World Press on Intolerance, How Dangerous Was Donald Trump, Right To Protest and Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn: New Age Islam's Selection, 22 December 2020
By
New Age Islam Edit Desk
22 December
2020
•
Intolerance and a Repressive Legal Regime: A Twin Threat to Freedom of
Expression
By
Sultan Mohammed Zakaria
•
Just How Dangerous Was Donald Trump?
By
Michelle Goldberg
• The
Great Conjunction Of Jupiter And Saturn
By
Quamrul Haider
• How
the British Government Is Trying To Crush Our Right To Protest
By
Gracie Mae Bradley
• For
Liberals, Brexit Is A Hard Lesson In The Politics Of Resentment
By
Nesrine Malik
•
Turkish Shadow Boxing Reflects Growing Rivalry With Iran
By
James M Dorsey
-------
Intolerance And A Repressive Legal Regime: A
Twin Threat To Freedom Of Expression
By
Sultan Mohammed Zakaria
December
10, 2020
On October
6, Robiul Islam Khandokar, 35, a district correspondent of the national daily
Sangbad in Rajbari, wrote a Facebook status appealing to the prime minister:
"Honourable Prime Minister[,] an utterly deranged person is trying to
cause unrest in the peaceful Rajbari." (My translation)
Robiul was
apparently trying to alert the prime minister to the unlawful activities of
someone in the district. He, however, forgot to place a comma after the title
of the country's leader. Little did he know that this oversight would be
construed as an attack on the prime minister herself. As soon as he was alerted
to the typographical error, Robiul corrected his Facebook post. But it was too
late. On October 9, a member of the student wing of the ruling Awami League
filed a defamation case against Rabiul under the draconian Digital Security Act
(DSA), accusing him of "defaming the prime minister". He was arrested
the next day. This Kafkaesque sequence of events has become depressingly
familiar in Bangladesh where even the perception of a slight is enough to
invite official retribution.
Like
Robiul, hundreds of people—journalists, academics, activists—have been charged
and detained under the Digital Security Act simply for exercising their right
to freedom of expression online. Many of these cases have been filed by members
of the ruling party, or people acting on their behalf. According to the
government's own Cyber Crime Tribunal data, more than 800 cases were filed
under the DSA between January and October in 2020. Nearly 1,000 people were
charged. More than 350 people were detained.
The DSA is
not the only tool used to silence critical voices. It is often accompanied by
others in an arsenal of repression that includes threats, harassment,
intimidation, physical attacks and even enforced disappearances. According to
Ain o Salish Kendra, a local human rights group, at least 219 journalists have
been targeted this year by state agencies or individuals acting on behalf of
the government.
On March
10, the editor of the daily Pokkhokal, Shafiqul Islam Kajol, was forcibly
disappeared from the capital Dhaka, a day after a ruling party lawmaker filed a
case against him under the DSA for his Facebook post. Kajol was later "found"
by police under mysterious circumstances along the Bangladesh-India border—53
days after he was last seen in Dhaka—only to face an unlawful detention since
then. In April, the acting editor of jagonews24.com, Mohiuddin Sarker, and
editor-in-chief of bdnews24.com, Toufique Imrose Khalidi, were charged under
the DSA for publishing reports on alleged embezzlement of relief materials
meant for poor people affected by the Covid-19 lockdown. In May, a news editor
of daily Grameen Darpan, Ramzan Ali Pramanik, staff reporter Shanta Banik, and
publisher and editor of the online news portal Narsingdi Pratidin, Khandaker
Shahin, were arrested for reporting on a custodial death at the Ghorashal
police station. In June, the editor of the Bangla national newspaper Inqilab,
AMM Bahauddin, was charged for publishing a story about an advisor to the prime
minister.
Even
children have not been spared. On June 19, a 14-year-old boy from Mymensingh
district, who is in his ninth grade at school, criticised the government's decision
of increasing Value Added Tax on mobile phone calls alleging that the extra
revenue earned would fill the prime minister's coffers. The next day, he was
detained under a DSA charge by police for "defaming the prime
minister" in his Facebook post.
