Consider this question about Zimbabwe. Roughly one-tenth of the 330 million dollar debt it “owes” the UK relates to the supply of British-made Land Rovers to the Zimbabwean police. Rates of infection for HIV in Zimbabwe have begun to decline in recent years due to a scale-up in antiretroviral treatment, according the latest United Nations World AIDS Day report. Should patients now forgo life-saving medical care so that bills can be paid back to the former colonial overlord?
In his compelling book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber describes how the International Monetary Fund demanded that Madagascar cut a monitoring and eradication programme for malarial mosquitoes in order to settle debts. In the absence of proper monitoring, malaria returned to the highlands of Madagascar, where it was previously thought to have been wiped out. Ten thousand people died, Graeber writes, “in order to ensure that Citibank wouldn’t have to cut its losses on one irresponsible loan that wasn’t particularly important to its balance sheet anyway.”
Africa’s debt is not the hot issue it was in the late 1990s and the early part of the new millennium. But the underlying problems have not disappeared. The way us journalists have shifted our attention away from this persistent crisis is all the more inexcusable, when you consider that there are some parallels between it and the problems we face in Europe.
During the past week, the Dublin government paid 1.25 billion euros to unsecured Anglo Irish Bank bondholders. At the end of March, another 3.1 billion euros is scheduled to be paid by Ireland, largely to please French and German banks who consorted with Anglo in financing reckless speculation by property developers. The 3.1 billion euro sum would be sufficient to fund Ireland’s primary school system for a year, according to the campaign group Debt Justice Action. Children who weren’t even born in 2007, when Anglo approved the loan for the single biggest transaction in the Irish property boom, are being condemned to an inferior education.
A touchy-feely quote on the programme of this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos reads: “The purpose of human life is to serve and to show compassion and the will to help others.” It is attributed to the theologian Albert Schweitzer. Sadly, that sentiment appears alien to the woman who opened the event, Angela Merkel. In her Davos speech, the German chancellor made the case for “more Europe”. What she really desires is a meaner Europe, where remote institutions in Frankfurt, Brussels and Luxembourg have the power to insist that less is spent on essential public services.
Taking capitalism to extremes
On 31 January, Merkel will probably be granted her wish of having a “fiscal compact” treaty for the EU. It will give the European Court of Justice power to fine EU governments that do not keep within rigid deficit limits. Dogmatic principles about how every economy in the Union – with the exception, this time, of Britain – should be run will be enshrined in the agreement rubberstamped at the imminent summit. No matter what type of governments us mere mortals elect in future, they will have to play by these rules. As a result, the Union will be formally committed – under its treaties – to a much more extreme form of capitalism than the United States is under its constitution.
Almost none of the Union’s citizens will have any say on these matters. The idea that they should be consulted is viewed as absurd by Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. Overstepping their powers, they made sure that George Papandreou abandoned his plan to hold a referendum on the terms of a “bail out” a few months ago. Papandreou’s idea was considered so silly that he had to hand over his job as Greek prime minister to a de facto representative of Goldman Sachs.
“Deficit of public authority”
Ireland, it appears, is the only country that might have a referendum on this “fiscal compact” monster. And I’m sure that Enda Kenny’s government would avoid holding one if it could get away with doing so. The sole reason why Ireland traditionally lets its people say “yes” or “no” to EU treaties is that an economist called Raymond Crotty undertook a court challenge against an attempt to ratify the Single European Act without a referendum in 1987. Crotty died in 1994 but his case established that significant changes to EU treaties necessitated an amendment to the Irish constitution, something that can only be done with public approval.
Rulings of similar significance have been delivered in Germany. In 2009, the federal constitutional court in Karlsruhe gave its verdict on the Lisbon treaty. According to the court, there is “a deficit of public authority when measured against the requirements of democracy.”
To her disgrace, Merkel is now taking actions that will increase that deficit. Ironically, of course, her efforts are being presented as indispensable towards dealing with another type of deficit. Why is tackling fiscal deficits considered a more urgent task than resuscitating democracy?
Around this time last year, mass demonstrations in Cairo caused the downfall of Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship. The protests can be emulated in Europe. When Angela Merkel tries to deprive children of a good education to increase her own stature, resistance becomes imperative. Unless ordinary, decent folk – the 99 percent, to use the slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement – stand up to her, 31 January 2012 could go down in history as the day when democracy died.
●First published by New Europe, 29 January – 4 February 2012.
Showing posts with label Angela Merkel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Angela Merkel. Show all posts
Monday, January 30, 2012
Monday, October 24, 2011
Health apartheid entrenched by EU's austerity agenda
Almost two decades have passed since I was first accused of scaremongering. With more energy than knowledge, I organised a lonely campaign against the EU’s Maastricht treaty in the part of Dublin where I grew up. Urging a “no” vote in a 1992 referendum, I stopped people in the streets to warn that the rigorous economic rules contained in that treaty would lead to severe cuts in social spending. It is probably superfluous to add that I was on the losing side.
Having lived in Brussels for 16 of the intervening years, I can claim a reasonable understanding of the Union’s politics. Now aged 40, I have less respect for the Union’s institutions than when I first tried to learn how they work. As I have always disliked the “Euro-sceptic” tag and its xenophobic connotations, it is a relief to have finally found a label that sums up my views. So it is with great pride, I declare myself an “indignado”.
Indignation seems to be the only proper response to a letter that appeared in The Lancet, a medical journal, earlier this month. Written by several academics specialising in health issues, it lamented how the economic crisis has led to a 40% reduction in the budgets for Greek hospitals. “Overall, the picture of health in Greece is concerning,” the academics stated. “It reminds us that, in an effort to finance debts, ordinary people are paying the ultimate price: losing access to care and preventive services, facing higher risks of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases, and in the worst cases losing their lives.”
Indignation also seems to be the only proper response to the pharmaceutical corporation Roche, which has announced it will stop delivering cancer medicines to hospitals in Greece and warned that it will take similar action against Spanish hospitals. These measures are being introduced or threatened to punish hospitals that cannot pay their bills. Terminally ill patients are being deprived of treatment because of a crisis they did not cause.
Merkel’s sadistic stance
And indignation seems to be the only proper response to Angela Merkel, who praised as “remarkable” an austerity programme introduced in Portugal earlier this year. Healthcare was one of the main targets in that programme, yet Merkel still demanded that more pain be inflicted on the Portuguese public (literally). José Manuel Barroso, who was prime minister of Portugal before taking up his plum post with the European Commission, argued that drastic cutbacks were “indispensable for confidence in the European economy”.
Last month, the same Barroso claimed that a “silent revolution” had been undertaken. He was referring to how a spineless European Parliament rushed through its approval of half-a-dozen sets of new economic rules (dubbed the “six pack” regulation). These rules give the Brussels authorities greater power to scrutinise the budgets of national governments belonging to the EU and to penalise those who spend more on public services (including health) than the Union’s “Stability and Growth Pact” allows. Rather than constituting a revolution, the Parliament’s decision can more accurately be called a coup, as the writer and activist Susan George has suggested.
Barroso is no revolutionary, unless you count his youthful dalliance with Maoism. He is a reactionary, implementing a system of apartheid. Determining access to healthcare based on wealth is just as immoral as determining access based on skin colour.
Indeed, the experience of South Africa is instructive. Because American and European governments pressurised the African National Congress to dispense neo-liberal prescriptions in the early 1990s, racial inequalities have persisted there. In 1993, the richest 23% of South Africans had access to 61% of total health spending.
