Exhibition: Counting dead women is a fine art – ‘Manslaughter’ by DinahVagina

21 Nov 2021 

Carrying the Weight. (2020) ceramic quilted cape; Album (2021). Images by Dinah

Sarah Morgan Jones

‘Manslaughter’ is an exhibition of work about domestic violence and the murder of women, by Carmarthenshire based artist DinahVagina, presented to mark ‘White Ribbon Day’ on 25 November.

Since the days of the swing-o-meter, we have become well used to infographics, and as technology has developed and the fine art of spin came into legitimate use, we also know that statistics can be made to say whatever people want them to say, in any format that suits.

When we see graphs and pie charts and fancy 3D app-based stats modelling, or figures per hundred thousand or percentage or per hundred grams, we can often be forgiven for thinking Bullshit Baffles Brains

When it comes to counting women who have been murdered by men, the figure we most often hear is three women a week, every week. For years.

And that’s just in the UK. Three women a week. So, Monday, Wednesday, Friday every week, say, a woman is murdered by a man. Who counts these women?

The ONS counts, but it doesn’t hold data on the sex of the victim by the sex of the suspect. It does however show that more men are killed either by their children, their friends, or a stranger than by an ex/partner. It also shows that more women are killed by their ex/partner than by any other person.

Karen Ingala Smith counts, first recording the data in her Counting Dead Women blog and then with Clarissa O’Callaghan, developing that into the Femicide Census in 2015.

Jess Phillips MP reads from this list in parliament every year on International Women’s Day, meaning Hansard has to count.

And Carmarthenshire artist, Dinah Guilfoyle, known as DinahVagina, counts. She counts them and she honours each and every woman’s life taken by a man, by incorporating the woman into an infographic work of art. ‘Manslaughter’ is her latest exhibition of this beautiful, powerful and thought provoking project.

Weapons of choice

When I met Dinah at the gallery at Volcano Theatre on High Street, Swansea, I was not sure what to expect. Accompanied by Ali Morris, who has been working in the domestic and sexual violence sector for ever and a day, I definitely feel like the novice in the room.

At first glance I see a trench coat on a tailor’s mannequin which passport sized photographs stitched on to it with a red silk X.

I see rows of parcel tags tied to a from a wall hanging, with a handmade ceramic button on each tag, holding a passport sized photo in place. That represented the women who were killed in 2015.

Counting: 2015

I see many more tags, adorned with faint neat writing, hanging from a tablecloth on an occasional table, the legs of which have been replaced with huge chef’s knife, a hammer, a cricket bat and a lawn edging spade. That represented the women killed in 2018 and the legs symbolised some popular weapons of choice for that year.

And I see a full-sized staircase made of soft white fabric, stuffed full like a mattress, but sewn into treads, and decorated with what I later discover to be appliqued love letters.

The staircase was a response to a photograph of the scene that met police officers when they attended a domestic violence incident. On every one of the bare wooden treads a knife stood point down, fixed in each side, as if thrown by a skilled knife thrower.

They had been. He had thrown them there to terrify and threaten his partner. The police said a life was saved.

“You can lie on that if you want. It’s very comfortable. All my work is to there to be touched and handled, I encourage it, in fact. It’s tangible, tactile.”

Indeed, everything I saw made me want to touch it. Each work radiated tactility, and homeliness and beauty, and made me want to put my face close enough to perhaps inhale.

This had a soothing effect, calming my nerves, slowing my movements, and although I was increasingly saddened or shocked by each name or representation, I also felt I was seeing each of them.

I was moving away from the ‘three women a week’ mindset to a ‘hello, you and you and you’ one.

‘Not another isolated incident’, ceramic (2018).

“men kill themselves and each other more than they do women, but the intersection of male violence and women is brutal”

Data gathering is a constant background activity for Dinah, she’s always tuned into it, although she makes the pieces in one go.

I wonder how it makes her feel, with this kind of information in her consciousness constantly. She has after all been creating these pieces for the best part of a decade.

“I seem to have a vaguely professional detachment and I intersperse work about violence with work relating to female sexual agency.”

In an online profile she says she “wants to change the way the world perceives women, and the way women perceive themselves, to encourage female agency and refute objectification.”

In these representations, we see ‘woman,’ but we do not see her in isolation. We see her and what was done to her and who did it to her. We see that her place in the world was ended because of the who and the what.

Dinah tells me: “It’s about language… If we talk about a woman who was battered… It’s all about her and the perp has disappeared.

“If you say Bruce beat Jane then you have the active party, the act and the victim. If you isolate her and only speak of her, she starts to be seen as responsible for everything that befalls her.”

Jumper (Counting); Lobster.

“Lobster: you would not choose to dive into the boiling water, but you can find yourself in it. Things may turn from good to bad by a thousand tiny steps”

Away from the main exhibition (of which there is far more than I can describe here), there is a dimly lit room on the door of which there is a warning to approach with the understanding that we cannot un-know things once we know them.

Inside that room are two mighty tomes, one called Album, which contains over 1000 small portraits representing women murdered by men in the UK between 2012 and 2018. The other is called Brutal and it explores the data behind the images.

Each book is big and heavy and textured and wrapped in beautiful fabric.

These books are not graphic or gory, they do not objectify or glorify, but they are devastating, and in the company of Dinah and Ali, I felt safe and connected in the face of what I could not now ‘un-know’.

The exhibition is called Manslaughter and is in place to mark White Ribbon Day which is on 25 November and extends for a further 16 days. It is a campaign to end male violence against women once and for all.

This year’s message is #AllMenCan emphasising, in the wake of the murder of Sarah Everard – when women’s experience of male violence became part of the mainstream conversation, prompting governmental policy reviews and debate – how men can take action and make a stand, and make the ‘White Ribbon Promise’ never to commit, excuse or remain silent about male violence against women.

The exhibition runs until 3 December at Volcano Theatre

Details of White Ribbon Campaign can be found here

Israel uses settler violence as 'tool' to take Palestinian land: B'Tselem

Israel, as policy, 'fully supports and assists' settler intimidation tactics that often result in the loss Palestinian farm and pasture land, says Israeli rights group

Israeli soldiers stand near a Palestinian vehicle defaced with Star of David graffiti, believed to be vandalised by Israeli settlers, in al-Bireh in the occupied West Bank on 9 November (AFP/File photo)

By MEE staff
Published date: 14 November 2021

 
The Israeli government has been using settler violence as "a major informal tool" to take over Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank, a leading Israeli rights group has found.

