Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on December 1, 2020

Since the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Parler has caught on among right-wing politicians and influencers as a social media platform where they can share and promote ideas without worrying about the company blocking or flagging their posts for being dangerous or misleading. However, the website has become a haven for far-right extremists and conspiracy theorists who are now interacting with the mainstream conservatives flocking to the platform.

As YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter continue to take action to mitigate the spread of extremism and disinformation, Parler has welcomed the ensuing exodus of right-wing users. It has exploded in popularity, doubling its members to 10 million during the month of November although it is still dwarfed by Twitters roughly 330 million monthly active users and Facebooks 2.7 billion monthly active users.

With its newfound success, the site is contributing to the widening gap between the different perceptions of reality held by the polarized public. On mainstream social media, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the presidential election, and theories alleging crimes by the Biden campaign and Democrats are flagged as misinformation. On Parler, Donald Trump won in a landslide, only to have his victory stolen by a wide-ranging alliance of evildoers, including Democrats and the so-called deep state.

While its too early to tell if Parler is here to stay, it has already achieved a reputation and level of engagement that has overtaken other alternative platforms. But along with its success comes the reality that extremist movements like QAnon and the Boogalooers have thrived in the platforms unregulated chaos.

Parler was launched in 2018 and found its place as another niche platform catering to right-wing users who ran afoul of content moderation on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Its user base remained small fewer than 1 million users until early 2020.

Other primarily right-wing platforms, especially Gab, had housed fringe and violent ideologues and groups for much longer than Parler. These included violent far-right militias and the mass shooter Robert Bowers.

Parler, in contrast, gained a reputation for catering to mainstream conservatives thanks to a handful of high-profile early adopters like Brad Parscale, Candace Owens and Sen. Mike Lee. As a result, in 2020 when Twitter began labeling misleading Trump tweets about possible fraud in absentee and mail-in voting, politicians like Ted Cruz embraced Parler as the next bastion for conservative speech.

In the weeks before the Nov. 3 election, the big social media sites took steps to mitigate election-related extremism and disinformation. Twitter rolled out labels for all mail-in ballot misinformation and put a prompt on tweeted articles to encourage people to read them before retweeting. Facebook blocked QAnon groups and, later, restricted QAnon-adjacent accounts pushing SaveTheChildren conspiracy theories. Facebook also began prohibiting Holocaust denial posts. YouTube labeled and blocked advertising for election-related fake information, though it left in place many conspiracy theory-promoting videos.

These actions continued in the wake of the election, especially as mainstream conservative politicians and Trump pushed the false claim that Biden and the Democrats committed large-scale voter fraud to steal the election. Consequently, millions of users migrated to alternative platforms: Gab, MeWe, and, in particular, Parler.

Users flocked there because of the promise of a site that wouldnt label false information and wouldnt ban the creation of extremist communities. But they also moved because Republican politicians and well-known elites signaled that Parler was the new home for conservative speech. These include commentator Mark Levin and Fox News host Sean Hannity.

Parler has only two community guidelines: It does not knowingly allow criminal activity, and it does not allow spam or bots on its platform. The lack of guidelines on hate speech has allowed racism and anti-Semitism to flourish on Parler.

My research center has spent several years building an extensive encyclopedia of far-right terminology and slang, covering niche topics from the spectrum of white supremacist, neo-fascist and anti-state movements. We have studied the ways that far-right language evolves alongside content moderation efforts from mainstream platforms, and how slang and memes are often used to evade regulations.

We have monitored far-right communities on Parler since March and have found frequent use of both obvious white supremacist terms and more implicit, evasive memes and slang. For example, among other explicit white supremacist content, Parler allows usernames referencing the Atomwaffen Divisions violently anti-Semitic slogan, posts spreading the theory that Jews are descended from Satan, and hashtags such as #HitlerWasRight.

In addition, it is easy to find the the implicit bigotry and violence that eventually caused Facebook to ban movements like QAnon. For example, QAnons version of the blood libel theory the centuries-old conspiracy theory that Jewish people murder Christians and use their blood for rituals has spread widely on the platform. Thousands of posts also use QAnon hashtags and promote the false claim that global elites are literally eating children.

Among the alternative platforms, Parler stands out because white supremacists, QAnon adherents and mainstream conservatives exist in close proximity. This results in comment threads on politicians posts that are a melting pot of far-right beliefs, such as a response to Donald Trump Jr.s unfounded allegations of election crimes that states, Civil war is the only way to drain the swamp.

Parlers ownership is still kept largely secret. However, the few pieces of information that have come to light make Parlers spike in popularity even more concerning.

For example, Dan Bongino, the highly popular right-wing commentator who published a book about the deep state conspiracy theory and frequently publishes unverified information, has at least a small ownership stake in the company. CEO John Matze has said that the ownership is composed of himself and a small group of close friends and employees.

Notably, conservative billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, are investors in the platform. Rebekah Mercer helped co-found it with Matze. The Mercers are well known for their investments in other conservative causes, including Nigel Farages Brexit campaign, Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica. The connection to Cambridge Analytica has, in particular, alarmed experts, who worry that Parler may harvest unnecessary data from unwitting users.

Parlers privacy policy doesnt put to rest concerns about user privacy, either: The policy says that Parler has permission to collect a vast amount of personal information, and gives its members much less control than mainstream platforms over what that data can be used for.

Parlers fate will hinge on what its members do over the next few months. Will the company be able to capitalize on the influx of new users, or will its members slowly trickle back to the larger platforms? A major factor is how Trump himself reacts, and whether he eventually creates an account on Parler.

Having catered to a right-wing audience and allowed hate speech to thrive on its platform, Parler is also at the whims of its user base. Parlers main competitor, Gab, similarly attempted to capitalize on concerns about unfair moderation against conservatives. However, Gabs expansion came to a halt after Bowers mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Bowers had been posting anti-Semitic and violent content on the platform, and the revelation resulted in PayPal, GoDaddy, and Medium banning Gab from their services.

Online extremism and hate can lead to real-world violence by legitimizing extreme actions. Parlers tolerance of hate, bigotry and affiliation with violent movements opens the possibility that, like Gab, one or more of its members will commit acts of violence.

Although its hard to know how Parler will grow in the future, my research suggests that the extremism among its user base will persist for months to come.

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Parler is bringing together mainstream conservatives, anti-Semites, and white supremacists as the social media platform attracts millions of Trump...

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Posted By admin on December 1, 2020

When a documentary is called The Meaning of Hitler, there are two things you know off the bat. One is that the film probably wont live up to that title and doesnt have to, because how could it? The other thing you know is that its trying for something audacious, placing itself on the high bar of who-was-Adolf-Hitler? meditation. And thats a good thing, since for all the mystery that still surrounds Hitler we do know a great deal about him, and we want a movie like this one to jolt us with the shock of the new. The author Martin Amis, whos one of the most compelling people interviewed here, says that if you can expand our knowledge of Hitler by just a millimeter, youve done something. We go into The Meaning of Hitler craving that millimeter of insight, of intrigue and revelation. And the film provides it. It ruminates on Hitler and the Third Reich in ways that churn up your platitudes.

Here, for instance, is an offbeat historical detail that I found weirdly resonant. Hitler, as we know, was one of the most hypnotic orators of the 20th century; his speeches were frothing arias of seduction and rage. But none of that would have happened in quite the way it did had it not been for the invention of a revolutionary microphone that became the prototype for the microphones that would propel the music industry. The old mics used carbon chips, which meant that you had to be no more than an inch away from them or your voice would drop out. In the 20s, public speakers stood stock-still, glued to their mics. The new microphone allowed Hitler to use his arms and body, to stand back and lean in, to give a thrusting gesticulating physical-vocal performance. Without it, he would still have been Hitler, but it was a case of technology not just lifting evil but giving form to it.

Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, the husband-and-wife writer-director team (Gunner Palace) who made The Meaning of Hitler, have conceived the film as a free-form, go-with-the-flow meditation on the Nazi era, made in the exploratory road-movie spirit of Werner Herzogs recent documentaries. Like Herzog, Epperlein and Tucker listen to their impulses, trotting off to key locations Hitlers birthplace, the art college that rejected him, the bunker where he killed himself and talking to the freest thinkers they can find.

One observer claims that if you switch on German television, theres a 95 percent chance that youll stumble onto a Hitler documentary. It might be about Hitlers friends, Hitlers household, Hitler in private, 10 things you didnt know about Hitler, his dogs, his women, his cars, his food, his secret weapons, his drug habit. Is this evidence of an attempt to understand him, or is it the lingering of his cult? Maybe both. One of the films themes is that Hitler, more than ever, remains a presence in Germany and in the world, which suggests something basic and disturbing: that the impact of Hitler and Nazism, the iconography of it, the power and the mythology that all of that may now be having a greater impact on the generations coming up than the actual horrors that Hitler perpetrated.