Discrimination against the disadvantaged
A form of health apartheid risks being entrenched in Greece. Even though Greeks work longer hours than Germans, the average income in Greece is now lower than it was when the country entered the EU in 1980. Out of a population of 11 million, nearly 1 million are unemployed. Greek governments were certainly guilty of profligacy in certain areas, most notably on military expenditure, which is rightly being decreased. Yet both the Athens and the EU elite are discriminating against the disadvantaged and cosseting those who are already comfortable. The richest 20% of Greeks pay the least income tax. By contrast, one-third of Greek citizens were in danger of poverty even before the crisis started to bite; rises in value-added tax mean they are the ones footing higher bills.
The denial of essential medicines to Greek hospitals appears all the more cruel when you realise that 70% of Greece’s 300 billion euros debt is held by French and German banks.
An audit published last month by the University of Limerick estimated that Ireland’s debt stood at 371 billion euros at the end of March. Of that sum, 279 billion euros related to the covering of bank debt. The Limerick team concluded it was reasonable to assume that a large part of the almost 92 billion euros remaining (identified as “direct government debt”) could be attributed to the banking crisis.
Imagine this situation. You live in the same town as a multi-millionaire, whose playboy lifestyle lands him in trouble. Using some opaque formula, the local court decides that he is not liable for his debts. Instead, it decides you will help repay them by not having an operation your doctor regards as necessary to keep you alive. That would not be fair, would it?
So why should Greek cancer patients die to save German banks?
●First published by New Europe, 24 October 2011.
Having lived in Brussels for 16 of the intervening years, I can claim a reasonable understanding of the Union’s politics. Now aged 40, I have less respect for the Union’s institutions than when I first tried to learn how they work. As I have always disliked the “Euro-sceptic” tag and its xenophobic connotations, it is a relief to have finally found a label that sums up my views. So it is with great pride, I declare myself an “indignado”.
Indignation seems to be the only proper response to a letter that appeared in The Lancet, a medical journal, earlier this month. Written by several academics specialising in health issues, it lamented how the economic crisis has led to a 40% reduction in the budgets for Greek hospitals. “Overall, the picture of health in Greece is concerning,” the academics stated. “It reminds us that, in an effort to finance debts, ordinary people are paying the ultimate price: losing access to care and preventive services, facing higher risks of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases, and in the worst cases losing their lives.”
Indignation also seems to be the only proper response to the pharmaceutical corporation Roche, which has announced it will stop delivering cancer medicines to hospitals in Greece and warned that it will take similar action against Spanish hospitals. These measures are being introduced or threatened to punish hospitals that cannot pay their bills. Terminally ill patients are being deprived of treatment because of a crisis they did not cause.
Merkel’s sadistic stance
And indignation seems to be the only proper response to Angela Merkel, who praised as “remarkable” an austerity programme introduced in Portugal earlier this year. Healthcare was one of the main targets in that programme, yet Merkel still demanded that more pain be inflicted on the Portuguese public (literally). José Manuel Barroso, who was prime minister of Portugal before taking up his plum post with the European Commission, argued that drastic cutbacks were “indispensable for confidence in the European economy”.
Last month, the same Barroso claimed that a “silent revolution” had been undertaken. He was referring to how a spineless European Parliament rushed through its approval of half-a-dozen sets of new economic rules (dubbed the “six pack” regulation). These rules give the Brussels authorities greater power to scrutinise the budgets of national governments belonging to the EU and to penalise those who spend more on public services (including health) than the Union’s “Stability and Growth Pact” allows. Rather than constituting a revolution, the Parliament’s decision can more accurately be called a coup, as the writer and activist Susan George has suggested.
Barroso is no revolutionary, unless you count his youthful dalliance with Maoism. He is a reactionary, implementing a system of apartheid. Determining access to healthcare based on wealth is just as immoral as determining access based on skin colour.
Indeed, the experience of South Africa is instructive. Because American and European governments pressurised the African National Congress to dispense neo-liberal prescriptions in the early 1990s, racial inequalities have persisted there. In 1993, the richest 23% of South Africans had access to 61% of total health spending.
Discrimination against the disadvantaged
A form of health apartheid risks being entrenched in Greece. Even though Greeks work longer hours than Germans, the average income in Greece is now lower than it was when the country entered the EU in 1980. Out of a population of 11 million, nearly 1 million are unemployed. Greek governments were certainly guilty of profligacy in certain areas, most notably on military expenditure, which is rightly being decreased. Yet both the Athens and the EU elite are discriminating against the disadvantaged and cosseting those who are already comfortable. The richest 20% of Greeks pay the least income tax. By contrast, one-third of Greek citizens were in danger of poverty even before the crisis started to bite; rises in value-added tax mean they are the ones footing higher bills.
The denial of essential medicines to Greek hospitals appears all the more cruel when you realise that 70% of Greece’s 300 billion euros debt is held by French and German banks.
An audit published last month by the University of Limerick estimated that Ireland’s debt stood at 371 billion euros at the end of March. Of that sum, 279 billion euros related to the covering of bank debt. The Limerick team concluded it was reasonable to assume that a large part of the almost 92 billion euros remaining (identified as “direct government debt”) could be attributed to the banking crisis.
Imagine this situation. You live in the same town as a multi-millionaire, whose playboy lifestyle lands him in trouble. Using some opaque formula, the local court decides that he is not liable for his debts. Instead, it decides you will help repay them by not having an operation your doctor regards as necessary to keep you alive. That would not be fair, would it?
So why should Greek cancer patients die to save German banks?
●First published by New Europe, 24 October 2011.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Putting art before avarice in Berlin
Marx has made a strong impact on Berlin. Erich Marx, that is.
He was an entrepreneur, whose collection of art by Andy Warhol, Anselm Kiefer and Robert Rauschenberg is on display in the Hamburger Bahnhof, a train station transformed into a gallery. My favourite is a vast triptych by the recently deceased Cy Twombly. The words “I am Thyrsis of Etna, blessed with a tuneful voice” are scrawled onto its main panel above some bottle green paint that looks as if it has been rubbed crudely onto the canvas. Apart from some touches of pale red and blue, the remainder of the panel is blank.
I am captivated by modern art, for reasons I do not understand. Show me a Caravaggio or a Da Vinci and I can admire the mastery of technique, yet be otherwise unmoved. Show me a video of Jackson Pollock splashing paint around or even one of Damien Hirst’s medicine cabinets and I feel a funny sensation akin to love.
The sensation hits me again in Friedrichshain, a district of Berlin that used to be in East Germany. For a moment, I am saddened by how an elegant red-brick kindergarten has been defaced by gaudy spray-paint. Then, I look up and see a giant cartoon character stare at me from a multi-colour mural covering a block of flats. Used wrongly, graffiti and street art can amount to vandalism. Used correctly, they can bring cheer to drab neighbourhoods.
Joep van Liefland is a Dutchman living in Berlin since 1996. He runs Autocenter, a small gallery (he prefers the term “art space”) above a Friedrichshain supermarket. The exhibitions he organises do not receive any public funding; instead, they rely on donations and events such as a recent auction to mark the 10th anniversary of the centre’s opening. “There has always been a counterculture in Berlin,” he tells me. “In the 1970s and ‘80s, it was maybe much bigger than now.”
