Category Archives: Global Politics

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Germany’s Global Role

 

That the EU would cooperate more closely with NATO was not among the least the decisions taken at the Warsaw summit. This would be the case, above all, in areas where the EU is either significantly weaker than the USA, or where it wishes support. The former case applies to the domain of cyberwarfare and intelligence activities to be expanded, while the latter applies to the EU warding off migrants, wherein the military alliance will lend support. It also stipulates that the EU’s arms industry should be further bolstered and can possibly expect new orders from the United States. This reinforcement of cooperation was taken after German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had announced that Germany has become a “central player” on the world stage and takes on a “global role,” while the USA has “stumbled” and “the illusion of a unipolar world” faded.[7] Steinmeier, together with his French counterpart, Jean-Marc Ayrault, additionally call for an excessive EU arms buildup permitting the European confederation to become an “independent” and “global” actor – also “independent” of the USA.[8]

 

Source: www.german-foreign-policy.com

After ‘Brexit’ Vote, Immigrants Feel a Town Turn Against Them – The New York Times

“Something is broken in this town,” said Paul Gleeson, a Labour Party councilor in Boston, where 76 percent of voters supported leaving the European Union, the highest pro-“Brexit” proportion in the country. “This veneer of propriety has suddenly disappeared.’’In this new environment, some immigrants say they have stopped speaking their native tongue in public. Nervous mothers say they worry about their children being bullied at school. Young immigrants say they fear discrimination over jobs and university admissions.Gregory Pacho, who is Polish-Italian, runs a thriving taxi company. For the first time in the 16 years he has lived in Boston, he said, he has given serious thought to moving out, prompted by a leaflet on his car’s windshield that read, “Did you pack your bags yet?”Some of his English clients, with whom he joked over the years, no longer talk to him. “In one week, you experience that some people you’ve known for three years change their attitudes 180 degrees,” he said.PhotoPolish and Chinese shops sharing a neighborhood in Boston, where 76 percent of voters supported leaving the European Union. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York TimesMagdalena Korzeb, 34, said she had long considered herself half-Bostonian, having worked, paid taxes and lived here for 11 years with her husband and 5-year-old daughter. Not anymore.Continue reading the main storyADVERTISEMENT‘Brexit’: Britain’s Decision to Leave the E.U.Updates on Britain’s exit from the European Union.Obama Tells NATO That ‘Europe Can Count On’ the U.S.JUL 9Why the E.U. Had It ComingJUL 9Contest for British Premier Flares Over Claims on MotherhoodJUL 9NATO Unity, Tested by Russia, Shows Some CracksJUL 8New British Premier Will Be: A WomanJUL 8See More »RELATED COVERAGEIN DEBTEconomic Uncertainty Remains Even After ‘Brexit’ JULY 8, 2016‘Brexit’: Explaining Britain’s Vote on European Union Membership APRIL 5, 2016Overwhelmed by ‘Brexit’? Here Are the Basics JUNE 24, 2016“I feel used. Eleven years wasted. Eleven years ago, they were so happy to invite us here,” she said at the Delight Pub, a Polish bar that she owns on West Street. (English locals call it “East Street” because of the number of Eastern European shops.) “I could now close my shop, pack my bags and say, ‘Bye-bye.’”

Source: After ‘Brexit’ Vote, Immigrants Feel a Town Turn Against Them – The New York Times

How Israel is turning anti-occupation activists into dissidents | +972 Magazine

“If you are not for the government, you are anti-Israel, scum, a mole, an outsider who should be made not a citizen

On another front, Culture Minister Miri Regev has been working for several years to curtail political dissent in the arts. Last month Regev sent questionnaires to artists asking them whether they perform in West Bank settlements, the first step in cutting funding on the basis of political conscious. A year earlier she warned, “institutions that delegitimize the State of Israel will not receive funding.”Combined with a range of other pieces of legislation, policies and actions by government officials and extra-parliamentary groups, the cumulative effect of the NGO Law is to portray those working to end the occupation, fighting for equality and liberal democratic values as dissidents subverting the State of Israel itself.Speaking at the Herzliya Conference last month, Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan announced a new legislative initiative to install legal — perhaps criminal — sanctions against Israelis who actively oppose government policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians.“There’s no real price for somebody or an organization working against his country in order to isolate it in the world,” explained Erdan, whose ministerial responsibilities include Israel’s law enforcement agencies. “I’ve already established a legal team together with the Justice Ministry to create government-sponsored legislation in that context.”“We understand that there is a need to draw a line between freedom of expression and democratic values, in which we believe and want to safeguard,” Erdan continued, “but if we want to convince the world that delegitimzation is unacceptable and for which a price must be paid, then it needs to start here in Israel.”In the same speech, Erdan discussed the need to use Israel’s intelligence capabilities against individuals and organizations working to end the occupation, drawing direct parallels to the methods Israel has used to fight terrorism, including searching for tangential and indirect ties to terrorist organizations, finding financial improprieties, smearing individuals, and shutting down bank accounts.

