The New York Review of Books: Germany: With Centrists Like These…

Because the AfD doesn’t have the necessary numbers to change laws, most of its efforts in the Bundestag have been designed to nudge conversation instead. Ever since the election, discussion of events in the public eye has had to include the AfD’s spin. When Deniz Yücel, a German-Turkish journalist, was released after a year in jail on false charges of espionage, AfD members declared him a “hater of Germany” and called for him to renounce his German citizenship. (A day earlier, André Poggenburg, an AfD leader in the state of Saxony­ Anhalt, attacked the entire Turkish community in Germany, which currently stands at some three million people. They were all “camel­drivers” who should be “sent back to the Bosphorus,” he said.) In recent months, the AfD has introduced legislation to make German the country’s “national language” and to alter the laws governing dual citizenship. These proposals have little legislative weight but a strong pull on the media. 

For people working with minority groups in Germany, the AfD’s presence in the Bundestag poses an additional problem. Now that these anti-immigrant views are being expressed by a parliamentary party, not individuals, members of government cannot criticize them as racist—by law, ministers are required to be neutral in their treatment of political parties. Last month, the German constitutional court judged that an education minister had acted unconstitutionally when she called for a “red card” boycott of the AfD over its anti-refugee politics three years ago. AfD politicians had brought the complaint. [...]

On the issue of immigration, however, there is a clear shift in tone. The 2013 coalition agreement had talked about Germany as a “cosmopolitan country” that saw “immigration as an opportunity.” The picture presented in the most recent agreement is much darker: “We’re continuing our efforts to mitigate migration to Germany and Europe appropriate with regard to the ability of society to integrate, so that a situation like 2015 is not repeated,” referring  to the nearly two million immigrants who arrived in Germany that year, many of them asylum-seekers from Syria. For the first time, a cap has been set for the number of asylum-seekers who can come to Germany: 180,000-200,000 a year. And while the Social Democrats can claim, as immigration expert Astrid Ziebarth explained to me, that the path remains open—that these are simply guidelines, not a hard and fast rule—the overwhelming impression conveyed by the current policy is a denial of the number of immigrants already in Germany and a misrepresentation of how many newcomers the country would need to welcome in order to maintain the current workforce (400,000 a year, according to one estimate). The name of the Interior Ministry has been changed: it is now the Ministry of the Interior, Development and Heimat—a somewhat uncritical choice of words for a country that claims to prize historical awareness.

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The New York Review of Books: A Mighty Wind

Yet before Modi was plucked from his post as chief minister of the state of Gujarat (roughly equivalent to an American governor) and made the party’s candidate for prime minister, the BJP had seldom excelled outside the “cow belt,” a socially conservative and largely Hindi-speaking northwestern wedge of the Indian diamond. Other Indians, whether minority Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, or just differently observant Hindus, generally shunned the Sangh “family”: they were earnest and devoted, yes, but also frightening; it was an extreme Hindu nationalist, after all, who shot Gandhi in 1948. The BJP could raise an occasional clamor, but the actual agenda of Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism—demands such as banning beef, ending the alleged “appeasement” of minorities by politicians seeking their votes, building a temple to the god Ram on the ruins of a mosque at his supposed birthplace, being extra-tough on Pakistan, or replacing “Western” modes of thinking and behaving with ostensibly “authentic” Indian ones like Ayurvedic medicine or rather vague notions of “Indian” economics—gained only slow and uneven traction in practice.  [...]

More political triumphs have followed. Having started with just seven in January 2014, the party and smaller allies now control nineteen states and territories that together account for nearly two thirds of India’s people—a feat not paralleled since Congress’s heyday in the 1960s. In March 2017 the BJP captured the biggest prize, Uttar Pradesh, a state with 220 million people, winning a stunning three quarters of all seats in the state legislature. In December it won an unprecedented sixth term in Gujarat, Modi’s home state, despite furious efforts by Congress to rally what has traditionally proven to be India’s most reliable political force, anti-incumbency. And in March the BJP captured three small states in the remote, ethnically complex northeast, proving its growing strength beyond the Hindi-speaking heartland. [...]

While Modi’s benign fatherly image has raised respect for the movement at home and abroad, his government has quietly inserted loyalists wherever possible in India’s establishment, from the boards of state-owned companies to top posts in state universities and research institutes. It has also aggressively—and quite effectively—bullied much of India’s mainstream press into toeing the party line. The Fox News–like stridency of Modi’s media claque does not seem to bother most voters, and many have also cheered what amounts to a quiet purge of the Congress-era mandarins who have long occupied the commanding heights in public life. Yet even among those who welcomed the BJP’s 2014 promise to make India “Congress-free,” some have begun to suspect that team Modi’s aim may be not merely to overcome but rather to destroy the once-dominant rival party, and not just to guide the national agenda but to capture the Indian state and hold it for keeps. [...]

