The Denis Villeneuve Dune films signal that the Fremen Bedouins of the desert planet Arrakis are “Muslim” in various ways, including casting Arab Muslims, shooting in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, and the use of Arabic vocabulary, drawing from the Herbert novels. The films have been charged with playing down the Muslim-ness of the Fremen, and perhaps there is somewhat less Arabic in their language and less reference to their religion (which in the novels is ZenSunni). But I think the visual vocabulary of the films makes pretty clear that the Fremen are some sort of descendants, at least, of old earth Muslims.

We are seeing the films in a different context than the one in which the 1965 novel appeared. It is a Cold War novel (as I will explain below). We are now watching it in the wake of the Bush “War on Terror” (against Muslims) to which the Republican Party and elements of the Democratic Party in the US are still committed. For this reason, the films do not use the term “jihad,” translating it inaccurately as “crusade” (ironic!) or “holy war,” in contrast to the Herbert novels. Jihad is a sacred word for Muslims, meaning to exert oneself or struggle for the faith in all sorts of ways– ethically, by donations to charities, by speaking out. It can also refer to taking up arms at the order of legitimate political authority to defend the country. Americans might call it “patriotism.”

We are also watching the second film in the the duology during Israel’s war on Gaza, and it is difficult not to see the Fremen as Palestinians. At least it was difficult for me not to see it in that context, though of course Villeneuve could not have predicted this moment when he and his team were shooting.

The massive firepower and awful destructiveness of the Harkonnen forces recall the intensive aerial bombardment pursued by the Israeli Air Force for five months. The Palestinians of Gaza are not Bedouin tribespeople, of course, but highly urbanized and literate. Still, the search for a religious and political deliverance from a brutal Israeli occupation led them to the fundamentalist Hamas, a dead end. In today’s political atmosphere in the United States, the only sort of resistance against occupation that can be lionized is fictional, in Dune and James Cameron’s Avatar films. Despite their own progenitors’ revolution against King George’s despotism, the majority of Americans nowadays, according to opinion polls, have a knee-jerk tendency to identify with the occupiers and not the freedom fighters.

Warner Bros. Video: “Dune: Part Two | Official Trailer 3”

For those who have not read the book or seen the film, I should give a brief plot summary. A set of planets, each ruled by a Siridar or planetary governor with a noble rank such as duke or baron, owe fealty to an emperor, Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV. They form of council of nobles, the Landsraad. Flying spaceships between these imperial planets requires pilots to ingest a psychedelic drug, melange or the “spice,” produced by fungus in the sands exposed to effluvia from young sandworms on the desert planet of Arrakis. The vocabulary here is Islamicate. Padishah is Persian for emperor. Shaddam has the morphology of an Arabic word and may be modeled on Saddam (though not the Iraqi one). Siridar is from the Persian sardar or governor.

Shaddam IV grows concerned about the growing influence on the Landsraad of Duke Leto Atreides of the lush planet of Caladan, and fears Leto may make a play for the throne. He therefore forces him off Caladan and orders him to rule the arid Arrakis instead. In this alien environment, Leto is vulnerable. The emperor puts Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, the Siridar of Giedi Prime, up to attacking the House Atreides on Arrakis, and secretly provides imperial Sardaukar troops to help in the assault. Leto is killed but his concubine, Lady Jessica and his son, Paul, escape to the desert and find refuge with the Fremen, tribal desert dwellers. Jessica belongs to a religious order, the Bene Gesserit, who engage in genetic engineering, and Paul is a result of this experiment (though he was supposed to be a girl).

Among the Fremen, Paul is given the personal name Usul (Arabic for “principles,” “foundations”) and the title Muad’Dhib (Arabic mu’addib, one who teaches culture). Paul Atreides, by imbibing the liquid derived from killing and harvesting a young Sandworm, gains superpowers, including prescience, and becomes accepted by the Fremen as their messiah or Mahdi (Arabic for “guided one”). He initially resists the temptation to lead them, seeing visions of a vast murderous horde conquering the known universe if he takes that course. But the Harkonnen attacks back him and the Fremen into a corner, and ultimately he takes on the mantle of the Mahdi, the “tongue of the Unseen” (Arabic lisan al-ghayb). He leads the Fremen in a campaign to overthrow the Harkonnens, and to subordinate the emperor himself.

I first read the book, I think, in 1967 when I was an army brat on a base in Africa. It had won a Hugo award the year before. Like many adolescents of my era, I found the story mesmerizing. We all wanted to be Paul Atreides; Denis Villeneuve, 15 years my junior, admits that the same was true for him. I didn’t understand then that Paul Atreides is an anti-hero, who becomes a monster to fight monsters.

Herbert was deeply influenced by T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in which a minor British intelligence official and amateur archeologist depicted himself as the true leader of the Arab Revolt during WW I, in which the Hashemite leaders of Mecca rebelled against the Ottoman Empire. In return for their opening of an internal front against the Ottomans in alliance with Britain, London promised the Hashemites an Arab kingdom that would have encompassed what are now Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel-Palestine, Syria and Iraq (the British may have excluded Christians in Mt. Lebanon from the deal). The sons of Sharif Hussain, Faisal and Abdullah, were of course the actual leaders of the revolt, and were joined by many other Arab chieftain, officers and intellectuals. The predecessors of MI6 and James Bond were embedded with them, but weren’t all that consequential. After the war, the British roundly screwed over their Arab allies, giving Palestine to the Zionists, greater Syria to the French, and colonized Iraq themselves. The British government (both major parties) are still dedicated to screwing over the Palestinians.

Herbert was also inspired by Lesley Blanch’s The Sabres of Paradise (1960), which recounted the story of the rebellion by Caucasus Muslims against the Russian Empire after it conquered them in the nineteenth century. They were led by Shāmil of Daghestan, a Sufi.

Haris Durrani wonders why Herbert, a Republican, was so open to multi-culturalism and psychedelics, but this bewilderment is anachronistic. Herbert was a fierce environmentalist, as many Republicans were in the 1960s and 1970s. Nixon passed the Clean Air and Water acts. Herbert had Libertarian tendencies, like Libertarian science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, who was also very interested in drugs for expanded consciousness. And Herbert hated bureaucracy and big government.

