Politico: 950 attacks on Muslims recorded in Germany last year

The figures were released by the interior ministry in response to an inquiry made by the far-left Die Linke party, the paper reported Saturday. The government did not previously collect data on anti-Muslim attacks, and therefore has no point of comparison to 2016 data.

According to the data, 33 people were injured in the attacks, which were predominantly perpetrated by far-right extremists. The report also recorded 60 cases vandalism against mosques and Islamic centers, some of which were defaced with Nazi grafitti. [...]

“There is a big blind spot, because the authorities — police and prosecutors — are not yet sensitized, and therefore many cases do not appear in the statistics,” Mazyek told the paper.

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Politico: How Italy does Putin’s work

“Italy is a weird exception [among Western states] because the relationship between Italian politicians and Putin is very open,” said Anna Pellegatta, a digital forensic research assistant at the Atlantic Council, a think-tank monitoring the rise of digital falsities worldwide. “The line between misinformation and officials promoting Russian messages is very blurred.” [...]

But it’s not just Berlusconi’s media empire that has been willing to portray Russia in a more favorable light. Last year, Rai, the country’s national broadcaster, ran uninterrupted a four-hour interview between Putin and Oliver Stone, the U.S. filmmaker, which gave a broadly positive spin to the Russian leader’s aggressive foreign policy. [...]

Ahead of Sunday’s vote, Facebook rolled out a series of programs to counter these false narratives, including a clampdown on people making money from advertising connected to fake news. The social network also teamed up with Pagella Politica, a local fact-checking site, to debunk online myths. [...]

Italy’s politicians are divided over how to fight digital misinformation, with some actively embracing and sharing outright lies among their followers. Candidates from the Northern League and 5Star Movement are skeptical that false information is even a problem.

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Al Jazeera: The problem with leftist myths about Syria

A great number of leftist in the West and the East have been buying into regime propaganda for years now. From Australian academic Tim Anderson, who's claimed that Bashar al-Assad has not been involved in mass killings of civilians and was simply demonised by the imperial West to British and US journalists Robert Fisk and Seymour Hersh who have claimed the regime did not use chemical weapons in various attacks on civilians, leftist public figures continue to believe that the Assad dictatorship is a bastion of anti-imperialism in the region and needs to be supported. [...]

For me, it is unfathomable how people who have stood up for social justice and human rights across the world remain in support of a regime that has exploited its population economically and tortured and killed innocent civilians in the most horrendous ways possible. Or how people who had seen through US imperial war propaganda cannot see through the Russian equivalent of it. [...]

In schools, we were brainwashed daily. I attended Baathist schools, where the president's portrait adorned every wall. During the flag salute every morning, we called for the immortality of Hafez al-Assad before heading to class. We memorised songs praising him and the Baathist Party, we had to recite his speeches. He was our leader and father. When Hafez died in 2000, I was 9 years old. I cried because the person who I'd always been told was immortal had died like a normal human.  [...]

Bashar's cousin, Rami Makhlouf, is the richest man in Syria. Makhlouf controls the major mobile phone company, TV channels, pro-government newspapers and used to control the oil and gas industry of the country before the war.

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Salon: Why Americans are such easy targets for trolls and bots

We measure intelligence in lots of ways, but at the top of the list is literacy and numeracy. A study published in September 2017 by the U.S. Department of Education found that U.S. adults performed the lowest of all developed nations in numeracy. They also found that our literacy was on the low end of developed nations. Most interesting was the finding that young adults in their 20s from Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Japan who did not finish high school had the same literacy levels of U.S. high school graduates.

Study after study shows that the United States underperforms in literacy across the developed world — especially given its resources. But that isn’t even the core issue; the real problem is the way we have consistently devalued quality education across all levels for decades. Consider the fact that 14 states teach creationism in public schools.

Add to that the reality that a Pew Research Study from 2015 found that 34 percent of Americans reject evolution entirely, saying humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. [...]

Public investment in K-12 schools has fallen dramatically in a number of states over the last decade, despite post-recession economic growth. Arizona cut funding for K-12 by 36.6 percent from 2008-2015. A study of investment in education across the developed nations of the OECD found that from 2010-2014 the U.S. decreased K-12 funding by four percent. Over the same period, education spending, on average, rose five percent per student across the 35 countries in the OECD. Even more noteworthy is the fact that in some countries, spending rose at a much higher rate. Between 2008 and 2014, education spending rose 76 percent in Turkey, 36 percent in Israel, 32 percent in the United Kingdom and 27 percent in Portugal.

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The Guardian: How populist uprisings could bring down liberal democracy

Some of these rules are formal. A president or prime minister allows the judiciary to investigate wrongdoing by members of his government instead of firing the prosecutor. He puts up with critical coverage in the press instead of shutting down newspapers or persecuting journalists. When he loses an election, he leaves office peacefully instead of clinging to power.

But many of these rules are informal, making it less clearcut when they are violated. The government does not rewrite electoral rules months before an election to maximise its chance of winning. Political insurgents do not glorify authoritarian rulers of the past, threaten to lock up their opponents or set out to violate the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. The losers of an election refrain from limiting the scope of an office to which an adversary has been elected in their last days in the job. The opposition confirms a competent judge whose ideology it dislikes rather than leaving a seat on the highest court in the land vacant, and strikes an imperfect compromise about the budget rather than letting the government shut down. [...]

In the US, and many other countries around the world, that is no longer how democratic politics works. As Ignatieff put the point, we are increasingly “seeing what happens when a politics of enemies supplants a politics of adversaries”. And the new crop of populists who have stormed the political stage over the past decades shoulder a lot of the blame for this. [...]

Citizens are less committed to democracy than they once were; while more than two-thirds of older Americans say that it is essential to them to live in a democracy, for example, less than a third of younger Americans do. They are also more open to authoritarian alternatives; two decades ago, for example, 25% of Britons said that they liked the idea of “a strongman ruler who does not have to bother with parliament and elections”; today, 50% of them do. And these attitudes are increasingly reflected in our politics: from Great Britain to the US, and from Germany to Hungary, respect for democratic rules and norms has precipitously declined. No longer the only game in town, democracy is now deconsolidating.  [...]

As I argue in my new book, The People vs. Democracy, we will only be able to contain the rise of populism if we ensure that the political system overcomes the very real shortcomings that have fuelled it. Ordinary people have long felt that politicians don’t listen to them when they make their decisions. They are sceptical for a reason: the rich and powerful really have had a worrying degree of influence over public policy for a very long time. The revolving door between lobbyists and legislators, the outsized role of private money in campaign finance, and the tight links between politics and industry really have undermined the degree to which the popular will steers public policy.

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