Of Cannibals

Understanding the Holocaust in its Totality

A Weekly Political News Magazine

Eat Like an Egyptian

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1784- January- 24/01/2020

Joaquin Phoenix: The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of the Oscar Front Runner

Issue 1784- january- 24/01/2020

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Editorial

A Weekly Political News Magazine

Issue 1784- January- 24/01/2020

A Weekly Political News Magazine

Culture is often seen as rigid, and difficult to change. While that is true to an extent, there are multiple instances in which elements of a culture changes, albeit at a slow rate, part in parcel due phenomenon such as migration and globalization. For instance, the presence of Asian migrants in Britain helped influence British food culture, as a brand new fusion of British-Indian cuisine became a prominent part of British diets. This week’s cover story by Bryn Haworth explores the art of French artist Paul Gauguin, who was a pioneer of “gauche” art and was born and spent a number of his formative years in Peru. The piece further explores how European conquest of Peru influenced the country’s religious beliefs, as colonial artists tried to infuse Christian art with that of the pagan Andean religion, for instance many paintings depict the Virgin Mary the same way Andeans depicted their own deities.

At the turn of the new decade, many of the world’s underlying issues have yet to be resolved. One of these issues is the increasing global wealth gap and levels of inequality. The Davos Summit organized by the World Economic Forum is an annual meeting of the world’s wealthiest as they try to propose ways to make the world a better place, however this summit has been widely criticized as an insulting display of privilege as invited participants arrived to Davos in private jets, helicopters and limousines. Yasmine El-Geressi writes on the Davos Summit, the disillusionment people all over the world have with current state of economic affairs and the controversy surrounding tax cuts for corporations and increased tax avoidance.

On January 27 of every year, the world gathers and mourns the millions of victims who viciously lost their lives during the Holocaust. While the Nazis targeted a number of minorities, 90 percent of the Holocaust’s death toll were Jewish. Despite the historical fact behind those numbers and figures, many historical revisionists and anti-Semites either claim that the number of victims is either over exaggerated, or make an even worse claim that the Holocaust never happened. Unfortunately, many leaders in the Arab and Muslim world have been projecting such hateful rhetoric. Robert Satloff, the Executive Director of the Washington Institute of Near East Policy, writes on the prominence of Holocaust denial and antisemitism in the Arab/Islamic world and emphasis the reasons why Muslims should not adopt such fascist thinking. He further talks about leaders in the region who are combating Holocaust denial.

The start of 2020 hasn’t been good for the Iranian regime. In the span of a month, it lost its second in command, brought down a civilian aircraft (triggering global condemnation and antigovernment protests in the process) and just recently, the UK, France and Germany accused it of violating JCPOA terms. Joseph Braude writes on the growing internal and external pressure on the Islamic Republic and why the pressure will not likely lessen in the near future.

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Ghassan Charbel Editorial secretary

the World’s Ultra-Rich Gather at Davos, the 20 AsDebate Over Economic Inequality Rages On

28 Bashar al-Assad’s Hollow Victory

36 Iran’s Leadership Faces a Heightened Crisis of Legitimacy

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Rights Abuses in Xinjiang Could 32 China’s Provoke a Global Terrorist Backlash

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Can Liverpool Win the League

by March 3

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50 Pickleball Pleasures and Pitfalls

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A man rides a horse through a bonfire during the traditional ritual in honor of San Antonio Abad (Saint Anthony the Abbot), patron saint of domestic animals.

This tradition known as Las Luminarias, is meant to purify the animals with the smoke of the bonfires and protect them for the year to come. (Getty) 4

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A woman throws hot water into the freezing cold air, at a temperature of minus 17 degrees Celcius in Kars, Turkey on January 2020 ,19. (Getty)

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eekly news

Davos, Switzerland that Trump had long made it clear “that any attack on Americans or American interests would be met with a decisive response.

Russian-Led Strikes on Rebel-Held 40 Northwest Syria Kill

Lebanon Forms New Government

Lebanon formed a new government on Tuesday, the presidency announced after Shi’ite Hezbollah and its allies clinched a deal on a cabinet that must tackle the country’s worst economic crisis in decades. Protesters returned to the streets, saying the new government does not meet their demands. They had been calling for an overhaul of the political system, the formation of an independent, non-sectarian cabinet, and an end to government corruption. The new cabinet was announced after months of deadlock. PM Hassan Diab said it would be a «rescue team» that would work to meet protesters› demands. But the demonstrators say the ministers were selected by the entrenched political elite that they blame for Lebanon›s problems.

Successor to Slain Iran General Faces Same Fate if he Kills Americans - U.S. Envoy

The successor to the Iranian commander killed in a U.S. drone strike would suffer the same fate if he followed a similar path by killing Americans, the U.S. special representative for Iran said, according to Asharq al-Awsat newspaper. Washington blamed General Qassem Soleimani for masterminding attacks by Iran-aligned militias on U.S. forces in the region. U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the Jan. 3 drone strike in Iraq after an escalation that began last month with missile strikes that killed an American contractor, which Washington blamed on an Iranian-aligned militia in Iraq. He said in the interview in

Russian-led air strikes killed at least 40 people on Tuesday in northwest Syria in a major army assault backed by Iranian militias to clear out rebels that has sent tens of thousands of people fleeing toward the border with Turkey, residents and rescuers said. They said a family of eight including six children was killed in the rural village of Kfar Taal west of government-controlled

emerged late last year from illegally traded wildlife at an animal market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. Most transport in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, was suspended on Thursday and people were told not to leave. Hours later, neighboring Huanggang, a city of about 7 million people, announced a similar lockdown.

Airports worldwide were screening passengers arriving from China.

Democrats Try to Persuade Reluctant Republicans to Join Push to Remove Trump

Aleppo, while another nine civilians were killed in Maardabseh in the southeast of Idlib province. At least 22 other civilians were killed in other strikes by Russian and Syrian government warplanes on rural opposition areas that have been hit hard since the Russian-led military campaign, supplemented by Iranian militias, began in December.

Democrats were poised on Thursday to press forward at U.S. President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial with their arguments for removing him from office, but his fellow Republicans showed no signs of softening their resistance to the Democratic case. The seven House Democratic “managers” serving as prosecutors in the trial were due at 1 p.m. (1800 GMT) to begin presenting the second of three days of opening arguments, having addressed the Senate for about eight hours on Wednesday. U.S. Representative

Adam Schiff and the other Democratic “managers” are presenting arguments that Trump should be convicted of two articles of impeachment passed by the House last month - abuse of power and obstruction of Congress - for pressuring Ukraine to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden last year, and impeding a congressional inquiry into the matter.

Trump Slams Impeachment, Lauds U.S. Economy at Davos Forum

President Donald Trump lashed out at his accusers in the Senate impeachment trial on Wednesday but broke with some of his defenders as he reiterated his preference for

wanted to see his aides, including former national security adviser John Bolton and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, testify in the Senate.

Brexit Deal Officially Becomes UK Law

The bill implementing Britain’s exit deal with the European Union officially became law on Thursday ahead of the country’s departure from the bloc next week. The legislation passed its final parliamentary stage on Wednesday, after more than three years of bitter wrangling over how, when and even if Brexit should take place. Queen Elizabeth has now given it Royal Assent, the leader of the House of Commons, Jacob ReesMogg, said on Twitter. Britain is due to leave the bloc at 2300 GMT on Jan. 31. A consent vote in the EU Parliament will take place on Jan 29. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to formally sign the Withdrawal Agreement in the coming days.

Millions on Virus Lockdown in China as WHO Weighs Response

China put millions of people on lock down on Thursday in two cities at the epicenter of a coronavirus outbreak that has killed 17 people and infected more than 630, as authorities around the world worked to prevent a global pandemic. Health officials fear the transmission rate will accelerate as hundreds of millions of Chinese travel at home and abroad during week-long holidays for the Lunar New Year, which begins on Saturday. The previously unknown virus strain is believed to have

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witnesses to be called in the proceedings.

Leaving the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Trump called a surprise news conference Wednesday to mark a “tremendous two days” at the glitzy summit of world leaders and financiers in Davos, Switzerland, which has served as a respite from the trial underway in Washington. “It’s such a hoax,” Trump said of the impeachment case against him. “I think it’s so bad for our country.”

Trump gave his legal team high marks after more than 12 hours of arguments on procedural motions Tuesday in which Republicans blocked Democratic efforts to immediately call witnesses and subpoena documents. But Trump said he

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Part One

Of Cannibals

by Bryn Haworth

As a painter, especially in his early years, Gauguin could be remarkably gauche. Given a different chain of events, who knows, he might have founded the Gauche movement in painting, though it’s possible he would never have been able to recognise his own talent: tragically, he did not possess the self-awareness to see how startlingly and innovatively gauche his paintings were.

Instead, having an entirely atrophied sense of the ridiculous, especially as regarded his own person, Gauguin did not flinch from self-depictions of the painfully self-pitying variety, masterfully gauche in execution. In one picture shown at the National Gallery recently, he was even crass enough to portray himself as Jesus on the night before the crucifixion. It was one of those moments in a career when you get the full measure of an artist’s ego.

An identification with Jesus is a common affliction with artists. The moment came later in the case of John Lennon. It took meeting and falling in love with an actual artist to get the erstwhile mop top to insist, over and over again in interviews, that he was an ‘artist’ too, and to sing ‘The way things are going / They’re gonna crucify me.’ What hell it must have been for the working-class hero turned conceptual art connoisseur to lie around in that bag, but we all have our cross to

bear, eh, John?

I digress. Did I mention that in his self-depiction as the ‘man of sorrows,’ Gauguin gave himself red hair? I reckon he borrowed that idea from Bosch. Here is my evidence for this stunning assertion: Frankly, the red hair is as much a mystery as the spiky gimp’s dog collar one of his tormentors is wearing, but hey, don’t complain, this is all remarkably restrained for Bosch.

Now Gauguin’s point is subtle, but unmistakable.

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The ginger-haired Jesus, by Paul Gauguin The Crowning with Thorns, by Hieronymus Bosch

It is drawn from every self-pitying tortured artist’s armoury of complaints. A translation into actual words would go something like this: “I am mocked by lesser mortals, hence my obscurity and lack of success, as a consequence of which I shall die a martyr, starved in a garret, no, sleepless in Gethsemane, living on nothing more than a sense of my own wronged superiority, a bit like my good friend Van Gogh. I cannot succeed. I am cruelly rejected by a corrupt and unappreciative civilisation. Just like Van Gogh. Did I mention, a mate of mine? Another long-suffering innocent. Come to think of it, he also has red hair. In this self-portrait I partly identify with the Dutchman. That’s Vincent, not Hieronymus. Okay, when I say ‘mate of mine’, he did come at me with a razor, and I have abandoned him to his fate, but suffering, it’s something we definitely have in common.

I painted this scene on the Mount of Olives the year after we fell out. It was no picnic. Being mates with Vincent, I mean, not the Mount of Olives. The man was demented. I’ve sweated blood for him, I tell you.

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Just like Christ did. The way things are going, they’re gonna...”

And so on. When Gauguin finally escaped the corrupt civilisation of France it was to a corrupted paradise in the Pacific – corrupted, naturally enough, by the French. Gauguin, being French, made his own humble contribution to the corrupting process by passing his work off as being influenced by the local culture before the French had sanitised it. He was a busy selfdramatist to the bitter end. It was the closest he ever cared to come to self-awareness. But this was not his self-perception, i.e. the derelict and debauched Dorian portrait incarnate, syphilitic sensualist of the south seas.

No, his self-perception, as persistently repeated from one letter to the next, was something quite different and, if you will excuse the cliché, nobler. It was of himself as savage.

