Salon: Europe is not a secular paradise — and Americans should be careful when embracing this myth

I had to come to America to realize I’m Christian. Until a couple of years ago, when I moved to New York, I had always embraced my atheism as a given. Even though Spain is largely a Christian country by many standards, I was never baptized, I can count with one hand the times I’ve been to church and I wouldn’t know how to say grace. At home, even if I would not describe my parents as radical atheists, I was born and raised in a religion-free environment — or so I thought. [...]

Most European countries have long embraced universal liberalism — the implicit belief in moral equality for all races and religions — and are proud of what some call “European values.” What that means exactly is largely unclear, but the idea of secularization — or the French laïcité — seems to be a central tenet: In Europe, politics and society are meant to operate without any religious influence. [...]

Philosopher Mark C. Taylor points out in “After God” that “secularism is a religious phenomenon, which grows directly out of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” He argues that secularism is associated with Modernization, but both phenomena are highly rooted in Western religion. The fallacy lies in the fact that Modernization, and especially the Enlightenment, made us think of values such as laïcité as universal. But those values were actually born in Christian societies. And even as religion retreats to the private sphere, centuries of tradition cannot be extirpated from culture — nor am I arguing they should be. [...]

Failing to understand how present Christianity still is in our cultures will only create more tensions with the rising influx of immigrants from non-Christian backgrounds. We need to stop pretending that we live in religiously devoid spaces, and that the issue is that those immigrants of Muslim background need to keep their religion a private matter, because that’s what European Christians do. The immigrants coming in see themselves as coming into a Christian culture — often one that is much more intolerant of their culture than they had expected.

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The Guardian: The small African region with more refugees than all of Europe

But safety doesn’t mean comfort. Kawu is just the latest of approximately 140,000 displaced people sheltering in this remote town of 60,000 people. North-east Nigeria has been hit by a displacement crisis that dwarfs any migration flows seen in Europe in recent years. [...]

About 40% more people have been displaced throughout Borno state (1.4 million) than reached Europe by boat in 2015 (1 million). Across the region, the war against Boko Haram has forced more people from their homes – 2.6 million – than there are Syrians in Turkey, the country that hosts more refugees than any other.

The comparisons mirror a wider trend across Africa. Of the world’s 17 million displaced Africans, 93.7% remain inside the continent, and just 3.3% have reached Europe, according to UN data supplied privately to the Guardian. [...]

The international community has largely failed to help: UN funding is still 61% ($297m) short of its target. Local residents have stepped in where they can. Babakara al-Kali, a Maiduguri businessman, has given a plot of land to about 3,000 IDPs – forgoing the 10m naira (£25,000) he previously charged construction workers and mechanics to rent it every year. “If you help someone, God will help you,” Kali says. “So I decided to help them.” [...]

But according to several interviewees, including the local governor, this social alienation was partly fuelled by rapid climate change. North-east Nigeria borders Lake Chad, a vast inland lake that supplies water to about 70 million people in four countries – Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Niger. But since the 1970s, it has shrunk by 90% – from 25,000km2 to less than 2,500km2. And those who live near its former shores say this shrinkage is one indirect cause of violence in the region, and the subsequent displacement.

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The New Yorker: A New Cuba (OCTOBER 3, 2016)

Obama said that his operating theory was based on three premises. “No. 1 was, Cuba is a tiny, poor country that poses no genuine threat to the United States. No. 2, in this era of the Internet and global capital movements, is that openness is a more powerful change agent than isolation. That’s not always the case. There are unique circumstances, like North Korea, which is such a closed system that all you do there is reward those who are in power, and there’s no capacity to reach people.

“No. 3 was the belief that, if you are interested in promoting freedom, independence, civic space inside of Cuba, then the power of things like remittances to give individual Cubans some cash, even if the government was taking a cut, that then allowed them to start a barbershop, or a cab service, was going to be the engine whereby individual Cubans—not directed by the United States, not directed by the C.I.A., not through some grand conspiracy, but Cuban people—who now have their own little shop and have a little bit of savings can start expecting more.” [...]