Source: How Israel is turning anti-occupation activists into dissidents | +972 Magazine

Victims, Not Threats: The Massacred In Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Yemen Are Not Terrorists For Hateful Rhetoric

Meet Adel Al-Jaf. He also calls himself Adel Euro, so you might know him by that. He was a rapper, a dancer and a man who tried to do the best that he could with what he had in his country. Last ye…

Source: Victims, Not Threats: The Massacred In Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Yemen Are Not Terrorists For Hateful Rhetoric

Sarah Sadaka, an Arab living in the United States, was going to a Best Buy store today. She went into that store speaking on her phone in Arabic, only to be circled by a woman who made it clear that her presence, her skin, her language made her uncomfortable. No one came to Sarah’s defense: she was just another sand nigger, breathing that free American air on the fourth of July. She did not deserve to have her right as a human being not to be violated that way taken away, she is, after all, only Arab.

Sarah, today, is the living embodiment of what it is to be the victim of terrorism in the United States, except this time it’s the brand championed by the likes of Donald Trump and the people with whom his rhetoric resonates.

When Omar Mateen went to a gay night club in Orlando and killed 49 people, mainstream American media only saw his name Omar as enough reason to justify his actions. He was just another Muslim. He was just another Middle Eastern offended by “our” way of life. Except Omar Mateen did not do so in the name of Islam, he did it in the name of his own insecurities, the insecurities of a man who is afraid of his own sexuality and who is so deluded in his own belief that he’d support two politically opposed factions in Hezbollah and ISIS as vindications for his action.

Omar Mateen’s characterization, and the repercussions that follow it, are a direct result of the kind of terrorism that Arabs and Muslims have to endure at the hands of people like Donald Trump, the Far Right across the world, and the minds that listen to them.

My mother tongue has become synonymous in people’s minds with death. If I speak it on a plane, I become an automatic threat, forced to undergo security checks, apprehended by officials because the words I utter from lips only resonate with fear, even if it’s to say: peace be upon you.

Victims, not threats. The more we are silent towards our murder, our decimation, and our characterization as people who do not deserve to live, the more we perpetuate the notion that people who think of Muslims, Arabs, Middle Easterners and those that live in the area are worth nothing is true. The more we are subdued in not demanding our deaths be remembered, be proclaimed, be cared for, the more our inherent value slips even further, even less than it already is, down an abyss in which the least valuable lives on this planet are Arab lives.

I should not be living in a world where I need to convince a friend of mine not to name his son Abdul Rahman because the name is “too Muslim.” I should not be living in a world where I have to defend myself at my own funeral. I should not be living in a world where the deaths of two hundred Iraqis is considered as just another bleb on the evening news, as they are just a waste of space.

We are people too, and we are worthy of life, one in which two hundred of us do not die at a mall buying new clothes for their children. We are victims, not threats.

Islamic extremists attack Christian village in Egypt, burn 80 homes

“Under Sisi the Coptic communities get protection from the military which then fuels sectarian attacks against Copts,” he said, adding that Egypt’s Christians have also been blamed for Sisi’s military coup because of their close ties with the army.Just last month, Egypt’s Christians were victim to a similar attack condemned by President Sisi in which 300 Muslims looted and torched Christian homes in the south, and stripped a 70-year-old Christian woman naked after accusing her son of having an affair with a Muslim woman, according to Reuters.President Sisi and other Muslim leaders have also spoken out about combating religious extremist ideology leading to incitement and sectarian violence.“Under (President Hosni) Mubarak we didn’t have as many cases against Copts as we have under Sisi,” Abdelmalak said.“I don’t think Sisi is personally pushing to marginalize Copts, but he’s not helping the situation either. He is living in denial about there even being a sectarian problem.”