One can see why this might have appealed. The ‘savage’ label sells, after all, as much nowadays as it did then. Take the word savage and simply append X Fenty, it virtually mints money – there’s more gold in

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there than those nature-loving miners will ever find in the Amazon. The word sells clothes, in an oh-so counter-intuitive way. It sells perfume, which is equally unlikely if you think about it. My hunch is that the ad for Sauvage, a fragrance for men, derives some of its imagery from the following French definitions: a) les animaux sauvages, meaning wild animals, b) une région sauvage, meaning a wilderness, and c) il est un peu sauvage, meaning he’s rather unsociable.

So, a) Johnny Depp [for it is he] drives out into the desert, passing a bison coming the opposite way; b) he arrives in the middle of nowhere, for reasons that will never become apparent, and c) he digs a hole and appears to drop a keepsake of some kind into it. Is he trying to forget? The look of satisfaction on his face after the keepsake has been buried suggests it is so. A less imaginative man would have joined the Foreign Legion, or maybe just chucked the keepsake in the nearest canal, but clearly this would have lacked the requisite noble savagery.

It’s a pity Roland Barthes cannot be here to help me with this advertisement. Surely anyone who has seen it shares my bafflement at its multi-layered semiology.

However, I would suggest that the semiotic punctum - if I may abuse a term from Camera Lucida - is the way Depp digs his hole. He does it with such savage flourish, tossing a spade full of dirt over his shoulder in a way calculated to get most of it on himself. Surely, no ordinary person would toss dirt over himself like that,

He does it with such savage flourish, tossing a spade full of dirt over his shoulder in a way calculated to get most of it on himself. Surely, no ordinary person would toss dirt over himself like that, in such a selfdefeating fashion... apart, maybe, from a working class Tory voter.

in such a self-defeating fashion... apart, maybe, from a working class Tory voter.

Forsooth, it is a mystery as profound as the hole is shallow, but my feeble attempt to emulate the great French theorist goes like this: Johnny Depp is an actor, and therefore has never had to clean himself up after a cack-handed attempt to dig a hole. Moreover, it is either his first try at digging such a hole, or – and this, I suspect, is the most likely explanation – how else was he to make the digging of a hole in the middle of nowhere, for reasons that would not become apparent, seem sufficiently virile? Yes, he may appear dumb to those more experienced in the task of hole-digging, but they have not made a fortune from being charismatic method actors. Leaving aside the fact that no real man ever dug a hole in this way, I submit that this ad speaks to the repressed savagery of an over-developed civilisation, and the perfect right of a real man to make a pointless gesture, unseen by anyone (excepting the millions viewing the advert) and then, afterwards, while

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Johnny, savagely digging

Inca walls in Cusco

cleaning himself up, grr, to douse his bestial body in the essence of an unwashed forest-dweller.

But then again, I could just be over-thinking it.

The small drawback for Gauguin was the slim basis for this self-portrayal. He had been a stock broker, but who doesn’t have something sordid in their past? More to the point, though, he had been born in France, but brought up in Peru, for reasons that I shall not go into as I have to get to the nub of this story. During his time in Peru, or else somewhat later when compelled to return to France, Gauguin decided that all the evidence – his aquiline nose, his eyes, his habit of wearing woollen hats with flaps over the ears, but most importantly the aquiline nose – pointed to Inca heritage.

The small details of having been born somewhere else, and not to actual indigenous Peruvian parents, could not refute the obvious evidence of the nose – Gauguin was indubitably of Inca heritage. As surely as James Brown was half African-American and half native American, so that nose was a pre-Colombian relic. The more one looked at it, the more irrefutable it became.

One imagines Gauguin spending hours staring at it in the mirror. Any mirror. You would probably not take him window-shopping, for fear he would ignore the merchandise, dismissing it as the trash of a civilisation devoted to ephemeral consumerism, and fixate on his nose reflected in the shop windows. The aquiline shape of his nose would then become the sole topic of conversation for the remainder of the afternoon because, not to put too fine a point on it, Gauguin had a nose fixation.

Some years ago, I myself was in Peru. It’s quite a

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An identification with Jesus is a common affliction with artists. The moment came later in the case of John Lennon. It took meeting and falling in love with an actual artist to get the erstwhile mop top to insist, over and over again in interviews, that he was an ‘artist’ too, and to sing ‘The way things are going / They’re gonna crucify me.’ claim, I know, but there was a time that I recklessly dumped carbon into the atmosphere for no better reason than to satisfy my idle curiosity. I was innocent back then, and yet I shall suffer for it one day, when my best suit gets so badly burnt, or drenched, in the apocalypse that I can no longer wear it to job interviews and I end up sleeping outside the mother of all parliaments, destitute. How will I afford frivolous trips to faraway Peru then? Evidently, I will not.

Anyway, suffice to say I have seen their roads, their lost cities, their irrigation systems and their foundations.

Some of the latter the Spaniards had the good sense to preserve, having dismantled the rest of the building.

They then built their own, inferior stuff on the top of these wonderfully solid and expertly carved blocks, which happened to withstand earthquakes.

The Incas, let me get to the point here, were no savages.

Some might claim that the distinction of that epithet belongs more to the conquistadors, but who am I to present a damning case against the civilising mission of black Catholic Spain? Who was Gauguin, for that matter? Well, as a disgruntled Inca, maybe. But not as a savage. It was yet another case of wanting to have his cake and eat it, and we Brits all know the unholy mess that can get you into. Gauguin thought he was Inca, and yet he reprised the conquistador’s disdain for his supposed ancestors by deeming them savages.

I suppose no one will credit me with huge, groundbreaking insight if I say that Paul Gauguin was one f—ked-up sonofabitch, though to be honest that phrase begs the whole question – just whose bitch was he the f—ked-up son of? Was it the Virgin, or was it the Earth goddess otherwise known as Pachamama?

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Perhaps at this juncture a small diversion into travel writing might be helpful. At the very least it will give me a welcome rest from trying to sound clever. But first, another picture, this time of the last supper that immediately preceded the agony in the garden: I came across this less than masterful depiction in Cusco, once capital of the Inca empire, after sampling some very wholesome soup provided by a wizened peasant wearing a llama wool hat with ear flaps, who told me...

That’s enough travel writing for the time being.

Given the state of the planet, it’ll soon be as outdated as letter-writing anyway. The painting, however, though no masterpiece, was of huge interest. It is the only thing I remember about the cathedral. In it, the disciples tilt their heads piously, either gazing at their Lord or heavenwards. Only Jesus and Judas look directly at the viewer. Judas, in case you were wondering, is the swarthy one on the wrong side of the table. The object he’s clutching, probably a bag containing thirty pieces of silver, is conclusive proof that he was corrupted by consumerism. In the versions by Perugino, Ghirlandaio and Vasari, he also sits on the viewer’s side of the table, but in Leonardo’s version he sits with the rest of them, with only the swarthy complexion to give him away.

Given such openness, Zapata’s tinkering with the menu for the Last Supper begins to look unremarkable.

Let the Inca have what the Inca wants. The way the Spanish colonialists managed to get inside the heads of the vanquished was the opposite of brainwashing. They did it by letting the ‘savages’ think that really, deep down, they were still thinking what they’d always thought.

Leonardo was never one to observe conventions. I shall come back to this swarthiness anon.

The picture was painted in 1753 by Marcos Zapata, a Quechua artist, so this was (if you want to go along with Gauguin’s misconceptions regarding his conception) the work of ‘a savage’. Clearly, anyone who doted on a cute, fluffy rodent as a child (I confess, I did) would agree with this description of Zapata, for the punctum here is not the figure of Judas, nor that of the glowing Christ. The punctum is not even a human being. Lying plumb in the middle of the table and of the picture, it is a savagely mistreated example of Peruvian fauna that grabs our attention: No, not a rat, though it could certainly pass for one under subdued lighting. In the local parlance, this is a cuy, or a rather scrawny-looking guinea pig, considered a delicacy in those parts. I have to say, either my guinea pigs were better-fed, or their outer fluffiness belied their inner scrawniness. One can’t imagine doting on a creature this scrawny, which probably explains why the Peruvians feel no qualms about slaughtering them.

This was not a delicacy they abandoned after the barbaric eighteenth century. To this very day, you can see guinea pigs roasted on spits in the public squares all over Peru. Many a tourist from gentler climes has wondered what these scrawny, runt-sized comestibles might be. Then, with one sickening jolt of recognition, they have been forced to leap the chasm from innocence to experience a second time. It was Tenpole Tudor who, charging dementedly around a cinema foyer, first posed the question “Who killed Bambi?” That question has haunted Western culture ever since. The answer is almost certainly “A native South American.”

And yet one man’s savage is another man’s member

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Painting in the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption, Cusco, Peru

A dainty dish to set before a king.

of the nobility. I remember being shocked to the core, on first setting foot in France, to find that the restaurants of Calais sold horsemeat. Worse still, the restaurateurs made no secret of the fact, advertising their wares on the public highway. Since then, the British have grown accustomed to the idea of horse flesh in their beef burgers, but back in the previous century a dead horse was supposed to be turned into glue, not knowingly eaten. Gauguin really was a savage, by dint of being French.

But these are trivial observations along the lines of the cultural differences between the nations. Nothing I have said so far comes close to the open-mindedness on this subject displayed by one of the greatest of all Frenchmen, Michel de Montaigne. He would not have shuddered at the sight of grilled pets, any more than he would, as a man of the world, have turned his nose up at horse glue. Montaigne was that rare thing in any age, a man without firm attachments to any customs or points of view. If you asked for his opinion on who killed Bambi, his answer would undoubtedly have been “What do I know?” I shall return to his essay Of Cannibals – from which I nicked my title and my theme – in the second part of these reflections, but for now I shall pick up where I left off and talk about Zapata.

One of the last members of the Cusco school (and it literally was a school, where he would have been taught by Spanish artists), Zapata was familiar with the routine. It is no surprise, for instance, that he places Judas on our side of the table. Leonardo was weird, it goes without saying, even Tintoretto had adhered to

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tradition on that one. Zapata knew very well the seating arrangements. He also knew that the Lord and his disciples ate bread and drank wine on the occasion, so why is it that some have claimed that in his version they are drinking chicha, a kind of beer brewed from maize and still drunk to this day? I’ve tried it, and I think I’ll stick to wine, if it’s all the same.

As a splash of local colour, this beverage seems harmless enough, until one remembers that the wine they drank at the Last Supper was the basis of the Eucharist or Holy Communion, which for Catholics involves an actual transformation of a wafer and a sip of Rioja into the body and blood of Christ. Somehow this seems to lose its solemnity if one tries the idea of a guinea pig and chicha instead. For one thing, chicha is a kind of murky brownish yellow, if memory serves me, while the flesh of the guinea pig is also roughly the same colour as the flesh of [ominous pause for effect here] Judas.

Actually, no, there is bread in the picture. Jesus is clutching a loaf of it. But on the matter of what should be drunk at Communion the Catholics were pretty clear. Would it be too cheap a comment to point out that believers consume (their preferred word is ‘ingest’) the body and blood of their Redeemer and that this sounds remarkably like cannibalism? It may not seem so to someone brought up to consider the mass a central part of their faith, and especially to one who takes scant interest in the arcane controversies over transubstantiation, but consider for a second the initial reaction of an Inca to all this. Just who looks ‘savage’ here, the conquered Inca who has to watch while his sophisticated culture is systematically obliterated and his people enslaved, or the blood-guzzling Spaniard providing his art lessons?

It’s hard to believe that this rank heresy, which leaps out at the viewer the moment they set eyes on the painting, has gone unnoticed in the cathedral for hundreds of years. It’s even harder to believe when one considers that guinea pigs were regularly sacrificed to Pachamama, the Inca earth goddess.

