Chandran Nair is author of the new book, THE SUSTAINABLE STATE. You write a lot about how lucrative palm oil farming is creating untold destruction across Indonesia and offer subsistence farming as a possible solution.  Yet isn’t that unrealistic, given that similar initiatives have failed with Colombian coca growers and Afghan opium growers?

I can think of three reasons why the coca and opium initiatives failed. First of all, rich countries did not do much to reduce the demand for illegal drugs. Crops that form the basis of drugs and which are part of a wider geo-political struggle are not the same thing as a cash crop like palm oil, albeit one that is rapacious.

Second, there was not enough investment in providing alternate economic options nor perhaps, more importantly, in the infrastructure that would be needed to support these alternatives. These two crops were part and parcel of a wider ideological war too.

Third, initiatives were instigated by a third party: namely the United States, who was never going to have the long-term time-horizon needed to see these programs through to completion. Afghanistan and Colombia were not the ones suffering the costs of drug production.

The difference with Indonesia and the haze is that Indonesia actually does suffer the consequences of palm oil production and the crop is not part of a war with another country. It is thus better placed to actually look at the long term and invest in alternatives: not “subsistence agriculture” (at least in the way it’s normally conceived), but smallholder, high-value crops supported by publicly-funded infrastructure. That would in fact achieve economic and social goals that the Indonesian government would see as desirable.

Is desalination the only way to prevent mass unrest, death and migration from water-scarce nations?

First of all, it’s expensive: both in terms of monetary cost and power consumption. So it remains a rich-country solution (i.e. in places like Singapore or the UAE) where it is in effect subsidized, and thus one that will require dealing with the massive trade-offs.

But the problem will still remain: that water, even in water-scarce nations, is underpriced. This encourages overuse and abuse, as we’ve seen in countries like India and China or even in places like California. Desalination without dealing with this fundamental problem will merely shift the reckoning to some later date by encouraging denial.

How viable do you find carbon capture and global cooling schemes to be in avoiding planetary collapse from global warming?

These technological solutions are very expensive and are unlikely to be accepted in most places. Our current business models will not pay for them, as they are based on a free ride, until the State is willing and empowered to intervene. But they are also being talked about because people think that we cannot actually change our economic practices away from a high reliance on fossil fuels. The argument is that building massive carbon capture processes or developing some harebrained scheme to cool the Earth (and not mess things up in the process) will be easier than decarbonizing, say, the automotive sector, which seems like a somewhat perverse argument. De-carbonising cars should not be more difficult than some of the schemes being hypothesized now.

But I want to make an important point. While climate change is an important part of sustainability, it is not the only part; hence why the Sustainable State doesn’t actually deal with climate change that much. Even if we had a magic cooling solution that could counter the effects of global warming, we would still face the problem of our massive overuse of resources. And even if we found ways to generate more renewable energy, what would it be used for: to continue to grow with a “business as usual” model, whereby renewable energy now would be used to extract resources recklessly to promote relentless consumption by externalizing true cost. Only the energy source would have changed and hopefully helping fight climate change, but not the other aspects of the destructive path of human progress based on growth at all cost.

Do you think rising sea levels will self-correct the rise of coastal megacities and the decline of rural interiors?

This is a good time to clarify something: I’m not “anti-city”. I live in Hong Kong — one of the world’s most densely populated cities — and so I am fully aware of the important role that urban economies play to the national economy. Thus, I’d much prefer the relatively gentle (but firm) management of urbanization and de-urbanization by state policy, rather than the rather violent and disruptive process that will happen when cities are threatened by massive sea level rise. The point I am trying to make is that given the huge challenges most mega cities in the developing world are facing, I am suggesting governments in these countries stop viewing urbanisation as inevitable and instead take a more balanced approach to the rural-urban challenge.

As for rising sea levels and the coastal megacities, the key point is to invest in adaptation to protect economic assets and populations and to not encourage any further expansion. In some cases, there is an argument to be to even de-urbanise and to “ruralize” with heavy investments in key areas such as farming, irrigation, education, healthcare and small to medium size industries.

Realistically, how are bureaucratic democracies going to meaningfully tackle the climate and resource crises with the same fervor as authoritarian China?

I talk about some things that democracies need to do in the book. I think it’s possible, but it will take some rather fundamental changes in many of these democracies. For one, economic and environmental regulators need to be empowered to do their jobs, rather than continually be hobbled by political interference. I think one thing we have learned recently is that many of the “rules” that people believed protected the civil service did not actually have any weight behind them. Perhaps the independence of the regulators needs to be enshrined in law.

Democracies also need to work to ensure they are truly representative. When that’s lacking, there are too many avenues for vested interests to worm their way into the system. For example: if it is expensive to run, then politicians need to be wealthy themselves or are beholden to wealthy donors, ensuring that policies reflect what the elite of society wants (i.e. overconsumption). Fixing that problem, and allowing more “ordinary” people to run for office will help create an important diversity of views in the legislature. But more fundamentally, democracies need to be willing to reconsider their constitutions. Some countries, like the United States, now seem to find it a strange point of pride that their constitutions are so difficult to change, despite the fact that we live in a very different world now.

Would it be more sustainable to break up megacities by building smaller regional cities across the country or by increasing suburban viability through spending on housing assistance and public transportation?

I think these are two different things, and are solving two different problems. Building smaller regional cities is something on the national level — and something that can only be done by the national government. This would try to create a more resilient distribution of people and economic activity across the country, so that one concentration of people, wealth and consumption does not distort the entire economy.

“Suburban viability” is on the level of individual cities: can they build an urban environment that can provide a decent standard of living for their residents? Interestingly, Hong Kong may have accidentally stumbled across a model for this. Hong Kong does not really have “suburbs”; instead, it has dense housing estates, connected by good public transportation and surrounded by protected green space. This may be a better model for urban planning than the suburban sprawl we see in many other cities.

Can online jobs and educational programs become a major catalyst in preventing young people from moving away from rural communities in search of better opportunities?

I think they can play some role, as will any policy that improves economic opportunities in rural areas. But I also think there’s a deeper cultural phenomenon at work. At the moment, the city is “where things happen”. What will fundamentally change rural decline is real investment in the countryside. Not just in alternate economic opportunities (although they are important), but also in public institutions. Healthcare, financial access and educational programs are part of this. But there should also be investment in public sports, artistic and cultural institutions. In other words, people need to think that they can live a prosperous life in rural areas just as easily as they can in urban ones. That will arrest the problem of rural decline.

I wish you had written more about the botanical city concept.  How would define it and what steps would be needed to implement it?

By a botanical city, I mean one that integrates urban living with green wild spaces and nature that goes well beyond landscaping contracts and municipal greening. Not just parks and botanical gardens (though they help), but actual nature: untamed, unrestrained wilderness that intrudes into the city and becomes as much a part of the city as its key infrastructure. This requires a whole rethink about everything with regard to how a city works in the tropics and what it is for. It is about ultimately making tropical cites what they should be “cites in the tropics” rather than ones built to ape life styles in temperate cites in the West.

I admit the examples of this are few in number, and often accidental rather than planned. Hong Kong, for example, does have country parks edge right up against high-rises — which has made hiking a popular activity amongst the city’s population. The lack of suburban sprawl also means that there is a lot of green space between the city’s dense satellite towns. This wasn’t a set policy by the Hong Kong government of course, as shown by the lack of public parks and green spaces in the city proper. Geography plays a role: if Hong Kong was not as hilly, I expect it would have far fewer protections for green space.

But it may provide a few lessons. One is to control suburban sprawl: rather than build low-rise housing that sprawls over a large area, instead build high-density complexes surrounded by protected wilderness, and served by good public transport.

Another step may be to force any development above a certain size to allot area for green space and recreation. Perhaps incentives can be given for different projects to combine their spaces, creating larger natural spaces within cities. The city of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia is one that I see as having the potential to be the world’s first botanical city.

Why did Malaysia’s FELDA farm collectivism program work, as opposed to the abject failures of many Communist attempts?

Actually, many of the initial Communist land reform projects (and, indeed, land reform in general) actually succeeded. Breaking up the big farms and redistributing the land to smallholder farmers helped to increase yields and productivity. From there, cooperatives could be developed that provided a structure for smallholder farmers to work together.

The issue is when these land reform projects went a step further, from cooperatives into massive collectives. Farmers were no longer smallholders working their own land in cooperation with other farmers, but turned into laborers for a massive state-owned agricultural project. FELDA made the small holders key long-term economic stakeholders and that was the key to its success.

Your book is very skeptical of corporations and consumerism.  Is a sustainable planet possible under capitalism or do you think socialism is necessary?

I’d rather not frame things in those terms, mostly because using them tends to immediately prejudice people one way or the other. After all, these terms mean different things in different places: “socialism” in the United States would be considered “pro-market” in many European countries. And it’s also a mostly Western debate. Asians aren’t too concerned about whether reforms are “capitalist” or “socialist”, but rather whether they achieve their goals.

I will say this: I do not believe a sustainable planet is possible under an unrestrained capitalism that pursues growth-at-all-costs. Hence the need for firm rules — set down by a strong state.

China has created a forest the size of France on top of the world, at the Qinghai Tibet Plateau, once a barren, cold wasteland of nothingness where even the spring wind would not reach.

For centuries, the plateau was a barren desert of bleakness and desolation. The local residents and even those in towns 70 kilometers away suffered from severe dust and sand storms caused by outflows of the loose sand up from the desert. Now, forests cover some 30,000 hectares of wide expanse due to an aggressive forestation drive that dates back 30 years ago.

“This is just one of the results since we began affoestation efforts in 1949, the results are impressive. Nationwide, some 40 million hectares of land are planted with trees”, said a spokesman of the Ministry of Forestry to this writer.

Afforestation means foresting an area with tree species never been grown in a certain land. Reforestation is the planting of tree species in an area where those trees used to grow.

World’s Largest Afforestation

The Qinghai Tibet Plateau afforestation is the biggest forestation accomplishment in the world.
The afforested land, more than the size of France, has increased China’s forest coverage from 10.6 percent in 1949 to 15 percent, which accounts for 25 percent of the world’s afforested area.

China once abounded with forests. But the forest reserves were depleted by recurrent wars, fires, land reclamation and indiscriminate logging Consequently, China’s total area of desert, denuded hills and wastelands in 1949 came to 240 million hectares, one fourth of its land area.

“The government has been paying great attention to afforestation to halt the denuding process, “said Prof. Weng Meng Li of the Beijing College of Forestry. “We have brought an annual average of 2.5 million hectares of land under afforestation from 1981 to 1986, twice the number that the old Soviet Union did and almost also twice the accomplishment of the United States in those five years”.

To maintain the attained 15 percent of tree coverage, China has to afforest 5.6 million hectares annually in the next 15 years, assuming that tree planting efforts have a survival rate of 100 percent. But this is not likely, because forestation efforts always chalk up to ten to fifteen percent mortality. Thus, it may take 25 to 30 years to complete afforestation of all possible plantable areas in China.

Trees Are the Only Answer against Desertification

Afforestation, according to Prof. Li is the only way to combat the advancing deserts along China’s northern frontier. China loses some 120,000 hectares of farm and pasture lands to desertification annually.

“Trees are the only line of defense”, Li says, adding that the farms and pastures lost were once forests but cleared for agriculture.

The Chinese dry lands have a long history of land use matched by a record of desertification, the natural phenomenon where once-forests and lands converted to abusive and unsustainable farming practices become deserts.

Of China’s 170,000 square kilometers desert area, 50,000 sq. km were desertified from 1900-2000. Besides abusive farming, wind is the main factor especially in western China where it pushes sand dunes, drifting sand and deflated topsoils, aggravated by salinization and sand burial low river beds.

To combat this, we have to plant thousands of rows of trees to stop desert invasion, reforest arable lands and meet head-on the incoming desert by planting trees going forward,” Prof Li stressed.

Trees Create China’s Green Great Wall

What Li refers to is called China’s “Green Great Wall”, a shelterbelt of millions of trees on the northern side of the country that started in 1978. It extends 7,000 kilometers from northern Heilongjiang province in the northeast to Heitian prefecture of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous region in the west, traversing more than 200 counties in 12 provinces and regions including Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, Ganau and Nirgxia.

The first phase was planted with some 50 million trees from 1980 to 1985, covered six million hectares of land. In the second phase which ended in 1990, another 6.3 million hectares were planted with trees by thousands of volunteers soldiers and public servants.

The Great Green Wall has helped hold back sand storms, promote soil and water conservation and improve conditions for farming and livestock breeding.

Take the town of Yulin, Shanxi province at the foot of Great Green Wall, it has saved 330,000 hectares of farmland from desertification through afforestation after sand buried houses and farms in 1949. As a result, forests sprouted from the desert.

Tree planting involves everyone in China. Every Chinese citizen above the age of 11, except the old, sick, weak and disabled, is required to plant five trees every year or contribute the same amount of labor by cultivating saplings, tending trees or doing other work connected with tree planting.

China designated March 12 as its National Tree Planting, on this day, millions of people swarm to the mountains, wastelands, plains, roadsides and on every piece of land to plant trees.

