https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/04/19/in-todays-america-i-cant-even-visit-a-hospital-without-getting-infected-by-politics/

The dangerous divides that have come to shape American culture are increasingly inescapable.

Casually held truisms can sometimes suddenly and unexpectedly erupt into daily life with the power of a thunderbolt. In the abstract, I know perfectly well that many Americans live in political-cultural bubbles that rarely communicate with each other. Yet I wasn’t prepared for a recent encounter with how that can turn a simple human interaction into an irrational furore.

I’ve been recovering from an injury in rural Virginia and ended up sharing a room with a man in his mid-80s, born and raised in this area. The results were eye-opening and deeply disturbing.

At first, he couldn’t have been more pleasant, warm and welcoming. On our first day together, he asked if I didn’t mind a little TV later on. I said fine, and then came the evening doses of Fox News.

He regularly watches three programmes, culminating in the notorious Tucker Carlson broadcast. In their entirety and natural environment, these shows were quite new to me. They all have a simple formula: find something, for the next segment or two, about which to thunder in faux indignation, before moving on to the next abomination.

I was astounded that at least three quarters of the horrors they fulminated against were exaggerations to the point of being effectively fictional or simply outright fabrications. I generally kept quiet during these evening reveries, but once observed that the subject of the last segment was entirely made up. I got no reply, so I asked him if he knew that no such thing existed. I was duly ignored.

The only other time I said anything was when Mr Carlson concluded a profoundly racist rant, and I noted it was one of the most offensive things I had viewed in a long while. He snorted and we moved on.

It was obvious that this virulent propaganda was carefully designed to produce mounting and sustained outrage in regular, enthusiastic viewers. My roommate consumed three to four hours of it daily and nothing else whatsoever, yet something wasn’t adding up. He seemed to remain perfectly calm and amiable. So, I began to wonder if I had badly misjudged both the intended and the real effect of Fox programming on its core audience. Where was the rage?

I didn’t have to wait for long. Shortly thereafter, he came into our room as I was having a conversation about US politics with a third individual. He interrupted, disputing what I was saying with increasing anger. He then stood up, declared that I was “against the country, against America,” denounced US President Joe Biden as “a communist,” and marched out.

It was the last I saw him because he immediately arranged to lodge elsewhere and had others retrieve his possessions. It was clear that I was being effectively declared anathema and that remaining in my presence for a moment longer was intolerable entirely because we didn’t agree about former US President Donald Trump’s term in office and bid for reelection (questions such as the attempted coup and the January 6 insurrection, hush money to adult film stars and his hero’s demands to “terminate” the US Constitution to allow himself to remain in office never came up – though he would undoubtedly have dismissed it all as “fake news.”)

His extraordinary reaction to my quite mild though clear disagreement with him suggests several important things.

While I didn’t react with the fury and revulsion he expressed, I live in my own, essentially liberal, bubble where I don’t encounter people like him. Most of the Republicans I know don’t like Mr Trump, and even those who do remain at least partly tethered to the fact-based reality.

Some Americans now simply cannot abide those who categorically disagree with them about domestic politics. Separation is the watchword, as representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia suggested a “national divorce” between red and blue America.

Some left-wing Americans must be just as intolerant, but he fits the Trump-supporting demographic perfectly: male, elderly, strongly Christian, lacking higher education and firmly rooted in a rural community. He’s a perfect target for Fox’s calculated, disingenuous propaganda. They are trying to make him and people like him angry and are succeeding brilliantly – to the point that he cannot stand to even share a room briefly with someone who politely and occasionally challenges his political dogma.

It is unclear how many Americans share these views but it’s probably at least 20 per cent of core Republican voters. It is clear, however, there is no mass market liberal propaganda on American television seeking to promote hatred and rage like I saw Fox successfully doing in a small corner of rural Virginia. MSNBC, and arguably even CNN, have liberal biases. But they aren’t deliberately seeking to demonise, and provoke anger and hatred against, other Americans the way Fox does.

The worst part is how cynical we now know this is – although my former roommate will likely never hear of it and wouldn’t believe it if he did. The internal messages uncovered by the Dominion lawsuit against Fox clearly demonstrate that Mr Carlson and the other hosts, along with owner Rupert Murdoch and other senior executives, privately do not believe, and even mock, Mr Trump’s election lies and those being spread by his representatives, while continuing to broadcast heavy support for those very fabrications.

Mr Carlson added “I hate him passionately,” but you’d never guess that by the fawning “interview” in which he recently allowed Mr Trump to spout all manner of falsehoods and gibberish, including suggesting he alone appreciates the destructive power of nuclear bombs, unchallenged.

It’s a mixed bag for US journalism that Dominion has settled the lawsuit for $787.5 million. It may save investors in the voting machine company, but probably isn’t massive enough to rattle a purse as heavy as Mr Murdoch’s. Fox has admitted that “certain claims” it made about Dominion were “false,” but will not have to broadcast apologies to its audience, or any admission of culpability, on its programming, particularly its powerful evening shows.

Lies indeed have consequences, but not commensurate ones. Therefore, Fox will be able to buy its way out of a potential crisis of credibility with its core audience, whether they think that they lied about Mr Trump winning the election in 2000 or that they are lying now about the fact that he really lost. But most of its audience will probably never learn of the blatant manner in which they were deliberately deceived.

Dominion’s victory will therefore do little to counteract the painstakingly concocted poison that Fox pours into the eyes and ears of its credulous proselytes. The channel is deliberately tearing American society apart in an unseemly scramble for the almighty dollar. Unfortunately Dominion couldn’t provide it, but while protecting the First Amendment and free speech, the means must be found to attenuate their venom and counteract the impact of this carefully curated outrage and fury against other Americans.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/2023/04/11/wild-abortion-rulings-to-private-jet-freebies-why-do-us-judges-have-such-bad-judgment/

As gridlock hits the legislative process and the Supreme Court’s credibility is worse than ever, marginal players seek national glory.

As the Biden administration’s domestic agenda is stalled by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which is also unable to pass legislation, peripheral sources of authority such as local prosecutors, judges, and state legislatures are suddenly hoping and reaching for an opportunity to influence national policies and practices.

It’s mainly, but not just, Republicans. Democrats are also contributing.

The indictment of former president Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg could invite future prosecutions of former presidents on a partisan basis – or so claim Republicans.

It would be much harder for a district attorney in Lubbock, Texas to indict former president Bill Clinton on some trumped-up charge. There would probably never be a trial at all, even if a local grand jury co-operated. After all, Mr Trump was residing in Manhattan when he allegedly committed the hush money crimes there, so Mr Bragg has uncontested jurisdiction.

