Indictment Of Trump Associate Threatens UAE Lobbying Success: Raises Questions About Emirati Campaign Against Political Islam – Analysis

US President Donald Trump meet with His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. Photo Credit: UAE Embassy

July 25, 2021 
By James M. Dorsey

This month’s indictment of a billionaire, one-time advisor and close associate of former US President Donald J. Trump, on charges of operating as an unregistered foreign agent in the United States for the United Arab Emirates highlights the successes and pitfalls of a high-stakes Emirati effort to influence US policy.

The indictment of businessman Thomas J. Barrack, who maintained close ties to UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed while serving as an influential advisor in 2016 to then-presidential candidate Trump and chair of Mr. Trump’s inauguration committee once he won the 2016 election, puts at risk the UAE’s relationship with the Biden administration.

It also threatens to reduce the UAE’s return on a massive investment in lobbying and public relations that made it a darling in Washington during the last four years.

A 2019 study concluded that Emirati clients hired 20 US lobbying firms to do their bidding at a cost of US$20 million, including US$600,000 in election campaign contributions — one of the largest, if not the largest expenditure by a single state on Washington lobbying and influence peddling.

The indictment further raises the question of why the Biden administration was willing to allow legal proceedings to put at risk its relationship with one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East, one that last year opened the door to recognition of Israel by Arab and Muslim-majority states.

The UAE lobbying effort sought to position the Emirates, and at its behest, Saudi Arabia under the leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed’s counterpart, Mohammed bin Salman, at the heart of US policy, ensure that Emirati and Saudi interests were protected, and shield the two autocrats from criticism of various of their policies and abuse of human rights.

Interestingly, UAE lobbying in the United States, in contrast to France and Austria, failed to persuade the Trump administration to embrace one of the Emirates’ core policy objectives: a US crackdown on political Islam with a focus on the Muslim Brotherhood. UAE Crown Prince Mohammed views political Islam and the Brotherhood that embraces the principle of elections as an existential threat to the survival of his regime.

In one instance cited in the indictment, Mr. Barrack’s two co-defendants, a UAE national resident in the United States, Rashid Al-Malik, and Matthew Grimes, a Barrack employee, discussed days after Mr. Trump’s inauguration the possibility of persuading the new administration to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a designated foreign terrorist organization. “This will be a huge win. If we can list them. And they deserved to be,” Mr. Al-Malik texted Mr. Grimes on 23 January 2017.

The unsuccessful push for designating the Brotherhood came three months after Mr. Barrack identified the two Prince Mohammeds in an op-ed in Fortune magazine as members of a new generation of “brilliant young leaders.” The billionaire argued that “American foreign policy must persuade these bold visionaries to lean West rather than East… By supporting their anti-terrorism platforms abroad, America enhances its anti-terrorism policies at home.”

Mr. Barrack further sought to persuade America’s new policymakers, in line with Emirati thinking, that the threat posed by political Islam emanated not only from Iran’s clerical regime and its asymmetric defence and security policies but also from the Brotherhood and Tukey’s Islamist government. He echoed Emirati promotion of Saudi Arabia after the rise of Mohammed bin Salman as the most effective bulwark against political Islam.

“It is impossible for the US to move against any hostile Islamic group anywhere in the world without Saudi support…. The confused notion that Saudi Arabia is synonymous with radical Islam is falsely based on the Western notion that ‘one size fits all,’ Mr. Barrack asserted.

The Trump administration’s refusal to exempt the Brotherhood from its embrace of Emirati policy was the likely result of differences within both the US government and the Muslim world. Analysts suggest that some in the administration feared that designating the Brotherhood would empower the more rabidly Islamophobic elements in Mr. Trump’s support base.

Administration officials also recognized that the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt constituted a minority, albeit a powerful minority, in the Muslim world that was on the warpath against the Brotherhood.

Elsewhere, Brotherhood affiliates were part of the political structure by either participating in government or constituting part of the legal opposition in countries like Kuwait, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain, Morocco, Jordan, and Indonesia.

The affiliates have at times supported US policies or worked closely with US allies like in the case of Yemen’s Al Islah that is aligned with Saudi-backed forces.

In contrast to UAE efforts to ensure that the Brotherhood is crushed at the risk of fueling Islamophobia, Nahdlatul Ulama, one of, if not the world’s largest Muslim organization which shares the Emirates’ rejection of political Islam and the Brotherhood, has opted to fight the Brotherhood’s local Indonesian affiliate politically within a democratic framework rather than by resorting to coercive tactics.

Nahdlatul Ulama prides itself on having significantly diminished the prospects of Indonesia’s Brotherhood affiliate, the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), since the 2009 presidential election. The group at the time successfully drove a wedge between then-President Susilo Yudhoyono, and the PKS, his coalition partner since the 2004 election that brought him to power. In doing so, it persuaded Mr. Yudhoyono to reject a PKS candidate as vice president in the second term of his presidency.