Here’s the thing. In the Cold War era, for Libertarians the ultimate symbol of big government was the Soviet Union. And in that era, conservatives saw Muslims as allies against international Communism. The Eisenhower administration was afraid Muslims would secularize and go Communist, so it actually appropriated funds to encourage pilgrimage to Mecca by improving rail links to the holy city.

Much later, Ronald Reagan (whom Herbert admired) allied with the Afghan Mujahidin, about half of whom were fundamentalists, against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

So Herbert’s symbolic deployment of Muslim Bedouins against the iron law of bureaucracy and Big Government (with the Soviets as the biggest of big governments) was actually entirely in character.

The wrinkle is that Herbert was at the same time very nervous about such alliances with religious groups against the Soviet Union, because he feared their irrational tendencies and their coercive power. One of the strengths of Dune is that there are not really any heroes. There are just bad choices. Shaddam IV tried to centralize power and reduce the power of the nobles, destroying Leto Atreides for his despotism. Paul Muad’Dhib Atreides could only fight back by enlisting the Fremen. But in so doing he distorted the Fremen ethic of a kind of humanist egalitarianism, turning them into fanatical zealots and unleashing interplanetary war. People who see the story as fascist don’t understand that it isn’t an endorsement of either of these two extremes but a critique of them, a sigh of despair by someone who believes in liberty and the individual and fears the arc of reality is going in bureaucratic and authoritarian directions instead. I have argued that it is a Libertarian critique of the 1950s, not a celebration of dictatorship.

Herbert clearly admired much in Islam and its history and culture. It was, in specific, Mahdist movements that aroused his simultaneous fascination and distrust. In this regard, Herbert’s Orientalism is distasteful, since of course many Muslims have waged political campaigns for liberty without surrendering to those impulses. Algerians freed themselves from France without becoming Mahdists, and their revolution looks like a lot of other decolonial movements of the 1950s and 1960s, whether in Indonesia or largely Christian Kenya.

Ironically, the biggest force for a messianic fanaticism in today’s world is the US Republican Party, so it turns out that the contemporary face of the Fremen fundamentalists is Donald John Trump. Herbert would have been a never-Trumper. One only hopes that our American fanatics don’t pull us into their holy wars.

Mayor slams op-ed as ‘bigoted’ and ‘Islamophobic,’ calls for increased police patrols in city

By: Jon King –

( Michigan Advance ) – Reaction to a Wall Street Journal opinion piece about Dearborn intensified through the weekend, as President Joe Biden and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer joined the chorus of condemnation. 

The WSJ op-ed, “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital,” alleged thousands of residents in the predominantly Muslim city, including “imams and politicians” are siding with “Hamas against Israel and Iran against the U.S.”

The op-ed was written by Steven Salinsky, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a group critics say often produces selective or inaccurate translations to negatively portray Muslims and Arabs. 

By Saturday morning, Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, a former House member, took to social media to lambast the piece.

“It’s 2024 and the @WSJ still pushes out this type of garbage. Reckless. Bigoted. Islamophobic,” said Hammoud, who called Dearborn “one of the greatest American cities in our nation,” noting that not only was it the home of the Ford Motor Co., but the fastest-growing city in Michigan, as well as  among the most diverse.

But within about two hours, he came back to X to note the negative impact the WSJ piece was having. 

“Effective immediately –  Dearborn police will ramp up its presence across all places of worship and major infrastructure points,” said Hammoud. “This is a direct result of the inflammatory @WSJ opinion piece that has led to an alarming increase in bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric online targeting the city of Dearborn. Stay vigilant.”

Requests for comment on the nature of those threats were sent by the Michigan Advance to both Dearborn Police and Michigan State Police, but have yet to be returned.

Click On Detroit | Local 4 | WDIV | Video | –
“Dearborn police on high alert after WSJ opinion article”

CAIR-MI Executive Director Dawud Walid said the group welcomes “the proactive approach taken by Mayor Hammoud to protect the Muslim community from potential attack based on the false claims in this inaccurate and inflammatory commentary.” The Washington, D.C.-based CAIR reports that the groups received 3,578 complaints during the last three months of 2023 — a 178% increase compared to a similar period in 2022.

Almost exactly 24 hours after Hammoud’s post, Biden also posted to social media his criticism of the WSJ op-ed.

“Americans know that blaming a group of people based on the words of a small few is wrong,” said Biden. “That’s exactly what can lead to Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate, and it shouldn’t happen to the residents of Dearborn – or any American town. We must continue to condemn hate in all forms.”

State Rep. Alabas Farhat (D-Dearborn) said he’ll be introducing a resolution in the House on Tuesday condemning “vile rhetoric.” 

“Glad to see the President condemning the hateful bigoted piece published by @WSJ,” he wrote. “Let’s not forget that dehumanizing words and policies lead to the rise in hate crimes we’re seeing.” 

Whitmer also issued a post on Sunday.

“Dearborn is a vibrant community full of Michiganders who contribute day in and day out to our state. Islamophobia and all forms of hate have no place in Michigan, or anywhere. Period,” she said.

Residents in Dearborn have organized and held multiple protests of the war against Hamas by Israel, jointly condemning the administration, and Biden specifically, for not embracing a cease-fire in Gaza, where more than 27,000 Palestinians have died since the Oct. 7 surprise attack by Hamas that killed as many as 1,400 Israelis, most of them civilians.

Most recently, groups held a rally last Wednesday at Fordson High School in Dearborn, protesting the ongoing Israeli military action. It took place on the eve of Biden’s campaign visit to Michigan — which also drew protesters, as the Advance previously reported — and about a week after several Arab American leaders, including Hammoud, declined to meet with Biden’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez.

While Biden administration officials have affirmed Israel’s right to respond to the attack, they have increasingly demanded more attention to minimizing civilian casualties.