It all ties into the rise, and increasing omnipotence, of fantasy culture. The horror of the Third Reich was reality at its most hideous. But Hitler, in his insidious way, represented a transporting fantasy, to the point that some may now view him as a superhero of hate. As Martin Amis puts it, Part of the spell of great evildoers is that they have this capacity to astonish. You cant believe anyones going to behave as demonically as that. And that in itself confers a kind of aura.

The movie keeps circling back to the 1978 book The Meaning of Hitler, written by the German author Sebastian Haffner (a pseudonym for the journalist Raimund Pretzel, born in 1907 and a witness to the rise of the Nazis), who pointed out that Hitler lacked the things that normally add weight and meaning to life. He had no occupation. He had no friends, which is striking for a politician. He was, famously, a failed artist, and were given an analysis of one of the four watercolor paintings that got him rejected from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Its painted with a graphic precision and feeling for light and shadow that indicate that Hitler, had he been born a few decades later, had the skills to become a commercial artist, if not quite a fine artist.

But Hitler proved to be the first twisted artist of mass media. In Triumph of the Will, of course, he employed Leni Riefenstahl to turn the Nazis into a sci-fi dream of lockstep delirium. The Nazis, one scholar tells us, had a feeling that they were acting in some huge historical play for the future, for history. The film suggests that Hitlers secret promise to the German people was that in the future, they could do the killing that was in their hearts. By 1978, when Haffner published his book, we would probably say that they were wrong. The Nazis, after all, had been defeated. The Third Reich, which was supposed to last 1,000 years, was crushed before it began.

Yet now, in our relatively young century, the Nazis have begun to loom larger as myth and metaphor, as sick-dream fascist reverie. They were destroyed, but they cast a dark shadow. The most chilling section of the movie is one in which the filmmakers, posing as a sympathetic audience, gain access to David Irving, the British historian and Holocaust denier who has already had his 15 minutes of infamy. So why give him more air time? Because the filmmakers, tagging along with Irving during one of his profiteering tours of the death camp at Treblinka (where 900,000 were killed), do something more than expose one scoundrels anti-Semitism. They demonstrate how Holocaust denial, once on the fringes, is now spreading like a virus, becoming a featured piece of historical fake news.

As the historian Deborah Lipstadt (who sued Irving for libel) puts it in the film, Anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory. Indeed, as codified in the early 20th century by the fraudulent document Protocols of the Elders of Zion, its more or less the original conspiracy theory. We hear Irving and a couple of his tour patrons chortle at the slogan that famously adorned the gate of Auschwitz (Work Sets You Free), which Irving claims was a joke on the Jewish prisoners. The Jews dont like any kind of manual work, he says. They just like writing receipts. Irving then adds, All these victims, it never occurs to them to ask themselves, Why us?' Thats a revealing comment. It indicates that if you look under the rock of Holocaust denial, what youll find is the slimy reality of Holocaust endorsement.

What feels very now, as documented in The Meaning of Hitler, are the testimonials of media-blinkered hipsters in the U.S. and in Europe who believe that Jews are the root of all evil. In the film, the sly wizened ninetysomething professor Yehuda Bauer says, One of the great problems that people today have who are educated in liberal or semi-liberal societies is they dont understand how people can believe that stuff. We then see a clip of the YouTube superstar PewDiePie, on one of his videos, making light of a sign that says Death to all Jews.

To say that Nazism could make a comeback, or is in fact making one, may not sound like much of an insight. But Prof. Bauers point is simple and profound, and its where The Meaning of Hitler finds its boldest impact. Hitler, he says, was a perfectly normal person. His psychological problems were no different from those of many millions of others. Is that the hidden key to it all? It sounds too easy, and is probably a knowing exaggeration, but the film goes on to make the point that the barbarism of the Nazis was many things but that ultimately it was human. Its something were capable of what people did, and could do again. Thats the meaning of Hitler.

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The Meaning of Hitler Review: A Look At Why the Icon of 20th-Century Hate Lives on in the 21st - Variety

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Posted By admin on December 1, 2020

THIS is an appraisal of Islamophobia, mainly in the west, and the so-called westophobia among Muslims from a different viewpoint. I believe that since all wars are trade wars, the ideological conflicts between Islam and western civilisations are primarily motivated by economic reasons, so they are trade wars by other means. I have mainly cited examples from the United States and France, which has recently emerged as the most Islamophobic nation in the world. I have argued that hate crimes or even racial/communal jokes often lead to physical violence against the objects of a joke, hate and ridicule. Hence, denigrating or hating Jews and their religion is a criminal offence in 17 European countries. I have argued that as in the light of the history of Jewish pogrom in Russia, Poland, and elsewhere in eastern Europe and the Holocaust in Germany, Austria, and elsewhere in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s anti-Semitism is considered a hate crime, so, Islamophobia or Islam bashing should also be declared a hate crime, as it often leads to physical attacks on Muslim minorities in the west.

The prejudicial portrayal of Islam as a violent faith has also led to multiple invasions of Muslim-majority countries, especially Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya in the past three decades or so. Hence the necessity of making Islamophobia a hate crime, in the east and west. The nature of Islamophobia or hate crime against Muslims in France is slightly different from that in America and the west in general. While France, especially the Macron administration, is aggressively explicit in demonstrating its hatred for everything Islamic or Muslim, US and other western nations are quite subtle and more hypocritical. They also discriminate against Muslims and invade Muslim-majority countries again and again they refrain from making public assertions that demonise Islam and its adherents.

Throughout human history, we see people from one tribe, one religion, or one nation denigrate and, even, fight and annihilate the others. The ubiquitous we and they are much older than human history. The root cause of this hate is economic and all wars in the name of religion, homeland, democracy, freedom or socialism are actually trade wars. People compete against each other primarily for economic reasons: better job or business opportunities, raw materials, markets, trade routes, etc. And, manipulative and clever leaders rulers, priests and others manufacture half-truth and lies to justify the denigration of the others and defending their wars. This has been going on since the days of Alexander, the Crusades, Chengis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler, Bush Sr, and Bush Jr. As capturing trade routes, sources of raw materials and markets from the Arabs motivated some west European monarchs to wage the Crusades with fatwas from Popes to justify the invasions of Palestine and adjoining areas, so was the motive behind Columbuss discovery of the shortest route to India. Columbus sought help from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabela of Spain to convert Indians into Christians to defeat the Arabs/Muslims to capture their colonies, trade routes and markets.

And, we know giving a dog a bad name before hanging him is as old as west European Crusades (10961271) against Islam and Muslims and what followed after Columbus had landed on the shores of the West Indies in 1492. Both the Crusades and Columbuss so-called Discovery of America were preludes to the rampant plundering of western colonisers of wealth, after killing and enslaving indigenous people from the Americas to Asia, Africa, Australia, and other places in the world. Thus, Islamophobia is not an end in itself but a means towards something much bigger: the domination of the resource-rich Muslim world after demonising the Muslims as barbarians, terrorists and threats to western civilisation. One wonders what else but only the further accentuation of the mutual hatred and mistrust between the backward and weak Muslims and the advanced and strong west would be the outcome of the ongoing hate-crimes against Islam.

Most people do not know that Islamist terrorism, which is very different from the politically incorrect Islamic terrorism is only around 30 years old, never existed before the end of the cold war in 1990. As the end of the cold war ushered in the new wave of Islamophobia in the west, so did it signal the beginning of Islamist terror and insurgency against the west and other adversaries of Muslims across the world. The west badly needed an enemy to oil its most profitable industrial complex, Eisenhowers military-industrial complex to manufacture and sell more arms to sustain economically. It also wanted to secure the oil-producing Middle Eastern (Muslim-majority) countries from the clutches of the Shiite Islamist regime in Iran, which emerged as a threat to western interests in the region. Paradoxically, the west nurtured Sunni Islamism against the Shiite Iran and the Soviet Union in the past decade of the Cold War only to fight it in the following two-three decades. With the defeat and disappearance of the mysterious Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL) in December 2017, the world has virtually entered the post-Islamist, post-terrorist phase of history. Barring sporadic and very small-scale Islamist terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East, Europe, and elsewhere in Asia and Africa which have been mostly lone-wolf terrorist attacks in the past three years, Islamist terror only exists in the imagination of the hardcore Islamophobic minds and those who benefit most politically from the phenomenon, in the west and east. The west and its allies elsewhere India and Israel, in particular are, however, in a denial mood. To them, Islamist terror poses an existential threat to western civilisation, India and Israel. The beneficiaries of Islamist terrorism often stage false-flag Islamist terror attacks or provoke backward and ignorant Muslims across the world. Unfortunately, the bulk of Muslims globally represent the least educated, least urbane and underdogs, many of whom are emotional and fanatical, willing to kill enemies of Islam and get killed in the process to embrace martyrdom. Although the Quran is specific about what the Muslims are supposed to do to a blasphemer of Islam and Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) to ignore the blasphemer or critic of Islam and to leave his/her company quietly without resorting to any counter-attack, verbal or physical Muslims in general want violent retaliation against all blasphemers of Islam and Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). Many Muslims approve of Ayatollah Khomeinis infamous fatwa to kill Salman Rushdie for his denigration of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and his family.

