BBC: Saudi Arabia has 'clear link' to UK extremism, report says

The Henry Jackson Society said there was a "clear and growing link" between Islamist organisations in receipt of overseas funds, hate preachers and Jihadist groups promoting violence.

The foreign affairs think tank called for a public inquiry into the role of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations. [...]

The Home Office report into the existence and influence of Jihadist organisations, commissioned by former Prime Minister David Cameron in 2015, has reportedly yet to be completed amid questions as to whether it will ever be published.

Critics have suggested it could make uncomfortable reading for the government, which has close and longstanding diplomatic, security and economic links with the Gulf, particularly Saudi Arabia.

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner said he understood the report was "largely finished and sitting on Theresa May's desk", but there was probably a reluctance to publish it because of "embarrassing" content. [...]

Saudi Arabia also has a much-criticised human rights record. This has prompted calls from some, including Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, for an arms embargo on Saudi Arabia.

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Politico: How the Psychology of Cyberbullying Explains Trump’s Tweets

n the case of adults, Patchin says, cyberbullying behavior is less about coping with personal problems, however, and more about gaining status or reputation among certain circles. “Neither kids nor adults, I don’t think, would bully another person unless they thought it would be valuable to them,” he explains. Which leads to Trump: “If the president believed that his tweets would cause people not to vote for him, he wouldn’t do it,” Patchin says. “It’s not just that he’s not worried about political or social backlash. But, more than that, he must think it’ll benefit him in some way.”

According to several surveys, adolescent girls are more likely than boys to experience cyberbullying. In 2014, the Pew Research Center found that young women aged 18 to 24 “experience certain severe types of harassment at disproportionately high levels,” especially on social media; about a quarter of them had been stalked online and had been victims of online sexual harassment. Working to Halt Online Abuse, a nonprofit that fields online harassment complaints, says 72.5 percent of the cyberbullying incidents recorded from 2000-12 were reported by women. With Trump, too, it is women—and women’s bodies—that seem to be most viciously attacked. His tweet at Brzezinski was clearly meant to humiliate a woman based on her appearance, first implying that she needed to improve her looks with plastic surgery and then evoking the image of her altered face, warped and bloodied. Trump has also described Rosie O’Donnell as “fat,” “dumb” and “a loser,” Arianna Huffington as “unattractive inside and out,” and Megyn Kelly as “average in every way.” During the campaign, he tweeted that Hillary Clinton “doesn’t even look presidential.” [...]

Last week, officials from both parties issued statements to that effect: House Speaker Paul Ryan, Republican senators such as Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins, and more. But Bazelon argues that these “pro forma” statements, as she puts it, aren’t enough—the condemnation needs to come from closer to the president. Nicolle Wallace, an alumna of the George W. Bush administration and now a host on MSNBC, called on female members of the Trump administration like Dina Powell, Elaine Chao and Betsy DeVos to “work behind the scenes to educate” the president. None of those women, nor anyone in the Trump family, however, has done so. Ivanka Trump was silent, and Melania Trump’s spokeswoman’s response was: “When her husband gets attacked, he will punch back 10 times harder.” What are our children supposed to glean from this, asks Patchin—“If someone bullies you, bully them worse?”

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Slate: The Age of Pluto-Populism

I don’t want to compare myself with other people, but I will tell you what my analysis is. Without understanding the very big macroeconomic trends, generationlong trends in some cases, such as the catching up of the non-West with the West, which has been taking place all my lifetime and I think will span the rest of my lifetime too, and of course the technological dimensions of that—without understanding the impact very big, really unshakable trends are having on the middle of our societies, and therefore on the sort of bedrock of our democracies, I think it’s very hard to understand what is going on across much of the West. And of course each particular democracy in the West, like each particular unhappy Tolstoyan family, is manifesting its reaction to this in different ways, some way better than others. [...]

It is no accident that the country that’s least affected by this is Germany. Germany has a very, very good program for absorbing skilled middle-class jobs, training people, and giving them vocational ability to succeed in the workplace without getting a college degree. A point that needs particular emphasis in the English-speaking democracies is that we confuse having a college degree with being skilled. And they are quite different things. You and I both know people with college degrees who are unskilled and we know people without college degrees who are highly skilled. And I think that part of the— [...]

