Posts Tagged → Donald Trump

Liberal democracy derails

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY ISN’T serving Americans very well, not, at any rate, in their well-being. Nicholas Kristoff is making the point poignantly. America’s “greatest threat,” writes the Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist, isn’t Communist China or authoritarian Russia “but our underperformance at home.”

Kristoff cites data from several surveys to support his argument. Fifteen-year-old American kids can’t do as well in math as do their peers in many in less developed countries such as Latvia, Poland and Russia. One in five of these children can’t read as well as 10-year-olds do in many other countries. Even more depressing, America is “one of only three countries, out of 163, that went backward in well-being over the last decade.”

Many Americans would, of course, still argue that they are blessed with “the world’s greatest democracy,” which is “a beckon of freedom” for the rest of the world.  I travel a lot and one of my favorite haunts is Kolkata (Calcutta), India, the hub of my native Bengali culture. Two years ago, my friend Susnata Sen, who teaches history at Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata, asked me, in jest, if Trump had “lost his way to a lunatic asylum” and ended up at the White House! In 2008, in Doha, Qatar, a stringer for the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun inquired of me “how in the world did you succeed in getting W” as our president?

I told them both that democracy is “a gift of the Enlightenment,” which had derailed through the “corruption of another gift of the Enlightenment,” liberalism.

Liberalism was originally conceived as the ideology of freedom of the individual from the tyranny of monarchy and religious bigotry and prejudices. The idea was that the human mind, disabused of these strictures and prejudices, would be free to inquire rationally about the world around it, develop the sciences and technology and pursue pleasure and happiness. It sounded as a momentous idea – the greatest message to mankind since Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and Muhammad’s Farewell Sermon (in which the Islamic prophet abolished blood revenge, forbade usury, reminded men of their rights and responsibilities toward women and women’s rights over them, warned men against evil conduct, and so forth).

The one thing that was missing in the Enlightenment missive was, however, moral duty. John Locke, Voltaire or John Stuart Mill didn’t talk about men’s and women’s responsibilities to their kin and community. And that is reflected in the ideology of capitalism and free enterprise, whose corruption has been all but completed by neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, the latest twist to capitalism, calls for the elimination of price controls, deregulation of capital markets, lowering of trade barriers, etc., unleashing the forces of wanton plunder and pillage on society, regardless of the poverty, privation and hardships they visit upon the masses. It’s all about making money and pursuing individual pleasure, caring little about kin, community, humanity or its fulfillment.

In 1991 I was researching U.S. foreign policy options in Arab societies with a fellowship from the University of Chicago Middle East Center and hired a research assistant from Washington suburbs. Abdul Matin (not his real name) was a hardworking immigrant from my native India. He took a second job and got his wife to work for another family to make ends meet. They had three children, born in India and Kuwait. One of them was a toddler, and the two others helped their parents around the house besides toiling over their hard schoolwork.

At my Washington office, an American friend used to drop by for coffee and chitchat and sometimes complained about his son not doing well in school because of an under-funded school with inadequately qualified teachers in a rather depressed area in the nation’s capital.

One morning Matin showed up for work with a smile stretching from one ear to the other. He showed me his young son’s school grade released the previous day. The boy got all A’s and just one B.

I congratulated Matin.  “You have a brilliant boy!” I said.

“Well,” he replied, “most of the credit goes to my daughter,” he said. Matin had told the children that education was “the most important thing” for them to do in life. Every day his daughter made sure her younger brother did his homework diligently and checked out each of his report cards. Matin’s wife wasn’t educated enough to check up on the boy’s progress in school. And the girl “reports any problem” the boy had to the parents, Natin said.

I saved a copy of the boy’s grade report and showed it to my American friend on his next visit. I told him how the family helped the Hindi-speaking boy do so well in an English-medium school.

“I just have to get serious about my kid’s school work,” he said, pensively. “He has to cut back on his Nintendo games.”

  • Mustafa Malik worked three decades as a journalist for American newspapers and researcher of U.S. think tanks. He now lives in Bangladesh.

