The Bumpy Road to "Peace for Prosperity"

Washington Struggles to Form Consensus Following Iranian Attacks

A Weekly Political News Magazine

Young Algerian Doctor Spends Ramadan in Rohingya Camp

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1753- June- 21/06/2019

Issue 1753- June - 21/06/2019

Fascism Ain’t What it Used to Be www.majalla.com

The Bumpy Road to “Peace for Prosperity” www.majalla.com

Editorial The “Road to Prosperity” workshop is set to take place next week in Manama, Bahrain. The aim of the US-led conference is to kick start new economic progress and investment in the region, particularly for the Palestinians. The workshop is part of the Trump administration’s Middle East peace plan for the region, which emphasizes the belief that economic development can lead to better relations between the states, thereby help facilitate political reconciliation. However, the conference has been mired with major setbacks, namely the fact that neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis will send a political delegation to the conference. This week’s cover story by Ali El Shamy and Yasmine El-Geressi focuses on these complications and argues that in spite of them, the workshop can still be a success. The conference's potential lies in the fact that major players in the region, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have confirmed their attendance and the US has stated that Egypt and Jordan will also be taking part. Moreover, some US sources have claimed that is likely that some Palestinian businesspeople will attend and Israel has said that it will send its own entrepreneurial delegation.

Joseph Braude writes on divisions within the US government towards the recent oil tanker attacks off the Gulf of Oman which, according to US intelligence, was conducted by the Iranian regime. The writer indicates that the administration is adamant that Iran did the attack, but has yet to plan a response, while other Republicans outside the administration have called for military retaliation. Democrats are divided over holding Iran responsible for the attack, as some have blamed the regime but others have cast their doubts. The writer notes that the divide might prevent a swift response as well as shift the administration’s strategy to that of Democrats or European allies.

Yassin Bodhan writes on Yassin Abd El Gabbar, a young Algerian doctor who went viral on social media for spending Ramadan in a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh treating those who had no access to medical care. The writer interviewed Abd El Gabbar who revealed how he managed to travel to Bangladesh and described the terrifying anecdotes that the refugees shared with him.

Bryn Haworth focuses this week on how Brexit Britain shares uncanny similarities with Europe during the 1930s a time when the continent saw a rise of fascist governments such the Nazi regime in Germany and Mussolini’s rule in Italy. The writer further muses over the fact that famous people are now able to get away with saying scandalous statements, for instance, Monty Python actor, John Cleese, recently said that London wasn’t an English city anymore.

We invite you to read these articles and more on our website eng.majalla. com. As always, we welcome and value our reader’s feedback and we invite you to take the opportunity to leave your comments on our website.

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

26 Use Venezuelan Assets to Help Venezuelan Refugees

Issue 1753- June - 21/06/2019

22 The End of the Spanish Exception?

Mohammed bin Salman to Asharq Al-Awsat: 08 32 We Won’t Hesitate to Deal with Any Threat

18 Iran’s Green Movement Never Went Away

36 From ‘Aladdin’ to Galaxy’s Edge, how Hollywood Interprets Arab culture

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The Colourful Life of Boris Johnson 3

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50 Dive Into a Swimming Regimen

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Richard Browning CEO of Gravity Industries and the Chief Test Pilot, wears the world's first patented Jet Suit and flies with second Test Pilot during a )demonstration in Belgrade, Serbia. (Getty

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Sled dogs make their way in northwest Greenland with their paws in melted ice water June 13, as recent high temperatures accelerated the spring thaw. Diplomats and climate experts gathered Monday in Germany for U.N.-hosted talks on climate change amid growing public pressure for governments to act faster against global warming. (AP)

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eekly news Saudi government or the company in several months, Crown Prince Mohammed said “We are committed to the initial public offering of Saudi Aramco… I expect that it will happen between 2020 and the beginning of 2021.”

But said, “setting the location of the IPO now is premature.” He also noted the completion of several preliminary measures in preparation for the offering.

Iran Shoots Down U.S. Drone; Trump Says 'You'll Soon Find Out' If U.S. Will Strike Mohammed bin Salman to Asharq Al-Awsat: We Won’t Hesitate to Deal with Any Threat

In an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, Majalla’s sister publication, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman spoke for the first time about the latest taker attacks amid fears of regional conflict, vowing that Saudi Arabia “won’t hesitate to deal with any threat” to the kingdom’s interests. According to the interview published on Sunday, he said “ we do not want a war in the region…But we won’t hesitate to deal with any threat to our people, our sovereignty, our territorial integrity and our vital interests.” He said the attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf, oil facilities in the Kingdom and Abha airport “underscore the importance of our demands for the international community to take a decisive stance against an expansionist

regime that has supported terrorism and spread death and destruction over the past decades not only in the region, but the whole world.”

In the interview, he also warned against “exploiting” the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi for political gains”. “The death of Jamal Khashoggi is a very painful crime," he told the newspaper’s Editor-in-chief Ghassan Charbel. He said "those accused of carrying out the crime are government officials" and the kingdom is seeking to "achieve full justice and accountability, without getting distracted by positions taken by some for their own domestic considerations that are known to everyone. Any party exploiting the case politically should stop doing so, and present evidence to the [Saudi] court, which will contribute in achieving justice.”

In the first mention of Aramco IPO from the

Iran's Revolutionary Guard said Thursday that it had shot down a U.S. drone over its territory to send "a clear message" to America, but the U.S. military says the unmanned aircraft was operating in international airspace. Hours after Iran announced that it shot down the drone, President Trump told journalists at the White House, "You'll soon find out" if the U.S. is planning a strike on Iran in retaliation. "They're going to find out they made a very big mistake," Trump added, in comments that came as he met with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

But Trump also said he suspects that Iran's taking out the drone was not intentional, saying he finds it hard to believe. "I have a feeling that it was a mistake made by somebody that shouldn't have been doing what they did." The president speculated that "it could have been someone loose and stupid.” Trump added that it makes a "big, big difference" that the drone was unmanned.

Iran Says it Will Break Nuclear Deal’s Uranium Stockpile Limit in 10 Days Iran will break the uranium stockpile limit set by its nuclear deal with world powers in the next 10 days, the spokesman for the country’s atomic agency said Monday, while also warning that Iran has the need for uranium enriched up to 20 percent, just a step away from weaponsgrade levels.

The announcement indicated Iran’s

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determination to break from the 2015 accord, which has steadily unraveled since the Trump administration pulled America out of the on charges of espionage with the Palestinian deal last year and reimposed tough economic Hamas militant group. sanctions on Iran, sending its economy into Trump Launches 2020 Re-election freefall.

Thursday as the only two candidates left in the race to become British prime minister, with the flamboyant Johnson odds-on favourite to win next month. Despite a series of scandals in the past and criticism about his attention to detail, Johnson has dominated the race since Theresa May announced a month ago that she would step down after failing to get her Brexit deal through parliament. In a fifth and final ballot of Conservative lawmakers, which eliminated Environment Secretary Michael Gove, Johnson was again way out in front with 160 out of 313 votes, versus Hunt’s 77. One ballot paper was rejected.

Campaign in Florida

Former Egyptian President Morsi Dies in Court

Former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi who later ousted from power, collapsed in court during a trial and died on Monday. The -67yearold Morsi had just addressed the court, speaking from the glass cage he is kept in during sessions and warning that he had "many secrets" he could reveal, a judicial official said. A few minutes afterward, he collapsed, the official said. State TV said Mr Morsi died before he could be taken to hospital. Morsi has been in prison undergoing multiple trials ever since the military ousted him in July 2013. Monday’s session was part of a retrial, being held inside Cairo’s Tura Prison,

President Donald Trump formally launched his 2020 re-election campaign on Tuesday by presenting himself as the same political insurgent who shook up the Washington establishment four years ago and who is now a victim of an attempted ouster by Democrats. At a packed rally in Orlando, Florida, Trump made clear he would run for re-election as an outsider, just as he did in 2016. Whether he can pull it off remains far from certain as Trump has been in Washington now for 2/1-2 years. As thousands cheered him on in Orlando's Amway Center, Trump said his Democratic challengers would radically change the United States and would seek to legalize migrants coming across the southern border so they could vote and boost the Democratic political base.

Jeremy Hunt and Boris Johnson are Final Two in Tory Leadership Race

Fervent Brexit campaigner Boris Johnson and foreign minister Jeremy Hunt emerged on

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China’s President Xi Visits North Korea Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the country’s reclusive neighbour North Korea on Thursday, seeking to bolster a longtime ally hit by U.N. sanctions over its nuclear and missile programmes, a week before Xi and U.S. President Donald Trump meet amid a bitter trade dispute. Xi is the first Chinese leader to visit in 14 years, and could bring fresh support measures for its floundering, sanctionsbound economy. Xi told Kim he had come to consolidate a traditional friendship and to promote the political process for a resolution of the Korean peninsula issue, it added.Xi “positively appraised” North Korea’s efforts to safeguard peace and stability on the peninsula and promote denuclearisation, state television said. “The situation on the Korean peninsula concerns regional peace and stability,” the report paraphrased Xi as telling Kim at their formal meeting.

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The Bumpy Road to “Peace for Prosperity” Why Bahrain’s Workshop Setbacks Aren’t Reasons for Despair 10

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by Yasmine El-Geressi and Ali El Shamy The Peace for Prosperity workshop is set to take place on June 25 and 26 in Bahrain’s capital Manama. The U.S.-led event is meant to kickstart a new economic vision for Palestinians and the wider region grounded in the view that economic prosperity will pave the way to peace. But the workshop has undergone criticism from Palestinian leaders, many of whom believe that the Trump administration’s peace proposals are biased toward Israel. The Palestinian Authority (PA) has decided to boycott the conference. Meanwhile, Israel’s decision to dissolve its newly formed government and hold new elections later this year has also signaled a setback. So is recent news that Israel will not send a government delegation to the workshop. Nevertheless, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and, of course, Bahrain have stated that they will participate in the conference. The presence of these important regional players should not be overlooked.

THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY'S BOYCOTT OF THE WORKSHOP

White House US Senior Advisor Jared Kushner attends the conference on Peace and Security in the Middle East in Warsaw, on February 2019 ,14. (Getty)

On May 2019 ,22, Saeb Erekat, Secretary-General of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) Executive Committee announced that the PA will not attend the conference. He reiterated the PA’s distrust of the Trump administration following its decisions such as moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Other PA officials have derided the conference as a form of “bribery” in which Palestinians are called upon to sell their land for economic rewards.

Amid Palestinian objection to the workshop, a recent article published in Asharq al-Awsat cites anonymous Palestinian sources stating that both regional and international actors are trying to persuade the PA to take part. These parties have made the case that the conference will focus on economic development, rather than political plans, which will benefit the Palestinians.

In a similar vein, Jason Greenblatt, the White House’s Special Representative for International Negotiations and one of the officials behind the administration’s peace plan, has recently written an opinion piece for CNN in which he addresses Palestinians’ concerns about the conferences and why rejecting it will only hurt them. Greenbelt was especially critical of Saeb Erekat for stating that the administration is trying to “buy off” the Palestinians rather than pursue a concrete peace deal.

He refuted the charge by emphasizing that an economic plan can only work with a political plan, and vice-versa: “Despite our repeated statements to the contrary, Saeb claims we are trying to buy the Palestinians. We know that won't work. We fully recognize that our economic

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Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and, of course, Bahrain will be attending and the presence of these big regional players should not be overlooked. plan cannot be successful without a political agreement, just as a political agreement would have little chance without an effective economic plan. The elements of the conflict must be dealt with to unlock the incredible potential of the Palestinian and regional economy.”

Greenblatt has also noted that beyond boycotting the conference, the PA has pressured Palestinian business leaders not to take part. “There is almost no Palestinian business leader that wants to refrain from meeting with some of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world,” he said in an article published by the Jerusalem Post. Reporting from the Times of Israel, for its part, confirms the pressure campaign on Palestinian business leaders. Nonetheless, as an anonymous senior Trump administration official has told the Jerusalem Post, some Palestinian business representatives are expected to attend the workshop.