“Israel must do more to stop violence against civilians in the West Bank and hold accountable those responsible for it,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last Thursday on sanctions levied by Biden against four Israeli settlers in the West Bank, part of an effort to curb civilian casualties in the region as the Israel-Hamas war continues. Negotiations on a ceasefire continued Sunday.

Critics of the WSJ op-ed said that protesting against American foreign policy, and even an American president, should not be used to indict an entire community, especially on ethnic or religious lines.

“Bigotry.  Hatred.  Anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim.  If the headline was about any other minority — with the worst stereotype of that group — it would have never gotten through the editors at the WSJ,” said U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Holly), who is Jewish.

Fellow Democratic U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Ann Arbor), who lived in Dearborn for nearly 40 years, called it “another example of hate directed at a community that is already hurting, resulting in fear, vitriol, and threats of violence.”

Dingell said her “neighborhood and friends were supportive, caring, and dedicated, and concluded by stating that “We cannot let hatred of any kind, Islamophobia, antisemitism, destroy people. We must stand up to hate everywhere and anywhere we see it.”

 

Jon King

Jon King is the Senior Reporter for the Michigan Advance and has been a journalist for more than 35 years. He is the Past President of the Michigan Associated Press Media Editors Association and has been recognized for excellence numerous times, most recently in 2022 with the Best Investigative Story by the Michigan Association of Broadcasters. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Cleary University. Jon and his family live in Howell.

 

Michigan Advance

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

World Hijab Day recognizes the millions of Muslim women and girls who wear the traditional Islamic headscarf.

(The Conversation) – Around the world, Muslim girls in hijab are experiencing unique forms and heightened rates of gender and race-based violence and discrimination. Overt violence against girls and women in hijab have captured global attention, evidenced most recently in the violent Canadian attacks on women in hijabs in Alberta and the horrific murders of the Afzaal family in London, Ont.

Violence against hijabi girls is often situated in structural oppression, including gendered Islamophobia and white supremacy. Understanding the underpinnings of this violence is key to imagining more just and equitable futures for girls and young women in hijab.

Islamophobia

The term Islamophobia has often been used and understood in different ways. While often used interchangeably, some have argued that the term anti-Muslim racism, rather than the term Islamophobia, better encapsulates the systemic nature of anti-Muslim hate and violence.

Sociologist and Muslim studies scholar Jasmin Zine has outlined how Islamophobia in Canada is comprised of systemic oppressive networks and industries that are both fueled by and fuel anti-Muslim racism. Zine explains that an “industry behind purveying anti-Muslim hate” distinguishes Islamophobia from other forms of oppression.

According to Zine, this well-funded, lucrative and often transnational industry is comprised of media outlets, political figures and donors, white nationalist groups, think tanks, influencers and ideologues that support and engage in “activities that demonize and marginalize Islam and Muslims in Canada.”

Gendered Islamophobia

Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism is part of the fabric of institutions. Critics of laws such as Bill 21 in Québec and similar measures in France have argued that Muslim women who wear the hijab are most affected. These measures reflect narratives that position Muslim girls and women as oppressed victims in need of rescue, as well as Orientalist tropes in the form of the “save us from the Muslim girl” narratives.

As Muslim women in hijab, we grieve horrific violence alongside our communities. Violent attacks highlight how anti-Muslim racism is often situated at a nexus of anti-Black racism, xenophobia, white supremacy and patriarchy.

We know that anti-Muslim violence is often aimed at girls and women in hijab. Yet, academic literature on hijabi girlhood is relatively scarce. Two years ago, we put out a call to the international academic community seeking papers and creative submissions on the experiences of girls and young women in hijabs.

The girl in the hijab

Two years later, our new special issue, called The Girl in the Hijab, has now been published in the international journal Girlhood Studies. It comes at a time when anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism are on the rise around the country and around the world.

Image by Chan Factory from Pixabay

The special issue includes academic articles written by mostly Muslim women and creative works produced by hijab-wearing girls themselves. Both types of work provide insight into the current global landscape of hijabi girl experiences.

Cultural politics lecturer Noha Beydoun explores the events surrounding the donning of the American flag as a method of protest. She finds that this phenomenon gained popularity because it worked to conceal complicated U.S. histories regarding Muslim immigration and broader imperial interests. Beydoun’s analysis evidences that the “American flag as hijab for girls and women reinforces the larger constructs it seeks to resist.”

Gender studies professor Ana Carolina Antunes highlights how unconscious bias and microaggressions hinder a positive sense of belonging among hijab-wearing students and impacts their academic success. This study also reveals that anti-Muslim sentiment in schools affects the everyday experiences of Muslim girls, leading to disconnection from the school community.

Among the central themes in the special issue is how women and girls resist gendered and Islamophobic discrimination in their everyday lives. Hijabi girls resist oppressive narratives through their everyday actions and activist engagements. In Antunes’s study, girls asserted their right to occupy space in the educational environment.

Clinical social workers Amilah Baksh and her mother, Bibi Baksh, provide insight into their lived experiences as Indo-Caribbean social workers and university educators. In their article, they identify the hijab as a form of resistance and resilience in their personal and professional lives. In their words, “it was never the hijab that rendered us voiceless. It is Islamophobia.”

The special issue highlights how Muslim girls and women, racialized through donning hijab, continue to be at the forefront of the struggle against Islamophobia and anti-Muslim violence, even as we remain among the primary targets of that violence.

The articles in this special issue demonstrate the need for better policies, education and laws that consider the unique experiences of girls and women in hijab. To counter violence against girls and women in hijab, we must name and understand the complexities of anti-Muslim racism and gendered Islamophobia.

Critically, this must center the voices of girls and women in hijab, opening or widening spaces for girls and women in hijab to practise acts of resistance in ways that are not bound by colonial logics and respectability politics.

