https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-russia-bombs-ukraine-and-the-whole-middle-east-feels-the-heat-1.10640739

From the UAE, where Russian oligarchs stash their cash, to Moscow’s client Syria, and from Turkey to Israel and Iran, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is convulsing the Middle East. Ambivalence won’t be an option for long

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine poses conundrums for almost every country in the Middle East. None stand to gain from Vladimir Putin’s wanton aggression in Europe. The Gulf Arab countries, which have expressed a telling range of disparate responses, are each trying to navigate a delicate and challenging diplomatic problem.

It’s not just Gulf states that are trying to thread the needle. Turkey is most deeply implicated, being a Black Sea power and a traditional rival of Russia in the region, not least in Syria. The crisis threatens an almost endless series of headaches for Ankara from virtually every direction.

Ankara and Moscow had to move quickly to foreclose a crisis that could have triggered NATO’s Article 5 obligations of mutual self-defense when an apparent Russian missile struck a Turkish merchant ship in the Black Sea in the afternoon of February 23, pre-empting Moscow’s initial attack on Ukraine.

Like earlier dangerous Russian-Turkish incidents, particularly Turkey’s downing of a Russian warplane near the Syrian border in 2015 and the assassination of the Russian ambassador in Ankara in 2016, this latest incident was patched up and passed over by mutual agreement. But such flare-ups show that Turkey and Russia are not just at loggerheads on many fronts, but could also easily be sucked into actual violent confrontations.

Now Turkey, alarmed by this extreme aggression by its historic rival to the north, has hinted at the possibility of barring Russian warships from entering the Black Sea through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straits. Ukraine has been urging Ankara to invoke Article 19 of the Montreux Convention, which allows the denial of passage to belligerent powers in a state of war.

It would be a significant escalation in tensions, but Russian-Turkish suspicions are already so inflamed that Turkey has officially acknowledged the state of war exists, hinting it could indeed take this dramatic step.

Israel, too, has had to walk a thin line on Ukraine. The Naftali Bennett government has obviously been forced to say more than it wanted to in defense of Ukrainian territorial integrity and the UN charter. The issue of territorial integrity is awkward because of Israel’s endless occupation of Palestinian territories that have been controlled since 1967.

Moreover, Israel is one of Washington’s Middle East allies that have prioritized strategic diversification, as the United States appears less engaged and reliable in the aftermath of its fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For Israel and some Gulf countries, this has meant courting Russia and, increasingly, China. But Israel’s closeness to Washington meant that ultimately it had to join the chorus of condemnation. Yet as soon as the explicit criticism of Russia was issued, the Israelis began to tone it down. The pressure is not yet over, though.

The other American partners seeking new ties to Russia in the name of strategic diversification have been Gulf Arab countries.

The UAE in particular, and much like Israel, has already developed a mature relationship with Moscow. The day before the invasion started, UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan told his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, that the “strategic partnership” remains “strong” and “friendly.”

Abu Dhabi is trying to protect this policy from the Ukraine crisis. The UAE abstained from a resolution condemning Russia’s aggression at the United Nations Security Council and has said little else.

But, like Israel, Abu Dhabi may not be able to remain aloof. The UAE faces a major potential problem if there is a concerted campaign beyond Europe and the U.S. to target Russian oligarch assets stashed around the world.

After London and some other European cities, Dubai has been an important secondary repository for pilfered Russian wealth. The Emirates may be called upon not merely to say more but to enforce sanction by taking unwanted measures regarding valuable foreign holdings.

Saudi Arabia, yet another traditional U.S. ally seeking to diversify its strategic defense and economic options, has thus far been able to succeed where Israel couldn’t, hedging its position between Moscow, Beijing and the White House, and largely remaining silent. Riyadh will maintain this ambivalent quiet as long as possible. Yet if the conflict drags on, pressure on the Saudis will certainly grow.

Other Gulf countries have taken a different tack.

Kuwait’s unique experience of suffering the Iraqi invasion and occupation of 1990-91 pushed it to quickly speak up in defense of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. And Qatar spies another potential opportunity to resurrect its pre-Arab Spring posture as a mediator and broker in international relations.

So, as usual, the Gulf Cooperation Council lacks a unified stance, to put it mildly.

Even Russia’s own regional allies potentially have much to lose. Syria promptly and effusively welcomed the Russian aggression. But the Assad regime had no choice because it remains dependent on Moscow, its preferred senior partner, patron and, arguably, savior, because Russia’s demands on Syrian sovereign prerogatives are much less extensive than Iran’s.

Yet Syria gains nothing by the invasion of Ukraine and stands to lose from the secondary effects of sanctions on Russia, ramped up Turkish-Russian tensions inside Syria, and the potential weakening of its patron which may well become bogged-down, distracted and weakened by a quagmire in far-off Eastern Europe.

Even Iran mainly stands to lose. Some in Tehran may be hoping Putin has initiated the final dismantling of the U.S.-led international order and that China will soon inflict a coup de grâce to the global status quo in Taiwan. Since Iran’s ambitions are entirely at odds with the legacy system, it’s instinctive for Tehran to welcome a major blow against it.

But that’s not how the Ukrainian crisis is playing out. Instead, U.S. President Joe Biden has surprised many with his resolute opposition to Russian demands and success in unifying and strengthening the Western alliance. NATO has not been this cohesive in at least a decade, and Germany’s announcement of greatly increased defense spending is only the latest sign that Russia’s aggression is reviving, rather than destroying, NATO and the Western alliance.

