War

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    [post_content] => As couriers, saboteurs, fighters, and assassins, Jewish women played key roles in fighting the Nazis, displaying astonishing bravery and sangfroid.

In 2007, while carrying out research at the British Library, author Judy Batalion found a dusty, Yiddish-language book called Women in the Ghettos (Freuen in di Ghettos). Published in 1946, it contained dozens of accounts written by and about Jewish women who, in the years after the Second World War, scattered around the world and faded into obscurity. But before “disappearing,” they left written records detailing astonishing acts of wartime bravery.

In her introduction to The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos, the gripping book inspired by her discovery in the British Library, Batalion describes her surprise at learning of the role women had played in organizing and leading resistance to the Nazis. “Despite years of Jewish education, I’d never read accounts like these… I had no idea how many Jewish women were involved in the resistance effort, nor to what degree,” she writes.

[caption id="attachment_3736" align="alignleft" width="300"] Judy Batalion[/caption]

Batalion grew up in Montreal’s tight-knit Jewish community “composed largely of Holocaust  survivor families”—including her own grandmother, who escaped German-occupied Warsaw and fled eastward to the Soviet Union. Most of her grandmother’s family was subsequently murdered.  As Batalion recalls, “She’d relay this dreadful story to me every single afternoon as she babysat me after school, tears and fury in her eyes.” For Batalion, remembering the Holocaust was a daily event. She describes a childhood overshadowed by “an aura of victimization and fear.”

That proximity allowed Batalion to develop an intimate connection to events that had taken place decades earlier, thousands of miles away. But even for those without such a close connection, the impact (and import) of the Holocaust is inescapable.  According to a 2020 Pew Survey, 76 percent of American Jews overall, across religious denominations and demographics, reported that “remembering the Holocaust” was essential to their Jewish identity. In stark contrast, just 45 percent overall said that “caring about Israel” was a critical pillar of their identity, with that percentage declining among the youngest age groups.

These numbers raise an urgent question: given its centrality to North American Jewish life, what exactly are we remembering when we remember the Holocaust? As Judy Batalion herself points out, the Holocaust was an important subject in both her formal and informal education. And yet, of the many women featured in Freuen in di Ghettos, she had only heard of one, the Hungarian-Jewish poet Hannah Senesh, who lived in Mandatory Palestine when she was recruited by the British to parachute into Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia. Why had all these other women been edited out of history?

Part of the problem is that “the Holocaust” wasn’t one unified moment in time, but a highly complex historical event within an even larger, more complex world war. It unfolded over several years, spanned continents, and left evidence in numerous languages. The murder of millions of Jews was complex, too; death camps and gas chambers are the most recognized aspects of the genocide, but it must be remembered that two million Jews within the Soviet Union were murdered in mass shootings—the so-called “Holocaust by bullets.” In addition to those murdered in gas chambers and mass shootings, there were hundreds of thousands of so-called passive victims, who died of weaponized starvation and disease. No single story or perspective can convey the genocide’s enormity, a fact which makes teaching, and remembering, the Holocaust a constant challenge. In that sense, The Light of Days makes a welcome intervention, prompting us to think critically about what we choose to remember (and what we don’t.)

Drawing on memoir, witness testimony, interviews, and a variety of secondary sources, Batalion focuses on the stories of female “ghetto fighters.” These were activists and leaders who came up in the vibrant world of Poland’s pre-war Jewish youth movements, which represented a remarkable variety of political and religious affiliations. The young women of the socialist Zionist groups Dror (Freedom) and Hashomer Hatzair (Young Guard) feature prominently, but religious Zionists, Bundists (Jewish socialists), Communists, and young Jews representing various other cultural, political, and religious affiliations are there, too. Before the war, these groups taught leadership skills: how to make plans and follow through. When the war began, pre-existing leadership structures and a network of locations all over Poland allowed members to find one another and to immediately make plans for mutual aid and resistance. When these young fighters lost their family members, movement comrades were there to support and care for one another as another type of family.

Only a small percentage of Jewish women took part in armed resistance and combat. Most of them were kashariyot, or female couriers. Couriers were quite literally “connectors,” transporting news, publications, medical supplies, weapons and more between ghettos at incredible personal risk. Over the years, the role of the couriers has been minimized and pushed to the edges of Holocaust resistance narratives. Light of Days brings the stories of the kashariyot back to the center of resistance history. As the war progressed, the “youth movements evolved into militias.” Because of their ability to travel, the kashariyot acquired valuable information about logistics like guard routines and routes in and out of ghettos. The kashariyot worked alongside male resistance leaders, aiding in mission planning and working as fixers.

Frumka Plotnicka is one of the “stars” of Light of Days. She had been a member of the Freedom youth group from the age of 17; in 1939, when war breaks out, she is 25 and working for the movement in Warsaw. On the instructions of movement leaders, she returns to her family in Pinsk, now in Soviet territory. But she soon insists on returning to Nazi-occupied Warsaw to be with her comrades. Even so, Frumka is not content to stay in one place. She was “prescient about the need to forge long-distance connections. She’d dress up as a non-Jew… and traveled to Lodz and Bedzin,” (cities with Freedom communes) “to glean information.” And that’s just at the very beginning of the war.

We think of the Jewish experience during the war as one of overwhelming confinement. Jews were forced into enclosed ghettos, then onto cramped trains, and finally into camps. The experience of the women in Light of Days, however, tells a completely different story. They move in and out of ghettos and travel across Poland, with some traversing mountains in perilous journeys across borders to freedom. Batalion describes the experiences of women who were imprisoned in Nazi jails and subjected to Gestapo torture, as well as those who experienced miraculous prison breaks and other amazing escapes from peril.

These women moved around with relative ease, but their mobility depended on many factors. Undercover travel required physical stamina and mental focus. Funds were needed to pay for essentials like forged papers, bribes, and smugglers, not to mention the cost of transportation itself.  In order to travel, a Jew had to be able to pass physically and linguistically as a Pole (or even a German). It was easier for women to pass because they didn’t have to worry about their circumcision betraying them. Many Jewish women spoke unaccented Polish thanks to their education at secular state schools, while their brothers, educated at religious schools, had heavy “Jewish” accents.

As a Yiddishist, some of Batalion’s characters were already familiar to me from Yiddish song and poetry. But Light of Days took me further into their stories, providing welcome recontextualization. For example, Hirsch Glik’s “Shtil di nakht”  is a well-known Yiddish song that tells the story of a daring act of sabotage against a Nazi train; it was inspired by Vitka Kempner, a female partisan.

Kempner’s sabotage is covered in Light of Days, within a much longer, fascinating exploration of the women of Vilna’s (Vilnius) Jewish partisans (known by their acronym, FPO). Vitka’s successful use of a homemade bomb to blow up a Nazi train was “the first such act of sabotage in all of occupied Europe” and inspired many more.

Glik’s song, as moving as it is, is told from a man’s point of view. The lyrics highlight the appearance of the unnamed woman. The narrator of the song asks (in Yiddish), Do you remember how I taught you how to hold a weapon in your hand? It’s a romantic image, but one that started to bother me as I read further. The women of the FPO were not subordinates who needed to be instructed by the men. Vitka’s friendship with Ruzka Korczak, a fellow partisan fighter, was arguably as important to Vitka as her relationship with her future husband, ghetto resistance leader Abba Kovner. Abba, Vitka, and Ruzka were a high visibility trio on the streets of the Vilna ghetto, and the three of them supposedly shared a bed, “stirring rumors about a menage a trois.” Vitka and Ruzka fought side by side and, after the war, ended up at the same kibbutz in Palestine, where they remained life-long friends.

Though women played only a small role in actual armed resistance, those who did take up arms exhibited astonishing bravery and sangfroid. Batalion tells the story of Niuta Teitelbaum, a young Communist in the Warsaw ghetto who wore her long blond hair in thick braids to give the impression that she was a “naïve sixteen year-old” when she was in fact “an assassin.” With her blue eyes and blonde hair that allowed her to “pass” as a non-Jew, Teitelbaum walked into the office of a Gestapo officer and “shot him in cold blood.” When an attempted assassination left a Gestapo agent in the hospital, “Niuta, disguising herself as a doctor, entered his room, and mowed down both him and his guard.” Teitelbaum went on to organize a woman’s unit in the Warsaw ghetto and take a leading role in the 1943 uprising. She was captured, tortured, and killed at the age of 25.


Despite exhilarating moments of triumph, the overarching story of The Light of Days is still the mass murder of millions of Jews. The protagonists suffer vicious torture at the hands of the Gestapo. They are under constant threat of sexual blackmail. They see their friends and families murdered, and witness the Nazi occupation of Poland unfold with its obscene ethos of brutalizing sadism. In other words, this is heavy stuff. It deserves more room to breathe, and to allow the reader to process. I imagine that Batalion couldn’t bear cutting any of her fascinating material. Unfortunately, the book sags at times with too many main characters, and jumps around between storylines in a way some readers may find confusing.

Nonetheless, Light of Days is a perfect book for our moment. Not only does it recenter an important history, but it takes the time to explore the ethical implications that come with it (for example, does emphasizing armed resistance minimize Nazi crimes? Do we valorize armed resistance at the price of minimizing spiritual or creative resistance?)  Batalion also does an admirable job exploring the many factors that account for the disappearance of women’s stories from Holocaust memory, both at an individual and societal level. In that regard, Light of Days offers something for all readers, whether Jewish or not, looking to (re)write lost narratives back into the collective memory.

 
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Edited out of history: the Jewish women who fought the Nazis

by Rokhl Kafrissen

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    [post_content] => Officially, Dodik's secessionism is in reaction to a new law that bans genocide denial. But his true motives are more cynical and venal.

Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) appears to be coming apart at the seams. The Balkan state is currently embroiled in its worst political crisis since the 1992-1995 war, the bloodiest on European soil since the Second World War. The current tumult was triggered by Milorad Dodik, a Bosnian Serb nationalist politician and notorious demagogue, who has been leading calls for Republika Srpska (RS), the Serb-majority region established after the war, to “pull out” of the country’s central institutions—its armed forces, intelligence agency, and tax authority. Most recently, he and his party, the SNSD, have expanded their secessionist rhetoric to include the state police, the border police, and even the country’s constitutional court.

Dodik and his party are paving the way for the RS entity to secede from BiH in all but name. His calls to quit the state’s central institutions are a violation of BiH’s constitution and of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which played a key role in ending the Bosnian War. According to that agreement, BiH is governed by a complex ethnic-based power system, which includes a tripartite presidency, wherein one Bosniak, one Serb, and one Croat simultaneously serve on the body and arrive at decisions via consensus. Or, at least, that is the theory. In practice, the system is marred by dysfunction and near constant obstruction, especially by Dodik and the SNSD.

What does he have to gain by pushing his war-scarred country dangerously close to the brink of another armed conflict? The answers are both cynical and predicated on a mix of political survival and ideology.

Officially, Dodik’s secessionist talk is based on his party’s rejection of a new law that criminalizes genocide denial. On July 23, 2020 the then High Representative, the Sarajevo-based international envoy who oversees the implementation of the 1995 peace agreement, Valentin Inzko, imposed a law banning the denial of all internationally recognized war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocides (like the Holocaust). This means that anyone who denies that Serb nationalist forces committed genocide against Bosniaks during the 1992-95 war is now committing a crime.

For Serb nationalist leaders in BiH, this is an outrage. Genocide denial is a staple of their politics; Dodik’s regime has even funded bogus “commissions” to cast doubt on the well-established and forensically proven fact that Serb nationalist forces carried out widespread atrocities against Bosniak civilians while under the command of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, both of whom were  convicted of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Their convictions are largely concerned with the 1995 genocide in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, where Serb nationalist forces forcibly separated over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys from refugees nominally under the protection of the UN, transferred them to nearby fields and industrial buildings, and gunned them down. The New York Times report on the killings, quotes human rights officers and diplomatic officials who described it as “the worst crime since World War II.” Most experts and scholars, however, consider the totality of the Serb nationalist war effort in BiH to have been genocidal in nature, and not isolated merely to the events in Srebrenica.

Read Jasmin Mujanovic's review of "Quo Vadis, Aida," a "shattering, essential" film about the Srebrenica killings. 

The Bosnian parliament failed to pass its own legislation banning genocide denial because of obstruction by Dodik’s SNSD bloc and their coalition partners in the Croat nationalist HDZ. While the HDZ is not a secessionist party, they do want to further the ethnic fragmentation of BiH through the creation of a so-called “third entity,” a kind of Croat-dominated RS. Such an entity existed briefly during the war; its entire senior leadership was also convicted of crimes against humanity. Because Dodik sees the HDZ’s goals as a means of further undermining the central BiH state, he is happy to champion the HDZ’s interests.

