Egypt’s Ongoing Battle
Iran’s Other Generation Gap, 40 Years On
A Weekly Political News Magazine
A Weekly Political News Magazine
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Issue 1736 - February 22/02/2019
Bernie Sanders: From Modest Upbringings to Presidential Nominee
Issue 1736 - February 22/02/2019
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Returning ISIS Fighters
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Editorial The 2010s can be described as turbulent decade to say the least. Major events such as the Arab Spring, the rise in the frequency of terror, the refugee crisis and increasing poverty has given the world a myriad of challenges that it must overcome. This week’s issue of Majalla explores some these global challenges and the steps that individual states and the international community has taken to counter such crises. This week’s cover story by Yasmine El Geressi looks into the recent controversy regarding Shamima Begum, a British teenager who travelled to Syria to join ISIS in 2015. She would eventually become a jihadi bride and would have children (only one of which survived) with her husband. With the recent defeat of ISIS, Begum, now aged 19, has requested to return to the UK sparking massive debates throughout Britain on whether or not she should be allowed to return. El Geressi has explored the views arguing for and against the return of ISIS fighters and/or brides/children and has outlined the policies that many states have undertaken to resolve this controversial issue. Peter Gries and Tao Wang explore the prospects of China forcibly seizing Taiwan as one of its provinces. The writers emphasize that China had high hopes of Taiwan peacefully becoming part of the Chinese state, especially after the handovers of Macao and Hong Kong in the 1990s and its rise in both the economic and political global stages. However, recent developments such as the election of a pro-Taiwanese independence government and soured relations with the US has made “peaceful reunification” difficult. Some experts and Taiwanese activists fear a military takeover from China. Narges Bajoghli did a number of interviews with older and younger individuals of the Basijis (one of the militant wings of the Revolutionary Guard) and showcases the frustrations and the generational gap that have divided young and old members of the Basijis. David Miliband writes on the recent resignation of Jim Yong Kim as president of the World Bank. Miliband cites that David Malpass, Donald Trump’s nominee, is the front runner to succeed Kim. The writer also explores some the good policies Kim has taken, such as the ones that made the provision of humanitarian aid to impoverished communities easier. The writer also argues that the rise of poverty and refugees can potentially lead to more global conflicts; as such Kim’s successor will need to address these issues, lest the world can become a more perilous place. In our culture section, Yasmine El Geressi interviews TunisianFrench calligraphy artist eL Seed as she asked him about his early inspirations, his projects and how his work helps brings people of different cultures together.
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A Weekly Political News Magazine
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Ghassan Charbel Editorial secretary Mostafa El-Dessouki HH Saudi Research and Marketing (UK) Ltd 10th Floor Building 7 Chiswick Business Park 566 Chiswick High Road London W4 5YG Tel : +44 207 831 8181 Fax: +44 207 831 2310
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A Weekly Political News Magazine
36 EL Seed: A Message of Unity, Drawn in ‘Calligraffiti’
Issue 1736 - February 22/02/2019
20 Will China Seize Taiwan?
32 32 A Battle Plan for the World Bank
32 26 Iran’s Other Generation Gap, 40 Years On
46 Shakespeare and the #MeToo Movement
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Time For A Change
54 Simple and Unrestrictive: 3
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Muslim devotees perform Friday prayer during 'Biswa Ijtema', the second largest religious gathering of Muslims in the world, in Tongi town of Dhaka , Bangladesh on February 2019 ,15. (Getty)
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10th Tour of Oman 2019, Stage 3 a 192,5km stage from Shati al Qurum to Qurayyat 250m on February 2019 ,18 in Qurayyat, Oman. The Tour of Oman is an annual professional road bicycle racing stage race held in Oman since 2010 as part of the UCI Asia Tour. (Getty)
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Putin Threatens to Target US if it Deploys Missiles to Europe
Saudi Crown Prince Tours Asia
UK MPs Quit Over Brexit Plan
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman embarked on a three-stage Asian tour, including visits to Pakistan, India and China. In Pakistan, Bin Salman signed key memorandums of understanding (MoUs) worth 20$ billion on Sunday in the fields of energy, petrochemicals, minerals, agriculture and food processing. In India, he announced a 100$ billion investment in India in areas including energy, refining, petrochemicals, infrastructure, agriculture and manufacturing. India and Saudi Arabia also set up a Strategic Partnership Council and agreed to hold summit meeting every two years.
British Prime Minister Theresa May says she is saddened by the resignations of three leading proEU MPs from her Conservative Party, but insists she is doing the right thing by continuing with her Brexit plan. The MPs, long critical of May's Brexit strategy to leave the EU which they believe is being driven by Conservative eurosceptics, said in a statement they would join a new group in parliament set up by seven former opposition Labour politicians. The resignations put Ms May in an even weaker position in parliament, where her Brexit deal was crushed by MPs last month when eurosceptics and EU supporters voted against an agreement that both sides say offers the worst of all worlds.
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Vladimir Putin has said that Russia will develop new weapons and aim them at western “centres of decision-making” if the west deploys new short and medium-range missiles in Europe. The threat, which appears to describe Washington and other western capitals, came after the United States and then Russia suspended compliance with the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty. In a speech to senior Russian officials in Moscow, Putin said the possible deployment of missiles that could reach Moscow in 10 minutes was “dangerous for Russia,” and that Moscow would be forced to review “symmetrical and asymmetrical actions”.
Pope Holds Child Sex Abuse Conference
Pope Francis promised that concrete actions against child sexual abuse by priests would result from a conference he opened on Thursday, countering scepticism from some survivors who said the meeting looked like a public relations exercise.
Francis convened Catholic leaders from around the world for the four-day meeting to address the scandal that has ravaged the Church’s credibility in the United States - where it has paid billions of dollars in settlements - Ireland, Chile, Australia, and elsewhere over the last three decades. The pope and the almost 200 participants in a Vatican auditorium watched a video of five victims, who wished to remain anonymous, telling painful stories of abuse and cover-up.
At Least 70 Killed in Major Bangladesh Blaze As many as 70 people died in a major fire that engulfed several buildings in a centuries-old neighbourhood of the Bangladesh capital, a fire official said on Thursday, warning the toll could climb as fire fighters scour the rubble. Lax regulations and poor enforcement of rules in
impoverished Bangladesh have often been blamed for several large fires that have led to hundreds of deaths in recent years. The city’s worst fire since 2012 broke out late on Wednesday night in a fivestorey building, before spreading to others nearby in the Chawkbazar precinct, parts of which date back more than 300 years to the Mughal period.
Yemen and Houthi Rebels Agree to Withdrawal Deal Yemen’s government and Houthi rebels have agreed on the first phase of a withdrawal from the key city of Hodeidah, in a deal the UN described as important progress. The redeployment from Hodeidah is a critical part of a ceasefire agreed in Sweden in December that calls on the government and Houthis to move forces away from ports. The fragile truce deal marks the first step toward ending a devastating war that has pushed Yemen to the brink of famine. After two days of talks in Hodeidah, the government and Houthis finalised a deal on the first phase of the pullback and also agreed in principle on the second phase, a UN statement said. The talks were led by a Danish general, Michael Lollesgaard, as chair of a redeployment coordination committee (RCC) that includes the government and the Houthis.
Trump Demands EU Take Back 800 ISIS Fighters Captured in Syria US President Donald Trump told the EU that is must take back its 800 fighters captured in Syria by US-backed forces and put them on trial. Britain and other European nations have shown
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a limited interest in taking those individuals back, however, and have instead put extra hurdles on repatriations. On Wednesday, Britain doubled down on that approach with a legally controversial move, saying that it was revoking the citizenship of Shamima Begum, a teenager who four years ago fled the country to join ISIS at the age of 15.
ISIS on Brink of Defeat in its Final Enclave In Syria Remaining civilians were evacuated from ISIS's final enclave in eastern Syria on Thursday, US-backed forces said, clearing the way for them to wipe out the last vestige of terrorist rule that once straddled Syria and Iraq. Iraqi sources said the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which has besieged the last ISIS enclave near the Iraqi border, handed over more then 150 Iraqi and other foreign terrorists to Iraq on Thursday, under a deal involving a total of 502. The village of Baghouz at the Iraqi border is the last scrap of territory left to ISIS in the Euphrates valley region that became its final populated stronghold in Iraq and Syria after a series of defeats in 2017.
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Returning ISIS Fighters Could Preventing Return of Home-Grown Jihadists Pose a Greater Risk? 10
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If foreign fighters are left in Iraq and Syria, they will be less likely to face justice which could lead to more instability, conflict, and violence. trial are being brought to a head. France said on Monday that it would take back militants on a “case by case” basis but would not comply with US president Donald Trump’s call at the weekend for European fighters to be repatriated immediately. Nicole Belloubet, French justice minister, told France 2 television: “At this stage France is not responding to [Trump’s] demands.” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said at a meeting of his counterparts in Brussels that his country has had few opportunities to check on Germans held in Syria.
Renu Begum, eldest sister of Shamima Begum, holds her sister's photo as she is interviewed by the media at New Scotland Yard, as the relatives of three missing schoolgirls believed to have fled to Syria to join ISIS pleaded for them to return home, on February 2015 ,22 in London. (Getty)
by Yasmine El-Geressi As the U.S. prepares to eradicate a small remaining ISIS force in eastern Syria, stories have emerged of regretful Americans and European Muslim women looking to return home. With more than 1,000 European ISIS prisoners detained in northern Syria by US-aligned PKK forces, and US President Donald Trump’s threat to release the fighters if European powers did not take them back and put them on trial, long-standing questions in big western European countries over how to bring homegrown Islamist radicals detained in the war-torn nation to
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“They could come to Germany only after ensuring that they could immediately be taken into custody," he told reporters Monday. "At the moment it’s not evident how all this could be guaranteed.” The UK has taken a hard line on the case of Shamima Begum, the British teenager who travelled from east London to Syria to join ISIS in 2015. Sajid Javid, UK home secretary, wrote to her family on Tuesday informing them he had made an order revoking her citizenship. He said the fact Begum’s parents are of Bangladeshi heritage means she can apply for citizenship of that country – though Begum says she has never been there. On Wednesday morning the solicitor for the Begum family, Tasnime Akunjee, said the home secretary’s actions were excessive because the government had allowed hundreds of Britons to return, some of whom were suspected of fighting for ISIS. The teenager was not suspected of being an ISIS fighter and has claimed she was a housewife while married to a suspected Isis fighter. Begum’s case is an emblematic illustration of the security, political and legal difficulties of this new
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problem. The -19year-old made the decision to leave her family and school in Bethnal Green at 15 with two school friends to join the terror group. Four years later, she appealed for public sympathy following the birth of her son, as a row intensified in the UK over whether she should be allowed to return. In the hours after the news broke that a Times journalist had located Begum in a refugee camp in Syria, it became clear that her story would be defined by many layers of entanglement. Begum exists in two overlapping spheres: Begum is undoubtedly vulnerable and was 15 when she was lured via sophisticated online propaganda to a part of the world she knew little of and married off to a jihadist fighter. But it is also true that she is an unrepentant jihadi that supported an abhorrent murderous terror organisation and whose own children have become victims of the war she entered and claims to be unfazed by the sight of severed heads in a bin. The question of security and responsibility and the threat that home-grown ISIS members pose is a source of mounting concern. One estimate is that of about 900 UK nationals who went to join ISIS in Syria, a fifth have died, two-fifths have returned, and only one tenth of them have been prosecuted upon their return to the UK. In some cases this because proving who is who and gathering solid evidence against suspects that would stand up in European courts and secure a conviction is difficult. Met Commissioner, Cressida Dick, acknowledged that travelling to Syria was not an offence in itself, and that if the teenager returned to the UK she would face questioning but that the current law might not be sufficient to see her prosecuted. The Commissioner said:
One estimate is that of about 900 UK nationals who went to join ISIS in Syria, a fifth have died, two-fifths have returned, and only one tenth of them have been prosecuted upon their return to the UK.