Unless Tehran fundamentally alters its strategic goals, or the West falters, this is distinctly bad news for Iran.

The same logic ought to apply in reverse to Iran’s Gulf Arab rivals. The six GCC countries are all veterans of the pro-American camp. All of them, including Qatar, benefit from the status quo and, therefore, traditional global order. It makes little sense for any, including the UAE, not to welcome and encourage the restoration of the system that is surely the best bet for their own stability and survival.

Disappointment and lack of confidence in Washington is almost unanimous among its Middle Eastern friends, and for good reason. The lack of judgment exemplified by the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the striking lack of will to respond to provocations by Syria and Iran during the Obama and Trump presidencies, leave no option other than seeking to broaden relationships and expand options. Anything else would be unrealistic.

Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been openly fretting about the possibility they could be caught in a new U.S.-China Cold War and forced by one or both sides to choose between their main strategic partner and their best customer which is also a rising global power. Yet such a dilemma may be imposed on them much sooner by Moscow and Washington because of Ukraine. And if such a choice is forced, the correct answer is no mystery.

Washington has repeatedly dashed hopes and raised fears in recent decades, but traditional U.S. allies, especially small and vulnerable countries with a lot to lose, have far more to gain from the potential revival of the global Western-led alliance than from a chaotic transition to a new might-makes-right framework increasingly dominated by Moscow and Beijing. Even if it’s awkward, difficult, and at times costly, that’s certainly the wiser choice.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/02/23/americas-grand-old-party-is-running-a-very-dangerous-race/

Tribalist pandering takes aim at incontrovertible facts in the US, as in many other countries.

The interminable US culture wars greatly intensified after the 2020 election of President Joe Biden, with Republicans around the country busily passing state-level laws that seek to restrict the teaching of race and US history in public schools and universities. This alarming trend shows that much of the right has decided to use state power to dictate a codified and politically correct version of history that is profoundly incompatible with both historical facts and present-day realities.

This push to use government authority to enforce a rigid, and often downright false, account of national history is highly reminiscent of laws in Poland that effectively criminalise public discussion of instances of Polish collaboration with the Second World War Nazi genocide against Jews, Roma and others, by mass shootings and then in death camps almost entirely in Poland and Ukraine.

The reality is that the Holocaust was a wholly Nazi-authored atrocity, although locals and authorities in many countries participated in various ways and for numerous reasons (while many others resisted or avoided it).

In fact, Poland has a proud history of heroic opposition to Nazi rule of which the country can be justly proud, while acknowledging that some Poles, under an especially vicious German occupation, collaborated in the genocide.t

There’s no need to lie, or even overlook facts, to maintain national self-respect. Yet, the current Polish government labours to legally enforce a narrative that casts Poles entirely as heroes or victims, and effectively denies any participation in the Nazi genocide. That’s the ideological and political falsification of history.

And it is precisely what’s being attempted in many Republican-run US states, at least when it comes to public education.

These new laws often forbid teaching that the founding of the American Republic was in any way at odds with the universal values articulated in the national mission statement, the 1776 Declaration of Independence.

Yet, the national bylaws, the 1787 Constitution, carefully incorporated the reality of widespread and lawful slavery in much of the country, even counting slaves – while delicately avoiding the word itself – as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation in Congress.

It is, therefore, simply a lie to argue that the US, as founded, lived up to the ideals in the Declaration and did not flout them to an existentially corrupting degree.

Under these new laws, it’s impossible to teach honestly about key negotiations at the Constitutional Convention of 1787; constant subsequent struggles over the expansion of slavery; the notorious Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857 that held that black persons had no rights under the US Constitution; the origins and trajectory of the Civil War of 1861-1865, or what former president Abraham Lincoln meant when he said the Civil War ushered in a “new birth of freedom”.

Teaching the history of lawful, constitutionally protected racial segregation until the mid-1960s would similarly be impossible.

Yet, as in Poland, there’s no need to lie. The US has struggled mightily over centuries to overcome this “original sin”, and, by any historic standards, has made remarkable progress.

The laws are especially pernicious because they’re so vague as to be practically meaningless except as a dire warning to teachers to avoid all such topics, or else. And the laws often cite the supposed feelings of students from lessons that make them feel “uncomfortable”.

Any education that fails to sometimes make students uncomfortable isn’t worthy of the name.

And the feelings implicitly being protected are those of white students who supposedly may feel guilty based on their ethnicity because of historical realities, though there is no reason to believe this is a real phenomenon. Such concerns have never been an issue regarding the feelings of the descendants of slaves.

The parallels to Poland should be evident: don’t annoy the majority community with unpleasant details about past abuses that are more comfortably elided and denied.

Unfortunately, in the US, it’s even worse. Because what these laws seek to purge is not memory of the past but acknowledgment of the present.

The legacy of, not just slavery, but an additional century of segregation, and then half-century and counting of de facto discrimination, raises immediate and concrete concerns about present inequities.

This is especially essential because official segregation and “red-lining” in the 20th century deliberately produced housing separations that have a profound present-day impact on social services such as health, education and infrastructure that define daily life for most Americans. Without acknowledging those factors, most American racial realities become unintelligible, unless “explained” by silly stereotypes that further perpetuate these divisions and inequalities.

The context for the right-wing state-level backlash occurred at three levels.