Nonetheless, his case may involve potentially dangerous interplay between state and federal authorities. Part of his argument seems to hinge on the idea that Mr Trump’s dishonest financial filings, misdemeanours in New York State, rise to the level of felonies because they helped violate a major crime: federal campaign laws. This arguably flips federalism on its head, or so Mr Trump’s lawyers will undoubtedly argue, expanding the District Attorney’s local power by usurping what should be federal jurisdiction.

The DA in Fulton County, Georgia, investigating alleged election tampering by Mr Trump, is likely to follow suit, doubling down on local Democratic indictments against the former Republican president. When Republicans can take revenge and try to enforce federal laws at the local level against nationally prominent Democrats, they will.

This weekend’s headlines were dominated by an extraordinary ruling by a Trump-appointed Texas judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, purporting to overturn the 23-year-old Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, a medicine mainly used in early-term abortions. The ruling attempts to render illegal the sale of mifepristone everywhere in the country.

The ruling is a minor masterpiece of abysmal reasoning and super-tendentious language. He uncritically cites particularly outlandish claims from anti-abortion groups while dismissing the fact that more than two decades of being approved and widely used in the US have demonstrated mifepristone to indeed be safe and effective.

Even the Supreme Court in its highly controversial overturning of the nearly 50-year-old constitutional guarantee of women’s access to early-term abortions avoided what, in the American political context, is remarkably inflammatory rhetoric, referring to doctors as “abortionists” and foetuses as “unborn humans” and “unborn children”.

Mr Kacsmaryk also endorses “foetal personhood,” the groundless claim that the US Constitution protects zygotes from the moment of conception as full human beings with all the core safeguards afforded to other citizens. Other legal systems may embrace such notions, but the American one never has. Instead, in line with English common law, it traditionally considers the process and fact of birth to be the defining point for personhood.

If his ruling were somehow to stand, this federal judge in Amarillo, Texas, would have effectively nationally banned early-term medicinal abortions, which account for most US abortions. Any federal judge would then presumably be able to outlaw any medicine or approved treatment she or he dislikes for whatever reason, especially given the apparently limitless flexibility of the ruling’s arguments.

Another concern with Mr Kacsmaryk’s tirade is his repeated invocation of the 1873 Comstock Act, which imposed a century of heavy censorship on US publications and outlawed mailing or shipping “obscene, lewd or lascivious”, material and “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion or for any indecent or immoral purpose”.

After decades of suffocating restrictions, by the 1960s the Comstock Act became a disregarded relic. When Congress removed the last restrictions on contraception in 1971, it was a truly dead letter, although, like thousands of other anachronistic laws, it was never formally repealed. Now comes Mr Kacsmaryk to resurrect one of the most repressive, detested pieces of legislation in US history. But even he stayed his ruling for a week, allowing the FDA to appeal.

A mere hour after Mr Kacsmaryk’s ruling was issued, a judge in Washington state ordered the FDA to protect the status quo in 17 states and the District of Columbia that allow abortion access. These competing rulings not only demonstrate how divided the country is over abortion following the Supreme Court’s decision last year, they also illustrate how regional judges are competing to control or influence what legislatures and the federal government may or may not do on this hot-button issue.

The growing trend of local courts seeking to impact national decision-making comes as the reputation of the Supreme Court has taken yet another massive hit at the hands of the incorrigible Justice Clarence Thomas, who has apparently never seen an ethics violation he didn’t like.

Recent news investigations have revealed that he took multiple, lengthy vacations on private planes and yachts to Indonesia, New Zealand, Greek islands and so on at the expense of one of the most prolific right-wing Republican political donors with a huge vested interest in the outcome of countless potential court decisions.

Mr Thomas breezily claimed “advisers” told him he didn’t need to report these vast gifts, which total in the millions of dollars in value, even though the law is clear, particularly regarding private plane trips. Yet Supreme Court justices face no ethics rules. The Court itself will not act. Neither will Congress, which, I have argued on numerous occasions, should have long ago impeached and removed Mr Thomas.

But who needs ethics, or even laws, when you’re a Supreme Court justice?

The impunity is repugnant.

Yet, the Court is hardly powerless. It’s on a rampage to repeal many aspects of settled law that particularly offend religiously conservative Christians.

With the collapse of ethics and credibility at the Supreme Court and a traditional gridlock stalemate between the House and President Biden, local panjandrums dream of national decision-making glory. In reality, The Democrats, winning election after election, are rapidly emerging as the epicentre of national power. It’s largely due to the unrelenting, highly unpopular right-wing offensive against abortion access with which Republicans are heedlessly charging off a political cliff.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-10/a-flirtation-with-china-won-t-rock-the-saudi-us-marriage?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l

The diplomacy agreement with Iran announced in Beijing wasn’t a threat to America’s position in the Middle East.

The relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia has been written off countless times since it began just after World War II. We are in another such moment. Last weekend, OPEC+, led by the Saudis, moved to oil lower production and raise global prices again. A few days later, Saudi Arabian and Iranian officials in Beijing announced an agreement to potentially restore diplomatic relations, with Chinese facilitation.

Although many have declared the oil cut an affront to Washington, government officials said the US was informed in advance; behind the scenes, there isn’t so much objection to the new Saudi pricing targets, which are between $80-$90 a barrel. This situation bears no resemblance to last October, when Washington genuinely was surprised by an OPEC+ quota cut and recriminations on both sides ensued.

Still, last year’s kerfuffle was quickly resolved, as Saudi Arabia was proven correct that there wouldn’t be a price surge for Western consumers. And in recent months, Washington and Riyadh quietly ramped up security cooperation, especially regarding a new strategy of containment and deterrence against Iran.

Aha, the doomsayers say, but what about Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic outreach to US rivals and adversaries? Isn’t that obvious evidence of a crisis? Not if you know what to look for.

Saudi Arabia has expanded cooperation with China, highlighted by a visit from President Xi Jinping to Riyadh last December. That event produced scores of agreements for cooperation on a wide range of issues, including artificial intelligence, sustainable energy, joint investments and, especially, infrastructure projects reminiscent of China’s Belt and Road initiative.

This outreach to China is an excellent example of Saudi Arabia playing a long game as it emerges more authoritatively onto the world stage as the leader of the OPEC+ oil cartel and the most influential Arab, and arguably Sunni Muslim, country. The Middle East is entering a multipolar era, and Saudi Arabia is maneuvering to find its place in this new reality.

