Messi Joins the 600 Goals Club
A Weekly Political News Magazine
Washington Debates Renewed Push to Designate Muslim Brotherhood a Terrorist Group
A Weekly Political News Magazine
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Issue 1746 - May - 03/05/2019
Issue 1746 - May - 03/05/2019
Emperor Akihito:Japan’s Post War Emperor Abdicates His Thrown www.majalla.com
Could Iran Really Close the Strait of Hormuz? www.majalla.com
Editorial In spite of calls to abandon its involvement in the region, the United States remains a big player in the Middle East. The reasons for its continued involvement are mainly due to the presence of rogue states, namely Iran, and groups which threaten the rest of the region. As the current refugee crisis has shown, conflicts in the Middle East have tendencies to spread across the globe. As it stands, the Trump administration has taken many steps to ensure that the violent actors do not overstep their boundaries and that allies are protected from any security threats. This week’s issue of Majalla explores some of the policies that the current US administration is taking to ensure stability in the region. Yasmine El Geressi writes this week’s cover story which focuses on the Iranian regime’s renewed threats to close off the Hormuz Strait. As the writer points out, such threats are not new as the regime has made similar calls before in retaliation to sanctions. However, the writer points out that there is a legal hurdle that would prevent the regime from taking such an action, as international law actually makes it illegal to close off the waterway. Moreover, any closure of the strait would not have the same impact on the US, as it would have done a decade ago since the current American economy isn’t as reliant on oil. The writer further notes that the closure would most likely harm Iran’s economic interests, as well as those of its regional neighbors. Joseph Braude writes on new statements coming out of the White House which showed intentions to designate the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Braude notes that both John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, two senior officials within the Trump administration, are supportive of the idea and past Republican initiatives have also tried giving the group the same designation. However, there are some logistical challenges that the administration will face, such as the fact that offshoots of the group play a role in the governments in Morocco and Tunisia and that American relations with Erdogan would further dwindle if the designation were to happen. In lighter news pieces, Bryn Haworth gives a historical overview of how eyebrow beauty and culture has changed throughout the ages. He gives a historical note on how renaissance painters and sculptors would present the female eyebrow and how eyebrow beauty is still very much the focal point in female beauty in the age of Instagram. Ali El Shamy writes on Lionel Messi’s historic achievement of scoring 600 goals for FC Barcelona following his second goal against Liverpool in the Champions League first leg semi-final. The writer gives an overview of previous players who have scored 600 goals or more at club level and how their achievement compares to that of Messi’s. Naturally, there is a portion dedicated on Cristiano Ronaldo who just happened to reach the same milestone four days before Messi.
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A Weekly Political News Magazine
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A Weekly Political News Magazine
Dogus: Son of Kurdish Refugees 22 Ibrahim Becomes Lambeth’s New Mayor
Issue 1746 - May - 03/05/2019
24 The Religious Tensions Behind the Attacks in Sri Lanka
14 Could Iran Really Close the Strait of Hormuz?
32 30 Information Warfare Is Here To Stay
34 People Power Is Rising in Africa
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Eyebrow Culture
50 Needling Your Way to Healthier Skin 3
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Volunteers open their homes to stray cats in Gaza City, Gaza on April 29,
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An actor of the French street theater company Royal de Luxe known as 'Monsieur Bourgogne' sits in his tent on the facade of a building in the Bellevue neighbourhood in Saint-Herblain, near Nantes, western France, on April 2019 ,25. - The 'Monsieur Bourgogne' installation sits at an altitude higher than 10 metres on the facade of the house and can be seen by the public for about a week. (Getty)
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of steady battlefield losses that saw the selfstyled "caliphate" shrink from an area the size of Britain to a tiny speck in the Euphrates River valley.
Trump Weighs Labelling Muslim Brotherhood a Terrorist Group
President Donald Trump is working to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organisation (FTO), the White House said on Tuesday, which would bring sanctions against Egypt’s oldest Islamist movement. “The president has consulted with his national security team and leaders in the region who share his concern and this designation is working its way through the internal process,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in an email. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi asked Trump to make the designation during an April 9 visit to Washington, a senior U.S. official said, confirming a report in the New York Times on Tuesda
ISIS Leader Appears in Video for First Time in 5 Years
The shadowy leader of the ISIS group claimed to appear for the first time in five years in a video released by the extremist group's propaganda arm on Monday, acknowledging defeat in the group's last stronghold in Syria but vowing a "long battle" ahead. The man said to be Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in the video also claimed the Easter Day bombings in Sri Lanka which killed over 250 people were "part of the revenge" that awaits the West. Despite numerous claims about his death in the past few years, al-Baghdadi's whereabouts remain a mystery. Many of his top aides have been killed, mostly by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes. He is among the few senior IS commanders still at large after two years
Iran Designates as Terrorists All U.S. Troops in Middle East
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani signed a bill into law on Tuesday declaring all U.S. forces in the Middle East terrorists and calling the U.S. government a sponsor of terrorism.The bill was passed by parliament last week in retaliation for President Donald Trump’s decision this month to designate Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards a foreign terrorist organisation. It was not clear what the impact of the new Iranian law might have on U.S. forces or their Middle East operations. Rouhani instructed the ministry of intelligence, ministry of foreign affairs, the armed forces, and Iran’s supreme national security council to implement the law, state media reported. The law specifically labels as a terrorist organisation the United States Central Command (CENTCOM), which is responsible for U.S. military operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
UK Defence Secretary Williamson Sacked Over Huawei Leak
Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson was fired over the leak of information about Chinese telecoms company Huawei, Prime Minister Theresa May’s office said on Wednesday. “The Prime Minister’s decision has been informed by his conduct surrounding an investigation into the circumstances of the
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unauthorised disclosure of information from a meeting of the National Security Council,” May’s office said in a statement. The inquiry into the National Security Council leak began after a Daily Telegraph report on warnings within cabinet about possible risks to national security over a deal with Huawei. The inquiry followed reports that ministers had raised concerns over a plan to allow Huawei limited access to help build the UK's new 5G network. There has been no formal confirmation of Huawei's role in the 5G network and No 10 said a final decision would be made at the end of spring. Huawei has denied there is any risk of spying or sabotage, or that it is controlled by the Chinese government.
Venezuela's Guaidó Accused of Coup Attempt by Government
Venezuela’s opposition leader Juan Guaido called on the Armed Forces and citizens to take to the streets and oust Nicolas Maduro in a shocking video filmed at a Caracas air base - as the country's information minister labelled the attempt a “coup” He appeared in a video with
uniformed men, saying he had military support. Mr Guaidó, who declared himself interim president in January, called for more members of the military to help him end Mr Maduro's "usurpation" of power. But military leaders appeared to be standing behind Mr Maduro. Venezuela's defence minister appeared on television to stress the point. However, photos from Caracas show some soldiers aligning democracy. House of Representatives Judiciary themselves with Mr Guaidó's supporters. Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler said he Japan's Emperor Prays for Peace in was prepared to begin a process that could lead to fines or imprisonment for Barr after the top First Abdication in 200 Years U.S. law enforcement official failed to appear Japanese Emperor Akihito, in his final remarks for a hearing on the Mueller report on Russian as his three-decade reign drew to a close on interference in the 2016 election. House Speaker Tuesday, thanked the people for their support Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in Congress, and expressed hope for a peaceful future. also accused Barr of lying to Congress, and said Akihito, 85, the first monarch to abdicate in neither the attorney general nor the Republican two centuries, had sought to ease the painful president are above the law.“That’s a crime,” Pelosi said, though she did not specify the comment to which she was referring. Democrats have accused Barr of misleading Congress by testifying in April that he did not know whether Mueller agreed with his initial characterization of the report - failing to mention a March 27 letter from the special counsel complaining that Barr’s initial public summary did not “fully capture the context, nature and substance of this Office’s work.” memories of World War Two and bring the monarchy closer to the people, including those marginalised in society. The popular Akihito was the first monarch to take the Chrysanthemum Throne under a post-war constitution that defines the emperor as a symbol of the people without political power. His father, Hirohito, in whose name Japanese troops fought World War Two, was considered a living deity until after Japan’s defeat in 1945, when he renounced his divinity.
U.S. Congressional Democrats Blast Barr
A senior U.S. congressional Democrat on Thursday threatened to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress for resisting demands for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s full report on the Russia inquiry, and accused President Donald Trump’s administration of a “growing attack” on
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Thai King Surprises with Royal Wedding Ahead of Coronation
Just days before his official coronation, Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn on Wednesday married the deputy head of his personal guard force and gave her the title Queen Suthida. The surprise announcement was carried in the Royal Gazette, and footage from Wednesday’s wedding ceremony was later shown on the nightly Royal News segment aired on all Thai television channels. Vajiralongkorn, 66, also known by the title King Rama X, became constitutional monarch after the death of his revered father, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, in October 2016, after 70 years on the throne. He is due to be officially crowned in elaborate Buddhist and Brahmin ceremonies on Saturday, followed by a procession through Bangkok the next day.
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History of Strait of Hormuz How a Waterway Sparked Multiple Conflicts 10
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By Majalla-London The Strait of Hormuz is strategically vital as most of the oil in the region is transferred to Europe via the waterway. Since the end of the Second World War, there have been multiple conflicts that have affected trade through the strait and have made Iran’s economic bloodline unusable.
MOHAMMED MOSSADEGH FACES A WESTERN STAND OFF In 1941, Britain forced Reza Shah Pahlavi to step down due to his relations with the Axis powers. Soon after, his son Mohammed Reza Pahlavi became the new Shah. By 1951, the new Shah appointed veteran politician, Mohammed Mossadegh, to be the new prime minister having been nominated by the Iranian parliament. Mossadegh already had ample experience as he was a long time member of parliament and held many ministerial posts. Mossadegh was a nationalist and sought to have Iranian industry benefit his country. As such, he decided to nationalize his country’s oil reserve; this violated a contract Iran had with British Petroleum (BP), which gave Britain preferential treatment with regards to the country’s oil reserves. Britain would bring the case to the International Court in Belgium, which ruled in favor of Iran. Britain’s naval forces would then blockade the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz to cut off Iran’s economic bloodline. This would prove to be the first of many conflicts to take place in Hormuz.
THE IRAN-IRAQ WAR
The reflagged tanker Gas King (foreground) loaded with Kuwaiti crude is escorted December ,28 1988 by the U.S. guided missile frigate, USS Gallery towards the Strait of Hormuz, off the Dubai coast. (Getty)
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Shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Iranian regime would be embroiled in a major military conflict with Iraq which would last eight years. By 1980, Saddam Hussein led an attack on Iran fearing that the Iranian regime would attempt to spread its ideology throughout the rest of the region. Despite the heavy battling, the Strait of
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Hormuz remained passable throughout most of the conflict. During the war, the United States had made multiple statements in which it stated that if any closure were to happen to the strait, then it would get involved in the conflict. Despite these warnings, Iran carryout many hawkish attacks on unarmed Arab oil tankers passing through the strait. In 1984, Iran attacked a Kuwaiti oil tanker moving through the strait. In 1986, Iran would go on to attack the Saudi oil tanker, Petrostar 16, which set the ship ablaze and wounded six individuals. The continued conflict led Iran to move its shipping port from Kharg Island to Larak Island. The US would eventually get involved in the conflict in 1988 after an Iranian mine damaged the American naval ship , USS Samuel B. Roberts, prompting US forces to sink several Iranian ships including one frigate and one gunboat.
POST IRAN-IRAQ WAR AND THREATS TO CLOSE THE STRAIT Things remained relatively quiet in the strait after the war, bar a standoff between US and Iranian naval ships during late 2007 to early 2008, after the latter had provoked the former. However, no damage or casualties happened during the standoff. But in June 2008, Iran made a new kind of challenge in which it
Throughout the Iran-Iraq War, Iran carryout many hawkish attacks on unarmed Arab oil tankers passing through the strait.
threatened to close off the strait if the US or Israel ever attacked it. In 2012, Iran repeated such threats after new sanctions were imposed on it. Despite the fact that the threats did more harm to its economy (the value of its currency fell right after it made such statements) it continued to challenge the world. In response, a flotilla composed of American, British and French warships docked in the Persian Gulf as to prevent the disruption of maritime trade. Moreover, the European Union imposed
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The Singapore flagged -85thousand ton Norman Atlantic stands ablaze 06 December 1987 after she was attacked by an Iranian warship in Omani territorial waters as it approached the Strait of Hormuz. (Getty)
more sanctions on the Iranian regime to prevent it from making such threats again. Now at the present day, the Trump administration has re-imposed sanctions on Iran to stop it from developing its nuclear program. Despite, the economic hardships its people are going through, the Iranian regime has shown little signs of wielding its weapons program. Furthermore, it has now renewed threats to close off the strait, but as history has shown, such threats do more harm than good.
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Despite, the economic hardships its people are going through, the Iranian regime has shown little signs of wielding its weapons program. Furthermore, it has now renewed threats to close off the strait.
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Could Iran Really Close the Strait of Hormuz? The Return of an Old Threat
by Yasmine El-Geressi Iran has recently been revisiting a familiar threat: to block the vital Strait of Hormuz. On April 22, the United States announced it would end sanctions waivers for countries importing oil from Iran and demanded that buyers, including China and India, stop purchases by May 1 or face sanctions, with the objective of ending all Iranian oil exports as part of the President Trump’s campaign of confrontation and pressure against the Islamic Republic. In apparent response, Alireza Tangsiri, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps navy force said that “if we are prevented from using [the Hormuz Strait], we will close it. In the event of any threats, we will not have the slightest hesitation to protect and defend Iran’s waterway.”
