Vox: The Cambodian prime minister just told his political opponents to “prepare coffins”

“Your tongue is the reason for war. If you still make insults and threats to kill, you have to prepare your coffin,” Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said on June 21. “To protect the peace for millions of people, if necessary, 100 or 200 must be eliminated. Please listen carefully. ... Whoever intends to undermine peace will receive what you deserve.”

The prime minister delivered the speech at a 40th-anniversary commemoration of the day he decided to defect from the Khmer Rouge army and organize rebel forces that eventually defeated the genocidal regime of Pol Pot. Hun made the speech wearing his military uniform — a rarity for him — and while flanked by his top military commanders.

Hun, who has ruled Cambodia for 32 years, also made clear that power over Cambodia is, and will continue to be, in the hands of his family. This remains to be seen, especially given the upcoming general election in 2018, which could pose a serious threat to Hun’s Cambodian People’s Party. [...]

Cambodia has organized national elections since 1993, though it has been virtually impossible for any other political party to challenge the CPP’s rule, until now. In 2013, despite even more intimidation and electoral manipulation than in previous years, the Cambodia National Rescue Party, which is the main opposition party, managed to take 22 seats from the CPP in the National Assembly, giving them a total of 55 out of 123 positions. [...]

Local elections in Cambodia aren’t typically seen as that important, but the buildup of opposition forces in the past few years made this one markedly different. Close to 90 percent of registered voters participated in these elections — the highest turnout in Cambodia’s history. Hun even hit the ground to campaign, attending his first political rally since 1998.

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Vox: Study: when it comes to detecting racial inequality, white Christians have a blind spot

The AVA is based on 40,000 telephone interviews conducted across all 50 states. On average, the study found that 63 percent of Americans acknowledged “a lot” of discrimination against immigrants, 57 percent against black people, and 58 percent against gay and lesbian people. Overall, about two-thirds of Americans see discrimination against at least one minority group as an issue, with 42 percent identifying discrimination as an issue among all three groups.

But among white Christians, those figures dropped significantly: Only 36 percent of white evangelicals, 50 percent of white mainline Protestants, and 47 percent of white Catholics reported perceiving discrimination against black people (the survey did not ask about other races). For contrast, 86 percent of black Protestants reported perceiving “a lot” of discrimination against black people in America, as did 67 percent of the religiously unaffiliated. Even higher proportions of Buddhists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Unitarians reported discrimination. [...]

Jones noted that among white Christians, there’s "a difference in degree, though not a difference in kind” between the responses of mainline Protestants, who have traditionally been more progressive, and white evangelicals. To explain these differences, Jones pointed to historic divisions between these camps in both geography (mainline Protestants tend to be clustered in the Northeast; evangelicals in the South) and positions over race issues (many mainline Protestant churches were deeply involved in both the abolitionist and civil rights movements, while many Southern evangelical churches had roots in pro-slavery and segregationist causes). [...]

Many white evangelicals who do not perceive discrimination against minority groups in fact perceive discrimination against themselves, Jones said, referring to a question in a previous PRRI study about whether discrimination against white people was as serious a cultural problem as that against black people. White evangelicals overwhelmingly said it was. “[White evangelicals are] more likely to see discrimination against themselves than against minority groups, and that is, I think, a reflection of that sense that they really have lost their power, their influence, they’ve lost the cultural center and the demographic dominance they once had — that, oh, no, we’re the ones being persecuted,” he said.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Bolsheviks and Antisemitism

The February Revolution transformed Jewish life. Just days after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, all legal restrictions on Jews were lifted. More than 140 statutes, totaling some thousand pages, were removed overnight. To mark this historic moment of abolition, a special meeting was convened by the Petrograd Soviet. It was the eve of Passover, March 24, 1917. The Jewish delegate who addressed the meeting immediately made the connection: the February Revolution, he said, was comparable with the liberation of Jews from slavery in Egypt. [...]

Without doubt, the soviets had become, by mid-1917, the main political opposition to antisemitism in Russia. An editorial in the newspaper Evreiskaia Nedelia (the Jewish Week) captured this well: “It must be said, and we must give them their dues, the soviets have carried out an energetic struggle against [pogroms]. In many places, it has only been thanks to their strength that peace has been restored.”