Most immediate was the election of a Democrat, Mr Biden, with a black woman running-mate, Kamala Harris, in 2020. Immediately before that, came the national earthquake of anger at continued racial injustice in law enforcement and the courts following the police murder of George Floyd.

The biggest, but delayed, factor was the election in 2008, and probably even more the re-election in 2012, of an African American, Barack Obama, as president.

Perhaps above all is the tremendous angst about the apparent US transition to having no ethnic majority rather than, for hundreds of years, a reliably “white” one.

The laws may be practically meaningless and unenforceable. Yet, they may be intended merely to chill speech in classrooms rather than produce robust enforcement. Evidence of self-censorship is already being documented.

Some of the bills, though, outlaw things that are not taught anywhere, such as that one group is “inherently” inferior or superior to another. The political point in such cases may be just virtue-signalling, the pretence that valiant champions of “the people” and “right thinking” are opposing a non-existent nefarious agenda in schools.

So, around the country, books are being banned, long-standing class-plans abandoned, facts suppressed, and reality whitewashed so some white parents can assure themselves that their children will never be asked to feel guilty for things they didn’t do, and for which no sensible person wants them to feel guilty.

The consequence is the American championing of a communal and political historical narrative that has analogues not just in Poland and other eastern European states, but in India, Israel, Japan, China, parts of Latin America, and elsewhere.

It’s the siren-song of self-appointed communal leaders: we will protect your tribal identity and “feelings” from basic and incontrovertible facts. It is, ultimately, the call of fascism.

https://agsiw.org/erdogan-visit-underscores-uae-turkey-rapprochement-is-at-the-heart-of-regional-de-escalation/

With the Muslim Brotherhood movement in seemingly chronic decline, the “bully” and the “upstart” find new avenues of cooperation.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrived in the United Arab Emirates capital Abu Dhabi February 14 for a state visit that would have been hard to imagine for most of the past decade. Turkey and the UAE were at odds in a range of regional conflicts, notably in Libya, and in a protracted ideational and ideological struggle, along with Qatar, over the political legitimacy of Islamism and the role and future of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world. However, Emirati-Turkish rapprochement has been one of the more striking, and apparently substantial and sustainable, elements of the new era of de-escalation among Middle Eastern regional actors. Erdogan’s visit, along with significant UAE investment and support for the Turkish economy, solidifies that trend and intensifies speculation that the Turkish president’s next stop could be Riyadh.

A Decade of Tension Between “Bully” and “Upstart”

The forces driving de-escalation, negotiations, and even rapprochement between major Middle Eastern players are all strikingly evident in the fraught UAE-Turkey relationship. After a decade of confrontation and conflict following the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, most Middle Eastern powers that sought to take advantage of the instability found themselves overextended.

Despite their different sizes and capabilities, Turkey and the UAE are among the key powers that sought to project their influence in the post-Arab Spring Middle East. Along with Qatar, Turkey was the main power supporting Muslim Brotherhood-aligned parties that sought, and indeed expected, to inherit power from former dictatorships in the republics rocked by rebellions. As the past decade progressed, some countries, notably the UAE and Egypt, were alarmed at the prospect of Muslim Brotherhood and Sunni Islamist groups organizing as a regional bloc coordinated by Ankara and backed by Qatari financial and media support. For its part, Turkey accused the UAE of providing financial support to some of the organizers of a failed 2016 military coup against Erdogan’s Islamist government. The two countries, in short, perceived each other as adopting fundamentally hostile stances, with Turkey cast as a dangerous bully and the UAE as an arrogant upstart.

While the initial concern was a wave of takeovers by Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated parties in post-dictatorship Arab republics, after the 2013 overthrow of the government of President Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, it became clear that this was not unfolding. Instead, concerns shifted to prospects for the development of a Sunni Islamist regional network more directly under the guidance of Turkey and Qatar. These, arguably more fanciful, anxieties helped drive first the Gulf Arab diplomatic crisis with Qatar in 2013 and then the 4-year boycott of Doha by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Egypt that began in June 2017. The fear was that Turkey and Qatar were seeking to build a Sunni Islamist counterpart to Iran’s regional network of Shia militias that have hollowed out many key Arab states and serve as the primary means through which Iran projects its own hegemony in neighboring countries, including Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria.

From the Turkish and Qatari perspective, however, they were merely supporting revolution, democracy, and legitimate and popular parties that had every right to form governments if they could. And since Turkey never succeeded in creating an Iranian-style, vertically integrated Sunni Islamist network, and Muslim Brotherhood-aligned parties in different countries have hemorrhaged political support since 2011, such Emirati fears may have been unfounded. Yet so long as the Muslim Brotherhood movement in the Arab world remained politically potent, and Turkey and Qatar were perceived by the UAE as its primary benefactors, the rapprochements unfolding between Abu Dhabi and both Ankara and Doha would have been difficult to achieve.

Stalemate in Libya Opens the Door

One of the most crucial developments allowing for the rapprochements was the stalemate in Libya. The UAE and Egypt strongly supported the eastern, Tobruk-based House of Representatives championed by General Khalifa Hifter. Turkey and Qatar were key supporters of the de facto, United Nations-recognized Government of National Accord based in the west in Tripoli, in which a variety of Islamist groups and militias are extremely powerful. The outside powers were therefore heavily invested in the “second” Libyan civil war beginning in 2017, in which the two governments attempted, in effect and in succession, to overrun each other. Both sides managed to retain control of their territories but could not displace the other.