WHY DOES THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ MATTER? The Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz are crucial not just to regional security, but also to the global economy. The vital
waterway is one of the most important trade routes in the world and the most important maritime route for black gold. It lies between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, providing the only sea passage for crude oil from many of the world’s largest oil producers - including Kuwait, Bahrain, Iran, raw and the UAE - to markets in Asia, Europe, North America and Beyond. Roughly around 40 percent of global seaborne oil exports pass through the narrow waterway, totalling about 20 million barrels of crude oil per day. The passage has been at the heart of regional tensions for decades and while Iran has made several threats to block the waterway in the past, whether realistic or not, “these threats dramatically affect market certainty because the worlds biggest oil or natural gas importers - including the US - depend on the secure passage of shipping through the strait,” writes Firas Elias of the Washington Institute for Near Far East Policy. The renewed threats and the prospects of reduced oil imports from Iran and instabilities in the region have prompted a surge in oil prices to six month highs and as long as the global economy remains so critically reliant on the supply of oil, even a partial
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These past threats may have lessened the gravity of this most recent claim, but Iran’s newest statements in response to Trump’s sanctions are happening against a different backdrop and therefore cannot be ignored. HOW SERIOUSLY SHOULD THESE THREATS BE TAKEN?
Iranian Navy boats take part in maneuvers during the "Velayat90-" navy exercises in the Strait of Hormuz in southern Iran on January ,3 2012, the End day of ten-day war games. (Getty)
or short-term closure would likely see a dramatic increase in oil prices, and spread fear and contagion through the global financial markets. Based on international law, Iran cannot block access to the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz and suspend or close down the freedom of commerce in those waters. According to Article 37 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (“UNCLOS”), Hormuz is an “international strait” because it is the only gateway between the Persian Gulf and the open sea. The law says that the right of transit of ships in all such straits “used for international navigation between one part of the high seas or an exclusive economic zone and another part of the high seas or an exclusive economic zone” should to be suspended. While the Iranian parliament did not approve the 1982 agreement, the Iranian government has signed it which means it is committed to avoid any action that would violate the convention. However, at the time that Iran signed the convention it announced that it would only recognise the “right of transit passage” for countries that had also joined the convention, and while the United States recognised provisions of the agreement as operative parts of customary international law, it is not a party to the treaty.
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The current threats are reminiscent of previous statements that the Iranian leadership have been making for years when tensions with the US have increased. In 2008, citing fears of a U.S. or Israeli attack, the commander of the IRGC, Mohammad Ali Jafari, threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation. During the 88–1980 Iran-Iraq War, both sides targeted one another’s shipping as part of a total war effort, raising fears that Iran might attempt to make the Strait of Hormuz unpassable. In 2012, in response to sanctions by the US and EU against the country’s nuclear program, Iran’s navy chief said it would be “easy” to block the strait, while its vice president warned that not a "drop” of oil would pass through it if more sanctions were piled onto Iran. But even though the US went ahead with those sanctions, Iran did not act on its threat. These past threats may have lessened the gravity of this most recent claim, but Iran’s newest statements in response to Trump’s sanctions are happening against a different backdrop and therefore cannot be ignored. Back in 2012, the Obama administration was negotiating the Nuclear Deal which was signed in 2015, and therefore the threats were downplayed. But the current administration has withdrawn from the agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and reimposed heavy sanctions while pursuing a heavily focused antiIran policy in the region while building on its strong ties with allies such as Saudi Arabia and Israel, who view Iran as a major destabilising force in the region and their primary adversary. Another major difference between previous threats and today is the recent decision by the Trump administration to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command (IRGC) - which is already designated as a terrorist group and subject to powerful sanctions - a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO). The FTO listing adds criminal liability for knowingly providing material support for the group. By definition, terrorists are non-state actors — so this designation for a foreign government’s military is a major first on the international stage and therefore the symbolism of the decision is very important, even if there are few practical advantages.
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THREATS ARE EASIER SAID THAN DONE Defense and energy analysts have fretted over the possibility that Iran could try to choke off maritime traffic in the strait for years, but threats are easy to make. In reality, it would would be extremely difficult for Iran to close it completely for an extended period of time. Iran’s ability to close the waterway to traffic is in doubt thanks in part to the presence of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, which is based in Bahrain. The U.S. naval presence has been anchored for years in Manama, Bahrain, not far from the Strait of Hormuz and would make it extremely difficult for Iran to choke off traffic. Iran’s closure of the Strait is also unlikely to involve employing naval forces to physically occupy the waterways because its naval capabilities are ill-equipped for total closure. Amy M. Jaffe, senior fellow for energy and the environment and director of the program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council on Foreign Relations says that there is the question of whether Iran could use “asymmetric warfare tactics, such as swarming speedboats and missile attacks, but the possibility of a decisive international military response led by the United States makes such an endeavour extremely risky for Iran and its military.” Jaffe adds that Iran would likely use more clandestine approaches, such as cyberattacks on neighbouring state oil facilities. “Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have alternative pipeline routes that can bypass the Strait of Hormuz. In the case of Saudi Arabia, upward of 6.5 million barrels per day in exports could bypass the Persian Gulf,” she said. Iran could also make a less drastic but still dangerous escalation in the Strait by utilising an Anti-Access/Area-Denial strategy (A2/AD) strategy - an attempt to deny an adversary’s freedom of movement on the battlefield. Michael Connell, head of the Iran programme with U.S. non-profit research body CNA, said of all
Iran’s closure of the Strait is also unlikely to involve employing naval forces to physically occupy the waterways because its naval capabilities are ill-equipped for total closure.
The Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz are crucial not just to regional security, but also to the global economy. Iran’s capabilities, mines were probably the one that caused the most concern. He also said a misjudged incident which would trigger direct fire was a more likely scenario than a blockade of the Strait. The U.S. has said it would use minesweepers, warship escorts and potentially air strikes to protect the free flow of commerce but reopening the Strait could be a lengthy process as mines would take some time to clear, causing turmoil in energy markets that could ripple across other assets. Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies says that in the event of any Iranian effort to mine the Persian Gulf or block the Strait of Hormuz, Washington has a lot more tools in its arsenal than minesweepers — and that could be enough to dissuade Iran from ever seriously trying.
ECONOMIC SELF-HARM Unlike previous calls to close the strait to all shipping, the latest threats seem aimed more specifically at Washington, but the U.S. economy is “less exposed now to oil price shocks than in past decades due to the lower oil intensity of the U.S. economy”, says Jaffe. “Still, high gasoline prices can derail consumer spending, especially on durable goods such as cars. At the same time, an oil price shock in the developing world could cut into countries’ appetites for U.S. goods and services,” she added. By closing the Strait, Iran would not only be harming its neighbors and the nations that import oil from the Gulf region: It would also have a regressive impact on Iran’s interests by causing considerable economic self-harm as the nation is also highly dependent on the Right of Free Passage through the Strait. Iran’s ability to wage the so-called “oil weapon” response to US sanctions may also be jeopardised because of its weakening economy. As John Allen Gay and Geoffrey Kemp explain in War With Iran: Political, Military, and Economic Consequences: “Eighty-five percent of Iran’s imports come through the strait, and the oil exports so crucial to the Iranian government’s solvency mostly flow out of it. Iran would be cutting off its own lifeline if it closed the strait, and it would have to live on its already dwindling currency reserves. Iran would also be inviting attacks on its own oil facilities by vengeful neighbors, and it would isolate itself internationally.”
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Washington Debates Renewed Push to Designate Muslim Brotherhood a Terrorist Group Pressure for an FTO Designation Has Been Accumulating for Some Time, But a Successful Designation is Far from Assured 18
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If the administration’s effort to designate the MB is carried to completion, anyone in the US or abroad found to have provided “material support or resources” to the group would risk deportation from the US, as well as financial sanctions. an April ninth visit by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in which the latter urged the move, as well as seeking American endorsement for a constitutional amendment that would allow him to run for two more six-year terms. Key figures pushing for the FTO designation reportedly include senior administration officials, including National Security Adviser John R. Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. However, they are encountering opposition from several career staffers at the Department of Defense, State Department, and other government agencies that have internally articulated legal and policy-oriented reasons for opposing the designation. Though the outcome remains uncertain, some speculate that the administration may eventually compromise on a more limited response. Supporters of Former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and members of the Muslim Brotherhood chant slogans during a rally on December 2012 ,14 in Cairo, Egypt. (Getty)
SUPPORTERS
by Joseph Braude After over a year of consideration, the Trump administration appears poised to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group. Though there is widespread political support for such a move, legal and policy analysts harbor doubts as to its prospects.
CAMPS WITHIN THE WHITE HOUSE Media have reported that the Trump administration is strongly considering designating the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood a Foreign Terrorist Organization and applying sanctions. This follows
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Opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood draws upon a large reservoir of support. Pressure for an FTO designation has been accumulating for some time. In 2015, Republican Senator Ted Cruz proposed a bill that would compel the State Department to designate the Brotherhood a terrorist organization, arguing that “the Brotherhood’s stated goal is to wage violent jihad against its enemies, and our legislation is a reality check that the United States is on that list as well.” Two years later, in 2017, a bill proposing much the same garnered 77 cosponsors in the House of Representatives. If the administration’s current effort to designate the Muslim Brotherhood is carried to completion,
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anyone in the United States or abroad found to have provided “material support or resources” to the group would risk deportation from the United States, as well as financial sanctions. Various cases have been made in support of such a move. Writing in the influential conservative magazine National Review, Qanta Ahmed argued, “While the Muslim Brotherhood may not be pulling the trigger, it nurtures jihadism efficiently and relentlessly” by “indoctrinating its members with the totalitarian tenets of 20th-century Islamism.” In her view, “in the propagation of terrorism, the Muslim Brotherhood has no equal and no competitor.” Indeed, supporters of an FTO designation stress that the Brotherhood, while rarely directly engaged in violence, often acts as a protective layer of sympathy and succor around those who do. As Jonathan Schanzer of FDD recently noted in Congressional testimony, “The Muslim Brotherhood is a gateway to jihadism... It’s also a hate group. Its ideology is xenophobic, bigoted, and totalitarian. ”
LEGAL AND DIPLOMATIC COMPLICATIONS Nevertheless, a successful designation of the Brotherhood is far from assured. As Benjamin Wittes of the influential blog Lawfare has observed, designated organizations are entitled to review by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and, in the case of the Mojahedin-e Khalq, “litigation over the designation went on for years… and a
Supporters of an FTO designation stress that the Brotherhood, while rarely directly engaged in violence, often acts as a protective layer of sympathy and succor around those who do.
designation can be thrown out if is arbitrary or capricious or if the administrative record does not support it.” The legal case for designating the Brotherhood is undermined by the group’s diffuse character and the lack of a single official stance on violence. In other words, the statute governing FTO designations was crafted for relatively centralized organizations embarked on a violent campaign against the United States or its allies. In contrast, the international Muslim Brotherhood is seen to resemble a loose-knit movement whose various factions have, in their public statements, taken contradictory positions on violence and the political process, depending on circumstances. Designating the Brotherhood a terrorist group is equally complicated diplomatically. As Schanzer notes, in Tunisia and Morocco, “the group has become an accepted element of the ruling elite”, while in countries such as Jordan, “it has an uneasy modus vivendi with the government, fulfilling the role of the loyal opposition.” The thorniest case is
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President Donald Trump (R) shakes hands during a meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 2019 ,9. (Getty)
presented by Turkey, where an FTO designation could potentially imperil the U.S.’s relationship with Ankara -- already under severe strain -- as President Erdogan is an avowed supporter of the group and its various regional branches.
OPPOSITION In Washington’s foreign policy community, hesitation to embrace an FTO designation is relatively widespread and stems from several factors, ranging from the Brotherhood’s organizational incoherence to sympathy for the group’s perceived embrace of political reform. According to Raymond Tanter and Edward Stafford, writing in Foreign Policy, “the Washington think-tank community is split — with most opposed to designation. Specialists on U.S. foreign affairs generally adhere to the position that the MB is more a legitimate political and social organization than a terrorist organization, and its multinational character reflects a diversity
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of sub-groups, many of which are not terrorist organizations.” Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institute, known for casting a more sympathetic eye on the organization, recently contended that “there isn't a single American expert on the Muslim Brotherhood who supports designation. That's because if you study the organization, there's really no way you can conclude, from a factual standpoint, that it meets the designation criteria.” Others, such as Eric Trager of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who counsels against taking the movement’s public statements at face value, have argued against designation for more tactical reasons. In Trager’s view, “A failed Brotherhood designation might ultimately afford the Brotherhood a more generous hearing in certain political and policy circles. So the administration should be wary of overplaying its hand: it could legitimate the Brotherhood in ways it doesn’t intend and in ways that Brotherhood organizations hardly deserve.”
