Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Two Israeli lawmakers made a modest proposal in an op ed in the Wall Street Journal, according to The Times of Israel for the countries of the world to each take 10,000 or so Palestinian refugees from Gaza, if those refugees wish to emigrate. Far right extremist Bezalel Smotrich, the minister of finance, then piled on, urging a “voluntary migration” of Palestinians from Gaza.

Critics accused the three of plotting ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Their plea is rather like Andrew Jackson calling on the territory that became Oklahoma voluntarily to take the American Indian tribes of the deep South whom his trail of tears displaced from their homelands.

But I think that these Israeli officials’ call is too limited. Why stop at the Palestinians? Surely many Israelis themselves have been traumatized by decades of attempting to take the Palestinians’ land and the negative reactions those land grabs have evoked? Why not include them?

One poll this summer found that nearly a third of Israelis wish to emigrate, in part over pessimism about the country given the extremist governments attempts to gut the Supreme Court. The number could be higher today.

Of Israel’s 7 million Jews, at any one time about a million of them are living abroad. Whether because their visas run out or because their jobs were downsized, or out of homesickness, most of them ultimately used to return to Israel. But now a recent poll finds that half of the current generation living abroad, some 500,000 people, have no plans to return.

I call on their host countries, such as the United States (where half of all Israeli expats dwell), Britain, Italy, France, Germany or elsewhere immediately to offer these Israelis citizenship and allow them to stay in the country indefinitely, since that is their express wish. After all the persecution of Jews in the West, it is the least we can do to welcome our Jewish brothers and sisters and try to make amends for the ways in which they were caused to feel unwelcome in the past.

Moreover, open immigration of Israelis to these countries should be instituted, such that any of them who desires to can emigrate from Israel and make a new home. Special programs should be set up to offer them job training and integration into local communities.

Why are Israelis moving abroad over unrest at home? – BBC News

I especially call on Germany to lift its harsh restrictions on Jewish immigration. As of now, Germany requires Jews who want to relocate there to have advanced German language skills. They won’t allow Jews from the former Soviet bloc to immigrate into Germany if they have lived in the US or Israel. Why? Germany for obvious reasons owes the Jewish people an open immigration policy. Germany should take in all the Jews who want to live in Germany.

There are currently 175,000 self-identified Jews in Germany. That is 0.2% of the 83 million Germans.

In January 1933 there were 522,000 Jews in Germany, with the country’s population then standing at 63 million. So 0.8% of Germans were Jews. We should surely try to get the numbers back up to the pre-Nazi percentages, at the very least, but there is no reason why the new united Germany, which has 5.5 million Muslims, shouldn’t have as many Jews as Muslims. If they would only take 5.5 million Jews from Israel who were willing to immigrate, why that would single-handedly resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Germany’s population is expected to decline to 73 million by the end of the century and the country will then be smaller than France or Britain. Germany could remain just as large a country if it took in large numbers of Israelis, and so could avoid being dominated by the French and British.

France, whose Vichy government was far more implicated in the Holocaust than most French are willing to admit, should also allow all the Israelis to come in who want to. Again, they have 5.7 million Muslims, so they really should offset that by taking in millions of Israelis who want to live in Paris (and who doesn’t want to live in Paris?)

As for Britain, it caused the whole problem of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute with its double-dealing during World War I and its asinine Balfour Declaration that promised Jews a homeland in Palestine while promising that the Palestinians would not be disadvantaged by it. Now that the horrid Suella Braverman is gone, maybe the UK can adopt a saner immigration policy. And part of it should be free immigration of Israelis.

Since there are really only 6 million Israeli Jews left in Israel, if each of the major North Atlantic countries just took in half a million, they could all flee the unpleasantness of drones, rockets, and terror attacks, and the even greater trauma of being ruled by far right extremists Binyamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. In this way, the Europeans wouldn’t even have to admit the traumatized, ethnically cleansed Palestinians of Gaza, who could finally go back to their homes in southern Israel, from which their families were expelled in 1948.

( Waging Nonviolence) – On June 27, Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old French boy of North African descent was murdered by a white police officer in a Parisian suburb. Since then, anger has erupted almost everywhere in the country, especially in poor neighborhoods. Young people are taking to the streets to protest against police violence and state racism. Their anger is eruptive. 

Recently, I helped organize support and solidarity for another uprising in France: Soulèvements de la terre, or Earth’s uprising. This movement, created in 2021, is fighting against large and useless infrastructure (like highways, giant tunnels under the Alps, etc.), transnational corporations and other sources of pollution and environmental destruction. At one recent action against a giant water-reservoir designed to support industrial farming, two protesters ended up in comas — the result of explosions from police grenades banned in most European countries, but not France. 

Since then, several spokespersons and coordinators of Soulèvements de la terre have been arrested and interrogated by the counter-terrorism service. A couple of weeks ago, the government decided to outlaw the group. Now, anyone claiming to be a member of the movement is committing a criminal offense. 

The near simultaneous occurrence of these two uprisings is more than a coincidence. It begs the question: Are these not actually two sides of the same coin, two moments in one larger uprising? 

As an activist trained in nonviolent direct action, I’m obviously partly unsettled by the eruptive protests following Nahel’s murder. Burning public libraries, crashing a car into a mayor’s house and trying to set it on fire, looting shops, and destroying buses and tramways doesn’t belong to the action repertoire I follow. If someone would mention these as potential tactics for a protest I would organize, I would vehemently counter-argue or simply not take part in such a protest. I feel more comfortable pushing through police lines to block a coal mine or disrupt a meeting of executives from the fossil fuel industry.

But my preferences don’t matter at all here, for several reasons.

First, alliances are not built upon tactical discussions. Debates and disputes over tactics tend to steal the whole conversation when we’re strategically lost. There’s always plenty of time later to agree to disagree. Alliances emerge from something else: a shared experience (or a shared anger); a set of demands that can be articulated in a way that makes them stronger; a common horizon; or a shared political project.

As for the second, and most important, reason why arguing over tactics is a bad idea: Just like Soulèvements de la terre, the ongoing uprising is about habitability and land.

