Haaretz: Are Muslims the 'New Jews' for Today's Far Right? Trump's Tweets Boosted That Claim

Prejudice towards Islam and Muslims is endemic in the Europe of 2017. The "Muslim Question" is central to the politics of the far right, which has achieved success unprecedented since WWII at the polls this year, from France to the Czech Republic via Austria and Germany. 

More significantly, the fear of Muslims as potential terrorists has become an integral part of mainstream European politics and the European security state, as has been identified by Amnesty International, among others. [...]

The similarities between contemporary Islamophobia and 1930s anti-Semitism, in particular, are certainly striking: Panic about a Muslim 'horde' coming from the East; an obsession with Muslim conspiracies against the West; and the generalized depiction of Muslim men as corruptors/abusers of vulnerable Christian women (from sex gangs in the North of England to the sexual assaults in German cities on New Year’s Eve 2016). [...]

And we must not forget that the association between Jews and Communism was a central part of European thinking about Jewry before and after the Second World War (John Le Carré’s first novel, Call for the Dead, published in 1961, is testimony to its longevity). The idea of the Judeo-Bolshevik menace, however, has no corresponding concept in contemporary European debates about Islam. [...]

In 2017, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in Europe are on the rise, in different ways. The idea of a global Jewish conspiracy is itself globalizing and has found a new incarnation with, for example, the vicious campaigns against financier and philanthropist George Soros.

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Haaretz: Are Official Bans and Slurs the Start of Full-on Persecution for Turkey's LGBT Community?

A week ago, the governor of Turkey’s capital city banned all events - "cinema, theater, panels, interviews, exhibitions" - relating to the gay, lesbian and transgender community from taking place in the nation’s capital in the name of the wider "community’s public sensitivity [and] to provide peace and security." [...]

It was only a matter of time until the ban reached Istanbul. And so it was: days later an LGBT-related film screening, to be held at the Pera Museum, was also banned by the Istanbul governor’s office, who claimed that the organizers had failed to submit the proper authorization papers.  [...]

Defying the ban, students at Ankara’s prestigious Middle East Technical University screened a gay-oriented film. The university cut the electricity in order to stop the screening. Fortunately, the Turkish police opted not to use force against the students, who went on to march and chant slogans supporting LGBT rights. [...]

The LGBT ban should be seen in the wider context of Turkey’s ongoing clampdown on civil society. The first spike came during the Gezi Park protests, but accelerated since last year’s failed coup, when Turkey came under a State of Emergency that continues up to today. [...]

For the ruling AKP, LGBT issues for years were too much of a taboo to address, both among the party leadership and its constituency. During its long rulethere have been plenty of of homophobic slurs by AKP members. However, these spiked as the LGBT community became more politically ambitious, as was evident during the 2015 parliamentary elections. 

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openDemocracy: Brexit Britain is displaying its old, dangerous delusions about Ireland

The current British political class seem to have next to no understanding that, in the period since both the UK and Ireland joined the then EEC on 1st January 1973, Ireland has been the UK’s closest ally, advocate and interpreter in EU corridors of power. The last twenty years of UK-Irish relations, of which the Good Friday Agreement is but one part, have also been the most harmonious between the two states since Irish independence in 1922. The backdrop of both countries being in the EU has been a part of this. All of these benefits are now under threat and cannot just blithely be assumed to continue unharmed into the future as the most nonchalant Brexiteers claim.

UK politicians and media feel free to comment on Irish politics and politicians, such as Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, in ways unhelpful and lacking subtlety. There seems to no awareness that such comments are read in Irish circles and factored into their responses. The Spectator’s Political Editor James Forsyth wrote at the end of last week, without a hint of irony, that: ‘If British politicians talked about a majority of the Irish electorate the way Varadkar does about Brexiteers, they would rightly be chastised.’ It does make you wonder where a Westminster watcher like Forsyth has been since the Brexit vote.