“If there is insufficient evidence for a prosecution it is our job to look at the threat they pose if they are returning from Syria and we do that with every single person who comes back from Syria and then manage the risk with colleagues in the (security and intelligence) agencies." Alex Younger, head of MI6, emphasized last week that home-grown jihadists were “likely to have acquired the skills and connections that make them potentially very dangerous”. “That fact needs to be uppermost in our minds as we approach this admittedly extremely complex and difficult problem. Public safety is the first thing that we will consider.” Sajid Javid wrote in an opinion piece in The Sunday
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A member of the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) raises the victory gesture as others hold upside-down the black flag of ISIS, outside the destroyed Al-Nuri Mosque in the Old City of Mosul, after the area was retaken from ISIS, on June ,30 2017. (Getty)
Times newspaper that while he felt “compassion for any child born or brought into a conflict zone" when considering the repatriation of their parents who joined the ISIS he has to think about “the safety and security” of children living in the U.K. However, Qadir, a senior expert with the government’s counter-extremism Prevent programme and whose charity Active Change Foundation was supported by police and worked with high-profile extremists until 2016 highlighted the threat to public safety of not letting Begum return to the UK: “Javid is fuelling the [ISIS] narrative and giving wind to the sails of other extremists. If we continue with this trajectory we’ll be sowing the narrative for them to reap and use against us.”
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Qadir said the home secretary’s emphatic response would backfire. “If the government doesn’t change their approach to this, we potentially have a second wave of ISIS coming, the connecting up and reloading of Isis, fence-sitters who are more sympathetic to another kind of narrative,” he said. This point was backed by Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern politics at the London School of Economics, who said any country which chose to punish children for the crimes of their parents would be haunted by that decision. “Its shortsightedness,” he said. “You cannot leave them in the desert, in the wilderness because they’re going
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to grow to be wild or feel the need or urge to exact revenge.” Gerges said governments also have a legal and ethical responsibility to help these children reintegrate. “It’s not their fault that their fathers are killers and their mothers were participants” in ISIS, he said. Robert Verkaik, author and journalist specialising in extremism and education said that ministers appear oblivious to the “wider influence this iron-fist approach will have on the problem of the radicalisation of young Muslims.” “Knee-jerk legislation and knee-jerk counterterrorism policy are never good ideas, and may only serve to make martyrs out of common criminals.” Dr Usama Hasan, senior researcher in Islamic studies at the Quilliam Foundation and a part-time imam, has said that he agrees with Trump that EU nations should take back ISIS fighters as “it is our moral duty, since most of them were radicalised here. “The knee-jerk reaction of stripping nationality from dual citizens means we would export terrorism abroad.” If foreign fighters are left in Iraq and Syria, they will be less likely to face justice which could lead to more instability, conflict, and violence. It will also inadvertently allow for hundreds of children to be radicalised. This risks developing into a global security threat as violence could be exported back the world beyond Syria, including the UK and Europe. European nations therefore could be seen as giving up their duty of care towards their citizens by failing to bring terrorists to justice if jihadists are not taken into custody, thoroughly interrogated and put on trial.
“The knee-jerk reaction of stripping nationality from dual citizens means we would export terrorism abroad.” Dr Usama Hasan, senior researcher in Islamic studies at the Quilliam Foundation.
How Are Governments The imminent fall of ISIS’ caliphate in Iraq and Syria has left many countries grappling with what to do with jihadists who want to return. Several hundred foreign jihadists are being detained by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the main fighters on the ground combating ISIS. Added to them are women who have not taken part in the fighting and children.
France: repatriation plan Around 50 French men and women, as well as 80 children, are being detained in Syria by the SDF. Another 250 men were still at large in Syria in January 2019, along with women and children. More than 300 French jihadists are believed to have been killed while fighting for the IS. The French authorities say they want to avoid the jihadists scattering and have raised the prospect of repatriating the 130 nationals currently in SDF hands. Details of the operation are unclear.
Belgium: ‘case by case’ Out of more than 400 Belgians who went to fight with the jihadists since 2012, around 150 were still active in Syria and Iraq in late 2018. Added to them are some 160 children and adolescents born to at least one Belgian parent. Belgium says it will help the repatriation of children younger than 10, as long as the link with one Belgian parent is proven. “For the others it is case by case,” the government says.
Germany: ‘right to return’ A third of the more than 1,050 Islamists who made the journey from Germany to Syria or Iraq have returned.
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Dealing With Returning Jihadists? “All German citizens, including those suspected of having fought for the IS, have the right to return to Germany,” according to the foreign ministry.
Britain: ‘big threat’ By June 2018 almost 400 of the nearly 900 British jihadists who went to Iraq and Syria had returned, mainly women and children. Forty have been prosecuted. Britain has also set up programs aimed at deradicalizing the jihadists. In January 2019, London estimated at 200 the number of British jihadists still in Iraq and Syria. A top anti-terrorism official recently qualified their return as a “big national security threat”.
are still there. Under a new law, the jihadists face between five and 15 years prison on their return. Some 20 imams have been selected to carry out deradicalization programs in prison. In neighbouring Albania, 145 people, including women and children, went to jihadist zones between 2012 and 2014. The death of 23 of them has been confirmed and 45 have returned. The Tirana authorities have carried out deradicalization projects, including economic aid for returnees. Those recruiting jihadists face up to 18 years in prison.
Morocco: jailed
Russia: no repatriation plan
In 2015, the number of Moroccans fighting alongside groups in Iraq and Syria was estimated at more than 1,600.
Nearly 4,500 Russian citizens went abroad to fight alongside “the terrorists”, the Russian security services said in early 2018. Some took their families with them.
On their return they are systematically arrested, put on trial and jailed. Sentences range from 15-10 years. More than 200 returnees had been prosecuted by mid2018-.
Moscow has not announced plans to repatriate jihadists but since last year around 100 women and children, mainly from Russia’s Islamic republics in the Caucasus, have returned under a program championed by Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov.
Tunisia: return ‘via the justice system’
In November 2018, however, Chechen activist Kheda Saratova accused Russia’s FSB security service of blocking attempts to bring back the remaining widows and children of Russian IS fighters.
The Tunis government is unwilling to help them return. “The Constitution provides for accepting all citizens, but they have to go via the justice system and eventually prison,” President Beji Caid Essebsi said recently.
“According to our organization, there are over 2,000 of them left in Syria and Iraq,” Saratova, who is on Kadyrov’s human rights council, said at the time.
Indonesia: surveillance
Kosovo, Albania: prison Out of the 300 jihadists from Kosovo who went to Iraq and Syria, 145, half of them women and children,
Between 3,000 and 5,000 Tunisian citizens are estimated to have gone to fight in jihadist organizations in Syria, Iraq and Libya.
Some 590 Indonesians who have joined the IS are still in Syria although the figure for Iraq is not known. Those who return have to go through a deradicalization program, before being freed, but remain under surveillance.
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Egypt’s Ongoing Battle Egypt Faces Terrorist Attacks Days After the Munich Conference By: Ahmed Salem Major General El Gohary: Qatar is the main funder of terrorist groups in the region since it annually buys 65 billion dollars’ worth of weaponry and only uses a scarce amount for itself. The rest of the purchased arms are given to terrorist organizations throughout the world. Dr. Mohamed Gomaa: international human rights
organizations unfairly criticize Egypt for its counterterrorist operations. Security Source to Al Majalla: the terrorist’s father is a physician and is sympathetic to jihadist ideology and has held on to such extremist views even before he immigrated to the US two decades ago. Cairo, Egypt: Last week just as the 55th Munich
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President El Sisi added that not reforming religious discourse would pose a danger to both Muslim and non-Muslim states. to both Muslim and non-Muslim states. El Sisi reminded the audience that he previously warned the international community of the importance of reforming religious discourse, he also alluded to the attacks that the world has faced as a result of such religious teachings. He finally said that not reforming religious discourse would have dire consequences on the world. Just days after the Munich Conference ended, two diabolical terror attacks took place in Egypt; the first was in North Sinai and the second one happened in Cairo in the heart of Al Azhar. Such events proved President El Sisi’s point that the forces of extremism still target Egypt and the rest of the Middle East.
Supporters of Hezbollah hold posters of Iran›s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the movement›s slain former military commander, Imad Mughniyeh, on Sept. 2018 ,20 in Beirut. (ANWAR AMRO/ AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
Security Conference came to a close, two terror attacks happened in Egypt. Coincidentally, Egypt was one of the participants in the 3 day conference which emphasized the necessity of international cooperation in the fight against terror which poses a threat against global security and stability and hinders harmonious international relations. In short, if the international community were to allow terror groups to continue their concerted operations, then human development would come at a standstill. In his speech to the participating world leaders, President Abd El Fatah El Sisi warned that if the international community does not adopt a comprehensive coordinated effort against terror, then it would only continue to penetrate global security. President El Sisi added that not reforming religious discourse would pose a danger
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Al Majalla spoke with Mohamed El-Orabi, former Egyptian Foreign Minister, current Egyptian MP and Head of the Foreign Relations Committee of the House of Representatives as he spoke of the global threat of terrorism and Egypt’s efforts in countering them. Mohamed El-Orabi told Al Majalla that Egypt is currently in an era of stability and that the recent terror attacks were in response to the state’s achievements and served to obstruct Egypt from furthering its goals. El Orabi also said that rather than states acting on their own accord, there needs to be a concerted global effort in tackling terrorism. This is because terror organizations have proved to be quicker and more effective in their use of social media and other media platforms for spreading their propaganda. He commended Egypt’s counterterrorism strategy as it was an initiative to stop terror attacks from becoming a common occurrence, rather than a response to widespread terrorism.
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The former Foreign Minister would also state that terrorists were not the only threat to the region’s security as he went on to say that there are foreign intelligence agencies infiltrating their own home grown terrorist elements fighting in the region as to ensure that they never go back to their countries. Moreover, while ISIS is coming to its end, there are still eight armies fighting on Syrian soil, most of the states fighting in Syria are only there for their own self-interests rather than ending the war. Examples of such armies that are putting Syria’s future in jeopardy include those of Iran, Russia and Turkey. Additionally, he claimed that there are those who want the Middle East to remain in a state of disarray. He gave the example of Libya which is in a worse state than Syria since it has become exposed to extremist elements from Mali, Chad and Niger. He also gave this example to showcase how zealous ideologies have become rampant throughout the African continent as well; in spite of Egypt’s precarious geographic position it is highly capable of protecting its borders in all situations. Al Orabi has also asserted that it is paramount for the international community to adopt a global strategy that will cut off all sources of terror; he went on to say that some of the biggest terrorist funders took part in the Munich Conference. Major General Salama El Gohary, the Head of the Defense and National Security Committee of the House of Representatives and the former
Turkey has close ties with terrorist groups in Syria and repeatedly sends ships filled with ammunition to Libya.
Commander of the Egyptian Counterterrorism Unit, told Al Majalla that the people of Egypt are well aware of the Muslim Brotherhood’s terror plots, but are not afraid of any terror attacks. He also reiterated that Islam has nothing to do with such terrorist ideology or activity. Moreover, El Gohary cited the instability in the Arab world as one of the drivers for increased terror activities throughout Europe, pointing out that combating terrorism and genuinely confronting it will guarantee stability of the Arab region to which he commended Egypt for successfully going through with robust counterterrorism measures. El Gohary also told Al Majalla that Qatar is the main funder of terrorist groups in the region
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since it annually buys 65 billion dollars’ worth of weaponry and only uses a scarce amount for itself. The rest of the purchased arms are given to terrorist organizations throughout the world. Dr. Mohamed Gomaa, an expert at the AlAhram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, pointed out that international human rights organizations unfairly criticize Egypt for its counterterrorist operations since they are highly politicized and biased against the state’s efforts in protecting its civilians. Furthermore, Turkey has close ties with terrorist groups in Syria and repeatedly sends ships filled with ammunition to Libya. Despite these perils, Egypt has been able to overcome many risks such as those posed by returning fighters from Syria.