French activist Fatima Ouassak explains that people living in poor neighborhoods are “landless.” People who originally migrated from Africa to France are, according to her, “deprived of land.” Henceforth, what is at stake when they organize is to claim the right to land. Interestingly enough, the French language offers only one word for both land and Earth: “terre.” The Earth’s Uprising would as well be the Land’s Uprising. 

At a protest to support the Soulèvements de la terre, feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial activist Françoise Verges explained that the system that the Earth’s uprising is fighting against (a vision of nature as a bottomless pit of resources one can indefinitely extract) started in the colonies, under the slavery-plantation system. Indeed, the “system” change that we’ve been demanding for many years is, first and foremost, about achieving full decolonization. Those facing, on a day-to-day basis, state racism and police brutality are therefore on the frontline of this fight.

The fact that I feel unsettled when I see people burn a library or a public transport infrastructure is as much a disagreement over tactics as it is a manifestation of my own background: I had the privilege to be trained in nonviolent direct action. I was taught how to channel my anger into a strategic plan, whose horizon shall remain the famous Gandhian “constructive program.” I feel privileged to experience the current state of the world without erupting and bursting out in rage — and to instead think about strategies, alliances and campaign goals. 

This is precisely why the current manifestation of anger shouldn’t be dismissed as illegitimate, or as something not smart or disciplined enough for a good campaign. After all, the climate movement is currently debating whether or not we should “blow up pipelines.” We would therefore be hypocrites to criticize those setting fire to the very French institutions oppressing them.

Ultimately, we are not facing two consecutive uprisings, but rather one, two-sided uprising. One side is about the habitability of the Earth, the other is about the habitability of France for Black, Indigenous and people of color. With this understanding comes quite a few strategic consequences. 

For starters, we should demand full amnesty for anyone who has recently been (or will be) arrested, whether they were taking part in the popular neighborhood uprising or in a protest organized by the Soulèvements de la terre. This is key: Since this is about dismantling the existing colonial matrix of power, we won’t return to an appeased situation without breaking with the cycle of violence. It has to begin where the cycle of violence has started: police brutality and repression. 

Yes, there’s a lot of anger and rage, and some of it is expressed in ways that are, to say the least, challenging. This is precisely why the cycle of violence has to stop — and it won’t stop in a sustainable and fair way unless the state does its part. It would be unfair and short-sighted to put the responsibility of breaking with the current cycle of violence on those who are protesting, expressing their anger and desire to not be victims of state racism any more.

People are rising up to defend a habitable world — some from the countryside, on the frontline of the extraction of natural resources, and others in dense urban areas, on the frontline of the extraction of the lives of oppressed and colonized people. 

We should then try and seek inspiration from movements that have tried to connect similar dynamics. One obvious example is the Breathe Act, developed by the Movement for Black Lives. This visionary bill aims to defund the police, develop community-owned ways of ensuring safety, and promote environmental and climate justice. In the words of one of its creators, Gina Clayton Johnson, “We know the solution has to be as big as the 400-year-old problem itself.” 

This visionary proposal combines the necessity of dismantling the institutions that are making the world inhabitable and the vision of what needs to be done in order to restore the conditions for justice. In other words, it seeks to preserve the habitability of the world. This could be a way for the French left to finally address the issue of structural racism and break with its color-blindness. Opening eyes to the reasons behind this side of the ongoing uprising is a first step toward supporting the fight for a habitable world for everyone.

Nicolas Haeringer is working at 350.org, where he coordinates partners engagement and works on global mobilizations. Based in France, he’s been involved in the global and climate justice movements for the last 20 years and has written on strategies for social transformation for two decades.

To illustrate this, in the 1990s, a friend told me that a Western doctor who he accompanied in a day visit to the West Bank told him the Muslim women they met didn’t look Muslims because they were educated and beautiful. Another Western man told me that his favorite Palestinian city was Nablus but he did not want to go there because its population are almost entirely Muslims and prefers to visit Bethlehem and Ramallah as they have more Christians. Based on that I advised a Western tourist to visit Ramallah while she was in Jerusalem. She told me the church she was visiting advised her to avoid Arabs and Muslims and that going to the West Bank was dangerous.

It is, therefore, not surprising that there is a campaign to discourage football fans from traveling to an Arab country. Admittedly, some critics of the Qatar World Cup there are sincere people with genuine human rights concerns. Let us, however, examine the issues raised by the press. White nationalist Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing British newspaper, The Sun published an article entitled “…Only six percent of Brits believe Qatar should host 2022 World Cup. It highlighted issues like the high price of alcohol and accommodations. The newspaper suggested moving the tournament to England. Note that there have been forms of alcohol ban in Italy and France at World Cup tournaments.

The Times cited such issues as LGBTQ rights and the deaths of migrant workers who helped building the tournament venues. Yet the World Cup in Russia was not criticized despite the harsh treatment of LGBTQ persons there, and many World Cups were held in Western countries at a time when LGBTQ rights did not exist there. Migrant workers in Qatar have a lower fatality rate than they do in their home countries, though admittedly this statistic does not include infant mortality at home. It seems likely that the workers’ fatality rate as guest workers is similar to that in their countries of origin. Official Qatari numbers show that 37 workers died building the stadium, but with millions of guest workers in Qatar, this is not out of line with the expected death rate. The Guardian printed an op-ed on the subject with a highly misleading headline that implied that there had been 6500 such deaths, which the article beneath the headline did not allege. The false number has nevertheless gone viral. All this is not to say that there is no room for improvement in the treatment of migrant workers in Qatar. Bandying about phony numbers, however, is irresponsible.

Migrant workers in Qatar typically earn ten times there what they did in their home countries. The World Bank argues that more labor migration to rich countries could transfer $1.7 trillion to the developing world. World Bank economists have also estimated that migrant workers from low-income countries who work in a Gulf oil and gas state for three years and live frugally during that time can accumulate enough wealth permanently to move up half a class back home. That is, members of the working class can become lower middle class, and those from the lower middle class can become middle class. Returning workers often open a business.

