Fox News host asks how mask-wearing became ‘political’ — after his network spent months politicizing it
HOPING IT WOULD PROD FOX AND FRIENDS GUEST TO BLAME THE DEMOCRATS

July 2, 2020 By Matthew Chapman


On Thursday, in the wake of President Donald Trump announcing that he actually likes the way he looks in a protective face mask, Fox & Friends co-anchor Steve Doocy bemoaned the fact that America ever let mask-wearing become a political controversy. “For some reason, over the last couple of weeks, a month, masks have become political,” said Doocy.

Writing for The Daily Beast, Justin Baragona and Maxwell Tani pointed to a key source of politicization of masks — Doocy’s own network.

“Since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. months ago, Fox News hosts and guests have repeatedly criticized face coverings—either by openly mocking them or by claiming mandated mask-wearing is an infringement on personal freedom, particularly by Democratic officials eager to control the population,” said the report. “During an April 24 broadcast of Hannity, for instance, guest host Mike Huckabee and Fox News contributor Trey Gowdy — both former Republican elected officials — groused about a then-new Houston mandate that would fine residents up to $1,000 if they didn’t wear a mask in public, calling it an example of local government ‘trampling the constitutional rights of American citizens.'”

In another incident, “primetime star Laura Ingraham — who was actually an early and vocal proponent of mask-wearing — insisted that donning face masks had become a way for Democrats and liberals to enforce incessant panic. ‘Now Rush Limbaugh made a great point, as he always does, on the radio the other day and he said the virus itself as it weakens and states start reopening, the media that have been selling panic, panic, panic for weeks and weeks and weeks, they have fewer images to sell their hysteria to justify continued lockdowns,’ she said on the April 29 broadcast of The Ingraham Angle. ‘But the masks, well they’re kind of a constant reminder. You see the mask and you think, you are not safe. You are not back to normal. Not even close.'”

Fox News’ criticism of masks tracked well with President Donald Trump’s previous refusal to be seen wearing them. Two weeks ago, he even suggested state masks requirements were part of a plot to make him look bad.

Irate Neil Cavuto Confronts GOP Congressman After He Claims ‘Usefulness’ of Fauci and Birx Has ‘Expired’

By Leia IdlibyJuly 2nd, 2020

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) clashed with Fox News host Neil Cavuto in a tense Thursday interview over Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx’s handling of the coronavirus, saying the two have caused “panic and hysteria” and have “expired”

“I think that Birx and Fauci, have gone well past their — the’ve expired. Their time of usefulness has expired,” Biggs told Cavuto. “What they do is when the president comes out and makes a policy, because he is the president and he is the policymaker, when they make these statements that they make, they engender panic and hysteria and undermine what the president is doing. That’s what’s critical.”

Biggs, who called earlier in the day for the White House Coronavirus Task Force to be Andy, faulted Fauci for being “all over the ballpark” when it comes to wearing a mask amid the coronavirus pandemic, noting that he’s also been inconsistent in talking about the return of sports in the United States.

Cavuto accused Biggs of failing to handle the coronavirus in his state and pointed out the spikes in coronavirus cases in Arizona, adding that the state has the highest coronavirus caseload in terms of percentage and the highest hospital bed use.

Biggs claimed he could refute Cavuto’s claims but admitted his state had the highest number of cases on a per capita basis. “Those are mostly coming from the age 20 to 44 brackets,” he said. “We have also had over the past three weeks a reduction in hospitalizations by 50, excuse me, almost 100 percent. From 11.5 percent, down to 5.6 today. If you take a look at the case fatality, rates, we have moved from over 4 percent, just about 30 days ago now to right at 2 percent.”

Cavuto noted that despite the spike in cases in Arizona, Biggs has encouraged President Donald Trump to dismantle his coronavirus commission because he opposes what Birx and Fauci have to say about the virus.

“Doesn’t he refer to them as the health experts? Doesn’t he have a commission because he defers to them as the health experts?” Cavuto replied. “And they are citing worries and they are citing also that we can get this under control. It needn’t be a panic if people should do what they’re supposed to be doing. But isn’t that what doctors do, look at people’s lives?”

Biggs also questioned the last time Fauci treated a coronavirus patient, prompting Cavuto to ask the same question of Biggs. He noted he isn’t a health expert, so he doesn’t have to handle patients, inciting Cavuto to reply, “But you’re telling the ones who are to get out, get off the commission, ‘We don’t need you.'”