In fact, there is not need for alarm. I say this advisedly, as some persons of the Catholic persuasion have become very alarmed indeed about Pachamama, one might almost say panicky, as I shall explain in my next piece on this topic. For the moment, let me reiterate that the Incas, far from fitting the standard definition of ‘savages,’ had a fully worked out civilisation before the Spaniards turned up, with sophisticated building techniques, roads, irrigation, houses and a highly

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developed religion. Their conquerors could rip down their palaces and temples, they could even compel the Incas to labour on their cathedral, and they could make a local artist paint this Christian scene to hang on its wall, but none of this afforded them access to the Inca mind.

The persistence of the Inca culture is illustrated by an icon created by one of their artists. In neighbouring Bolivia, the Spaniards had found a hill at a place called Potosí that was so full of silver it supplied their empire for decades.

They then got the conquered Incas to mine the silver for them, before shipping it back to Spain in galleons.

At some point the idea occurred to someone that the Virgin Mary protected what the foreigners referred to as the Cerro Rico (Spanish for Rich Hill), and from there an identification of the triangular silhouette of the hill with the Virgin herself led to this: The picture is of a hill woman and its style is surrealism, long before Dali painted his first soft watch. Across the female hillside, out of scale, wander miniature men, horses, llamas, while the foreground is occupied by the bigwigs of state and clergy, and between them what appears to be a massive ball of solid silver, which amounts to considerably better earnings than Judas ever got.

In his Art of Colonial Latin America, Gauvin Alexander Bailey notes how syncretism meant that ‘the Andeans artists and their patrons united the Christian figure of the Virgin with elements of indigenous religion, fusing the two traditions into one.’ The end result is ‘a new, Andean Madonna.’ Quite literally, she became the Andes. Merging with the landscape itself, she was neither pre-Columbian nor Spanish.

Whoever came up with this syncretic hallucination – and it seems to have predated the Potosí image – it had the desired effect: it completely absorbed the imaginations of Peruvian artists. They easily transcended the crudity of the metallic mountain and dreamt up abstract, triangular Virgins, just as English artists had dreamt up stiff, cone-shaped images of Queen Elizabeth, also in imitation of the Biblical virgin. A Cusco Madonna was regal and yet benign. She could be very floral, yet earthy. At her base, and elsewhere, the sun and moon gave her additional universality, conveying the idea of twenty-four-hour protection to those who believed in her:

Her infant wore matching garb: And at times could look oddly geometrical too:

Cerro de Potosí, from Pedro Cieza de León, Crónica del Perú, 1553

In this way, indigenous Peruvians managed to carry on worshipping their Andean goddess, not surreptitiously, but in plain sight.

Given such openness, Zapata’s tinkering with the menu for the Last Supper begins to look unremarkable.

Let the Inca have what the Inca wants. The way the Spanish colonialists managed to get inside the heads of the vanquished was the opposite of brainwashing.

They did it by letting the ‘savages’ think that really, deep down, they were still thinking what they’d always thought. In a Conservative general election campaign under the leadership of Michael Howard, the Tories once posed the arch rhetorical question “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” The electorate replied

Madonna Peruviana, scuola di Cusco

with a resounding “Nope.” In the case of the Incas, the question was posed the other way around: “Are we thinking what you’re thinking?” and the Incas replied, “If you say so. A rose by any other name etc.”

Presumably, nobody much cared to get into the

Virgin of the Mountain of Potosí, c. 70–1740, artist unknown

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Madonna andina del 1680

Virgen de Belen del 1700, scuola di Cusco

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theological niceties of it all. The whole question of whether the bread and the wine of the Eucharist were literally the body and blood of Jesus depended on how one understood Christ’s assertion on the night that “this is my body… this is my blood.” Was Jesus being literal or just metaphorical?

Sometimes with these pesky conundrums you just have to put your foot down. Accordingly, in his 1968 Credo of the People of God, Pope Paul VI declared that any theological explanation of the doctrine of transubstantiation must uphold the twofold claim that, after the consecration, 1) Christ’s body and blood are really present, and 2) bread and wine are really absent, and that this presence and absence were real, and not merely in the mind of the believer.

Zapata might have used the same kind of argument if a fastidious Jesuit had ever questioned his orthodoxy: “Now don’t concern yourself, father,” he could have told him, shaking his head with an indulgent smile.

“This is no heresy. Just as Pachamama is really absent when the Virgin is present, undergoing a miraculous alteration and ceasing to be a pagan goddess, so the guinea pig is but a figment of the imagination there to keep us savages happy. What’s that? Why is Judas so swarthy and the others so pale? I’d have thought it was obvious, father – Judas is a Peruvian.”

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Understanding the Holocaust in its Totality – the names of martyrs they will recite will, justly and appropriately, be Jewish.

by Robert Satloff Their names and numbers were Ismail (R9954) and Nasreddin (R9955), Mohammed (R9959) and Hassan (R9965). They were Soviet prisoners of war, captured on the eastern front.

In late February and early March 1942, they and several dozen other Muslims joined the thousands upon thousands of Abrahams and Sarahs, Isaacs and Rebeccas, Jacobs and Rachels, who together comprised the 1.1 million men, women and children killed at the vast complex of Nazi concentration, labor and extermination camps in rural Poland known as Auschwitz.

Jews, of course, were the principal victims of Auschwitz’s barbarity, comprising nearly 90 percent of its vast death toll. Even that huge number was itself just a fraction of the six million Jews killed in the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jewish people, known as the Holocaust. When world leaders descend upon Auschwitz on January 27 for the 75th anniversary of its liberation by Soviet troops – the date chosen by the world community to commemorate the Holocaust

But if the goal of Holocaust remembrance is, at least in part, to counter Holocaust ignorance and denial – a phenomenon that can range from not knowing the basic facts of the Holocaust to rejecting its proven history to glorifying Hitler’s near-success in achieving his genocidal goal – then organizers of the Auschwitz memorial should consider including in their recitation the names of the Nazis’ Muslim victims, too.

IGNORANCE IS GROWING, BUT SO IS UNDERSTANDING Focusing on the small number of Muslim victims is not to obscure the role of Muslim perpetrators, such as the Bosnian troops of the SS’ infamous 13th Waffen Mountain Division. And citing Muslim victims as a way to counter Holocaust ignorance and denial is not because those are uniquely “Muslim problems” – to the contrary, these are cross-cultural, cross-ethnic, cross-national, cross-religion phenomena. Just last year, for example, 13 percent of Britons told pollsters they either believe the Holocaust was a hoax or the number of Jewish deaths greatly exaggerated. And a 2018 poll showed that 41 percent of Americans -- and 66 percent of millennials -- could not correctly say what Auschwitz was.

But that reality does not diminish the fact that Holocaust denial is particularly pronounced in many Muslim societies. Coupled with its first cousin – anti-Semitism – it is propounded by national

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leaders, like Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mohamed Mahathir and the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas, and by religious leaders, like the influential Qatar-based cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi. In Arab and broader Muslim popular culture and social media, the phenomena of Holocaust ignorance, denial and celebration are, regrettably, commonplace.

Thankfully, there is some important good news.

A growing chorus of Muslim leaders has been increasingly active in countering this pernicious hate, speaking out in support of tolerance and against Holocaust rejectionism. These range from the king of Morocco, who has publicly declared the Holocaust to be “one of the most tragic chapters of modern history,” to the secretary-general of the Saudi-based Muslim World League, who denounced Holocaust denial and is now making his own high-profile visit to Auschwitz.

CHALLENGING NAZISM’S LIVING LEGACY Including Muslim victims of Auschwitz alongside the nearly million Jewish victims and the thousands of Christian victims will help bring Muslims into

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this critical historical narrative and contribute to this positive trend. After all, while the Holocaust was an overwhelmingly Jewish tragedy, the Nazi quest for global domination based on a warped sense of racial supremacy continues to animate annihilationist rhetoric and apocalyptic strategies one hears from extremists in Muslim societies. And the genocide the Nazis attempted to perpetrate on the Jewish people has, regrettably, been replicated since then by genocidal attempts to wipe out millions more innocents, many of whom have themselves been Muslim, from the Kurds of northern Iraq to the Rohingya of Myanmar.

The Muslims who died at Auschwitz may not have been killed because of their faith but their faith did not exempt them from their fate. Remembering them – Ismail Mamatdzanon, Nasreddin Tadzubajev, Mohammed Sultanov, Hassan Mamedov and their co-religionists – is a small step that could reverberate far beyond the killing fields of the Polish countryside.

Robert Satloff is Executive Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach Into Arab Lands.

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olitics For many critics who are angry at the soaring wealth and income inequality around the world, Davos is a symbol of the global elite who are out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people.

As the World’s Ultra-Rich Gather at Davos, the Debate Over Economic Inequality Rages On Renewed Calls for Raising Taxes on the Wealthiest People

by Yasmine El-Geressi This week the world’s richest and most powerful people, including 119 billionaires with a collective worth of 500$ billion, ascended to the small Swiss Alps town of Davos in a stream of private planes, helicopters and luxury cars for the invitation-only World Economic Forum meeting. The exclusive

WEF, with a membership fee of 60,000$ to 600,000$, has been an annual event for billionaire executives to rub shoulders since it was founded in 1971 with the goal to “improve the state of the world”. But Davos does not only attract global power players. For many critics who are angry at the soaring wealth and income inequality around the world, Davos is a symbol of the global elite

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Indian children work nearby to their parents at a construction project in front of the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium on January 2010 ,30 in New Delhi, India. (Getty)

who are out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people.

There are over 2,100 billionaires in the world. A report released ahead of the forum by charity group Oxfam says they own more wealth than the poorest 4.6 billion people on Earth - and the gap between rich and poor is widening, with half the world’s population living in poverty. Their research builds

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on Forbes’ billionaires list among other sources and states that the number of billionaires has doubled in the last decade.

To highlight the level of inequality in the global economy, Amitabh Behar, CEO of Oxfam India, cited the case of a woman called Buchu Devi in India who spends 16 to 17 hours a day doing work like fetching water after trekking 3km, cooking, preparing her children for school and working in a poorly paid job.

“And on the one hand you see the billionaires who are all assembling at Davos with their personal planes, personal jets, super rich lifestyles,” he told Reuters.

Behar says that across the world, there is a narrative of anger. Anti-government demonstrations have erupted in more than 30 countries in recent months, from Chile to France, South Africa to South Korea.

Their political aims may differ but they share the same resentment, says Behar.

“If you just look around the world, more than 30 countries are seeing protests. People are on the street and what are they saying? - That they are not to accept this inequality, they are not going to live with these kind of conditions,” he said.

«Our broken economies are lining the pockets of billionaires and big business at the expense of ordinary men and women. No wonder people are starting to question whether billionaires should even exist.»

Oxfam says that billionaires need to pay their taxes, but that the responsibility lies on governments to ensure that they pay their fair share.

Also taking their message of higher taxes on the rich to Davos were a group who identify themselves as “members of the most privileged class of human beings ever to walk the Earth”.

The Patriotic Millionaires, made up of more than 120 wealthy celebrities and business figures,

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signed an open letter titled “Millionaires Against Pitchforks” urging their peers around the world to call for tax increases to address economic disparities “before it’s too late”. The letter was released to coincide with the forum which the group’s president, Erica Payne, calls “one of the most obnoxious displays of privilege that is found on the world stage.”

The millionaires and billionaires from eight countries, including co-founder of Innocent Drinks Richard Reed, former chief executive of Unilever Paul Polman, and Disney heiress Abigail Disney, claimed the wealth gap had hit crisis level, resulting in erosion of trust within societies, increased resentment and the undermining of basic social cohesion.

Addressing their “fellow millionaires and billionaires across the globe,›› they said: «There are two kinds of wealthy people: those who prefer taxes and those who prefer pitchforks.’

“Taxes are the best and only appropriate way to ensure adequate investment in the things our societies need. Individuals who reject this truth pose a dual threat both to the climate and to democracy itself,” says the letter.

The letter also claimed tax avoidance had reached “epidemic proportions”, adding: «In some nations, the wealthiest actually pay lower effective tax rates than those of modest means.»