Beyond the ideological Islamist affiliation, Turkey was determined to ensure the survival of the Tripoli-based regime because of its control of the port city of Misrata, where Turkey has historical influence and there is a sizeable Turkish population. That control is crucial to Ankara’s claims to an exclusive economic zone for liquid natural gas development and exportation in the eastern Mediterranean. Those highly contentious Turkish claims are based on an imaginary line drawn between the northern Turkish coast and Misrata and pursuant to an agreement between Turkey and the Government of National Accord. For the Turkish economic zone claims to remain plausible, that Libyan government must continue to control the port city.

This imperative led to a major Turkish military intervention in Libya in January 2020, involving hundreds of Turkish troops and almost 20,000 Syrian mercenaries. The UAE, too, was directly involved in the 2017 Libyan war (as well as the “first” Libyan civil war that overthrewMuammar al-Qaddafi, in 2011), although on a much smaller scale, including with deadly drone strikes and other airpower. Yet intervention at any scale by outside forces was not able to prevent the emergence of a stalemate in Libya in which both the eastern and western Libyan regimes proved incapable of unseating the other. The result has been an unsteady equilibrium and a faltering political process to pursue reconciliation in a deeply divided country.

The Libya stalemate helped lay the groundwork for the UAE reconciliation with Turkey and Qatar, because there was nothing more for outside powers to gain on the Libyan battlefield. Indeed, the Libyan engagement suggests that both the UAE and Turkey had overreached, at least somewhat, in regional conflicts. Virtually all Middle Eastern conflicts that outside powers had used to try to gain advantage after the decade of confrontation ended up stalemated (as in Libya), effectively resolved by a victory (as in Syria), or somehow having passed the point of diminishing returns for such regional actors. Ongoing fighting in Yemen and Houthi missile attacks against the UAE demonstrate that conflict still has an appeal for local forces that feel they can still make gains on the battlefield. And local wars can still disrupt the atmosphere of de-escalation for outside powers that are generally seeking to pull back. This creeping inertia and conflict fatigue prompted a turn away from confrontation and toward diplomatic, political, and commercial maneuver. Regional actors are seeking to rebuild their economic and military strength and preserve those gains that are essential or cost-effective while jettisoning unduly burdensome commitments in other countries.

The Collapse of the Muslim Brotherhood Project

Even more important, during the Qatar boycott – although not due to it – the political viability of the Muslim Brotherhood in most of the Arab world disintegrated. The movement had been dealt a grievous blow with the 2013 coup in Egypt, and it never fully recovered. But this 100-year-old political project effectively collapsed over the past three years. Its adherents in Hamas continue to rule Gaza, which is probably more of a burden than a prize. Other Sunni Islamists remain influential in western Libya and parts of Yemen, although even in those two places they are seemingly in decline.

But the apparently open-ended constitutional suspension in Tunisia that began September 22, 2021, and which was primarily aimed at the Muslim Brotherhood-offshoot party Ennahda, had all the hallmarks of a coup de grace as well as a coup d’etat. There is no reason to assume that Sunni Islamism could not enjoy a resurgence in the future, but for now, not only are most of the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned groups in the region no longer viable contenders for national or even local power, the rhetorical and ideological appeal of the movement appears badly tarnished by a decade of consistent failure and widespread discreditation.

Turkey and Qatar have therefore been left with little to work with in terms of a powerful regional network of ideologically affiliated groups, although the two countries, especially in tandem, remain an exceptionally formidable pair even without such a potential regional bloc. The UAE, and to a lesser extent Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, no longer face the prospect of a potent regional Islamist movement that threatens to gain and hold power in multiple Arab republics and, ultimately, potentially threaten regime legitimacy and stability in Gulf monarchies as well.

Purely at the ideational and ideological level, the UAE appears to have prevailed, at least at this juncture. However, Turkey remains arguably the most powerful regional actor by most standards, especially insofar as it emphasizes its Middle Eastern role. And Qatar successfully defended its sovereignty and independence by surviving the boycott without significantly altering its policies. Moreover, the apparent setback may be less damaging than it appears. Turkey has no need for such a network of subordinate regional groups to emerge as a central Middle Eastern player. And Qatar may find itself liberated from a nonviable, and even self-defeating, foreign policy framework it acquired over a decade ago during a bout of what, in hindsight, looks like irrational exuberance.

Can This Rapprochement Be Institutionalized?

Under such circumstances, not only did a reconciliation within the Gulf Cooperation Council make sense, so did a rapprochement between the UAE (and, separately, Egypt) and Turkey, just as the Erdogan state visit to Abu Dhabi signals. For all its undoubted regional might, Turkey is undergoing a period of significant economic stress, which has provided the opportunity for the parties to try to build an institutional and, eventually, infrastructural framework for this rapprochement. On January 19, a nearly $5 billion currency swap agreement helped reinforce the struggling Turkish lira, and the UAE is reportedly planning a $10 billion investment fund for Turkey. Abu Dhabi has vowed to double or even triple trade volumes with Turkey in the near future, seeing Ankara as a key conduit to new markets, especially in Africa. Many more initiatives of this kind are likely to develop beyond the 13 reportedly agreed to during the state visit.

With the main sources of tension on foreign battlefields effectively played out, and the ideological and ideational struggle over Islamism similarly resolved, at least for the time being, the main grounds for mutual suspicion no longer pose serious barriers to cooperation. Since the UAE and Turkey are among the overextended regional powers pursuing retrenchment and consolidation, seeking avenues of mutual benefit is logical and, it appears, not particularly difficult. Ankara gets to access important financial support at a time of need and a chance to pull back from some of its seemingly endless tensions and quarrels with neighbors. And Abu Dhabi can access important new investments and markets at advantageous prices while, perhaps, attempting to use investment and infrastructure to provide Turkey with positive incentives to moderate any possible future regional assertion.

