Iran’s Cheap Political Propaganda

The Iranian regime is playing a cynical game against its people demands. After violent crackdowns on protestors and failed attempts to silence chants in Iranian streets against the mullah’s regime, the Iranian authorities announced that they will be reviewing the hijab law, which became obligatory for all women in Iran in April 1983. In this week’s article, Suzan Quitaz discusses the mixed messages received by foreign media from Tehran officials on dismantling the morality police and abolishing mandatory hijab. She highlights the consequences of such a decision, if truly taken, on the protesting minorities and the impoverished people of Iran, who have been calling for the end of the theocratic regime.

In a historic visit to the Arab region and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Chinese President Xi got a grand reception in Riyadh on December 8, where signs of strengthened relations and further future partnership between China and the Arab world, are sent from Saudi Arabia. Motasem Al Felou writes about the implications with regards to the timing and its global context, focusing on both Saudi and Chinese keenness on fostering their cooperation for the sake of a balanced world.

In a new step demonstrating Saudi support for Yemen, KSA launched a comprehensive economic, financial and monetary reform program, technically supervised by the Arab Monetary Fund. Ahmed Taher details the aspects of Saudi support in the face of the terrorist Houthi group and its allies, in an effort to restore stability and complete the constructive steps that had begun after the implementation of international resolutions and Gulf initiative plans.

As the World Cup 2022 competitions are heating up, Sarah Gamal sheds the light on the unprecedented scene of a woman referee taking the field for the first time in men›s World Cup history.

In the Culture Section, Bryn Haworth writes about the German melancholic writer W.G. Sebald being an ideal reader of his works. Read these articles and more on our website eng.majalla. com. As always, we welcome and value our readers’ feedback and we invite you to take the opportunity to leave your comments on our website.

A Weekly Political News Magazine www.majalla.com/eng

Editor-in-Chief

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The Editor Mostafa El-Dessouki

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

napshot

‘Get well soon’ Pele

Brazilian fans hold a banner showing the Brazilian soccer legend Pele with the message ‘Get well soon’ during the World Cup round of 16 soccer match between Brazil and South Korea, at the 974 Stadium, in Doha, Qatar, Monday, Dec. 5, 2022. /AP

napshot

People view seasonal illuminations on display to celebrate the upcoming Christmas and the New Year holidays at Beirut Souks in Lebanon has been .2022 December 04 ,downtown Beirut, Lebanon struggling with compounded crises for nearly two years, including the economic and financial crisis and the explosion at Beirut›s port.. EPA

Christmas at Beirut Souks

EGYPT

Egypt's annual urban consumer in ation rate rose from 16.2 percent in October to 18.7 percent in November, the country's Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) said Thursday.

The in ation hike in November marks the highest increase since December 2017, when it reached 21.9 percent.

Egypt's annual headline in ation rate rose to 19.2 percent in November 2022, compared to 16.3 percent in the previous month.

LEBANON

A Lebanese prosecutor said on Thursday she had ordered security forces to bring in for questioning a Lebanese actress for whom central bank chief Riad Salameh was suspected of buying luxury property using ill-gotten gains. The order issued by Judge Ghada Aoun is part of an ongoing money laundering and embezzlement investigation against Salameh, Aoun told Reuters, adding that the actress - Stephanie Saliba - had not been charged with any crime.

Saliba did not immediately respond to a social media message requesting comment. Reuters was unable to reach her via phone.

SAUDI

Saudi Arabia ties with a series during a visit one with tech King Salman partnership lavish welcome partnerships The Chinese Prince Mohammed him with a in Arab ties.

SAUDI ARABIA

Arabia and China showcased deepening series of strategic deals on Thursday visit by President Xi Jinping, including tech giant Huawei.

Salman signed a "comprehensive strategic partnership agreement" with Xi, who received a welcome in a country forging new global partnerships beyond the West.

Chinese leader held talks with Crown Mohammed bin Salman who greeted warm smile. Xi heralded "a new era" ties.

UAE

The leader of the United Arab Emirates made a surprise visit on Monday to Qatar as it is hosting the World Cup — his rst since leading a yearslong four-nation boycott of Doha over a political dispute that poisoned regional relations.

IRAQ

French President Emmanuel Macron has invited Iraq's prime minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani to a meeting in France early in 2023, Macron's o ce said in a statement on Sunday following a phone call between the two leaders.

Macron said the two leaders have agreed to reinforce bilateral cooperation between France and Iraq and that France would help Iraq in its ght against terrorism and attacks on its sovereignty.

IRAN

Confusion over the status of Iran’s religious police grew as state media cast doubt on reports the force had been shut down. Despite the uncertainty, it has appeared for weeks that enforcement of the strict dress code has been scaled back as more women walk the streets without wearing the required headscarf. The mixed messages have raised speculation that Iran’s cleric-run leadership is considering concessions in an attempt to defuse widespread anti-government protests that are entering the third month.

A WEEK ACROSS

CUBA.

U.S.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -China wants stabilized relations with the United States in the short term as it faces domestic economic challenges and push back in Asia to its assertive diplomacy, White House Indo-Paci c coordinator Kurt Campbell said on Thursday.

Frustrations over China's strict COVID-19 protocols boiled over into widespread protests last month, the biggest show of public discontent since President Xi Jinping came to power in 2012.

The United States is barring some top Cuban players from participating in the upcoming World Baseball Classic, Cuba’s deputy foreign minister said Wednesday, the latest in a series of disputes over a sport loved by fans in both countries.

Cuba had several players in the past monthwho in recent years ed the Caribbean island long known for its baseball talent, askedto represent their home country at the World Baseball Classic in March 2023. Others volunteered themselves. Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio called the development a “positive move” that marks a change of tone in a country that has long branded “defected” athletes as traitors who have deserted their home country.

GERMANY.

German authorities expect further arrests and raids in the coming days in connection with a far-right group that prosecutors say were preparing a violent overthrow of the state to install a former member of a German royal family as national leader.

"Based on my experience, there is usually a second wave of arrests," Georg Maier, the interior minister of the eastern German state of Thuringia, told broadcaster Deutschlandfunk on Thursday.

ACROSS THE WORLD

UKRAINE

Time magazine named Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy 2022's "Person of the Year" on Wednesday, saying he inspired Ukrainians and won global accolades for his courage in resisting Russia's devastating invasion.

Refusing to leave Ukraine's capital of Kyiv at the outbreak of the war as Russian bombs rained down, the former comedian rallied his compatriots in broadcasts from the capital and traveled across his war-torn nation, the publication noted in bestowing its annual title. On Tuesday, Zelenskiy visited Ukrainian troops near the front lines in eastern Ukraine.

CHINA. INDIA.

India, a leading importer of fertilisers, is seeking investment from global companies as the nation works to build storage for the crop nutrients, fertiliser minister Mansukh Mandaviya said on Wednesday.

As many Chinese embraced new freedoms on Thursday after the country dropped key parts of its tough zero-COVID regime, there was mounting concern that a virus, which had largely been kept in check, could soon run wild.

Three years into the pandemic, many in China had been itching for Beijing to start to align its rigid virus prevention measures with the rest of the world, which has largely opened up in an e ort to live with the disease.

Those frustrations boiled over into widespread protests last month, the biggest show of public discontent since President Xi Jinping came to power in 2012.

Iran’s Cheap Political Propaganda

A review of hijab law does not answer the demands of the people

By Suzan Quitaz

On Saturday, December 3rd , after struggling to quell the protests, the Iranian authorities announced that they will be reviewing the hijab law, which became obligatory for all women in Iran in April 1983, which was four years after the Islamic Revolution that overthrew the U.S-backed Shah monarchy.

Speaking on Saturday at an event at Qum about “outlining the hybrid war during recent riots,” and commenting on the Hijab issue, Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri said, “We know you feel anguished when you witness [women] without a hijab in cities, and do you think the officials would be silent about it? As someone who is dealing with this issue, I say that both the parliament and the judiciary are working on it. For example, just yesterday we

A newspaper with a cover picture of Mahsa Amini, a woman who died after being arrested by the Islamic republic’s “morality police” is seen in Tehran, Iran September ,18 2022. Majid Asgaripour/ WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

had a meeting with the cultural commission of the parliament, and you will see the results within the next week or two.”

To begin with, there were a number of ambiguities in Montazeri’s statement, it could possibly be interpreted as an end to the morality police but may also indicate that the judiciary wants to disassociate itself from this force. However, that did not stop many Western media outlets like the BBC and the Wall Street Journal from falling victim to the Iranian regime’s disinformation propaganda and start reporting that the “Gasht-e Ershad,” or “Guidance Patrol,” has been abolished until afterwards when the media were forced to backtrack.

State-affiliated media outlets ISNA and Al-Alam, an Arab language state-funded channel, strongly denied that Gasht-e Ershad has been shut down, saying that the Interior Ministry oversees the force, and not the judiciary. Al-Alam also blamed international media for miss-interpreting Montazeri’s words as “a retreat on the part of the Islamic Republic from its stance on hijab and religious morality as a result of the protests.”

With respect to the issue of the ongoing nationwide protests, Iranian officials as well as state-affiliated media still maintain that foreign influences are behind the street protests, which they refer to as “riots.” Iran blames the US and its allies, Britain, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iranian Kurdish opposition groups based in Iraqi Kurdistan like Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK) and Komala, for carrying out operations inside Iran to destabilize the country.

The idea of a mandatory headscarf law came into being shortly after the Mullah regime came to power in 1979. On February 1st of that year Khomeini returned to Iran after many years in exile. On International Women’s Day, March 8, 1979, tens of thousands of Iranian women marched in the street, protesting against the implementation of the law. By April 1983, the bill became a law and all Iranian girls and women were legally obligated to wear the headscarf in public. The law applied even to Iran’s non-Muslim minorities and female foreigners visiting Iran.

Criminal punishment for those breaching the mandatory headscarf law was introduced in the 1990s and ranged from fines to imprisonment for repeated offenders. The morality police, known formally as the

Gasht-e Ershad, was established by Iran’s Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution at the beginning of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rule. The first morality police patrols began in 2006 in order to “spread the culture of modesty and hijab.”

The ‘reviewing of the headscarf’ should not be seen as an indication that theocratic-authoritarian regime in Tehran is softening its position or listening to the demands of the protesters. The people of Iran are demonstrating against authoritarianism and demanding an end to the 43-year tyranny of the Mullahs. It should be well noted that they are chanting “Death to the Dictator” and not ‘Let’s review Hijab Law.’

Let us assume that the regime will report back in two weeks’ time, as it promised, and decides to abolish the morality police. While this would be welcomed as a “goodwill” gesture by some Western governments and some Iranians, the majority of Iranians would not see it as a triumph. This is especially true in those regions where the most intense and persistent protests are taking place, and happening primarily in Iran’s marginalized ethnic communities, such as the Kurdish region and Baluchistan. Compared to the central parts of Iran, those peripheral regions are having higher rates of death and arrest of protesters. David Romano, Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University, writes “The Kurds face a disproportionate amount of repression from the regime. We know that roughly half the political prisoners and executions in Iran are Iranian Kurds when they are less than 10% of the population”.

Speaking to Majalla, Khalil Nadri, the spokesperson of PAK, explains why Kurds, Baluchi and Iran’s other ethnic minorities rose up, “we want all identities

The morality police, known formally as the Gasht-e Ershad, was established by Iran’s Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution at the beginning of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rule.

over story

(Kurdish, Baluch,

Arab and

to achieve their common goal, which is to end a suzerain state and a totalitarian and occupying system. There is an attempt by the Persian-speaking media to conceal the reality of non-Persian nations. This is a continuation of the betrayal of these nations for 100 years. The whole world must know that Iran is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-sectarian country. Freedom means that each of these different groups can express their existence and have equal rights.”