Globalisation has made it easier for companies to

Globalisation has made it easier for companies to seek shelter in countries with lower corporate tax rates. That challenge is heightened by the rising tech giants like Facebook, Amazon and Apple that render taxing based on physical presence an obsolete notion.

seek shelter in countries with lower corporate tax rates. That challenge is heightened by the rising tech giants like Facebook, Amazon and Apple that render taxing based on physical presence an obsolete notion. The global corporate tax has essentially halved in the past 35 years. It stood at %49 in 1985 and is %24 today, according to the IMF. But efforts to create change have been thwarted by diplomatic tensions. A frequently discussed potential solution is the imposition of a “digital tax” through which countries can tax an internet company doing business in its region. Several European nations are considering taxing search engines, social media platforms and online marketplaces due to claims they shift their profits to other countries to cut their tax liability. With most of the world’s largest technology companies based in the U.S, though, there are fears such a tax offers other nations a chance to prosper from the fruits of these American firms’ success. As such, the U.S. has been sparring with France, Italy and Britain over threats of a digital tax as it sees it as a “tax grab” on American companies. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland,

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A helicopter carrying US President Donald Trump flies over the Swiss Alps on his way to Davos, Switzerland, on January 2020 ,21, for the World Economic Forum. (Getty)

Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid confirmed Britain›s intention to go ahead with the tax in April despite US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin threatening the UK with retaliation by putting taxes on car companies.

It is against this stark backdrop that public relations firm Edelman, which has been measuring public trust in people and institutions for the past 20 years, surveyed over 34,000 people in over 28 countries.

Just over half (%56) thought that capitalism was doing more harm than good, as trust in global an national institutions has collapsed. “We are living in a trust paradox,” says Richard Edelman, the CEO of Edelman, describing the fact that economic growth no longer appears to drive optimism in developed markets.

Rising income and wealth inequality in rich countries has seen a breakdown in the link between economic growth and faith in institutions such as governments, businesses, the media and NGOs, the research, released on Monday, found.

At the top of WEF›s agenda this year is a «better kind of capitalism,» but still many remain to be convinced the summit does not actually erode

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Also taking their message of higher taxes on the rich to Davos were a group who identify themselves as “members of the most privileged class of human beings ever to walk the Earth”. trust and has it has once again been targeted by protesters.

Rosalina Mueller, a spokesperson for the Young Socialists, which helped to organise demonstrations in South Africa, India, Kenya, Zambia, Philippines, Mexico, Netherlands and the UK, told the Associated Press that Davos attendees had failed to make a positive impact in previous years.

“They say they want to make the world better, but for 50 years they haven’t done anything,” she said.

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Hezbollah is unlikely to pick a fight with the United States by itself. The group has its own tensions with Israel to worry about, and huge domestic protests jeopardize its political grip on Lebanon. It also suffered heavy losses in Syria, where it fought hand-in-glove with Iran to prop up President Bashar al-Assad. But not wanting a war isn’t the same as being unwilling to fight one. Hezbollah has been preparing for this day for decades, building up military, terrorist, and cyber capabilities in Lebanon, the Middle East, and around the world in order to strike back at the United States and anyone else who might join a war against Iran and its allies. Now, because of its ideological commitment to and military interdependence with Iran, the group may have no choice but to enter a conflict with the United States.

Iran’s missile attack on two Iraqi bases that host U.S. forces was Tehran’s initial, symbolic, and overt response to Soleimani’s death. The full response will unfold in the coming months and years—and will likely feature Hezbollah in a starring role. Playing to its strengths and avoiding a direct conventional confrontation with the United States, the Quds Force and its Hezbollah partner may attempt to orchestrate a regional campaign of asymmetric attacks across the Middle East and possibly outside of it. Their goal will be to disrupt, threaten, and restrict the operations of U.S. soldiers, diplomats, and intelligence officers to the point that the benefits of their presence in the Middle East no longer outweigh the costs.

Hezbollah Has Prepared for This Moment for Decades The Lebanese Militant Group Could Star in Iran’s Response to the Soleimani Strike

by Brian Katz “What is just retribution?” So asked Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a speech on January 5, two days after the United States assassinated Iranian Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in a drone

strike in Baghdad. With no American official “on par with Soleimani or Muhandis,” in Nasrallah’s estimation, the answer was to retaliate against “the American military presence in our region.” American civilians shouldn’t be harmed, he said, but “the U.S. bases, the U.S. warships, every American soldier and officer” in the Middle East would all be fair game.

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Supporters of Shiite Hezbollah movement react with clenched fists as they watch a speech by the movement›s leader Hasan Nasrallah, transmitted on a large screen, in the Lebanese capital Beirut›s southern suburbs on January ,5 2020. (Getty)

Hezbollah is unlikely to pick a fight with the United States by itself. The group has its own tensions with Israel to worry about, and huge domestic protests jeopardize its political grip on Lebanon.

advanced missiles and issuing measured, proportional responses to Israeli strikes.

But the magnitude of the Soleimani strike—which killed both Hezbollah’s Iranian patron and the commander of the PMF, the group’s closest Iraqi ally—may necessitate retaliation. And dependence on Iran will not be the only impetus for such action. Hezbollah will likely feel the need to demonstrate resolve to its constituents and its adversaries.

The group may already fear that the United States and Israel are gearing up to attack it, in which case it will likely seek to deter both countries by reminding them of its asymmetric capabilities.

A Hezbollah campaign against the United States could take many forms, but it will likely consist of a series of calculated acts of violence that escalate over time. The aim will be to constrain U.S. freedom of action and deter U.S. attacks on the scale of the Soleimani strike. Hezbollah could employ military, terrorist, intelligence, cyber, and information tools, and it could do so overtly or covertly across multiple BROTHERS IN ARMS domains, depending on its strategic messaging objectives or Since its founding by the Iranian Quds Force in the early need for plausible deniability. The scope and severity of the 1980s, Hezbollah has forged and sought to balance two attacks will be calibrated to the intensity of the perceived identities. The first is as a Lebanese actor, with a powerful threat from the United States and Israel, and the targets will military, political, religious, and socioeconomic apparatus be surprising but logical in hindsight. capable of advancing its domestic goals and empowering its Such attacks are likely to begin on Hezbollah’s home turf Shiite constituents. The second is as a proxy turned ally of in Lebanon, where the most logical target would be the Iran, loyal to its so-called axis of resistance, which includes U.S. military presence. Scores of U.S. troops are deployed the Syrian regime, Hamas, and various regional Shiite to multiple bases across the country to train and assist the militias such as the PMF. But balancing both identities Lebanese Armed Forces. Instead of attacking these forces has been difficult. Over the decades, tensions among Iran, directly and risking a devastating response, Hezbollah could the United States, and Israel have periodically flared, and use deniable rocket fire to disrupt U.S. air operations, and Hezbollah has found itself walking a narrow line, seeking IEDs—which it could blame on Sunni militants—to restrict to support Iran militarily without provoking a U.S. response U.S. movements on the ground. In addition, it could use that would threaten its achievements in Lebanon. In cyber and electronic attacks to jam U.S. communications 2006, cross-border attacks between Hezbollah and Israel and expose the identities of U.S. intelligence officials escalated into a devastating Israeli air and ground campaign and their Lebanese sources. Then, using propaganda and in southern Lebanon and Beirut. Since then, the group has disinformation on social media, it could mobilize swarms sought to avoid unnecessary hostilities with Israel. Instead, of “spontaneous” protestors to keep U.S. diplomats and it has focused on deterrence by building up an arsenal of intelligence officers confined to their compounds. Hezbollah

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could also attempt to kidnap or assassinate U.S officials, but unless tensions escalate dramatically, it will likely hold these options in reserve for the short term.

In addition to effectively neutralizing the United States in Lebanon, Hezbollah might begin to attack U.S. interests across the Middle East. Farther away from its constituents and core interests, the group will be more willing to take aggressive military action. Working together with the Quds Force, Hezbollah will seek to demonstrate the reach of the axis of resistance and to overextend U.S. forces. The group has fighters in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen that it can call on to carry out similar deniable attacks against U.S. forces and installations. It can also work with other members of the axis, such as the Iraqi PMF, the Houthis in Yemen, and thousands of loyal Syrian, Afghan, and Pakistani Shiite fighters, to conduct more overt attacks. These fighters have experience on the battlefield and growing weapons arsenals. They are also loyal to the Iranian and Hezbollah commanders who trained and equipped them—and will be willing to fight and die for the axis after Soleimani’s martyrdom. Through a steady campaign of attacks on U.S. facilities, communications, and—especially if tensions escalate—personnel, these allied Shiite forces will make it increasingly difficult for the United States to operate across much of the Middle East.

Hezbollah, of course, holds another regional card to play: the threat it poses to the United States’ closest regional ally, Israel. As Iran’s forward defense in the Levant, the group is trained, organized, and armed primarily for conflict with Israel, whether a direct one such as the 2006 war or a regional one between Iran and Israel in which Lebanon becomes a main front. Hezbollah almost certainly doesn’t want a confrontation with Israel, particularly with U.S.Iranian tensions on the rise, but it stands ready to wage one nonetheless. The group has a formidable precision missile and drone arsenal capable of striking not only Israeli targets

In addition to effectively neutralizing the United States in Lebanon, Hezbollah might begin to attack U.S. interests across the Middle East.

Hezbollah almost certainly doesn’t want a confrontation with Israel, particularly with U.S.-Iranian tensions on the rise, but it stands ready to wage one nonetheless.

but also U.S. facilities in Israel, as well as U.S. Navy ships operating in the Mediterranean. Short of this dire and— unless all-out war erupts between the United States and Iran—unlikely scenario, Hezbollah could leverage its deep ties to Palestinian militants such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas for smaller-scale but still deadly attacks inside Israel.

Hezbollah could also elect to retaliate outside of the Middle East, likely with a terrorist attack. The group’s terrorist arm, the External Security Organization (ESO), maintains perhaps dozens of cells across five continents. Hezbollah built this organization patiently, over decades, with Iranian support, in anticipation of a day like today, when the Iranian or Hezbollah leadership would have a sudden need to retaliate or demonstrate their ability to fight on a global battlefield at the time and place of their choosing. As the U.S. intelligence community assessed last year, Hezbollah “most likely maintains the capability to execute a range of attack options against U.S. interests worldwide.”

Hezbollah and Iran may have already concluded that

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An Israeli mobile artillery unit fires 155mm shells towards Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon 13 July 2006, at a military staging area along the northern Israeli border with Lebanon. (Getty)

Soleimani’s killing justifies a spectacular, deadly, and quasi-deniable terrorist response. They calculated as much in 1992 when, in retaliation for an Israeli attack on then Hezbollah leader Abbas Musawi, the group drove a truck bomb into the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killing 29 people and wounding hundreds. Hezbollah and Iran could also decide to hold these global assets in reserve for the dire contingency of an all-out war. Either way, the ESO will likely bide its time while the United States is on heightened alert and search for vulnerable U.S. facilities in countries outside the Middle East where local security forces are weak and where groups like the Islamic State or al Qaeda can be blamed for an attack. If tensions continue to escalate, the ESO may attempt to strike directly at the U.S. homeland, where it is known to maintain operatives.

UNPREDICTABLE ENEMY A campaign of retaliatory strikes against the United States, either in the Middle East or elsewhere, would come with

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risks for Hezbollah. The United States and its allies are on heightened alert after the Soleimani strike, and they may detect and thwart any operation the group attempts.

Hezbollah and Iran’s other partners and proxies in the axis also probably fear U.S. retaliation and may seek to lay low in the immediate term, despite Iran’s desire for vengeance. Hezbollah may be especially motivated to do so because hundreds of thousands of Lebanese citizens are currently protesting their government and Hezbollah’s role within it as the country’s economy disintegrates. Provoking a destructive war with the United States right now could eviscerate public support for the group’s political wing.