Washington understands this and, indeed, sees benefits in these evolving arrangements, that it anyway cannot prevent. Despite the huge range of commitments, Saudi Arabia was extremely careful not to agree to anything that violates the fundamental American red line — basically, don’t do anything that gives China an undue strategic foothold in this crucial region.

The US cannot stop China from seeking relations with Gulf countries that go beyond buying and selling energy. And Washington has an interest in its regional partners breaking up the increasingly strong Iran-China relationship.

What about this week’s Chinese-brokered agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia? The Chinese role is actually welcome, because Tehran won’t talk to Washington. The Joe Biden administration has been promoting diplomacy over confrontation, and has welcomed the rapprochement. There is no reason a reduction in regional tensions should be a problem for the US. To the contrary, it could even help prompt badly needed dialogue, however indirect, between Washington and Tehran, as well as an end to the war in Yemen.

Much the same applies to Saudi Arabia’s recent outreach to the dictatorship in Syria. The two countries may restore diplomatic relations soon, and Saudi Arabia might invite Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to the next Arab League summit, this May in Riyadh. The US may not be delighted with this — Assad is a murderous tyrant Washington has long wanted out of power — but there is no other way forward for countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that have security interests in Syria, but (unlike Iran) have no troops or armed proxies there.

Saudi Arabia is spreading its wings, but it’s doing so within a US umbrella. And it’s being very careful not to challenge the fundamental partnership with Washington. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the US is increasingly recognizing that security control of the three key waterways around the Middle East (the Red Sea, Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf) and the three crucial choke points (the Suez Canal, Bab al-Mandab and the Strait of Hormuz) is one of the most significant American competitive advantages in great power competition with China.

The US-Saudi partnership has survived the 1973 oil embargo, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and countless disputes over oil pricing and production, most recently in 2013 and, on a smaller scale, last October. That’s because both sides need each other and neither has a plausible alternative.

The specifics of the relationship are being readjusted for a new strategic reality, as they have several times before. Yes, OPEC+ could produce more tensions over oil pricing and production in the coming months. But, for now, the US-Saudi partnership is fundamentally sound and very likely to remain robust.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/04/07/donald-trump-court/

This is probably not the last such experience in a courtroom for the former US president.

On Tuesday, Americans were presented with a remarkable split screen of former president Donald Trump sullenly submitting to the indictment process in New York and his familiar raging, furious performance before his closest friends and advisers back at his hotel in Florida. After 50 decades of living in a grey zone of legality, taking full advantage of the myriad ways in which US law avoids punishing wealthy, white-collar defendants for financial offences and resorting, in the end, when necessary, to paying fines, Mr Trump’s fuzzy bookkeeping habits appear to have finally caught up with him.

Mr Trump’s final posting on his bespoke social media network, Truth Social, captured his disbelief and outrage: “Heading to Lower Manhattan, the Courthouse. Seems so SURREAL — WOW, they are going to ARREST ME. Can’t believe this is happening in America. MAGA!”

In the courthouse, though, the only words he spoke, reportedly softly, were “not guilty”, in response to 34 felony counts involving false financial reporting in furtherance of a range of other alleged crimes.

It was fully anticipated that Mr Trump would face charges related to $130,000 in payments made by his former lawyer and self-declared “fixer” Michael Cohen to the former adult film actress Stormy Daniels to ensure her silence a few weeks before the 2016 presidential election. But it also includes similar payoffs of $150,000 to former model Karen MacDougall who also says she, like Ms Daniels, indulged in an extramarital affair with Mr Trump. That, too, came as no surprise.

However, District Attorney Alvin Bragg did present an unexpected theory that could significantly strengthen his case. The two hush-money payoffs could be tricky to turn into convictions. Defence attorneys will likely argue that statute of limitations has passed. And such payoffs for silence are, on their own, not illegal. Even the bookkeeping fraud charges alone constitute misdemeanours, and would often not be prosecuted.

But, as expected, Mr Bragg is insisting that all 34 counts involve felonies because, under New York law, financial misrepresentations in furtherance of separate crimes rise to the level of felonies punishable by up to four years in prison. Mr Cohen, for example, was sentenced to three years in prison for the payoffs he insists were at the behest of Mr Trump. There is no doubt that he made the payoffs and that Mr Trump subsequently over-reimbursed him, including for taxes the fixer would have incurred in the process.

But Mr Trump’s lawyers have many potential arguments to counteract Mr Bragg’s assertions that the former president and his “fixer” were engaged in de facto unlawful campaign contributions or other underlying felonies. They could, for instance, try to argue that Mr Trump routinely made such payments to alleged former lovers throughout his career to protect his reputation and family, and that therefore these payments were routine reputational hygiene rather than covert campaign contributions.

Mr Bragg’s surprising addition to the charges that argue the bookkeeping fraud was pursuant to second crimes (often federal ones, further weakening his argument), is to insist that these financial misrepresentations were also intended to break serious New York State laws, primarily state tax regulations. The District Attorney insists that participants in the scheme, including Mr Trump and Mr Cohen, had mischaracterized the true nature of the payments for unlawful tax avoidance purposes, a felony in New York.

These tax allegations give Mr Bragg’s case a largely unanticipated safety net, whereby his state tax-avoidance allegations are more secure from the numerous potential weaknesses of his hybrid and untested state/federal campaign finance violation charges. If all else fails, in other words, he’s got an excellent chance of winning on state tax-avoidance issues with few, if any, of the problematic complications of the anticipated charges.

The most sobering part of Mr Trump’s day in court may have come from the realisation that this may well not be the last such experience in the coming months. Mr Bragg’s case has been widely viewed as significantly weaker than potential prosecutions of Mr Trump in Georgia for alleged election tampering and at the federal level for the January 6 uprising and attempted coup. Even the purloined “documents case” – often despaired of because classified documents were also found in the possession of President Joe Biden and former vice president Mike Pence – has reportedly been strengthened with new evidence.

According to The Washington Post, significant evidence suggests that even after all government and classified materials were subpoenaed, Mr Trump personally went through his boxes to try to keep some items in his possession unlawfully. Evidence is stronger than ever that he may have instructed one of his valets to move the boxes after the subpoena was received for similar purposes. Furthermore, texts and emails also help illustrate the key aspect of the case: clear evidence of intent to frustrate the government and obstruct justice. One of the strongest of these threads is potential testimony that Mr Trump allegedly showed these documents and maps to potential donors to impress them.

So not only does Mr Bragg’s case seem stronger than anticipated, even as the classified documents potential charges join the January 6 and Georgia cases as serious legal vulnerabilities facing the former president. Mr Trump was also admonished by the judge in New York to “refrain from making statements that are likely to incite violence or civil unrest”.