They plant three kinds of trees:” trees of the same age” to mark a child birth, “heart to heart trees” to celebrate marriage, and “memorial trees” to commemorate those who passed away. Considering China’s 1.7 billion population, this translates to 1.7 billion new trees annually.

Combating Global Warming

China, the world’s major CO2 emitter because of its coal consumption is attempting to offset its carbon footprint by planting trees.

The government announced several forestry goals, which include increasing the country’s forest coverage rate to more than 26 percent by 2050.

New forest areas will be created in Hebei and Qinghai provinces to cover all of the Tibetan Plateau and in the Hunshandake Desert in Inner Mongolia to cost about US$83 billion in an attempt to put the country’s total forest area to 208 million hectares, Prof Li bared, adding the trees will boost the nation’s carbon sink capacity.

He said government is also promoting an “ecological red line” program to force provinces and regions to restrict “irrational development” to curb construction near rivers, forests and national parks.

China has also embarked on a forestry responsibility campaign barren hillsides and mountain slopes are allocated o peasant families to plant with fruit-bearing trees and trees of other importance provided they are not cut in the future and that the families pay a minimal tax to the government.

Hungarian-Ukrainian relations seem to hit an all time low as a result of a series of poor choices. The clash over the minority language rights and dual citizenship led to a diplomatic scandal, and none of the parties show intentions to compromise. The conflict hits hardest the Hungarian minority in Ukraine, whose interests both governments claim to serve with their actions.

About a year ago, the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a new law on education. It was in the making since four years, yet being modified until the last moment. The law was presented as a reform bringing the educational system closer to the European Union’s Bologna system, but it contains something that the European neighbors do absolutely not approve: while leaving the opportunity for kindergartens’ and primary schools’ first four classes’ minority language usage untouched, the reform reduced minority language education in secondary schools to ‘special classes’.

Briefly this law makes Ukrainian the language of instruction in secondary schools all over the country; whereas prior to its acceptance the language of instruction could be any of the minority languages (there are officially 13 minority languages in the country). The Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs reacted immediately with vetoing Ukraine NATO integration process, as the law puts the Hungarians in Transcarpathia at a huge disadvantage.

As of early 2018, 15,400 children were attending 53 Hungarian schools in Transcarpathia. Ukrainian politicians argued that the new law is taken to broaden the Ukrainian job market opportunities for all citizens of Ukraine. The majority of Ukrainians is bilingual, given the fact that until 1991 the primary language was Russian. Therefore the often referred census data taken following the question ‘Which is your mother tongue’ is probably misleading, as respondents were not asked whether they spoke any other language, and for having purely Ukrainian as mother tongue, you must have been born after 1991.

The educational system inherited from the Soviet times provided a relative freedom to minority schools in terms of language usage, and all subjects could be taught in minority languages.

Language on the other hand is not the primary society-organizing force. There are millions of Ukrainians speaking Russian as their primary language (or they do not even speak Ukrainian) yet they consider themselves Ukrainian nationality-wise. The problem of language usage is predominantly acute among non-Slavic speakers such as Hungarians and Romanians, mostly living in the neighboring territories to their kin-states, not necessarily interacting with Ukrainian speakers.

There are territories where the majority of children go to minority schools, such as in Transcarpathia, where more than half of the students failed to pass the Ukrainian language entry exam to higher education, meaning they could not continue their studies at Ukrainian universities.

Officially this is one of the reasons why the new educational law was made; however, it does not provide any alternative for increasing the effectiveness of Ukrainian language-teaching at earlier ages, only designates the date of starting secondary school when children would have to switch overnight from their primary language to Ukrainian that in many cases they barely speak. Though the improvement of the minorities’ Ukrainian knowledge would be a goal to be greeted, teaching subjects on it when students poorly speak it would not increase their language proficiency, but obstruct them in understanding other subjects. It is rather the language teaching methods, methodology and conditions that should be revised considering the worrisome statistics on failing the university entry exam after having learned Ukrainian for 11 years.

The effective teaching of Ukrainian language would be the common interest both of Hungary and Ukraine, as it would not necessarily go against preserving the minority language. With education on the mother tongue until the end of secondary school but reforming Ukrainian language education, we could have the cake and eat it. With guarantees that the right to education on the mother tongue will not be violated, and the existing local Hungarian educational system will not be thrown up, the improvement of Ukrainian language would be an incentive to be greeted. Yet there are no such guarantees. The law’s approach seems to make a question of prestige out of the lessons to be conducted in Ukrainian, without taking into consideration the damage the insufficient level of language would cause in acquiring subject specific knowledge. And yes, it goes against the Ukrainian Constitution, and Ukraine’s international obligations that guarantee full education on the mother tongue. Therefore, unlike its stated goal, the education law seems to be taken in order to promote Ukrainian national identity through the common Ukrainian language, and the assimilation of minorities.

It is not difficult to see that this law puts minorities in a disadvantaged situation. Not speaking Ukrainian language is definitely a huge handicap that among others also hinders students wanting to enter higher education. A compromising solution would not be impossible, but apparently, neither the Hungarian, nor the Ukrainian aim to find it. The situation is rather describable with the game theory’s ‘game of chicken’. In this setup both players are heading toward each other. If the players continue on the same path, they bump into each other; if one swerves out of the way and other doesn’t, the swerver “loses” and is labeled the chicken, while the second, implicitly braver player, wins.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were several attempts on behalf of the Ukrainian governments to create similar reforms, but due to the protest of minorities and their kin-states. The Euro-Maidan brought significant changes in it, as the authorities became more sensitive to the demands of activists groups and parties, pushing a nationalizing agenda. After the Pro-European Euromaidan, strong Ukrainizing incentives gathered ground aiming to strengthen Ukrainian identity (primarily as opposed to Russian), leading to the pursuit of nationalizing policies. Hence, the mind to law-making inspired by the Pro-European movement’s triumph lead to an educational law going against European values and the regulations in force on regional and minority language protection. The fact that the law aimed implicitly the ban on Russian language usage, not primarily that of Hungarian or Rumanian does not make it any more legal or acceptable.

Immediately after the education law was passed in September 2017, the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared to block Ukraine’s NATO integration process. It is doing so ever since living with its veto right already 6 times. Since Ukraine did not modify the education law even after promising it on the EU-Ukraine summit in June, Hungary is still blocking the NATO-Ukraine Commission’s meetings since more than a year already. As of recent news, even the NATO-Ukraine Summit planned for December 2018 in Brussels may not be hold.

The Hungarian minority’s vital interest is Ukraine’s euro-atlantic integration and Ukraine’s stabilization. Hence, Ukraine’s interest would be to not to make enemies out of its EU and NATO member neighbors, which are the kin-states of Transcarpathia’s ethnic minorities. Poland and Romania are such kin-states as well, with significant minorities in Transcarpathia. They chose however, a different path from what Hungary did and while also criticizing it, initiated negotiations on the implementation of the education law in order to reach a compromise or exemption from it.

The Hungarian government’s exceptionally intense relation with Russia is something that highly restricts its room for maneuver regarding the negotiations, or finding alternative, compromising solutions as Poland and Romania do.

In September 2018 a new frontline opened. The Ukrainian law does not recognize dual citizenship. Yet, several hundred thousands of Ukrainian citizens have it. Many of them are Hungarians, who benefitted en masse from the simplified Hungarian nationalization introduced by the Hungarian government in 2011, providing already more than a million citizenships to Hungarians worldwide.

This is remarkable not only due to the fact that actual population within the borders of Hungary is less than 10 million, but also because the simplified process allowed a massive passport fraud, allegedly helping criminals to receive the citizenship of a country within the Schengen zone and with a visa free regime to the US and Canada.

The practice of obtaining dual citizenship in Transcarpathia was not unknown to the Ukrainian authorities, but no measures were taken against it. Up until September, when the footage of the ceremony of oath-taking was leaked -with high probability as an action of Ukrainian Security Services- inciting a diplomatic scandal between Ukraine and Hungary. After the leaking, the list of more than 500 citizenship recipient Hungarians also leaked, along with their personal data and was available for months on the internet freely as ‘the enemies of Ukraine’. The leaking of the oath-taking video has put the Ukrainian government under pressure, as the ‘dual citizenship scandal’ has seen the light, and exploded the news. The government decided to expel the Hungarian consul to Berehove. The Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared the First Secretary of the Ukrainian Embassy to Hungary a persona non grata immediately as a response.

As if the diplomatic fallout wasn’t enough, apparently some are making efforts to intensify the ethnic tensions in Transcarpathia. Earlier this year the Trancarpathian Hungarian Cultural Association (KMKSZ)’s office was set on fire twice. The Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs immediately accused Ukrainian nationalist behind the acts, and so did the Russian media.

According to an international team of investigative journalists however, the attacks were committed by Kremlin-friendly Polish extremists. It is not difficult to see that to fuel ethnic conflicts in Transcarpathia stands in Moscow’s interests, and so does Hungary’s continuous veto of Ukraine’s NATO integration process. In October, billboards appeared overnight claiming to ‘we stop the separatists’, under the pictures of three local Hungarian politicians. Hennadiy Moskal regional governor suspected the FSB behind the hatred-fueling action, as the billboard’s text was ‘a mirror translation from Russian’, he said.

The tension between the two countries intensified even further as Budapest appointed an envoy for the freshly created position of ‘Transcarpathia envoy’. According to Kiev, Budapest crossed a line with this step and acts as if the territory belonged to Hungary (as it did until the Trianon treaty).

Ukraine threatened to ban the entry of this new envoy to the country. After more than a month of bitter messaging, the Hungarian government made a gesture and changed the name of the envoy to ‘authorized minister responsible for the development of cooperation between Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county and Transcarpathia region as well as coordination of the program of children’s educational institutions of the Carpathian region’. At the very moment this seems to be the maximum that any of governments do.

In accordance with the recommendations of the Venice Commission that expressed its concerns about the law, serious changes in it would be necessary. Yet the Ukrainian Parliament, the Verkhovna Rada did not pass even the extension of the transition period of the drastic changes ahead to 2023. As next year presidential and parliamentary elections will be held in Ukraine, following the nationalist agenda, easing or changing the law does not seem to be likely any time soon. On the other hand, on October 4th this year, the Ukrainian government passed the base of a new language law, abolishing the status of ‘regional languages’, such as Hungarian. It means that though still being elaborated, if the law enters into force, it would not allow minority language usage in situations other than ‘private discussions’, making the usage of Ukrainian obligatory for example at the post, in the shop or doctor’s office, even if all parties taking part in the conversation are of Hungarian mother tongue and they barely do speak Ukrainian, if at all.

The Ukrainian Parliament is playing off the nationalist card, but also the Hungarian government can always be counted on in pointing out enemies and using them effectively in their political campaigns, as they did this year April at the parliamentary elections. Hungary’s harsh and immediate response fitted perfectly into its combative rhetoric and the narrative of ‘defending the country from the attacks from abroad’ such as from Brussels, the UN, George Soros, and so on.

Therefore, the scandals with Ukraine prove handy for them as they could continue to play this role to the domestic audience. At the moment, neither the government of Hungary, nor that of Ukraine is interested in a fast conflict solving; therefore it is highly unlikely to find a solution for this until the upcoming Ukrainian Presidential elections next spring, and Parliamentary elections next autumn.

Permanently, both countries are accusing each other with aggravating the conflict. The game of chicken is to be continued.

*Dorka Takácsy is a foreign policy analyst specialized in Russia and Eastern Europe. She has a MA in International Relations from the Central European University Budapest. Currently a Széll Kálmán Public Policy Fellow in Washington DC.

News of Iranian regime’s hit man on the loose in Denmark shocked many when Iran is desperately struggling to show good behavior to win over Europe in its battle with stinging US sanctions.

Denmark has summoned Iran’s ambassador, Morteza Moradian, following the “assassination” attempt by an Iranian intelligence agency, which the Nordic country’s foreign minister called “completely unacceptable.” It seems foolish ordering a hit on opposition figures on European soil especially now.

Bahram Qassemi, Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman, tried hard to come up with some excuses to clean up the mess. An Iranian citizen holding Norwegian citizenship was arrested by Swedish security police (Säpo) in Gothenburg and was handed over to Danish authorities.

Qassemi called the arrest “spiteful” “media reports” and “its attribution to Iran is a plot by enemies to affect Tehran’s growing relations with European countries.”

Reactions to the arrest

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted: “We congratulate the government of #Denmark on its arrest of an Iranian regime assassin.”

“For nearly 40 years, Europe has been the target of #Iran-sponsored terrorist attacks. We call on our allies and partners to confront the full range of Iran’s threats to peace and security.” the tweet reads. The key word is actually four decades of Iranian regime’s terrorism abroad.

The Nordic countries in a joint press conference supported Denmark. The UK, according to Danish prime minister, has also given a green light to his movie against the Iranian regime. Denmark has clearly taken a bold step and asked for fresh EU sanctions against the clerical regime.

Back to old habits

Since summer, Tehran has change its pattern of dealing with its dissidents abroad and has removed the “moderation” mask altogether.

