The Washington Post National Weekly - January 29, 2017

SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 2017

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

The Messenger In the era of Trump, can a former DJ from Oklahoma be the leader young Muslims need? PAGE 12

Politics Trump’s vows vs. reality 4

World A Czech team for truth 10

5 Myths About Jeff Sessions 23

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SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Seven days in Syria BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

R

ep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) has done something few members of Congress dare to do these days: Go to Syria and meet with the man the United States has actively been trying to oust, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Besides the fact a sitting member of Congress met with the leader of a nation that Washington has no diplomatic relations with — a man former president Barack Obama described as the main roadblock to peace — the timing of Gabbard’s trip is perplexing.

Consider: President Trump had not yet signaled whether he plans to shift U.S. policy in Syria, nor how. Gabbard raised eyebrows in Washington when she met with Trump in November to share her view that the United States should stop arming and assisting rebels, a policy that candidate Trump expressed support for.

Then, the week Trump was inaugurated, we find out one of the few Democrats to knowingly talk foreign policy with Trump is in Syria potentially meeting with its president.

Gabbard returned this past week and said the seven-day trip — which also featured former Ohio congressman and presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich — was led and paid for by the Arab American Community Center for Economic and Social Services in Ohio. It’s common for lawmakers to take trips abroad via advocacy groups but not common for them to meet with foreign leaders without explicit permission from the president.

Melissa Dalton, a Middle East defense expert now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies described Gabbard’s trip as “odd” and “premature.” She said it does not appear to be connected to any broader policy deliberations about how to approach Syria. If

KLMNO WEEKLY

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) recently met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

that’s the case, Dalton warned that Gabbard risks undermining those deliberations by taking things into her own hands.

“High-level U.S. contact with Assad should be conducted in the context of a broader strategy,” Dalton said, “or it can easily send the wrong message that the U.S. government supports Assad or condones the brutal tactics Assad has used against his own people.”

Gabbard said the meeting with Assad was unplanned but that she couldn’t pass up the opportunity. In an interview Wednesday with CNN's Jake Tapper, she elaborated: “When the opportunity arose to meet with him, I did so because I felt it was important that if we profess to indeed care about the Syrian people . . . then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there’s a possibility we could achieve peace. And that’s exactly what we talked about.”

Gabbard has framed this as a “fact-finding” mission, but any trip to a war-torn country by a sitting member of Congress carries with it

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 16

political implications, Dalton said: “It seems to be getting out ahead of what I would anticipate to be a process, both on the Hill and in the administration, to review whether our current approach is working.”

Perhaps that’s exactly what Gabbard intended with this trip — to get out ahead of the Trump administration. In the absence of any concrete strategy from them about whether to continue to arm Syrian rebels trying to topple Assad or leave Assad alone, it’s possible Gabbard saw room for persuasion.

Gabbard has introduced a bill that would make it a crime for the U.S. government to provide assistance, inadvertently or not, to “terrorists” or any country that has given assistance to terrorists.

Her extreme caution of getting involved militarily in Syria tracks with the hesitancy Trump and his advisers have shown for continuing to arm rebels.

Gabbard, twice deployed in the Middle East during the Iraq War, has a worldview that boils down to two seemingly opposing views: 1. Get tough on terrorists: She has criticized Obama for not using the term “Islam” to describe the Islamic State, at times sounding more like a hawkish Republican than a progressive.

2. Largely get out of the Middle East: She has derided U.S. aid to rebels in Syria as “regime change,” at times sounding more like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), whose presidential candidacy she endorsed at the price of resigning her leadership spot at the Democratic National Committee.

Gabbard and Trump have at least one striking policy disagreement on Syria. She released a statement early Thursday urging the president not to ban Syrian refugees, as an executive order awaiting Trump’s signature proposes. n

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY ENTERTAINMENT BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 16 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Suhaib Webb is a convert to Islam. After studying the Koran for seven years in Cairo, he is now an Islamic scholar and travels the country teaching Islam.

Photograph by ANDRE CHUNG for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

President Trump’s reality check

KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

His first week included lots of vows, but many of them will never actually happen

BY A SHLEY P ARKER AND S EAN S ULLIVAN

N

o one can accuse Donald Trump of campaigning in poetry. But after just one week in the White House, the new president is bumping up against the hard reality of governing in prose.

Many of the sweeping actions President Trump vowed this past week through his executive orders and proclamations are unlikely to happen, either because they are impractical, opposed by Congress and members of his

Cabinet, or full of legal holes.

The reality — that yawning gap between what Trump says he will do and what he actually can do — underscores his chaotic start, which includes executive actions drafted by close aides rather than experts and without input from the agencies tasked with implementing them.

On a host of issues, from health care to trade to immigration, Trump began his presidency with executive orders intended to both placate and excite his base by keeping his bold campaign promises — in rhetoric if not immedi-

ate, tangible results. And the White House says Trump’s executive actions should be viewed as initial moves to enact his agenda.

“We’re taking the first steps to get it done, with the understanding that some of these things may be a process, but you have to begin the process and that’s what he’s doing — taking bold action and doing everything he can to make sure these things happen,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the principal deputy White House press secretary. “I have no doubt these things are going to happen.”

But the reality is far more com-

President Trump on Monday signs an executive order that places a hiring freeze on nonmilitary federal workers. Trump began his term with numerous executive actions to placate and excite his base by keeping his campaign promises.

plicated. On immigration, for instance, Trump’s call for a border wall paid for by Mexico first has to be funded by Congress. And the possibility that Mexico would pay for the wall — always a long shot — grew even more remote this past week after Mexico’s president on Thursday canceled his planned visit to Washington to meet with Trump, citing disagreement over the wall. The White House said that one possible option would be to pay for the project with a border tax on Mexican imports.

On trade, Trump can withdraw

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COVER STORY from and renegotiate trade agreements, as he promised during the campaign. But there is no guarantee that he will have willing partners with whom to renegotiate better trade deals, and certainly not necessarily with better terms.

And change will hardly be instantaneous: Under the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement, for example, the president or any other leaders must give six months’ notice of his or her intention to withdraw.

Trump has also promised to order an investigation into his false claims that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally in November for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who beat Trump by nearly 3 million votes.

But there is no evidence to support Trump’s claim, and although he has the authority to launch a fact-gathering investigation, it is unlikely to unearth the massive election fraud he is asserting.

One national security executive order he is considering would allow the CIA to reopen “black site” prisons abroad, as well as reconsider the agency’s nowshuttered enhanced interrogation program. But it does not have buy-in from Defense Secretary James Mattis or CIA Director Mike Pompeo, both of whom privately told lawmakers they were not consulted. Many lawmakers in both parties have also expressed strong opposition to the directive.

The ad hoc nature of Trump’s executive orders — including some finalized at the last minute or prompted by an off-the-cuff conversation Trump had with a friend or business executive — has further undermined their impact.

Trump, for example, said that only after a discussion with industry leaders this past week did he realize that the nation’s pipelines are not necessarily made with U.S. steel. The epiphany scrambled aides to draft an executive order requiring that they be constructed with solely American-made materials. But specifying U.S.-made steel is a violation of the World Trade Organization agreement, except in cases of national security — which this is not.

“It would certainly be subject to challenge at the WTO,” said Rob Shapiro, a Commerce Department official under President Bill Clinton. Although it could take five years to adjudicate at the

MATT ROURKE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

“He can’t just sit there and show people pieces of paper with his . . . signature and say, ‘I have changed the world.’ ” Rena Steinzor, a professor at the University of Maryland’s law school

WTO, he said, there is also “the possibility of retaliation by whoever does produce them. The truth is that ‘America first’ is contrary to global trade.”

Trump, however, does not seem to realize the limited power of his executive orders and has made public signing ceremonies a trademark of his first week.

“President Trump needs to go back to civics class because he can direct his employees to do various things, but he cannot repeal a bunch of laws through his executive orders because he needs congressional consent — and the executive orders themselves say that,” said Rena Steinzor, a professor at the University of Maryland’s law school.

Steinzor, who is also a member of the Center for Progressive Reform, added that the language in many of Trump’s executive orders explicitly acknowledges that they can be done only in accordance with the law. “He can’t just sit there and show people pieces of paper with his overly emphatic signature and say, ‘I have changed the world,’ because that’s not how

we do it,” she said.

Some of Trump’s actions have caught fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill off guard. “I haven’t seen the new action or what’s being proposed,” said Senate Republican Conference Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.), as he was peppered this past week with questions about Trump’s draft order revisiting interrogation practices.

And although there is broad consensus among Republicans about the need to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act — a process Trump began with an executive order the day he was sworn in — there is far less harmony on exactly when and how to handle the issue. Trade, infrastructure, and tax restructuring have also exposed rifts in the party.

“Punitive tariffs are not helpful,” said Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), a centrist lawmaker.

“Trade wars do not end well.”

In many ways Trump is simply experiencing the stark difference between campaigning and governing, a riddle that has bedeviled nearly every incoming president,

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Sen. John Thune ( R-S.D.) take questions at a news conference at the GOP congressional retreat Wednesday.

Republican legislators have faced numerous questions about Trump’s actions but have sometimes been caught off guard by them.

KLMNO WEEKLY

including Barack Obama.

Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster, said that although “it would be a serious mistake to underestimate the patience Trump supporters have for him and his agenda,” he wondered if Trump may grow frustrated. “He’s going to find that running a business is a lot simpler than running the government,” Newhouse said.

David Axelrod, a former senior Obama adviser, pointed to Obama’s executive order his first week in office to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, noting that he faced stiff congressional opposition and never completed his pledge.

But Trump, he said, could face an even more difficult challenge, in part because he presented himself — rather than his policies — as the linchpin.

“The appeal he had as a candidate is that people clearly want someone to snap their fingers and just make something happen, and he saw that desire and played to that desire,” Axelrod said. “Now comes the reality and he’s going to be snapping in the dark.”

Axelrod added, “He campaigned as an autocrat and now he’s the president, and the president isn’t an autocrat — and he’s going to find that some of the things he wants to do are difficult.”

Many Republicans, however, think that Trump’s supporters may give him a generous amount of time and latitude before demanding concrete results. Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, said a goal such as building a wall along the border with Mexico is largely symbolic.

“It’s symbolic of greater security and greater control,” Ayres said. “If he gets part of a wall built and Congress has to pay for it, the response from his supporters will be, ‘Well, we didn’t get Mexico to pay for it but at least we got the wall.’ ” And Judd Gregg, a former Republican governor and senator from New Hampshire, said that for Trump supporters, concrete changes may be beside the point, at least initially.

“They’re more interested in the verbal jockeying and the confrontational verbal approach than the results,” he said. “So as long as he’s poking a stick in the eye of the people his constituency feels are a problem, the rest won’t matter.” n

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POLITICS

Mayors ready for faceoff with Trump

BY K ATIE Z EZIMA, W ESLEY L OWERY AND J OSE A . D EL R EAL

I

n the past 24 hours, President Trump has signaled sweeping federal intervention in the way local and state officials carry out policing, treat immigrants and run elections, setting off a wave of defiance and apprehension from leaders of some of America’s largest cities.