Watch above, via Fox News.    mediaite.com RIGHT WING MEDIA SITE 

Arizona Republican Accuses Fauci of Undermining Trump as His State Reports Record Spike in Coronavirus Cases

BY EMILY CZACHOR ON 7/2/20 NEWSWEEK

Arizona Congressman Andy Biggs suggested Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx's warnings about the national COVID-19 outbreak have compromised President Donald Trump's reopening efforts on Thursday.

Arizona is one of several states—including Texas, California and Florida—where health officials have confirmed rapidly increasing case counts and subsequent hospital admissions since the start of June, following the termination of its stay-at-home order in mid-May. Parts of Maricopa County, the region reporting Arizona's highest concentration of virus diagnoses, fall within Biggs' congressional jurisdiction.

In a statement released by Biggs' office, the Republican congressman pointed out that Fauci and Birx's comments "continue to contradict" the economic recovery procedures that Trump prioritizes. Biggs argued the White House's COVID-19 Task Force, of which the doctors are leading members, should be disbanded as a result.

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"As our economy is restored, it is imperative that President Trump is not undermined in his mission to return our economy to greatness," Biggs said in Thursday's statement, referencing the U.S. Department of Labor's latest report decreased nationwide unemployment rates compared to previous weeks.

"Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx continue to contradict many of President Trump's stated goals and actions for returning to normalcy as we know more about the COVID-19 outbreak," the congressman continued. "This is causing panic that compromises our economic recovery. We can protect our most vulnerable from the COVID-19 outbreak while still protecting lives and livelihoods of the rest of the population. It's time for the COVID-19 task force to be disbanded so that President Trump's message is not mitigated or distorted."


Newsweek reached out to Biggs' office and the NIAID for comments but did not receive replies in time for publication.

Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has warned about the consequences of hasty reopening plans in states reporting spikes in new cases and hospitalizations related to the novel coronavirus. Fauci addressed the relationship between loosened restrictions and elevated virus transmission during a hearing held by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Tuesday.


 

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci addresses reopening efforts during a June 30 Senate Committee hearing. On Thursday, Arizona Congressman Andy Biggs suggested Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx's warnings about the novel coronavirus outbreak were compromising economic recovery plans. 

AL DRAGO/POOL/GETTY IMAGES

In a testimony before the committee, he urged leaders in states seeing an uptick in COVID-19 cases to consider more moderate reopening strategies as well as ongoing virus mitigation practices.

"We are now having 40-plus thousand cases a day. I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 a day if this does not turn around," Fauci told the committee. "It could get very bad."

The Arizona Department of Health Services confirmed the state's highest single-day increase in COVID-19 cases to date on Wednesday with 4,878 new diagnoses. According to the department's data, more than 87,400 people have tested positive for the novel virus and 1,757 have died across Arizona as of Thursday afternoon. Maricopa County has diagnosed more than 54,750 of the state's total infections.

Arizona's overall COVID-19 case count has increased by more than 65 percent over the last three weeks, with the health department's latest report indicating a statewide test-positivity ratio of 12.5 percent.

Exempted from the Caesar Act, the Kurdish-led ‘Autonomous Administration’ negotiates with the US to continue dealing with the Syrian regime

Officials from the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria discuss measures related to the Caesar Act in a meeting in Hasakah province’s city of Amouda, 6/18/2020 (AA).

By Mohammad Abdulssattar Ibrahim

June 30, 2020
المقال باللغة العربية


AMMAN — Shortly before the Caesar Act went into effect, the United States announced the exemption of the region controlled by the Kurdish-dominated Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AA) from the sanctions imposed by the new law. It “will not target the regions of North and East Syria or the Syrian people,” Deputy Special Envoy of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS Ambassador William Roebuck said after a meeting with Kurdish officials in Syria on June 16. “Rather, it will target the Syrian regime only,” Roebuck added.

The AA, however, seeks to obtain an additional exemption, allowing it to deal with Damascus “since we were surprised by the mechanism of the law’s implementation,” Salman Barodo, president of the AA’s Commission on Economy and Agriculture, told Syria Direct.

“In practice, it is not possible to apply an exception to the [Autonomous] Administration’s areas from the sanctions, since they are part of Syria and we use the Syrian pound,” said Barodo. There is “economic, social and geographic intertwinement with inner Syria [the regime-held territories],” he added, “and dealings with Damascus cannot be entirely separated when it comes to importing and exporting basic and necessary goods.”