In 80s and early 90s the nascent theocratic regime not caring about the consequences of its actions hunted down opposition figures in European capitals such as Paris, Berlin and Rome. Now it seems that the ruling regime is revisiting the old terror tactics in Western cities again.

The first stop in renewed terror campaign-this time using Iranian trained spies turned diplomats instead of using proxies such as Lebanese Hezbollah to do the dirty work – was where a large gathering of Iran’s main opposition the National Council of Resistance (NCRI) took place in Paris on June 30.

Even as the rally unfolded, a terrorist plot intending to target it was foiled by security forces in France with the help of their German and Belgian partners. Timing of the plot was significant because Hassan Rouhani was scheduled to visit Austria the next day.

Assadollah Assadi masterminded the plot while under diplomatic immunity from Austrian government. He was stationed in Vienna. Assadi was caught red-handed when he was giving the explosives and detonator to a sleeper cell, an Iranian born Belgian couple to carry out the attack.

Later Assadi was extradited to Belgian where he is imprisoned waiting his trail on terror charges.

According to diplomatic and security sources last month France has expelled an Iranian diplomat in response to the failed plot. France’s foreign ministry said on October 2nd there was no doubt the Iranian intelligence ministry had been behind the plot against the June 30th rally in Paris.

It subsequently froze assets belonging to Tehran’s intelligence services and two Iranian nationals. The Iranian regime continued with its campaign of hunting down its opponents in the summer and the next stop was the US.

The US Justice Department announced two arrests on America soil on August 20. Ahmadreza Mohammadi-Doostdar a 38-year-old man born and bred in America and from Iranian immigrant parents was one of them. The second man was identified as Majid Ghorbani a US permanent resident living in California.

The two were charged with spying on members and supporters of Iran’s main opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK).

In July, Dutch authorities said they had expelled two Iranian diplomats whom foreign officials say were linked to the assassinations of at least one Iranian dissident, Ahmad Mola Nissi. He was shot and killed in November by a masked assassin in The Hague. US officials believe Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security was involved.

How to leash the regime

To begin with, it should be a coordinated effort on both sides of the Atlantic to be effective. A first step in getting real with Iranian regime in Europe may start with EU implements its own April 1997 decision.

The EU Council of Ministers in 1997 issued a declaration for the expulsion of all Iranian Intelligence operatives from European soil. That order came after a trial in Germany found Iranian regime guilty of involvement in the assassination of four Kurdish dissidents in what came to be known as the Mykonos murders.

Past four decades has taught us a good lesson in dealing with the Iranian regime and it can be summarized in two words “GET TOUGH” if you want results. what Iran dose is somewhat confusing and looks more like shooting itself in the foot. Saving its shaky relations with the EU is certainly crucial but let’s not forget that the regime is facing an ever growing opposition at home.

Since January the country is in constant turmoil. This scares the supreme leader and President Rouhani alike. They know full well that chasing their opposition in other countries costs more than an arm and leg; but desperate times call for desperate measures. This is the key to understand Iranian regime’s bizarre actions these days.

*
Reza Shafiee is a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). He tweets @shafiee_shafiee.

Isn’t the declaration of the International Convention on the Elimination of forms of Racism (Icerd) as proposed by the de facto national unity P Waythamoorthy, an Islamic document in spirit? One that has all the modern vision, mission and operating principles that all religions would promote?

Wouldn’t Prophet Muhammad ratify this human rights instrument if he were to be around today? Maybe the turban-wearing thick-bearded Malay-Muslims who carried the coffin to Parliament did not get to read closely what the noble UN document is seeking to remedy.

Maybe these protesters, an embarrassment to what Islam holds as principles of human rights, did not get the chance to understand what being a “nationalist” and being a “globalist” means in the context of being a Muslim. They have misused the coffin, in fact. An insult to the revered casket of the dead.

Maybe. One can be totally off in this cultural analysis.

One thing for sure: “Ketuanan Melayu” caused the people countless billions of ringgit at the end of the story. The head honcho of Ketuanan Melayu was chief of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves International Money-Laundering Cartel.

Back to the Icerd-coffin protest. What is wrong with that picture? What is wrong, as a Muslim, in giving equal rights to all Malaysians? Did Prophet Muhammad teach us not to discriminate, degrade, alienate and dehumanise fellow human beings? Did he not tell us that the greatest jihad is the battle against one’s ego? Against a false sense of superiority? Did he not tell us, in his last khutbah/message on Mount Arafat that “an Arab is no more superior than any other race” except in his/her piety to Allah? Wasn’t that clear enough for the Ketuanan Melayu folks to abandon the idea of being racist Malaysians once and for all?

For 60 years, the old regime was not nice to the non-Malays. They institutionalised a system stylised after apartheid. The new regime should dismantle it.

But here is the larger issue. Of what a Malay is and why all Malaysians should be given equal rights.

What is a ‘Malay’ anyway?

What is a Malay? What is a Malaysian? What is a nationalist? What is a ‘nation’? How are we becoming “re-tribalised” in this world of increasing restlessness over a range of issues that are not being resolved by the previous regime and likely going to continue with the new? These are burning questions as we become more mature in discussing race relations in Malaysia almost 40 years after the May 13, 1969 incident.

Ernest Renan, Anthony Smith, William R Roff, Benedict Anderson, Harry Benda, the Andayas and John Funston – all major scholars of nationalism – would agree that Umno does not have an ideology except to sustain its elusive political superiority via the production of post-industrial materials and human beings. That Islam is not for Malays only. And that Islam prohibits all forms of racial discrimination. Prophet Muhammad the messenger of peace had a long time ago eliminated all forms of discrimination.

The problem lies in how Malays see “Malayness” as a political construct which can be easily manipulated and misrepresented and used by the richer, wealthier, and more powerful Malays in order to maintain their stranglehold over the easily manipulated, ignorant and powerless Malay. This is not new. The feudal lords, historically, found it useful as well.

And when Islam is hybridised in the mix of misrepresentation, the clamouring for Ketuanan Melayu became louder and was used as a battle cry for some meaningless memory of an imagined community as well as a slogan which no one exactly knows the meaning. The idea of “Malay Superiority” does not exist in the constitution and after a while, it became a laughing stock for Malays thinking like Malaysians.

Herein lies the elusiveness of things. Of the Malays being constructed as a post-industrial tribe.

Elusive word

Even the word “Barisan Nasional” is elusive. It is surviving and its means to cling on to power by all means necessary becomes more efficient and sophisticated. Its survival lies in the way people are divided, conquered, and mutated into “post-industrial tribes” and market-segmented and differentiatedly-sophisticated enclaves that are produced out of the need for the free market economy to transform Malays and Malaysians into consumers of useless goods and ideologies.

Post-industrial tribalism is a natural social reproduction of the power of the media to shape consciousness and to create newer forms of consumerist human beings. Nationalism, including Malay nationalism of the previous Mahathirian era, is an artificial construct that needs the power of “othering” and the “production of enemies” and “bogeymen and bogeywomen” for ideological sustainability.

But what is “nationalism” and does “Malay nationalism” actually exist in this century? Does the idea of “natio” or “nation” or “a people” survive merely on linguistic, territorial and religious homogeneity when these are also subject to the sociological interrogations of subjectivity and relativity?

Nationalism is a psychological and cultural construct useful and effective when deployed under certain economic conditions. It is now ineffective as a tool of mass mobilisation when nations have gained “independence” from the colonisers and when the “enemy” is no longer visible. All that exists in this post-industrial, globalised, borderless and mediated age of cybernetic capitalism is the idea of “post-industrial tribes” that live and thrive on chaos and complexity and on materials and goods produced by local and international capitalists.

Special rights for all, please

We are in the 21st century. We have a new government that is trying to move away from tribal politics. In a year, we will arrive at the year 2020, supposedly the Mahathirist-metaphorical year we will have achieved a clear vision. Like going to an eye doctor and everything is A-okay. The non-Malays and non-bumiputera have come a long way into being accepted as full-fledged Malaysians by virtue of the ethics, rights and responsibilities of citizenship. They ought to be given equal opportunity in the name of social justice, racial tolerance and the alleviation of poverty.

Bright and hard-working Malaysians regardless of racial origin who now call themselves Malaysians must be given all the opportunities that have been given to the Malays since 60 years back through the New Economic Policy of the early 1970s. They can no longer be discriminated in all spheres of life. They pay their taxes, too. They have aspirations. Of the Malaysian dream, for their children. They are us. Because we cannot be living in a world of “Us versus Them”, under the cultural roof in the house we together built. The plain logic of national unity.

Islam and other religions require this form of social justice to be applied to the lives of human beings. Islam does not discriminate one on the basis of race, ethnicity, colour, creed or national origin. It is race-based politics, borne out of the elusiveness of nationalism that creates post-industrial tribalistic leaders; leaders that will design post-industrial tribalistic policies. It is the philosophy of greed, facilitated by free enterprise run amuck that will force leaders of each race to threaten each other over the control of the economic pie.

The claim of “civilisational Islam” or “Islam Hadhari” back in the day or sloganised in the 1980s as “Masyarakat Madani” must be backed with a philosophy of development that restructures society no longer on the basis of newer forms of post-industrial tribalism that accords the political elites with the best opportunity to amass more wealth, but to redesign the economic system based on an efficient and sound socialistic economic system. It might even require political will to curb human enthusiasm of acquiring more and more of the things they do not need. In short, it should curb the temptation to out-consume each other in the name of greed.

To be civilised means to wake up to the possibilities of humanism and not plunge into a world of more sophisticated racism. The universal principle of humanism requires the privileged few to re-examine the policies of national development that prioritises the creation of more real estate projects rather than the construction of programmes to meet basic needs of all races and classes of peoples. To civilise a nation means to de-tribalise the citizens into a polity that will learn to share the wealth of this nation by accepting this land as the “earth of mankind” (bumi manusia) rather than of a land belonging to this or that race.

‘Ketuanan Melayu’ un-Islamic

In a multi-racial, multi-religious country such as Malaysia, nationalism is a complex yet bankrupting concept. In a globalised world of globally and government-linked companies, this concept of “fatherland” or “motherland” is a powerful weapon of the wealthy to mount arguments that hide the real intention of empire-building. The lifestyles of the country’s rich and famous require nationalist sentiments to be played up so that the more the rights are “protected” the more the political-economically rich few will have their sustained control over the people, territories, natural resources and information.

This, I think is the picture of post-industrial tribalism we are seeing as a mutation of the development, appropriation and imitation of the Malay feudalistic mentality. The clear and present danger in our post-industrial tribalistic world lies in the old formula we are wrongly using.
The essential question now is as a Malaysian nation/Bangsa Malaysia, haven’t we agreed upon a common history and a common destiny?

Again, Prophet Muhammad (Peace be Upon Him) would disapprove of the Malay-Muslims protesting with a coffin. He would not even approve of any Islamic party.

Eliminate racism! Think and act Malaysian! The fight against all forms of racial discrimination is now a Malaysian jihad.

Physician burnout, depression, and suicide increasingly invade discussions within the medical field. Depression and suicide are more common among male and female physicians, with suicide rates 1.41 and 2.27 times greater than that of the general male and female populations, respectively. Though, the insults to the mental health of physicians begins much earlier in their career.

While the numbers may vary from study to study, some 28 percent of medical residents experience a major depressive episode during their training compared to 6 to 8 percent of the general population. These numbers are important, not only because suffering physicians are suffering humans in their own right, but also because this epidemic leads to poor patient care.

As a recent study out of the Stanford School of Medicine suggests, burnout and depression in physicians can lead to medical error and death. Many have tried to explain the causes of the epidemic, referencing everything from unmanageable workloads and work inefficiency, to lack of meaning in work and lack of work-life balance. Films are now being produced to shine light on the issue. In her TED talk “Why Doctors Kill Themselves,” Pamela Wible points to a medical school culture of hazing and bullying that continues into residency, along with a professional culture that hinders physicians from obtaining mental health treatment.

These factors certainly contribute to the epidemic, but when discussing physician suicide, we ignore the elephant in the room: capitalism. We are unable to recognize how the exploitation and alienation of physicians is integrally connected to this dominant economic system, but nothing could be more poignant, given in the state of the world today.

Ironically, the same destructive system that is driving physicians to extremes is also the main driver of the deterioration of health of the patients and populations, requiring patients to see physicians in the first place. The sooner we realize and confront our own exploitation, the sooner we can join in the fight to address the real driver of disease that is plaguing physicians and patients.

The System Outlined

Busy physicians may not have time to study how the world’s prevailing economic system functions, but doing so could benefit both our profession and the patients with whom we work. To briefly discuss, inside this system the working class that does not own the means of production is forced to sell its labor to an employer to survive.

A few corporations control most of the market for each of the commodities they produce. In these corporations, a very small sector of a board of directors and majority shareholders makes essentially all of the decisions on what to produce, where to produce and how to distribute profits. This puts the working class in a vulnerable position.  With the ultimate goal of profit maximization, decisions are often made by the corporate class which are not in the best interest of workers and negatively affect the health of entire communities.

Outsourcing work, closing factories, creating poor working conditions to cut costs, polluting waterways and the environment–decision after decision may initially increase profits, but in the long term harms health. This harm to health can be more obvious, as when air and water are polluted, or more subtle, for example when families are put under chronic stress–which eventually leads to various forms of illness– from poor workplace conditions or income insecurity secondary to factory closure and outsourcing.