Salsabel Almanssori, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education, University of Windsor and Muna Saleh, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education, Concordia University of Edmonton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

On September 20, 2001, President Bush delivered a speech to Congress in which he shared a carefully constructed storyline that would justify endless war. The United States, he said, was attacked because the terrorists “hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” In that official response to the 9/11 attacks, he also used the phrase “war on terror” for the first time, stating (all too ominously in retrospect): “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”

“Americans are asking,” he went on, “why do they hate us?” And then he provided a framework for understanding the motives of the “terrorists” precluding the possibility that American actions prior to 9/11 could in any way have explained the attacks. In other words, he positioned his country as a blameless victim, shoved without warning into a “post-9/11 world.” As Bush put it, “All of this was brought upon us in a single day — and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.” As scholar Richard Jackson later noted, the president’s use of “our war on terror” constituted “a very carefully and deliberately constructed public discourse… specifically designed to make the war seem reasonable, responsible, and inherently ‘good.’”

Your Fight Is Our Fight

The day after the 9/11 attacks, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gave a televised address to Israelis, saying that “the fight against terrorism is an international struggle of the free world against the forces of darkness who seek to destroy our liberty and way of life. Together, we can defeat these forces of evil.” Sharon, in other words, laid out Israel’s fight in the same binary terms the American president would soon use, a good-versus-evil framework, as a way of rejecting any alternative explanations of those assaults on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York City that killed almost 3,000 people. That December, Sharon responded to an attack in Jerusalem by two Palestinian suicide bombers by saying that he would launch his own “war on terror… with all the means at our disposal.”

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On the day of Bush’s September 20th speech, Benjamin Netanyahu, then working in the private sector after holding various positions within the Israeli government, capitalized on the president’s narrative by asserting Israel’s enthusiastic support for the United States. In a statement offered to the House Government Reform Committee, emphasizing his country’s commitment to fighting terrorism, Netanyahu stated, “I am certain that I speak on behalf of my entire nation when I say today, we are all Americans — in grief, as in defiance.”

Israel’s “9/11”

Just as the 9/11 attacks “did not speak for themselves,” neither did Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023. In remarks at a bilateral meeting with President Biden 11 days later, however, Prime Minister Netanyahu strategically compared the Hamas attacks to the 9/11 ones, using resonant terms for Americans that also allowed Israel to claim its own total innocence, as the U.S. had done 22 years earlier. In that vein, Netanyahu stated, “On October 7th, Hamas murdered 1,400 Israelis, maybe more. This is in a country of fewer than 10 million people. This would be equivalent to over 50,000 Americans murdered in a single day. That’s 20 9/11s. That is why October 7th is another day that will live in infamy.”

But 9/11 doesn’t live in infamy because it actually caused damage of any long-lasting or ultimate sort to the United States or because it far exceeded the scale of other acts of global mass violence, but because it involved “Americans as the victims of terror, not as the perpetrators” and because of the way those leading the country portrayed it as uniquely and exceptionally victimized. As Professor Jackson put it, 9/11 “was immediately iconicized as the foremost symbol of American suffering.” The ability to reproduce that narrative endlessly, while transforming 9/11 into a date that transcended time itself, served as a powerful lesson to Israel in how to communicate suffering and an omnipresent existential threat that could be weaponized to legitimize future violent interventions. By framing the Hamas attacks on October 7th similarly as a symbol of ultimate suffering and existential threat, Israel could do the same.

Giving Israel further license for unfettered state violence under the guise of a war on terror, in remarks in Tel Aviv President Biden stated that “since this terrorist attack… took place, we have seen it described as Israel’s 9/11. But for a nation the size of Israel, it was like 15 9/11s. The scale may be different, but I’m sure those horrors have tapped into… some kind of primal feeling in Israel, just like it did and felt in the United States.”

It bears noting that while Israel quickly deployed the rhetoric of the War on Terror on and after October 7th, weaponizing the language of terror was not in and of itself novel in that country. For example, in 1986, Benjamin Netanyahu edited and contributed to a collection of essays called Terrorism: How the West Can Win that spoke to themes similar to those woven into the U.S. war on terror narrative. However, in responding to Hamas’s attacks, Israel’s discursive strategy was both to capitalize on and tether itself to the meanings the U.S. had popularized and made pervasive about the 9/11 attacks.

“Surprise” Attacks

The power of that “primal feeling” was intensified by the way both the United States and Israel feigned “surprise” about their countries being targeted, despite evidence of impending threats both were privy to. That evidence included a President’s Daily Brief that Bush received on August 6, 2001, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,” and the possession by Israeli officials of a Hamas battle plan document detailing the potential attack a year in advance.

Just as Bush referred to the 9/11 attacks as a surprise, despite several years of conflict with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden (who clearly stated that U.S. violence in Muslim-majority countries was the motivation for the attacks), Netanyahu claimed the same after the Hamas attacks, ignoring Israel’s longtime chokehold on Gaza (and Palestinian areas of the West Bank). Addressing Israeli citizens on the day of the attack, Netanyahu asserted that “we are at war, not in an operation or in rounds, but at war. This morning, Hamas launched a murderous surprise attack against the State of Israel and its citizens.”

By portraying terrorism as a grave, unparalleled, and unpredictable danger, both the United States and Israel framed their brutal wars and over-responses as necessary actions. Even more problematically, both tried to evade accountability for future acts by characterizing themselves as coerced into the wars they then launched. Netanyahu typically asserted on October 30th that, “since October 7th, Israel has been at war. Israel did not start this war. Israel did not want this war. But Israel will win this war.”

All of these tactics are meant to create and perpetuate “an extremely narrow set of ‘political truths’” (or untruths, if you prefer). Whether ingrained in the public consciousness by the United States or Israel, such “truths” were meant to dictate just who the “terrorists” were (never us, of course), their irrational, barbaric, uncivilized nature, and so, why intervention — full-scale war, in fact — was necessary. An additional rhetorical goal was to position the dominant narrative, whether American or Israeli, as a “natural interpretation” of reality, not a constructed one.

Israel has relied on such a framework to consistently peddle a depoliticized narrative of Hamas, which roots any violence committed in a fundamental and irrational opposition to the state of Israel and inherent hatred of the Jewish people as opposed to the longstanding regime of occupation, apartheid, and now genocide of Palestinians. Hamas and other non-state actors are, of course, always portrayed as “driven by fanaticism,” as Scott Poynting and David Whyte note, while state violence, in contrast, is “presented as defensive, responsible, rational, and unavoidable — and not motivated by a particular ideological bias or political choice.”