Hezbollah now faces an unpredictable adversary in the United States. Nasrallah’s strategic calculus and military decision-making process have been honed through decades of conflict with Israel. Since the 2006 war, Israel and Hezbollah have developed a shared understanding of proportionality, and a system for managing escalation through periodic but consistent testing on the battlefield.

As a result, they understand each other’s redlines, the consequences for crossing them, and how to calibrate responses that allow both sides to declare victory and go home. Hezbollah has no way to know whether the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump will adhere to these informal rules of the game, and a miscalculation about U.S. willingness to absorb attacks could lead to a rapid escalation that threatens the group’s interests in Lebanon. If Trump has proved anything by killing Soleimani it’s that unlike his predecessors he is willing to use lethal force against Iranian and axis of resistance leaders. But the U.S. president must also be ready for the retaliation that will inevitably follow: the “coffins of American soldiers,” as Nasrallah threatened in his January 5 speech, and, quite possibly, the coffins of American diplomats, intelligence officers, and ordinary citizens as well.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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olitics If Assad realizes these minimalist aims—survival and the restoration of Syria’s territory—his victory will be a Pyrrhic one.

Bashar al-Assad’s Hollow Victory

Subservient to Patrons and Profiteers, the Syrian Regime Is Weaker Than Ever

by Lina Khatib President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria has now endured through nearly nine years of civil conflict. The question for those invested in Syria’s future is no longer whether the regime will survive but how it will seek to consolidate its power before ending the war still ravaging the country.

Assad may have entered battle thinking that his regime could retain the authority it enjoyed before 2011, but today his goals are likely more modest.

Their circumscription, however, does not make Assad’s current priorities less dangerous. They may even be more so. In order to demonstrate to the world that he remains in control and that relations with his regime should be normalized,

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A drone photo shows the aerial photo of marketplace after it was hit by Syrian regime and Russian airstrikes in central Idlib, Syria on January 2020 ,15.

(Getty)

Assad will undoubtedly seek to take back all of the country’s former territory. In order to sustain his regime internally, he will not dally with meeting the needs of the Syrian people but aspire to bare survival, which he can achieve by maintaining the patronage network that has become the Syrian regime’s lifeline throughout the conflict.

But if Assad realizes these minimalist aims— survival and the restoration of Syria’s territory— his victory will be a Pyrrhic one. He will sit atop a hollow state with weak institutions, beset with war profiteers, and subservient to external powers.

CLIENT, NOT PARTNER Assad has already begun to make good on his

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goal of regaining territorial control over Syria.

The main region at issue is the north. Islamist rebels control the northwest, where they have resisted Assad’s advances. In the northeast, the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) had pushed ISIS out of the area by 2018 and established a kind of self-government to which U.S. troops supplied ballast. In October 2019, U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew most troops and Turkey swept into the region.

The SDF reached an agreement with Assad to allow the Syrian army to enter the northeast and counter the Turkish offensive. Today, Kurdish forces administer the area in the presence of the Syrian army.

Now the Syrian regime is working with Russia to take the north fully back for Damascus. Russia is brokering a deal with Turkey in which the latter withdraws its troops from Syria in return for guarantees that the SDF, which Turkey views as a terrorist organization, will be kept away from the border. As part of this effort, the regime is discussing military and political cooperation with Kurdish forces, though Assad will likely deny the Kurds the degree of autonomy that they had hoped would reward their role in countering ISIS. If the regime can secure the contested region, it will claim that it has restored its authority over Syria and call for the normalization of its relations with the world. Normalization would grant Assad’s regime international legitimacy and pave the way for the lifting of sanctions, which would permit reconstruction money to flow into Syria. But though Assad might declare victory, he would do so as a bit player in the story of his own triumph. Through Syria’s travails, Russia will have risen to become the war’s most influential external actor, and Iran will have guaranteed its enduring influence in the Levant. The Assad regime will find itself less a partner than a client, its survival dependent on the support of these two

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external backers.

Already, Syria has been granting Iran and Russia economic and security privileges, such as government contracts in the oil sector and control over naval bases, in return for their assistance in the conflict. Russia, in particular, has greatly expanded its interests in Syria by pressuring the regime to grant economic contracts to Russian companies and placing Russian loyalists in high positions in the Syrian army. The United States apparently does not view Russian control over Syria as a direct threat to American interests, so there are no external checks on Russia’s ability to impose itself upon the Assad regime. Having reinstated himself by dint of a heavy Russian hand, Assad will rule Syria not as a sovereign nation but as one whose viability depends on Russia.

Such an endgame may not have been Assad’s original intention, but he will have to live with it, because his control over the country has been reduced to bare bones. Areas that the regime has recently retaken in the northeast, such as Qamishli, remain under the de facto control of the Kurdish militia, which means checkpoints but, under pressure from Russian patrols, raises the Syrian flag to give the impression that the Syrian army is in charge. Some newly recruited and undertrained Syrian soldiers in the area are even working in

A different regime might try to shore up power in a post conflict situation by wooing citizens with attention to their needs. The Assad regime has done the opposite, punishing those it perceives as insufficiently loyalist by depriving them of basic services, security, and rights.

Having reinstated himself by dint of a heavy Russian hand, Assad will rule Syria not as a sovereign nation but as one whose viability depends on Russia.

agriculture to make ends meet.

HOUSE OF CARDS External actors are not the only interested parties to whom Assad will owe his political life. Throughout the conflict, the regime has had to rely on a large network of non-state and auxiliary actors, some armed and some civilian, to circumvent international sanctions in business transactions, assist in battle, and perform state functions, such as delivering services where the regime has little access or capacity. These actors have profited from the protracted conflict, becoming ever more ambitious and powerful, such that now the tables have turned and the regime has become dependent on them for survival. These profiteers have become the de facto authorities that are performing the role of state institutions, but at an increasingly extortionate price.

Profiteers have infected Assad’s security apparatus at all levels. Some militias that supported the state

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Russian President Vladimir Putin, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu visit the headquarters of the Russian forces in the Syrian capital Damascus on January 2020 ,7.

(Getty)

security agencies during the conflict have become increasingly independent, primarily pursuing their own economic and power interests. In some cases, these militias have transformed into armed gangs that intimidate civilians in loyalist areas.

As a result, the regime has been unable to answer to the needs even of its own loyalists or to rein in some of the supposedly pro-regime militias.

In certain cases, such as in Assad’s hometown of Qardaha, regime forces have not been able to enter areas controlled by armed gangs. The gangs have handed over their heavy weapons only on the condition that the regime overlook their illicit economic activities. Even the Syrian army and security institutions have become transactional, with local branches of the security services pursuing their own interests rather than those of the state.

The Syrian regime cannot possibly satiate the greed of these profiteers from its current coffers.

But neither can it afford to starve them, because its power rests in part upon their pillar. For this

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reason, Assad is desperate to obtain reconstruction funds that he can then divert to Syria’s patronage networks. To prevent this outcome, any external support given for resilience projects must be conditioned to ensure that the money is distributed to the Syrian people at large.

A different regime might try to shore up power in a post conflict situation by wooing citizens with attention to their needs. The Assad regime has done the opposite, punishing those it perceives as insufficiently loyalist by depriving them of basic services, security, and rights.

In 2018, Syria imposed Law No. 10, which strips people of property rights unless they report proof of ownership to local authorities in person. The law is mainly enforced in towns seized from rebel groups, where those who report their property are subjected to interrogations that pave the way for their arrest. Patronage networks benefit from such measures—for example, by soliciting bribes to release those arrested.

By silencing dissidents and solidifying his territorial grip on Syria, Assad seeks to convey the impression that Syria is going back to its pre2011status quo. But his regime is built on the illusion of a state, and what little power it has rests in the hands of its puppet masters. Western countries should not normalize relations with Syria on the grounds that Assad is the only available option.

They should instead seek to understand Syria from the bottom up, so that they can apply leverage to the cracks in its system to ensure that any support programs for Syria are not used by the regime to feed its domestic profiteers and external patrons.

Assad’s endgame in Syria leaves him sitting on a fragile throne of a thousand precariously balanced pieces.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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China’s Rights Abuses in Xinjiang Could Provoke a Global Terrorist Backlash Washington Should Help Beijing Fight Extremism Without Resorting to Repression

by Colin P. Clarke In mid-November 2019, The New York Times published more than 400 pages of leaked internal documents from the authorities in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, a province in northwestern China. At least one million people, but perhaps twice that number—mostly ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities—have been incarcerated in the province’s so-called re-education camps, where detainees are held against their will and forced to perform manual labor, forbidden from

contacting relatives, and in some cases psychologically and physically tortured.

The leaked documents included painstaking instructions for the silencing of those whose parents had been locked away, as well as internal speeches in which Chinese President Xi Jinping called on the Chinese people to show “no mercy” and use all the “weapons of people’s dictatorship” to combat a perceived extremist threat. The leak confirmed what human rights organizations, practitioners, and China watchers have long feared: that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is engaged in

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This photo taken on June 2019 ,4 shows a man walking past a screen showing images of China›s President Xi Jinping in Kashgar in China›s northwest Xinjiang region. (Getty)

the systematic persecution of the country’s domestic religious and ethnic minorities.

So far, Chinese authorities have carried out this campaign with impunity. The United States and several European countries have voiced concern about human rights in Xinjiang, but Chinese officials retort by invoking their country’s sovereignty.

Moreover, they claim, harsh actions in Xinjiang were necessary to protect China from what it calls “the three evils”—terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism. Less often spoken about is the Chinese government’s vested interest in asserting control over a region that has historically opposed Chinese rule—and one which now serves as Beijing’s gateway to the Eurasian continent for infrastructure investment, trade, and energy diversification.

Given the intensity of China’s commitment to bringing Xinjiang to heel, condemning human rights abuses there has availed Washington very little and served to raise hackles in Beijing.

There is a better way for U.S. policymakers to engage the Chinese government regarding the persecution of Uighurs and other minorities, and the approach is a counterintuitive one: Washington should offer to share its counterterrorism expertise.

At the moment, China views Russia and the Central Asian states as security partners. These states address their own terrorism problems by cracking down on minorities and strangling human rights. Such an approach in Russia temporarily curbed domestic terrorism but stoked terrorism abroad. Former Soviet Republics accounted for the largest number of foreign fighters that traveled to Iraq and Syria to join ISIS. China appears to have adopted similar tactics, and if it continues down this road, Beijing could very well be setting the stage for a generational struggle with Uighurs both within China and abroad, where a Uighur diaspora is growing in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

The United States and its allies could show China a better way forward. By advising China on security questions, the United States could help relieve the pressure on Chinese minorities even while improving Washington’s relationship with Beijing.

THE THREE EVILS Anyone who has tried to broach a conversation about human rights in Xinjiang with a Chinese government official knows that the dialogue tends to end abruptly—usually with a lecture on how China has successfully eliminated terrorism within its borders. This policy comes as a direct response to a number of relatively recent terrorist attacks in China—the government cites, for instance, the 2013 Tiananmen Square car bombing and the 2014 Kunming Railway Station attack. The Chinese counterterrorism strategy is deeply rooted in the belief that socioeconomic development of this previously underdeveloped region will eradicate “the three evils.” Such is the explanation the CCP has offered for developments in Xinjiang in its white papers and in the antiterrorism law it adopted in 2015.

Beijing may be correct in arguing that the police state the CCP created in Xinjiang has temporarily attenuated the threat of terrorism in China. There is little evidence to the contrary.

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The leak confirmed what human rights organizations, practitioners, and China watchers have long feared: that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is engaged in the systematic persecution of the country’s domestic religious and ethnic minorities.

But this argument is difficult for outsiders to adjudicate, given that China has a history of being less than transparent about the frequency and lethality of terrorist attacks throughout the country. China also defines terrorism more broadly than Western security analysts generally would, including under its rubric both separatism and religious extremism.