In an executive order signed Wednesday, Trump directed the Department of Homeland Security to find ways to defund cities and jurisdictions out of step with his immigration priorities. That action — which could cost sanctuary cities including Washington, New York and Los Angeles millions of dollars — is the latest in a series of moves where Trump has appeared willing to step on statelevel or municipal prerogatives.

In the scuffle, U.S. mayors have emerged as key players in the resistance to Trump’s agenda.

“Cities know how important local control is, because we are in touch with the people we represent most closely. This is a president who’s been clear that he wants to centralize as much authority as he can in himself,” Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges said Wednesday. “That is dangerous for our democracy, I believe, and he is using the levers of our democracy to centralize his authority.”

At the center of the sanctuary city debate is a disagreement over whether local police officers should be required to help immigration officials enforce federal immigration laws. Many liberal mayors, including Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and New York City’s Bill De Blasio, have argued that requiring local police departments to assist immigration agents with deportations could sow distrust among immigrant populations. It could also discourage undocumented victims or witnesses from coming forward to report crimes.

“This is a federalism issue,” said Jorge Elorza (D), the mayor of Providence, R.I., who is the son of immigrants. “The idea of local

JOEL MARTINEZ/MCALLEN, TEX., MONITOR VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

On immigration, leaders of sanctuary cities assume a defiant posture control is deeply embedded in American history, and what we have now is a very aggressive attempt by the federal government to commandeer our local police departments to become immigration agents.”

He vowed “massive and aggressive lawsuits,” a resistance echoed by several local leaders.

Kevin de Leon, the Democratic president pro tempore of the California state Senate, said the state legislature is prepared to “explore all of our legal options” to fight the order.

“Singling out states and cities with punitive threats and withholding federal resources as today’s order on sanctuary cities does is unconstitutional,” de Leon

said. “It’s not the job of our local and county and state law enforcement to turn the cogs on President Trump’s deportation machine.”

For states and mayors, the debate also comes down to dollars.

Elorza, who has vowed to defy any federal order to change how his city handles undocumented immigrants, said that officials within his administration have watched anxiously as Trump and his surrogates have leveled threats and suggestions that federal funding for sanctuary cities could be at stake. He estimates that about 10 percent of the city’s $700 million budget consists of federal money.

Garcetti criticized the order in a statement Wednesday and

Members of LUPE, La Union del Pueblo Entero, gather with supporters to express their concern for President Trump’s immigration policies at the U.S. border wall Wednesday in Hidalgo, Tex.

stressed his city’s crucial economic stature. “Splitting up families and cutting funding to any city — especially Los Angeles, where 40 percent of the nation’s goods enter the U.S. at our port, and more than 80 million passengers traveled through our airport last year — puts the personal safety and economic health of our entire nation at risk. It is not the way forward for the United States.”

In Boston, Mayor Marty Walsh (D) said that he would open City Hall to immigrants if that’s what it takes to keep them safe.

“You are safe in Boston. If necessary, we will use City Hall itself to protect anyone who is targeted unjustly,” Walsh said during a news conference Wednesday after

SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 2017

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POLITICS Trump signed the order. Asked about what funding Boston might lose, Walsh said, “I guess we’ll find out.”

Sanctuary city funding is just one of many ongoing concerns, though certainly the most tangible. Trump has also made other broad — if vague — statements in recent days that have caused outrage and alarm. He tweeted from his personal account Wednesday that he planned to ask for a “major investigation” into allegations of widespread voter fraud, as he reasserted a false claim that cheating caused him to lose the popular vote in November.

States oversee elections and certify results, and some members of Trump’s own party have voiced opposition to some of his ideas.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, said during an interview with The Washington Post on Wednesday that his state investigates voter fraud every two years and that it is “not widespread” or systemic. He said elections need to be kept in the states’ hands.

“Every time the federal government touches something, with all due respect, it gets worse, not better,” he said. “Our system of elections with federal involvement, it’s not going to improve it.”

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) on Wednesday called the president’s call for a probe “lunacy.” He also expressed concerns that such rhetoric or executive action could lead to actions restricting voting rights.

“What I worry about is they use these types of comments and tactics to deny people’s access to the voting booths, make it harder for people to vote, to justify more stringent voter ID laws,” McAuliffe said.

Another flash point came Tuesday night when Trump vowed in a Twitter message to “send in the feds” if leaders in Chicago are unable to end the ongoing spate of violence in the city. Many were left speculating whether Trump meant he would send National Guard troops or expand the number of FBI agents embedded in Chicago. At a briefing on Wednesday afternoon, White House press secretary Sean Spicer clarified that Trump’s tweets were a reference to providing more federal resources to Chicago via the U.S. attorney’s office as well as other federal agencies. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Obama watchers wonder: What comes next for No. 44?

BY

T HOMAS H EATH

S

peaker? Professor? Author? Board member?

Owner of a professional basketball team?

Those are among the job prospects being bandied about for Barack Obama’s time post-presidency.

All ex-presidents receive an annual pension of $205,700 annually, which is pegged to inflation.

And Obama’s kicked in on Jan. 20.

They also receive federal money for offices and administrative help. Beyond that, they are on their own.

Obama is a relatively young man of 55, so the ex-president — who first decided to kick back for a few days near Palm Springs in Rancho Mirage, Calif. — could spend decades making a living from several income streams.

One safe bet is public speaking, which has enriched most former presidents. An ex-president can command $250,000 or more for a speech.

“We don’t know what Obama is going to do, but I’m comfortable saying he isn’t going to go out and grab as many high-priced speeches as he can get,” said James Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. “He’s going to lean toward book writing, writing his memoirs. He’s an intellectual who has had good success with two books and probably will have good success with future books.”

In just 2009, Obama earned $5.1 million from those two books, “The Audacity of Hope,” and “Dreams From My Father.”

The New York Times estimated that Obama and his wife, Michelle, could earn anywhere from $20 million to $45 million from future book contracts. And Obama said in his farewell news conference that he would like to write after leaving office. It worked for Ulysses S. Grant. The former president secured his family’s financial future when the

Civil War hero finished his memoirs while suffering from terminal throat cancer.

The Obamas are already wealthy. One report a year ago pegged the president’s net worth at $12.2 million. That and his pension should keep him comfortable as he rents a home in Washington’s upscale Kalorama neighborhood for $22,000 a month. Obama, an avid golfer, is also reportedly noodling around

KEVIN DIETSCH/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Obama leaves Washington, D.C., after the inauguration on Jan. 20.

for a home in Rancho Mirage, where golf is akin to a religion.

Obama could go back to teaching. He was a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School for 12 years before he was elected to the U.S. Senate. The Harvard Law School graduate could return to Chicago, where the Obamas own a $1.5 million home, or teach in Washington, or at Columbia University in New York, where he studied as an undergraduate.

“Any university would love to have him,” Thurber said.

Law professors generally earn $150,000 to $200,000, but that can vary depending on their experience.

There are other options. The former president could follow the Clintons and start a sprawling foundation. Any corporate board

would probably be happy to have a former president at the table.

Corporate boards pay well, with many offering healthy sixfigure fees and private jet travel to and from the meetings. Obama has said he does not want to travel by commercial air in the future.

“He doesn’t seem like the type to serve on boards of corporations,” Thurber said. “Maybe on a board of a university and maybe a foundation, but even that is unlikely.”

Time magazine recently speculated that the lanky executive, who is considered the best basketball player to serve in the White House, may want to own a professional basketball team some day.

But most NBA teams throw off little wealth to their owners, who are generally super-rich businessmen who own the team for reasons other than income.

Besides, even if he earns tens of millions in his post-presidency, Obama would be hard-pressed to afford even a small chunk of an NBA team. Forbes magazine estimates the average NBA team is now worth around $1.25 billion.

Of course, he could be a part of a group that buys all or a piece of a team.

Professional sports worked for George W. Bush. Bush led a group that bought, owned and eventually sold Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers for a big profit.

It made “W” independently wealthy.

In a 2015 GQ interview, Obama talked about owning an NBA team as a daydream: “I have fantasized about being able to put together a team and how much fun that would be.”

Thurber said he knows little about the NBA but opined that the ex-president owning an NBA team “seems quite far-fetched and outlandish.”

In the end, Thurber sees Obama following more of the Jimmy Carter model, with fewer paid speeches, some social and do-gooder involvement and lots of book writing. n

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NATION

Where will the circus animals retire?

BY

K ARIN B RULLIARD

W

hen Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey folds its circus tents in May, about 400 people will be out of a job. So will dozens of animals.

The show’s famous elephants are already retired, now living out their days on the company’s conservation center in Florida. Some acts, like the dogs and the lions, are owned by their handlers and will remain with them. But the kangaroos, horses, camels, tigers and others belong to Feld Entertainment, the producer of Ringling, which has said it will find them suitable homes. Stephen Payne, a spokesman, said in a recent interview that those locations have not yet been chosen but that wherever the creatures land will “have to meet our high animal care standards.”

Their options include zoos and private owners, but former circus animals often end up at the animal sanctuaries that dot the nation, which vary widely in quality.

Those might not have much trouble taking in horses or kangaroos, but tigers, bears and other large carnivores are another matter.

Failed roadside zoos and refuges, abandoned exotic pets and crackdowns on circuses have created a swelling menagerie of wild animals that need homes. Payne said Feld owns about 18 tigers, which will probably join a steady stream of big cats in search of shelter.

“We will do anything we can do to help them place their tigers, I’ll say that right now,” said Ed Stewart, the president of the California-based Performing Animal Welfare Society, or PAWS, a longtime Ringling adversary.

“But it’s not going to be easy, because all legitimate sanctuaries are full of tigers right now.”

The demand for wild animal accommodation is rising out of trends that animal welfare activists and sanctuary owners welcome, such as an increasing public distaste for entertainment and research involving animals and bans against circuses in U.S. cities and several Latin American

MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

For large animals, the trouble is finding private owners, zoos or sanctuaries with space for them countries. But they say it is also a sign of the shocking ease with which Americans can acquire exotic animals, as well as the big money involved in breeding bear cubs and other creatures that sell for thousands of dollars.

Tigers are the emblems of this crisis of homeless wild animals, though bears are also “ridiculously hard to place,” said Kellie Heckman, executive director of the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries, which has accredited 132 U.S. sanctuaries, only 11 of which accommodate big cats. Ordinary people adopt fuzzy cubs as pets, and some zoos and refuges let visitors handle and take photos with them, a practice animal welfare advocates condemn. But cute cubs grow into aggressive adolescents within a matter of months, and those used for entertainment often don’t perform for many years. They outgrow their use, in other words.

U.S. officials and conservation groups estimate that 5,000 to 10,000 tigers live in the United

States, far more than in the wild.

Until recently, dozens of them resided at Serenity Springs, an unaccredited Colorado sanctuary that bred big cats, offered photos with cubs and had been cited by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for animal welfare violations.

