Foreign Affairs: Trump’s Plan for Palestine Looks a Lot Like Apartheid

The apartheid government ultimately created only four ostensibly independent Bantustans (Bophuthatswana, Venda, Ciskei, and Transkei) and six supposedly self-governing territories. Foreign governments for the most part dismissed the puppet states for what they were; South Africa was the only country in the world to officially recognize the Bantustans, and the major decisions regarding their affairs were made exclusively in Pretoria. [...]

During these years, I learned, to my dismay, that no country in the world (with the exception of South Africa) contributed more to the economy of the Bantustans than Israel. Israelis built factories, neighborhoods, a hospital, and even a soccer stadium and an alligator farm in these South African puppet states. Israel went so far as to allow one of them, Bophuthatswana, to maintain a diplomatic mission in Tel Aviv, and its leader, Lucas Mangope--shunned by the entire world for advancing and legitimizing apartheid by cooperating with the South African regime--was a frequent guest in Israel. [...]

The details of the proposal, and the rhetoric used by both Trump and Netanyahu, made it clear that this was not a deal but rather the implementation of Netanyahu's long-standing plan to further entrench Israel's control of the West Bank by giving its residents disconnected enclaves of territory without granting them real freedom or basic political rights. That was precisely the goal of the old South African government's Bantustan policy, too.

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The Guardian: Bild, Merkel and the culture wars: the inside story of Germany’s biggest tabloid

 Today Bild is paradoxically less influential than it was in the 60s, but more politically important. “I read it first in the morning because it is the agenda-setter,” says Josef Joffe, the publisher-editor of the liberal weekly, Die Zeit. “Politicos in Berlin probably read it first in the morning as well.” The paper enjoys a close relationship with the German political elite. The former German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, was one of the best men at the wedding of former Bild editor, Kai Diekmann, and in 2008, Diekmann performed the same role for Kohl at his wedding. “Kohl rules with Bild,” the Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll wrote, and Kohl’s successor as chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, affirmed the practice: “To govern I need Bild, Bild Sunday’s edition, and the telly,” he once said. [...]

Reichelt’s agenda is marked less by novelty than by a chest-crunching resuscitation of Bild’s core commitments: pro-US, pro-Nato, pro-Israel, pro-austerity, pro-capital, anti-Russia, anti-China. According to the Bild worldview, the best way to counter the left is to portray its demands as totalitarian, and the best way to kill off the far right is to cannibalise its grievances. While Bild prints relatively little material that a supporter of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party would object to, Reichelt sees the party as a threat to his effort to remake the German political scene. “We want nothing to do with the imbeciles of the AfD,” he told me. “The way to destroy them is to make room for their voters in what used to be the political mainstream of this country.” [...]

As editor, Reichelt sees himself less as a news impresario than as an emotional entrepreneur. “Journalism is basically about emotions, as all of the other news outlets in this country seem to have forgotten,” he told me. Reichelt likes to point out what he sees as the shared delusions of the more “respectable” German press. He gave the example of Merkel, around whom he said the press had created an “elaborate mythology” that she has such natural wit and is extremely clever, whereas her skill lay in identifying the direction of the prevailing winds.

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WorldAffairs: Communism vs. COVID-19

 Vietnam may have limited resources to stop the spread of the coronavirus, but it’s made up for it with proactive policies and manpower. The country mobilized tens of thousands of military personnel, health care workers and ordinary citizens to fight COVID-19. This level of collective action requires a unified front, and though it was ultimately successful, Vietnam is still an authoritarian country that weathered a 20-year, famous civil war. There are plenty of Vietnamese people who, with good reason, don’t trust their government, and our guest on the podcast, Nguyen Qui Duc, is one of them. He’s a journalist and restaurant owner who joined us to describe his experience in Vietnam during a global pandemic.

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Balkan Insight: Mass Arrest of LGBT People Marks Turning Point for Poland

 “I have been an activist for equality and human rights for over 30 years, but never in my life have I been as afraid as I am now,” Rawinska told BIRN following her release from prison. “What happened on Friday is a kind of greenlight to shout at us and attack us.” [...]

Rawinska’s determination to fight for her rights is echoed by other activists, who say that Friday’s events have revealed a “new rainbow solidarity” and anti-LGBT actions by the government and its allies are likely to receive a stronger pushback from now on. “I think it’s in the Polish genes that when something bad happens, we flex our muscles and fight it off. We saw it with the Solidarity movement or martial law – the more the government pressures us, the more we will fight back,” Bart Staszewski, a prominent LGBT activist who was part of the protests on Friday, told BIRN. [...]

The police said the mass arrests were necessary to carry out the court order to take Margot into detention. But testimonies from the detained and their lawyers, as well as independent observers, point to a disproportionate response by the police, who arrested peaceful protesters and even random passers-by while acting violently – an approach some argue can be explained by the general anti-LGBT climate building up in Poland over the last years. [...]

A report published on Saturday by the Polish Ombudsman’s office, based on talks with 33 of the detained while they were imprisoned, says that, “among the arrested, there are people who did not take active part in the gatherings on Krakowskie Przedmiescie or Wilcza street, but were watching the incident. Some of them had rainbow emblems – bags, pins, flags. Among the detained there were also random people who in a certain moment were, for example, coming out of a shop with bags.”

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Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: Moldova's Orthodox Church Lashes Out At 'Anti-Christ Plot' To Develop Virus Vaccine

 The Moscow-affiliated Moldovan Orthodox Church has called on the country's leadership to ensure that a potential future anti-coronavirus vaccine will not be made compulsory, claiming conspiracy by a "world anti-Christ system" that will allegedly insert microchips into humans to control them via 5G technology. [...]

Such accusations are also present in the Moldovan church's statement, which says that "Bill Gates is considered the man responsible for the creation of a technology allowing people to be microchipped through a vaccine that would insert in their bodies nanoparticles that interact with 5G waves and allow people to be remotely controlled." [...]

The Moldovan Orthodox Church is autonomous but operates under the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Romanian Orthodox Church's Metropolis of Bessarabia is the country's other major church.

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