In this system, certain “costs”–the health of families, and entire communities being destroyed–are “externalized.” This means the business itself does not pay for these costs of poor societal health, which are created secondary to decisions made by business executives to increase profits. Such decisions are made by a small number of wealthy, powerful individuals pursuing their interests for greater wealth and power accumulation at expense of all else.

As economists such as Thomas Piketty have shown by combing through economic records from as far back as the 18th century, capitalism inherently generates inequality, concentrating wealth into the hands of the few at expense of everyone else. Study after study shows us that socioeconomic inequality itself is detrimental to patient health and actually increases morbidity and mortality.

Despite the negative effects, the working class today is more productive than ever, while wages remain flat (or are sometimes even lower) and work hours continue to increase. Workers struggle to put food on the table and meet basic needs, while the ownership class continues to become richer. Workers are exploited and reduced to tools for industry, many times forced to do mundane tasks or assignments over and over. They are alienated, or separated from the control and the product of their labor, each day they go to work. Inside this system workers are ultimately reduced to mechanistic cogs producing profit for large corporations.

This combination of being overworked and lacking true meaning and fulfillment in the work being done, drives more and more throughout both the white and blue collar sectors into despair. As Johan Hari, shows in his recent work Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and Unexpected Solutions, workers become separated from loved ones and from things that bring them joy as they work multiple jobs for longer hours as they struggle to make ends meet.

This constant stress leads to anxiety, depression, and various other forms of disease. Meanwhile, all medicine has to offer for them are at best poor attempts–many times with questionable supporting data demonstrating efficacy– to numb the pain that much larger systemic structures continue to create.

Unfortunately, the corporate elite know no limits in this system, they continue to exploit the masses and drive more and more into poverty and desperation while concentrating wealth in ever fewer hands. In America today, the three wealthiest individuals own the same wealth as the entire bottom half of the population, more than 160 million individuals. In order to maintain this system, the elite must ensure that the members of the working class fight amongst themselves rather than direct their rage toward those who are benefiting off of the oppression of the masses.

The capitalist system, born from racism and white supremacy as highlighted in studies such as Edward Baptist’s The Half That Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, continues to separate members of the working class based on social constructs such as race. At the same time, through a multitude of mechanisms, the system creates a self-loathing, insecure public, driven to constant consumption, leading to the pollution of the earth and poisoning of community after community.

These various forms of structural violence are the true drivers of disease and suffering, of which the health care system sees the results, but has little to no ability to truly address. The health of the majority of the population deteriorates and the elites benefit. Capitalism’s need to endlessly expand and its effect on the earth, has literally lead some scientists to call for the designation of a new geologic era called the anthropocene to describe the effect humans have had on the earth.

Scientists now warn we have moved into the sixth great mass extinction of species seen in our world’s history. A new report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) suggests, “Humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970, leading the world’s foremost experts to warn that the annihilation of wildlife is now an emergency that threatens civilisation.” Meanwhile, a new U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report warns us that humanity has only a dozen years to address global warming to avoid increasing droughts, floods, etc., which will inevitably lead to more poverty and illness.

Capitalism does not just threaten the health and well being of every human, but life on this earth as we know it. Capitalism operates as a terminal cancer, knowing no limits to its endless growth and consumption, destroying systems necessary to survival and threatening the continued existence of its host.

Medicine Has Not Escaped

What is outlined above are the underlying causes of the majority of disease and suffering. The prevailing economic system in the world today commodifies every aspect of life including health care. As a result, the health of the public, especially the US public, is subjected to a barrage of market mechanisms.

US medical professionals, while often paid more than the typical member of the working class, are still forced to operate inside of this system that places profits above patient health. We see how this system harms our patients, limiting availability of the care they need, but we tend to miss that we also are damaged by this same system.

As Howard Waitzkin and the “Working Group on Health Beyond Capitalism” state in the book, Health Care Under the Knife: Moving Beyond Capitalism for Our Health,” until the 1980s, doctors, for the most part, owned and/or controlled their means of production and conditions of practice.” This allowed them to have control over things such as their work hours and how much time to spend with patients. As the Working Group references, “loss of control over the conditions of work has caused much unhappiness and burnout in the profession.

As other members of the proletariat, or working class, have experienced for years, doctors now no longer have control over their labor. Now corporations or other large institutions control such decisions. Physicians have become “proletarianized” and while not members of the traditional working class, they have become tools in the corporate wheel of profit production. This has left us with a health system parasitized by the capitalism that cares more about profit production than it does the care of human beings.

The medical industrial complex, made of a multitude of different institutions–hospital corporations, large insurance companies, or pharmaceutical and device corporations and, more specifically the corporate elite who control these corporations–ultimately governs a majority of the large scale, structural decisions that affect patient care. The elite in these institutions, just like other capitalist organizations, make decisions that affect the lives of the majority with little to no input from those who are affected by these decisions.

They govern the prices of drugs–often leading to the obscene drug prices–and how long a physician should be spending with his or her patients in the clinic. These organizations have the primary goal of maximizing profit (regardless of whether they bear the title of “for profit” or “non-profit”) above all else. Consequently, patient health really becomes secondary in this system.

The metastasis of capitalism’s perverse incentives to even the sector that claims to care for the health of human beings, has given us the ineffective, damaging system we have today. Since profit production is of prime importance, physicians–and really health care providers in general–must be trained to be efficient tools for profit, seeing more patients more quickly, knowing how to bill appropriately, etc.

These incentives limit a physician’s ability to do what he or she actually went into medicine (or should have) for: to help people. Physicians want to help their patients, but are simply not able to truly address patient suffering because addressing the causes, as highlighted above, are outside the scope of a profit based medical system.

To understand how exactly this system creates human tools for health care profit while in the process leaving them physically and mentally broken, we must delve into the medical education and training structure and analyze how medical providers are conditioned to accept their own exploitation.

Training in the Art of Being Exploited

Step 1: Medical School

Medical trainees in the US enter medical school at least generally claiming they have some interest in caring for other human beings. Unfortunately, little do they know, they are entering a system designed to prime them for their own exploitation from the second their training begins—one could argue even well before that point–and subsequently throughout their residency training.

During medical school, students are forced to study innumerable hours while being told they have to “lay a good foundation” of knowledge for their future practice. The first 2 years in most medical schools are classroom based, where insurmountable amounts of information are thrown at students as they are told “this is just the way medicine is, get used to it.”

Unfortunately though, much of the information students spend their time studying–or more often mindlessly memorizing–will never be used when caring for patients. This information is absorbed, regurgitated on an exam, and then often forgotten. One thing students do begin to learn–if they hadn’t already through their undergraduate education or their grade school education prior–is to listen to authority figures’ demands if they would like to succeed.

Students have little influence on what they are being taught. Instead, they must accept what they are being told or they may not pass their next exam. Students who entered medicine eager and idealistic, hoping to help others, begin to slowly withdraw from their individual passions and interests simply because tests, rotation evaluations determined by the opinions of supervising providers students must impress, and board exams are deemed more important. They are taught that listening to authority figures at the expense of their own interests and passions, comes first and then they can try to pursue their interests if they have time. This obviously can affect the mood and morale of a training physician.

During their third year, medical students are forced to spend numerous hours in the hospital. They are also required to take “shelf exams” at the end of each rotation, which can often have a large impact on their overall rotation grade. Because slight differences in grades can affect residency opportunities, students spend free-time studying for these exams instead of participating in activities to maintain their own mental and physical well being. While the exam scores offer little insight into the type of a physician the student will become, they serve to add extra pressure on students and ensure that they spend little time actually thinking for themselves while they are out of the hospital.

During fourth year many students are expected to complete sub-internships in the fields they are are interested in going into for residency training. These sub-internships normally require students to work near their 80 hour work limit, congruous to work limits of residents (more on that shortly). Medical students often carry their own patient panels, write notes that can be co-signed, and can even pend medication orders to be approved. The main difference between them and an actual paid intern is that they do not get paid. Instead they must work to “impress” their superiors in hopes of obtaining a positive evaluation. Once again, students are taught that listening to and striving to impress authority is their ultimate goal.

After four years of indoctrination, in addition to a medical degree, most medical students are given one final parting gift on their way into residency: hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. This debt serves as a convenient way of pushing newly minted doctors into financial constriction when entering their residency.

No matter how they view their new employer or the field they have chosen, they know that they now have hundreds of thousands of dollars that they must find some way to pay back. This makes them much less likely to question or challenge authority in their new positions because doing so could impede completion of their training, sabotaging their career and only chance to escape debt. Along, with the inherent emotional stress of caring for sick patients, these financial difficulties can lead to depression, anxiety and a host of mental health issues in the newly minted physician.

Step 2: Residency

Once medical school graduates enter residency, they have already been primed for their inevitable exploitation, understanding that they need to take direction from authority, curtail their passions to make them more palatable to superiors, and most importantly, suppress any depression or anxiety they feel secondary to an ineffective, exploitative system. They now have few options–or are at least told so–other than to continue through residency. They know that to find themselves at this stage, they have made significant financial and emotional sacrifices, often losing connection with the people and things they love in order to fulfill education requirements.

Unfortunately, the exploitation of these newly minted doctors is just beginning.  During training, residents are forced to work often 80 hours per week doing a large portion of the patient care in hospitals (not to mention the additional hours of preparation outside of hospital or clinic, which are not counted toward this 80 hour limit). Residents are salaried, so they provide a cheap, efficient source of labor for hospitals and clinics. Residents become physically and emotionally exhausted trying to care for maxed out patient loads effectively in understaffed hospitals. Work hours become normalized over time and residents simply expect to be working an unhealthy amount of time in the hospital or at least convince themselves that it is normal to maintain their own sanity. It is no wonder this situation plunges many, who are already at risk, into burnout and depression.

Throughout residency, residents do, admittedly, grow exponentially in their ability to care for patients and become independently functioning physicians. Though, there is another type of growth that occurs during these years, which is seldom discussed.

Residents are groomed to be efficient, effective profit producers once they enter the workforce. For example, over their time in residency, a large degree of emphasis is placed on residents meeting particular “quality measures” for the clinic or hospital settings. Training after training is spent ensuring residents understand how to properly bill and submit insurance claims. Residents learn how to see patients extremely quickly and complete entire patient visits within 15 minutes. As anyone who has even interacted with a health care provider can attest, this is not enough time to actually make any significant interpersonal connection with a patient.

Either during this visit or after, residents must also learn to input information into whichever electronic medical record their training center uses. As Matt Anderson notes in Health Care Under the Knife commenting on EMRs, “most were designed to capture billing and quality information, not facilitate clinical care.” Residents end up spending more time looking at a computer than they do connecting with a patient. In the inpatient setting, a hospitalized patient might only see their doctor for a few minutes each day. This is partially because the rest of the day is spent documenting a coordinating care inside of a completely nonsensical system to ensure hospitals will be able to cash in on patient hospital stays.

This puts individuals, who went into medicine to care for and make connections with patients, torn between still trying to achieve this goal and meeting designated “quality measures.” If they are not able to see patients fast enough in the clinic or inpatient hospital setting they may not be seen as “marketable” to employers. This is clearly an environment that can breed physical, mental, and emotional suffering in the exploited trainee.

Even while studies have shown these grueling hours put both patients and residents at risk, when it comes to actually addressing the problems highlighted above, the onus is consistently put on the provider to maintain “self care.” From the beginning of residency, different “mental health departments” speak with residents about the importance of maintaining self care and “balance,” while at the same time maintaining an exploitative system that overworks its employees and drives suffering. Residents are a cheap form of labor for hospitals or clinics, and actually addressing this problem at a systemic level would be too threatening to the profitable status quo.

How the system’s leaders speak about these work conditions is very telling. For example, in 2016 Dr. Janice Orlowski the Chief Health Care Officer with the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), stated “The individual is going to go into a profession where their profession calls on them to work extended hours and to be available at unusual hours […] We need to train individuals who can learn to pace themselves, who can recognize when they have sleep deprivation or when they are stressed.”

This is an interesting statement, coming from someone who should know the demands put on residents drastically limits their capacity to “pace themselves.” It is clear that there is much more concern for protecting a public image of medicine and hospital programs than there is for addressing the crisis of physician depression and suicide.

Step 3: Practicing Physicians

Finally, if not already burned out, the physician has escaped residency and now believes that he or she will be able to practice “however one wants.” Unfortunately, any overburdened physician–either fresh out of residency or seasoned–who has worked inside a busy hospital or clinic, can attest to feeling tired, overworked, and often unfulfilled, in part due to their lack of patient connection as they are rushed from patient to patient and progress note to progress note.

Again, citing Matt Anderson in the Health Care Under the Knife’s section “Becoming Employees: The Deprofessionalization and Emerging Social Class Position of Health Professionals,” concepts typically lauded again and again in the health sector–”value, efficiency, quality, and market discipline–are part of an ideology to justify corporate control over the work of physicians and other works providing health services.” He references Marx’s concept of alienation–the separation of worker’s control over his or her labor– and describes how more and more health care providers are separated from what they once truly loved about their work, and now must fill the primary role of profit producer and secondary role of health care provider. If this separation did not occur during residency, there is a good chance it will when outside of training working for an employer.