The project, according to Obama and a number of his key advisers, started with the modest goal of tweaking a few regulations, but it evolved into an ambitious bid to open up Cuba’s closed system, by using seduction instead of force. For a generation brought up with the terror of the Cuban missile crisis, this meant abandoning a half-century-long crusade. Over the years, the United States had tried to dislodge the Castro regime by a variety of methods, including invasion, attempted assassination, funding dissidents, and a baroque plot to create a fake Twitter service that was intended to aid an antigovernment uprising. When Obama announced the opening with Cuba, John Boehner, then the Republican Speaker of the House, said, “There is no ‘new course’ here, only another in a long line of mindless concessions to a dictatorship that brutalizes its people and schemes with our enemies.” For a younger generation, though, it seemed obvious that commerce would triumph over politics. “We just don’t believe that rhetoric about changing the Cuban political system is constructive,” one of Obama’s aides told me. “And we don’t think it resonates broadly with the Cuban people, who are more focussed on their economic well-being.” [...]

I asked Obama why, considering Fidel’s long-standing distrust of the Americans, Raúl had finally stepped forward. “It’s my sense that two things are going on,” he said. “One is that there is a recognition—particularly in light of what’s happening in Venezuela—that sustaining their economic model over the next ten years becomes increasingly untenable. So they’re very much in the mode of: how do we make our economy run without giving up power?” He went on, “My impression also is that Raúl recognizes that any substantial change to their economic system—and, by extension, at least their civil society, if not their full political system—requires him to do the downfield blocking. If a younger generation tries to pull this off without the revolutionary credentials, there will be too much pushback.”

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Politico: A Russia reset? Maybe not yet

But interviews with more than a dozen officials and experts contacted by POLITICO since the election reveal an unyielding bipartisan and institutional opposition to any perceived effort by Trump to appease Putin. Such a gesture would be met with strong resistance from Congress, European allies, career national security officials and possibly even some key Trump officials. [...]

Trump has also repeatedly expressed admiration for Putin and bragged that the Russian has called him “brilliant” — Putin actually used an adjective closer to “impressive” —leading critics to worry that the New Yorker may be dangerously eager for Putin’s friendship and approval.Many analysts expect that Putin will offer Trump military cooperation against the Islamic State, which has not been a focus of Russian operations in Syria. In return, Putin will seek recognition of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula; an end to economic sanctions; and reduced U.S. military and political engagement in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Earlier this month, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told the Associated Press that a “slow down or withdrawal of NATO’s military potential from our borders” could “lead to a kind of detente in Europe.” [...]

The first obstacle to Trump’s outreach could be within his own circle of top advisers. Vice president-elect Mike Pence derided Putin in an October debate as “small and bullying,” and said that recent “provocations by Russia need to be met with American strength.” Trump’s pick for CIA director, Rep. Mike Pompeo, has called the U.S. response to Putin’s aggression in Ukraine “far too weak.” [...]

Most top Republicans in Congress take a far more hawkish line towards Putin than Trump does. In September, House Speaker Paul Ryan rebuked Trump’s praise of the Russian, calling Putin “an aggressor that does not share our interests.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he would send arms to Ukraine’s government and expand U.S. missile defense systems in eastern Europe—moves that would enrage Putin.

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The Atlantic: The Understudied Female Sexual Predator

Two years ago, Lara Stemple, Director of UCLA’s Health and Human Rights Law Project, came upon a statistic that surprised her: In incidents of sexual violence reported to the National Crime Victimization Survey, 38 percent of victims were men––a figure much higher than in prior surveys. Intrigued, she began to investigate: Was sexual violence against men more common than previously thought? [...]

In “When Men Are Raped,” the journalist Hanna Rosin summarized the peer-reviewed results that Stemple published with co-author Ilan Meyer in the American Journal of Public Health. “For some kinds of victimization, men and women have roughly equal experiences,” Rosin wrote. “Stemple is a longtime feminist who fully understands that men have historically used sexual violence to subjugate women and that in most countries they still do. As she sees it, feminism has fought long and hard to fight rape myths—that if a woman gets raped it’s somehow her fault, that she welcomed it in some way. But the same conversation needs to happen for men.” [...]