The Caesar Act, which imposes American sanctions on states, entities and individuals dealing with the Syrian government, went into effect on June 17. Afterward, negotiations were revealed between the AA and the Americans to allow the former to deal with Damascus without being subject to sanctions.

“Until now, there is no clear [American] mechanism to exempt the Autonomous Administration from the Caesar sanctions,” said economics expert Chalang Omar.

Omar told Syria Direct that any such mechanism could be expected to provide “direct financial and technical support from the American government, or by way of western governments in the [Global] Coalition [against Daesh (ISIS)], and perhaps also through companies or non-governmental organizations implementing development and infrastructure projects.”

In this context, the co-chair of the Executive Council of the AA, Berivan Khaled, said after the meeting with Roebuck that the “American party assured its continuous support of the Autonomous Administration on economic and political levels.”

Omar did not rule out the possibility of “the AA being granted exemptions or given concessions from the American administration to deal with the Syrian [regime-held territories],” particularly since interaction between the two areas “goes on under the eyes of the Coalition and everyone.” In the case that “America insists on imposing sanctions on internal collaborators,” said Omar, “then they will have to find alternative outlets, markets and sources for goods if they are serious about ensuring the stability of the AA areas.”

Preventive measures

A few days before the Caesar Act came into force, the AA announced that it had formed an economic crisis unit aimed at “avoiding the economic sanctions imposed on Syria under the Caesar Act and improving the standard of living for the workers of the Autonomous Administration,” according to a statement by Salwa al-Sayyed, co-president of the AA’s Commission on Finance.

Before that on May 28, as the Syrian lira fell sharply, The AA announced measures to prevent the exit of US dollars from its territories. The move aimed to control the exchange rate while continuing to use the Syrian lira—in contrast to areas controlled by the opposition and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in northwestern Syria, which has started replacing the Syrian lira with Turkish lira.

Still, both of the moves made by the AA must be accompanied by the“monitoring of food supplies, establishing self-sufficiency projects, developing the economy and raising the level of individual income,” according to Barodo. On June 18, the AA announced a 150 percent increase in the salaries of its workers.

Omar also expressed support for the decision not to replace the Syrian lira with foreign currency because the AA does not have enough foreign currency—like the dollar or the euro—and does not want to use “the currency of neighboring countries, such as Turkey or Iraq, [as that] would leave the AA at the mercy of their economies.”

However, Omar doubts that the moves by the AA “will make a difference in controlling the exchange rate, because this task exceeds the capabilities of the AA. It is the role of the central bank in any country, and the Administration does not have the monetary policy tools that would allow it to perform this task,” he said. Nonetheless, this step aims to “preserve the Administration’s balances of hard currencies in order to conduct its economic policy and secure its need for imported goods.”

In contrast, Suleiman Khalil, Vice President of the Qamishlo (Qamishli) Provincial Council, believes that “controlling the exchange rate can be achieved by exporting and bringing in hard currency,” and that the AA is “able to make a difference in the exchange rate between its region and the other regions in Syria.”

The presence of the “Semalka border crossing [with Iraqi Kurdistan], through which we export some goods, including agricultural products and livestock, and is an outlet that generates dollars for the region,” he explained to Syria Direct. “Additionally, [there is] freedom to deal in dollars in our areas because of supply and demand, and supply in the AA areas is greater than demand, which regulates the exchange rate.”

Pending the outcome of negotiations with the US side regarding an exemption from the Caesar Act sanctions, the AA still has some tools in its pocket to face the repercussions of the law, particularly“ oil and natural gas resources, vast agricultural areas and dams,” said Omar, “providing there is optimal investment.”

This report was originally published in Arabic and translated into English by Mateo Nelson. It reflects changes made on 01/07/2020 at 12:30 pm.


Authors


Mohammad Abdulssattar Ibrahim
Reporter

Trump’s Record on Foreign Policy: Lost Wars, New Conflicts and Broken Promises

by MEDEA BENJAMIN - NICOLAS J. S. DAVIES

JULY 3, 2020 COUNTERPUNCH

On June 13, President Donald Trump told the graduating class at West Point, “We are ending the era of endless wars.” That is what Trump has promised since 2016, but the “endless” wars have not ended. Trump has dropped more bombs and missiles than George W. Bush or Barack Obama did in their first terms, and there are still roughly as many US bases and troops overseas as when he was elected.

Trump routinely talks up both sides of every issue, and the corporate media still judge him more by what he says (and tweets) than by his actual policies. So it isn’t surprising that he is still trying to confuse the public about his aggressive war policy. But Trump has been in office for nearly three and a half years, and he now has a record on war and peace that we can examine.