Constantly evolving
Berlin’s art scene appears to be constantly evolving. In 2008, Der Spiegel described the city as “something of an art mecca”, celebrating its abundance of unused property that can be turned into studios. Earlier this month, a piece in The New York Times noted that the scene has “downshifted”, with many small galleries closing and the Art Forum Berlin cancelled after 15 years of this fair.
Van Liefland says that because he wasn’t in New York in the 1980s, he wouldn’t draw a comparison between its appeal for artists and that of Berlin today. But he adds: “Lots of Americans come here, that’s for sure. And already prices are going up. It has been changing rapidly, especially in the last five years. If you compare Berlin to what it was 10 or 15 years ago, you’ll see that it is moving in the direction of a normal city.”
The friction between the creative and the commercially-minded is visible across Berlin. Near the aforementioned kindergarten, the property firm CDS Wohnbau is developing a series of townhouses. Elsewhere in Friedrichshain, police forced squatters from a building in February; nine were arrested during the eviction. The building had been occupied by squatters since the Berlin Wall was dismantled in 1990.
Tacheles, a former department store in Mitte (a central district), has been a refuge for squatters and artists for a similar length of time. It, too, is the subject of a battle between the city authorities and the artistic community. (Tacheles, incidentally, was used by the Nazis to detain French prisoners).
Heroic battle
I don’t wish to romanticise Berlin’s squatters and artists too much. Many would probably share my left-leaning political views. Others appear more willing to compromise. I was taken aback at how several of those whose works were on sale in Tacheles had notices requesting that no photographs be taken. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I would have thought this attachment to intellectual property – a corporate concept – is at odds with the free-thinking ethos that they seem to embrace.
Still, there is something marvellous about seeing artists demand that a site in what businesspeople would regard as a prime location be preserved as a cultural commune. It is all the more heroic that this struggle is being waged in the former East Berlin. This city has been blighted by totalitarianism in the not-too-distant past. It should not be crushed by another hugely destructive ideology, that of market fundamentalism.
Sadly, there are a number of fundamentalists holding powerful positions in Berlin. Germany’s federal coalition includes both the Free Democrats, which has an ultra-liberal approach to economics (they are opposed to tax increases on the rich) and Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, which takes a distinctly illiberal stance on social issues (they have denied full marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples). In 2010, the German parliament introduced cutbacks of 29 billion euros on social spending. Parents on welfare lost a monthly payment of 300 euros, which they had received for a year after the birth of a child, as a result. Merkel is demanding even more drastic austerity measures in embattled euro-zone countries like Greece and Ireland.
Berlin’s art scene might seem irrelevant to the supposedly hard-headed accounting exercises being undertaken in federal government departments. But the studios and small galleries serve as a reminder that a city with a history like Berlin’s should move to a rhythm dictated by something other than the lust for profit. That is why non-conformists should be cherished.
●First published by New Europe, 17 October 2011.
He was an entrepreneur, whose collection of art by Andy Warhol, Anselm Kiefer and Robert Rauschenberg is on display in the Hamburger Bahnhof, a train station transformed into a gallery. My favourite is a vast triptych by the recently deceased Cy Twombly. The words “I am Thyrsis of Etna, blessed with a tuneful voice” are scrawled onto its main panel above some bottle green paint that looks as if it has been rubbed crudely onto the canvas. Apart from some touches of pale red and blue, the remainder of the panel is blank.
I am captivated by modern art, for reasons I do not understand. Show me a Caravaggio or a Da Vinci and I can admire the mastery of technique, yet be otherwise unmoved. Show me a video of Jackson Pollock splashing paint around or even one of Damien Hirst’s medicine cabinets and I feel a funny sensation akin to love.
The sensation hits me again in Friedrichshain, a district of Berlin that used to be in East Germany. For a moment, I am saddened by how an elegant red-brick kindergarten has been defaced by gaudy spray-paint. Then, I look up and see a giant cartoon character stare at me from a multi-colour mural covering a block of flats. Used wrongly, graffiti and street art can amount to vandalism. Used correctly, they can bring cheer to drab neighbourhoods.
Joep van Liefland is a Dutchman living in Berlin since 1996. He runs Autocenter, a small gallery (he prefers the term “art space”) above a Friedrichshain supermarket. The exhibitions he organises do not receive any public funding; instead, they rely on donations and events such as a recent auction to mark the 10th anniversary of the centre’s opening. “There has always been a counterculture in Berlin,” he tells me. “In the 1970s and ‘80s, it was maybe much bigger than now.”
Constantly evolving
Berlin’s art scene appears to be constantly evolving. In 2008, Der Spiegel described the city as “something of an art mecca”, celebrating its abundance of unused property that can be turned into studios. Earlier this month, a piece in The New York Times noted that the scene has “downshifted”, with many small galleries closing and the Art Forum Berlin cancelled after 15 years of this fair.
Van Liefland says that because he wasn’t in New York in the 1980s, he wouldn’t draw a comparison between its appeal for artists and that of Berlin today. But he adds: “Lots of Americans come here, that’s for sure. And already prices are going up. It has been changing rapidly, especially in the last five years. If you compare Berlin to what it was 10 or 15 years ago, you’ll see that it is moving in the direction of a normal city.”
The friction between the creative and the commercially-minded is visible across Berlin. Near the aforementioned kindergarten, the property firm CDS Wohnbau is developing a series of townhouses. Elsewhere in Friedrichshain, police forced squatters from a building in February; nine were arrested during the eviction. The building had been occupied by squatters since the Berlin Wall was dismantled in 1990.
Tacheles, a former department store in Mitte (a central district), has been a refuge for squatters and artists for a similar length of time. It, too, is the subject of a battle between the city authorities and the artistic community. (Tacheles, incidentally, was used by the Nazis to detain French prisoners).
Heroic battle
I don’t wish to romanticise Berlin’s squatters and artists too much. Many would probably share my left-leaning political views. Others appear more willing to compromise. I was taken aback at how several of those whose works were on sale in Tacheles had notices requesting that no photographs be taken. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I would have thought this attachment to intellectual property – a corporate concept – is at odds with the free-thinking ethos that they seem to embrace.
Still, there is something marvellous about seeing artists demand that a site in what businesspeople would regard as a prime location be preserved as a cultural commune. It is all the more heroic that this struggle is being waged in the former East Berlin. This city has been blighted by totalitarianism in the not-too-distant past. It should not be crushed by another hugely destructive ideology, that of market fundamentalism.
Sadly, there are a number of fundamentalists holding powerful positions in Berlin. Germany’s federal coalition includes both the Free Democrats, which has an ultra-liberal approach to economics (they are opposed to tax increases on the rich) and Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, which takes a distinctly illiberal stance on social issues (they have denied full marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples). In 2010, the German parliament introduced cutbacks of 29 billion euros on social spending. Parents on welfare lost a monthly payment of 300 euros, which they had received for a year after the birth of a child, as a result. Merkel is demanding even more drastic austerity measures in embattled euro-zone countries like Greece and Ireland.
Berlin’s art scene might seem irrelevant to the supposedly hard-headed accounting exercises being undertaken in federal government departments. But the studios and small galleries serve as a reminder that a city with a history like Berlin’s should move to a rhythm dictated by something other than the lust for profit. That is why non-conformists should be cherished.
●First published by New Europe, 17 October 2011.