It is worth noting, however, that these campaigns against antisemitsm were aimed at workers in factories and sometimes activists within the broad socialist movement. In other words, antisemitism was identified as a problem within the social base of the radical left, and even sections of the revolutionary movement itself. What this revealed, of course, is that antisemitism did not simply emanate from “above,” from the former tsarist establishment; it had an organic base within sections of the working class, and it had to be confronted as such. [...]

What underscored moderate socialist concern about the capacity of antisemitism and revolution to overlap was the way Bolsheviks mobilized the masses, and channeled their class resentment. On October 28, when the revolution was in full flow, the Mensheviks’ Petrograd Electoral Committee issued a desperate appeal to workers in the capital, warning that Bolsheviks had seduced “the ignorant workers and soldiers,” and the cry of “All power to the Soviets!” would all too easily turn into “Beat the Jews, beat the shopkeepers.” For the Menshevik L’vov-Rogachevskii, the “tragedy” of the Russian revolution lay in the apparent fact that the “the dark masses (temnota) are unable to distinguish the provocateur from the revolutionary, or the Jewish pogrom from a social revolution.”

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The New Yorker: Saudi Arabia's Game of Thrones

On Wednesday, King Salman, who is eighty-one and frail, ousted his more seasoned heir—a fifty-seven-year-old nephew who crushed Al Qaeda cells in Saudi Arabia during decades as the counterterrorism tsar—in favor of Prince Mohammed, the monarch’s seventh and favorite son. The sprawling royal family has traditionally shared power among the first generation of sons of Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the founding father of modern Saudi Arabia. When he died in 1953, he had fathered forty-three sons and even more daughters. Since then, an artful balancing act has distributed politics, privilege, and financial perks among the royal family’s many branches. The arrangement preëmpted serious dissent.

Now, in a royal decree, the king’s move has bypassed his own brothers, hundreds of royals in the second generation who thought that they had a shot at the kingship, and even his own older sons. Prince Mohammed is the youngest heir apparent in Saudi history—by decades. In a country long ruled by men who grew up without air-conditioning or direct-dial phones, the new crown prince talks of growing up playing video games, carries an iPhone, and talks openly about idolizing Steve Jobs. [...]

The transformation happened overnight. Upon King Salman’s ascension, he appointed Prince Mohammed, still in his twenties, to be the country’s top decision-maker on defense, oil, and economic development, with total control over the royal court and the king’s agenda. He became the youngest defense minister in Saudi history—and the “youngest holder of this position in the world,” according to the House of Saud Web site, despite no military training. He was also chosen to head a newly formed Council for Economic and Development Affairs and to chair a new Supreme Council for Saudi Aramco, the body that oversees the world’s largest oil-producing company. The last title alone provides influence well beyond Saudi borders. Aramco pumps some ten million barrels of oil a day—or about one in nine barrels consumed daily worldwide, according to the Financial Times. [...]

The new crown prince also has Trump on his side. The President called Prince Mohammed within hours of his appointment. They committed, the White House said, to “close cooperation to advance our shared goals of security, stability, and prosperity across the Middle East and beyond.”

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Politico: Battered and bruised, Theresa May limps into enemy territory

In the queen’s speech setting out the government’s policy agenda Wednesday, much of the prime minister’s planned legislative program as outlined in the Conservative Party manifesto was either ditched or kicked into the long grass. The bulk of what remained was all about Brexit. [...]

Should she survive the queen’s speech vote next week, her next major test will be the “Repeal Bill,” without which there can be no Brexit. The bill repeals the act of parliament which gives EU law its legal status in Britain. It also downloads the entire body of EU law onto the U.K. statute book. [...]

Adding a further layer of complexity, the prime minister revealed to MPs Wednesday that part of the Repeal Bill may need the approval of the Scottish parliament. “It’s possible that a legislative consent motion will be required in the Scottish parliament,” she said. It’s hard to see Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon not making hay with that.

Such is the precariousness of May’s situation that any of her top team of ministers could oust her with one well-timed public intervention. “If DD [Brexit Secretary David Davis] said her lack of authority was stopping him negotiating Brexit she would be gone in minutes and he would be PM,” one senior former government aide said on condition of anonymity.[...]

Labour MP Wes Streeting gave the most brutal of many brutal put-downs during the debate on the queen’s speech. “She asked for a personal mandate in the election and didn’t get one,” he said to cheers. “The only question is, why is she still here?”

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