“With or Without the Hijab, we’re going to over-

throw the Regime”

Mandatory or non-mandatory hijab is irrelevant for Iran’s ethnic minorities, they were equally as oppressed and discriminated under the secular rule of Shah. Mr. Nadri suggests that we look back to one hundred years ago, to the time when the socalled modern Iranian state was established and Reza Shah become its first king. One of the first measures the Shah of Iran took was to attack the Kurds in north-eastern and south-eastern Kurdistan. Mr. Nadri explains that, “The process of Iranization of Kurds and other ethnic minorities began. Or rather, to dissolve the Kurds within the Persian identity.”

It may not be known to many that Amini was the first women in the entire Islamic Republic of Iran to lose her life because she supposedly breached the country’s mandatory headscarf law. That is not saying that before Amini, Iranian women weren’t harassed by morality police or jailed and charged with breaching hijab Law. Doctoral candidate Rojin Mukriyan, who specialized in Kurdish politics, says, “For Iran, killing Jina (Zhina) was a way for them to kill two birds with one stone. First, it sent a strong message to all women in Iran that the regime is willing and ready to massacre all the women in

Azeri, Persian,

Turkmen)

“The whole world must know that Iran is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multisectarian country. Freedom means that each of these different groups can express their existence and have equal rights.”

Women wearing head coverings walk along a street in the center of Iran’s capital Tehran. (Atta Kenare/AFP)

Iran if they do not comply with compulsory hijab law. Secondly, targeting a young woman from an ethnic minority would cause no harm to the regime of Iran, but it would bring more fear and obedience among the people, especially the ethnic minorities.”

Dr. Mukriyan continued, “The Kurds have been at the receiving end of absolute enmity by the Iranian regime and Persian nationalists. They have been treated as being insufficiently human to count as a

distinct political grouping.”

The interview finished with Mr. Nadri stating his belief that Amini was killed for being a Kurd and a woman, and adding, “the truth is that the main burden and the biggest cost for the uprising has been on the shoulders of the Kurds and Baluchi. The Kurds are proud to have launched the uprising.” The protests are continuing across Iran and, in reaction to the regime’s so-called review-of-hijab law, protesters across the Kurdish region and Baluchistan held major rallies chanting anti-regime slogans: “Death to Khamenei,” “Kurds and Baluchis are brothers and they hate Khamenei” and adding a new one “with or without the hijab, we’re going to overthrow the regime.”

The demonstrations began after Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian of Kurdish origin, died in custody (AFP)

The ‘reviewing of the headscarf’ should not be seen as an indication that theocraticauthoritarian regime in Tehran is softening its position or listening to the demands of the protesters.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting with a group of students in Tehran, Iran November 2, 2022. Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/REUTERS

Politics

A New Silk Road from Riyadh to Beijing

Towards a More Balanced World

By Motasem Al Felou – Jeddah

In April 1999, the airplane carrying the then Prince of Riyadh, now King, Salman bin Abdulaziz, landed in Beijing responding to an invitation by the Mayor of the Beijing Municipal People’s Government. The Saudi delegation in-

cluded a group of senior Saudi officials specialized in infrastructure along with a trade group. As the Saudi Crown Prince, King Salman followed his first visit with a second one in 2014 when he was welcomed by the incumbent Chinese President Xi Jinping and four strategic agreements were signed. Prince Mohammed bin

Salman, accompanied his father on that visit, as he was the Chief of the Crown Prince’s Court, before ascending to be the Crown Prince and Prime Minister.

That visit was significant for the new Saudi rulers, particularly for the Crown Prince who was introduced to the Chinese leadership and felt their willingness to move forward with deepening the bilateral relations and extending the ties beyond trade. It marked the beginning of close personal relations that has had a political impact.

China was the world’s top importer from KSA in 2021 at $51 billion (nearly one sixth of Saudi budget revenues or spending in the same year), making China the most prominent partner for Saudi Arabia. On China’s part, it is the top buyer of Saudi oil (although there are other low-price exporters such as Russia), which means that KSA is the most valuable and credible energy supplier for China. While Saudi Arabia deems the economic factor a pivotal part of its foreign relations, isn’t politics the other side of the economy? If political relations aren’t stable, bilateral trade, technical and military cooperation will not thrive.

In his current visit to Riyadh, the Chinese President Xi got a grand reception as he was welcomed by the Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, in a reflection of the warm bilateral ties.

The Chinese President wrote an article for the Saudi Al-Riyadh newspaper to highlight the deep historical ties between both countries. Citing Chinese travelers’ journeys to the Arabian Peninsula in ancient times, President XI recalled the historic Silk Road that extended from China to west Asia and Europe. He pointed to solidarity and cooperation with the Arab and Gulf community, with particular focus on the strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia, describing Gulf countries as the “energy tank” for the world.

Here’s an analysis of the Chinese President’s visit, which is his second one to the country, after a series of official Saudi visits to China. What are the Saudi-Chinese messages implied by this visit? What are the reasons of holding two joint, Arab and Gulf, summits during the visit?

BETWEEN INDEPENDENCE AND IMPOSING AGENDAS

Saudi-Chinese relations are equitable, where both parties enjoy equal status and no agendas or ideologies are imposed. Neither of them harbor a specific ideology to lead the world. Hence, the absence of intervention in each countries’ domestic affairs have largely contributed to boosting relations.

Since the visit was announced, Western political and research circles started to criticize the move and expressed fears over its implications and results. For example, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy published an article on December 7, detailing the US and Western concerns over the strengthened Sino-Saudi partnership. These concerns are focused on nuclear and military cooperation, and the “strained” SaudiAmerican ties. The article mentioned the missile deal of 1988, and the building of a drone facility in Riyadh in 2017. It also highlighted President Biden’s visit to the Kingdom five months ago, when he told assembled Arab leaders, “We will not walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia, or Iran ... [T]he U.S. is not going anywhere.” The article’s authors, Simon Henderson and Carol Silber, commented that this week’s events will test Biden’s pledge.

Such rhetoric is no longer successful. Imposing agendas and values on other countries, deemed

Xi pointed to solidarity and cooperation with the Arab and Gulf community, with particular focus on the strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia, describing Gulf countries as the “energy tank” for the world.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman welcomes Chinese President Xi Jinping in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia December 2022 ,8. Saudi Press Agency/Handout via REUTERS

Politics

less civilized by the West, won’t help in building stable and scalable relations. In fact, Saudi Arabia will only accept mutually equitable foreign relations.

The recent fierce Western criticism against Saudi Arabia signaled the arrogance of the West. Conversely, China has refrained from any intervention in other countries’ domestic affairs.

The Gulf peoples, particularly the Saudis, have

sensed the ease with which friends of the United States may be abandoned. Didn’t the former US president say China should guard the Bab alMandab Strait because it is the primary customer for Gulf oil, and the United States no longer requires Gulf oil and route protection? The oil markets have changed dramatically as a result of American shale oil, and Saudi Arabia only sells a small amount of oil to the United States. Joe Biden also continued criticizing Saudi Arabia, claiming that it has made American lives difficult by raising oil prices!

By comparison, in his article published in AlRiyadh, the Chinese president focuses on the “Millennia-old Friendship and Jointly Creating a Better Future,” which is also the article’s title. In bilateral relations between Saudi Arabia and the Arabs, there is a new spirit, a new language, and a remembrance of shared values and a rich history.

The use of the phrase “China-Arab community with a shared future in the new era” also highlights a new language in which China addresses the Arabs from the heart of Saudi Arabia, emphasizing the Chinese and Arab shared values,

The timing of the Sino-Saudi summit, along with other two Gulf and Arab summits, reaffirms Saudi Arabia’s growing political and economic weight, as well as its importance in shaping the future of ArabChinese relations.

HRH Crown Prince and President of China Hold Session of Official Talks and Witness Exchanging of a Number of Bilateral Agreements and MoUs between the Two Countries (SPA)

Dec. 2022 ,8. (Saudi Press Agency via AP)

history, present, and future. This friendly discourse brings comfort to the Arabs. It contrasts with the Western rhetoric, which promotes a different system of values that may not suit Arabs in some details, and uses those Western values as a compass for Arab-Western relations, as if the relations only go in one direction, without respecting the Arab values and culture.

Thus, the timing of the Sino-Saudi summit, along with other two Gulf and Arab summits, reaffirms Saudi Arabia’s growing political and economic weight, as well as its importance in shaping the future of Arab-Chinese relations. It also emphasizes Riyadh’s pivotal role in the Arab decisionmaking process and in guiding the Arab relations with the Chinese dragon.

SINO-SAUDI RELATIONS

Although cooperation between both countries began in the late 1930s, formal diplomatic relations were established between the Saudis and the Chinese in 1990. Over the years, China has gradually pushed the West out of first place in the trade partnership of the two countries.

Since 2007, China has maintained a Contact Office of Chinese Companies (COCC) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. According to the office’s CEO, Wang Xiaofeng, the number of Chinese companies operating in KSA has increased to around 200.

Indeed, Chinese conglomerates such as Huawei, Alibaba, Sinopec, and others have headquarters or representative offices in Saudi Arabia in order to take advantage of additional opportunities.

Furthermore, the Saudi Cloud Computing Company (SCCC) launched its services in June as a result of a Chinese-Saudi alliance that included both Alibaba cloud computing companies (which promised to pump half a billion dollars into the Saudi market within five years), the Saudi Telecom Group, Arabia Capital, as well as the Saudi Company for Artificial Intelligence and the Saudi Information Technology Company.

In the same vein, Ajlan bin Abdulaziz Al Ajlan, President of the Federation of Saudi Chambers, told the Saudi Press Agency that “China is KSA’s primary trading partner, and the two countries have strong economic and historical ties, where-

Chinese President Xi Jinping, left, shakes hands with Saudi King Salman, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Thursday,

as the volume of trade exchange increased by 37% in 2021 to 304.3 billion riyals ($81 billion), giving KSA approximately 26% of China’s foreign trade with Arab countries as China’s largest partner in West Asia and North Africa.” The volume of goods imported and exported between the two countries was 358 billion riyals ($95.5 billion) from January to October 2022, reflecting the strength and diversity of trade between the two countries.”

Majalla recently met a Chinese researcher (who preferred to be called John) in an Arab capi-

tal, and he says: “China sees Saudi Arabia as a key pillar in its efforts to strengthen ties with the Arab world. Starting this year, I anticipate that trade between the two countries will exceed $100 billion. Although the trade balance favors Saudi Arabia, the opportunities for Saudi and Chinese companies are numerous between the two countries.”

Because numbers are the most accurate predictors of commercial performance, the figure of 1.2 trillion riyals ($320 billion) represents the volume of trade exchange between the two countries between 2017 and 2021. As a result, it is a clear indication of unprecedented growth across a wide range of trade and industry sectors.

Furthermore, Saudi Arabia is an important part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which focuses on trillions of dollars in infrastructure investments. During this visit, Saudi companies signed agreements totaling 110 billion riyals (approximately $29.4 billion), all of which aim to improve trade exchange, with the results to be revealed in stages.

CULTURE AND TOURISM

Culture is an important component of Sino-Saudi relations. Xi Jinping, the Chinese President, quoted a hadith from the Prophet Muhammad,

Culture is an important component of Sino-Saudi relations. Xi Jinping recalled the many Arab and Chinese travelers throughout history, who provided fertile material for stories and creative imagination.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, left, is greeted by Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, after his arrival at Al Yamama Palace, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Thursday, Dec. 2022 ,8. (Saudi Press Agency via AP)

saying, “Seek knowledge even if you have to go as far as China,” recalling the memories of the many Arab and Chinese travelers throughout history, who provided fertile material for stories and creative imagination.

Furthermore, approximately 40 Chinese universities teach Arabic language and literature, while four Saudi universities teach Chinese, and Chinese has become an optional subject in eight Saudi elementary schools.

“Kong Xiaoxi and Hakim,” which was coproduced by China and Saudi Arabia.