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A senior Egyptian security source close to Al Majalla confirmed that the suicide bomber who blasted himself in El Darb Al Ahmar has American citizenship and that he was previously arrested for a murder case, having only been released 3 months ago. Our source has also told us that the terrorist’s father is a physician and is sympathetic to jihadist ideology and has held on to such extremist views even before he immigrated to the US two decades ago. According to our source the suicide bomber was a 37 old American citizen called El Hassan Abd Allah and hails from a rich family living in Misr El Gedida. His radical father, meanwhile, still lives in the US and other members of the assailant’s family also have American citizenship.
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Will China Seize Taiwan? Wishful Thinking in Beijing, Taipei, and Washington Could Spell War in 2019 20
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Some Chinese nationalists now argue that China has only a brief window of opportunity to seize Taiwan. Talk of “forceful reunification” is ascendant. world stage, those expectations redoubled. But “peaceful reunification” has proved elusive. After Taiwan elected Tsai Ing-wen, of the proindependence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), to the presidency in 2016, many Mainland Chinese lost patience with the idea. Some Chinese nationalists now argue that China has only a brief window of opportunity to seize Taiwan. Talk of “forceful reunification” is ascendant. China has already begun to tighten the noose. It has forced Taiwan out of international bodies, such as the World Health Organization; required airlines to replace “Taiwan” with descriptions such as “Taiwan, Province of China”; and induced five more countries to sever relations with Taipei. Beijing seems to believe that the United States will sit by as it squeezes Taiwan. Taipei, meanwhile, has convinced itself that China has no plans to invade. And U.S. President Donald Trump seems to think he can rock the boat without consequences. All are wrong—and their wishful thinking is raising the odds of conflict.
“CHINA DREAM” IN BEIJING
Hong Kong , January 2019 ,5: Former Hong Kong lawmaker Leung Kwok-hung (centre R), also known as 'Long Hair', and Avery Leung (centre L) burn a portrait of Chinese President Xi Jinping after saying he did not rule out using military force in the unification of Taiwan with the Chinese mainland. (Getty)
By Peter Gries* and Tao Wang* “China must be, and will be reunified,” Chinese President Xi Jinping declared in a speech in January. Xi spoke of “peaceful reunification” with Taiwan, but he warned, “We do not forsake the use of force.” Ever since Hong Kong and Macau rejoined Mainland China in 1997 and 1999, respectively, Chinese expectations that Taiwan would follow suit have grown. When, a decade ago, the Beijing Olympics and the global financial crisis boosted China’s confidence on the
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Now that Xi has consolidated power, he seeks a legacy befitting the great emperors of old: the reunification of the Middle Kingdom. “The only thing that will make him the greatest leader in the Chinese Communist Party’s history is to take Taiwan back,” Shen Dingli, a foreign relations scholar at Fudan University, told Quartz in 2018. “If he were to achieve China’s reunification, who will say he is second to Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping?” Xi, whose “China Dream” promises the make China great again, likely agrees. “Fight a war, win a war,” is one of his signature slogans. In 2017, he presided over a military parade with a replica of Taiwan’s presidential palace visible in the distance. Chinese soldiers had constructed it to train for an invasion of Taiwan. That same year, China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, circumnavigated Taiwan twice.
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“The PLA is likely preparing for a contingency to unify Taiwan with China by force,” the U.S. Defense Department told Congress in 2018. There are signs that Xi believes the world will sit by if China invades Taiwan. “Xi has told people that he was impressed by Putin’s seizure of Crimea,” a Beijing insider told the reporter Evan Osnos in 2015. “[Putin] got a large piece of land and resources” and met little resistance from the West. Many among China’s elite have embraced military action. “The possibility for peaceful reunification is gradually dissipating,” Wang Zaixi, a former deputy director of the PRC’s Taiwan Affairs Office, declared in 2017. “There will very likely be military conflict,” retired Chinese General Wang Hongguang told the People’s Daily in December. Many ordinary Chinese agree. “If we want to take our island back, we have to use force.” reads a Weibo post from last November. Both Chinese academics and journalists argue that this sentiment is widespread. “Mainland Chinese public opinion became impatient with Taiwan a long time ago,” former director of the Chinese Academy of Social Science’s Institute of Taiwan Studies Zhou Zhihuai wrote in 2017. “Mainland Chinese will be very happy to see the PLA take action to punish a ‘pro-independence Taiwan’,” a Global Times editorial claimed in 2018.
WISHFUL THINKING IN TAIPEI Despite this increased militancy across the Strait, Taipei has convinced itself that China will not attack. Many in the ruling Democratic Progressive Party have persuaded themselves that China is too sensible to take military action. “The mainland Chinese leader today is a rational decision maker,” Tsai claimed in 2017: Xi would not provoke a war likely to drag in Japan and the United States. Others in the DPP depict China as too weak. “China has too many domestic problems” to capture Taiwan, professor Fan ShihPing wrote in 2017. Taiwan’s major opposition party, the Kuomintang, takes a rosy view of Beijing that rejects the idea that China might invade. “There is no problem,” former president Ma Ying-jeou declared last year. “Nowadays Beijing’s top strategy is peaceful rise,” the journalist Huang Nian wrote in April. “Forceful reunification would derail it.”
This complacency has led Taiwan to neglect its armed forces. Taiwan’s military suffers from a desperate shortage of officers—nearly half of all lieutenant positions are unfilled. In 2018, Taiwan made matters worse. Just as talk of “forceful reunification” was rising in Mainland China, the government ended compulsory military enlistment—but allowed felons to serve. Morale has plummeted. The United States has recommended that Taiwan consider restoring conscription. “The shift to a voluntary military was a mistake,” U.S. officials concluded. In an April 2018 poll, more than 40 percent of Taiwanese said they had “no confidence at all” that their military could defend Taiwan; but 65 percent had convinced themselves that the PRC would not take military action against the island; and only six percent believed that an attack
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Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks during an event to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Message to Compatriots in Taiwan at the Great Hall of the People January 2019 ,2 in Beijing, China. (Getty)
was “very likely.”
“AMERICA FIRST” IN WASHINGTON The withering of Taiwan’s armed forces has increased Taiwan’s military reliance on the United States— just when many in Beijing are questioning the U.S. commitment to Taiwan. Trump’s “America first” doctrine has convinced many Chinese that the United States is now too isolationist to come to Taiwan’s defense. “America will absolutely sacrifice Taiwan,” the Global Times insisted in 2017. “On the premise of America First … the United States is not likely to send troops to fight for Taiwan.” For decades, a U.S. policy of “dual deterrence”
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has helped prevent conflict in the Taiwan Strait. Washington has warned Beijing not to attack Taiwan unprovoked, but reassured Chinese leaders that the United States would not support Taiwanese independence. It has told Taipei, in turn, that the United States would come to its defense—as long as it did not provoke Beijing by declaring independence. Making the policy work has meant treading a fine line, but for decades, dual deterrence has allowed Taiwan to enjoy de facto independence and helped prevent a war with China. Trump has upset that delicate balance. In December 2016, Tsai called Trump to congratulate him on his victory. The incoming Trump administration then began to talk of “revisiting” the One China policy,
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under which the United States recognizes the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal government of China, but maintains unofficial relations with Taiwan. Beijing was outraged. Xi refused to talk to Trump until he recommitted the United States to the One China policy. In February, Trump capitulated. In a phone call with Xi, he affirmed that the United States would continue to support the “One China” policy. “Trump lost his first fight with Xi,” the Beijing scholar Shi Yinhong bragged to the New York Times. “He will be looked at as a paper tiger.” Last year, however, the pendulum swung back toward confrontation. In February, Congress passed the Taiwan Travel Act, encouraging (but not requiring) high-level U.S. officials to visit Taiwan, and highlevel Taiwanese officials to visit the United States. In the fall, Trump started a trade war with China, generating anxiety among Chinese nationalists. They now believe Trump is using Taiwan as part of a new Cold War against China, creating a sense of urgency for reunification.
A WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY China could well move to take Taiwan before 2020, when some Chinese fear that Taiwan’s presidential election will close Beijing’s window of opportunity for military action. Many Mainland Chinese nationalists were disappointed, rather than relieved, by the pro-independence DPP’s poor showing in last November’s local Taiwanese elections. This counterintuitive reaction reveals an alarming calculus: should a weakened Tsai and the DPP lose the presidency in 2020 to a more pro-China candidate,
Just as the Communist Party seized Beijing in 1949 without shooting a single bullet, he argued, China could capture Taiwan peacefully by surrounding the island, imposing economic sanctions, and cutting off its oil supply. “No need to shed blood,” he concluded.
the opportunity for “forceful reunification” would be lost. “What a pity,” one Weibo user from Beijing wrote about the DPP’s losses. “We could be further away from the day of reunification.” It is the hated DPP that gives Chinese nationalists a pretext to take Taiwan back now. That disappointment has fed a sense of urgency among many Chinese nationalists. “I request that Mainland China issue a timetable for reunification,” one outraged Weibo user wrote in November. “Whether peaceful or forceful, please don’t drag this out again and again.” The 2020 U.S. presidential election also looms in the minds of Chinese nationalists. Trump looks less likely to win reelection after Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms, and many Chinese worry that a Trump loss would make forceful reunification harder. Trump is seen as a businessman and isolationist willing to bargain Taiwan away. “America will sell Taiwan out in the blink of an eye,” a People’s Daily editorial claimed last year. (Few Chinese recognize the possibility that Trump might respond forcefully to an attack on Taiwan to rally support at home.) A Trump successor, “forceful reunification” advocates fear, may not be so willing to cut a deal. Some in Beijing even think China can retake Taiwan without violence. China may “break the enemy’s resistance without fighting,” Wang Zaixi told the Global Times in 2017. Just as the Communist Party seized Beijing in 1949 without shooting a single bullet, he argued, China could capture Taiwan peacefully by surrounding the island, imposing economic sanctions, and cutting off its oil supply. “No need to shed blood,” he concluded. The idea that China can force reunification without fighting is delusional and dangerous. Tightening the military or economic noose around Taiwan would likely provoke a reaction from the United States. Given popular nationalist pressures, Beijing would then feel compelled to respond. Things could get out of control fast. All sides need to wake up to the dangers of backing into a conflict that few want. *PETER GRIES is Lee Kai Hung Chair and Director of the Manchester China Institute and Professor of Chinese Politics at the University of Manchester. *TAO WANG is a doctoral candidate in East Asian politics at the University of Manchester. This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.
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Iran’s Other Generation Gap, 40 Years On
Among the Revolutionary Faithful, the Young Seek Confrontation While Their Elders Embrace Change 26
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“Does anything in Iran work so smoothly? They should come and see how messy everything is here. What makes them think that amid everything barely functioning–– from our economy, to our traffic, to our work culture––the Basij are so well organized?”
Iranian members of the Basij militia march during a parade marking the country's Army Day, on April 2017 ,18, in Tehran. (Getty)
Ali was working on a sequence for state television about U.S. media and its opposition to the Islamic Republic. Carrying his laptop, he excitedly showed us his latest find, a segment on CNN prior to the signing of the Iran deal about why the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Basij are so powerful in Iran. The segment depicted Iran’s armed forces as a homogenous crowd of bearded men with stern faces, dressed in fatigues or black button-down shirts, listening to the supreme leader. Mustafa and Ali watched the report with wide smiles. Ali turned to me once it ended and said: “It’s funny to me how Westerners depict us. They make it seem as if the leader [Ali Khamenei] says something and we just fall in line.” He laughed. “Does anything in Iran work so smoothly? They should come and see how messy everything is here. What makes them think that amid everything barely functioning––from our economy, to our traffic, to our work culture––the Basij are so well organized?”
