Haaretz: Israeli Culture Minister's 'McJesus' Response Proves: Culture Is Now a Dirty Word Associated With Leftists

“McJesus” brought hundreds of angry demonstrators out into the streets in Haifa, protesting the offense to the religious feelings of Christian believers. Earlier someone threw a firebomb at the museum's exterior, and three policemen were injured in a confrontation with the protesters.

We may recall the case of a hamsa with the inscription “Idbah al-Yahud” (Slaughter the Jews) produced by Gal Volinez and displayed at Sapir Academic College, which aroused the anger of a student who destroyed it; or the portrait of Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked in the nude at an exhibition of students' work at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, which ended with the removal of the work and the resignation of the head of the art department, Larry Abramson; and the video clips by Natali Vaxberg, who defecated on the Israeli flag; and the white flag that Ariel Bronz rammed into his posterior at a Haaretz cultural conference. Provocation always works and always arouses one of the major questions that preoccupies us here: Is freedom of expression an absolute value or it is it relative? [...]

Culture Minister Miri Regev was quick to contact the executive director of Haifa's municipal museums, Nissim Tal, demanding that he remove the work. She wrote that she had received “many complaints over the serious offense caused to the Christian community’s feelings” and that “contempt for symbols sacred to religions and many believers around the world as an act of artistic protest is illegitimate and cannot be displayed in a cultural institution supported by state funds.” She also added a threat that the Culture Ministry would withhold support from the Haifa Museum of Art. [...]

So not only freedom of expression is a liberal, Western value and therefore unnecessary in Regev’s opinion, but culture as a whole becomes a dubious idea. Culture has become a dirty word that is identified with leftists, and it is the antithesis of the most basic and important characteristic of the Jewish people in its own view, which is to be a special people.

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Politico: An Idea for Electoral College Reform That Both Parties Might Actually Like

The Electoral College system governing us today, as delineated in the 12th Amendment, is primarily the result of congressional deliberations in 1803, which revised the original system adopted at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. To the Founders, the goal of the first electoral system was to elect presidents who were consensus choices, rising above the fray of squabbling political factions. Each elector was required to cast two votes for president, each for a different candidate and the two candidates coming from different states. The assumption was that nationally acceptable second-choice candidates often would prevail over disparate “favorite son” candidates from each state. [...]

The Federalists—with Senator Uriah Tracy of Connecticut most conspicuously leading the way—defended the 1787 Electoral College system, clinging to the idea that it allowed a minority party to block a majority party’s presidential candidate. If the minority electors found the majority candidate objectionable, all they had to do was cast their two votes for their own presidential candidate and the vice-presidential candidate of the majority party, and the majority party’s vice-presidential candidate would almost certainly end up with more votes than the majority party’s presidential candidate. The Federalists contended that this minority veto was more consistent with the consensus-seeking goal of the 1787 Electoral College. [...]

The primary reason was a major transformation in the methods that states use for appointing their Electoral College members. Before the 12th Amendment, most often a state’s legislature voted directly for Electoral College electors, which was consistent with the principle of majority rule. When states let citizens vote for the electors, they took steps to make sure that the chosen electors still represented the majority of the state’s voters, as well. For example, Massachusetts and New Hampshire experimented with different forms of runoffs in the event that an elector did not receive a majority of votes from the citizenry. Some states used districts to vote for presidential electors, rather than have all the voters of the state vote for all the state’s electors. This method permitted a regionally based minority party within the state to win at least some of the state’s electors, but presumably the majority party within the state overall would control a majority of the state’s Electoral College votes.[...]

There are many methods states can use to comply with this principle. They could have a regular runoff between the top-two candidates, held in late November, if no candidate received a majority in the initial popular vote. Alternatively, states could hold a preliminary vote—perhaps on the Tuesday after Labor Day—to clear the field of third-party and independent candidates, so that only the top two finalists appear on the November ballot. (This option would function similarly to the “top two” system that California and Washington state currently use for nonpresidential elections.) Or, states could adopt the kind of “instant runoff voting” procedure that Maine recently employed successfully for its congressional elections: Voters can rank their preferences among multiple candidates, so that a computer can tally which of the top two finalists receives a majority once all lower-ranked candidates are eliminated.