The need to introduce Arab and Chinese cultures has become necessary, as Arab and Chinese cultural consumers are unfamiliar with the each other’s country. Drama, theatre, and the activation of a translation campaign are critical to strengthening Sino-Saudi relations and possibly producing a cultural economy between the two countries, which is an area where investments can be directed.

On the other hand, Saudi Tourism Minister Ahmed Al Khateeb stated last October that he was “hoping on Chinese tourists” to boost tourism in Saudi Arabia.

Improving destination promotion between the two countries inevitably contributes to increased tourism output and deeper people-to-people relations between the two countries.

A Chinese tourist once told Majalla, “I desperately want to return to Al-Ula region. The magic there is unstoppable.” So, when will there be a greater influx of Chinese tourists to KSA, given that KSA already receives 140 million Chinese tourists each year?

The Chinese president also praised the animation series

China’s President Xi Jingping arrives in the Saudi capital on an official visit. (SPA)

Two Saudi Arabian children look at the poster for the animation series Kong Xiaoxi and Hakim, Feb ,22 2017. [Photo/Xinhua]

Saudi Support for Yemen

Development and Reconstruction in Yemen: A Leading Saudi Role

By Ahmed Taher

In a new development, Saudi Arabia took a step late last month to support the Yemeni economy by launching a comprehensive economic, financial and monetary reform program, technically supervised by the Arab Monetary Fund. At a cost of one billion dollars, this reform program would cover the period 2022-2025.

This in turn represents a link in a long chain of Saudi support for Yemen, not only economically, but also politically, and at the security and military levels. This support is made in the face of the terrorist Houthi group and its allies, in an effort to restore stability and complete the constructive steps that had begun after the im-

plementation of international resolutions and Gulf initiative plans.

In order to shed light on this Saudi initiative in support of the Yemeni economy, this report reviews the objectives and the significance of this step through three axes that reflect, in essence, the scope of the Saudi vision in its political, economic and development support for Yemen.

THE ECONOMIC REFORM PROGRAM:

The main objective of the reform program launched by the Kingdom to support the Yemeni economy continues to be represented by working to establish the founda-

Sponsored by Saudi Arabia, the Arab Monetary Fund signed a 1$ billion agreement with the Yemeni government to support an economic, financial and monetary reform program. (SPA)

tions of its economic, financial and monetary stability, in addition to strengthening the state’s public finances and external position, rebuilding its institutions and enhancing its governance and transparency.

This is in addition to the program’s endeavor to achieve a number of sub-goals, the most prominent of which are the following:

- Promoting inclusive and sustainable economic growth and job creation, which leads to putting the Yemeni economy on a more sustainable path, advancing economic and social development, and reducing unemployment and poverty rates.

- Strengthening the financial position of the Yemeni government, developing the financial and banking sector, creating an enabling environment to enhance the role of the private sector, and involving it in the process of sustainable economic development.

In light of these main objectives, the program is launched through a package of economic reform priorities, including:

- Reforming the state’s public finances, developing self-generated public resources, controlling and rationalizing government spending, enhancing its efficiency and governance, and directing it to urgent priorities.

- Rehabilitation of vital infrastructure in the electricity, water and roads sectors.

- In the financial and banking sector, the program seeks to work on developing the system of banking governance and supervision in a way that enhances transparency and accountability, enhances financial inclusion, in addition to supporting digital financial transformation.

- Developing the private sector so that it assumes its position as a main engine for comprehensive and sustainable economic growth and the creation of productive job opportunities.

The Saudi Program for the Development and Reconstruction of Yemen:

It is without exaggeration to say that it is very difficult to talk about Saudi support to Yemen without touching on one of the most important development programs in the world, as this program was established by royal order from King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in 2018 when he drew up a development strategy for the program.

Taking into consideration three aspects, the first is what serves the development plans and needs of Yemen. Second is the need for these plans to align with the global goals of sustainable development. Third is the need to take into account previous international experiences in development and reconstruction.

In this context, the program was implemented as a result of its signing by the Saudi and Yemeni governments according to a development agreement to work through three axes.

The first relates to technical content that aims to provide sustainable economic and development support in various fields for Yemen, with the aim of implementing development projects and programs that contribute to raising the level of basic services for the Yemeni people, providing job opportunities, developing infrastructure, contributing to building the capacities of Yemeni government institutions, raising the capacity of Yemeni society to absorb development loans and grants, and applying the highest standards of governance.

The second is related to the program’s partnerships, as this program works with a group of diverse partners at all levels – local, regional and international, governmental and non-governmental.

The third is related to the regions and sectors of development and reconstruction, as the program operates in various Yemeni governorates, and in seven different vital development sectors, namely, health, education, transportation, energy, water, agriculture and fisheries, and government institutions.

The main objective of the reform program launched by the Kingdom to support the Yemeni economy continues by establishing the foundations of its economic, financial and monetary stability.

Politics

In light of these three axes, during the past four years, from 2018 until November of this year, the program created more than 224 development projects and initiatives in 14 Yemeni governorates, with a total value of 917,217,200 dollars and a total number of beneficiaries reaching 14.6 million in the seven basic sectors, which made this program come fourth in the list of donor organizations to Yemen, which numbers 75 organizations.

It is worth noting that this program is one of other programs allocated by the Kingdom to support Yemen, as Yemen is the highest recipient of Saudi aid,

with a value exceeding $20.3 billion.

Yemen and Economic Reform: A Hostage to Completing Political Process

Several reports fill the media space whether printed or online with what happened regarding the start of implementing the reform program which was subject to the contract between the Kingdom and the Yemeni government.

The Kingdom has been keen to establish peace in Yemen through its diplomacy, to open many regional and international doors in order to end the Yemeni crisis, while preserving at the same time the principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of Yemen, as well as the principle of not abandoning the Yemeni people who suffer from the Houthi coup against the legitimate government.

It is the coup that thrust the Yemeni crisis into a dark tunnel after it had come close to reaching political understandings emphasizing the restoration of political security and stability in Yemen.

This is evidenced by the Kingdom’s steadfast strategy regarding the Yemeni crisis, which provides that the solution to the Yemeni crisis must be political, through agreements and understandings that bring

People browse through the rubble of a house destroyed by Houthi missile attack in Marib, Yemen, October 3, 2021. REUTERS/Ali Owidha

This is one of numerous programs allocated by the Kingdom to support Yemen, which is the highest recipient of Saudi aid, with a value exceeding $ 20.3 billion.

together the Yemeni people on a national vision far from external dictates.

The Kingdom has upheld its steadfast strategy which has not been altered even with the change of international envoys.

In Yemen, the Kingdom has maintained its extensive efforts to facilitate their tasks by dealing positively with their proposals aimed at restoring security and stability to the Yemeni state, which includes the various Yemeni factions, regardless of religious, sectarian, ethnic, or regional distinctions. This is the focal point of Saudi policy towards Yemen.

The Kingdom believes that politics and development are two inseparable and complementary processes, and realizes that the required economic reforms and development efforts will not bear the desired fruits for the Yemeni people if the Houthi group continues its political practices, military violations and terrorism.

This requires the international community to realize the fact that it is of great importance to exert more pressure on this group and its regional supporter by sitting at the negotiating table and adhering to the agreements that are made. Such agreements are preferable to maintaining a coup policy and returning to

a zero point, which wastes all the development and humanitarian efforts on which the Kingdom is keen in its policy with the Yemeni people.

In sum, the commitment of the Yemeni government to the comprehensive economic reform program, which is assisted in its implementation by the Arab Monetary Fund, represents a major pillar for it in its direction towards resolving the daily living crises that the Yemeni citizen suffers.

It behooves Yemen to conclude such development programs not only with the Kingdom, but also with various international and regional donors, as such cooperative programs aim to support efforts to reform the Yemeni economy with the aim of restoring the Yemeni state to the role and position it deserves.

An airport staffer walks through the rubble of a building destroyed by Saudi-led air strikes at Sanaa Airport in Sanaa, Yemen December ,21 2021. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah/File Photo

The Kingdom has upheld its steadfast strategy which has not been altered even with the change of international envoys.

Tensions Rise in As-Suwayda Following Anti-Government Protests

Developments demonstrate dissatisfaction with Assad’s rule over dire living conditions

By Jiwan Soz

Protests erupted a few days ago in the Syrian city of As-Suwayda, located in the country’s south. These protests are the most violent of the year’s sporadic protests in the city, which is home to the majority of the Druze community. These protests marked the first time that images of the Syrian regime’s leader, Bashar al-Assad, were burned after protesters demanded his ouster. What factors contributed to the escalation of these protests?

Circumstances have reached an unbearable level in the city of As-Suwayda, according to local sources and protesters who participated in the protests, which were interspersed by gunfire from security forces.

Fuel is not available there, rationed electricity hours are long, and transportation is almost non-existent. These are all reasons that led the population to demonstrate in the city for the fourth time in a row since the beginning of the current year 2022.

Demonstrators set fire to As-Suwayda provincial headquarters, known as the Government Palace, in-

Hundreds of people gathered Friday in the city of As-Suwayda in southern Syria to demand democracy and improve living conditions in a rare demonstration, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

(AFP)

furiating the regime’s Ministry of Interior, which labelled the protesters as outlaws and vowed to take legal action “against anyone who dares to tamper with the security and stability of As-Suwayda governorate and the safety of its citizens,” according to Ministry’s statement.

“The lack of basic services and the spread of unemployment and poverty prompted us to take part in these demonstrations,” a demonstrator near the government headquarters told Majalla, adding that “the security services confronted the protesters with bullets, especially when the governorate building was burned.”

There were no official statistics released on the number of people killed or injured by security forces gunfire, but according to Majalla sources, at least 18 people were injured, in addition to the deaths of a demonstrator and a police officer, while the Ministry of Interior accused “outlaws” of shooting at security forces and protesters alike.

DETERIORATING CONDITIONS AND POLITICAL DEMANDS

Although the main reasons for the As-Suwayda protests appear to be economic, the protesters also have political demands, as evidenced by their chants, which called for the overthrow of the Assad regime.

Armed movements in the country supported the demonstrations, including the Syrian Democratic Council, which represents the political umbrella of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and the armed Men of Dignity movement, a self-defense militia formed following the outbreak of the Syrian war to defend the As-Suwayda region.

Îlham Ahmed, a Syrian politician from the Democratic Union Party who is currently serving as co-president of the Executive Council of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, announced her support for the protesters’ demands. She blamed the Syrian regime for what happened in the governorate, which was repeated by a source in the Men of Dignity movement, who held the Syrian regime responsible for the deaths and injuries at the Assad regime demonstrations.

According to a source from the Men of Dignity movement, the reasons for the demonstrations are primarily due to the governorate’s poor liv-

ing conditions after the state abandoned its responsibilities for providing services. The movement, according to its official statement, held the regime responsible for the worsening conditions, particularly after the protesters were shot.

On the other hand, Fadel al-Khatib, a Syrian dissident from As-Suwayda who belongs to the Druze sect, commented on the protests, saying that: “The majority of As-Suwayda demonstration participants are young, and youth are usually the most affected segments of society by life’s difficulties.”

PROTESTING MATERIAL AND MORAL PERSECUTION

“The reasons for the demonstrations are the result of the combination of material and moral persecution, including: security chaos, the spread of Captagon pills (Fenethylline), Hezbollah’s infiltration into the province and attempts to convert people to Shiism, as well as the absence of the positive role of clerics and other Druze leaders. This is in addition to the high prices and the intelligence agencies’ alliance with all smuggling groups, the drug industry and trade, and the presence of dozens of armed factions ostensibly under a religious banner, but in practice following non-Druze financiers,” explained al-Khatib, who closely monitors the city’s news, told Majalla. “Other reasons for the demonstrations include a rivalry between dozens of armed factions, security chaos, the absence of the state, and the spread of extreme poverty,” al-Khatib continued, emphasizing that “for these and other reasons, hundreds of young men and women ‘exploded’ and demonstrated. The regime or the Russians then deploy their forces in order to absorb the ‘anger’ and prevent its continuation.”