Such an examination makes one thing very clear: Trump has come closer to starting new wars with North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran than to ending any of the wars he inherited from Obama. His first-term record shows Trump to be just another warmonger in chief.

A Bloody Inheritance

First, let’s look at what Trump inherited. At the end of the Cold War, US political leaders promised Americans a “peace dividend,” and the Senate Budget Committee embraced a proposal to cut the US military budget by 50 percent over the next ten years. Ten years later, only 22 percent in savings were realized, and the George W. Bush administration used the terrorist crimes of September 11 to justify illegal wars, systematic war crimes, and an extraordinary one-sided arms race in which the United States accounted for 45 percent of global military spending from 2003 to 2011. Only half this $2 trillion spending surge (in 2010 dollars) was related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the US Navy and Air Force quietly cashed in a trillion-dollar wish list of new warships, warplanes, and high-tech weapons.

President Barack Obama entered the White House with a pledge to bring home US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, and to shrink the US military footprint, but his presidency was a triumph of symbolism over substance. He won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize based on a few speeches, a lot of wishful thinking, and the world’s desperate hopes for peace and progress. But by the time Obama stepped down in 2017, he had dropped more bombs and missiles on more countries than Bush did, and had spent even more than Bush on weapons and war.

The major shift in US war policy under Obama was to reduce politically sensitive US troop casualties by transitioning from large-scale military occupations to mass bombing, shelling, and covert and proxy wars. While Republicans derisively dubbed Obama’s doctrine “leading from behind,” this was a transition that was already underway in Bush’s second term, when he committed the United States to completely withdrawing its occupation troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Obama’s defenders, like Trump’s today, were always ready to absolve him of responsibility for war crimes, even as he killed thousands of civilians in air strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria and drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, including the gratuitous assassination of an American teenager in Yemen. Obama launched a new war to destroy Libya, and the United States’ covert role in the war in Syria was similar to its role in Nicaragua in the 1980s, for which, despite its covert nature, the International Court of Justice convicted the United States of aggression and ordered it to pay reparations.

Many senior US military and civilian officials deserve a share of the guilt for America’s systematic crimes of aggression and other war crimes since 2001, but the principle of command responsibility, recognized from the Nuremberg principles to the US Uniform Code of Military Justice, means that the commander in chief of the US armed forces, the president of the United States, bears the heaviest criminal responsibility for these crimes under US and international law.

Is Trump Different?

In January 2017, as Donald Trump prepared to take office, US forces in Iraq conducted their heaviest month of aerial bombardment since the “shock and awe” bombing during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This time, the enemy was the Islamic State (IS), a group spawned by the US invasion of Iraq and Obama’s covert support for Al Qaeda–linked groups in Syria. Iraqi forces captured East Mosul from the Islamic State on January 24, and in February, they began their assault on West Mosul, bombing and shelling it even more heavily until they captured the ruined city in July. A Kurdish Iraqi intelligence report recorded that more than forty thousand civilians were killed in the US-led destruction of Mosul.

Trump famously summed up his policy as “bomb the shit out of” the Islamic State. He appeared to give a green light to the military to murder women and children, saying, “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.” Iraqi troops described explicit orders to do exactly that in Mosul. Middle East Eye (MEE) reported that Iraqi forces massacred all the survivors in Mosul’s Old City.

“We killed them all,” an Iraqi soldier said. “Daesh (IS), men, women, children. We killed everyone.” An Iraqi major told MEE,

“After liberation was announced, the order was given to kill anything or anyone that moved . . . It was not the right thing to do . . . They gave themselves up and we just killed them . . . There is no law here now. Every day, I see that we are doing the same thing as Daesh. People went down to the river to get water because they were dying of thirst and we killed them.”

By October 2017, Raqqa in Syria was even more totally destroyed than Mosul in Iraq. Under Obama and Trump, the United States and its allies have dropped more than 118,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq and Syria in their campaign against the Islamic State, while US HIMARS rockets and US, French, and Iraqi heavy artillery killed even more indiscriminately.

The wholesale destruction of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and other major cities in Iraq and Syria cannot be legally justified under the Hague and Geneva Conventions, any more than the destruction of entire cities in past wars, like Hiroshima or Dresden. Despite the total lack of accountability, it is clear that American bombs, rockets, and shells killed thousands of civilians in each city and town captured. Obama and Trump share responsibility for these terrible crimes, but they are an escalation of the systematic war crimes the United States has committed since 2001 under three presidents.