Bangladesh's
academy was once regarded as a relatively safe space for airing of critical
views. But this year, several academics have also been targeted and prosecuted
for exercising their right to freedom of expression. In June, two professors at
Rajshahi University and Begum Rokeya University were sacked for their Facebook
posts about a deceased ruling party MP. In September, the Dhaka University
authorities terminated BNP-linked professor Hasan Morshed Khan for publishing
an opinion piece in a national newspaper allegedly distorting history. In the
same month, the National University authorities suspended AKM Wahiduzzaman, an
assistant professor, for posting on Facebook "offensive" and
"indecent" remarks about the prime minister.
The DSA is
a successor to the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Act, widely
criticised by human rights groups for its draconian Section 57, which was
abused to file more than 1,271 charges between 2013 and 2018. But instead of
remedying the repressive elements of the ICT Act, the DSA is arguably more
abusive in character. The law was passed in 2018 in the face of strong
opposition from journalists, civil society organisations, and human rights
defenders. At the time, there were serious warnings of how an already restricted
space for dissent online could be further squeezed to the point of
near-suffocation. These warnings seem prescient now.
Some
sections of the law that raised serious concerns were too vague and too broad
to be able to define a crime, and also provided for disproportionately harsh
punishments. For instance, Section 17 of the DSA can punish anyone for 10
years' imprisonment for "making any kind of propaganda or campaign against
liberation war, spirit of liberation war, father of the nation, national anthem
or national flag." The actions that would specifically constitute a
violation under this provision were not at all defined. Besides, the terms are
dangerously vague and overly broad, and the suggested punishments are not only
disproportionate, but they also punish acts that shouldn't be considered a
crime in the first place.
Provisions
such as this create a situation where any political position deemed to be
contrary to the regime narrative could land an individual in prison for 10
years. Similarly, Sections 25(b) (publications "damaging the image or
reputation of the country"), 28 (publications "hurting religious
values and sentiments"), 29 ("publications of defamatory
information"), 31 ("publications deteriorating law and order"),
and 32 ("breaching the secrecy of the government")—all criminalise
legitimate forms of expression and suffer from the same vague and broad
definitional issues, giving law enforcement authorities too much leverage to
determine what act(s) would constitute a crime.
What the
country has now is a legal regime under which the government's intolerance for
criticism means that anyone even publishing the faintest whispers of dissent
can be severely punished. Instead of a system where people can express
themselves to promote the accountability of those in power, the reverse
applies. A climate of fear now pervades society, with people filled with a
sense of foreboding for what may happen if they dare to speak out, or even
forget to place a comma correctly.
The right
to freedom of expression is essential to all societies, and crucial to advance
human rights. It is how people can claim their other human rights, speaking up
for their rights and that of others—whether that's education, food, or
healthcare. It is also the right on the basis of which societies thrive,
testing old ideas and generating new ones. Without the right to freedom of
expression, which is protected in Bangladesh's constitution and in its
international commitments under the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights, Bangladesh stands to lose in a global knowledge-based
economy.
We must
remember that when people fear to express themselves freely, when journalists
are afraid to write or report on what they see, without fear of reprisals, it
only corrodes and undermines the accountability and transparency pillars of the
state. Such an outcome may prove ultimately self-defeating for any government
that wants to serve the public good. Only an open, deliberative, and discursive
political culture resting on the respect of the right to freedom of expression
can arrest such a drift. As the noted American Justice Louis Brandeis once
said, "Sunshine is the best disinfectant."
-----
Sultan
Mohammed Zakaria is South Asia Researcher for Amnesty International.
https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/news/intolerance-and-repressive-legal-regime-twin-threat-freedom-expression-2008781
-----
Just How
Dangerous Was Donald Trump?
By
Michelle Goldberg
Dec. 14,
2020
Throughout
Donald Trump’s presidency, there’s been an argument on the left over the sort
of threat he poses.
The
American left’s most famous figures — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders,
Noam Chomsky — saw Trump as an authoritarian who could, if re-elected, destroy
American democracy for good. But another strain of left opinion viewed Trump’s
fascistic gestures as almost purely performative, and believed his clumsiness
in marshaling state power made him less dangerous than, say, George W. Bush.