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Biden’s war on racism nets UK war hero

ONE OF THE TOP items on President Biden’s agenda is fighting racism. So upon entering the White House on Wednesday he removed – again – the bust of the racist British Prime Minister Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. President Barack Obama had put away the bust from the room but Donald trump, his successor, brought it back.

Told about Biden’s action, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he had no quarrel with the new American president decorating his “private office … as he wishes.”

But when Obama had removed the bust from the Oval Office, Johnson, then mayor of London, was furious. He fumed that the black Obama’s action had shown “the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire.”

Johnson’s conciliatory gesture toward the 46th American president may reflect, in part, the Britts’ desperate need for good trade relations with the United States after their foolish breakup with the European Union.  The Conservative British prime minister was wrong, however, to assume that Obama disliked Churchill because of Churchill’s or Britain’s legacy of imperialism, which doubtless was brutal and dehumanizing. Many people in the East – and now in the West – despise Churchill mainly for his rabidly racist views of non-white people and societies. He called them “barbaric nations” and “savages” whom he considered “a menace to civilized nations” in the West.

Churchill ardently believed in Social Darwinism, superiority of white races, and argued over and over that they have the inherent right to subjugate, dispossess and persecute non-whites. Intriguingly, Churchill considered Jews a white people and as British colonial secretary in the 1920s, he defended, strongly, the expulsion of Palestinians from the lands belonging to them for centuries by Jewish refugees from Europe. Churchill thought of brown-skinned Palestinians as some kind of beasts who had no right to challenge their dispossession by fairer-skinned European Jews.

“I do not admit,” he explained, “that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, though he may have lain there for a very long time.”

The British leader who led his nation to victory in World War II held the same view about Anglo-Saxons uprooting dark-skinned people from the United States and Australia and occupying their land. “I do not admit,” he said. “that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race or at any rate a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

Churchill’s view of non-whites being subhuman made him disregard the usefulness of their lives. A glaring example it was his role during the 1943 famine in the Indian region of Bengal, where I grew up and made my debut as a journalist. In other times when a food shortage had occurred in Bengal or any other part of British India, rice, and sometimes wheat, was rushed in from elsewhere to feed people. But in 1943 Britain was fighting a bitter war with Germany and, ignoring the Indian administration’s warnings about the approaching famine in Bengal, Prime Minister Churchill decided to divert food supplies for Bengal to British and other troops in Europe. The result was mass starvation of Bengalees, millions of whom perished from it. William F. Buckley Jr. called it a slaughter of “genocidal proportions.”

Finest Hour is a quarterly publication put out by the International Churchill Society. In an editorial (Nov. 18, 2008) entitled “Media lying over Churchill’s crimes,” an editor of the journal, Gideon Poyla, wrote: “Churchill is our hero because of his leadership in World War 2, but his immense crimes, notably the WW2 Bengali Holocaust, the 1943-45 Bengal Famine in which Churchill murdered 6-7 million Indians, have been deleted from history by an extraordinary Anglo-American denial.”

Reliable estimates have put the death toll from the famine at about 3 million.

In India, Churchill was the most hated British prime minister in history. He earned that infamy with his racist contempt for Indians (He called Mahatma Gandhi “a half-naked fekir,” or beggar), which he gushed out off and on and which was reflected in his disdainful rejection of Indians’ repeated pleadings and demands for autonomy or independence. As World War II began, many Indian, realizing that they won’t get their independence from the Churchill government, prayed for Hitler’s victory, which they hoped would dissolve the British empire and liberate them from British colonial rule and racist domination.

The Allied victory over Nazi Germany was a pyrrhic one for Britain. The war wrecked the British economy and military power so much so that within two years the Britts – who were never impressed by Gandhi’s non-violent mantra or tactic – were forced to concede the independence of India and Pakistan, which was followed in quick succession by the independence of other British colonies around the world.

Today even many Britts see Churchill as among the most notoriously racist leaders in their history. Last June protests over the killing of African-American George Floyd by a white American police officer spread to Britain.  Soon the Churchill statue at London’s Parliament Square was found spray-painted with the words: “Was a Racist.” Sadiq Khan, then London mayor, got the statue boarded up to protect it from protesters’ rage. Undaunted, some of them wrote in big black letters on one of the walls around it: “Watch out! Racist Inside!”