Professional journalism implies representing both sides of the story. An AlJazeera program in Arabic devoted one episode to dealing with this issue. Former professor and Oxford lecturer, Farhang Jahanpour told the program that the reasons behind the call for the boycott are economic and political as some Western media outlets will lose money due to broadcasting rights. The program highlighted that Rupert Murdoch who owns The Sun and FOX News complained to FIFA that the timing of the event will cost him money. The program also revealed that The Daily Telegraph, which is partially owned by Qatar’s rival Saudi Arabia, promoted relocating the world cup elsewhere by falsely trying to link Qatar to extremism.

Furthermore, the general secretary of the International Trade Union, Sharan Burrow told the program that the Guardian figure was a mistake as this included all deaths of all causes since the start of construction not only deaths related to construction work. On the same topic, FIFA Ethics and Regulations Watch campaign director in London Alistair Thompson said that the Western media did not pay much attention to an Amnesty International report which highlighted improvements in work regulations and rights in Qatar.

Marc Owen Jones, an associate Professor in Middle East Studies at HBKU pointed out that Western media tends to report negatively on smaller, less powerful and less visible countries when they host major sports events. Moreover, when it comes to Arab and Muslim countries, Western media tend to represent them negatively. In comparison with the last world cup in Russia, the British press was more lenient with Russia and separated its coverage of the World Cup from Russia’s brutality.

In France, another country with a colonial history in the Middle East, some cities decided to show black screens in public places instead of World Cup games. Unlike the British press, however, the French press didn’t attempt to hide its Islamophobia. One French Newspaper depicted Qatar football team as terrorists. Speaking to Aljazeera program, founder and director of the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs, Pascal Bonifac was more straightforward and said some hate the idea that a Muslim country is hosting the world cup. A Brazilian former sports minister also highlighted that the Western press don’t like it when major events are held in the southern hemisphere and they gave Brazil and South Africa some hassle when they hosted the World Cup.

The hypocrisy is clear when we consider that few in Europe were concerned about human rights when the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest was held in Israel, which is militarily occupying 5 million Palestinians deprived of basic rights, or seemed to care Europe immigration policy causes the deaths of thousands of immigrants in the Mediterranean annually. Some critics –a minority– are genuinely concerned about human rights but it is obvious that the main reason behind calling to boycott this World Cup is because it is held in an Arab Muslim country. The Western media which have long demonized Arabs and Muslims hate to allow the world to see anything positive happening there. For a lot of people outside the Western world, this is a case of West is best that re-enforced the racist idea of clash of civilizations and the illusion of Western supremacy.

Nobody, however, said it better than the European FIFA president Gianni Infantino: “We are told to make many lessons from some Europeans, from the Western world. I’m European. I think for what we Europeans have been doing for 3,000 years around the world, we should be apologising for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people.

“How many of these European companies who earn millions and millions from Qatar or other countries in the region — billions every year — how many of them have addressed migrant-worker rights? I have the answer: none of them because if they change the legislation it means less profits.”

“Women are tied up,” he typically says. “They’re bound. Duct tape put around their faces, around their mouths. In many cases they can’t even breathe.”

It’s a scenario he’s only continued to elaborate over time. “They have tape over their mouths, electrical tape, usually blue tape, as they call it. It’s powerful stuff. Not good. And they have three, four, five of them in vans, or three of them in back seats of cars.” As they approach ports of entry, he swears, the vehicles carrying them “get off the road, and they drive out into the desert and they come in, they make a left turn — usually it’s a left, not a right.”

Fact-checkers and experts in border sex trafficking have been quick to insist that they know of no such incidents, however elaborately imagined — not one. Instead, most women and children forced into prostitution, they report, enter the country through legal ports of entry.

Border Patrol headquarters even sent out a request asking agents to provide any evidence whatsoever that might help support the president’s tall tales. None apparently did. It’s worth noting that Trump first added stories of duct-taped women to his border repertoire in early January, not too long after the heartbreaking news broke of the discovery of two Saudi sisters, 16 and 22, found dead in New York City’s Hudson River, duct-taped together. Their deaths were ruled suicides, committed after the United States denied them asylum and ordered them deported to Saudi Arabia, a close American ally. Their bodies even washed up on West 68th Street and Riverside Drive, close to Trump Place Condominiums. (He seems inescapable.)

In any case, one doesn’t need Sigmund Freud to grasp the crude displacement evidently underway here. By narrating the “crisis” on the border in a pornographic manner, painting it as a hellscape ruled by MS-13 murderers and rapists, President Trump is undoubtedly using ever more salacious fables to sublimate guilty desires, as well as his and the nation’s complicity in hellish atrocities.

Currently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has nearly 50,000 migrants in custody. That’s roughly the number of people Canada incarcerates in its entire prison system. And no one knows how many migrant children the U.S. is detaining, except that the number is much higher than the 2,737 listed in court documents. The Department of Health and Human Services can’t even provide journalists with an accurate count: “The total number of children separated from a parent or guardian by immigration authorities is unknown” is all its spokespeople can say.

Many of those children are housed in tent compounds in the desert or vacant Walmarts, forced to eat in shifts and sleep on the floors of chain-link cells covered only by a thin, metallic blanket. In one Florida detention center, children are packed “like sardines” in large halls stacked with bunk beds with little room even to walk. At such places, they are reportedly taunted or even sexually terrorized, either by staff or older migrants. They are overprescribed psychotropic drugs to numb them, given pills to make them sleep, and often refused medical attention when sick.

Border Patrol agents have even reportedly snatched babies from their mothers as they were breastfeeding them. Families have been tear gassed at the border and children have already died in Border Patrol custody (though “custody” is undoubtedly too soft a word to describe what the U.S. is doing to the progeny of nearby republics). “These kids are incarcerated,” said an MSNBC reporter who visited one of the detention complexes.

Some of the incarcerated migrant children are then delivered to a Christian adoption service with links to Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. According to the Associated Press, the Trump administration has all but given up trying to reunite children placed in “sponsor” homes with their actual families, since returning them, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, “would present grave child welfare concerns.”