A leading
proponent of this position is the political theorist Corey Robin, author of an
essential book about right-wing thought, “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism
From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.” In an interview with the left-wing
publication Jewish Currents, he argued, “Compared to the Republican
presidencies of Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush, Trump’s was significantly
less transformational, and its legacy is far less assured.”
The day
when the Electoral College meets to ratify Joe Biden’s victory seems an
appropriate one to revisit this debate. Trump tried, in his sloppy, chaotic
way, to overturn the election, and much of his party, including the majority of
Republicans in the House, and many state attorneys general, lined up behind
him. Yet he failed, and it’s unlikely that he will follow calls from
supporters, like his former national security Adviser Michael Flynn, to declare
martial law.
So what
matters more, the president’s desire to overthrow American democracy, or his
inability to follow through? Just how fascist was Trump?
Part of the
answer depends on whether you’re evaluating Trump’s ideology or his ability to
carry it out. It seems obvious enough that the spirit of Trumpism is fascistic,
at least according to classic definitions of the term. In “The Nature of
Fascism,” Roger Griffin described fascism’s “mobilizing vision” as “the
national community rising phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence
which all but destroyed it.” Translate this into the American vernacular and it
sounds a lot like MAGA.
Fascism is
obsessed with fears of victimization, humiliation and a decline, and a
concomitant cult of strength. Fascists, wrote Robert O. Paxton in “The Anatomy
of Fascism,” see “the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male),
culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the
group’s historical destiny.” They believe in “the superiority of the leader’s
instincts over abstract and universal reason.” This aptly describes Trump’s
movement.
Yet Trump
was only intermittently able to translate his movement into a government. The
national security state was more often his antagonist than his tool. There were
Justice Department investigations of the president’s political enemies, but
they mostly came to nothing. The military was deployed against protesters, but
only once.
Trump
celebrated what may be the extrajudicial killing of Michael Reinoehl, an antifa
activist wanted in a fatal shooting, but such killings weren’t the norm. He put
children in cages, but was pressured to let them out. And in the end, he lost
an election and will have to leave.
The damage
he’s done, however, may be irreversible. On Twitter, Robin argued, correctly,
that George W. Bush, far more than Trump, changed the shape of government,
leaving behind the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security. Most of
Trump’s legacy, by contrast, is destruction — of even the pretense that the law
should apply equally to ruler and ruled, of large parts of the Civil Service,
of America’s standing in the world. (If mainstream liberals are more deeply
horrified by Trump than some leftists, it could be because they maintain
greater romantic attachments to the institutions he’s defiled.)
Most
consequentially, Trump has eviscerated in America any common conception of
reality. Other presidents sneered at the truth; a senior Bush official, widely
believed to be Karl Rove, famously derided the “reality-based community” to the
journalist Ron Suskind.
But Trump’s
ability to envelop his followers in a cocoon of lies is unparalleled. The Bush
administration deceived the country to go to war in Iraq. It did not insist,
after the invasion, that weapons of mass destruction had been found when they
obviously were not. That’s why the country was able to reach a consensus that
the war was a disaster.
No such
consensus will be possible about Trump — not about his abuses of power, his
calamitous response to the coronavirus, or his electoral defeat. He leaves
behind a nation deranged.
The
postmodern blood libel of QAnon will have adherents in Congress. Kyle
Rittenhouse, a young man charged with killing Black Lives Matter protesters, is
a right-wing folk hero. The Republican Party has become more hostile to
democracy than ever. Both the Trump and Bush presidencies concluded with
America a smoking ruin. Only Trump has ensured that nearly half the country
doesn’t see it.
In May,
Samuel Moyn predicted, in The New York Review of Books, that if Biden won,
fears about American fascism would dissipate. Complacent in their restoration,
he wrote, those who warned of fascism “will cordon off the interlude, as if it
was ‘an accident in the factory,’ as Germans after World War II described their
12-year mistake.”
As American
electors gathered — with the police offering armed guards and Michigan’s
capitol closed by “credible threats of violence” — Moyn’s words, meant
cynically, seem too optimistic. Trump failed to capture America, but he may
have irrevocably broken it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/opinion/trump-fascism.html?