The Threat of Terrorism and Moral Equivalencies

Terrorist violence in these years has regularly been weaponized in the service of state violence by conceiving of its threat as almost unimaginably dangerous. Both the United States and Israel have represented terrorism as “catastrophic to democracy, freedom, civilization and the American [or Israeli] way of life,” and “a threat commensurate with Nazism and Communism.”

As with Bush’s argument that the 9/11 attackers were the “heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century” and that “they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism,” Netanyahu urged a mobilization of countries across the world to eliminate Hamas on a similar basis. To this end, he asserted that “just as the civilized world united to defeat the Nazis and united to defeat ISIS, the civilized world must unite to defeat Hamas.”

American officials regularly frame U.S. violence as a function of the country’s inherent goodness and superiority. For example, in September 2006, responding to criticisms of the moral basis for the War on Terror, Bush said at a press conference: “If there’s any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it’s flawed logic… I simply can’t accept that. It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.”

By the time Bush made those remarks, the invasions of and wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other “counterterrorism” operations across the globe, had been underway for years. Given the staggering number of civilians already killed, drawing a demarcation line between the United States and “Islamic extremists” based on the slaughter of innocent women and children should hardly have been possible (though when it came to those killed by Americans, the term of the time was the all-too-dehumanizing “collateral damage”).

No stranger to weaponizing the language of moral equivalencies, Netanyahu has repeatedly highlighted the victims of Hamas’s attacks in order to distinguish them from Israel’s. For example, he described Hamas as “an enemy that murders children and mothers in their homes, in their beds. An enemy that kidnaps the elderly, kids, youths. Murderers who massacre and slaughter our citizens, our kids, who just wanted to have fun on the holiday.” But like the United States, Israel has killed women and children on a strikingly greater scale than the non-state actors they were comparing their violence to. In fact, in the last 100 days of Israel’s war, it is believed to have killed more than 10,000 children (and those figures will only rise if you include children who are now likely to die from starvation and disease in a devastated Gaza).

Birds of Violent Rhetorical Feathers Flock Together

In a White House briefing a week after the Hamas attacks, Biden said, “These guys — they make al-Qaeda look pure. They’re pure — they’re pure evil.” Then, nearly three weeks after those October 7th attacks, in a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, Netanyahu asserted that his country was in “a battle” with “the Axis of Evil led by Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, and their minions.” More than two decades earlier, President George W. Bush had uttered similar words, referring to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” who were “arming to threaten the peace of the world.”

In each case, the “evil” they were referring to was meant to communicate an inherent and innate desire for violence and destruction, irrespective of the actions of the United States or Israel. As the saying goes, evil is as evil does.

As scholar Joanne Esch has noted, “If they hate us for who we are rather than what we do, nothing can be gained from reexamining our own policies.” In other words, no matter what we do, the United States and Israel can insist on a level of moral superiority in taking on such battles as the harbingers of good. And it was true that, positioned as a battle of good versus evil, the all-American war on terror did, for a time, gain a kind of “divine sanction,” which Israel has used as a blueprint.

In response to the recent International Court of Justice complaint submitted by South Africa charging Israel with genocide, a defiant Prime Minister Netanyahu tweeted that his country would continue its Gazan war until it was over. He also mentioned a meeting he had with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in which he told him, “This is not just our war — it is also your war.”

If Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide of the Palestinians has revealed anything about the power of discourse, it’s that the war on terror narrative has proven to be remarkably enduring. This has enabled both states to make use of specific schemas that were constructed and deployed in Washington to explain the 9/11 attacks — and now to justify a genocidal war in a world where “terror” is seen as an eternal threat to “liberal democracies.”

In his book Narrative and the Making of US National Security, Donald Krebs argues that, when it comes to politics, language “neither competes with nor complements power politics: it is power politics.” In this vein, it remains critical to subvert such destructive and pervasive narratives so that countries like the United States and Israel can no longer maintain “necropolitical” rule domestically or globally — that is, in the words of Cameroon historian and political theorist Achille Mmembe, “the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”

Copyright 2024 Maha Hilal

Via Tomdispatch.com

“Today’s McCarthyist tactic of manufacturing an antisemitism scare… turns the very real issue of Jewish safety into a pawn in a cynical political game to cover for Israel’s deeply unpopular policies with regard to Palestine.”

Jessica Corbett

( Commondreams.org) – “For the safety of Jews and Palestinians, stop weaponizing antisemitism.”

That’s the headline of a Friday op-ed from Bernie Steinberg, who was the executive director of Harvard Hillel from 1993 to 2010.

Harvard University is among many U.S. higher education institutions—including Brandeis University, Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Florida, and University of Pennsylvania (Penn)—embroiled in a battle over antisemitism amid what a growing number of world leaders and legal scholars call Israel’s “genocidal” war on the Gaza Strip.

Even before the Hamas-led attack on Israel 12 weeks ago sparked a U.S.-backed retaliatory war in which Israeli forces have killed more than 21,670 people in Gaza, including over 8,200 children, members and supporters of the Israeli government have used bad-faith claims of discrimination, hostility, or prejudice against Jews to defend policies and practices that have oppressed Palestinians for decades.

Since October 7, reports of antisemitism and Islamaphobia have soared. There have also been heightened efforts to conflate antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel, with U.S. critics facing shuttered campus groups, lost jobs, congressional resolutions, and other consequences for daring to condemn the mass killing of Palestinian civilians.

Image by cplesley from Pixabay

Recalling his own experiences enduring antisemitism, including violent attacks, Steinberg wrote for a new Harvard Crimson opinion series:

As a leader in the Jewish community, I am particularly alarmed by today’s McCarthyist tactic of manufacturing an antisemitism scare, which, in effect, turns the very real issue of Jewish safety into a pawn in a cynical political game to cover for Israel’s deeply unpopular policies with regard to Palestine. (A recent poll found that 66% of all U.S. voters and 80% of Democratic voters desire an end to Israel’s current war, for instance.)