KEEPING THE CONFERENCE APOLITICAL While the PA has been adamant from the start that it would not take part in the workshop, Israelis would like to play a role. Israel’s Finance Minister, Moshe Kahlon, was initially expected to represent Israel at the conference. However, a week before the start of the workshop, it was reported that at the behest of the U.S. administration, Israel would not send a government delegation to Manama According to an anonymous White House official speaking to the Times of Israel, the decision to not invite Israeli government officials was taken in order to keep the conference apolitical and focus on economic and business investment and opportunities: “This is a workshop where we will present our economic vision for the Palestinian people. As such, we want the focus to be on the economic aspect, not the political.” It was also reported that the decision came after Bahraini officials persuaded organizers not to invite Israeli officials, in part because the country is currently being led by an interim government. In various public statements, Israeli officials signaled deference to the U.S. administration’s

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choice.

In lieu of a government delegation, an Israeli delegation of private citizens involved in business, technology, and innovation are expected to attend.

While the setbacks leading up to the conference might induce a pessimistic outlook, causes for optimism have also emerged. If reports indicating that some Palestinian businesspeople will attend are true, then prospective investment talks between them and their Israeli counterparts can potentially demonstrate the promise of the workshop’s approach. Perhaps a “bottom-up” process will see private citizens set an example for their political leaderships in paving the way to peace. In any case, inasmuch as Greenbelt and Jared Kushner — the other initiator of the peace plan — have said that the workshop is an economic and investment conference rather than a political one, the participation of government officials from every country was not a sine qua non.

KEY ARAB STATES TO ATTEND The confirmed attendance of delegations from frontline Arab states across the region bodes well. The UAE and Saudi Arabia were the first to formally join the international workshop and have assured the Palestinians that they would not endorse a plan that fails to meet their demands. The Gulf states have taken some steps toward advancing rapprochement. Notably, during the 2002 Arab Summit in Beirut, Saudi Arabia broke with precedent to introduce its “Arab Peace Initiative,” marking an opening to increased Gulf involvement in resolving the conflict.

Saudi Arabia confirmed that the Minister of Economy

Following the announcement of the workshop, the UAE welcomed the initiative by stating the country’s support for all international efforts aimed at supporting economic progress ad increasing opportunities, not just for the Palestinians, but for the wider region too.

and Planning, Mohammed bin Maid Al-Tuwaijri will attend. "His Excellency's participation is in continuation of Saudi Arabia's firm and supportive positions for the Palestinian people," the Saudi Press Agency published. The statement emphasised Saudi Arabia’s long-standing support for the stability, growth for the Palestinian people as well as security, stability and prosperity in the region. The Kingdom also reiterated its support for the Palestinian cause during the Saudi-hosted Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit held in Jeddah last month where King Salman told the members that the Arab nations would not compromise on the Palestinian issue. Moreover, the head of the Arab league, also warned this week that attempts to solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict will be in vain without the establishment of a Palestinian state on all territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war. Ahmed Aboul Gheit’s comments appeared to be directed at the Trump peace plan and are likely a message to reassure the Palestinians who have urged Arab states to reconsider their attendance to the conference as Saudi Arabia and Egypt are the Cairo-based Arab league’s most influential members.

Following the announcement of the workshop, the

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Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (R) meets with Jared Kushner, Senior Advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump, on June ,21 2017 in Ramallah, West Bank. (Getty)

If reports indicating that some Palestinian businesspeople are true, then prospective investment talks between both sets of entrepreneurs can demonstrate the golden opportunities that can be unlocked in the region.

UAE welcomed the initiative by stating the country’s support for all international efforts aimed at supporting economic progress and increasing opportunities, not just for the Palestinians, but for the wider region too. The statement noted that the workshop aimed to create a framework that would alleviate “the suffering of people in the region, particularly our brothers in Palestine,” adding that it aims to “lift the Palestinian people out of misery and enable them for a stable and prosperous future.” The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation said Abu Dhabi would send a delegation and reiterated the country’s support for the establishment of a Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital. Noting that efforts aimed at development and prosperity are not in conflict with the UAE’s position on the issue of Palestine, the statement also underscored that such efforts will only advance and support a political solution that cultivates in lasting and comprehensive peace between the Palestinians and Israelis.

While the US confirmed their attendance, there have not been any official statements from Egypt or Jordan confirming this and so it is not yet clear what their level of representation will be. The participation of both

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countries is noteworthy: As the only Arab countries that maintain peace treaties with Israel, they have at times served as facilitators of broader diplomatic efforts. Palestinians have urged Egypt and Jordan - the parties most directly involved in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute these 70 years - to reconsider their reported attendance at the conference, saying it would weaken any Arab opposition to Washington’s plan to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But while the Jordanian government has kept silent on its position on the Bahrain event, the same day that Jordan’s attendance was reported, King Abdullah met with political and media figures to underscore his “support for the Palestinian people in their pursuit of their just and legitimate rights, noting the kingdom’s coordination with the Palestinian side,” according to the Royal Court. A spokeswoman for Jordan's government has also reiterated any peace plan must be based on a twostate solution and that the economic proposal cannot be a substitute for a political solution that will end the Israeli occupation.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi also said earlier this month that Cairo would not “accept anything the Palestinians do not want.” El-Sisi appeared to dismiss suggestions that Egypt might make concessions as part the plan, “You are asking what's the story and what does El-Sisi have in mind, and will he give up anything to anyone,” he said. Referring to reports that Egypt could be required to allow areas in Sinai adjacent to the Gaza border to be part of the deal, El-Sisi added, ”can you imagine that I would give something up. ... But, why?”.

Greenblatt sought to reassure Egypt and Jordan that they would not shoulder the burden and discounted rumors that Gaza’s Palestinians would be encouraged to move to the Sinai, in a land swap that would allow Israel to annex parts of the West Bank, or that Jordan - whose population is half Palestinian - would find itself recast as an alternative Palestinian homeland.

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Washington Struggles to Form Consensus Following Iranian Attacks Divided Reactions Highlight a Critical Challenge for the Trump Administration 14

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For their part, leading Democrats were more divided on whether to assign blame for the shipping attacks to Iran or lend credence to the administration’s account of events. confidence that Iranian forces were responsible for the June 13 attack on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman. As U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News Sunday, "The intelligence community has lots of data, lots of evidence" of Iranian complicity. "The world will come to see much of it, but the American people should rest assured we have high confidence with respect to who conducted these attacks as well as half a dozen other attacks throughout the world."

While the administration has not yet outlined a response, Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas was swift in urging military retaliation.

In a Sunday morning interview on CBS News’ Face the Nation, Senator Cotton said, “What I'm talking about is not like what we've seen in Iraq for the last 16 years or Afghanistan for the last 18 years … [but that the U.S. should initiate] “retaliatory military strikes against Iran that make it clear we will not tolerate any kind of attacks on commercial shipping on the open seas.”

DIVISION, SKEPTICISM AMONG LEADING DEMOCRATS Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks at the State Department, Thursday, June 2019 ,13, in Washington following attacks on 2 tankers near Arabian Gulf. (AP Photo)

by Joseph Braude Controversy over the recent attacks on international shipping in the Gulf of Oman is dominating the American public discussion: The Trump administration and Congressional Republicans are pushing a hard line, while Democrats and much of the media are conflicted over whether to assign responsibility for the attacks to Iran.

REPUBLICANS CALL FOR HARSH RESPONSE TO GULF ATTACKS The Trump administration has expressed high

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For their part, leading Democrats were more divided on whether to assign blame for the shipping attacks to Iran or lend credence to the administration’s account of events. On Meet the Press, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a leading candidate in the Democratic presidential primary, said, “what we see out of the White House is something disturbingly reminiscent of the kind of accelerating drumbeat that got us into the war in Iraq.” By contrast, Congressman Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, stated unequivocally that there was “no question that Iran's behind the attacks. I think the evidence is very strong and compelling. In fact I think this is a Class A screw-up by Iran.”

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Skepticism of the administration was pronounced in progressive quarters of the national media.

Former Obama administration official Ben Rhodes, known for his advocacy of the JCPOA, said, “This definitely feels like the kind of incident where you'd want an international investigation to establish what happened. Huge risk of escalation.”

Senator Bernie Sanders, a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, went further: “The Gulf of Oman incident must not be used as a pretext for war with Iran. War would be an unmitigated disaster for the United States, Iran, the region, and the world.”

A highly polarized political climate has intensified skepticism of any intelligence which might support the case for a new war in the Middle East.

For her part, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi showed willingness to assign blame to Iran, but also conveyed firm opposition to any form of military retaliation: “We have absolutely no appetite for going to war, or to be provocative to create situations that might evoke responses, where mistakes could be made. You know, it's one [of the ways] countries exercise their leverage. They threaten. They [do] this or that. But there could be mistakes made, and that's a very dangerous thing.”

THE PATH FORWARD Washington’s divided reaction to the Iranian attacks on international shipping highlight a critical challenge for the Trump administration. A highly polarized political climate has intensified skepticism of any intelligence which might support the case for a new war in the Middle East. Whether the U.S. can respond effectively to the latest round of Iranian probing may turn on the administration’s strategy for allaying the concerns of leading Democrats and European allies.

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White House supporters are meanwhile interpreting the easing of tensions as a vindication of the administration’s policy.

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Iran’s Green Movement Never Went Away Ten Years On, the Islamic Republic Only Strengthens What It Represses

By Omid Memarian Ten years ago today, shortly after Iran’s presidential election on June 2009 ,14, millions of people took to the streets of Tehran chanting, “Where is my vote?” The protests that came to be known as the Green Movement shook the Islamic Republic like nothing had since its founding in 1979.

Among the unforgettable images from those days were those of women and men marching side by side, not only protesting the dishonesty of the election results but also refusing to submit to the government’s repressive presence in almost all aspects of their lives. They did so at great risk. State security forces, including agents of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, arrested thousands of protesters, dozens of whom lost

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their lives. The movement’s leaders—former presidential candidates Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi and political activist Zahra Rahnavard—have remained under house arrest since 2011.

By the end of 2009, the state largely succeeded in quashing those public protests. And ten years later, the Islamic Republic’s basic character remains unchanged. The authorities still respond to the people’s demands for change by trying to silence them. Multiple intelligence agencies, all beyond the reach of justice, compete with one another to stamp out peaceful dissent; the executive branch operates under the shadow of an unelected, all-powerful “supreme leader”; the judicial system serves as a handmaiden to the security apparatus; and policymakers remain preoccupied with women’s dress and moved by a deeply rooted antiAmericanism.

For all that, the Islamic Republic did not succeed in pulling out the roots from which the Green Movement sprang. Even as the cost of dissent remains high, a new generation of Iranians—including women, youth, students, workers, and ordinary citizens from all socioeconomic strata—continues to demand civil and political liberties. And although those who raise their voices are subject to arrest, detention, forced false confessions, torture, and denial of due process, significant numbers of Iranians have remained undaunted in the exercise of peaceful dissent. Indeed, for all its violence, the Islamic Republic appears to have produced little more than a vicious cycle of repression and defiance that erodes its legitimacy and authority.

ABUSES WILL OUT Supporters of Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi wave green flags -- his campaign color -- as they attend a pro-reform rally at Haydarniya Stadium in Tehran on June 2009 ,9. (Getty)

The Islamic Republic was born from repression and has yet to risk ruling without it. Before the revolutionary state was a decade old, it had already executed thousands for their political views and activities. Since that time, thousands more have spent years in prisons for political reasons. In recent years, however, the Internet has made this repressive project more difficult for the state to conceal and justify.

Unlike in the past, when the government could easily control and manipulate news, today both activism and the steps the state takes to repress it can be magnified and amplified through social media. The circulation of such news has raised domestic awareness of human and civil rights violations, making state propaganda increasingly ineffective and revealing the falseness of the government’s narratives. The result has been a steady chipping away of the legitimacy of state institutions and officials. This change in the internal dynamic of the country, and the huge deficit of trust in the state, is one of the most important developments under way in Iran. Trust in the country’s state TV, once the jewel in the crown of state propaganda, has plummeted in recent years, according to ranking officials. A recent poll by IPOs showed that some two-thirds of the Iranian people judge the country's

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The Islamic Republic was born from repression and has yet to risk ruling without it. Before the revolutionary state was a decade old, it had already executed thousands for their political views and activities. banks, courts, and judicial system to be corrupt; more than half feel the same about the nation's police.