B'Tselem, in a report released on Sunday, said that Israel uses two main methods to confiscate Palestinian land in the West Bank: official annexation via its judicial system and unofficial acts of intimidation and violence carried out by its settler population.

'Sometimes, soldiers actively participate in the settler attacks or look on from the sidelines'
-B'Tselem report

"The state fully supports and assists these acts of violence, and its agents sometimes participate in them directly," the Israeli rights group said in its report.

"As such, settler violence is a form of government policy, aided and abetted by official state authorities with their active participation."

According to the report, Israeli settlers have taken over 11 square miles of farm and pasture land in the occupied West Bank during the past five years.
'They broke my leg'

Using five case studies to illustrate how continuous, systemic violence meted out by settlers is part of Israel’s official policy, B'Tselem said Israel is using settler violence to drive a "massive takeover" of Palestinian land.

One of the case studies documented an illegal outpost known as Ma’on Farm, which was erected illegally in the southern West Bank and consists of about one square mile of land. Settler have harassed, beaten and otherwise intimidated the Palestinians that have historically used the land for pasture and farming, resulting in confiscation.

Jummah Ribii, a 48-year-old shepherd from al-Tuwani village, told B’Tselem that settlers had been for years working to push his family off the farming that sustains them. In 2018, settlers attacked and beat Ribii, leaving him with severe injuries.

"They broke my leg, and I had to spend two weeks in hospital and continue treatment at home," he told the rights group. "I had to sell most of our sheep to cover the cost of treatment."

According to B'Tselem, Israel legitimises settler violence both by legalising their informal land grabs and by failing to even attempt to prevent or prosecute such violence.

Israel: Settler attacks on Palestinian olive harvest 'most dangerous in years'Read More »

"The military avoids confronting violent settlers as a matter of policy, although soldiers have the authority and duty to detain and arrest them. As a rule, the military prefers to remove Palestinians from their own farmland or pastureland rather than confront settlers, using various tactics such as issuing closed military zone orders that apply to Palestinians only, or firing tear gas, stun grenades, rubber-coated metal bullets and even live rounds," B'Tselem found.

"Sometimes, soldiers actively participate in the settler attacks or look on from the sidelines," it continued.

Moayyad Besharat, Programs and Project Manager at the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, told MEE that settler attacks against Palestinians have increased this year, particularly during the olive harvest season, which runs between October and November.

The olive harvest is a lifeline for some 80,000 to 100,000 Palestinian families in the occupied West Bank. This year's season has been the hardest in recent memory, according to Besharat, who accompanies farmers during harvest as an observer.

Echoing B'Tselem's report, Besharat underlined the difficulty Palestinians face in attempting to combat settler attacks and land grabs, given the frequency in which the settlers are accompanied by army escorts.

 
'It is state violence'

While Palestinians regularly, document and report settler attacks - both legally and via tools such as books, research reports and documentaries - the Israeli government almost never takes legal action against settlers, B'Tselem's report said.

"Israel’s inaction continues after settler attacks on Palestinians have taken place, with enforcement authorities doing their utmost to avoid responding to these incidents," the group wrote.

'When the violence occurs with permission from the Israeli authorities... it is state violence'

- B'Tselem report

"Complaints are difficult to file, and in the very few cases in which investigations are in fact opened, the system quickly whitewashes them. Indictments are hardly ever filed against settlers who harm Palestinians and when they do, usually cite minor offenses, with token penalties to match in the rare instance of a conviction."

In all, the lack of government action has translated into de facto approval, the group found.

"State violence – official and otherwise – is part and parcel of Israel’s apartheid regime, which aims to create a Jewish-only space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea," it said.

"The combination of state violence and nominally unofficial violence allows Israel to have it both ways: maintain plausible deniability and blame the violence on settlers rather than on the military, the courts or the Civil Administration while advancing Palestinian dispossession. The facts, however, blow plausible deniability out of the water: When the violence occurs with permission and assistance from the Israeli authorities and under its auspices, it is state violence. The settlers are not defying the state; they are doing its bidding."

This article is available in French on Middle East Eye French edition.

China is not committing genocide in Xinjiang



on November 20, 2021
By Iveta Cherneva

Genocide committed by the Chinese government in the Chinese province of Xinjiang is a commonplace narrative that gained speed over the past year or so, and it deserves closer examination. Genocide is the highest crime in the international crimes category, which itself is the highest category of crimes. Genocide accusations should never be made lightly, yet the word genocide creeps in everywhere in relation to Xinjiang – in the mainstream media, in formal accusations at the highest level by various governments, in academic and Twitter debates, and in the American government propaganda machine.

On its border with Afghanistan, China faces Uighur jihadists who are affiliated with Al Qaeda. Hundreds of Uighur jihadists fight with ISIS in Syria and across the region. Uighur jihadists are a part of the global jihad movement. It’s the same people that the US government fought after 9/11. Yet, the US government, in fact, is more than happy to stoke the radicalization forces in Xinjiang, so that the Chinese government cracks down on the population even more, and the US government can point the finger to a cruel, authoritarian regime committing genocide.

To answer the question whether China is committing genocide, it has to be acknowledged that many things are going on in Xinjiang: counter-terrorism against Uighur jihadists, fighting a separatist movement and sentiments, resettlements and deportations, fear-based and fear-inducing crackdown on the local population, detention in camps, political repression, cultural and religious pressure, unjust persecution of innocent people, and many other things that are in-between all that, and perhaps a lot more that we in the West might not be aware of.

What’s missing from the analysis of the genocide narrative is the element of the intent to destroy the group – the decisive element that makes genocide very difficult to prove, uniformly, time after time. You might remember that the genocide case at the International Court of Justice against Serbia showed that there was genocide committed in Srebrenica, and the state was guilty of not preventing and addressing it, and for not punishing the criminals. It could not be proven that the state itself committed genocide, even in that clear-cut example where it was proven that genocide took place. That’s as close as we ever got to seeing what a genocide case would look like in the court room, and the standard indeed is very high. This is not knit-picking or just semantics – this is the center of gravity in the international crime of genocide.