Nahdlatul Ulama’s manoeuvring included the publication of a book asserting that the PKS had not shed its links to militancy. The party has since failed to win even half of its peak 38 seats in parliament garnered in the 2004 election.

“Publication of ‘The Illusion of an Islamic State: The Expansion of Transnational Islamist Movements to Indonesia’ had a considerable impact on domestic policy. It primarily contributed to neutralizing one candidate’s bid for vice president in the 2009 national election campaign, who had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood,” said militancy expert Magnus Ranstorp.Click here to have Eurasia Review's newsletter delivered via RSS, as an email newsletter, via mobile or on your personal news page.



James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

Some Native Americans Fear Blood Quantum Is Formula For ‘Paper Genocide’ – Analysis


Portrait of Left Hand Bear, Oglala Sioux Chief.

 Photo Credit: Heyn Photo, Pixabay

July 25, 2021 
By VOA
By Cecily Hilleary

Native Americans have survived centuries of imported diseases, dispossession of lands and forced assimilation. Today, many worry about another existential threat: Blood quantum—a system the U.S. government and many tribes use to measure Native ancestry and eligibility for membership.

Blood quantum (BQ) is based on a simple formula: Half of the combined degree of “Indian blood” an individual’s parents’ possess. So, if both parents have 100% Indian blood, their child will have a BQ of 100%.

But where bloodlines have been “diluted” by unions with non-Natives, calculating BQ can be complex, as evidenced by a chart published in the 1983 Bureau of Indian Affairs Manual, and percentages are usually expressed as fractions. For example, if a man with one-half BQ marries a woman with one-quarter BQ, their child will have a BQ of three-eighths.

Colonial construct

For thousands of years, Native tribes understood “belonging” in terms of social kinship. Settler colonialism, however, introduced notions of race to determine social status, eligibility to marry, hold office or own land.

By the 19th century, terms such as “mixed-blood” and “half-breed” crept into treaties such as that with the Osage in 1825, by which the United States set aside a separate reservation for “half-breeds.”

Gradually, BQ became the standard test for deciding who was eligible for land and treaty benefits.

In 1934, Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), touted as an effort to reduce government interference in tribal affairs. The new law, which recognized anyone with “one-half or more Indian blood,” urged federally recognized tribes to form representational governments, draft individual bylaws and constitutions, and decide membership criteria.

More than 260 tribes ended up accepting the IRA and set membership requirements. For some, it was lineal descent from individuals listed on historic “base rolls.” Others mandated BQ of one-quarter or more. A few decided on a combination of lineal descent, residency and/or BQ.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs issues Certificates of Degree of Indian Blood, a form of identification that certifies individuals’ BQ and eligibility for tribal membership.
‘Paper genocide’

But some Native Americans who follow the issue closely say sticking with the BQ system for measuring ancestry is a recipe for disaster.

Jill Doerfler, head of the University of Michigan’s American Indian and Indigenous Studies Department, grew up in the White Earth Nation, one of six bands of Anishinaabe (also known as Chippewa) people united under the governing body of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe (MCT).

“What blood quantum does is racialize American Indian identity,” she said. “It is an outside concept used to disenfranchise Native people and tribes from their legal and political status. And it’s the best way to eliminate ongoing treaty obligations.”

Increased urbanization and intermarriage with non-Natives mean bloodlines are diluting, and as time goes on, fewer and fewer individuals will qualify as tribe members and will lose associated health and education benefits.

“And if a nation doesn’t have any citizens, there’s no nation,” Doerfler said. “There’s no relationship that has to be maintained, and no services that need to be provided. The government could eliminate the whole budget line of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.”

And then, she worries, the government could divest tribes of all their land, resulting in what some term “paper genocide.”

‘Drastic decline’

In 2012, MCT contracted with the Minnesota-based Wilder Foundation to study population trends for MCT as a whole, and its six member bands—White Earth, Mille Lacs, Grand Portage, Fond du Lac and Bois Forte—individually.

“The study showed that if we keep the current one-quarter MCT blood quantum requirement, we will see a pretty drastic decline by the end of the 21st century,” said Mike Chosa, public relations director at the Leech Lake Band.

“In 2013, our population was around 41,000. And in 2098, they predict fewer than 9,000 members,” Chosa said. “And the numbers decline even more rapidly the further you go out.”

Wilder looked at how MCT’s tribal population would change over time if different membership criteria were applied—allowing blood from other Chippewa tribes to enter the equation, for example, or reducing BQ requirement to one-eighth.

Wilder concluded that by loosening BQ restrictions, MCT’s population would grow significantly. But for that to happen, MCT would have to rewrite its constitution.
Considering alternatives

In 2018, MCT conducted a tribal survey to gauge interest in doing just that.

“Over half the people were in favor of eliminating blood quantum altogether,” Chosa said. “The other half were in favor of expanding the types of blood that we would consider. In the end, it’s got to be an individual decision for all native nations and tribes.”