Activists have fed this changing internal dynamic by consistently choosing nonviolence as their main strategy for dealing with a repressive regime. The choice is a wise one, because the Islamic Republic has a long history of discrediting, demonizing, and crushing groups that promote violent resistance. The government can rally people behind the flag to delegitimize armed opposition. But these tactics don’t work with peaceful activism—in fact, when the state treats peaceful protesters the same way it would armed insurgents, it winds up facing censure not only from the majority of the country’s civil society activists but from the international community as well. Important countries with which Iran maintains ties, including Brazil, Japan, and many European states, have repeatedly voiced concern about the Islamic Republic’s high rate of executions and its persecution of peaceful activists.

International news media regularly—though not effectively or consistently—question Iranian officials who travel abroad about the state’s silencing of dissent and imprisonment of activists. Those Iranian officials who deny these rights violations invite mockery and criticism.

In 2013, the United Nation’s Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed a special rapporteur to monitor the human rights situation in Iran, demonstrating international recognition of the severity of the human rights abuses in the country. The rapporteur has documented such abuses as juvenile executions, the persecution of religious minorities, and the harassment and imprisonment of prominent human rights activists. These reports have put global pressure on the country by singling out the authorities responsible for the abuses. At critical junctures, international opprobrium has dovetailed with domestic pressure to bring about real change.

For example, sustained work on Iran’s death penalty laws

by Iranian activists such as Narges Mohammadi (currently serving a ten-year prison sentence for her efforts), together with international pressure, resulted in a dramatic drop in reported executions, from 977 in 2015 to 253 in 2018, according to Amnesty International.

Indeed, Iran is not immune to pressure. The ferocity with which the authorities have persecuted human rights lawyers,

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who bring abuses to both domestic and international attention, reflects their fear of exposure and their urgent desire to evade accountability. Prominent defense attorney Nasrin Sotoudeh is serving 12 years for defending women who removed their hijabs in public as a form of civil disobedience, and for protesting the judiciary’s denial of the choice of counsel to detainees held on politically motivated charges. Mohammad Najafi is serving 13 years for defending prisoners and speaking out against violent abuses and deaths in prison.

Abdolfattah Soltani, originally sentenced to 13 years for defending political prisoners in court, was released only last November after serving more than seven years behind bars.

SUPPRESSION BACKFIRES Lawyers and activists are not the only ones who persist in struggling for basic human rights in Iran. Ordinary people across the country—especially workers—have continued to mount peaceful protests against such abuses as unpaid wages, prohibitions against organizing effective and independent unions, and the imprisonment of independent labor leaders. Industrial equipment workers, sugar industry workers, teachers, bus drivers, and many others have held protests throughout the country over the last decade.

Earlier this year, labor activist and union representative Esmail Bakhshi brought international attention to Iran’s southwestern Khuzestan Province, where for years workers from the Haft Tappeh Sugarcane Agro-industrial Complex have protested unpaid wages. Videos of Bakhshi speaking to workers and criticizing the security forces’ aggressive attempts to quash their protests received millions of views online.

Bakhshi’s case revealed the cost of such activism—and thus how notable it is that peaceful protest has continued unabated in Iran. Bakhshi was arrested on November 2018 ,18, and detained for roughly a month in an Intelligence Ministry–run

The lesson of the state’s violent crackdown in 2009 is one that Iran’s state and supreme leader have yet to learn: denying the demand for justice and human dignity will not silence but strengthen it.

detention center in Ahvaz. Upon his release, Bakhshi wrote an open letter in which he described his severe torture while in state custody. Another detained activist, independent reporter Sepideh Qoliyan, corroborated his allegations. For speaking out, both were re-arrested in January 2019 and interrogated for months without access to lawyers. Their ordeal has done little to discourage workers from raising their voices, however: in just the last six months, in various parts of the country, teachers, bazaaris, dam workers, Ministry of Agricultureworkers, and railway workers have gone on strike or protested unpaid wages.

If the Iranian government hoped that by raising the cost of activism and dimming prospects for change, it could convince Iranians to go home and stop trying, it was apparently mistaken. The lesson of the state’s violent crackdown in 2009 is one that Iran’s state and supreme leader have yet to learn: denying the demand for justice and human dignity will not silence but strengthen it.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Supporters of Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi hold up his picture on placards during a demonstration supporting him outside Tehran University on June 2009 ,9 in Tehran, Iran. (Getty)

Banners are displayed as members of Sydney's Iranian community protest outside a polling booth in Sydney's north on June 2009 ,12.

(Getty)

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The End of the Spanish Exception?

Far-Right Populism Has Finally Conquered Spain, but the Real Shift Lies Elsewhere

by Sam Edwards Spain’s acting prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, recently announced that his center-left Spanish

Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) would seek to form a minority government in cooperation with the far-left party Unidas Podemos. Six weeks after elections in late April left no party with a clear majority, the country is edging closer to a new

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Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez holds a press conference in Palace of Moncloa, N Madrid, Spain on June 2019 ,6. (Getty)

left-wing government.

In the international press, the national election made headlines for two reasons, each offering a different picture of the state of Spanish—and, by extension, European—politics. The shocking entry into the lower house of parliament of the far-right nationalist party Vox appeared to augur a potential new threat to liberal democracy in a country long considered immune to rightwing populism after 40 years under the rule of fascist dictator Francisco Franco. By contrast, the victory of the PSOE, which came in first with some 29 percent of the vote, seemed a sign of democracy’s resilience (and a rare win for Europe’s beleaguered social democrats).

Both of these developments were actually the outcome of a far more momentous shift: the stunning implosion of the center-right People’s Party (PP), the Spanish right’s home for the last 30 years. Founded in 1989, the PP united camps on the right that ranged from centrist fiscal conservatives all the way to a far-right minority nostalgic for Franco’s dictatorship. The party took somewhat of a hit in 2015, when upstart leftist parties such as Podemos began chipping away at Spain’s traditional two-party system. Yet few expected the PP’s near-complete collapse this April. The party won only 17 percent of the vote, gaining a mere 66 seats in the -350seat parliament—its worstever result and a dramatic comedown from the 186 seats it held at its height in 2011. In municipal, regional, and European elections in May, the PP’s downward trajectory continued, the party averting complete disaster only because of strong results in Madrid.

How did this bastion of the Spanish right crumble?

The PP’s failure to ward off a new far-right, antiimmigrant rival, and the broader malaise gripping many Western establishment parties, surely damaged the party’s fortunes. But ultimately, the PP’s implosion is a uniquely Spanish story—one that centers around a secessionist crisis and a sprawling corruption case.

THE COLLAPSE OF AN EMPIRE As the election results came in on the evening of April 28, two very different scenes played out in a wealthy corner of central Madrid. At the PP’s headquarters on the Calle de Génova, each news

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The shocking entry into the lower house of parliament of the far-right nationalist party Vox appeared to augur a potential new threat to liberal democracy in a country long considered immune to right-wing populism. update described an increasingly grim return for the once formidable party. The PP won 66 seats in the -350seat parliament, losing more than six million votes since 2011. It was, one journalist quipped on Twitter, like watching the Roman Empire collapse.

A few blocks away, at the upmarket Phoenix Hotel, a radical far-right movement, led largely by former PP figures, was rising from the ashes of its forebear. Formed in 2013, but largely irrelevant until a sudden regional success in late 2018, Vox now managed a respectable ten percent of the national vote.

Vox’s choice of venue seemed imbued with symbolism. A few months earlier, the plaza outside the Phoenix Hotel had hosted a giant rally of unionists protesting Catalan separatism— the defining issue in Spanish politics since a controversial independence referendum two years ago, which was deemed illegal by Madrid courts. The referendum in late 2017 triggered a months-long standoff between Madrid and the Catalan regional government, which ended only after Madrid took direct control of the province and jailed several former Catalan politicians. The crisis provoked a fierce backlash in other parts of the country, and Spanish nationalism, long tainted by its association with Franco, returned with full force. Hard-line unionists blamed former PP leader and Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy for mishandling the secession crisis by allowing the referendum to take place at all. The PP worked desperately to shore up its unionist credentials, even sharing the stage with Vox at the Madrid rally. But in the final weeks before the vote, polls showed, the party lost support.

The Phoenix Hotel was also the site where, a decade

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earlier, a whistleblower had secretly recorded a key businessman with close ties to the party and PP leaders confessing to an enormous corruption scheme involving high-ranking PP members.

The recording, revealed in 2009 after the first of a string of high-profile arrests of PP figures, detailed a secret party slush fund that collected large donations from business and used the funds to finance campaign events. The case, known in Spain as el caso Gürtel, was the most visible of a series of graft scandals that revealed systematic corruption within the party. It painted a garish image of a corrupt, arrogant, and debauched circle of chancers either in office or bribing those who were. Satisfaction with the political system, which for many years had remained high as Spaniards reveled in their relatively young democracy, gave way to resentment of a flawed political class—a self-interested set belonging to what the left-wing populist party Podemos memorably branded “the caste.”

For many years, the PP looked set to weather the storm. Mariano Rajoy, the PP leader elected prime minister after a landslide victory in 2011, was dubbed “the Survivor” for his uncanny ability to outlast the kinds of crises that toppled his counterparts in other countries. But the combined weight of the Gürtel case and the Catalan secession crisis proved too much even for Rajoy.

In May 2018, a long-awaited ruling in the Gürtel case came down, convicting a slew of former party members of corruption and naming the PP

Vox has tried to whip up anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment, but immigration is still a fairly marginal issue in Spanish public opinion, as are opposition to globalization and skepticism toward the EU.

itself as a direct beneficiary of a vast kickbacksfor-contracts scheme in operation since the party’s inception in 1989.

The PP had survived similar shocks before, but this time the center-left PSOE saw its chance and called a no-confidence vote against Rajoy. The move was a gamble: the PSOE held only 84 seats in the -350seat parliament, and no such motion had ever succeeded in the Spanish parliament. But the Socialists managed to narrowly scrape together the support they needed—in part thanks to the votes of Catalan separatists intent on toppling the prime minister who had thwarted their independence bid.

VOX POPULI In the wake of Rajoy’s shock ouster, the PP opted not to address the systematic corruption in its ranks directly. Officials refused to apologize for the Gürtel scandal, choosing to blame only “a few shameless individuals who betrayed the party.”

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The president of Vox, Santiago Abascal, talks to the press to analyze the results of the past local, regional and European elections and explains his position of possible pacts with other political parties on May 2019 ,29 in Madrid, Spain. (Getty)

Instead, the PP sought to dispense with the old guard by appointing -37year-old Pablo Casado as its leader. But the party, which for its entire history had appealed to conservatives across the spectrum, now found itself squeezed from both sides. On one end, Vox was calling for a reconquista to save Spain’s supposedly Christian character from Muslim immigrants, leftists, and Catalan separatists—and found itself kingmaker in the state of Andalusia after regional elections in late 2018. Slightly to the left of the PP, the new party Ciudadanos—whose leader, Albert Rivera, has been compared with France’s Emmanuel Macron—courted centrist but staunchly unionist voters.

Casado sought to elevate his profile by striking a bellicose tone. He dubbed Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez a “traitor” and “felon” for having relied on Catalan nationalist parties to oust Rajoy.

But Casado’s strategy of confrontation and polarization backfired. While Ciudadanos broke

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off the center-right, the PSOE presented itself as the only credible bulwark against a coalition beholden to its most reactionary component, the anti-immigrant, anti-feminist Vox. Vox utterly dominated the election campaign, drawing disproportionate media coverage and pulling the political debate toward polarizing issues such as gender violence, abortion, and gun ownership. But the PP’s collapse casts new light on Vox’s rise. The right-wing group’s entry into parliament invites comparisons to the populist surge sweeping much of Western Europe, but whether Spain really fits this trend is questionable.

Vox has tried to whip up anti-Muslim and antiimmigrant sentiment, but immigration is still a fairly marginal issue in Spanish public opinion, as are opposition to globalization and skepticism toward the EU. “If we hadn’t seen such systematic corruption and if Rajoy . . . had taken a more assertive position on Catalonia, I don’t think [Vox’s rise] would have happened,” David del Val, an analyst at Spain’s AFI consultancy, told me. Unlike Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, Vox has failed to attract traditionally left-leaning working-class voters.