Make Heaven Weep

Racial and sexual violence on the border has a long history. In Washington’s 1846 war on Mexico, for instance, which established the current boundary between the two countries, state militia volunteers and Army regulars rampaged across that region, burning churches, raping women, and scalping men.

On February 9, 1847, for example, a member of an Arkansas volunteer regiment raped a Mexican woman near the regiment’s camp at Agua Nueva in the state of Coahuila and Mexicans retaliated by killing a U.S. soldier. In response, more than 100 of those Arkansas volunteers cornered a group of war refugees in a cave. Screaming “like fiends,” according to one witness, they raped and slaughtered their victims, even as the women and children among them were “shrieking for mercy.” By the time it ended, scores of Mexicans lay dead or dying on a cave floor thick with clotted blood. Many of them had been scalped. (That’s hardly surprising since more than a few of those U.S. Army volunteers had, in the pre-war years, made their livings on those same borderlands by scalping Apaches for bounty money, or “barbering” them, as one Texan scalp-hunter put it.)

Even before that massacre, General Winfield Scott, commander of U.S. forces, wrote Washington to complain of other atrocities being committed by such volunteers, organized under the command of future president Zachary Taylor. The crimes of Taylor’s men, Scott said, were so heinous they would “make Heaven weep.”

When the war ended, Washington had taken all of Mexico’s northern territories, including all or parts of present-day Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, western Colorado, Utah, and southwestern Wyoming. About 500,000 square miles, home to an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people, had been added to the United States.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Chief Pimp

Sexual violence only continued, committed by members of the Border Patrol (founded in 1924) and other security forces like the Texas Rangers.

Starting in the 1970s, ever more middle-class families in the U.S. began hiring undocumented Mexican women as live-in servants, cooks, maids, and nannies. Many of them found themselves far from home in peonage-like conditions, unable to leave the houses in which they worked. Some of those women quickly found themselves not just trapped, but sexually and emotionally battered. One was locked in a house in Nevada for months, according to a witness: “She worked from sunup to way after dark. She requested that her wages be sent to her father in Mexico. No money was ever sent to her father. This went on for about a year and a half. Then she flipped — she became insane, broke out of the house and ran down the street. That’s when the Border Patrol got her.”

Others were raped by their employers and, if they complained, beaten or told that they would be handed over to the Border Patrol, which came to double as a labor procurement service for wealthy households and large ranchers. During those years, in fact, the Border Patrol and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) were notoriously corrupt, violent federal institutions. In Texas, Border Patrollers worked closely with ranchers, delivering workers to their properties (including one owned by Lyndon Johnson when he was still president), then raiding those properties just before payday and deporting the same workers. “The ranchers got their crops harvested for free, the INS men got fishing and hunting privileges on the ranches, and the Mexicans got nothing,” a New York Times reporter, John Crewdson, wrote.

An investigation into INS corruption revealed that agency officials traded young Mexican women caught at the border to the Los Angeles Rams for season tickets. One such official was known within the INS as the service’s “chief pimp.” Part of his job was to help other officials and politicians, including New Jersey Democrat Peter Rodino (who presided over Richard Nixon’s impeachment in the House of Representatives), “get laid” by arranging visits to Mexican brothels.

In his memoir, a former guard, Tony Hefner, described the INS detention center in Port Isabel, Texas — overflowing in the 1980s with refugees from President Ronald Reagan’s Central American wars — as essentially a rape camp. There, underage Salvadoran women, summoned by the center’s guards and wardens, were forced to dance, watch gore films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and submit to sexual demands. They were given abortion pills in case such encounters resulted in pregnancy.

Human Prey

For decades, the border also gave liberty to nativist fantasies, as vigilantes of one sort or another ran wild there.

In the era after the United States lost its war in Vietnam and began to make its fast turn toward deindustrialization, such fantasies became ever more sadistic. In 1990, for instance, a group of San Diego high school students fashioned themselves into a neo-Nazi paramilitary group, calling themselves the Metal Militia, and began staging “war games” on the border, hunting down and robbing migrants. The spree was notable in that it was covered by a new broadcasting network, Fox, on a show called The Reporters.

Racism and nativism would become Fox News’ bread and butter, but here it went for sensationalism, titling the episode “Human Prey.” Its host, former Newsday investigative journalist Bob Drury, depicted migrants sympathetically. In a wide-lapelled white blazer, he interviewed one vigilante who estimated that there were about 10 militant groups in the San Diego County area who would “hunt, track, and stalk” migrants for sport. The film crew accompanied one such group as they captured a family, including a baby and a terrified grandmother.

Drury linked this upsurge in border extremism to the end of the Vietnam War: many of the vigilantes were veterans of that war. Others were teenagers who modeled their tactics, including the setting of booby traps, on Vietnam War movies they had seen. The most disturbing portions of Drury’s report were his interviews with vigilantes. Disguised so as not to be recognizable, they expressed unalloyed hate. “Grab a kid,” one said, discussing his favored method of terrorizing migrants, and “nobody is going to do anything.”

Rome at the Colosseum

“Human Prey” helped launch a genre of TV “border patrol porn.” Even before Trump came on the political scene, the National Geographic channel ran five seasons of Border Wars. Since then, more such shows have aired, including Discovery Channel’s Border Live and Netflix’s Border Security. Copying the style of law-and-order series like Cops, these shows offer viewers ride-alongs with Border Patrol agents as they guard the country’s frontier. The set-up is familiar: greenish night-goggle cinematography, Black Hawk helicopters, battered-down doors, and sunrise jeep runs through mesquite scrub. While driving, Border Patrol agents in dark sunglasses hold forth on life, duty, manhood, and their occasional doubts, as an unseen camera films them from the passenger seat or back seat.

One episode from season two of Border Wars, “Lost in the River,” reveals a common, often deadly Border Patrol practice: the use of helicopters and all-terrain vehicles to scatter border crossers, forcing them ever deeper into the dangerous desert or fast-flowing rivers. It’s a game — patrollers play scatter, chase, catch; migrants surrender or die — that pits desperate people with next to no resources against one of the best-funded, high-tech, armed-to-the-teeth law enforcement agencies on earth. “We’ll let him tire himself out. If he wants to run, we’ll let him run,” says one agent. “You kind of have to pick your battles, and I usually pick the one who runs the most… We’ve got bodies running all over the place… It’s a never-ending game for us.”