Last fall, it was sold to a respected sanctuary in Arkansas, which has since been finding new homes for 110 animals, mostly cats.

“The sanctuary community cannot continue to be the dumping ground for all of those that make a profit off animals — whether that is using them for cub photos, circus acts or any commercial purpose. There just isn’t enough capacity,” Heckman said. “Building more sanctuary enclosures is not the answer. We need to regulate who can have exotic animals and for what purposes.”

Some states have bans or require permits, while five do not restrict keeping dangerous wild animals. Last year, the federal government finalized two regula-

In Wilkes-Barre, Pa., performers with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus wave goodbye to the elephants after the animals’ final show in May. The elephants will live out their days at the company’s conservation center in Florida, but the future homes of other circus animals are still being determined.

tions aimed at increasing oversight of the American tiger population. Advocates say they are hopeful the Ringling closure might generate momentum for two federal bills, which the company opposed, to ban private ownership and breeding of big cats as well as the use of wild animals in circuses and traveling shows.

In the meantime, representatives of accredited sanctuaries say they’re eager to help find homes for the Ringling animals. Susan Bass, the spokeswoman for Big Cat Rescue in Tampa, said its founder had offered assistance in an email to chief executive Kenneth Feld. The sanctuary would be able to add some of the tigers to its population of 80 cats big and small, Bass said.

Among the Big Cat Rescue animals are five tigers from Serenity Springs, as well as Hoover, a recently arrived tiger that had spent his life traveling Peru in a circus wagon.

Hoover, who today lives on an acre of land with lakefront access, seemed startled when he first dipped his paw in the lake, but “he swims day and night now.”

Such initial bewilderment is common to circus animals, many of which have never had room to roam, said Pat Craig, executive director of the Wild Animal Sanctuary, a 720-acre Colorado spread that is home to 450 large carnivores.

Craig emphasized that he could find space for Ringling animals.

Stewart, the California sanctuary director, echoed that. His main, 2,300-acre facility houses a former Ringling elephant, one of three retired circus elephants on the property.

Other animals under PAWS care, which include lynxes and monkeys, have more complicated backstories, having been passed from owner to owner, he said.

“There’s no line between, ‘This is a pet animal, a roadside zoo animal, a circus animal,’ ” Stewart said. “They could be any one of those categories in their lifetime.

They’re just a commodity.” n

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NATION

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This apple may decide fate of GMOs Advocates hope the fruit, which doesn’t brown, will be a hit and open the door for others

BY

C AITLIN D EWEY

A

fter years of development, protest and regulatory red tape, the first genetically modified, nonbrowning apples will soon go on sale in the United States.

The fruit, sold sliced and marketed under the brand Arctic Apple, could hit a cluster of Midwestern grocery stores as early as Wednesday. The limited release is an early test run for the controversial apple, which has been genetically modified to eliminate the browning that occurs when an apple is left out in the open air.

Critics and advocates of genetic engineering say the apple could be a turning point in the nation’s highly polarizing debate over genetically modified organisms (GMOs). While genetic modifications have in the past been mainly defended as a way to protect crops, the Arctic Apple would be one of the first GMOs marketed directly to consumers as more convenient.

“What companies are desperate for is some really popular GMO product to hit the market,” said McKay Jenkins, the author of a forthcoming history of the debate.

“Any successful product could lift the cloud over GMOs.” Industry executives predict the apple could open a whole new trade in genetically engineered produce, potentially opening the market to pink pineapples, antioxidant-enriched tomatoes and other food in development.

“We see this as less about genetic modification and more about convenience,” said Neal Carter, founder of the company that makes the Arctic Apple. “I think consumers are very ready for apples that don’t go brown. Everyone can identify with that ‘yuck’ factor.”

GMO critics say they are hopeful, however, that consumers will continue to show skepticism about the produce. Despite a growing consensus in scientific circles that GMOs pose little risk, environmental and consumer groups have successfully mounted campaigns against GMOs over the past 30 years, successfully limiting

OKANAGAN SPECIALTY FOODS

The Arctic Apple has been genetically engineered not to brown.

the practice to commodity crops such as soybeans and corn.

Anti-GMO groups have successfully pushed for GMO crop bans in places like Boulder, Colo., and Sonoma, Calif., and several major food brands have agreed not to use genetically modified ingredients.

Critics have also questioned how consumers will be able to judge the freshness of sliced apples when they don’t brown.

“This apple is understudied, unlabeled, and unnecessary,” said Dana Perls, the senior food and technology campaigner with the environmental nonprofit Friends of the Earth. “It’s only a matter of time before consumers realize they’re being falsely marketed to . . . And then there will be an uproar.”

Carter and his company, Okanagan Specialty Fruits, have bet millions of dollars that this will not be the case. The Canadian fruit-grower, now a fully owned subsidiary of the biotechnology firm Intrexon, has spent the past 20 years developing the Arctic Apple under the direction of Neal and his wife, Louisa.

After nine years of testing, the Carters petitioned the U.S. Department of Agriculture to deregulate the apples, which would allow them to sell in the United States. Despite vocal opposition from anti-GMO groups — which

organized petition drives and sent public comments by the tens of thousands — the agency ruled in February 2015 that the apple posed no significant health or environmental risks.

For the Arctic Apple, however, the greatest test is yet to come: whether the convenience of a nonbrowning apple is enough to persuade consumers to look past GMO’s negative reputation.

“I don’t know what their chances are — it’s a very polarized debate,” said Michael White, an assistant professor of genetics at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “But I think this is huge. What the Arctic Apple is doing, trying to push GMOs on their own merits, could lead to a more positive discussion.”

Despite widespread scientific consensus that genetic engineering is not dangerous to human health, the practice remains controversial and poorly understood.

Both the World Health Organization and the National Academy of Science have concluded that there are no health reasons for avoiding the current slate of genetically engineered foods.

But in a 2016 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, 39 percent of Americans said that they believed genetically modified foods were worse for their health

than other foods. And the NonGMO Project, a nonprofit that opposes genetic engineering and administers the Non-GMO label seen on some North American foods, points out that 92 percent of American consumers believe that genetically modified products should be labeled, according to Consumer Reports.

Most Americans already consume a large number of GMOs or GMO-derived ingredients every day. Ninety percent of all corn and soybeans grown in the United States are engineered to improve agricultural efficiency and withstand frequent pesticide applications. The resulting corn and soy are frequently fed to animals intended for human consumption or routed into such processed foods as cornstarch, corn meal, corn syrup, soybean oil, soy lethicin and dozens of other derivatives.

Yet even if consumers already eat GMOs, very few do so knowingly. To date, most agricultural engineering has focused almost exclusively on improving yields for producers. The exceptions are the Flavr Savr tomato — the world’s first commercialized GMO, which suffered lackluster sales and was eventually pulled after its introduction in 1994 — and the more recent non-browning Innate Potato, currently sold at several stores under the White Russet brand.

But the Arctic Apple has a distinct advantage over its predecessors: It’s being sold sliced in 10ounce bags as a convenient snack food. The Carters say they’re imitating the baby carrot model, which has proved a success for vegetable growers, helping to catapult sales of the vegetable. Presliced apples, currently treated with chemicals to prevent browning, enjoy a similar popularity in school cafeterias and Happy Meals.

“We might eventually sell them to distributors for service in schools,” Carter said. “We thought our initial go-to-market strategy would be through food service.

But a significant number of retailers reached out, and we realized — they’re ready for us.” n

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WORLD

Cold War becomes Information War A NTHONY F AIOLA Prague BY

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he target of high-stakes Kremlin power plays during the Cold War, the Czech Republic is again on the front lines of a contest with Russia and its sympathizers — this time in the Information War. Inside a mustard-yellow stucco building in northwest Prague, Benedikt Vangeli is a commander in that fight — leading a new SWAT team for truth. Armed with computers and smartphones, the freshly formed government unit is charged with scouring the Internet and social media, fact-checking, then flagging false reports to the public.

“Truth is important to a democratic state,” Vangeli said.

Following the fake-news barrage during the U.S. presidential race, the worried Czechs are not the only ones suddenly breaking into the fact-checking business.

Nations including Finland and Germany are either setting up or weighing similar operations as fears mount over disinformation campaigns in key elections that could redefine Europe’s political map this year.

Here in the Czech Republic — a nation that was a Cold War hub for the KGB — intelligence officials are charging Moscow with rebuilding its spy operations and engaging in “covert infiltration” of Czech news media ahead of elections this year. And the new government truth squad will pay special attention to a proliferation of opaque, pro-Russian websites in the Czech language that officials say are seeking to gaslight the public by fostering paranoia and undermining faith in democracy and the West.

Using methods reminiscent of Soviet-era propaganda, such sites offer a vision of a world where no Russian soldier set foot in Ukraine, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is a Muslim-hugging menace and the United States is behind Europe’s refugee crisis.

Some are running the same disproved stories that tainted the U.S. election — including false allega-

MARTIN DIVISEK/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

The Czech Republic deploys a truth squad to try to fight a pro-Russian disinformation campaign tions that Hillary Clinton’s campaign dabbled in child trafficking and the occult. But they are also curated for local audiences. ProRussian Czech politicians, for instance, are exalted, while Moscow’s critics are torn down. The E.U., such stories suggest, is power grabbing and inept.

There is some evidence that the assaults may be having their desired effect — with opinion polls showing the number of Czechs who trust the E.U. slipping to just 26 percent.

“We have no ability or political will to close all these websites,” said Ivana Smolenova, a fellow at the Prague Security Studies Institute. “The only thing we can do is work on our self-defense.”

Yet the new unit’s creation has brought countercharges of statesponsored spin from the sites and their supporters, who argue that the government is picking sides in a nation still divided between proRussian and pro-Western sympathies.

“Nobody has the monopoly on

truth,” said Czech President Milos Zeman, a pro-Russian politician who fills a largely ceremonial role and is at odds with the Czech government over Russian sanctions he wants lifted. He maintains a special adviser with financial links to the Russian energy giant Lukoil, and Zeman’s interviews frequently appear on proRussian websites.

In the Czech Republic, the tug of war for influence between Moscow and the West has lurked just below the surface since the fall of the Iron Curtain. It reemerged, officials say, after the 2014 Russian incursion into Ukraine — denied by the Kremlin — that led the West to impose sanctions on Moscow.

A Czech intelligence report issued last year asserted that Moscow’s embassy in Prague — with staffing levels far higher than those of other nations — has become a beefed-up den of spies. It also warns that Russian covert use of Czech-language media and its state-sponsored propaganda are “exerting influence on the percep-

A protester in Prague stands under effigies of Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Trump as she attends a “Love Trumps Hate” rally last weekend. Czech intelligence officials say Moscow is engaging in “covert infiltration” of Czech news media ahead of elections there.

tions and thoughts on the Czech audience” and promoting a “relativity of truth.”

It cites no smoking gun linking the Kremlin to the 40 or so proRussian websites published in Czech. But the Russian government, for instance, backs the Sputnik News Agency’s Czechlanguage service. Smolenova said she has also identified at least one other site as being funded and directed by Russian citizens.