Circumstances have reached an unbearable level in the city of As-Suwayda, according to local sources and protesters who participated in the protests.

Politics

NO INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT

“There is no international or local assistance that can be relied on to help the people of As-Suwayda or the Druze in general. The Druze rely solely on themselves in this region, but the regime was successful in recruiting many figures, particularly religious, social, and political, and neutralizing the majority of the people who lack strength of character such as the Jumblatt family in Lebanon. As a result, the Druze are orphans. Despite the fact that the Druze made up two-thirds of

Syrian martyrs against French colonialism, President Adeeb Shishakli bombed As-Suwayda and some of its villages a few years after the French were evacuated,” al-Khatib continued. “Historically, the Druze were at the forefront of forming Arab nationalist parties, and they played a prominent and major role in leftist parties, as well as being among the first ranks in ‘national’ wars fought in defense of the homeland. We all know what happened. After the 1963 Syrian coup d’état, when Assad the father arrested or assassinated all of his old Druze comrades, the majority of Druze officers were detained or killed,” al-Khatib added.

MARGINALIZED BY STATE

Al-Khatib believed that “the sacrifices the Druze made, or the size of its population and geographic area, had no bearing on the Druze’s role and status in managing state affairs, not even in AsSuwayda. Thus, I believe that religious culture and power monopolies are to blame. The Druze took part at the beginning of the 2011 revolution, and factions were formed under the banner of the Free Army. Dozens of them were martyred, before being fought by jihadist groups and forced to lay down their arms, like the majority of the

Smoke rises near a building as people take part in a protest in As-Suwayda, Syria, December 4, 2022. (Reuters)

“The Russian forces are not stationed in the governorate and its countryside, but they send contingents there when tensions arise, and they have been conducting weekly control patrols on the border with Jordan”

non-Islamic Free Army factions.”

THE PROTESTS MAY BE REPEATED

Al-Khatib did not rule out the possibility of further protests, saying that “they may be repeated, but Assad will absorb the protesters’ anger through his men in the governorate. However, the movement against him today cannot lead to overthrowing him, even if the youth movement would be able to attain some simple rights such as obtaining food and others.”

The security services in As-Suwayda detained a number of young men who had taken part in the city’s protests over two days earlier in the week. It should be noted that As-Suwayda has remained neutral in Syria’s military conflict for nearly a decade. Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, its young men have refrained from joining the regime’s armed forces. The number of these young men is estimated to be between 30,000 and 40,000, but other non-governmental sources put the figure closer to 60,000.

Last week’s protests were the fourth this year, and for the same reasons, as protesters are always calling for improving their economic conditions and the provision of basic services. Despite the regime’s repeated promises to im-

prove the situation in As-Suwayda, more than one protester told Majalla that the authorities did not provide any solutions to their problems, such as power outages and a lack of fuel.

The chants calling for overthrowing the regime’s president, followed by the burning of his pictures, marked a watershed moment in the protests, something the province had never seen before.

The shooting by security forces is the first of its kind in As-Suwayda. According to a local source, the shooting was in response to protesters torching the government headquarters.

RUSSIAN FORCES HAVE CROSSED THE CRISIS LINE

The Russian forces stationed in the As-Suwayda governorate attempted to enter the demonstrations, but their efforts were thwarted when the citizens of a town in the countryside expelled a Russian military detachment.

According to Majalla sources, the people of Al Thaala gathered in the vicinity of the municipality building and yelled at the Russian soldiers, describing them as occupiers and demanding that they leave the town immediately. The units withdrew from the town without escalation.

People hold placards demanding “freedom and social justice” as they gather during a protest in As-Suwayda, Syria, December ,4 2022. (Reuters)

“The Russian forces are not stationed in the governorate and its countryside, but they send contingents there in case any tensions arise. They have been also conducting weekly control patrols on the border with Jordan for two months to prevent drug smuggling,” a source from the town’s municipality told Majalla. According to information obtained by Majalla, the government intends to form a delegation from Damascus to the governorate to meet the protesters’ demands regarding services and living conditions.

CAUTIOUS CALM AFTER MASSIVE PROTESTS

According to local sources in As-Suwayda, calm

has prevailed in the city since last Tuesday, but most shops are closed and pedestrian movement is limited. In response to the protests, the government temporarily delegated the governorship of As-Suwayda to the governor’s deputy, Wael Jarbou, without officially dismissing the governor, who had sought refuge in Damascus.

In statements to local media, the deputy governor issued a statement about the financial damage caused by burning the government headquarters, noting that its maintenance requires “exorbitant” sums, as he put it.

THE DEPUTY GOVERNOR PLEDGES REFORM

The governorate of As-Suwayda announced on its Facebook page that it would continue to provide services “according to the available capabilities,” despite the building’s being damaged as a result of vandalism.

On the other hand, the deputy governor visited the burnt governorate headquarters and emphasized that work in the governorate to manage citizens’ affairs will continue despite the current state of the premises. He also pointed out that governorate workers have begun to remove the debris of the destruction, but this “will not discourage governorate workers from performing their duties.”

People gather as they take part in a protest in Sweida, Syria, December 2022 ,4, in this screen grab obtained from a social media video.

(As-Suwayda 24/via REUTERS)

Demonstrators set fire to the As-Suwayda governorate building, infuriating the regime’s Ministry of Interior, which labelled the protesters as outlaws.

ook Reviews B

“American Exceptionalism as Religion”

A Religious Basis for Nationalism

By Mohammad Ali Salih – Washington

Published just last month, the latest book about American Exceptionalism connects it to religion, a different approach from many earlier books that related the concept to foreign policy, history and social factors.

Titles of some of those books included: “American Exceptionalism: An Experiment in History;” “American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea;” “American Exceptionalism in the Age of Obama;” “American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization;”

“American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion;”

“American Exceptionalism Reconsidered: U.S. Foreign Policy, Human Rights, and World Order;” and, “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.”

As the last two book titles show, a few books were critical of the concept, and some were outright opposed to it.

This new book, “American Exceptionalism as Religion,” follows the steps of an earlier book that was published in 2015, “American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion,” which was written by John Wilsey, a Professor of Religion at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Wilsey wrote other religionoriented books such as: “One Nation Under God” and “God’s Cold Warrior.” The last one was about John Foster Dulles, U.S. Secretary of State during the early 1950’s, who was considered the father of the anti-Communist Cold War policies, and mostly because of his strong religious beliefs. He was quoted saying that religion was needed “not merely to save souls, but, also, to solve the

practical problems of international affairs.”

This new book, “American Exceptionalism as Religion,” was written by Jordan Carson, a Professor of Religion at Baylor University, Texas, and his major contribution is arguing that the word “religion” should not necessarily mean the established religious institutions, but, rather, a person’s spirituality that could stand by itself or supported by a higher spiritual authority.

The author argues that secular writer’s definition of “religion” has distorted the ideal of American Exceptionalism which is based on American religious roots. Ideas like those of Puritan John Winthrop, who wrote about a “City upon a Hill” in 1630 when religious beliefs – and deeds – were predominant.

As in the book about “American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion,” “civil religion” is defined in this book as more about a country than about God. It is a “political religion” with public rituals, symbols, national flag, heritage, monuments and historical battlefields. However, as has become clear, disassociating God from

Book: “American Exceptionalism as Religion: Postmodern Discontent”

Author: Jordan Carson

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Paper pages: 234 Paper: $34.95 Kindle: $29.95

these major aspects of life has been difficult – if not impossible. An example is the phrase “In God We Trust,” the official motto of the U.S., which has been on currency, postal stamps, public schools, car license plates, and in the oaths for taking a government office.

While the U.S. Constitution does not mention God, nearly all state constitutions reference either God or the divine. God also appears in the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance and the citizenship oath. Christmas Day is a federal holiday as well as a religious one.

On the other side, while there are no federal laws which forbid «religious insult» or «hate speech,» some states have blasphemy statutes that penalize such acts.

Recent public polls have shown a variety of reactions among the Americans about the role of religion: Religion should be kept separate from the government: 73 percent agreed.

The Church and other houses of worship should stay out of politics: 70 percent agreed.

Teachers should lead students in a form of prayer: 35 percent agreed.

Religious values should influence American laws: 51 percent agreed.

The U.S. should be a Christian nation: 45 percent agreed.

In his book, the author argues that American Exceptionalism “is a religion that shapes its adherents’ spiritual and political identities. But because many people view this exceptionalism as a political ideology, rather than a religion – or spiritual – one, many are blind to its powerful effects.”

The author adds that there should be a better definition of American Exceptionalism so as to avoid the secular “pernicious” effects. He calls for a spiritual definition that both avoids religious definitions and, at the same time, continues the centuries-old attempts to build the world-wide ideal -- the exceptional American creed.

The second part of the book’s title, “Postmodern Discontent,” refers to the interaction between nationalism and religion as shown in contemporary American literature.

The author argues that nationalist ideologies intersect with religious ones in contemporary literature, and have distorted the “purity” of American exceptionalism because they confuse the meaning of “religion.”

The author offers spiritual power as the basis of government, society and morality. He argues that defining religion according to secularist criteria has insulated both secular and religious ideas from public scrutiny.

The received definition of “religion” relates it to a “belief in a supernatural controlling power,” but there are differences in details – God or god? God or self? Organized or personal? Positive or negative (implying Satan)?

Moreover, a generally agreed definition of “spirituality” covers “religion” and beyond, meaning a person’s inner feelings that might not be rational or scientific – and might not be religious, just “secular.”

Recent neuroscientific discovery of brain functions during spiritual experience showed the presence of unconscious thinking, and opened the door for more exploration in the relation between the conscious and the unconscious.

Using these definitions, “American Exceptionalism” could be a religious belief connected to God, or a personal spiritual experience. But, like religions, it has its critics, as shown in one of the above-mentioned books: “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.”

“Civil religion” is defined in this book as more about a country than about God. It is a “political religion” with public rituals, symbols, national flag, heritage, monuments and historical battlefields.

ovies

A Panoramic Snapshot of a Rattled Confederacy Nearing Its Final Days

By Justin Chang

In March 1863, two months after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a Black man known as Peter (other accounts name him as Gordon) escaped a Louisiana plantation, endured 10 days in alligator-infested marshes and found his way to Baton Rouge, where he received medical attention and soon enlisted in the Union Army. His survival alone is an astonishing story, but what immortalized him was a photograph of the raised welts and scars crisscrossing his back, brutal evidence of a lifetime of whippings. The widely circulated image, variably referred to as “Whipped Peter” or “The Scourged Back,” is credited with fueling the abolitionist movement at a crucial Civil War midpoint, igniting the outrage of Northerners who had never seen the horrors of Southern slavery up close.

Director Antoine Fuqua and his star, Will Smith, reenact the shooting of that photograph toward the end of “Emancipation,” their swampy, sloggy action-movie treatment of Peter’s journey. Fuqua doesn’t show us the lashings that produced those

scars, leaving them to the imagination of an audience presumably acquainted with, and likely exhausted by, the many grueling depictions of racist violence in movies and TV series. The pointedly titled “Emancipation” means to focus on acts of physical and spiritual defiance, and it dramatizes the apparatus of chattel slavery primarily to show that apparatus being subverted or overthrown. Here, even a cotton gin can be repurposed as an instrument of resistance, albeit resistance of an especially cruel and painful kind.

Little is known about the details of Peter’s life, which serves the purposes of William N. Collage’s narrowly focused screenplay just fine. We first see Peter (Smith) kneeling in prayer just before he is separated from his family, thrown into a cage and transported from the plantation to a labor camp, where he and other male prisoners are forced to lay railroad track. The heat is unendurable, the work exhausting and deadly. But despite the scars on his back and the metal collar around his neck, Peter remains more alert and hopeful than the others. He’s overheard whispers that Lincoln has declared all enslaved people free and

that Union troops have made it to Baton Rouge, a blessing from a God he fervently believes in.