America is going through a revolution to stamp out racism from its social fabric and has done away with statues, busts and pictures of most of its confederate heroes who used to defend racism. It’s crazy to try to have an arch-racist from abroad enshrined in the American political pantheon. Well, Trump was craziest of American presidents.

  • Mustafa Malik, the host and editor of this blog, is an international affairs commentator in Washington.

War on terror winding down

ON EASTER SUNDAY a bunch of Islamic State terrorists bombed several Sri Lankan churches and hotels, leaving more than 250 dead and nearly 500 wounded. The terrorist group said the carnage was meant to avenge the March 15 shootings at two New Zealand mosques by an Islamophobic Christian, Brenton Tarrant. Forty-nine people had died in those attacks.

Surprisingly, the Trump administration’s response to these attacks has been muted. No denunciation of “radical Islamic Islamic extremism.” No thunders about rooting out terrorism. It appears that President Trump – unlike his two predecessors in the Oval Office – is considering washing his hands of the “war on terror.” He had hinted doing so earlier. Does it mean he has finally realized the futility of the bloody, gargantuan, global anti-terror enterprise?

The Muslim and Christian terrorists who staged the killings in New Zealand and Sri Lanka echo bygone days when religious violence in both Islamdom and Christendom was not only acceptable, but often laudable.

During my early teens in my three-centuries-old ancestral village, Polashpur, in what is now Bangladesh, one of my aunts used to hold “puthi reading” reading sessions her guest rooms. Puthi in old Bengali means a folk history book, narrating exaggerated or fictionalized stories of history, love affairs, etc. Many villagers believed them to be true.

I attended a session in which aunt Sakina was reading out Jangnama (war history) in Sylheti Nagri script about a battle (I forget which one) between Arab Muslim invaders of a non-Muslim tetorry. A cluster of my other relatives had gathered around her, chewing pan – sliced betel nuts mixed with tobacco and lime and wrapped in betel leaves – and listening with rapt attention.

When Sakina came upon an anecdote about Muslim invaders slaughtering “hundreds of thousands of infidels,” native non-Muslim defenders of the territory, her audience broke into a chorus of applause: “Subhan Allah” (glory to God). My second cousin Mukaddas Ali Tafader sprang to his feet, punched the air with his right fist, roaring: “Fi naari jahannam,” a Quranic phrase meaning, “into the fire of hell.” My relatives obviously viewed the massacre of the “hundreds of thousands” of people defending their homes and families from the Muslim invaders as a virtuous act approved, if not mandated, by Allah. Never mind the Quran teaches Muslims to regard Christianity and Judaism as sister faiths and their practitioners as fellow partisans of the Abrahamic tradition.

But in the late 1950s the mostly illiterate village Muslims in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) thought Jangnama and other accounts of folk Islam were Islamic scripture. Thanks to the spread of education and modernization of Muslim societies, most Muslims today know more about Islamic values and principle and have critical views about folk Islam. During trips through Muslim countries in South Asia and the Middle East I am amazed by everyday Muslims’ discriminating views about and Islamic tenets, culture and tradition. As anthropologist Ernest Gellner pointed out in the 1990s, Islam has now been going through “a major cultural revolution,” barely noticed or acknowledged in the West.

Today the Islamic mainstream no longer approves of religious violence. By the way, Muslim armed struggles against the Israeli apartheid and colonialism in Palestine; Indian occupation of Kashmir; American invasion of Afghanistan; and Muslim monarchies and dictatorships in the Middle East are reactions to foreign subjugation or domestic repression – not religious passion per se. And support for those struggles is widespread among Muslims and many non-Muslims around the world.

Religious zealotry against perceived enemies of Islam is confined to the fringes of some Muslim societies. The IS in the Levant, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al-Ittihad al-Islamiya in Somalia, Abu Sayyaf Group in the Philippines and some other Muslim guerrilla groups belong to those fringes.