Most of the pro-Kremlin websites here have opaque operations with complex ownership structures. At least some appear to have adopted a favorable stance on Russia after years of publishing conspiracy theories and bizarre news.

The extent to which they are actively doing Moscow’s bidding, or simply trafficking in echo chamber economics, remains unclear.

Jan Koral, the publisher of one pro-Russian site — nwoo.org — said that half of his revenue comes from digital ads and the other half from reader donations. Some of those donations, he noted, are made anonymously.

The new “fake news” unit is still in the midst of hiring its full contingency of 15 agents and has only begun preliminary operations.

Among the false claims flagged in test trials so far: a Facebook post asserting that the perpetrator in last month’s attack on a Berlin Christmas market was based in the Czech Republic, and one from a Russian news outlet claiming that Moscow’s agents had already managed to penetrate the Czech Republic’s elections system.

Critics — including free speech activists — say it is a fine line. More often than not, offending stories are simply spun and twisted rather than entirely fabricated. And it is potentially dangerous, some argue, to have a government — even a democratic one — deciding on recommended reading for its public.

“This would put the government in the position to act as a media outlet, which should be the task of classical journalism,” said Markus Beckedahl, a prominent German Internet activist and blogger. n

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WORLD

KLMNO WEEKLY

Election chances grim for French left J AMES M C A ULEY Paris BY

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rance is among the world’s most storied welfare states, the historic province of the 35-hour workweek and, now, “the right to disconnect” from work emails after leaving the office.

For decades, the country has been home to one of Europe’s strongest Socialist parties, which managed to shape policy even when technically out of power.

But as France prepares for its 2017 election — a contest widely expected to shape the course of a troubled Europe — a jarring reality has emerged.

Quite simply, the Socialists have almost no chance of winning, according to nearly every major public opinion poll. Even more so, they are increasingly unlikely to qualify for even the second and final round of the presidential election, to be held in early May. As the once-indomitable power of the center-left wanes across the Western world — in the Europe of Brexit and in the United States of Donald Trump — it looks as though France, its age-old bedrock, may follow suit.

Last Sunday, French voters went to the polls in the first round of elections to choose which two of the seven candidates running they want to lead the center-left come late April and early May. In first and second place came Benoît Hamon, a former education minister, and Manuel Valls, the former prime minister of François Hollande, France’s current Socialist president and the most unpopular on record in the country’s modern history.

One of the two will be chosen in a second-round vote today.

But after that, the climb gets much steeper.

First is the threat from Emmanuel Macron, an increasingly popular former finance minister who defected from the current Socialist administration to launch an independent and more centrist campaign.

Second is the specter of the

BERTRAND GUAY/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Polls indicate the Socialist Party faces trouncing, as right-wing, populist parties see their odds rise center-right François Fillon and the Marine Le Pen, both of whom are expected to make the final round of the presidential election in May. For the first time, Le Pen has polled ahead of Fillon, suggesting what for decades has been unthinkable: that the National Front, France’s far-right populist party of xenophobia and economic protectionism, could actually win a national election.

The National Front, once a pariah party, has become the linchpin of a Pan-European coalition of far-right parties. On Jan. 21, Le Pen spoke at a summit of other nationalist leaders in Koblenz, Germany — a gathering that also included Geert Wilders, the leader of the anti-Islam Dutch Freedom Party, and Frauke Petry, a joint leader of the Alternative

for Germany party, one of whose other leaders drew headlines recently for attacking Holocaust atonement.

“In 2016, the Anglo-Saxon world woke up,” Le Pen said at the conference. In “2017, I am sure, the people of continental Europe will wake up.”

In France, Socialists have begun to worry that her prediction will come true. In the final days before last week’s vote, even some of the leftist candidates seemed to have considered their primary a fool’s errand in a changing country.

This was a point made by JeanLuc Bennahmias, one of the virtually unknown candidates, in one of the contest’s televised debates.

Before a reported 3 million viewers, Bennahmias acknowledged that he was a “little candidate”

Last Sunday, Benoît Hamon, foreground, came in first place in the first round of the French Socialists’ presidential primary.

with whom few were familiar.

But, he added, so was everyone else on the stage, in the grand scheme of things. “There are no candidates here who have the floor on the big subjects,” he said.

Data suggest that he is correct.

Apart from Le Pen and Fillon, the most recent opinion poll conducted by Le Monde newspaper and the Cevipof agency ranked all Socialist candidates behind the centrist Macron, a former investment banker, and even the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

The reasons for the surprising demise of the Socialist Party in France are manifold.

For starters, Hollande is staggeringly unpopular. He has struggled with relatively high and constant unemployment and a wave of terrorist violence that has killed 230 in the past two years.

Hollande decided in December not to run for reelection. This is the first time in a primary that a ruling leftist party is not represented by its incumbent president.

But analysts see the fall of the Socialists as part of a deeper trend away from a perceived establishment, which in France has long been dominated by the centerleft. The same dissatisfaction with the realities of an increasingly globalized economy that fueled much of the Brexit campaign — and the Trump campaign — has begun to see an enemy in the French left.

“There is a general crisis in social democracy,” said Gérard Grunberg, a renowned historian of the French left at Sciences Po in Paris. “And it’s become more and more difficult to show why it matters, what its values are, against the evolution of financial capitalism and globalization.

What’s come back is anti-liberalism, reaction.”

In the throes of these significant external challenges, Grunberg said, there is virtually no unity on the center-left to sway voters away from the extremes on either end of the political spectrum.

“The party is no longer a community,” he said. n

Imam Suhaib Webb prays at the Church of the Epiphany in Washington, D.C., in December.

ANDRE CHUNG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

A

SHOW OF FAITH Once part of an Oklahoma hip-hop group, Imam Suhaib Webb has become a guiding spirit to young Muslims

BY BILL DONAHUE

quarter-century ago, before he converted to Islam and long before he was a Muslim cleric, Imam Suhaib Webb was a street gangster.

He was a swaggering 6-foot-5, 18-year-old blond, blue-eyed member of the Bloods, a Los Angeles contingent whose tentacles reached east to Webb’s home in the suburbs of Oklahoma City. He smoked weed. He skipped school. His English teachers, he says now, were rappers — Tupac Shakur, NWA, Biggie Smalls and Public Enemy — and Webb spun his own tunes, serving as the DJ in a hip-hop ensemble called AK Assault. On the cover of the band’s second album, “Mafia Style” (1992), Webb stares sullenly off into the distance, arms crossed. The hint of a scowl on his smooth baby face conveys a message embraced by teen rebels everywhere: The whole world is totally lame and in need of serious reform.

On a cool, rainy Friday in October, as Webb stands before Muslims gathered for prayers at the Church of the Epiphany in Washington, D.C., he’s 40 or so pounds heavier than he was in his AK years, but his hard gaze has not softened. He’s sporting a bushy, mustache-less beard and a gray suit. He is 43 years old. But somehow he still carries the same badness and verve that enlivened the album cover. Maybe it’s the sleek, snappy cut of his suit or the gleaming white kerchief tucked in the lapel pocket. His size 12 shoes are pointy-toed — fancy and well-suited for dancing — and as he stands on the altar, politely waiting out the emcee’s introduction, there’s a bristling energy in the way he shifts on his feet.

Legions of Islamic teenagers in America know who he is. Webb has 100,000 followers on Twitter and 230,000 on Facebook. On Snapchat, the disappearing-message platform that is de rigueur among millennials, he gets roughly 20,000 daily views. His snaps are 10-second prose poems that bespeak his wisdom on both Islamic law and 2016 street style.

In one, he’s wearing a flat-billed Kangol hat as he waxes dubiously on arranged marriage. No other Sunni imam could joke, as Webb did in a video last year, that his Snapchat handle is pimpin4paradise786.

Webb is the founder and guiding spirit of a faith-based community group aimed at gathering Washington’s young Muslims. Center DC does not yet have an office or a single donor.

There are only three volunteer staffers, all part time, but in leading his small group — which offers prayer sessions at iconic sites like the Lincoln Memorial and fortnightly classes on Muslim theology — Webb aims to make classical Islam relevant to modern Americans and to help a hate-addled world see that, if the prophet Muhammad were alive today, he’d be politically in sync with Bernie Sanders. He’d be tolerant of gays and abortion, and he would, like Webb’s long-ago rap idols, be sickened by the systematic racism pervading America.

Naturally, jihadist hard-liners hate Webb for his liberal views. In its online magazine, Dabiq, the Islamic State last year labeled him an apostate and “all-American imam.” The story ran with a photo of a machete pressed to continues on next page

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COVER STORY

from previous page

a man’s neck and, beneath it, a caption reading, “The punishment for apostasy.” The story said of Webb, “Adopting a Southern inner-city accent sprinkled with thug life vocabulary, he is quick to switch to an ordinary voice when speaking to CNN and other media outlets.”

At the Church of the Epiphany in October, Webb’s subject is Donald Trump. “We’ve got a presidential candidate who has no respect for women, for Latinos, for Muslims, for blacks,” he says. “This is a guy who doesn’t know how to wear a suit properly and has a bad spray tan.”

For Webb, Trump is a reason to read Islamic history more closely and to find inspiration in two Muslim heroes of the first millennium, Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad, and his descendant, Zaid. Both died in battle, “sacrificing themselves,” Webb argues, “for the freedom of the Muslims. Zaid was killed and his body hung on a fence for four years.

“You have a responsibility to honor his legacy,” Webb intones to the hundred or so faithful kneeling on prayer mats arrayed on the altar. “You need to stand up against persecution, for what is right and just. Think of Rick in ‘The Walking Dead,’ of the way he wakes up in the hospital. We can wake up like that and speak out against white male privilege in this country. We have the collective power to propel causes like Black Lives Matter.

We can make a huge difference.”

Webb arrived in Washington late in 2013 from Boston, where for three years he was the top imam at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center — and a target. When terrorists with Islamic ties bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013, killing three and injuring more than 260, Webb fended off baseless Internet rumors that the bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were trained in Boston mosques. In a New York Times op-ed, he wrote, “Radicalization does not happen to young people with a strong grounding in the American Muslim mainstream. . . . What Islam requires, above all else, is mercy.” Meanwhile, he was under attack from a local activist, Charles Jacobs, co-founder of Americans for Peace and Tolerance, who alleged that Webb was anti-Semitic, homophobic and in cahoots with the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, even as Boston’s leading rabbis disagreed and one U.S. attorney, Carmen Ortiz, told the New York Times that Jacobs’s claims were “incredibly racist and unfair.”

Webb moved to Washington, oddly enough, to duck the political limelight — and to reinvent what it means to be a Muslim cleric. He is now, almost uniquely, a freelance imam, unaffiliated with any mosque, foundation or university. He makes his living traveling the globe, giving talks on Islam as he addresses crowds of up to 2,500. His biggest fans are brainy millennials who were raised Muslim, only to come of age in the fractured techno blur of the 21st century. During a recent three-week period Webb traveled to Syracuse, England, Morocco, Oklahoma and Texas, and also to Boston,

where one fan, a 22-year-old Somali emigre named Ahmed Hassan, noted that Webb is a passable basketball player. “He’s old-school,” Hassan says, critiquing his former imam’s on-court habits. “He posts up and shoots sky hooks like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He fouls a lot. He plays to win.”