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Ibrahim Dogus: Son of Kurdish Refugees Becomes Lambeth’s New Mayor Dogus to Majalla: “It is important to help people recognize the contributions these (migrant and refugee) communities have made to Lambeth and the wider United Kingdom.” By Ali El Shamy In 1994, Ibrahim Dogus came to the UK at the young age of 14. His parents were Kurdish refugees from Turkey and like most migrants they hoped to start a new life in their new homeland. Despite starting his working life as a waiter, Dogus would persevere and eventually become a restaurant owner in the year 2005. Additionally, a young Dogus became involved in politics in 1997 when he joined the Labor Party. As a small business owner he understands the importance that such enterprises have on Britain’s economy and communities. As such, he has become one of the co-chairmen of the Small and Medium Sized Enterprises for Labour (SME4Labour) an organization that promotes Britain’s small businesses which are often overlooked in favor of big corporations. Dogus is also the founder of the Center for Kurdish Progress, which was officially inaugurated in 2014. The organization aims to provide a forum for the political, social and economic developments of the Kurdish community both within the UK and the Kurdish region. As there are 250,000 Kurds living in the UK, it is important that there be an organization which prioritizes their interests since the organization also aims to introduce the Kurdish Question to the wider British public. Additionally, he also founded the Centre for Turkish Studies (CEFTUS) which provides a non-partisan dialogue on Turkey and aims to improve relations between Turkey and the UK. Dogus also established the British Kebab Awards which is currently in its seventh year. The Kebab Awards recognizes the British Kebab industry which has become a staple in UK’s economy. Annually, the industry provides the British economy with 2.8 Billion pounds, and employs 200,000 people. The last time we met with Dogus was in 2017 as he preparing to run as the Labor candidate for the parliamentary seat for the
Cities of London and Westminster constituency. In late April 2019, Dogus was elected as the new mayor of Lambeth after spending the previous year as its Deputy Mayor. As the new Mayor, Dogus has chosen migration and refugees as his mayoral theme. Majalla recently sat down with the new mayor and he spoke to us about what he intends to do during his term, whether or not he will stand again for parliament and his opinion on the openness of Britain post the Brexit referendum. Q: How do you intend to promote Lambeth during your time as mayor? A: Lambeth is a brilliant borough in London with great institutions from the National Theater to Southbank Center, from the Royal Festival Hall to the Queen Elizabeth Hall; great landmarks such as the London Eye is based in our borough, great districts such as Brixton, Kennington and Streatham are all based in Lambeth. With all this in mind, Lambeth is already a high profile borough, and like the rest of London’s boroughs, it has a lot to offer to a wide array of communities. As such, Lambeth does need much in terms of promotion, but as the mayor for the next year, I will continue to do my best to attract more communities, more people, and more businesses to Lambeth. Q: What do you intend to accomplish by the end of your term as mayor? A: The theme I have chosen for this year is about refugees and immigration, so I want to promote immigrant communities and make sure that more and more people start to realize how important it is for people to come into a new country and start a new life and the challenges that come with such a prospect. It is also important to help people recognize the contributions these communities have made to Lambeth and the wider United
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“People need to engage so that their voices will be heard; together we can all make a real difference in areas where we live.” Dogus second referendum. Would you be open to backing a second vote? A: As a mayor, I must be politically neutral on such issues and cannot comment on such a prospect. But, as a Labor councilor working here in Lambeth, I was a remain supporter who voted to remain within the EU. As such, I would not be opposed to a confirmatory vote on the final deal on Brexit and if that entails a second referendum, then so be it.
Ibrahim Dogus becomes Lambeth’s new mayor.
Kingdom. I will be working hard with my team and I will be working separately with two different charities to spread this message, one of the charities is called the Migration Museum and the other is called Lambeth Welcomes Refugees. These two charities will be my mayoral charities for my term and together we will be highlighting the contributions of migrant communities to Lambeth as well as the wider UK. Q: It seems that your identity as a migrant to the UK has influenced both your career and life as a whole; do you believe that Britain is still a welcoming nation three years on from the Brexit referendum result and the confusion that has followed it? A: I was born into a Kurdish refugee family from Turkey which arrived in Britain in 1994. Britain has always had an issue surrounding immigration. But, Britain is a welcoming country, British society is a very welcoming society that is tolerant towards diversity and different cultures and will continue to be so for the coming years. Brexit has created divisions and tension in our communities, but I think that in the near future, once the Brexit issue is resolved, the nation will come together and reunite as a community again. Q: During your last interview with Majalla, you were standing for parliament do you intend to do so again after your mayoral term or during the next general election, whenever that may be? A: There is a strong chance that I will run for parliament again, once we know when the next election is going to be, once we know what might be available , then I might consider running. But, it is very likely that I will once again stand for parliament. Q: The Labor party is currently split over the prospect over a
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Q: Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labor Party has been divisive and has caused party MPs and members to quit the party, do you think his continued leadership will do more harm than good for the party? A: As a Labor councilor, I think any party with new leadership will face a number of issues. I remember when Tony Blair became the new leader and lots of issues within the party arose which subsequently caused a lot of members to quit the party. The same can be said when Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband became leaders of Labor, the problems surrounding leadership of political parties is not new. Labor party is a broad church and under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership things will get better for the wider Labor movement. Q: You joined the Labor Party just as Blair became its leader. As you know, during his tenure Blair shifted the party to become more centrist, do you think Corbyn’s attempts to reshift the party back to the left is beneficial? A: The needs of the communities and the country are changing; the center of politics is changing gradually. The center in politics now may not be the center of politics in ten years’ time. Things will change because the British public is always changing. What we offered in the last Labor manifesto was greatly received by the British public and Labor did really well in the elections, while commentators were expecting us to lose seats we actually gained seats, so I think what we are doing now is greatly serving the British public. Q: Tell me more about the organizations that you run? A: I run several different organizations, one of them is a think tank called the Center for Turkish Studies which does a lot of work in Turkey and the UK. Another think tank I run is the Center for Kurdish Progress which does work on Iraq, Iran, Syria and the UK and most of its work focuses on Kurdish issues. Both organizations are quite active as they hold conferences, seminars, panels, networking events. Since these organizations
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are cross-party organizations, we work closely with all political parties. As such, we worked with Tory members, Labor members, SNP members, Lib-Dem members, Green members…etc. The reason for this is because the organizations focus on communal issues within the Middle East and Turkey, so we work really hard to cooperate with people from across the political spectrum. Q: Will these organizations come into play during your term as mayor? A: No, even though they’re based in Lambeth they don’t have anything to do with local issues, but rather international politics. As such, they won’t have a role during my mayoral term. Q: Can you tell me any Labor policies or manifestos which try to alleviate the tensions between the migrant communities and the wider British community? A: As a Labor councilor, I can tell you that Labor is the party of equality and tolerance. Labor has always worked with migrant communities and refugee communities within the UK. Under Labor governments, migrant and refugee communities have always been supported well in terms of settling and integrating and their issues have always been addressed by the government. The Tory government’s austerity policies have made things difficult for all communities but in particular for migrant communities, which have also caused an increase in far right activism. While Brexit didn’t directly cause this rise of the far right, we did start to see a surge in far right after the Brexit vote. Today, there is an increase in racist attacks on migrant communities and religious minorities in the UK, which is a great danger. Any government, regardless of its party, should work to stop such attacks from happening. Q: There are commentators who argue that there is a problem of migrant communities not integrating within wider society and instead opt to live within their own communities under their own cultural rules and norms. What do you say to that? A: As a Labor councilor I can say that migrant communities are law abiding citizens and they work really hard to engage and interact with mainstream communities and integrate. So, if integration is
“As a Labor Councilor, I think Labor is the party that is trying very hard to find common ground (between Brexiters and Remainers)” Dogus
taking a slower pace than expected, then the government needs to provide the facilities to speed it up. It’s easier to blame the migrant communities and refugee communities and tell them that they are not integrating properly. So what does proper integration mean? That needs to be debated and I believe that given the opportunity every single community in the UK will integrate within society. If you are excluding these communities, then they will resort to closing themselves off and protect their own culture, so you cannot really blame them. You need to find a way to find a way to help those communities open up and integrate within mainstream society. Q: You were quite young when you first joined Labor and went into politics, so what inspired you to go into politics in the first place? A: Simply put, the people in the Labor party were so welcoming to me, a young Kurdish man from a refugee family hailing from Turkey. As such, the Labor Party felt just like home and my fellow party members felt like a big family that you can rely on and be a part of. That’s how I got involved in the Labor party and its politics and its values of equality and tolerance which have attracted me and many people like me. Q: Do you think many young people today are more engaged or less engaged in politics than the time you first started your political career? A: Young people are much more engaged than ever, there’s a lot of issues that are directly affecting young people in today’s Britain. Issues regarding young people did not take priority 20 years ago, but today these issues are on a much higher agenda. Moreover, the increasing problems young people face today has encouraged them to be much more involved in politics. Q: How much political engagement from the youth do you see within your own constituency? A: In terms of participation in local activities, it’s not bad but it could be better. There are many young people who are members
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Ibrahim Dogus with his wife, Raife Aytek, during his inauguration ceremony at Lambeth Town Hall.
of the local constituency but they are not all actively out on doorsteps campaigning, this needs to be developed further but at the same time it’s getting much better. Q: What do you think of Labor’s chances in the upcoming European Parliamentary elections? According to most polls Labor is second after the Brexit Party. A: As a Labor councilor, I can say that the debate over Brexit has been divisive both before and after the referendum. The Labor Party has tried really hard to keep both leave voters and remain voters together, so that the country can remain united. I think the Labor Party is doing really well in the polls. While some polls have placed the Brexit Party on top, the majority of the polls are putting Labor ahead of all other parties. The real worry here is the Conservative Party, as it is third or fourth in most polls. In spite of the fact that the Conservatives are the government, it’s losing support from most of its grassroots. The upcoming European elections on May 23 could be precursor for the upcoming general elections, especially if the Labor Party is voted in, the Conservative Party is voted out and the Brexit Party and the Lib-Dems take seats away from the Conservatives.
Ibrahim Dogus getting inaugurated as Lambeth’s new mayor.
Q: There is a problem of hardline Brexiters and Remainers who refuse to compromise no matter what, do you think Labor can bring those people together and reconcile between them? A: As a Labor Councilor, I think Labor is the party that is trying very hard to find common ground, in which jobs will be protected, the economy will be protected, the environment will
“The (mayoral) theme I have chosen for this year is about refugees and immigration, so I want to promote immigrant communities and make sure that more and more people start to realize how important it is for people to come into a new country and start a new life…” Dogus be protected and workers’ rights will be protected. At the same time, we aim to remain in the single market and customs union so that our country’s businesses will continue to do well. But, it is the government that has negotiated a certain deal with the European Union and the former has shown a lack of willingness to compromise both within parliament and its own party. Hard Brexitors within the Tory Party have refused to negotiate with the government and rather than blaming in party fighting, the government has blamed Labor for its own failures. Q: Environmental issues have become more important, as evidenced from the recent protests. What has the Lambeth Council done to find a solution to the growing environmental problems? A: The solution is not an easy solution, but we are one of the pioneer councils that have declared an emergency for the environment. So we are trying very hard in terms of our recycling activities and looking after our own environment. There are prominent Lambeth constituents who have taken part in the environmental demonstrations and the Extinction Rebellion. Our council works very hard with environmental groups to protect our own environment, without our environment there is no future for anyone. Q: What is your message to those living in Lambeth as their new Mayor? A: The importance of engagement. All our communities need to engage with our local authorities and our local NGOs, local community organizations, youth groups…etc. People need to engage so that their voices will be heard; together we can all make a real difference in areas where we live. With this spirit of cooperation we can make Lambeth an even better place to live and work in, the same can be said on every council across the UK and every local community across the world. Everyone needs to engage with their local political, environmental and grassroots groups because only by working together we can make a real difference in our own lives.
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The Religious Tensions Behind the Attacks in Sri Lanka How Sectarianism Could Spin Out of Control 26
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The attacks are likely to inflame tensions between the country’s Buddhist majority and its Muslim minority—and to promote sectarianism in the wider region, too. out, the attacks are likely to inflame tensions between the country’s Buddhist majority and its Muslim minority—and to promote sectarianism in the wider region, too.
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
In this picture taken on April 2019 ,28, Indian Christians put candles in the formation of Sri Lanka's map after participating in a peace march to show solidarity with the Sri Lankan victims of last week's serial bombings in Ahmedabad. (Getty)
Sri Lanka is no stranger to terrorism, having lived through a nearly three-decade-long civil war that pitted the majority Sinhalese against minority Tamil separatist organizations, most notably the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. During the war, the LTTE carried out dozens of suicide attacks. But last weekend’s carnage was unprecedented. The bombs killed over 300 people and injured at least 500 more. Sri Lanka’s Muslim community has long bridled at the austere, Wahabi-influenced practices the NTJ propounds. But aside from making the news last year for desecrating some statues of the Buddha, the NTJ was hardly known to nonMuslims in Sri Lanka until this week. Now, however, the group has taken center stage in a long-running ethno-religious drama. Beginning around 2012, extremist Buddhist groups, emboldened by the LTTE’s defeat in the civil By Neil DeVotta*, Sumit Ganguly* war, began targeting Muslims, even though most [OR ALL?] Muslims supported the state against The series of suicide bombings at Christian Tamil separatism. Based on preliminary reports, churches and hotels in Sri Lanka’s capital, it appears that anti-Muslim violence may have Colombo, on Easter Sunday threatened to rip influenced some of last weekend’s attackers to apart the country’s complex ethno-religious join the NTJ. If so, that suggests an unsurprising fabric. The government has blamed the attacks lesson: further violence against Sri Lanka’s on two obscure Islamist groups called the Muslim community will only radicalize others. Jammiyathul Millathu Ibrahim and the National Sri Lanka has long operated as an ethnocracy Thawheed Jamaat (NTJ). It appears the latter has dominated by Sinhalese Buddhists, who make up links to jihadists outside Sri Lanka, including the 70 percent of the population. This was the main Islamic State, or ISIS. If that attribution bears spur for the Tamils’ separatist campaign. By
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switching to targeting Muslims, who constitute less than ten percent of the population, Buddhist extremists sought to open up a new ethnoreligious fissure and then exploit it. Stereotypes of Muslims—the idea that traders fleece nonMuslims, for example, and that the Muslim community is more loyal to predominantly Islamic countries, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia—coupled with the Muslim community’s relative insularity have made their Islamophobia all the more effective. Muslims have pushed back against efforts to marginalize them. Muslim elites have worked diligently to ensure that young people do not react violently to the burgeoning anti-Muslim agitprop, and some Muslims have protested against the Islamist extremism within their communities and provided the state with intelligence on extremists. NTJ’s attacks will obscure those efforts and give Buddhist nationalists fodder for their anti-Muslim agenda. Most of the victims were Sinhalese and Tamil Christians, a fact that may lead to the creation of a broader antiMuslim coalition. That could plunge the country into ethno-religious crisis once again. Even if Sri Lanka avoids this dire scenario, the country is in for a bout of political instability. The Indian intelligence services, which keep close tabs on Islamists in the region, warned
Some Sri Lankan Muslims have protested against the Islamist extremism within their communities and provided the state with intelligence on extremists. NTJ’s (National Thowheeth Jama'ath) attacks will obscure those efforts and give Buddhist nationalists fodder for their anti-Muslim agenda.
their Sri Lankan counterparts of impending attacks weeks ago. Yet the bad blood between Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe (partly stemming from Sirisena’s failed attempt to sack Wickremesinghe late last year) led the president to exclude the prime minister from National Security Council meetings. As a result, the prime minister and the cabinet were left uninformed of India’s warnings. After the attacks, the initial calls for unity and calm were quickly overtaken by ministers allied with Wickremesinghe questioning the actions of the president. Charges and counter-charges of blame for the government’s abject failure to forestall the terrorists are flying back and forth.