While practicing, providers are still attempting to treat patients who present with illnesses created by the much larger system of capitalist exploitation referenced above, but their training prior to starting independent practice in no way, shape, or form has actually prepared them to join the communities they serve in combating these larger oppressive systems. On the contrary, what they were taught was to keep their head down, survive, and make it through exploitative residency programs. They are in regular practice and know how to put in a billing code and attempt the near impossible task of making a true connection with someone in a 15 minute clinic visit, but have not remotely learned how to begin to resist a parasitic capitalist system damaging both their colleagues and their patients.

At the same time, even if a physician did want to step outside of traditional boundaries to help challenge the true socioeconomic and structural causes of disease highlighted above, the provider still has a massive amount of student loans constricting their decisions. They may also have started a family or accumulated other financial constraints during residency. This leaves them with few options and many find it easier to get back in the clinic, put their heads down, and tell themselves they are really helping to address patient health. When in reality, they have been indoctrinated into a system based on profit maximization and blunting of patient suffering at best.

This endless process of day after day in clinic, seeing little to no progress at a systemic level, can become frustrating and make one’s work seem futile. Imagine spending over 10 years in training–from college, through medical school, through residency–to find yourself in this position. It is no surprise that more and more physicians are burning out, and feeling so desperate, that harming oneself becomes a viable option to escape.

Recognizing One’s Exploitation and Fighting Back

Capitalism’s parasitic economic structure has infiltrated all aspects of our society, and medicine has not been spared. This results in physicians being trained and conditioned to be obedient profit producers above all else. It leads them to be alienated from their loved ones and from their true passions. Inside our healthcare system, physicians are separated from the things that truly brought them joy and fulfilment. Yet we still continue to question why physicians are killing themselves?

Some maintain hope that there will be action around these issues from residency administrations, hospital working groups, or any number of hierarchical bodies that govern medical education, graduate medical education, or our healthcare system in general. The reality is that these issues will never be solved by any large committees or “task forces” we currently have in place, which continually put the onus onto medical students, residents, and practicing physicians to develop more “resilience” inside of a system that is build to do the exact opposite.

Those who have made it to the top positions of organizations such as the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) or the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) are there because they will continue to support the status quo. As political dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky discusses in reference to elite control of institutions,  “an unstated but crucial premise is that the ‘responsible men’ achieve that exalted status by their service to authentic power, a fact of life that they will discover soon enough if they try to pursue an independent path.” These institutions will never consider the best interests of physicians or the patients they serve. Their leaders have been groomed to support the status quo. It is up to us to realize our exploitation and begin to fight against it.

Realizing this fact is easier said than done, as most physicians, due to the filtering mechanisms throughout our educational system, which typically lead to those from the upper classes securing seats in medical school, come from the exploitive classes themselves. Physicians are also paid more than a majority of other employees within our healthcare system such as nurses, technicians etc. They are conditioned to believe that they are somehow different or more important than the rest of the working staff when in reality all members are important in caring for the patient and all members are overworked and exploited by the same system.

Giving one member of an exploited group–in this case the physician–more benefits than others, helps to keep the fighting going between all groups as opposed to collaboration and organizing. We will be able to begin addressing the crisis of physician suicide once we, as physicians, accept that just as this capitalist system exploits our patients and coworkers, it is also exploiting us. And then we organize against it.

Whether it is consciously recognized or not, physicians specifically are also often boosted up with a false sense of elitism from the second they step into the field. This creates a blind spot for them being able to recognize their own suffering and exploitation and organize against it. They are given special white coats, which–besides becoming completely filthy after 80 hour work weeks–distinguish them from other hospital staff and distinguish themselves by the title of “doctor.”

While other staff members, such as nurses, actually have the collectivist mindset to organize against the damage the health care industrial complex causes to the patients they care for and even strike when necessary, physicians–especially those in the US–have been conditioned to believe they are too important to the system to do the same, even while that system is actively damaging them.  Their administrators and peers say, “If we aren’t caring for patients, our patients will die.”

Those with a vested interest in maintaining the business as usual hold patients as hostages inside this system, guilting providers into accepting the status quo (inadequate care, inadequate access to care, medical errors, and crushing debt) with this rhetoric. It is despite the fact that physicians around the world have been able to organize and strike effectively while also continuing to provide absolutely necessary care.

Referencing Mark Ames’s 2005 book, Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond is useful for understanding this current phenomenon. In the book, Ames evaluates the mental anguish caused by Reagan era policies and analyzes how our capitalist system degrades and humiliates workers until they are pushed to harm themselves and others. In the following passage he speaks of how people can often deny their own exploitation until it is too late. He notes:

The middle class persistently denies its own unique pathos, irrationally clinging to an irrational way of measuring it, perhaps because if they did validate their own pain and injustice, it would be too unsettling–it would throw the entire world order into doubt. It is more comforting to believe they aren’t really suffering, to allocate all official pathos to the misery of other socioeconomic groups, and its more comforting to accuse those who disagree of being psychologically weak whiners. Despite its several hundred million strong demographic, the white bourgeoisie’s pain doesn’t officially count–it is too ashamed of itself to sympathize with its own suffering.

Until physicians are willing to accept the fact they they are being exploited by the same system that harms their patients, there will be no progress made in addressing physician depression and suicide. At that same time, until health care providers generally accept that it is our current capitalist system which puts profit production above the well being of every living thing on this planet–including themselves–we will not be able to effectively address true social and structural causes of disease and suffering.

Capitalism exploits, damages, and destroys us all. History shows us, large scale systemic change has never come from the beneficence of those in power and, frankly, it never will. As historian Howard Zinn writes speaking about public activism, the rights of the citizenry only come when “citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel, and violate the law in order to uphold justice.”

As physicians, if we truly care about the well being of our coworkers and of our patients, we must begin to organize, unionize, and rebel inside our practices, residency programs, etc, resisting business as usual, and finding ways to threaten the profits of capitalists if we want to see systemic change. We must begin to organize with communities and populations resisting oppression from a parasitic capitalist system as physicians in the past have done with groups such as the Black Panthers and Young Lords.

Once physicians can begin to view the dynamics of our capitalist system more clearly–and view the dynamics of our healthcare system as just one microcosm of how capitalism harms us all–it will become clear what needs to be done. We must put down our fancy white coats and begin to organize with our fellow healthcare staff–and, more importantly, with our patients–against a system that exploits and damages us all. Only then will be able to begin developing a new system that actually cares about both people and the planet.

*Michael Pappas graduated from Georgetown Medical School and is currently training in Family Medicine residency in New York City. He can be reached at pappasm898@gmail.com.

With the steadily increasing lack of public confidence in politicians and bureaucrats, Indians are now increasingly viewing judiciary as the conscience keeper of the country, to ensure probity and fairness in dealings on matters of national and social importance.

In such scenario, judiciary in India has now become a very powerful force , strengthened considerably by the people’s perception and expectation that judges can do no wrong. Therefore, the verdicts of the court are now deemed to be the be all and end all of solutions for settling all sorts of disputes and disagreements .

While courts enjoy enormous clout in the country today, there are also disturbing news of some judges at various levels being suspected of not measuring up to the requisite standards and not meeting the expectations that “the Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion”. Recently, when the judges at the highest level in the country openly accused the Chief Justice in a press conference , many people started wondering whether the level of confidence that the country men have placed in judiciary is appropriate.

Further, in recent years, there have been many instances of judgement of the lower court being over ruled by High Court and judgement of the High Court being over ruled by Supreme Court and judgement of two member bench of the Supreme Court being over ruled by five member bench. Such over turning of the verdict of the lower court by the higher court have become too frequent and not rarity anymore. In such scenario, the disturbing thought is running through in people’s mind whether the judgements could always be considered as fair and which judgement is right and which is wrong.

Judiciary in India is at the cross roads today . While still enjoying considerable support from the public, judiciary has to maintain it’s credibility at highest standards, so that public confidence will not get diluted.

Some of the recent judgements of Supreme court on matters such as adultery, homosexuality, entry of women of all age groups in Sabarimala temple, restricting bursting of crackers to two hours during Deepavali day have all become highly controversial and have raised the eyebrows in many quarters. Large section of country men and many religious outfits think that legalizing of such acts as homosexuality and adultery by the Supreme Court is extremely detestable under any circumstances.

General understanding is that the judiciary should give verdict on the basis of laws enshrined in the Constitution and enacted by parliament from time to time. However, in recent years, Supreme Court has no hesitation in entertaining cases that should be left to the administration to tackle, as it involves no interpretation of law.

Further, in awarding the verdicts on several matters of public interest which are not related to the law of the land but only some vague concept of personal liberty with conflicting interpretation and public perception, judges appear to be guided by their own personal perspectives and do not seem to take into consideration the traditional practices , beliefs and public sentiments while pronouncing judgements.

As the judgements are being delivered on quite a few matters not based on law but based on perspectives and personal opinions of the judges and probably without considering holistic logic, it is becoming difficult to implement some of the directives due to public protest.

For example, the Supreme Court verdict on allowing women of all ages to enter Sabarimala temple cannot be implemented in view of the very strong opposition from devotees. Similarly, Supreme Court verdict that fire crackers should be burst only for two hours on Deepavali day has been defied by the people.

The courts are compelling the governments to implement measures and rulings such as two wheeler riders should wear helmet, noise level must be restricted in certain period of day etc. which all come under the purview of administration.

Matters relating to administration should be discussed in legislative assemblies and parliament and the government has to take decision weighing pros and cons, it’s own policy approach and of course, duly considering the overwhelming public opinion expressed in various forums, social media , print and visual media.Is there any need for court to interfere in such matters?

It is high time that judges should take a re look at their approach and appreciate the importance of distinguishing between the matter that squarely fall under administrative jurisprudence and the domain of judiciary. Further, judges should keep in view that their primary responsibility is to uphold the rule of law and not pass judgements on matters relating to administration based on their personal view and convictions.

In the US midterm congressional November 6 elections, 35 of 100 senators, 435 congressmen, and 39 state and territory governors will be elected.

According to the results of a public opinion poll conducted by The Washington Post and the ABC News channel, Democrats have a better chance of winning: 53% of respondents are ready to vote for them, and only 42% – for Republicans.

However, many political analysts are skeptical of this data, because two years ago, such studies suggested that Hillary Clinton is favored to win the presidency with a margin of 70% to 90% of the vote.

Analyzing the power dynamics shortly before the vote, Henry Brands, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin, member of the Society of American Historians and the Philosophical Society of Texas, said that events can develop according to various scenarios, which are quite difficult to predict.

“All I can say at this point is: wait and see,” the expert told PenzaNews.

At the same time, in his opinion, the victory of the Democrats in the elections to the House of Representatives can significantly complicate legislative projects in the United States.

“If the Democrats gain control of the House, they will launch investigations into the administration and can probably block further important legislation,” Henry Brands said stressing that they might even consider articles of impeachment against the president.

According to Charles Henry, Professor Emeritus of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, the Democrats will launch impeachment proceedings only if the Mueller report contains evidence of impeachable offenses.

“However, I doubt that the Senate would vote to impeach if the Republicans are in control,” the expert noted.

In his opinion, the most important point for the outcome of the vote will be voter turnout.

“I expect it to be high. Not only do Democrats and Independents need to turnout but in states controlled by Republicans they face a number of obstacles seeking to disenfranchise them. Georgia is an excellent example of this,” Charles Henry added.

Meanwhile, Graham Dodds, Department of Political Science, Concordia University, shared the view that it is difficult to accurately predict the results of elections in the United States.

“However, odds are that Democrats will win enough seats in the House of Representatives to capture a majority, while Republicans might well add to their majority in the Senate, resulting in a Congress with split partisan control,” the analyst said.

According to him, a Democratic House would be a huge block on many Donald Trump’s initiatives.

“It’s hard to see a Democratic House voting to build a wall on the border with Mexico, to pass more tax cuts, or to reduce regulations. Also, if Democrats win the House, they could launch various investigations about Trump and his administration. They could also initiate impeachment proceedings. But even if a Democratic House were to impeach Trump, odds are he would not be removed from office by the Senate, as there would not be enough Democrats there to do so,” Graham Dodds said.

“November’s elections will largely determine the political dynamics of the next two years, which will in turn very much influence the presidential election in 2020,” he added.

In turn, Ryan Hurl, Department of Political Science, the University of Toronto, expressed confidence that the geography of the Senate elections is not in the Democrats favour this year.

“Every 2 years one third of the Senate is up for election, and the ‘Class of 2018’ features many Democratic Senators who hail from states won by Trump [in presidential election]. Thus for years most observers have been predicting that the GOP will retain control of the Senate in 2018. Nothing has happened that would lead me to change this prediction,” the expert said.

At the same time, in his opinion, representatives of the opposition party have a chance to be defeated in the upcoming vote.

“Usually, the President’s party loses seats in mid-term elections – this was definitely the experience of President Barack Obama. However, the pattern does not hold. I think there is a small possibility that the 2018 election will look like the 1998 election,” Ryan Hurl said.