------
The
Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn
By
Quamrul Haider
December
15, 2020
On December
21, the first day of winter this year, the two gaseous giants in the solar
system—Jupiter and Saturn—will put up a spectacular display in the evening sky.
They will be so close that they will appear, from our perspective, to overlap
completely, creating a rare "double planet" effect. However, while
they may appear to the naked eye extremely close, within 0.1 degree of each
other, in reality, they are separated by more than 400 million miles. To
visualise this distance, a 0.1 degree separation is about the thickness of a
dime held at arm's length. This celestial synchronisation, also referred to as
the "Christmas Star," has not occurred in nearly 800 years. Last time
they were so close together was on March 4, 1226.
The
spectacle is a curious effect of their orbits around the Sun. Since Jupiter
takes 11.9 years to circle the Sun and Saturn 29.5 years, the faster moving
Jupiter catches up with the slower moving Saturn and overtakes it roughly every
20 years. Astronomers call the moment of overtaking "Great Conjunction."
At
conjunction, separation between two objects in the sky as viewed from Earth is
a minimum. Moreover, at great conjunction, Earth, Jupiter and Saturn align
themselves along a straight line so as to make the two Jovian planets appear
very close together. Great conjunctions are rare though because more often than
not, Earth is not aligned along a straight line with Saturn and Jupiter when
they are at conjunction. The duo will then appear to be separated by a few
degrees.
Furthermore,
the event can happen while the Sun is up blocking the conjunction from view.
Indeed, during the last great conjunction on May 31, 2000, the planets never
came anywhere as close together as they will this month. Besides, we could not
see the overlap because the alignment occurred too close to the Sun and thus
was lost in the glare of the twilight. The same was true the time before, in
December of 1980.
This time
around, after sunset on Monday, December 21, which is also the winter solstice,
Jupiter and Saturn will appear to the unaided eye as a single bright object low
in the southwestern sky. This dazzling display of two celestial objects kissing
each other on the longest night of the year can be seen from everywhere in the
world. It will become visible in Bangladesh soon after sunset but only for a
short time. The conjoined planets will sink below the western horizon about an
hour later. Also, the further north viewers are, the less time they will have
to catch a glimpse of this astronomical event.
How can we
spot the planets with naked eye? In the weeks leading up to the great
conjunction, Saturn will be to the upper left of Jupiter, slowly dancing toward
Jupiter. On clear nights, unlike stars which twinkle, Jupiter and Saturn will
hold consistent brightness, making it easier to spot them amidst the myriad of
objects in the stellar zoo. Although Saturn will be slightly dimmer and smaller
in size, yet it will be just as bright as the brightest stars, with a
recognisable golden glow. An amateur telescope or a high-power binocular will
show the planets in more detail, including the Galilean moons of Jupiter—Io,
Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
We do not
have to wait until December 21 to view this dazzling conjunction. They are
already a pretty pair in the sky, and will remain so through the entirety of
December. Nevertheless, after December 21, Jupiter will start moving eastward,
separating from Saturn. Additionally, during early evening hours, the planetary
pair will appear lower in the sky, albeit appearing near each other for about a
month, giving sky watchers plenty of time to witness the amazing alignment
throughout the holiday season.
If you miss
the spectacle this year, you should not expect to see it in 2040 or 2060. The
next great conjunction, with a separation of about 0.2 degree, will occur on
March 15, 2080. After that, it will be 2417 and 2477.
Finally,
dating back to Kepler's time in the 17th century, some astronomers hypothesised
that the Star of Bethlehem that guided the Three Magi—also known as the
"three wise men"—to Christ's birthplace was a conjunction like the
one we will witness on December 21. It could be but involving different
planets.
----
Quamrul
Haider is a Professor of Physics at Fordham University, New York.
https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/news/the-great-conjunction-jupiter-and-saturn-2011449
-----
How The
British Government Is Trying To Crush Our Right To Protest
By
Gracie Mae Bradley
14 Dec 2020
Not content
with ambitions to limit judicial review, “update” (that is: weaken) the Human
Rights Act, and pass laws that would insulate various agents of the state from
accountability for human rights violations, the government is now, according to
press reports last week, planning to introduce a new law that will limit our
right to protest.