Rather, Vox voters are largely male, educated, and middle-class. Many are former PP voters.

The PP’s implosion, in other words, allowed Vox to capitalize on ultraconservative religious and nationalist sentiments that had always existed but previously been incorporated into the PP. The PP’s disastrous campaign tells of the dangers of allowing relatively small populist parties to dominate the political conversation. But the lessons for the outside world end there, because Spainstill stands out from the rest of Europe with its idiosyncratic national politics. The traditional political and economic division between right and left remains fairly intact, national politics are defined by questions of centralization and regionalism, and mass immigration is still a much more recent phenomenon than in many neighboring European countries. As a result, the Spanish case doesn’t fit easily into anxious accounts of the inexorable advance of right-wing populism: in Spain, the rise of the far right is the symptom of a collapsing center-right, not the cause.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Use Venezuelan Assets to Help Venezuelan Refugees Mass Displacement and the Responsibility to Pay

by Amalia Perez and Selim Can Sazak In Venezuela, a humanitarian crisis is coming to a boil.

The country’s GDP has shrunk by double digits over the past few years, annual inflation runs to more than 80,000 percent, and 90 percent of the population lives in poverty.

Opposition leader Juan Guaidó declared himself the country’s legitimate president in January, and more than 40 countries formally recognized him as such—but he has since lost steam. With each passing day, the opposition’s chances of ousting President Nicolás Maduro fade.

As the instability in their country deepens, Venezuelans

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Venezuelan migrants wait to get a refugee application at the Peruvian border post at the binational border attention centre (CEBAF) in Tumbes on early June 2019 ,14. (Getty)

flee in droves, precipitating a refugee crisis for which there is no precedent in the Western Hemisphere. An estimated 3.4 million Venezuelans are living abroad, the majority having fled since 2015. More than 1.2 million Venezuelans have settled in neighboring Colombia; another half million live in Peru, while Ecuador hosts a quarter million.

These refugee-receiving countries have deep-seated problems of their own. Colombia, despite its booming economy, remains the second-most unequal country in Latin America, trailing only Honduras. For more than 50 years, its government has fought a low-intensity civil war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist guerilla group. Colombia is second only to Syria in terms of the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs): today, some 5.7 million Colombians are forced to live away from their homes because of the conflict. The landmark peace deal brokered with the FARC in 2016 is unraveling. Colombian President Iván Duque, a former right-wing senator who opposed the deal, has stalled its implementation and is now calling for the renegotiation of some of its key clauses. Violence is re-escalating in the Colombian countryside, and there are worrying signs that the country might relapse into a full-scale conflict.

In Colombia, the impact of the refugee crisis can be seen everywhere. In Bogotá, the capital city, thousands of Venezuelan families, many with newborns and toddlers, live on the banks of sewage canals. In border towns such as Arauca and Maicao, which already had some of the highest poverty rates in the country and large numbers of IDPs, Venezuelan refugees account for nearly one-fifth of the local population. Although Colombia is already spending more than 1.5$ billion—0.5 percent of its GDP—annually on the crisis, it is unable to provide basic services such as prenatal care, primary education, and decent housing to most Venezuelan refugees.

The principle of non-refoulement—which prohibits states from returning refugees to the territories where their lives or freedoms would be threatened—is not only part of 1951 Refugee Convention. It is also a so-called jus cogens norm of international law: like the prohibitions against slavery and genocide, it is considered to be a binding duty for all nations. But the legal regime lacks clarity on who, if anyone, is responsible for solving refugee crises, and how the burdens of such crises should be shared.

Instead, refugees generally flee to neighboring countries, which are left to shoulder the economic, political, and social costs associated with their influx. The result is a system of organized hypocrisy. In theory, refugee-hosting countries fulfill a duty on behalf of the entire international community. In reality, the rest of the world free-rides on their sacrifice.

Consider the case of Turkey: since 2012, the country received more than 3.5 million Syrians, the world’s

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The world failed at making Assad pay for what he did in Syria. It should avoid repeating the same kind of failure in Venezuela. largest refugee population. Providing for them has cost Turkey more than 35$ billion. Although the international community has pledged over 6 billion euros in aid, much of it is yet to materialize, and even if paid in full it would amount to less than one-quarter of what Turkey has spent out of its own pocket.

Nor is money the only problem. When refugees come, they stay for years, even decades. The world’s largest refugee camp, Kenya’s Dadaab, has been home to almost half a million Somali refugees for more than 25 years.

In Lebanon, which hosts more refugees per capita than any country in the world, Palestinian refugees have been trapped in camps such as Ayn al-Hilweh since the 1950s.

To absorb millions of refugees and provide them with the means to live in dignity is a Herculean task. Yet the countries expected to do so are often those least able to afford the expense: 85 percent of refugees live in the developing world. Nearly half live in just ten countries.

Of those ten, only Germany, which ranks sixth, is a high-income country; the average GDP per capita of the remaining nine is barely more than 3800$. International agencies, such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), are ostensibly tasked with helping refugeereceiving countries but are chronically underfunded and understaffed. NGOs can do only so much. This is not a sustainable course.

GIVING BACK There is, however, an alternative. As one of the coauthors of this piece argued in Foreign Affairs almost four years ago, refugee-receiving states and international institutions such as UNHCRshould be allowed to fund their relief efforts by drawing on the assets of refugee source countries. Today, billions of dollars in Venezuelan state assets sit frozen in financial centers around the world.

These funds could provide countries such as Colombia with a sustainable revenue stream to care for the millions of refugees that have recently settled within their borders.

Although more aggressive conceptions of sovereign responsibility, such as the Responsibility-to-Protect doctrine, remain controversial, it is widely accepted that states can commit wrongful acts for which they can be held liable, and that other states harmed by these acts can

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request reparations. There is even case-law precedent for the use of frozen assets for such purposes: before Iraq finally agreed to the UN Compensation Commission in 1995, the commission had planned on using Iraq’s frozen assets to pay reparations to Kuwait.

The obvious defense that refugee-generating states would invoke against such measures is force majeure: they are not intentionally inflicting harm on another country but, due to extraordinary circumstances, have been rendered incapable of providing for their citizens. If that is the case, then the transfer of the refugee-generating state’s assets to refugee-receiving states for the purpose of providing basic services to their citizens is even less controversial: had it not been for the extraordinary circumstances, these assets would have been used for the good of the sending country’s citizens anyway. Our proposal does not contest the legal ownership of frozen assets—they still belong to their original owners. What we propose is taking money sitting idly in bank accounts, putting it into good use, and leaving an I.O.U. in its place, with the understanding that the assets will be returned if and when the situation returns to normal.

Syria was the initial impetus behind our proposal, but the opportunity to put it into practice there proved elusive.

Although the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was placed under sanctions and the Assad family’s assets were frozen across Europe, the Syrian economic elite’s domestic investments so outweighed their overseas assets and commercial interests that the total value of assets that could be targeted by the international community was inconsequential in the context of the broader crisis.

Freezing more Syrian assets would have required action from the United Nations Security Council, which was impossible given Russia’s unswerving support for the Assad regime.

In Venezuela, the circumstances are more favorable because billions of dollars in Venezuelan assets already sit

To absorb millions of refugees and provide them with the means to live in dignity is a Herculean task. Yet the countries expected to do so are often those least able to afford the expense.

frozen in Western bank accounts. The Bank of England, for example, has frozen 1.56$ billion worth of Venezuelan assets, while the United States has frozen more than 3$ billion. More recently, the United States has imposed sanctions on the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, and transferred control of its U.S. subsidiary, Citgo, to the opposition. Unlike in the case of Syria, the U.S. and other governments can take action against Venezuela without Russian buy-in. They can introduce legislation to requisition these funds for the benefit of UNHCR, which would use them to help Venezuelan refugees. If Moscow compels the UN to turn down these funds, they can be disbursed directly to refugee-receiving countries such as Colombia instead.

The assets requisitioned in this manner would remain the property of Venezuela. When the refugees start returning to their country—if they ever do—the assets should be returned as well. Until then, however, there is no reason for such resources to sit dormant in bank accounts while

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Syrian displaced people carry water canisters in the flooded Deir al-Ballut refugee camp in Afrin's countryside, along Syria's northern border with Turkey on February 2019 ,11.

(Getty)

millions of Venezuelans in forced exile languish without access to food, housing, and security. From Cicero to Locke to contemporary legal scholarship, there is a well-established tradition arguing that governments are fiduciaries for their citizens, meaning that they are obligated to look out for their citizens’ interests. The same logic should extend to public assets as well: governments are fiduciaries, not proprietors, of their assets, which actually belong to their citizens. There is a compelling case for using these assets to help citizens in their time of need.

DON'T REPEAT THE PAST A political as well as a moral logic supports the use of frozen assets to support refugees. As the political scientist Kelly Greenhill has observed, refugee crises are rarely accidental. Rather, certain governments benefit from the mass displacement of their citizens, and they deliberately

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choose it, even using it as a weapon.

Syria provides a textbook case. By driving millions out of the country, the Assad government destabilized neighboring countries such as Turkey, secured its grip on power, wiped out the domestic opposition, and externalized the costs of civil war. The brave souls that stood up against Assad are dispossessed, devitalized, and dispersed around the world, if not already dead.

Without swift action, the same will happen in Venezuela.

The Maduro regime directly benefits from having forced millions of its citizens to depart from the country. The more opponents leave the country, the fewer critics Maduro must face, and the easier it is for him to hold on to power.

Such acts should not come cost-free. The world failed at making Assad pay for what he did in Syria. It should avoid repeating the same kind of failure in Venezuela.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Young Algerian Doctor Spends Ramadan in Rohingya Camp Humanitarian Reveals the Misery of Rohingya Refugees

by Yassin Bodhan * Majalla met up with Abd El Gabar after he returned to Algeria, where he shared his experiences and stories of the nightmare that

the Rohingya refugees are enduring. * Yassin Abd El Gabar: “I would see many distressing images on activist social media pages, but my sympathies fell silent as I felt that I had no method of reaching out to them and helping.�

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*Yassin Abd El Gabar: “Why don’t Muslims helping Rohingyas get the same attention as those who carried out the Sri Lanka attacks?”

Social media outlets across the Arab world spread the news of a young Algerian physician who decided to spend Ramadan caring for Rohingya refugees residing in the Kutupalong camp located on the shared Myanmar Bangladesh border. Photos of the -29year-old carrying a backpack full of medicines and wearing a stethoscope over his neck made Yassin Abd El Gabar a sensation across his home country of Algeria.

Abd El Gabar’s decision to go to Kutupalong was not an easy one since Ramadan is a time in which families spend precious time together; he nevertheless made the sacrifice to provide care for those who needed it most.

Majalla met up with Abd El Gabar after he returned to Algeria, where he shared his experiences and stories of the nightmare that the Rohingya refugees are enduring. When asked about his reasons for making the trip he said that he has a long history of working with humanitarian groups in Algeria while he was a student and has made several charity trips across many Algerian governorates. One time he traveled as far as Ain Kazan, which is the farthest point in the Algerian desert.

Abd El Gabar also had a compassionate reason for traveling to Kutupalong: “I would see many distressing images on activist social media pages, but my sympathies fell silent as I felt that I had no method of reaching out to them and helping.” Fortunately, he would eventually get his opportunity to provide aid for said refugees. One of Abd El Gabar’s friends is a head of a charity organization in France, and just before Ramadan his friend announced that he needed volunteers to help distribute Ramadan provisions to Rohingya refugees, so he phoned his friend and asked him if the charity needed a doctor and the arrangements were made. Abd El Gabar understood that he would be exposed to many hazards during his travels; he even knew that he risked dying, but none of that mattered to him since nothing would come between him and his humanitarian mission. “I am not a wealthy businessman, but I have medical training which I can use to help these refugees.”

After he packed up his medical supplies, Abd El Gabar went on to obtain a visa to travel to Bangladesh, but he faced a dilemma namely the fact that Bangladeshi authorities have been returning travelers who come to help the Rohingya refugees. So he had to pretend that he was traveling as a tourist rather than a philanthropist. “Security officials at the airport thoroughly questioned me; they did not comprehend why an Algerian would go to Bangladesh for tourism, but after 45 minutes of continuous investigation I was able to convince them that I was an avid traveler who chose Bangladesh as his next destination due to its beautiful scenery and the fact that the trip coincided with Ramadan helped my case.”