“I think it is possible that the Democratic advantage in this election – driven mostly by distaste for President Trump amongst suburban and upper middle class voters – has been undercut by controversy over Justice Kavanaugh, and the emergence of varieties of extremism on the Democratic left, advocating violence and incivility, open borders, massive expansion of the welfare state at a time of trillion dollar deficits,” the analyst explained.

Meanwhile, Edward Lozansky, President and Founder of the American University in Moscow, also expressed the opinion that the previously predicted victory of Democrats in the elections to the House of Representatives is becoming less obvious.

“Currently, the situation has changed significantly. Now the so-called ‘blue’ wave of Democrats is losing its intensity, and the Republican ‘red’ wave is gaining momentum. This is due to several factors: the impressive success of Trump on the domestic front, which includes economic growth, historically low unemployment, the strengthening of the Supreme Court in favor of Republicans, and ineffectiveness of Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s ‘collusion’ with Moscow,” the expert explained.

According to him, “a multi-thousand caravan of migrants from Latin America towards the border of the United States and Mexico” also plays its role, since “the Democrats prevent the construction of a wall holding back the influx of illegal immigrants.”

“For these reasons, polls show that the Republicans will definitely keep control of the Senate, and that the Democrats still have chances to win the House of Representatives, but the gap in the rating is significantly reducing day by day,” Edward Lozansky said.

“In any case, Trump is not going to be impeached and will stay in the White House until the end of his first term. Moreover, he has already begun active preparations for the next elections in 2020,” the analyst added.

Meanwhile, Kyle Kondik, Managing Editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, University of Virginia Center for Politics, expressed confidence that the Republicans will hold the Senate and increase their presence in it.

“The Democrats have to defend many incumbent senators in states that President Trump won in the last presidential election. In the House, Democrats are in better position to win the majority but that is not guaranteed,” Kyle Kondik said.

According to him, House Democratic leaders do not seem to want to pursue impeachment at this time even if they do take control of the House.

In turn, Daniel Chirot, the author of Modern Tyrants, Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, suggested that if the Democrats return control of the House of Representatives, the voting gap may be minimal.

“No serious analyst thinks that the result is already decided. Similarly, almost all analysts believe the Republicans will keep the Senate,” the expert said.

“If the Democrats win the House it would become impossible for the President and his Republican Party to pass any of their more desired legislation, like further tax cuts or cutting social security and Medicare. Politics would become even more divisive and bitter, and the American government would become largely paralyzed,” Daniel Chirot concluded.

Source: https://penzanews.ru/en/analysis/65753-2018

By Haroro J. Ingram*

(FPRI) — Since 2016, the Islamic State has lost its caliphate and 98% of its territory, seen its overall operations decline by about 70%, had its coterie of capable commanders and media officials killed, and retreated from highly visible social media platforms. In an audio message released by Islamic State media in August, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph without a caliphate, exhorted his followers to continue to have faith through these difficult times and to persevere in the fight against global enemies. In the midst of such a precipitous decline, with a U.S.-led coalition still continuing to reduce the last bit of the caliphate and hunt down its leaders, the group has remained remarkably cohesive organizationally, ideologically, and strategically—a true measure of resiliency beyond mere survival.

For every trend that suggests the group is down and out, others suggest it is clawing back. Successful attacks by lone actors inspired by the Islamic State are down, but this is largely due to vigilant and effective counterterrorism efforts and not for a lack of trying. Attacks in Iraq have generally stabilized to a level between five and ten per day in 2018, but in key areas like Kirkuk and the suburbs of Baghdad, attacks are increasing again. A few analysts are pointing to the similarities in the style of guerrilla warfare the Islamic State used to consolidate territorial control leading to the establishment of the caliphate, with a nascent insurgency developing in areas once pacified since 2014. Their point is a simple one; if it happened before, it can happen again.

To measure the Islamic State’s potential for resurgence, it is only natural to draw parallels with its past. The United States and its partners defeated the early manifestation of this group—the Islamic State of Iraq, also known as al-Qaeda in Iraq—in 2007-2010, and yet it bounced back to successfully establish its self-proclaimed caliphate in 2014. At this point, it would be naïve to think that the Islamic State’s past example of resilience, compounded by its current ability to endure, is an anomaly. Accordingly, we believe that its longevity is a product of an underappreciated (or at least regularly misunderstood) factor: its leadership practices and its implications for organizational and strategic dynamics. These organizational characteristics have kept the group operational for over a decade and will be essential for its survivability now and its future efforts to remerge again. We look back upon this history to understand the present and consider how the group’s wishes for the future may be thwarted.

History Repeats?

Over a decade ago, the Islamic State movement had been physically gutted in Iraq. Any measure of “tangibles” at the time would conclude that the group had little future; instead, the group’s survival largely hinged on the “intangibles” of leadership. There is evidence that the Islamic State of Iraq’s leaders worked to cultivate a strategic culture within the organization that sought to learn from past problems to improve future performance. Like his direct predecessors Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the “two sheikhs” Abu Hamza Al-Muhajir and Abu Umar Al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr remained committed to preserving the movement’s manhaj through boom and bust. Like the “two sheikhs,” Abu Bakr’s approach to leadership largely shuns the public spotlight not only for the sake of security, but also for maintaining organizational stability over personal aggrandizement. In doing so, Abu Bakr has helped to extend the leadership legacy that has been crucial to keeping the group functioning.

Fast forward to the present day and the Islamic State is, once again, in a period of decline. A close consideration of that mix of “tangibles” and “intangibles” at its disposal reveals a different picture than when Abu Bakr took over in 2010. There is no question that the movement is in a measurably stronger position now, despite its heavy losses. A recent United Nations report suggests the group still has up to 30,000 members across Syria and Iraq. Moreover, having held territory and urban centers for varying periods of time since 2013, the Islamic State has undoubtedly sown “friendly” networks deep within these societies that will again prove vital for its survival. When one also considers that, unlike a decade ago, the Islamic State has a global spread of formal and aspirational wilayats (provinces) across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, the group has more flexibility in how they regain the initiative.

Besides the ongoing battle against a coalition of adversaries, perhaps the next most significant challenge facing the Islamic State is more of an “intangible” one and concerns how to maintain organizational, strategic, and ideological coherence through this current storm. While this challenge is a perpetual one for any movement, especially one with a transnational spread, it is further complicated by the conditions of its current failings. The Islamic State’s current predicament follows in the wake of a period of extraordinary success that brought with it expansion—territorially and strategically—and diversification—of its membership and operational activities. Success, expansion, and diversification create challenges for a movement. Success raises expectations and competition amongst the membership, while expansion and diversification strain the unifying bonds that keep a movement strategically and ideologically focused. During periods of boom, these tensions are comparatively easier to manage with member morale high, bureaucracies engaged, and communications functioning. During periods of bust, however, these tensions exponentially exacerbate the pressures inherent to survival. The remaining veterans of the Islamic State should know, as it was the beneficiary of another movement’s struggle to deal with these forces: al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda’s Charisma Vacuum

Seventeen years ago, the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. catapulted Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda to the forefront of the global jihad. What had begun as a small “vanguard” network in the 1990s had, within a decade, morphed into a transnational network of formal and aspirational affiliates. The subsequent reaction by the United States and its partners suppressed al-Qaeda’s leadership and crippled much of the structure essential for maintaining a semblance of strategic, operational, and ideological consistency across the network. So in the wake of a period of success, expansion, and diversification, al-Qaeda entered a period of steep decline. The Abbottabad Letters captured from Bin Laden’s hideout reveal how Bin Laden and al-Qaeda Central struggled to deal with its far-flung subordinates, particularly al-Shabaab in Somalia and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At its heart, al-Qaeda is an adhocracy and its inherent organizational susceptibilities were exacerbated by counterterrorism strategies that decimated not only its communication, logistical, and financial networks, but also killed those “middle managers” so crucial to operationalizing the directives of central leadership; all of which are essential for maintaining strategic and operational consistency. Bin Laden struggled to maintain coherence over his organization during its decline, and during the final stages of his life, he even considered renaming the group he had founded. When Bin Laden was killed in 2011, his successor Zawahiri made decisions which did more to bust open these tensions than placate them.

For years, Bin Laden’s charismatic appeal played a key role in holding al-Qaeda together as the various factions on internal disputes largely complied with his authority. His death created a vacuum which predictably resulted in remaining factions and affiliates “competing” to be the rightful heirs of his legacy. The greatest beneficiaries of these dynamics would be the Islamic State movement under the leadership of Abu Bakr, and the rest is history: by 2013, it challenged Zawahiri’s authority, and by July the following year, it had usurped al-Qaeda as the flagship of the global jihad with the announcement of its caliphate. By 2016, the Islamic State was facing a similar test to that which al-Qaeda had confronted. So far, its leadership has proven crucial to the difference in outcome.

The Caliph Factor

Despite indications of a growing ideological schism within the ranks of the Islamic State leadership, the group has managed its decline better than al-Qaeda had under Bin Laden and Zawahiri. We suggest that the difference in the nature of the authority of Abu Bakr’s leadership compared to that of al-Qaeda’s leaders may explain, if not in full then in part, those fortunes. Unlike Bin Laden, Abu Bakr is not a charismatic leader. While commentators regularly misuse “charismatic leader” as a catch-all term, since Max Weber’s Economy & Society, the scholarly field has understood “charisma” to refer to an emotion-based leader-follower bond. In contrast, Weber defined two other leadership types: legal-rational authority, which is based on adherence to “law” or a legally enshrined process (e.g., elections in a democracy), and traditional authority, which is based on established order/custom (e.g., monarchy). For the Islamic State, the position of caliph represents a unique fusion of legal-rational and traditional authority. Abu Bakr didn’t seize power in the group, he was elected by the Islamic State of Iraq’s Shura council. Long time spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani described his new emir in 2011 in this way: “Although we have missed our emir, Abu-Omar al-Baghdadi, Allah has bestowed us with a better successor for him; we expect him to be so.” The position of caliph also requires the fulfillment of more “traditional” qualities which Abu Bakr has promoted by emphasizing the Al-Qurayshi tribal affiliation that reflects his lineage to the Prophet Muhammad, a PhD in Islamic jurisprudence reflecting his theological credentials, and delivery of the Friday khutbah in July 2014 soon after its caliphate was announced; all of which are traditional qualities and roles of the caliph.

Abu Bakr is not the first leader of this type in the organization. His predecessor, Abu Umar, was very similar in background and style. Outsiders criticized and even ridiculed the selection of Abu Umar, and later questioned the selection of the little known Abu Bakr in 2010, yet repeated use of the selection process demonstrated the group’s firm adoption of this style of leadership as necessary for long-term stability. Put simply, the position makes the man, and the leader is largely followed for the position he holds. The stability inherent in this type of authority stems from the fact that the followers support the leader because of the position and will support the next one as willingly so long as these legal-rational and traditional conditions are satisfied. In contrast, charismatic authority requires constant engagement between the charismatic figure and their followers to maintain legitimacy. Without this contact, those emotion-based bonds of authority may wither. Charismatic leadership also tends to be volatile as they constantly react to the ebbs and flows of history as it unfolds. The Islamic State has a deep appreciation for such problems given its experiences with their founder Zarqawi’s volatility and reputation.

While the Islamic State’s declaration of a caliphate might have been a surprise, it shouldn’t have been. The group had been preparing this ground very carefully. Now that the caliphate has collapsed, it is noteworthy that the authority of the caliph remains in the eyes of its members. Instead of a massive hemorrhaging of people, current estimates of Islamic State fighter numbers remain higher than expected. The caliph’s intervention into serious internal disputes at the highest levels—a risky endeavor for a wanted man—seems to have prevented a takeover by an even more extreme wing of the group. By reshuffling the members of the Islamic State’s consultative council, and sending some of its highest-ranking members into exile, Abu Bakr demonstrated a tremendous extant power over the group. From an external perspective, the Islamic State West Africa province (also known as Boko Haram) recently published a book (translated by Aymenn al-Tamimi) about its history and beliefs, and in it dedicated a section to strongly reaffirm its allegiance to Abu Bakr. In the extended analysis by the current leaders, Abu Bakr is their caliph regardless of the state of the caliphate—largely because of the process of how he was selected and their judgment of the group’s religious doctrines.

Given the emphasis the Islamic State places on its supporters adhering to its manhaj (methodology), maintaining operational and strategic coherence is an important benchmark of its resiliency. This includes ensuring that not only is its propaganda apparatus disseminating official messaging that is pertinent and timely, but also that its supporters are amplifying official messaging and helping to flood media channels with “unofficial” messaging of their own design. The Islamic State even disseminated doctrine to help guide its so-called “media operatives.” Its online supporters play a particularly high-profile role as amplifiers and content creators, but clearly concerns were emerging within the organization that these auxiliaries might inadvertently broadcast and amplify the wrong message. Abu Bakr addressed this danger in his speech last month, and the Islamic State’s Arabic newsletter Al Naba recently offered a framework for guiding this “informal” component of its propaganda apparatus.