What makes this trend particularly disturbing is the power differential: Billionaire donors and the politically connected, non-Jews and Jews alike on one side, targeting disproportionately people of vulnerable populations on the other, including students, untenured faculty, persons of color, Muslims, and, especially, Palestinian activists.

“In most cases, it takes the form of bullying pro-Palestine organizers. In others, these campaigns persecute anyone who simply doesn’t show due deference to the bullies,” Steinberg wrote of current trends on campuses. He noted the effort to smear Harvard’s new president and warned that “the toppling of the president of the University of Pennsylvania is a sobering example of what can happen when we empower these unscrupulous forces to dictate our path as university leaders.”

Founded a century ago, Hillel International calls itself “the world’s largest and most inclusive Jewish campus organization,” operating at 850 campuses in 16 countries. The ex-Hillel leader wrote to Jews at Harvard that “I know that it’s alienating and hurtful to so many of you when campus Jewish organizations, like Hillel and Chabad, take positions that exclude your voices. To those students, I say: The Jewish tradition is much deeper than any organization. No one has a monopoly on Judaism.”

Steinberg, who lived in Jerusalem for 13 years, urged Harvard’s Jewish students to “continue to learn Torah, Jewish history, and our ethical traditions,” and to “be boldly critical of Israel—not despite being Jewish, but because you are.”

“I know what antisemitism looks like and I do not take the issue of violence against Jews lightly. I have monitored, with vigilance, the kinds of speech that Israel-aligned parties are calling ‘antisemitic,’ and it simply does not pass the sniff test,” he argued. “Let me speak plainly: It is not antisemitic to demand justice for all Palestinians living in their ancestral lands.”

“The activists who employ this language, and the politics of liberation, are sincere people; their cause is a legitimate and important movement dissenting against the brutal treatment of Palestinians that has been ongoing for 75 years,” he stressed. “One can disagree with any part of what these activists say, but they must be allowed to speak safely and afforded the respect their morally serious position deserves.”

Steinberg added that “it is very telling that some of Israel’s own supporters instead go to extraordinary lengths to utterly silence the other side. Smearing one’s opponents is rarely a tactic employed by those confident that justice is on their side.”

“Antisemitism in the U.S. is a real and dangerous phenomenon, most pressingly from the alt-right white supremacist politics that have become alarmingly mainstream since 2016,” he asserted. “To contend against these and other antisemitic forces with clarity and purpose, we must put aside all fabricated and weaponized charges of ‘antisemitism’ that serve to silence criticism of Israeli policy and its sponsors in the U.S.”

Steinberg’s op-ed was praised on social media as a “powerful,” “deeply considered,” “cogent,” “must-read piece.”

Rebecca Vilkomerson, a former Jewish Voice for Peace executive director now at Funding Freedom, said Saturday that “as someone who has felt disappointed and betrayed by mainstream Jewish institutions, including Hillel, for well over a decade (and yet plunged into an even deeper depression and rage by their response to genocide in Gaza), I felt deeply moved by this piece.”

Jessica Corbett

Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – What does it mean to be European? This is a complex but legitimate question. Still, one is unlikely to find an answer to the conundrum in the numerous billboards paid for by the EU Commission in Munich and many other European cities under the motto “You are Europe”.

There are four different models of EU-funded billboards. They all put focus on three different concepts, which give us a total of twelve ideas: freedom, peace, energy independence, democracy, diversity, climate protection, stability, respect, green transition, unity, security, and renewable energy. In every model of the billboard, there is a different single individual in the picture alongside a reference to renewable energies, with an electric car, solar panels, and a windmill appearing.

Billboard at Giselastrasse Subway Station. Munich, November 21, 2023.

By examining the billboards, we understand that the message the EU tries to convey is that the EU is a value-based community. The promotional site of this new campaign calls Europeans to “stand up for our values, to protect your and your family’s future, the climate and the planet.” But one does not need to do more than search online “EU billboard” to see how fragile these values can be. Because the billboards that are catching the headlines in Europe are not the ones promoted by the EU Commission but those found in one particular EU country, Hungary, and paid by Fidesz, the political party of the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

These billboards depict President of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen alongside Alex Soros, the son of the Hungarian-born billionaire and philanthropist George Soros, under the slogan “Let’s not dance to their tunes”. This is not a first for Orban’s party, as they had already been responsible for similar billboards in 2019 featuring von der Leyen’s predecessor Jean-Claude Juncker and George Soros.

In the recently published book “Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project”, Hans Kundnani, an associate fellow at Chatham House, examines from a critical perspective how the EU has come to define itself and its values. The EU is often understood as a project united by the rejection of nationalism, which led to the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

This discourse can be found in, for instance, the address to the European Parliament in November 2018 by then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Merkel said that “nationalism and egoism must never have a chance to flourish again in Europe. Tolerance and solidarity are our future.” Kundnani begs to differ and presents a more complex picture of the EU, writing that “we should think of the EU as an expression of regionalism, which we should in turn think of as being analogous to nationalism—something like nationalism but on a larger, continental scale.”[1]

Internal borders and nationalistic competition between EU countries might have lost importance, but the borders and adversarial relations between Europe and the rest of the world remain there and have even hardened. It is difficult to disagree with Kundnani when we see how, despite their internal differences on the topic, EU countries are currently discussing how to further cooperate to establish harsher EU policies towards migrants and asylum seekers.

Kundnani’s key idea, namely that the EU represents a form of regional nationalism, helps understand the current rise of the European far-right from a different perspective. Increasingly, “the far right in Europe does not simply speak on behalf of the nation against Europe, but also on behalf of Europe”, notes Kundnani. Contrary to what many would think, the far-right can also be pro-European in its own specific way.

Hans Kundnani Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project. Hurst, 2023. Click here.