The history of Christianity, by which I mean Western Christianity, used to be much more violent that those of Islam and other faiths. During the Thirty Years’ War, fought in the seventeenth century between Catholics and Protestants, 25 percent to 40 percent people in German states perished. In Brandenburg, the losses amounted to half its population. Württemberg lost three-quarters. The pogroms, the Inquisition and other flare-ups of violence against the Jews, Christian heretics and “pagans” racked Europe and North America for centuries.

The Crusades were an epic orgy of hair-raising Christian savagery against Muslims and Jews. In July 1099 when the Crusaders stormed into Jerusalem, they wept in joy. Having thanked God for enabling them to enter the holy city, the Crusaders streamed through the streets and alleys of Jerusalem, killing everyone in sight. They beheaded men, rapaciously raped and murdered women, and thrust children’s heads against walls, smashing their skulls. Thomas Asbridge has written that “blood-hungry, ravening packs” of Crusaders plunged in a two-day bacchanalia of random murder, rape and plunder that “left the city awash with blood and littered with corpses.” These Christians’ cruelty to Muslims and Jews was no different from their brutality to Christian heretics inside Europe. In 1179 the Third Lateran Council anathemized all heresy and proclaimed rich rewards in the hereafter for those who would kill heretics, or enslaved them and seized their property.

Most Western Christians today would believe that the Inquisition, the Crusades and the Puritan violence against Quakers and other American Christians were prompted by misinterpretations of the Gospel. (I don’t know, though, about Vice President Mike Pence or Secretary of State Mike Pompeo!) Christianity has since gone through a three-fold transformation: the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. These revolutions catalyzed the secularization and modernization of Western societies, fostering religious tolerance and pluralism. Most Western Christians no longer view non-Christian groups through religious lenses, let alone fight them in the name of religion.

For Western Christians the Other now is defined by secular ideologies nationalism, racism and economic creeds, which have triggered warfare and violence on far greater scales than witnessed during the earlier eras of religious violence.

There remain, however, fringe groups such as followers of evangelical preachers, Ku Klux Klan, anti-abortion campaigners, and white supremacist gangs. Racism and anti-immigrant zealotry inform the French National Front, Sweden Democrats, Greek Golden Dawn, Polish Law and Justice, Dutch Party for Freedom, and the Danish People’s Party. Affiliates and supporters of these groups and political parties engage in cross burning, bombing mosques and synagogues, and attacks on non-white individuals and institutions.These days Christian terrorist and extremist groups lurch on the fringes of Western societies, as do their prototypes in the Muslim world.

Violence and bigotry among fringe groups isn’t confined to Muslim and Christian societies, however. It’s as or more prevalent among Israeli Jews, Indian Hindus and Buddhists in Myanmar and other southeast Asian countries. The question is whether these violent fringes of religious communities will eventually evolve and join the mostly peaceable mainstreams of their faiths? Or would their ideologies spread further in their countries? I won’t venture any answers, and social anthropologist are all over the place on these questions. Violence or social disorder must of course be tackled legally and socially, but the problem is we don’t know and often can’t figure out their sources.

Despite its bigots and warmongers, the Trump administration seems to have come to the same conclusions. Their slow-pedaling of the war on terror, slackening of the Afghanistan war and pullout of American troops from Syria are further proofs of this trend.

  • Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts this blog.

Saudi betrayal of Palestinians

AS I NOTE the Saudi, Israeli and American governments coming together on the same platform to confront Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah, I wonder how my father would’ve reacted to the event.

Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, has been prodding Israel to go to war with the pro-Iranian Hezbollah organization, apparently to divert the Saudi public’s attention away from the regime’s badly botched interventions in Yemen and Syria.  Ofer Zalzberg, a researcher at the International Crisis Group in Jerusalem, reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has so far been wary of taking on the powerful Hezbollah. Netanyahu, though, has hyped his propaganda blitz against Iran and Hezbollah, apparently to throw a smoke screen around the serious corruption charges he and his wife face in Israeli courts. And Iran-phobia, among other things, has driven Donald Trump, America’s Christian president, to join the anti-Iranian alliance of the Muslim crown prince and Jewish prime minister.