Monday, May 9, 2011
The moral bankruptcy of Germany's Greens
We can judge if a nation is civilised by how seriously it takes cycling as a mode of transport. Germany scores well. As recompense for the indignity of turning 40, I have been treated to a two-wheel tour of Bavaria. Apart from being able to marvel at the Alps and the pride grown men take in donning lederhosen, the sojourn has filled with admiration for the state’s superb network of bike paths.
Bavaria is in many respects a role model for sane environmental policies. Two of the world’s largest solar energy plants can be found here; at street level, bins have separate compartments for different types of waste and ordinary people appear to be careful not to put their used bottles and papers into the wrong sections.
Ecological awareness does not happen by accident; it results from decades of campaigning, often by people who were ridiculed as fantasists when they started out. I first learned about the necessity of protecting nature from the work of Germany’s Green Party a few years after they were formed in the 1980s. The Greens were different to mainstream politicians, I was led to believe, because they were more interested in principles than power. While that may have been true once, it is certainly not now.
After elections in Baden-Württemberg in March, the Greens are now the largest party in a state legislature for the first time in their history. Becoming part of the next federal government is the overriding objective of their leader, Cem Ozdemir, whose public relations handlers like to depict him as Germany’s equivalent to Barack Obama (Ozdemir is of Turkish ethnicity and the party has even used the inane slogan “Yes We Cem” to promote him).
Given that Angela Merkel has declared multiculturalism “dead”, progressives can derive some satisfaction from Ozdemir’s popularity. Yet in other respects the Greens have become a deeply reactionary force. It is particularly galling that a party formerly wedded to pacifism has morphed into a bunch of war-mongers.
When Merkel abstained from supporting the bombardment of Libya recently, her most strident critics were prominent Greens. Renate Künast, a Green parliamentary leader who covets the post of Berlin mayor, accused Merkel of political failure. Her erstwhile boss, Joschka Fischer, was even more scathing.
In a syndicated opinion column, Fischer intimated that Germany could be isolated unless it followed the example he set as foreign minister, when it agreed to participate in the US-led occupation of Afghanistan. He wrote: “Germany and other European countries went to Afghanistan in solidarity with a NATO partner – our most important security guarantor, the United States – after it had been attacked from there on 11 September 2001. And solidarity within NATO – a term all but shunned these days in official German circles – is mutual: left to its own devices, Germany could one day wake up in a very precarious situation.”
Hold on a second. The best evidence we have tells us that the 11 September atrocities were planned in Hamburg, not in Osama bin Laden’s Tora Bora hideaway. There would have been no justification for the US to bomb German cities in retaliation; there was even less justification for how America and its stooges invaded Afghanistan. As part of a sordid sucking-up exercise to the Bush administration, Fischer gave his imprimatur to a war that widened inequality. Each week, the United States – a country that denies millions of its own people the right to health insurance - spends $2 billion on waging war on Afghanistan. Germany has helped “our most important security guarantor” to increase hardship in Afghanistan. According to World Bank data, 36% of the Afghan population lived below the national poverty line in 2008; in 2005, the corresponding figure stood at 33%.
Just as the German Greens showed a callous indifference to the plight of Afghanistan’s poor, they acted as cheerleaders for austerity measures at home from 1998 to 2005, when they last belonged to the federal government. Gerhard Schröder, the country’s chancellor at the time, encountered stiff resistance within his own Social Democrat party to the welfare reforms he introduced – some of his colleagues even quit the party in protest. The Greens, on the other hand, defended him vigorously, supporting extreme cuts in public expenditure in the full knowledge that they would hurt the disadvantaged most.
The U-turns of the German Greens have been copied by their sister parties elsewhere. With his slightly dishevelled appearance, Daniel Cohn Bendit still poses as a radical. It is a long time, though, since he was a student rebel in the Paris of 1968. As leader of the Green group in the European Parliament, he has been a hawkish advocate of US-led military operations. Disgustingly, he has cited humanitarian reasons to defend wars designed primarily to ensure America’s control of oil and other prized resources.
In the early 1990s, I was an active member of the Irish Greens. Although I knew several Green members of the Dublin parliament personally, I was delighted to see all of them losing their seats in the recent general election. Their willingness to accept public service cutbacks demanded by the IMF and EU amounted to treason.
Because climate change imperils our survival as a species, I am convinced that we need a genuine green movement, separate from any political party. Having a few politicians who claim to be green answering to the title “minister” is no substitute for people power.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 8-14 May 2011
Bavaria is in many respects a role model for sane environmental policies. Two of the world’s largest solar energy plants can be found here; at street level, bins have separate compartments for different types of waste and ordinary people appear to be careful not to put their used bottles and papers into the wrong sections.
Ecological awareness does not happen by accident; it results from decades of campaigning, often by people who were ridiculed as fantasists when they started out. I first learned about the necessity of protecting nature from the work of Germany’s Green Party a few years after they were formed in the 1980s. The Greens were different to mainstream politicians, I was led to believe, because they were more interested in principles than power. While that may have been true once, it is certainly not now.
After elections in Baden-Württemberg in March, the Greens are now the largest party in a state legislature for the first time in their history. Becoming part of the next federal government is the overriding objective of their leader, Cem Ozdemir, whose public relations handlers like to depict him as Germany’s equivalent to Barack Obama (Ozdemir is of Turkish ethnicity and the party has even used the inane slogan “Yes We Cem” to promote him).
Given that Angela Merkel has declared multiculturalism “dead”, progressives can derive some satisfaction from Ozdemir’s popularity. Yet in other respects the Greens have become a deeply reactionary force. It is particularly galling that a party formerly wedded to pacifism has morphed into a bunch of war-mongers.
When Merkel abstained from supporting the bombardment of Libya recently, her most strident critics were prominent Greens. Renate Künast, a Green parliamentary leader who covets the post of Berlin mayor, accused Merkel of political failure. Her erstwhile boss, Joschka Fischer, was even more scathing.
In a syndicated opinion column, Fischer intimated that Germany could be isolated unless it followed the example he set as foreign minister, when it agreed to participate in the US-led occupation of Afghanistan. He wrote: “Germany and other European countries went to Afghanistan in solidarity with a NATO partner – our most important security guarantor, the United States – after it had been attacked from there on 11 September 2001. And solidarity within NATO – a term all but shunned these days in official German circles – is mutual: left to its own devices, Germany could one day wake up in a very precarious situation.”
Hold on a second. The best evidence we have tells us that the 11 September atrocities were planned in Hamburg, not in Osama bin Laden’s Tora Bora hideaway. There would have been no justification for the US to bomb German cities in retaliation; there was even less justification for how America and its stooges invaded Afghanistan. As part of a sordid sucking-up exercise to the Bush administration, Fischer gave his imprimatur to a war that widened inequality. Each week, the United States – a country that denies millions of its own people the right to health insurance - spends $2 billion on waging war on Afghanistan. Germany has helped “our most important security guarantor” to increase hardship in Afghanistan. According to World Bank data, 36% of the Afghan population lived below the national poverty line in 2008; in 2005, the corresponding figure stood at 33%.
Just as the German Greens showed a callous indifference to the plight of Afghanistan’s poor, they acted as cheerleaders for austerity measures at home from 1998 to 2005, when they last belonged to the federal government. Gerhard Schröder, the country’s chancellor at the time, encountered stiff resistance within his own Social Democrat party to the welfare reforms he introduced – some of his colleagues even quit the party in protest. The Greens, on the other hand, defended him vigorously, supporting extreme cuts in public expenditure in the full knowledge that they would hurt the disadvantaged most.
