component of the common good for maintaining the long-term health of our democracy. Why? Because we will not meaningfully transform our political and economic models until we begin to transform our culture. And you do not transform culture by screaming at people. You transform culture by educating people and celebrating rational discourse among all citizens.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
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Britain’s Commitment to Retaining the Spoils of History
by Philippa Kaur 17 December 2020, 15:52
This past weekend, The Guardian unearthed a story from the past that throws an oblique light on the present. It began with an odd couple and led to the creation of a real one. The odd couple is the American actor George Clooney and the current UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Their conflict aired in public at the time marks the origin of the making of a real couple: Clooney and his future bride, the human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin.
In 2014, Clooney made a public statement about a controversy that had been raging for decades over the presence in London of what are called the Elgin Marbles or, more properly, the Parthenon Sculptures. These are a collection of ancient Greek statues and carvings removed from the most famous monument of ancient Athens by the Scottish aristocrat, Thomas Bruce, earl of Elgin.
This transfer of ancient artwork took place at the beginning of the 19th century, when the Ottoman empire controlled Greece. Lord Elgin was Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman empire, who clearly was more interested in Greek history and art than the Ottomans themselves. He requested permission to sketch the remains of what had been left in partial ruin and even obtained weakly formulated permission to “to take away any pieces of stone with old inscriptions or figures thereon.”
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He employed artists to do the sketching but took on board personally the business of taking away the pieces with inscriptions and figures. As traditional Muslims, the Ottomans were not merely iconoclasts, but aniconists, denouncing the representation of sentient beings. They may have felt relieved that some of the “graven images” were being removed from a territory they controlled. Bruce dutifully collected what interested him and sent them to England, where for nearly two centuries they have been on display in the British Museum.
While promoting the release of his film “The Monuments Men,” about the Nazi theft of great European artwork, consistent with the theme of the movie Clooney voiced his support for the Greek claim that the artwork should be returned to Athens. Clooney’s remarks drew the attention of London’s mayor at that time, a certain Boris Johnson. Boris felt very strongly that the town over which he presided should be recognized as the rightful owner of the Greek artwork.
Summoning up his patented talent for stale puns and personal put-downs, Johnson told The Telegraph: “Someone urgently needs to restore George Clooney’s marbles.” This turned into a public scandal as Johnson went further, accusing Clooney of “advocating nothing less than the Hitlerian agenda for London’s cultural treasures.”
Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Cultural treasures:
Valuable items produced by one culture that are considered even more valuable when pilfered from their original setting and possessed by another culture, in part because they stand as a symbol of former dominance.
Contextual Note
Since those events in 2014, several things have happened. Johnson eventually became Britain’s prime minister, thanks primarily to a series of shambolic episodes surrounding the still ongoing dog-and-pony show Boris put together in 2016, known as Brexit. Clooney married later that year.
The actor explained to The Observer that, after Johnson’s outburst, he needed to be briefed on the status of the controversy surrounding the Parthenon marbles. He accordingly arranged to meet the lawyer who was pleading the case for the return of the artwork. The lawyer’s name was Amal Alamuddin. Without Johnson’s denunciation of an American interloper in London’s business, the now happy couple might never have met.
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In the same edition of The Guardian, a casual reader could have happened upon another article, with the title “Wealthy MP urged to pay up for his family’s slave trade past,” which is also about the British habit of plundering the riches of other regions of the world in the days of empire. The authors, Paul Lashmar and Jonathan Smith, recount how Richard Drax, the Conservative MP for South Dorset, recently inherited a plantation in Barbados that owed its prosperity in former times to the brutal exploitation of African slaves.
Modern voices, including the Barbadian historian of slavery, Sir Hilary Beckles, are now demanding “reparatory justice” for the crimes of Drax’s ancestors. Beckles reminded Drax of the historical truth that “Black life mattered only to make millionaires of English enslavers and the Drax family did it longer than any other elite family.” The Guardian notes that Drax recognizes these facts from his family’s past. But like many Britons, he has been taught to think of history as a subject of study that serves primarily to fascinate schoolchildren with inspiring stories of heroism from the past.
Serious people, as the MP clearly understands, must focus on the issues of the day. Brexit for instance, which Drax has consistently voted for, as well as aggressive Britain’s military combat operations overseas. After all, all modern combat engaged by Britain, essentially in the Middle East, aims at telling darker-skinned people who’s boss. It’s in his family’s tradition.
Historical Note
The Guardian notes that Drax “is probably the wealthiest landowner in the House of Commons, with 5,600 hectares of farmland and woodlands. The estate’s finances are largely opaque to the public gaze and involve at least six trusts and other disconnected financial entities.” With such resources, Drax has had plenty of time to reflect on the logic of history and to develop an understanding of his own position in it, both as the scion of a colonial family and a legislator in a modern democracy.