“Faith without works is dead,” a preacher intones early on, and Peter gives that Scripture its most righteously violent interpretation. Seizing his opportunity along with a shovel, he metes out some well-earned justice and flees into the bayou with three other men — Gordon (Gilbert Owuor), Tomas (Jabbar Lewis) and John (Michael Luwoye) — with whom he quickly parts ways, the better to improve their individual chances of finding their way to Baton Rouge and the Union troops stationed there. But Peter doesn’t just have to outrun his pursuers, who are led by the broodingly sadistic Fassel (Ben Foster) and armed with guns and bloodhounds. Over the course of his long, arduous journey he must also endure hunger and thirst, alligators and mosquitoes, sweltering heat and complicit plantation owners.

(“Runner!” a young white girl screams, chillingly, when she spies Peter racing past.)

It’s easy enough to see what drew Smith to the role of a man who became a vivid icon of suffering and resilience. He has a fondness for dramatic physical transformations and tricky accents (this version of Peter is Haitian-born),

and here he obscures his handsome features, if not his natural charm, with a clenched underbite and wrinkled, sun-splotched skin. Pain and self-sacrifice come all too easily to Smith’s characters, as evidenced by various tortured psychodramas running the qualitative gamut from “Hancock” to “Seven Pounds.”

And I suspect, given the actor’s public declarations of faith, that he felt some affinity for a character who wears his Christianity on his ragged sleeve, prays before consuming a precious meal of honey and at one point turns a cross necklace into a weapon.

“Emancipation” means to focus on acts of physical and spiritual defiance, and it dramatizes the apparatus of chattel slavery primarily to show that apparatus being subverted or overthrown.

Will Smith, left, and Ben Foster in “Emancipation.”

(Quantrell Colbert/ Apple/TNS)

ovies

Smith gives the solid, easily sympathetic, sometimes rousing performance you’d expect, even if what’s called for here is less a nuanced feat of acting than a forceful display of sweat, blood and endurance. And “Emancipation,” like more than a few cinematic endurance tests, labors hard to elevate a bloody, barbaric spectacle into an inspiring, high-minded one. Peter’s journey is a gauntlet of horrors, barely relieved by moments of grace and respite, but Fuqua and his editor, Conrad Buff, try to imply more than they show, cutting around or cutting away from the ghastly images of Peter’s friends being mauled or decapitated. The director seems vaguely torn between his usual flair for bone-crunching violence (“The Equalizer” movies, “Olympus Has Fallen”) and the desire to forge something more artful and historically resonant from Peter’s experience.

That confusion is reflected in Robert Richardson’s stylized black-and-white cinematography, which is inflected with muted washes of color (a bit of greenery here, a flicker of orange flame there). The mostly monochrome palette effectively evokes a distant era; for better or worse, it also makes the violence, including some blood-on-theleaves imagery, easier to process. It’s not hard to get swept up in Richardson’s muscular camera moves — particularly his sweeping aerial views of the swamp and, later, a smoke-choked battlefield — or to admire the meticulously mud-caked

exteriors of Naomi Shohan’s production design. “Emancipation” seeks to capture a panoramic snapshot of a rattled Confederacy nearing its final days, providing what the production notes describe as “an immersive, 360-degree experience.”

But in terms of psychology and character, a 360-degree experience is actually the opposite of immersive, and it’s at odds with the fleet, propulsive survival thriller Fuqua seems to be trying to make. The more the movie pulls away from Peter’s perspective, the more it undercuts its own tension. And even with a physically impressive production at his disposal, Fuqua’s filmmaking instincts are clumsy and prone to cliche. Every flourish — a close-up of horses’ hooves pounding the mud, an action scene rendered in partial slow-motion, a sudden gasp as Peter’s wife, Dodienne (Charmaine Bingwa), awakens from a premonitory nightmare — suggests a filmmaker constrained by the visual grammar of the Hollywood action flick. (The musical grammar, too, judging by Marcelo Zarvos’ unsubtly wielded score.)

If “Emancipation” were nothing more (or less) than that action flick — leaner, meaner, less solemn, less monochrome — it would probably be a better, more honest movie. Certainly I’d rather watch Smith’s Peter go a few more rounds with an alligator, as he does in a scene that briefly jolts the movie to life, than listen to another minute of, say, Fassel’s hoary campfire monologue, with its less-than-revelatory peek into the diseased white-supremacist mind. Foster, so often cast as the villain, doesn’t go as showily over-the-top as he has in the past, but that’s scant consolation. His

“Emancipation,” directed and executive produced by Antoine Fuqua and starring and produced by Will Smith, will premiere in theaters on Friday and on Apple TV+ on Dec. 2022 ,9. (Apple Studios/TNS)

Director Antoine Fuqua and his star, Will Smith, reenact the shooting of that photograph toward the end of “Emancipation,” their swampy, sloggy action-movie treatment of Peter’s journey.

presence in this role alone is emblematic of the movie’s obviousness.

I suppose it’s no more obvious than Smith’s casting as the persecuted, persevering hero, but that’s par for the Hollywood course. Pricey historical dramas like “Emancipation” — better ones, worse ones — have long depended on stars to leverage their prestige ambitions and sell their weighty subject matter to a largely indifferent public. The viability of Smith’s star persona has of course been cast into doubt since this particular project was set in motion, which is why the much-analyzed events of Oscar night 2022 have generated so much anxiety around their likely impact on the movie’s release, box office potential and (God forbid) Oscar prospects.

What any of that has to do, in the end, with the life of an enslaved man whose courage profoundly shaped the course of racial justice — or the heroism of the Black soldiers who fought for a nation that had done nothing to deserve their loyalty — is well worth wondering. But the answers are pretty dispiriting. “Emancipation” is hardly the first or last picture to be overshadowed by the

industry that produced it, or to fall short of the history that inspired it.

‘EMANCIPATION’

MPAA rating: R (for strong racial violence, disturbing images and language)

Running time: 2:12

How to watch: In theaters Friday; on Apple TV+ Dec. 9

This article was originally published by Los Angeles Times.

“Emancipation” is hardly the first or last picture to be overshadowed by the industry that produced it, or to fall short of the history that inspired it.

Will Smith in “Emancipation.”

(Quantrell Colbert/ Apple)

Melancholy Part One: The Ideal Reader

The works of W.G. Sebald are a draught of melancholy for our times

By Bryn Haworth

A writer is a strange, solitary individual at the best of times. If the writer is German, we might expect them to be melancholy too. When Friedrich Nietzsche sneered that only the English would set such store by the pursuit of

happiness, one might think he was taking aim at the famous British sense of humour and a propensity to answer questions about our wellbeing with phrases like “Oh, you know, mustn’t grumble.” But actually, his target was far more specific. Nietzsche was having a go at the Utilitarians and the felicific calculus, which Jeremy Bentham had pioneered. This calculus was intended as a way of measuring right and wrong based on whatever was conducive to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people – not the obvious criterion for a philosopher with such a sniffy attitude to the masses and what he called their slave instincts. One German writer who had more democratic credibility as a melancholic was W.G. Sebald. His works are saturated in the black bile that darkened the complexion of Dürer’s angel. This is not a criticism. Quite the opposite. In an age afflicted by glibness and crude emotions, Sebald’s prose comes as a welcome draught of complexity. Any humour that appears is wry and understated, which is itself a great relief from the strain of cheap cynicism that afflicts contemporary comedians. His greatest achievement, however – most notably in his novel Austerlitz – is to avoid the barbarism that Theodor Adorno thought was inevitable when contemplating the worst crimes of European history. The name of the protagonist, derived from a battlefield in Napoleonic times, shares its first and last letters with the most infamous crime scene imaginable. It is an indirect reference, alluding to the unspeakable, in a similar way to Joseph Conrad’s ‘horror’, by indirect means. James Wood has called it ‘the most beautiful act of Sebald’s withholding.’

It is surely no accident that Belgium, in its guise as imperial oppressor, appears so often in Sebald’s writing, with Brussels, not the Congo, viewed as the primary locus of the horror. This is true of his harrowing visit to the fortress of Breendonk, but even the Lion Monument commemorating the battle of Waterloo he calls ‘the very definition of Belgian ugliness’.

It is the false perspective that offends Sebald, the way the actual events of a bloody battle, and all its painful details, are overlaid by this sweeping gesture, a vulgar representation of victory: ‘We, the survivors…’

Melencolia I, an engraving by Albrecht Dürer, 1514

In that word there is more than a touch of survivor guilt. ‘We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was. The desolate field extends all around where once fifty thousand soldiers and ten thousand horses met their end within a few hours. The night after the battle, the air must have been filled with death rattles and groans… Whatever became of the corpses and mortal remains? Are they buried under the memorial? Are we standing on a mountain of death? Is that our ultimate vantage point? Does one really have the much-vaunted historical overview from such a position?’

It’s hard not to be reminded of Walter Benjamin’s assertion, in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, that every document of culture is also a document of barbarism.

The monumental buildings in Brussels itself also fascinated Sebald, primarily as magniloquent compensations for a horror staged elsewhere. They are insecure in their monumentality, as if guiltily prescient of their own reduction to ruins by avenging history. Salons dating back to the era

of colonial exploitation have a macabre atmosphere. The city is filled with ‘hunchbacks and lunatics.’ Sebald briefly gets carried away by his own disgust and describes (in Chapter V of The Rings of Saturn) the ‘strikingly stunted growth’ of the Belgian population. This gives quite a different sense to the old cliché of plucky little Belgians; by way of retribution, they have been transformed into pygmies, some of the fellow humans they once sought to subjugate.

In a similar manner, the bombers would visit appropriate punishment on people forced to subsist in the ruins of devastated German cities: ‘The Germans, who had proposed to cleanse and sanitise all Europe, now had to contend with a rising fear that they themselves were the rat people’ (On the Natural History of Destruction, p. 34).

Such reflections amount to an unbearable vision of the ‘continuing oppression, exploitation, enslavement and destruction… of those who were furthest from the centre of power.’ Colonial crimes were committed in outposts far beyond the sight of ‘civilised’ eyes. Other crimes would be perpetrated in plain view, by Sebald’s compatriots. What we have here, then, is a particularly German melancholy, charged with historical guilt. As Sebald points out in The Rings of Saturn, however, dark thoughts are an occupational hazard for all writers. Like weavers, they toil in silence on their own and are prone to melancholy. The title of the book is itself a reference to melancholia, since Saturn was traditionally the ruling planet of that humour.

It is obvious from this alone that I am W.G. Sebald’s ideal reader. But before I go into the multifarious connections and affinities between myself and the ingenious writer of Austerlitz, which are uncanny, I want to be clear what I mean by an ‘ideal reader,’ as it may not be the meaning others give it, or even the meaning I myself have attached to it thus far. While the weavers he has in mind created silk garments, the writer – and in particular a writer like Sebald – creates a complex web of connections out of digressions and allusions. These scraps of information may not seem, on first blush, to have any connection at all. But for the writer, there must be a person out there, beyond his or her time and space, who will be able to intuit the connections he or she perceives. This is the ideal reader. It’s a mysterious entity, as it probably has no substance, and only properly exists as the writing is being written, in the form of an absent correspondent. It has no preordained gender, though it may be the case that the author imagines one for it. In general, the reader has no specific features, and will exist in a future the author has no way of understanding, because the au-

One German writer who had more democratic credibility as a melancholic was W.G. Sebald. His works - are saturated in the black bile that darkened the complexion of Dürer’s angel.

Lion

Pygmies

thor is already dead the moment they walk away from their writing. Only the reader can save the writer’s life.

