Haaretz: Are Israelis More or Less Violent Than Their Potential?

The national index of violence released by the Public Security Ministry in 2014 found that from 2003 to 2010, some 620,000 crimes of violence were committed every year on average. Between 2010 and 2012, this number may have fallen, according to the index, but they were more serious. The 18-to-44 age group committed most of the violent crimes reported to the Israel Police, and in most of these cases – what a surprise – the attackers were men. In addition, both the attackers and their victims were usually of the same religious background.

We must now wait for the release of the new national violence index in order to see if it proves, or refutes, our subjective emotions, and to again compare our situation to that in the other OECD countries. Based on the 2014 index, Israel’s rate for robbery was lower than in the rest of this prestigious club of developed nations, but the level of violent assaults was much higher: 700 incidents per 100,000 people, compared to only 300 per 100,000 on average in the OECD. [...]

Why should someone who for three years of their lives, at least, the most natural gesture was to load a rifle and aim it at a civilian population, not conclude that attacking women is their birthright, and those who signed demolition and expropriation orders not upgrade them to embezzlement and computer crimes? And why should someone who attacks a nurse or teacher who they feel has caused them injustice expect to be punished, when thousands of armed Israelis who killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are not only not put on trial as murderers, but are defined in spoken Zionism as heroes?

read the article

America Magazine: French presidential candidates are breaking tradition by playing the religion card.

Trump administration officials have repeatedly said religious freedom is one of the key demands they will make of Cuba when they finish reviewing former President Barack Obama's opening with the island. The administration has never been more specific, but outside groups have accused Cuba of systematically repressing the island's growing ranks of evangelicals and other Protestants with acts including the seizure of hundreds of churches across the island, followed by the demolition of many. [...]

Clergy and academics say Cuba's 11 million people include some 40,000 Methodists, 100,000 Baptists and 120,000 members of the Assemblies of God, which had roughly 10,000 members in the early 1990s, when Cuba began easing restrictions on public expressions of religious faith. The church council estimates there are about 25,000 evangelical and other Protestant houses of worship across the country. About 60 percent of the population is baptized Catholic, with many also following Afro-Cuban syncretic traditions such as Santeria. [...]

The Cuban constitution now recognizes freedom of religion, but the law is silent on the issue of church construction. In a system where the government has long monopolized public life, virtually all activities are presumed illegal unless the law says otherwise. Authorities in some areas have prohibited new churches, even as they allow worship in religious buildings erected before Cuba's 1959 revolution.

read the article 

America Magazine: French presidential candidates are breaking tradition by playing the religion card.

Two of the most interesting photo ops of France’s current presidential election campaign took place last month 2,000 miles away in Lebanon—and they were all about religious optics.In one, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen called off a scheduled meeting with Grand Mufti Abdellatif Deriane just outside his Beirut office when the Muslim cleric’s staff insisted she don a headscarf before going in for the meeting. With the video cameras rolling, she emphatically refused. 

Later that day, with the same media entourage in tow, she smiled and exchanged pleasantries with Patriarch Bechara Boutros al-Rai, leader of Lebanon’s Maronite Christians and a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. [...]

After several deadly attacks by militant Islamists in recent years and sliding support for the main parties, politicians—especially from the right and far-right—are harking back to a secularized version of France’s traditional Catholic identity as one of several ways to mobilize voters. [...]

But Francois Fillon showed in November that there were still lots of votes to win on the right when he swept the primary of the Republicans—the main conservative party—by openly appealing to traditional Catholics angered by the Socialist government’s legalization of same-sex marriage in 2013.

read the article 

IFLScience: There Is No Word For This Color In English – But There Is Now In Japanese

It might sound somewhat unimportant, but the use of this word actually shows how the Japanese language has evolved over the last 30 years. And it highlights the cultural differences in how we describe color in different countries.

The fact you’re reading this suggests you speak English, so you probably know how to describe colors as red, blue, green, and so on. How we get to those colors and what shades we define, starting from black and white, is somewhat intriguing.

The 1969 book Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution suggested that there was a hierarchy of colors in all cultures, starting with black and white, then things like red and blue, and finally more descriptive colors like orange or pink.

read the article 

Financial Times: Brexit reinforces Britain’s imperial amnesia

This strikes me as a serious misunderstanding of Britain’s relationship with its past. Rather than being obsessed by empire, the British have largely consigned the whole imperial experience to George Orwell’s “memory hole”. Most British people, including leading politicians, are profoundly ignorant of the country’s imperial history.

This imperial amnesia does, however, have a crucial bearing on Brexit. It means that leading Brexiters and advocates of “Global Britain” misunderstand the past — with dangerous consequences for the future. They speak warmly of returning to Britain’s historical vocation as a “great trading nation”, when it was actually a great imperial nation. That important distinction leads to overconfidence about the ease of re-creating a global trading destiny, in a world in which Britannia no longer rules the waves. [...]

The fact that victory in the second world war and loss of empire more or less coincided was also helpful. Victory in Europe was a moment of national triumph that cushioned the psychological blow of the loss of empire. All British opinion formers have 1945 stamped on their memory — the year that marked victory in Europe. Few would be able to tell you that 1947 was the year of the independence of India. [...]

If Prime Minister Theresa May truly wants to forge a future for a “global Britain”, she might consider changing the kind of history that its citizens are taught. It would be helpful if future British politicians understood the significance not just of 1939, the year that the second world war broke out, but also of 1839, the year that the first opium war broke out.

read the article