Trump has been saying he wants to exit the Iran nuclear deal for a long time, a deal that has so far prevented Iran from developing nuclear weapons. And now that he has, decades of negotiations could unravel, with far-reaching consequences for the US foreign policy.
11 May 2018
BBC: The young Turks rejecting Islam
In the 16 years that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party has been in power, the number of religious high schools across Turkey has increased more than tenfold. [...]
But over the past few weeks, politicians and religious clerics here have been discussing whether pious young people have started to move away from religion. [...]
While there are no statistics or polls to indicate how widespread this is, anecdotal evidence is enough to worry Turkey's leaders. [...]
Turkey's top religious cleric, the head of Religious Affairs Directorate Ali Erbas, has also denied the spread of deism and atheism among the country's conservative youth. "No member of our nation would ever adhere to a such a deviant and void concept," he said.
The Guardian: Corbyn 2.0 comes out swinging – and floors May with plain English
Corbyn 2.0 had a revolutionary plan. Talk in plain English. Keep things short and sweet. Stick to one subject. Don’t attempt the impossible of thinking on his feet. And ask the questions that everyone in the country wanted answered. He began by highlighting the government’s divisions on Brexit. Did she agree with her foreign secretary that her favoured “customs partnership” arrangement was crazy?
The prime minister couldn’t cope. May has been through several iterations of her own – no one is entirely sure if we are currently at Maybot 5.0 or Maybot 6.0 – but she has yet to find a system that is passably functional. Rather it seems that each upgrade only serves to further weaken her. Even though Boris Johnson’s contributions to cabinet collective responsibility had been front page news for a couple of days, she was totally taken aback by the question. [...]
Boris Johnson had managed to prove his loyalty to May by refraining from heckling her – being so jet-lagged he could hardly keep his eyes open must have helped – but once she had left the chamber it was his turn at the dispatch box to explain how his one-man mission to nominate Donald Trump for the Nobel peace prize had ended with the US president canning the Iran nuclear deal. It wasn’t his finest hour, but even he seemed surprised that so many of his own MPs, including former defence secretary Michael Fallon, were so quick to hail Trump’s genius. With just a hint of Boris being in charge, the lunatics really are taking over the asylum.
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10 May 2018
Edmonton Journal: Allied soldiers — including Canadians — raped thousands of German women after Second World War: research
The exact number of rapes is unknown, with estimates ranging from tens of thousands to millions. It is clear, however, that this violence was driven in no small part by a desire to exact revenge on the Germans for atrocities committed in the East, including mass sexual violence perpetrated against “non-Aryan” women. [...]
However, wartime sex between soldiers and enemy civilian women occurs within a complex sexual economy. During the Second World War, it was common for both German women and women living in German occupied zones to enter into negotiated relationships of exchange, wherein sex was traded for protection and provision. [...]
This approach makes virtually all wartime sex between civilians and enemy soldiers criminal, regardless of whether the women involved saw it that way. The reality is that women engage in strategic bargaining under wartime conditions, often using their sexuality as a lever of power. Many of these women regard their exchange of sex for survival as a choice; a constrained one, to be sure, but nevertheless a meaningful choice. [...]
The question of how we should make sense of Allied sexual violence perpetrated against German women must be considered within the broader context of political struggles over wartime cultural memory. Feminist mobilization around the rapes, led in part by the activist and filmmaker Helke Sander, began in the 1990s and was explicitly structured around the idea of silence-breaking for the purpose of combating a patriarchy premised on women’s sexual subjugation.
Social Europe: May’s Perpetual Brexit And Labour’s Forsaken Base
The Brexiters, and their followers who just want to be PM and are signaling to party members, have put their collective foot down over the Irish border. This could imply that May will have to finally break with the Brexiters. But first she will try to do what she has done since negotiations began, which is to find a fudge that is good enough for the EU and which just keeps the Brexiters on board. I have no idea if such a fudge is possible, but suppose she manages to achieve one and prevents a revolt from the rebels in her party, so we leave in 2019 as planned.
If that happens, we are in danger of having perpetual Brexit. A final deal cannot be fudged, and the reality is that no deal is possible that will keep the Brexiters happy and be acceptable to the EU. The stumbling block is the Irish border: the EU will not negotiate an FTA that requires a hard border, and the Brexiters will not accept either the UK staying in the Customs Union (CU) and SM for goods, or a border in the Irish Sea. A crunch point could come at the end of 2020, but to avoid that May will plead for an extension which the EU may grant. And so it will go on: perpetual Brexit.
In a strange way, it is in May’s interest for this to happen. No one thought she would last for more than a few years after the 2017 fiasco, but Brexit keeps her in place. The majority of the parliamentary party dare not allow her to go because they will get a Brexiter in her place, given that it is members who ultimately decide. Furthermore, the closer we get to 2022 the less the party will want a bust up over how transition ends, so she fights another election. [...]
I think this is a mistake, although I am happy to have experts tell me otherwise. I think it is a mistake because you will lose more votes from disillusioned Remainers than you will gain from reassured Leavers, even when you allow for where each are in parliamentary seats. I keep being told that this is the Tories Brexit, but the moment Labour enable it they become complicit. If car factories in the North East go because we leave the SM, they cannot claim this is not our fault because we abstained on a vote that could have prevented this. Voting to stay in the SM indicates economic competence, which always matters in elections and particularly matters for Labour.
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