In any case, Christian Schmidt, the new High Representative, has said the law imposed by his predecessor would remain in effect until parliament passed its own. Rather than engage in democratic niceties like parliamentary debate, Dodik has now shifted tactics to creating illegal parallel institutions. He has even threatened to recreate the “Army of the Republika Srpska” (VRS), the militia that committed the Srebrenica genocide.

Dodik has governed BiH’s RS as a virtual autocrat since 2006. Prior to the genocide, the areas of northern and eastern BiH that now constitute the entity were wholly multiethnic; today they are almost wholly Serb-dominated. Dodik is currently a member of BiH’s tripartite state presidency and has no official function within the RS, but the Serb enclave is his personal fiefdom in all but name. Once an American-backed reformist who helped eject Karadzic’s SDS party from power, Dodik has spent much of the last 16 years reinventing himself as a hardline nationalist. That has also meant violently cracking down on civil society, creating a regime-controlled media apparatus, and centering all real power in the entity of his own person.

Because of the Dodik regime’s near-authoritarian domination of the Serb entity, the SNSD is unlikely to lose power in the next BiH general elections, scheduled for October 2022. Moreover, because of the expansive power-sharing provisions of the Dayton constitution, Dodik and his Croat nationalist allies in the HDZ also (in)directly control large aspects of the state apparatus, a fact that has shielded leading figures in both parties from prosecution for a legion of criminal affairs and a smorgasbord of anti-constitutional activities. In October 2021, for instance, BiH’s BN TV reported that the SNSD government had allowed industrial grade oxygen tanks, unfit for human consumption, to be used in hospitals in the region. In December 2020, Dodik’s appointee on BiH’s central judicial oversight body was forced to resign in disgrace after he was caught on tape directing payoffs to underlings, and openly discussing how to sway justices.

It is this trinity—sectarian ultranationalism, autocracy, and kleptocracy—that is the nucleus of Dodik the person, and the regime he has constructed in RS. He wants to dismantle the Bosnian state because he needs all three to survive politically and because of venal, financial self-interest.

Dodik and his party have made the glorification of genocide denial one of their central ideological and electoral pillars. Without it, their political survival is in grave danger. The law banning genocide denial also creates politically and emotionally legitimate grounds for the High Representative to remove Dodik, which in turn would decimate his expansive criminal patronage networks. As noted in a January 5 U.S. Treasury Department brief, outlining the reasons for a new round of U.S. sanctions against him:

“Dodik…has established a patronage network in BiH from which he and his associates benefit. As one example of his corrupt actions, Dodik has provided government contracts and monopolies in the RS directly to close business associates. With his corrupt proceeds, Dodik has engaged in bribery and additional corrupt activities to further his personal interests at the expense of citizens in the RS.”

To be clear, the High Representative had grounds to remove Dodik already, but the SSND is hardly the only political party in BiH guilty of corruption, self-dealing, and abuse of office. Systematic genocide denial, however, packs a more robust, normative punch.

This also explains why Dodik has resisted implementing the “5+2 Agenda,” the formula set out in 2008 for the phasing out of the Office of the High Representative (OHR). The two most important pieces of that checklist are: the dispute over state properties on RS territory, the most sensitive of which are military installations that belong to the Bosnian Armed Forces; and “the entrenchment of the rule of law.” Both items strike at the heart of Dodik’s authoritarian autonomy in BiH. If Dodik agreed to respect the presence of Bosnian military bases on RS territory and to abide by the rule of law, including an appropriate genocide-denial law, he could secure the OHR’s departure. But he would also be undermining his own authority by accepting the state’s primacy over his fiefdom. That is why he is trying to get rid of the OHR without implementing the 5+2 Agenda.

Dodik ’s extremist gambit, however, reveals the true nature of his broader political project. He is not concerned about the anti-genocide law per se. He is worried because the OHR has shown that it is willing and still able to activate the Bonn Powers—i.e., its authority to use extra-constitutional powers to protect the integrity of the Dayton Accords—and this threatens Dodik’s own political survival.


What gives Dodik’s current efforts additional weight is not only that his party has begun using the RS assembly to formalize his purported “withdrawal” from state institutions, or his dismissing the legitimacy of Schmidt’s tenure at the OHR. That, in and of itself, does not make such acts legal. A sub-national assembly cannot unilaterally override the acts of a state parliament or the contents of international agreements—which is what the SNSD is doing—in any country on Earth, not even in BiH. But these actions indicate a degree of actual political courage Dodik’s regime has not hitherto displayed.

Dodik feels he can afford to be bold because he enjoys the support not only of Moscow and Belgrade, but also of Hungary, which is a member of the EU and NATO;  he recently claimed to have the support of several additional EU member states. While the Russians had Schmidt barred from the UN Security Council—the first time a BiH High Representative was prevented from addressing the body—Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has said explicitly that he would prevent the EU from imposing sanctions against Dodik’s regime, even as his country pledged financial aid to the RS. Orbán, whose Fidesz party is notoriously racist, antisemitic, and anti-democratic, has also peddled thinly veiled Islamophobic conspiracy theories to buttress Dodik’s brinksmanship.

Where BiH goes in the months ahead remains to be seen. Dodik and his partners in the HDZ might try to scuttle the country’s next elections, in order to further the narrative that BiH is a “failed state” that should be partitioned among neighboring powers, in line with the contents of a recent non-paper written by the cabinet of Slovenia’s Prime Minister, Janez Jansa, another Dodik ally. The U.S. has imposed new rounds of sanctions on Dodik; on Alternativa Television, a regime-controlled TV station that broadcasts pro-Dodik propaganda; and on Dodik’s former appointee to BiH’s judicial oversight body. The U.S. is expected to add more names to the list in coming weeks. The UK and Germany have also threatened their own measures, though they have not yet initiated them. In the interim, Zeljko Komsic, the Chairman of BiH’s presidency, has warned that unless the international community works with local authorities to stop Dodik, “force will have to be the response.”

Komsic is not wrong. Whether because of his extremist politics or his criminal interests, Dodik is clearly replicating the 1992 march to war under presided over by Radovan Karadzic, the convicted genocidaire. For all his bravado, though, Dodik knows he does not have the necessary hard power to go up against the BiH security apparatus, as fragmented as it is. The fear, however, is that he is still gambling on the idea that if he concocts a serious enough crisis, Serbia and Russia will come to his aid—little green men and all. Such a scenario would create a vortex of instability and conflict in the strategic center of the Western Balkans that, as in the 1990s, would suck in neighboring states. With Russia threatening further aggression against Ukraine, the West can ill afford another security crisis in the volatile southeast of Europe.
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    [post_excerpt] => Once a US-backed anti-nationalist reformist, Milorad Dodik has spent much of the last 16 years reinventing himself as a hardline nationalist politician.
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A genocide-denying autocrat is threatening to throw a lit match into Bosnia’s tinderbox

by Jasmin Mujanović 

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    [post_content] => The dominant religion of Russian officials is money. There are many ways to exploit that, starting with a long list of individually targeted sanctions.

Russia appears to be preparing for a full scale invasion of Ukraine. Satellite images show the  Kremlin has been moving military materiel to the border since October, while intelligence analysis posits that as many as 175,000 troops are headed for border-region Russian army bases. These developments have alarmed both Europe and the United States, with President Biden warning President Putin on Tuesday of “strong economic and other measures” during a two-hour video summit between the two leaders. 

The ongoing conflict began more than seven years ago, after the November 2013 Euromaidan Uprising that led to the popular ousting of Viktor Yanukovich, a fantastically corrupt president who had largely been Putin’s ally. The Russian president responded in March 2014 by invading and annexing Crimea, and destabilizing parts of the Ukrainian east. Now, a simmering conflict is poised to get much worse. How should  Western powers respond, particularly given that Ukraine is not a member of the EU or NATO?

First, we must dispense with the idea that we can and should do nothing. As someone originally from Ukraine I am a biased observer; but even when I set aside my desire to prevent Putin from killing my relatives, I can see dire consequences for ostensibly disinterested parties. Western states would prefer to pretend that the headache called Vladimir Putin didn’t exist, given all the other headaches they have to deal with — like the global pandemic and rising inflation — but deal with him they must.

A Russian invasion of Ukraine would cause instability throughout Europe and beyond, including a gas pipeline disruption and the loss of a buffer zone between NATO and an ever-belligerent Russia. Adventurism by leaders of other countries—such as Iran, for example—who would see the distraction and the dismay as an opportunity, would likely increase in scope. The current refugee crisis would grow exponentially, with disastrous repercussions. Markets would suffer, as would businesses and aviation.  

Russia’s other neighbors — including Central Asian regimes — could become increasingly unstable. Putin is using extreme measures in an attempt to bully Western powers into keeping Ukraine out of NATO; his fear is the prospect of seeing the Western alliance’s military forces right on his border, but this fear holds risks for the entire region. As long as there are no consequences to his actions, Putin will not stop. 

The Russian view of Ukraine, which was part of the czarist empire and the Soviet Union, is distorted by imperialist propaganda that describes it as both a nation of buffoons and a threat that Russia must pacify. Russia also sees Ukraine as the stage for another grievance—that of Western triumphalism following the end of the Cold War, which the United States described as a “victory.” To put the matter in crude but simple terms, America insulted Russia and Putin, the former KGB officer, wants revenge.

Putin seems to believe that demoralizing the United States, which has provided aid to Ukraine  since it became independent in 1992, would be a major win for Russia. Ukraine is poised to fight, even if their military is destined to lose an all-out war against Russia's, but images of carnage and violence don’t deter Putin easily. We must understand that the Russian president would be initially unmoved by the sight of Russian soldiers coming home in body bags. 

“Who the hell do Ukrainians think they are?” was something I often heard in elite Moscow circles— among businessmen, television personalities, politicians—after the ousting of Yanukovych and the launch of the 2014 war. Russia’s ruling elite disliked the idea of Ukrainians possibly enjoying a functioning democracy and a better standard of living than they had. Moscow sees a stable, prosperous Ukraine as hostile simply because its existence might cause ordinary Russians to ask questions about why they were comparatively worse off. 

Because Russia is an extremely unequal society, its elite sees ordinary citizens as less than human and thus not entitled to ask uncomfortable questions, which might lead to popular discontent. In order to maintain their position, the leadership is most likely to choose divide-and-conquer: Incite a bunch of ordinary Russians against Ukrainians, dial up anti-Ukrainian and anti-Western propaganda, and keep everyone distracted with a war. 

What’s to be done to prevent this looming nightmare that will involve both bloodshed and wider instability? 

First, the Western nations must stop behaving as though they are powerless. Putin sees Western consternation as a sign of weakness.

It’s important, furthermore, to understand that Putin is not an ideologue. He uses ideology as an effective shield, but in practice he’s just another kleptocrat—albeit one with nuclear weapons. Russia’s new elite is composed of his close friends and important functionaries, all of whom benefit financially from their relationship with the president; normal people loathe Putin’s friends because they are so overtly corrupt. That very justifiable hatred is one of Russia’s greatest vulnerabilities, and one of the saddest elements of modern Russian life, which is dominated by stress and suspicion. Putin is the single leadership figure that Russians look to today, but he cannot fix all their problems. Meanwhile, brewing discontent is ripe for exploitation.

Western powers must also draw clear red lines by naming consequences and then acting upon them if Putin refuses to back down. Cutting Russia off from SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication)—the international system that allows banks to carry out trans-border transactions—should absolutely be on the table. This would rattle the Russian economy and have an immediate impact on Russian citizens. Notice how you can’t send money to an Iranian bank from the United States? That’s because Iran has been cut off from SWIFT; this affects everyone in Iran, from the leadership to ordinary people on the street. 

A move to cut Russia off from SWIFT would also, of course, impact U.S. banks and German banks, which use it to communicate with Russia. But these banks are more insulated from financial pain because their economies are far more robust and integrated than Russia’s.

The Russian elite loves opulence. It stashes its assets (and, frequently, its children) abroad — popular spots include London and Paris, Manhattan and Miami, the Cayman Islands, and Cyprus. The dominant religion of Russian officials is money. There are many ways to exploit that, starting with a potentially very long list of individually targeted sanctions, such as those already levelled at dangerous Kremlin lackeys like businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has been indicted in the U.S. for the role he played in meddling in the 2016 election; and propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov, the notorious state TV presenter who is Russia’s own Tucker Carlson, only virtually unopposed.