For a
government that claims to be concerned about free speech and “cancel culture”,
cracking down on protest isn’t a great look. Without the text of the proposals,
we don’t know for certain how far it will go. Reports suggest it will limit the
physical locations, such as near parliament or newspaper distribution plants,
in which protest is allowed to take place; and that it will seek to ensure
protesters aren’t “blocking democratic functions from happening”. This is a not
hugely subtle sleight of hand that ignores something very important: protesting
is integral to democracy.
Protest is
a fundamental right, protected in domestic and international law, which the
government and public authorities have a duty to facilitate. It is an essential
tool for expressing dissent against those in power, and one of the ways that we
join forces with one another to effect social, political and economic change.
The plans are very likely to undermine our ability to collectively express dissent,
which has been more crucial than ever this pandemic year.
Let’s be
clear: Liberty has always supported proportionate action to protect public
health, and much of our work recently has focused on ensuring that the people
most likely to be hit hard by the pandemic are prioritised in the government’s
response. At the same time, the magnitude of the limitations on our freedom
implemented by politicians this year cannot be overstated.
In 2020
each of us has faced criminalisation for leaving the house without a
“reasonable excuse”. Police have used surveillance drones to shame people
walking in national parks. And countless people have been wrongly criminalised
under the rushed and draconian Coronavirus Act, which also contains powers to
force people to quarantine, close our borders, and even postpone some
elections. And in all of this, parliament has been sidelined, with some
lockdown laws, which have regulated aspects of our daily lives to a minute
degree, coming into force at the stroke of a minister’s pen, with parliament
given an opportunity to vote only weeks later.
It isn’t
just the government response to the pandemic that has given people cause to
protest this year. This summer saw a global uprising against the killing of
George Floyd by American police, and more broadly in support of black people’s
rights to live flourishing lives. In the UK, against a backdrop of
disproportionate police use of force and powers such as stop and search, the
deaths of black frontline workers such as Belly Mujinga, and longstanding
racism in the criminal punishment system, people mobilised in 260 towns and
cities up and down the country, rallying to insist that black lives matter.
Across the
board, the response from the government and police has raised cause for serious
concern. Scores of people have been arrested for taking to the streets to
protest against lockdown restrictions. Protest organisers who have done their
best to comply with pandemic restrictions, such as carrying out a risk
assessment, have been cowed into not going ahead. And during the Black Lives
Matter demonstrations in the summer, the home secretary, Priti Patel, claimed
that these protests were illegal, and many demonstrators were subject to
aggressive police tactics such as kettling. A report by Netpol found that the
policing of the Black Lives Matter protests was symptomatic of institutional
racism. These attacks on the right to protest are not unique to the pandemic:
in 2019, the Metropolitan police unlawfully used an injunction to ban protest
during the Extinction Rebellion demonstrations.
Leaving
heavy-handed pandemic provisions and unlawful actions to one side, the UK’s
legal environment is already heavily weighted in favour of the authorities when
it comes to protest. Police have extremely wide-ranging powers to control or
ban protests, and to arrest those who stray from conditions the police impose.
These latest proposals tip that balance even further towards the authorities.
Being able
to challenge the government and other public bodies is the lifeblood of our
democracy, and in a year that has seen spectacular curbs on our liberties, it’s
more important than ever. Threatening the right to protest is just another way
this government is trying to limit our ability to stand up to power, alongside
weakening our human rights framework and the ability of the courts to hold it
to account. We could be disheartened, but instead we should look to the many
powerful protest movements that have persisted nonetheless – from school
climate strikers, to opponents of the exam “mutant algorithm”, to people
fighting for racial equality. It’s up to all of us to protect our hard-won
freedoms: 2021 is going to be hard enough for the government – it should drop
this protest bill before it sees the light of day.