Nonetheless, in his enraged speech in Florida, the former president said he was facing “a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family,” and singled out the judge’s daughter for special criticism. Both of Mr Trump’s sons also denounced the daughter by name and with photos in angry social media posts. Over time, Mr Trump is going to have to learn to control himself or find himself in serious jeopardy of incarceration, despite the judge’s statement of commitment to free speech, especially for political candidates.

Meanwhile, Democrats continued to rack up practical political victories as Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz defeated former state Supreme Court justice Daniel Kelly, meaning that liberals finally ended 15 years of right-wing control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. This will have colossal impacts ranging from abortion rights to election procedures, including the 2024 presidential election, in a crucial swing state.

Images of Mr Trump sitting in the dock and then raging, surrounded by his closest supporters at his Florida hotel, don’t merely contrast with each other. They present a remarkable irony for a candidate who spent so much of his 2016 campaign encouraging chants of “lock her up, lock her up”, referring to his opponent Hillary Clinton. Who is on the way to getting locked up now?

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/04/03/netanyahus-attempt-to-reform-israels-judiciary-is-bringing-the-occupation-home/

A new extremist Israeli political majority is, in the meantime, dividing America’s  support for Israel along partisan lines.

The uproar in Israel over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s effort to transform the judicial system is accelerating trends reshaping US-Israel relations. But it is also integrally related to the occupation Israel maintains over millions of Palestinians. These two threads interweave in a complex pattern that poses serious challenges to Israel, the US and the Palestinians alike.

From its founding, Israel touted itself as “the only democracy in the Middle East”. This was never true. It was only for a few years in the mid-1960s, after martial law for Palestinian citizens of Israel was lifted and before the occupation began in 1967, that most Arabs living under Israeli rule were not systematically excluded from the most basic democratic processes.

Since 1967, Israel has ruled over millions of Palestinians who have no access whatsoever to the government that controls them. They live side-by-side with Israeli settlers, but under completely different legal systems and with all aspects of life separate and radically unequal.

There are few, if any, socio-political systems in the distinctly repressive Middle Eastern region that are more oppressive than those Israel maintains over Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Yet the occupation has become almost invisible to most Jewish Israelis. It has not been a factor in an Israeli election in ages, as if the only related issues worth talking about involve Jewish settlers and settlements.

There is the occasional flash of anxiety about violence in, or coming out of, the occupied territories, but most Israelis appear confident this problem is effectively under the control of the military, with the grudging co-operation of the Palestinian Authority security forces.

But whether such a sanguine attitude about holding some 5 million people in subjugation with little prospect of any meaningful change is rational, most Jewish Israelis have also become blind to another dangerous, albeit very different, threat posed to them by the occupation.

Israelis typically take pride in their democracy, which for Jewish citizens has been vibrant and impressive and which the demonstrators are trying to protect. But the Arab citizens, about 18 per cent of Israel’s population, not to mention the millions of Palestinians iving under occupation, have been excluded to one degree or another from this democracy.

Israel, especially with no end in sight for the occupation, cannot honestly be described as a “democracy”. It would instead be better categorised as an “ethnocracy“ – the rule of one ethnic group over another – or at least a restricted “Jewish democracy”.

The unstated assumption among Israelis since 1967 has been that they can manage the occupied territories and Palestinians living there on a completely separate, parallel track to their own Jewish democracy inside Israel – even when extended to the settlements or wherever a Jewish Israeli happens to be in the occupied territories – without any damaging cross-contamination.

Most Israeli analysts have ignored the occupation as a factor in Mr Netanyahu’s attempt to redefine Israel’s Jewish democratic system and would probably dismiss this contention. Yet from an Arab perspective, it seems obvious that decades of repression, lawlessness and arbitrary governance in the occupied territories have served as an indispensable foundation on which the attempted attack on judicial independence rests.

It is not just a matter of angry, and at times violent, Palestinian responses to Israeli repression. It is also the impact that maintaining this system has had on the attitude of Jewish Israelis about the nature of political power.

All this comes as most religiously and politically liberal Jewish Americans are being systematically alienated by concomitant efforts from Mr Netanyahu’s coalition to exclude large numbers of them from the Jewish fold under Israeli law. They are also exasperated with Israel’s increasing abandonment of a two-state solution and embrace of eventual annexation.

US President Joe Biden, in opposing the judicial overhaul effort, said the Israelis “know my position” and, more pointedly, “the American Jewish position”. Obviously, Mr Biden does not speak for all Jewish Americans, particularly not the religious conservatives many of whom generally support Mr Netanyahu’s coalition. But he’s accurately speaking for most mainstream Jewish Americans, who are firmly rooted in the Democratic Party and feel increasingly alienated by these extreme religious and chauvinistic policies which seem to represent a new Israeli majority.

From its outset, the cornerstone of Jewish-American lobbying for Israel has been to prevent the issue from becoming partisan, ensuring both parties support Israel. But that seems to be happening now, as Republicans and their evangelical Christian base are increasingly supportive of the theocratic and annexationist Israeli right. They are joined by religiously conservative Jewish constituencies, but the large majority of Jewish Americans are Democrats, liberals and increasingly alienated from Israeli government policies.

Slowly and quietly, the premier Jewish American pro-Israel lobbying umbrella, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – better known as Aipac – is aligning with Republicans, including from the much-hated Donald Trump faction.

It appears that the founding image of Jewish-American pro-Israel lobbying – support for the country turning into a partisan issue in the US and therefore vulnerable to election outcomes – may now be virtually irreversible and only likely to intensify.

None of this, unfortunately, is good news for Palestinians. New finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, at a recent speech in Paris – from a podium draped with a flag showing Israel including not just all the occupied Palestinian territories but all of Jordan as well – thundered that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people”. In just a few months, he has clearly demonstrated far more interest in annexation than finance. If he and his ilk can turn such dangerous provocations into Israeli policies, they won’t hesitate.

The Israeli demonstrations that forced Mr Netanyahu to pause his attempted judicial changes do not seem to have prompted much reconsideration of the impact of the occupation on their own political culture. But, at least in theory, these throngs ought to provide a base with which the Palestinians, who lack their own effective national leadership and policies, can finally begin to purposively re-engage.

Unfortunately, the next serious test for all parties may come only when the violence brewing in the West Bank eventually erupts into another sustained revolt, potentially providing Israeli extremists with plausible rationalisations for annexation and expulsion. History is distinctly discouraging. And Washington – whether controlled by alienated Democrats or pro-annexation Republicans – may be more uninterested than ever in stepping into the breach.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/03/31/could-trumps-indictment-could-work-in-his-favour/

The former president’s arrest will whip up his base – but most Americans will be turned off.