Hitler’s genocide against the Jews had the intent to end them as a group – full extermination, so that they no longer exist. That’s a clear-cut case of genocide in the legal sense, not just anecdotally to denote something very horrible. Turkey’s genocide against the Armenians during the First World War has also been recognized by the American government. Saddam gassing the Kurds is similar – he wanted to destroy and get rid of the Kurds as a group, so that they didn’t exist in Iraq.

What’s happening in Xinjiang can be compared to the Japanese internment camps after Pearl Harbor. It was not genocide directed to exterminate the Japanese population in the US because the US government hated Japanese people and wanted to end them as a group. Instead, it was over the top, heavy-handed suppression, repression and revenge on people from the same group as the military enemy. It was a way to make sure that people from the enemy ethnic group won’t pose a threat, as the US was fighting Japan externally. I think it’s safe to say that the Chinese regime does not intend to destroy the Uighurs as a group – it’s carrying out a number of systematic human rights violations against the population in order to suppress them, scatter them and diffuse the movement and the descent, not to destroy them and exterminate them as a group.

States are always very careful when they utter the word genocide. You might remember that there was a lot of hesitation at the UN level to pronounce the genocide in Darfur as genocide. The reason was that once you make the determination that the highest of the highest international crimes is taking place, the UN and the international community have to step in. So, there are situations where the assessment errs on the lower side, failing to brand a genocide genocide. Other times, countries err on the opposite side – they exaggerate a human rights situation into genocide in order to tout the horn for political reasons. The Biden administration pronouncing the situation in Xinjiang genocide in 2021 is a clear example of that, and in time, history will also judge the US government’s assessment as an error. But that doesn’t matter because the US government needs the genocide narrative, now, in the context of hardening the Cold War rhetoric against China.

Jeffrey Sachs argued recently in Project Syndicate that the genocide accusations against China are unjustified, and I agree. That doesn’t mean that nothing is happening there. It simply means that the highest of the highest international crimes is not taking place.

You have to take a look at the US government’s treatment of the issue on the practical level. The US government hasn’t admitted any Uighur refugees over the past years. Generally, Chinese refugees seeking asylum are not accepted into the US. Also, zero Uighurs were accepted in the United States, even though they were designated by Biden himself a priority refugee group in 2021, and the Biden administration claims genocide is taking place.

There is a reason for that, and it’s not a practical or logistical one in the sense that it must be close to impossible for Uighurs to apply for refugee status and escape the country – there are many Uighurs outside of China who would gladly try, and people from far worse and more difficult places apply and come to the US as refugees. It is also not the case that accepting Chinese refugees would be very rude to China. The US government has already accused China of genocide – I don’t think it can get ruder than that. Rather, the US government knows that there are hundreds of Uighurs fighting with ISIS in Syria and across the region, and they will be the first to apply, if the US government started taking in Uighurs. The US government knows that really well. That’s why it’s not opening up the refugee program to Uighurs, even if formally, the Uighurs are a priority refugee group for Biden.

The zero number simply shows that the US government is itself not convinced. It knows very well that hundreds from the group are engaged in jihad and it will be difficult to determine who is who. The US government itself fears this Chinese minority group and it doesn’t want to open its doors even to a small number for the worst, clear-cut cases of persecution. In the same time, the US government scooped up and accepted indiscriminately thousands of Afghan refugees in 2021, without any vetting. So there is something much bigger behind the zero number of refugees fleeing genocide. The US government itself is not buying its own narrative, aware of the reality on the ground.

In terms of what can be done to help the situation of the Uighurs in China, you can’t make terrorists not want to be terrorists, you can’t make people who want to separate from China not want that, and you can’t make a government not crackdown on a group of people. What can be done, however, is to not support Uighur terrorist groups in and outside China, and to prevent a military escalation of the situation, which is something that the US government could be entertaining as an option, behind the scenes. There is nothing worse for innocent people from the same ethnic group than a government facing an actual terrorist or military threat.

With jihadist groups in the region, and around and inside Xinjiang, the most important priority for the international community right now is that the situation doesn’t grow into actual military hostilities, or worse, a civil war that draws in all kinds of forces. After Syria, the global jihadist movement could be eyeing Xinjiang to be next.

The heartwarming story of Uighur jihadists


on November 19, 2021
By Iveta Cherneva

In the wake of 9/11, the US government scooped up all the terrorist networks and made an assessment of which ones were a threat to America. The prisoners held in Guantanamo were of the jihadist Islamic militant type. It’s not like the US government, in order to help other governments, filled Guantanamo with random, latent secessionist movements from around the world – Quebec, Catalonia, the IRA in Ireland, or the Tigray in Ethiopia. You wouldn’t find any of them in Guantanamo. The Guantanamo profile was clearly that of the Islamic militant jihadist that poses a threat to America.

Guantanamo was not a charity project where governments from around the world could dump and keep their separatists. There was a shared counter-terrorism interest between the United States and China, specifically in the area of combating Uighur jihadists, and that’s not a story that can be erased.

There were 22 Uighur jihadists held in Guantanamo, in total. Uighur jihadists were and still are the China-oriented spinoff of Al-Qaeda. Their organization, the East Turkestan Independence Movement (ETIM) was formally listed as a terrorist organization by the US Treasury Department and the US State Department during the war on terror. ETIM is still on the UN Security Council’s list of sanctioned for terrorism entities. The Uighur jihadists stayed on the Security Council’s list after a recent review of their status was completed in November, 2020. ETIM is also a part of the UN report on the status of Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Very recently, in July 2021, the UN said that the Uighur jihadists group ETIM has several hundred fighters in Afghanistan on the border with China, and that they are affiliated with Al-Qaeda, even though the US government de-listed them from its terrorist organizations list in 2020 and has argued that they no longer exist. This was a purely political move by the US government that does not reflect the reality on the ground, and signifies a shift that the American public is expected to follow.

Just after 9/11, in 2002, Uighur jihadists plotted a terrorist attack on the US Embassy in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. At the time, the Washington Post said: “The U.S. Embassy in Beijing said today there is evidence that an obscure Muslim organization fighting Chinese rule in the western province of Xinjiang has been planning a terrorist strike against the U.S. Embassy in Kyrgyzstan”. That marked the first time China and the US shared a common terrorist enemy. That same year, the same terrorist group (ETIM) shot dead a Chinese diplomat in the same city.