Making the Caliph Irrelevant Again

As the Islamic State movement follows its own playbook from the past to weather the current storm, a dogged commitment to its manhaj will be pivotal to ensuring that the next iteration of the Islamic State phenomenon stays true to its origins. After all, maintaining organizational, ideological, and strategic coherence is a more telling criterion for gauging resilience than mere survival at some small level of activity. On this account, Abu Bakr “the caliph” has played an essential role in helping his movement navigate the storms and ride-out the inevitable fluctuations in fortune. With hindsight, the announcement of its caliphate and, with it, a caliph in 2014 was about celebrating the achievement of the impossible, and then using the event to feed future imaginations in the face of what was sure to be an all-out assault. Killing the caliph will have little impact on the cohesion of this mature ideology and organization, at this point in its life cycle. The only way the international community can thwart the Islamic State’s efforts to rise again is to prepare for a much longer campaign than originally envisioned and continue to maintain a collaborative effort in intelligence sharing, counter finance, civil society support, disrupting information technology, and military pressure against the movement as it continues to stabilize. Despite the rhetoric of politicians looking at short-term gains, there will be no magic bullets in this long fight to keep this caliph a man without a kingdom.

About the author:
*Haroro J. Ingram is a senior research fellow with George Washington University’s Program on Extremism and an associate fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT)-The Hague.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI

The European Union announced on Tuesday that it will remain committed to Iran nuclear agreement as long as Tehran complies with the deal.

Speaking to reporters, Margaritis Schinas, the spokesman for the European Commission said there is already a deal that is called the JCPOA (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), unanimously endorsed by the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2231.

“The European Union’s position is clear: we remain fully committed to the Iran nuclear deal as long as Iran implements as it is now confirmed 12 times by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the only (agency) competent to make such an assessment,” Schinas said.

The stance came a day after the US imposed the second phase of its unilateral sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

On May 8, the US president pulled his country out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear deal that was achieved in Vienna in 2015 after years of negotiations among Iran and the Group 5+1 (Russia, China, the US, Britain, France and Germany).

Following the US exit, Iran and the remaining parties launched talks to save the accord.

Trump on August 6 signed an executive order re-imposing many sanctions on Iran, three months after pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal.

He said the US policy is to levy “maximum economic pressure” on the country.

By William Gallo and Jim Malone

Democrats have taken control of the House of Representatives in midterm elections in the United States, while Republicans gained seats that solidify their control of the Senate.

As of Wednesday morning, the Democrats were on track to win at least 26 seats previously held by Republicans, with several races still undecided, which could give them as many as 230 seats in the 435-seat chamber.

Among the winners were several first-time candidates, including two Native American women — one of them openly gay — and two Muslim women, a first in both categories. They will be among the 100 women who will be sworn in when the new Congress takes over in January, another first.

Speaking to a crowd of supporters in Washington Tuesday night, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said, “Thanks to you, tomorrow, there will be a new day in America.”

The veteran California lawmaker, who served as the nation’s first female House speaker from 2007-2011, said the victory was not about Democrats or Republicans, but about “restoring the Constitution’s checks and balances to the Trump administration.” Democrats will now be able to launch numerous investigations of President Donald Trump, including his personal finances and allegations of his presidential campaign’s collusion with Russia to win the 2016 race.

Despite the setback in the House, President Trump issued a self-congratulatory tweet Wednesday morning.

“Received so many Congratulations from so many on our Big Victory last night, including from foreign nations (friends) that were waiting me out, and hoping, on Trade Deals. Now we can all get back to work and get things done!”

“It is a critical check on Trump,” says University of Virginia analyst Larry Sabato. “Big legislation with an ideological tint, left or right, won’t pass for the next two years. Democrats now have the power of subpoena so Trump and his administration can expect to be investigated rather than protected by the House.”

Senate races

In the Senate, Republican challengers handily defeated Democratic incumbents in Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota, while two Republican challengers in Florida and Montana held razor-thin leads as vote counting stretched into Wednesday morning. The race for an open Senate seat in Arizona was also undecided.

In one of the most watched races, Republican Ted Cruz fended off a strong challenge from rising Democratic star Beto O’Rourke to keep his Senate seat in Texas.

And former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, easily won an open Senate seat in Utah. The Mormon-dominated state has embraced Romney, who is himself a Mormon. Romney also helped turn around the scandal-plagued 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

Each of the 435 seats in the House was being contested, as were 35 of 100 Senate seats.

Voter enthusiasm

Precincts across the country reported strong voter numbers for a midterm election.

The New York Times and Michael McDonald of the United States Election Project both estimated national turnout of at least 111 million, far surpassing the 83 million people who voted in the 2014 midterms.

Rebecca Gill, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said voter enthusiasm was the unusual aspect of Tuesday’s election.

“This probably has something to do with some of the rhetoric, particularly from the president. It’s been intended to rally his base, but at the same time, it ends up also rallying the base of the Democrats. It sort of polarizes folks, and it gets more people engaged on both sides,” Gill said

An editorial in the November 7 Philadelphia Inquirer, commenting on the November 4 story it jointly published with the Boston Globe, said the papers found that since 2002 “the leaders of the U.S. Catholic Church are far better at covering up child sexual abuse than stopping it.”

This is factually inaccurate. It is not even remotely true. Since the Dallas reforms were passed by the bishops in 2002, there has been a marked decline in current charges of sexual abuse against the clergy—almost all the allegations that have come forward in the past 16 years are about offenses in the last century.

In fact, just .005 percent of the clergy have had a substantiated charge made against them in the last two years: six allegations were substantiated between July 1, 2016 and June 30, 2017; two were substantiated between July 1, 2015 and June 30, 2016.

Does the Philadelphia Inquirer know of any institution, religious or secular, that has a better record than that?

Moreover, owing to the diligence of New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, former cardinal Theodore McCarrick is no longer in ministry. And just last week, one of Dolan’s auxiliary bishops, John Jenik, stepped down pending a probe of allegations made against him for offenses that took place decades ago. Dolan was responsible for that as well.

Does the Philadelphia Inquirer know of any institution, religious or secular, where its leaders turn in one of their own?

In spite of the progress that has been made, the newspaper has the gall to say that the Church is “incapable of policing itself,” and instead calls on what it terms “professionals—prosecutors who understand the law and know how to adjudicate crimes” to take over.

They had such a person, the former District Attorney of Philadelphia, Seth Williams. But he is now in prison. They also had the former Attorney General of Pennsylvania, Kathleen Kane. But she is now in prison. If anything, Pennsylvania needs to hire Cardinal Dolan to clean house throughout the state. Or they could hire Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput—he doesn’t lack for integrity or guts either.

Even more infuriating is the arrogance of the Philadelphia Inquirer. It says the Church “should turn over its secret archives.” The Church should turn over nothing, not at least until the Philadelphia Inquirer turns over its secret archives on Paul Davies.

Davies was the deputy editorial page editor from 2007 to 2011. Reports surfaced in 2011 that he was fired for running a front-page story in the “Currents” section that detailed what a rip-off the Philadelphia Convention Center was. The newspaper denied the allegation but refused to comment on the matter saying it is “company policy not to discuss personnel matters relative to former employees.” Yet it demands that the Church turn over its files to them!

The Inquirer should open its secret archives on Davies so the public can learn the truth. That he was rehired in 2016 does not resolve this issue: The editorial welcoming him back on August 18, 2016 never mentioned why he left in the first place. We know he threatened to sue the paper in 2011 but we don’t know what happened after that. Why the secret?

Finally, the newspaper argues that state legislators should lift the statute of limitations on crimes involving the sexual abuse of minors. Will the paper implore lawmakers to include the public schools in this legislation? Or will it do what it always does and just favor targeting the Catholic Church?

The Philadelphia Inquirer reeks of hypocrisy.

Contact Sandra Shea, managing editor, opinion: sshea@phillynews.com

The Trump administration’s crippling new sanctions on Iran are now in place. With a presidential meme to warn Iran of what is coming and daily infographics from the State Department, the US is saying: “Enough.”

The drivers of this round of sanctions are multiple. Primarily, Iran’s perfidious behavior around the world, but especially in Arab lands, has reached a new level of threat that must be pushed back. The Gulf states were never happy with the Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran because of their exclusion from the negotiating process. Arab and specifically Arabian Peninsula voices were ignored. With the Trump administration, however, these voices found a home at the highest levels of the White House, with officials who recognize the serious threat that Iran presents not only in the Middle East, but also in the West from nodes in Latin America, Europe and Southeast Asia.

Another critical driver is the residual nature of recent historical memory in Washington, and elsewhere in the country, concerning the 444 day US-Iran hostage crisis in 1979-1981, plus the Iranian bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut in 1983. Sending a clear message to Tehran about intent and resolve, the second round of sanctions started on the 39th anniversary of the start of the hostage crisis.

In addition, other acts of Iranian hostility — assassinations, bombings, drug trafficking and cyberwarfare — in the past 10 years added to the administration’s current push to strangle Iran’s economy at this historic juncture. Tehran’s ability to use its Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) networks from Europe to Latin America to Southeast Asia has helped give the Islamic Republic a global reach for terrorism. Moreover, Iranian-made explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) that killed many Americans in Iraq have only added to Iran’s deadly tradecraft and capability.

These EFPs and their toll on American troops is a driver unto itself. At least an estimated 500 US military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan are directly linked to Iran and its support for anti-American militias. That figure, which in reality is probably much higher given statistical measurement, underscores the controversy surrounding Washington’s now torn-up deal with Tehran. The Iranian-made EFPs first appeared in Iraq in 2005 and for years were the most lethal weapon that US troops faced during the eight-year Iraq War. Unlike the typical improvised explosive devices the US troops encountered, the EFPs used a more sophisticated technology and required more skilled milling to produce. Also known as “shaped” explosives, they used curved copper plates to direct or “shape” the bomb blast. Many EFPs were powerful enough to destroy US Humvees or breach tank hulls.

A final and important driver behind the sanctions is the confrontational discourse within the Beltway and in capitals around the world, including in Europe, about their impact. Reactions to these sanctions come from multiple corners on the world stage, regional outlooks, and divisions within America’s capital.

Naturally, in Washington, advocates for both sides are at each other’s throats trying to one-up each other on the potential impacts and outcomes on the Islamic Republic. America’s dystopia is driving the arguments into a new level of false narratives and loss of expertise, driven by hysteria. Regardless, the bottom line is that the Trump administration is moving forward with anti-Iranian sanctions in order to put the Islamic Republic out of business unless it meets demands that include ending its support for terrorism and its military engagement in Syria, as well as completely halting its nuclear and ballistic missile development.

Reactions to the new round of sanctions moving forward are filled with rhetoric about their impact on average Iranian citizens. Those supporting the Islamic Republic in Europe and elsewhere by not agreeing with the new sanctions are likely to find themselves going along with the program. New alignments in Europe between France, Italy and Germany, and Turkey and Russia, to name just a few, will certainly provoke disdain for the sanctions, but economic interests will trump political goodwill toward the Islamic Republic.

On the other hand, America’s partners against Iran, notably Israel and several Gulf Arab countries, see an opportunity to influence the Islamic Republic’s historical path as an aging leadership begins to die off, while systemic pressures are building and lashing out across the country’s socio-religious landscape. In turn, regime forces are fighting back against this new age of discontent in Iran. Shared mutual interests in terms of Iran’s future means robust support for the Trump administration’s Iran policy is found more outside the US than within. The historical shift in the Middle East and its relationship with the Islamic Republic over Tehran’s behavior is allowing for a coalescence around White House policy.

In the coming months and into next year, the pressure on Iran will continue to draw reactions of various types, including hand-wringing over images and terrified voices that will be projected by the Iranian media. While some may argue that the Tehran government may actually benefit from an excuse to “crack heads” and reorganize the political field, the systemic problems in the theocratic state signal real and significant pressure from the US upon the Islamic Republic. Next year’s 40^th anniversary of the start of the 1979 hostage crisis may be quite telling in terms of the metrics of success of the Trump administration’s second round of crippling sanctions.

Make no mistake: America has rejected Trumpism.

No one seriously expected the Senate to flip, because Democrats had to defend 26 seats in that chamber, compared with only nine held by Republicans.

The real battleground was the House, where Democrats had to achieve a net gain of 23 seats to get the 218 needed for a majority.

They did.

Trump wasn’t on the ballot but he made the election into a referendum on himself.

So Americans turned against House Republicans, who should have acted as a check on him but did nothing – in many cases magnifying his vileness.

The nation has repudiated Trump, but do not believe for a moment that our national nightmare is over.

Trump still occupies the White House and in all likelihood will be there for two more years.

The Republican Party remains in control of the Senate.

Fox News is still Trump’s propaganda ministry. (The line between Fox and Trump, already blurred, vanished completely at his last pre-election rally when Fox hosts Sean Hannity and Jeannine Pirro joined him on stage.)

The American people will be subject to more of Trump’s lies and hate, as amplified by Senate Republicans and Fox News.

Trump can be expected to scapegoat House Democrats for anything that goes wrong. American politics will almost certainly become even meaner, coarser, and uglier. We will remain deeply and angrily divided.