Some of those migrants are chased back into Mexico, others caught, but many simply disappear and die, either from drowning or dehydration. Those that do make it to the United States go on to work at some of the lowest-paying but essential jobs around: they pick crops, slaughter and pack meat, clean houses, tend to the sick, watch kids — and for the privilege of all this, the federal government has put them through a dystopic death race, which is then transformed into reality-show entertainment for the masses. Watching such spectacles on cable TV, it’s hard not to feel that the United States is now ancient Rome — an empire that, in its later years, held compassion to be a vice — and the whole of that southwestern desert our Colosseum.

Occasionally, these shows humanize immigrants, but only long enough to super-humanize their pursuers. In one Border Wars episode, a group of 24 detained migrants sit around in the cold morning desert air, looking alternately scared and bored. “It tugs at your heart string[s],” says one of the Border Patrollers who chased them down. “When you see people that are in a bad position, you know, it’s tough, it plays on you emotionally as an agent, even though you have a job to do. To keep America safe.” None of these shows, however, reveal what happens off screen, including reports that Border Patrollers gratuitously tackle non-resisting migrants, beat those they catch, piss on their belongings, destroy their sources of drinking water, and deny them humanitarian aid.

If the images that do appear on screen sooner or later come to numb the moral senses and if viewers need to up the ante, they can always click on PornHub, which offers a whole subgenre of actual Border Porn, including actors dressed as border agents and as migrants: “If you are caught, you are fucked,” is the title of one video.

“Like the Sabine virgins,” the New York Herald wrote a century and a half ago about how Mexicans would come to enjoy being ruled by Washington, Mexico “will soon learn to love her ravishers.”

Trump’s Necromancers

Maybe there’s a better metaphor than describing the United States as decadent Rome. Maybe Trump’s wall, whether built or not, is psychologically refashioning the country into a besieged medieval fortress, complete with its own cult of martyrs. As a candidate, Trump campaigned with the victims (or the families of victims) of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, using their grief to stoke grievances. As president, one of his first acts was to establish a government office charged with providing support services to “victims of crimes committed by removable aliens.” (Never mind that such aliens have a lower crime rate here than the general population.) Trump’s never happier than when, at one of his rallies or speeches, he’s able to call the name of someone who had a family member killed or raped by an undocumented immigrant.

A few years before Trump’s election, as Robin Reineke of the Colibri Center for Human Rights has reported, the sort of men who would later become Trump’s followers began showing up at Tea Party conventions with binders full of photographs of migrant corpses, gruesome images of the desiccated remains of those who had died in the desert trying to enter the United States. The anti-migrant activists who displayed such books of the dead claimed they were humanitarians, trying to raise support to build a wall to stop poor migrants from crossing over and so dying. But really they, like the president today, were necromancers, a kind of American priesthood of the lost frontier, offering a new litany of hate and using the fetish pornography of death to reassure racists that their cruelty was actually kindness.

Greg Grandin, a TomDispatch regular, teaches history at New York University. His newest book, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (Metropolitan Books), has just been published. He is the author of Fordlandia, shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Empire of Necessity, which won the Bancroft Prize in American history, and Kissinger’s Shadow.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Copyright 2019 Greg Grandin

via Tomdispatch.com

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WPBF 25 News: “Report: thousands of migrant children sexually assaulted while in custody”

Americans might be especially drawn to the Swiss example because what has been working for that country addresses not only our current immigration crisis but also the need among progressive U.S. movements to re-learn how to go on the offensive.

According to Flavia Kleiner, a young leader in the movement Operation Libero, the right wing grew steadily for two decades in Switzerland using the issue of immigration. The right-wingers cleverly introduced a series of modest anti-immigrant initiatives — each of which contained some common-sense logic — and used their successes to become the largest political force in Switzerland.

My impression is that the Swiss right-wing’s strategy was like the movement against reproductive choice in the United States — a series of steps designed to chip away at a woman’s right to choose. Switzerland’s established parties reacted to this offensive in the way the Democrats do in the United Sates: by going on the defensive and trying to hold on to previously-won gains. In both countries, the largest parties operate contrary to the folk wisdom that “the best defense is a good offense.”

Kleiner and her friends, however, knew better, and they launched a grassroots initiative. Their crowd-funded, volunteer-based campaign defeated the Swiss People’s party in four major referendum battles from 2016-2018.

Operation Libero did this by ignoring the established parties’ strategy of defending existing immigration policies. Instead, the movement put forward a vision that stressed Switzerland’s progressive values. In their cultural context, they framed the vote as an affirmation of their pluralist constitution, “a pillar of the liberal democracy” that the vast majority of Swiss are proud of. They were so effective at re-framing the referenda that the right wing had to change its own argument and go on the defensive. As a result, the anti-immigrant cause lost its referendum for the fifth time in November.

Can individuals also go on the offensive?

In Denmark, where neo-fascism has been on the rise, Sherin Khankan was getting abusive letters and implied death threats. She led the Mariam mosque in Copenhagen, and was the first female imam, or cleric, in Danish Islam.

From her start in February 2016, she knew her position would arouse controversy in that country. She also expected to be pressured from inside Islam, since one of her major objectives was to use her leadership to challenge patriarchal structures in religious institutions. The result: she didn’t know who would have her back.

Embed from Getty Images

Khankan’s Muslim father is a refugee from Syria who came to Denmark after being imprisoned and tortured for his opposition to the regime. She knew from his experience what courage looked like. But still, the threats worried her.

One person she turned to for advice was Jacob Holdt, an internationally known Danish artist who owned the building she used for the mosque. A few months afterward, my partner and I happened to be visiting Holdt in Copenhagen. I asked the artist what happened to the threats against Khankan.