This is the deeper meaning behind Sebald’s interest in photographs of people who are dead or, in the case of the pretty page boy on the cover of Austerlitz, simply forgotten. The page boy is in fact Austerlitz himself, but pictured at a time, and in a place, he can no longer recall, antecedent to a catastrophe that will separate him from everything in the image. For this reason, the grown adult feels called upon by the ‘piercing, inquiring gaze’ of his younger self to ‘accept the challenge and avert the misfortune lying ahead of him’ (p. 260).

It is as if Austerlitz is confronted by the gaze of an accusing ghost. In pho-

tographs, the ghosts are more often of people who are actually dead. As James Wood explains in his introduction to the novel, they are ‘mute witnesses, judging us for our failure to save them’. Wood finds the same idea in Theodor Adorno’s essay on Mahler, where memory is ‘the only help that is left to them [the dead]’. It is also there in Roland Barthes’ description of old photographs in Camera Lucida, which make us think ‘That person is going to die, and is in fact now dead’. Adorno went even further, describing the deceased person as being ‘like someone who was murdered by the living.’

Could all this have something to do with the way a photograph renders the subject immobile? Not necessarily, as the pathos surrounding old films can demonstrate. One thing that definitely doesn’t help us view these records dispassionately, though, is when the dead are smiling. There is no need for the dead to look pathetic, since the pathos of their extinction increases in direct proportion to their self-evident vitality.

It’s hard to see how a piece of writing could contain the same form of entreaty, as if it was begging for the ideal reader to remember that the author lived and knew how it felt to be alive, yet writing of the kind Sebald gives us, though never quite as stark or plaintive as an image, manages to carry within it the same longing. Like the doomed victims of the ‘agents of death’ – Barthes’ rather intemperate term for photographers – these books long to be saved by a recipient who is always out of reach and for whom they are a voice from beyond the grave, as they were already at the point of being written.

None of this has anything to do with my claim to be Sebald’s ideal reader. My only reasons, sadly, are far more trivial: I have observed a multitude of uncanny similarities between us. For instance, we both write prose and interlard the paragraphs with images. It may seem a really trivial point this. My use of images bears little resemblance to his, after all. I write about art a lot, and because of that, and for no deeper reason, I draw on reproductions of paintings. In Sebald’s case, pictures can have a far more mysterious connection to the words. He sometimes reproduces paintings, such as those by Rembrandt or Dürer, but he also includes poorly focused photographs, diagrams, inconsequential landscapes, often without explanation.

It’s a mere stylistic accident that I have, for years now, been using pictures to supplement my text.

But then there is the similarity between the author’s biography and my own. The clearest instance of this is Norwich, a sprawling medieval city in

For the writer, there must be a person out there, beyond his or her time and space, who will be able to intuit the connections he or she perceives. This is the ideal reader.

Austerlitz

Jews in Poland, 1938, from Three Minutes

East Anglia, far enough from the capital to have its own distinctive character. Norwich is the main population centre in the county of Norfolk and I arrived there at the age of eleven from Essex, a county that borders London. I was not pleased to have been uprooted from Essex and part of me never felt at home in Norfolk, but that may not be Norfolk’s fault. In contrast, this was the county W.G. Sebald moved to voluntarily, having started his exile from his native Germany in Manchester. I got to know about him years and years after leaving Norfolk, and one thing I learnt was that he had lived for a while in Wymondham, a small market town I had passed through in a double decker bus every weekday for some seven years, to get to my grammar school. Nothing about Wymondham had ever struck me as remarkable, though I liked its octagonal market cross raised on eight timber stilts, perhaps as a precaution against fires like the one that ravaged the town in 1615:

est parts of the English countryside, under what David Constantine has called ‘the vast and somehow annihilating skies of East Anglia’ (The Independent, 20 July 2002). In Chapter IX, he admits ‘I knew then as little as I know now whether walking in this solitary way was more of a pleasure or a pain’. Nevertheless, this – or something like it – is the landscape he now calls home. Why, then, does it intimidate, even alienate him at times, and why does he seem to invite these sensations? At one point, on his way across Dunwich Heath, he is gripped by a kind of mortal dread. He sees a building with a lookout tower, which he imagines belongs in Ostend – once again, Belgium has sinister associations for Sebald. This ‘spectral tower’, as he calls it, is the only landmark on the treeless expanse. With time, to his ‘astonishment, not to say horror’, it appears to shift its position in the landscape, presenting itself: ‘…time and again from a quite different angle, now close to, now further off, now to my left and now to my right, and indeed at one point the lookout tower, in a sort of castling move, had got itself, in no time at all, from one side of the building to the other, so that it seemed that instead of seeing the actual villa I was seeing its mirror image.’

…and I had a morbid fascination for its half-ruined abbey…

The reference to ‘castling’ immediately turns the landscape into a chess board, with Sebald like some hapless Alice unable to reach the opponent’s king. Even the looking glass gets a mention. But if this is chess, it is a game dictated by unknown laws of movement. Prevented from striking across as the crow flies by the knee-deep heather, he continues to go round in circles, his frustration building to a kind of exhausted unease, until:

‘In the end I was overcome by a feeling of panic. The low leaden sky; the sickly violet hue of the heath clouding the eye; the silence, that rushed in the ears like the sound of the sea in a shell; the flies buzzing around me – all this became oppressive and unnerving.’

And then, as suddenly as it began, it is over. He finds himself on a solid, dependable country lane, ‘…beneath a mighty oak, and the horizon was spinning all around as if I had jumped off a merry-go-round.’

There is another point of similarity between me and Sebald, a shared geographical proximity to the war. In his case, just as he habitually saw the North Sea as the German Sea, so Norfolk was both a blameless scene of immemorial tranquillity and a launching pad for the bombing raids on his homeland, known to the Allies as ‘Operation Gomorrah’. He spends the duration of The Rings of Saturn wandering around some of the bleak-

It’s hard to tell for sure, but he seems to imply that he has been both infantilised (only children believe the sound of the sea is contained in the shell) and emasculated (turned into the Alice of the sequel to Wonderland, a far more disturbing dream than its predecessor). Later on, unsurprisingly, he returns to this scene in his actual dreams, his sleeping self knowing ‘with absolute certainty’ that the landscape represents ‘a cross-section of my brain’. Sebald has apparently lost his way in his own head. But more than this: at moments like these on the heath, it’s as if he has got lost behind enemy lines, or at least the lines of an enemy in ghostly form, and can see his surroundings only through German eyes.

This impression is reinforced when he arrives at the village of Middleton, home of his friend and fellow German, Michael Hamburger, and steps into

The monumental buildings in Brussels itself also fascinated Sebald, primarily as magniloquent compensations for a horror staged elsewhere.

Cross

The Abbey

a grocery store. There he finds a local girl with blue eyes (it’s a detail he is at pains to include) who is flabbergasted at the sight of him, and stunned when he wishes her good afternoon: ‘It has often struck me that when country people set eyes on a foreigner, they are quite overawed, and, even if he has a good command of their language, they find it hard to understand him.’

In this case, the country person fails to provide him with the water he asks her for, and instead he finds himself quaffing Cherry Coke, ‘which I drained at a draught like a cup of hemlock, leaning against the churchyard wall’. There is more than a trace of hysteria in that hemlock, given its association with the death of Socrates, but perhaps the writer is sending himself up as a roving, and ageing, academic. After all, the churchyard is suspiciously close at hand, as if he is ready to join its decomposing occupants without further ado. Those blue eyes must have had the potency of a basilisk.

Yet, even as an Englishman born a few miles from this spot, I can recall something of Sebald’s alienation here. Sadly, he had no way of knowing that being a literal ‘foreigner’ made little or no difference in the rural depths, or at least it made none when I lived there, forty odd years ago. Coming from Essex, a region adjacent to the far-off capital, I was never readily understood by the locals and certainly never accepted. It may have changed beyond recognition, but the last time I was in the county, back in the Nineties, I still found these attitudes prevalent. I even met an elderly gardener who found my accent hard at first, but when he’d grown accustomed to it, was happy to converse about matters horticultural. He habitually referred to the weather as ‘she’ as if speaking about Mother Nature. “I reckon she’ll rain in the morning,” he assured me, in the local version of the rustic accent that pervades the south of England, punctuated by the alien accents of the urban islands dotted across it. He also proudly declared he had never set foot in the neighbouring county of Suffolk, let alone in London. You don’t have to be German to feel out of place in Norfolk; Essex lad will do.

Maybe there was something else going on, though. Sebald, after all, suggests as much in that reference to a ‘cross-section’ of his brain. For him, Norfolk is a mental landscape as much as a literal one. In his On the Natural History of Destruction, he points out how ‘more than seventy airfields from which the war of annihilation was waged against Germany were in the county of Norfolk’, and he goes on to describe the grassy runways, dilapidated control towers, bunkers and corrugated iron huts that ‘stand in an often eerie landscape where you sense the dead souls of the men who never came back from their missions, and of those who perished in the vast fires.’ The latter souls are ambiguous. Though he leaves it uncertain, Sebald seems here to confuse the souls of the airmen with those of their victims in distant Germany, burned alive in the hellish firestorms that destroyed Hamburg and many other cities. It is as if geographical distance, along with time, has been telescoped by the presence of a tiny human fragment of the fatherland – called Sebald – lost in the flat Norfolk expanse.

Since my school was just two miles from where he once lived, it is hard to imagine that Sebald was ignorant of its existence. Though never an airfield, it had been a hospital for the very men who flew sorties over Germany, and was made up of long huts named after their inventor, a certain Major Peter Norman Nissen. These Nissen huts had never been taken down and served as classrooms, a dining hall, even a chapel where the windows had been colourfully glazed in feeble imitation of the stained glass in a cathedral. Every morning we all assembled there, to pray and sing hymns and listen to the headmaster’s homily.

By the time I was a pupil, the huts of Wymondham College were draughty, rusting, infested with rats and poorly heated by a system of pipes running along the tops of covered ways. Norfolk winters could be brutal, and we had to rush through these covered ways, their sides exposed to the elements, to get from one class to another. The shells of

As Sebald points out in The Rings of Saturn, dark thoughts are an occupational hazard for all writers. Like weavers, they toil in silence on their own and are prone to melancholy.

Sebald. A disconcerting foreigner?

the huts were made of corrugated iron, and each hut was divided into three or four separate classrooms, so when you had to read in silence or complete a test, you could hear the lessons in neighbouring rooms. Voices were a relief, though. I vividly recall visiting the Art Department hut one late afternoon in winter. It was already dark, and I arrived to find the place deserted. I had to walk through to the end in case the teacher I had come to see was there, but by the time I reached the last of the rooms it was obvious no one was about, and then a cold fear took hold of me, chilling my entrails, and I ran full-pelt back through the rooms and into the open. We all knew there were ghosts in the huts. One was of a suicide – I believe it was in hut 14B. Pupils had heard blood-chilling groans and no one would dream of visiting 14B after dark. But this was no particular surprise. The Norfolk I remember was notorious for two things: hauntings and people going mad. In the case of the latter, I was exemplary. As the account of his visit to Michael Hamburger proceeds, one might be forgiven for thinking that Sebald was not in full possession of his wits either. It doesn’t help that Hamburger was a translator of Hölderlin, a German poet who one suspects allowed his melancholy to get the better of him, and who took to addressing visitors as Your Excellency and signing letters ‘your humble servant Scardanelli.’ But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Having miraculously survived his encounter with the local basilisk and the paralysis of the neuromuscular systems brought on by Cherry Coke, Sebald heads off to his friend’s house and abruptly begins quoting at length from his friend’s memoirs. The account is of a childhood dimly, somewhat randomly recalled by a man who moved from Berlin to England aged just nine. This is very close to Austerlitz territory. Hamburger even describes returning to the house of his childhood, anomalous survivor of Berlin’s destruction, just as Austerlitz returns to his childhood home in Prague. Unlike Austerlitz, who suffers from complete amnesia, the scenes of Hamburger’s childhood come back and get muddled with his present surroundings in hallucinatory fashion. There he even sees his grandmother, subject to one of her recurrent bouts of melancholy, lying on a high table, ‘…dressed in her best. The gleaming tips of her patent leather shoes point towards the ceiling, she has spread a grey silk handkerchief over her face, and for days… she has not uttered a single word.’ It’s a little like a hundred years of Teutonic solitude, with melancholy

as the ruling passion. The narrative switches back to the present, in the village of Middleton, where the two friends are sitting in the garden, discussing the dog days of August and the difficulties of writing. They question their reasons for writing at all, and whether it renders them more perceptive or more insane. There follows a string of references to Hölderlin in which it is unclear if the dead poet or his living translator is speaking, until the ghosts of Goethe and Baudelaire briefly join in: ‘Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one’s own precursor?’