In Afghanistan, as the Taliban gradually takes control of more of the country, Trump has resisted the temptation to send in tens of thousands more US troops, as Obama did, but he instead approved a major escalation in US bombing that made 2018 and 2019 the heaviest and deadliest years of US bombing in Afghanistan since 2001.

Trump has shrouded his war-making in even greater secrecy than Obama. The US military has not published a monthly Airpower Summary since February 2020, nor official troop deployment numbers for Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria for nearly three years. But the United States has dropped at least twenty thousand bombs on Afghanistan since Trump came to power, and there is no evidence of a reduction in bombing under the peace agreement the administration signed with the Taliban in February. Some US troops have been withdrawn under that agreement, but the remaining 8,600 are still being replaced as their tours end, keeping US troop strength at about the same level as when Obama left office.

Trump made a great show of repositioning US troops in Syria in October 2019, leaving the United States’ Kurdish allies in Rojava to confront the Turkish invasion alone. But there are still at least 500 US troops in Syria, and Trump deployed 14,000 more US troops to the Middle East in 2019, including to a new base in Saudi Arabia.

Trump has vetoed every bill passed by Congress to disengage US forces from the Saudi war in Yemen and to halt the sales of US-made warplanes and bombs, which the Saudis use to systematically kill Yemeni civilians. He created a new conflict with Iran by pulling out of the nuclear deal, and in January 2020, he capriciously flirted with a full-scale war on Iran by ordering the assassination of Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi military commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in Iraq.

Trump’s bizarre decision to move the US Embassy in Israel to a plot of land that is only partly within Israel’s internationally recognized borders — and partly on Palestinian territory that Israel is illegally occupying — quite literally took US international relations into uncharted territory. Then Trump unveiled a so-called peace plan based on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ambition to annex the rest of Palestine into a “Greater Israel” with vastly expanded — but still unrecognized and illegal — international borders.

Trump has also backed a coup in Bolivia, staged several failed ones in Venezuela, and targeted even the United States’ closest allies with sanctions to try to prevent them from trading with US enemies. Trump’s brutal sanctions on Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Cuba are not a peaceful alternative to war, but a form of economic warfare just as deadly as bombs, especially during a pandemic and its accompanying economic meltdown.

A Boon to the Merchants of Death

Once the large-scale US military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan ended under Obama, the US military budget fell to $621 billion by 2015. But since then, military spending for procurement, research and development (R&D), and base construction has risen by 39 percent. This has been a huge windfall for the Big Five US weapons makers — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics — whose arms sales revenues rose 30 percent between 2015 and 2019.

The 49 percent increase to more than $100 billion for R&D on new weapons systems in 2020, part of the enormous $718 billion Pentagon budget, is a down payment on trillions of dollars in future revenue for the merchants of death unless these programs are stopped.

The pretext for Trump’s huge investment in big-ticket, high-tech weapons, including a new Space Force with a $15 billion price tag for 2021, is the New Cold War with Russia and China that he officially unveiled in the 2018 National Defense Strategy. Obama was already trying to shift away from the United States’ lost counterinsurgency wars in the greater Middle East through his “Pivot to Asia,” the US-backed coup in Ukraine, and the expansion of US land and naval forces encircling Russia and China.

But Trump has the same problem as Obama as he tries to wriggle out of the “forever wars”: how to bring US troops home without making it obvious to the whole world that this chronically weak imperial power and its extravagant multitrillion-dollar war machine has been defeated everywhere. Even the most expensive weapons still only kill people and break things. Establishing peace and stability require other kinds of power and legitimacy, which the United States does not possess and which cannot be bought.

Before President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office in 1961, he remarked, “God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do.” Trump is obviously as dazzled by chests full of medals and whizz-bang technology as every other president since Eisenhower, so he will keep giving the Pentagon everything it wants to keep spreading violence and chaos around the world.

Just as Obama co-opted and muted liberal opposition to Bush’s wars and record arms spending, Trump has co-opted and muted conservative opposition to Obama’s wars. Now, with the outpouring of protests against domestic police repression and calls for defunding the police, there is a growing chorus to also defund the military. That is certainly not a call Trump would listen to, but would Joe Biden be more receptive to public calls for peace and disarmament than Obama and Trump?