Meanwhile, during the last 30-odd years, the west has revived its millennium-old hatred for Islam and Muslims. As Emmanuel Macron, among many western leaders, publicly calls Islam a violent faith, a problem, and an enemy of western civilisation, so does Donald Trump. The dissipation of Islamist terrorist threat did not dissipate Islamophobia in the west. Knowing fully well the consequences, the west provokes Muslims by denigrating their religion and Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) only to make them retaliate against such provocations, to justify its war on terror in the name of restoring the elusive world order. The west promotes and rewards Islamophobes, especially those born in Muslim families, such as Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Taslima Nasreen, Arshad Manji and others. Most importantly, many of the Islam-bashers coming from Muslim families suffer from some psychological disorder. They struggle with their atheism, which many of them not being able to fully absorb, demonstrate their atheism by publicly saying extremely bad things about Islam, the Prophet, and the Quran. It is, sort of, comparable with the nouveau-riche syndrome. They cannot keep their atheism to themselves without showing off their lack of faith in Islam by publicly being offensive to Islam, the Prophet and the Quran. Some of them also aspire to be in the limelight by being offensive to Islam, which they know would lead to extreme/violent reactions from Muslims (who represent the bulk of the not-so-educated and enlightened people on earth) against them. And, that would endear them to the Islamophobic west, who would protect them and give wide publicity to their anti-Islamic writings although in the name of promoting the freedom of expression but actually to demonise the Muslims to justify its war on terror or the neo-colonial ideology in the post-cold war world. Islam-bashers from the Muslim community become celebrities in the west and India (which, of late, has literally become the most dangerous country for Muslims in the world). Rushdie, Hirsi, Nasreen and Manji may be mentioned in this regard.

As Islamism and Islamist terror and anarchy have emerged with greater intensity than ever before in the 1990s after the end of the cold war so has the centuries-old but dormant western Islamophobia much more intensified than before. There is absolutely no reason to assume that western Islamophobia is a post-9/11 syndrome. Far from it. The extremely Islamophobic Hollywood movie True Lies depicting Muslims as the worst terrorists that ever existed in history was made in 1994 and moments after the Oklahoma City bombing by a white American non-Muslim Timothy McVeigh, American media and analysts jumped to the conclusion that it was an Islamic/Muslim terrorist attack on America. America and the west as a whole need an enemy to rally support for their hegemonic warfare across the world and to divert peoples attention from internal socio-economic and political problems. During the cold war, the enemy was communism and the Soviet Union; afterwards, it is still Islam and the 1.8 billion adherents of the faith. Interestingly, while ultra-right white supremacy has emerged as the gravest security threat in America, Islamist threat has remained on the top of the list of terrorism.

Islamophobia or Islam-bashing is a hate crime. And the hate or denigration of any individual or community is an important factor behind terrorist activities. One western scholar has aptly elucidated this: Men such as Osama bin Laden would never have followers if there were no victims of humiliation in many parts of the world, victims who are young, intelligent and dynamic men, and who are willing to die avenging their humiliations (Evelin Gerda Lindner, Humiliation as the Source of Terrorism: A New Paradigm, Peace Research, Vol 33, No 2, p 59, November 2001). And we have been witnessing this since the First Gulf War against Iraq in 1991. The west loves to provoke Muslims to see them retaliate violently. It is simply a ploy to highlight Islam as the biggest adversary of western civilisation.

The provocations come in the form of some scurrilous and extremely hateful writings, cartoons, movies, and posts in social media against Islam, Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and the Quran. What started with the western promotion/glorification of Salman Rushdie and his ridiculously provocative anti-Islamic fiction The Satanic Verses in 1988 provoked a storm of angry protests from Muslims across the world did not stop there. One Islamophobic writing following another, portraying Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) as a terrorist in cartoons (the first one came out in Denmark in 2005 and later reproduced by the Charlie Hebdo in France, once again in October 2020) and extremely anti-Islamic movie like Fitna in West Europe and elsewhere have become normative since the publication of The Satanic Verses. The rabidly violent Muslim reaction to Rushdies portrayal of Prophet Muhammads (PBUH) wives, in the east and west especially Ayatollah Khomeinis fatwa to kill Rushdie for the fiction added more fuel to the fire of Islamophobia across the west and elsewhere. Without defending Muslims violent reaction to Rushdies fiction, let alone Khomeinis atrociously un-Islamic fatwa to kill him, one believes what the western Islamophobes and hatemongers have been doing to denigrate Islam and Muslims in the world definitely fall in the category of hate-crime against Islam and Muslims la the denial of the Holocaust in 17 European countries. Interestingly, while holocaust denial is a hate crime, hate crimes against Islam have remained decriminalised, for some strange or not-so-strange reasons, across the west. In view of this, one may legitimately assume that among the so many double standards the west has been nurturing for centuries against Afro-Asian people and their culture (including religion), Islamophobia is the most potent, virile, and vicious after the official end of racism and apartheid in the west, including the US and South Africa. The west, later joined by Israel and India, directly or indirectly promotes Islamophobia, mainly to provoke Muslim anger and retaliation.

As mentioned above, some rabid atheists or Islamophobes emanating from Muslim communities in Bangladesh and elsewhere attack Islam to come to the limelight after Salman Rushdie had become a celebrity in the west. Bengali writers like Taslima Nasreen and Humayun Azad, among a few others in the 1990s, started writing fiction, essays and poems ridiculing Islam and Muslims in all possible ways. Scores of atheist bloggers in the country, mostly coming from Muslim families, also started writing extremely scurrilous things against Islam and its Prophet (PBUH). Some of them got killed by Muslim fanatics, in retaliation in the past few years. And Bangladesh witnessed its biggest showdown between orthodox but non-violent Islamists belonging to the Hefazat-e-Islam and blasphemers of Islam and Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in May 2013.

Again, Islamophobes in Bangladesh and abroad have one thing in common, their obsession with Islamist terrorism and terrorist attacks, mostly imaginary and exaggerated; and both of them love to use the expression Islamic terrorism instead of the politically correct Islamist terrorism, as their prime concern is not about preventing or fighting the dying and imaginary Islamist terrorism, but it is all about their obsession with Islam and inventing a new boogieman hell bent on destroying western capitalism after the demise of the Soviet Union in the wake of the cold war. Bangladeshi Islamophobes, mostly nominal Muslims or atheists from Muslim families, hate everything Islamic or Muslim out of self-deprecation, inferiority complex and a desire to prove something to external power-brokers. They are mostly favour- and power-seekers from Islamophobes outside Bangladesh.

To be concluded.

Dr Taj Hashmi is an adjunct professor of criminal justice at Austin Peay State University in the United States. He is a historian, author, and analyst of global current affairs.

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Muslims v the west, in France and beyond - newagebd.net

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Posted By admin on November 30, 2020

This Native American Heritage Month, I hope youve been able to read some of the amazing books by Native American writers that were released this year. If not, theres still timeBecause you should not only read books by Native writers this month, you should be reading them all year long!

Anyway, if theres one book you read this month, make itHow We Go Home: Voices From Indigenous North Americawhich is out now byVoice of WitnessandHaymarket Books. Edited by oral historian Sara Sinclair (Cree-Ojibwe),How We Go Homeis a collection of twelve oral histories by Indigenous people from across Canada and the United States. Accessible and necessary, this volume shines a light on a wide variety of challenges and successes these Indigenous narrators have experienced throughout their lives.

Karla J. Strand had an opportunity to speak with Sara Sinclair about the book, its impact and the power of collective memory.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Karla J. Strand: First of all, Sara, I loved the book. Its very moving, very candid. Can you say a bit about the book and how the idea for it came about?

Sara Sinclair: It really did feel like this series of serendipitous moments. I discovered this phrase oral history in the back of a Dave Eggers novel, [which described] this oral history series that Eggers founded, Voice of Witness.

I started madly Googling about oral history and understanding how it exists in so many different contexts but also how its becoming an academic practice. I then realized that I knew what oral history was because on both sides of my family its a really important part of culture: I have two grandparents who have participated in more formal oral history projects.

My fathers father was interviewed for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Canada, which was essentially a huge oral history project that looked into the legacy of the Indian residential schools in Canada. And then my mothers mother was a German Jewish refugee who was later in her life interviewed by the Shoah Foundation. So again, another huge oral history project, but I wasnt familiar with [the term oral history]. Somehow it just resonated with me in a way that was ultimately life-changing.