Jacob chuckled and said, “She was very surprised with my answer, but she trusted me enough to try it. She used her networking skills to track down some of the extremist leaders of the anti-immigrant movement, then she went to see them. She knocked on their doors at their homes, talked with them, let them see her courage and what she’s made of.”

The fascists were, of course, startled. What’s more, as Jacob explained, “They were so impressed by her boldness that they agreed to put the word out that she shouldn’t be hurt or threatened.”

Now the mosque is flourishing with a female co-leader Saliha Marie Fetteh, offering mixed-gender services on most days and a women’s service on Fridays. Taking the offensive seems to be the way to go.

What’s going on in public confrontations?

Right-wing extremists have two main strategies for public actions. One is to set up situations where they can play the victim and increase sympathetic interest in their cause, or at least to polarize and confuse the issues — something Richard Spencer has done on college campuses.

I’ve also seen that approach used in my own neighborhood park in West Philadelphia. It happened last year, during a Pagan Pride festival, when a few right-wing evangelicals showed up on the edge of the park to do street speaking against feminism, gender diversity, homosexuality and of course paganism.

My neighborhood is full of progressive and radical activists. Enough of a crowd gathered, so the police showed up.

At first some of my neighbors, understandably upset by the inflammatory denunciations being made by the evangelicals, argued back. I watched, ready to intervene if no one else would. Happily, several people in the crowd began to explain the game the evangelicals were playing, urging that our neighbors not cooperate with that game. My neighbors “got it,” and stopped. The evangelicals, clearly disappointed, soon departed. They didn’t manage to look like victims after all.

The other favorite tactic of right-wing extremists is to threaten and use violence to increase the fear level of their opponents. Symbols are less costly than actually injuring and killing, and so they like to use symbols like clubs, tiki torches, burning crosses, or dressing in sheets or military-style uniforms. By getting there first, they set the tone, but they don’t win just by doing that. Their victory comes when their opponents respond in a like manner and try to out-intimidate the intimidators.

The threat of counter-violence reinforces the “action logic” of the fascists: we are the framers of this contest, and our opponents concede by following our lead. The confrontation has become a contest about who is best able to scare the other side into changing their behavior.

Not only have the right-wing extremists succeeded in getting progressives to copy their tactics, but the nature of the tactics used by both sides drain the contest of its ideological content. It’s violence vs. violence — fear vs. fear. That’s why Donald Trump and others could claim that, in Charlottesville, both sides were to blame. In Germany and Italy in the 1920s, the bystanders to street fighting between fascists and leftists came to the view that what was needed was a strong state to stop the violence. (And we know who the economic elite in both countries chose to lead the state: Hitler and Mussolini!)

Alternatives to playing the fear game

The grassroots progressive Swiss solution was not only to go on the offensive with visionary content. They re-framed, set a different tone, confounded the right-wingers, and won over and over. What’s the equivalent on the streets?

In a number of countries grassroots people have been experimenting with re-framing and sending a message that strongly contrasts with the right-wingers. In Sweden the Clowns against Racism confronted a spring rally last year of the extreme-right Nordic Resistance Movement in the town of Ludvika. The clowns became so popular, exceeding numbers that can march without a permit, that the police announced they needed to pay a fine. That announcement gained even more publicity for their refusal to follow the neo-fascist’s tactical lead.

Clowning has also shown up in Finland and Scotland. In her delightful article for Waging Nonviolence, Sarah Freeman-Woolpert describes clowning in a number of U.S. localities. In Knoxville, Tennessee, the clown brigade was so effective that the neo-Nazi group called off their demonstration several hours early.

In Wunsiedel, Germany, some merry pranksters who oppose neo-Nazi ideology came out to cheer the marchers. Why? They’d turned it into a fundraising event: local residents and businesses pledged to donate 10 euros for every meter the white supremacists marched. The funds raised went to an anti-fascist group helping people leave right-wing organizations.

Where does activist creativity come from?

The strategic initiatives in Switzerland and Denmark — as well as the tactical innovations in multiple countries — come from activists who turn from the reactive part of their brain (fight, flight or freeze) to the creative side, even in the face of danger. Humans, including top athletes, are simply more effective when we visualize the result we want, tapping the resource of vision.

The decades of defensiveness of the Democrats, copied by most major progressive movements, rendered our country vision-averse. The big signal of change was the Movement for Black Lives’ 2016 release of a vision for the United States that, for the first time, gives us a chance to move past racism.

That same year, visionaries in the Northwest proposed a huge, solar-based reinvention of transportation across the northern tier of the country called “Solutionary Rail.” And, in 2017, Popular Resistance convened a gathering that wrote “The People’s Agenda.”

In 2018, a grassroots group of Vermonters, after reading about the Nordic countries’ success in turning their countries around, realized that collective vision was a critical ingredient. The group called for a statewide “Vermont Vision Summit.” A hundred people came together from all parts of Vermont, deciding to tackle a vision on the state level.

Now the Sunrise Movement and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have made the Green New Deal a buzzword among progressives.

Is our political discourse getting ready for vision? I hope so, because not only does it anchor us in a place of creativity — where we can give up playing the fear game with the neo-fascists — but it also invites the possibility of a movement of movements that could actually take on the dominance of the 1 percent. A vision helps because it shows how the disparate groups struggling on their own issues can share a vision that will liberate all from the ability of the economic elite to veto each of our separate group’s hopes.

All substantial progressive goals are now vetoed by the economic elite that controls both the Republican and Democratic parties. Only a people’s movement of movements can scale up nonviolent direct action to the level where it can force a power shift. Each movement needs the others in such an undertaking. Each deserves the reassurance that its priority goals will be achieved in the new society.

The lesson is clear, whether learned by grassroots movements in Switzerland or elsewhere: Without a vision, the people perish. We don’t need to build our political identities around what we’re against. It’s time we align our tactics, strategies, and organizing approaches with a positive, common sense vision that inspires us.