FALLOUT The ethnic and religious fallout from the attacks is likely to ripple across the region. India, the region’s dominant power, has long played a role in Sri Lanka’s domestic politics. In the late
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A Sri Lankan Muslim woman (R) looks on at a checkpoint in Colombo on April 2019 ,30. (Getty)
1980s, it tried to end the civil war by brokering a pact between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government. The LTTE, however, refused to disarm, and the Indian peacekeeping force ended up fighting the group even as a new Sri Lankan government, fearful of India’s designs, demanded the peacekeepers’ withdrawal. India has made great efforts in the ensuing years to overcome the ill feelings the peacekeeping operation generated among Sinhalese and Tamils. Throughout, India’s nearly 70 million-strong Tamil population has kept a watchful eye on the conditions of their co-ethnics in Sri Lanka. No government in New Delhi can entirely overlook them, as they constitute an important electoral force. Now the Indian government’s real focus, however, will be on India’s nearly 200 million Muslims. Few of them have responded to the siren call of global Islamic jihad. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in the throes of an election campaign, lost no time in telling voters that only his party could end terrorism in the
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region. Since all the suicide bombers are believed to have been Muslims, Modi’s sectarian message was hardly obscure. Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists harbor ambivalent feelings toward India, but they now share a common Islamophobic agenda with India’s Hindu zealots. Should former President Mahinda Rajapaksa return to power in this year’s presidential elections—a real possibility— India’s Hindu nationalists and Sri Lanka’s Buddhist nationalists will be able to forge a common anti-Islam platform. Combined with the presence of Islamic terrorist groups in Pakistan, the rise of Islamic radicalism in Bangladesh, and ongoing unrest in predominantly Muslim Indiancontrolled Kashmir, an anti-Islamic front would further rupture communal relations in both India and Sri Lanka and foment Islamic radicalism across South Asia. The Easter Sunday bombings may yet claim more victims. This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.
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Information Warfare Is Here To Stay
States Have Always Fought for the Means of Communication By Heidi Tworek* We often forget that the Internet is not as wireless as it seems. Most online data still flow through physical fiberoptic cables laid out across several hundred thousand miles of ocean floor. If a shark were to bite through a cable (which has happened before), some or all of the Internet could come to a standstill.
These days, however, observers spend less time worrying about underwater fauna than about Russia’s submarines, which have been taking a special interest in ocean-bed cables in recent years. Since 2017, Russian submarines in the North Atlantic have reportedly been unusually active in the vicinity of undersea fiber-optic cables that carry most European and U.S. Internet traffic. It remains unclear what exactly Russia is planning or doing. The Russian activity
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The abstract image of the hacker wearing a mask and using a laptop in the empty white room overlay with source code hologram. (Getty)
may indicate an attempt to surveil the Pentagon’s secret cable network or plans to tamper with certain connections. But the reports also fit in with Russia’s global push to shape political outcomes and public opinion through the Internet, whether through Russian-funded news websites or social media meddling. Russian submarines snooping on undersea cables may seem unique to today’s interconnected world. Yet states have long competed to shape global information flows and control the infrastructure that enables them. U.S. submarines started to tap undersea cables decades ago. One submarine, the USS Jimmy Carter, was altered specifically for that task. Indeed, information warfare has been a feature of the international system for at least a century. Competition has simply shifted from the submarine copper wires and global news agencies of the late nineteenth century to the fiber-optic cables and social media of today. The crucial question, then, is not whether information warfare happens but when and why states engage in it. One of the best examples of a state seeking to influence global politics by reshaping the information landscape is Germany’s decades-long push to control world communications in the first half of the twentieth century, a campaign that I explore in my book, News from Germany. Germans had not always cared about international news. In the 1860s and 1870s, few besides Chancellor Otto von Bismarck thought that news, and control over it, had much bearing on politics at home or abroad. By the 1880s, however, attitudes were changing. German political and economic leaders, worried that imperial powers such as the United Kingdom and France were encircling and constraining Germany, started harboring imperial ambitions of their own. Like its European competitors, Germany needed a “place in the sun,” as Bernhard von Bülow, secretary of state for foreign affairs, put it in 1897. The Reich embarked on a campaign of violent colonial conquest, and ever more German elites came to see the world beyond Europe, from South America to East Asia, as a battleground for Germany’s national interests. Communications technology was central to this new imperial undertaking. Late to the European race for global domination, Germany’s elites saw their country boxed into second-class status when it came to communications. Submarine cables were privately owned by an oligopoly of Anglo-American companies, and most global news was collected by British and French news agencies. As British-German rivalry intensified at the turn of the century, Germans became increasingly convinced that the British government was using the global submarine cable system to undermine German foreign policy and turn neutral countries against it. In the late 1890s, for instance, the British government blocked a transatlantic undersea cable connecting Germany and the United States from going across British
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Since 2017, Russian submarines in the North Atlantic have reportedly been unusually active in the vicinity of undersea fiber-optic cables that carry most European and U.S. Internet traffic. It remains unclear what exactly Russia is planning or doing. soil, and in 1902 the United Kingdom completed an “All Red Route” of cables around the world that landed only on British imperial soil. World War I seemed to confirm German suspicions: one of the United Kingdom’s first acts of war was to cut most of the submarine cables connecting Germany to the rest of the world. In response, Germans seized upon a new technology with the potential to undermine the entire nineteenth-century international communications system of submarine cables and news agencies: wireless telegraphy, which sent electrical impulses through the air to convey information in Morse code. “The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand,” Albert Einstein supposedly said. “The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.” German investment in wireless technology accelerated during World War I and helped make German wireless (and later radio) among the most technologically advanced in the world. Much of this investment was aimed not at achieving technological leadership as an end in itself but at using wireless to send news from Germany to as many people around the world as possible. To this end, German elites combined technological prowess with a focus on news agencies. A distinctively modern phenomenon, these agencies had emerged in the mid–nineteenth century, partly in response to the swift spread of submarine cables. Agencies stationed correspondents around the world to gather news and telegraph it back home for newspapers to print. Because foreign correspondents and telegrams were so expensive, only a handful of news agencies existed, chief among them the British Reuters and the French Havas. They became gatekeepers, controlling the flow of information to other news organizations and, by extension, entire countries. News agencies possessed astonishing power. Only a few major papers, such as the London Times, could afford their own foreign correspondents. Many papers did not
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even station journalists in their own capital cities. In ,1926 90 percent of German newspapers had no correspondents abroad or in Berlin. Instead, they received all their national and international news through news agencies or syndicate services. Today, we worry that Facebook and Google hold monopolies over information provision. A century ago, news agencies held an arguably even greater grasp over national and international news. German politicians, industrialists, military leaders, and journalists became obsessed with news agencies as a tool to shape international politics and economics in their favor. From Wilhelmine Germany in the late 1800s through the interwar years of the Weimar Republic all the way to the Nazi era, German leaders helped create “homegrown” German news agencies, subsidized them, and sat on their boards. Wolff, the biggest of these agencies, was privately owned but consulted with the government before publishing any “questionable” news. In return, the government granted Wolff preferential access to stateowned cables. Others agencies, such as Transocean, were directly subsidized by the German state. These investments paid off, at least for a while. U.S. newspapers unwittingly printed tens of thousands of Transocean stories from 1915 to 1917, often putting a German spin on the battle reports. This ended only when the United States entered the war in April 1917 and the U.S. military took control of the wireless stations that had been receiving the German transmissions. Still, German influence persisted elsewhere. British publishing magnate Lord Northcliffe was shocked to discover in 1921 that British ships distributed wireless news from German sources to their passengers during their weekslong voyages. Nazi Germany became the leading supplier of news to Japanese-occupied China during World War II. The virulent anti-Semitism, nationalism, and jingoism of Nazi news differed dramatically from what had come
Today, we worry that Facebook and Google hold monopolies over information provision. A century ago, news agencies held an arguably even greater grasp over national and international news.
before. But its success relied upon German investment in international news networks reaching back to 1900. The German example offers two main lessons for today. First, whoever controls the relevant infrastructure can also exert influence over the data and news that flow through it. For Germany, this meant investing in new wireless technology and supporting homegrown news agencies. Today, the Chinese technology giant Huawei is aiming for global leadership in 5G, the latest generation of wireless communication. U.S. intelligence agencies have claimed that the company receives funding from several Chinese state security agencies, although Huawei has denied this. Huawei’s control may enable China to determine future technical standards and surveil data flows in ways that we cannot fully anticipate today. Second, states invest in global information networks when they aspire to a status as a global power. This was as true for Germany in the past as it is for Russia and China today. In 2000, China’s state-run broadcaster CCTV launched an English-language TV news channel and since then has continuously expanded its geographic and linguistic range. The official Chinese government news agency, Xinhua, has also increased its English-language coverage, even moving into offices near Times Square in 2011. The Russian-
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A journalist takes pictures of a projection screen prior to the start of Germany's auction for the construction of an ultra-fast 5G mobile network on March 2019 ,19 at the German Federal Network Agency (BNA, Bundesnetzagentur) in Mainz, western Germany. (Getty)
funded TV and online news network RT (formerly Russia Today) has been expanding across Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, and the St. Petersburg–based Internet Research Agency runs influence operations on social media to help Russiato project international power. Still, global competition over information is a geopolitical constant that seemed to vanish only briefly in the unipolar moment of the 1990s. Al Jazeera’s extensive coverage of the Arab Spring in 2011 seemed to herald what The Economist called the “Al Jazeera moment,” because the channel provided the best coverage of the protests despite its “tendency to inflate numbers and play down risks.” As it turned out, the Qatari state-subsidized TV channel was far from a one-off; it was the harbinger of a new era, in which many more states would once again use international media for national purposes. It is too early to tell whether these new outlets will succeed in fundamentally reshaping global news flows. But one thing is certain in today’s multipolar world: competition over communications is here to stay. *HEIDI TWOREK is Assistant Professor of History at the University of British Columbia and the author of News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1945–1900. This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.
High Angle View Of Time Displayed On Smart Phone Against Gray Background. (Getty)
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People Power Is Rising in Africa How Protest Movements Are Succeeding Where Even Global Arrest Warrants Can’t By Zoe Marks*, Erica Chenoweth*, Jide Okeke* A new tide of people power is rising in Africa. On April 2, a nonviolent resistance movement in Algeria succeeded in pressuring Abdelaziz Bouteflika to resign after 20 years as president. Nine days later, protesters in Sudan were celebrating the ouster of Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s president of 30 years, after a three-month-long uprising against his regime. The nonviolent overthrows of Bouteflika and Bashir are not aberrations. They reflect a surprising trend across the continent: despite common perceptions of Africa as wracked by violence and conflict, since 2000, most rebellions there have been unarmed and peaceful. Over the past decade, mass uprisings in Africa have accounted for one in three of the nonviolent campaigns aiming to topple dictatorships around the world. Africa has seen 25 new, nonviolent mass movements— almost twice as many as Asia, the next most active region with 16. Since the 1970s, Africa’s nonviolent uprisings
have also had the highest success rate in the world. Roughly 58 percent of the uprisings aimed at overthrowing dictatorships have succeeded, in countries as diverse as Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Madagascar, Mali, South Africa, Tunisia, Zambia, and, most recently, Algeria and Sudan. That far surpasses the success rate of 44 percent for movements against autocratic regimes in all other regions. What explains the striking effectiveness of African mass movements? One factor is Africa’s long legacy of resistance against colonial and neocolonial rule. Mahatma Gandhi, after all, laid the foundations of his civil resistance to British rule in India over 21 years organizing with migrant workers in South Africa. Contemporary African resistance movements have deep roots, from antitaxation campaigns waged in the early 1900s against British occupiers to coordinated actions to boycott apartheid-supporting businesses in 1990 South Africa. The movements in Algeria and Sudan occurred in many waves and echo past protests— in Algeria, the general strikes that occurred during the independence struggle, localized micro-riots, and national upheavals from
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Algerians gather during an anti-government demonstration in the capital Algiers on April 2019 ,26. (Getty)
2010 to 2012; and in Sudan, the 1964 and 1985 uprisings. In addition to the historical knowledge that the current generation of protesters has inherited, four other key factors underpin the success of uprisings in Africa. Activists have mobilized mass movements, harnessed women’s participation and leadership, elicited active or tacit support from military and security services, and secured regional buy-in.