Since the underlying tensions between them arose primarily from mutual suspicions and ideological competition, much of which have been rendered moot, there is no reason the UAE-Turkey reconciliation shouldn’t be long lasting and mutually rewarding. Finally, both countries are traditional U.S. partners, and as Washington continues what is widely perceived to be a slow disengagement from long-standing regional commitments, its friends have numerous incentives to emphasize strategic diversification and accumulate additional partners and options. Both the UAE and Turkey will certainly be better off by working together instead of remaining on the collision course of the past decade.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/2022/02/14/a-right-wing-template-to-disrupt-western-cities/

It again pits the right in a war against the state and adopting tactics and even aesthetics from the far-left.

Most of what the “freedom convoy” immobilising the Canadian capital Ottawa purports to be is false or phony.

This disruption cutting off crucial bridges and supply lines to the United States is supposedly protesting vaccine mandates. But that’s not the point. It is Canadian. But it’s also highly influenced and funded by the US ultra-right. The iconography, including Confederate battle flags and Nazi swastikas, amply illustrates that.

Most of the protesters are not truckers. And most Canadian truckers (over 90 per cent of whom are vaccinated), and certainly their outraged union, seem aghast at the disruption.

This is less a “protest” than an act of lawless economic vandalism promoting a topsy-turvy notion of “freedom”. It’s also the latest instance of the western ultra-right taking on the worst trappings of the extreme left of the 1960s and ’70s.

In the 20th century, it was typically the left that engaged in and celebrated disruption, takeovers, besieging the powerful, and attacking institutions and the police. Yet a series of events – the gilet jaune movement in France (which never really found a focus), the attack on the Michigan state house in April 2020, the January 6 insurgency at the US Capitol building, and now this radical disruption in Canada – show how thoroughly such tactics are being adopted by the extreme right.

What’s emerging is a template for how relatively small groups, just a few hundred people, can immobilise western capitals, disrupt trade, cut supply lines and terrorise society. The point is the one I have been identifying time and again in these pages: the western and American right is now firmly focused on attacking the state in virtually all its forms.

It is notable that the grievances are typically inane. If the 2020 US election really was “stolen,” why did Democrats hand themselves significant congressional defeats? If the Canadian protests are about vaccination requirements, why aren’t they targeted at provincial authorities, responsible for such rules in Canada, or the US, which has long-imposed a vaccination requirement for crossing the border?

Attacking the state is the only thing that renders any of this coherent. As political scientist Timothy Snyder notes, “senselessness… is part of the point. Making demands that cannot be met makes it hard to bring the chaos to an end.”

The anarchism, countercultural rage and absolute opposition typical of the far-left between 1965-1975 is now primarily a tool of the ultra-right. Even the hippie aesthetic can be readily seen in, for example, the famously outlandish bearded and horned “QAnon Shaman”, the most memorable figure from the January 6 insurgency.

He would have raised no eyebrows at Woodstock. Neither would the right’s new-found passion for homeopathic medicines, weird drugs like hydroxychloroquine, or deep hostility to medical authorities, the pharmaceutical industry and science in general.

To the contrary, it would have fit right in. Conservatism, meanwhile, has disappeared.

Yet the Ottawa protest was hardly ad hoc. It was not only well-funded by US radicals, the instigator, James Bauder, is a noted QAnon and conspiracy theorist who calls Covid-19 “the biggest political scam in history”.

It reportedly involves former Canadian police and military personnel who set up ingenious, complex supply chains to keep the disruption going by funnelling fuel, food and comforts to protesters.

It is a sophisticated operation, provincially, nationally and internationally. Yet the state response has also been quite sophisticated.

Canadian authorities were caught off guard and evidently unprepared. However, both the provincial and national authorities have understood this was, above all, a provocation. The organisers sought an overreaction by the government, precisely because they are attacking the state itself.

Therefore, while it has been frustrating for many Ottawa residents, other Canadians and reasonable people everywhere, the authorities were wise to keep a low profile and not rise to the bait by overreacting.

Canadian premier Justin Trudeau leads an unpopular government, so he was wise to tread carefully. But beyond that, while many elements of the Canadian political right at first were tempted to side with the disruption, the restraint by the authorities effectively made most such open sympathy politically untenable.

The protesters were allowed to have their say, even at the cost of many millions of dollars and massive public dislocation and frustration. Few have been arrested and there has been no crackdown. Instead, the protest was given the space to overplay its hand, which it did.

Angry public opinion forced right-wing Canadian politicians such as Ontario Premier Doug Ford to eventually side with the public and the state, against the protesters. In effect, by taking a light touch, the Canadian state allowed the “freedom convoy” to paint itself, and not the authorities, as the bullies.

Yet the template for how small numbers of fanatics can cause havoc in major western cities has been reaffirmed. Copycat efforts are inevitable, and there are numerous reports of American groups preparing to mimic exactly this tactic.

They already have cheerleaders. In the US, many Fox News hosts have been lauding the Canadian truck protests, as has former president Donald Trump. Ultra-right Senator Rand Paul encouraged American extremists to pull similar stunts in Washington DC and elsewhere in the US.