------
Gracie Mae
Bradley is the interim director of Liberty
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/14/british-government-right-to-protest-limitations-freedoms-pandemic-legislation
------
For
Liberals, Brexit Is A Hard Lesson In The Politics Of Resentment
By
Nesrine Malik
14 Dec 2020
There is a
law of physics that also applies to politics: energy cannot be created or
destroyed. It can only be changed from one form to another.
The story
of Brexit is a story of energy conversion – the work of political engineers who
mined a generation of scattered grievances and forged them into a single
demand, to leave the European Union. Nobody did this more successfully than
Nigel Farage, who transformed an untapped reservoir of xenophobic suspicion
into a political force by making the EU synonymous with “immigrants”.
In the days
before the referendum – around the time Farage unveiled his infamous “breaking
point” billboard, and a far-right terrorist murdered the Labour MP Jo Cox,
there was a vivid sense that this atmospheric energy, present in the air for so
many years, had finally taken a new form. For decades, anti-immigrant feeling
had been left to grow, unchecked and unchallenged; now it was coupled with a
political resentment against an amorphous governing elite, and in a single
moment changed the future of the country for ever.
This week,
as remainers once again contemplate our defeat, we may reflect on those days
after Cox’s murder – when it felt like there might be a pause for thought, a
public recognition of the dark place we were heading. But there was no such
moment: the campaigns barely paused, and the entire circus of bile and lies
barrelled onwards with a redoubled haste. I remember feeling at the time that
there was a steely national insistence that we must refuse to draw the obvious
conclusions from the case of a murderer who spent years collecting
anti-immigrant propaganda and filing it away neatly in his house in folders.
If you
think that was a grotesque failure to stop and confront how this happened, then
the years since will provide no solace either. Many people who had lived in the
UK for years, or indeed all their lives, reported their first experiences of
racist abuse in public. I was one of that number. In 2018, a plot to
assassinate another Labour MP, Rosie Cooper, was uncovered. These attitudes did
not develop overnight, or even over the span of the EU referendum. Even the
pain and frustration caused by austerity are of relatively recent vintage.
According to research by Lucy Hu of the University of Pennsylvania:
“Exclusively economic arguments proved to be a facade for private racist
attitudes of many leave voters.”
The longer,
more corrosive history is that of a right that exploited immigration for
cynical ends, and a Labour party that made its own cynical compact with this
sentiment, using it, when needed, to show its own “toughness” against the
devious migrant. It was always a myth that New Labour was fundamentally a
pro-immigration project; immigrants were welcome as a feature of a
pro-globalisation view. High-skilled migrants, who came in on a points-based
system, were the most desirable; asylum seekers, after some initial promises,
were quickly ditched.
Much of the
“hostile environment” infrastructure of immigration controls that exists today
is the legacy of Labour’s last government. The tier system that sorts
immigrants according to their value to the UK, the high barriers to gaining
citizenship and the conversion of employers into border guards were all
policies established by Labour in 2006.
But it was
the way that politicians talked about immigration, or rather didn’t talk, that
allowed this resentment to congeal, ready to be shaped into an explosive. The
years before the financial crisis saw increased asylum applications from
conflict zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. And between a governing party
eager not to look like it was too soft on claimants and a rightwing media that
tapped into the rich vein of scaremongering about migrants, the tone was fixed.
The presence of immigrants was now a matter of “legitimate concern”; there was
a need to look out for “the indigenous population”, in the words of Labour’s
immigration minister Phil Woolas. By the time Gordon Brown was on the ropes
trying to save his premiership, it was “British jobs for British workers”, the
progenitor of Ed Miliband’s dismal “controls on immigration” crockery.
All that
energy had to go somewhere. In politics, everything is connected: liberals
cannot pick and choose when they care about immigrants. Britain went into the
Brexit referendum hobbled by a financial crisis and a decade of austerity, many
of its communities badly damaged by deindustrialisation. There were no quick
answers to any of this, and so the pain was shifted on to an immediate,
intimate enemy, easily purged: the immigrant, and all the immigrant
represented, be it the enabling EU, the elected elite, the lawyers or the
judges.