THE WINNING INGREDIENTS For national movements to succeed, they must inspire mass participation that cuts across regional, generational, class, ethnic, and religious boundaries. African civil resistance has long relied on the leadership and coordinating power of professional associations, unions, and other institutions, such as churches, to communicate the principles of a movement to a wide range of
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During the past decade, mobilization has succeeded when activists have transcended their identities. participants. During Algeria’s recent uprising, a journalist and member of the book publishers’ association printed “18 commandments” for protesters to follow to ensure that the resistance remained nonviolent and effective. In Khartoum and Omdurman, the Sudanese Professionals Association brought together members of the health-care, education, and legal sectors under a nonideological banner. It also helped participants in the uprising maintain nonviolent discipline and
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speak with a unified voice. Protests in Zimbabwe against Robert Mugabe, one of Africa’s longestserving presidents, had simmered for years, but they threatened the leader only when a charismatic pastor, Evan Mawarire, began mobilizing professionals and young people. These efforts animated over a year of protests by veterans, churchgoers, lawyers, the working poor, and others, ultimately toppling Mugabe in 2017. During the past decade, mobilization has succeeded when activists have transcended their identities. With 62 percent of Africa’s population under the age of 25, successful coalitions have hinged on mobilizing youth support, as in Senegal’s Y’en a Marre movement (2011) and Burkina Faso’s Balai Citoyen (2013). In Algeria, young people have filled the streets protesting unemployment, but so, too, have their parents and grandparents, who want better futures for their children. Underpinning these successes has been the prominent role of women organizing, leading, and joining resistance activities. As half of the population, women must participate if a mass movement is to work. But they have done more than simply show up: their leadership has added political legitimacy to protests, enhanced credibility to calls for nonpartisan unity, and reinforced the importance of nonviolent tactics. Iconic images from both Sudan and Algeria have featured young women dancing and reciting poetry, calling on demonstrators to celebrate and unite in the face of dictatorship. In Sudan, -22year-old Alaa Salah, who was dubbed the
What explains the striking effectiveness of African mass movements? One factor is Africa’s long legacy of resistance against colonial and neo-colonial rule.
protests’ “Nubian queen,” described her resistance as motivated by patriotism, not politics. Women also joined Algeria’s protests on an unprecedented scale and held key leadership positions in the cross-party Citizen movement. Elsewhere on the continent, women have revitalized historically innovative tactics, such as deploying public nudity during environmental movements in Kenya, protesting for peace in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and pressuring Côte d’Ivoire’s former president to step down. In Zimbabwe, Women of Zimbabwe Arise had been organizing demonstrations against Robert Mugabe’s corruption and repression since the early 2000s, long before the protests that helped lead to his overthrow. And women have led
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Sudanese protesters chant slogans as they gather near the military headquarters in the capital Khartoum, during a rally on April 2019 ,27. (Getty)
efforts to meet protesters’ basic needs: take, for example, the grandmother in Khartoum who has coordinated volunteers to provide over 2,000 meals a day at the sit-in. Protests, however large and inclusive, often struggle to elicit immediate change unless economic elites, civilian bureaucrats, and security forces stop protecting the status quo. For instance, security forces might signal non-cooperation with the regime by throwing down their arms, refusing to report for duty, ignoring orders to fire on demonstrators, or even defending protesters against repression. The Sudanese military, which was closely aligned with Bashir, chose to protect protesters in the streets of Khartoum from Janjaweed militias (the groups notorious for their
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role in the Darfur genocide) and other security forces, even as protesters occupied military headquarters. In this case, the military’s loyalty shifted from the bottom up: foot soldiers were siding with protesters on the street several days before top generals convened a midnight meeting to oust Bashir from office. In Sudan, the opposition has continued massive protests and walkouts even after Bashir’s resignation and quickly announcing plans for a civilian transitional leadership council. Protesters in Algeria have applied similar pressure to their transition leaders and have turned their attention to perceived corruption in Bouteflika’s elite inner circle while they await details on civilian transition plans.
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As protests persist and pressure mounts, regional actors play a bigger role in facilitating peaceful transitions and consolidating popular demands for democracy. The African Union (AU) champions democratic governance, but it has responded inconsistently to nonviolent resistance. The African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, which came into force in 2012, rejects unconstitutional changes of government. This prevents the AU from explicitly endorsing popular protests as a legitimate basis for political transitions. As a result of this enforced neutrality, the AU failed in its attempt to intervene in the 2015 Burundi crisis owing to the controversial reelection of President Pierre Nkurunziza for a third term. The AU also sent mixed messages in the 2018 electoral protests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and has turned a blind eye to ongoing protests in Cameroon as well as recent austerity protests in Chad. Yet the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance clearly spells out what should follow leadership changes induced by mass mobilization: a swift transition to democratic elections, with respect and protections for human rights. As a result, the AU has sided with the Algerian and Sudanese people in the aftermath of their movements’ victories, calling for civilian-led transitions to democratic rule in both countries. This recent shift toward unequivocal support for civilian rule from the AU is significant because it signals consolidation of democratic norms on the continent, even (perhaps especially) without U.S. and European interventions to that end. Subregional groups have been even more influential than the AU in consolidating political gains achieved through nonviolent resistance. Mass protests in Côte d’Ivoire in 2011, Burkina Faso in 2014, and The Gambia in 2016 initiated political transitions partly because of mediation by the leaders of the Economic Community of West African States. Key allies and institutions that prop up autocrats can also play a decisive role by withdrawing their support. For instance, the Southern Africa Development Community’s decision not to defend Mugabe during the
protests was crucial for the political transition in Zimbabwe.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE Civil resistance campaigns in Africa don’t always succeed. Recent pro-democracy movements in Cameroon and Togo have so far led only to violent government crackdowns. And even when civil resistance works in the short term, the new system sometimes falls short of delivering real change. In South Africa, for example, many observers complain that although legal apartheid ended in 1994, inequality, segregation, and racism persist.
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Lawyers of the Law Society of Zimbabwe bar association take part in a "March for Justice" toward the Constitutional Court in Harare on January 2019 ,29, to call for restoration of the rule of law, respect of human rights as well as the country's Constitution. (Getty)
Yet the historical record provides reason for cautious optimism. In Africa more than anywhere else in the world, civil resistance campaigns outperform armed struggle. And nonviolent movements generally lead to higher-quality democracies in the long term. International actors and regional organizations, such as the African Union and its nine constituent subregional communities, have an important role to play in denouncing the repression of peaceful protesters, protecting democratic institutions and human rights, and helping consolidate transitions to democracy. External actors should not subvert or co-opt popular protests—but they can support
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their aspirations for democracy and respect for human rights. *ZOE MARKS is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and member of the Harvard Center for African Studies Executive Committee. *JIDE OKEKE is a Mason Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. *ERICA CHENOWETH is Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. This article was ForeignAffairs.com.
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Issue 1746 - May - 03/05/2019
Emperor Akihito:Japan’s Post War Emperor Abdicates His Thrown www.majalla.com
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Eyebrow Culture The Mysteries of the Modern Brow By Bryn Haworth For some time now, I’ve been preoccupied with eyebrows in a way few men have ever been. Not since the obsessive young man described in Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy, As You Like It, has anyone been more obsessed than me. It’s not the case that I want to pen woeful ballads on the subject; I’m simply obsessed with finding out what has happened to the eyebrows I once knew. As is so often the way with obsessions, I can date the birth of this one with precision. It happened during a period of freak weather we had in February. It was an unseasonably warm afternoon and I was in a brightly sunlit room, ordering lunch. As I did so, I glanced at the waitress. She was young, smartly dressed and her manners were impeccable. She took my order with an amiable smile. But the sad fact is, I would certainly recall nothing about her now, were it not for her eyebrows.
They had something about them that disturbed me, these eyebrows. They were not of a kind I had ever set eyes on before. I had the strange sensation they were not even hers. Of course, they were hers, they didn’t float disembodied in space, but they had an alien quality nonetheless, like the unidentified alien objects of yesteryear, and also something suggestive of a robot. She was a young woman, but mortal. Her eyebrows, on the other hand, seemed to have an immortal quality, as if they would outlast the human condition. They were like an uncanny glimpse of the future. Ever since seeing that waitress’s eyebrows, I have sought to explain them, but it has not been easy. No man, least of all an English man, can walk into an establishment like the one we have here, called Brow Buzz, and ask one of the women to explain the modern eyebrow. It’s as if there is some unwritten etiquette that forbids such an enquiry. I might as well walk into one of
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the numerous nail parlours and demand to know if they really launder money there. Such things are like the Masonic secrets of the opposite sex. But somebody knows, I thought. Somebody could explain those eyebrows, how they are made, and why, and whether there are more on the way. As it turned out, there were more on the way. Once one has noticed a thing, one tends to see it everywhere. Ever since that initial sighting, I have seen countless other examples. It’s exactly as if the dirty secret of places like Buzz Brow is this: that they are mass-producing eyebrows. Like Bond villains, these eyebrows will gradually take over the faces of half the world, attacking Bond where it hurts most, by targeting Bond girls. It’s a dastardly plan. These eyebrows are already obliterating the unique beauty of every face they settle on. The entirety of womankind will one day be overwhelmed by them. Every face will have frightening eyebrows that are out of proportion with the rest of the face, dominating their surroundings, until they merge into one huge monobrow of Frida Kahlo proportions. I knew it was already perfectly possible to see eyebrows like that roaming abroad, unhindered, a fact for which I held Cara Delevingne chiefly to blame. Yet the eyebrows I saw on that unseasonably warm February afternoon were not bushy; they were exaggeratedly modelled, as if painted on. Not a single hair was out of place. What could it all mean?
HIGH BROW CULTURE Mona Lisa Eyebrows.
She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. These are the words Walter Pater used to describe the sublime Gioconda at the end of the nineteenth century. Very poetic, of course, but did he really see all that? She has such a kindly demeanour, nothing like a vampire, and what about that smile? It seems odd, to say the least, that Pater doesn’t even mention the most remarkable thing about this portrait. Perhaps he was unable to see her properly, owing to size of the crowd of admirers that day. If he had managed to elbow his way to the front, he might have observed that she comes across as benign, mildmannered, even funny. She sits there, quite prim, yet her smile is a candid one. She’s not what you might call a stunner, but she’s definitely not ugly. She has no moustache for a start; that was a mischievous addition the Dadaists came up with. Her nose is long, but shapely. A fetching sfumato effect hovers about her features and she has (not so often remarked upon) no eyebrows. Say what you like about her, no one could call Mona Lisa ‘supercilious’. Only a nutcase could suspect that she smiles like that – without bearing
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The Louvre is a big place, but she is incredibly easy to track down, since no work of art in the entire building has her ability to draw a crowd. You know you’ve found her even before you see her face. her teeth – to conceal fangs. On a visit to the Louvre in Paris recently, I decided to head straight for Mona Lisa. I wanted to home in on the pièce de résistance. Nothing less than the ‘vampire’ herself would do, so I hurtled through the galleries with indecent haste. The Louvre is a big place, but she is incredibly easy to track down, since no work of art in the entire building has her ability to draw a crowd. You know you’ve found her even before you see her face. You might even find her, as Walter apparently did, without getting to see her face. She is like that black hole the astronomers have recently managed to photograph – all you get to see is the event horizon, by which I mean the throng of people standing around her in rapt homage, careless of the danger of being sucked in. I say ‘rapt’, but maybe I’m remembering a different crowd – the one that used to assemble around her in the days before the smart phone. Today’s digital crowd are there, in the room, with the Gioconda, but they do not have the same reverential attitude as the analogue crowd – their parents – used to have. Some of the digitals are holding their gadgets up and pointing them at her. Others hold theirs up too, but are facing in the opposite direction. Given how far some of these people are from their points of origin, you might think they would be slaves to the glamour of the masterpiece. She was painted hundreds of years ago, after all. She once smiled down from Napoleon’s bedroom wall. Her fame is such that, when they came to bestow some of their glitter upon her, she put Beyoncé and her husband in the shade. Notwithstanding, the digital crowd turn their backs on her to take pictures of themselves standing in her presence, and by this gesture they tell us how truly dispossessed of glamour she has become. Not only is she reproduced on a mass scale, as we already knew, but she is reduced to an ornament in the background, behind other smiling people who are themselves reproduced on an unimaginable scale. She is beamed across the world in all directions, in an instant, a failed Renaissance photobomber peeking between more glamorous modern faces on Instagram. She comes across as dowdy and awkward. She looks out of place, even in what is uniquely her place. Maybe she should have shown her teeth, applied some makeup, prepared herself properly for the big occasion. She should have done more to appear ‘on fleek’. But that is the sad reality: Mona Lisa was always going to have a problem making a splash these days. It all
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comes down to her lack of eyebrows.