It isn’t an easy decision, especially for tribes that share casino and other earnings with members. A greater tribal population means smaller per capita payouts.

MCT plans to put the matter to a referendum and, if that passes, a secretarial vote.

Ultimately, however, it will be up to the federal government to decide.

“Unlike some tribes, our constitution was actually written by the Department of Interior and approved by the Department of Interior,” Chosa said. “So, if we want to change it, we need to go through the Department of Interior.”

Why isn’t Joe Biden doing all he can to protect American democracy?

Both parties are beholden to an anti-democratic coalition. This is stopping real change

‘If democracy is to be preserved, both parts of the anti-democracy coalition must be stopped.’ Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Robert Reich,

Sun 25 Jul 2021 

You’d think Biden and the Democratic party leadership would do everything in their power to stop Republicans from undermining democracy.

So far this year, the Republican party has passed roughly 30 laws in states across the country that will make voting harder, especially in Black and Latino communities. With Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen, Republicans are stoking white people’s fears that a growing non-white population is usurping their dominance.

Yet while Biden and Democratic leaders are openly negotiating with holdout senators for Biden’s stimulus and infrastructure proposals, they aren’t exerting similar pressure when it comes to voting rights and elections. In fact, Biden now says he won’t take on the filibuster, which stands firmly in the way.

What gives? Part of the explanation, I think, lies with an outside group that has almost as much influence on the Democratic party as on the Republican, and which isn’t particularly enthusiastic about election reform: the moneyed interests bankrolling both parties.

A more robust democracy would make it harder for the wealthy to keep their taxes low and profits high. So at the same time white supremacists have been whipping up white fears about non-whites usurping their dominance, America’s wealthy have been spending vast sums on campaign donations and lobbyists to prevent a majority from usurping their money.

They’re now whipping up resistance among congressional Democrats to Biden’s plan to tax capital gains at 39.6% – up from 20% – for those earning more than $1m, and they’re on the way to restoring the federal tax deduction for state and local taxes, of which they’re the biggest beneficiaries.

In recent years these wealth supremacists, as they might be called, have quietly joined white supremacists to become a powerful anti-democracy coalition. Some have backed white supremacist’s efforts to divide poor and working-class whites from poor and working-class Black and brown people, so they don’t look upward and see where most of the economic gains have been going and don’t join together to demand a fair share of those gains.

Similarly, white supremacists have quietly depended on wealth supremacists to donate to lawmakers who limit voting rights, so people of color continue to be second-class citizens. It’s no accident that six months after the insurrection, dozens of giant corporations that promised not to fund members of Congress who refused to certify Biden as president are now back funding them and their anti-voting rights agenda.

Donald Trump was put into office by this anti-democracy coalition. According to Forbes, 9% of America’s billionaires, together worth a combined $210bn, pitched in to cover the costs of Trump’s 2020 campaign. During his presidency Trump gave both parts of the coalition what they wanted most: tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks for the wealth supremacists; legitimacy for the white supremacists.

The coalition is now the core of the Republican party, which stands for little more than voter suppression based on Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and tax cuts for the wealthy and their corporations.

Meanwhile, as wealth supremacists have accumulated a larger share of the nation’s income and wealth than at any time in more than a century, they’ve used a portion of that wealth to bribe lawmakers not to raise their taxes. It was recently reported that several American billionaires have paid only minimal or no federal income tax at all.

Tragically, the supreme court is supporting both the white supremacists and wealth supremacists. Since Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito joined in 2005 and 2006, respectively, the court has been whittling away voting rights while enlarging the rights of the wealthy to shower money on lawmakers. The conservative majority has been literally making it easier to buy elections and harder to vote in them.

The Democrats’ proposed For the People Act admirably takes on both parts of the coalition. It sets minimum national standards for voting, and it seeks to get big money out of politics through public financing of election campaigns.

Yet this comprehensiveness may explain why the Act is now stalled in the Senate. Biden and Democratic leaders are firmly against white supremacists but are not impervious to the wishes of wealth supremacists. After all, to win elections they need likely Democrats to vote but also need big money to finance their campaigns.

Some progressives have suggested a carve-out to the filibuster solely for voting rights. This might constrain the white supremacists but would do nothing to protect American democracy from the wealth supremacists.

If democracy is to be preserved, both parts of the anti-democracy coalition must be stopped.


Robert Reich a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a columnist for Guardian US

The Many Faces of Regime Change in Cuba

Cubans confront a host of problems amid a national health emergency — and the Biden administrative is only adding to punitive sanctions with the intent to make everything worse.

Fidel Castro holds up a newspaper headlining a plot to kill him in 1959. (Bettmann via Getty)

BY LOUIS A. PÉREZ JR

JACOBIN
07.24.2021

After months of casual indifference to conditions in Cuba, the Biden administration reacted with purposeful swiftness to support street protests on the island. “We stand with the Cuban people,” President Biden pronounced. A talking point was born.