Probably not, based on his long record in the Senate, his roles in authorizing war on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, his close ties to Israel, and his failure to rein in US war-making as vice president, despite personally opposing Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan. Biden is also trying to outdo Trump in his opposition to China. Like Obama and Trump, Biden would be mainly a new manager and salesman in chief to sell the military-industrial complex’s latest strategy for war and global military occupation to the corporate media and the American public.

We will not rescue our country from the iron grip of the military-industrial complex by picking the lesser evil and hoping for the best. That has not worked for sixty years, since Eisenhower defined the problem so clearly in his farewell address.

On the other hand, a civil society coalition, led by the Poor People’s Campaign and including CODEPINK, is calling for a $350 billion cut in the military budget to fund human needs and public services, and representatives Barbara Lee, Pramila Jayapal, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have introduced a resolution in Congress to do just that.

At the margins, this campaign could have more impact on Biden than on Trump, but not if people sweep up the bunting on election night and think their job is done, as liberals did with Obama and anti-war conservatives did with Trump. Unless and until the American public applies overwhelming pressure to dismantle the US war machine and its futile bid for “full spectrum” global dominance, the US military will keep losing wars on its own terms, bleeding us dry (metaphorically), and bleeding our neighbors overseas dry (literally), until it loses a major war with mass US casualties or destroys us all in a nuclear war.

The US peace movement has always had huge passive public support, but it will take mass collective action, not just passive support, to secure a peaceful future for our children and grandchildren. Public outrage and activism are starting to take away the license to kill black and brown people with impunity from the militarized RoboCops on our streets. The same kind of collective political action can defund and disarm the US military and take away its license to kill black and brown people everywhere.

Building a new anti-war movement that is connected to the domestic anti-police struggle is the only thing that can rein in US militarism. Because reelecting a president with as much blood on his hands as Trump — or simply transferring the command of the war machine to Joe Biden — certainly won’t.

This piece first appeared in Jacobin.

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More articles by:MEDEA BENJAMIN - NICOLAS J. S. DAVIES

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the US-Saudi Connection. Nicolas J. S. Davies is a writer for Consortium News and a researcher with CODEPINK, and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq

Challenging the French Republic’s Color-Blindness

by PHILIPPE MARLIÈRE 
JULY 3, 2020 COUNTERPUNCH

Photograph Source: Mike Shaheen – CC BY 2.0

George Floyd’s killing by a policeman in Minneapolis reverberated across the world in an unprecedented fashion. On all continents, young people took to the streets to pay tribute to Floyd. They protested against police brutality which they regarded as ‘systemic’. Citizens expressed their anger at the racial profiling of Black people by the police.

Those American scenes had a strong echo in France for two major reasons. Firstly, racialised populations were the most affected by Covid-19. Secondly, the young racialised could identify with George Floyd as they experience the same discriminating practices as their American counterparts.

There is strong anecdotal evidence that racialised populations were the most affected by Covid-19 in France and in the United Kingdom. In the UK, ethnic statistics were used to back up the claim, whereas in France it was only an assumption as no such statistics are available. People facing the greatest economic deprivation experienced a higher risk of exposure to Covid-19. Existing poor health put them at risk of more severe outcomes when they contacted the virus. Being poorer, living in overcrowded housing, poor health and access to health services largely increased the chances of contracting coronavirus. A British survey pointed to a strong correlation between those factors and the high rates of infection among the BAME population. What is more, BAME people were overrepresented among key workers (nurses, couriers, supermarket cashiers); the most exposed and affected workers during the pandemic.

The French media reported on the situation in the UK, but showed no interest in what was going on in France. Rare articles in the French press noted that in Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest French department, was the area which had the largest racialised population, many of them being key workers. Furthermore, the BAME population were also on the receiving end of the government’s most draconian lockdown measures. BAME people in Seine-Saint-Denis were three times as much arrested and fined as white people. Police brutality against ethnic minorities in poorer suburbs also made the headlines.

Why is there so much reluctance to address the question of racial discrimination in France? It can be best explained by the fact that French citizenship is granted to individuals in abstracto. To be a French citizen is to be part of a national community no matter what people’s ethnic or religious background is. France, which is deemed an ‘assimilationist’ country, differs from the ‘pluralist’ nations such as the United States or the United Kingdom in as much as it is theoretically indifferent to its citizens’ personal identity. The French State interacts with individuals, not with communities.

This is one of the legacies of the French revolution which broke with the class-ridden Ancien Régime by positing that all Men are born equal. It has now become one of the most ingrained features of French republicanism. As a result of this, it is illegal to implement any kind of positive discrimination action in education, housing or on the job market. A 1978 law regarding ‘data files, processing and individual liberties’ explicitly prohibits the collection and processing of personal data that reveals directly or indirectly, the racial and ethnic origins, or religion, of any persons.