The U-turns of the German Greens have been copied by their sister parties elsewhere. With his slightly dishevelled appearance, Daniel Cohn Bendit still poses as a radical. It is a long time, though, since he was a student rebel in the Paris of 1968. As leader of the Green group in the European Parliament, he has been a hawkish advocate of US-led military operations. Disgustingly, he has cited humanitarian reasons to defend wars designed primarily to ensure America’s control of oil and other prized resources.
In the early 1990s, I was an active member of the Irish Greens. Although I knew several Green members of the Dublin parliament personally, I was delighted to see all of them losing their seats in the recent general election. Their willingness to accept public service cutbacks demanded by the IMF and EU amounted to treason.
Because climate change imperils our survival as a species, I am convinced that we need a genuine green movement, separate from any political party. Having a few politicians who claim to be green answering to the title “minister” is no substitute for people power.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 8-14 May 2011
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
EU turns blind eye to Palestinian citizens in Israel
Answering questions from YouTube viewers over the past few weeks, Binyamin Netanyahu depicted Israel as an oasis of interracial harmony in a region of strife. "There's only one country in the heart of the Middle East that has no tremors, no protests,” the Israeli prime minister said. “That's Israel. Because we're the only one where we respect human rights. The only one that respects the rights of Arab citizens. Twenty percent of our population are Arabs. And they enjoy full civil rights in Israel. It's the only place in this entire vast expanse where Arabs and Muslims enjoy complete freedom and complete equality before the law."
It was a statement of characteristic chutzpah. Despite his claim that Israel “respects the rights of Arab citizens”, its national parliament – the Knesset – had just approved two pieces of legislation that discriminated against the 1.4 million Palestinians living within Israel’s internationally accepted borders.
First, on 22 March, a bill was passed to withdraw state funding from any institution that commemorates the Nakbah, the massacres and forced displacement of Palestinians that led to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Then, six days later, the Knesset approved a new law, which allows for Israeli citizenship to be removed when someone is convicted of terrorism or treason. Opponents of the law noted that it was directed at Palestinians and that it was virtually unthinkable that Jewish Israelis would have their citizenship revoked as a result.
Netanyahu’s comments were made ahead of a short European tour, confined to Germany and the Czech Republic. Predictably, they did not elicit any protest from the political leaders he met in Berlin and Prague. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, went out of her way to exude warmth towards her guest. Insisting she is “never irritated” by Netanyahu (notwithstanding reports they had exchanged cross words in February over the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories), Merkel described her contacts with him as “fun”.
Merkel’s silence over the treatment of the Palestinian minority in Israel is mirrored by the stance of the entire 27-country European Union.
Since Catherine Ashton was appointed the EU’s foreign policy chief in 2009, she has not issued even one statement focusing exclusively on the plight of Palestinians within Israel. Her reticence stands in marked contrast to her hasty reaction to incidents that affect Israeli Jews. For example, she swiftly condemned the rockets fired by Hamas from Gaza into southern Israel on 7 April.
Ashton frequently meets Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, whose party Yisrael Beitenu (Israel Our Home) has been part of the country’s ruling coalition for the past two years. During that time, Lieberman and his colleagues have been the main sponsors of about 20 laws and bills designed to worsen the discrimination faced by Israel’s Palestinian minority.
In 1973, the United Nations recognised that the crime of apartheid did not only apply to South Africa but also to other situations where one racial group dominated over another. Israel has long enshrined its racism against Palestinians in quasi-constitutional legislation. The 1950 Law of Return enables Jews throughout the world to move to Israel and gain citizenship. Yet Palestinians forced to leave their homes during the Nakbah are denied that right.
When I asked Ashton’s spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic why EU representatives never utter the words “Israel” and “apartheid” in the same sentence, she replied: “Israel is a democratic country and a partner of the European Union. Human right issues and possible shortcomings in this respect are discussed in the regular dialogue we have with the Israeli authorities.”
Kocijancic would be well-advised to read an interview with the Israeli historian and political dissident Ilan Pappé published earlier this month by New Internationalist magazine. “Israel is what we in political science call a herrenvolk democracy, democracy only for the masters,” Pappé said. “The fact that you allow people to participate in the formal side of democracy, namely to vote or to be elected, is meaningless if you don’t give them any share in the common good or in the common resources of the state, or if you discriminate against them despite the fact that you allow them to participate in the elections. On almost every level – from official legislation through governmental practices to social and cultural attitudes – Israel is only a democracy for one ethnic group.”
The EU’s unwillingness to address the treatment of Palestinians within Israel was exposed in a report published in February by Adalah, a minority rights organisation based in Haifa, and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network. It noted that the rights of the Palestinian minority in Israel are not even mentioned in the “association agreement” between the EU and Israel that came into effect in 2000 and sets out the main contractual basis of relations between the two sides.
That omission was partly compensated for by an “action plan” on Israel approved by top-level EU representatives in 2005. The plan listed minority rights as one of the topics which the European Commission (the EU’s executive) and Israel were prepared to hold discussions. While Brussels officials appear to be monitoring the situation facing the Palestinian minority in Israel, “the Commission’s language has neither consistently hardened nor softened over the years,” the February report says.
“The EU is not willing to compromise its relationship with Israel,” Nathalie Tocci, the report’s author, told me. “This means it's unwilling to recognize Israel as not being a democracy. It is ready to criticise Israel's democratic deficiencies - regarding human and minority rights - but would view these problems as analogous to those within some European countries too.”
The socio-economic conditions in which Palestinians inside Israel live also put them at a disadvantage. Throughout Israel, more than 20% of households live below the poverty line. But the proportion rises to 50% for the Palestinian minority in general and to 80% for Bedouins.
When Lieberman visited Brussels in February, the EU issued a 45-paragraph statement on its relations with Israel. It called on the Israeli government to implement the recommendations of a panel chaired by Eliezer Goldberg, a retired Israeli judge, on Bedouin communities in the Negev. Issued in 2008, the Goldberg Commission report found that 62,000 Bedouins in 46 villages unrecognised by Israel were living in an “unbearable state”. It urged Israel to confer a legal status on those villages.
Lending its support to a commission mainly dominated by Israeli establishment figures was an easy step for the EU to take. Unsurprisingly, it did not go further by denouncing the role of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in destroying Bedouin villages such as Al Araqib, which has suffered more than 20 demolitions since July last year.
Even though the JNF’s bulldozers have been used in those demolitions and other acts of dispossession against Bedouins, the fund is regarded as a charity by some 50 countries worldwide. The JNF held a central position in the Zionist movement well before the state of Israel was established and used that position to advocate vigorously in favour of ethnic cleansing. Back in the 1930s and 1940s, one of its leading figures Yosef Weitz argued repeatedly that Palestinians should be forced out of Palestine.
The JNF has been given direct ownership of 13% of the land of Israel and a role in managing most of the remainder. It is particularly influential in Britain, where David Cameron, the prime minister, is one of its patrons. On its website, the JNF presents itself as a humanitarian and environmental organisation dedicated to planting trees in Israel.
“The JNF is involved in the illegal expropriation of Palestinian land and the concealing of Palestinian villages beneath parks and forests,” said Michael Kalmanovitz from the Stop the JNF Campaign in Britain. “The fact that David Cameron is one of its patrons is a disgrace.”