Abd El Gabar spent two days in Dhaka, staying with a Rohingya refugee representative. He then went to southeast Bangladesh to join the other charity activists who had 100 tons of food and medical supplies with them. Then they headed to the camp, passing through a harsh jungle path trying to avoid Bangladeshi

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Abd El Gabar stated that the camp lacks the basic necessities for human life as it does not have food, water, medicine or a sewage system and their conditions make it easy for diseases to spread. troops who capture activists like them.

Abd El Gabar stated that local groups help these activists reach the camp: “There are local groups that help facilitate our mission, for instance, they provide us with primitive means of transport and plan routes that help us avoid soldiers. Some of these groups are humanitarian ones, while others are motivated by profit, but this is the case all over the world”.

The camp is located at the city of Cox’s Bazar of the state of Chittagong, which borders Myanmar (Burma). Since August 2017, Myanmar came under international scrutiny after its army and extremist Buddhist militias started a genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority, thus forcing them out of the country.

Since then the refugees have stayed at asylum camps in the outskirts of Cox’s Bazar which has become a global destination for media correspondents, charities and international delegates.

There are currently 800,000 persecuted Rohingya Muslims and the United Nations has listed them as one of the most persecuted minorities around the world.

The activists at the Kutupalong camp directed Abd El Gabar towards schools that had orphan children who lost their parents during the genocide. He met with the children, diagnosed them and prescribed medication for them. He then bought the medicine which he personally delivered to the children.

Abd El Gabar stated that the camp lacks the basic necessities for human life as it does not have food, water, medicine or a sewage system and their conditions make it easy for diseases to spread. He also said that “This is the largest refugee camp in the world and it houses almost a million refugees whose only hope for survival is the aid that comes from here and abroad.”

The doctor spoke more on the causes of the refugees’ misery: “The refugees cannot travel into Bangladesh because they do not have identity documents, and they can’t go back to their homes in Burma because of the bombs planted at the border, as such they are trapped in the camp. But those who are in the camp are actually the lucky ones since many did not make it through the dangerous journey of seas and jungles and many had to resort to eating grass for survival. As a result, many Rohingya die before reaching the camp.”

He further noted that the refugees are suffering from diseases that were last heard of during the previous century as many of

them have come down with the measles. In addition to these archaic illnesses, shortness of breath, high blood pressure, and diabetes are common in the camp.

Abd El Gabar then emphasized that “The camp is teeming with horrific stories and anecdotes, there is that one boy who lost all his family members and is now alone, I met an elderly widow who lost her husband and now has no one to take for her, and I also met a mother who lost all her children one by one right in front of her eyes. There are other stories with shocking details that reveal the magnitude of their misery, furthermore, their lack of identity documents means they can’t do anything to help themselves.”

Despite all the horrors he has seen, Abd El Gabar said that he intends on returning to the camp, as a matter of fact, he made a promise to the refugees that he would visit every year to deliver provisions.

Despite all the horrors he has seen, Abd El Gabar said that he intends on returning to the camp, as a matter of fact, he made a promise to the refugees that he would visit every year to deliver provisions. He also said that he would announce relief projects for the Rohingya, the projects will be in Algeria and they will aim to provide the refugees with food, medicine, and clothing.

He also revealed that he received a call from a high-level government official who expressed her gratitude for his actions and considered him a great example for Algeria. She further expressed readiness to assist in other solidarity initiatives in the future. He then told Majalla of a new national association that would provide relief to the Rohingya Muslims.

On his family’s views of his travels he said: “My parents didn’t approve of my trip since going to a war zone puts me at risk of death or imprisonment, but I tried convincing them by stating that I’m going there for peaceful and humanitarian purposes, so whatever happens to me is going to happen.”

He ended the interview with this statement: “I am one of the tens of young Muslims who came from five different continents to help these refugees. We came here through two charities; the first is called “je vous aime” which is headed by Mohamed Karim Daragy and the second is called “HAMED” which is headed by Nour El Din. Why don’t many young Muslims volunteer for such charities rather than bombing religious shrines and public areas?

Why don’t Muslims helping Rohingyas get the same attention as those who carried out the Sri Lanka attacks?

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1753- June- 21/06/2019

Fascism Ain’t What it Used to Be www.majalla.com

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From ‘Aladdin’ to Galaxy’s Edge, how Hollywood Interprets Arab culture Some Stereotypes Subside while Others Remain 36

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Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, Disneyland’s new theme park, is inspired by Islamic architecture, nomadic desert life and cultural markers throughout the Middle East.

Mena Massoud and Naomi Scott attend the premiere of Disney's "Aladdin" on May ,21 2019 in Los Angeles, California. (Getty)

by Lorraine Ali The city walls are scarred with bullet holes and burn marks. Tattered camouflage netting hangs like moss over defunct fighter posts and the Moorish archways of the marketplace. The cries of hungry children fill the bazaar, where merchants in flowing robes and headscarves hawk scarce, overpriced goods to desperate parents.

It’s a war zone I recognize, or at least one I think I recognize as an Iraqi American and someone who has taken more family trips in combat-wrecked regions than poolside resorts.

But despite the multiple checkpoints, nomadic desert

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garb and food staples of hummus and pita, this is one Arabesque war zone where you won’t hear flying American fighter jets overhead or see the black flags of IS crumpled on the ground.

You may, however, spot a fairy princess or three smothered in layers of pink taffeta, adults wielding 200$ toy lightsabers and “locals” addressing “travelers” with jargon that as many have pointed out sounds as if it were pulled straight out of a “Handmaid’s Tale” episode. “Bright suns!”

“Under his eye” is not the correct response, I learn, but it won’t get you kicked out of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, Disneyland’s new theme park inside a theme park.

The -14acre immersive experience is designed to transport guests from the old-timey shops of Main Street to the Black Spire Outpost on the planet of Batuu, “a remote trading port for smugglers, traders, and adventurers traveling the Outer Rim and Wild Space.”

Translation: It’s a wonderland for fans of the film franchise, many of whom cried when they stepped foot in the “port” on opening day two weeks ago. But for those of us who know little about fictional resistance beyond that being waged in Gilead, it’s a costly journey to an artfully distressed realm where the entry fee is equal to a transcontinental plane ticket and pricegouging has driven the cost of a small bottle of Coke to nearly 5$ (just like Baghdad!).

Galaxy’s Edge, like “Star Wars” creator George Lucas, was inspired by Islamic architecture, nomadic desert life and cultural markers throughout the Middle East. It borrows from the rugged terrain of Tunisia and Jordan, the chaos of war-torn areas stretching from Sanaa to Gaza and the romance of an exotic Arabia concocted in the backlots of old Hollywood.

In Magic Kingdom schematics, it’s the mouse-ears version of the Arabian Gulf, just as the American South is New Orleans Square, Europe is all over Fantasyland (a castle, the Matterhorn, lederhosen, turkey drumsticks fit for a king), the West is Frontierland and yesterday’s idea of future is here today in Tomorrowland.

The world of sheiks, sand dunes and never-ending conflicts, however, is trickier to navigate than, say,

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rockets and submarine rides without running into the unpleasantries of the real world.

Take Disney’s other recent venture, “Aladdin.” The film, released last month, is a live-action remake of the animated classic featuring Robin Williams. The new Genie, Will Smith, stars alongside an ethnically representative cast of Arabs, Coptic Egyptians, South Asians and more. In addition, several aspects of the story were updated to avoid the barbarous, hook-nosed stereotypes of the original.

And this time around the movie’s villainous, turbaned Jafar (Marwan Kenzari) is just as hunky as its Westernized hero, Aladdin (Mena Massoud). Take that, Indiana Jones, whose foes always seemed to be swarthier than his allies. Side note: The “Indiana Jones Adventure” ride is just a few checkpoints and churro stands from Galaxy’s Edge.

Some corners of the Arab and Muslim community felt the revamped “Aladdin” was still too Orientalist and inauthentic, despite the fact that the story is derived from a fictional tale written by a Frenchman about a place that never existed outside his own imagination. Despite the criticisms and lukewarm film reviews, the risky undertaking has rekindled a love affair with genie pants, DJ Khaled and turquoise blue.

Disney isn’t the only entertainment or media enterprise now playing with imagery and concepts from countries across the Mideast and North Africa.

Egyptian American Ramy Youssef, the stand-up comedian who made Muslim-centric humor the new avocado toast for millennials, drops his anticipated stand-up special on HBO later this month.

The new Aladdin stars an ethnically representative cast of Arabs, Coptic Egyptians, South Asians and more.

In addition, several aspects of the story were updated to avoid the barbarous, hook-nosed stereotypes of the original.

“Ramy Youssef: Feelings” follows the success of his breakthrough Hulu sitcom, “Ramy,” where he dramatized his experience growing up in New Jersey into comedic, half-hour episodes that tackled dating while Muslim, terrorism, immigration and racial profiling.

Stormtroopers regularly march through Galaxy’s Edge like an occupying force, past shops selling tunics and signage in the common dialect of Aurebesh.

Pronounced Aa-rab-esh, it resembles Arabic, if Arabic was dropped in a blender with Hebrew, my son’s physics homework and a bag of pretzel sticks.

It’s a convincingly complicated-looking language that might easily pass as the dangerous “chatter” terrorism experts were so fixated on across cable news in the 2000s until they finally figured out it was an actual language spoken across continents.

Lucas, however, named Luke Skywalker’s home planet, Tatooine, after the Tunisian town of Tataouine, a spot in North Africa he reportedly fell in love with. It’s no

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Droid Alley is seen during the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge media preview at The Disneyland Resort at Disneyland on May 2019 ,29 in Anaheim, California. (Getty)

wonder we’d later see Tusken Raiders dressed like Bedouins, or Jabba the Hutt puffing on something that looked a lot like a hookah.

Disney representatives reportedly said that Black Spire’s marketplace was fashioned after a souk in Istanbul, and it’s easy to see the resemblance while walking under the brass, filigreed lamps, through the merchant stalls and down the outposts’s winding alleyways. There’s even a seedy underbelly: Dok-Ondar’s Den of Antiquities. The shop, which sells state-of-the-art lightsabers, could pass as a black-market arms dealership or a clearing house for looted goods. It feels wonderfully illicit, and that’s OK. The Middle East, with all its charms and flaws, is a complicated, fascinating mess of a place, and we’re finally starting to see its myriad angles reflected across an impossibly wide array of entertainment. It’s a shift that’s not lost on the folks who live in the very places that have dazzled the most jaded of Hollywood directors.

A few years ago while I was in United Arab Emirates,

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I took a drive three or more hours into the vast desert outside Abu Dhabi, a place called the Empty Quarter where “The Force Awakens” had just wrapped up filming. Sand dunes as high as skyscrapers towered above us, and we had to keep scarves wrapped around our faces like Tusken Raiders to keep the sand out. My Emirati guide beamed with pride that the Rub’ al Khali desert where he’d grown up was to star in what would surely be one of the biggest films of the year. Arabs had finally become an accepted part of the pop culture they consumed.

Galaxy’s Edge isn’t a love song to the Middle East, but it is a playful take on a region that’s too often written off as simply troubled and dangerous. If only the people who represent the region weren’t labeled troubled and dangerous when it serves the larger narrative.

Meanwhile, I’ll take Arab culture as a theme park driver rather than a scare tactic any day, even if it means embracing faux war scars and mediocre hummus as part of the package.

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Fascism Ain’t What it Used to Be Uncanny Similarities Between Europe’s Past and Brexit Britain

by Bryn Haworth If you pretend that [fascism] is merely an aberration which will presently pass off of its own accord, you are dreaming a dream from which you will awake when somebody coshes you with a rubber truncheon (George Orwell, 1936).

These are troubled times in Europe. Democracy itself is in danger, just at the point where it seems to have peaked in its spread across the continent. Along with an upsurge in populism has come an alteration in what it is deemed acceptable to say. Here in Britain, there has been the extended agony of Brexit and unprecedented calls, according to the Hansard Society, for a ‘strong leader’ who could cut through the conventions and the rules to fulfil the referendum result and take the country out of the European Union.