By Narges Bajoghli* It was late in the afternoon on a cold winter day. Light snow had covered Tehran the night before, and I was spending the day in the production office of a small film unit of the Basij paramilitary militia. I was researching cultural producers in the Islamic Republic’s military and paramilitary organizations, and the young men who worked in this film unit had agreed to talk to me on the condition of anonymity. Ali, a -20year-old Basij film editor, came into the office where I sat with his colleague Mustafa, 24.
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Across town the following week, I observed a production meeting with a group of IRGC leaders in charge of media. All the men in the room were in their early 50s. Fervent revolutionaries in the first decade of the Islamic Republic, today they wanted to modify the system by easing social and cultural restrictions and opening the political system to greater competition, but they disagreed with one another about what those changes would look like. They agreed, however, that they needed to cultivate a broader audience for their media and that young Basijis, such as Ali and Mustafa,
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should not make ideological films that appealed only to small audiences. The young Basijis “are our real problem,” Alireza, a lieutenant in the Revolutionary Guard, lamented. “They’re so black and white in their outlook, and they drive a bigger wedge between us and the people.” “Their arrogance is poison for us,” Javad, a captain in the guard, added. Referring to the eight-year war with Iraq that consumed the first postrevolutionary decade, he said, “They wouldn’t last a day in the trenches of the war.”
A VIEW FROM INSIDE In the more than ten years I spent researching among the media producers in the Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Guard, Basij, and Ansar-e Hezbollah, I found a world in which men tied to the country’s armed forces held heated debates about the future of the Islamic Republic and fought with one another over resources. The institutions I studied were far from monolithic, nor were they purely ideological in their outlook. The concerns of the men who helped create the Islamic Republic’s vast media output were not confined to religion and Islamic politics. Rather, they tended to focus on class, generational differences, and social mobility. My findings led me to question not only the existing depictions
Contestation in the Islamic Republic is not just between the regime and the people, or the old generation and a protesting young generation. Rather, the regime itself is conflicted over its very nature and what its future should look like.
of these men but more generally the predominant frame of analysis when it comes to understanding the Islamic Republic. Since 1979, when revolution swept through a country that just one year earlier U.S. President Jimmy Carter had toasted as an “island of stability,” American policymakers have scrambled to understand an upheaval that not only blindsided them but expressed a deeply felt anti-imperialism, as Iranians demanded independence from Washington. U.S. news media described Iranian society as “possessed by madness” and Iranians as blinded by religious fervor and seeking martyrdom at all costs. Such explanations may have answered an immediate need to understand on simple terms—and to undermine—the revolutionary government and the aging ayatollah at its helm. But those who have viewed Iran’s politics over these last 40 years exclusively through the lens of Islam have overlooked important social dynamics that undergird the regime. What happens if we reframe our analysis of Iranian
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Busloads of Basijis (mobilised volunteer forces) leave Tehran for the war front with Iraq, 12th February 1988. (Getty)
Reza, a leading regime filmmaker and captain in the Revolutionary Guard. During the meeting, he had told the nearly two dozen students in attendance that regime media needed to work toward projecting a more inclusive vision of the Islamic Republic—one that could reach portions of the population that have become disillusioned. Reza referred to the events of 2009, which witnessed the largest protests against the Iranian government since the 1979 revolution. In what came to be called the Green Movement, a cross section of mainly urban women and young people protested perceived voter fraud, eventually producing a crisis of legitimacy for the political elite. In order to reach the part of the population that had protested or sympathized with the protests, Reza suggested creating media that would emphasize narratives of nationalism and unity, while allowing religion to fade into the background. The leader of the students stood up, his finger pointed angrily at Reza, and proclaimed, “Your generation may be tired of confrontation, but not ours!”
politics from the vantage point of those who work inside the Islamic Republic in support of the goals of the 1979 revolution? If scholarly and policy analysis thus far has failed to understand the Islamic Republic in all of its complexity, what can be gained from an approach that insists on exploring the positions and worldviews of its supporters, on their own terms? Such questions led me to try to understand how the Islamic Republic attempts to keep its revolution “alive” and how it communicates a vision for the future of the Islamic Republic. What I came to see was that contestation in the Islamic Republic is not just between the regime and the people, or the old generation and a protesting young generation. Rather, the regime itself is conflicted over its very nature and what its future should look like.
When we left, Reza turned to me and said, “These young Basijis don’t realize that distancing ourselves from the general public is what got us in this mess we now face. We need to reach out to the other side that is protesting us, not alienate them, as these kids want. You know what these kids’ problem is? They don’t know what it was like to be marginalized in society. They don’t remember, because they were born after the revolution. All they’ve ever known is a system in which our side has been in power.”
The leaders of the Islamic Republic’s armed forces have more, even, at stake today than the defense of a political system. These men and their families did not command respect in Iranian society before 1979. The monarchy of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi formally marginalized religious families, and the Iranian intellectual elite of the day looked down on them as well. The creation of the Islamic Republic gave pious GENERATIONAL CHANGE WITHIN Iranians of Reza’s class and generation a sense of purpose and a place in society. I often heard THE BASIJ them wonder aloud anxiously: If circumstances in One afternoon in central Tehran, I left a tense the country changed, would they be driven to the meeting between young Basiji film students and periphery again?
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Reza continued, “The younger Basijis don’t know that if we don’t take care of this revolution, we’ll be relegated back to the margins. They don’t know how quickly things can change.” Many men of Reza’s generation see the younger Basijis as opportunistic and soft because they have not passed through the harrowing experience of war. Regime paramilitary organizations such as the Basij were the main recruitment arm through which the revolutionary state sent soldiers to the front in the 1980s. After 1988, when the war with Iraq ended, Iran’s political elite were left to figure out what to do with these organizations. The supreme leader’s office eventually deployed them to confront Western “soft war” tactics and to police anti-regime activists. Because it is tailored to these purposes, and frames the general population as a potential threat and target of policing, the ideological training the younger Basij receive today is one the older generation of the Revolutionary Guard disagrees with. “The only similarity between the Basij of today and the Basij of the war is that we share the same organizational name. Those in the Basij today are horrible,” Mehdi, a war veteran and filmmaker, said to me. “It’s so painful for me that people think of the Basij in negative terms now,” he continued. “We were created for a different purpose at the beginning of the revolution. We went to defend the country against the invading Iraqi military, not to get better jobs or get into university, like the Basij of today. Or to beat our own people, for God’s sake! Today these kids are opportunistic.” Although Reza and his colleagues had all eagerly joined the Basij in the first years after the revolution, not a single guardsman I met over a ten-year period would allow his children to become active Basijis. “There’s no reason for them to be involved. And the atmosphere is not one I want my kids to be in,” one of them told me. Instead, they send their children abroad to Europe. Allowing their children to be a part of the Basij would be a step down the social ladder they have already scaled.
Younger Basijis such as Ali and Mustafa, however, feel that the revolution has gone astray because the older generation lost touch with its values. Like many of their colleagues, Ali and Mustafa hail from pious working- and lower-middle-class families that migrated to Tehran from smaller provincial towns. When, as a teenager, Mustafa wanted to pursue filmmaking, the Basij in his high school provided the resources and social network his family could not. Once he graduated from film school, Mustafa easily found a job at a production house that made documentaries for state television, allowing him to be a full-time
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Iraqi Soldiers On Iranian Tanks The Day Of Ceasefire Of Iran Iraq War, July 1988 ,19. (Getty)
filmmaker and provide for his new wife. The revolution had offered Mustafa and Ali a social mobility to which they saw the corruption of the older generation of revolutionaries as a threat. “They’re the ones who are soft, not us,” Ali told me. “We appreciate their sacrifices during the war, but they’ve become corrupted by money and obsessed with making themselves like the secular elite.”
back to issues of corruption, social and cultural class, and generational differences. Often my interlocutors turned their ire on one another more than on those who were not supporters of the regime. Their vast and nuanced disagreements revealed a complicated political reality that could not be contained in the familiar binaries, such as reformist vs. hard-line or anti-regime vs. proregime.
CONTESTED FUTURE
This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs. com. *NARGES BAJOGHLI is Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.
Again and again, my conversations with members of the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij turned
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A Battle Plan for the World Bank Why Refugees Are at the Center of the Fight Against Poverty
by David Miliband The abrupt resignation of Jim Yong Kim as president of the World Bank on February 1—more than three years before the scheduled end of his term—sent ripples of
concern through the global development community. With the multilateral system under sustained attack, the last thing it needs is instability at the top. On February 6, U.S. President Donald Trump nominated David Malpass, a U.S. Treasury official, to succeed Kim
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In an era of humanitarian retreat, the bank’s leadership understood that meeting global development goals meant addressing the effects of conflict and displacement. ON THE MOVE AND FORGOTTEN Extreme poverty and conflict go hand in hand. By 2030, some 85 percent of extremely poor people—those living on less than 1.90$ a day—will live in fragile settings, affected or threatened by war and other shocks. The number of armed conflicts around the world is 65 percent higher today than it was a decade ago. Many of these conflicts are civil wars, which tend to last longer than interstate wars and are much more likely to recur after a peace agreement has been reached. As a result, displacement is lasting longer—at least ten years for the average refugee. During those years, many of the displaced are unable to work or go to school. The host countries are often overburdened: almost 90 percent of the world’s 24.5 million refugees live in low and middle-income countries, which already struggle to educate their populations and expand their economies. An influx of refugees can threaten tentative progress toward development. And when host countries do develop, refugees are often left behind. Refugee children are five times less likely to attend school than their peers. A Syrian refugee family from Aleppo, stay under a shelter during a rainy day on March 2014 ,8, at Uskudar in Istanbul. (Getty)
at the bank’s helm. Other countries have until mid-March to put forward their own candidates, but the United States controls 16 percent of votes in the executive board, giving Malpass every chance of becoming the latest in a long line of American leaders at the bank. The new president will face a big task. The institution’s core mission is to end extreme poverty and promote sustainable development. But the geography of poverty is changing, shifting more and more toward conflict-affected sites. Kim understood that fulfilling the bank’s mission meant tackling the consequences of war and forced displacement. It is essential that his successor continue on this path.
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The global response to the displacement problem has been underwhelming. Back in 2007, the United Nations reported a 28 percent shortfall on its humanitarian appeals. As of 2017, that number had risen to a shocking 40 percent. Most humanitarian aid addresses the short-term, basic needs of camp populations, even though the majority of refugees now live in urban areas. By circumstance or by design, national poverty surveys rarely include refugees. When countries submit their action plans for achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, they rarely account for the displaced populations they house. The goals themselves include neither indicators nor targets for tracking process among these populations.
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TERMS AND CONDITIONS During Jim Yong Kim’s seven-year tenure, the World Bank stepped into the breach. It expanded support for countries threatened by conflict and began to focus on transnational crises, including displacement, climate change, pandemics, and famine. In 2016, the bank started offering concessional financing—grants and loans with little or no interest—that allowed it to raise more than 2.6$ billion for low- and middle-income countries that host refugees. The model has the potential to be a game-changer. Instead of stopgap cash, the bank provides multiyear financing that allows refugee-hosting states to improve a broad range of services, from public infrastructure to health and education. The grants and loans support vulnerable host communities as well as refugees, thereby helping reduce friction between the two groups. The World Bank has pushed for legal reforms in the countries to which it provides financing. At the bank’s urging, governments have allowed refugees to move more freely, work legally, and send their kids to school. In exchange for the more than one billion dollars that the World Bank helped it secure in grants and loans, the government of Jordan provided its refugees with work permits, expanded the types of jobs they could take, and allowed them to run home-based businesses. Ethiopia made a similar agreement; a law that was passed in January gives refugees the right to attend primary schools and opens up pathways for legal work and residence outside camps. Kim’s reforms have made a crucial difference at a time when refugee populations are rising and even wealthy nations are turning their backs. Whoever succeeds Kim at the World Bank must keep the momentum going. The tide of displacement is unlikely to ebb, and meeting humanitarian needs is an investment in stability, not an
Kim’s reforms have made a crucial difference at a time when refugee populations are rising and even wealthy nations are turning their backs.
economic waste.