Moreover, counterterrorism concerns are not the only ones driving Beijing to assert harsh control over Xinjiang. Several of the CCP’s most important domestic and foreign policy goals require unfettered access to the region. Xinjiang’s geographic location is crucial to the Belt and Road Initiative’s land routes that connect the Chinese and European markets. The region is also central to Chinese energy ventures and security. According to Chinese state media, for instance, the Central Asia–China gas pipeline that runs from Turkmenistan to Khorgos, Xinjiang, delivered more than 47.9 billion cubic meters of natural gas to China in 2019. Political unrest in Xinjiang and the threat of the region’s independence could severely endanger China’s energy security and sabotage President Xi’s signature project and political legacy. Reining in the region is for this reason of paramount importance to the CCP. Doing so through draconian repression, however, is myopic and could result in a new cycle of terrorist violence.

OF SEPARATISTS AND TERRORISTS Whether or not the militant groups in Xinjiang are linked to transnational terrorism to begin with is a subject of debate. Beijing has long tried to tie the historic separatist movement in Xinjiang to Islamist terrorist organizations outside China’s borders, like al Qaeda. The CCP accelerated these efforts in the 2000s, after the 11/9 attacks and in the early years of the United States’ global war on terrorism. The CCP also claims that the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a Uighur jihadist group, maintains connections to Xinjiang, but most terrorism experts would argue that these links are tenuous and that, in any case, they withered well before 2020.

Even so, terrorism has come to pose a growing threat to Chinese interests and nationals abroad. Analysts have tied the 2015

P

olitics The United States has a wealth of experience in countering the threat stemming from transnational terrorist organizations. China lacks this expertise and would benefit from tapping into that of the United States.

bombing of a shrine in Bangkok, in which Chinese tourists were targeted, to the deportation of Uighurs from Thailand to China, at the latter’s request. Kyrgyz security services claimed that a 2018 car bomb attack on the Chinese embassy in Bishkek was a joint operation by the ETIM and Kateeba Tawhid wal Jihad, a predominantly Uzbek group based in Syria. And an Afghan militant group claimed responsibility for a 2018 attack on the Chinese consulate in Karachi, which ended with a shootout.

During this period, Chinese nationals abroad have been the victims of multiple kidnappings and executions.

In 2019, terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda and ISIS explicitly mentioned China in many of their propaganda materials—citing the CCP’s abuse of Muslim minorities as a justification for going after China and Chinese nationals. On the messaging application Telegram, jihadi groups use images of Chinese atrocities against Uighurs to recruit and radicalize Muslims throughout the world.

The situation in Xinjiang serves to rally extremists across the globe, just as U.S. abuses in Abu Ghraib Prison became a potent recruitment tool for al Qaeda in Iraq in 2004.

rights abuses. Rather, Beijing’s crackdown risks fanning the flames of transnational terrorism against China.

Washington should appeal to China by offering to help ensure its domestic security rather than simply condemning the CCP’s human rights abuses. Such outreach could help defuse the humanitarian crisis and alleviate the crackdown in Xinjiang, even while preventing China from aligning more closely with Russia and other authoritarian states.

As the repercussions of China’s high-handed counterterrorism policy play out, U.S. policymakers may find themselves wishing that they had made the security-focused humanitarian argument— and Chinese officials will wish that they had listened to it.

THE VOICE OF REASON Through its Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing has rolled out largescale, highly visible infrastructural projects abroad that furnish an abundance of soft targets for transnational terrorism. The growing anti-Chinese sentiment in many countries and regions where Chinese investments are ubiquitous—including several South Asian, Central Asian, and African countries—poses a serious security threat. Such organizations capitalize upon local grievances, making Beijing’s exposure abroad a potential vulnerability.

The United States has a wealth of experience in countering the threat stemming from transnational terrorist organizations. China lacks this expertise and would benefit from tapping into that of

In 2019, terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda and ISIS explicitly mentioned China in many of their propaganda materials—citing the CCP’s abuse of Muslim minorities as a justification for going after China and Chinese nationals.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

the United States. While a true partnership is unlikely due to the competitive nature of U.S.-Chinese relations, Washington could certainly supply Beijing with credible intelligence about specific plots against China or Chinese interests. It would have to do so without compromising sources or methods, but the information would likely garner goodwill and could create an opening for the United States to persuade the CCP that a scorched-earth approach to counterterrorism, particularly one that involves egregious human rights abuses, is likely to backfire in the long term.

Without U.S. cooperation, however, Beijing will continue to turn to private security contractors—such as former Blackwater chief executive Erik Prince, known for employing a team of soldiers for hire who operate outside of recognized legal boundaries and with little accountability—as well as Shanghai Cooperation Organization members, such as Russia, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, all of whom approach counterterrorism with little regard for human rights.

FAINTEST HOPES Beijing’s counterterrorism strategy in Xinjiang is ultimately counterproductive. The policy could instigate more violence, serve as a recruitment tool, and increase the number of attacks against Chinese projects and nationals abroad. To avert this potential threat to global security, U.S. policymakers must first recognize that the situation in Xinjiang is about more than human

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This photo taken on June 2019 ,2 shows an AFP video journalist (L) being escorted away from a village while filming buildings at the Artux City Vocational Skills Education Training Service Center (at rear), believed to be a re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained, north of Kashgar in China›s northwestern Xinjiang region. (Getty)

The media stand behind a line of police officers as a foreign suspect in the August Erawan shrine 17 bombing, identified by the ruling junta as Yusufu Mieraili (not pictured), gets out of a police van during a reenactment with police officers nearby the Erawan shrine (not pictured) in Bangkok on .2015 ,9 September )Getty(

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WESTERN PRESSURE CAMPAIGN TIGHTENS FURTHER On January 14, France, Germany, and the UK formally accused Iran of violating the terms of its 2015 agreement to curb its nuclear program, which raises the spectre of the reimposition of U.N. sanctions lifted under the deal. In the statement, the E3- said, “Iran has continued to break key restrictions set out in the JCPOA. Iran’s actions are inconsistent with the provisions of the nuclear agreement and have increasingly severe and non-reversible proliferation implications.” According to European officials, the Trump administration leveraged a prospective 25 percent tariff on European automobile imports in order to guarantee that Britain, France, and Germany would declare Iran in breach of the accord, testifying to Washington’s resolve on the issue.

On January 18, Washington took another measure to strengthen the hand of the Iranian protest movement when the State Department announced that Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Brigadier General Hassan Shahvarpour, Khuzestan Province’s Vali Asr Commander, was being personally sanctioned for his involvement in “gross violations of human rights against protestors.” According to information supplied by Iranian dissidents, IRGC units under Shahvarpour’s command were responsible for the killing of up to 148 Iranians during the November protests in Mahshahr last year.

Iran’s Leadership Faces a Heightened Crisis of Legitimacy Tehran Confronts Problems at Home and Abroad

by Joseph Braude Iranian-Western relations have returned to their normal rhythm of a tightening ring of Western economic pressure, with new sanctions targeting IRGC officials

and European denunciations of Iran’s violation of the JCPOA. At the same time, domestic discontent has risen sharply in Iran as a result of the government’s inadvertent killing of dozens of Iranians aboard Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752.

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Iranians shout slogans against the government after a vigil held for the victims of the airplane of Ukrainian International Airlines that crashed near Imam Khomeini Airport turned into an anti-government protest outside Amirkabir University in Tehran, Iran on January ,11 2020. (Getty)

With respect to administration rhetoric, President Trump again rebuked Khamene’i directly on Twitter: “The noble people of Iran—who love America—deserve a government that›s more interested in helping them achieve their dreams than killing them for demanding respect,” and urged Iran’s leaders to “abandon terror”.

In an earlier, more caustically worded tweet, President Trump noted that “The so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ of Iran, who has not been so Supreme lately, had some nasty things to say about the United States and Europe,” and advised Khamene’i that “he should be very careful with his words!”

PRESSURE ON TEHRAN GROWS AT HOME While the Western pressure campaign continues to take a toll on the Iranian government’s regional posture, a new source of stress has arisen on the

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On January 14, France, Germany, and the UK formally accused Iran of violating the terms of its 2015 agreement to curb its nuclear program. domestic front. Earlier this week, Mojtaba Zolnour, the Chairman of the Iranian Parliament›s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, said «human error» was responsible for the downing of the Ukrainian plane in Tehran on January 8 which killed dozens of Iranian citizens. Iranian authorities have denied any larger responsibility for the tragedy, laying blame instead on a low-ranking missile operator who reportedly took the decision to fire «on the basis of his own judgement.”

This explanation did not sit well with Iranian protesters, who have defied security forces by repeatedly taking to the streets in protest. Many students and middle-class Iranians gathered in anti-government protests, while security forces responded with deadly force, wounding several. In a highly symbolic gesture indicating the deep distrust and resentment accumulated by Tehran’s handling of the incident, crowds of people outside Beheshti University refused to trample over giant U.S. and Israeli flags that had been painted on the ground, in an apparent rejection of the government›s attempts to deflect blame.

Nor was rejection of the government’s narrative limited to the streets. Gelareh Jabbari, a host on the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting TV network, offered a public apology «for lying to you for 13 years,» in an Instagram post last Monday addressing the crisis.

Similarly, Taraneh Alidoosti, one of Iran’s most popular actors, also criticized the regime in a post to her 5.8 million Instagram followers. “We are not citizens, we are captives, millions of captives,” Alidoosti wrote in a nowdeleted instragram post.

Indeed, by all accounts, the Iranian government is suffering from its most acute crisis of legitimacy in some time. And the actions and rhetoric of Western powers suggest that the pressure is unlikely to lessen any time soon.

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Eat Like an Egyptian Vegans in Egypt Face an Uphill Battle as they Return to their Rich Culinary Roots

by Yasmine El-Geressi Plant-based diets have spread across the West, with meat-free restaurants and product seeing meteoric rises in sales. According to Google Trends, interest in “veganism” – eating and living without animal product - increased seven fold in the five years spent between 2014 and 2019 as concerns for personal health, animal welfare, and environmental sustainability coalesce. You would be forgiven for thinking that a meat-free lifestyle is a relatively new internet-born trend, but in Egypt, where many people eat a mostly vegetarian diet by chance and not by choice, and the modern-day concept of being vegan would be considered alien to most, a plant-based diet is in fact a return to their dietary roots.

For vegetarians and vegans, Eid al-Adha is not solely a cause for celebration; the sight of animals slaughtered street, and the meaty meal that follows, causes understandable distress.

Egyptians love meat. Ask anyone what their favorite dish is: they’ll probably say “kebab w kofta”, which are the population’s two most popular meat. But in a country where there is extreme poverty and rising food prices, meat is increasingly seen as a luxury and a sign of wealth and therefore many Egyptians who are following a mostly vegetarian by default see it as something to aspire to.

Yet, many Egyptian staples and specialty foods are typically not meat-based.

Meals usually center on stews and vegetables.

Street food is what most Egyptians can afford, and they happily wait in line for the best kushari, the country’s national dish originating in the 19th century, made of rice, macaroni, and lentils mixed together, topped with a spiced tomato sauce and garlic vinegar and garnished with chickpeas and crispy fried onions. Egyptian specialties include molokhiyya; a garlicky leaf soup which was known to be part of the pharaohs’ diet, mahshi; rice stuffed vegetables, foul; mashed fava beans that are a mainstay of any proper Egyptian breakfast, and deep-fried crunchy falafels; made only of fava beans and herbs, not of chickpeas like in other Middle Eastern countries.

Traditional Egyptian cuisine has partly been

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shaped by the country’s indigenous Coptic Orthodox population, which make up %15-10 of the country, who fast for between 180 and 200 days of the year, abstaining from all animal products and adhering to a plant-based diet on fasting days. These fasting periods are exceeded by no other Christian community except the Orthodox Tewahedo. While the principle behind fasting is limiting indulgent foods in the name of religious piety, fasting practices also led to a boom in plant-based offerings year-round for the general public.