The tone of public debate has audibly changed. It has coarsened. The referendum itself revealed a bitter divide in the country and there has been a well-documented rise in hate crime. At the same time, a beleaguered prime minister has fallen and, at the point of writing (things move fast), one of the contenders for her job has suggested that parliament be by-passed altogether in order for the country to exit without a deal. This would be achieved through a ‘proroguing’ of parliament; in other words, sending elected members home. If that

sounds extra-parliamentary, it is. The referendum, like all referenda, did not sit easily with the parliamentary system of government from the start. It was Clement Attlee who once said that fascists like plebiscites. Could this divisive referendum have marked the beginning of the end for parliamentary democracy?

I haven’t enjoyed researching this article. I only read such stuff so you, dear reader, wouldn’t have to. My idea was to go back almost a hundred years to another place and time and to see if it held any lessons. The obvious period to return to was the Weimar Republic. It is a complex topic. The factors that contributed to the failure of the republic and the rise of Nazism are probably unrepeatable. The blood-letting they led to have no parallel in history. Nonetheless, the queasy feeling one gets seeing intolerance on the rise is a reminder that these were people too, and they were able to do this to each other. Theodor Adorno said there could be no poetry after Auschwitz. There has been plenty, of course, but made possible by forgetting; the same forgetting which makes the opposite of poetry possible.

A sense of dread has returned. In Britain, the voices of hatred are more audible than before. The famous Python who gave the world Basil Fawlty appears to transform into his own creation and starts complaining that London is no longer an English city. Morrissey, who also gets upset about the capital for similar reasons, openly

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declares his support for a far-right party no one has ever heard of, called For Britain, and worries about the free speech being denied to a well-known bigot by the name of Tommy Robinson.

At the same time Elton John, who once sang proudly how he was ‘made in England’, says: “I’m ashamed of my country for what it has done. It’s torn people apart … I am sick to death of politicians, especially British politicians. I am sick to death of Brexit. I am a European.

I am not a stupid, colonial, imperialist English idiot.”

How much of this idiocy is, as Orwell said, ‘merely an aberration which will presently pass off of its own accord’? By comparing the Thirties and the ideology that thrived in them, I hope to prove that we are still at a point where the bigots can be laughed at – just about. We might even get away with throwing milkshakes at them.

They are, for the time being, like P. G. Wodehouse’s Roderick Spode (otherwise known as Lord Sidcup), an ‘amateur dictator’ and leader of a fictional fascist group in London called the Saviours of Britain, also known as the Black Shorts: About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.

This image of Spode is not unlike that of the burly

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A sense of dread has returned. In Britain, the voices of hatred are more audible than before. The famous Python who gave the world Basil Fawlty appears to transform into his own creation and starts complaining that London is no longer an English city.

Carl Benjamin, the rising star of UKIP, who recently tweeted that he would not even rape a female member of parliament, then corrected himself in a video by admitting “with enough pressure I might cave”. Benjamin passed this off as a joke. He has the natural sense of fun, and the generously rounded physique, of a poorly paid night club bouncer, but rather than risk gratifying his ego, here is a picture of Spode: Wodehouse goes on to say that the way Spode eats asparagus “alters one’s whole conception of Man as Nature's last word.” It’s a nice image, but clearly inappropriate in this case, as no one could imagine Carl Benjamin eating anything that wasn’t made of meat.

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DIMINISHED RESPONISIBILTY It is fashionable these days, among the pundits, to talk about the political stage being populated by “pygmies”. Of course, this is not very kind to members of that diminutive tribe, but they are surely used to it by now. Our politicians are routinely called inferior, puny, lacking in stature and vision. If Nigel Farage was really so intent on speaking for ‘the little people’, he would be sticking up for the politicians, rather than telling his followers to ‘put the fear of God in them’.

For the fact is that, in the absence of any towering figures in the political landscape, the people have ceased respecting the political class altogether. Since the Fifties, the electorate have gone from deference and forelock tugging to utter disrespect. The last person who knew how to defer or tug their forelock died around the same time as the last speaker of Cornish. It has become unimaginable to feel awe. Just referring to the ‘great’ departments of state sounds like ludicrous hyperbole when the likes of Theresa May, or Boris Johnson, or even Gavin Whatsisname, can preside over them. No wonder it’s so hard for satirists. Their job was to cut the politicians down to size, but how does one go about belittling a pygmy?

And yet, it is easy to say we ought to speak up for them, they are our servants and they are trying to do a good job, and so on. This would be possible if the dwindling of the powerful was merely a trick of perspective. Father Dougal McGuire (the idiotic priest in Father Ted) might struggle with the idea that the cows in the distant field are not tiny, they are far away, but in modern politics the colossi really are small and insignificant. All across the old world, similar mental pygmies are in the ascendant, but in a country once famed for its big ideas, we have

been at the cutting edge when it comes to elevating small minds to the highest office. There was a time when you were required to rise to a great height to reach Number Ten. It was the apogee of political ambition. It was such a struggle, fraught with danger, involving a climb up a ‘greasy pole’, that few attempted it, and the ones that did hardly knew why. They simply did it because it was there.

But that was then. Nowadays, there is a queue for the summit almost as long as the one for Mount Everest. As we have seen in the unseemly huddle to replace Theresa May, only a refusal by Sherpas to accompany them can possibly put them off trying.

Prime ministers ascend and descend with the same vaulting ambition as before, yet the holders of the job are, to say the least, pusillanimous. That is to say, they are much reduced in moral stature. When they arrive at Number Ten, it’s as much as a modern prime minister can do to reach the door handle. It’s quite possible that one day soon becoming prime minister will be as routine as summitting Everest and people will remain in office just long enough to take in the view before being elbowed aside. Indeed, I’m considering it myself; I think ‘I might be good at it’, to quote a recent incumbent.

If I seem to be exaggerating and you still have a certain reverence for the role, try a little thought experiment as if you were a member of the Conservative Party (one of the few who are not already dead, that is): ‘Boris’ in Downing Street.

We ex-Britons will climb down off our hallucinatory pedestal, relax, and finally enjoy the universal feeling of the whole human race: insignificance.

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A metaphor for the Conservative leadership race?

Photo of the queue for Mount Everest by Nirmal ‘Nims’ Purja

And it’s not just politics that’s in historic decline. It's the entire civilisation. And, of course, the natural world.

With the megafauna dying out, how long before the minifauna get the same treatment? Insects, obviously. Then there’s the birds. I used to get woken up by birdsong in the mornings, but now that the reduction event is in full swing, it is no longer such a problem. Silence reigns. It is the Golden Age of silence, which is the only thing that’s truly golden.

In truth, I am beginning to adapt to this diminished world. I can see the advantages. For one thing, I can avoid the pain of feeling small and insignificant. We are all small and insignificant. Paradoxically, this certainty that people are smaller than they once were makes me feel bigger than I actually am, so the discomfort in my limbs is less of a problem these days. I have grown accustomed to the vague sensation of being pinned to the ground by Lilliputians. They don’t scare me. They need me. If Windsor Castle ever catches fire again, I complacently assure myself, who else will be able to douse the flames?

This complacency lasts only as long as I can manage

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to stay away from my mobile phone, or from a similar online device. As ever, it is the Internet that ushers in the Age of Lead. As soon as I pick up my phone, I begin to hear their little voices in my ears, because even the little people have voices now, twittering in the ether. Birdbrained, self-appointed pundits, the Lilliputians freely express their opinions on everything, while complaining that they are prevented from doing so. As birds drop like stones from the sky, their irritating tweets are replaced by misquotes, soaring opinions, rumours, fake news, conspiracy theories, false allegations, more opinions, hate speech, threats of rape and murder, the recommendations of influencers and mysterious neologisms like ‘covfefe’.

It would be a mercy if the spring had really fallen silent as we were promised. Instead, it has been replaced by the raucous cacophony of the Kakocracy. The whole Anglosphere is abuzz with it.

When the United Kingdom does, eventually, manage to disunite itself and each constituent part goes its own way, I suggest we grasp the opportunity and stop referring to this particular part as England. We should be bold and adopt the name Lilliput. Then the few people like me who can remember better times can be tied

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down and made secure, for the good of public health and civic order. We can do everything that we used to do, but responsibly, and the illusion that we ever had any greatness can finally be put to bed, or quietly euthanised.

What a mercy killing it would be. We Britons would finally be able to retire from the world stage. We don't want your seat on the Security Council, thank you very much. You never liked us, so we're going. Toodle-pip!

Exeunt omnes.

Only when the sun finally sets on the last part of the empire – i.e. on ourselves – shall we finally get our voices back. No one will be able to judge us anymore. No one will care. We shan’t have to be on our best behaviour ever again. We will have free reign (we always spelt it wrong) not to tow (we can spell that wrong too) the line.

No more shall we feel the need to be polite, no more shall we be responsible, no more will we be serious. We will have done with giving the world the benefit of our expertise, our ingenuity and our precious rule of law.

Finally, we can sneak behind the bicycle sheds during History class and sniff as much glue as we please. It was all we ever really wanted.

Meantime, we can squeak our ill-founded and inexpert opinions at the tops of our shrill little lungs without restraint. It will no longer be a Gulliver experience, waking up in this once great country, as we will all be Gulliver and, simultaneously, Lilliputians. It was only ever a trick of the light, that world power thing. No longer will there be either grandeur or pettiness, these concepts have had their day. We ex-Britons will climb down off our hallucinatory pedestal, relax, and finally enjoy the universal feeling of the whole human race: insignificance.

In the Little England of the notso-distant future, there are no ‘epoch-men’ to be seen, only ‘bad boys’ who rampage across the island, taunting the losers and worshipping the dead head of their porcine god, Brexit.

No more strutting our stuff. We can share the commonly held conviction that the normal dimensions of human life are nasty, brutish and the opposite of tall. We can admit, with some pride, that the world is but a speck in the eye of the cosmos and there are no aliens coming from a more advanced corner of it, ready and willing to abduct us. Instead, we have been abducted by pygmies.

No, better than that, we are the pygmies, led by our dear (but not very great) leader, Nigel Farage.

Be bold, I say, for are we not examples, each and every one of us, of how good things come in small packages? We are here, and we are bent on revenge for all the trouble the world has put us to over the years, trying to punch above our weight the whole time, trying to maintain order. A thankless task.

So, from now on we’re going to show you another kind of order. It’s called disorder. We’ll lead the way to a new kind of greatness. It’s called pettiness. No more vaulting ambition. No more ‘because it was there’. We’ve seen the view from the summit and it wasn’t as pretty as we’d hoped, but that’s alright, because we’ve managed our expectations. It’s really beautiful, being small.

Onwards and downwards. We are in a new battle for Britain and we have our very own Churchill for the job.

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An immense “Rally for the Republic” in 1922.’

Photograph: Ullstein Bild/TopFoto

want to hear is what we genuinely think... Of course, I'm sorry for the offence I've caused, but...

You see, there’s nothing to worry about; he’s just a journalist. When Johnson was accused of falsely claiming a no-deal Brexit was the most popular option among the British public, brandishing a fictional poll to prove it, The Daily Telegraph said he was ‘entitled to make sweeping generalisations based on his opinions’. They added that none of the claims in Johnson’s column should be taken seriously, as the piece ‘was clearly comically polemical, and could not be reasonably read as a serious, empirical, in-depth analysis of hard factual matters’. He had said it in jest, you see. He’s just a journalist.

Didn’t that Mussolini start out as a journalist?

Look, don’t worry your pretty little head. The present situation is not nearly as bad as you’re painting it. Those fascists of the twentieth century, they had a lot more going for them than a dodgy line in patriotism and a big ego. They had reading lists. Those old fascists had done their homework. They’d moved on from journalism long before they took power. They hated journalists. But this is England. You are not going to wake up one day and fail to recognise your surroundings.

He’s even written a biography of the other Churchill.

Admittedly, he is not quite of his hero’s lofty stature.

He’s all mouth, frankly. But we need someone who can break the rules and get us through this crisis he got us into. First time tragedy, second time – well, fascist.