“The Biden-Harris administration stands by the Cuban people,” secretary of state Antony Blinken followed. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Robert Menéndez also joined to emphasize “the need for the United States to continue to stand with the Cuban people.”

For more than a hundred and twenty years, the United States has “stood with the Cuban people” — or, perhaps more correctly, has stood over the Cuban people. Cuba seems always to be at the receiving end of American history. To stand with the Cuban people has meant armed intervention, military occupation, regime change, and political meddling — all normal events in US-Cuba relations in the sixty years before the triumph of the Cuban revolution. In the sixty years after the revolution, standing with the Cuban people has meant diplomatic isolation, armed invasion, covert operations, and economic sanctions.

It is the policy of economic sanctions — the embargo — officially designated as an “economic denial program,” that gives the lie to US claims of beneficent concern for the Cuban people. Sanctions developed early into a full-blown policy protocol in pursuit of regime change, designed to deprive Cubans of needed goods and services, to induce scarcity and foment shortages, to inflict hardship and deepen adversity.

Nor should it be supposed that the Cuban people were the unintended “collateral damage” of the embargo. On the contrary, the Cuban people have been the target. Sanctions were designed from the outset to produce economic havoc as a way to foment popular discontent, to politicize hunger in the hope that, driven by despair and motivated by want, the Cuban people would rise up to topple the government.

The declassification of government records provides insight into the calculus of sanctions as a means of regime change. The “economic denial program” was planned to “weaken [the Cuban government] economically,” a State Department briefing paper explained, to “promote internal dissension; erode its internal political support . . . [and] seek to create conditions conducive to incipient rebellion.” Sanctions promised to create “the necessary preconditions for nationalist upheaval inside Cuba,” the Department of State Bureau of Intelligence and Research predicted, thereupon to produce the downfall of the Cuban government “as a result of internal stresses and in response to forces largely, if not wholly, unattributable to the U.S.”

The “only foreseeable means of alienating internal support,” the Department of State offered, “is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. . . . Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba . . . [to deny] money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

The embargo has remained in place for more than sixty years. At times expanded, at other times contracted. But never lifted. The degree to which US sanctions are implicated in current protest demonstrations in Cuba is a matter of debate, of course. But that the embargo has contributed — to a greater or lesser extent — to hardship in Cuba can hardly be gainsaid; that has been its intent. And now that hardship has produced popular protests and demonstrations. That, too, is in the “playbook” of the embargo.

But the embargo has had a far more insidious impact on the political culture of Cuba. The Cuban government is not unaware of the United States’ desired policy outcomes from the sanctions. They understand well its subversive reach and interventionist thrust, and have responded accordingly, if not always consistently.

Such a nakedly hostile US policy, which has been ongoing and periodically reaffirmed over such a lengthy period of time, designed purposely to sow chaos, has in fact served Cuban authorities well, providing a readily available target that can be blamed for homegrown economic mismanagement and resource misallocation. The embargo provides a refuge for blamelessness and immunity from accountability. The tendency to attribute the consequences of ill-conceived policies to the embargo has developed into a standing master narrative of Cuban government.

But it is more complicated still. Not a few within the Cuban government view popular protests warily, seeing them as a function of US policy and its intended outcomes. It is no small irony, in fact, that the embargo has so often served to compromise the “authenticity” of popular protest, to ensure that protests are seen as acts in the service of regime change and depicted as a threat to national security.

The degree to which the political intent of the embargo is imputed to popular protest often serves to drive the official narrative. That is, protests are depicted less as an expression of domestic discontent than as an act of US subversion, instantly discrediting the legitimacy of protest and the credibility of protesters. The embargo serves to plunge Cuban politics at all levels into a Kafkaesque netherworld, where the authenticity of domestic actors is challenged and transformed into the duplicity of foreign agents. In Cuba, the popular adage warns, nothing appears to be what it seems.

Few dispute the validity of Cuban grievances. A long-suffering people often subject to capricious policies and arbitrary practices, an officialdom often appearing oblivious and unresponsive to the needs of a population confronting deepening hardship. Shortages of food. Lack of medicines. Scarcity of basic goods. Soaring prices. Widening social inequalities. Deepening racial disparities.

Difficulties have mounted, compounding continuously over many years, for which there are few readily available remedies. An economy that reorganized itself during the late 1990s and early 2000s around tourist receipts has collapsed as a result of the pandemic. A loss of foreign exchange with ominous implications for a country that imports 70 percent of its food supplies.

The Trump administration revived the most punitive elements of US sanctions, limiting family remittances to $1,000 per quarter per person, prohibiting remittances to family members of government officials and members of the Communist Party, and prohibiting remittances in the form of donations to Cuban nationals. The Trump administration prohibited the processing of remittances through any entities on a “Cuba restricted list,” an action that resulted in Western Union ceasing its operations in Cuba in November 2020.