Another factor to consider is Moscow’s fragile relationship with Beijing, with the Kremlin particularly worried about China expanding its influence in Russia’s Far East, where there are real tensions between the local leadership and Putin’s central government. When you want to know what bothers the Russian government, look at what it is restricting or monitoring. The FSB, for example, controls the Russian census in order to cover up resentment of Moscow in different parts of Russia. I was in Moscow when the 2010 census was conducted, and saw how researchers noted that the number of people identifying as “Siberian” as opposed to “Russian” had spiked. Today, writing about these issues in Russia can easily land you on a watchlist. All of this demonstrates that Moscow is worried about Russian territorial integrity. 

Russian propagandists tend to yell at me when I make these observations; they are defensive because they know I am telling the truth. Moscow is wary of China’s ambitions in the Far East and elsewhere, how they might affect Russia’s position in areas ranging from the Arctic to outer space, and how an already resentful Russian society might react to their country’s declining position. Washington can leverage that fear in many ways, most saliently by playing up the fact that Moscow today is nothing but Beijing’s uneasy sidekick. Russia is poorer and more vulnerable than China. Its population is declining. In its desire for great power status, it is decidedly outmatched by Beijing. These facts already don’t sit well with Putin, but are particularly infuriating to Russia’s citizens. 

Engaging Russia directly would merely serve to create another vortex of violent instability. But Russian private military companies (PMCs) have their fingers in many pies — in countries like the Central African Republic and Venezuela, where they are interested in both resource extraction and political influence. Signaling that all of these ventures are fair game for hostile action might not have an immediate effect—Putin likes PMCs precisely because they are expendable—but many of the Russian leader’s friends have significant amounts of money tied up in these ventures; inflicting pain on them makes him vulnerable. 

Most importantly, we must not mythologize Putin. Nor should we adopt the approach of the notorious Fox TV commentator, Tucker Carlson, who claims that Putin is massing troops and materiel because he needs to “secure” his border with Ukraine. This is a cynical political move: Carlson’s ratings go up every time he trashes President Joe Biden. If Biden is opposed to Putin, Carlson will side with Putin, even at the cost of global stability and the international standing of the United States. If Putin came out and claimed he needed his “Lebensraum” now, Tucker would probably cheer him on, and that’s all you need to know about that. 

Instead of being like Tucker, we should simply see the depressing system Putin created in all of its stark, granular detail — and understand that it won’t stop after it devours Ukraine. The time to oppose it is now.
    [post_title] => To stop Putin, grab him by his wallet
    [post_excerpt] => Western leaders are conducting their foreign policy as though nothing can be done to stop Putin. This is a mistake: he's weaker and more vulnerable than he appears.  
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To stop Putin, grab him by his wallet

by Natalia Antonova

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    [post_date] => 2021-04-24 15:35:11
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    [post_content] => The devastating legacy of the Bosnian War is laid bare in this dramatization of the Srebrenica massacre.

I don’t know if I have seen Quo Vadis, Aida? I know I have sat in front of a screen on four or five separate occasions and taken in portions of the film. But I don’t know whether I have “seen” the film in the way that term is typically used. It is perhaps more accurate to say that I have experienced Aida, or more truthfully still: Aida played, and I was swallowed by grief.

Quo Vadis, Aida? is the Academy Award nominated film by Sarajevo-born director Jasmila Žbanić. It documents the fall of Srebrenica, a town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), in July 1995 to the Serb nationalist forces led by convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić. The ensuing campaign of extermination—which took place between July 11 and July 22— saw the murder of 8,372 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys and the expulsion of the entire non-Serb population of the town (approximately 25,000 people, primarily women and girls).

Aida is a (barely) fictionalized account of the events that occurred in Srebrenica; it focuses on the protagonist Aida Selmanagić (Jasna Đuričić), a local schoolteacher who has obtained wartime work as a UN translator, and her increasingly untenable position as an intermediary between the incompetent Dutch peacekeepers and the frantic, besieged Bosniak population of the town. The plot is largely based on the real-life experiences of Hasan Nuhanović, as told in his 2007 book Under the UN Flag, but draws thematically on the broader Srebrenica survivors’ literature.

But the Srebrenica Genocide—officially recognized as such by the International Criminal Tribunal— is only the final, horrific culmination of what scholars, researchers, and survivors refer to as the Bosnian Genocide. That is the systematic campaign of extermination, expulsions, torture, and sexual violence carried out in BiH by the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS) between 1992 and 1995. The genocide targeted primarily the country’s Bosniak community; it was directed by the leadership of the self-declared Republika Srpska (RS) and financed and supplied by their patrons in the Serbian government.



In the film, as the townspeople begin to realize that the UN and the wider international community could not or would not halt the VRS conquest of Srebrenica, panic and terror ensues. Thousands rush to the UN base, trying to find shelter and safety there, while thousands more are forced to wait outside the overcrowded facility, with no shelter or food, as they await their fate. Aida races around the base, forced to translate the lies of the Dutch officers as they instruct the Bosniaks to prepare for evacuation to a “safe place.” Aida knows the truth—that Mladić’s forces are loading the men onto trucks and taking them to be killed. She first tries to hide her teenage sons and husband in obscure corners of the base, which is a repurposed abandoned factory, while she pleads repeatedly, desperately (and ultimately vainly) with her UN employers to ensure their safe passage.

Žbanić insists that, like the UN peacekeepers in Srebrenica, her audience knows what is happening—that it is genocide, and that we are responsible for bearing witness. Twice we see a Dutch junior officer who wears a Star of David pendant observe his superiors equivocate on Aida’s anguished pleas for help. His disgust with his commanders is evident. But for Bosnian viewers there is an added level of poignancy in this obvious reference to the world’s inaction during the Holocaust.

[caption id="attachment_2526" align="aligncenter" width="840"] A still from the film shows Bosniaks taking refuge at the UN Dutch peacekeeper base in Srebrenica.[/caption]

In 1993, at the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Elie Wiesel made an impassioned plea to President Clinton, seated only a few paces behind him, to intervene in the conflict: “Mr. President, I cannot NOT tell you something. I have been in the former Yugoslavia, last fall. I cannot sleep since— what I have seen. As a Jew I am saying this, we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country…Something, anything must be done.”

Nor was Wiesel alone in his testimony. America’s Jewish community was at the forefront of the international effort to demand a credible response to the Bosnian Genocide. In Aida, Žbanić is the one bearing witness to those who saw what was happening in BiH and called it by its proper name.

The film is harrowing. It is an emotional ordeal to sit through for anyone. But for those from BiH, especially for those who have any direct experience or memory of the war, it is almost unbearable. This is also the film’s greatest triumph: it is a story about the Bosnian Genocide, told by Bosnians, for Bosnian audiences. That it has, rightly, won international acclaim is hugely significant, but Žbanić’s crowning achievement is in refusing to tell this story for anyone other than the Bosnian and Bosniak people themselves.

One aspect of that commitment is seen in the director’s remarkable talent for capturing the authenticity of the Bosnian people; their affect, their cadence —how our language sounds when it is whispered. Especially when it is whispered by our mothers; whispered when they, alone, were left to tell us that it would all work out, that we were safe. Knowing that it was not true.

For this Bosnian the film felt almost nauseating in its intimacy. One scarcely experiences the production as a piece of media at all. It took me nearly a week to watch the whole thing, because I could not manage more than twenty or so minutes at a time. My breathing would quicken, verging on hyperventilating; I would realize only after the fact I had been digging my fingers into my thighs, rocking in place.

Such reactions are, obviously, manifestations of being forced to relive trauma. But this too is a testament to the singularity of the work. Because the truth is that Bosnian and Srebrenica Genocide denial is perhaps more rampant today than at any time since the events themselves occurred.

In Serbia, and the RS entity in post-war BiH, denial and negationism are official government policy. Across the territory of the latter, including Srebrenica, returnees are routinely harassed, their properties, community centers, and places of worship defaced. Bosniak children are prevented from referring to and studying the Bosnian language, or learning the history of the genocide. The government in the de facto capital of the entity, Banja Luka, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, over the last two decades sponsoring the publication of a series of revisionist and negationist accounts of the Bosnian Genocide. Worse, its leadership, headed by Milorad Dodik, is explicitly attempting to engineer the entity’s secession from BiH, and thus the belated realization of a “Greater Serbia” that caused the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian War in the first place.

Much as in the 1990s, the international response to all of this is muted at best. Indeed, the very existence of the RS—a product of the U.S.-brokered Dayton Peace Accords in 1995 —is an affront to the survivors of the genocide. As the war-time leadership of the RS acknowledged openly, the sole purpose of its creation was the extermination and expulsion of the Bosniak and non-Serb populations of northwestern and eastern BiH. Even the entity’s name speaks to this; it is a grammatically bizarre construction which does not easily translate to English and barely makes sense in our language. In Western media it’s often incorrectly glossed as “Serb Republic.” In terms of its intended meaning, it is perhaps more accurate to refer to it as “Serbland.” But the result is the same: it is a chauvinist term, meant to erase non-Serbs from the area’s politics, society, and history.

In this sense, the events portrayed in Aida are not history, per se. They occurred in the past, yes, but the politics that caused the horror in Srebrenica, which caused the Bosnian War, remain active and unchanged. No one who has even a passing familiarity with the daily stream of vulgar, sectarian chauvinism emanating from the ruling regimes in Belgrade and Banja Luka could seriously believe that these reactionaries regret the genocide. Or that they would pass up an opportunity to recreate the horrors of Srebrenica— or any of Bosnia’s dozens of other killing fields. One need only recall the warning issued to NATO forces by Serbia’s now President Aleksandar Vučić in the Serbian parliament on July 20, 1995, as the executions in Srebrenica were still ongoing: “Kill one Serb, and we’ll kill a hundred Muslims.”

Today Mr. Vučić presides over a one-party regime in Serbia, just like his mentor Slobodan Milošević. The regime hands out free copies of genocide denial literature to those seeking COVID-19 vaccines. BiH’s friends in Europe, meanwhile, award Nobel Prizes and seats in the House of Lords to genocide deniers like Peter Handke and Claire Fox—that is, when their governments are not busy proposing the country’s partition and dissolution.

The international community watched in real time as the killings in Srebrenica unfolded. They expended more energy trying to wash their hands of any sort of meaningful involvement in the Bosnian War, than they did on implementing the idea of humanitarian intervention. When such action finally came, it only took the deaths of fewer than 30 VRS soldiers for the genocidal regime to concede to negotiations. But by that point, nearly 100,000 other Bosnians had been killed— most of them civilians. The vast majority were Bosniaks, targeted systematically for extermination by the VRS.

Regardless of whether Quo Vadis, Aida? wins the Oscar for best foreign film, Žbanić’s work has already cemented, in searing detail, the truth of the genocide in Srebrenica and BiH. For as determined as the forces of negation and revision are, her work has projected the memory of that terrible crime to the world.

But should she win, Bosnians will weep again—this time, tears of catharsis. Our story, and our survival, will finally be seen and recognized on its own terms.
    [post_title] => Bearing witness to genocide: 'Quo Vadis, Aida?' is a shattering, essential film
    [post_excerpt] => Director Jasmila Žbanić dramatizes the events surrounding the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, when Serb nationalist forces, led by convicted war criminal Ratko Mladic, murdered more than 8,000 Bosniaks, mostly men and boys. 
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Bearing witness to genocide: ‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’ is a shattering, essential film

by Jasmin Mujanović 

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    [post_content] => The bleakest and likeliest scenario for Afghanistan after the US withdrawal is a Taliban victory.

What was it for? After all the counted and uncounted dead, the destruction, the waste, the trauma, the failure, the loss, what was the war in Afghanistan for? Twenty years after it invaded an already war-torn country, the Biden Administration has announced a full withdrawal of its military, scheduled to be completed by the deeply symbolic date of September 11. From my perspective as an Afghan woman and as a foreign policy analyst, this decision is an acknowledgement of absolute failure.

I am 38 years old. Afghanistan has been at war longer than I have been alive. My parents and I came to the U.S. as refugees almost four decades ago; then, we were fleeing the Soviet invasion and occupation. Because the American war has gone on for so long, few people know or care that by 2001 Afghanistan was already sitting amid the ruins of two successive wars; by then the Soviet invasion of the 1980s and the violent internal power struggle that followed in the 1990s had already killed and displaced millions of Afghans and laid waste to the country. When the U.S. decided to invade to overthrow the Taliban in retribution for the 9/11 attacks, few questioned the logic of the global superpower and the strongest military alliance going to war with the world’s poorest, weakest country.