For the first time in US history, a former president will face criminal indictment. The grand jury convened by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on Thursday voted to indict Donald Trump regarding hush money payoffs to an alleged former paramour.

Mr Trump has shattered so many norms in his political career – including being the only president to have been impeached twice and to have refused to recognise his electoral defeat and instead attempt to overturn the constitutional system to remain in power – the political and historic significance of this latest breakthrough may be lost in the shuffle. But that would be a significant mistake.

2023 had been acquiring a powerful odour of 2016 regarding Mr Trump’s latest bid for party leadership and a third consecutive Republican presidential nomination. But the indictment adds a very different dimension.

The former president reportedly welcomes the indictment and has even contemplated the televisual optics of surrendering to the traditional Manhattan “perp walk,” in which the indicted individual is paraded, handcuffed, before the media and marched into the courthouse. Cooler heads in his own camp, and certainly in Mr Bragg’s office, will undoubtedly prevail, and he is likely to have an uneventful surrender and quick processing next week.

Nonetheless, Mr Trump is undoubtedly convinced that this indictment, which he appeared to welcome in numerous statements in recent days, will strengthen him politically. And this highlights the noteworthy elements of 2023 that are arguably similar to and distinct from 2016.

Once again Mr Trump appears to be the unstoppable candidate despite obvious trepidation from party leadership. He has been consistently gaining ground against his only plausible opponent thus far, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Mr DeSantis, who has not even announced his candidacy, has demonstrated the impossible dilemma facing Republican leaders who wish to defeat Mr Trump but feel unable to directly criticise him by name because of his deep popularity with the party faithful. So, while the former president has been criticising and mocking Mr DeSantis, the Florida governor has barely uttered Mr Trump’s name. Therefore, Mr Trump’s lead has been consistently extending.

Overt opposition to his candidacy is coming from two very weak sources. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie is unabashed in bashing Mr Trump, but he is not exactly a potent political threat. Similarly, some programmes and hosts on Fox News Channel have proven distinctly hostile to Mr Trump, but others remain loyal. And the channel as a whole has proven more than willing to ultimately give its audience what it wants, including if that means consciously, deliberately and systematically lying to them. Again, Mr Trump has little to fear.

The Trump campaigns in 2023 and 2016 both pulled the party to the right, or at least exposed and empowered an ultra-right-wing faction that had been leaderless and largely powerless since the end of the Second World War. But in 2023 clearly Mr Trump is pulling his party in a much more dangerous direction, one overtly hostile to the American political system and democracy.

He has openly called for the “termination” of the Constitution to allow him to remain in power, has fully embraced the January 6 prisoners awaiting trial for sedition and other offences during the assault on Congress, and has vowed “retribution” against all those he feels wronged him or his followers.

Trump 2023 is considerably more radical than Trump 2016 or 2020. And he appears to be pulling the Republican Party with him, particularly in the House of Representatives. And he not only faces no significant opposition, he appears to be pulling away with the nomination at this extremely early stage with no plausible obstacle in his way.

It is into this morass that the criminal indictment comes. He has threatened “death and destruction” if he is charged with a crime, but that is empty hyperbole. Given the aftermath of January 6, only lone wolf terrorists, not furious mobs, are imaginable albeit highly unlikely.

Instead, what he hopes to do is use this indictment and other possible charges – for election tampering in Georgia And at the federal level for prolonging documents and attempting a coup – to amplify his victimhood and intensify his supporter’s hatred of the government and all major US national institutions.

There is every danger this will indeed work within the Republican Party base. But it will surely further alienate him from the suburban and swing voters who decide national elections. It is yet more good news for President Joe Biden’s re-election chances.

For far-right wing Republicans who already despise government, these probably multiple indictments and forthcoming trials will solidify rancid narratives about a non-existent corrupt “deep state” and various “rigged” systems. And it will probably spread and deepen those paranoid delusions within the party itself, including both the base and elected officials.

But as the 2000 general election and, even more, the 2022 midterms demonstrated, running on these narratives can win a lot of votes but not a lot of elections.

As for the charges themselves, the hush money payment plot doesn’t seem as strong as the Georgia election interference or January 6 coup plot cases. But Mr Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen who actually made the payments at his behest pled guilty to virtually the same charges and was sentenced to three years in prison. So, the case is clearly both precedented and plausible.

If Mr Trump and his supporters imagine that it will strengthen his image with the general American public to be put on trial for having authorised and subsidised hush money payments to an “adult film actress” for a sexual liaison, they are delusional.

It doesn’t help that Mr Trump denied any affair with Stormy Daniels on the grounds that she “wasn’t his type”. Or that he claimed he didn’t know anything about the $130,000 payment. Or that he then said that perhaps he did know about it, but never ordered Mr Cohen to make the payment, despite having secretly and allegedly unlawfully reimbursed him.

Mr Trump likely faces at least one or two more indictments in the coming months. The Republican base may rally around him, but most Americans are unlikely to be impressed with the facts of the hush money case, whatever the trial’s outcome. And Mr Trump will be remembered, on top of everything else, as the first former US president to face a major criminal indictment.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/03/06/email-leaks-in-the-american-media-underlie-the-absence-of-moderate-republicans/

Fox deliberately lied to its audience, but that same audience isn’t hearing anything about the emails proving it.

The US is being rocked by one of the worst political scandals in its modern history, yet the essential constituency remains blissfully unaware. The trove of Fox News emails uncovered in the lawsuit by Dominion Voting System, the election technology company, as I recently explained in these pages, reveal, apparently irrefutably, that Fox News Channel’s executives and star personalities deliberated and consciously misled their vast audience about the outcome of the 2020 election.

While privately mocking the notion that US President Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump through massive fraud, both hosts and guests insisted – and still maintain – that the outcome is in serious doubt. The rift between Republican “red” and Democratic “blue” America is being severely exacerbated as right-wing audiences remain largely unaware they have been systematically deceived.

Although this is an unparalleled media scandal, Fox has refused to cover it at all, implicitly because anything it says can still be used against it by Dominion. But that ensures that at least a large part of its own audience remains unaware of being intentionally misled, as the overwhelming evidence seems to prove.

And it’s not just Fox. Its right-wing cable television competitors – the very upstarts that Fox apparently feared could capture its market share if it did not feed its right-wing audience the disinformation they apparently believed it craved as a matter of “respect” – aren’t covering it either. Newsmax and One America News, and most major right-wing websites, are avoiding the topic altogether. In the right-wing echo chamber, only the upmarket and well-informed readers of the Wall Street Journal – also owned by News Corp, Fox News’s parent company – are being entrusted with these revelations.