The Uighur jihadists threatened the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing; they are responsible for political assassinations, bombings and wide-spread, clear-cut terrorism of substantial scale. Uighur jihadists perpetrated a terrorist attack in Thailand in 2015, killing 20 people in a tourist resort. The same group of Uighur jihadists successfully carried out a suicide car-bomb attack on the Chinese Embassy in Kyrgyzstan in 2016, 14 years after the US Embassy there shared the same risk. You didn’t hear about more plots against America by the Uighur jihadists because the US government went after them right away: some went to Guantanamo; others were scattered.

The US State Department reported in 2002 that ETIM was a terrorist organization with over 200 acts of terrorism committed in the 1990s. China did not start making things up only after 9/11, just to fit in the US counter-terrorism narratives and priorities in order to get rid of uncomfortable critics of the regime. China was already experiencing a big, very real terrorism threat of the same kind the US faced in the 2000s. It was the same enemy.

Something as big as a terrorism plot against a US Embassy would have definitely counted in a time when even borrowing the Quran from a library was followed. If put through the ordinary legal system, a foiled plot on a US embassy could give you 15-20 years in jail or less, and then you’d be out, or maybe you would just walk if the judge didn’t like the source of the evidence. If you were “only” training with Al Qaeda and Bin Laden without an actual plot, that would also give you only several years in jail, or no jail time at all, if the judge didn’t like the source of the evidence. That’s the kind of things Guantanamo was created to prevent: a place to keep “the worst of the worst” where the US government didn’t have to think about the regular legal system. Current Attorney General, Merrick Garland, in fact, was one of those judges back in the days of the Guantanamo court wars, who ruled to release Uighur jihadists on the basis of over-reliance on evidence from the Chinese government. If the Chinese are saying it, they can’t be terrorists, was the argument there, so they had to be released. With the parents-as-terrorists DOJ memo by Garland and the recent confirmation that the FBI’s counter-terrorism unit indeed puts red flags on parents as potential terrorists in 2021, one has to be reminded that Garland rarely gets it right in the area of terrorism. More often than not, it’s exactly the other way around. Jihadists can leave, parents can come in.

There is an attempt right now to reverse the narrative of the Uighur jihadists, and the audience is the American public. That push is relatively new and emerged in the US mainstream media only over the past 1-2 years, in parallel with the narrative of the Uighur genocide committed by China. The reason is simple: you can’t have it both ways. Americans can’t feel compassion for the Uighurs and hate China, if they are constantly reminded the uncomfortable facts that the Uighur jihadists were actually together with Bin Laden in Tora Bora, they lived in a village provided by Al Qaeda and trained in weapons and terrorism tactics for Bin Laden. It’s just that their direction was different: mostly against China. They ran away together from the American bombardments of Al Qaeda in Tora Bora. They were sought after by the Americans, the same way the Americans searched for Bin Laden for 10 years. There was bounty on their heads. 22 Uighurs were held in Guantanamo for many years and were released only after a decade. In Guantanamo, Uighurs confessed right away to their activities and their links to Al Qaeda. The ETIM was listed as a terrorist organization by the US government in 2002, after the US government reviewed several organizations proposed for terrorism listing by the Chinese government, and concluded there was evidence only for them, dismissing the other organizations proposed by the Chinese. The US government wasn’t indiscriminately accepting requests by countries to help them with their problematic groups. Just after 9/11, in 2002 the group organized the plot against the US Embassy. The plot was foiled.

When the facts are so damning, the US mainstream media certainly has a problem. These facts show that China was not just making it up, looking for ways to exploit the US counter-terrorism mania of the 2000s when everything was about the war on terror and, in the haste, the US government could have been easily misled. The Uighurs as jihadists presents a very clear challenge to the spin factory of the liberal media right now. The attempt to reverse the narrative of the Uighurs as jihadists over the past 1-2 years takes the nuanced analysis angle to the level of parody. I’ll walk you through some of it.

A recent CNN investigation claims that the Uighurs jihadists held in Guantanamo were mostly economic migrants who left China in a search of a better life and they had nowhere else to go but Bin Laden’s Tora Bora. They have no idea how they found themselves in the Al Qaeda village, they were in the wrong place, at the wrong time. They were not aware of what Bin Laden was doing. Now, years after leaving Guantanamo, they are just men looking for love and family. The CNN story is that the Uighur jihadists were never really terrorists, just “dreamers” with guns. They used weapons only because that was the cultural tradition in the mountains – not as terrorists or something. The terrorist training camps in Tora Bora under the umbrella of Al Qaeda and bin Laden was not actually terrorism training, they were using weapons only casually, not in a determined way. The Uighur jihadists didn’t join Bin Laden as terrorists; it’s just that there was nowhere else to go. When the American bombardments of Tora Bora started, it was very scary for them. They ran around the caves looking for food like refugees. When they were captured by the Americans in Pakistan, they felt “cheated” and tricked. How could they do this to them? That wasn’t nice of the Pakistanis at all. Their dreams were shattered after all the suffering experienced in running away from the Americans bombardments. Actually, going to America and Guantanamo was better than going back to China for them. They were impressed with the level of cultural awareness demonstrated by the Americans in Guantanamo that surprised the Chinese that visited Guantanamo. To you and me, from the point of view of our standards, it could look like the American government was torturing in Guantanamo, but the Uighur jihadists really preferred the American prisons to ordinary life in China, despite “some mistakes” on the part of the Guantanamo management. The narrative is mind-boggling and you wonder how the American public can stomach that at all.

It gets better. At Atlantic story of the same kind claims that the fact that the Uighur jihadists told the US government right away what they were doing, stated their affiliation with Al Qaeda and Bin Laden, and explained their terrorism training activities, meant that they can’t really be terrorists, if they weren’t trying to hide it. If what they themselves confessed was so damning, then they couldn’t have been terrorists, and that had to be excluded from the evidence. It was sad that they were “incriminating” themselves by being so forthcoming. If they confessed to it, that was just a sign that they were honest people and they can’t be terrorists. The Guardian, recently in 2020, also joined The Atlantic line and claimed that if the men incriminated themselves, the interrogations had to be discredited. And anyways, right now it all has to be about the Chinese detainment camps in Xinjiang anyways, so you can’t have actual Uighur jihadists uncomfortably messing up the narrative. The Guardian presses that ETIM is an organization designated as a terrorist organization only by China, skipping that the designation was virtually uniform – the US government, the UN Security Council, the UN report on the status of Al Qaeda and ISIS, the Canadian government, and more. You can really tell that these facts are quite annoying to the liberal media, and it is really messing up their stories.

