Haaretz: Zionism's Terrorist Heritage

Two weeks ago outside a courtroom in the mixed Jewish-Arab town of Lod, some 20 young Jews danced and chanted in celebration of the grisly 2015 fire-bombing murder of an 18-month-old Palestinian baby, Ali Dawabshe, killed in his bed in the West Bank village of Duma. [...]

"Where is Ali? Dead! Burned! There is no Ali!" they jeered at the grandfather, who has raised the four-year-old Ahmed and seen him through the grueling healing process since the attack. "Ali is on fire! Ali is on the grill!"

Apart from the question of how the police would have reacted had the demonstrators been Palestinians and the victim a Jewish child – recent experience leaves little doubt that the result would have been beatings, injuries and arrests – it is worth paying attention to the response of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, who are consistent and immediate in strafing social media after every event involving Palestinian terrorism: Silence. [...]

"The terror attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was in its day the equivalent of the Twin Towers," wrote historian Tom Segev in 2006, after Benjamin Netanyahu had taken center stage at a commemoration celebrating the 60th anniversary of the attack. Years later, Segev would call it, "at the time the most lethal terrorist attack in history."

The blast, which levelled six floors of a wing of the hotel with 350 kilograms of explosive, killed 91 people, all but 16 of them civilians. Most of the dead were British government staffers or hotel employees. There were 41 Arabs, 28 British citizens, 17 Jews, two Armenians, one Russian, one Greek and one Egyptian. 

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Politico: Italy’s post-fact immigration debate

Ask an average Italian what percentage of the country’s population was born abroad and the answer you’ll get — according to the research firm Ipsos Mori — is 26 percent. The actual number is 9.5 percent.   

Similarly, 11 months after a sudden, lasting drop in irregular sea arrivals to Italy, 51 percent of Italians still believe the number of migrants arriving in Italian ports is “similar or higher” than before, according to a recent survey published by the newspaper Corriere della Sera. The truth: Arrivals are almost 80 percent lower than they were nearly a year ago.

The problem is not unique to Italy. Across Europe, and indeed the world, the dominant political discourse has become increasingly dissociated from reality. The Ipsos Mori survey found similarly inflated perceptions about the foreign-born population in France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. And, according to another recent study, Germans estimate the unemployment rate among immigrants at 40 percent. The true figure is less than 8 percent. [...]

But while funds for securing the EU’s external borders will nearly quadruple (from €5.6 to €21.3 billion), money devoted to integration — an area that experts agree is essential for the long-term management of immigrants — will most likely remain at current levels. This is a direct reflection of pressure created by politicians who have zeroed in on closing the bloc’s external borders, despite the fact that new arrivals are down and a long-term solution requires attention to integrating those who stay.

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The Atlantic: There Is No Immigration Crisis

I think this argument is wrong. It’s wrong because it conflates good politics with good policy. It may be true that Democrats would benefit politically by taking a harder line on illegal immigration, as Bill Clinton benefitted in the 1990s by taking a harder line on welfare and crime. I’m not sure. The contention is plausible but difficult to prove. Regardless, family detention is a terrible response to a largely fictitious crisis. It would be lovely if shrewd politics and sound policy always went hand in hand. But it’s important for commentators to acknowledge that, often, they don’t. [...]

There’s some truth to this. As the Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner has shown, using data from the American National Election Study, Trump outperformed Mitt Romney among voters with negative views of undocumented immigrants. And, crucially, he did no worse among voters with positive views. In Klinkner’s words, “Trump won in 2016 by mobilizing the minority of Americans with anti-immigration views—but only because he avoided an offsetting counter-mobilization by the majority of Americans with pro-immigration views.” [...]

Frum, Sullivan, and Zakaria think Democrats need a middle path. They should oppose Trump’s most brutal policies while more clearly acknowledging public anxiety about illegal immigration and endorsing measures to stop it. The theory, presumably, is that such a strategy could lure back some white voters who flipped from Obama to Trump over immigration without depressing turnout among the Democrats’ pro-immigrant, young, progressive, and minority base. In the hands of a gifted candidate, this might work. Bill Clinton appeased white voters in 1992 and 1996 with his punitive stances on welfare and crime while still galvanizing a large liberal and African American turnout. Barack Obama took a harder rhetorical line against illegal immigration in 2012 than Hillary Clinton took in 2016 yet won a larger share of the Latino vote. As I’ve noted previously, Democrats might benefit from emphasizing the virtues of assimilation, and focusing on helping immigrants learning English, thus counteracting Trump’s claim that immigration undermines national unity. [...]

This is misleading. Over the last decade, illegal immigration has been going down. Between 1983 and 2006, according to the Border Patrol, the United States apprehended roughly one million—and sometimes as many as 1.5 million—undocumented immigrants per year along America’s southwest border (where the vast majority of undocumented migrants cross). That number steadily dwindled during Obama’s presidency. In fiscal year 2016 (which began in October 2015 and ended in September 2016), it was 408,000—less than half the number in 2009.  [...]

But the evidence for this argument is weak. In a 2007 study of undocumented Mexican migrants, Wayne A. Cornelius of the University of California at San Diego and Idean Salehyan of the University of North Texas found that “tougher border controls have had remarkably little influence on the propensity to migrate illegally to the USA.” Surveying the academic literature for The Washington Post this March, Anna Oltman of the University of Wisconsin at Madison noted that, “researchers increasingly find that deterrence has only a weak effect on reducing unauthorized immigration.” A weak effect isn’t no effect. Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies probably contributed to the drop in border crossings last year. Yet those numbers are now returning to their pre-Trump levels. In early April, in an effort to push them back down, the Trump administration announced that it would separate parents and children. Yet the number of apprehensions in both April and May was almost identical to the number in March.