The most charitable explanation for the last 20 years of Afghanistan’s collective nightmare is that the U.S. haphazardly chose to respond to an unconventional threat posed by a transnational terrorist network with a conventional war.

I have observed and questioned American, European and regional policy toward Afghanistan for the length of my career:  trying to share dispassionate analysis of the war: the layered material, physical and psychological harm it brought to millions of Afghans; the economic catastrophe the conflict entailed; the misguided military policies in Western capitals; the toxic consequences of an aid bonanza;  and Pakistan’s brazen double-dealing in Afghanistan. I stayed dispassionate when explaining to policymakers that one night U.S. Special Forces killed eight members of my own family in Nangahar as they slept in their home, in a senseless frenzy of violence for which we will see no investigation, apology or justice.  None of it matters now, if it ever did, and Afghans at home and in the diaspora are left to contemplate their rage, fear and heartbreak.

Afghanistan going forward would face formidable challenges even if President Ashraf Ghani’s government were competent. The majority of families live in deep, multigenerational poverty, worsened through repeated displacement because of violent conflict. Most women and girls, as many as 84 percent by the government’s own admission, are illiterate. Outside major provincial cities and the capital, most Afghans still lack access to basic infrastructure like clean water or electricity, or to services like healthcare and education.

The economic outlook was grim before the onset of the COVID-19 crisis; now millions more men and women find themselves even worse off than they did a year ago as access to casual labor for a daily wage dried up through the pandemic. Heavily dependent on agriculture, the country faces serious consequences of climate change: floods and droughts are on the rise, while opium production is an ongoing scourge. And still the war grinds on, killing dozens if not hundreds each month.

The bleakest and likeliest scenario for Afghanistan is a Taliban victory following the departure of U.S. and other foreign forces. They will probably continue to capture districts and provinces from national security forces until they can claim control of the entire country, fueling civil war between the official backers of the government on one hand and the Taliban and its allies on the other. The hope of various negotiating processes—between the U.S. and the Taliban, and the Taliban and the Afghan government—was to try and fold the Taliban leadership into a transitional government that constituted of the full range of Afghan political actors, with an election to follow.

So far, the Taliban have made clear they are uninterested in this process until foreign forces have left the country. They expect to be in a stronger position by then.

Unfortunately, the constituent backers of the Afghan government also have a poor track record for peace. Many of the same leaders who now jostle for a place at the negotiating table have impeccable war crime credentials. They bombed, raped, pillaged and massacred their way through the Afghan civil war before the U.S. re-elevated them to power in Kabul after ousting the Taliban. Others used their political connections to generate lucrative relationships with U.S. agencies and contractors, funnelling aid intended to build schools or clinics into vast patronage networks. Key security and intelligence organs have been systematically torturing and executing suspected Taliban members. The bad blood between the different groups competing for power, and the Taliban’s apparent reluctance to share power unless they hold the preponderance of it, suggests the fighting will continue for years.

To put it more simply, the Taliban have won, and see no reason to rule Afghanistan in any way that does not acknowledge their victory.

And yet the notion of Taliban victory is anathema to many Afghans, both inside the country and in the diaspora. Even those who did not support the purpose or goals, such as they were, of the U.S. war were nonetheless relieved to be free of the group’s violent, arbitrary governance and practices. That relief was short-lived, as Taliban members and leadership regrouped in their safe haven across the border in Pakistan and returned to fight a new ground war that more violent than before. That violence spared no one, and the Taliban remain responsible for more Afghan deaths than international or Afghan security forces. What we know now of life in Taliban-controlled areas suggests very little has changed in their outlook, their role in Afghan society or how they intend to govern in Afghanistan. Where the Taliban hold power, in roughly half the country, the group institutes the same rules and codes that defined their attitudes when it was last in power.

No one will suffer more in Afghanistan from a Taliban revanche than Afghan women and girls. Can girls attend school, or will women be able to continue working in their chosen professions? Can anyone inside or outside Afghanistan challenge the Taliban’s writ where it holds power? The answers to most of these questions is no. The Taliban has long demonstrated how it deals with dissent. Over the past two years, a campaign of targeted assassinations across Afghanistan has killed dozens of journalists, activists and community leaders, men and women, who criticize the group. Some die after criticizing the government. In all instances, the questions of who is responsible, and whether there will be any accountability for murdering Afghans in broad daylight, go unanswered.

Then what? What does Afghanistan have to look forward to? The country’s population is staggeringly young (around 63 percent of the population is younger than 25); a generation has grown up entirely in wartime, uncertain of who can bring them stability, peace and prosperity. With the end of the U.S. war, will Afghans be able to look each other in the eye and concede that powerful groups have all wrought countless damage to the country and its people? That, if total impunity and disregard for the rule of law no longer defined the character of the Afghan state, the country would have half a chance of reconciling competing factions and ethnicities? Perhaps, but it will take another decade before a new generation of politically engaged Afghan men and women advocate for shaping the type of society they want to live in.

Afghanistan will remain in crisis for years to come, but the world’s already limited attention will almost certainly shift away completely. U.S. forces will not return to Afghanistan after they withdraw, even if the Taliban capture Kabul and overthrow the current government. The war may be ending in American eyes, but I will remember the names of every official, politician, diplomat, pundit, think tanker, and “expert” who made a living propagating the lie that the war was good, or right, or winnable, or making progress, or turning a corner, or that David Petraeus was a military genius, or that the Afghan government served the interests of its own people. It was a carnival of bad faith, bad choices, bad actors, and death. I will not forget.
    [post_title] => The US decision to withdraw from Afghanistan is an admission of absolute failure
    [post_excerpt] => The most charitable explanation for the last 20 years of Afghanistan’s collective nightmare is that the U.S. haphazardly chose to respond to an unconventional threat posed by a transnational terrorist network with a conventional war.
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The US decision to withdraw from Afghanistan is an admission of absolute failure

by Fatima Ayub

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    [post_date] => 2021-02-12 04:13:29
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    [post_content] => Civil society organizations in Myanmar are pushing for international recognition of internet access as a human right.

Since the internet first emerged during the 2011 Arab Spring as an effective means of organizing grassroots protests and speaking directly to the rest of the world in an unprecedented way, human rights defenders have found that it can also be used as a weapon against them. Since 2011, nationalist politicians in both authoritarian and democratic states have learned how to manipulate their citizens through social media—and when to use internet shutdowns to cut their critics off from the rest of the world. The Myanmar military clearly understands this dichotomy well. Since seizing power on January 31, it has restricted internet access—starting with Facebook, which for most people in Myanmar is their primary gateway to the online world.

In the midst of massive peaceful protests and a violent response from the military, people inside Myanmar have attempted to get information out during first a partial and then nearly total internet shutdown. It has never been easy for human rights defenders in Myanmar, but without the internet it is exponentially harder.

This is not the first time the Myanmar government has limited or blocked internet access. Eight townships in Rakhine and Chin states have been living with shutdowns off and on since June 2019. The military reportedly lifted those shutdowns on February 3, even as they began to restrict access elsewhere. Without access to the internet during the pandemic, residents— many of them survivors of the military’s genocide against ethnic Rohingya—have been denied essential information and vital aid. Now there are signs that internet shutdowns will be the new normal in Myanmar.

#WhatIsHappeningInMyanmar?

Using this hashtag and others, people inside Myanmar have been doing their best to report events on the ground, although Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger have been blocked since February 3. Many people, including activists and journalists,  moved to Twitter, where they called for the world to pay attention and support them. The military responded by blocking access to Twitter and Instagram on February 5, and followed this with a broader internet shutdown.  For a few days, friends and family outside of Myanmar had no information; they were left to wonder whether their loved ones were safe. Only a few independent media outlets and individual activists, such as journalist Mratt Kyaw Thu, managed to circumvent the shutdown and post live updates to social media.

Internet access now appears to be at least partially restored. Footage of protests, including a video of the military shooting 19-year old Myat Thet Thet Khaing, is making the rounds on social media; but military leaders refuse to back away from their anti-democratic coup, despite international condemnation and the imposition of sanctions by the United States.

In fact, the military has proposed a draconian “cyber security bill.”  According to an open letter signed and posted online by 161 Myanmar civil society organizations—a brave move, given the ongoing arrests of members of the National League for Democracy party as well as Union Election Commission officials and high-profile activists— the bill:

…includes clauses which violate human rights including the rights to freedom of expression, data protection and privacy, and other democratic principles and human rights in the online space. As the “bill” is drafted by the current military regime to oppress those who are against its rule, and to restrict the mobilization and momentum of online resistance, we strongly condemn this action by the current military regime in accordance with our democratic principles.

Currently there are only unofficial English translations of the bill available on social media, but reviews by Reuters and BBC reporter Freya Cole confirm that the legislation would prohibit “speech, texts, image, video, audio file, sign, or other expressions disrupting unity, stabilization, and peace.” The text also appears to include provisions that would enshrine the government’s right to shut down the internet at will and require Internet Service Providers to retain massive amounts of user data. ISPs that do not comply could be subject to fines and see their employees imprisoned.

The internet as a weapon

The military knows from its own experience the power of the internet—and especially of social media. The consensus among international experts and the U.N. is that the genocide of the Rohingya was enabled by the military’s use of Facebook; this is something that even Facebook acknowledges.

In a 2018 article on the role Facebook played in inciting against the Rohingya, The New York Times reported that the military created fake Facebook personas who “posed as fans of pop stars and national heroes” and “flooded” the social media platform with hatred, spreading misinformation and fear about Muslims generally and the Rohingya specifically, even as the military systematically massacred and raped Rohingya, burning their villages to the ground and forcing the survivors to flee to neighboring Bangladesh.

Facebook provided some shocking statistics about posts in Myanmar during the genocide of the Rohingya. In a 2018 blog post the company says it removed “425 Facebook Pages, 17 Facebook Groups, 135 Facebook accounts and 15 Instagram accounts in Myanmar” for engaging in “Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior” (CIB)—i.e., networks of fake accounts dedicated to inciting violence and hatred and spreading misinformation. According to the company “[a]pproximately 2.5 million people followed at least one of these Facebook Pages.”

But that wasn’t the end of the matter. Facebook has continually reported on efforts remove CIB— yet some of this content is still active. In fact, the social media platform banned a military television network page that was operating after the coup had already taken place only because the Wall Street Journal asked why it was still active, given that it had been banned earlier.

#SaveMyanmar

We do not have any clarity on what will happen next to internet freedom in Myanmar. For social media users outside the country, this a good time to follow the Twitter accounts of people who have been reporting events from the ground as much as and whenever possible. Twitter should consider authenticating these accounts and fast-tracking a blue check of verification to those who request it.

In a February 6 letter, civil society organizations in Myanmar called for Internet Service Providers to “prevent the military from accessing user data…take every action available to appeal the recent junta directives, [and] develop plans in the event the human rights situation in Myanmar deteriorates.” The situation in Myanmar is inarguably deteriorating, and ISPs must develop those plans now. Telenor, the Norwegian multinational communications services provider, has said repeatedly that it is doing everything it can to push back on these orders, but their best is clearly not enough.

The UN Human Rights Council is holding an emergency session on Friday to discuss the “implications” of the situation in Myanmar. The UN has already taken steps towards declaring access to the internet a human right. As it considers how to support human rights in the country it should emphasize the need to maintain internet access.

After all, the internet isn’t just a weapon; it is still, even now, and despite those who continue to abuse it for nefarious purposes, a tool for upholding human rights and maintaining democracy.
    [post_title] => In Myanmar, the internet is a tool and a weapon
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In Myanmar, the internet is a tool and a weapon

by Dia Kayyali

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    [post_content] => “Show me your budget, and I will tell you what you value.”
--Joe Biden

In 2019, America spent $732 billion on its military. China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and Brazil spent $726 billion combined. Since American defense philosophy is predicated on the belief that national defense is better carried out abroad rather than at home, it spends billions of dollars on overseas military bases—of which the U.S. has more than any other nation—and aircraft carriers.

Meanwhile, more than 210,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 and more than 7 million have contracted the virus, according to the Center for Disease Control. But the Republican-controlled Senate has refused to approve bills initiated by the Democrats, which would provide relief of $2,000 per month to people deprived of an income, even as frontline healthcare workers struggled during the height of the pandemic to secure personal protective equipment (PPE) while the federal government declined to help. 

The country with the biggest economy in the world failed to protect its citizens from unemployment, economic recession, and a pandemic. 