And as a final spiteful, gratuitous gesture, the outgoing Trump administration returned Cuba to the list of state sponsors of terrorism. At the precise moment the Cuban people were reeling from greater shortages, increased rationing, and declining services, the United States imposed a new series of sanctions. It is impossible to react in any way other than with blank incredulity to State Department spokesperson Ned Price’s comment that Cuban humanitarian needs “are profound because of not anything the United States has done.”

Cubans confront all at once a collapsing economy, diminished remittances, restricted emigration opportunities, inflation, shortages of food, scarcity of medicines, all in a time of a national health emergency — and with the United States applying punitive sanctions with the intent of making everything worse. Of course, the Cuban people have the right to peaceful protest. Of course, the Cuban government must redress Cuban grievances.

Of course, the United States must end its deadly and destructive policy of subversion.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Louis A. Pérez Jr is the J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of History and director of the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent book is Rice in the Time of Sugar: The Political Economy of Food in Cuba (2019).

Behind the Cuba crisis is U.S. politics, intervention, trade embargo

 25-Jul-2021
Azhar Azam

U.S. and Cuban flags display side by side in Havana, Cuba. /Getty

Editor's note: Azhar Azam works in a private organization as market and business analyst and writes about geopolitical issues and regional conflicts. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The history of U.S. antipathy toward Cuba and intervention in the Caribbean island harks back to early 1960s when Washington failed to overthrow Cuban revolutionist leader Fidel Castro during the Bay of Pigs invasion. Loss of U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista and a Soviet-inclined government next door at the height of the Cold War was a lethal brew for America.

Since then, Washington's Cuba policy has been dominated at isolating Havana economically through an adulterous trade embargo. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, American blockade of the small economy was noticed by the international world that chose to withdraw its support for "unjust" financial and trade restrictions, costing Cuban people a total of $130 billion in six decades.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama in 2014 tried to shift the ineffective strategy and rescinded Cuba's designation as state of sponsor of international terrorism, restored diplomatic relationship and eased off sanctions on travel and remittances, among other measures. But the détente was suspended after Donald Trump took office.

More than 240 economic sanctions including a slew of new politically-driven measures before the 2020 U.S. presidential election returned Trump votes of the large Cuban-American population in South Florida. Yet crippling curbs deeply hurt a fragile economy, "really" affected Cuban people and contributed to food and medicine famines.

Before Trump was routed out of the White House, his administration made sure that Cuban people were completely squeezed and did not receive any respite from the United States. Just days away from his departure, he put back Cuba to the list of state sponsors of terrorism and ripped off all diplomatic norms to blacklist Cuban Interior Minister Lazaro Alberto Alvarez Casas.

Joe Biden on the campaign trail vowed to reverse Trump's policy, which had "inflicted harm" to Cuban economy and added to worsening shortages of food and medicine. Nonetheless, once took oath as the U.S. president, he ignored advice of 80 House Democrats' advice in March to repeal the prior administration's "cruel" sanctions and overturn politicized decisions and opted to follow his predecessor.

Disregarding Cubans' calls to lift sanctions, the Biden administration on June 23 opposed a United Nations General Assembly resolution to terminate the U.S. embargo and exposed its willingness of reconciliation.

The near-unanimous vote for 29th consecutive time condemned America's sanctions and invited the ire of some leading international nations such as Beijing and Moscow, demanding Washington to end interference in Havana.

Many Democrats still are pressing Biden to waive sanctions on Cuba. They call on him to help Cubans by rescinding Trump-era sanctions and offering additional humanitarian and vaccine assistance to them as well as have "outright" rejected administration's defense of the embargo and use of "cruelty" as a point of leverage against ordinary folks.

On the other way around, the U.S. president is suppressing progressive voices in his own party as he designated head of Cuba's Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces Alvaro Lopez Miera and Ministry of Interior's National Special Brigade.

Biden's response, outlined in a call with hardliners in Miami and welcomed by infamous Cuba-American Republican Marco Rubio, revealed the political nature of the new measures that appeared to strengthen his position in Florida.


Protesters in "Biden, hands off Cuba" protest demand that the Biden administration take immediate action to reverse the actions taken by the Trump administration to deepen the economic war against Cuba, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S. /Getty

Biden, after secession from his commitment with Cuban people, labeled Havana government a "failed state" and intended to mull over options to reinstate the internet outages. While it's a paradigmatic case of foreign intervention, his temptation to receive cash remittances from Cuban-American wasn't short of incitement to violence.

This forms an opinion that Biden's vacillation to assist Cuban people fight health and economic challenges has nothing to do with the human rights; it is aimed at politicking to avoid increased risk of losing a slim majority in the House in 2022 from Florida, where Miami in 2020 deprived Democrats of two Congress members for pursuing normalization policy.