In Washington, Webb teaches two classes for the region’s biggest Islamic group. But his main focus is his nonprofit, Center DC, which boasts about 25 frequent participants, most of them young Muslim professionals who are reminiscent of the Islamic believers who followed Muhammad into the hinterlands of the Arabian desert in A.D. 622. They’re idealistic wanderers of the city, revolutionaries whose faith is not moored to a building but rather to “pop-up duas,” which are spontaneous prayer sessions on random street corners. As Webb sees it, they constitute a vanguard. “Eventually,” he told me, “one of them might become a federal judge or a congressman or a senator and they’ll remember their experience with Center DC. It could shape how we treat Muslims in this country.”

Center DC meets every other Tuesday night at George Washington University for a class, “Getting It Right,” a primer on Muslim theology. Webb’s ostensible mission tonight is to explicate 28 qualities of God, but the splendor

Top: Webb works out with personal trainer Garrett Thomas at a D.C. gym.

Above: Webb Snapchats with followers on his way to the gym. He gets about 20,000 daily views on Snapchat.

of his talk lies in his wild and erudite digressions. When he notes that God is “the first and the last,” he dwells for a moment on a 1996 book on Christian theology, “The Domestication of Transcendence,” before musing briefly on ’90s-era heavy-metal music and its facile use of divine phraseology — “guitar gods,” for instance. “I believe in freedom of speech,” Webb says, “but I think it’s important to see what’s going on.

“God is immanent,” he continues. “He’s part of your life. He’s alive. He’s living.” Soon, he’s stressing that Muslims must practice acts of charity and is dwelling on the “screaming liberal” bent of historical Islam by, for instance, quoting a 13th-century Syrian scholar.

According to Webb, al-Nawawi said, “If a person is gay because of their nature, we have to treat them with mercy.”

The students listen attentively, taking notes. When the class ends Anders Rosen, one of the students, downplays Webb’s leadership role. “He makes us think,” says Rosen, a recent convert to Islam. “He gives us a place where we can unpack our ideas in an honest environment, but really it’s the group that matters. It’s an interesting time to be a convert, but among this group I feel like I’m supported. I feel like I’m on the TV show ‘Friends.’ ” Perhaps it’s no surprise that Webb’s first spiritual mentor was an Oklahoma City rapper. Chilly D. was four or five years older than Webb, who was 18 at the time, and he was, Webb remembers, a “pseudo Muslim. He was a cocktail of black nationalism, Judaism and Islam. He was a guy with dreadlocks who smoked a lot of weed.” He spoke in cosmic terms, telling young Webb, “Islam is where black people come from.” He noted, not inaccurately, that Kunta Kinte, the central character of “Roots,” writer Alex Haley’s saga of African American life, was a Muslim; Webb was intrigued. He bought a copy of the Koran and began reading, clandestinely. Fearful of angering his parents, he read the holy book in a cramped bathroom off his family’s kitchen, perched on the toilet, the door locked as he absorbed the Koran’s wisdom.

There was warfare and bloodshed in the holy book’s 114 surahs, or chapters, yes, but as Webb read he also found a rhetorical zing that put him in the mind of the myriad rap rhymes he had memorized over the preceding years.

He kept reading, and when he neared the end of the 18th surah, he encountered these words: “If trees were pens and the oceans were ink, you could never exhaust the words of God.” Webb thought to himself, Wow, this is dope!

I need to do this.

Within months, he stopped drinking. He stopped smoking pot, stopped eating pork. His parents were “concerned,” he says. They were relatively liberal Christians. As a gang member, he had been shot at twice — luckily by bad marksmen. Once he watched a rival gang member bleed to death outside a restaurant.

His parents asked, “How can you turn your back on Christ?” They worried that he was allying with a cult.

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COVER STORY But Webb only deepened his faith. In time, he changed his first name — Suhaib was a disciple of Muhammad. He moved to Cairo and spent seven years studying Islam at AlAzhar University, the Harvard of the Muslim world. In Cairo, he learned to speak Arabic fluently. He became a hafiz, meaning that he joined the tens of thousands of Muslims worldwide who have fully memorized the Koran, all 77,500 words. On the day before he left Egypt, an aging, gray-bearded farmer approached him in the mosque, dressed in a simple homemade robe. Mumbling in a country dialect of Arabic Webb could scarcely make out, the man asked the American imam to explain the pronunciation behind a single Arabic word in the Koran: “shrri,” meaning evil. “Tell it to me simply,” he said, “in everyday language. Every time I ask you guys a question you give complex answers nobody can understand. Simple, please.”

Webb gave him an answer and the old man went home, satisfied. And in an instant, Webb apprehended his mission in life: He would teach Islam in simple language. He would reach out to young Muslims by speaking the casual street patois of his youth, and it would work.

It would be super dope.

Among Washington-area Islamic leaders, there seems to be some confusion as to Center DC’s mission. Mohamed Magid, an imam in suburban Virginia, tells me that, as he understands it, the group was created to “convert faith to social service.” But there is nothing about social service on Center DC’s website, and in my research I’ve learned of only one Center DC service event: It involved handing out sandwiches to homeless people. Still, Magid heaps praise on Webb. “He speaks the language of youth better than anyone I know.”

Sahar Mohamed Khamis, a professor at the University of Maryland, says that when Webb spoke at her school a student approached him, post-lecture, on fire with “these fanatical ideas he’d read online. Suhaib Webb took this guy aside,” Khamis says. “Then, very gently, he told him how Islam is a religion of peace and understanding. I think it sunk in. I was very impressed with Suhaib’s care for that young man.”

I could not find anyone in Washington who takes issue with Webb’s rare standing as a white leader in a religion populated largely by people of color. In 2014, though, one Canadian blogger, Dawud Israel, railed against Webb in an online screed titled “Imams of White Privilege — Are They a Problem?” alleging that the convert imam was being paternalistic in decrying the misogyny of one Pakistani imam.

Webb’s critique, Israel said, “is not far off from American boots in Afghanistan saving the oppressed Muslim damsel in distress.”

But Israel’s post hardly galvanized the Muslim world, and he recently took it down. He may have averted a spat.

At his worst, Suhaib Webb can be a hothead with a sharp tongue. In 2009, after a fallingout with an employer — SunniPath, an online Muslim academy for which he served as a teacher — Webb rounded on the school’s

PHOTOS BY ANDRE CHUNG FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

devotees, alleging that they often bought the “sweaty clothes” and “nasty old miswaks [teeth cleaning twigs]” of SunniPath’s Jordanian leader, Sheikh Nuh Ha Mim Keller. “This,” he said, “is an issue of a Jim Jones type cult.” In one 2014 speech, Webb’s fury focused on Dutch atheist and anti-Islam crusader Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom he called an “idiot,” even though she has taught at Harvard. In the same speech, he proclaimed, “Secularism is a radical lunatic ideology.”

Like a lot of liberals, Webb had a whole array of reactions after Trump won. In mid-November, he seethed with outrage.

“White privilege is like cancer,” he tweeted.

“You think you removed it, but it permeates, taking on new parts of society.”

In another tweet he wrote, “Trump’s victory is steroids for white privilege.”

Later, he tried a little dark humor, retweeting a picture of some Third Reich-era German soldiers striding along in jodhpurs. “Oh look,” the accompanying text reads, “it’s some dapper white nationalists!”

Eventually, though, Webb found his voice by baring his soul to the pain of Trump’s victory and writing and speaking in language that seemed almost to bleed. “There are times in life when Qada (God’s plan) chips away at us, ripping into our seemingly perfect worlds,

Top: Webb works on lecture notes at home.

Above: At George Washington University, he teaches a Center DC class called “Getting It Right,” a primer on Muslim theology. At left is Lauren Schreiber, executive director of Center DC.

KLMNO WEEKLY

leaving gashes, open wounds, and small crevices,” he wrote in a November Facebook post.

“It renders us gasping, confused, feeling incomplete and struggling to comprehend Allah’s plan.”

Left unmentioned in the post was a more personal tale, a deeper hurt: Webb’s mother was in the hospital, and failing. In our conversations in Washington, he had spoken of her with admiring affection, noting that she had, many years earlier, come to embrace his conversion. In 2011, Mary Lynn Webb told the Los Angeles Times, “I’m proud of him” before marveling over his Islamic scholarship: “It’s amazing, really, when you think that he doesn’t have that background. I think it may have saved him from something had he stayed in the rap world.”

Now she was dying, and Webb was channeling his grief into eloquence. In addressing 350 or so people at an Arizona mosque in midNovember, he likened American Muslims’ current crisis to the period circa A.D. 620, when Islam was still a fringe faith in Arabia. The prophet Muhammad was, along with his followers, being persecuted in his native city, Mecca. “It was a time of economic and social isolation,” Webb said. “People were being killed. At least 85 percent of the prophet’s companions were suffering from malnutrition. Some of them were subsisting on grass.

The prophet loses his mother, he loses his uncle, his city. But he soldiers on and he teaches us how to deal with oppression and how to deal with difficult times.”

Soon, Webb was imploring his audience to emulate the prophet — to enact “prophetic policies for our age. We’re seeing American citizens murdered,” he said, alluding to shootings by police officers. “We’re seeing the killing of innocents. Drones are flying over the Middle East. We have to be moved if we’re members of the prophetic office, and the prophet cannot be silent about the minimum-wage issues in this country, about paid leave for mothers. We should make sure that the forgotten in this country who voted for Trump and haven’t seen economic prosperity for years have a voice.

“I’m an ally,” Webb continued, “for Palestine, for black America, for the budding Hispanic community. Whether they’re Muslim or not Muslim, I approach these communities like a dead body being washed.” He threw his hands in the air. “Use me as you like. I have no control of myself.”

Two weeks later, Webb’s mother passed away. I spoke to him on the day of her death, and coming over the phone his voice was quiet, his tone understated and measured. I was reminded of a basketball player kneeling by the scorer’s table, collecting himself just before being dispatched onto the court in the last minutes of a critical game. Muslims would need to organize, he told me, but that was just the start. “Look,” he said, “the election of Donald Trump is going to be perhaps one of the greatest challenges we ever face. I’m just encouraging people to find spiritual strength.” n

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ENTERTAINMENT

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

Hollywood needs a long-lasting reset BY

A NN H ORNADAY

R

edemption — or at least a whiff of it — was in the air on Tuesday when nominations for the 89th Academy Awards were announced.

Whether in the form of records being broken or milestones being reached, the prevailing mood was one of forward progression for an industry that loves nothing more than a great comeback story — especially its own.