It’s clear we value guns and other weapons of war over the medical needs of citizens those arms are supposed to protect. 

Last summer, as financial relief to individuals under the CARES Act was about to end, Senators Bernie Sanders and Ed Markey proposed an amendment to the $740.5 billion annual defense budget that would cut 10 percent, or $74 billion, and invest the funds in education, healthcare, and housing in poor communities. 

The Senate rejected the amendment, with 37 Democrats joining their Republican colleagues to vote “no.” Senators Sanders, Warren, and Markey were among those who voted in favor of the amendment. 

In the House, Democrats split 92-139 against the amendment to cut the defense budget. This prompted Representative Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat representing California’s 17th District, to tweet: "I don’t want to hear anyone tell me that we can’t enhance expanded unemployment benefits when we spend more on endless wars than the next ten countries combined."



Bernie Sanders argued that the cut would help create jobs by building schools, affordable housing, hospitals, sustainable energy, clean water facilities and other community centered needs that have been proven to improve health and decrease crime. It would help the federal government improve education by reducing class sizes, increasing teacher pay and supporting free public tuition for universities, colleges and trade schools.  

More poignantly, Sanders said:

 If this horrific coronavirus pandemic has shown us anything, it is that national security involves a lot more than bombs, missiles, tanks, submarines, nuclear warheads and other weapons of mass destruction. National security also means doing all we can to improve the lives of the American people, many of whom have been abandoned by our government for decades.

The United States government claims to be protecting its citizens from foreign threats, yet cannot shield them from domestic ills like homelessness, underpaid teachers, the lack of universal healthcare, and failure to implement a minimum wage that keeps full-time workers out of poverty. 

The conservative position is that a superpower needs a strong military to protect itself from “emerging threats” in China, Iran, North Korea and Russia. 

But what good is a strong military if it protects a nation that cannot provide food to low-income school children? 

And what good is it to be a nuclear power if America cannot solve the problem of Black women—ironically America’s most committed voters—dying at childbirth at higher rates than any other ethnic group in America?

President Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961 of an oversized military when he spoke of an overinvestment in military spending and the excessive influence of the “military industrial complex.”

We have failed to heed that warning. We need to reimagine what safety means.

America’s defense policy needs to change, beginning with its position on nuclear weapons. As late as the 1980s, the United States and the former Soviet Union held close to 90 percent of the world’s nearly 75,000 nuclear weapons; through various nuclear non-proliferation treaties, that figure has dropped to around 14,000, with the U.S. and the Russian Federation continuing to hold 90 percent. 

Serious, knowledgeable people have called for reducing America’s weapons stockpile.

William Perry, who was Deputy Secretary of Defense during the Clinton Administration, wrote in a 2017 Washington Post op-ed that America’s proposed $1.7 trillion nuclear weapons spending was unnecessary. No surprise attack could destroy all of the navy’s submarines, he explained; but the risk of a conventionally armed cruise missile being mistaken for one with a nuclear warhead was real—as shown by the three narrowly averted Cold War catastrophes. Moreover, cutting nuclear-armed cruise missiles and cancelling plans to replace Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) stockpiles would save $30 billion and $149 billion, respectively—i.e., more than double the $75 billion that would be saved with a 10 percent cut to the current military budget. 

Similarly, Berry Blechman of the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., argued in a 2016 opinion for the New York Times that the $1 trillion nuclear weapons modernization program approved by President Obama was unnecessary because it would “impose an increasing burden on the defense budget, making it difficult to maintain our conventional military superiority—the real guarantee of U.S. security.” Like Perry, Blechman recommends cutting more than 100 ICBMs. 

Defunding the Pentagon is an essential strategy for appropriating funds to social services, exactly as is defunding police departments that do not actually reduce crime. This is a message the public needs to hear.

America has 6,800 nuclear weapons in its arsenal. But it only takes 100 nuclear weapons to destroy the Earth. And yet, the Trump Administration has asked for $29 billion in nuclear weapons spending for the 2021 fiscal budget—even though the president’s own Air Force Chief of Staff has argued that the Pentagon cannot afford it. 

COVID-19 has killed more Americans than the five most recent wars the U.S. has been involved in combined. Our current military outlook is too focused on defending the homeland instead of actual Americans who actually reside in it. Republicans are angling to push through a SCOTUS nominee to end the Affordable Care Act, threatening to strip millions of Americans of the only healthcare safety net they have—during a pandemic.  

Small businesses are struggling to secure COVID-19 relief while Donald Trump, a billionaire, notoriously paid only $750 per year in federal income tax.

During the 2012 presidential debates, Mitt Romney worried that the U.S. had fewer naval ships than at any other point in the country’s history—to which Obama responded that it also had fewer horses and bayonets. In other words, having more doesn’t make us stronger; on the contrary, being smaller and nimbler makes us more efficient. Obama was wrong to dismiss the threat to U.S. security posed by the Kremlin, but Putin’s most potent weapon wasn’t the military: it was disinformation and election meddling, against which Republicans in Washington refuse to protect the nation. 

The United States Postal Service is an essential service, particularly during a pandemic election year, when millions are choosing to mail their ballots rather than risk being infected by COVID-19 while standing in line to vote. And yet, the USPS is facing a budget crisis. We are a democracy that can single-handedly destroy the Earth, but can’t make it possible for every citizen to vote.

The knowledge that we have an arsenal of unnecessary nuclear weapons and a military capable of occupying several nations simultaneously might make conservatives feel secure. I’m willing to bet, however, that most Americans would rather have universal healthcare, affordable housing, and improved public education. That silent majority must surely feel some bitterness at seeing their tax dollars allocated to fund endless wars when the local hospital doesn’t even have enough ventilators to save all the Covid-19 patients. 

 
    [post_title] => The case for taking from the Pentagon and giving to the people
    [post_excerpt] => What good is a strong military if it protects a nation that cannot provide food to low-income school children? 
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The case for taking from the Pentagon and giving to the people

by Terrell J. Starr

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    [post_date] => 2020-03-20 18:57:47
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    [post_content] => With security risks and data-leaks, why do some serving soldiers bring smartphones on deployment, and how do countries differ?

A few years ago, my husband deployed to Afghanistan where the British Army had categorically banned all soldiers from using their phones. He called once a week at most, and our conversations were stilted and short. It’s hard to share sweet nothings in front of a line of soldiers waiting their turn. All was well until one morning I had coffee with another army wife. Her husband was working in the US Marine Corps Camp Leatherneck, and she got to facetime him every. single. morning. What I’d thought was an iron law of deployment – no personal communications devices for anyone, anywhere, anytime – turned out to be more an evolving set of practices.

Cell phones are wildly insecure. They’re the most vulnerable node in a network designed to generate and exploit user-data and share it with a wide range of actors, from device manufacturers, operating system owners, content-creators, software and app-designers, phone companies and partner networks. And those are just the organizations officially permitted to pull down mobile device data. Many apps leak data continually, as a consequence of either poor design or the user’s failure to install updates. We also have a perennial problem of apps that access and share personal and device data they have collected unnecessarily.

Cell phones use several different families of communications protocol — SMS, MMS, WiFi, Bluetooth and GSM – each with its own security vulnerabilities and unpredictable interaction effects. Then there are the network exploits: network providers use signalling protocols that  have known and more or less unfixable weaknesses. This means that more than half the attempts to tap calls made on 3G networks succeed, while nine out of ten SMS messages can be intercepted.

Attackers can exploit all of these weaknesses. Spyware such as NSO Group’s infamous Pegasus software can allegedly read text messages, track calls, collect passwords, track the location of the phone, access its microphone and camera and suck up information from apps. No wonder so many militaries ban personal cell phones for soldiers in action, while some ban their use altogether.

For soldiers, however, a cellphone can seem essential. These are young people who exercise a lot, often using apps, are typically far from home and often bored — and they really, really like to show off to their friends by posting videos and photographs. But the morale boost of a cellphone can undermine operational security:

    
 	
  • Researchers for Bellingcat, the open-source intelligence website, used soldiers’ social media posts to forensically trace the entire journey of the Russian military unit that transported the Buk missile launcher, which likely shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) over eastern Ukraine in 2014. Bellingcat used painstaking geolocation work on selfies the soldiers uploaded to popular Russian social media platforms VK and Odnoklassniki to determine the whole route. Some soldiers made the job a lot easier by photographing themselves in front of place-name signs along the way.
    • 
 	
  • In January this year, during a military exercise in the Mojave Desert, a US Marine Corps lance corporal ‘got his whole unit killed’ – hypothetically — by posting a picture of them on Facebook. Nowadays, every conflict zone is “an electronic warfare-type environment,” said the Marine Corps’ head of education, in a widely syndicated article clearly intended to get the message across the whole US military.
    • 
 	
  • But it’s not all soldier selfies. The 2018 Strava case showed that a popular fitness tracker, used by many in the US military and diplomatic services to record their favourite running routes for other app users, had exposed the locations of military and intelligence installations around the world.
    • 


Different militaries have varied in their responses, often in ways that seem to track their broader culture and politics. Turkey banned smartphone use by soldiers on-base in 2015, and Russia followed suit in 2019 when its parliament unanimously voted to ban tablets and smartphone use by on-duty armed forces. The Russian law also forbids men and women in the military from sharing information and photos about their service, because this content had been used by others “to shape a biased assessment of the Russian Federation's state policies."

A more liberal outlier is China, where the People’s Liberation Army decided in 2016 to limit where and when soldiers on domestic bases can use their smartphones, and only after they realized that the taxi-hailing apps soldiers used to get back at night were collecting personally identifiable location data around military installations. Some bans are specific to location; Indian soldiers along the “Line of Actual Control” between Indian and Chinese-controlled parts of the Himalayas are forbidden to use Chinese apps like Weibo and WeChat. Countries that are more likely to use internet shutdowns also seem more likely to implement blanket-bans on soldiers using smartphones. Turkey, for example, recently blocked access to Twitter during a bombardment in Syria. In India, Kashmir is now in its six-month of a government-imposed internet shutdown.

Authoritarian countries tend to be more absolutist in their policies regarding communications. They also lack the institutional capacity to consistently police their draconian rules, so smartphone bans may be observed more in the breach. Already, Bellingcat has easily identified many Russian soldiers’ pseudonymous profiles, and the weakest link in the chain — as I can attest — is often the proud or just emotionally needy wives and girlfriends who share pictures or insist on frequent phone calls.

The US seems more permissive on communications devices than the UK’s military, based on my experience of a friend’s husband buying and using an iPad on a US base in Afghanistan. One reason could be that US deployments tend to be longer and more frequent. But as our cell phones become increasingly integrated into every aspect of our lives, they represent an increasing threat — which is why the rules are tightening. Since 2018, the US has forbidden GPS-enabled functioning of personal devices on deployment, although this unintentionally hilarious education video – “Don’t end up like this guy”– suggests the ban is more honoured in the breach. Decisions to ban devices altogether, and not just specific GPS functionality on the devices, seem to be determined on a case by case basis. A recent 82nd Airborne deployment to the Middle East that banned all smartphones and devices was sufficiently newsworthy to be reported on CNN.

One factor quietly influencing phones and deployment is geography. Typically, a soldier is deploying to somewhere far away. Distance tends to lower the expectation of frequent contact, and it also complicates the matter of the cell phone service provider. Soldiers from the US or UK who deployed to Afghanistan could, in theory, buy a local prepaid SIM card and put it in their own smuggled phone. This would be a bad move. A unique identifier in the phone, verifiable via a global industry database, would immediately allow the local phone provider to determine the phone’s provenance. With Russian, Iranian and Chinese intelligence agencies widely believed to be perched on Afghan networks, they could build up a picture not just of troop movements but possibly of identified individuals to track when they went home. Following the soldier home electronically doesn’t seem to have happened Afghanistan, but it’s been reported to have happened to NATO personnel in the Baltics, whose families were apparently traced by Russian entities.

Not being able to trust the local cell phone provider can have a big impact, and it can happen even if the conflict is in the military’s own territory. The Kenya Defence Force (KDF) operates in Al Shabab-contested parts of north-eastern Kenya, near Somalia, and seem to have an active feud with Hormuud, the main Somali telecoms provider. The KDF frequently targets Hormuud cellphone towers across the border in Somalia. Al Shabab, which has long been suspected of being close to the cellphone operator Hormuud, returns the favour, frequently blowing up Safaricom towers inside the Kenyan border. This knocks out some of the KDF’s communications, and often happens just before attacks. Researcher Rashid Abdi has suggested that the battles over these cellphone towers could be some combination of a proxy war between the governments of Kenya and Somalia, and the Somali telecoms provider Hormuud using Al Shabab to “gain commercial advantage or to avenge previous attacks” on Hormuud’s cellphone towers. Either way, KDF soldiers cannot reliably and securely communicate with cellphones while on Kenyan turf.