This episode is not merely illustrative of the bifurcated landscapes – informational and imaginary – and presumed baseline realities, cleaving right and left America. It is deepening it considerably. A victory by Dominion is likely to be regarded as rigged and phony, much in the same way that Mr Biden’s election was, by the rank-and-file of the political right, if they ever hear of it at all.

Considerable ink has been spilt explaining the proactive ways in which political disinformation, particularly on the right, beginning with the talk radio craze of the 1980s, shattered a supposedly shared set of fundamental political reference points defined, above all, by the network evening news programmes. As channels and programming proliferated in the US, it is widely and convincingly argued, audiences have been increasingly self-selecting and self-segregating into homogenising echo chambers. The internet proved the last straw, as algorithms – which are designed to maximise user engagement by social media platforms – fed viewers increasingly shrill propaganda, rewarded with ample jolts of dopamine.

That might be a cliched narrative, but it accurately summarises what happened. And by now the US news media and audiences are divided neatly in twain. One giant camp is not only being lied to but, Fox apparently believed, is demanding to be aggressively misled as a form of twisted political representation but is not hearing anything about how and why that happened. Meanwhile, the rest of public-affairs consuming Americans are looking on in dismay.

Most analyses of how and why the Republican Party has become so extreme in recent years have focused on the takeover of the party by traditionally fringe elements. But the Fox scandal suggests that an even more significant factor has been the concomitant disappearance of liberal and even centrist Republicans.

The key inflection points were probably the failed effort to impeach former US president Bill Clinton and the “tea party” response to the election of former US president Barack Obama. The mainstream of the party leadership, and Fox News itself, enthusiastically promoted the growth of such extremism for political and financial profit, only later to discover it was and remains completely beyond their control.

They couldn’t stop the presidential nomination of Donald Trump in 2016, although they tried, and their increasingly ham-handed efforts to promote Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as an alternative to him for 2024 have yet to look any more effective.

All this created a reactionary echo chamber in which populist outbidding, pandering and absurd theatrics are automatically rewarded, so that in merely two years a talentless mediocrity such as Republican congresswomanMarjorie Taylor Greene could rise to power, prominence and prestige in the House of Representatives purely on unmatched stridency.

Because there have long been no rewards for Republican moderation, especially on Fox programmes, it now no longer exists. As the emails demonstrate, Fox ended up chasing the audience it created down an endless rabbit hole of reactionary disinformation and extremism.

Lowest common denominator appeals of the Republican right have been consistent since at least the end of the Second World War. The first is sexual and gender anxieties, currently expressed through book banning and outlandish fears of “grooming” in public schools. The second go-to is racial hysteria, now embodied in campaigns to police the teaching of history in the name of opposing Critical Race Theory.

That’s very old wine in slightly updated bottles. But what’s now missing is any discernible voice of centrism and moderation.

The contrast with the Democrats is striking. Under Mr Biden, the party centre has fended off continuous efforts by the progressive left to push the agenda too far, most recently with his pledge not to veto a Republican-led effort to overturn changes to Washington’s criminal code. And by sticking to the centre, Democrats are consistently winning.

Conventional wisdom held that only a series of dramatic political defeats could rescue the Republican Party from its freefall into ever greater extremism. But despite exactly such a cascade of debacles following 2016, no self-regulating moderation is emerging. But if Fox and its right-wing media competitors and Mr Trump and his Republican opponents insist that the 2020 vote was “stolen,” the most significant of those defeats can be dismissed as “fake news”.

In his first two years, Mr Biden accumulated legislative victories that will allow him to spend the next two years of his presidency cutting ribbons at major infrastructure and other spending projects creating new working-class jobs and opportunities. He will be making the case, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that he’s really delivering on the renewed “greatness” Mr Trump only promised.

He’s betting Republicans can be won over through good governance despite appeals to sexual or gender phobias and cultural anxieties. The 2024 election should prove a fascinating test of Mr Biden’s theory, but only if mostRepublican voters ever learn about any of it. Don’t bet on that.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/02/27/bidens-middle-east-policies-place-a-premium-on-collaboration/

Partnerships with allies – even if to pursue different motives – plays a central role in US policy to the region.

In a speech at the Atlantic Council in Washington last week, White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Brett McGurk outlined an emerging “Biden doctrine” that “guides US engagement” in the Middle East. Any declaration which is that sweeping deserves to be carefully unpacked.

Mr McGurk outlined “five declaratory principles,” effectively restating much of what was already laid out in the National Security Strategy issued in October 2022. These five principles are partnerships, deterrence, diplomacy, integration and US values.

Both the McGurk speech and the NSS begin with partnerships, evidently to emphasise the centrality of collaboration for the Biden doctrine in the Middle East.

The Ukraine war has helped the Biden administration and most serious strategic thinkers in Washington to reconsider the strategic importance of Southwest Asia to US foreign policy. Energy exports from the Gulf region and the three key waterways, the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea and the Arabian Gulf, plus their three key chokepoints, the Suez Canal, Bab Al Mandab and the Strait of Hormuz, are unmistakably central to any global regime of stability, security and prosperity.

Washington’s role as the guarantor of maritime security and unimpeded international access to these arteries that carry so much of the lifeblood of the global economy is now viewed as a key asset for imperatives ranging from maintaining what is left of the beleaguered rules-based global order to great power competition with China.

The Biden administration deserves credit for recognising, particularly after the invasion of Ukraine, not only the centrality of this region to the US global posture but also the centrality of local partners in realising such security and stability. The equation drawing the US close to its Gulf Arab and other Middle Eastern partners is no longer anything resembling “oil for security” – if, indeed, it ever was that. Instead, on both sides, it is increasingly viewed as a partnership necessary to achieve mutual goals even if they are being pursued for different reasons. That is a lot more like the US relationship with its Nato partners, Japan or South Korea.

Therefore, while the 1980 Carter Doctrine held that the US would use all means to prevent any outside force to gain control of the Arabian Gulf region, the Biden doctrine pledges that the US will “make sure those countries can defend themselves against foreign threats,” and “will not allow foreign or regional powers to jeopardise freedom of navigation through the Middle East’s waterways.” The greater shift towards burden sharing and mutuality is evident, even though the Biden administration maintains it “will not tolerate efforts by any country to dominate another – or the region – through military buildups, incursions or threats.”

Co-operation such as the maritime surveillance and security projects being overseen by the US Navy’s Task Force 59, which are heavily reliant on regional partners, recognise that Gulf Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE have emerged as mid-level regional, and to some extent international, powers. This new emphasis on partnerships provides Washington’s Middle East allies ample scope to, for example, develop much greater ties with China without threatening the overarching strategic relationship with the US, as long as those measures don’t provide Beijing with an undue strategic foothold in the region.