Source: Islamic extremists attack Christian village in Egypt, burn 80 homes

Nieto 120: “The support of Grandmothers energizes me to witness my ownership” – Red Harvest

José Luis’s mother did not suffer a kidnapping in the strict sense of the term. They applied another type of ordeal. After the operation where they took her husband (who was later imprisoned politician in Coronda and regained his freedom in 1982) and her mother, Ana Elena Schoesting; Luisa’s sister, Griselda Pratto, 15, arrived from Buenos Aires to help. She was also kidnapped. When Luisa entered the hospital to have her baby, in March 1977, she was forced to surrender the child threatened to kill her husband. Then followed the gang visiting at home to torture and abuse her. And released, her mother accompanied her on claims by her husband and son.In the 80s, a neighbor brought clues to the whereabouts of the child, who sought for years. But appropriators threatened the family Ratto Maulin, while providing the child stolen explanations did not close it. The cause Airbase, in 2006, collected several testimonies of what had been state terrorism in the area. In 2008, Luisa and her sister Griselda said to justice. And that left the note on the radio that caught the ear of José Luis. Today the grandson 120 declared for the first time before the court in the cause of its appropriation, and so will his parents and aunt Griselda. “This support gives me energy Grandmothers to testify, is a great incentive. I’m hopeful , “said Red Harvest shortly before returning to his province. He recalled that saw many times the press conferences of other grandchildren, “When Estela found hers, was so happy that sent me a good roast”. Lucila Puyol and Guillermo Munnué (lawyers) and Valeria Silva are part of the team accompanying CHILDREN Jose Luis at trial and that he also accompanied Grandmothers in Buenos Aires. “This case was not registered between allegations of missing children Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, nor in new cases that, thanks to research from the National Commission for the Right to Identity (CONADI), are incorporated into the Bank “I read the statement Grandmothers that spread after the press conference. “This is another case of abduction, concealment and falsification of identity of a baby in the framework of state terrorism, like all of our grandsons and granddaughters appropriate. Thanks to his courage and family were able to reconstruct the events genocide tried to erase and distort. After in-depth know its history and the sufferings of their parents recover, the Association decided to incorporate appropriate to list of restituted grandchildren, as an act of reparation and historical truth. ”

Source: Nieto 120: “The support of Grandmothers energizes me to witness my ownership” – Red Harvest

Charlemagne’s Empire Deja Vu?

The Social Democrat Steinmeier and the Socialist Ayrault write that to ensure “internal security,” the “operational capacity” must be enhanced at the EU level. This includes making the best use of “retention of flight passenger data (PNR)” – the “data exchange within the EU” must be “improved” – but also “making the best use of Europol and its counterterrorism centre.” “In the medium term,” there should otherwise be the “creation of a European platform for intelligence cooperation.” Last weekend, SPD Chair, Sigmar Gabriel and the President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz (SPD) called for the extension of domestic repression as well as the creation of a “European FBI.”[7]

Seize the Opportunity – Just a few days ago, Foreign Minister Steinmeier declared in the US journal “Foreign Affairs” that Germany has become “a major power” and will “try its best” on the world stage “to hold as much ground as possible.”[8] With Britain, which had always adamantly opposed an integrated EU military policy, leaving the EU, Berlin sees an opportunity for reviving its efforts at restructuring the EU’s military and mobilizing as many member countries as possible for the EU’s future wars.

Source: www.german-foreign-policy.com

Britain sees spike in hate crimes after Brexit vote | Europe | DW.COM | 28.06.2016