The CNN rather gullible narrative ends with a criticism of Canada, which is also repeated by The Guardian: Canada won’t let in three Uighur jihadists, former Guantanamo detainees. The liberal media narrative wants you to see them simply as men looking to be reunited with their families, but the Canadian government hypocritically stands in the way of love. Hypocritically – because, as CNN states, Canada is against the Chinese crackdown and detainment of people in Xinjiang but won’t let in Uighur jihadists, former Guantanamo detainees. That, in fact, is the most rational approach to the issue a government can have.

The Guardian pushed the same story with the title “It breaks my heart”, also blaming Canada for not letting them in, after their families moved to Canada.

The Atlantic article pushed the same narrative, claiming that the Chinese government somehow tricked and deceived the American government that these Al-Qaeda affiliated, Tora Bora residing, Guantanamo-held terrorists were terrorists. This was only Chinese propaganda by an authoritarian regime. The article admits that the Chinese experienced over 200 terrorist attacks by that group, but here the nuanced analysis kicks in. These events were separate and isolated, instead of arising from one place of coordination, so this wide-spread terrorism wave can’t be terrorism. That pattern is exactly what terrorism of this kind looks like, in fact: loose, ideologically-driven networks without a direct chain of command. You don’t need one place of coordination to prove that terrorists are terrorists. The article also submits that a lot of terrorist attacks that China experienced were actually falsely branded as terrorism, citing small-scale incidents and attacks that would right away fall under the mainstream terrorism narrative, if the same happened in Western Europe. The Atlantic narrative also pushes the argument that terrorism is used only as an excuse by the Chinese, that’s not the real reason why they are after these networks, as if it could get more serious than that. And most importantly for the American audience, the Atlantic analysis claims that the Uighur jihadists were never anti-American “enemy combatants”, even though the author cites an article by the Council on Foreign Relations that mentions the foiled terrorist plot on the American Embassy in 2002, which was a central event for the US government. But that doesn’t count because it didn’t happen, the plot was foiled. The group was rather local, The Atlantic argues now, and was not a part of the international jihad. They were, however. ETIM’s objective was the creation of a fundamentalist Muslim state called “East Turkistan”, which was supposed to cover many countries in the region – something like ISIS’s idea for a caliphate, but for the Turk ethnicity across the region. In terms of operations, Uighur operations definitely had an international reach – whether across countries in the region, by threatening the international Olympic Games, and even as a terrorist attack on a tourist resort going as far as Thailand.

So, these are the narratives that various liberal corners are trying to push: the version of the warm, fuzzy, innocent terrorists who were just misunderstood. If there is one area where US mainstream media can’t sell their narratives about “demonizing”, “scapegoating” and “dog whistling” to the American public, that’s with Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists. But they will still try. Reading these articles, you have to wonder: what’s the agenda there.

After their release from Guantanamo, Uighur jihadists were dispatched to Albania, Switzerland and Slovakia and some Latin American countries. The question is whether the American government has leverage over these former Guantanamo detainees, and whether they will join the terrorist networks operating against China. We don’t know what the terms of release of these jihadists were and whether they are not sleeping cells that could be unleashed upon China at some point. The radicalization of Xinjiang by the US government with the aim to create trouble for the Chinese government is one of the reasons the US government invaded Afghanistan, as I argued previously.

You have to love the way the US government interprets US support for terrorism around the world: we are not funding and supporting terrorism, we are just creating strategic groups to fight authoritarian regimes. In the 1980s, the US government created and funded the mujahidin, right there, in the same region. Then they pushed ISIS on the world as the good terrorists in Syria, only to have to fight them later, and God knows how many more terrorist groups that we have no idea about.

The fact that over the last 1-2 years the big US mainstream media spends resources on stories to basically white-wash clear-cut terrorists should signal something. These stories appear only now, almost 10 years after most of the Uighur jihadists were released from Guantanamo. These stories about the innocence of Guantanamo detainees scapegoated by the bad Chinese government didn’t appear right away. You’d think that the time for these stories would have been around the time when the Uighur jihadists got released from Guantanamo, not now.

The white-washing efforts by the US mainstream media who have to somehow explain the inconvenient past, show a sad fact about American public discourse right now: you can be vilified as a monster for saying things to women, while US mainstream media will break their backs to explain why actual terrorists are not that bad after all, and are really the victims here. They were not really terrorists, they just became victims of their terrorist activities. Watch this white-washing space. It will become even more pronounced, as we move forward into more hardened narratives of the Cold War against China.

Iveta Cherneva
Iveta Cherneva is an Amazon best-selling author, political commentator and human rights activist. Her latest book is “Trump, European security and Turkey”. Cherneva’s career includes Congress and the UN; she was a top finalist for UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of speech in 2020. Iveta’s opinions appear in Euronews, New York Times, Salon, The Guardian, Jurist, Washington Examiner, Modern Diplomacy, Emerging Europe, EurActiv, The Fletcher Forum, LSE, Daily Express. She comments on TV and radio for Euronews, DW, Voice of America and others.

Russia will not invade Ukraine

on November 20, 2021
By Alexander Clackson

https://moderndiplomacy.eu/

Russia has recently increased its military presence on the border with Ukraine, sparking alarmist suggestions by Western officials and think tanks that Russia is about to invade its neighbour. Last week US officials suggested a high probability of Russian military intervention and briefed their European colleagues about a potential military assault.

While such claims make for sensationalist headlines, a deeper examination of the situation leads to the conclusion that Russia will not invade Ukraine. From military, economic and diplomatic standpoints, Russia has nothing to gain and much to lose from attacking its neighbour.