Cuba clearly is gripped with widespread protests owing to the death of food, medicine and electricity due to persistent U.S. "politics of economic asphyxiation". By politicizing Cuban crisis, keeping crudest measures intact and stoking social divide and violence in the Caribbean island, Biden, like Trump, wants to choke Cuban economy to force a violent change.

Havana's assertion about the U.S. embargo's role in ravaging Cuba's healthcare is discarded by American media, contending food and medicines are exempt from ban. That's untrue and misleading. In reality, Washington has stopped life-saving drugs bound for the ailing Cubans, causing even deaths, to describe it as having no respect for human life and international law.

Some Western outlets wrongly frame the unrest in Cuba as "World's Big Struggle: Autocracies vs. Democracies." It is not the case either. Exacerbated by pandemic, strife has stemmed from decades-old unwarranted U.S. trade embargo.

The UN resolutions, reaffirming non-intervention and non-interference in other states, and economists have identified such measures for adversely affecting Cuban people and blamed the hardening of American sanctions for shortage of staple foods.

Washington's vain words, shifting the responsibility of Cubans' economic suffering on Havana government and supporting violent demonstrations, won't help the people entrapped in economic and health crises. For that, the U.S. must stop politicizing the issue, bring an end to its intervention and lift the economic, commercial and financial trade embargo on Cuba.

American sanctions on Cuba will hurt the country’s people, not its regime

Even superpowers must learn to live with regimes they dislike.

PRAVEEN SWAMI
JULY 24, 2021

Protests broke out across Havana, Cuba, in July 2021 as the combined economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and US sanctions hit already shrinking livelihoods. (Photo: Alexandre Meneghini/ Reuters)

Forty-thousand Cuban immigrants, massed at the Orange Bowl college football match in December 1962, cheered wildly, as US President John F. Kennedy ended his unscripted speech. The battle-flag of the Bay of Pigs rebels, the ill-fated force despatched by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) the previous year, would one day “be returned to this brigade in a free Havana”, the President vowed. From that time until his own death, President Kennedy waged a relentless covert war, to undermine Cuba’s communist regime, sanctioning CIA bombings, sabotage and assassination attempts.

But there was one thing Kennedy would not do: go to war to dethrone Latin America’s revolutionary icon, and Cuba’s President, Fidel Castro.

“The Soviet Union knows that the United States does not intend to invade Cuba and the United States knows that the Soviets have removed missiles from Cuba,” he explained to his National Security Council in November 1962, hours after negotiating the end of the superpower showdown that brought the planet to the edge of nuclear annihilation.

John F. Kennedy, the 35th US President.

Now, six decades on, Cuba has returned again as a significant test for United States foreign policy. As the largest protests since the mid-1990s have roiled Cuba, US President Joseph Biden’s government has sanctioned elements of Havana’s state security apparatus, in a shift away from campaign promises to work for a thaw.


For United States foreign policy makers, the big question is this: can sanctions, without the use of military force, in fact influence the conduct of regimes? The case of the tiny island, home to just 11 million people, is a useful prism to understand the United States’ prospects in more critical challenges, like Iran, North Korea and even China.

The immediate trigger for Cuba’s protests is familiar to Indians: the Covid-19 pandemic has ravaged key sectors of the economy, hurting already-fragile livelihoods. Tourism—already shrinking from United States sanctions—has fallen sharply, from a peak of 4.7 million visitors in 2018. Exports of medical skilled labour and biotechnology have declined. Remittances from the diaspora, estimated at $3.9 billion in 2019, have eroded dramatically.

For many ordinary Cubans, images released early this year of Fidel Castro’s nightclub-owning grandson bragging about his Mercedes crystallised resentment about a ruling élite that has strayed from its egalitarian promises.

Ever since the end of the Cold War, moreover, Cuba came to depend heavily on Venezuela for its oil and gas needs. In 2000, the two countries signed a preferential-trade agreement, in essence bartering energy for medical personnel. Venezuela’s own economic problems, though, have seen supplies shrink steadily since 2015, a problem accentuated by the United States sanctions targeting oil tankers and companies delivering oil.

The once-central sugar industry, moreover, has been in long-term decline because of the lack of global demand. In 2019-20, Cuba produced only 1.2 million metric tons, down from 8.4 million in 1990.

Economic sanctions have often been legitimised as creating the conditions for a social revolution. Experience, though, has given little reason for such optimism.

Even though Cuba hoped trade with China and Russia would offset the problems imposed by then US President Donald Trump’s sanctions, the reality has fallen short of expectations. Trade with China, for example, was valued at only $1.3 billion in 2019, in line with a steadily declining trend from a high of $2.3 billion in 2015. Imports from Russia, similarly, have shown a significant decline since 2018—all signs of grinding economic problems these relationships could not offset.

Facing the pandemic-induced crisis, President Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel Bermúdez’s government instituted a series of reforms last year—among them, allowing the private sector, lifting a 10% tax on United States dollar, and convertible currency to be used to make some retail purchases. The most significant of these changes was dismantling a dual-currency system, which fixed the exchange rate of the Cuban peso at 24 per United States dollar.