Again, this expresses the sentiment of being at war with the state itself – and arguably even society in general. As Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for Republican president George W Bush, explained: “Support for seditious acts is now a normal and accepted element of Republican identity.”

This war has become definitional for the new right, just as it was for radical parts of the “new left” in the 1960s. It is impossible to imagine President Joe Biden or other senior Democratic Party leaders chanting “burn, baby, burn,” or supporting violent attacks on the police. But many major Republican Party figures have increasingly been embracing exactly those attitudes.

That’s the biggest difference.

The far-left of the 1960s-1970s never made many inroads in the Democratic Party or came close to seizing its leadership. Yet the Republican Party has unquestionably suffered an increasing extremist take-over, with the Senate old guard and a few governors as the last holdouts.

Such attacks and disruptions are likely to happen again in the US and elsewhere, with some key political leaders on the right cheering. But the Canadian experience shows the wisdom, when possible, of not taking the bait and instead giving such provocateurs the space in which to overplay their hands.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/02/09/does-the-us-supreme-court-wear-only-a-veneer-of-impartiality/

It’s time to restore the Court to its traditional political context as a first step to urgent reform.

The US Supreme Court cloaks itself in a mystique of wisdom, erudition and impartiality. But increasingly, skepticism surrounds this aura of wonder, which is good because this smokescreen can be not just ridiculous but dangerous.

The US Constitution ensures that the Court, apex of the judicial branch of the federal government, is entirely political. That should be obvious and was for most of US history.

But mainly in the 20th century, the mystique was carefully constructed (partially to defend its role as a vanguard of liberalism), principally by the Court itself.

The Court is as partisan as Congress and the White House. But judges on both sides have been complaining that the public is seeing through their veneer of lofty even-handedness.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett, two right-wing activists steeped in the Republican agenda, both insisted, in irony-rich speeches, that they and their colleagues never rule according to their opinions, though other judges might. Yet, such claims are patently untrue.

Retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, a stalwart liberal, also complained that judges are too-often assumed to be politically motivated and warned that major reforms could backfire. Yet, he too, has plainly been guided by the evolving Democratic perspective, as have his colleagues Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

The justices, left and right, rarely admit it, but they are politically-aligned. And at least to some extent, they are supposed to be. And that understanding must urgently be reclaimed.

The makeup of the Supreme Court is produced by the political process. Justices are nominated by the president and approved by the Senate. It is hard to imagine a more political procedure.

Courts have typically reflected those origins, except when some Republican-appointed judges proved more liberal than expected on civil and women’s rights. The political right successfully organized to ensure that would never happen again.

In the 21st century, the veil has completely fallen off, thanks to a set of partisan outcome- and process-related cases with immediate political consequences, akin to votes in Congress. Time and again, these supposedly neutral scholars invariably voted precisely along partisan lines.

The most notorious instance is Bush versus Gore, through which the Supreme Court decided the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. The contest between George W Bush and Al Gore in the deciding state of Florida was impossibly close and recounts based on various criteria could have swung the election either way.

The court stopped recounts and effectively ratified an extremely dubious vote certification by the Republican Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who had used her power on behalf of Mr Bush.

The court not only selected the president along partisan lines, by ruling against the Florida courts, Republicans blithely abandoned their supposedly-principled opposition to federal intervention in state-run elections, while Democrats flipped the other way.

The ruling would be inexplicable but for raw partisan politics. Republicans voted to ensure a Republican victory and Democrats tried to block that. Only the most naive could thereafter consider the court remotely nonpartisan or impartial.

That has been compounded many times since, with justices on both sides invariably repeating this partisan bias, above all in cases involving core processes and outcomes.

Ideologically-inflected policy cases, such as on abortion rights, are less stark and subject to more compromise. But when it comes to their friends winning and losing, justices are as reliable as any apparatchik.

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell further cemented the raw politics of the Supreme Court by treating the confirmation process as a political game. He denied Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, consideration on grounds that it was a presidential election year, and then rushed Ms Barrett’s confirmation when 2021 voting was already underway.

This is manipulation of the clock worthy of the end of a basketball game.

Such partisanship is particularly worrying as both Democrats and Republicans are indulging in ruthless partisan gerrymandering in many states, rendering many crucial elections noncompetitive. Fortunately, state courts, most recently in North Carolina, are defending the right of voters to select their leaders and not allowing politicians to pick their own voters.

These cases are likely to end up before the Supreme Court. Because that is widely presumed to advantage Republican power, the right-wing majority will surely insist that state legislatures have an absolute right to regulate elections, and the state courts overstepped their bounds. Unfortunately, Democratic justices wouldn’t necessarily rule in a more principled manner if the roles were reversed.

Finally, the composition of the court has received its ugliest political patina in years after President Joe Biden confirmed he will fulfill his campaign pledge to nominate a black woman to replace the retiring Mr Breyer.

Many Republicans have erupted in outrage, calling this racism, discrimination against white people, offensive and that any such nominee will be the beneficiary of “affirmative action” efforts to break down discriminatory barriers (another important public policy facing a likely defeat at the Supreme Court). The racism is undisguised.

Mr Biden’s pledge is not any of that, but it is both political and traditional. Former US Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump both promised to appoint (white) women and did, to general approval. Historically, factors such as geography were cited to justify Supreme Court nominations.

It is not surprising that a generic empowered black woman appears acutely alarming to the white-grievance oriented Republican Party. Still, it is rich to hear complaining about identity-based preferences from white Christian American men, who have historically monopolized all positions of power, including at the Court.