FASCISM’S GOOD OLE DAYS That Boris Johnson, what a card, eh? Always ready with a funny word you don’t expect, never failing to tell it like it is, as he did in a press conference on 12th June announcing his bid for the leadership of the country and explaining why he was well within his rights to describe women in burkas as looking like bank robbers: …one of the reasons the public feels alienated now from us all as a breed of politicians is because too often they feel we are muffling and veiling our language, if I might put it that way [applause].

Veiling. Did I mention, Boris never knowingly did the dance of the seven veils? Cocaine just made him sneeze.

He’s straight as a die, is our Boris, unlike certain lesser politicians he could mention: Not speaking as we find, err, covering everything up in bureaucratic platitudes, when what they [the public]

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The day Hitler came to power, on 30th January 1933, a Jewish journalist and novelist by the name of Joseph Roth did just that. Consequently, he boarded a train in Berlin and headed straight for Paris. He would never return to Germany. After years of poverty, exiled in the French capital and with his health failing, he wrote: The country whose nationality we haul around, we can leave, albeit with a wrench. But the epoch in which we were born, that we cannot leave, unless we happen to die.

Whether we move from left’ to ‘right’, or remain in the ‘centre’ […] we’re all children of the epoch whose mark or stigma we carry. Our epoch is our homeland, and our ‘statesmen’ would better be known as ‘epoch-men’. And our obligation […] is to act as patriots and to reside in the domain that we know is inhabited by good and listen for its call.

In the Little England of the not-so-distant future, there are no ‘epoch-men’ to be seen, only ‘bad boys’ who rampage across the island, taunting the losers and worshipping the dead head of their porcine god, Brexit.

If the Hansard Society is right, and the British people really are in search of a strong leader who can break the rules, then who can disagree with Martin Kettle when he writes (The Guardian, 16th May 2019) that the political landscapes of Brexit Britain and of the Weimar Germany are ‘scarily similar’? Surely Joseph Roth would have diagnosed the sickness in the British soul, given all the

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talk lately of Empire and of recovered greatness. As an uprooted Austrian, Roth witnessed the escalation of violence and intolerance in the German-speaking lands and the absorption of his own country into that same Teutonic madness, culminating in the Anschluss, an absorption mandated by the very kind of plebiscite Attlee would identify as the favourite instrument of fascists. Roth had anatomised with growing horror the decomposition of the ‘German soul’, predicting the death of German literature and even, chillingly, the ‘national pyromania’ that would eventually incinerate his own books, before getting around to incinerating actual people.

The flies buzzing around the Brexit head are no less dirty and noisy than the carrion feeders of Roth’s day, but history is not repeatable. Any comparison with the Weimar Republic has to recognise the contrasts too.

Martin Kettle is moved by a picture of a demonstration in support of democracy in Berlin in 1922: In Britain, he points out, there have been no such demonstrations in defence of parliamentary democracy, but the crowds in the picture are defending a democracy in its infancy, and one already menaced by rival gangs with extreme political ideologies, some of whom saw democracy itself as a sign of sickness.

For one ideologue, Weimar was the Judenrepublik, a nadir in history that represented the utter defeat of German civilisation. That ideologue’s name was Chamberlain, but he was not a relative of the Prime Minister who was to bring back a famous piece of paper signed by Herr Hitler. This one’s full name was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and he is worth some attention as the writer and thinker whose most popular book, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, was studied and hugely admired by Wilhelm II, the last German Emperor or Kaiser. It would also become, unsurprisingly, a favourite bedtime read for the Führer.

I say he merits ‘some attention’, but one must read these old fascists with care, not for fear of succumbing to their potions, but to guard against clinical depression.

Chamberlain knew the Wagnerians, he even married Wagner’s daughter. Like her he dabbled in völkisch theory and rabid anti-Semitism. He later met Hitler and Goebbels and enjoyed their applause. But there is obvious paranoia in his abhorrence of everything Jewish.

He saw the Jewish people as engaged in a war to the death with Aryan civilisation. He went so far as to lose

sleep over it, convinced the Jews were plotting to kill him. Since he didn’t much like the Chinese either, in his magnum opus he announced that Chinese civilisation had been founded by the Jews, because just like the Jews the Chinese had ‘the total absence of all culture’. As part of their plan to destroy the Aryans, Chamberlain also claimed that the Jews had founded the Roman Catholic Church, which only preached a ‘Judaised’ Christianity that had nothing to do with the Christianity created by the Aryan Christ. Naturally, the saviour had the right pedigree. In 1923, the ex-Kaiser, perhaps Chamberlain’s biggest fan, wrote to him of his belief that the Jews were ‘not our religious forebears’ and that Jesus was ‘not a Jew’. He was instead an Aryan ‘of exceptional beauty, tall and slim with a noble face inspiring respect and love; his hair blond shading into chestnut brown, his arms and hands noble and exquisitely formed…’

I could go on.

One can only hope that Steve Bannon eventually gets his way and manages to open a monastery for the training of alt-right ‘gladiators’ in Italy. The level of knowledge among aspiring twenty-first century fascists is lamentable compared with their forbears. What do they know of Christ’s hair colour? I dare say they have never even come across the Jewish origins of Chinese civilisation. That doesn’t mean they don’t try. Some of them (such as Bannon himself) have even heard of Julius Evola.

Now Evola was the real thing, a proper fascist philosopher. According to his Wikipedia entry, he wrote ‘prodigiously on Eastern mysticism, Tantra, hermeticism, the myth of the Holy Grail and Western esotericism’. Though he viewed Jews as corrosive and anti-traditional, he described Hitler’s more fanatical antiSemitism as an idée fixe that damaged the reputation of the Third Reich. The Jews were simply “the carriers of a world view ... a spirit [that] corresponded to the ‘worst’ and ‘most decadent’ features of modernity: democracy, egalitarianism and materialism.”

In May, 1951, Evola was arrested and charged with promoting the revival of the Fascist Party, and of glorifying Fascism. Defending himself at the trial, he stated that his work belonged to a long tradition of anti-democratic writers who certainly could be linked to fascism — at least fascism interpreted according to certain Evolian criteria — but who certainly could not be identified with the Fascist regime under Mussolini.

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Evola then declared that he was not a Fascist but a “super fascist”. This may, or may not have been, immodesty. He was later acquitted.

Where, one might ask, are the super fascists in this benighted epoch of ours? All one ever sees are liars, gangsters and choleric tweeters. I sincerely hope the Italian Cultural Heritage Ministry is overruled by Matteo Salvini and Steve Bannon is able to open his alt-right monastic retreat. They need educating, these knuckleheads, and Bannon, a Catholic himself, is surely the man to do it.

bunch of gladioli in the air whilst singing: Why pamper life’s complexity When the leather runs smooth On the passenger seat? (‘This Charming Man’)

Soon as it opens, I intend to infiltrate the place. Like a political version of a school inspector, I want to see if the classes are up to standard. I shall tonsure my head for the purpose, so as not to arouse suspicion, and become a Judeo-Christian gladiator. Or something.

There’s a club if you’d like to go, You could meet somebody who really loves you.

So you go and you stand on your own, And you leave on your own, And you go home, and you cry, and you want to die’.

THE LOVABLE GANGSTER What are the main differences between those times, back in the first half of the previous century, and these?

Could one difference be that the nearest thing to a British Wagner – and he’s not even anti-Semitic – is a slightly long-in-the-tooth pop singer who seems to like pettiness in his heroes?

It seems a very long time since Morrissey twirled a

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That ‘pamper’ sounded suspiciously like a malapropism, but it hardly mattered. There was something incredibly cool about Morrissey back then, when he was still a Smith. I vividly remember the thrill of arriving at a party and first hearing the other-worldly guitars on ‘How Soon Is Now’, with Morrissey’s tormented voice singing:

I must have been in my mid-twenties at the time; the psychic wound of adolescence had long since healed, but Morrissey allowed one to feel that pain, now cauterised, all over again, this time as a kind of pleasure. He was peerless in his miserabilism, a poet of adolescent anguish. What she’d said to him at the end of the day, Caligula would have blushed. He’d been looking for a job, and he’d found a job, and now, heaven knows, he was miserable.

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He was also very mouthy. This much he had confessed in a song actually entitled ‘Big Mouth Strikes Again’, where he confided that he really had ‘no right to take my place in the human race.’

Morrissey had strong views. He was opinionated. At a time when a lot of pop singers were expected to do little more than divulge their favourite colour or what they did for fun at the seaside in the course of interviews considerably less challenging than the ones conducted by hairdressers, Morrissey had a go at the royal family, for instance, or darkly suggested he was not entirely enamoured of the pop business. I used to read this kind of stuff with pleasure. I quite liked the way he’d bang on about animal rights and proclaim that meat was murder.

He still does. But there is a phenomenon here akin to the transformation of John Cleese into Basil Fawlty.

Here, for instance, is Basil Morrissey getting irate about walking through Knightsbridge: If you walk through Knightsbridge on any bland day of the week you won't hear an English accent. You'll hear every accent under the sun apart from the British accent.

Compare Nigel Farage feeling uncomfortable when he hears foreign languages spoken in his train carriage.

Perhaps he thinks he’s suddenly been transported back to Brussels.

Or just compare this, from John Cleese: I don’t know what’s going on in London, because London is no longer an English city. That’s how we got the Olympics. They said we were the most cosmopolitan city on Earth. But it doesn’t feel English.

I had a Californian friend come over two months ago, walk down the King’s Road and say, "Where are all the English people?" I mean, I love having different cultures around. But when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you’re left thinking, "Well, what’s going on?"' (Daily Mail, 2 September 2011) Or more recently, in a tweet: Some years ago, I opined that London was not really an English city any more. Since then, virtually all my friends from abroad have confirmed my observation. So there must be some truth in it... I note also that London was the UK city that voted most strongly to remain in the EU. Basil Morrissey has also been in gestation for many years. I hardly need go into too many examples, they are

well known by now, ask any disillusioned fan about the incident with the union flag or the song about the Bengali in platforms.

The problem is, of course, that as the miserable pop star’s tooth lengthens ever longer, so one wonders if the signs were there all along and whether, just as Basil Fawlty seemed to be pure send-up and has now proved closer to reality, so some of the less savoury sentiments in Morrissey’s early work were not ironic after all. What if he meant it when he sang so jollily about his girlfriend being in a coma? What if he really did want to kick people in the eye from time to time?

It is not a painless procedure, the surgical removal of irony. In most cases, with a caustic wit like Morrissey’s, an anaesthetic is strongly recommended. But to extend the metaphor of long in the tooth well beyond anything an aging narcissist could ever countenance, what I am about to do is the equivalent of dentistry in the years immediately following the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia. There can be no relief for the pain I am about to inflict.

Because there is a particular brand of fascist thinking which has little to do with the intellectual elaborations of Chamberlain or Evola. It is, in fact, so far from thinking as such that it might better be described as fervour, an emotion, in fact, that one can recall from youth but would not wish to encounter in the grown man. This emotion is, I suspect, homoerotic, and it attaches to a certain kind of love object: a pretty thug.

I do not mean to suggest that this strain of fascism was missing from the early, good ole fascists I have described above. The Brown Shirts were notorious for it. In fact, even their leader, Ernst Röhm, who was dispatched along with hundreds more on the Night of the Long Knives, was well known to have little interest in the ladies. He was also an old friend of the Führer and the only man who referred to him as Adolf, or even as Adi. He used the ‘du’ form in addressing his old comrade. Indeed, their association was so close that some began to speculate that Hitler himself was that way inclined. Hitler had an expeditious way of stilling wagging tongues, of course.

Guns, not knives, were handy for the purpose.

There is a streak of violent imagery that runs all the way through the lyrics of The Smiths, but it was when Morrissey broke free and began his solo career that the desire for the pretty thug became more explicit, and the song I would focus on, ‘The Last of the Famous

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in Morrissey’s work has a listen to a more recent song called ‘First of the Gang to Die’ which speaks of the singer’s love for Hector, who is idolised as the … first of the gang with a gun in his hand, And the first to do time, And the first of the gang to die.

Reggie and Ronnie Kray, pictured in their prime by David Bailey

International Playboys’, name checks two actual (and notorious) thugs, namely the Kray Twins.