What drives this delusion and derision towards all things Irish? One major factor is the powerful myopia at the heart of the UK. The British political establishment barely understands the complexities, composition and character of the UK. This lack of understanding has a long history but it’s now becoming a chasm that is vitally important to how Brexit pans out.

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Al Jazeera: The End of China Inc? (Sep 16, 2016)

There's a magic formula to becoming a millionaire in China - borrow big to earn big.

For years, individuals, state-owned companies and municipalities have taken massive loans to chase the Chinese dream.

Now it's payback time, but a severe economic slowdown means many are struggling to pay their debts.

The New York Review of Books: This Poisonous Cult of Personality

Barack Obama was the first “celebrity president” of the twenty-first century—“that is,” as Perry Anderson recently pointed out, “a politician whose very appearance was a sensation, from the earliest days of his quest for the Democratic nomination onwards: to be other than purely white, as well as good-looking and mellifluous, sufficed for that,” and for whom “personal popularity” mattered more than the fate of own party and policies.  Public life routinely features such sensations, figures in whom people invest great expectations based on nothing more than a captivation with their radiant personas. [...]

The politics of celebrity, however, has no patience for cautionary tales. It remains impervious even as white supremacists thrive in America’s “post-racial” age, and democracy in Myanmar empowers ethnic cleansers. Premised on seeing history as inconsequential and political institutions as pliable, this politics continuously renews itself around new luminaries. Last week, Thomas Friedman emerged from a deep bath in the charisma of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, to announce a new Arab Spring. The latest—though relatively benign—icon of world peace and harbinger of a post-racial future is Meghan Markle, a biracial American actress who is engaged to marry Prince Harry, the fifth in line to the British throne. [...]

The culture may occasionally appear progressive, a showcase of diversity, but only because it comforts the rich, famous, and powerful without regard for race or gender. This identity-cum-personality politics is profoundly indifferent to political and moral principle. Thus, for example, the former Pakistani cricketer Imran Khan, leader of the Pakistan Movement of Justice and a member of Pakistan’s National Assembly, maintained his luster among British glossies and tabloids long after he mutated from handsome Lothario to stern Islamist. And so it is with Theresa May, the flailing conservative prime minister of Britain, who recently appeared on the cover of American Vogue—for no apparent reason than that she is a woman with power. [...]

Obama continued to dazzle the literati even as he stepped up deportations of illegal immigrants and drone attacks, ruthlessly pursued whistle-blowers, and inaugurated the extrajudicial executions of American citizens. He exhorted African Americans to assume personal responsibility for their plight while absolving bankers of all responsibility for ruining the lives of millions of people. Yet, as with Trump and his loyal and captive audience today, support for Obama remained steadfast among African Americans and white liberals.

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Quartz: Nine out of ten adolescent deaths due to AIDS are in Africa

East and southern Africa still have the highest number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the world. The region is home to 6.2% of the world’s population but has over half of the global HIV-positive population, according to Avert. While 790,000 new infections in 2016 are still worryingly high, it is an improvement from the previous decade: HIV infections have decreased by 24% among adults and 56% among children.

Now, however, a new generation finds themselves as vulnerable to the disease as they may have been in the early years of the pandemic. Health authorities are sounding the alarm with a new set of statistics: the high number of new infections among teenagers. The high rate of infections among young people threatens to undercut the very-recent gains made. [...]

Part of that statistic is due to the children born HIV-positive who have grown up, but their medication regimes have failed to keep up. Many of these deaths, however, are due to new infections among a generation who may not have experienced aggressive public information campaigning. [...]

HIV/AIDS, however, has always been an opportunistic illness. Not only does it thrive in a weakened immune system, it attacks the most vulnerable in society. Women remain the most affected by the disease, accounting for more than half of the HIV-positive population. Yong women are most vulnerable: for every five adolescent boys infected with HIV, there are seven girls, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, according to Unicef.