Drax explains the state of his understanding: “I am keenly aware of the slave trade in the West Indies, and the role my very distant ancestor played in it is deeply, deeply regrettable, but no one can be held responsible today for what happened many hundreds of years ago. This is a part of the nation’s history, from which we must all learn.” With his repeated “deeply,” Drax appears to echo the Lewis Carroll’s Walrus feasting on the oysters he had earlier befriended.
I weep for you,’ the Walrus said:
I deeply sympathize.’
With sobs and tears he sorted out
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in World Politics
Denmark’s Politics of the Foreskin
by Philippa Kaur 17 December 2020, 11:58
Religious practices, including religious clothing, ritual slaughtering and circumcision, are coming up for debate more frequently in Danish politics and the media. The issue of male circumcision has recently hit the headlines, reignited by a protest launched by a task force of health organizations and associations. The task force was asked to update the clinical guidelines of male ritual circumcision by the Danish Agency for Patient Safety. However, the Danish Pediatric Society decided to withdraw from the group to protest the advised medical practice in the guidelines, which allows to carry out the surgical operation by locally sedating infants and young boys.
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Other health associations have since followed suit, arguing that the regulations infringe on the welfare and rights of the child while also not guaranteeing health safety. Among Danish public opinion, critical positions also prevail. In a recent poll, almost 9 out of 10 respondents (86%) said that male circumcision under the age of 18 should be prohibited altogether, confirming a similar survey conducted in 2016.
The unfolding of these events contributed to the relaunch of a 2018 citizen proposal advanced by the anti-circumcision association Intact Denmark, which asked to ban the practice of male ritual circumcision of children unless required for health reasons. In 2018, it obtained the 50,000 signatures needed to bring the discussion before the Danish parliament. The pending national elections of June 2019 have put the parliamentary discussion on hold — until now.
Pork and Headscarves
It is worth noting that debates over religious practices are not new when it comes to political controversies in Denmark. The list is, in fact, quite long. For instance, the dispute over male circumcision comes only two years after the Danish government’s approval of the contentious so-called “mask ban” legislation, which proscribes people to cover their faces in public. While the government attempted to frame this piece of legislation as a matter of national and personal security, it was in fact a political shortcut for introducing a ban against Muslim burqas and niqabs, circumventing the issue of discrimination against religious minorities.
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Religious clothing had in fact already been a policy target back in 2009, when the Conservatives proposed to prohibit the use of the burqa in Denmark. Then, the ban was rejected due to both its discriminatory nature and the fact that a report by the University of Copenhagen concluded that at most 200 Muslim women wear the burqa in Denmark.
In 2016, it was ritual halal slaughtering and the serving of pork-free meals in public institutions that made the headlines. The right-wing populist Danish People’s Party (DF), among others, singled out food politics, and halal meat in particular, as a sign of the gradual accommodation by Danish society and public institutions of the religious dictates of Islam. Some went as far as to argue that the dietary menu in kindergartens should safeguard the Danish cuisine and food heritage by serving children pork every day.
Like in other European countries, pork and headscarves have been a staple of the Danish populist right’s attacks on Muslims. These issues have served the DF well in terms of framing the West as surrendering its principles, identity and values to the religious prescriptions of the Muslim minority. One would expect the male circumcision issue to fit neatly into the radical right populists’ main identity politics racializing catalog. Yet the debate has taken a rather interesting turn in respect to earlier party positions concerning religious practices and rituals.
The distinguishing line on the issue of male circumcision vis-à-vis other religious practices is that this one not only relates to Islam and Muslims, but also to Judaism and Jews. The political reactions to the question highlighted what looks like a mainstreaming of double standards as regards to the identity politics debate in Denmark. As a piece in Information pointed out, when “the defence of Old Testament traditions” is at stake, the DF tends to move more cautiously. This time, however, things got a little more complicated.
Unexpected Turn
Up until the most recent controversy around the topic this autumn, the party had opposed an actual ban of the practice, referring to the issue as being “complex.” Yet in September, and very much contrary to expectations, DF voted in favor of the ban on circumcision. The party argued that it supported the health organizations’ concerns for children’s rights, welfare and safety, stating that these must be given priority over decisions pertaining to religious traditions.
However, this was by no means a unanimous decision. For the first time in party history, the DF allowed three of its most prominent MPs to vote against the ban, and thus against the line decided by the party central organization. Morten Messerschmidt, Soren Espersen and Marie Krarup voted against the ban on the basis that the measure would isolate the Jewish community from Danish society, arguing it was a family policy matter rather than a health issue.
Krarup argued, for instance, that “male circumcision is an unpleasant and inappropriate tradition, but it is alright to allow the Jews in this country to practice it.” On a similar note, Messerschmidt bluntly declared that “Judaism historically has a greater justification in Danish society than Islam does,” and that it should be up to the parents to decide whether the child should be circumcised or not. Later, Krarup announced that because of the party’s decision to vote for the ban, she would leave politics and not stand as a parliamentary candidate at the next election.