EYEBROWS IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPROUCTION In Western society, women have long been on the receiving end of embarrassing amounts of praise. The tendency to depict them as goddesses goes back at least as far as Neolithic times. The versions favoured by the ancient Greeks were not so curvaceous, but they eventually prevailed over the more generously proportioned ideals of the cavemen. During the Renaissance, this trend got a huge boost from the Italians, and specifically from Sandro Botticelli, whose svelte Venus stands on a big shell which is borne to the shore at Cyprus on a crest of foam. It’s one of the most familiar images of all time, therefore it’s quite unnecessary to reproduce the whole thing here. Besides, for the purposes of my theme, I intend to approach her warily, training my gaze exclusively on her eyebrows. In a recent tour of Italy, Francesco da Mosto, strode right up to Botticelli’s Venus with total fearlessness. No iconic, universally famous beauty was going to frighten him. ‘Francesco’, as his adoring fans like to call him, is an enthusiast who excels in introducing the English-speaking world to the manifold delights of the dolce vita. He pootles around the Italian peninsula in his little car, singing operatic arias badly to himself, in a perpetual state of ecstasy at the food, the surroundings, the weather, you name it, that his beautiful country has to offer, exactly as if the tourism industry had yet to get wind of the place. It’s no surprise, therefore, that when confronted with the Venus on a wall in the Uffizi, Francesco immediately begins to gush about her charms. Men’s attitudes in Italy are not so guarded as they are in contemporary Britain. Italian men who are possessed of oldworld charm are as common there as intact medieval villages, whereas they are, it goes without saying, rare to the point of extinction on Britain’s inhospitable, tongue-tied shores. A certain kind of Italian man makes it his solemn duty to prove that the age of chivalry is not dead. He will greet a woman by kissing
the upper part of her hand, an action not seen in Britain since the dawn of the Reformation. Thus, when confronted with the very symbol of feminine beauty, Francesco does not hold back. He confesses she is undoubtedly the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, then checks himself and says “Apart from my wife, of course.” Just look at her ever-so-slightly tilted face, he continues, her long neck, her elegant contrapposto posture. He simply cannot overstate her inexpressible beauty. “She is made for pleasure!” he concludes. She is made for pleasure. Would it sound coy if I confessed that I don’t really know what this means? Because the obvious question here is whose pleasure we’re talking about exactly, her own, or that of Francesco? To be charitable to the Italian gallant, the answer would probably be a bit of both, but scratch a chivalrous gentleman and you’ll find a potential Berlusconi, avid to attend the nearest bunga-bunga party. Maybe that’s just me being cynical. Besides, I don’t want to stray too far from the issue at hand, and therefore, confronted in my turn by the allure of Botticelli’s goddess, I shall quickly pass over the matter of her nakedness, or the fact that she is born fully post-pubescent. I shall even ignore the obvious improbability of surfing the waves on a giant scallop shell. Seafood – need I say more? Instead, like some blushing schoolboy who just walked in on the girl he worships in a state of undress, I shall avert my eyes and talk about something that cannot be considered illicit or saucy in any way, and which I dare say has never been mentioned before about Botticelli’s Venus. I mean, of course, her eyebrows. Unlike Mona Lisa, Venus has eyebrows. Quite ordinary eyebrows at that. Anyone with the faintest claim to expertise on the matter of eyebrows can see that hers are unremarkable. They are slightly squared at the nose end and, after describing a graceful arch, they taper slightly at the temples.
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Venus Eyebrows.
Naomi Wolf Eyebrows.
These are not the kind of eyebrows to go viral. One wonders, frankly, who her influencers were. They are so understated, it’s hard to believe the people of her day ever appreciated eyebrows on a woman. Easier to assume that, when they looked at Botticelli’s eyebrows, men would sigh like a Shakespearian furnace, but for all the wrong reasons: “I’d prefer them nonexistent, like Leonardo’s.” Now, two thirds of me belongs to a different century; the one just gone feels spookily present sometimes, like the phantom
Walter Benjamin Eyebrows.
limb of an amputee. Being a visitor from the past, I decided to consult a book for enlightenment. If beauty was my enigma, then I wondered if Walter Benjamin could help. He was that rare thing, after all, a Marxist who was also an aesthete. The question of lost aura was one that had first occurred to him back in the interwar years when, faced with the triumph of photography and film, he foresaw the plight of Mona Lisa. Aura was his word for the uniqueness of the art work. It also suggested a mystique of some kind, and a tradition that attached to its passage through time, the sort of thing Walter Pater was getting at. This was all there in the artefact. It had started as a cult object, put to use in rituals. Then it became more secular and appeared in exhibitions. Finally, the masses had got hold of it, robbing the artwork of uniqueness through endless reproductions. In this way, the aura was dissipated. Mona Lisa acquired a moustache and was exposed to the indignities of mass reproduction. Benjamin might not have seen it coming, but Instagram would deplete the aura even further, emptying every last bit of it out of the image, which is why the crowds in front of Mona Lisa were distracted, by their own faces mostly, and bored by the real thing. She had become more familiar than their own faces. They’d seen her to the point where they could no longer see her, and familiarity had bred contempt. I reread the famous essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, but I was disappointed. Despite his best efforts, Benjamin had allowed the whole mystery to slip from his grasp. Having seen the aura, he seemed to lose sight of it himself, and got carried away with ever more baroque observations on the nature of film. I would have responded in a melodramatic manner, tossing the book aside with disgust, had I not been reading the whole thing on a computer screen.
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Instead, it was to my memory of Benjamin that I went for enlightenment, and two things I recalled from his personal reflections, though I had to trawl my unreliable memory to find them. The first was a marvellous line from his reminiscences of Berlin, when he spoke of trying not to look at beautiful women he saw in the park as he didn’t wish to intrude on their beauty, or something of this kind, and how the sidelong glimpses he caught inevitably led to the repeated experience of ‘love at last sight’. The second was his admission, somewhere, that it was the blemish on the beloved’s face that made it beautiful for the lover. This was the holy grail. Beyond the mass production of the cosmetics industry, in the realms of actual beauty, the aura lived on in the individuality of a loved face, and not in its perfection, but in its imperfection, resided the attraction. I tried to hunt this little aperçu down, but in vain; it was lost forever in the old century along with two thirds of my person. But he’d said it, I knew he’d said it, somewhere. So, duly placated, I went back to the essay on reproduction and turning to the sixth section, instantly found this: In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty. Bingo! That Walter Benjamin, he always comes up with the goods. The cult, and the aura it bequeathed to the image, may have deserted Mona Lisa, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t still be found, not in Snapchat perhaps, or any platform that erases the image soon after its conception, but in the good old traditional selfie.
PERFECTION By now hungry for knowledge, like a crazed thing I decided to consult another book, this time in actual hard copy. It was not as incredibly old as Benjamin’s essay, but still, at some thirty years old, it belonged to an age before those with the questionable eyebrows were even a glint in their parents’ eyes. The book was Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, first published in 1991, and it contained some difficult home truths on the role of men in the rigours of female beauty – so difficult that, as a man, I began to wonder if my curiosity about the appearance of modern women was part of the problem. Wolf sees the insistent demand to be beautiful as the revenge Western men have taken on women’s emancipation. ‘It is hard to love a jailer,’ she says, referring to a time when these men kept women indoors, as housewives and child minders, ‘But it is not much easier to love a judge’. What right had I to set myself up as a judge of the contemporary beauty, especially as, like a real-life
judge, I was grotesquely old? The book maintains that women are so oppressed by judgement of this kind that they’ll try anything to appease it, through tattoos, extreme diets, rhinoplasty, yet in a man’s world only the male is ever perfect. The female is left to wrestle with her imperfections, dressing and applying makeup, battling her age, seeing herself perpetually through the eyes of men – what Wolf calls inside-out eroticism – and imprisoned in the Iron Maiden of society’s preordained notions of attractiveness. That Iron Maiden made me wary. The idea recurred throughout the book; there was even a sub-section entitled The Iron Maiden Breaks Free, which sounded very gothic. It was definitely an instrument of torture or execution, possibly of German origin, but having seen one in a castle in Bohemia I couldn’t recall any resemblance to: a body-shaped casket painted with the limbs and features of a lovely, smiling young woman. The unlucky victim was slowly enclosed inside her; the lid fell shut to immobilise the victim […] The modern hallucination in which women are trapped or trap themselves is similarly rigid, cruel, and euphemistically painted (p. 17) It sounded a bit like the waitress, yet the Iron Maiden I’d seen was a very drab mechanism, a metal box with spikes on the inside. Oddly enough, this more delectable model really does seem to have been the author’s hallucination. The words ‘in which women are trapped or trap themselves’ are a bit of a giveaway too. Who in their right mind would ever climb into one of these things voluntarily? It would be churlish, however, to argue with the book’s basic premise: that beauty is an imposition, and that women feel obliged to live up to its standards, imposed through a constant stream of images, many of them altered to achieve unreal perfection. She complains that …we as women are trained to see ourselves as cheap imitations of fashion photographs, rather than seeing fashion photographs as cheap imitations of women (p. 105) Nowhere in The Beauty Myth is there anything to suggest that women have been told about the lovable ‘blemish’ mentioned by Walter Benjamin. On the contrary, if he pointed it out, they would probably act swiftly to remove it long before Walter got a chance to pay a shy compliment. There are different ideas of beauty in different societies. It’s well known that, for certain tribes in Africa, a plate in the lower lip or hoops around the neck are considered alluring. The effect
is the same, however. Women are expected to go through pain or inconvenience in pursuit of the ‘perfection’ that beauty entails. This struggle to conform can easily lead to the horrors of anorexia and plastic surgery. The perceived blemish can be the source of body dysmorphia, which in its most extreme manifestations has led to suicide. A passage describing a visit to a department store nicely illustrates the wider problem of striving for perfection. A woman enters the store from the street, … looking no doubt very mortal, her hair windblown, her own face visible. To reach the cosmetics counter, she must pass a deliberately disorienting prism of mirrors, lights, and scents (p. 107) Already in an advanced state of sensory overload, she looks about her: On either side […] are ranks of angels […] the “perfect” faces of the models on display. Behind them, across a liminal counter in which is arranged the magic that will permit her to cross over, lit from below, stands the guardian angel. The saleswoman is human, she knows, but “perfected” like the angels around her, from whose ranks she sees her own “flawed” face, reflected back and shut out. Disoriented within the man-made heaven of the store, she can’t focus on what makes the live and pictured angels seem similarly “perfect”: that they are both lacquered in heavy paint […] the mortal world disintegrates in her memory at the shame of feeling so out of place among all the ethereal objects. Put in the wrong, the shopper longs to cross over. Beauty, in this context, is synonymous with perfection. The drive is to achieve the perfect look, a drive that seemingly exceeds the rewards of love and sex. It’s a drive to belong, even to join the ranks of the blessed. If heaven, as the song says, is a place where ‘nothing ever happens,’ then that is part of the appeal, for here in this heaven the ‘shopper’ will no longer have to strive for the right look; she will have crossed over. Sadly, this heavenly state is not for mere mortals and things will inevitably happen, hence the continuing agony. Could the problem be something to do with the ‘man-made’ nature of this heaven? With the advent of plastic surgery, the true dystopia has begun. Women are no longer painted by male artists, nor always content with self-painting. Instead, they stand on the brink of being sacrificed to technology and going from ‘woman-made women’ to ‘man-made women’. Wolf tells us that at least one surgeon has totally reconstructed his own wife. Virtual reality
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Instagram Eyebrows.
and photographic imaging will, she thinks, ‘make “perfection” increasingly surreal’. She says surgeons in Los Angeles have already developed and implanted transparent skin through which the inner organs can be seen, opening up the possibility of ‘the ultimate voyeurism.’ Each to their own, I suppose. Or perhaps not. There are times when the apocalyptic imagination can get a little, shall we say, hyperbolic. According to Wolf, we should really know by now, as the ‘millennium of the man-made woman will be upon us.’
ON FLEEK
Though the new millennium of the see-through ‘man-made woman’ has not come to pass, the age of the geek-made woman is well and truly upon us. On 23 January 2019, Elle Hunt reported in ‘The Guardian’ about the injurious effects of certain filters people were using to adjust images of themselves. These filters would change their complexion, alter the line of the jaw, smooth out any rucks in the facial carpet and enlarge the eyes. Those who suffered from a tendency to see every slight imperfection as a problem would then have a perfect image to send to potential suitors, only subsequently to disappoint the aforesaid suitors in the flesh. Some, to avoid such calamities, would even seek the help of surgeons: The phenomenon of people requesting procedures to resemble their digital image has been referred to – sometimes flippantly, sometimes as a harbinger of end times – as “Snapchat dysmorphia”. The term was coined by the cosmetic doctor Tijion Esho, founder of Esho clinics in London and Newcastle. He had noticed that where patients had once brought in pictures of celebrities with their ideal nose or jaw, they were now pointing to photos of themselves. While some used their selfies – typically edited with Snapchat or the airbrushing app Facetune – as a guide, others would say, “‘I want to actually look like this’, with the large eyes and the pixel-perfect skin,” says Esho. “And that’s an unrealistic, unattainable thing.” The basic error here is the insistence on one’s appearance being perfect, as if there was a manual somewhere entitled The Vitruvian Woman. One wonders when perfection ever got confounded with beauty. Nowadays, would Marilyn Monroe be allowed to keep the mole on her left cheek? Of course not, and by the way, she looked incredibly overweight in that pink number she wore in ‘Some Like It Hot’. No wonder she always ended up with the fuzzy end of the lollipop, her eyebrows were way
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Nowadays, would Marilyn Monroe be allowed to keep the mole on her left cheek? Of course not, and by the way, she looked incredibly overweight in that pink number she wore in ‘Some Like It Hot’. too fuzzy. Which brings me, by circuitous route, back to the topic I began with. Foolish of me to seek an explanation in books. Who reads them nowadays? One should always go to the most likely source, and the source of all insight is geek, especially for a living fossil such as myself, still capable on a daily basis of suddenly feeling I’ve been plucked from the depths of the sea (I’m thinking coelacanth, otherwise classified as ‘curmudgeon’), gasping for breath in the rarefied cultural atmosphere of our times. Go to the source. So, I went to the source. Having chanced on the phrase ‘Instagram eyebrows’, I simply googled the phrase. The sensation was not unlike the one Ali Baba must have felt when he discovered a cave full of gold and precious jewels. There before me, in innumerable duplicates, were the eyebrows of my amiable waitress. There also, for this is social media we’re talking about, were numerous comments on the same, some laudatory, others denunciatory, a whole debate out there on whether to pluck, tattoo, thread, paint, manicure or otherwise customise one’s eyebrows. But there was one video on YouTube that clinched the whole matter for me. A girl with somewhat Japanese features, unless that was my imagination, but a very broad Northern British accent, was giving a tutorial on how to create neater eyebrows and transforming her own from ‘sparse’ to ‘selfie-worthy’. What she meant, of course, was on fleek. For lo, thy brow will be fainter at the nose end, and thicken even as it tapers towards the temple, for verily I say unto you (this is where it starts to get complicated, but in the immortal words of one Peaches Monroee): “We in dis bitch, finna get crunk, eyebrows on fleek, dafuq.”