Most worrisome, America still won’t respond to real threats that continue to grow, which Trump and his enablers have worsened – climate change; the suppression of votes, and foreign intrusions into our elections; the most expensive and least efficient healthcare system in the world; and, not least, widening inequalities of income, wealth, and political power.

America will eventually overcome and reverse Trumpism. The harder challenge will be to reverse the reasons Trump and his Republican lapdogs gained power in the first place.

Some blame racism and nativism. But these toxins have poisoned America since the founding of the Republic.

What’s new has been the interaction between them and the long economic slide of tens of millions of working Americans, most of them white and lacking college degrees.

They used to be the bedrock of the Democratic Party, many of them members of trade unions whose strength in numbers gave them an increasing share of the gains from economic growth.

Their long economic slide has generated the kind of frustrations that demagogues throughout history have twisted into rage at “them.”

Meanwhile, most economic gains have gone to the top 1 percent, whose wealth is now greater than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent – giving them enough political muscle to demand and get tax cuts, Wall Street bailouts, corporate subsidies, and regulatory rollbacks. These in turn have created even more wealth at the top.

All were trends before Trump. Yet Democrats failed to reverse them, even though Democrats occupied the White House most of these years (and during four of them controlled both houses of Congress).

Trump has worsened them by slashing taxes on the wealthy and corporations, whittling back the Affordable Care Act, and loosening restrictions on Wall Street.

Jobs may be back but they pay squat, especially compared with the rising costs of housing, healthcare, and education. And they’re less secure than ever. One in five is now held by a worker under contract without any unemployment insurance, sick leave, or retirement savings.

Which presumably is why Trump decided to focus the midterms on hate and fear rather than the economy.

He thereby created a large opening for Democrats aiming for 2020. They can become the party of the bottom 90 percent by creating a multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalition to wrest back control of our economy and democracy.

They would focus on two big things: First, raise the purchasing power of the bottom 90 percent through stronger unions, a larger wage subsidy (starting with a bigger Earned Income Tax Credit), and Medicare for All.

Second, get big money out of politics through public financing of elections, full disclosure of all sources of political funding, an end to the revolving door between business and government.

Democrats shouldn’t try moving to the “center.” The center no longer exists because most Americans are no longer on the traditional “right” or “left.”

The vast majority of Americans are now anti-establishment, and understandably so.

The practical choice is either Trump’s authoritarian populism backed by the moneyed interests, or a new democratic populism backed by the rest of us.

The direction couldn’t be clearer. It should be the Democrat’s hour.

The Kremlin doesn’t believe that there has been any decline in the popularity of Vladimir Putin or his regime “as a whole,” Tatyana Stanovaya says. Instead, it thinks any appearance of declines in support for officials is their fault or something the regime can easily manage.

If those around Putin do conclude that there has been a decline, the Russian analyst says, they may artificially seek to boost in via media campaigns or alternatively they may tighten the screws still further, eliminating the last remnants of any real competition in the political system (carnegie.ru/commentary/77646).

The latter variant is more likely, she argues; and either is far more probable than one that some in Moscow are talking about – “the liberalization of the regime.” That is because for “a significant part of the Russian elite, especially the siloviki, that is viewed as capitulation before the West.”

The Putin regime, she argues, was not prepared and is not now prepared for declining ratings of itself. Instead, it blames any appearance of that on the bad decisions of particular officials or even as a natural result of the extremely unpopular pension reform. The first can be replaced, and the second will ultimately be accepted.

Those attitudes have governed the Kremlin’s response to losses in the gubernatorial elections and to demands for policy changes, Stanovaya says. This means that governors now aren’t “the subjects of the political process but part of the faceless mechanism of corporate administration,” something that could make the current problems even worse.

The oft-repeated thesis that “’there is no catastrophe’ sums up the general attitude in the Presidential Administration, Everything is built around the conviction that Putin is the only choice and that his rating cannot seriously fall;” and that in turn means that those in his entourage are increasingly concerned only about him and not about anything else.

There is a logic here, Stanovaya says. “An alternative to Putin can only be a successor of Putin.” And consequently, she continues, if there is more evidence of a decline in his or the system’s popularity, “the kremlin will see in this everything except the political weakness of the president.” It cannot face that because it cannot admit that it is possible.

That in turn means that the Kremlin is unlikely to eliminate the basic features of the electoral system lest it appear weak but instead seek to cope with occasional defeats by a focused cadres policy. And that attitude is true for the political system as a whole. The Kremlin now isn’t planning on any major changes.

If any changes do take place, Stanovaya says, “this will be connected with the process of the transition of power and not with any adaptation to the declining ratings of support.” This isn’t “stupidity or shortsightedness,” but rather the result of an almost exclusive focus on Putin as the source of power and legitimacy.

Via cadres policy, the Kremlin will largely rid itself of politicians and put administrators in their place, people who aren’t interested in or skill at political activities. They won’t be like the Surkovs or Volodins of the past but rather faceless people who will shine only with the reflected light of Putin. Intrigues will decline because such people won’t engage in them.

The Putin regime, Stanovaya concludes, is working on the formation of a corporate state “where the interests of the corporation are automatically classed as those of the people and the population itself loses its last political rights.” Only if the regime becomes indecisive will this change, and that will only happen if there are serious challenges from below.

Turkey’s European Union membership accession process should continue, said the European Commission’s chief spokesman Wednesday.

“The collegial decision, the position of the college is that the accession negotiations [of Turkey] should be maintained,” Margaritis Schinas told a daily press briefing in Brussels.

Referring to a statement this week by Johannes Hahn, the EU commissioner for European neighborhood policy and enlargement negotiations, saying the EU should pursue “a new direction” with Turkey in lieu of membership, Schinas said that the commission’s official position can be “expressed by the President [Jean-Claude] Juncker only.”

At the EU-Turkey summit meeting this March in Varna, Bulgaria, both Juncker and Donald Tusk, the European Council president, stressed the reform process and good-neighbor relations of Turkey.

“These are vital to keeping open the channels of communication with the EU and Turkey, and being able to stay on the course of this process,” Schinas said.

Original source

Pakistani entertainment channel Geo TV has apologized to the country’s Christian minority over a teaser for a new drama series that was said to be promoting religious conversion.

It has also withdrawn the trailer and reassured Christians that Maria Bint e Abdullah will not hurt religious sentiments.

The apology came during a meeting between Christian leaders and Geo TV executives at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Karachi on Oct. 31.

Geo TV recently released the trailer showing Maria, the daughter of a Christian mother and a Muslim father. It begins with images of Sacred Heart Cathedral in Lahore, the crucified Jesus and Maria crying with a rosary in her hand.

The promo provoked a backlash from Pakistani Christians who felt that the drama would show that Christianity was inferior to Islam.

A protest was organized by the Christian community under the umbrella of the Pakistan Catholic bishops’ National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP) on Oct. 29 in Karachi.

At the meeting Father Saleh Diego, vicar general of Karachi Archdiocese and director of NCJP Karachi, told Geo TV representatives that many non-Muslim girls in Pakistan were being forced to change religion, with one underage Hindu girl recently kidnapped by a Muslim and forced to marry him.

“These types of TV dramas create hatred and pain in the hearts of minorities in Pakistan,” he added.

Father Mario Rodrigues, rector of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, said the recent production of dramas showing Christian girls marrying Muslims was “a bad move and a ruthless act.”

Kashif Anthony, coordinator and secretary of NCJP Karachi, reminded the delegation that whenever someone insulted Muslims or Islam anywhere in the world, Pakistani Christians and other minorities stood beside Muslims to protest and support Islam as a religion of peace.

“We applaud and congratulate all the Muslims of the world on the recent decision of the European Court of Human Rights in which it is said that defaming the holy Prophet Muhammad exceeds the permissible limits of freedom of expression,” he said.

“In the same way, we demand that all the faiths and religions in Pakistan among Muslim majorities should be respected and given full rights to living and practicing their faiths.”

Geo TV executives issued a joint statement in which they said they felt the pain of the Christian community over the teaser for the TV drama.

Managing director Abdullah Kadwani assured the entire Christian community that the issue would be resolved. The company will soon send a letter to the Christian community to clarify that the drama does not contain anything which may offend religious sentiments.

“Geo will further ensure that the entire drama complies with the approved code of conduct and does not hurt any religious sentiment, especially in relation to emblems and their usage,” the company said.

By Hadi Azmi

The defense phase of the trial of two Asian women charged with murdering the half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un at a Kuala Lumpur airport will start Jan. 7, a Malaysian judge ruled on Wednesday, allowing a defense attorney time to heal from surgery.

The trial was set to resume on Nov. 1, but was delayed because Gooi Soon Seng, who is leading the team defending Indonesian citizen Siti Aisyah, underwent pancreatic surgery.

“He is recovering well,” Hisyam Teh Pok Teik, who represents co-defendant Doan Thi Huong, a Vietnamese citizen, told BenarNews outside the courtroom.

The women are charged with the murder of Kim Jong Nam, who died after being exposed to the toxic VX nerve agent at Kuala Lumpur International Airport 2 on Feb. 13, 2017.

On Aug. 16, after the prosecution had rested its case, presiding Judge Azmi Ariffin ruled that both suspects must present their defense. He found that the prosecution had presented enough evidence for the trial to go on.

On Wednesday, the judge read out the new dates for the trial.

“The new dates will be on Jan. 7, 8, 9 and 10, 2019, beginning at 9 a.m.,” he announced.

He set four more court dates in January, two in February, eight in March and six in April. Siti will be given 10 days to present her defense and Doan the next 14.

Siti and Doan, who were in the courtroom on Wednesday, appeared calm during the short hearing.

In addition, the judge set Dec. 14 to hear a request from Siti’s lawyers that prosecutors produce statements from eight witnesses.

The witnesses include Dessy Meyrisinta and Raisa Rinda Salma, who were Siti’s roommates in Kuala Lumpur and may have been present when police raided their room.

Another name on the list is Tomie Yoshio, a Japanese friend of the estranged half-brother of Kim Jong Un. During the prosecution’s case, the lead investigator identified Yoshio as the Malaysian who provided his personal chauffer for Kim Jong Nam, who had expressed fear for his life six months before he was killed.

Meanwhile, Doan’s lawyer said he planned to call up to six citizens – Malaysians and foreigners – for her defense.

“We have one or two foreign witnesses that might be a bit difficult to persuade to come. We will do our best to persuade them and we hope we are able to get them to come here,” Hisyam said, adding Doan plans to testify.

By Mark Najarian

(RFE/RL) — U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has resigned as the country’s chief law enforcement officer at the request of President Donald Trump, throwing the future of the special counsel’s Russia investigation into uncertainty.

The White House said Sessions resigned in a letter to Trump on November 7 and that the president had accepted his resignation as chief of the Justice Department — a move that immediately raised concerns from Democrats, who called for protection for the probe conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi called it a “blatant attempt” to undermine the Russia probe, while Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer tweeted that “clearly, the president has something to hide.”

The Justice Department has the ultimate authority over Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election and interactions between Trump associates and Russian officials.

Russia denies meddling in the election, and Trump denies any “collusion” with Russia.

Sessions, a Republican and former Alabama senator, has been the focus of public attacks by Trump, who criticized him for recusing himself from the Russia investigation because of his role on the Trump campaign team before becoming attorney general.

Trump announced in a tweet that Sessions’ chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, will become the new acting attorney general. Whitaker, a former Republican politician, has publicly called for limits on the Mueller probe.

As Sessions’ deputy, Rod Rosenstein has been the authority over Mueller’s probe, but multiple media outlets are reporting that he has officially been removed from oversight of the investigation.

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said that the acting attorney general — meaning Whitaker — is in charge of “all matters” within the department, including the Russia probe.

Democratic Representative Jerry Nadler, who will likely become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee — which has congressional oversight over the Mueller probe — immediately responded to Sessions’ resignation by demanding an explanation for the change.

“Americans must have answers immediately as to the reasoning behind” Trump’s move to remove Sessions, he said.

“Why is the President making this change and who has authority over Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation? We will be holding people accountable,” he tweeted.

Schumer called it “paramount” that Mueller’s status be protected by the new attorney general.

The senator said he found the timing of Sessions’ departure “very suspect” and suggested it would cause a “constitutional crisis” if Trump made the move as a “prelude” to limiting the Russia investigation.

He called on Whitaker to recuse himself from the Russia probe because of previous comments about the investigation, echoing calls from other top Democrats.

In her tweet, Pelosi, who is likely to become House speaker under the new Democratic-controlled Congress, wrote that “It is impossible to read Attorney General Sessions’ firing as anything other than another blatant attempt by Donald Trump to undermine & end Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation.”

Earlier, at a White House news conference, Trump said the Mueller investigation was not good for the United States.

“It should end, because it is very bad for the country,” Trump told reporters.

When asked if he would fire Mueller, as some critics have feared, Trump said, “I could have ended it any time I wanted, [but] I didn’t.”

“I could fire everybody right now, but I don’t want to stop it because, politically, I don’t like stopping it.”

He said he was “not concerned about anything with the Russian investigation, because it is a hoax.”

“They’re wasting a lot of money, but I let it go on. I could end it right now.” he added.