The Israeli Defence Forces’ unusually liberal policy regarding cell phone use during active service may be partly because their soldiers stay relatively close to home and can use their own domestic service providers. A recent alleged catfishing attempt by Hamas tried to tempt Israeli soldiers to share information with fake profiles of attractive young women on social media sites. Like the US Marine whose unit selfie ‘got his whole unit killed’ and became a cautionary tale on the evening news, the thwarted Hamas attack on a known vulnerability – the infinite vanity and ever-hopefulness of horny young men far from home – seems to have been publicised as a lesson for the troops. A widespread ban on personal cell phones in the IDF seems unlikely, not least because in a small country with near-universal conscription, parents are eager to keep tabs on their children during military service.

Military chiefs often focus on the operational security problems of cell phones, but downplay another reason for their disquiet — i.e., soldiers using them to highlight bad treatment or conditions. Soldiers in India and Turkey have reportedly uploaded pictures or videos of bad food or poor shelter.

Even when conditions are fine, cell phones are an escape from military life, and not all countries welcome that. South Korea banned its conscripts from having mobile phones at all during their two years’ service, and rigorously enforced it. But in 2018 the ban was reviewed and partly relaxed as part of a wider effort to reduce the isolation and total control over conscripted soldiers. Now, soldiers are allowed to use cell phones for an hour or two per day in barracks, enforced not by the military itself, but by specialised subscriptions from telecoms providers. Both the conscripted soldiers and their families back home report being happier, and time will tell if lessening the total control over soldiers affects their morale or cohesion.

Enemies will always exploit vulnerabilities – both technological and human. Official policies on soldiers and cell phones will go on evolving as the demands of operational security change, the places they’re deployed to vary, and our expectations about connectedness to serving loved ones develop. And as the rules evolve, the ways people break them will, too.
    [post_title] => Soldiers with smartphones can be a gift to the enemy
    [post_excerpt] => Half the attempts to tap calls made on 3G networks succeed, while nine out of ten SMS messages can be intercepted.
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Soldiers with smartphones can be a gift to the enemy

by Maria Farrell

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    [post_date] => 2019-08-09 15:36:13
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    [post_content] => Human rights organizations warn that northwestern Syria is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in the twenty-first century. 

On July 22 Russian jets bombed the market in Maarat al-Numan, a town near Idlib in northwestern Syria, killing 40 civilians. According to an eyewitness named Um Abdullah, the bombing was so devastating that rescue workers struggled to find corpses left intact. “They filled entire bags with body parts,” she said.

Idlib and the surrounding area is now the last remaining territory in Syria still controlled by opposition forces. Over three million people live there, including over 1.5 million children. They are nearly all civilians, with about half displaced from other parts of Syria. After Russia intervened directly in the civil war in late 2015 on the side of the Assad regime, pro-regime forces, including Iran-backed militias, recaptured all the other rebel-held areas. Those who refused to surrender to the regime were deported to Idlib, where they now await their fate. Since the end of April Bashar al-Assad’s regime forces and their Russian allies have been pounding the area with air strikes, killing nearly 800 people so far. The UN and human rights NGOs warn of an impending “humanitarian nightmare,” as regime forces decimate cities, pushing civilians to flee toward the sealed Turkish border.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFAZ_FsKxmg&feature=youtu.be

Syrian and Russian militaries renewed their assault on Idlib in late April, recycling tactics they used in places like Aleppo: in addition to heavy indiscriminate attacks on population centers, they destroy essential infrastructure and services such as hospitals, ambulances, schools and markets with targeted strikes from the air. They also kill civil defense teams while they are trying to rescue civilians trapped under rubble. Between heavy airstrikes, shelling, and a ground assault, more than 452,000 people have been displaced over the last three months.

But neither the dire warnings from humanitarian workers and UN agencies, nor the devastating death and destruction, have received significant media attention. The world has turned its attention away from the war for many reasons, but the main factor seems to be that there is essentially nothing new about Syrian civilians dying in indiscriminate airstrikes. Hundreds of thousands have died in such attacks over the last eight years. Activists on the ground disseminate graphic and disturbing images of the carnage and destruction in the hope of shocking the outside world into taking action; but those disturbing images achieve the opposite of their intended purpose, with the news-consuming public feeling helpless and thus increasingly reluctant to look and to know.

Another factor behind the scant reporting from Idlib is that journalists have extremely limited access. All entry of foreign journalists into Idlib requires coordination with the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an offshoot of al-Qaeda, which is the dominant power in the region. Even when journalists do gain access to the area, they face enormous challenges that include limitations of time and space: it’s almost impossible to explain the complex international negotiations and power plays over the fate of this densely populated region in a succinct 750-word news item or a three-minute report for television news.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4I4tthapJw[/embed]

Aftermath of the Russian airstrike on Maarat al-Numan, July 22, 2019.

The significant media coverage of the atrocities in Aleppo, eastern Ghouta and the city of Homs did not alter the fate of these regions: they all fell to the regime, after ferocious military campaigns. The saturation coverage did, however, make it more difficult for Russia to claim that the regime was killing “terrorists” while the wire services were publishing photos and videos of wounded children undergoing painful medical treatment in bombed out hospitals that had run out of anesthesia.

Media coverage also increased international empathy for the people living in areas that were under siege, with activists organizing demonstrations around the world. Syrians followed the online support campaigns and solidarity protests held across the west, feeling that even if their predicament remained unchanged, at least their humanity and suffering were acknowledged. The current silence, despite the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe, makes them feel abandoned. Perhaps, if the assault on Idlib had received the kind of media attention given to Aleppo in 2015, public pressure would have affected western government policy; perhaps those governments would have reconsidered their decision to cut essential funding for civil society organizations in the opposition-held areas of Syria.

Despite the world’s indifference and the dearth of foreign reporters on the ground, local journalists continue to cover events. Samer Daabol, a photojournalist in Idlib, sees his work as an act of defiance against the Syrian regime. He explained that he felt a “responsibility to amplify the voice of civilians,” adding: “No one can do this except us, living in this war zone.” He tried to explain what it’s like to live with a complete absence of physical security. “There is no safe place during the day or night,” he said, adding that the air strikes “create immense pressure, anxiety, sudden precipitation, insomnia, headaches.” He and the rest of Idlib live “a life that revolves around death.”

Idlib’s fate is now in the hands of Turkey, Russia, and, to a lesser extent, Iran. The three countries have negotiated several “de-escalation” deals, but all the armed actors in the conflict — the opposition, the Assad regime, and its ally Russia — have repeatedly violated those agreements.

The Assad regime has vowed to retake every inch of Syria. In pursuit of this goal, it has ignored deals to de-escalate the conflict. Turkey, meanwhile, is determined to prevent the area from falling into the hands of the regime, largely because Ankara knows that as Assad’s forces re-take control of Idlib, a massive number of Syrian civilians will rush to the Turkish border, which has been sealed since 2016. Only a very few have the means to escape by paying smugglers thousands of dollars. Turkish border police routinely shoot and kill Syrian asylum seekers, while others have been caught and deported back. Turkey already has 3.6 million Syrian refugees and they don’t want any more — particularly not if they are jihadi militants. In order to preempt this scenario, Ankara has increased military assistance to the National Liberation Front, a conglomeration of Islamist and mainstream rebel groups.

Umm Yazan, 28, is one of the Civil Defense employees who helps rescue civilians and provide them with medical care. I spoke to her after she had been displaced from her hometown in southern Idlib due to intense airstrikes.

Umm Yazan explained that she joined the Civil Defense, also known as the White Helmets, because she could never abandon her people. White Helmets work under extremely perilous conditions: they are routinely targeted in “double tap” attacks, with bomber planes first hitting a target and then swooping back for a second time to kill rescue workers while they are working to drag survivors out of the rubble. Um Yazan’s five year-old son, Yazan, was killed in an airstrike in 2015. “When I rescue someone’s son, I feel I am recovering my son’s spirit. This gives me such great positive energy to continue my work,” she said.

In recent years I have spoken to hundreds of Idlib residents and met with refugees who managed to escape to Turkey. The dire living conditions in the region — the near-constant shelling, loss of loved ones, poverty, absence of basic amenities, instability, and displacement patterns from and into Idlib, have left an indelible mark on the region’s inhabitants, forging a unique temperament. They have strong communal solidarity, are dogged, fatalistic, fearful, angry and bitter toward the outside world; they also suffer from unyielding, but usually repressed, mental anguish.

“People have changed a great deal,” said Mohammed, a commander with the Free Syrian Army who was displaced from his home in Hama several years ago. “We never expected [when the uprising began in 2011] to be targeted with barrel bombs and missiles.” He added: “These people have been sentenced to death.” While in other regions of Syria the population often pressured the rebels to surrender to the regime, in Idlib half the population is composed of people who chose displacement over “reconciliation.” Many original inhabitants of the region are also opposed to surrender.

[caption id="attachment_1303" align="aligncenter" width="5184"] Atmeh border camp in Idlib, near the Syrian border. Over 800,000 internally displaced people live here in tents, with neither running water nor toilets.[/caption]

“Civilians saw with their own eyes what happened in areas that reconciled with the regime. People there are suffering humiliation, detention and torture,” said Mohammed, the FSA commander. In previous “reconciliation” deals, those who refused to surrender were bussed to Idlib, which was the last stronghold of the opposition. These internally displaced people have seen and heard what the Assad regime’s soldiers do to civilians in formerly opposition held areas — i.e., they rape the women and slaughter indiscriminately. Many people in Idlib believe that opposition factions are implementing the agendas of their foreign sponsors. They also acknowledge that the opposition forces can be abusive toward civilians. And yet, they need their protection.

Yasin (not his real name), a resident of Khan Sheikhoun, said that about 150 members of his extended family had been killed during the eight-year war. “The international community and all countries, Arab and Western, do not care about [us],” he said, adding that he believed the Arab and western governments wanted the Russians to help the Assad regime kill all the people of Idlib. Yasin barely survived the April 2017 Sarin gas attack on Khan Sheikhoun, which killed about 100 people. The UN’s chemical weapons watchdog, the OPCW, held the Syrian regime responsible for the strike. “The entire world abandoned us — Turkey, the world, the West. Nothing is before us except death,” said Yasin. He spoke rapidly, rushing to unload his pain, inhaling and exhaling audibly.

Yasin works as a monitor tracking Syrian and Russian jets. He informs the Syrian Civil Defense of approaching planes, so that they can warn civilians to find shelter, or escape the crowded locations that are routinely targeted by Russian forces and the Syrian regime. His immediate family fled to northern Aleppo, which is under Turkish control and thus safe from airstrikes. Khan Sheikhoun has been largely depopulated, with civilians seeking cover in nearby orchards or fleeing further north. “The Russian jets are chasing people wherever they escape,” Yasin said. But he refuses to leave, insisting that the regime will come for him no matter where he goes. “Let me die when I’m here, on my land.” Yassin’s resolve is not predicated on hope, but on fatalism. “No one hears us. Our blood is the cheapest on earth. Whether a Syrian dies or lives, it does not matter,” he said.

Umm Abdullah is a math teacher and prominent anti-regime activist in her city, Maarat al-Numan, an epicenter of civil society activism in Idlib. She joined the early protest demonstrations in 2011. Today she leads several associations, advocates for the rights of detainees in regime prisons and supports their families. “If you walk around Maarat al-Numan, you will see buildings with floors collapsed atop each other, stores with metal gates blown out. Jets do not leave the sky. Strikes are ongoing... Our children are dying.” She wept as she said, “I have not seen my son in seven years. He was my happiness. My eldest. He had a flame inside him. He was full of life.” ِAbdullah, her son, was arrested in February 2012 and detained in the notorious Sednaya Prison for participating in anti-regime protests. The family was informed only this year that he died under torture back in 2014. Like many other relatives of detainees, they sold property to pay exorbitant bribes for the release of their child, but to no avail.