That sense of cockeyed optimism propelled the day’s most recognized movie, “La La Land,” which with 14 nominations tied “All About Eve” and “Titanic” for a record number of nods. It’s no surprise that Damien Chazelle’s musical — about a couple of ambitious kids trying to make it in Hollywood — would be catnip to members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who understandably gravitated toward its homage to old-school musicals, the perennial showbiz values of grit and determination, and cinema as an endangered art form.

But the most obvious sign of karmic evolution was a dramatic uptick in nominations of people of color, from the seven actors and five directors who received nods for their work to groundbreaking — if shamefully overdue — “firsts” in the cinematography and editing branches.

In contrast with recent years, when actors and filmmakers of color were barely represented or erased outright, this year’s list of nominations showcases an encouragingly inclusive spectrum of artists, genres and stories, ranging from lively fact-based history to contemporary drama and documentary. In 2014, “12 Years a Slave,” directed by Steve McQueen made Oscar history as the first movie by a black filmmaker to win best picture. Three years later, another plateau seems to have been reached in terms of styles, stories and characterizations that are available to artists — and audiences — eager for movies that reflect the culturally varied, multifaceted world outside the theater.

DAVID LEE/PARAMOUNT PICTURES VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Diversity in Oscars nominations shows progress — and hopefully also signals enduring change The supporting-actress category offers one case in point: Viola Davis broke her own record by becoming the first African American actress to be nominated for three Oscars in the course of her career. She was nominated for best supporting actress for her fierce portrayal of a long-suffering wife in “Fences” and will compete alongside Octavia Spencer, who played a brilliant mathematician in the ’60s-era NASA drama “Hidden Figures,” and Naomie Harris, who delivered a searing turn as a crack-addicted mother in “Moonlight.”

“Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins’s tender portrait of a young gay man coming of age amid poverty and crime in Miami, was just one of many films by and about people of color to be nominated many times over (Jenkins was nominated for best director and for his script, and Mahershala Ali was nominated for best supporting actor for his role as an improbably paternal drug dealer). Jenkins’s film — which earned

him first-time status as a black filmmaker nominated for both writing and directing — will compete for best picture alongside “Lion,” “Fences” and “Hidden Figures.” All have done well at the box office; in fact, “Hidden Figures” has become something of a sleeper hit, its story of the African American women who played crucial roles in the United States’ early space program offering exhilarating proof that audiences are hungry for a wide range of narratives that have as yet gone untold.

Because of their visibility, the best-picture and best-acting categories have taken on outsize importance at Oscar time (Ruth Negga and Dev Patel were also nominated for their lead performances, in “Loving” and “Lion,” respectively). But history was made in other craft categories as well. Joi McMillon became the first African American woman to be nominated for editing, for her work on “Moonlight.” And Bradford Young be-

Denzel Washington and Viola Davis star in “Fences.” Davis is the first African American actress to be nominated for three Oscars.

came the first African American cinematographer to be nominated for his contribution to a movie, in this case to the science-fiction drama “Arrival.”

Happily, Young will be joined on the red carpet by Ava DuVernay, whose documentary “13th,” about the legacy of racism within the criminal-justice system, was nominated for best documentary (Young shot DuVernay’s 2014 civil rights drama “Selma”). Four out of the five films nominated for best documentary were made by filmmakers of color, including Roger Ross Williams’s “Life, Animated,” Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro” about James Baldwin, and Ezra Edelman’s “O.J.: Made in America,” a sprawling, 71/2-hour film about O.J. Simpson that became an epic, compulsively engaging tutorial in race, history, policing, celebrity and identity.

Still, it bears noting that Chazelle was able to make his passion project directly after his breakthrough film “Whiplash,” while eight years elapsed between Jenkins’s “Medicine for Melancholy” — an early film just as assured and promising as “Whiplash” — and “Moonlight.” In its usual one-stepforward, two-steps-back fashion, the film industry has made some headway in reflecting the larger culture it purports to serve, but its gatekeepers lag their counterparts in television. (Where is the movie version of “Jane the Virgin,” one might ask, or “Fresh off the Boat” or “Transparent”? Authentic inclusion covers a wide expanse of ethnicities and experiences.)

The best news out of Tuesday’s Oscar headlines is that none of these actors or filmmakers are going anywhere — and, if a few are lucky enough to take home an Oscar, they will be that much more empowered to initiate and produce projects that tap into the riches to be found outside the still-dominant monochromatic paradigm.

Considering Hollywood’s troubled history of racist imagery, professional exclusion and blinkered solipsism, redemption can never be found in award nomination. But a real and long-lasting reset will do. n

SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 2017

17

DATA CRUNCH

KLMNO WEEKLY

Crunched

When to give a child a phone?

When should my child get a smartphone? Survey says ...

A recent survey from Common Sense Media revealed that parents spend more than A recent much-shared from Common Media revealed that spend more than nine hours a day looking at nine hours asurvey day looking at media Sense screens yet believe they areparents good technology role models for their children. mediaTucked screensinto yetthe believe they are statistics good technology roleand models fortechnology their children.

Tucked intointerest the report were statistics about report were about teen tween usage that may parents of younger kids.teen and tween technology usage mayainterest parents of younger kids. the When to give a child a smartphone, after all,nis among the When to givethat a child smartphone, after all, is among most debated issues families face today. most debated issues families face today. — Elizabeth Chang —Elizabeth Chang

Which of the following belong specifically to your child?

For those who have rules about content, how often do you enforce rules on the amount of time a child can use technology?

Never

Once in a while

4%

smartphone

tablet

56%

some of the time

10%

21%

laptop

51%

30%

Most of the time 32%

All of the time

No time rules

27%

6%

Age your child got their own: smartphone

tablet

laptop

12.1

9.9

12.1

Is your child allowed to use mobile devices in the following places or at the following times?

Age your child set up their first social media account:

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

Family meals

17

18

Bedtime when guests are visiting

AllOwed

NOt AllOwed

NO rules

6%

78%

15%

16% 33%

63% 34%

19% 32%

Older children who are always arguing that parents are more lenient with younger siblings will find some validation in this data: Children who personally own a smartphone, by birth order:

Only

Middle

1%

1%

4%

4% 10% 12% 8%

6%

3%

1%

59%

62%

48%

52%

Youngest

Oldest

0% SOURCE: “THE COMMON SENSE CENSUS: PLUGGED-IN PARENTS OF TWEENS AND TEENS”

SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 2017

18

KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Edward Snowden: Hero or traitor?

N ONFICTION

HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft

By Edward Jay Epstein Knopf.

350 pp. $27.95

l

REVIEWED BY

N ATE F ICK

A catastrophic data breach.

Russian complicity. Blundering institutions. Distrust of government. Reading Edward Jay Epstein’s gripping and devastatingly evenhanded account of Edward Snowden, “How America Lost Its Secrets,” provides a Faulknerian reminder, during these days ringing with the same themes, that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Epstein’s revelations hit hard and don’t stop. Snowden could not have acted alone, because he didn’t have access to the secret compartments from which he took the most sensitive documents. Vladimir Putin personally authorized Snowden’s exfiltration from Hong Kong to Moscow.

Snowden turned over to journalists only 58,000 of the 1.7 million documents he “touched,” the vast bulk of which had nothing to do with domestic surveillance but rather covered America’s overseas spy network, including its most sensitive sources and methods.

Snowden washed out of Army training in 2004, worked briefly as a security guard at the University of Maryland and then got a job as, of all things, a CIA telecommunications support officer. Two years later, he received an unfavorable evaluation from his superior and was forced to resign. He then went to work for Dell as a National Security Agency contractor in 2009. As a system administrator, he had the privileges to access vast amounts of data and the mandate to transfer it to backup servers — the perfect cover for a whistleblower or a spy.

On June 9, 2013, a video of Snowden was posted on the website of the Guardian. Shot in a Hong Kong hotel room, the disclosure begins with “My name is Ed Snowden,” and goes on to detail how the NSA was spying on U.S. citizens.

Most of the public debate since that summer has been over whether Snowden is a hero or a traitor, a whistleblower or a spy. Epstein’s

FREDERICK FLORIN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Edward Snowden speaks in 2015 from Russia, where he fled in 2013.

answer is both — but more spy than whistleblower. And the case he builds, especially in light of disclosures since the U.S. election in November, is damning.

In some ways, Snowden’s disclosures of NSA surveillance and details of an Internet-monitoring program code-named PRISM were beneficial. As Epstein writes, the disclosures “accomplished a salutary service in alerting both the public and government to the potential danger of a surveillance leviathan” and “revealed a bureaucratic mission creep that badly needed to be brought under closer oversight by Congress.”

What Snowden exposed, however, wasn’t a rogue operation. It was a series of programs authorized by presidents of both parties and Congress, and approved by no fewer than 15 federal judges. Epstein cites the current NSA director, Adm. Mike Rogers, and numerous others, including former NSA directors Mike McConnell,

Michael Hayden and Keith Alexander, and former CIA acting director Michael Morell, laying out the crippling effects of Snowden’s revelations: “lost capability,” “impact on our ability to do our mission for the next twenty to thirty years,” “sources dried up; tactics were changed.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, concluded, “I think it’s an act of treason.”

The real scoundrel in Epstein’s telling is neither Snowden nor the security leviathan he checked; it’s the muscle-bound bureaucracy of the government and its contractors that allowed this breach to happen in the first place.

Whatever his ultimate motives, that Snowden maintained access to government secrets as long as he did was a colossal failure of the system. Five months after being forced out of the CIA, he was working on sensitive systems inside the NSA, first as an employee of Dell

and later of Booz Allen Hamilton.

Epstein reports that Snowden was able to keep his security clearance because the CIA had instituted a policy several years earlier that allowed voluntarily departing officers to maintain their clearances for two years after leaving. The grace period was intended to make it easier for them to find jobs among defense and intelligence contractors. When his CIA clearance finally expired in February 2011, Snowden applied — successfully — to renew it. Since 1996, the background investigations required to obtain a clearance had been outsourced to a private firm compensated according to the number of investigations it completed. The picture that emerges is of a self-dealing bureaucracy and a web of private contractors performing core government functions.

But the bigger problem is more subtle.

Epstein points out a culture clash that will be central to this era of national security policy: libertarian hackers in one corner, animated by a belief that information will be free; privacy advocates in another, convinced that privacy and security are zero-sum; and the national security establishment in a third, united by a conviction that some information is so important that it must remain secret (and that secrecy is even possible).

The challenge arises where these worlds intersect — at the nexus of technology, security, privacy and civil liberties where the NSA operates.

In this winter of rattled confidence in government, Epstein’s welcome reappraisal of the most destructive data breach in the history of U.S. intelligence brings nothing to mind so much as the Roman poet Juvenal’s timeless question: “Who will guard the guards themselves?” n Fick is chief executive of cybersecurity software company Endgame and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 2017

19

BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A tireless hero in a tiresome book

An account of the nature of addiction

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

A

l

REVIEWED BY

P ATRICK A NDERSON

fter 30 years and 21 novels, John Rebus, the detective inspector at the center of Ian Rankin’s popular mystery series, is still fighting crime — despite two serious problems.