Contrary to the liberal-multiculturalist way of thinking which reckons that this information is vital to identify and measure the extent of racial discrimination, France’s republican ideology thinks to the contrary: to collect ethnic-related data on individuals is allegedly ‘racist’ because it posits the unscientific notion that ‘races exist’. In truth, the lack of statistics makes it virtually impossible to judge the level of discrimination of Muslims and other ethnic minorities, since those populations are invisible in the rhetoric and data of the government and of the media.

The conditions were therefore ripe for the French youth to take to the streets and protest against police’s brutality, its arbitrary powers and racism. George Floyd’s killing gave young racialised that momentum. There have been several young people’s deaths under police custody. In a very large number of situations, the cases against policemen were dismissed and no sanction were taken against the perpetrators of violent acts against members of the public. The existence of institutional racism within French police is well documented. France has been sentenced several times by the European Court of Human Rights for breach of human rights such as torture or mistreatment. The Cour de Cassation – France’s highest court – condemned the State for ‘wilful misconduct’ in its racial profiling procedures. In a damning report, Jacques Toubon, the Ombudsman, singled out the ‘systemic’ racial profiling of youngsters subjected to repeated identity checks. The most high-profile case concerns Adama Traoré, a 24-year-old Black Frenchman who, according to his family and medical experts, was asphyxiated under the weight of three police officers in 2016.

Assa Traoré, Adama’s sister, set up the Justice and Truth for Adama committee, which has been demanding the indictment of the police officers involved in the arrest. Four years on, those three men are still active members of the police. On 2nd and 13th June, the Adama Traoré committee respectively gathered together 20,000 and 120,000 people in Paris despite a media blackout. No antiracist movement had ever managed to get off the ground in such spectacular fashion without any money or institutional support. The historic gathering in Place de la République showed that George Floyd’s death had struck a chord with young racialised people. They mostly demanded the prohibition of all the deadly techniques of arrest: the chokehold, strangling or kneeling on people’s backs.

The resurgence of anti-racist demonstrations – something relatively unheard of since the 1980s – was met by incredulous politicians. As ever when it comes to race, the French establishment was in denial. Most reverted to the tired argument that to talk about ‘race’ was ‘racism’. They argued that France had to uphold its ‘republican universal’ values, the best defence against racism and division. In a televised address to the nation, President Macron failed to pay tribute to George Floyd. In a thinly veiled critique of the Adama Traoré committee, he labelled the demonstrators of Place de la République ‘separatist’ and ‘communautaristes’ (a very pejorative word which implies that people reject the laws and traditions of the republic, and cultivate instead their own ‘community-driven’ values and lifestyles).

In a country which traditionally prides itself for rejecting all forms of ‘Americanisation’, the rise of antiracist activism was portrayed by some as an attempt to import American debates into French society. The use of a new repertoire of concepts to describe forms of racist discrimination was described by some as ‘political correctness gone mad’. Yet, the antiracist camp has been scoring important points: notions such ‘white privilege’, ‘racialised people’, ‘State racism’, ‘decolonial thought’ have lately been gaining traction and recognition in the public debate.

Under the impulse of the Justice and Truth for Adama committee, the fight against racism may be at a turning point in France. Never since the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism, antiracism had taken centre stage in French politics. What is more, this new antiracist activism relies on the grassroots of the movement. These activists are young, ethnically diverse and intellectually ready to challenge some of the myths of ‘republican universalism’.

More articles by:PHILIPPE MARLIÈRE

Philippe Marlière is a Professor of French and European Politics at University College London (UK). Twitter: @PhMarliere

700+ Advertisers Boycott Facebook Over Hate Speech. Can The Social Network Change?

The Stop Hate For Profit campaign has garnered massive support in only a few weeks.

 But analysts say their dent in the social network’s profits won’t be enough.

By Kavish Harjai
Published on 7/2/2020 at 2:22 PM

You won’t see Ben & Jerry’s or Legos ads on Facebook in July.

These companies join more than 700 others that have said they will halt advertising on Facebook for at least a month starting July 1, according to an Anti-Defamation League spokesperson. The boycott is a part of the Stop Hate For Profit campaign and calls on Facebook to better handle hate speech and misinformation on its platform.