THE FIGHT AHEAD This agenda is challenging. It requires officials to take up the thorny issue of refugee politics with host governments. Tackling poverty in the midst of conflict in South Sudan, Yemen, or Nigeria, for example, calls for a whole new set of skills. The new World Bank president should refine and, ideally, expand financing for refugee response. To ensure that its financing improves the lives of refugees and hosts, the bank needs clear goals and benchmarks (think income levels and child literacy rates). The bank could use the targets and indicators enshrined in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals as a blueprint, adjusting them to measure progress among refugee populations. It should also improve data collection on refugee well-being, which has been patchy. The new Joint Data Center, a collaboration between the World Bank and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees
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President of the World Bank Jim Yong Kim attends the Third ‹6+1› Roundtable Dialogue held by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at Diaoyutai State Guesthouse on November 2018 ,6 in Beijing, China. (Getty)
The sustainable development of host countries depends on the ability of refugees to thrive alongside the host population. groups and NGOs with strong research and evaluation expertise (such as my own, the International Rescue Committee), and of course refugees themselves. Only such varied input will allow the bank to understand what is really needed and what isn’t. In Jordan, a bank-funded health project prioritized services in far-flung brick-and-mortar public clinics, forcing refugees to use money they did not have to travel for proper treatment and medication. As a result, some Syrian refugees have relied instead on underqualified doctors, self-medicated, or chosen to forego vital services altogether. Had the bank consulted Syrian refugees during the design phase of the program, it might have made a different set of investments that accounted for these challenges.
(UNHCR), could be tasked with fixing this problem. The bank, under Kim’s leadership, was right to tie its financing to policy reform, and the new president should do the same. The sustainable development of host countries depends on the ability of refugees to thrive alongside the host population. Refugees need to be able to move freely, obtain quality education, access health services, get safe and decent jobs, and be protected from forcible return to the countries they came from. Bank financing has enabled a number of countries to make and implement regulatory changes that allow refugees to exercise these rights. To make this work more systematic and transparent, the bank could develop a refugee policy index that evaluates host countries’ policies and identifies necessary reforms. Progress on the policy front would be rewarded with eligibility for more financing. The World Bank’s partnership with the UNHCR has been fruitful, but it is insufficient. The bank’s interlocutors should include states, humanitarian
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At a 2016 summit, 50 countries committed to raise financing for refugee-hosting countries by 30 percent, double the number of resettlement spots, and increase refugees’ access to schools and jobs. For the most part, progress has fallen far short of these commitments. But there are bright spots on the map—countries such as Jordan, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Cameroon, which are tapping into World Bank support. It is up to the bank’s next president whether these outliers will come to represent the norm. The financing is on the line this very year: the bank’s next replenishment of the International Development Association—the most important source of funding for low-income countries— will take place in December. Renewed financing for refugee-hosting countries, in particular, should be a top priority. In an era of humanitarian retreat, the bank’s leadership understood that meeting global development goals meant addressing the effects of conflict and displacement. Whoever takes over the bank next will inherit this mission and needs to carry it forward. This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.
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eL Seed: A Message of Unity, Drawn in ‘Calligraffiti’
Renowned French-Tunisian ‘Calligraffiti’ Artist: “Arabic Calligraphy helped me reconcile two parts of my identity. Today, I use it as a tool to bring people, cultures and generations together.” 36
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When I decided to create an art piece in Manshiyat Naser, the neighborhood of the Cairo garbage collectors in Egypt, I never thought this project would be the most amazing human experience that I would ever live. from the Middle East. Majalla had the pleasure of interviewing eL Seed in light of his current solo exhibition, Tabula Rasa at Lazinc in London.
French-Tunisian ‘Calligraffiti’ artist, eL Seed. (Courtesy: eL Seed Studio)
by Yasmine El-Geressi
Q. Tell us about your background? A.I was born and raised in the suburbs of Paris. My parents were immigrants from Tunisia. I am from a modest social background but my parents made sure my brothers and sister studied. I went to University and got a Master’s Degree in Supply Chain Management. Art has always been a hobby since childhood but it was at the birth of my daughter that I quit my job as a business consultant to focus on my art. Q.What was your first memory of art? How did you discover your form of artistic expression? A. I remember a kid called Yannick who was 6 when I was 7. He was our neighbor. His mom used to drop him off at our house as she was starting work early. He had a school book called ‘Ratus et ses amis’ and there was a double page with a big drawing. I remember re-drawing this double page on a big sheet of paper every morning for weeks. Everyday Yannick was so excited to see the evolution of the drawing. I have been drawing since I was kid.
Born in Paris to Tunisian parents, eL Seed consciously uses Arabic calligraphy and a distinctive style to spread messages of peace, unity and to underline the commonalities of human existence. His artwork can be found all over the world and consistently aims at unifying communities and redressing stereotypes. His work is the result of literary and philosophical research and carries direct significance to the place and community within which they are placed. eL Seed has installed his work in public spaces, galleries and institutions on every continent and recently launched his most recent book ‘Perception’ at MoMA in New York. In 2017, he won the UNESCO Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture. He was named a Global Thinker in 2016 by Foreign Policy for his project ‘Perception’ in Cairo. In 2013, he collaborated with Louis Vuitton on their famous ‘Foulard d’Artiste,’ the first time the brand manufactured a product designed by an artist
Q. Who are your biggest influences; people, styles, you looked upon while establishing your visual language? A. Traditional calligraphy, old school graffiti artists. Q. When and why did you begin to ornament public buildings and spaces? How does your creative process look like? My first wall was painted in 1998 in my neighborhood in the suburbs of Paris. I thought it was cool. Later when I started painting in Arabic, I felt that painting in a public space in large scale had so much impact and freedom that I couldn’t think of anything else. I remember painting in this abandoned factory. Sometimes, I was the only person who could see or saw my artwork in real. My creative process is really spontaneous. I usually do not sketch my mural. I know what I am writing and I just go with the flow, free hand. Q. What guides you in your work, how do you begin choosing
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As part of its autumn/ winter Foulard d’Artistes (‘Artists’ Scarves’) project, fashion powerhouse Louis Vuitton adopted a design by eL Seed on its emblematic giant silk square. (Courtesy: eL Seed Studio)
the location of your next project and the message you want to convey there? A. The process of my art has evolved. I believe, as an artist working in the public space, I have a social responsibility. It usually starts with a theme, an issue I want to highlight, then I look for the perfect place to do the artwork, and finally I find the appropriate message. The message takes a long time sometimes. The research is really important. I have to make sure the message is relevant to the place and to the people. Q. Tell us about your current solo exhibition at the Lazinc art gallery?
The universality of the message, the political context of Tunisia at this time, and the fact that I was writing Quran in a graffiti were not insignificant. It reunited the community.
A. For this exhibition, I have taken a step further by attempting to strip down my thought process as an artist, in an effort to access my own tabula rasa, if indeed it is possible. Expect to get a better grip of Arabic script and its beauty through a calligraphic experience. I take the idea of tabula rasa as a starting point and implant it onto the deep-seated preconceptions that are commonly held about the Arabic script and culture. The idea of the human mind as a ‘tabula rasa’ occurred late in the 17th century, when the English philosopher John Locke in an essay concerning human understanding (1689), argued for the mind’s initial resemblance to “white paper, void of all characters,” with “all materials of reason and knowledge” derived from experience. Essentially, he says that the human mind at birth is a complete, but a receptive, blank slate (or tabula rasa) upon which experience imprints knowledge. Q. There exists a mystery that connects with your soul as soon as you observe a piece of calligraphy that happens at a different level beyond mere comprehension, where an implicit message is hidden behind every stroke and every letter. How does this impact the way you practice your art and the way people perceive it? A. I believe Arabic script speaks to your soul before it reaches your eyes, and when you get the meaning, you feel connected
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Mural painted across around 50 buildings in Manshiyat Naser, the neighbourhood of the Cairo garbage collectors in Egypt. (Courtesy: eL Seed Studio)
I believe Arabic script speaks to your soul before it reaches your eyes, and when you get the meaning, you feel connected to it. one is the aesthetics. There is a beauty in the dynamic of calligraphy. The second layer is the message. People who want to go deeper than the just the beauty will recognize the script and wonder if there is a meaning or if it just letters put together. And the last layer is the political and social context of where the art piece is created. It is important that that depth and meaning are in each piece I create.
to it. I always make sure to write the messages that are relevant to the place where I’m painting, messages that have universal dimension, so anyone around the world can feel connected to it. I stopped writing the translation of the artwork on the wall
eL Seed’s The Bridge, an installation in demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. (Courtesy: eL Seed Studio)
as I don’t want the poetry of the calligraphy to be broken. As it is art, you can appreciate it as it is, in the way that you can enjoy any music from other countries. Some people see it as a rejection, or closed doors, but for me it is more of an invitation to my language, to my culture and to my art. I feel there are many layers to reading my artwork. The first
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Q. You said that Arabic calligraphy helped you to accept your French identity. Can you talk to us about that? A. Growing up in France, I felt I was disconnected from my Arab roots and not fully French. The social and political climate I was growing up in made me feel I needed to choose between one of these two identities. I ran into to my Arabic roots and ignored my French culture. The more I was digging into my Arabic culture, the more I realised that I would never have been able to do what I am doing if I wasn’t born and raised in France. I made a mistake by thinking that I needed to choose. Arabic calligraphy allowed me to reconcile these parts of my identity. Q. What are the messages and ideas you are trying to implement through your art into society’s social conscience and why are they of particular interest to you? A. I perceive my artwork as a tangible expression of my search for identity, both as an individual and as an artist. My compositions, that combines the freestyle technique of street art with traditional Arabic calligraphy, reflect the tension represented in my hyphenated identity. Arabic Calligraphy helped me reconcile two parts of my identity. Today, I use it as a tool to bring people, cultures and generations together. Q. You have described your project in Cairo, Egypt as the most amazing human experience you have ever lived. What spurred you to launch this project and why was this experience significant to you? When I decided to create an art piece in Manshiyat Naser, the neighborhood of the Cairo garbage collectors in Egypt, I never thought this project would be the most amazing human experience that I would ever live. As an artist, I had this humanist intention of beautifying a poor and neglected neighborhood by bringing art to it and hopefully shining light on this isolated community. My perception towards the community changed during the
project, and towards what they do. All the garbage that everybody is disgusted by is not theirs. They just work out of it. Actually, they don’t live in the garbage. They live from the garbage. So I started doubting myself and wondering what was the real purpose of this whole project? It was not about beautifying a place by bringing art to it. It was about switching perception and opening a dialogue on the connection that we have with communities that we don’t know. The community welcomed my team and I as if we were family. It was one of the most amazing human experiences I have ever had. They are generous, honest and strong people. They have been given the name of Zabaleen (the garbage people), but this is not how they call themselves. they don’t live in the garbage
For this exhibition (Lazinc), I have taken a step further by attempting to strip down my thought process as an artist, in an effort to access my own tabula rasa, if indeed it is possible.