I found the oral history masters program at Columbia and I arrived with an interest in using it to amplify contemporary Indigenous narratives. That was the area that I felt the most interest in and also the area that I felt the most pressing need. I just was so conscious of the fact that my own experience growing up even in pretty progressive public schools in Toronto, the Native American story was so absent and so I was just really excited about the opportunity to work towards filling a pretty significant gap.

While I was at [Columbia], I did a thesis project [with] a very specific narrative arc: It was interviewing Native Americans specificallyI didnt interview Canadians at that pointfrom reservation communities who left their Nations to attend elite academic institutions and then returned home again to work for their Nation.

Ashley Hemmers (Fort Mojave Indian Tribe) was the first person that I traveled to interview for my thesis. I really am not sure that, had that not been the first trip and the first interview, that this path would have unfolded in the way that it didbecause the experience that I had with her just really showed me the richness of what this could become. The experience that I had, the way that she acted as a guide to me on her Nation, the hospitality that she showed me and also just the intimacy and the intensity of what she shared with me, I was overwhelmed in the best possible way. I remember feeling like shes given me this enormous gift and also this enormous responsibility.

It was really those first few interviews that showed me what this project could be because Ashley and Wizipan Little Elk (Rosebud Lakota) were such incredible narrators and educators. I felt if I kept going with this, if I kept traveling the continent and hearing different peoples stories, histories and ways of existing in relation to this land, what a collection this could be! And so that was what I proposed to Voice of Witness and they were very interested.

They wanted to expand the central question to include a greater range of life experiences, so we [came] up with a new central question: What is it like to be a citizen of one nation subsumed within a larger nation whose fundamental economic, social, political and cultural goals are so often at odds?

And that felt like a good question because it allowed me to start conversations with really almost anyone but it had enough of a focus to keep it in line with Voice of Witnesss focus on injustice. So that was the origin story of the project.

Strand: The narratives in the book are so wide-ranging but then still come back to this collective experience of something being taken away or missing or leaving and then returning, which is so powerful. And the method of oral history really overlaps with the oral traditions of many Indigenous cultures and communities.

Sinclair: Oral historians are really interested in memory, of course, and if you think about stories and memory in an Indigenous context, then youre thinking about the collective memory.

One of the things that I hope that the book conveys is that the collective memory is more complex than just a collection of stories, but each nation and each tribe has their own collective memory, which is basically the culture and contains the stories of how to exist in a certain place. So its the story of how to practice ceremony, the stories that contain political systems, the stories that contain the spiritual family, the stories that provide a guide for a particular way of life, a way of life thats connected to a very specific place on this Earth.

How We Go Homeshows how colonialism has interrupted the collective memory, and we see the outcome of that in many different ways in the book. We see the legacy and the intergenerational impact of the different kinds of trauma that have been enacted by both the United States and the Canadian governments. We see how loss of language and culture has affected peoples sense of themselves. We see the higher rates of poverty, addiction and incarceration.

But then also, and what was so important to me from the outset, is we see that return. There isnt a narrator in this book whos not in some way working towards restoring that collective memory, that culture, that knowledge, that village we once had as Althea Guiboche (Mtis, Ojibwe, Saulteaux) calls it [in her narrative in the book].

So I believe that the book is honoring the collective memory, showing how it has been attacked and dismantled and then showing the work thats being done to restore it.

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Strand: Did you have any special considerations regarding representation or the stories that were told? Was the trust harder to build with some more than others or were different topics harder to cover than others?

Sinclair: We thought about representation in a really broad sense, in terms of gender, age, geography, sexual orientation.

I think with respect to gender, theres a different take on that traditionally within many Indigenous communities, right? This whole idea that theres a binary is really a colonial construct. It didnt exist for many nations and Jasilyn Charger speaks about that [in her narrative]. Jasilyn is Two Spirit and in pre-colonial times she would have had really unique and powerful roles to play in her community. She talked about trying to navigate her way through and wanting to bring that pre-colonial value system into her tribe in which, unfortunately, misogyny has trickled down.

The collection process was partly through connection. I think even as an Indigenous person, I was really conscious of the history of extraction thats occurred in different communities. I was traveling far and wide so I wasnt known in many of the places that I was traveling to and so trust was very prevalent in my mind. I was very conscious of the fact that I hadnt done anything yet to earn anybodys trust. And so I was very careful with that and there were a few things that I did that helped.

I would send them an email: Are you interested? This is what Im doing. This is my background. This is who I am. Definitely, introductions matter a lot more in an Indigenous context. People wanted to know who I was, who my family was, why I wanted to do this, what I was going to do with it. There needed to be familiarity before the extraction began and there needed to be some sense that this wasnt just for me. They werent giving me the story, they were doing this for a larger common good which they were able to believe in because I also made a practice of sending edited narratives beforehand.

So once someone expressed interest, I would send an edited draft of one of the narratives that I put together for my thesis. I think it showed them that I had integrity, it showed them that I wasnt looking to put together a collection of sad stories, that I was honoring them and their history, their ideas and their strengths as well.

But also it showed them the extent of the engagement, you know, this isnt just a little chit chat. This is a big ask and I never wanted to minimize that. So if they read Ashleys narrative in advance of sitting down for an interview with me, then they would get a really good sense [that narrators were] really sharing some pretty intimate details of their own life story and also reflecting upon the times in a broader social and political way. But I found that to be really helpful with trust.

Strand: I appreciate your point about not collecting or exploiting the sad story. Often researchers, especially settler researchers, collect and share these stories and they become poverty porn. The narrators in the book are very candid about their experiences and related times that have included violence, addiction, missing family, and so onbut there are also some really empowering experiences shared like people attending university, going home and supporting their communities, honoring traditions, taking part in resistance efforts: I loved Jasilyns narrative about Standing Rock and the youth that were involved in that movement. I think its really impactful to witness any sad stories balanced by tremendous successes.

Sinclair: I think honestly that was my greatest fear all the way to the end. I will feel like I have failed so terribly if someone thinks that this is just a collection of sad stories or if it were if anyone thought that this was poverty porn; that would be my worst possible outcome. Because I just feel like this community does not need more of that.

Just the strength that the narrators brought to every encounter I had with them is incredible. Each of them as individuals are so powerful. The power! I mean the power that Jasilyn has as this very young woman and the assurance that she has in telling her story, its incredible.

Thats why I love oral history so much: The conversation that you have really does feel to me like a sacred contract. You sit down with this person and you hopefully have been as explicit and as clear as you possibly can about your intention, and they have decided that theyre willing to sit with you in this really intimate, engaged way. And you have this encounter that could only happen in that kind of bonded space and then its shared. And so its really unique.

Strand: I think this is really important. I also want to make sure that we mention that its Native American Heritage Month and we need to be reading these accounts and honoring Native communities and increasing their visibility not only this month, but every day of the year. The book is a great place to begin educating oneselfIm looking at you, fellow white settlers!and even includes ideas of what readers can do to help support Indigenous communities.

Care to highlight some of those?

Sinclair: Im conscious of the fact that I dont normally see a ton of coverage for [Native American Heritage Month], but Im seeing less this year because its just so drowned out by the noise from the election. I dont know if you caught the wholeCNN graphic mishapwhere they were trying to show voter representation and it [listed] White, Latino, Black and something else. It was just super ironic in this moment when Native Americans have been so engaged in the political process.

I was excited [that] Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both included the Native Americans in their speeches the evening that the election was decided but its always last. Like, can we switch up the order once? Could we not always have Native Americans be last? Its like this very intentional effort at inclusion that just doesnt feel very authentic, doesnt feel very heartfelt.

One thing that really struck me when I was working on the book is that I would like people to know a little bit [more about Native Americans]. I got the impression people were afraid to engage [with me] because they didnt want to reveal how little they knew. And so one of my hopes for the book is that it can provide information so that people feel a little less scared to start those conversations because it will give them that little entryway into all these different topics.

Related to that and this month, you can find out whose land you live on, find out the history of the land. Find out what Indigenous people in the city that you live in are up to. What do they care about? What are they working towards? Just follow a couple of Native thinkers or artists or writers on some of your social media feeds so that you start to have this little piece of your intake come from a unique and different and necessary perspective.

I just wish that there was just a little bit more space in the public consciousness given to the work of Native Americans and to knowing the history and the current desires that Native Americans have.

Strand: And these things take so little effort! Wemeaning settlersneed to actually start being more active and intentional with what were focusing our attention on.

Sinclair: Yeah, and starting that young. One thing that I didnt put in the Ten Things You Can Do [list in the book] is getting kids books by Native authors. There are so many beautiful books by Native American and First Nations authors. Thats a very easy starting place. And then as your kid ages, age that reading with them. Louise Erdrich has a series of books for young readers, the first one is calledThe Birchbark House. You know theres a way to begin this learning early and then to grow it.