George Lakey has been active in direct action campaigns for six decades. Recently retired from Swarthmore College, he has facilitated 1,500 workshops on five continents and led activist projects on local, national and international levels — most recently with Earth Quaker Action Team. Among many other books and articles, he is author of “Strategizing for a Living Revolution” in David Solnit’s book Globalize Liberation (City Lights, 2004). His 2016 book is “Viking Economics,” and in December 2018 Melville House will release “How We Win: A Guide to Nonviolent Direct Action Campaigning.”

Via Waging Nonviolence

Republished under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

——

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Euronews: “Is Europe still facing a migration crisis? UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi speaks to Andrew Neil”

Directly across from the White House, demonstrators filled Lafayette Square park in an atmosphere of both indignation and sadness, before marching toward the Capitol.

“We don’t believe in borders, we don’t believe in walls,” Sebastian Medina-Tayac, of the Piscataway Indian Nation, declared in English and Spanish at the start of the rally dubbed “Families Belong Together.”

Loudspeakers broadcast the cries of a child split from its relatives, as a Brazilian mother told of being separated from her own son.

“I missed nine months of his life and it should never have happened,” said the woman, Jocelyn, whose case dates from before the practice of separating families intensified in May.

“Shame! Shame!” the crowd responded in temperatures above 90 F (33 C).

The president could not hear the protesters’ shouts, as he spent the day in Bedminster, New Jersey at the Trump National Golf Club.

There, too, protesters gathered on his motorcade route, many of them with signs about immigration policy.

“Asylum seekers are not criminals,” said one.

Starting in early May, in an attempt to staunch the flow of tens of thousands of migrants to the southern US border every month, Trump ordered the arrest of adults crossing the boundary illegally, including those seeking asylum.

Many trying to cross the US-Mexico frontier are destitute, fleeing gang violence and other turmoil in Central America.

As a result of Trump’s crackdown, distraught children were separated from their families and, according to widely broadcast pictures, held in chain-link enclosures, a practice that sparked domestic and global outrage.

Trump later signed an order ending the separation of families but immigration lawyers say the process of reuniting children and their parents will be long and chaotic.

About 2,000 children remained split from their parents, according to official figures released last weekend.

“It’s thinly-veiled racism,” Dorothy Carney, 59, a middle school French and Latin teacher, told AFP at the Washington rally.

“The way for evil to win is for good people to do nothing. This is doing at least something,” said the resident of Charlottesville, Virginia

Rita Montoya, 36, a Washington lawyer, was born in California but has Mexican origins and arrived at the protest with her two sons, aged four and two.

– ‘Not what we stand for’ –

AFP / DOMINICK REUTER. As part of nationwide rallies, protesters gathered in Philadelphia to oppose the practice of family separations under US President Donald Trump’s immigration policy.

“We’re children of immigrants,” she said. “We’ve been putting in our dues in this country for a long time, and this country needs to start paying us some respect.”

The mood was similar in New York, where Julia Lam, 58, joined the protest with two friends and their young children in strollers.

Lam is a mother and retired fashion designer who emigrated from Hong Kong in the 1980s.

“I think it’s really cruel to separate kids,” she said.

“I am angry. I’m very sad already with what is going on with our country. I just don’t see how a human being would do such a thing.”

Courtney Malloy, 34, a lawyer, said it was important to show support for immigrants and that administration policies are “not America.”

“This is not what we stand for and this is not okay, and we will not stand here and watch our country be torn apart and watch babies be torn from their mothers,” she told AFP, holding a sign that said, “The Only Baby Who Belongs in a Cage is Donald Trump.”

Families, young people, children and the elderly — both recent arrivals and long-time citizens — all stood under a burning sun as part of a protest that a New York police officer said numbered “a couple of thousand.”

“Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here,” they chanted, also declaring a welcome for Muslims.

A band of drummers whipped up the fervor of a crowd carrying signs including, “Our New York is Immigrant New York.”

“Abolish ICE,” said another sign, reflecting growing calls by activists for disbanding the country’s frontline immigration enforcement agency.

Saturday’s protests come after the US Supreme Court on Tuesday handed Trump a major victory by upholding his ban that mostly applied to travelers from five primarily Muslim nations.

More than 500 women, including a member of Congress, were arrested Thursday in the US Capitol complex protesting Trump’s immigration policy.

Saturday’s demonstrations were the biggest yet. Marches were also reported in Philadelphia, Boston, Denver, Chicago and Portland.

Trump has made fighting immigration — both illegal and legal — a major plank of his “America First” policy agenda.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) makes arrests and otherwise enforces the administration’s immigration crackdown, but an emerging coalition of politicians, activists and pro-immigrant protesters has begun calling for the agency to be dismantled.

“Occupy ICE” camps have been set up in several US states.

Featured Photo: AFP / Alex Edelman. A demonstrator in Washington, where protesters filled a park across from the White House in opposition to the immigration policies of US President Donald Trump.

According to a draft memo obtained by Time magazine, the navy plans to build “temporary and austere” tent cities to house 25,000 migrants across three abandoned air fields in Alabama, 47,000 people at a facility near San Francisco, and another 47,000 at a training center in southern California.

The document estimates the navy would spend $233 million to run a facility for 25,000 over six-months.

Asked for comment, Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Jamie Davis said: “The Department of Defense is conducting prudent planning and is looking nationwide at DoD installations should DHS (Department of Homeland Security) ask for assistance in housing adult illegal immigrants.

“At this time there has been no request from DHS for DoD support to house illegal migrants.”

The fate of 2,300 children wrested from their parents at the US border with Mexico remained unclear Friday two days after Donald Trump ended migrant family separations.

While the US leader bowed to global outrage over the splitting of families, conflicting messages were contributing to a sense of chaos in the handling of the crisis.

But having been forced into a climbdown, Trump swung back into fighting mode — insisting he remained committed to the “zero tolerance” policy that aims to deter the flow of migrants from Central America.

“We must maintain a Strong Southern Border. We cannot allow our Country to be overrun by illegal immigrants as the Democrats tell their phony stories of sadness and grief, hoping it will help them in the elections,” he tweeted.

Trump also met at the White House with parents of victims killed by undocumented immigrants.

The parents standing with Trump have been “permanently separated from their loved ones,” the president said, “because they were killed by criminal illegal aliens.”