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The Atlantic: Want to Cultivate a Liberal European Islam? Look to Bosnia

What is too little noticed, however, is that a tolerant European Islam has already existed for centuries—on the southeastern part of the continent, where Bosnian Muslims, Albanians, Turks, and others see themselves as fully Muslim and fully European. A 2013 Pew Research Center study shows that they’re among the most liberal Muslims in the world. For example, only tiny minorities of surveyed Bosnian Muslims, known as Bosniaks, think adulterers must be stoned and apostates executed, in contrast with large majorities in favor of both stances among Pakistani and Egyptian Muslims.[...]

The majority of Bosnians gradually accepted Islam after the Ottomans brought it to the region in the 15th century. They ruled until 1878, when they lost Bosnia to a longtime rival: the Austro-Hungarian empire. Many Bosniaks at that point felt uncomfortable under their new rulers, not least because classic texts of Muslim jurisprudence had banned living in territory ruled by non-Muslims. From 1878 to 1918, an estimated 150,000 emigrated to Turkey.

But prominent Muslim intellectuals voiced arguments that helped stem the tide of Bosniak emigration. Among them was Grand Mufti M. T. Azabagić, who argued in the 1880s that a Muslim can in fact live happily under a tolerant non-Islamic state “where he is neither abused nor insulted for his acts of devotion.” In response, Bosniaks accepted Austro-Hungarian rule and began to organize themselves under the secular state. [...]

The Islamic Community cites the “requirements of time” (in the words of Bosnia’s top Islamic legal scholar) as one of the principles animating its religious interpretations: Islamic thought can and should offer Muslims answers on how to practice Islam here and now. The result is that “the institutions are given an element of flexibility, while maintaining Islam’s timelessness.” The same institution today asserts its credibility to “serve as a constructive partner for other Muslim communities and EU institutions.”

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Al Jazeera: 'Not just horror and crime': Parallel worlds in Berlin's Neukolln

"There really are parallel worlds here, of cultures and classes," she said. "I can't say it's not dangerous but within the white middle class, it's not. In the world right next to it, it can be."

Neukolln stretches across a long, jagged slice of land at the southeastern edge of the capital; the northern half lies within the inner city and is stitched together by a few "kiezes" or neighbourhoods. On the whole, the borough reflects the front lines of the very battleground issues dividing German political opinion, from integration and refugees to crime and gentrification. [...]

The closing of the Tempelhof airport drew in newcomers, particularly on and around the wide, leafy Schiller Boulevard next to the park. There, according to Berlin's daily Morgenpost, the price per square metre of apartment space was 4.80 euros in 2006 ($5.51). Now, the average is 12.90 ($14.80).[...]

"There are cafes here serving a cup of tea, from a teabag, for 3.50 euros ($4.01), in a neighbourhood where the average salary is really low," he remarked, weaving between fluent German and English tinged with a Dutch accent. In 2017, 26.8 percent of households across the entire borough of Neukolln were deemed to be at high risk of poverty: they earned less than 60 percent of the median income, or in other words, under 923 euros ($1,058) a month.

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The Huffington Post: Evangelical Christian Group Upset That LGBTQ People Are Mentioned In Anti-Lynching Bill

After more than a century of inaction from Congress, the Senate unanimously approved legislation in December that would make lynching a federal hate crime.

But some conservative evangelical Christian activists are upset that the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act contains language that specifically protects people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. [...]

While emphasizing that he’s generally in favor of banning lynching, Staver claimed the bill is being used to further other proposed federal legislation that would explicitly protect queer Americans from discrimination at work and in other contexts. [...]

Liberty Counsel has spent years advocating against LGBTQ rights, prioritizing the religious liberty of conservative Christians over the civil rights of queer Americans. The organization represented Kim Davis, the now-former Kentucky county clerk who was jailed in 2015 after refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Staver, who served as her lawyer, painted her as an evangelical Christian heroine, comparing her at one point to Jewish people who were persecuted by the Nazis.

On its surface, the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act isn’t about queer rights. The bill addresses the crime of lynching ― extrajudicial executions carried out by a mob. According to the NAACP, lynching was used after the Civil War to resolve “some of the anger that whites had in relation to the free blacks.” At least 4,742 people, predominantly African-Americans, were reportedly lynched in America from 1882 to 1968. [...]