On December 3, European far-right parties held an international meeting in Florence, Italy, to co-ordinate in advance of the European elections to be held in June 2024. During the meeting, Reuters reports, “Jordan Bardella, president of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, won applause speaking in Italian and saying that Europe cannot become a “5-star hostel for Africa”, and linking mass immigration to violence and crime.”[2]

Instead of hiding his Italian family background, which would have made sense from a French ultra-nationalist perspective, Bardella used his Italian language skills to appeal to his audience in Florence and demonize the non-European as violent and criminal. Inner European borders lose part of their importance when the main frame of reference is civilizational. And this is increasingly the case. European far-right parties share a belief in racist doctrines such as the ‘Replacement Theory’, which posits that white people around the world are being replaced by nonwhite people.

Kundnani argues that the regional nationalism we currently find in the EU is largely the result of its history. At the time the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957 establishing the European Economic Community (EEC), two of the six founding members – Belgium and France – still had colonies. This is what Kundnani calls the EU’s “original sin”.[3]

More important than that, however, is probably the way the EEC and its successor organizations, the European Community and the European Union, failed to come to terms during the following decades with this legacy of European colonialism and violence. Consequently, “the emerging official narrative of the EU was based on the internal lessons of European history, i.e. what Europeans had done to each other, but not the external lessons, i.e. what Europeans had done to rest of world—in particular colonialism.”[4]

There was an important sense, however, in which European regionalism could promote civic values. Kundnani mentions how many who described themselves as pro-Europeans saw “the social market economy and the welfare state as a more humane alternative to a more brutal American form of capitalism.”[5] Such an understanding of being European, which Kundnani names ‘civic regionalism’, reached its high-water mark in the decades following the Second World War. It became increasingly difficult to sustain in the face of the neo-liberalism of the 1980s and 1990s and the austerity measures imposed by the EU after 2008 during the Eurozone crisis.

This neo-liberal turn, and the increasing role of the EU in setting economic policies with little democratic oversight, argues Kundnani, was partly responsible for the rise in Euroscepticism. If the Eurozone crisis split the EU in terms of the better-off North versus the struggling South, the sudden increase in the arrivals of migrants and asylum seekers to Europe in 2015 led to important divergences between a more welcoming West and a closed-doors East. This double split, according to Kundnani, undermined the EU’s self-confidence. During the last years, the civic regionalism of the social market economy and the welfare state has receded even further in favor of a more exclusionary understanding of what it means to be European.

In this context, “centrists began to adopt far-right tropes and integrate them into the EU itself”.[6] Examples of this dynamic are abundant. After becoming President of the European Commission, the center-right politician Ursula von der Leyen announced the creation of a Commission Vice-Presidency for protecting ‘the European way of life’, which would include responsibility for topics such as migration. Von der Leyen, facing outrage, substituted the word ‘protecting’ for ‘promoting’, but little else changed. Meanwhile, the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, from the Socialist Spanish Party, pronounced a speech in 2022 where he defined Europe as a garden and added that “most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden”.

There are two significant weaknesses in “Eurowhiteness”. The first one is related to the very title of the book. Kundnani explains that “Eurowhiteness” is an “ethnic/cultural version of European identity”[7] but does not develop the concept extensively enough to justify why the term has such prominence in the title. The second shortcoming is the lack of a proper concluding chapter in the book. The last chapter deals with Brexit instead of pointing out some key ideas on the way forward if we want an EU that strengthens civic regionalism.

Catherine de Vries, the dean of international affairs at Bocconi University, has recently published an op-ed for the Financial Times that quotes Kundnani’s work and offers some significant reflections regarding the problems identified in “Eurowhiteness”. Reflecting on the recent electoral victory in the Netherlands of the far-right Party for Freedom (VVP) led by Geert Wilders, de Vries explains that we would be mistaken if we seek to understand the success of the European far-right only through its anti-migration rhetoric.

De Vries notes that “research has shown that cuts to public services play an important role in explaining the rise of the far right”. “Concerns about reduced access to public services”, she adds, “leads people to question the extent to which their government cares about people like them. Waning public services may also fuel immigration concerns out of fear of more congestion and overcrowding.”[8]

Kundnani’s book represents a major contribution to a better understanding of how nationalism, far from fading away with the emergence of a European Union that now covers most of Western and Central Europe, has adopted a new shape in the form of exclusivist European nationalism. “Eurowhiteness” is not without its faults, but it offers an intellectually stimulating and policy-relevant departing point to any discussion about the future of Europe.

[1] Hans Kundnani, Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (London: Hurst & Co., 2023), p. 3.

[2] Armellini, Alvise. “Far Right Parties Eye Gains in next Year’s EU Parliament Elections.” Reuters, December 3, 2023. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/far-right-parties-eye-gains-next-years-eu-parliament-elections-2023-12-03/.

[3] Kundnani, Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project, p. 75.

[4] Ibid., p. 94.

[5] Ibid., p. 84.

[6] Ibid., p. 126.

[7] Ibid., p. 6.

[8] De Vries, Catherine. “Migration Crackdowns Won’t Help Europe’s Moderate Right.” Financial Times, December 4, 2023. https://www.ft.com/content/6b3e2ee0-189e-47f4-95df-375d79dd6266.

Israel’s total war on Gaza, following Hamas’s horrific terrorist attack on Oct. 7, has roiled higher education in the United States. The atrocities committed by Hamas in southern Israel two months ago have reverberated on many U.S. campuses, deeply traumatizing many Jewish students. But so too has Israel’s massive military response in Gaza, which has been equally shocking to Palestinian-American, Arab American and Muslim American students, among many others.

In the heated atmosphere prevailing since then, questions have arisen about the limits to free speech in the classroom, among student and faculty organizations, and on the social media accounts of university members, from professors to administrators. Often, these charged debates reflect the advent of significant numbers of minority students on university campuses, some from the post-1965 immigration wave, who view the Israel-Palestine conflict very differently than the white majority on many campuses, as a recent Gallup poll demonstrates. These controversies also reflect the efforts of special interest groups and outside organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League, to discipline campus speech and brand some of it as support for terrorism.