Strand: Right and Debbie Reese has such a great website,American Indians in Childrens Literature, that focuses on books for kids with positive representations of Native American communities and stories. Okay, so whats next for you and the project?

Sinclair: Right now Im interviewing on a couple projects for the Columbia Oral History Research Center: Im interviewing some Indigenous people about Obamas legacy and Native America and also interviewing some Indigenous folks about their experiences with COVID in New York City.

In January, Im teaching a course called Indigenous Oral Traditions and Anti-Colonial Oral Histories and Im really excited about that. And then my next project is just like beginning fantasies right now, but I think what Im most drawn to is this idea that Winona LaDuke has communicated in a lot of her work, which is that cultural diversity is good for biodiversity. And so Im really interested in finding a way to use oral history to show these very granular relationships that specific Nations have to specific parts of the natural world. And at the same time using that as a way to show what is sacred.

Strand: I want to thank you and all of the people who shared their stories for this work that has become a beautiful and important book. Do you have anything else you want to add about the experience?

Sinclair: I really feel like there was this amazing collective kind of goodwill that formed around this project and that came from all of the narrators who were such incredible mentors and teachers to me. So I just really want to honor that.

Yes, this was my work over the last three years, but I very much see myself as just the conduit. I think Im a good interviewer and editor, but they are the heart and Im just so grateful that each of them was willing to sit with me and be so generous with their time and with their stories.

How We Go Home: Voices From Indigenous North America, edited by Sara Sinclair, is out now from Voice of Witness and Haymarket Books.

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The Ms. Q&A: Sara Sinclair on the Imperative of Indigenous Voices - Ms. Magazine

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Posted By admin on November 30, 2020

In one sense, Rabbi Joshua Gerstein has come a long way from his roots in a traditional Conservative American Jewish home. In another way, those exact roots are what started him on his journey.Growing up, he saw his parents gradually become more religiously observant. Both of his grandfathers were active in pro-Israel causes, and Gerstein was blessed with a strong sense of connection to Israel as a state, country and as the Jewish homeland.He was 10 when he made his first visit to Israel, but it was his bar mitzvah trip that changed everything.I remember looking around and feeling an overwhelming sense of belonging. In Lancaster, you felt the odd man out. [In Israel], no one is looking at you funny when you go to the park with matzah in a bag.As a 13 year-old boy, seeing all the hayalim [soldiers] and police officers, [I understood that] along with a country comes the responsibility of these things. Being part of the Jewish community means being part of the country and all that entails.Young Joshs awareness that a Jewish country requires Jews to take responsibility for running the country was a foreshadowing of his adult life.Like so many Zionist youth, he came to Israel the year after graduating from high school. Intending to return to the US for college, the March 2008 terrorist attack at Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva changed the course of his life.

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Making aliyah allows one young rabbi to break out of the American bubble - The Jerusalem Post

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Posted By admin on November 30, 2020

In the past two months, Secretary of the Navy Kenneth Braithwaite has announced the names of three future Virginia class attack submarines. In a departure from the established convention, which the lead boat in the class had set, all three will be named after fish. The Navy's boss says these monikers, all of which honor past submarines, will help the members of its Silent Service restore a link to important history and heritage after decades of sailing in boats primarily named after U.S. states and cities.

On Nov. 17, 2020, Braithwaite had revealed that two future Virginia class submarines, with the hull numbers SSN-805 and SSN-806, would be named USS Tang and USS Wahoo, respectively. The month before, he had announced that the forthcoming SSN-804 would receive the name USS Barb. All of these will be Block V boats with the additional Virginia Payload Module (VPM), which has four large-diameter launch tubes that will be capable of firing various weapons and potentially deploying other systems, including unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV). You can read more about these boats and their enhanced capabilities in this past War Zone piece.

As already noted, the Navy's established naming convention for Virginia class boats is to name them after U.S. states. When it came to attack submarines, before that there had been the Los Angeles class, all but one of which, the USS Hyman G. Rickover, originally to be called USS Providence, were named after American cities.

In between those two classes, the Navy also acquired three Seawolf class attack submarines. The service had originally planned to buy 29 of these highly advanced boats, but growing costs together with defense spending drawdowns after the end of the Cold War led to that purchase being severely truncated. The first-in-class USS Seawolf, which was commissioned in 1997, is named after a fish, but the trio does not follow any real naming convention. The other two are the USS Connecticut, which presaged the Navy's naming decision with regards to the Virginia class, and the USS Jimmy Carter.

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The Seawolf class submarine USS Jimmy Carter.

These boats, which you can read about in more detail in this previous War Zone story, have since been leveraged heavily for intelligence-gathering and other specialized missions, including extended operations under the Arctic ice. Jimmy Carter is notably a unique subclass unto itself with the addition of a 100-foot-long Multi-Mission Platform (MMP) module in the center of the hull. The highly modified boat is now America's top underwater espionage and special missions submarine.

Beginning in 1981, the Navy also began commissioning its newest ballistic missile submarines, the Ohio class, all but one of which, the USS Henry M. Jackson, are named after states. Henry M. Jackson was a long-time member of Congress from Washington state. Four of these were subsequently converted into guided missile submarines that also featured advanced command and control capabilities, which you can read about more in this previous War Zone feature.

Naming Virginia class submarines is a unique opportunity to reclaim submarine names that carry inspirational records of achievement, Braithwaite said in announcing the future USS Tang and USS Wahoo. Previous submarines with those names, as well as past USS Barbs, certainly have storied histories.

The first USS Tang was a Balao class submarine that served during World War II in the Pacific. She sank a total of 33 ships, including Japanese warships, as well as freighters and tankers, over the course of five patrols in 1944. She also helped save downed airmen.

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The Balao class USS Tang.

Her service came to an unceremonious end on Oct. 25 of that year, when she was sunk by one of her own torpedoes that went off course and came circling back at her. Of her crew of 87, only nine, including her captain at the time, Commander Richard O'Kane, survived and ended up in Japanese captivity. O'Kane subsequently received the Medal of Honor for his actions during the Tang's final two engagements against the Japanese.

O'Kane became something of a legend in the Navy's submarine community and his cribbage board, which survived the sinking of the Tang, now goes into officer's wardroom aboard whatever the oldest attack submarine on active duty is at present. The honor is now held by the Los Angeles class submarine USS Chicago, after the previous oldest boat, the USS Olympia, another member of the same class, left active service last year.

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Navy Commander Benjamin Selph, the commanding officer of USS Olympia, plays cribbage using O'Kane's board against Commander Chance Litton, the captain of the USS Chicago in October 2019.

A second USS Tang was commissioned in 1951 and was the lead boat in her class of diesel-electric submarines. This boat conducted operations in the Pacific region in the 1950s and 1960s, including patrols in the South China Sea during the Vietnam War. Starting in 1972, the submarine underwent a major overhaul, which extended the hull-length by 22 feet and increased its displacement by 600 tons. A new passive sonar system was installed along with a Prairie Masker acoustic signature reduction system.

Afterward, this Tang returned to the Pacific until it underwent another overhaul in 1977 and was sent the following year to Groton, Connecticut, where it took up a new role, training sailors from the Imperial Iranian Navy. It also provided other training support to Navy units on the East Coast. The plan had been to eventually transfer the submarine to Iran, but those plans were halted after the Islamic Revolution in that country in 1979. The ex-USS Tang was eventually passed to the Turkish Navy in 1980, where the boat served with the new name Pirireis until 2004. It is now on display in the Turkish port city of Izmir.

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The second USS Tang, the first in her class, at Pearl Harbor.

The original USS Wahoo, on which Commander O'Kane had served for a time as Executive Officer, was a Gato class submarine that also served in the Pacific during World War II. This boat sank 20 ships across seven patrols between 1942 and 1943 and became one of the most decorated submarines in the Navy at the time, earning six battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation, which is given in recognition of extraordinary heroism in action against an armed enemy.

Wahoo sank in the La Prouse Strait in the Sea of Japan sometime in October 1943 in the wake of a Japanese aerial attack. There were no survivors and the exact location of the wreck was not confirmed until 2006.

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The Gato class USS Wahoo.

The Navy tried twice to name a Tench class submarine Wahoo, but that never came to be amid a raft of canceled submarine orders late in the Second World War and immediately afterward. The service did eventually name one of the 1950s-era Tang class submarines after this storied World War II-era boat.

As with the first submarine in that new class, this second USS Wahoo also spent most of its career in the Pacific, including conducting patrols in support of the Vietnam War. Just like the first-in-class USS Tang, this boat relocated to the East Coast in 1977 ahead of what was supposed to be a transfer to the Imperial Iranian Navy. After the Islamic Revolution in Iran upended those plans, Wahoo was decommissioned in 1980 and was used as a source of spare parts for other Tang class submarines until it was finally stricken from the rolls for good in 1983 and subsequently sold for scrap.