Moreover, the emphasis on partnerships promotes closer bilateral and multilateral relations among traditional US partners, most obviously the Abraham Accords between a number of Arab countries and Israel.

Mr McGurk was quick to add deterrence to the list and left no doubt this primarily concerns Iran. With nuclear talks having broken down, Washington has been quietly developing a new regime of containment against Tehran that seeks to restrain its destructive regional activities and prepare for any Iranian sprint towards nuclear weapons construction.

Yet he emphasised the administration’s commitment to diplomacy, which is serious. However, Mr McGurk and many other key officials, including the president, participated in the two Obama administrations and appeared to have learnt key lessons about the limitations of how much American goodwill can achieve in the face of implacable opposition.

The fourth principle is integration, which may be the biggest innovation of Mr Biden’s Middle East approach. Mr McGurk claimed the US is at last developing “an integrated air and maritime defence architecture in the region.” Regarding air and missile defences, this crucial goal appears to remain largely aspirational, though some limited progress is being made. But the administration is right to believe that such a system is crucial to the national security of many of its regional partners, not least Gulf Arab countries. More integrated regional infrastructure is surely the best way to give the current climate of de-escalation in the Middle East more staying power by providing incentives to avoid conflict and confrontation.

The fifth principle of values rightly comes last. It is not that the US does not want, or even try, to promote its values. But major efforts to emphasise that, whether by force when the George W Bush administration invaded Iraq or maladroit efforts by the Barack Obama administration to create a new dynamic between the US and the Arab and Muslim worlds, ended up looking phony and misguided, respectively, and in both cases wholly ineffectual.

The Biden administration is wise not to over-promise on promoting values it cannot realise in practice, while reiterating that Washington does, in fact, believe what it preaches. Indeed, the Biden doctrine crucially recognises several key realities: the centrality of partnerships to achieving plausible and necessary goals in the region; traditional partners emerging as regional actors in their own right in the context of a developing multipolar reality; and that diplomacy and integration provide the greatest opportunity for advancing security and stability.

The emphasis on partnerships, integration, and diplomacy promote burden sharing and in time should allow the US to right-size its regional force posture and do more with less. Much of the current configuration is a legacy of the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. It doesn’t correspond to most present-day missions and threats and appears more of a relic of a bygone era.

The “Biden doctrine” may not be an innovation or even much of a doctrine. But it is serious and sound. That is probably as much as anyone can hope for. Given the fate of more ambitious Middle East policy agendas by recent administrations, less is decidedly more.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/02/21/how-the-us-right-got-trapped-in-lies-about-the-2020-election/

Republican politicians feared their voters in exactly the same way Fox feared its viewers with both ending up beholden to preposterous falsehoods.

Since the rise of Donald Trump, there has been a mystery about how and why so many otherwise respectable, seemingly intelligent and well-informed, Republicans could embrace his preposterous fabrications. A new trove of emails reflecting top-level behind-the-scenes conversations at Fox News Channel, the highest-rated US public affairs network, illustrates in vivid and deeply disturbing detail the process that produces a deliberate embrace of falsehood over basic and objectively verifiable truth. Now we know.

The lessons go far beyond Fox. It is an excellent roadmap of the process through which most Republican leaders refused to challenge the worst of these falsehoods, especially the “big lie” that the 2020 election was somehow “stolen” from Mr Trump. The cynicism and corrupted groupthink at Fox News has reflected in Congress and state houses around the country. It has left most of the US right detached from reality and beholden to a preposterous fairytale that is highly damaging to the country and corrosive to democracy.

The emails exposing the systematic dishonesty at Fox were obtained by Dominion Voting Systems, which makes the voting machines used in much of the country. Dominion is suing Fox for defamation because of the barrage of false accusations made by guests and hosts on the company’s flagship programmes. To this day, Fox’s most significant shows – Fox and Friends in the morning and the evening primetime troika of Sean Hannity, Laura Ingram and Tucker Carlson – routinely promote a wide range of conspiracy theories, often targeting Dominion, purporting to explain that Mr Trump won the election.

But what the company, which has probably become nonviable because of this crude defamation, has already achieved through its $1.6 billion lawsuit is: irrefutably establishing that the Fox hosts and officials knew perfectly well that such claims were ridiculous and privately disparaged many of the regular guests as lying. But at the same time, they insisted that the network must “respect” the audience by telling it what it wants to hear rather than what the organisation knows full well to be true. That is much closer to disdain than respect.

Hosts and guests on the network routinely claimed that Dominion was founded or controlled by Venezuela and Cuba, and that its machines could be “hacked” and “rigged” to “flip” vast numbers of votes from Mr Trump to US President Joe Biden. None of this is true, or even possible.

In the White House then-attorney general William Barr, among many other officials, strongly warned Mr Trump these claims are outlandish. He later testified that he worried that, because he seemed to take such interest in them, the former president was losing touch with reality.

Even more significant, though, are the insights into why a self-described “news” network would base so much of its programming on incendiary untruths. The emails demonstrate that the Fox News anchors and executives were fixated on ratings (and thus advertising revenue), and virtually panicked when large chunks of the Trump-adoring fan base began turning the channel after it correctly predicted Mr Biden’s victory in Arizona.

As Fox’s ratings dropped and its tiny but even more extreme and Trump-obsessed competitors, Newsmax and One American News, rose, emails between the network’s stars and executives show they quickly concluded that their all-important audience was not interested in verifiable truth, but was actively seeking comforting, reassuring and reinforcing falsehoods, especially denying or at least casting doubt on the fact that Mr Biden soundly defeated Mr Trump.

And they noted that the more they focused on conspiracy theories about the election, the more their audience returned to them. So, they decided to provide the audience what they crave, no matter how absurd. It is the antithesis of news and a quintessence of propaganda.

Moreover, the emails demonstrate that Fox News’s movers and shakers were actually afraid of their audience. And undoubtedly the same calculation was obvious to Republican officials and candidates in Congress and state houses around the country. A few may be fanatical, conspiratorial or just plain gullible to believe such absurdities. How could Mr Biden wrongly and so many Republicans rightly be elected on the same ballots if they were fraudulent? Why would Democrats cheat to secure the White House but not give themselves a majority in the Senate? In the main, they appear to have followed the same logic about their voters as Fox officials did about their viewers.