In the song, Morrissey is writing to one or other of these ne’er-do-wells: Dear hero imprisoned, with all the new crimes that you are perfecting, oh, I can’t help quoting you, because everything that you said rings true. And now in my cell (well, I followed you) and here’s a list of who I slew.

Reggie Kray, do you know my name? Oh, don’t say you don’t, please say you do. Oh, I am the last of the famous international playboys. And in my cell (well, I loved you) and every man with a job to do. Ronnie Kray, do you know my face? Oh, don’t say you don’t, please say you do? […] I never wanted to kill. I am not naturally evil.

These things I do just to make myself more attractive to you. Have I failed?

Is any song more breathless with hero-worship than this one? Extract the irony for a moment as I suggested, hear it as the plain-spoken truth, and Morrissey is virtually ecstatic with masochistic man love. He is fully prepared to kill for the Krays. The list of ‘who I slew’ has that slightly archaic, malaprop quality again, but this time he is gleefully admitting to rubbing out undesirables to please his heroes.

I know it’s a song. I know it’s a persona and Morrissey has never killed in his life. Suffice to say, the Krays had killed in their lives.

Elsewhere, one encounters similar sentiments. I recommend anyone who doubts the existence of a theme

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He doesn’t really admire petty thieves like Hector.

It’s their defiance of the rules he likes. He did once urge the shoplifters of the world to ‘unite and take a bow’, but it was all just silly pop. The pretty thug, the lovable gangster – how could anyone take such nonsense seriously? The fact that Brecht satirised Hitler as a Chicago gangster, involved in the cauliflower racket, is beside the point. Hector is no fascist thug. He’s just a bit of rough, and Morrissey has always liked the glamour of bad boys. The fact that he supports For Britain, a rightwing party possessed by Islamophobia, is just another example of his provocative interview technique.

Anne Marie Waters [leader of For Britain] seeks open discussion about all aspects of modern Britain, whereas other parties will not allow diverse opinion. She is like a humane version of Thatcher ... if such a concept could be. She is absolute leadership, she doesn’t read from a script, she believes in British heritage, freedom of speech, and she wants everyone in the UK to live under the same law. I find this compelling.

It’s confused, but then aren’t we all?

As for the fact that he defends Tommy Robinson – real name Yaxley-Lennon, as The Guardian habitually points out – that’s also on the basis that the man ought to be allowed free speech. He’s described the media’s treatment of the EDL founder as ‘shocking’. Surely you can’t, you know, be suggesting? Nah, I mean the bloke’s little more than a petty criminal with a thinly-veiled racist agenda. He’s a moral pygmy. A waste of a good milkshake. Who in their right mind could ever look up to him?

But, in naked truth, Morrissey may be doing more than looking up to Robinson. When the word ‘love’ creeps into his lyrics, a kind of fawning and morbid admiration of masculine potency is never far behind. Because, as he menacingly observes in his hymn to Hector, ‘You have never been in love until you’ve seen the sunlight thrown over smashed human bone…’

That’s the best thing about lovable gangsters: they live fast, die young and leave such a good-looking corpse.

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Dive Into a Swimming Regimen Health Benefits from Lap Swimming

by Harvard Health Letter

swimming stroke known as the crawl.

Lap swimming offers a total-body workout of strengthening, stretching, and aerobic conditioning.

When you think of a swimming workout, you may envision an athlete pounding away at the water, racing from one end of the pool to the other. But you don’t have to break speed records to reap the rewards of swimming back and forth, and you don’t even have to do the competitive

“The pace is up to you, and any stroke is fine.

Breaststroke, sidestroke, and backstroke are often favored because a lot of people don’t like putting their face in the water, like you have to do with the crawl,” says Leigh de Chaves, a physical therapist and clinical supervisor of rehabilitation services at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She also swam competitively in college.

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You don’t have to break speed records to reap the rewards of swimming back and forth, and you don’t even have to do the competitive swimming stroke known as the crawl. you have to move all of your muscles to swim.

It’s a total-body workout,” de Chaves says. She also points out that the resistance of the water helps maintain muscle strength.

In addition, swimming laps offers these features: It relieves joint pain. Your buoyancy in water takes weight off your joints, which eases arthritic joint pain during a workout.

It increases flexibility. “With each stroke, you reach out a little more and move more than you would in daily activities, and that stretches the muscles,” de Chaves says.

It has a meditative quality. Swimming is a repetitive motion that forces you to focus on your movement and breathing. That helps reduce stress, anxiety, and depression.

Even more potential benefits from swimming laps: weight loss, better balance, sharper thinking, and a reduced risk for falls.

AQUATIC EXERCISES Young Woman Swimming in a Pool.

(Getty)

WHAT YOU GET FROM SWIMMING LAPS Lap swimming has many benefits. It’s great aerobic activity — the kind that gets your heart and lungs pumping — which helps improve your endurance and cardiovascular health and lower your blood pressure.

Lap swimming is also great for strengthening muscles. “Simply keeping yourself afloat activates the core muscles in your back and abdomen. And

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If you’re not a lap swimmer, you can still benefit from aquatic exercises—exercising in the shallow end of a pool. You might take a class with a trainer who leads a group through a set of exercises with special water weights or flotation devices (like pool noodles). Or you can simply try water walking; working against the resistance of the water is good for your muscles and helps keep you flexible.

“If you have balance problems, it’s a good idea

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to exercise with a friend who can assist you. I also recommend wearing a buoyancy belt around your waist to keep you upright,” says Leigh de Chaves, a physical therapist and clinical supervisor of rehabilitation services at Harvardaffiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Look for aquatic exercise classes — such as strengthening or aerobics — at the local pool, a fitness center, or a community center.

SWIMMING RISKS Not everyone’s a candidate for lap swimming.

De Chaves suggests avoiding it if you have an underlying condition, such as heart disease or a seizure disorder, that puts you at risk for a life-threatening event in the water. You may need to skip lap swimming if you’re not strong enough to climb in and out of the pool easily.

You should also be careful if you have injuries to your shoulders or neck, as lap swimming may increase your pain.

JUMPING IN Consider lap swimming if you’re generally healthy, you’re a good swimmer, and your doctor says it’s okay. But start slowly. “Focus on the amount of time you spend swimming, at first.

For example, swim for five or 10 minutes, a few times per week. Gradually increase the amount of time each week, and note how many laps you can do within that time. Eventually, set goals to increase your speed by doing more laps in your

Consider lap swimming if you’re generally healthy, you’re a good swimmer, and your doctor says it’s okay. But start slowly.

set time, so that you can measure your progress,” de Chaves explains.

Some tips for good practice: < Warm up with a few minutes of gentle paddling and then static (long) stretches of your shoulder

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Shot of a male swimmer doing the butterfly stroke toward the camera.

(Getty)

and leg muscles. < Use the proper equipment, such as goggles and a bathing cap. < If you can, choose a pool that has swimming lanes. < Wear nonslip shoes or sandals when walking

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on the pool deck. < Apply sunscreen if youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re swimming outdoors. < Stay hydrated before and after a workout. < Stretch your muscles after lap swimming.

Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll want to stay flexible so you can get back in the pool and go for your own gold!

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it

The Colourful Life of Boris Johnson

by Yasmine El-Geressi Christened Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, he is known to the British public simply as “Boris”. Recognised by his trademark blonde, ruffled hair and famous for his record of gaffes and plum-voiced wit, he is one of Britains best known and contradictory politicians and is now a runaway favourite to become the UK’s next Prime Minister.

The journalist, historian and politician was born on born on June 1964 ,19, in New York to English Parents, has Turkish ancestors and spent a formative part of his childhood in Brussels. His father Stanley, had been one of the first British bureaucrats appointed to work at the European Commission after the United Kingdom joined the bloc, in 1973. Although Boris’ upbringing has always been described as idyllic and privileged, according to his siblings, Brussels had been a deeply unhappy place for Boris as a child.

Johnson was a clever child and was awarded a King’s Scholarship to study at Eton College, the prestigious boys’ boarding school that has produced a phalanx of British prime ministers.

He attended the University of Oxford where he read Classics and became president of the Oxford Union, a position held by former Conservative leader William Hague and exPrime Minister Edward Heath. He is the oldest of four successful siblings - he has two brothers and a sister. Politics and journalism run in the family. Boris’ brother, Jo Johnson, is also a Conservative politician following a career as an investment banker and as bureau chief at the Financial Time. His sister Rachel is also a

prominent journalist.

Like his political career, Boris’ career in the media was marked by controversy. His job as a reporter at The Times ended dramatically when he fabricated a quote from his godfather who was an Oxford historian. A couple of years later in 1989, he was appointed the Brussels correspondent at The Daily Telegraph where he made a name for himself mercilessly mocking what he saw as petty EU rules and regulations.

His articles contained many of the claims widely described as “Euromyths”, including plans to introduce “euro coffins”, establish a “banana police force” to regulate the curved yellow fruit, and ban prawn cocktail crisps. He later became the assistant editor. In 1994, he became a political columnist for The Spectator, and in 1999 he was named the magazine’s editor, continuing in that role until 2006.

In 2001, Boris was selected for the Conservative seat on Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire and was embroiled in a scandal in his early years as a politician. In 2003, while still Spectator editor, he said the city of Liverpool revelled in a “victim status” over the 1989 Hillsborough disaster and blamed drunken Liverpool fans.

He was forced to apologise for misrepresenting events. In the same year, Michael Howard gave Boris two new jobs after becoming the leader of the Conservatives - party vice-chairman and shadow arts minister. He was sacked from both in 2004 after assuring Mr Howard that the tabloid reports of his affair with Spectator columnist Petronella Wyatt were false and an “inverted pyramid of piffle.” When the story was found to be true, he refused to resign.

In 2008, Boris Johnson became the Mayor of

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London. The flamboyant MP gained notoriety for his idleness and sloppy dress sense. A keen cyclist, he introduced a public bicycle scheme called “Boris Bikes” which proved to be popular. During his 8 years as Mayor, he became embroiled in several controversies, including the failed garden bridge project which cost taxpayers 43£ million. But despite the repeated mistakes and gaffes, people warmed to him and he continued to enjoy popularity in the eyes of his ardent supporters. Some critics, however, charged that Boris was less involved in his job as mayor than he was in self-promotion and his burning desire to be prime minister or, failing that, as he told his family a boy: “The world king” Even before leaving the office of mayor, Johnson became the leading spokesman for the “Leave” campaign in the run-up to the June 2016, national referendum on whether the United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Union. This move made Boris a far more divisive figure. He also backed the infamous claim on the side of the bus that the UK was sending 350£m a week to the EU, followed by “let’s fund our NHS instead”.

When Britain officially voted to leave the EU and Cameron announced that he was resigning, Boris was a favourite to become the new prime minister. But in a shocking turn of events, he announced that he would not seek the office of prime minister after his ally Michael Gove announced his own candidacy.

Theresa May ultimately emerged victorious in the race for prime minister. She appointed Boris as secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs on July 13. Johnson

was not a particularly effective diplomat and his two-year reign, marked by repeated gaffes and offensive comments, did his reputation no favours. In 2017, for example, he caused uproar after joking that Libya could be the next Dubai if it clears the "dead bodies away" first. In 2018, His misleading comments about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe's purpose in visiting Iran saw the British-Iranian mother, jailed by Tehran, hauled before a court where his remarks were used as "proof" she had been engaged in "propaganda against the regimeâ&#x20AC;?. Johnson resigned as foreign secretary in July 2018 in a

rebuke of May's approach to Brexit and became among her harshest critics.

Following Theresa Mayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s announcement that she would resign as Conservative leader on June 7, Boris stood in the leadership contest to replace her. His ambitious leadership bid suffered a blow when he was summoned to court over claims he lied in the EU referendum campaign - but the case has since been thrown out of the High Court and he remains the front runner by a large margin. Boris has said that he is willing to take the UK out of the EU without a deal and

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ahead of the nominations he announced that he would bring in a tax break for 3 million Brits in a bid to woo high earners. Boris is still hugely popular among conservative party members - more than half them back Johnson in the leadership race- but over the years he has become a polarising figure with a lot of baggage. If he is announced as the new Prime Minister in the second half of July, he will be faced with the daunting task of trying to finalise the UKâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s break up with the EU, which is currently scheduled for October 31.