Since 2014, the United States has provided Ukraine $2 billion in security assistance, including two tranches of Javelin missiles as well as other military equipment. Just this week Britain and Ukraine finalised a treaty that will enable Kiev to seek loans from London to buy British warships and missiles. While Russia’s military remains significantly superior to Ukraine’s, an invasion would incur substantial military costs and deaths of Russian soldiers. It is also likely that the European Union and the United States would step in to protect its ally, at least by supplying it with more weapons and intelligence, thus taking the world closer to a major international conflict. Russia has nothing to gain by starting a bloody hybrid war with the EU and the U.S. on its doorstep.

From an economic perspective, occupying Ukraine would sustain massive economic costs. Russia continues to spend a notable amount of its government budget on Crimea, channelling around $1.5 billion this year to support 68 percent of the budget of the territory it acquired in 2014. Holding a tight grip on newly conquered Ukrainian territory, where public support for Russia is significantly less compared to the genuine approval of Russia among Crimeans, would cost much more. This is most likely why Russia was not interested in seizing eastern Ukraine, particularly the Donbas region, even though the opportunity to do so was present in 2014 when the separatists in Donbas urged Russia to take over the region. It is also inevitable that the EU and the U.S. would slap severe sanctions on Russia, which would further damage an already sluggish economy. This would lead to a deterioration of living standards of Russians, resulting in a drop in President Putin’s approval ratings. Despite the genuine feeling of patriotism that Russians felt when Crimea returned to Russia in 2014, it is unlikely that the majority of the public would support a costly war and additional economic sanctions, when livings standards in Russia have already fallen, while poverty has risen.

Finally, diplomatically, President Putin has no interest in completely severing ties with Europe, the United States and its current allies in Asia. While relations with Europe and the United States have been frosty for some time, a full invasion of a sovereign state would shock Russia’s remaining allies, particularly countries in Central Asia. Any military attack on Ukraine would signify that Russia is intent on destabilising countries and the European continent through military force. This would make Russia a pariah state resulting in significant reluctance from other countries to cooperate with it. It would also make Russia severely isolated from the global comunity. There is also the issue of Putin’s personal reputation. An attack on Ukraine would damage Putin’s political standing at home and abroad. Regardless of what is said about him in the West, the Russian president has remained pragmatic and level-headed during his leadership. There is no indication that this has changed.

Ultimately, invading Ukraine would damage Russia on all fronts – militarily, economically, and diplomatically. It would also decrease Putin’s popularity at home due to the inevitable economic hardship that would be caused by a major war. The Russian president has no interest in provoking domestic political instability, especially when his approval ratings are already lower compared to several years ago.

There are numerous other reasons why Russia has decided to up the ante on the Ukrainian border. Most likely is to gain concessions from Ukraine and NATO through the threat of force. Russia could be sending a message to Ukraine to drop its plans to join NATO, after Ukraine’s president called on the western military alliance and key member states to hasten his country’s membership of the organisation. Russia may also be unhappy about the Ukrainian-led, American-assisted military training exercises that took place in September. Perhaps, Russia is also aiming to take the international community’s attention away from Belarus, a Russian ally that has come under severe pressure from the EU following the country’s presidential elections last year and subsequent protests.

Regardless of the rationale for Russia’s recent actions, Putin is not about to give the green light for the Russian army to invade Ukraine. Suggestions to the contrary from Western officials are unhelpful and only deteriorate the already tense relations.

Alexander Clackson is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Lancaster (UK), specialising in Russia and the CIS region

Alexander Clackson



Alexander Clackson is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Lancaster (UK), specialising in Russia and the CIS region

Reason Versus Anti-Reason: America’s Primal Struggle


on November 21, 2021
By Prof. Louis René Beres



“The enemy is the unphilosophical spirit which knows nothing and wants to know nothing of truth.”-Karl Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time (1952)

After the Second World War, Karl Jaspers identified a crucial but neglected bifurcation, one that could best explain the rise of Nazism. Beginning with a general comment about human behavior – “There is something inside all of us that yearns not for reason but for mystery…” – the thoughtful German philosopher proceeded to advance pertinent warnings at far deeper levels. Among other things, Jaspers observed that we must confront the enemies of Reason and Science not only in the “outside world,”[1] but “more dangerously…. inside each one of us.”

If Jaspers was correct that anti-Reason can inhere in each individual person, in the singular being and not just in the broader society (the macrocosm), it’s time to seek serious explanations and remedies beyond politics. There will, of course, arise various clarifying reasons for citizen bewilderment. Here, as is the case for any multi-layered intellectual quandary, truth may prove counter-intuitive.

During the incessantly law-violating Trump era in American politics, the United States was never actually “becoming Nazi Germany.” Still, its easily determinable trajectory was both authoritarian and lethal. And though palpably vital differences exist between “then and now,” there were also conspicuous forms of resemblance.

How shall the recent US period of grievous governmental declension best be explained? In part, meaningfully correct answers should be sought “behind the news.” For example, both the Third Reich and Trump’s presidency thrived upon variously paradoxical juxtapositions of privilege with philistinism. For such a seemingly self-contradictory fusion, the nineteenth century Friedrich Nietzsche (an “existentialist” forerunner of Karl Jaspers) coined a specific term, one he hoped could sometime become universal. This new word of the German philosopher was Bildungsphilister. When expressed in its lucid and coherent English translation, it signifies “educated Philistine.”[2]

The fearful commonalities are incontestable. As was the case in Germany’s late Weimer Republic years, street-fighters (e.g., Sturmabteilung or SA, Trump’s “Proud Boys,” etc.) made collaborative cause with accomplished professional classes. In the United States, this anti-democratic pattern of mutual support was established before and after the January 6 insurrection. Once again, in 2021 America, the benefits of a higher education proved more-or-less irrelevant to personal integrity.

Intellectually and linguistically, these are “delicate matters.

Even now, Nietzsche’s Bildungsphilister is a term that could shed useful explanatory light on Donald Trump’s still-uninterrupted support among millions of America’s well-educated and well-to-do. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump several-times commented: “I love the poorly-educated.” Nonetheless, in the end, a substantial fraction of his voter support arrived from the not-so-poorly-educated. Here, recalling philosopher Karl Jaspers’ far-seeing fears of “whisperings of the irrational,” Americans should be reminded of a kindred remark by Third Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels: “Intellect rots the brain.”