In many of the BJP’s most successful campaigns, this politics of intercaste resentment has proved just as crucial as the party’s carefully cultivated grudge against “nonindigenous” religious minorities. (Hindutva ideologues make a pointed distinction between Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs, who are considered properly Indian, and Muslims and Christians, who are somewhat suspect—regardless of the fact that these big monotheistic faiths reached the subcontinent 1400 and 1900 years ago, respectively.) [...]

This is an expensive business. Vaishnav cites one study that puts the overall cost of India’s 2014 national election at $5 billion, in the same ballpark as the $6.5 billion that the US—a country whose GDP is almost ten times greater than India’s—spent on presidential and congressional elections in 2016. His candidate friend personally shelled out close to $2 million in a race for the Andhra Pradesh state assembly. That is more than thirty times the legal limit, yet Vaishnav was laughingly told that other candidates spent far more. In some states, inducements are paid in kind rather than cash. Kitchen appliances are the favored payoff in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Election officials in Gujarat, an officially dry state, seized 500,000 bottles of liquor during its 2012 state elections—most of this presumably intended as sweeteners for voters.  

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The New York Review of Books: More Equal Than Others

But Waldron thinks that in neither case are we drawing fundamental distinctions of kind between humans: being a child or an alien is (in principle) a contingent condition, one that justifies different forms of moral treatment, but that does not speak of fundamental differences in moral worth. Or, to put it another way, insofar as our differential treatment of children and adults, or citizens and aliens, is justified, it is only because we can show how it is mandated by a principle that applies equally to everyone, including children and aliens.  [...]

Waldron is insistent that basic equality, despite its status as a second-order principle, is morally demanding. It requires us, he writes, to “insist unflinchingly that the benefit of basic principles of human worth and human dignity accrues equally to every human being.” His central example is a decision made by the Israeli Supreme Court in 2005 on targeted killings of Palestinians, including those not directly involved in terrorist activities. In his opinion, Supreme Court President Emeritus Aharon Barak argued that a ruling on the question had to respect the fact that “unlawful combatants are not beyond the law. They are not ‘outlaws.’ God created them as well in his image. Their human dignity as well is to be honored.” Barak went on to argue for an expanded notion of what counts as “direct participation” in terrorist activity, so as to make Israel’s killings compatible with international customary law. The other justices concurred. Waldron finds Barak’s invocation of basic equality moving, a sign of “the hard and desperately difficult work” that the principle does. A skeptic might think it a prime example of how talk of basic human equality can be used to dignify profound inhumanity. [...]

In offering his account of what makes profoundly disabled humans our equals, Waldron also means to “confront and refute” an argument famously made by the philosopher Peter Singer. Singer notes that most of us would be instinctively horrified by the idea of treating a human with severe cognitive impairments in the ways we routinely treat animals with similar cognitive capacities. But this, Singer says, is inconsistent; if profoundly disabled humans are our equals, then surely chimps, dolphins, pigs, and elephants are too. As a believer in distinctive equality—the idea that humans have significantly more worth than animals—Waldron must resist Singer’s conclusion. This is why Waldron does not simply expand what counts as the “ordinary” range of human capacities to include those capacities actually possessed by profoundly disabled humans. By instead locating the grounds of equality in a profoundly disabled human’s potential capacities, he hopes to defend the thesis of basic human equality without granting equality to non-human animals.

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Vox: How the first nude movies were made (Nov 29, 2015)

Slate: What Living off the Grid in Europe Looks Like

Bruy, who grew up in urban France, became fascinated by the self-sufficient, off-the-grid lifestyle he experienced and resolved to see more of it while documenting it with his camera. Using the WWOOF network, Bruy has lived on remote farms all across Europe, from Spain to Switzerland to Romania, staying anywhere from two weeks to three months at a time. “Most of the farmers had been living in big cities and I really respect their decision to say, ‘This is not my thing and I can't live this way anymore.’ I think there are a lot of people thinking this way but few making the steps to change. I was interested in how they managed to live another way,” he said.

While they all aspire to some degree of self-sufficiency, Bruy’s subjects represent a range of experiences. Some live without electricity or running water, while others are equipped with most modern conveniences. Bruy isn’t necessarily concerned with finding the most extreme cases. Instead, he’s interested in capturing a variety of people who have chosen alternative lifestyles. “Some of them would say they’re 30 percent self-sufficient or they’re 60 percent self-sufficient. It's very hard to check those numbers. The most important thing, for me, was the intention,” he said.