For one, he’s overweight, tires easily and has alarming fits of coughing. Also, he’s too old for police duty, a civilian who can only inject himself into cases with the help of friends on the force.

In Rankin’s new novel “Rather Be the Devil,” Rebus steals an identification from a detective to pass himself off as a real cop.

Another time, he snaps at the detective superintendent, “Is your head full of f---ing mince?” whereupon he’s marched out of police headquarters.

Still, he hangs on. The idea is that Rebus is such a brilliant detective that only he can solve the crimes that beset Edinburgh.

You can think that if you want to.

But Rankin makes a less-thanconvincing case in this disappointing novel. I found nothing in these pages more suspenseful than whether Rebus, who may have cancer, would survive it.

(While tests are underway, Rebus’s romantic interest, coroner Deborah Quant, gives him a glass jar containing “a section of lung, showing the bronchial tubes,” to remind him to be good. They’re a fun couple.)

And what are the crimes here?

Well, at the outset a gangster named Darryl Christie is badly beaten outside his home. But by whom? The suspects include Gerald “Big Ger” Cafferty, a gangster and longtime antagonist of Rebus. And there’s another gangster, Joe Stark, to whom Christie owes money.

“Money or your head,” this one warns.

Meanwhile, Rebus is obsessed with the unsolved case of a beautiful woman who was strangled in her hotel room nearly 40 years earlier. The

suspects include her wealthy banker husband, several of her lovers and a rock star she’d met the day she died.

Rebus interrogates the aging husband as well as the husband’s sister, whose fiancee drowned, perhaps murdered, in the family swimming pool years earlier. There’s also the question of whether the banker embezzled millions of dollars and whether a murderous Ukrainian gangster is coming to claim the money.

And Rebus’s investigation of the woman’s slaying leads him to an ex-cop who worked the case and is murdered soon after he talks to Rebus. All of this becomes extremely confusing.

The novel features several of Rebus’s friends on the force whom we know from earlier novels, including Inspector Malcolm Fox, whose drug-abusing sister owes gangster Christie a small fortune thanks to her addiction to his slot machines. The gangster offers to write off the debt if Fox will hand over police secrets. Fox debates whether he should do that, sell his house to pay the gangster or risk serious punishment being inflicted on his sister.

The book has its dramatic moments. One chapter begins with a very respectable citizen inexplicably running naked down the street as passersby snap photos. And a vengeful man armed with a huge sword — a veritable scimitar — threatens to chop off a rival’s head as a warning to others. Rebus even gains a confession in the woman’s long-ago murder. But the novel simply has too many characters and too much going on. I despaired of keeping things straight — and I was taking notes. Rankin has done better in the past and no doubt he’ll do better in the future. Let’s hope. n Anderson regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post.

W

RATHER BE THE DEVIL

By Ian Rankin Little, Brown. 320 pp. $27

NICOTINE

By Gregor Hens Translated from German by Jen Calleja Other Press. 176 pp. $16.95

l

REVIEWED BY

T IMOTHY R . S MITH

hen I was a boy, I would plead with my dad to quit smoking — long, tearful entreaties that fell on stiff ears.

“Uh huh,” he’d say. “Maybe later.”

Funny, then, that years later, a smoker myself, I would buy him a carton of Marlboro Blacks on the way to the hospice where he eventually died of cancer. “Maybe later” came to an urn.

I’ve smoked, by my estimate, 5,023 cigars since my first: a Monte Cristo white label, bought for the name when I was a college freshman. Of all those cigars, I never enjoyed one with my dad.

He asked once, maybe three months into his illness. I was smoking a cigar under a tree in the front yard, reading, when he wobbled out. We sat and chatted, and he asked me for a cigar, or maybe he suggested that he’d like to have one with me one day. I demurred, uncomfortable given his condition. Perhaps I hadn’t accepted that he would be dead so soon.

Perhaps he had accepted that he wouldn’t be alive much longer.

That was the last chance. I cry just to think of it.

There’s always the person you want to share a smoke with. For the German writer Gregor Hens, it was his grandfather. “He died too soon,” Hens writes in his book “Nicotine.”

“I’m convinced that he died because his cigarettes were taken away from him when he was admitted to hospital after a fall, even though he smoked only five to ten a day for sixty years.”

Hens, though, decided to kick his cigarette addiction once and for all after a close friend’s mother died of cancer.

“My decision owed less to the fear of an early death (what, after all, is too early?) and a lot more to the immediate worry about my quality of life,” he writes. “I wasn’t doing well.”

“Nicotine” is a chronicle of his year overcoming the habit. The

book is a slim but plaintive memoria to a lost love — a philosophical meditation on the nature of addiction, the listlessness, the frustration and the sense of grief one feels at the loss of a fix. Its structure is reminiscent of the memoryscapes of W.G. Sebald, including the strange, captionless photographs.

This intelligent, literary volume plumbs Mark Twain, Italo Svevo and Van Morrison.

But make no mistake: “Nicotine” isn’t a self-help book. It’s not an anti-smoking screed. Nor is it a love sonnet to tobacco. It’s an honest exposition of the emotional complexity of quitting.

Hens’s chances of kicking the habit are poor. Only about 8 percent of smokers quit permanently, he notes. And this isn’t the first time he’s tried.

The truth is that no matter how long you’ve stopped smoking, you’re never fully recovered — and temptations and reminders abound. Hens recounts such moments with honesty and solemnity. One day he’s strolling through Brooklyn when he sees a young couple lighting a cigarette: “They straighten up and take the first drag. . . . I close my eyes; I know what they’re feeling.”

Hens also remembers the specific locations of his favorite smokes: by lakes, in airports, after a bicycle accident when the smoke salved his pain, shooting fireworks on New Year’s, when he was 5 or 6 years old. That was the first cigarette.

But he’s managing his addiction well enough.

Caring friends and overbearing doctors often suggest I quit.

“Uh huh,” I say. “Maybe later.”

I know where that might end, but so does life, and there’s no stopping the inevitable.

I like Hens’s opinion on the matter: “Light up if you feel like it.

Smoke one for me.”

I’ll smoke one for Dad, too. n Smith is on the staff of The Washington Post’s Book World.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 2017

20

KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

How will Ryan adapt as Trump alters GOP tenets?

PAUL KANE is The Post’s senior congressional correspondent and columnist. His column about the 115th Congress, @PKCapitol, appears throughout the week and on Sundays.

As the gavel fell on a critical vote advancing the global trade agenda, Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R­Wis.) pumped his arm, fist­bumped three Republicans and high­fived another.

That was June 2015.

On Monday, President Trump delivered a knockout blow to that agenda. On his first full work day in the Oval Office, Trump formally withdrew the United States from the Trans­Pacific Partnership, a proposed trade pact among a dozen nations that was supposed to have been eased into passage by Ryan’s leadership 19 months ago.

Trump’s move was largely symbolic because Ryan, who was elevated to House speaker a few months after that celebrated vote, had already waved the political white flag on what would have been the world’s largest trade deal.

Throughout 2016, Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) signaled that support for the deal had collapsed in both chambers — in large part because presidential candidates including Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had successfully portrayed it as a bad pact for American workers.

Still, Trump’s actions demonstrate his seriousness about reversing decades of Republican orthodoxy on globalism — a pledge he renewed during his inaugural address, when he committed to an “America first” agenda.

These actions also show the rocky road that may lie ahead for congressional Republicans on a range of policy issues.

If past is prologue, Trump won’t be asking for the Hill’s help. He’ll be telling his fellow Republicans to get on board or step out of the way. They, in turn, will be figuring out how to stick to their principles while also positioning to play a role in Trump’s success.

The abandonment of the TPP

came a short time after Trump’s meeting with business executives, during which he again voiced support for tariffs or a border tax on U.S. companies that build products with cheap foreign labor and ship them to the United States. That policy has already caused friction between the new president and traditional conservatives such as Ryan.

It’s a stunning reversal for a party that, just two summers ago, continued to support a free-trade agenda.

Ryan, who was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee at the time, played the lead role in legislation granting special fast-track rules for trade deals for the last months of Barack Obama’s presidency and the first few years of the new administration. The measure won support from 194 Republicans in the House and 48 in the Senate; that’s nearly 80 percent and 90 percent, respectively, of the GOP caucus in each chamber.

It was one of the most important pieces of legislation Ryan shepherded into law, as his emotional response on the House floor indicated. It reflected an ideology that was part of the Republican bedrock since at least the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

Throughout the Obama years, Ryan became the public face of

SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Trump meets with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R), center, and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D) on Monday.

that brand of conservatism, projecting faith in U.S. leadership in open, global markets. “It gives America credibility,” Ryan said during final debate over the 2015 fast-track bill. “And boy, do we need credibility right now.”

That period created a deep rift among Democrats who bitterly fought their president on the issue, particularly those in the Midwest, where the manufacturing sector has been crushed by the movement of jobs overseas — and automation in the plants that remain here. In an odd twist, Democrats provided some of the biggest applause to Trump’s formal withdrawal from the trade treaty.

“It’s a pleasant surprise to me.

I’m glad that we have a president that’s joining us,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), a leader of the opposition to TPP, said Monday evening.

“I think their heads must be spinning right now,” Stabenow said of Ryan and McConnell.

Ryan’s advisers say the opposite, that the politics of trade had shifted long before Trump won the presidential election — an election in which Clinton, who helped negotiate the initial contours of TPP, reversed course and became an opponent of the deal.

“President Trump is wasting no time acting on his promises,” Ryan said in a statement Monday after the new president issued a string of executive orders. On

trade, Ryan noted: “He has followed through on his promise to insist on better trade agreements.”

Republican advisers are quick to say that the bulk of GOP lawmakers still believe in negotiating trade deals. Except now the focus is on smaller, bilateral deals with one nation at a time, as opposed to the more sweeping multilateral deals involving many nations.

This reorientation on trade is one of several key policy areas that the Ryan and Trump wings of the party must work through in the months ahead. In his inaugural address, Trump returned to his dream of pushing a massive new infrastructure bill for roads, bridges and airports — the kind of largesse that House Republicans have furiously fought in the past.

And all sides within the party are struggling to explain the process and details of how they’re going to replace the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans have promised to repeal.

On Monday evening, Trump met privately with Ryan. The speaker’s aides said the meeting focused on every major policy issue of the moment.

What they didn’t say is what the two men agreed on — and what they didn’t. Which leaves a burning question for Ryan: Will he get on board or step out of the way? n

SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 2017

21

OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Israel must decide what it wants DAVID IGNATIUS writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column and contributes to the PostPartisan blog.

TEL AVIV — President Trump’s embrace of Israel poses an unlikely dilemma for leaders of the Jewish state: They have to decide what they want from America, and on that question, there’s sharp disagreement.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu moved to seize the Trump moment Tuesday by announcing that Israel plans to construct 2,500 housing units in West Bank settlements. Just two days before, he and Trump had what the new president called a “very nice” phone conversation. “We’re building — and will continue to build,” an emboldened Netanyahu proclaimed Tuesday.