Krarup’s, Messerschmidt’s and Espersen’s stance aligns with the usual DF party line on questions regarding Judaism. Throughout the years, the DF has often championed the Jewish cause, promoting a pro-Israel and anti-anti-Semitic agenda. This has often served as another pretext for fending off Muslims, while Jews are conferred the status of a tolerated minority, in part because they are not considered to represent a threat to the “native” identity and culture. The decision not to continue along this line of thinking opens a few interesting questions as regards the DF’s current vote-maximizing and crisis-management approach both at national and EU levels.
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The DF appears to be split internally over the strategies it can pursue in order to extract itself from the crisis. The timing could not be worse for the DF leadership. The party has not yet recovered from the dramatic decline suffered in the 2019 parliamentary elections, where DF’s electoral support suddenly shrunk down to only 8.7%, a 12.4% drop from 2015.
The aftershocks still trouble the party command, and several dissenting voices from the party rank and file have started to openly question Kristian Thulesen-Dahl’s leadership — something completely unprecedented in party history. This has brought about a significant political reshuffle at the central organization level. The vice-chairman, Soren Espersen, had to step down, while Morten Messerschmidt became a new member. Messerschmidt has also recently been endorsed by Thulesen-Dahl to become the new party leader once he himself steps down.
This is an interesting endorsement, especially considering Messerschmidt’s recent pronouncements for the need to strengthen the DF’s positions on value and cultural politics by placing Christianity and the common Christian heritage and traditions at the core of party ideology.
It would also tally with DF’s choice to join the European Parliament group, Identity and Democracy, which includes parties such as the Italian League, the French National Rally, the Austrian Freedom Party and the Alternative for Germany. These parties strongly promote the primacy of traditional Christian values and symbols as a staple against Islam, a religion they see as representing the most serious threat to the Christian West and Judaism. It is this ideological framing that Messerschmidt now strongly supports and which had earlier important “intellectual” exponents among DF politicians like the pastor Soren Krarup and the late Jesper Langballe.
And yet, the party’s support for the ban on male circumcision went against this standpoint, highlighting a tension between the more radical line represented by Messerschmidt and the middle-way ambitions embodied by Thulesen-Dahl. The current leader’s strategy appears more responsive toward the opinions expressed by the party rank and file and by the wider public. Messerschmidt seems to be trying to come up with a good response to the DF’s current political reality of having no real influence in Danish politics while perhaps also casting an eye to the European developments among the radical right.
External Challenges
The political tensions within the DF also reflect the challenges coming from outside the party. The DF needs to both fend off the offensive coming from the far-right in the form of The New Right party (which voted for the ban) while also having to pay attention to the reaction among the mainstream parties, particularly the Social Democrats (who voted against it).
The governing party was slow to react to the law proposal, but on September 10, the Social Democratic Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen explained the party’s decision to vote against the ban on male circumcision by appealing to not let the “debate about circumcision of boys … become a single case detached from our European history,” in reference to the persecution of Jews throughout the last centuries, and in particular during World War II. “I know what the century-old ritual means for religious minorities in Denmark,” she continued. “And I know that some Danish Jews no longer will be able to see themselves in our society if a ban is implemented.”
Yet, in 2008, as part of the opposition, Frederiksen said the opposite, namely that she was against male circumcision, arguing that she did “not believe that religion can legitimize inflicting physical problems on one’s children and the pain that may be associated with it.” Yet today, she believes that a ban would prompt Jews to think “they no longer belong to the Danish society.”
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Here, the health concerns for the (Jewish) children fade into the background, while discrimination, historical legacies and security issues are brought to the forefront. Still, what the more attentive audience immediately noticed was the prime minister’s silence regarding the fact that this religious ritual is also practiced by Muslims, who also experience forms of discrimination and intolerance in Denmark on the basis of race, ethnicity and religion.
By adopting this position, the Social Democrats contribute to the double standard that legitimizes the view that some groups in society deserve to access rights over others, which otherwise would be deemed as incompatible with those held by the overall society. Few would argue against the need to tackle growing anti-Semitism in Denmark and in Europe or against the need to take the horrible history of the Holocaust into account.
Yet Frederiksen’s explanation remains ambiguous and risks to widen divisions and to foster conflicts between minority groups in society. This is particularly the case in view of the proliferation of categories such as “non-Western immigrant/descendent” employed by the Danish Social Democrats as a proxy for Muslim immigrants in the party course on migration politics.
In this sense, the most recent debate about male circumcision in Denmark tells us perhaps more about two other issues. On the one side is the normalization of discourses and practices that tend to single out Islam and Muslims and to portray them as the unassimilable and threatening minority. On the other, there is a further polarization of the political space on issues of migration, religious rights and integration, with the DF having to decide where to place itself between the far right and the mainstream on such questions. This latest dispute is symptomatic of the developments in Danish politics as a result of cohabitation with the radical right over the last two decades.
*[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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