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The Tang class USS Wahoo at sea in the 1950s.

The Navy's first USS Barb was a Gato class submarine that served in both the Atlantic, as well as other bodies of water around Europe, and the Pacific. She is credited with sink 17 ships over the course of 12 patrols, in total.

Barb's first patrol was in support of the allied invasion of North Africa, nicknamed Operation Torch, which began in late 1942. She then conducted four more patrols around Europe hunting Axis blockade runners during which she sank one German ship.

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The submarine was then sent to the Pacific, arriving in Pearl Harbor in September 1943. The boat's seven subsequent patrols in that theater left it with an impressive combat record, including the sinking of the Japanese escort carrier Un'y in September 1944.

On the night of Jan. 22-23, 1945, Barb managed to penetrate inside what was then known as Namkwan Harbor on China's Hainan island, which the Japanese controlled at the time. The submarine sunk or damaged multiple ships sitting at anchor before withdrawing to safety, despite having no charts of the shallow and heavily mined waters inside what is known today as the Port of Yangpu. This action earned the boat a Presidential Unit Citation.

Before her final patrol, which began in June 1945, Barb was fitted with an array of five-inch rocket launchers on the deck, which the boat's crew subsequently used to bombard multiple coastal towns in the Japanese home islands. During this patrol, the crew also sent a raiding party ashore that is credited with blowing up a train.

USS Bowfin Submarine Museum and Park

Barb's battle flag at the end of World War II, with markings denoting ships sunk or damaged and other notable actions, including attacks on land targets using rockets, as well as its three-inch deck gun, and the destruction of the train. Notable awards given to the ship and its crew are also denoted at the top.

Barb survived the war, having destroyed the most Japanese ships by tonnage, and was placed in reserve status in 1946, before being decommissioned the following year. The Navy recommissioned the boat in 1951 and it operated in the Atlantic until it was decommissioned again in 1954. The service then put it through the Greater Underwater Propulsion Power Program (GUPPY) conversion program. Gato, as well as Balao and Tench class submarines, received the GUPPY upgrades, which were derived from features found on captured German Type XXI U-boats and offered extra speed when sailing submerged, as well as improved maneuverability and greater endurance.

The Navy again recommissioned Barb in August 1954, but decommissioned her for the last time less than four months later and transferred her to the Italian Navy. The Italians operated the boat for some time after that, having renamed it the Enrico Tazzoli, and subsequently sold it for scrap in 1972.

In 1963, the Navy commissioned a second USS Barb, a nuclear Permit class submarine. The Permit class had been known as the Thresher class until the USS Thresher was lost in an accident in 1963, an incident that remains a source of controversy.

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The Permit class USS Barb.

This second Barb operated in the Pacific right up until the last years of the Cold War. She was notably responsible for reporting unusual Soviet naval activity in April 1968, which subsequently turned out to be search efforts for the stricken Golf-II class ballistic missile submarine K-129. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) famously mounted a highly-classified effort to recover that sunken boat, nicknamed Project Azorian. The Hughes Glomar Explorer, a modified drillship, built at the direction of Howard Hughes in cooperation with the CIA, was ultimately only able to pull a portion of K-129 up from the bottom of the ocean in 1974.

This submarine also received a Meritorious Unit Commendation for rescuing survivors of a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber that crashed in the Pacific near Guam in 1972 as Typhoon Rita slammed the area. In 1977, the boat was selected as a test platform for the submarine-launched version of the Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile.

The Navy decommissioned this USS Barb in 1989.

Before Braithwaite's announcement about the future USS Barb, Seawolf had been the last Navy submarine named after a fish. Before that, the Sturgeon class had been the last Navy submarine class where the formal convention had been to name them after denizens of the deep. The Navy decommissioned its last Sturgeon class boat, USS Parche, a heavily modified spy submarine akin to the USS Jimmy Carter that followed it, in 2005. The Navy also operated a unique diesel-electric research and development submarine, USS Dolphin, until 2007.

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It's also worth noting that exceptions generally prove the rule when it comes to Navy ship naming conventions. There are already two Virginia class submarines set to be named after notable Americans, rather than states. These are the future USS John Warner and USS Hyman G. Rickover. The Los Angeles class USS Hyman G. Rickover was decommissioned in 2006.

John Warner was a long-time Senator from Virginia who also served as Secretary of the Navy under President Richard Nixon. He had also fought in World War II and the Korean War with the U.S. Marines.

Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, a Polish Jewish immigrant who first joined the Navy in 1922, is described as the "Father of the Nuclear Navy" and ran the service's Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program for just over three decades after its creation in 1949. Rickover, who eventually became something of a controversial figure, was forced into retirement in 1982, at the age of 82, and died in 1986. He remains, by far, the longest-serving director of the Navy's main nuclear office, also commonly known simply as Naval Reactors.

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Admiral Hyman G. Rickover onboard the submarine USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear-powered vessel.

It's perhaps somewhat amusing that the future USS Hyman G. Rickover will share space with at least three other Virginia class submarines named after fish. Rickover is said to have been responsible for ending the convention of naming submarines after denizens of the deep. Admiral James Watkins, who was Chief of Naval Operations, the Navy's top officer, from 1982 to 1986, said that the head of Naval Reactors had once declared to him "Fish don't vote!"

The idea, at least in theory, was that establishing a more visible link to specific American constituencies, even land-locked ones, would create a sense of attachment to individual boats, which in turn would help sway members of Congress to approve funding for new submarines. A similar logic appears to have been applied to the Navy's two subclasses of Littoral Combat Ships (LCS), the bulk of which are also named after U.S. cities.

It's not entirely clear if the Braithwaite truly intends to continue naming new submarines after fish, or if the names of other notable, now-decommissioned submarines that have nothing to do with undersea fauna may also make comebacks. For instance, for a time, the Navy had named ballistic missile submarines after notable Americans, including multiple Presidents, and even foreign historical figures. The Benjamin Franklin class USS Simon Bolivar, named after the Venezuelan revolutionary hero who led multiple Latin American countries to independence from Spain in the 19th century, is perhaps one of the more interesting examples.

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Secretary of the Navy Kenneth Braithwaite speaks with sailors aboard the Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS Milius in Japan in October.

The latest edition of the Congressional Research Service's (CRS) report on ship naming, which is dated Nov. 16, the day before Braithwaite announced the future USS Tang and USS Wahoo, does not say that there has been any formal change in the naming convention for the Virginia class. It also says that the Navy has yet to state publicly how it plans to name its Columbia class ballistic missile submarines, despite the general belief being that these will be named after states, just like the Ohio class. Congress may well have their own opinions on all of this and ship naming can often be a politically-charged issue on the Hill, which is the reason CRS' report exists in the first place.

World War II-era submarines, all named after fish, are among the most likely to have had the "inspirational records of achievement" that Braithwaite says he is now looking to honor. There will definitely be more submarines in need of names in the future, too, with the Navy's current highly ambitious force plan calling for between 70 and 80 total boats to be in service by 2045. Right now, the service is planning to acquire Block VI Virginia class boats ahead of the planned future introduction of an all-new attack submarine, presently referred to as SSN(X). That design is expected to be based, at least in part, on the Columbia class and have features carried over from the Block VI Virginias.

If nothing else, the Secretary of the Navy has made clear that any formal or informal prohibition the service had on naming new submarines after fish is gone, at least as long as he is in the post.

Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com

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The Navy Has Started Naming Its Submarines After Sea Creatures Again - The Drive

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Posted By admin on November 30, 2020

Record-breaking virus numbers reported among Palestinians

Palestinians have seen a record-shattering 1,811 new coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours, as the pandemic worsens in both the West Bank and Gaza.

Around 26% of tests came back positive among all Palestinians, indicating that the virus could be spreading even more widely while largely undetected.

Seventeen Palestinians died of the virus, setting another daily record.

According to the Palestinian Authority Health Ministry, the West Bank saw a record 1,126 cases over the past day. The previous record, set a day before, was 863.

While the outbreak is worst in Nablus where 224 cases were identified hundreds of cases were also discovered in Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Hebron governorates.

PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh has announced that tighter restrictions will soon be put in place on the West Bank to break the spread of the virus.

On Friday and Saturday, PA-controlled areas will enter total lockdown before the beginning of a 14-day nightly curfew.

Business leaders, however, have come out in opposition to the lockdown, which they say will topple the already damaged Palestinian economy.

In the Gaza Strip, Hamas health authorities identified 685 new cases.

Cases have spiked dramatically in the coastal enclave over the past week, with 3,703 new cases reported over the past five days.