For a while here we seem to have stumbled upon the ‘familiar compound ghost’ of Eliot’s Little Gidding, the one he encounters, or so I have always imagined, in the blitz-torn streets of London at the break of dawn. Here and now, however, it is Sebald asking the question of himself, in relation to a man who was to be his translator, his ideal reader. He stands in Michael’s abandoned study, too cold even in midsummer, spellbound: ‘a strange feeling came over me, as if it were not he who had abandoned that place of work but I.’ The heaps of stuff strewn about the place seem to have belonged to Sebald, and to have outlasted him. The feeling, then, is a posthumous one, as spooky as the encounter of a man with the self he never became in Henry James’s short story set in New York. In Middleton, Sebald finds his very own jolly corner. The thoughts are quickly dispelled, ‘perhaps because it is not possible to pursue them without losing one’s sanity.’ The secret that might make one mad is not elucidated, but could it be that Hamburger, when he translates Sebald’s poetry, does so faithfully by means of a process far from mundane, by a kind of merging with the original? Does Hölderlin also haunt the unnaturally cold study?

The incident is never explained, but it reverberates beyond that house. What Sebald calls ‘the ghosts of repetition,’ trivial coincidences very like the ones that I share with him, ‘…haunt me with ever greater frequency. Scarcely am I in company but it seems as if I had already heard the same opinions expressed by the same people somewhere or other, in the same way, with the same words, turns of phrase and gestures. The physical sensation closest to this feeling of repetition… is that of the peculiar numbness brought on by a heavy loss of blood, often resulting in a temporary inability to think, to speak or to move one’s limbs, as though, without being aware of it, one had suffered a stroke.’

Soon after this, Hamburger’s wife, Anne, comes in and tells the story of a local man, a certain Mr Squirrel who, despite lacking a memory, resolved to take part in a local production of King Lear and could recall to this day one of his lines from it, ‘as I once discovered for myself when I said good morning to him and he replied in sonorous tones across the street: They say Edgar, his banish’d son, is with the Earl of Kent in Germany.’

‘Three Minutes: A Lengthening’ (see the still photograph above) is a documentary based on footage taken by an American visitor to Nasielsk in Poland in 1938. The Jewish people seen in the film would very soon fall victim to the Nazis. It screened in cinemas with a recorded Q&A featuring Bianca Stigter, Steve McQueen and Helena Bonham Carter on 30 November. It is on general release and on Curzon Home Cinema from 2 December.

The Nissen huts at Wymondham College; the arrow points to haunted hut 14B

Finally, a Female Referee in Men’s World Cup

Frappart has a seemingly endless string of firsts, makes World Cup history

By Sarah Gamal

A woman has taken the field as a referee for the first time in men’s World Cup history. In charge of Germany’s match against Costa Rica in the final round of Group E games, Stéphanie Frappart became the first woman to be the lead referee during a men’s World Cup match 92 years after the first games were played in Uruguay.

The Frenchwoman was part of an all-female refereeing trio that officiated Costa Rica vs. Germany in Group E, alongside Brazilian Neuza Back and Mexican Karen Diaz.

Frappart was named earlier this year as one of the referees who would travel to Qatar with other female officials.

“Not only football, but the men’s World Cup is the most important competition in the world,”

Stéphanie Frappart. |Photo Credit: Reuters

she told the Athletic.

“However, I was the first female referee in France, the first in Europe, and I was always the first. I know how to handle that.”

“I’m really going to head into this with enormous emotion,” Ms. Frappart said before the game, “but you have to channel that because clearly the important thing is the pitch.”

“I think I’ll keep everything around me in mind, and the goal will remain the same, which is to be the referee based on performance on the field.” FIFA called the event “history in the making.”

As a result, she is accustomed to the accompanying noise. Among the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Frappart and her assistants’ appointment, with many seeing it as an antidote to a tainted tournament, were the same tired refrains.

Frappart is a 38-year-old referee whose career has had a significant impact on female officials around the world and has more men’s stage experience than any other woman. She has her name written all over the record books, with nu-

merous impressive firsts to her credit.

Frappart began officiating in the French third division in 2011, and three years later became the first female official in Ligue 2.

The Frenchwoman was then called up to referee alongside an all-female crew at the 2015 Women’s World Cup in Canada.

In 2019, Frappart became the first female referee in Ligue 1 before being recalled to the Women’s World Cup for the second time. She would be appointed as the tournament’s referee for the final.

This would pave the way for even greater

In charge of Germany’s match against Costa in the final round of Group E games, Stéphanie Frappart became the first woman to be the lead referee during a men’s World Cup match.

Stéphanie Frappart in the middle of the action during the match between Costa Rica and Germany. |Photo Credit: Raúl Arboleda/ AFP/Getty Images

achievements later that year, when the French official was appointed to the men’s UEFA Super Cup.

By doing so, Frappart became the first female referee to take charge of a men’s European match, as well as the first female official of a men’s Champions League game.

In May, she was appointed as the referee for the 2022 Coupe de France Final, which Nantes won 1-0 over Nice at the Stade de France.

All in all, she has had a successful career for nearly two decades. She officiated her first game at the age of 19 in 2003, which was a women’s match between Henin-Beaumont F.C. and La Roche-sur-Yon, in Le Plessis-

Bouchard, a remote town in the far north of the Paris region.

“I knew my life had changed after 2019 because almost everyone recognized me on the street,” Frappart says.

Since then, she has risen through the ranks like no other woman before her, earning numerous accolades. She was the first woman to be the lead referee during a men’s Ligue 2 game in

The 38 -year-old referee has had a significant impact on female officials around the world and has more men’s stage experience than any other woman.

Nezua Back (left), Stéphanie Frappart and Karen Díaz leave the pitch after making history at the Al Bayt Stadium.

|Photo Credit: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Stéphanie Frappart. |Photo

Credit: Getty Images

France’s second division in 2014. She then officiated in men’s Ligue 1, international friendlies, and the Champions League.

Ms. Frappart also became the first woman to referee the UEFA Super Cup match between Chelsea and Liverpool on August 14, 2019. Liverpool coach Jürgen Klopp praised her performance after the game.

Furthermore, Frappart officiated the 2019 Women’s World Cup final, which the United States won over the Netherlands, capping a tournament that served as a major public forum for the United States team’s fight for equal pay and treatment from its national federation.

The French official’s name has already gone down in history. She became the first female referee to take charge of a men’s World Cup Qualifier in March 2021, when the Netherlands defeated Latvia 2-0 in Amsterdam.

When Italian champions Juventus defeated Ukrainian club Dynamo Kyiv 3-0 in the group stage in Turin in December 2020, she became the first female official to take charge of a men’s Champions League match.

Pierluigi Collina, the FIFA referee committee chairman known for being tough on his col-

Ms. Frappart was

first

referee the UEFA Super Cup match between Chelsea and Liverpool on August 14, 2019.

leagues, on the other hand, has high praise for Frappart. “I hope that there will be more Frapparts in the future, and that this will no longer be an oddity or a news story,” Collina told the Italian press in 2021.

At the 2019 Globe Soccer Awards, Ms. Frappart was named best referee, and Collina presented her with the trophy.

In Qatar, Ms. Frappart has already served as the fourth official twice this World Cup, becoming the first female official at a men’s World Cup match between Mexico and Poland. Mukasanga and Yamashita have also served as the fourth officials in two and four World Cup games, respectively.

Kathryn Nesbitt of the United States was also working as an offside specialist in the video review team at the Group E match at Al Bayt Stadium.

The female officials from left to right: Karen Diaz Medina, Stephanie Frappart and Neuza Back. |Photo Credit: AP

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Pelé: A Legend and a National Hero

By Majalla Illustrated by Jeannette Khouri

Edson Arantes do Nascimento, known as Pelé, is a retired Brazilian soccer player, born on October 23, 1940, in the city of Tres Caracos in Brazil. Pelé is considered by many to be the best player in the history of football.

Pelé is hailed as a national hero in Brazil where he played as a striker. He was also famous for playing back balls, and said that he regretted not scoring such a ball in the World Cup.

Pelé said that he will be watching his country’s World Cup matches from the hospital where he was admitted.

“In 1958, I walked the streets thinking about fulfilling the promise I made to my father,” the three-time World Cup winner wrote on Twitter, alongside a photograph of a then-17-year-old Pelé. “I know that today many have made similar promises and are also seeking their first World Cup. I’ll be watching the game from hospital and I’ll be rooting for each one of you. Good luck!”

The 82-year-old Pelé was admitted to the hospital this week but is under no imminent risk of death, according to

several family members.

The soccer great is also undergoing chemotherapy in his fight against cancer. He is expected to leave the Albert Einstein hospital in Sao Paulo once he fully recovers from the respiratory infection, although neither the family nor the hospital know when that might happen.

In 1999, Pelé was chosen as the player of the century by the International Federation of Football History and Statistics.

In the same year, Pelé won the title of “Player of the Century,” after France Football magazine asked the winners of its Ballon d’Or award to nominate the best player of the century.

Again In 1999, Pelé was chosen as the Sportsman of the Century by the International Olympic Committee. Time magazine also nominated him for the list of the most important people of the 20th century. In 2013, Pelé was awarded a special Ballon d’Or Prix d’Honneur by FIFA.

Pelé played his first international match with the Brazil national football team on July 7, 1956, against the Argentina national football team, which won 2-1.

After that, he participated in the World Cup with the national team for four consecutive sessions.

He was the youngest player in the world to participate in the 1958 World Cup and scored his first goal in the World Cup against the Wales national football team in the quarter-finals.

He became the youngest player to score a goal in the World Cup, and ended the tournament with six goals scored in four matches. He was the second top scorer in the tournament, behind Just Fontaine. It is worth noting that Brazil won the World Cup in that year.

After that, the Brazilian legend participated in three consecutive World Cups, namely, the 1962 World Cup, the 1966 World Cup, and the 1970 World Cup. Brazil won the World Cup in Sweden 1958 which was the first participation of the Brazilian football legend. Brazil won the 1959 South American Cup and Pelé played the final match and was the top scorer of the session with 9 goals in the 1962 World Cup in Chile.

He won the England 1966 World Cup title but was eliminated in the first round of the World Cup World Mexico 1970.

How Roblox Built a Hiring Test that Feels Like a Video Game

Roblox Believes that this Test Will Reduce Bias in Hiring

By David Lidsky

Ritti Bhogal had never seen an internship test like this before. “It was like a game,” says the second-year NYU student of her recent experience taking an online Roblox exam. She had guessed it would involve coding and take place on the Roblox platform, which attracts around 40 million daily active users. “I felt myself using the same kind of skills I use every day while coding, which is kind of bizarre because it’s not in the context you’d expect it.” In other words, she hadn’t anticipated being asked to predict how a

disease might spread across a deer population.

Tech companies are known for their novel—and sometimes brutal—approach to job applications. Why are manhole covers round? How would you solve problems if you were from Mars? Google gets a lot of credit (and blame) for the modern incarnation of seeking out these obtuse displays of intellect, which has spread through the industry and into corporate America like, well, a disease transmitted through a deer herd. At its best, the hiring process at tech companies discovers unorthodox thinkers. At

its worst, it unnecessarily stumps candidates and is ultimately arbitrary. For all the show at identifying a candidate’s “Googleyness” or whatever, the recruiting process has largely remained ripe with bias. Hiring managers favor “elite” schools, judge applicants based on their names on resumes, and respond more often to people who look or act like them.