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Emperor Akihito:Japan’s Post War Emperor Abdicates His Thrown By: Ali El Shamy Illustration by Ali Minadalou 1. Early Life Akihito was born on December 1933 ,23 to Emperor Shōwa (Hirohito) and Empress Kōjun in the Tokyo Imperial Palace. Despite the fact that he was their fifth child, Akihito became the heir to throne, since he was their first son and the laws of succession indicated that only a male can become Japan’s emperor. 2. World War II: A New Start for Japan and Akihito During the Second World War, Akihito and his younger brother were evacuated out of Tokyo and were sent north to Nikko to escape American bombardment. After the war, the US briefly occupied Japan. During the occupation, Japan signed a new constitution which stripped the Emperor from most of his powers. Almost instantly, the Emperor lost his divinity and his father, Emperor Hirohito, attempted to change the image of the monarchy. Considering emulating Britain’s constitutional monarchy, Hirohito hired Elizabeth Gray Vining, an American librarian and author, to teach Akihito English and Western customs. The Prince would later go to Tokyo’s Gakushuin University to study Political Science, though he never finished his degree. In 1951, he formally became the crown prince of Japan. 3. Love at first Serve One of the Crown Prince’s favorite pastimes was playing tennis, but on one fateful day the
court would become more than just an arena for competitive sport. In the summer of 1957, Akihito was at a tennis court in Karuizawa, Nagano where he met with a young woman named Michiko Shōda. Despite the fact that Michiko was a commoner, Akihito fell in love with her and they started dating. In addition to her status as a commoner, Michiko hailed from a Catholic background and as such some traditionalists opposed the prospect of the crown prince marrying her. However, love would overcome these challenges as their engagement was approved in 1958 and they were married in 1959, thereby making Akihito the first crown prince to marry a commoner. 4. Emperor to the People In 1989, Akihito’s father passed away and he subsequently ascended to the throne. As emperor and empress, Akihito and Michiko continued Hirohito’s legacy of bringing the throne closer to the people. To do that, they made frequent visits to Japanese cities and towns and met with the people living there. More importantly, they often visited victims of natural disasters. In 1991, a volcanic eruption happened in Nagasaki. Afterwards, the Emperor and Empress visited the victims in plain clothes and knelt down to the victims, such actions were unprecedented and unheard of; however the people and media of Japan loved it. They made a similar visit in 2011 after the earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima, and scenes of the royal couple’s softly speaking to the victims and comforting them became part of their lasting legacy.
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5. Emperor of Reconciliation Unlike Germany, Japan doesn’t view its atrocities during the war with the same attitude of remorse. Although, Akihito was forbidden from making political statements, he often visited countries that fell victim to Imperial Japan’s wrath and carefully chose words that expressed regret for Japan’s actions during the war, many of said actions were done in his father’s name. For instance, he would often visit China and Indonesia and during one of his visits to the former he praised Chinese culture pointing out its influences on Japan’s culture. In 2015, during the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, he made a speech in which he expressed Japan’s “deep selfcriticism”. 6. Abdication of the Throne In 2016, word got around that the Emperor had the intention to abdicate the throne, something that had not happened since 1817. Later that year, the Emperor made a televised appearance where he spoke of his old age and declining health which led more to believe that his abdication was imminent. In 2017, Japan’s National Diet (its legislature) issued a bill that would allow the emperor to give up his throne for his eldest son, Crown Prince Naruhito. Thus, after months of preparations, Akihito formally abdicated his throne on April 2019 ,30 and Naruhito was crowned as the new Emperor of Japan. Now Naruhito has big shoes to fill as his father left a lasting legacy that will be remembered throughout Japanese history.
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Needling Your Way to Healthier Skin Once Viewed with Skepticism, Microneedling Can Be an Effective Procedure to Improve the Skin Harvard Health If the idea of poking yourself in the face with tiny needles in hopes of improving your skin sounds a little bizarre to you, you’re not alone. For years, the medical establishment looked at the practice, known as microneedling, with a leery side-eye. “I didn’t take it seriously until relatively recently,” says Dr. Kenneth Arndt, medical editor of the Harvard Special Health Report Skin Care and Repair and a founding editorial board member of the Harvard Health Letter. Microneedling, also referred to as percutaneous collagen
induction, was first described in the literature in 1995. In recent years, not only has the technique gained acceptance, but it appears to have secured a place alongside mainstream treatments designed to improve the skin’s condition and appearance. “In the last three to five years, there’s been a lot more information, interest, and studies documenting what microneedling can do, as well as a lot of commercial development,” says Dr. Arndt. Microneedling has also grabbed the attention of consumers. “I think this is largely driven by social media, which makes procedures once hidden behind a physician’s office doors
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now widely visible,” says Dr. Johanna Riesel, a clinical resident in plastic surgery at Harvard Medical School.
HEALING INJURY Skin microneedling uses pen-shaped or roller devices armed with fine needles to make minuscule, evenly spaced punctures in the skin. The small wounds created by the needling devices, which sometimes allow a pinprick of blood to rise to the surface, induce the skin to start a wound healing response. The body rushes to patch up the injury by growing fresh collagen and elastin, says Dr. Arndt. Collagen and elastin are what give your skin its strength and ability to stretch and make it appear more youthful. Microneedling is what is referred to as a type of fractional treatment, in which only a fraction of the surface of the skin is affected, leaving skin unharmed around each microwound. This allows for rapid healing and a short recovery time associated with the procedure, says Dr. Arndt. “In our practice, we use microneedling primarily to treat fine lines and wrinkles, in particular perioral wrinkles, which are vertical lines that form around the mouth,” says Dr. Arndt. It is also sometimes used in combination with other skin treatments. The healing response triggered by the treatment can also improve scarring, including acne scars, and help reverse skin damage from the sun, says Dr. Arndt. It’s sometimes used along with topical medicines and light to treat actinic keratoses, crusty precancerous lesions caused by sun exposure. There has been some anecdotal evidence that microneedling may be useful in combating hyperpigmentation, including difficult-to-treat dark patches known as melasma, but research is lacking to back up these reports, says Dr. Arndt. Others claim success in using the treatment to help to regrow hair in people in people with early balding. More studies are needed to determine how well microneedling works on various conditions, says Dr. Riesel.
THE PROS AND CONS OF MICRONEEDLING In addition to stimulating the body to produce new collagen and elastin, microneedling can also provide a means of getting therapeutic products through the skin barrier, where they can work more efficiently, says Dr. Arndt. This is not only a benefit of microneedling, but also a caution. Applying potentially toxic substances to microneedled skin can enable them to be absorbed throughout the body and cause harmful reactions, so make sure you use only treatments that your doctor has specifically approved for this purpose. Over all, microneedling treatments are considered very safe, and there have been few reports of adverse events
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Skin microneedling uses pen-shaped or roller devices armed with fine needles to make minuscule, evenly spaced punctures in the skin. related to the practice, says Dr. Arndt. It’s also well tolerated by most skin types, including darker skin, and is typically less expensive than other similar treatments, such as laser surgery, he says. Microneedling can be uncomfortable, so your doctor may apply a topical anesthetic before treatment. Microneedling is not a quick fix. Changes with microneedling take time, because your body is actually repairing itself and growing new tissue. Most people will also need a series of treatments — typically at least two or three, but potentially as many as six, spaced four to six weeks apart — to get the desired result. And microneedling won’t likely produce dramatic results, but rather mild to moderate improvements. Studies show that people themselves and objective viewers report seeing a %45 to %55 improvement to the skin six to 12 weeks after a microneedling treatment, says Dr. Arndt.
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Messi Joins the 600 Goals Club
The Argentine’s Incredible Free Kick Against Liverpool Proves to be a Great Milestone
By Ali El Shamy
Pele and of course his longtime rival Cristiano Ronaldo.
On May 2019 ,1, the much anticipated semi-final first leg between Barcelona and Liverpool came underway. Despite Barcelona’s 0-1 lead in the first half, both sides looked equally capable of winning and Liverpool started the second half strong implementing its high press game. However, a defensive blunder saw Messi score his 599th goal for Barcelona and a free kick in the last 10 minutes of the game gave Messi the opportunity to hit that 600 goal milestone, an opportunity he took with brave confidence and determination. Now Messi is in an elite club of players who scored 600 goals or more during their club careers, as he joined the likes of Puskas, Bican, Gerd Muller, Romario,
Joseph Bican
Joseph Bican was a Czechoslovakian footballer who had a long illustrious career spanning from 1928 to 1955. Bican played in many clubs throughout his career, but he spent most of his time with Slavia Prague having played there from 1937 to 1948. While playing for Prague, he bagged 395 goals and while his other goals came from his time with other clubs such as Rapid Vienna and Farbenlutz. Bican allegedly scored a total of 607 club goals for club, but statistics coming from the early to mid20-th century are a bit controversial since people would rely on dubious methods, such as word of mouth and counting goals not
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In 2009, Cristiano Ronalo moved to Real Madrid where he won two Spanish Leagues, two Spanish Cups and four Champions Leagues and scored 450 goals for the Spanish giants. beautiful” scored during a football year. He started his career in Budapest Honved, where he scored at least 358 goals and then moved to Real Madrid where he scored at least 156 goals. Once again, if you count goals scored during friendlies, then his tally would reach the 600 mark, but UEFA officially recognizes 517 senior level goals scored throughout his career.
Pele
Before the Messi-Ronaldo debate, there was the PeleMaradona debate. Pele played his first world cup as a 17 year old in the 1958 Brazil World Cup squad, and would be a key player in the nation’s first ever world cup victory. He would win the World Cup again with Brazil in 1962 and 1970, respectively. Pele spent most of his club career playing for the Brazilian team Santos FC, where he played from 1956 to 1974. He then moved to the now defunct American club called the New York Cosmos where he would end his career. Again his club goal scoring record should be taken with a grain of salt, since friendlies and word of mouth is used to verify his record. Some records cite that he scored 619 to 650 goals, 541 of them being league goals.
Gerd Muller Lionel Messi of Barcelona celebrates after scoring his team's third goal during the UEFA Champions League Semi Final first leg match between Barcelona and Liverpool at the Nou Camp on May 2019 ,01 in Barcelona, Spain. (Getty)
in top tier league matches (i.e. friendlies), for recording goals. However, UEFA is certain that he scored at least 518 league goals throughout his career.
Ferenc Puskas
Hungarian Ferenc Puskas, along with Pele, was one of the most prolific player from the mid-twentieth century. He was known as a goal scoring prodigy and is cited by the International Federation of Football History & Statistics (IFFHS), as the greatest goal scorer in the twentieth century. He is also the only player in history to score seven goals in one match, in three different occasions. As such, it should be no surprise that he is the namesake of the FIFA Puskas award which recognizes the “most
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Widely regarded as one of the legends of German football, Muller started his career with the German club TSV 1861 Nördlingen, where he scored 51 goals. He would then move to Bayern Munich, where he scored 615 goals (depending on which statistics you’re using and whether or not you’re counting friendly games or other unofficial games). He would go on to finish his career in the United States, where he played for the now defunct Fort Lauderdale Strikers scoring 38 goals for the American club.
Romario
Romario is another significant Brazilian player who is the fourth-highest goal scorer for the Brazil national team. Unlike other players on this list, Romario would spend most of his career moving to different clubs, having played for ten clubs throughout his career. He spent the
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most time with the Dutch club, PSV Eindhoven, scoring 96 goals in 107 appearances. He is recognized for scoring 694 goals throughout his career. In 2007, he sparked a bit of controversy after he and his PR team declared reaching the milestone of scoring a thousand goals for club and country after scoring a penalty for Vasco da Gama. In spite of congratulating him for the feat, FIFA officially only counts 929 career goals for the Brazilian forward, since other goals came from his time as a youth player and friendly games.
Cristiano Ronaldo
He is one half of the never ending “greatest of all time” debate. Widely regarded as a legend in his old clubs, Manchester United and Real Madrid, Cristiano Ronaldo is still playing top flight club football with the Italian club Juventus. Despite, just turning 34, he shows no signs of retiring anytime soon. Ronaldo is widely known for his intense personal drive to be one of the best in the game’s
On May 14 ,2019 ,14 years after his first club goal for Barcelona, Messi scored that incredible free kick against Liverpool to bring his club scoring record to 600 goals.
history, which has led him to go through extreme training and diet regiments. His training has paid off, since the Juventus medical staff noted that the then 33 year old had the fitness of that of a 20 year old athlete. Ronaldo started his career in the Portuguese Club, Sporting, where he scored five goals during his short tenure there. In 2003, Ronaldo played with Sporting in a friendly game against Manchester United and little did he know that one game would change his life forever. The 18 year old played his heart out against the English club, so much so that Manchester United’s scouts instantly went in to buy the teenager, and the rest is history. Ronaldo would spend 6 years with the Red Devils, scoring 118 goals while winning three premier leagues, one FA Cup and one Champions League along the way. In 2009, he moved to Real Madrid where he won two Spanish Leagues, two Spanish Cups and four Champions Leagues and scored 450 goals for the Spanish giants. In his new club, Juventus, he already scored 26 goals, bringing his whole club tally to 599 goals. Then on April 2019 ,27, Ronaldo scored the equalizing goal in a 1-1 draw against Inter Milan, thus joining the elite 600 club. However, only four days later, his rival Messi would also reach the club, albeit in a much more winning fashion.