Perhaps we
could not have predicted how and when this would happen – but we allowed it to
happen. Liberals across parties who are horrified by the consequences of Brexit
must realise that they were defeated by an epic national scapegoating project –
one whose power needed to have been checked long before. That is how to
understand Brexit: not an irrational rightwing populism, not a derangement of
post-truth politics, but the predictable outcome of a concerted political and
media campaign that capitalised on a colossal failure of our economic model.
Just as I
did in the days after the murder of Jo Cox, I have searched for signs of this
epiphany since the Brexit vote. I have looked for it among Conservatives,
naively bewildered by the thuggishness that has captured their party. I have
looked for it in Labour under Corbyn and Labour under Starmer. And I have
looked for it, in the past few days, in the belated mea culpas of those enraged
that all the calamities of a Brexit blunder may finally be upon us. I have not
found it. Which means that all that we love will be wrecked, again and again,
by an energy that shifts the blame for our national failures from our leaders
on to anyone who is not “indigenous”. If you think that energy is gone because
our borders are closing and we have taken back control, think again. It is
simply changing form.
----
Nesrine
Malik is a Guardian columnist
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/14/liberals-brexit-politics-resentment
-----
Turkish
Shadow Boxing Reflects Growing Rivalry With Iran
By
James M Dorsey
December
22, 2020
Turkey is
leveraging its successful backing of Azerbaijan's recent war against Armenia to
counter Iran in the Caucasus and gradually challenge Russia in Central Asia,
the heart of what Moscow considers its backyard. The Turkish moves have
elicited different responses from Russia and Iran, two countries Turkey views
as both partners and rivals.
Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been careful not to jeopardise his newly
found status as a Russian recognised-player in the southern Caucasus. By
contrast, Erdogan seems determined to provoke Iran with statements and postings
by his state-run broadcaster that potentially call into question the
territorial integrity of the Islamic republic.
In doing
so, Erdogan is fuelling Iran's deepest fears. Iran, not without reason, has
long believed that the United States and Saudi Arabia are bent on instigating
ethnic unrest in a bid to force Tehran to alter policies, if not topple the
Iranian regime.
"Turkey's
sick president took steps to break up Iran. Erdogan is single-handedly
implementing the West's dirty policy in the region," said Mahmoud Ahmadi
Bighash, a member of the Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign
Policy Commission. Erdogan adopted his provocative posture as he moved to
exploit new geopolitical transportation opportunities created by the
Russian-brokered deal that sealed Azerbaijan's defeat of Armenia in the recent
Caucasus war.
The deal
opens a corridor that links Azerbaijan with Nakhichevan, an Azeri enclave in
Armenia that straddles the border with Turkey. The opening boosts Turkish
efforts to expand transportation tie-ups with the Caucasus, Central Asia, and
China's infrastructure-driven One Belt One Road Initiative that seeks to bind
Eurasia to the People's Republic.
Turkish
transportation minister Adil Karaismailoglu was quick to announce that his
office was about to complete a study for the construction of a railway through
the corridor as part of a USD 5.7 billion project to link Turkish, Azeri and
Georgian transportation nodes and ports.
Turkey this
month dispatched its first China-bound freight train that travelled on the
newly opened rail line from the northeastern Turkish city of Kars to the Azeri
capital of Baku via Tbilisi in Georgia and then across Kazakhstan to Xi'an
Province. The Caucasus ceasefire deal includes no security provisions for the use
of the corridor by Armenia, even though Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan
and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have suggested that a railway
linking Armenia to Iran was a possibility. Turkey's advantage in Nakhichevan
reinforces the significance of last week's opening of a 220-kilometre long
railway linking Khaf in northeastern Iran to Herat in western Afghanistan. Iran
and Afghanistan are discussing the extension of the rail link to China with
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
Erdogan's
verbal toying with a break-up of Iran as a nation state, like the railway
competition, is one facet of Turkish and Iranian efforts to carve out their
individual places in an emerging rebalanced world order. In doing so, Turkey
and Iran are exploiting a vacuum created by reduced US engagement, China's
economic-driven approach to geopolitics, and challenges across the former
Soviet Union to Russian hegemony in a swath of land that stretches from
Afghanistan via the Caucasus and the Eastern Mediterranean into North Africa.