Both the terror group and international observers have warned that the Gaza health system, worn down by years of an Israeli-Egyptian blockade and three wars, cannot handle a severe increase in cases.

There are currently 14,342 active coronavirus infections among Palestinians: 6,499 in the Gaza Strip and 7,843 in the West Bank. Around 740 Palestinians have died of the virus in the West Bank and Gaza. Aaron Boxerman

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Polls show Yamina continuing to challenge Netanyahu as coalition falters - The Times of Israel

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Posted By admin on November 28, 2020

After Joe Biden won the presidency, my liberal friends mostly Ashkenazi Jews with deep roots in America were aghast that over 70 million Americans voted for Trump.

My Syrian, Persian, Bukharian and Hispanic friends and family members Jews with immigrant identities were shocked, too. But most mourned the presidents defeat.

Throughout this election, I kept feeling a sense of vertigo living at the collision point between my life as a scholar working in liberal settings and as a traditional Jew with deep ties to conservative immigrant Jewish communities. This afforded me a dual vantage point to a political division that is not understood or acknowledged by the liberal Jewish establishment: that entire populations of diverse Jews (or Jews of color, depending on ones definition) lean Republican, and many within them voted for Trump.

Demographic data is scarce about the voting patterns of diverse Jewish communities like the ones to which I belong. But as an Argentine immigrant Jew of Middle Eastern background and scholar of Sephardic Jews, I see that much of the American Jewish political fracture stems from precisely these divergent identities. Our current Jewish communal efforts toward understanding our diverse community overlook conservative-leaning Jews from minority groups. We have learned how to check off diversity requirements without making space for ideological difference.

These challenges are not unique to the Jewish community. Despite progressive conventional wisdom that as America became more diverse the Democratic Party coalition would grow, Trumpsshareof ethnic and racial minority votes increased in 2020 compared to 2016. While we can argue as to why this occurred, it is clear that there is no monolithic category of American people of color who universally vote for Democrats.

The now-obvious gap between how minorities identify and mainstream institutional leaders speak of them is also present in the Jewish community. This gap interferes with our understanding of diversity and ability to perform critical political work in our own communities.

In the course of my work, I have found three most prevalent fallacies that impair Jewish diversity projects: the idea that all diverse Jews are the same, that nonwhite or diverse Jews are all progressive, and rampant tokenism.

Many have a well-meaning but mistaken impulse to flatten the differences within and between diverse Jewish populations. They assume that all Syrian Jews, for instance, have the same political orientations or that all Black Jews would feel uncomfortable with security details at synagogues.

Others commit this flatteningbetweengroups, lumping together Black, Asian and nonwhite Middle Eastern Jews as if they all see themselves as parts of the same communities with shared goals and interests. One example is the way some use the term Jews of color as a catchall phrase that includes all kinds of populations Black Jews, Middle Eastern Jews, sometimes even all Sephardic Jews and Hispanic Jews.

Yet we have no indication that these diverse populations identify as part of the same group, use this label or have shared interests. In fact, the data suggest otherwise. One prominent example relates to Hispanic Jews in America. Although these Hispanic Jews mainly from Mexico, Venezuela and Argentina are typically the largest group assigned by scholars to estimates of Jews of color, most are likely to identify both as Hispanic and white.

In other words, although they are increasingly labeled as Jews of color, Hispanic Jews in America are just as likely to identify as white. (For more on Latino Jews in America, including their negotiation of whiteness, I recommend Laura Limonics fabulous bookKugel and Frijoles.)

An unintended consequence of this between groups flattening is that it obscures some needed anti-racist work. When we group together all diverse or nonwhite Jews, it actually undermines what we are trying to achieve. Black Jews, for instance, face greatly different challenges given the long history ofanti-Black racism in America, including in our communities, than, say, white-identifying Hispanic Jews or Sephardic Middle Eastern Jews.

Categorizing a group with a term the community doesnt actually identify with is especially problematic in the case of immigrant Jewish populations, which are often labeled with broad American racial or ethnic categories foreign to their immigrant experiences.

This summer, I participated in several private roundtables focused on questions of representation in which diverse Jews were described as fully aligned with progressive ideologies. This is demonstrably untrue. While liberals in my newsfeed were arguing this summer that the best way to honor Jews of color would be to march with Black Lives Matter on the streets, many of my Hispanic friends were anxious about BLMs anti-capitalist discourse, and my Middle Eastern Jewish friends were more likely to be dropping off cookies at police precincts than supporting anti-racist demonstrations.

As Limonic says, Latino Jews are not, on the whole, politically conservative, but there are electorally significant populations of Hispanic Jews who defy this mold. According to the 2019 American Jewish Yearbook, Florida, a battleground state, contains the third largest population of Jews in America. SinceJews tend to vote at higher rates than other Americans, and Jews in Florida at higher rates than other Jews, the Jewish vote is particularly important there.

While we do not have data on how Jewish Hispanics voted in Florida, my own anecdotal interactions with Latino Jews there indicate that many have immigrant identities that contribute to their support of Republicans. In particular, Cuban Jews many of whom experienced the tyranny of left-wing regimes oppose what they perceive as the Democrats affinity toward communism or socialism.

Among Middle Eastern Sephardic Jews living in America, many share family histories of having escaped Arab nationalism and antisemitism in the Middle East. Their recent experiences of Jewish displacement have led many to identify with a realpolitik approach in which a strongman politician can best compete in the international arena to protect both Israel and American interests. Moreover, many are socially conservative and identify with Trumps economic policies.

In her widely shared2009 TED talk, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie highlighted what happens to underrepresented populations when they are mainly portrayed through monolithic single stories. One danger of single stories or of ideologically monolithic stories is that we only hear from minorities when they fit the majority cultures narrative. In the liberal media, those who are ideologically progressive are increasingly represented, but people of color who question progressive orthodoxies are largely absent.

Similarly, Jewish communities seeking to become more inclusive will often invite guest speakers or activists who tend to embody liberal viewpoints and values.

Some years ago I was invited to speak at a panel about being a Sephardic Jew. One of my co-panelists made a comment about how my own experiences were a powerful window into my community. Her words so troubled me that I turned to my mostly Ashkenazi crowd and said a version of the following: I want you to consider that I am on this stage because I am a progressive feminist who knows how to speak to a pluralistic and liberal audience. I share many ideas and values with my Sephardic family, community and with the Sephardic Jews I have researched. At the same time, most of them are politically conservative. I want us to think about what it means to have representative ethnic diversity if we were to take moral and political diversity seriously.

If you want to appreciate how badly these three fallacies have led us to misunderstand Jewish diversity, consider how liberal Jewish organizations choose to label diverse communities versus how those very diverse communities choose to self-identify.

More often than I can count, I have been mislabeled as a Latinx, Mizrahi or a Jew of color. Yet I do not use any of these terms to describe myself, mainly because my communities of origin do not use these labels.

The overwhelming majority of American Hispanics 97 percent, according tothe Pew Research Center do not use the term Latinx, a word that reflects American progressive gender norms more than the language used in Latin America by its indigenous people. The pan-ethnic category of Mizrahi reflects a uniquely Israeli context and has not emerged organically in my American Sephardic communities. And the classification of Jews of color has distinctly American racial undertones that feel foreign to my personal identity as a nonwhite immigrant.

Of course, there are populations of diverse Jews who deserve visibility and advocacy, who proudly identify and organize through these and other identities. But every time I am called a name that does not reflect my identity, it reminds me that we have a long way to go as our communities undertake what should ideally be a complex and disruptive American Jewish diversity project.

Many liberal Jews were shocked that so many Jews could have supported the president, much less diverse Jews. But if we want to truly understand those who hold views different than ours, we must take the time to get to know diverse communities rather than ascribing our own political beliefs and assumptions onto others.In the wake of this election, my commitment for my beloved countrys democracy leads me to reaffirm the difficult work of working to move hearts and minds and cultivate common cause with political opponents. This work begins at home.

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Many Jews of color are conservative and many voted for Trump - The Jewish News of Northern California

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Posted By admin on November 28, 2020

As President-elect Joe Bidens transition is kicking into high gear after the Trump administrations General Services Administration on Monday finally agreed to acknowledge his victory, we can report that at least five Jews will serve in top positions in the new administration: Ronald A. Klain as White House Chief of Staff; Antony John Blinken as Secretary of State; Janet L. Yellen Secretary of the Treasury; Alejandro N. Mayorkas as Secretary of Homeland Security; and Avril Danica Haines as Director of National Intelligence.