but from the garbage; and not their garbage, but the garbage of the whole city. They are the ones who clean the city of Cairo. Q. Can you single out other important milestones in your career? A. I think the painting on the Minaret of Jara Mosque in my hometown of Gabes. In 2012, when I painted it, I never thought that graffiti would bring so much attention to a city. At the beginning, I was just looking for a wall in my hometown, and it happened that the minaret was built in ‹94. And for 18 years, those 57 meters of concrete stayed grey. When I met the imam for the first time, and I told him what I wanted to do, he said: «Thank God you finally came,» and he told me that for years he was waiting for somebody to do something on it. The most amazing thing about this imam is that he didn›t ask me anything, neither a sketch, or what I was going to write. In every work that I create, I write messages in my style calligraphy. I use quotes or poetry. For the minaret, I thought that the most relevant message to be put on a mosque should come from the Quran, so I picked this verse: «Oh humankind, we have created you from a male and a female, and made you people and tribe, so you may know each other.» It was a universal call for peace, tolerance, and acceptance coming from the side that we don›t usually portray in a good way in the media. I was amazed to see how the local community reacted to the
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In 2018, Dubai Opera commissioned eL Seed for a sculpture, he wanted to pay tribute to Declaration as a way of declaring his love for the city of Dubai–the place which affected his life and his practice more than any other. (Courtesy: eL Seed Studio)
In 2012, eL Seed painted the minaret of Jara Mosque in his hometown of Gabes, in the south of Tunisia. (Courtesy: eL Seed Studio)
My creative process is really spontaneous. I usually do not sketch my mural. I know what I am writing and I just go with the flow, free hand. you still like to explore? What do you collect when you travel? A. There is so many places to visit, people to meet and stories to tell. I usually do not collect anything. I write the stories, the memories that I have and publish them sometimes or keep them. The most important thing in what I do is the human experience. On a four week calligraffiti road trip, eL Seed around Tunisia during the summer 2013, eL Seed painted 24 walls in total, spanning the entire country. He beautifully and poetically documented in his first book ‘Lost Walls’. (Courtesy: eL Seed Studio)
painting, and how it made them proud to see the minaret getting so much attention from international press all around the world. For the imam, it was not just the painting; it was really deeper than that. He hoped that this minaret would become a monument for the city, and attract people to this forgotten place of Tunisia. The universality of the message, the political context of Tunisia at this time, and the fact that I was writing Quran in a graffiti were not insignificant. It reunited the community. Q. You have painted murals all over the world. Where would
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Q. Can you tell us about any special projects that you are working on now? A. Secret. I never say anything about what I haven’t done yet. Q. When you›re not painting, what other interests do you have? A. I love running and cooking. My kitchen is an extension of my studio. The exhibition ‘Tabula Rasa’ by eL Seed is on view until March 2019 ,9 at Lazinc, 29 Sackville Street Mayfair, London, W1S 3D. www.lazinc.com
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Time For A Change Analysis: The 61st Grammys Marked the Beginning of the End for a One-sided Music Industry 42
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The Recording Academy’s fraught relationship with women and artists of color played a starring role during a ceremony that was as much an ode to diversity as it was a reparation effort.
Drake accepts the Best Rap Song award for 'God's Plan' onstage backstage during the 61st Annual GRAMMY Awards at Staples Center on February ,10 2019 in Los Angeles, California. (Getty)
And a notable number of African-American artists were nominated in mainstream categories outside of rap and R&B. But it was clear from who wasn’t at the Staples Center on Sunday that all was not well. The Recording Academy’s fraught relationship with women and artists of color played a starring role during a ceremony that was as much an ode to diversity as it was a reparation effort. What were they making up for? More than a half a century of operating like most other entertainment mediums until movements such as #OscarsSoWhite, #MeToo and #TimesUp forced the first real signs of change in the TV and film industries. The music industry has been slow to catch up. Last year just one woman won a solo award during the telecast. And it didn’t seem the organization felt any pressure to change things up when the chief executive of the Recording Academy, Neil Portnow, said women in music should “step up” to advance their careers. It was the same year that Kendrick Lamar was passed over by the academy for an album that went on to win a Pulitzer. His Grammy snub followed a pattern of rappers such as Jay-Z being asked to perform, making the show look diverse, only to be passed over for wins in pop and mainstream categories. This year, the Grammys became the latest awards show to visibly struggle with the overwhelming calls By Lorraine Ali* for change. Childish Gambino, who won in three LOS ANGELES — The 61st Annual Grammy major categories including best record, wasn’t there Awards appeared to be an exemplary model of to pick up his awards. Neither was Ariana Grande, diversity and progress as an unprecedented number of who won in the pop category. It was as if they were female artists — including Cardi B, making history as taunting academy voters when, during commercial the first solo woman to win for rap album and Kacey breaks, emojis of both artists appeared in separate ads Musgraves, who won the night’s album of the year for Apple Memoji and Google Playmoji, singing the prize — dominated the evening’s live performances. songs they probably would have performed on the Alicia Keys (not LL Cool J or James Corden) hosted. Staples Center stage had they agreed to appear.
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Best album nominee Lamar, who led with eight nominations, also refused to attend. Drake, up for best album and six more awards, surprised everyone when he showed up to receive his award for rap song. But he took the opportunity to voice the frustration of a generation of artists locked out by a mainly white, mainly male voting body. “This is a business where it’s up to a bunch of people who might not understand what a mixed-race kid from Canada is saying, or a fly Spanish girl from New York … The point is, you’ve already won if you have people who are singing your songs word for word, if you’re a hero in your hometown. Look, if there’s people who have regular jobs who are coming out in the rain and snow, spending their hard-earned money to buy tickets to your shows, you don’t need this (Grammy award) right here. I promise you. You already won.” Grande tweeted that she had a dispute with producers over what she wanted to perform. “It was when my creativity & self expression was stifled by you, that i decided not to attend,” she posted. The Grammys did make changes after last year’s ceremony to be more inclusive and representative of today’s music industry. On Sunday, eight acts rather than five competed in the top four categories of album, record, song of the year and best new artist. The -2/1 3hour show opened with the Latin music
Drake, up for best album and six more awards, surprised everyone when he showed up to receive his award for rap song. But he took the opportunity to voice the frustration of a generation of artists locked out by a mainly white, mainly male voting body.
number “Havana” led by Camila Cabello and featuring Colombian rapper J Balvin and Ricky Martin. But it was clear the show had a female empowerment theme when Keys opened things alongside Michelle Obama, Jada Pinkett Smith, Jennifer Lopez and Lady Gaga, who shared what music meant to them. They kicked off one of the more spontaneous ceremonies in memory, which included -20plus performances by artists ranging from Dolly Parton with Miley Cyrus to best new artist winner Dua Lipa with St. Vincent. Not everyone, however, appeared comfortable. And after Janelle Monae’s bombastic performance of “Django Jane” — in which she shouted the lyric, “Let
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Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz arrives at the 61st Annual GRAMMY Awards at Staples Center on February ,10 2019 in Los Angeles, California. (Getty)
the vagina have a monologue!” — there was no way the agro funk of the Red Hot Chili Peppers could look anything but out of place. The major artists who didn’t show spoke volumes with their silence, but the effort to make the Grammys relevant and representative of the artists it’s supposed to honor might have been better served if, say, Donald Glover (aka Gambino) had been there to take the mike. His winning number, “This is America,” speaks for itself, as does the “Black Panther” soundtrack by Lamar. In film and TV, it took outspoken actors and behindthe-scenes folks speaking out against a white,
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patriarchal system — at the ceremonies that had overlooked them for so long — to finally crack open the doors. The Emmys and Golden Globes were the latest proof. Music isn’t there yet. Just take a look at a University of Southern California Annenberg study that showed there’s a long way for women to go in the record business. But Sunday night looked like the beginning of the end for a tradition that’s woefully out of touch with the medium it’s meant to honor. Originally published in LA Times Lorraine Ali is television critic of the Los Angeles Times.
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Shakespeare and the #MeToo Movement When Will Judi Dench Finally Get to Play King Lear? By: Bryn Haworth If one visits the drama section of Foyles bookshop in London, it is hard to believe that Shakespeare, far from being merely our ‘greatest living playwright’ (as Andrea Leadsom might say) is anything less than the sole playwright that ever lived. The shelves groan under the weight of his volumes and of the parasitic scholars which
cling like barnacles to the immense sperm whale of English Lit. Meanwhile, in the shelves opposite, a multitude of lesser mortals, so-called playwrights in their own right, huddle like microscopic krill lest they get swallowed in their thousands by the immortal Moby Dick. The ancient Greeks themselves are put in the shade. The kitchen sink dramatists never get a look in. This had been the case for many years, centuries, but it
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arguably got even worse with the invention of cinema – talkies, that is; silent movies couldn’t convey the man’s genius. Sir Laurence Olivier had a lot to do with the transfer of the Bard’s work onto celluloid, the same Olivier who famously advised Dustin Hoffman to try acting. It was Olivier who first offered a brooding Hamlet to the camera, complete with Yorick’s chap-fallen skull. His patriotic Henry V urged the ‘band of brothers’ to support the British war effort. The location was in Ireland and the ‘brothers’ were actually Irish extras whose country, being neutral, was the safest location the filmmakers could find. More recently, the Bard himself has also received filmic treatment, reviving his acting career and appearing (as himself) in Shakespeare In Love, courtesy of that nice Mr Weinstein (who has so much else to answer for). Here, Will was flatteringly depicted as the young, slightly frenetic and adolescently confused lover of Gwyneth Paltrow. That time he had the good fortune to have his part scripted by Tom Stoppard. So far, so bardolatrous, but it has taken till now for the Olivier of our times (he literally played Olivier in one film) to present worshippers of the only truly English religion since the Druids with the ultimate gift: after years of playing the famous roles, Kenneth Branagh has directed a film in which the finest Shakespearian actor of his generation (himself) plays the Bard (himself). No less. The one and only. At a stroke, and with all the magic of cinema at his disposal (along with a false nose and bald wig), Branagh has transformed himself into the most transcendent genius of all time, only this time scripted by a stand-up comedian. Sir Kenneth Branagh, Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen attend a BAFTA screening of ALL IS TRUE at Picturehouse Central on December 2018 ,4 in London, England. (Getty)
All Is True purports to tell the story of Shakespeare’s last years back in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon. The title is filched from the subtitle of the last play that the bard had a hand in, Henry VIII, and is distinctly tongue in cheek. Ben Elton, the screenwriter and also the inventor of a sit-com starring the bard called ‘Upstart Crow’, knows very well that history records next to nothing of the truth about Shakespeare. Indeed, Mark Rylance would insist we do not even know he wrote the plays. This demonstrates at the very least a treacherous attitude to Rylance’s own profession, but I leave it to some brave actor to step forward and mount a defence of the intellects of actors. The fact is that William Shakespeare, player and playwright, managed to fly so far beneath history’s radar as to leave no real trace of his life. Aside from some anecdotes concerning deer poaching in his youth, or the endless enigma concerning the recipients of his sonnets, we have little more than a rather dreary last will and testament and some dodgy examples of his handwriting. No letters. No evidence of how his genius arose. He is the prolific and brilliant writer who left behind a tabula rasa. In the circumstances, it’s astonishing how few people have
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Writing in ‘Slate’, Isaac Butler asserts that this is a biopic for the #MeToo generation, and certainly one can agree that although Shakespeare is no Harvey Weinstein, he is depicted as a ‘crap husband and father’. resisted the temptation to scribble all over him. So, for Ben Elton even to hint that what his screenplay depicts is the real and compelling story of the great man is clearly a joke. Sadly, it is – along with a splenetic and snobbish outburst from the Earl of Southampton – the film’s only decent joke, except the Earl’s joke is not decent. The outburst appears when Southampton, played by a very antiquated Sir Ian McKellen, is sitting with the great poet at the fireside of his Stratford home. They are sitting in the pervasive gloom of candlelight that the whole film seldom escapes. The possible addressee of some of the sonnets sits, wizened, wearing a curly wig, before an adoring middle-aged Shakespeare, and dismisses less talented writers (all of whom belong in the disregarded shelves of Foyles) as having been ‘spat out by the dicks of non-entities’. It is probably the only moment one can detect the hand of the writer of ‘Upstart Crow’ and ‘Black Adder’. Shakespeare/Branagh, however, is not laughing. Instead, he sits in the gloom with his eyes welling up as his ruined idol pays him the useless compliment. What he really wants, we are expected to believe, is a belated confession of love from the old toff. The sparsity of humour is surprising given the screenwriter’s back catalogue. This was the writer, after all, who reimagined Queen Elizabeth as a kooky overgrown teenager squealing with pleasure when one of her courtiers said something bawdy. There are no squeals to be heard here. The tone of the entire film is melancholic throughout, based on the idea that Shakespeare has returned to mourn his dead son, which is an excuse for several ghostly apparitions of a kind Shakespeare himself would have applauded, especially as Hamnet has a tendency to quote his father’s plays, even when they were written after Hamnet’s death at the age of eleven. It’s really the language, however, which acts as the biggest drag on the film. There is no sense that we are hearing the words spoken by a brilliant and restless genius. Branagh’s Bard is content to delve in his garden with a heart-shaped
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spade, act the curmudgeon when an aspiring writer turns up asking for advice and never once ascend from the dismal plateau of modern English, except when he quotes from his own extant writings. On the part of Elton this is a massive dodging of responsibility which makes one wonder why he didn’t dodge the entire brief, but who knows, maybe Stoppard was unavailable. The scene in the Bard’s living room is a case in point. Branagh’s apparition suddenly breaks off from the lifeless quotidian English he has spoken thus far to recite one of his own sonnets. It is number 29 in fact, a poem very pertinent to the class divide yawning between him and Southampton. The sonnet is quite possibly as perfect a sentence (and it is just a single sentence) as anyone ever came up with: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee, and then my state, (Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate; For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings. The Bard then makes the mistake of telling the Earl that he had, indeed, loved him and wondering out loud if the Earl ever returned his love. Southampton is indignant. He scolds the poet for getting above his station. “It is not for you to love me,” he says, snootily. But that is not the end of it. We then have to hear the entire sonnet again, this time (as a further compliment to the poet) recited by Southampton. It’s as if these two national treasures of the acting profession are engaged in a sonnet duel, a competition to see who can recite the same sonnet most affectingly. This
But at no point does Judi Dench really grab the limelight. So much for #MeToo, then.