Erdogan's
provocative playing with words and images that were certain to raise Iranian
eyebrows came as he was taking steps to improve relations with Iran's
archrivals, Israel and Saudi Arabia, which were certain to curry favour with
incoming US President-elect Joe Biden. The Turkish president appointed Ufuk
Ulutas, a 40 year-old Hebrew-speaking member of a think tank who studied the
Middle East at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, as his first ambassador to
Israel in two years. The appointment was announced as the United States imposed
long-anticipated sanctions on its NATO ally over Turkey's procurement and
testing of Russia's S-400 air defence system.
Turkey has
also diverged from positions shared with Iran by significantly toning down its
harsh criticism of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and
Arab states.
"Every
country has the right to create ties with any country it wants," said
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in response to Morocco becoming the
latest Arab country to formally recognise the Jewish state. Earlier, Cavusoglu,
in the first face-to-face meeting between senior Saudi and Turkish officials
since the October 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, met with his
Saudi counterpart, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, on the sidelines of an
Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) conference in the African state of
Niger.
"A
strong Turkey-Saudi partnership benefits not only our countries but the whole
region," Cavusoglu tweeted after the meeting. The meeting came days after
Saudi King Salman telephoned Erdogan on the eve of last month's virtual summit,
hosted by the kingdom of the Group of 20 (G20), that brings together the
world's largest economies.
Erdogan
sparked the most recent spat with Iran when he recited a nationalist poem by
Azeri poet Bakhtiyar Vahabzadeh during a military parade while on a visit to
Azerbaijan. The poem depicts as artificial the border along the Aras River that
divides Azerbaijan from ethnic Azeri provinces of Iran. It suggests that Azeris
on both sides of the river will one day unite again.
State-run
Turkish Radio and Television's Arabic service this week published a map on
Instagram depicting Iran's oil-rich province of Khuzestan with its large
population of ethnic Arabs as separate from Iran. Iran has blamed Saudi Arabia
for intermittent attacks by nationalist groups that it says are backed by the
kingdom.
The
publication came days after the disclosure that Habib Chaab, a leader of the
Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz, or ASMLA, had been
kidnapped in Istanbul by an Iraqi Kurdish drug baron in cooperation with
Iranian intelligence, and transported to Iran. Chaab had been lured to Istanbul
in October from his exile in Sweden. Turkish intelligence officers and police
have detained 11 men, all Turkish citizens, who have been arraigned on charges
that include "using weapons... to deprive an individual of their liberty
through deceit," a Turkish official said.
ASMLA aims
to gain independence for Iranian Arabs who have long complained of
discrimination and neglect. Iran blames ASMLA for a 2018 attack on a
Revolutionary Guard military parade in the Khuzestan capital of Ahwaz that
killed 25 people and wounded more than 50 others. Iranian and Turkish officials
have largely sought to downplay the significance of the incidents.
"Based
on my past knowledge of Erdogan, it is very unlikely that he had any intention
of insulting our territorial integrity. He always recites poetry in his
speeches," said Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.
Rouhani may
have helped to squash for now an escalating spat, but statements by protesters
outside the Turkish consulate in Tabriz, the capital of the Iranian province of
East Azerbaijan, carried by the semi-official Fars News Agency, left little
doubt about what Iran's true sentiments are.
"Those
who have greedy eyes on the territories this side of the Aras River had better
study history and see that Azerbaijan, specifically the people of Tabriz, have
always pioneered in defending Iran. If Iran had not helped you at the night of
the coup, you would have had a fate similar to that of former Egyptian
President Mohammed Morsi," the protesters said, addressing Erdogan
directly. The protesters were referring to the failed military coup against
Erdogan in 2016 and the toppling of Morsi in 2013 in a takeover by the Egyptian
armed forces.
----
Dr James
M Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and a senior fellow at Nanyang
Technological University's S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in
Singapore and the National University of Singapore's Middle East Institute.
https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/news/turkish-shadow-boxing-reflects-growing-rivalry-iran-2015105
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URL: https://newageislam.com/world-press/world-press-intolerance,-how-dangerous/d/123835
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