I don’t recall a time since the early seventh century when governments from all three Abrahamic faiths forged an alliance against a common adversary. My late father was an Islamic scholar in the Indian state of Assam and what is now Bangladesh. He used to say that in the Arabian town of Medina, in the early 620s, the Islamic community, or umma, consisted of all three Abrahamic faiths groups: Muslims, Christians and Jews. Eventually, that community split into three. “Baba,” as I called my father, was steeped in the orthodox Islamic version of Muslim history. He blamed the split on Jewish and Christian “betrayal” of Muslims, which included a Jewish attempt to kill the Prophet Muhammad.

The Americans and Israelis have been joined at the hip for decades, while the Muslim world – including Saudi Arabia – viewed Israel as its archenemy because of its occupation of Palestine and ethnic cleansing and persecution of Palestinians. The House of Saud was especially vociferous about its support for Palestinians because most Palestinians are Muslims and it claimed its legitimacy to its service to Islam, which was born in what is now Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi and other Arab autocracies used to be on pretty good terms with Iran during the decades it was also was under an autocracy. The Arab autocracies became wary of Iran after its Islamic revolutionaries overthrew the repressive pro-American monarchy of Shah Muhammad Riza Pahlavi, and replaced it with a populist Islamic government. The Arab monarchs and dictators feared that Islamic populism might spill over to their societies, threatening their despotic rule.

The fear of populist and democratic “subversion” also prompted Arab monarchies to oppose the Arab Spring of 2011-2012 and rally behind the military putsch in Egypt that overthrew that country’s democratically elected government of President Mohammed Mursi.  Mursi belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood, the leading Islamic movement in the world. Many Muslims had long questioned the House of Saud’s claim to Islamic legitimacy. Now its hostility toward the Muslim Brotherhood eroded that claim further.

Apologists of the Saudi monarchy have had a hard time defending its Islamic credentials. They included Walid Arab Hashim, an economics professor at King Abdul Aziz University in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah. During a research trip to the kingdom in 1991, Hashim told me about many activities of the monarchy to promote Islamic causes and institutions around the world.

I told him about many un-Islamic activities I had known members of the Saudi royal family to have indulged in during their visits to the United States. I also asked if hereditary rule could be justified by the teachings of the Quran or the traditions of the prophet of Islam.

I didn’t expect him to give forthright answers to these questions to a foreign journalist, which would likely have cost him his job, and he didn’t. He told me that his country’s ruling dynasty was “a biped animal.” One of its two legs rested on Islam, as its founder, King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, had come to power in the 1920s in alliance with the Wahhabi Islamic movement. The monarchy remained “dedicated to the service” of Islam, he added. Its other leg, he said, rested on Arab tribalism, which historically had supported dynastic rule.

“Which leg does it first put forward,” I asked the professor, “Islam or the dynasty?”

He laughed, without giving me an answer.

I thought I got the answer in July 2013 when the House of Saud ganged up with the Egyptian army General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi to get Mursi’s Islamic government toppled and replaced by Sisi’s brutal military dictatorship. Later that year I ran into an official of the Jeddah-based World Muslim Congress (Motamar Al- Alam Al-Islami) who was visiting Washington. The organization is funded by the Saudi government and carries on Islamic outreach and charity work in different countries. I asked the gentleman about the rationale behind the Saudi government’s campaign against Egypt’s Mursi government and support for the military dictatorship that overthrew it and also it’s increasing hostility toward Iran.

He told me on condition of anonymity that both the Brotherhood and Iran had posed “a threat” to the monarchy. Echoing Hashim, the professor in Jeddah, he said the Saudi government had been funding and supporting “many very important programs for Muslims and Islam” around the world. Among them he mentioned Saudi Arabia’s financial and diplomatic support for Palestinians and other “oppressed” Muslim groups. He claimed that the Saudi-led Arab decision to “ostracize Israel in the Middle East has kept Israel from annexing the West Bank and Gaza.”