On Sunday morning, staff at the Polish Social and Cultural Association (POSK) in Hammersmith, west London, woke up to an unpleasant surprise: racist graffiti daubed over the entrance of the building. This was not an isolated incident. In Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, cards saying “Leave the EU” and “No more Polish vermin” were found outside St Peter’s School. An 11-year-old Polish child told reporters that the leaflets had made him feel “really sad.” Similar leaflets were put through people’s doors in the area. “As an eastern European, I feel worried,” says Ana Petrov, a Bulgarian national who has lived in southern England for three years. “I have built my home here but now I wonder if I speak in Bulgarian on the phone in public, will someone shout at me that I should leave? Or worse?” According to initial police figures, there has been a sharp spike in hate crimes since last week’s referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU: an increase of 57 percent in reported incidents between Thursday and Sunday, compared with the same days four weeks earlier. In addition to the incidents reported to police, accounts of verbal abuse have proliferated on social media. “I suddenly feel a lot further away from home,” German national Karoline Weber, who works in London, told DW. While much of the aggression has been targeted at EU nationals, non-white Britons have also been affected. BBC journalist Sima Kotecha was called a “Paki” while reporting on the responses to the Brexit vote in her home town of Basingstoke. Channel 4 News correspondent Ciaran Jenkins heard three people shout “send them home” in the space of five minutes as he reported on the referendum in Barnsley in northern England. “The attacks are mostly on eastern European migrants – but not all,” says Liz Fekete, director of the Institute for Race Relations. “What we’re observing is Muslim women are a prime target and a lot of children as well. A lot of damage has been done to social and community cohesion. There’s a hell of a lot of work to be done to repair that.”

Source: Britain sees spike in hate crimes after Brexit vote | Europe | DW.COM | 28.06.2016

A Brexit for English as EU language? | News | DW.COM | 28.06.2016

Danuta Hubner, a Polish politician and chair of the European Parliament’s constutitional affairs committee, has come out with a warning that a British exit from the European Union could also delete English from the EU’s list of 24 official languages. That possibility reverberated Tuesday far beyond the administrative levels of Article 50 – the provision allowing a member state to leave the bloc under EU treaty rules. Addressing the European Parliament on Tuesday, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker spoke only in French and German, clearly avoiding the use of English. During past crises, on the euro zone, for example, he had used English prominently as well. “We have a regulation … where every EU country has the right to notify one official language,” Hübner had told a press conference late on Monday. “If we don’t have the UK, we don’t have English (as an official language),” she warned, adding that keeping it would require assent by all remaining member states.

Source: A Brexit for English as EU language? | News | DW.COM | 28.06.2016

Brexit and the New Axis? Germany, France and Italy? Cameron becomes the deja vu – oops – Chamberlin?

The New Directorate

Beyond such long-term agreements, Chancellor Angela Merkel has invited France’s President, François Hollande, Italy’s Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi and EU Council President Donald Tusk to Berlin, Monday to discuss the EU’s future, after Great Britain’s withdrawal. The objective is to agree upon important stipulations prior to the EU’s Tuesday summit – which is similar to the 2010 – 2011 meetings she had held with the French president at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy (“Merkozy”), to set the guidelines for the EU’s handling of the Euro crisis. Observes point to the fact that Merkel’s inviting Renzi along with Hollande has ostentatiously demoted France’s status. Simultaneously, German media are speaking in terms of the EU’s “new directorate.” Of course, there is no doubt that “Germany remains the most important EU nation, both politically as well as economically.”[11] In practice, the “directorate” serves the function – as in the previous cases of Merkel’s Sarkozy meetings – primarily of transmission of German specifications to the EU’s other member countries.

The Central Role – Berlin’s predominance within the EU is being, more or less, officially confirmed by the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker. Also in the future, Germany will “continue to play a central role, if not an even more significant role, in the European Union,” Juncker declared.[12]

Supranational Repression

Parallel to preparations for the transformation of the European Union, leading German Social Democrats are calling for supplementary steps for the political-economic streamlining the EU or its core.[13] For example, in their position paper entitled “Re-Found Europe,” Germany’s Minister of the Economy, Sigmar Gabriel, and the President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, are calling for an expansion of the EU’s single market, under the topic an “economic Schengen.” In the process, across the board “central” job market reforms must be implemented. The masses in the French population are currently up in arms fighting the imposition of these job market reforms.[14] In addition, Gabriel and Schulz are calling on the EU to “more than ever” “act as a unified governing force,” which would signify that the “communitarization” of the EU’s foreign policy. The implementation of this communitarization, would mean Germany’s global interests being pursued via institutions in Brussels due, to a large extent, to Berlin’s predominance within the EU. Finally, the German social democrats are calling for the systematic creation and expansion of supra-national structures of repression. For example, institutions warding off refugees from the EU must be systematically reinforced (“effectively securing European external borders”) and cooperation between domestic repressive authorities intensified. The creation, for example, of a “European FBI” should be an objective.

Source: www.german-foreign-policy.com