For the past three years, Idlib has been stuck in an impossible, deadly situation. The frozen low-intensity conflict escalates every few months, resulting in mass casualties; the influence of the jihadis has expanded under the increasingly pragmatic Hayat Tahrir al-Sham; and humanitarian conditions have deteriorated as a consequence of a reduction in international funding. In the west, we are not reading about Idlib in the headlines — or even in the back pages. Because the media is barely reporting the story, many people have the mistaken impression that the war in Syria is over. The people of Idlib have become somewhat accustomed to having their intense suffering ignored — but still, they do feel dehumanized. “We are human beings. We have feelings, just like you,” said Umm Abdullah. “You in the west call for animal rights, for dogs and cats, so first demand our rights, us human beings.”
    [post_title] => Who will write our history? The world looks away while Idlib awaits its fate
    [post_excerpt] => Because the media has largely stopped reporting the war in Syria, there is a widespread misunderstanding that the war in Syria is over. In fact, it has escalated.
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Who will write our history? The world looks away while Idlib awaits its fate

by Elizabeth Tsurkov

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    [post_date] => 2019-06-21 17:23:28
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    [post_content] => America's foreign policy and international image would be improved if the foreign policy community were more diverse.

I am a black man in America, which means I am physically vulnerable all the time. The United States leads the world in police killings of its own black and brown citizens, and ranks first in incarcerating them. Its education system disproportionately funnels black children through the school to prison pipeline. Millions of people  — many of them black — are disenfranchised from voting because they served time in jail for felonies. In many cases they never regain their right to participate  in American democracy. Despite all these obvious and well-documented injustices, the white majority believes America has the moral pedigree to tell the rest of the world how to handle its own internal affairs. 

This attitude among white Americans speaks to an astonishing lack of self-awareness. The people who dominate and shape global conversations in the western and English-speaking world — think tank presidents, diplomats, foreign correspondents, and business executives  — are almost exclusively white men. They have no experience of the America I grew up in, and this limits their ability to understand the world. 

 As a black man who grew up in Detroit and then spent a good part of his adult life traveling and reporting in Eastern Europe, I have learned that white supremacy and imperialism are the same. The difference is that one is global while the other is domestic. Africa is least responsible for global warming but suffers most of its consequences, which are caused by the world’s leading powers. This is the type of visceral understanding gained from lived experience that the white men who dominate and shape the foreign policy conversation do not have. Their understanding of the world is thus limited, and the consequences are becoming increasingly clear: the American conversation about the world lacks nuance and insight; this undermines our ability to engage effectively — which, in turn, weakens both our own society and our place in the world.

I welcome the conversations about the need for more ethnic diversity in foreign policy conversations. I am glad that people are beginning to understand that with more diverse voices, America could develop a foreign policy that was less expansionist in its global engagement. Unfortunately, however, these conversations are predicated on inaccurate beliefs.

A flawed democracy

America is not the world’s most successful democracy; nor is it an example for the world to follow. Its own legal system has kept black people from gaining any real electoral power at the local and national levels. In Florida alone, more than a million people convicted of felonies were disenfranchised from voting before a November referendum restored their rights; the current governor is trying to slow the restoration process. This is not a system to export. It is a system that must be changed.

If America’s white majority were truly interested in making sure that non-white voices were included in foreign policy discussions, they would first work to stop the disenfranchisement of people of color. Nor are teachers with unchecked racial biases qualified to shape the minds of the next generation of foreign policy thinkers.

Besides its many misguided military interventions, such as the now widely-reviled Second Iraq War, the U.S. also has a long-documented history of allowing its intelligence service to carry out assassinations against world leaders whose policies deviate from the administration’s. In the twentieth century the CIA backed the assassination of elected leaders like Chile’s Salvador Allende because he was a socialist, and helped engineer the coup that deposed Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddegh because he wanted to nationalize his country’s oil reserves. 

The United States is accustomed to implementing its foreign policy via the barrel of a gun, which makes a twisted kind of sense for the most gun-toting country on earth with the second-highest number of gun-related murders of any industrialized nation. But if the United States wants to be an example to the world it must change its gun laws and change its ways. It must ban the sale and distribution of military grade weapons to law enforcement agencies that treat the communities they are supposed to serve like enemy combatants. 

There is a saying in journalism that all politics is local. I’d argue that international politics is local and it's impossible to deploy a diverse diplomatic corps if so many potential non-white recruits are disenfranchised or jailed.

I write for The Root, the largest black news site in America. I have the rare opportunity of covering national politics from the perspective of a black person with a black editor. I do not have to deal with a white male editor who might try to change my voice or question my using personal experiences to inform my reporting. I love working at The Root, but my ambition is to be a foreign correspondent. I have two graduate degrees in journalism and another in Russia area studies; I speak two Eastern European languages and can point to many other achievements. But I have never been invited to an interview for any foreign reporting job. 

An editor at a mainstream newspaper once told me that I wasn’t qualified to write about U.S.-Russia/Ukraine relations because I was not a diplomat. This same publication has hired white people without any relevant credentials for foreign reporting positions. One of the recurring claims one hears in foreign policy circles is there aren’t enough qualified people of color to fill open positions. And yet, despite my qualifications, I cannot find a job as a foreign correspondent.

Hypocrisy won't win hearts and minds

The lack of diverse voices in international news has a profound  impact on the coverage of countries like Russia, China, Nigeria and Ukraine. The foreign press corps in Moscow and Kiev are almost exclusively white. I am quite confident that the reporting from those regions would be richer and more nuanced if half the press corps were composed of black and brown reporters who had personal experiences of immigration and of police abuse.

In the United States the coverage of Russia over the past two years has been weak. Analysts have focused on Putin, at the expense of nuanced reporting about ordinary Russians. Our media has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to blame the Kremlin for the fact that millions of Americans decided to vote a white supremacist into the White House, even as they have refused to engage in a serious conversation about the white supremacy that played a far greater role in getting Donald Trump elected than Putin could have done.

Incorporating more ethnically diverse people into foreign policy spaces goes well beyond cherry picking brown faces that seem non-threatening to sit at the table. If the U.S. is to pursue an honest, effective foreign policy, it needs to recruit people who are willing to break from the neo-liberalism that underlies the racism in contemporary American society.

There is transparent hypocrisy in insisting that Russia remove its troops from Ukraine while threatening military intervention in Iran. America regularly condemns Russia and other nations over their abuse of LGBTQ people, even as black trans women in America are murdered at alarming rates. 

Why diversity is important

Too many of our white diplomats are blind to this hypocrisy, because they are the products of an America that was built by and for them. There are too few people like me representing the United States at the table of global affairs, and this undermines the effectiveness of its foreign policy. Take Haiti, for example. Under the expansionist Monroe Doctrine, the United States deployed Marines to the island in 1915 to fend off German influence during World War I. But instead of helping to protect Haiti’s independence, the U.S. occupied the Caribbean country until 1934, exacerbating the theft of resources and political instability caused by French colonization. More recent U.S. policy towards Haiti hasn’t been much better. During the 1970s and 1980s successive administrations supported the violent  regime of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, while Donald Trump stripped Haitians in the United States of their Temporary Protected Status and made them vulnerable to deportation. 

House Democrats have held hearings on reparations for the descendants of slaves who were brought to America from Africa. The conversation needs to go global in the case of Haiti, with a hearing to address reparations for that country — or, better yet, a Marshall Plan.

What is good for Europe is good for Haiti. 

Americans see their country as a global cop enforcing democracy around the world, but Putin, Kim Jong-un, China’s President Xi and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei see a state with dubious motives and a narcissistic worldview.

I am working to diversify the international affairs conversation through my fellowship at Global Strategists Association, a non-profit organization that helps people from the black diaspora to engage in foreign policy spaces. Most of our events are held in spaces that are majority people of color, and look at domestic and global issues through the lens of blackness. Founder Apprecia Faulkner created the organization after encountering obstacles that prevented her from persuading white-dominated organizations to open up for black participants. I and other fellows are benefiting from her efforts, but the fact that she had to build that space illustrates the problem: America’s foreign policy circles are not interested in being as diverse as the image of America they sell to the world. 

The United States needs to carry out a major makeover of its domestic politics so that it is committed to all of its citizens, and not just the white ones. Only then can America truly promote an honest foreign policy that is not predicated on exploiting the world’s most vulnerable people — which is precisely what it does to its own minority groups at home. 
    [post_title] => America's foreign policy is undermined by the dominance of white men
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America’s foreign policy is undermined by the dominance of white men

by Terrell J. Starr

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    [post_content] => Gaza is often described as a humanitarian catastrophe, but its crisis is the result of self-serving policy implementation that could be reversed

Exactly a week after the most recent military escalation between Gaza and Israel, Haaretz, a left-leaning Israeli newspaper, placed on the front page of its Hebrew print edition a photograph depicting a crowd of Palestinians in Gaza gathered around a steaming cauldron of soup. Mostly men and boys, they are clamoring to get closer to the cauldron, clutching pots, bowls and even plastic storage containers to be filled. It is an aerial shot and you can almost hear the commotion through the image.

Over just three days during the first week of May, 25 Palestinian residents of Gaza and four Israeli citizens were killed while hundreds were injured. This was just the latest of eight military escalations since Operation Protective Edge in 2014. Israeli missiles and artillery fire damaged homes and businesses in Gaza, while barrages of rockets fired from the Strip hit dozens of homes in Israel in a tactic that seemed meant to overwhelm the Iron Dome defense system, which has until now prevented heavy damage and loss of life in Israeli cities and towns.

For most Israelis, Gaza exists only as a place of violence and misery. The images in the mainstream media depict its residents as either shooting rockets or clamoring for food. Israeli citizens can’t enter the Strip, and residents of Gaza are very rarely granted permission to enter Israel.

The misery-violence connection

While Israelis have little insight into the complex, nuanced realities of Palestinian society, many do see the link between violence and misery. In a poll conducted in early 2017, more than two-thirds of Israelis acknowledged that Israel would be serving its own interests by working to improve living conditions in Gaza. Israeli security experts — current and former military officials, analysts, and politicians — frequently warn that the misery in Gaza is a threat to Israel’s security.

The terms of each ceasefire agreement have been variations on the same theme: Expanding the fishing zone, allowing more goods into Gaza, and granting exit permits to more people. But Israel regularly fails to implement the terms of the agreements, and Gaza’s desperate situation continues to deteriorate. If misery drives conflict, and everyone acknowledges this, why isn’t Israel doing more to prevent the next round of violence?

A crisis rooted in policy

Neither increased aid nor improved infrastructure can resolve the crisis in Gaza. The endless cycle of escalations, ceasefires, and unfulfilled concessions are symptomatic of a broader problem. The international community has allowed Israel to “manage the conflict” with the Palestinians, rather than take meaningful steps to end it. From Israel’s perspective, keeping Gaza in perpetual crisis is the point —not the problem. The two parties will remain stuck in this holding pattern, with escalations becoming increasingly frequent and their magnitude stronger, until external players who have an interest in ending the conflict compel Israel to shift course radically and take responsibility for the well-being of civilians in both Israel and Gaza.

The crisis in Gaza today is rooted in policies implemented over the course of decades, particularly in Israel’s June 2007 decision, soon after Hamas took over, to declare Gaza a “hostile territory” and impose a closure. After 2007, Israel allowed only one crossing for the transport of humanitarian aid to remain open. The message was that Gaza could have aid but not an economy, subsistence but not prosperity. An Israeli official at the time said that the government’s policy was “no development, no prosperity, no humanitarian crisis” and in court proceedings the state articulated that its intention was to wage economic warfare against Gaza.  The justification for the closure, which Egypt joined by closing its own crossing point at Gaza’s southernmost point, was that it would squeeze Hamas into compliance — or place so much economic pressure on the general population, that it would rise up and overthrow Hamas.

Over the ensuing 12 years, there have been three major military operations, more than a dozen interim escalations that felt very much like war to those experiencing them, and more than a year of protests at the perimeter fence where Israeli snipers have killed hundreds of unarmed protesters. Millions of Palestinians and Israelis have been affected by violence. Palestinians in Gaza have borne the vast brunt of the conflict, with Israel using its formidable military force on the small territory, which lacks bomb shelters and has an underfunded and overwhelmed medical system. Israelis — mostly in southern Israel but not only — have also experienced the violence of Palestinian factions, whose use of sniper, mortar and rocket fire, and incendiary devices, has caused death, injury, property damage and trauma.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, realizing that Israeli policy created a situation in Gaza that was a liability as well as an image problem, has sought to manage the situation by keeping the pot simmering, believing he can prevent it from boiling over. But it keeps boiling over.