I recalled his comment as I observed the the Saudi crown prince lurch into the embrace of Netanyahu, while Israel continues to occupy Palestine and expropriate Palestinian lands by building and expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank.  Except for Iran and perhaps Qatar, other Persian Gulf states are hopping into the Saudi train to Israel.  I wonder what incentive, except the Palestinians’ own fighting spirit, would ever persuade Israel to concede the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

I guess if Baba were alive today he wouldn’t have called the Saudi-Israeli-American entente against Iran and Hezbollah a reunion of Abrahamic faiths. More likely, he would’ve branded bin-Salman’s genuflection to Netanyahu a betrayal of the Palestinians and the umma, most or which remains morally committed to the liberation of Palestine from Israeli colonial occupation.

  • Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington, who hosts this blog.

Bravo, Trump!

This is a first for me: supporting an action of President Trump. I applaud his order tonight to strike Syrian military installations with dozens of Tomahawks. It’s a highly moral and humane undertaking whose strategic consequences are likely to be far-reaching.

I hope that America will finally get rid of the ghastliest and most repugnant dictator alive, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. And I hope this is the beginning of the end of the hell on earth that has engulfed the Syrian people for six years, which has seemed eternity to most.

I have opposed Trump’s election and most of his words and deeds so far. And I will continue to criticize his right-wing domestic political and economic programs and most of his other uninformed and potentially counter-productive foreign policy agenda. But his decision to clip the wings of the bloodthirsty dictator in Damascus has my unreserved support. The president has put the world, and especially the Obama administration, to shame, which they richly deserve, for wringing their hands while Assad and his Russian and Iranian collaborators systematically slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent Syrian men, women and children.

Trump has been widely criticized and lampooned, often rightly, for his many faults and failings, but tonight he has hopped onto a moral high ground for his bold decision: to punish the Assad regime for its chemical attack, which has snuffed out the lives of scores Syrians, including “beautiful babies,” as he put it. With a single stone he also is killing a host of other birds: cutting Vladimir Putin down to size; giving Ayatollah Ali Khamenei a bloody nose; putting Kim Jong-un on notice; earning the support and accolade of Arab regimes, whatever it’s worth; and above all, giving a principled dimension to his otherwise wrong-headed, rudderless administration.

The ultimate outcome of the U.S. intervention in Syria is unlikely to please Trump, his Republican friends and many other Americans. Post-Assad Syrian politics and society will likely be dominated by Sunni Arab forces most of whom will remain hostile to U.S. support for Israel and the repressive Arab monarchies and dictatorships. It will require the Trump and the United States a much greater epiphany to earn the support and trust of Arab and Muslim societies, which, at this moment, doesn’t seem to be on the horizon. But that doesn’t diminish the significance of the laudable operation the administration has launched in Syria.

Nobody can tell the future awaiting Syria, which is going to be chaotic at least for a while. Whatever it is, it will be far better than the nightmare that millions of Syrians have gone through since they rose up against their brutal dictator.

Meanwhile, Trump’s bold and decisive undertaking in Syria has earned him and America abiding gratitude of the Syrian nation (except the coterie surrounding and supporting Assad), and a very bright spot in Syrian history.

–Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts the blog ‘Muslim Journey’: https://muslimjourney.com.

Kushner: The son-in-law also rises

DONALD TRUMP HAS told The Times of London that Jared Kushner will be trying to negotiate a peace deal between Israel and Palestinians.

“Jared is such a good lad,” explained the new president, “he will secure an Israel deal which no one else has managed to get. You know, he’s a natural talent, he is the top, he is a natural talent.”

No one would dispute Trump’s description of his son-in-law as “a good lad,” or “a natural talent.” The problem is that the 36-year-old billionaire businessman has no government experience. Peacemaking is a diplomatic job, and Kushner never had a diplomatic stint. He has little familiarity with the Middle East or the actors involved in the long and knotty conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Kushner is reported to be talking with Henry Kissinger about his impending debut in diplomacy, but chatting with an old celebrated diplomat isn’t the same thing as juggling adroit belligerents and pulling off a diplomatic breakthrough in, of all places, Israel and Palestine, the graveyard of hundreds of peace projects, undertaken by wizards in the field through decades past.