Featured Photo: AFP/File / Brendan Smialowski. The US Navy plans to build temporary immigrant shelters on remote bases, according to a memo obtained by Time magazine.

Demographically, the 21st century will be the Muslim Century, as the Pew Research Center on Religion in Public Life has shown. Muslims will go from 24% of the world’s population today to 31% by 2060. I.e. they will equal the Christian population of the world by that date. And then they will outstrip the Christians by 2100.

Pew writes:

“Between 2015 and 2060, the world’s population is expected to increase by 32%, to 9.6 billion. Over that same period, the number of Muslims – the major religious group with the youngest population and the highest fertility – is projected to increase by 70%. The number of Christians is projected to rise by 34%, slightly faster than the global population overall yet far more slowly than Muslims.”

h/t Pew Research Center.

Most of the increase will occur because of population growth where people live. Africans will be a larger proportion of the world’s population in 2060 they they are now. In fact, over the next century, the African population could quadruple, and 40% of the human population could be African by 2100. Muslims in Africa will form a larger proportion of the world Muslim population, while the Middle East will remain stable with about a fifth of the world’s Muslims. Nigeria could go to 900 million over the century, coming to dwarf the European Union and equaling a shrinking China by 2100.

Some countries will be deeply affected by these changes. The Russian Federation will go from 11% Muslim in 2010 to at least 33% Muslim in 2060. The future of Muslims in Europe depends in part on immigration policy (most of Western Europe is not reproducing itself, and so Europe will get old and less dynamic if it decides against immigration). The European Union could remain steady at about 500 million, but I suspect that projection takes immigration into account.

The publisher of Time magazine, Henry Luce, called the twentieth century “The American Century.” It was an apt description. The US had half the world’s GDP just after WW II and even in 1999 it had nearly a quarter. It was the main world center of technological innovation, and has an enormous military-industrial establishment probably costing $1 trillion a year, dwarfing that of all the other countries of the world.

It isn’t clear whether the Muslim world will have that kind of economic clout. China and Hindu-majority India will be the two largest countries and may well have the two largest economies. But China’s population may fall and age, which could be an economic challenge.

Prejudice against Muslims has grown by leaps and bounds in the United States, and hatred of Muslims played a role in Trump’s campaign and in the policies he tried to enact once elected. Not all Americans are bigoted toward Muslims, and most understand that you can’t blame 1.8 billion Muslims for the violence and extremism of a tiny fringe. The Neo-Nazis and their slightly less illiterate fellow travelers over at Breitbart froth at the mouth on this issue. I am sorry to say that Evangelical Christians are according to opinion polls pretty hateful in this regard, much moreso than the general population (they are also the most enthusiastic supporters of Trump, which makes me think a lot of them are dressing up white supremacy as Christianity). The Zionist right wing seems to think if only you can badmouth Muslims enough, no one will mind if you steal all the remaining land owned by Palestinians in the West Bank. And, a small sliver of the US left, exemplified by Bill Maher, hates Muslims almost as much as they hate Evangelicals and Republicans.

The world's most populous countries, 1950-2060. Watch #India overtake #China, and #Nigeria passing USA to become #3 pic.twitter.com/ZqlBG7yYHj

— Aron Strandberg (@aronstrandberg) August 2, 2016

Despite White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s impractical dreams, there is no prospect that government policy or other measures can kickstart population growth among the “white” population, whatever that is. Middle class people tend to have smaller families. They want to enjoy some leisure, and be sure to be able to send their children to college.

The only proven antidote to shrinking populations is immigration. Countries like Japan that are allergic to letting a lot of immigrants in will simply shrink, that is all, and will have a very large number of old people. Countries that welcome immigrants, as France traditionally has, will grow and be economically vibrant.

So to sum up, Muslims will go from a fourth of humankind to a third just in the next 43 years. They will then likely go on up to 38% or 40% during the rest of the century. That is, a plurality of human beings in 2100 could well be Muslim. Since growing populations will be increasingly rare, countries will prize young, dynamic Muslim immigrants and will compete for them. Those countries that lose out and just can’t get Muslims to move there will get small and old and stagnant. Islamophobia may have a future. Islamophobes do not.

It was not clear from the excerpt who exactly Trump considered “bad hombres” — drug cartels, immigrants, or both.

President Donald Trump threatened his Mexican counterpart Enrique Peña Nieto with sending U.S. military to his country to deal with “bad hombres” because the Mexican Army seems to be “scared” of them, the Associated Press reported Wednesday night, according to an excerpt of the transcript of the conversation it obtained.

“You have a bunch of bad hombres down there,” Trump told Peña Nieto in a Friday phone call according to the excerpt seen by the AP. “You aren’t doing enough to stop them. I think your military is scared. Our military isn’t, so I just might send them down to take care of it.”

It was not clear from the excerpt who exactly Trump considered “bad hombres” — drug cartels, immigrants, or both.

Just hours before the AP report, Dolia Estevez, a journalist based in Washington, D.C., told the Mexican news outlet Aristegui Noticias that Trump indeed did threaten to send a military force to deal with the drug trade, citing sources from both sides of the call.

“It was a very offensive conversation where Trump humiliated Peña Nieto,” Estevez told the outlet. He also said that Trump seemed to be aggressive when talking about the wall he authorized along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I don’t need the Mexicans. I don’t need Mexico,” Trump reportedly told the Mexican president. “We are going to build the wall and you all are going to pay for it, like it or not.”

However, Mexico’s foreign relations department downplayed the reports and flatly denied that Trump made such comments. “The assertions that you make about said conversation do not correspond to the reality of it,” the statement said.

“The tone was constructive and it was agreed by the presidents to continue working and that the teams will continue to meet frequently to construct an agreement that is positive for Mexico and for the United States.”

The reports come almost a week after Trump signed an executive order to follow through on his campaign promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican, which prompted the Mexican president to cancel an official trip to Washington to meet the U.S. president that had been scheduled to take place this week.

Via TeleSur

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

KGUN9: “President Trump threatened to send troops to Mexico if they didn’t take care of ‘bad hombres'”