Although a tech recession is underway and very few tech companies are openly hiring, Roblox, which generated $517.7 million in revenue in the third quarter of 2022, is an exception. With more talent on the market in years, as many companies have slimmed their workforces through layoffs, Roblox’s commitment to revamping its recruitment process comes at an opportune time. The gaming platform has been investing in assessments that would combat bias and inefficiency in its application process, weeding out subjectivity as much as possible for the company’s entry-level jobs, which it believes is critical to help it improve the diversity of its workforce.

“It’s got to be in that funny gray area between the test and the game,” says Jack Buckley, Roblox’s VP of people sciences.

“Even after taking [the test], I’m not 100% sure what they were testing me on,” says Bhogal. “So how do I prepare for that next time? I’m not really sure.”

Computer science majors know what to expect from a coding test, but they don’t know how to prepare for an assessment extracting the rhythms of their brains. For Roblox’s leaders, that’s kind of the point: They want to find employees outside of the typical compsci mold.

That doesn’t make the experience any less stressful. Nor is Roblox’s new testing regimen guaranteed to do everything it’s supposed to do. But, says Roblox CTO Dan Sturman, “I think this could be the future.”

THE ‘BEST TEST’ OR THE ‘WORST GAME’?

Roblox’s path to exploring the science and art of job assessments started when CEO David Baszucki approached a startup named Imbellus about taking on his company as a client. Imbellus built game-based assessments for clients such as McKinsey, and Baszucki wanted the company to develop a test that quantified the exact types of thinking necessary for success at Roblox. As it happens, Imbellus was in the middle of looking for a buyer, so Roblox bought it instead, formally acquiring it in December 2020.

“We needed something based on the way Roblox works that would test the intrinsic sorts of things that people bring to the table,” says Roblox CTO Dan Sturman. With Imbellus now in house, Buckley, who had been president and chief scientist at Imbellus, worked with industrial organizational psychologists to do a job analysis of entry-level software engineers and product managers. “You need to go study exactly what skills are necessary for these people to be successful at Roblox,” he says, devoting hours to surveys and employee interviews and observation.

Buckley’s team developed a list of around 15 critical skills. They decided the cognitive test could best measure “creative problem solving” and “systems thinking.” Buckley relayed the skills to Roblox’s lead game designer to incorporate into the assessment. To judge an applicant’s creative problem solving abilities, the designers devised a challenge where one would have to build as many robots as possible that could clear certain obstacles. For systems thinking, applicants would need to complete a “pathogen test” in which they would be asked to determine which animals out of a group were most likely to attract disease.

After the designers baked the skills into the assessment, the next step was testing. Roblox volunteers participated in “think-alouds” where they’d have to talk through their thought process in front of researchers recording their every utterance. (I did a think-aloud at the suggestion of the Roblox team, and taking an exam in front of others and having to verbalize your thought process is not for the faint of heart). The Imbellus vets then caucused with the designers to discern where the test may have been flawed, or if there’s a new way of interacting with the test that better captured the skill.

The next challenge: figuring out how to score. Unlike your classic multiple choice assessment, the “questions” in a game-based task are invisible to the test-

Roblox believes that this test will reduce bias in hiring because it’s based on the cognitive traits of successful employees, rather than identity or educational pedigree.

Credit: TNS

Technology

taker. Roblox’s candidates are graded on certain decisions they make while completing the task. Buckley says candidates need a minimum score on the cognitive test, but the team uses an algorithm to balance out the score with the coding assessment. They typically try to be more generous if someone’s score is on the margins.

“We don’t hire people who are good at one thing,” Buckley says. “What that usually boils down to is, you have to figure out in the entire hiring process when to measure what.”

The cognitive test, which Roblox started using late last year, is somewhere between “the best test” you’ve ever taken or “the worst game” you’ve ever played, according to Buckley. “We do get feedback where people are like, ‘This is so much fun, I’d actually like to keep playing it,’” he says. “But for the most part, it’s got to be in that funny gray area between the test and the game.”

The company has paired the cognitive assessment with a coding one from CodeSignal, another developer testing tool. Roblox only requires the test for students applying to engineering and product management roles, and it administers it after a very basic resume screening that mostly checks for whether the student can work in the United States.

Once the applicant passes the tests, they’re invited to complete technical screenings and interviews. This is where some of the other skills come into play. “Measuring your empathy and communication is not easy to do in a game,” Buckley admits. “It’s much

cheaper and easier to do in a conversation.”

NO TEST IS PERFECT

Roblox believes that this test will reduce bias in hiring because it’s based on the cognitive traits of successful employees, rather than identity or educational pedigree.

But creating an effective standardized test is not simple, and creating one completely without bias is nigh impossible. “The more subjective you attempt to make what you’re capturing, the more problematic it becomes,” says Akil Bello, a test-preparation expert who notes that bias can easily slip in when you’re not measuring practical, easily quantifiable skills like coding. “It conveys mushy things like fit, ‘good employee,’ and all of these things that start to create biases and reflect existing biases.”

Bello takes particular issue with the “cognitive” test label, as it refers to someone’s innate being, which is very difficult to capture in a standardized test. It’s a very “loaded title,” he says, stretching “beyond that narrow definition of, ‘these are highly relevant skills for what you’re doing.’” He also points out that using existing Roblox employees as the foundation of the company’s research inherently limits what a successful candidate might look like. “If you’re evaluating who’s a fit for your organization by looking at who’s in the organization,” he says, “then essentially you’re saying the old hiring process is going to be encoded through a system that we get to claim is objective.”

Roblox’s Buckley pushes back on this concern, saying his team analyzed the jobs—and not the people in them. “We do, of course, have to survey, interview, and observe people performing the tasks,” he says, “but the objective is not to build an idealized profile of a Roblox employee—it’s to make sure we are selecting people based on the skills and competencies necessary for success.”

Thus far, at least by one metric, the company is happy with the results. Roblox’s percentage of hires from “elite” schools decreased from 68% to 52%, and its “non-elite” hires grew from 32% to 48%. But Roblox did not clarify whether that growth is due to the assessment or how the assessment impacted diversity

Credit: ROBLOX CORPORATION

Computer science majors know what to expect from a coding test, but they don’t know how to prepare for an assessment extracting the rhythms of their brains.

areas beyond schooling, as the company declined to share additional demographic data. Roblox also didn’t have statistics on the types of candidates who did well and who did poorly on the exam.

THE NEXT TEST FOR THE TEST

Other Roblox candidates echo Ritti Bhogal’s first impressions of the cognitive test: pleasantly surprised by the experience, although caught off guard by a test that felt impossible to prepare for. “I had a hard time telling whether I was doing well or not doing well,” says Deepayam Sanyal, a sophomore at the University of Washington. “But I enjoyed the experience. If that was a game on its own, I’d probably play it.”

Slight apprehension from college students who are accustomed to taking exams is one thing. Trying to scale this approach company-wide is another. Sturman, Roblox’s CTO, says that rolling the experience out to mid or later-career professionals will be a challenge. “You ask [experienced job candidates] to take a test and they give you a funny look,” Sturman said.

Bello, the testing expert, has encountered a similar test hesitation among adults in academia as well. “You ask college admissions people to take the SAT,” he says, “and they look at you like you just asked them to chop off their wrist.”

But Sturman is hopeful that the Roblox test will become more socially acceptable in the future. “There’s no reason,” he says, “that our type of assessment couldn’t be used by any company.”

This article was originally published by Fast Company.

“I felt myself using the same kind of skills I use every day while coding, which is kind of bizarre because it’s not in the context you’d expect it.”

Health

By Heidi Godman

It’s 4 a.m., and you can’t sleep. As you lie awake wondering why, consider whether any of your medications could be causing the trouble.

“Medications can interfere with sleep in a number of

ways. Some delay sleep onset, which is how long it takes you to fall asleep. Some cause frequent nighttime awakenings or trigger early morning waking. And some medications impair sleep quality or how rested you feel in the morning,” says Jennifer Corapi, a psychiatric clinical pharmacist at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.

COMMON OFFENDERS

Medications that affect sleep can be prescription drugs or over-the-counter remedies. Here are some common culprits.

Antidepressants. Antidepressants are typically prescribed to treat depression or anxiety, and they have varying side effects, even within the same drug class. For example, among selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), fluoxetine (Prozac) can be stimulating and make it hard to fall or stay asleep. “But another SSRI, paroxetine [Paxil], can be more sedating and make you sleepy,” Corapi says.

Beta blockers. Beta blockers such as metoprolol (Lopressor, Toprol XL) and atenolol (Tenormin) are used primarily to treat high blood pressure or an irregular heartbeat. “One side effect is that the medications can decrease the body’s natural levels of melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate your sleep-wake cycle. If beta blockers suppress melatonin, you might have trouble falling or staying asleep at night,” Corapi says.

Decongestants. Decongestants such as phenylephrine or pseudoephedrine help shrink swollen membranes in the nasal passages, allowing more air to pass through them. “Both drugs can be stimulating. They can raise your blood pressure and heart rate, and may cause insomnia in some people,” Corapi says. “We don’t recommend them for people with heart problems, a history of stroke, or high blood pressure.

Diuretics. Diuretics such as furosemide (Lasix), torsemide (Demadex), and hydrochlorothiazide reduce the amount of sodium and water in the body. They’re prescribed to treat high blood pressure, kidney disorders, liver disease, and fluid retention caused by heart failure. “Diuretics don’t affect sleep directly, but they can interrupt sleep if they make you go to the bathroom during the night,” Corapi says.

Smoking-cessation drugs. Over-the-counter nicotine replacement medications such as nicotine patches, gum, or lozenges help people stop smoking. “Nicotine can cause someone to have unusual dreams or nightmares and wake them up,” Corapi says. Prescription medications that curb smoking can also interfere with sleep. One drug, varenicline (Chantix), affects the same brain areas as nicotine replacement products and can cause nightmares. Another drug, bupropion (Wellbutrin), is an antidepressant that may be stimulating and make it hard to fall asleep.

Steroids. Oral steroids such as prednisone are used to reduce inflammation inside the body. “Prednisone stimulates the production of the stress hormone cortisol and mimics

what stress does to the body,” Corapi says. “And one thing stress does is disrupt the sleep cycle.” Steroids are usually taken short-term, but certain chronic diseases might require longer-term therapy.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

There are a number of things you can do if you think your sleep problems could be related to your medications. For starters, write down the date, dose, and time of every drug you take, as well as any symptoms you experience, to find patterns linking symptoms to medications. You can also try the following strategies, if your doctor or pharmacist says it’s okay.

Take the medication during the day. This applies to drugs that make it hard to fall or stay asleep, cause nightmares, or make you to get up and go to the bathroom. For example: “We advise patients not to take diuretics within six hours of bedtime,” Corapi says.

Take a melatonin supplement before bed. Melatonin is a hormone that regulates the sleep-wake cycle. “It may help for the short term, until your body gets used to the medication that’s causing sleep difficulty,” Corapi says.

Take a lower dose. Ask your doctor if lowering your medication dose will help you get better sleep.

Practice good sleep hygiene. Go to bed and wake up at the same time each day; avoid caffeine after lunch; don’t drink alcohol or eat close to bedtime; turn off electronic screens an hour before bed; and sleep in a cool, dark, comfortable spot.

Switch to a new medication. “If you’ve tried everything and sleep problems are becoming distressing, ask your doctor if you can switch to a medication that won’t affect your sleep,” Corapi says. “There’s often a good alternative.”

article was originally published by Harvard Health Letter.

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“One side effect is that the medications can decrease the body’s natural levels of melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate your sleep-wake cycle.”

Credit: TNS