Ron Klain, 59, was born in Indianapolis, Indiana to a building contractor named Stanley Klain, and his travel agent wife Sarann Warner (ne Horwitz), both of whom are Jewish. Ron Klain graduated from North Central High School in 1979 and was on the schools Brain Game team which finished as season runner-up. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree summa cum laude from Georgetown University in 1983. In 1987, he received his Juris Doctor degree magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Byron White during the 1987 and 1988 terms. In the Clinton White House, Klain was Associate Counsel to the President and led the team that won the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In 1995, he became Chief of Staff to Vice President Al Gore. In 2008, he became Chief of Staff to Vice President Joe Biden, having served as counsel to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary while Biden chaired the committee.

Tony Blinken, 58, was born in New York City to his Jewish parents, Judith (Frehm) and Donald Blinken. He attended the Dalton School until 1971, when he moved to Paris, to attend cole Jeannine Manuel. He lived in Paris with his divorced mother and her new husband, attorney Samuel Pisar, a Holocaust survivor. Blinken attended Harvard University where he earned his bachelors degree. He earned his J.D. degree at Columbia Law School in 1988. After graduation, he practiced law in New York City and Paris. He served on the United States National Security Council staff at the White House from 1994 to 2001. From 1994 through 1998, Blinken was Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Strategic Planning and NSC Senior Director for Speechwriting. From 1999 to 2001 he was Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European and Canadian Affairs. In 2002 Blinken was appointed staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, until 2008. From 2009 to 2013, Blinken served as Deputy Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to the Vice President. In December 2014, Blinken was confirmed as Deputy Secretary of State by the Senate. In 2002, Blinken married Evan Ryan in a bi-denominational ceremony officiated by a Jewish clergy and priest at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Washington, DC.

Janet Yellen, 74, was born to Polish Jews from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Her mother, Anna Ruth (ne Blumenthal) was an elementary school teacher, and her father, Julius Yellen, was a family physician, whose clinic was on the ground floor of their home. Janet Yellen graduated from Fort Hamilton High School as a valedictorian. She graduated summa cum laude from Pembroke College in Brown University with a degree in economics in 1967. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1971 and was the only woman in her doctoral class. Yellen served as Chair of President Clintons Council of Economic Advisers from 1997 to 1999, and served on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 1994 to 1997. She chaired the Economic Policy Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development from 19971999. From 2004 until 2010, Yellen was the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She was a voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) in 2009. In 2010, President Obama nominated Yellen as vice-chair of the Federal Reserve System. Yellen simultaneously began a 14-year term as member of the Federal Reserve Board that will expire in 2024. On January 6, 2014, the Senate conformed Yellen as Chair of the Federal Reserve by a vote of 5626, the narrowest margin ever for the position.

Alejandro Mayorkas, 61, was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1959, and his parents arrived with him and his sister to the United States in late 1960 as refugees, following the Cuban Revolution. The family started out in Miami, Florida, but later moved to Los Angeles, California. His father was a Sephardic Jew, and his mother a Romanian Jew whose family escaped the Holocaust and fled to Cuba in the 1940s. Mayorkas earned his Bachelor of Arts degree with distinction from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1981. He received his Juris Doctor from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles in 1985. In 1998, Mayorkas was recommended by Senator Dianne Feinstein and appointed by President Clinton as the United States Attorney for the Central District of California, becoming the youngest United States Attorney in the nation. In 2009, Mayorkas was appointed by President Obama as the Director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Mayorkas transformed the agency, including realigning its organizational structure to prioritize the agencys fraud detection and national security responsibilities and creating an office of public engagement that made the agency more transparent and open in its consideration, development, and promulgation of policies and practices impacting the more than 7 million people who apply for benefits each year. Mayorkas championed United States citizenship, management efficiencies and fiscal responsibility, and safeguarding the integrity of the immigration system. In 2014, Mayorkas was promoted to the position of Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Avril Haines, 51, was born in Manhattan on August 29, 1969, to a Jewish mother, Adrian (ne Rappaport), and Thomas Haines. Her mother was a painter and died when Avril was 15. Her father is a biochemist and professor emeritus at City College, who helped found the CUNY School of Medicine, where he served as the chair of the biochemistry department. After graduating from Hunter College High School, Haines enrolled in 1988 in the University of Chicago where she studied theoretical physics and worked repairing car engines at a mechanic shop in Hyde Park. In 1991 Haines had taken up flying lessons before graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in physics degree in 1992. In 1998, Haines enrolled at the Georgetown University Law Center and received her Juris Doctor in 2001. In 2001, Haines became a legal officer at the Hague Conference on Private International Law. In 2002, she became a law clerk for United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit Judge Danny Julian Boggs. From 2003 to 2006, Haines worked in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the Department of State. From 2007 until 2008, Haines worked for the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations as Deputy Chief Counsel for the Majority Senate Democrats (under then-chairman Joe Biden). She then worked for the State Department as the assistant legal adviser for treaty affairs from 2008 to 2010. In 2010, Haines was appointed to serve in the office of the White House Counsel as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Counsel to the President for National Security Affairs at the White House. In 2013, Obama nominated Haines to serve as Legal Adviser of the Department of State but later withdrew her nomination, choosing instead to select her as Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

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Biden Appoints Five Jews to Top Posts, Boy, Are their Mothers Proud - The Jewish Press - JewishPress.com

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Posted By admin on November 28, 2020

Former Vice President Joe Biden talks with Senator Kamala Harris after the conclusion of the 2020 Democratic US presidential debate in Houston, Texas, Sept. 12, 2019. Photo: Reuters / Mike Blake.

In the days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, the MirYam Institute hosted a debate titled: Which Presidential Ticket Is Best for the US-Israel Relationship? At the debates conclusion, the Biden-Harris ticket was declared the winner. Perhaps this was prescient, as Biden and Harris went on to win the November 3 election.

The future Biden administration will usher in a new era of American governance and politics. Although this proposed agenda seems popular amongst one-half of the American public, I nevertheless remain skeptical as to whether the Biden administration will be the best for the US-Israel relationship. My skepticism stems from the Biden campaigns recent actions and the embrace by some in the Democratic Party of ideologies that view Israel as an oppressor state.

Over the summer, some in the Biden campaign reportedly privately apologized to former Womens March leader Linda Sarsour following public condemnation of her anti-Israel rhetoric. At the beginning of November 2020, it was reported that the Palestinian Authority established direct lines of communication with the Biden campaign though this has never been confirmed. Most troubling, Kamala Harris chief of staff, Karine Jean-Pierre, stated this summer that Democratic candidates had made the right call in boycotting the annual AIPAC conference. Jean-Pierre declared that AIPACs values were not progressive. Although none of these actions by the campaign are determinative of the future Biden-Harris administrations policies, they indicate that the US-Israel relationship may become much less amicable than in previous administrations.

Biden has called for unity and renewed cooperation with historic American allies. But the skeptic in me does not believe that such rhetoric or policy will apply to the State of Israel. The far-left of the Democratic Party has embraced the collective ideologies of Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, identity politics, and wokeness. Although each of these ideologies warrants its own unique discussion, there is significant overlap in their respective world view. In short, these ideologies divide the world into oppressors and oppressed, predominantly along the distinctions of race and class. These ideologies believe that white people occupy the positions of oppressors within the United States and the West. Black, brown, and indigenous peoples are viewed as being oppressed victims at the mercy of the oppressor class. And, as it turns out, Jews do not fit neatly into this bifurcated framework.

November 27, 2020 7:07 am

At first glance, it should appear that Jews would clearly fall within the victim category. After all, Jews have been oppressed for millennia. But in the world view of the radical left, Jews are not victims, but rather members of the oppressor class. Their perceived economic success in the United States, and the presumed but wrong belief that all Jews are of Ashkenazi heritage, places Jews at the apex of the oppressor hierarchy.

With no knowledge of, or exposure to, Mizrahi, Ethiopian, or Sephardic Jews, the charge of all Jews are white allows Jews to be collectively grouped into the previously-stated oppressor class. These assertions are then further supported by the Palestinians being portrayed as victims within the mainstream media narrative.

Although Biden may not personally believe in these ideologies, there is a substantial portion of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party that does. A Biden-Harris administration may claim to be able to control or stymie the most radical voices in the party, but I remain doubtful.

These ideologies are powerful, ascendant, and demanding to be heard. And coupled with the Biden campaigns recent interaction with various anti-Israel groups, they resonate that much more clearly. At the present moment, however, the potential Biden-Harris administration seems intent on maintaining bipartisan support for Israel. Whether that view is able to hold remains uncertain.

Micah Q. Jones is a publishingAdjunct at The MirYam Institute, a US Army veteran, and recipient of the Bronze Star Medal for Meritorious Service. He is a litigation associate in the Boston office of an international law firm.

The MirYam Institute is the leading international forum for Israel-focused discussion, dialogue, and debate, focused on campus presentations, engagement with international legislators, and gold-standard trips to the State of Israel. Follow their work at http://www.MirYamInstitute.org.

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Biden-Harris and the US-Israel Relationship: the Jury Is Still Out - Algemeiner

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