is one of those occasions when acting verges on a contact sport. We know it will end in tears. Sadly, from the point of view of cinematic climax, I have to declare Branagh the victor by a nose, though no doubt other judges will disagree. But that is of no great moment; it’s not whether you win or lose but that you played, after all, if you’re an actor, and once this scene is over there isn’t a dry eye in the house – the house of the almost entirely fictional and once again entirely quotidian William Shakespeare, that is, brought back to sullen earth after recollecting a sonnet he could not conceivably have penned. How stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me the uses of modern English. I recall similar disappointment on first reading the New English Bible, whose ‘translators’ – they must have been a committee of trendy vicars – flatly refused to employ the word smote, presumably on the basis that it was too harsh for modern sensibilities. Branagh/ Shakespeare never misses an opportunity to prove Mark Rylance’s theory that he could not have been himself. His use of language is never as good as the Earl’s was for that fleeting moment, thus fuelling another pet theory of those who deny the player from Stratford could ever have been the author: it was obviously Southampton’s work all along. “What else do you expect?” I hear you cry. “No one
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Dame Judi Dench attends the 21st British Independent Film Awards at Old Billingsgate on December 2018 ,02 in London, England. (Getty)
under-use of Judi Dench as the much put-upon and very disgruntled Ann Hathaway. Writing in ‘Slate’, Isaac Butler asserts that this is a biopic for the #MeToo generation, and certainly one can agree that although Shakespeare is no Harvey Weinstein, he is depicted as a ‘crap husband and father’. He has so alienated Ann with his long absences and carryings on in that London, she addresses him coldly as ‘Husband’ for most of the film. It is not till a touching scene of reconciliation over the flower beds, when he admits he’s a bad gardener, that she deigns to call him Will and lets him back into her bed ‘for comfort’. But at no point does Judi Dench really grab the limelight. So much for #MeToo, then. I thought it was about improving the lot of actresses in the film industry after dumping the casting couch in the nearest skip, or it was until the whole thing exploded over social media and became the scourge of sexual predators everywhere. So no, Husband/Will is not a sexual predator, unless he’s what Barbara Ellen (in reference to Ryan Adams) calls a ‘needy predator’. There is some literary evidence for that, judging by the way he depicts male lovers. In ‘As You Like It’, one such lover scratches his sentiments into the bark of trees. Your typical Elizabethan predator was not a powerful middle-aged type, but a young man such as the one who courted a girl some years his senior, an upstart crow yet to become a swan. could have done a better job of writing like the all-time master, not even the speaker of the House of Commons.” Oh, I don’t know, what about that strange moment in Vice when Dick Cheney and his wife go to bed and start speaking in blank verse like latter day Macbeths? It may be a kind of Shakespearian gibberish, but it sounds just as good as the real thing. And there was blank verse in Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III too, unless my ears deceived me, and that was written sometime in the future. It is at least possible to do this kind of thing. But when someone in his family accuses Shakespeare of always ‘putting words in other people’s mouths’, this is surely a confession on the part of Ben Elton that he has been doing just that with the dramatist, a feat even James Joyce could not achieve. This is what the Bard sounds like in Ulysses, after all:
SHAKESPEARE: (WITH PARALYTIC RAGE.) WEDA SECA WHOKILLA FARST. It’s hardly even English, let alone divine poesy. However, there is another level of sadness beyond the discovery that the Bard was not, in a private capacity at least, remotely bardic, or even the decision to abandon all pretence to authenticity and hang the entire story on Branagh/Shakespeare’s mourning of his dead son. It is the
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Nowadays, the typical predator is longer in tooth and claw. If we are indeed living through an age where directors are beginning to cast women in the major roles and pay them accordingly, it is also an age where an all-female version of Julius Caesar can be staged and Maxine Peake gets to play ‘the Dane’. Far from being in the swim, then, All Is True accepts a version of Ann as the dumpy, illiterate wife of a quill, and reins Dench in to allow Branagh full sway in his somewhat ridiculous hair and beard. This is sad, as it’s hard to imagine that the Bard, with all his references to cross-dressing and his liberal resort to gender-bending, would have been particularly alarmed by the implications of #MeToo for the theatre. On the contrary, he might have been thrilled. His own theatre with its all-male casts was in some ways a mirror image of our own. Take his Cleopatra. When she commits suicide rather than be hauled off to Rome in chains, it is informative that she dreads mockery more than simple captivity. She warns Iras, one of her faithful servants, that ‘saucy lictors’ (don’t ask me): Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers Ballad us out o’ tune. The quick comedians Extemporally will stage us and present
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Our Alexandrian revels. Antony Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I’ th’ posture of a whore. (Antony and Cleopatra, Act 5, Scene 2) It is clear that back in Rome her tragedy could very rapidly turn into a comedy, with rude ballads to boot. No doubt, given Cleopatra’s reputation, a prosthetic nose would be involved. But what really mortifies Cleopatra is the idea of someone ‘boying her greatness’. It is well known that female actors weren’t allowed in Shakespeare’s day, so this is an incredibly bold piece of fourth wall demolition. Even as his ‘Cleopatra’ spoke these lines, she was being boyed in her greatness before the very eyes of the Globe’s audience. Would they have awoken from their trance of suspended disbelief at this reflexive juncture, and if so, would they have experienced theatrical alienation such as Brecht could only dream of? Hard to say if we do not fully understand how they accommodated the illusion of femininity in the first place. It was surely high risk, however, for the playwright to imperil the spell of theatrical illusion and admit that his actor squeaked. One recalls Bottom pleading to be allowed to play Thisbe as he can speak in a ‘monstrous little voice’. Perhaps those classical French critics were right and Shakespeare just didn’t have the dramaturgical nous to keep his tragedy and his comedy separate in the wash. Disappointed as I was by this portrayal of Ann as a dowdy and sulky adjunct, I naturally longed for the opinion of an acknowledged godmother of modern feminism. Amazingly, I got lucky and found a book by Germaine Greer on the very subject of ‘Shakespeare’s Wife’. Unfortunately, it predated the current debate; Greer’s book was published back in 2007. Nonetheless, what could be better for the purposes of saving Ann Hathaway from the role of resentful sidekick to greatness than a great feminist who never shied from controversy, eager to champion her cause? Alas, I shall not deny it, the book only served to compound my disappointment after the film. Don’t get me wrong, it is a wonder of scholarly research. The author has a grand old time challenging the assumptions of (male) scholars who have questioned the possibility that Ann might have had a mind of her own, or that her husband loved her, or that any of the sonnets could be addressed to her, etc, etc. Greer
refuses to take for granted that he shunned her for years and that she was unable to read. The Ann Hathaway she gives us is (at least potentially) economically independent, intelligent and a superior gardener, possibly a brewer of beer. Yet, as is the fate of all such efforts to dig out facts concerning Shakespeare and those who knew him, Greer offers no more plausible an account in the end than that of a stand-up comedian. So dependent is she on suppositions drawn from what she can glean concerning other women who lived at the same time and in the same part of the country, it is a bit rich when she writes in her sixteenth chapter that scholars ‘bereft of anything like fact, occasionally permit themselves a little idle speculation’. Facts are even thinner on the ground concerning his wife than they are concerning the illustrious poet. Given this dearth of facts, however, one is bound to wonder why nobody, not even an arch feminist, has dared to speculate more. What did she have to lose? In her final chapter, Greer seems close to fulfilling at last the unspoken promise of the book. She proposes that
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A portrait of William Shakespeare is pictured in London, on March 9,
that even mean? I can’t imagine the world taking so much interest in a dusty old book the likes of which a wife from Stratford-uponAvon might have helped preserve, if the writer had been this judicious about the Truth. We would never have got the evil ‘hedgehog’ Richard III for a start. His portrayal would have been far more even-handed. He would probably have lost his hump and spent most of the play being nice to his relatives, just as Shakespeare should have been.
after her husband’s death, Ann supervised the collecting of his plays and their publication. Yet even here she is timid, betraying perhaps even more deference towards scholarship than she has admitted thus far: ‘The idea that [Ann] might be entitled’, she says, ‘to some of the credit for the preservation of her husband’s work is apparently too ridiculous to contemplate, which is why we shall now contemplate it’. It has taken well over three hundred pages for Greer to become this heterodox. In the process we have had to wade through a huge amount of material that has no bearing on the matter in hand. Now, having aired her theory – which, like all bardic theories, is as plausible or implausible as the rest – on the very last page she confesses: ‘All this, in common with most of the book, is heresy, and probably neither truer nor less true than the accepted prejudice.’ Neither truer nor less true. Probably. Pray, what does
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But let’s imagine that Germaine Greer had not abandoned her usual guise of fearless contrarian. Imagine she had brought the full force of her heretical character to the vexed question of Shakespeare’s wife. Would she not, at the very least, have claimed that it was Ann, and not that syphilitic wastrel Will, who penned the plays? After all, who actually had the leisure to do it, stuck up there in her Stratford backwater? While hubby was off in Sin City, trawling the stews and acquiring venereal complaints, she could have been surrounded by books and helped by her clever daughters. They couldn’t go to London, that was as much a boy’s job as putting the bins out in Theresa May’s household, but it was no real loss. London would have been too big a distraction. She’d never have got a decent line written with all that hubbub going on. No, she was happy to let him go gadding off for months on end, pretending the plays she wrote were his, receiving all the praise, even visiting the court. She, meanwhile, was able to get her revenge on the patriarchy of her day by writing the best female characters the world had seen since the Wife of Bath, only this time they were written by a woman. They could be in control. They could be lawyers weighing the lives of criminals in the balance, or murderesses asking the evil spirits to ‘unsex me here’ and chiding their husbands for a lack of ambition. They could be wide-eyed innocents like Miranda, or subtle psychologists like Rosalind or Beatrice. They could be Cleopatra topping herself rather than go near a theatre. It was for her to decide. All the things she could not be, she could write. Now that would have been a woman for Judi Dench to play. It is really not impossible – although a touch heretical and impossible to prove, like everything else about him – that the Bard was in fact his better half. Not Bacon, nor Marlowe, nor even the grotesque Southampton. It is possible his very own wife was the actual writer and true genius of her age, with Shakespeare her obedient accomplice. Even if this were not the case (though who can prove otherwise?), it is surely high time someone offered a great actress a part worthy of her genius. It is time Judi Dench got to play King Lear.