But Netanyahu’s quick move angered some other Israeli officials, who argue that more settlements will push Israel toward annexation of the West Bank that would mean the end of the two-state solution. Isaac Herzog, head of the largest opposition bloc, said his supporters would resist a prosettlement agenda that they see as a threat to Israel’s status as a Jewish democratic state.

Trump’s election offers what many Israelis have dreamed of — a relaxation of U.S. pressure on Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians. But for some, it’s a case of “be careful what you wish for.” Israel’s views may now be decisive — but the country remains conflicted 50 years after the West Bank was seized in the 1967 war.

A panoramic view of the puzzles facing Israel in the age of Trump was presented this past week at a conference hosted by the Institute for National Security Studies. The gathering was attended by nearly every top Israeli official other than Netanyahu. The voices were sharply divergent.

“Israel must make a choice between separation and annexation,” argued Tzipi Livni, a parliament member who is one of the strongest advocates for a peace deal. “With a new administration, there is no longer the same pressure from Washington that Israel experienced previously. Israel now has the opportunity — indeed, the obligation — to decide what kind of future it seeks.”

Proposals for what Israel

should request from Trump ranged across the spectrum.

Naftali Bennett, who heads the right-wing Jewish Home party, used Trump’s signature line, “You’re fired,” to describe what he would say to Israeli officials who advocate what he described as a failed peace process. He presented a plan to formally declare Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank.

Herzog outlined a 10-year transition plan that would conclude with resolving “final status” issues such as Jerusalem and the rights of refugees. The alternative to such a separation process, he said, was Israel’s “suicide” as a democratic Jewish nation.

Israeli public opinion is divided, but according to a poll presented at the conference, 59 percent of Jewish citizens favor a two-state solution and more than 60 percent support withdrawal from at least some settlements.

Americans attending the conference urged Israel to be cautious in its requests to Trump.

“It’s hard to say what Donald Trump will do, because I’m not sure he himself knows,” said Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel.

As a sign of Trump’s start-up uncertainty, Indyk noted that

recently the new administration seemed to have moved from advocating a quick relocation of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem (which could trigger incendiary reaction in the Muslim world) to saying that the issue was in the “very early stages” of decision.

Walter Russell Mead, a prominent foreign policy scholar who teaches at Bard College, urged that Israelis “not get identified with Donald Trump in the popular mood in the U.S.” and that he not be seen as “Israel’s man.”

Trump has proclaimed his desire to negotiate an IsraeliPalestinian agreement that, if he succeeded, would truly demonstrate “the art of the deal.”

But Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States and a veteran of peace negotiations, warned the conference: “You cannot be a broker . . . by making a deal that’s 90 percent pro-Israel. It won’t fly.”

Shlomo Avineri, a prominent Israeli academic, offered a stark summary of his nation’s dilemma: “Israel after 1967 didn’t make up its mind what kind of country it wanted to be, in geography or demography. . . . This year we should say what kind of Israel we want.” That’s the conundrum Trump presents: What should Israelis ask for? n

SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 2017

22

OPINIONS

BY WALT HANDELSMAN FOR THE NEW ORLEANS ADVOCATE

Don’t silence a lifesaving noise ROBERT J. SPITZER is chair of the Political Science Department at State University of New York at Cortland and the author of “Guns Across America.”

Ari Fleischer, the onetime press secretary for President George W. Bush, happened to be passing through the Fort Lauderdale airport on Jan. 6 when he heard what he described as “multiple gunshots ringing out” close by. “We all realized it was gunfire, and it was coming from the level below us at the escalator.” Five people were killed, and six were injured. Fleischer and others could easily have walked straight into the line of fire had they not been able to hear those shots.

Gunfire — loud, sharp, rude, abrupt — is an important safety feature of any firearm. From potential victims who seek to escape a mass shooting to a hiker being alerted to the presence of a hunter in the woods, the sound warns bystanders of potentially lethal danger. Yet gun advocates insist there is a greater danger: hearing loss by gun owners.

The NRA is renewing with gusto its misbegotten push, begun in the last Congress, to make gun silencers easier to acquire by swiping a page from the public-health community’s long-standing efforts to warn of the dangers of firearms. The Hearing Protection Act, which would remove federal registration and identification requirements for those seeking gun silencers, has received the blessing of President Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and the

welcome of the gun-friendly 115th Congress. Even though silencer purchases are legal in all but eight states, advocates want to sweep aside background check and record-keeping requirements, such as photos and fingerprinting, first enacted as part of the National Firearms Act of 1934, a law passed to curb gangster weapons such as submachine guns and sawed-off shotguns.

Beyond the familiar political imperative to eviscerate any and all gun laws — so why not this one? — the goal is clearly to boost silencer (advocates prefer the term “suppressor”) sales, which have already become a gun industry boomlet. Further proliferation of silencers would also have the commercial benefit of boosting gun sales, because most existing guns do not have the threaded barrels necessary to

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY LISA BENSON

attach them.

In addition to touting the supposed “public health” threat to gun owners’ hearing, silencer advocates also say that they reduce gun recoil, thereby increasing accuracy, and make the shooting experience “more neighborly,” according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation. The simple and obvious expedients of wearing earplugs or ear covers are alternately dubbed inadequate to protect hearing and a drag on the social experience of shooting.

Concerns about criminal use are brushed aside by noting that, as the NSSF says, silencers do not “increase crime.”

But one might attribute silencers’ rare use in modern crime (the Violence Policy Center notes modern silencer use in a handful of serious crimes since 2011) to the success of the strict federal registration requirements governing them — a gun law that has worked, in other words.

Our forebears recognized the dangers of silencers almost immediately, and they weren’t limited to fears about criminal use. The silencer was invented in 1908 by Hiram Maxim, and the first state law outlawing silencers’ sale or possession came within a year — a Maine ban enacted in 1909. Pittsburgh moved against

silencers that same year. As the city’s superintendent of police warned, “The risk of shooting is too great; the discharge of the weapon makes too much noise and attracts too many people. But with a silencer in use this would be different.”

From then until 1934, at least 13 states enacted silencer laws, with five of them specifically barring their use in hunting.

North Carolina’s 1925 law, for example, barred “any gun” used for hunting “that does not produce when discharged the usual and ordinary report.”

Ironically, Maxim ceased manufacturing silencers in 1930, according to the New York Times, “because of the popular impression that this invention was an aid to crime.” Instead, he turned his energies to automobile mufflers.

Absent some kind of cataclysmic hearing-loss crisis by America’s tens of millions of gun owners, this political push should be recognized for what it is: an effort to provide an extremely small benefit to gun owners that willfully ignores what can happen to others once a bullet leaves a gun barrel. The lifesaving safety benefits of gun noise should weigh far more in the silencer debate. Just ask anyone caught in the vicinity of a shooting. n

SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 2017

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Jeff Sessions BY

R ICHARD F ORDING

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R­Ala.) has been the subject of intense debate ever since Donald Trump nominated him to be attorney general. His critics argue that he could lead a radical rollback of civil rights pol­ icies, while supporters defend his record as more moderate. Sorting the truth about Sessions from the hyperbole isn’t easy.

MYTH NO. 1 Sessions has an unusually poor record on civil rights.

He isn’t an outlier among Senate Republicans. Sessions’s voting record shows that he is a consistent opponent of expansive civil rights legislation. But so are many of his colleagues. During the 114th Congress in 2015 and 2016, for instance, the advocacy group Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights tracked 21 key Senate votes; Sessions opposed the group’s position every time, and he did the same in the previous Congress.

However, this is not unusual within the Republican Party.

Sessions was one of 16 senators, all Republicans, to receive a score of zero, and one of 18 GOP senators in the 113th Congress.

And according to the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study conducted by researchers at Harvard University, the average approval rating for Republican senators among their African American constituents was 27 percent.

Sessions’s approval rating was 25 percent.

MYTH NO. 2 Sessions has been a champion of civil rights.

Sessions was involved as a U.S. attorney in the investigation of Henry Hays, a Ku Klux Klan member suspected of lynching Michael Donald in Mobile, Ala., in 1981. But as the Atlantic noted, the principal players in the case say that Sessions merely played a “supervisory role.” The case was not prosecuted by Sessions; it was prosecuted in state court, which is where Hays received the

death penalty. Sessions had become Alabama’s attorney general by the time Hays appealed his sentence. He opposed the appeal, and Hays was executed in 1997.

Perhaps the most significant exaggeration involves Sessions’s role in desegregating Alabama’s schools. There is no record that he ever filed such a case, and he certainly did not participate in “20 to 30” such cases, as he once claimed in 2009.

MYTH NO. 3 Sessions plans a crackdown on illegal immigration.

Sessions has a long record as a crusader against both legal and illegal immigration, constantly pushing Congress to pursue harsher border security and immigration measures.

If he is confirmed, though, his ability to do what his critics fear will be constrained by the federal bureaucracy, local law enforcement officials and even Republicans in Congress.

Most federal immigration enforcement falls to another Cabinet agency, the Department of Homeland Security. The attorney general does have important relevant powers: The immigration court system is part of the Justice Department, for example, and Sessions would be able to appoint immigration law judges.

It may be impossible to increase deportations dramatically, anyway, no matter what Sessions might prefer. And House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (RWis.) indicated recently that Congress won’t go along with

ALEX BRANDON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the attorney general nominee, testifies at his confirmation hearing before a Senate committee this month.

mass deportations of undocumented immigrants who don’t have criminal records.

co-sponsor legislation to reduce disparities between punishments for crack and powder cocaine.

MYTH NO. 4 Sessions would revive a 1980s-style war on drugs.

As a U.S. attorney, Sessions had a reputation for aggressive prosecution of drug offenses.

And in the Senate, he has pushed for tougher enforcement of drug laws.

Federal drug enforcement may become a higher priority under Sessions, but bringing back a fullscale war on drugs isn’t likely.

Critics fear that Sessions would go after the marijuana industry in the states that permit medical marijuana or recreational uses. During his confirmation hearing, Sessions described the current solution for dealing with inconsistency between state and federal laws as “truly valuable.”

Sessions would have broad discretion to redirect resources and shape prosecution and sentencing practices in ways that could lead to a significant increase in federal prison sentences for drug offenders. But he has worked with Democrats to

MYTH NO. 5 On gay rights, Sessions just wants to enforce the law.

He has a long history of opposing every important piece of legislation aimed at expanding such rights. He was one of the most vocal opponents of the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, which expanded the definition of hate crimes to include attacks on people because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

LGBT people are the most likely to be targets of hate crimes, and as attorney general, Sessions would be in charge of enforcing this law. While he told the Senate that he now sees same-sex marriage as settled law that he will uphold, he co-sponsored the State Marriage Defense Act of 2014, which would have allowed a state’s definitions of “spouse” and “marriage” to supersede the federal definitions. n Fording is the Marilyn Williams Elmore and John Durr Elmore endowed professor of political science at the University of Alabama.

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SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 2017