In a country where there is extreme poverty and rising food prices, meat is increasingly seen as a luxury and a sign of wealth and therefore many Egyptians who are following a mostly vegetarian by default see it as something to aspire to.

Research also suggests that Egypt’s veg-friendly origins date all the way back to the Ancient Egyptians. According to several findings, including research that looked at the carbon atoms in mummies that had lived in Egypt between 3500 B.C. and 600 A.D, relied mostly on cultivated wheat and barley rather than meat

and fish. This might be surprising considering the civilization›s proximity to the Nile, but researchers theorise this was for religious reasons. Cows, rams, pigs and geese were all considered sacred in ancient Egypt. Not only did Egyptians at the time rarely eat meat (only during festivals and special occasions), they also

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frowned upon the wearing of animal flesh. One notable vegan-learning leader was the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten who banned animal sacrifice because he thought it was sinful to take away any given life by the Aten god.

Although on a lesser scale, the modern vegan movement is also growing in Egypt’s capital, where there is a small elite following, but more people beyond that privileged group are embracing the trend. “When I first got into the food business in 2013, I was probably one of 20 vegans in Egypt! Now I can guarantee there are thousands, and still growing! It’s amazing to see this transformation in our society, even if it’s on the small scale, it’s relatively a huge shift in the past five years,” Yasmine Nazmy, a young Egyptian food entrepreneur who founded Egypt’s first vegan and organic restaurant, told Majalla.

One of the most common myths about going vegan is that you spend much more on groceries as a vegan than you do if you buy animal-based products and therefore it is only an option for the middle/upper class, but Nazmy believes that veganism can easily be tailored to fit into most people›s lives, regardless of income.

“Vegan food basically means plants, right? And plants are cheap, they always will be - unless you’re importing something from 2 continents away! What costs a lot are products. products include packaging, marketing, salaries, bills,

Traditional Egyptian cuisine has partly been shaped by the country’s indigenous Coptic Orthodox population who fast for between 180 and 200 days of the year, abstaining from all animal products and adhering to a plant-based diet on fasting days

transportation and other fees! As long as you’re sticking to buying fresh food, it won’t cost much at all. You can easily be vegan on a budget,” she said.

“The better question here would be how to remain carnivorous on a budget!” - A question that is practically pertinent to Egypt’s accidental vegetarians.

Despite Egypt›s cuisine traditionally involving many vegetarian options, there remains a stigma against vegetarians who are often met with resistance. “When I ditched meat and dairy in 2013, people saw me as extreme and I felt quite isolated, I would only eat with vegan friends or impose vegan food on my guests. I became known as «the vegan girl” or «Yasmine the vegan,” explained Nazmy, who has a brand of raw vegan frozen foods, KAJU, which is available in supermarkets across the country.

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But when Nazmy became less restrictive with her diet, she noticed her family become more accepting of her lifestyle choice: “I was a strict vegan for about 2 years until I slowly started to taste some dairy foods, and some fish, but never ever going back to meat again. I feel that allowing myself some flexibility has tremendously changed the way my family and friends deal with me - they just seem more accepting, and alienate me less.”

It is important not to undervalue the importance meat has in Arab and Islamic culture. During Eid al- Adha, also known as the Festival of Sacrifice, animals – most commonly lamb, though sometimes goats and cows - are slaughtered by millions of Muslims worldwide. It is a highlight of the Egyptian year for most where people save up to eat meat, or are given it by richer neighbours. But for vegetarians and vegans,

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Research also suggests that Egypt’s veg-friendly origins date all the way back to the Ancient Egyptians. One notable vegan-learning leader was the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten who banned animal sacrifice. the day is not solely a cause for celebration; the sight of animals slaughtered street, and the meaty meal that follows, causes understandable distress. “I always leave the country during Eid el Adha, I can’t tolerate the bloodshed. Like seriously for the past 5 Eids, I’m not in Egypt!” said Nazmy.

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Tardy Britain Seeks New Economic Ventures in Africa Why the UK Will Find Difficulties in Establishing Better Economic ties in Africa

by Ali El Shamy In less than a fortnight from now, the UK is too officially leave the European Union. While the future of the UK-EU trading partnership will still be further discussed during the transition period, the UK has been quick to attempt to establish new economic ties with other non-EU states. As such, the UK-Africa Investment Summit, which took place in London on January ,20 2020, was an opportunity for Prime Minister Boris Johnson to showcase the new global Britain that will be able to forge new partners. Likewise, the Summit was also an opportunity for various African states to consider greater economic ties with the UK. Although this seemed like a typical economic conference, it did mark an important development in the dynamic between the UK and African states, namely the fact that it is Britain which is in more need of better economic relations with Africa and not vice-versa. More importantly, while Johnson conveyed confidence that African states will seek robust partnerships with the UK, there is little evidence which points to that happening and the biggest reason for that is because the UK took too long to realize the economic potential of Africa.

TOO COMFORTABLE WITH THE EU, TOO PREOCCUPIED WITH BREXIT As it has been stated numerous times, the EU is the UK’s largest trading partnership and the task of finding new partners to replace those in Europe was never going to be easy. Just to put

into perspective of how much the UK relies on the EU, 7 out of the UK’s top ten trading partners are EU states and if you count Switzerland (which is part of the European Economic Area, but not the EU), then that would bring the total to eight. To hark things back to the Summit, the UK currently has a poor trading partnership with African states, only 2.3 percent of the UK’s exports go to Africa. Moreover, half of all the UK’s trade with Africa is with the continent’s three largest economies, Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa. So not only is British trade with Africa inadequate, the UK simply does not do enough business with the smaller economies in the continent. Just to add insult to injury, there are currently six other EU nations that have greater trade relations with Africa, as France’s, Germany’s and Italy’s exports to African states dwarf those of the UK. While the British government should have probably exerted more effort into building stronger economic ties with non-EU states, the process of negotiating a withdrawal agreement with the EU understandably had a higher priority. In theory, after January 31 the UK should have more time to focus on rejuvenating these new trade deals outside the EU, but in reality more negotiations with the bloc will take place during the transition period which is set to end in December 2020. This does beg the question if the Johnson government will repeat the mistakes of the May government, whereby it focuses too much on the Brexit negotiations and forgets to forge relations elsewhere in case a no-deal scenario is unavoidable. While Johnson has stated that he is willing to resort to a no-deal, he most likely wants to more or less maintain the relations his country already has with the EU27-. Nevertheless,

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UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El Sisi pose with 20 other representatives from African countries.

(Getty)

the government should put contingency plans into place in the event of a worst case scenario. ?TOO LATE TO THE PARTY Too put things bluntly, the UK has ignored Africa’s potential as well as its rapid economic growth. It is only now that it is placed in such a precarious situation that it is seeking deep economic relations with the states that make up the continent. As previously stated, countries such as France and Germany have already beaten the UK when it comes to the African economic sector. However, even the EU countries investments and trade is miniscule when it comes to that of one other major international player: China. Since the dawn of the 21st century, China has become a leading trading and investment partner in Africa.

According to the China Global Investment tracker, from 2005 to 2018 China invested around 63 Billion dollars in North Africa.

Such investments helped contribute to a number of development projects in the region, such as the New Administrative Capital in Egypt. Chinese investment in Sub-Saharan Africa far exceed those in the North, as the China Global Investment tracker indicates that Beijing invested almost 305 billion dollars in the time period between 2005 and 2018. Furthermore, 40 out Africa’s 54 states are part of China’s controversial Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to improve infrastructure in Asia, Africa and Europe to promote a better flow of trade and business between states. These partnerships have given Beijing access to a number of valuable exports from Africa, namely hydrocarbons, copper and iron. Even Russia, which has had deteriorating relations with the continent since the fall of the Soviet Union, has

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The UK has ignored Africa’s potential as well as its rapid economic growth and countries such as France and Germany have already beaten the UK when it comes to the African economic sector. recently started looking into investment projects in Africa and even held its own Russia-Africa Summit in Moscow last year.

OPPURTUNITY KNOCKS FOR BRITAIN As the saying goes, it’s always better late than never. While the UK has languished behind other international players when it comes to trade and investment with Africa, it now has the opportunity to remedy that. However, greater economic relations between both parties cannot be formed overnight, and even more critically Britain cannot tap into sectors that are already filled by other states. For example, while Johnson did say Cairo would receive monorail trains “made in Derby” Britain cannot become a major automobile exporter to the continent since Germany already fulfils that gap. Brexit was never going to be easy, but it is now up to the UK to find new economic opportunities that will alleviate its reliance on the EU.

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1784- January- 24/01/2020

Joaquin Phoenix: The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of the Oscar Front Runner

www.majalla.com

H

ealth Pickleball is a hybrid racquet sport that combines aspects of tennis, table tennis, and badminton. leball, which is good for tight shoulders. The fast pace of the game (like table tennis) requires a lot of eye-hand coordination, which keeps thinking skills sharp, and lateral (side-to-side) motion, which boosts balance and strength. The sport engages your leg, core, arm, and shoulder muscles, and it›s a weight-bearing activity, which is good for your bones. Also: because the pickleball court is small, you›re in close proximity to the other players, making the game very social.

Pickleball Pleasures and Pitfalls

«Social networking and the number and quality of social connections are emerging as huge determiners of health and longevity. Particularly for older people who might tend to be isolated, this is a great way to get out into the community and enjoy the camaraderie of a fun sport,» says Dr. Aaron Baggish, director of the Cardiovascular Performance Program at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.

The Game Requires Agility and Quick Thinking. But it Can Leave You in a Pickle if You Overdo it or Fall WHAT IS IT Pickleball is a hybrid racquet sport that combines One of the fastest growing and popular sports aspects of tennis, table tennis, and badminton. among older adults is easy to play and lots of The game is played indoors or outdoors on a fun. But pickleball, with its funny name, comes small court (20 feet by 44 feet, about the size of with some serious risks. «It has a quick pace and a badminton court) resembling the top of a giant a lot of stops, starts, and changes in direction Ping-Pong table. The net dividing the court is a that can lead to leg injuries and falls,» says Clare few inches shorter than the net on a tennis court.

Safran-Norton, clinical supervisor of rehabilita- You play pickleball in singles (one against one) tion services at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and or doubles (two against two) with large, lightweight paddles that are a little bigger than PingWomen›s Hospital.

by Harvard Health Letter

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PICKLEBALL RISKS Pickleball has some drawbacks. One is that it›s not an aerobic workout. «Playing pickleball won›t provide the same cardiovascular benefits as 30 minutes of jogging,» Dr. Baggish says.

«The game is best as a complement to your exercise regimen, not a replacement for aerobic activity.» Another drawback: like any sport, pickleball has injury risks, including the following.

Pickleball player Cathy Binnquist on the courts at Bonita Canyon Sports Park in Newport Beach on Wednesday, June ,6 2018 (Getty)

Pong paddles.

The pickleball itself is similar to a Wiffle ball, full of holes. It travels slower and bounces lower than a tennis ball, making it easier to hit.

Ankle injuries. A quick change of direction or lateral motion could cause an ankle strain (an overstretched Achilles tendon) or an ankle sprain (a tear of the anterior talofibular ligament on the front and outside of the ankle).

BENEFITS OF THE GAME Pickleball has many benefits. It›s less taxing than tennis -- you don›t have to hit the ball as hard or run as far to reach it, which is easier on the knees. Overhead serves are not allowed in pick-

Knee injuries. Lateral motion can also lead to a knee sprain -- a tear in the medial collateral ligament, which supports the inner side of the knee.