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Vox: America’s racial future is California’s present

America is changing, and it’s changing fast. People feel that. And everything we know about identity and politics suggests this kind of transition will push America into a fragile and even dangerous place. Look at Donald Trump and the ideas that powered his rise — this transition has already pushed America into a fragile and even dangerous place. “Slowing massive demographic change is not fascist; it’s conservative,” warns Andrew Sullivan. [...]

Eric Garcetti is the mayor of LA. He’s its first Jewish mayor and its second Mexican-American mayor. He was reelected in 2017 with a stunning 81 percent of the vote. I’ve always found him to be unusually thoughtful on questions of diversity and national identity, perhaps because of the place he lives and works, and perhaps because of how many of those questions are bound up in his own biography. [...]

I think Democrats are very good at speaking about the discomfort of what it means to be a person of color, of having a different relationship with the police department. But on the other side of it, Democrats have lost the more national vision of a national identity. We run away from too often just embracing patriotism, of speaking about the United States as a great nation and a great people and a great country.  

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Bloomberg: The Millennial Crown Prince Running Saudi Arabia

Known as Mr. Everything for his deep influence in all aspects of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is radically changing his country before he even takes his seat on the throne. Bloomberg’s Profiles takes a closer look the most powerful young man in the region.

Quartz: Happiness doesn’t change much in long marriages. But something else does

To answer that question, sociologists Paul Amato from Pennsylvania State University and Spencer James of Brigham Young University examined data from 1,617 participants in the Marital Instability over the Life Course survey, a longitudinal study of marriage in the US conducted from 1980 to 2000. All respondents were married at the start of the survey; by the end, about half of them still were, the rest having divorced (19%), become widowed (5%), or dropped out of the study. [...]

In couples headed for divorce, reported happiness declined continuously and precipitously until the marriage’s end. Couples that stayed together saw a moderate decrease in happiness through the first decades of their partnership as well, with a slight uptick around the 30-year mark. [...]

Conflict, for instance, declined dramatically and continuously over the course of a life together. After a dip in the first decades when work and family obligations consume a couple’s time, the frequency of shared activities increased. By the fourth decade of marriage, couples reported spending as much time dining, socializing, and having fun together as they did when they were newlyweds. [...]

Divorced women reported more unhappiness, fewer shared activities, and more conflict than their former husbands did. Women in long-term marriages reported less happiness and more conflict at the start of the marriage, though eventually their views of marital conflict converged with their spouse’s.

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Vintage Everyday: 6 Racist, Sexist and Dishonest Vintage Advertisements That Seem Shocking Today (March 04, 2018)

These vintage advertisements are from Beyond Belief, a book by art collector and former advertising executive Charles Saatchi, which brings together the most shocking advertising campaigns of the last century. From racism and sexism to dodgy health claims, nothing was out of bounds for the real-life Mad Men.

“In the middle of the last century, marketing men had few qualms about creating brutally offensive advertisements...It proved a grimly amusing task to find so many examples that I could collect together; they provide a clear insight into the world of the ‘Mad Men’ generation and the consumers they were addressing. Although many of the advertisements selected are alarming they present an important portrait of society in the 1940s and ‘50s.” - Charles Saatchi.

Misogynistic, racist, unscientific, dishonest and just plain bizarre, these ads demonstrate how our attitudes towards women, race, tobacco, personal hygiene and drugs have changed over the years. 

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The Guardian: Blame for the ‘migrant crisis’ lies with national politicians, not the EU

To be sure, the EU failed to anticipate the scope of the 2015 migration crisis. But today’s dismal turn of events has more to do with how national politicians have behaved than with the European project itself. Politicians should explain the complexities of migration rather than pander to anxieties and alarm citizens. Throughout history, Europe’s very fabric was born of age-old movements of entire populations. With so many desperate people on the move today, seeking safety or simply a better life for themselves, migration cannot simply be stopped. Instead it must be managed.

But there’s an obvious discrepancy between what the EU commission is proposing and what national governments are ready to do. For instance, Brussels institutions have published a plan for Africa, calling for spending of €32bn (£28bn) over six years and focusing particularly on infrastructure. Will the leaders of EU states accept it, even though it’s a bare minimum? Or will they try to take the easier route of building walls and barriers in order to allay the very fears some of them have fanned?  

Look at the facts: the number of migrants arriving in Europe by sea has dropped spectacularly – in Italy, by over 70% compared to last year. But that reality has gone almost unnoticed. There is no large-scale migration crisis in Europe now. Instead, what we’re seeing are domestic political crises in which the theme of migration is exploited by demagogues. [...]

The dominance of the nation state also goes some way to explaining why the needs of citizens – in terms of jobs and social policies – are paid insufficient attention. Take the Maastricht treaty. It has been essentially used in the name of economic and fiscal rigour – a topic dear to the heart of the conservative European People’s party, which has long acted as the de facto ruler in Brussels. That is largely what has turned the eurozone into a bogeyman for people who care about social justice. But here’s the thing: only the budget deficit and GDP parameters of the Maastricht treaty were enacted. The parts that pointed to social policies have been left to languish. Who is aware today that the Lisbon treaty, in article 3, talks of goals relating to social progress and economic growth, and that it even mentions full employment?

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