A coalition of civil rights groups, including the ADL, NAACP, and Color of Change among others, launched the Stop Hate For Profit campaign on June 17.

“The social media company is amplifying the messages of white supremacists, permitting incitement to violence, and is failing to disrupt bad actors using the platform to do harm,” the group said in a press release.

Some of the brands participating in the boycott, such as consumer mega-corporation Unilever, have said they’ll pause advertisements on all social media, not just Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram. Unilever said it’ll halt all such advertisements until the end of 2020 in part because of a “polarized election period in the U.S.”

Companies including Starbucks and Coca-Cola have pledged to a 30-day pause on Facebook advertisements, but didn’t officially endorse the Stop Hate For Profit campaign.

Facebook’s ad dollars made up nearly 99% of the company’s $70 billion global revenue last year. But several experts and reports predict that the month-long boycott will hardly affect Facebook’s bottom line. Those observers have argued that most of Facebook’s ad revenue comes from small and medium-sized businesses, and that a boycott would need to involve thousands of advertisers to be effective.

A CNN business analysis concluded that most of Facebook’s top 100 advertisers, including Walmart and American Express, are not participating in the boycott. One Wall Street firm said the boycott will impact less than 5% of Facebook’s overall revenue.

Since the boycott was announced, Facebook has tried to placate some of its critics with policy updates. On June 26, Zuckerberg said the company would restrict ads that claim people of a certain race and ethnicity “are a threat to the physical safety, health or survival of others.” He also announced that Facebook would affix “newsworthy” labels to posts that the company would otherwise take down, marking a departure from its previously intransigent stance on labeling objectionable content that it says has news value. This policy could affect politicians’ and world leaders’ posts more consequentially than the company’s actions have in the past.

In May, Facebook came under intense scrutiny for not taking action on a post by President Trump that said “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The post was in reference to nationwide unrest after the police killing of George Floyd. Twitter, on the other hand, labeled Trump’s post with the same language, saying the tweet violated the platform’s rules on “glorifying violence.”

The Stop Hate For Profit coalition said on June 29 that Facebook’s recently announced policy changes are insufficient.

“Businesses did something incredible last week: they got Facebook’s attention,” the coalition said. “Sadly, none of these initial steps will make a significant dent in the persistent hate and racism so prevalent on the largest social media platform on the planet. That’s why we need to keep up the pressure.”

The coalition directed participating companies to ask Facebook 10 questions, such as whether the company will hire executives with civil rights expertise to evaluate its products and if the company will remove public and private groups “dedicated to hate or violent conspiracies.”

On July 1, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s VP of Global Affairs and Communications, wrote in AdAge that the company “does not profit from hate.” Clegg said the company invests billions of dollars in “people and technology to keep [the] platform safe.” The VP also said that in the first quarter of 2020, the company ”took action against” 9.6 million pieces of content. But Clegg acknowledged that with 100 billion messages being sent on the platform every day, some objectionable content falls through the cracks. He used a similar defense during a June 28 appearance on CNN, to which NYT opinion writer Charlie Warzel responded in a July 1 piece.

“Mr. Clegg’s defense is also an admission: Facebook is too big to govern responsibly,” Warzel wrote. “There will always be more work to do because Facebook’s design will always produce more hate than anyone could monitor. How do you reform that? You can’t.”

In private, Zuckerberg is reportedly unmoved by the ad boycott. Reporting from The Information revealed that the CEO told Facebook staff that the company will not change any policies “because of a threat to a small percent of our revenue, or to any percent of our revenue.”

“I tend to think that if someone goes out there and threatens you to do something, that actually kind of puts you in a box where in some ways it’s even harder to do what they want because now it looks like you’re capitulating, and that sets up bad long-term incentives for others to do that [to you] as well,” Zuckerberg reportedly said in private remarks on June 26.

Zuckerberg will meet with the boycott’s organizers next week, according to Reuters.

While Joe Biden’s campaign has aggressively pressed Facebook on content policies — most recently about the company’s June 26 updates — it will not participate in the boycott. However, Bill Russo, a campaign spokesman, told CNN that the campaign “shares the concerns” of the companies that are participating.

"But with less than five months until Election Day, we cannot afford to cede these platforms to Donald Trump and his lies,” Russo said. “Our campaign will be present every day to get our message in front of every voter to ensure Trump doesn't get another four years."
Since April 2019, the Biden campaign has spent less than $27 million on Facebook ads.

The Trump campaign, which has spent nearly $10 million more on Facebook ads than its rival campaign, will also not participate in the boycott.