Some Republican voters believe the “stolen election” mythology because they heard it from Mr Trump, from Fox News and the others, and from their own elected officials (who, at the very least, did not try to disabuse them of this delusion). Mr Trump and his allies moved quickly to make election denial a litmus test to distinguish “real Republicans” from “Republicans in name only” (the detested “Rinos”). And they demonstrated during the midterm election that they can still decide most Republican primaries although, with a few scattered and rare exceptions, purveyors of the big lie lost in the general elections.

Now it has become a self-reinforcing mythology of totemic proportions. Over the weekend, Republican voters in Michigan – where Democrats secured complete control of the state for the first time in many decades in the midterms – doubled down on the outlandish by selecting Kristina Karamo, one of the US’s most vociferous election deniers to be their state party leader. She defeated a slightly less enthusiastic election denier who was endorsed by Mr Trump and the party leadership.

Allowing for scatterings of oddballs and conspiracy theorists, there is no doubt that Republican officials and leaders followed the same path into absolute dishonesty that the Dominion lawsuit email trove demonstrates Fox leaders did.

Most alarming is the spread and casual acceptance of a complete fabrication. It is one of the surest signs of the emergence of authoritarian political systems whether of the left or the right. But the Fox email trove demonstrates exactly how and why the US political right has become a solar system guided by one gigantic lie and orbited by countless smaller ones. That’s a catastrophe not just for the Republican Party, but for the whole country.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/02/14/how-to-honour-close-friends-after-their-death/

Interacting with Colin, Blake and Pratip illuminated the intersection of the personal and political registers.

Over the past 12 months, I lost three friends, each of whom had a profound impact on my life, thinking and career. But behind my grief and survivor’s guilt I think I can discern some valuable lessons about what one can learn from the most interesting people we meet and how crucial it is to look past superficial foibles. I owe each one of them a considerable debt of gratitude.

The first loss was hardly unexpected. On April 25, 2022, Colin Cavell passed away from complications of diabetes. He was a close friend in graduate school at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and proved especially loyal and warmhearted. I found Colin fascinating immediately because in the early 1990s he already seemed a figure from the mythic past, almost like seeing a pterodactyl swoop by, as he was a committed member of the Communist Party USA. Until I met him, I thought that organisation was long gone.

He appeared a walking contradiction. Here was an all-American guy oozing the Cajun charm and gentility of his native Baton Rouge, Louisiana. With his moustache, boots, overcoat and hat, he might’ve been a stagecoach driver out of another mythic past. Yet he was the proud owner of the collected works of Marx, Lenin, Engels, Mao and even Stalin.

No one worked harder to rename the UMass library after the great African-American scholar WEB Du Bois. My friends and I successfully nominated him for the UMass Chancellor’s Award for Multiculturalism in 1996. When accepting the award, however, he made the assembled dignitaries sit through an endless Leninist harangue worthy of Fidel Castro. It was simultaneously hilarious, excruciating and tedious.

Colin went on to teach at the University of Bahrain’s American Studies Center from 2002-2011. In October 2008, he arranged for me to be the keynote speaker at the Center’s 10th anniversary. Neither the end of the Cold War nor the many decades following the collapse of the USSR shook his baffling Marxist-Leninist convictions. He never budged an inch.

Since Colin’s health had been deteriorating for several years, his death was saddening but unsurprising. But I was utterly shocked when Blake Hounshell died by suicide by jumping off of the Taft Bridge in Washington DC on January 10. He was just 44, and among the most talented American journalists of his generation. He was editor of the New York Times‘ ‘On Politics’ newsletter, but I had gotten to know him earlier as managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

Blake spent several years in Egypt studying Arabic and working at the Ibn Khaldun Centre for Development Studies. As Blake and his mentor, Susan Glasser, were brilliantly reinventing Foreign Policy, I had numerous lunches with him. One of them gave rise to a short and provocative article in June 2012, asking whether the then-ongoing Arab uprisings were worth it – a question that eventually became far more widespread.

Blake was a rare American journalist with a deep understanding of the Arab world and a reliable voice of reason on the Middle East. His tragic death is a loss not just for his family and friends, colleagues and readers, but also for better understanding of the Arab world in the US.

On January 26 came the sudden and shocking passing of Pratip Dastidar. He was definitely the most intelligent person in my own age cohort I ever met (we were exactly the same age), and had a tremendous influence on my life and career. 

We became extremely close in 1990, during the buildup to the first Gulf War, in campus activism and journalism at UMass. We worked closely together at the Third World affairs page in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian newspaper and the “Voices of the Third World” programme on WMUA radio station originally hosted by another close friend, Madanmohan Rao, and later by me.

It wasn’t Pratip’s ideology or political orientation that struck me so deeply. Indeed, his specific views were somewhat ephemeral. He could flip from what seemed to be the far-left to what most would consider the ultra-right without batting an eyelid, although his Indian nationalism and pro-Palestinian commitment remained consistent. His pronouncements often seemed calculated to produce an effect more than stake out a passionately-held claim.

However, watching him analyze and almost clinically dissect another person, an event, or a development was a masterful seminar. He had an uncanny ability to size up his audience, and especially his opponent, no matter how small or large the group and the topic at hand, identify the weak spot and strike at the jugular with the sudden speed of a king cobra. He was a master of psychology, always probing for the emotional rather than the logical or factual vulnerability on the other side. I watched him regularly stun practiced and well-prepared interlocutors into dumbstruck silence and, on many occasions, obnoxious opponents into tears.

Yet, beneath the (sometimes sadistic) interpersonal ferocity and ideological malleability lay a wealth of invaluable insights for those who could withstand the tempest. Like another of my closest friends, the late, great contrarian Christopher Hitchens, Pratip wasn’t always right. Indeed, in my view both of them were often wrong. But their analytical prowess and rhetorical genius turned long, late-night conversations into methodological and stylistic master classes.

Pratip was unexpectedly diagnosed with stage four brain cancer and died just a few weeks later. With him goes a pile of books I am sure he was going to write, and that I am furious I will never get to read. We seriously discussed co-authoring a volume on the changing nature of work, productivity and human fulfilment.

Interacting with Colin, Blake and Pratip illuminated the intersection of the personal and political registers.

Colin’s ideological passion made his seeming contradictions all the more fascinating. Blake was the first editor to bring out the best in me as a writer and translate conversations into publications.

Many of my formative political experiences were shared with Pratip. Working with him trained me to analyse a political problem and act with effect, but also what to avoid. He often said our campus activism taught us almost everything we needed to know for our later life and careers. He was right, and working with him was a major part of that invaluable extracurricular training.

Losing friends who were also our teachers is exceedingly painful. The best I can do going forward is to honour their legacy through writing that faithfully reflects these lessons.