Among adults who reported sexual contact with prison staff, including some contact that prisoners call “willing” but that is often coercive and always illegal, 80 percent reported only female perpetrators. Among juveniles, the same figure is 89.3 percent. Queer men and women were two to three times more likely to report abuse. “The disproportionate abuse by female staff members does not occur because women are more often staffing facilities,” the authors write. “Men outnumber women by a ratio of three to one in positions requiring direct contact with inmates.” [...]

Stereotypes about women “include the notion that women are nurturing, submissive helpmates to men,” they write. “The idea that women can be sexually manipulative, dominant, and even violent runs counter to these stereotypes. Yet studies have documented female-perpetrated acts that span a wide spectrum of sexual abuse.”

They argue that female perpetration is downplayed among professionals in mental health, social work, public health, and law, with harmful results for male and female victims, in part due to these “stereotypical understandings of women as sexually harmless,” even as ongoing “heterosexism can render lesbian and bisexual victims of female-perpetrated sexual victimization invisible to professionals.”

Jakub Marian: Percentage of pupils learning French by country in Europe

French was and to a certain degree still is one of the most influential languages in the world. It is one of the official languages of the UN, EU, NATO, OECD, and other important organizations, so it shouldn’t be surprising that it is one of the most widely studied foreign languages in the world, with over 150 million non-native speakers.

The following map (based on data by Eurostat from 2012) shows the percentages of pupils in general (non-vocational) upper secondary education who learn French in European countries: [...]

Finally, readers not familiar with the linguistic situation in Europe may be surprised by the isolated large percentage in Romania. This is caused by the fact that Romanian, just like French, is a Romance language, so French is the easiest major world language for Romanians to learn. French is also likely studied by a majority of pupils in Moldova, where Romanian is the most common native language, but Eurostat unfortunately does not provide any data for Moldova.

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VICE: Photos of the Homes Polish Immigrants Left Behind

There are currently 9.5 million Poles living in the United States, and many of them have their roots in the beautiful, but historically poorer, mountain region of Podhale. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, a number of Polish highlanders emigrated to America. But they hoped to come back one day and use the favorable exchange rate to build spacious mansions. However, various circumstances—be it better social care for the elderly, or their children not wanting to leave the place they'd been born for a land they barely knew—kept many of them in the US. So many of these mansions were left unfinished.

Warsaw-based photographer Natalia Dołgowska was born in Zakopane, which is Podhale's biggest town. Last year, she traveled back to her home region to photograph the empty buildings that belong to Podhale immigrants in America, as well as photos of their new lives, which they mailed to relatives back home. "I realized that all my childhood, I've been feeling close to America. Growing up, I always envied my friends who had family there—their plastic Christmas trees, their bubble gum, and their flashy sneakers," Natalia said to VICE Poland.

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Al Jazeera: The young Muslims finding love via an app

For the past four weeks, she has been using Muzmatch, a smartphone app for Muslims to meet potential marriage partners. But unlike well-established dating apps, such as Tinder and Hinge, Muzmatch specifically caters to Muslims searching for a spouse - giving young Muslims greater influence in finding the right mate. [...]

Dating is often prohibited in Muslim families. Traditionally, family members are often directly involved in seeking and vetting possible partners - and the couple's respective families often meet to approve the marriage. [...]

The app markets itself solely to Muslims seeking marriage. It claims to have more than 120,000 users across 123 countries, about two-and-a-half years after launching. About two thirds of users are men. The UK, its home country, is its biggest market, followed by the US, Canada, Pakistan and Australia, but it also caters to singles in Indonesia, India, Morocco, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia, among others. [...]

Muzmatch's religious parameters, which members can check off, include the sect of Islam and things such as how often they pray. A wali, or guardian, can be nominated as a third-party moderator to monitor chats within the app, and photos can be made private.

Education levels are also delineated, and the app is conscientiously aspirational. Mocked-up promotional material presents two Yale graduates using its messaging service - Muzmatch says about 71 percent of its users are university-educated.

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