The scapegoating of course is easier to do when there’s more immigration. But just to the first part of your question: Is immigration a good thing or a bad thing? It’s an unmixed blessing economically. Almost regardless of the type of immigrant, whether skilled or unskilled, documented or undocumented, not just in the broad American sense of “this is part of your tradition and your creed, the American creed” but also for very basic economic reasons, first and foremost it adds to the labor force, which adds to growth.

Secondly, it diversifies the skillset and is a net positive for the economy. There is some debate about whether it has a downward effect on certain kinds of middle-class—particularly lower-income—jobs. There might be a marginal downward effect there but nothing compared to the benefits that it brings. And that of course includes the benefits to the taxpayer of generating greater taxable income that shows that immigrants put in far more than they take out.

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Social Europe: How Populists Win When They Lose

Less obvious, but more pernicious, is the insinuation that citizens who do not share the populist’s conception of “the people,” and hence do not support the populist politically, are less than legitimate members of the polity. Think of Farage claiming that Brexit was a “victory for real people.” The 48% who voted to remain in the European Union, he implied, might not be part of the “real” British people at all. [...]

Populism is thus a form of anti-pluralism. To say that “the people” are rising up against “the establishment” is not a neutral description of political developments; it’s actually populist language. It accepts the populists’ claim that they authentically represent “the people.” [...]

The image of an irresistible populist “wave” was always misleading. Farage did not bring about Brexit all by himself. He needed the help of established Conservatives such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove (both now serve in Prime Minister Theresa May’s post-election cabinet). Likewise Trump was not elected as the candidate of a grassroots protest movement of the white working class; he represented a very established party and received the blessing of Republican heavyweights such as Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich.

In fact, if anything, Trump’s election was a confirmation of how partisan US politics has become: 90% of self-identified Republicans voted for Trump; they clearly could not fathom voting for a Democrat, even if many Republicans in surveys registered deep doubts about the party’s nominee. To this day, no right-wing populist has come to power in Western Europe or North America without the collaboration of established conservative elites. [...]

The idea that the Dutch and the French elections heralded the arrival of a “post-populist moment” fails to appreciate the distinction between populism as a claim to a moral monopoly on representation and the policies – think of restrictions on immigration – typically promoted by populists as part of their exclusionary identity politics. For example, Wilders, who really is a populist, did less well than expected in March. But his main competitor, center-right Prime Minister Mark Rutte, adopted Wilders-like rhetoric – telling immigrants that they should leave the country if they do not want to behave “normally.”

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The New York Review of Books: Macron’s California Revolution

Along with the speech, there has been Macron’s quasi-official investiture of his wife, Brigitte, as a highly visible First Lady. And then there are the market-driven economic policies he has endorsed. All this has seemed—from the French point of view—emblematic of Macron’s fascination with the United States. Or to be more exact, with the California version of the United States, where Silicon Valley libertarianism mixes with a general progressivism on social issues—access to education and health care, openness to immigration and minorities, support for gay marriage, efforts to control climate change, etc. Didn’t he declare, on June 15, visiting VivaTech, a technological fair, that he intends to transform France in “a nation of start-ups” able to “attract foreign talents”?

Among other proposals announced on Monday, Macron said he planned to reduce by one third the number of representatives and senators in parliament, while offering them bigger staffs to make their work more “fluid” and “efficient.” He wants to abolish parliamentary immunity, so that ministers of the government and members of parliament will remain “accountable for their acts” and can be judged just like normal citizens by regular courts during their mandate. He also wants to lift the current state of emergency by fall, following the passage of a new antiterrorist law. Last but not least, he announced that he will indeed come back once a year to address the Parliament. [...]

Continuing deindustrialization has shut millions of older employees out of the job market. And unemployment among the young is beating all records: at the end of April 2017, the number of officially registered jobseekers hit 5,836,000—the same number as in the United States, a country with five times France’s population! For the past forty years, whether governed by the right or the left—or even during short periods of “cohabitation”—neither side has been able to curb unemployment. [...]

By contrast, in his campaign Macron avoided the identity debate entirely, as if it simply had no meaning. At the risk of alienating voters on the right and the “identitaires” on the left, he even went to Algiers, the capital of France’s largest ex-colony, and publicly declared that colonialism had been “a crime against humanity.” On many other occasions he showed how much more open he is than the traditional political establishment to welcoming immigrants—provided they are college graduates. Macron’s instincts proved right: the so-called lepénisation des esprits—the “Le Pen-ization of the French mind,” or support for far-right ideas—seems to have abated.

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