Thankfully, there do remain tangibly meaningful distinctions between German National Socialism and the false ideology of Trump Era American politics. But generally, these distinctions express more of a difference in magnitude than one of any discernible demographic origins. At one level, many Americans remain wholly willing to abide an ex-president (and potentially future president) who not only proudly avoids reading, but who openly belittles history, science and learning.

In time, if not suitably obstructed, such misplaced trust could become lethal for an entire nation.

The “Trump Era” did not suddenly end with the election defeat of its leader. Hence, more “penetrating clear thought” is needed to understand our still-ongoing American declension. Do most Americans (even Trump’s avowed political opponents) sufficiently object to an ex-president who obviously never glanced at the US Constitution, the very same document he so solemnly swore “to uphold, protect and defend?” Is it even reasonable or persuasive to “uphold protect and defend” a document that has never even been read? Is it reasonable or persuasive that “We the people….” are still not pervasively troubled by such a cavernous intellectual disjuncture?

Certain key questions ought not be skirted any longer. To begin, how has the United States managed to arrive at such a portentous and dismal place? What have been the pertinent failures (both particular and aggregated) of American educational institutions, most notably our vaunted universities?[3]

Once upon a time, in western philosophy, Plato revealed much higher leadership expectations for his “philosopher-king.” Yet, even if we should no longer plausibly expect anything like an ideal ruler in the White House, ought we not still be entitled to a man or woman who manages to read and think, seriously?

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra warns prophetically: “One should never seek the `higher man’ at the marketplace.” But the generally intellect-free marketplace was precisely where a misguided segment of American society first championed Donald J. Trump. What else should we have expected? In the United States, after all, we are ultimately measured by only one conspicuous standard.

We are measured by what we buy.

There is more, of course, much more. The former American president was not “merely” marginal or inattentive. He represented the diametric opposite of both Plato’s philosopher-king and Nietzsche’s “higher-man.” At its moral and analytic core, the Trump administration expressed a wretched inversion of all that might once have been ennobling in the United States. Even more worrisome, we Americans are now stumbling further and further backwards, visibly, unsteadily, not in decipherable increments, but in giant leaps of self-propagating and mutually reinforcing harms.

Among other debilities, these leaps identify the stain of unforgivable cowardice, especially in certain narrowly-combative sectors of the US Congress.

Former president Trump never did begin to understand that tangible US history deserves a special pride of place. How many Americans have ever paused to remember that the Founding Fathers who framed the second amendment were not expecting automatic weapons? How many citizens have ever really bothered to know that the early American Republic was a religious heir of John Calvin or the philosophical descendant of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes? How many “successful” US lawyers have even heard of William Blackstone, the celebrated English jurist whose learned Commentaries literally formed the common law underpinnings of America’s legal system?

There is more. Is there a single Trump lawyer (personal or institutional) who could conceivably recognize (let alone read) Blackstone’s juristic contributions? It’s a silly question.

Human beings are the creators of their machines; not the other way round. Still, in politics, there exists today an implicit and grotesque reciprocity between creator and creation, a potentially lethal pantomime between users and the used. Nowhere is this prospective lethality more apparent than among the endlessly self-deluded but always loyal supporters of former US President Donald Trump. If these supporters still follow him faithfully, it is because they seek more intense emotional satisfactions than Science or Reason can ever possibly offer.

But by definition it’s an ill-fated search.

Again and again, these acolytes turn to contrivance, conspiracy and an utterly willful irrationality. Whether the January 6 insurrection was past or prologue remains to be seen.

Even today, former President Donald Trump’s simplifying “explanations” offer millions of Americans an ill-founded kind of reassurance. Metaphorically, they continue to provide adherents with a ubiquitous and useful “solvent,” one capable of “dissolving” almost anything of any enlightening consequence. At the end of the 18th century Age of Enlightenment, the philosopher Immanuel Kant urged Europeans: “Sapere Aude”: “Dare to know.” Above all else, the Trump minions’ uninterrupted “fight” against Science and Reason expresses a fierce struggle against this helpful mantra, against the indispensable sovereignty of human intellectual freedom.

What’s ahead for the United states? Soon, even if Americans should somehow manage to avoid nuclear war and nuclear terrorism – an avoidance not to be taken for granted in the dissembled aftermath of Donald Trump – the swaying of the national “vessel” could become unendurable. Then, the phantoms of great ships of state once laden with silver and gold would no longer lie forgotten. Then, perhaps, we could finally understand that the circumstances that sent the compositions of Homer, Maimonides, Goethe, Milton, Shakespeare, Freud and Kafka to join the works of properly forgotten poets were neither unique nor transient.

These circumstances were recurrent and remain palpably menacing.

In an 1897 essay titled “On Being Human,” Woodrow Wilson inquired about the “authenticity “of Americans. “Is it even open to us to choose to be genuine?” he asked. This American president had answered “yes,” but only if the citizens could first refuse to cheer the dreadfully injurious “herds” of “mass”[4] society. Otherwise, as he had already understood, our entire society would be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of broken machinery, more hideous even than the biological decomposition of each individual person.

In every society that seeks to endure (as Emerson and the other American Transcendentalists had already recognized), the wittingly scrupulous search for Reason is most important. Looking ahead, there can be a “better”American soul[5] (and thereby a more Reason-directed national politics), but not before this nation can first acknowledge a prior obligation. This antecedent requirement is a starkly overriding national responsibility to overcome a still-menacing “herd” culture.

Per Karl Jaspers’ apt warnings, this means a primal obligation to uproot an all- too-often triumphant Anti-Reason.

Even after its final destructive explosion of lawlessness at the US Capitol, the Trump presidency managed to end without igniting a catastrophic war. But for the United States, even that presumptively “happy ending” might still represent little more than a temporary reprieve. Unless we can finally begin to work much harder at changing this polity’s consistently core antipathies to Intellect, Law and (above all) Reason, Americans will have to face periodically perilous eras of collective decline.

The “trick” will be to alter the nation’s direction in time. Philosophically, to change this lethal trajectory will call for a manifestly far-reaching national victory of Reason over Anti-Reason. Once such a victory is finally achieved, the United States could finally begin to fashion a future based upon more than distressingly illiterate conspiracy theories and rancorously foolish ad hominem diatribes.