A Weekly Political News Magazine
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Issue 1736 - February 22/02/2019
Bernie Sanders: From Modest Upbringings to Presidential Nominee
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Simple and Unrestrictive: Mediterranean Diet Works by Adding up Small Improvements Harvard Health Over time, eating a diet high in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and olive oil can reduce heart and blood vessel disease risks. Eating a Mediterranean-type diet won’t suddenly and
dramatically improve your cholesterol, magically slash your blood pressure, or help you drop 20 pounds overnight. But if you stick with it over time, it can potentially cut your risk of heart and blood vessel diseases by as much as %25, according to a study published online Dec. 2018 ,7,
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by JAMA Network Open. This overall improvement may be due to the cumulative effect of numerous small positive changes that occur in the body as a result of the diet — most notably, a drop in chronic inflammation, a known risk factor for heart disease. “Eating a traditional Mediterranean diet can protect people from their first heart attack or first stroke to the same extent as statin medication, and it’s even more protective than low-dose aspirin therapy,” says Dr. Samia Mora, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and one of the study’s authors.
“Eating a traditional Mediterranean diet can protect people from their first heart attack or first stroke to the same extent as statin medication, and it’s even more protective than low-dose aspirin therapy,”
WHAT’S IN THE MEDITERENEAN DIET?
Assorted ingredients used in Italian cooking, including garlic, plum tomatoes, olive oil, olives, peppers, bread, salad garnished with fresh basil leaves. (Getty)
The Mediterranean-type diet is based on an eating pattern historically followed in countries around the Mediterranean, such as Spain, Greece, and Southern Italy — although many people in these regions have now strayed from this dietary pattern. Mediterranean-style meals are built on a foundation of vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. Animal protein is used more sparingly than in a traditional Western-style diet and most often consists of lean meats and fish — and only small amounts of red meat. The diet also includes moderate amounts of cheese and yogurt. The diet also includes lots of olive oil, as well as nuts, seeds, and legumes. To switch to a Mediterranean-style diet, make small changes to your daily meals over time. Simple strategies include • adding more vegetables to each of your daily meals • swapping butter and other fats for extra-virgin olive oil • switching out refined carbohydrates, such as crackers and rice, for whole grains and whole-wheat breads • periodically trading servings of red meat for beans or lean meat options • reducing your intake of sugars and refined carbohydrates — for instance, by eating a serving of fresh fruit instead of your usual sweet treat. The Mediterranean-type diet may be more challenging for people who live in a food desert, an area where it’s difficult to find fresh fruits or vegetables. But it can be done by using frozen vegetables and beans, says Dr. Samia Mora, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “In general, it’s healthier to prepare legumes yourself rather than relying on canned legumes, which can be loaded with salt,” she says. “If you do use canned beans, be certain to rinse them thoroughly to eliminate as much of the added sodium as possible.” Also, beware of added sodium in nuts. Opt
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instead for unsalted raw or dry roasted nuts and seeds. A HEART-HEALTHY DIET It’s really no surprise that researchers found health benefits from the Mediterranean-style diet, which is heavy in lean meats and fish, olive oil, whole grains, legumes, and fruits and vegetables and low in processed foods and sugary deserts. Researchers have long known that the Mediterranean diet appears to protect against cardiovascular disease. But nobody knew exactly why the Mediterranean diet produced those benefits. What specifically does the diet change within the body that helps heart health? Dr. Mora and her fellow researchers from Harvard Medical School, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital embarked on their study to find out. They looked for clues in 25,000 participants in the Women’s Health Study, examining the women’s diets as well as 40 different biomarkers. They then compared that information against data on which of the women went on to have heart attacks, arterial blockages, or strokes over the course of the approximately -12year follow-up period. Not only did they find that women whose diets most closely resembled a traditional Mediterranean pattern were a quarter less likely to have heart and blood vessel problems than those whose diets least resembled that model, they also used the biomarker information to get a better picture of exactly what was different about people who were eating a Mediterranean-style diet versus those who weren’t. Biomarker data showed that women eating a Mediterranean-style diet had improvements in some important measures. Compared with women who didn’t eat a Mediterranean-style diet, women who did saw drops in heart and blood vessel risks of
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• %29 from a reduction in inflammation, which is a known contributor to heart disease • %27.9 from improved glucose metabolism and a reduction in insulin resistance • %27.3 from lower body mass index. Researchers also saw improvements in blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and other biomarkers, but these were less significant. “We were not expecting that all these pathways would be affected by the diet,” says Dr. Mora. The drop in chronic inflammation appeared to provide the largest degree of risk reduction. “We were surprised that the contribution of inflammation was even stronger than the effect on blood pressure and glucose metabolism,” says Dr. Mora. Other factors may also be at play in Mediterranean diet. Future research may look at other factors that may also make the Mediterranean diet beneficial, says Dr. Samia Mora, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Some believe that the Mediterranean diet may have a beneficial effect on your digestive tract and the 100 trillion bacteria and other microorganisms that live within it. Research is revealing the importance of a diverse and healthy intestinal microbiome (the microbial community in the gut), which is now thought to play a role in immune function and healing inflammation inside the body. It’s thought that the Mediterranean-style diet, which includes low-sugar Greek yogurt and other fermented foods, may contribute healthy organisms to the microbiome. Some of its positive health effects may stem from those contributions. “We did not have a measure for that in our study,” says Dr. Mora. Future research on the diet may also look specifically at the role extra-virgin olive oil plays in the dietary benefits of the Mediterranean-style model. Extra-virgin olive oil is believed to prevent a type of irregular heartbeat known as an arrhythmia, and it’s also thought to reduce
The good news is that unlike some popular fad-type diets, the Mediterranean model is relatively easy to follow.
breast cancer risk. Other research has revealed potential associations with lower risks for diabetes and dementia, says Dr. Mora. REAPING THE BENEFITS The more closely women followed the Mediterranean diet, the more improvements they saw on average, says Dr. Mora. But that doesn’t mean you need to be perfect to see health benefits from dietary changes. Try to follow the Mediterranean diet %80 to %90 of the time, but you can allow yourself some room to stray — provided it stays within that %20–%10 range. However, you will need to stick with the Mediterraneanstyle pattern over time to see a real reduction in cardiovascular risks. This is not a short-term fix, says Dr. Mora; instead, view it as a lifestyle change. “It needs
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Close-Up of Food in Plate. Photo Taken In Spain, Barcelona. (Getty)
Even without calorie counting, this eating plan could help with weight control. On average, there was a reduction in body mass index among those in the study who complied most closely with the Mediterranean-style diet, but the changes were small. However, Dr. Mora said it’s important to note that while women on the diet didn’t see a lot of weight loss, the diet may have helped prevent weight gain in some instances, because many of the Mediterranean-style eaters in the study maintained their body weight as they entered menopause, when they otherwise might have gained. Originally published in Harvard Women's Health Watch.
to be done consistently,” she says. But this study shows that embarking on this approach is likely to bring tangible benefits. Many people are more likely to change their lifestyle if they know how it is going to benefit them. “A lot of us are curious, why should I do this? Knowing how something works is helpful,” says Dr. Mora. The good news is that unlike some popular fad-type diets, the Mediterranean model is relatively easy to follow. “The Mediterranean diet is actually very well tolerated, and many people can adhere to it over the long term,” says Dr. Mora. And, she adds, it offers a lot of choice in food selection and doesn’t require counting calories. “This is a nonrestrictive diet.
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Bernie Sanders: From Modest Upbringings to Presidential Nominee By: Ali El Shamy 1. Bernie Sanders was born on September 1941 ,8 in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Elias Ben Yehuda Sanders, immigrated to the United States from Austrian Poland in 1921 and worked as a paint salesman. His mother, Dora Sanders, was a daughter of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia, although she herself was born in the US. While his parents never had a problem affording the bare necessities, such as food and clothes, they would struggle in buying luxuries. His parents passed away while he was young, his mother died in 1960 when he was 19 and his father died in 1962 when he was just 21. As such they would never live to see the day their son become a successful politician. 2. Since some Sanders’ immediate family remained in Poland, many had fallen victim to Hitler’s atrocities and were killed in the Holocaust. Hitler’s rise and the resulting deaths of 6 million Jews made Bernie realize from a young age how important politics
is, and how it can be used as a force for harmony or absolute carnage. Moreover, his working class upbringing helped influence his political beliefs and ideology.
rejection he had become too old to serve in the military.
5. Bernie’s success did not happen overnight; as a matter of fact he had to endure many 3. In 1964, Bernie graduated from the defeats during his early political career. In University of Chicago with a bachelor’s 1972, he unsuccessfully ran for Governor of degree in Political Science. He became Vermont and US senate. The 1970s would politically active as a student having joined prove to be a turbulent time for his career the now dissolved Young People's Socialist as he lost another bid for the senate in 1974 League. During the 1960s he became and another bid for Vermont Governor in involved in the Civil Rights movement; 1976. His big break would come at start of examples of his civil rights activism include the 1980s when he was elected Mayor of taking part in a sit-in protesting Chicago Burlington in 1980 and would remain at his University’s segregated student housing post for another four terms until 1989. and accommodation and joining the Congress of Racial Equality. Bernie also 6. In 1990, Bernie would run for a seat participated in the March on Washington in the US House of Representatives for for Jobs and Freedom in which civil rights Vermont. Running as an Independent activist, Martin Luther King Jr., delivered candidate he faced off against Republican Peter Plympton Smith. Despite not running the famous “I Have a Dream” speech. as a party candidate, he successfully beat 4. Bernie was opposed to the Vietnam War Smith by gaining 56 per cent of the vote. and applied for conscientious objector status His win marked the first time since 1950 to avoid fighting in the war. His application that an Independent candidate won a seat in was rejected, but by the time he received his Congress.
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7. During his time in the House of Representatives, Sanders would criticize both Democrats and Republicans for working on behalf of the wealthy rather than common citizens. He would also co-found and chair the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which was a group that consisted of liberal and leftist Democratic members of Congress. As a House Representative he also vocally opposed the Iraq War, warning that a US invasion would destabilize the country and the Middle East. Sanders would remain a House Representative until 2007. 8. In 2006, he ran for Vermont seat in the US Senate. He once again ran as an Independent against Republican
Richard Tarrant and successfully beat him with 65 per cent of the votes. As Senator he campaigned for tax reforms and an elimination of tax policies that favored the wealthy. He also introduced a bill to raise minimum wage of federal workers and another bill that would alleviate workers from sanctions should they choose to join a union. In 2018, he introduced the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (Stop BEZOS) Act which aimed to make corporations (specifically Amazon), not taxpayers, pay for their employees’ health insurance and food stamps. The publicity and pressure of the act persuaded Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, to raise his employees’ minimum wage.
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9. He ran for 2016 Presidential elections and despite the fact that he ran as an Independent, he sought out the Democratic Party’s nomination. Even though he did not take any campaign donations from corporations, wealthy donors, Super-PACs or lobby groups, he was able to make it all the way to the primary elections which he eventually lost to Democratic Senator Hilary Clinton. 10. Having showed his perseverance and determination in the past, he has done the same now as he recently announced his candidacy for the upcoming 2020 presidential elections.