Hassan Jabareen, director of Adalah, said that both the EU and the US have tended to concentrate only on Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza and not on the Palestinian minority within Israel. By turning a blind eye to the Palestinian minority in Israel, the EU has failed to learn important lessons from the experience of its own member states. “You couldn’t have got peace between the UK and the Republic of Ireland without addressing the situation in Northern Ireland,” Jabareen said. “Europe should understand that.”
In his new book Boycott Divestment Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, Omar Barghouti argues that Westerners promoting conflict resolution in the Middle East have not grappled with the underlying injustices. “The main culprit is the insistence of Israel and successive US governments on exploiting the current massive power imbalance to impose a peace devoid of justice and human rights on the Palestinians, an unjust ‘solution’ that fails to address our basic rights under international law and undermines our inalienable right to self-determination,” he writes.
Barghouti is correct to pin much of the blame on Washington. Yet Europe’s contribution to this dismal state of affairs should not be overlooked, either. As the biggest destination for Israeli exports, the EU could have made the strengthening of its political and economic links with Israel conditional on improving the situation of all three groups that comprise the Palestinian people. These are the Palestinians in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza; those within Israel’s internationally accepted borders; and refugees in the diaspora. The EU’s refusal to attach such conditions exposes its never-ending declarations of support for human rights as hollow.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 12 April 2011
It was a statement of characteristic chutzpah. Despite his claim that Israel “respects the rights of Arab citizens”, its national parliament – the Knesset – had just approved two pieces of legislation that discriminated against the 1.4 million Palestinians living within Israel’s internationally accepted borders.
First, on 22 March, a bill was passed to withdraw state funding from any institution that commemorates the Nakbah, the massacres and forced displacement of Palestinians that led to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Then, six days later, the Knesset approved a new law, which allows for Israeli citizenship to be removed when someone is convicted of terrorism or treason. Opponents of the law noted that it was directed at Palestinians and that it was virtually unthinkable that Jewish Israelis would have their citizenship revoked as a result.
Netanyahu’s comments were made ahead of a short European tour, confined to Germany and the Czech Republic. Predictably, they did not elicit any protest from the political leaders he met in Berlin and Prague. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, went out of her way to exude warmth towards her guest. Insisting she is “never irritated” by Netanyahu (notwithstanding reports they had exchanged cross words in February over the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories), Merkel described her contacts with him as “fun”.
Merkel’s silence over the treatment of the Palestinian minority in Israel is mirrored by the stance of the entire 27-country European Union.
Since Catherine Ashton was appointed the EU’s foreign policy chief in 2009, she has not issued even one statement focusing exclusively on the plight of Palestinians within Israel. Her reticence stands in marked contrast to her hasty reaction to incidents that affect Israeli Jews. For example, she swiftly condemned the rockets fired by Hamas from Gaza into southern Israel on 7 April.
Ashton frequently meets Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, whose party Yisrael Beitenu (Israel Our Home) has been part of the country’s ruling coalition for the past two years. During that time, Lieberman and his colleagues have been the main sponsors of about 20 laws and bills designed to worsen the discrimination faced by Israel’s Palestinian minority.
In 1973, the United Nations recognised that the crime of apartheid did not only apply to South Africa but also to other situations where one racial group dominated over another. Israel has long enshrined its racism against Palestinians in quasi-constitutional legislation. The 1950 Law of Return enables Jews throughout the world to move to Israel and gain citizenship. Yet Palestinians forced to leave their homes during the Nakbah are denied that right.
When I asked Ashton’s spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic why EU representatives never utter the words “Israel” and “apartheid” in the same sentence, she replied: “Israel is a democratic country and a partner of the European Union. Human right issues and possible shortcomings in this respect are discussed in the regular dialogue we have with the Israeli authorities.”
Kocijancic would be well-advised to read an interview with the Israeli historian and political dissident Ilan Pappé published earlier this month by New Internationalist magazine. “Israel is what we in political science call a herrenvolk democracy, democracy only for the masters,” Pappé said. “The fact that you allow people to participate in the formal side of democracy, namely to vote or to be elected, is meaningless if you don’t give them any share in the common good or in the common resources of the state, or if you discriminate against them despite the fact that you allow them to participate in the elections. On almost every level – from official legislation through governmental practices to social and cultural attitudes – Israel is only a democracy for one ethnic group.”
The EU’s unwillingness to address the treatment of Palestinians within Israel was exposed in a report published in February by Adalah, a minority rights organisation based in Haifa, and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network. It noted that the rights of the Palestinian minority in Israel are not even mentioned in the “association agreement” between the EU and Israel that came into effect in 2000 and sets out the main contractual basis of relations between the two sides.
That omission was partly compensated for by an “action plan” on Israel approved by top-level EU representatives in 2005. The plan listed minority rights as one of the topics which the European Commission (the EU’s executive) and Israel were prepared to hold discussions. While Brussels officials appear to be monitoring the situation facing the Palestinian minority in Israel, “the Commission’s language has neither consistently hardened nor softened over the years,” the February report says.
“The EU is not willing to compromise its relationship with Israel,” Nathalie Tocci, the report’s author, told me. “This means it's unwilling to recognize Israel as not being a democracy. It is ready to criticise Israel's democratic deficiencies - regarding human and minority rights - but would view these problems as analogous to those within some European countries too.”
The socio-economic conditions in which Palestinians inside Israel live also put them at a disadvantage. Throughout Israel, more than 20% of households live below the poverty line. But the proportion rises to 50% for the Palestinian minority in general and to 80% for Bedouins.
When Lieberman visited Brussels in February, the EU issued a 45-paragraph statement on its relations with Israel. It called on the Israeli government to implement the recommendations of a panel chaired by Eliezer Goldberg, a retired Israeli judge, on Bedouin communities in the Negev. Issued in 2008, the Goldberg Commission report found that 62,000 Bedouins in 46 villages unrecognised by Israel were living in an “unbearable state”. It urged Israel to confer a legal status on those villages.
Lending its support to a commission mainly dominated by Israeli establishment figures was an easy step for the EU to take. Unsurprisingly, it did not go further by denouncing the role of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in destroying Bedouin villages such as Al Araqib, which has suffered more than 20 demolitions since July last year.
Even though the JNF’s bulldozers have been used in those demolitions and other acts of dispossession against Bedouins, the fund is regarded as a charity by some 50 countries worldwide. The JNF held a central position in the Zionist movement well before the state of Israel was established and used that position to advocate vigorously in favour of ethnic cleansing. Back in the 1930s and 1940s, one of its leading figures Yosef Weitz argued repeatedly that Palestinians should be forced out of Palestine.
The JNF has been given direct ownership of 13% of the land of Israel and a role in managing most of the remainder. It is particularly influential in Britain, where David Cameron, the prime minister, is one of its patrons. On its website, the JNF presents itself as a humanitarian and environmental organisation dedicated to planting trees in Israel.
“The JNF is involved in the illegal expropriation of Palestinian land and the concealing of Palestinian villages beneath parks and forests,” said Michael Kalmanovitz from the Stop the JNF Campaign in Britain. “The fact that David Cameron is one of its patrons is a disgrace.”
Hassan Jabareen, director of Adalah, said that both the EU and the US have tended to concentrate only on Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza and not on the Palestinian minority within Israel. By turning a blind eye to the Palestinian minority in Israel, the EU has failed to learn important lessons from the experience of its own member states. “You couldn’t have got peace between the UK and the Republic of Ireland without addressing the situation in Northern Ireland,” Jabareen said. “Europe should understand that.”