Israel has reversed some of its most egregious restrictions, like the one that forbade certain foods, books and children’s toys they described as ‘luxuries’ from entering Gaza. Nonetheless, 12 years after the Hamas takeover, there are dozens of policies that have nothing to do with security and everything to do with the logic of applying pressure or sanctions — i.e., creating more misery, which keeps all parties to the conflict locked in a loop of escalations and ceasefires. For example, Israel frequently closes Erez Crossing — the only pedestrian crossing for Palestinians who have permission to leave Gaza — and Kerem Shalom, its only commercial crossing. In 2018, Israel closed both crossings on seven occasions, sometimes for weeks at a time.

Human bargaining chips

Israel only issues permits to leave Gaza for what it calls “exceptional humanitarian” reasons, with some exceptions for merchants. The list of criteria determining who is eligible to request a permit for travel reveals the arbitrary nature of Israel’s access policy and a kind of violent and dystopian bureaucracy. Even after passing a security screening, Palestinians must meet additional criteria in order to be granted an exit permit. Permission to visit a family member, for example, is only granted in the case of a first-degree relative who is dead, mortally ill, or getting married. The processing time for permit applications can run up to 70 business days, and many applications go unanswered. Israel often disputes the request, asking whether the relative is still sick enough to warrant a visit or whether their death occurred so long ago that there is no longer justification for issuing a permit to participate in the mourning rituals. Israel routinely blocks travel that could allow residents of the Strip to establish trade ties or travel for professional development — including for women, who rarely meet Israel’s bar for what is considered legitimate business needs.

If Israel wanted to stave off misery in Gaza, it would take its boot off the necks of Gaza residents and stop using their lives as currency in its negotiations vis-à-vis Hamas. But Israel has no incentive to make compromises that would move the region out of conflict. It conveys the perception that it is “managing” an insoluble problem and that it is a victim of Palestinian violence, with neither responsibility for Palestinian misery nor the ability to alleviate it.

But the truth is that the status quo serves Israel well. As long as a weakened Hamas has control over Gaza while Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah heads the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, Israel can use divide and conquer tactics to manipulate the rift between the two parties and maintain its hold on the West Bank, where more than half a million Israeli settlers live and which Netanyahu recently said he plans to annex.

A deeper look at the situation in Gaza, and its connection to the bigger picture, reveals these truths. If the political leadership of Israel, Palestine and the international community were willing, collectively, to prioritize the needs and rights of civilians, in Israel and Palestine, there would be a clear path to negotiating a way out of the crisis. Israel’s control over freedom of movement provides it with ample opportunities to take meaningful steps in this direction.
    [post_title] => Policy, not aid: how to avert catastrophe in Gaza
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Policy, not aid: how to avert catastrophe in Gaza

by Tania Hary

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The most compelling argument for repatriating British citizen Shamima Begum, who sneaked into Syria and joined the Islamic State when she was 15, is based not on emotion but on cold, hard logic.





On February 19 the British home secretary announced that he had decided to revoke the citizenship of 19 year-old Shamima Begum, the London-born daughter of immigrants from Bangladesh. Begum sneaked out of Britain and infiltrated Syria to join the Islamic State when she was 15 years old, becoming one of its most notorious promoters on social media platforms. Now, with the ISIS routed from nearly all its territory in Syria, Begum is detained in a Kurdish-controlled detention camp. In interviews with British media outlets, the teenage ISIS bride, who recently gave birth to her third child (the first two died), asked to be allowed to return to the UK. 





Begum’s request set off a storm of controversy, with those who opposed her repatriation pointing to her lack of contrition for having supported notorious terror attacks like the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. Those who favor bringing the young woman back to Britain point to international law, which prohibits rendering a person stateless. While Begum’s parents are Bangladeshi, she is not a citizen of the South Asian country; the government of Bangladesh has said that it would not be willing to take her in. 





Other arguments in support of her repatriation include the fact that her child is a UK citizen, and revoking the citizenship of one person for engaging in politically unacceptable activity sets a dangerous precedent. 





My argument is based neither on international law nor on sympathy for Begum's innocent child, but rather on cold logic. The fact is that the British government, with its decision to strip Shamima Begum of her citizenship, is playing directly into the hands of ISIS. It is implementing the Islamic State’s own policy — thereby strengthening jihadi recruiting methods.





The Begum case pours salt into one of the gaping wounds of the postcolonial condition: as in the case of other ISIS brides, the British government’s decision to revoke Shamima Begum’s citizenship makes her “someone else’s problem now.” She has been cast aside, a move justified by pointing to her ancestral roots in another nation-state (which happens to be a former British colony) — where she is not even a citizen. To British Muslims, their government’s message is very clear: “you will never really be British.” 





But the fundamental problem with stripping citizenship from ISIS returnees is far more worrying and destructive than having made Muslims feel that they will never belong in the so-called West. The real consequence of the British home secretary's announcement is that is doing  the work of the Islamic State by stepping right into its propaganda trap.





The difference between compassion and understanding





Shamima Begum’s case elicits heated emotions and divisive debates. People who say they are trying to “understand” the teenager's motives, or who call for compassion to be shown toward her, provoke reflexive and performative expressions of horror and, often, the accusation that they are soft on ISIS. 





Propaganda succeeds when it provokes emotional responses that override one’s willingness or ability to respond with logic and reason — rather than reacting emotionally. And that is the ISIS trap. 





I understand well the temptation to give in to one’s emotions: Steven Sotloff, the American journalist who was killed in Syria by ISIS in 2014, was a close friend. 





The way to lose a war is by dehumanizing your enemy.  When your enemy appears wholly irrational and monstrous, the idea of trying to “understand” her ostensibly renders one guilty of “sympathizing.” But it is impossible to defeat an opponent whom you do not understand — because you will never see them coming. 





ISIS 101: Citizenship, gender, and civilians in the caliphate





If Shamima Begum joined a terrorist group, does that make her a terrorist? The question is a valid one, albeit controversial. There is a difference between offering support and actively carrying a weapon for a terrorist group. The jihadi brides are accused of providing support by disseminating pro-ISIS propaganda on social media platforms. 





But while the regime of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad has killed far more civilians than ISIS could ever aspire to, one very rarely hears calls to revoke the British passport of Asma al-Assad, the London-born wife of the Syrian dictator. And yet, Asma al-Assad frequently and vehemently expresses her uncritical support for her husband’s regime and its army, both on social media and in television appearances that are broadcast all over the world.





Note, too, that men who were recruited to become fighters with ISIS were later repatriated to their home countries with only a fraction of the media attention paid to Shamima Begum’s request return to her native England. If we fail to grasp that the case of Shamima Begum is complex, then we simply do not understand ISIS. 





The first two letters of the acronym ISIS stand for Islamic State. The caliphate aspires to establish a state, and states need civilian settlers, not just an army. They need a nation of citizens to govern, which requires civilians — including women and children — who have chosen the caliphate over the contemporary nation-state. 





That is why when men who are new recruits to the Islamic State’s fighting force arrive in IS-held territory, they are compelled to burn their passports in a ritual act that is recorded. ISIS propagandists disseminate the videos of those passport burning ceremonies online, where they are shared widely, with the intended impact of severing from those new recruits the possibility of returning home. Women who join the Islamic State as jihadi brides are also compelled to burn their passports. 





Why, then, is the public far less outraged about male jihadi fighters having been repatriated to their home countries than they are about women who joined the Islamic State and now want to return home? The answer is that when young women like 19 year-old Shamima Begum join the jihadis to become their brides, and praise them for carrying out beheadings or terror attacks on European soil, they contradict a very commonly held orientalist stereotype about oppressed Muslim women who lack agency. Note well that much of the controversy over Shamima Begum has been over her apparent lack of contrition. There is an unsettling contrast between her shapeless traditional black robe and hijab, which many interpret as a symbol of oppression, and the assertive manner in which she expresses pro-ISIS opinions.





The fastest and most efficient way to lose a war is to underestimate your opponent. If you believe they are irrational and incapable of strategizing, then you are underestimating them. The key to winning the war is to understand the enemy. Critical here is an overlooked feature of ISIS propaganda — the organization tailors messaging with particular audience demographics in mind. ISIS purposely represents themselves as monstrous and irrational, because that image plays into our fears and stereotypes. They weaponize orientalist stereotypes against us — and we fall for it, every time.. 





Remember that ISIS sees itself as a state, which means it must attract civilians, including women, as well as male fighters. The vast majority of ISIS propaganda is, to the surprise of many, not violent. Instead, it employs utopian images of a sustainable state and nation—where civilians can live in safety and security in a welcoming, multi-racial, autonomous and sovereign state. Shamima Begum was recruited online from her London home, when she was only 15 years old, because she saw those propaganda videos of a land where — in contrast to Saudi Arabia — women could drive, and were promised comfortable lives as the wives of fighters, but not as fighters themselves.  Of course we can find Begum’s decision to join ISIS abhorrent, and her gullibility for the group’s propaganda absurd. But remember: we are falling for ISIS propaganda too — just different propaganda, which targets a different audience. 





Neurology, violence, and trauma: The making of child soldiers





Public outcry over Shamima Begum has largely focused on her failure to express remorse. Fundamental to both the ISIS state-making project, and the production of child soldiers is the role of neurological development before the age of twenty-five. Begum joined the IS when she was 15 years old. Much like the ISIS youth group, Cubs of the Caliphate, Begum has witnessed — and perhaps committed — acts of grotesque violence and morally abhorrent trauma at an age well before the brain develops its capacity to exert full agency, to cope with trauma, or to deal with the consequences of one’s actions. 





The leaders of the ISIS youth groups deliberately traumatize children when they are very young, as a means of ensuring that their psychological scars make their reentry to their home society nearly impossible. In their graduation ceremony from ISIS youth groups, children are forced to commit an act of murder. This same method was used to recruit child soldiers in Sierra Leone and Côte d'Ivoire. 





Once children have been forced to witness or participate in morally injurious acts like murder, the psychological scars are profound. The guilt and self-hatred can prove irreversible without considerable assistance—one reason, among others, that the reintegration of child soldiers proves a challenge across global conflict zones. Worse, these underage returnees are well aware that society views them as monsters — damaged beyond recognition. And so they are inculcated with the idea that there is no going back home, because “home” no longer exists. 





Successful counterterrorism tactics





Shamima Begum needs help — if for no other reason than the biological reality of her age means that her neurological ability to reason is limited. There is also the concern that she has witnessed extensive trauma that she is — again, for neurological reasons — unable to process. This is not an appeal to set her free, nor a suggestion that she face no consequences for her actions. One can understand why she behaved as she did, without condoning her actions.





The fact is that we, the people who want to defeat ISIS, need Shamima Begum. Repatriated former members of the Islamic State are the best weapon we have in the war against jihadism. They are, in fact, the only credible messengers. By repatriating them, we slay the jihadi propaganda claim that the so-called West not only doesn’t care about its Muslim citizens, or that it commits human rights abuses far worse than those of the caliphate’s fighters. By bringing Shamima Begum home to Britain, we give lie to the ISIS claim that once recruits join the Islamic State, they can never go home again  — that their governments will disown them, because they do not care about or want their Muslim citizens. 





What next





Successful counterterrorism strategy is not driven by public emotion or political expediency. The politicians who chose to take the populist route in revoking Shamima Begum’s citizenship capitulated in the face of a frightened electorate. In doing so, they fell straight into the trap set by ISIS. They confirmed what jihadi propaganda videos preach to followers and to potential new recruits: that their home countries are led by non-believers who don’t care about them or want them, and that they are thus better off in the caliphate than in suburban London (or Paris, or Brussels, or Toronto).





I am not calling for peace, love, and understanding for ISIS, but precisely the opposite: an emphatic reminder that cold, hard logic makes for successful policy. The purpose of ISIS propaganda is to undermine our ability to engage in logical thought by blinding us with hate-filled emotion. In the case of Shamima Begum, the British government handed ISIS their victory — because a public frightened by beheading videos votes on emotion. Politicians win elections not on strategy that is born of detached logic, but on the calculus of political expediency. 





Fear-inducing propaganda is extremely effective — until it isn’t. But rather than wait to see if something worse comes after propaganda stops working, let's take some preemptive, logical action. Let's show vulnerable teenagers who spend far too much time online that ISIS propaganda is a lie. 


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The older sister of Shamima Begum, Renu Begum, holds a photo of her sister with a child. Two of her fingers obscure the child's face. She is wearing rings on two of her fingers and a watch on her wrist. In the photo, Shamima's hair is tied in a bun and she's wearing a burgundy button down shirt buttoned to the top, and a matching blazer over it. She is looking directly at the camera.

When Britain Revoked a Jihadi Bride’s Citizenship, They Fell for ISIS Propaganda

by Dr. Amanda E. Rogers

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