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, who specializes in reading present-day controversies through deep US history, recently argued that the court is and always has been entirely political, especially regarding the nomination of justices.

The whole mystique of a Supreme Court that is impartial and majestically above the political fray has been an illusion, and hence the source of considerable confusion and mischief.

From the founding of the Republic, by design, and certainly since the 1803 Marbury versus Madison case that established its broad authority, the Supreme Court has been supremely political. Pretending otherwise is either manipulative or foolish.

The current Court has become a menace to the values and interests of the large American majority. Reforms are essential. They could range from term limits or mandatory retirement ages to expanding the number of justices.

In any event, demystifying the Court and recognizing, once again, that it is an entirely political body is a necessary first step towards reining in its excesses.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-02-04/amnesty-international-erred-by-calling-israel-an-apartheid-state?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l

Its new report lets Israel off the hook by inviting a debate about a controversial word rather than Israel’s indefensible policies

On Tuesday, Amnesty International became the fourth major human-rights group to accuse Israel of creating and maintaining an “apartheid” system to control Palestinians. This provoked a torrent of outrage from Israeli officials, pro-Israel groups and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides. Almost all of them accused Amnesty of anti-Semitism.

Yair Lapid, Israel’s foreign minister, said that “if Israel wasn’t a Jewish state, no one would dare make such a claim against it.” The Israeli Foreign Ministry said the report “denies Israel’s right to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people.”

There’s something worth noting here. The report’s critics aren’t offering any substantive refutation of the facts it cites. Instead they condemn its ideological framework. And they have a point. By using the apartheid label, Amnesty undercuts its mission, and helps ensure that there will be little constructive debate over Israel’s policies and practices.

This is a problem not just for the Palestinians, but also for Jewish Israelis, who won’t be able to extricate themselves from decades of conflict and occupation without an honest discussion of the various ways Arab citizens, and especially non-citizens under Israeli rule, are treated under the law.

Israel defines itself as belonging exclusively to the Jewish people. Yet it governs territories in which Palestinian Muslims and Christians make up nearly half the population. Legal realities are simple for Jewish Israelis: They are all citizens with equal rights and status no matter where they are considered to reside. For Palestinians, those same issues are extremely complicated: They are caught in a dizzying labyrinth of different legal and political statuses depending on where they live.

Thus human-rights groups, in a growing consensus, are turning to the fraught word “apartheid” to try to concisely convey a reality that is simultaneously very simple and extremely complex.

About 2 million Palestinians are citizens of Israel, with the same basic rights as their Jewish compatriots, although they face housing discrimination, joblessness and a lack of government services in their neighborhoods. The rest of the Palestinians have no citizenship of any kind, a pervasive statelessness that is virtually unique in today’s world.

Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem have more options than most, but they cannot vote in national elections and have difficulty accessing Israeli civil law. The nearly 3 million Palestinians living in Areas A, B and C of the occupied West Bank have, in practice, three different relationships with the ruling Israeli authorities. The additional 2 million effectively trapped in Gaza have yet another de facto status.

The Amnesty report knits a coherent pattern from countless tidbits that are meticulously detailed and connected: the displacement of Palestinian refugee families in East Jerusalem and Bedouin communities in the Negev to make way for Jewish Israelis; routine abuse at West Bank checkpoints, highlighted by the recent deathof an elderly Palestinian-American man, and the myriad policies that have turned Gaza into an open-air prison.

It demonstrates that Israel’s Byzantine system of legal complexity toward Palestinians is central to its strategy. It’s also been an effective obstacle to clear international understanding of Israel’s policies. Criticism of the extreme lack of rights in the West Bank is routinely countered by citing the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, as if these were same people and places. Confusion is part of the point.

Yet the accusation of apartheid is deeply fraught. It invites an argument about the word itself, or the validity of analogies to the old South Africa, rather than about the conditions under which Palestinians live.

Critics accuse Amnesty of denying Israel’s legitimacy or seeking its destruction because the organization attempts a holistic analysis, tying together all aspects of Israel’s relations with the Palestinians going back to the formation of the state in 1948. That’s another strategic fumble by the human-rights group, because it inevitably provokes debate about Israel’s founding and legitimacy rather than the indefensible legal and administrative honeycomb in which Palestinians are fractured into multiple enclaves.

International criticism that makes Israelis defensive and angry isn’t necessarily a bad thing. One reason there has been no progress for decades in ending the conflict is a lack of sufficient pressure on Israel to ease the occupation or slow the seemingly inexorable crawl toward annexation of the West Bank. No matter how much many resent it, Israelis need to hear justified and principled international criticism of the system they have constructed.

Clarity and unvarnished facts about lived realities can help all parties make better choices. That would look a lot like the Amnesty report, without the Ideological stridency. Rhetorical overreach lets Israel, and everyone else, off the hook, inviting a debate about a controversial word rather than the ground truths that keep the Israeli-Palestinian struggle a tinderbox.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/02/01/americas-dangerous-taste-for-mob-stories/

Ex-hoodlums are being marketed as celebrities and entertainers  on social media.

The US isn’t just a “land of opportunity”, but of second chances. And now some of the most notorious criminals in US history are enjoying a spectacular and profitable comeback via the quintessentially American manoeuvre of public redemption.

It has been like this from the beginning. Many of the English settlers who established the colonies that became the United States were consciously and openly seeking to reinvent themselves.