In his new book Boycott Divestment Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, Omar Barghouti argues that Westerners promoting conflict resolution in the Middle East have not grappled with the underlying injustices. “The main culprit is the insistence of Israel and successive US governments on exploiting the current massive power imbalance to impose a peace devoid of justice and human rights on the Palestinians, an unjust ‘solution’ that fails to address our basic rights under international law and undermines our inalienable right to self-determination,” he writes.
Barghouti is correct to pin much of the blame on Washington. Yet Europe’s contribution to this dismal state of affairs should not be overlooked, either. As the biggest destination for Israeli exports, the EU could have made the strengthening of its political and economic links with Israel conditional on improving the situation of all three groups that comprise the Palestinian people. These are the Palestinians in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza; those within Israel’s internationally accepted borders; and refugees in the diaspora. The EU’s refusal to attach such conditions exposes its never-ending declarations of support for human rights as hollow.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 12 April 2011
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Rumours that Israel has fallen out of favour in Europe exaggerated
Is Binyamin Netanyahu really as tough as he would like us to believe? The prime minister’s European tour this week was restricted to Germany and the Czech Republic, two countries where he is guaranteed softball treatment from the political elite and the media.
Yet it would be wrong to think that everyone in those two countries has made a “Welcome Bibi” placard. On Tuesday evening, I shared a platform in Prague with Eva Nováková from the International Solidarity Movement. Nováková hit the headlines in January 2010, after she was taken from an apartment where she lived in Ramallah by Israeli soldiers. The following day she was deported, allegedly because she had overstayed her visa. (Her lawyers have mounted a challenge against the deportation in the Israeli Supreme Court. Israeli forces, the lawyers argue, had no legal power to apprehend a woman in a West Bank city nominally under full Palestinian control).
Since arriving back in Prague, Nováková has turned her attention to business links with the occupation of Palestine. She can regularly be seen protesting outside a shop that sells products made by Ahava, the cosmetics firm based in Mitzpe Shalem, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
Even though the Czech government likes to champion political dissidents abroad, it prefers to ignore courageous home-grown troublemakers like Nováková. Karel Schwarzenberg, the Czech foreign minister, has been kicked out of Cuba for embracing opponents to Fidel Castro, yet is uncharacteristically reticent when it comes to Israel’s systematic denial of basic rights to the Palestinians.
According to Schwarzenberg, the Czech Republic and The Netherlands are Israel’s most steadfast allies in the European Union. In January this year, he told The Jerusalem Post: “Whereas 10 or 20 years ago, there was a vast majority of EU countries who were definitely for Israel, now we can really rely on two countries.”
As it happens, he was misrepresenting the EU’s position. All of the Union’s 27 governments have embraced Israel in recent years. Britain, for example, is in the process of rewriting its universal jurisdiction law, which theoretically allowed for foreign war criminals to be tried in the UK’s courts. The weakening of this law is a direct response to pressure from Israel. In late 2009, Tzipi Livni chickened out of visiting London, when she discovered a warrant had been issued for her arrest at the request of Palestine solidarity campaigners.
Netanyahu is reportedly using his stopovers in Berlin and Prague to voice concern about Freedom Flotilla II, which will sail towards Gaza next month.
To their disgrace, some EU governments are helping Israel thwart this new initiative to break the medieval siege on Gaza. Demetris Christofias, the Cypriot president, stated during March that a 2010 order banning ships from travelling to Gaza via Cyprus remained in place.
So while Netanyahu mightn’t deign to set foot in most of the EU’s countries, he can still twist their leaders’ arms. Rumours that he has fallen out of their favour seem to be exaggerated.
·First published by Mondoweiss (www.mondoweiss.net), 8 April 2011
Yet it would be wrong to think that everyone in those two countries has made a “Welcome Bibi” placard. On Tuesday evening, I shared a platform in Prague with Eva Nováková from the International Solidarity Movement. Nováková hit the headlines in January 2010, after she was taken from an apartment where she lived in Ramallah by Israeli soldiers. The following day she was deported, allegedly because she had overstayed her visa. (Her lawyers have mounted a challenge against the deportation in the Israeli Supreme Court. Israeli forces, the lawyers argue, had no legal power to apprehend a woman in a West Bank city nominally under full Palestinian control).
Since arriving back in Prague, Nováková has turned her attention to business links with the occupation of Palestine. She can regularly be seen protesting outside a shop that sells products made by Ahava, the cosmetics firm based in Mitzpe Shalem, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
Even though the Czech government likes to champion political dissidents abroad, it prefers to ignore courageous home-grown troublemakers like Nováková. Karel Schwarzenberg, the Czech foreign minister, has been kicked out of Cuba for embracing opponents to Fidel Castro, yet is uncharacteristically reticent when it comes to Israel’s systematic denial of basic rights to the Palestinians.
According to Schwarzenberg, the Czech Republic and The Netherlands are Israel’s most steadfast allies in the European Union. In January this year, he told The Jerusalem Post: “Whereas 10 or 20 years ago, there was a vast majority of EU countries who were definitely for Israel, now we can really rely on two countries.”
As it happens, he was misrepresenting the EU’s position. All of the Union’s 27 governments have embraced Israel in recent years. Britain, for example, is in the process of rewriting its universal jurisdiction law, which theoretically allowed for foreign war criminals to be tried in the UK’s courts. The weakening of this law is a direct response to pressure from Israel. In late 2009, Tzipi Livni chickened out of visiting London, when she discovered a warrant had been issued for her arrest at the request of Palestine solidarity campaigners.
Netanyahu is reportedly using his stopovers in Berlin and Prague to voice concern about Freedom Flotilla II, which will sail towards Gaza next month.
To their disgrace, some EU governments are helping Israel thwart this new initiative to break the medieval siege on Gaza. Demetris Christofias, the Cypriot president, stated during March that a 2010 order banning ships from travelling to Gaza via Cyprus remained in place.
So while Netanyahu mightn’t deign to set foot in most of the EU’s countries, he can still twist their leaders’ arms. Rumours that he has fallen out of their favour seem to be exaggerated.
·First published by Mondoweiss (www.mondoweiss.net), 8 April 2011
Monday, October 25, 2010
My 'date' with Angela Merkel: let's see how multiculturalism hasn't failed
Far-right politicians may soon need to padlock their wardrobes. Should present trends continue they could find that all their clothes have been stolen by “mainstream” parties.
The xenophobic tone of recent rhetoric from two of Europe’s most powerful leaders is frightening to anyone with a rudimentary grasp of this continent’s history. First, Nicolas Sarkozy engaged in the worst kind of populism when he announced an onslaught on the Roma. Sarkozy’s efforts to criminalise an entire ethnic group proved that he is not averse to stoking the flames of racism in order to appear tougher than the Front National (at a time when a successor to Jean-Marie Le Pen is being chosen).
Unlike Sarkozy, Angela Merkel does not appear to face a significant electoral challenge from Nazi admirers. But this hasn’t stopped her from directing insults against Muslims that would be considered taboo if aimed at followers of any other religion. During the first week of October, the chancellor told Muslims they must accept that “our culture is based on Christian and Jewish values”. Later in the month, she went further by declaring multiculturalism to have “utterly failed”.