Some of these campaigns have attempted to silence Palestinian-Americans and their perspectives outright. In October, Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis ordered all public universities in the state to derecognize Students for Justice in Palestine chapters on their campus. The move came after the organization issued a “toolkit” for understanding the context of the Oct. 7 attacks, in which they characterized Hamas as a resistance organization. The SJP insisted that its student members are part of the resistance, not merely in solidarity with it. DeSantis’s order immediately provoked threats of civil lawsuits that would personally name university officials participating in the shutdown. Emma Camp at Reason magazine reported that as a result, the Chancellor of the University of Florida system, Ray Rodrigues, announced that he was backing off any action against SJP, though he did hold out the possibility that the university would require the group to pledge nonviolence and disassociate itself from Hamas. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a civil liberties group, immediately pointed out that that requirement would also be unconstitutional.

Photo by Merch HÜSEY on Unsplash

But that did not stop the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law from taking up DeSantis’s program, writing a letter to university presidents pressuring them to close down SJP chapters on the grounds that the group gave material assistance to terrorism (a charge the letter does not substantiate). Under U.S. law, “material assistance” involves training, expert advice or assistance, service and personnel. Given that the SJP is not hosting training camps for Hamas fighters or actively advising the organization on tactics, the letter is nonsensical and, in a just world, would be found libelous.

Concrete harms are being done to our communities on campus. A doxing truck has been observed driving around campus calling “terrorists” those who are critical of the prosecution of a bombing campaign on dense urban neighborhoods and denial of food, water and electricity to the civilian population, half of whom are children. Some students or student groups have displayed in public materials that identified as “Hamas” our campus chapter of Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), a pro-Palestinian group. Faculty members have suffered verbal abuse and acts of intimidation, including threatened or near acts of violence.

The long history of anti-Arab bigotry in American culture, the equation of Palestinians with violence, and the hateful tide of Islamophobia have been revived as tropes by those dedicated to hate speech and to marginalizing and silencing Arab- and Muslim-American voices. These tropes ignore the centuries of the Arab and Muslim presence in North America, and the many important and positive contributions they have made. Contrary to what many assume, such tropes also enable bigotry toward other minorities, including Asian and Jewish Americans, a bigotry we forcefully condemn.

As a university with a universal mission, we cannot allow vigilante tactics to interfere with freedom of speech, inquiry, and debate. Our faculty, staff and students are diverse, and hate speech toward the ethnic groups with whom we are intellectually and culturally engaged is harmful whether it consists of Islamophobia or bigotry toward any other minority. It diminishes us all, whether we are of Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or any other religious or ethnic background. Harassment, hate speech and mischaracterizations must cease.

Sincerely,

Juan Cole

Director

Program in Arab and Muslim American Studies

Department of American Culture, University of Michigan

Ann Arbor, MI 48109

The absence of Palestinians and their advocates from news coverage isn’t just unfair. As a Jewish American, I think it’s harmful.

By Sarah Gertler |

( Otherwords.org ) – Like many of us, I’ve been glued to media coverage of the terrible violence in Gaza and Israel.

I was deeply shaken by the brutal killings of over a thousand Israelis on October 7. The families of Israelis killed and taken hostage deserve justice for these crimes. But instead of justice, all I’ve seen from the far-right Israeli government is more death.

Palestinians have already endured 75 years of displacement and oppression. The 2.2 million Palestinians living in the cramped Gaza strip have lived for 16 years under an Israeli siege that chokes their access to food, water, electricity, and movement.

Now Gazans’ access to these necessities has been cut off completely. Nearly half of the population’s homes have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli bombings, and well over 6,000 civilians have been killed. All with no end in sight.

As a Jewish American, I don’t feel safer when the Israeli government breaks international law to bomb families sheltering in refugee camps or cut off electricity to children in hospitals. I especially don’t feel safe knowing my U.S. tax dollars are funding these crimes.

And I’m not alone. Recently, I joined a march in Philadelphia calling for an end to the violence and freedom for the Palestinian people.

An estimated 10,000 of us showed up — including parents pushing strollers, friends holding banners together, and elderly couples arm in arm. We marched against what hundreds of scholars have warned is genocide.

It was a historic community call for peace. Yet it was noticeably absent from local news coverage. Days afterward, the only evidence it happened was one small news clip noting that “dozens gathered” — a comic misrepresentation.

Sky News: “Israel-Hamas war: Palestinians feel ‘unseen’, says ambassador”

“This is not only media suppression, but an erasure of history,” said Philadelphia organizer Nour Qutyan, who helped assemble the rally.

Just the previous week, a smaller rally in support of the Israeli government was covered by a swath of local news outlets. This eye-opening double standard reflects a much broader silencing of Palestinians and their advocates in the media.

During these weeks of Israel’s bombing campaign, leading Palestinian commentators including Noura Erakat, Omar Baddar, and Yousef Munayyer have had cable news appearances cut or canceled. Jewish American author Nathan Thrall had ads for a new book simply about Palestinians pulled from NPR and the BBC.

Equally noteworthy is the U.S. media’s passive treatment of Palestinian deaths. While headlines note when Israelis are “killed,” they often say that Palestinians simply “die,” without saying how.

According to a 2019 study on 50 years of coverage, U.S. headlines are also more than twice as likely to cite Israeli sources — including documented disinformation — than Palestinian sources.

This bias isn’t only unfair — it’s harmful.

Polls show the vast majority of Americans across party lines agree that our government should call for a ceasefire in Gaza. In Israel, even the siblings of people killed by Hamas are calling for peace, not war. Instead of uplifting these voices, many media outlets are inciting more violence.

By “silencing any criticisms of Israel,” Qutyan warns that “editors who are meant to uphold journalistic integrity, truth, and the so-called ethics of news media” are instead “co-signing genocide” in Gaza.

In the coming weeks, I will remain glued to the coverage of the violence that my tax dollars are funding. As a Jewish American, I demand life and freedom for Palestinians — and coverage which reflects that.

 

Sarah Gertler

Sarah Gertler is the Newman Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Otherwords.org