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Spiegel: An Author's Quest to Explain Muslim Anti-Semitism

There are a number of patterns to be found in the transcripts. For example, most had read something about a supposed Jewish global conspiracy or heard about it from friends or family. A female engineer who grew up in a Turkish family in Germany said, "People talk about it, that the world is governed by some families, about 120 families. They are Jewish and that they control the government, more or less. All these diseases, bacteria, that are being spread everywhere in the world here, supposedly also come from there, that means the whole system in the world! I do think that Jews very, very much manipulate the world and also control it." [...]

The central subject in his conversations, Ranan writes, was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many of his interview subjects, he argues, said "Jew" when they meant "Israeli." As Ranan puts it, "When someone is shouting 'Jew, Jew, cowardly pig' at a protest in reaction to an Israeli bombing of Gaza, they aren't referring to London or New York Jews, but Israelis. That doesn't make it more pleasant for spectators and it is especially hard for Jews to bear." [...]

The number of anti-Semitic crimes is consistently high in Germany. Last year, the police registered 1,453 anti-Semitic offenses, an average of four per day. Of these, 1,377 crimes can be ascribed to the far-right extremist scene. Only 58 crimes were classified as being the result of "religious ideology" or "foreign ideology." According to anti-Semitism researchers, the number of unreported crimes is high. Critics also complain that the judiciary in German does not classify many crimes that are anti-Semitic in nature as such.

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Haaretz: Gaza Carnage Is a Propaganda Victory for Hamas – and a Hasbara Nightmare for Israel

Future developments are also in the hands of the Islamic organization. The more Hamas persists with the “March of the Million,” as it has been dubbed, and the more it succeeds in separating the protests from acts of violence and terror, the more it will succeed in defying and embarrassing Israel as well as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. If commanders of the Israel Defense Forces don’t find a way to repel efforts to breach the fence without causing so many casualties, Israel’s predicament will grow exponentially. Friday’s day of bloodshed may be quickly forgotten if it remains a solitary event, but if the bloodshed recurs over and over during the six-week campaign that is slated to culminate on the Palestinian Nakba Day in mid-May, the international community will be forced to refocus its attentions on the conflict. Criticism of, and pressure on, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has virtually evaporated in recent months, could return with a vengeance. [...]

The immediate support of the Trump administration, expressed in a Passover-eve tweet by special envoy Jason Greenblatt, who lambasted Hamas incitement and its “hostile march,” is ostensibly a positive development from Israel’s point of view. Contrary to Trump, Barack Obama would have been quick to criticize what is being widely described as Israel’s excessive use of force, and might have conferred with Western European countries on a proper diplomatic response. Israel welcomes and Netanyahu often extols its unparalleled coordination with the Trump administration, but it could also turn out to be a double-edged sword, which will only make things worse.  [...]

The unqualified U.S. support strengthens the resolve of Netanyahu and his ministers to stick with their do-nothing polices toward both Gaza and the peace process. Most Israelis view Hamas purely as a terror organization, and their gut reaction is that Israel can’t and shouldn’t be perceived as caving in to terror and violence. At a time when early elections seem just beyond the horizon, the last thing Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition wants to do is deviate from its established policies, which would be tantamount to admitting the error of its ways. Calls from the left to review the IDF’s conduct in Gaza and reassess Netanyahu’s policies toward the Palestinians overall could bring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict back to the center of public discourse after an extended absence, but will also provide the prime minister with an excuse - as if he needs one - to divert attention away from the crisis in Gaza to backstabbing internal enemies from within.

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The New York Times: How Viktor Orban Bends Hungarian Society to His Will

His party’s appointees or supporters dominate many artistic institutions and universities. A growing number of plays and exhibitions have had nationalist or anti-Western undertones. Religious groups and nongovernment organizations critical of Fidesz have seen funding dry up. He has especially vilified pro-democracy organizations funded by the Hungarian-American philanthropist George Soros.

National opinion surveys are used to steer public opinion as much as collect it, while history is also up for grabs. The government has jousted with educators over textbooks while promoting a narrative of Hungarian victimhood and ethnocentrism. [...]

“The government is using its democratic legitimacy not only to reform the state but to reform the society,” said Professor Andras Patyi, the head of a new university formed by Fidesz to train the public officials of the future. He said the current president of France, Emmanuel Macron, was doing the same thing. “This is common in democratic societies,” he said. [...]

This kind of revisionism has also entered the national curriculum. High school graduates can now be tested on the new preamble to the Hungarian Constitution — a text which implies that Hungarian nationality is exclusively Christian, even though Hungary has a substantial Jewish minority. Its wording also reduces the agency of Hungarian officials in the final year of World War II, when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were murdered.

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