In the long term, these reforms are expected to have positive impacts on Cuba’s economy. The short-term impacts on inflation and the country’s expansive social-security net have been severe, though. The question is: are Cubans, tired of blackouts, job cuts and rising prices, also ready for regime change?

Ever since 1960, when revolutionary Cuba nationalised American-owned oil refineries without compensation, the United States has maintained and deepened economic sanctions against Cuba—this, in spite of substantial criticism from the United Nations as well as Europe. The pressure has been, in no small part, driven by the electoral influence of the Cuban diaspora in the United States. In the course of the Cold War, though, the risk of a superpower conflict made invasion a less-than-attractive option.

As the scholar Donald Losman has argued, sanctions offer the United States government a half-way house between doing nothing and going to war. The decision to impose them, he argues, is taken “less on its intrinsic merits than because of its attractions in relation to the available options”.

The evidence for the effectiveness of sanctions as a foreign-policy tool is mixed. The scholar Robert Pape, among others, has shown that “economic sanctions have little independent usefulness for the pursuit of noneconomic goals”. “Nationalism,” Pape pointed out, “often makes states and societies willing to endure considerable punishment, rather than abandon what are seen as the interests of the nation”.

Economic sanctions have often been legitimised as creating the conditions for a social revolution. Experience, though, has given little reason for such optimism. Long decades of economic sanctions against Iran, for example, have shown no signs of undermining the regime, even though protests have often swept across the country. North Korea’s nuclear-weapons programme succeeded in spite of its economic isolation. Even Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Husain, had to be removed by military action—not sanctions.

Learning from this experience, US President Barack Obama made a shift away from the past, restoring diplomatic relations, rescinding Cuba’s designation as a state sponsor of international terrorism and facilitating the enhancement of travel and trade. Engagement, supporters of the policy argued, offered a more effective means to bring about change, since it would tie in the regime and the élite with the United States.

In an effort to build electoral capital with Cuban-American voters, though, President Donald Trump reversed course, reimposing sanctions that targeted Venezuela’s oil exports to Cuba. From 2019, the Trump administration re-designated Cuba a state sponsor of international terrorism, claiming it was supporting violence in other Latin American states, and restricting financial transactions involving the country.

Faced with images of police violence against protestors, President Biden has backed away from his promise to restore President Obama’s policies. Few experts, though, believe Cuba’s regime is about to collapse. As long as the government has the resources to retain the support of its coercive apparatus, the restoration of order is within its grasp. Even in 1994, when the collapse of the Soviet Union saw Cuba’s economy implode, its state apparatus proved resilient.

The CIA’s war against Cuba continued long after President Kennedy’s death. In 1976, United States-based Cubans allegedly tied to the CIA bombed a Cubana Airlines flight mid-air, killing 73 people. In 1997, the CIA was again implicated in terrorist attacks on tourism infrastructure in Havana. These attempts, like the sanctions programme, did little to destabilise the regime, and legitimised repression against dissidents.

Where does this leave United States foreign policy? An important lesson might be that even superpowers have to learn to live with regimes they dislike—unless the behaviour of those regimes is so threatening that war is unavoidable. Even then, witness the case of Iran and North Korea, the costs of war might outweigh any conceivable gains.Like his predecessors, President Biden has electoral reasons to step up economic pressure on Cuba. Escalating sanctions, though, will do little more than inflict greater hardship on the country’s poor.

PRAVEEN SWAMI
TAGS: #covid impact #Cuba protests #economic sanctions #foreign policy #Havana #Joe Biden #US Cuba relations #US foreign policy
FIRST PUBLISHED: JUL 24, 2021 

Business News | Stock and Share Market News | Financial News (moneycontrol.com)

Cuba slams latest US sanctions

Cuban foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez.

Havana, July 23 (IANS) The Cuban government has denounced the latest sanctions imposed against the island nation by the US administration.

“I refute the unfounded and slanderous US government sanctions against Army Corp General Alvaro Lopez Miera and the National Special Brigade,” Foreign Affairs Minister Bruno Rodriguez said in a Twitter post on Thursday.

“I denounce that the State Department is exercising offensive and humiliating pressures on European countries, particularly six from Eastern Europe, and eight from Latin America, to force them to support a declaration condemning Cuba,” he added.

Earlier in the day, the US Treasury Department announced sanctions against Miera and an elite military unit popularly known as the “black wasps” for their participation in the “rebuke” of protests this month in Cuba.

The new sanctions come amid the worst outbreak of Covid-19 Cuba has seen to date, with a rise in infections, deaths and hospitalisations.