Moreover, Kushner is unlikely to have any credibility among the Palestinians. A practicing Orthodox Jew, Kushner identifies with right-wing Israeli causes such as building Jewish settlements in Palestinian land and moving the U.S. Embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The depth of the Jewish businessman’s commitment to his faith showed when he broke up with his then fiancée, Ivanka Trump, because she was unwilling to convert to Judaism, and didn’t marry her until she agreed to do so. On Jewish Sabbath, Orthodox Jews aren’t supposed to drive. Hence Kushner and his wife have bought a $5.5 million home in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood within walking distance of the local Chabad synagogue.

Kushner is reported to be Trump’s most trusted adviser, who has been the main – if not the only – reason the incoming president made his pledge to relocate the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. The son-in-law drafted the speech that the father-in-law gave last March at the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In it Trump declared that, if elected president, he’d “move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.”

Israel occupied Jerusalem during the Six-Day War and its annexation of the city violates international law. Palestinians plan to make Jerusalem capital of the state they have been struggling to create. Which is why no country, including the United States, has yet recognized Israel’s annexation of Jerusalem and none, including the United States, has set up its embassy there.

Kushner, too, is reported to have been behind Trump’s appointment of David M. Friedman, an ultra-right American Jewish lawyer, as the next U.S. ambassador to Israel. Since long before Trump announced his plans for move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, Friedman has pushing for it.

Kushner has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to projects to build Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. These settlements are illegal under international law and intended to block the creation of any Palestinian state. Kushner and his wife also belong to the powerful Orthodox Jewish movement Chabad-Lubavitch, which has been a major sponsor of West Bank settlements.

Chabad views Orthodox Jews as the only true Jews. The movement’s literature says that it is Orthodox Jews’ “duty to exterminate [Jewish infidels] with one’s own hands.” Chabad’s founder and spiritual leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, proclaimed that the “bodies” of Jews and non-Jews “should be considered completely different species.”

“An even greater difference exists,” he said, “in regard to the soul … a non-Jewish soul comes from three Satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness.” A Jewish soul being divine, “a Jew was not created.”

Rabbi Schneerson and his followers always supported Israeli wars and opposed Israel’s withdrawal from any of its occupied territories. They believe that divine favors attend Jews who occupy and settle lands which, the Bible says, was once inhabited by Hebrews.

Allan Brownfeld, editor of the American Council for Judaism’s periodical, Issues, says that “thousands of [Schneerson’s] Israeli followers played an important role in the election victory of Binyamin Netanyahu” as Israeli prime minister. “Among the religious settlers in the occupied territories, the Chabad Hassids constitute one of the most extreme groups. Baruch Goldstein, the mass murderer of Palestinians, was one of them.” Schneerson died in 1994, but his followers adhere to his beliefs and zealously pursue his projects.

Palestinians are worried about Kushner’s appointment as Trump’s senior adviser, his peacemaking stint, and his affiliation with Chabad. They suspect that his anticipated initiative to engage them in peace talks with Israel is intended to be a smokescreen behind which the Trump administration would be helping Israel to tighten its grip on the West Bank.

  • Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington. He hosts the blog ‘Muslim Journey’ (https://muslimjourney.com).

Trump is right, no blank check

COULD DONAL TRUMP, of all people, help mend American democracy?

I bet you’ve read the story about the third presidential debate in some major newspaper yesterday. Chris Wallace, the moderator, asks the Republican presidential nominee if he would commit himself to accepting the results of the November 8th vote, whatever that might be.

“I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied. “What I have seen is so bad. First of all, the media is so dishonest and corrupt and has … poisoned the minds of voters.” He went on to suggest that Hillary Clinton’s corporate patrons and her campaign were rigging the election against him.

Trump’s comment has sent shudders through the American media and political establishments.

“Donald Trump Won’t Say If He’ll Accept the Result of Election,” exclaimed the Page One banner on the New York Times lead story. The reporters, Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin, put us on notice that Trump’s “remarkable statement” had “cast doubt on American democracy,” besides “horrifying” Clinton, his Democratic rival and partner in the debate.