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Leg muscle injuries. Taking big strides with

Ben Johns is the US Open and Nationals Champion and ranked 1# in the world for pickleball. (Getty)

tight hamstrings (in the back of the thighs) could cause strains or tears in those muscles.

Elbow injuries. Twisting your wrist repeatedly as

Pickleball has some drawbacks. One is that it›s not an aerobic workout.

you prepare to hit the ball with your paddle can cause tiny tears in a tendon in your forearm. The inflammation, tenderness, and pain in the elbow (where the tendon attaches) are characteristic of lateral epicondylitis, informally known as tennis elbow.

Shoulder strains. Reaching up for an overhead shot may lead to a tear in the rotator cuff (the group of tendons and muscles that helps you raise and rotate your arm).

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A group of seniors participate in a coed recreational pickleball league at the Milliken Park Community Recreation Centre. (Getty)

Falls and fractures. Taking quick steps backward to hit the ball may cause you to lose your balance. «When we fall, we put our hands out for protection. It›s a natural reaction. But you can break your wrist,» Safran-Norton says.

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO With your doctor›s okay (especially necessary if you have heart, endurance, or balance problems), prepare for pickleball by wearing the right clothing (shorts, not loose pants that can make you trip), shoes (court sneakers, not running shoes), and goggles to protect your eyes from fast-flying balls.

Before playing, warm up your muscles with five

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minutes of brisk walking around the pickleball court. This gets blood flowing to your muscles and makes them more amenable to the demands you›re about to place on them.

During the game, don›t risk falls. «Don›t scoot backward to get to the ball if your partner is closer and can get the shot,» Safran-Norton advises.

After the game, stretch your muscles. «Focus on your hamstrings, calf muscles, shoulders, and wrists. Hold the stretches for at least 30 seconds,» Safran-Norton advises. Stretching will keep your muscles long and flexible, which will help prevent injuries the next time you›re on the pickleball court for fun and friendly competition.

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Joaquin Phoenix: The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of the Oscar Front Runner Majalla - London Joaquin Phoenix was born as Joaquin Rafael Bottom to John Lee Bottom and Arlyn Bottom in Rio Piedras in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on October 1974 ,28. His parents were ardent followers of the Children of God missionary and so he moved frequently with his family during his earl life. Later they became disillusioned with the religious group and left, changing their surnames to Pheonix which was symbolic of their new life.

Moving to Los Angeles around the age of four, Joaquin and his siblings — older brother River, older sister Rain, and younger sisters Liberty and Summer — soon tried to make their way in Hollywood. The Phoenix children already liked to put on shows for each other before their mother found an agent to represent them. «We all used to sing and play music, and we were all very outgoing. My parents always encouraged us to express ourselves. And so it seemed like second nature to start acting,» Phoenix explained to Interview magazine. Soon the children were spotted by a leading Hollywood children’s agent who helped them appear in television shoes and commercials.

As Leaf Phoenix, he got his first significant role in 1986›s Spacecamp, and then went on to star in Russkies (1987) and Parenthood (1989), the latter of which was successful enough to make Phoenix something of a fledgling star. However, he chose to retreat from Hollywood, spending a few years traveling and living with his father in Mexico. It was his brother River’s death in 1993 that brought his younger brother – now called Joaquin – back into the limelight, albeit a very unwelcome limelight.

The 911 call that Pheonix made as his older brother lay dying was broadcast over radio and television in the aftermath of River›s death, only compounding

his grief. Again, Phoenix left Hollywood, not to be seen again until 1995, when his performance in “To Die For” where he played a young man whose married girlfriend convinced him to kill her husband which won him an array of positive reviews. From there, Phoenix went on to film Inventing the Abbotts (1997), but the movie was a major failure at the box office.

A turn of events happened in 2000 when Pheonix nearly stole the Roman epic Gladiator from Russell Crowe with his turn as the twisted, jealous emperor Commodus. His work in this summer blockbuster, directed by Ridley Scott, netted him nominations for many of the acting profession›s most prestigious awards, including the Oscars. That same year, he cemented his position as a top-rated actor with the film, “The Yards” in which he played a slick operator opposite Mark Wahlberg. The movie was followed by yet another historical epic drama, ‘Quills’ released the same year.

Phoenix outdid himself in his next major role, undergoing even more extensive preparation to play one of country music›s greatest stars, Johnny Cash, in Walk the Line (2005). Diving deep emotionally and physically to embody the character and the addictions that shaped his life and career would also come with a dark side for Phoenix: After filming for Walk the Line wrapped, he checked himself into rehab for a brief stint. Phoenix had never been more than a social drinker before Walk the Line, and had increased his alcohol consumption significantly to better understand Cash. As he told London Magazine, «I was really leaning on alcohol to feel okay. That›s really what it was.» Widely praised by critics, the film and its stars netted numerous nominations and awards.

From 2009 to 2010 the public at large was

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worried about Joaquin Phoenix, wondering if he was on drugs — or worse — when he announced his retirement from acting to become a rapper.

This period was marked with Phoenix behaving erratically in interviews and talk shows like his now-infamous David Letterman appearance which was full of awkward pauses and low mumbling. All of this would turn out to be an elaborate piece of performance art directed by Phoenix›s then-brotherin-law Casey Affleck that was eventually turned into the mockumentary “I›m Still Here.”

Following a self-imposed two-year hiatus from acting, he returned to the big screen with Paul Thomas Anderson›s film ‘The Master’ in 2012. The film was widely commended and applauded by the critics as well as the audiences. It also won him the Volpi Cup for Best Actor.

In 2018, it was announced that Phoenix would star in an origin story of the playing the mentally unstable Arthur Fleck, an aspiring comedian who decides to hit back against the people who rejected him. The actor lost 52 lbs. for the role.

Comic fans initially expressed misgivings, in part because no origin story of the character existed to that point, though a teaser trailer released the following spring offered a tantalizing look at Phoenix as the iconic villain. Joker later received some backlash for its depictions of violence after debuting in theaters in October 2019, though Phoenix›s performance was generally praised: He received his fourth Academy Award nomination, his third in the Best Actor category, his fourth BAFTA nomination and won his second Golden Globe in the category Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama, his second Critics Choice Award in the category Best Actor and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role.

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Liverpool can actually get their 19th title as soon as March 14 when they are set to face their local rivals Everton at Goodison Park, which would give them eight games to spare.

Can Liverpool Win the League by March?

Three Records Klopp’s Liverpool Can Beat this Season

by Ali El Shamy At the end of the 90-1989 English First Division season, Liverpool had grabbed their record 18th league title. Few Reds fans would have fathomed at the time that they would spend almost the next 30 years without a league title, after all they had won it six times in the 1980s. Furthermore, the only teams at the time that came close to their league record were Arsenal and Everton, both of which only had a measly 9 league titles each to their name.

Since then Liverpool have been painfully waiting

for a return to glory, often coming close but just falling short at the end, most recently of course was last season when they went head to head with Manchester City only to end up losing by just one point. However, things are already looking up for Liverpool this season, as of the writing of this piece they are league leaders with a -16point gap ahead of Manchester City. To make matters better they have one game in hand, meaning that if they win their next match against West Ham they can extend their lead by 19 points. If Liverpool keep up their winning ways, and Man City continue to

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Liverpool›s Ian Rush lifts the Football League Division one trophy aloft, with Gary Ablett to his right holding the Barclays Trophy as Liverpool are crowned champions of England for the 18th time at Anfield on May 1990 ,26 in Liverpool, England. Liverpool are now eagerly awaiting to end their -30year League drought and win their 19th overall league. (Getty) A cameraman films Liverpool›s German manager Jurgen Klopp (R) embracing Liverpool›s Egyptian midfielder Mohamed Salah (C) at the end of the English Premier League football match between Liverpool and Manchester United at Anfield stadium in Liverpool, north west England on January 2020 ,19. (Getty)

drop silly points then the -30year wait will finally come to an end this season. However, as the Reds are presently still in all three major competitions, they have the potential to break records set by their rivals, so if they play their cards right this Liverpool team can end up becoming the greatest ever team to grace English club football. Here’s a list of the records they can break this season.

MANCHESTER UNITED’S FASTEST PREMIER LEAGUE WIN

During the 01-2000 Premier League season, Manchester United won the title on April 14

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with five games to spare marking the fastest ever title clench in the competition’s history. Funnily enough, Liverpool’s recent 0-2 victory over Man United meant that they only needed to win 10 games to be crowned champions. Some have speculated that Liverpool could win the league on April 4 if they beat Man City at the Etihad, which would be enough to break Man United’s record. However, if Man City keep dropping points at their current rate, and Liverpool keep their winning pace, they might actually win the league much sooner. Some sports analysts from the BBC and Give Me Sport think that they can

actually get their 19th title as soon as March 14 when they are set to face their local rivals Everton at Goodison Park, which would give them eight games to spare.

been previously achieved by Preston North End back during the first ever Football League in 89-1888. Thus far, Liverpool have won all their league games and only drew once to Manchester United at Old Trafford.

With 15 games to go, Liverpool still have a long way before being crowned the new Invincibles but if they manage to maintain their form they might even break ARSENAL’S INVINCIBLES SEASON Arsenal managed to win the 04-2003 Premier Arsenal’s record of 26 wins, 12 draws and 0 losses.

League without any losses, a record that has only With a track record so far of 22 wins, 1 draw and 0 losses, such a feat might be within reach. If Liverpool achieve this then they, along with Arsenal, will be the only clubs to have a gold Premier League trophy in their cabinet.

This is a team that already knows what it takes to be European champions and they are more than capable of retaining the trophy, and while the FA Cup can be unpredictable at times it is still winnable. As such I can see Liverpool becoming the second team in English history to become treble winners.

MANCHESTER UNITED’S TREBLE SEASON

Often lauded as the greatest achievement in English football, in 1999 Manchester United won a historic treble consisting of the Premier League, the FA Cup and the Champions league. The -98 99 season has both been a testament of glory for United and its fans and a subject of bitterness and jealousy for its rivals. No other English team had ever achieved this before, and no other English team has achieved it since. Ironically, the team

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Thierry 2004 May 15 Henry and Robert Pires of Arsenal pose with the Premiership trophy, which they had won with a record of no losses throughout the )campaign. (Getty

Manchester United celebrate winning the treble as the jubilant team make their way through Manchester during an open top bus parade.

Teddy Sheringham, Dwight Yorke, Andy Cole, Phil Neville, David Beckham among the team members on the bus. 27th May 1999. (Getty)

that came closest to achieving this feat before United was the 77-1976 Liverpool team, which

by May 1977 had already won its 10th League title and saw itself in both the FA Cup and European Cup finals. Having been the greatest team in English football at the time, it seemed only fitting for Liverpool to become the first English team to win the treble, but a 1-2 loss against Manchester United in the FA Cup final put those dreams to rest. While the Reds did manage to win the European trophy a few days later, the fact that their biggest rivals prevented them from making history made their double bittersweet. To add insult to injury, 22 years later it would be Manchester United that achieved the first treble in English football.

All of this is history now, and as it stands Liverpool are still in all three major competitions, furthermore they are arguably the best team in Europe and the world right now so they can well win the treble by the end of this season. This, of course, is easier said than done but the team is already on the verge of winning the league, and have already been in two Champions League finals in a row, the second of which they won. This is a team that already knows

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If Liverpool manage to maintain their form they might even break Arsenal’s undefeated record of 26 wins, 12 draws and 0 losses what it takes to be European champions and they are more than capable of retaining the title, and while the FA Cup can be unpredictable at times it is still winnable. As such I can see Liverpool becoming the second team in England to become treble winners.

Just beating one of those records would be a great achievement, but imagine if Liverpool manage to do all three? If they do, it would be difficult to argue that this current Liverpool team isn’t the greatest team in the history of English football.

They will also undoubtedly seek to beat more records in the near future. Perhaps they could win the league this year and next year, thus equaling Manchester United’s record of 20 league title wins.