“With the grossly disproportionate rates of hate crimes against LGBTQ people, and the horrifying rate of murders of transgender women of color in particular, a demand to strip [sexual orientation and gender identity] out of an anti-lynching bill is truly dumbfounding, and beyond comprehension,” she said. “That it would be done by someone claiming to be motivated by Christian teachings just shows how deeply perverse and inhumane that anti-LGBT advocacy can become.”

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Quartz: A new German far-right party chooses a symbol with a dark past

The announcement has caused a stir in Germany and abroad. The logo of Poggenburg’s new party, Aufbruch der Deutschen Patrioten (Awakening of German Patriots), will feature a blue cornflower, which Austrian Nazis used as a secret symbol to recognize each other when their party was banned in the country in 1933. As historian Bernhard Weidinger told the BBC, “the cornflower is a complicated symbol” in more ways than one. It is also known as “the kaiser’s flower” because it was once a favorite of German Kaiser Wilhelm I, the first German emperor. CNN notes that the cornflower has continued to be associated with nationalism and the far-right in recent history; Austria’s far-right Freedom Party adopted it as a symbol, eventually ditching it in 2017. [...]

But Poggenburg is far from an aberration within a German far-right that often flirts with Nazi symbolism or language. In 2016 Frauke Petry, the former chair of AfD, gave an interview in which she argued in favor of de-stigmatizing völkisch, a word used by German Nazis to allude to a person’s race. And in January 2017 Björn Höcke, an AfD politician, “attacked Germany’s national Holocaust memorial and the country’s devotion to teaching its citizens about Nazi genocide,” according to German broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW).

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The Guardian: ‘Brought to Jesus’: the evangelical grip on the Trump administration

The secretary of state’s primary message in Cairo was that the US was ready once more to embrace conservative Middle Eastern regimes, no matter how repressive, if they made common cause against Iran.

His second message was religious. In his visit to Egypt, he came across as much as a preacher as a diplomat. He talked about “America’s innate goodness” and marveled at a newly built cathedral as “a stunning testament to the Lord’s hand”. [...]

The gravitational pull of white evangelicals has been less visible. But it could have far-reaching policy consequences. Vice President Mike Pence and Pompeo both cite evangelical theology as a powerful motivating force. [...]

For many US evangelical Christians, one of the key preconditions for such a moment is the gathering of the world’s Jews in a greater Israel between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. It is a belief, known as premillenial dispensationalism or Christian Zionism – and it has very real potential consequences for US foreign policy. [...]

The comparison is made explicitly in The Trump Prophecy, a religious film screened in 1,200 cinemas around the country in October, depicting a retired firefighter who claims to have heard God’s voice, saying: “I’ve chosen this man, Donald Trump, for such a time as this.”

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Politico: Macedonia’s historic name change leaves deep scars

Eighty-one lawmakers narrowly passed the amendments to the constitution after three days of intense negotiations. Prime Minister Zoran Zaev needed a two-thirds majority, or 80 of the country’s 120 MPs, to ratify the deal he made back in June with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Greece has blocked Macedonia’s membership of both NATO and the EU since the early 1990s, arguing that the name infringes culturally and territorially on its own region called Macedonia. [...]

Leaders from NATO and EU member states offered congratulations. NATO secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, hailed the “important contribution to a stable and prosperous region” in a statement on Twitter. EU commissioner for enlargement, Johannes Hahn, tweeted that Friday was “a day that made history!” Hahn said he hopes it “creates a positive dynamic for reconciliation in the whole western Balkan region.” [...]

But concern has grown in recent weeks that the ugly road to the two-thirds majority could carry costs further down the line. Nationalist opposition party the VMRO-DPMNE boycotted the vote, claiming the new name threatens Macedonian identity. They also accused Zaev of using “blackmail and threats” to push it through. [...]

Florian Bieber, professor of Southeast European history and politics at the University of Graz, said the struggle over the name change reflected the realities of political dynamics across the region. “It shows the fundamental dilemma of trying to resolve such an important political dispute. What price is it worth paying in terms of doing a deal which is not exactly transparent, but which in a certain way achieves the ratification?” he asked.

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