“At third debate, Trump won’t commit to accepting election results,” bewailed the Washington Post headline.

The headline on a Boston Globe column warned: “Donald Trump undermines the legitimacy of our democracy.”

Call me dumb, but I don’t get it. I’m baffled by the widespread hysteria sparked by Trump’s comment. I thought that the GOP nominee was saying simply that this electoral process has been corrupted so pervasively that its outcome could become suspect and may need to be reviewed. What’s wrong about that?

In fact, the American electoral process, especially since the Supreme Court’s Citizens v. United decision, has put up American democracy on an auction bloc for special interests to bid on. Jimmy Carter, Noam Chomsky and other American statesmen and intellectuals have been telling us that we no longer have democracy in this country. What we have is a plutocracy. And I agree with them. So do most Americans.

Just glance through the posts on your Facebook News Feed, or ask the lady next to you at a Starbucks counter, about what’s going on in the two presidential campaigns. You would immediately know, if you already haven’t, what “the world’s greatest democracy” has come to: money flooding the election campaigns; candidates selling public trust for personal gains; public officials appear to be lying under oath to hide a candidate’s illegal activity; government agencies, especially arms of the Justice Department, potentially violating the law to get someone elected, or needlessly immunizing someone against possible perjury; and so on. Yet the most surprising thing about it all, to me at least, is that nobody seems to care – or dare – to stand up and say, “Enough is enough! Let’s fix the mess.”

Amnesia and resignation appear to have paralyzed us against the long-overdue clean-up of our political system, which probably is envied by crooked politicians in some of the autocratic and pseudo-democratic countries. Frankly, I’d have liked to see Al Gore take a stand against the Republican shenanigans that cost him the presidency in 2000. Maybe Richard Nixon should have asked for a thorough review of 1960 voting in Chicago. As we know, “the Daley machine,” created by then Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, rigged the presidential election in his city that year in favor of  John F. Kennedy.

Our lethargy in the face of the meltdown of our democracy reminds me of death sentences given to Pakistani Muslims who are accused of having lost their faith in Islam. Nobody challenges those draconian fatwas or rulings, even though many Pakistanis are disgusted with them. The reason: nobody wants to be accused of running afoul of what some moronic clerics have, because of their loopy reading of scripture, proclaimed as Islamic canons.

In America, religion has been disestablished by the Founding Fathers, wisely of course. But most Americans, as most people in the world, still need religion, or some other belief system. Anthropologists tell us that faith in a creed establishes order, security and goals in believers’ minds, without which their lives lose their meaning and purpose.

In our secular American society, capitalist democracy has virtually replaced Christianity and become a “public religion,” to borrow sociologist Robert Bellah’s phrase. You call the process into question, however unfair and venal it might be, and all hell breaks loose. Trump’s refusal to accept the election results three weeks before the voting will actually take place is “horrifying,” not just to Hillary Clinton, but, as we’ve noted, to most of the American media and intelligentsia. Can someone help me understand how you may begin to rescue our democratic institutions from the ubiquitous clutches of interest peddlers unless you challenge their knavery and misdeeds that are ailing those institutions and contorting their output.

Trump is the most reckless ignoramus that the Republican Party has nominated to be our president since George W. Bush. A Trump presidency would be, not only fraught with danger, but a disgrace for America as well. Luckily, opinion polls show that he’s going lose the election big time. And he should.

All the same, I find myself, strangely as it seems, defending his refusal to pre-approve the results of the election. Yes, many other losers in presidential races chose to forfeit beforehand their right to recheck voting results, should there be serious irregularities in the process. But what has that accomplished? It has served only to perpetuate the biennial and quadrennial charade, called the “democratic process,” and has practically disenfranchised us by mortgaging our unfettered constitutional right to choose our government and legislatures to special interests of all kinds

I’d hope that Trump’s challenge to our failing electoral system would inspire others to break the taboo against trying to clean it up.

– Mustafa Malik is an international affairs analyst in Washington. He hosts the blog: Muslim Journey (https://muslimjourney.com).