Whether intentionally or not, Merkel has thrown down the gauntlet to the left. There is an onus on everyone who regards himself or herself as egalitarian to counter her bigotry. I’m not advocating that we respond with a misty-eyed “United Colours of Benetton” view of diversity but that we shatter the myths she is so busy propagating.
Myth number one: multiculturalism has failed. Yes, it is easy to find districts in many cities and towns where there is tension between different ethnic groups. But there are even more cases where a minority has enriched a city by creating an ambience that is vibrant and exciting. If Merkel doesn’t believe me, I’ll gladly take her for a drink in Matongé, the African quarter of Brussels, when she jets in for this week’s EU summit.
Myth number two: migration is “illegal”. In a just world, it would be unnecessary to travel outside one’s own home country to make a decent living. The world we have today is far from just – not least because European governments are committed to defending an economic system that widens global inequalities. As long as this system remains, the poor will have little choice than to migrate. There is nothing criminal about this.
Myth number three: Europe is “overrun” by asylum-seekers. Data compiled by the United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, indicate that there were 377,000 applications for asylum filed in industrialised countries last year, around the same number as 2008. It is telling that the top countries of origin for asylum-seekers were Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries occupied by the US and its European allies. If we want fewer asylum-seekers, let’s have fewer wars.
Myth number four: Europe is based on Christian and Jewish values. As Muslims have lived in Western Europe since the eighth century, those who try to airbrush Islam out of our history have concocted an intellectual fraud. Europe equally has long had millions of atheists and agnostics. So how can its values be the property of just one or two religions?
I began by noting that the far-right is setting an agenda that more “moderate” parties feel obliged to follow. This does not mean that I predict the far-right will vanish once its repugnant policies are implemented. The strong performance of extremists in recent parliamentary elections in Sweden and the Netherlands shows how adept they are at tapping into the disillusionment that is widespread in these dangerous times.
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has linked the rising popularity of far-right firebrands to what he calls “the withdrawal of leftist politics”. Speaking on the excellent American TV programme Democracy Now! last week, he said: “It is as if the left, being obsessed by the idea that we shouldn’t appear as reactionary in the economic sense, that is to say that ‘No, we are not the old trade union representatives of the working class, we are for postmodern digital capitalism’, they don’t want to touch the working class or so-called lower ordinary people. And here right-wingers enter. The horrible paradox is that, apart from some small leftist fringe parties, the only serious political force in Europe today which still is ready to appeal to the ordinary working people are the right-wing anti-immigrants?”
Separately, Zizek has warned that the future of European politics is likely to be dominated by figures like Silvio Berlusconi, a man who has thought nothing about forming a grubby alliance with largely unreconstructed fascists. This warning should rouse all of us on the left from our slumber. Running Europe is too important a business to be left to charlatans such as Berlusconi.
There is no magic formula for how the left can reclaim the ground lost to the far-right. Doing so will take organisation, determination and perspiration. Clearly, we should address the grievances that often lead otherwise decent people to vote for fascist scumbags. But we should never pander to the far-right. Our dedication to justice is not something to feel embarrassed about.
Another important message is that the alternative to multiculturalism isn’t much fun. I should know – the part of Ireland where I grew up was almost exclusively white. My country is an economic disaster zone but immigration has made it a far sexier place than it used to be. Thank God.
·First published by New Europe (www.neeurope.eu), 24-30 October 2010
The xenophobic tone of recent rhetoric from two of Europe’s most powerful leaders is frightening to anyone with a rudimentary grasp of this continent’s history. First, Nicolas Sarkozy engaged in the worst kind of populism when he announced an onslaught on the Roma. Sarkozy’s efforts to criminalise an entire ethnic group proved that he is not averse to stoking the flames of racism in order to appear tougher than the Front National (at a time when a successor to Jean-Marie Le Pen is being chosen).
Unlike Sarkozy, Angela Merkel does not appear to face a significant electoral challenge from Nazi admirers. But this hasn’t stopped her from directing insults against Muslims that would be considered taboo if aimed at followers of any other religion. During the first week of October, the chancellor told Muslims they must accept that “our culture is based on Christian and Jewish values”. Later in the month, she went further by declaring multiculturalism to have “utterly failed”.
Whether intentionally or not, Merkel has thrown down the gauntlet to the left. There is an onus on everyone who regards himself or herself as egalitarian to counter her bigotry. I’m not advocating that we respond with a misty-eyed “United Colours of Benetton” view of diversity but that we shatter the myths she is so busy propagating.
Myth number one: multiculturalism has failed. Yes, it is easy to find districts in many cities and towns where there is tension between different ethnic groups. But there are even more cases where a minority has enriched a city by creating an ambience that is vibrant and exciting. If Merkel doesn’t believe me, I’ll gladly take her for a drink in Matongé, the African quarter of Brussels, when she jets in for this week’s EU summit.
Myth number two: migration is “illegal”. In a just world, it would be unnecessary to travel outside one’s own home country to make a decent living. The world we have today is far from just – not least because European governments are committed to defending an economic system that widens global inequalities. As long as this system remains, the poor will have little choice than to migrate. There is nothing criminal about this.
Myth number three: Europe is “overrun” by asylum-seekers. Data compiled by the United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, indicate that there were 377,000 applications for asylum filed in industrialised countries last year, around the same number as 2008. It is telling that the top countries of origin for asylum-seekers were Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries occupied by the US and its European allies. If we want fewer asylum-seekers, let’s have fewer wars.
Myth number four: Europe is based on Christian and Jewish values. As Muslims have lived in Western Europe since the eighth century, those who try to airbrush Islam out of our history have concocted an intellectual fraud. Europe equally has long had millions of atheists and agnostics. So how can its values be the property of just one or two religions?
I began by noting that the far-right is setting an agenda that more “moderate” parties feel obliged to follow. This does not mean that I predict the far-right will vanish once its repugnant policies are implemented. The strong performance of extremists in recent parliamentary elections in Sweden and the Netherlands shows how adept they are at tapping into the disillusionment that is widespread in these dangerous times.
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has linked the rising popularity of far-right firebrands to what he calls “the withdrawal of leftist politics”. Speaking on the excellent American TV programme Democracy Now! last week, he said: “It is as if the left, being obsessed by the idea that we shouldn’t appear as reactionary in the economic sense, that is to say that ‘No, we are not the old trade union representatives of the working class, we are for postmodern digital capitalism’, they don’t want to touch the working class or so-called lower ordinary people. And here right-wingers enter. The horrible paradox is that, apart from some small leftist fringe parties, the only serious political force in Europe today which still is ready to appeal to the ordinary working people are the right-wing anti-immigrants?”
Separately, Zizek has warned that the future of European politics is likely to be dominated by figures like Silvio Berlusconi, a man who has thought nothing about forming a grubby alliance with largely unreconstructed fascists. This warning should rouse all of us on the left from our slumber. Running Europe is too important a business to be left to charlatans such as Berlusconi.
There is no magic formula for how the left can reclaim the ground lost to the far-right. Doing so will take organisation, determination and perspiration. Clearly, we should address the grievances that often lead otherwise decent people to vote for fascist scumbags. But we should never pander to the far-right. Our dedication to justice is not something to feel embarrassed about.
Another important message is that the alternative to multiculturalism isn’t much fun. I should know – the part of Ireland where I grew up was almost exclusively white. My country is an economic disaster zone but immigration has made it a far sexier place than it used to be. Thank God.
·First published by New Europe (www.neeurope.eu), 24-30 October 2010
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