Lionel Messi
While Ronaldo’s success is a result of an intense work ethic, Messi has a God given talent that is unrivaled by any current footballer, or any other footballer that has come before him. As a child in Argentina, Messi was already recognized as prodigy but his growth hormone deficiency would be a setback. Barcelona FC’s youth academy agreed to pay for his treatment if he moved to Spain to play for them, this would prove to be one of the best decisions the
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Cristiano Ronaldo of Juventus FC celebrate with his teammates Federico Bernardeschi and Leonardo Spinazzola after scoring a goal during the Serie A football match between Fc Internazionale and Juventus Fc. (Getty)
Brazilian professional footballer Pele pictured arriving at London airport with the
Gerd Mueller playing for Bayern Munich. (Getty)
Ferenc Puskus, Hungarian footballer who played for Honved and Real Madrid. (Getty)
Romario of PSV. (Getty)
club has ever taken. Messi made his senior debut during the 04-2003 season. He would score his first goal at the young age of 17 on May 2005 ,1 in a 0-2 win against Albacete. The one club man would go on to win a whopping 10 Spanish Leagues, 6 Spanish Cups and four Champions Leagues for the Catalan side. He also won two trebles with Barcelona during the 09-2008 season and the -2014 15 season, respectively. Even during mediocre Barcelona seasons, Messi would always find a way to shine. For instance, during the 12-2011 season, Barcelona only managed to win the Spanish cup and ended second in the
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league, but Messi scored a total of 91 goals in 69 games throughout 2012, breaking the most goals in a calendar year record set by Gerd Muller in 85( 1972 goals). Messi has also broken the highest goal scoring record in La Liga, has the most hat tricks in the Champions League (8) and has scored the most goals in the El Classico derby against Real Madrid. Then on May 14 ,2019 ,1 years after his first club goal for Barcelona, Messi scored that incredible free kick against Liverpool to bring his club scoring record to 600 goals. Some might say he was destined to reach that milestone on that fateful night.
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A Good Democracy Is Hard to Find Why Progress Takes So Long and Falls Apart So Easily
by Thomas Carothers Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien RÊgime to the Present Day. Sheri Berman. Oxford University Press, 544 .2019pp.Democracy’s global travails continue to mount. What looked as recently as a decade ago to be real democratic progress in countries as diverse as Brazil, Hungary, South Africa, and Turkey has been either reversed
by illiberal strongmen or unsettled by revelations of systemic corruption. Some of the most stirring recent political openings, such as those in Egypt and Myanmar, have slammed shut. The United States and several long-standing democracies in western Europe are struggling with serious democratic challenges, especially the rise of illiberal populist forces. And the two most significant nondemocratic powers, China and Russia, are strutting on the global stage.
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republics consolidated into liberal democracy only after World War II. Germany had to endure its own punishing odyssey before solidifying as a remarkably stable and productive democracy. Berman accounts for the United Kingdom’s exceptionally smooth transition from aristocracy to democracy by pointing to the willingness of the country’s landowning elites to cede power peacefully, albeit slowly and grudgingly. As Berman makes clear, the combination of free and fair elections, the rule of law, and widespread respect for democratic institutions that is today termed “liberal democracy” is a recent and rare achievement. From the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, European democratic strivings usually produced illiberal or electoral democracies, such as the short-lived Second French Republic (which lasted from 1848 to 1852), in which large numbers of citizens were disenfranchised or governments offered only weak protections for political and civil liberties. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that liberal democracy became common. Berman pushes hard on this point and insists on the careful use of the term “liberal democracy,” emphasizing that it does not apply to the earlier phases of European democratic life. American analysts would do well to adopt this conceptual rigor, given their habit of blithely applying the same term, “democracy,” to the system of governance maintained by the United States today and to the one that the country maintained in the nineteenth century, which excluded women, African Americans, and other groups from full citizenship.
Now, the West is in for a protracted, possibly indefinite, period of slow growth or even stagnation. It’s not clear whether the liberal democratic consensus can withstand the inevitable public anger and alienation that will result.
If liberal democracy is recent and exceptional, what makes it possible? Despite popular fascination with political leaders, the process that produces liberal democracy is not, in Berman’s view, principally the work of great men and women. It is more fundamentally the result of deep economic and societal transformations. In order for liberal democracy to emerge, countries have had to forge national unity and break up—or grow out of—strong concentrations of economic power. War often served as the handmaiden of national unity in Europe. Many of the necessary economic transformations were also violent, given the reluctance of landed elites to relinquish power.
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A mural by British artist Banksy, depicting a workman chipping away at one of the stars on a European Union (EU) themed flag, is pictured in Dover, south east England on January ,7 2019. (Getty)
Liberal democratic regimes, Berman concludes, are most likely to succeed when they are built on national unity and a strong state. She points to Italy to illustrate how difficult it is to make liberal democracy work in the absence of these conditions. This analysis would seem to support a “development first, democracy later” prescription, urging democratic activists to hold off until others have built a capable state and bridged communal divides. Yet Berman adds nuance to that simplistic story by noting that coercive state building by dictators often goes only so far and that “some of the most striking advances in state- and nation-building in European history occurred only after dictatorships were overthrown.”
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WHERE IT ALL WENT WRONG Berman’s history covers an enormous amount of ground. Yet although the book is billed as an account running up “to the present day,” it barely touches on events after the early 1990s. Berman’s detailed exploration of western Europe runs out of steam in the 1980s. Her analysis of eastern Europe gets to 1989 and its immediate aftermath, but hardly any further. In the concluding chapter, she mentions some recent events, but only sketchily, devoting little more than a few paragraphs to all that has happened since the early 1990s. It would have been useful to bring the narrative up to date with a thorough analysis
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of crucial developments such as the enlargement of the European Union, the 2008 financial crisis, the eurozone debt crisis, the rise of populism, the migration crisis, and Brexit. By giving short shrift to those subjects, Berman isn’t able to persuasively answer the question of why European liberal democracy has fallen on hard times. Liberal democracy’s success in western Europe, she argues, rested on three factors: the role of the United States in constructing an economic and military order that promoted peace and prosperity in Europe; the successful advance of European integration; and the construction of social democratic systems that avoided economic crises, kept inequality low, and narrowed social divisions. The trouble began in the 1970s, she contends, when all three pillars of this foundation started to crumble. First came U.S. President Richard Nixon’s decision to leave the gold standard, a move that brought “an end to the postwar–Bretton Woods monetary system” and “reflected a decline in the United States’ willingness or ability to shoulder the burdens of hegemonic leadership.” That decline, Berman argues, accelerated in the past two years, as U.S. President Donald Trump has undermined the United States’ basic commitment to the postwar order. European integration, meanwhile, went off track in the 1970s with the decision by European leaders “to move forward with monetary cooperation and eventually integration” while neglecting to develop regional political institutions. And Europe’s economic difficulties during that decade opened the door to neoliberalism, which over the next several decades generated “slow and inequitable growth” and eventually contributed to the financial crisis of 2008, fueling right-wing populism.
Understanding democracy’s past is vital to understanding democracy’s present. But democracy’s future remains mostly unfathomable.
After Berman’s careful analysis of the previous several hundred years, this rather hasty explanation of Europe’s current democratic woes feels inadequate. Nixon’s unilateral abandonment of the Bretton Woods system certainly shocked many allies in Europe. But Berman neglects to mention that Nixon’s administration also pioneered new kinds of multilateral engagement, starting with what would become the G7-, a forum dedicated to coordinating economic policy among the world’s major industrialized democracies. Certainly, Trump’s skepticism of the United States’ international security commitments has contributed to a hostile environment for European democracy. But none of the seven U.S. presidents between Nixon and Trump backed away from the basic postwar economic and military commitments that undergirded democratic consolidation in Europe. Indeed, their steady adherence to those obligations is precisely what has made Trump’s approach so jarring. And although Berman is correct to observe that the EU’s move toward technocracy has fueled a backlash against Brussels, this problem has tarnished the legitimacy of the EU more than it has that of liberal democracy. Berman suggests that the EU’s growing unpopularity over the past decade has fueled “the nationalism and populism that threaten liberal democracy in Europe today.” Yet in many troubled European democracies, the EU is more a convenient punching bag than a driver of populism itself. Berman’s sweeping claim that the turn to neoliberalism in the 1970s is to blame for Europe’s slow growth, economic dislocations, and rising inequality is equally unpersuasive. As Berman acknowledges, growth was already slowing in the 1970s. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s economic medicine in the 1980s was unquestionably a harsh tonic, but it did counter the slow growth that social democracy had ended up delivering the decade before. It would also be difficult to blame neoliberalism for the economic travails France has faced in the past four decades, given that most economists would say the theory has never been seriously put into practice there, at least not until the current administration of President Emmanuel Macron. The same can be said of Italy. It is true that the financial crisis, which hit Europe hard, was a product of a global capitalist system that had been heavily influenced by neoliberal
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of crucial developments such as the enlargement of the European Union, the 2008 financial crisis, the eurozone debt crisis, the rise of populism, the migration crisis, and Brexit. By giving short shrift to those subjects, Berman isn’t able to persuasively answer the question of why European liberal democracy has fallen on hard times. Liberal democracy’s success in western Europe, she argues, rested on three factors: the role of the United States in constructing an economic and military order that promoted peace and prosperity in Europe; the successful advance of European integration; and the construction of social democratic systems that avoided economic crises, kept inequality low, and narrowed social divisions. The trouble began in the 1970s, she contends, when all three pillars of this foundation started to crumble. First came U.S. President Richard Nixon’s decision to leave the gold standard, a move that brought “an end to the postwar–Bretton Woods monetary system” and “reflected a decline in the United States’ willingness or ability to shoulder the burdens of hegemonic leadership.” That decline, Berman argues, accelerated in the past two years, as U.S. President Donald Trump has undermined the United States’ basic commitment to the postwar order. European integration, meanwhile, went off track in the 1970s with the decision by European leaders “to move forward with monetary cooperation and eventually integration” while neglecting to develop regional political institutions. And Europe’s economic difficulties during that decade opened the door to neoliberalism, which over the next several decades generated “slow and inequitable growth” and eventually contributed to the financial crisis of 2008, fueling right-wing populism.
Understanding democracy’s past is vital to understanding democracy’s present. But democracy’s future remains mostly unfathomable.
After Berman’s careful analysis of the previous several hundred years, this rather hasty explanation of Europe’s current democratic woes feels inadequate. Nixon’s unilateral abandonment of the Bretton Woods system certainly shocked many allies in Europe. But Berman neglects to mention that Nixon’s administration also pioneered new kinds of multilateral engagement, starting with what would become the G7-, a forum dedicated to coordinating economic policy among the world’s major industrialized democracies. Certainly, Trump’s skepticism of the United States’ international security commitments has contributed to a hostile environment for European democracy. But none of the seven U.S. presidents between Nixon and Trump backed away from the basic postwar economic and military commitments that undergirded democratic consolidation in Europe. Indeed, their steady adherence to those obligations is precisely what has made Trump’s approach so jarring. And although Berman is correct to observe that the EU’s move toward technocracy has fueled a backlash against Brussels, this problem has tarnished the legitimacy of the EU more than it has that of liberal democracy. Berman suggests that the EU’s growing unpopularity over the past decade has fueled “the nationalism and populism that threaten liberal democracy in Europe today.” Yet in many troubled European democracies, the EU is more a convenient punching bag than a driver of populism itself. Berman’s sweeping claim that the turn to neoliberalism in the 1970s is to blame for Europe’s slow growth, economic dislocations, and rising inequality is equally unpersuasive. As Berman acknowledges, growth was already slowing in the 1970s. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s economic medicine in the 1980s was unquestionably a harsh tonic, but it did counter the slow growth that social democracy had ended up delivering the decade before. It would also be difficult to blame neoliberalism for the economic travails France has faced in the past four decades, given that most economists would say the theory has never been seriously put into practice there, at least not until the current administration of President Emmanuel Macron. The same can be said of Italy. It is true that the financial crisis, which hit Europe hard, was a product of a global capitalist system that had been heavily influenced by neoliberal
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combustible communal divisions. But how much does the historical record help in predicting the future? Western democracies are experiencing tectonic shifts. Will they come undone, despite having enjoyed an almostunbroken -50year run of stability? Here, history offers only a limited guide. Broadly speaking, European and other Western democracies were built on the back of two centuries of remarkable economic growth, albeit with major shocks along the way. Now, the West is in for a protracted, possibly indefinite, period of slow growth or even stagnation. It’s not clear whether the liberal democratic consensus can withstand the inevitable public anger and alienation that will result. The toxic political fallout of the financial crisis does not bode well.
ideas and policies. But Europe’s failure to maintain the economic performance it achieved in the first three decades after World War II into the next three decades and beyond has far more complex causes than those suggested by Berman’s simple narrative of a transition from social democracy to neoliberalism.
INTO THE UNKNOWN Berman repeatedly emphasizes the importance of looking at the present through the lens of the past. There’s considerable value in her account, not just with regard to Western democracy but also for adding perspective to the many attempted democratic transitions in developing countries that are hitting hard times. The rockiness of Europe’s long road to democracy shows that it should have been possible to predict the troubles encountered by democracy’s so-called third wave, which began in 1974 and spread across a wide swath of countries in Latin America, Asia, eastern Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa. That is especially true considering that recent democratic transitions have occurred mostly in countries with weak states, concentrated economic power, and
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New technologies are also battering democracy. Past communications breakthroughs, such as radio and television, had major effects on democracy, but they at least tended be spaced out, giving democracy time to adapt. The problems raised by the current wave of technological change—the loss of authority on the part of traditional media gatekeepers, the vulnerability of all information to manipulation, the new capacities for total surveillance—are hitting liberal democracy all at once. And they are just the start of what will be even more revolutionary developments, as machine learning and other disruptive technologies take off. The wider world is changing, too. The influence of the West is declining relative to that of non-Western countries, many of them nondemocratic. Liberal democracy consolidated just as Western power reached its zenith. In the decades ahead, Western countries will face greater constraints on action outside their borders, and other countries will infringe more on their internal affairs. That is certain to unsettle liberal democratic governments. And global trends including climate change and migration will tug even harder at the fabric of liberal democracy. Understanding democracy’s past is vital to understanding democracy’s present. But democracy’s future remains mostly unfathomable. Thomas Carothers is Senior Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. This article was originally published in ForeignAffairs. com.