The Puritans of New England and Quakers of the Delaware Valley were seeking to become ruling religious factions rather than persecuted minorities. Countless immigrants, noteworthy and obscure, still relocate from the old worlds of Europe, Asia and Africa looking for an opportunity to literally reinvent themselves.

It is a proud tradition to take on new names, change identities, and “assimilate” into the American melting pot, often wiping away a sordid past. Even without immigration, similar transformations are a central and celebrated theme of American popular culture.

One of the most important American novels, The Great Gatsby, is precisely about a wealthy, celebrated man who is widely and correctly suspected of having gained riches through organised crime, specifically bootlegging.

It is the country that elected Donald Trump as its president and could conceivably do it again. Charisma and a good story overcome most other obstacles in US culture.

Ageing Mafiosi are providing the latest redemption tales.

The process began as soon as figures of “Cosa Nostra” (“Our Thing” in Italian), began testifying against their former friends. The memoirs of the first major Mafia turncoat, a mid-level hoodlum called Joseph Valachi, written with the journalist Peter Maas, became a bestseller in 1968. The Valachi Papers was even made into a Charles Bronson movie in 1972.

That same year Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece The Godfather, and the best-selling novel it was based on, spurred a Mafia-oriented revolution in American popular culture. The Godfather provided the template to replace the stale old western genre with a new kind of gangster movie that reflected key US cultural figures: dangerous mavericks outside the law who can nonetheless supply justice where state authority breaks down, rugged individual anti-heroes who make their own laws and use violence to defend their honor.

Maas’s book and The Godfather, book and movie, together defined a lucrative market. But gangland memoirs rarely make anyone rich and are a one-off.

Social media now provides podcast and video forums allowing ex-hoodlums to market themselves as celebrities and entertainers embodying the venerable American tradition of public redemption.

Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, former underboss of the Gambino crime family –  one of the Cosa Nostra “Five Families” in New York City – illustrates how this sordid process plays out. After Gravano broke ranks and testified against his former boss and partner John Gotti, he collaborated with none other than Mass in the 1997 book Underboss.

Despite laws intended to prevent killers from profiting from their crimes, courts allowed Gravano to ultimately keep the $250,000 Maas paid him. Predictably enough, he then formed a drug ring with his children in Arizona, which eventually resulted in a 20-year sentence. He was released in 2017.

Yet Gravano is enjoying a resurgence in status and income online. He and other former mobsters of varying ranks have fashioned a new mass media genre through podcast reminiscences and commentaries.

Gravano, who is reportedly battling Covid-19, poses as an unrepentant mobster. Despite breaking the single most important organizational rule and testifying, he preposterously claims to be a living embodiment of Cosa Nostra.

That puts him at odds with many other practitioners of the former-Mafioso genre who present a more traditional American narrative of redemption through religious conversion.

His biggest competitor, and frequent supposed antagonist, is Michael Franzese, a former captain in the Colombo crime family. Franzese primarily markets himself as a born-again Christian.

The two have had obviously staged shouting matches about whether or not the Mafia is inherently evil and destructive.

Similar new brand names include John A Gotti, son of the infamous Gambino leader; and his former associate John Alite, who, naturally, testified against him. Noteworthy lesser lights include the former Bath Avenue Crew member Jimmy Calandra, who also claims, a bit more convincingly than Franzese, to have found God. So do Anthony Ruggiano Jr and many others who promote themselves as born-again “motivational speakers”.

It is striking that all these former mobsters seem to adopt a blue-collar conservative and pro-Trump political orientation. Predictably, their podcasts also promote highly dubious narratives.

Gravano may or may not peddle total fabrications, yet his accounts are transparently and crudely self-serving, casting himself as an admirable antihero. And he hasn’t added much substantial to the narrative in Underboss.

Most disturbing is the media collusion in repackaging and marketing ageing killers as inspiring or entertaining public figures.

Last week, ABC broadcast a shoddy cut-and-pasted two hour “special” on Gravano, largely based on an old interview from the 1990s. ABC acknowledged his heinous record by examining his role in the mob killings of his former best friend Louie Milito and also his own brother-in-law Nicholas Scibetta.

Both men were working with the mafia, and can be cast as fair game in the kill-or-be-killed ruthlessness of “that life”. Gravano often peddles the transparent fiction that “we only kill each other”.

In his 1994 plea deal, in exchange for his testimony he was granted a stunningly lenient five-year sentence for the 19 murders “Sammy The Bull” admitted to. It included time already served, and he walked away after a few months.

In that plea, he formally confessed to the 1977 murder of 16-year-old Alan Kaiser, an innocent bystander who witnessed Gravano and Milito commit a murder. To ensure his silence, the teenager was immediately gunned down. No one knew why or by whom he was killed until the plea agreement.

ABC never mentions Kaiser. Neither did Maas. Online, Gravano has offered an implausible, indeed ridiculous, account of the murder at odds with his sworn plea statement.

Americans love a redemption story. They sell very well.

The ambiguous image being carefully constructed around “Sammy The Bull” is menacing enough to provide a patina of authenticity and aura of “toughness,” but with Godfather-like antihero elements deeply-rooted in American culture and drawn from the westerns.

But the murderer of Alan Kaiser cannot be repackaged as the latest Jay Gatsby. It doesn’t leave any crucial grey areas. Like the 16-year-old witness, it had to go.

But it is not just “Sammy The Bull” wiping him out now. That work is being done for and with him by some journalists and American news organisations that have no excuse.