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Quartz: Italy’s neo-fascism is what happens when you normalize extremism

Then things changed. Today, political parties with fascist sympathies are growing fixtures (paywall) in Italian politics, and a number of publicly fascist actions have troubled Italian society: During a soccer match last month (Oct. 22), a group of football fans gave out stickers of Anne Frank dressed in their arch-rival’s jersey. Earlier in the year, an Italians-only beach decorated with fascist symbols and paraphernalia had opened near Venice. Near Rome, a town mayor erected a statue to a fascist general.

Fascism’s rebirth and insidious spread in Italy is the result of a political process that has progressively whitewashed extremism, assisted by the confluence of recent historical factors: By the early 1990s, new generations had grown disconnected from the country’s history of resistance against fascism, as partisans and victims of racial laws aged and died. The fall of the USSR and the dissolution of the Italian communist party also meant a drop in funding to some of the country’s main anti-fascist educational organizations.

More importantly, something happened in the right at the same time. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of Italian history at New York University, calls it the rise of “fuppies,” or fascist yuppies. “Fuppies” were typically members of, or politically aligned with, Alleanza Nazionale (AN), a rightwing party that publicly rejected antisemitism and other fascist principles, such as violence.

“Fuppies” used articulate, tolerant language and showed respect for democratic institutions. Founded in 1994, AN was led by Gianfranco Fini, who entered politics with the belief that deposed fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was “the greatest statesman of the 1900s,” the Fuppies positioned themselves as modern, successful conservatives. The party’s newspaper, Il Secolo d’Italia, describes AN as aiming to (Italian) move “from the ghetto to the governing right, become ‘presentable,’ scrap nostalgias, acquire moderates who are no longer scared of neofascism.”

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Politico: French and Italians sense golden opportunity in glyphosate ban

When the two countries announced Monday that they would ban the controversial weedkiller by 2020, the decisions seemed like knee-jerk reactions to being on the losing side of a vote in Brussels to extend the license of the world’s most common herbicide for another five years.

But French President Emmanuel Macron’s promise to outlaw glyphosate in France as soon as “alternatives are found” wasn’t fueled by blind faith. After all, he and Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni can’t risk infuriating powerful agricultural constituencies that see weedkillers as vital for growing everything from barley to carrots.

In fact, both France and Italy have a Plan B: a more natural product that threatens to oust Monsanto’s ubiquitous glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup from its dominant position in European agriculture. [...]

On Monday, France, Belgium and Italy joined six other countries to vote against a new license for glyphosate. They lost the vote when Berlin cast the swing ballot in favor of the weedkiller, extending the license by five years. The German chemical giant Bayer is poised to acquire Monsanto for $66 billion.

The decision by national experts in a food safety committee marked the culmination of a bitter political debate over whether glyphosate is a carcinogen. In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) said it “probably” causes cancer. Both the European Food Safety Authority and the European Chemicals Agency subsequently declared glyphosate as safe for use, however.

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Politico: Eastern Europe strikes back at EU establishment with Eurogroup bid

Kažimír had fallen out of favor among his fellow eurozone socialists, who overlooked him amid concerns about his unpredictable nature. Several eurozone officials told POLITICO that the Slovak has a tendency to “speak without thinking,” with one person questioning whether Kažimír would be able “to do the job without insulting people.”

But Slovakia’s curveball comes less than two weeks after its capital, Bratislava, lost out in the race to host the European Medicines Agency (EMA) which must relocate from London after Brexit. Amsterdam edged out Milan for the EMA, with Bratislava not even getting past the first round of voting despite having been considered a leading contender. [...]

The Commission, Parliament and Council are all headed by conservatives from the European People’s Party (EPP), which deliberately didn’t field its own candidate for the Eurogroup race to keep political peace with socialists in Brussels. Spain’s Finance Minister Luis de Guindos orchestrated that EPP strategy, which should have paved the way for the socialist candidate to win the Eurogroup presidency. [...]

The winner will exert significant influence over economic and monetary policy across the 19-country bloc as it embarks on ambitious reforms to strengthen its foundations. Another immediate task facing the next Eurogroup president will be the delicate process of shepherding Greece toward the exit from its €86 billion bailout program next summer.

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