America’s most genuinely primal problem is not a struggle against any one species or another of “enemy” (whether foreign or domestic), but a recalcitrant segment of United States citizens which “knows nothing and wants to know nothing of truth.” Until this is changed, millions of Americans will cling fiercely to evident and dangerous nonsense.

Until this is reversed, enlightenment and survival will remain in dire peril.

[1] We were all originally warned about confusing “shadows” for reality by Plato (The Republic). See, by the present author, Professor Louis René Beres, at Horasis (Zurich): https://horasis.org/looking-beyond-shadows-death-time-and-immortality/

[2] The first language of the present author, Professor Louis René Beres, was German. Born in Zürich, this is his own translation.

[3] See by this author at The Daily Princetonian: Louis Rene Beres, https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2018/06/a-core-challenge-of-higher-education

[4] See especially Jose Ortega y’Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (Spain, 1930).

[5] Sigmund Freud maintained a general antipathy to all things American. In essence, he most objected, according to Bruno Bettelheim, to this country’s “shallow optimism” and its seemingly corollary commitment to crude forms of materialism. America, thought Freud, was very evidently “lacking in soul.” See: Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), especially Chapter X.

Trump rages after former aides subpoenaed for mishandling the Covid crisis

Tom Boggioni
November 20, 2021

Former president Donald Trump issued a frantic statement on Saturday afternoon, accusing the "Communist Democrats" of "engaging in yet another Witch Hunt" as they investigate members of his administration who have been accused of meddling in the country's Covid -19 response for political purposes.

Late Friday Politico reported a congressional committee "issued a subpoena for former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on Thursday for failing to respond to document requests," with the controversial Navarro joining "Steven Hatfill, a virologist and former adviser to Navarro" who was served in September.

As Politico noted on Friday, "When the pandemic hit, Navarro became an increasingly influential member of the White House team responding to the virus, advising the president on supply shortages and methods to keep the American economy running during lockdowns. His testimony and personal materials would help shed light on how the Trump administration reacted to early warnings about the virus, its potential economic consequences and how it went about securing goods such as masks, gowns and ventilators."

According to Trump's Saturday missive, issued through his spokesperson on Twitter since he is banned, he is instructing Navarro to ignore the subpoena and invoke executive privilege.

For good measure, Trump suggested an investigation of Hillary Clinton. Again.

"The Communist Democrats are engaging in yet another Witch Hunt, this time going after my Administration's unprecedented and incredible coronavirus response, despite the fact that, sadly, more Americans have died this year from Covid than in all of 2020, " Trump wrote.

He then added, "It is a Witch Hunt that's been going on for years. Why don't they investigate Crooked Hillary, when so much has now been proven about her and her campaign's lies and dealings with Russia to smear me and spy on my campaign?" and accused the Democrats of trying to "discredit our great accomplishments."

You can see his statement below:

  

Trump's economic record is being 'soundly beaten' by Biden as economy bounces back: Forbes

Tom Boggioni
November 20, 2021

Donald Trump/Joe Biden -- AFP/Biden Facebook page

According to an analysis by Forbes that will likely displease former president Donald Trump, current President Joe Biden is blowing by his predecessor's economic records he was so proud of as the U.S. economy comes roaring back

Chuck Jones of Forbes reports that Trump was in the habit of boasting about economic gains during his administration, but now his records are being "soundly beaten" according to the S&P 500.

Writing, "The S&P 500 closed at a record high on Thursday at 4,704.54 (its third close above 4,700) and fell just short of another record on Friday when it dropped 6.58 points or 0.14% to 4,697.96. The Nasdaq closed at a record high of 16,057, its first close above 16,000 while the Dow Industrials is the laggard at 35,601, almost 1,000 points below its record," Jones added despite rising inflation and the possibility that interest rates could rise the economy under Biden is thriving.

"By President Trump's favorite measure of success President Biden's post-election gains in the S&P 500 Index have soundly beaten Trump's equivalent at just over their one-year election anniversary," he wrote before explaining that, "Charlie Bilello, Founder and CEO of Compound Capital Advisors, has created a chart that shows how many times the S&P 500 has hit record highs in any year since 1929. For 2021 the Index has eclipsed the record 66 times, which is the second highest number to 1995's 77 times. Biden's record number also eclipses Trump's best year in 2017 when the Index broke its all-time high 62 times."

For good measure, he pointed out: "Using the Index's returns from when Biden's election was called the weekend after the election to Friday Biden's market returns are substantially above Trump's by 13.3% and 9.7% from his inauguration."


You can read more here.

BEHIND PAYWALL

 ZIONIST OCCUPIERS

Occupation army hands over body of slain Palestinian child

RAMALLAH, Saturday, November 20, 2021 (WAFA) – Israeli occupation authorities today handed over the body of slain Amjad Abu Sultan, a 16-year-old Palestinian minor who was shot dead by Israeli occupation forces in the town of Beit Jala in the occupied West Bank last month.

The child’s body was released by the Israeli occupation military and handed over to his family at Jaba’a military checkpoint, southwest of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, after the body had been withheld since his killing by the Israeli military and for no reason.

The body of the slain 16-year-old boy, who hails from the Gaza Strip, has been withheld by the occupation authorities ever since his killing by Israeli soldiers near a military checkpoint in Beit Jala on October 15.

Over the last four years, the Israeli occupation authorities have escalated the practice of withholding the bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli occupation forces, claiming that funerals of Palestinians had provided grounds for “incitement” against Israel.

Israel has long been condemned by human rights advocates for its policy of withholding the bodies of Palestinians killed by its forces during alleged attacks on Israelis.

International law considers the practice a violation of human rights. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 state that the parties of an armed conflict must bury the deceased in an honorable way, and “if possible according to the rites of the religion to which they belonged and that their graves are respected, properly maintained, and marked in such a way that they can always be recognized”.

In September 2020, the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center (JLAC) said Israel was withholding the bodies of at least 67 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces since 2015 until the time of the update last year.

In 2017, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the state has no legal basis to withhold bodies, but reversed course in 2019 and upheld the government’s policy to withhold bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli occupation troops.

According to JLAC and Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights, an NGO, Israel is the only country in the world that has a policy of confiscation of human remains, where it relies on regulations dating back to 1945 (during the British Mandate) as grounds for its policy.

M.N