The ‘US factor’ bursts into the Cuban crisis


Published by: MRT

Published on: July 24, 2021


The factor EE UU It has burst into the open crisis after the protests of July 11 and 12 in Cuba, which is becoming more and more international. The new sanctions announced last Thursday by the Joe Biden Administration, which until now had said that Cuba was not a priority and was reviewing its policy towards the island, again open the way to diplomatic confrontation and threaten to close the doors. to the hope that some kind of relief can come from Washington to the critical economic situation that the country is going through.

It’s not going to be like that, at least for now. The US strategy complicates the solution of an explosive scenario, at times of great discontent in the population due to the hardships that are being experienced, with the economy in the red, the epidemic running rampant and the Government shrinking water, and when the very summary trials against hundreds of detainees in the protests, mostly young people.

The dynamics of pressure and sanctions from Washington tend to cause Havana to be castled, warn veteran observers. And perhaps that is why on Thursday even the most critical of the Government of Miguel Díaz-Canel saw as a bad omen the announcement of the Administration of Joe Biden that it will sanction the Minister of Defense, Álvaro López Miera, and the National Special Brigade – a the elite body of the Ministry of the Interior, popularly known as black berets, for the repression exerted by the security forces during the demonstrations that shook the island on July 11.

“Turn off and let’s go,” said, as soon as he heard the news, a retired professional whose son was arrested in the demonstrations in the Fraternidad park and released the next day. It was a meeting of friends, and at that time they spoke with concern about the first sentences of the summary proceedings, of up to one year in jail for public disorder and contempt, emphasizing those gathered that even voices close to the officiality have demanded that all the peaceful protesters are released and only those who participated in violent acts go to trial.

When the group learned of Biden’s statements, to the effect that “this is just the beginning” and that “the United States will continue to sanction the individuals responsible for the oppression of the Cuban people,” there were several who reached out. head. “With the United States there is no solution, compadre,” lamented one of those who had shouted the most up to that moment against the convictions of the protesters.

Immediately after, what had to happen, happened. The Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodríguez, called a press conference in which he once again accused Washington of being behind the protests of July 11, of promoting manipulation through social networks to provoke the destabilization of the country and of exacerbate to impossible limits the economic embargo to aggravate the crisis and hardships on the island. Regarding the sanctions imposed on the Minister of the Armed Forces and the black berets, he stated that these were “politically motivated and intentional, and totally irrelevant from a practical point of view.”

The US, he said, does not have “the least authority, neither legal nor political nor moral, to go around sanctioning people around the world when it is known that they have a quite reprehensible behavior in terms of repression”, and added that it does not have “any authority moral to ask for the release of people detained in Cuba: it is an act of interference and intervention in our internal affairs ”. The Foreign Minister denied that most of the protesters were peaceful, and called on Washington to demonstrate that there were “disappeared” and minors under arrest, assuring that what happened was not “a social outbreak”, but that they were violent riots, and that those who they will be prosecuted for that reason they will have “all the guarantees of Cuban law.”

There is still no official number of detainees, nor has it been reported how many people will be brought to trial, an issue that is now at the center of debates on social networks – the internet is working again – where more and more people from the world of Culture speaks out against a strong hand in the trials and calls for an investigation into the allegations of police abuse made by some of those arrested.

In this tense environment, with more and more critical voices making themselves heard, and in the midst of a deep crisis that cannot be seen to end and that is the basis of the malaise that led people to the protests, the factor EE UU becomes key. “If they had a minimum of intelligence, they would remove the blockade now, what they are doing is strengthening the toughest positions within,” said the father of the young man arrested on 11-J.

There is considerable consensus that the US, instead of adding more gasoline to the fire, would do well to provide water to put it out, especially when the crisis tends to become international. Havana once again accused Washington of having evidence of its pressure on various governments of the former Eastern Europe and also on Latin American countries to condemn Cuba, something that some have already done. Meanwhile, other nations such as Spain try to maintain equidistance and ask for solidarity and humanitarian aid in these times of pandemic, while condemning the police violence used to silence the protest and criticize the embargo.

This Friday, The New York The Times published a letter from 400 intellectuals, politicians, artists, scientists and former heads of state calling for the White House to immediately lift the more than 240 sanctions adopted by Donald Trump during his term “that hinder Cuba’s efforts. to control the pandemic ”. Film figures such as Jane Fonda, Susan Sarandon, Danny Glover and Mark Ruffalo are signed, or former presidents such as Lula da Silva (Brazil) and Rafael Correa (Ecuador).

While summary trials and jail sentences arrive in avalanche, in Havana and in other localities the queues and shortages remain and the pandemic advances. Renowned Cuban economists have actively and passively said that the intensification of the embargo, the persecution of financial and oil supplies, and the effect of the Helms-Burton law to discourage investment have exacerbated the crisis. But they point out that it is the structural inefficiency of the productive system and the economic reforms so often postponed, as well as the lack of spaces for debate to discuss different visions, which have put the country on the ropes. There is consensus that the solutions are internal, and depend only on the will of the Government to introduce far-reaching reforms, not patches, to alleviate the situation. But that the role of the United States is also an important factor.

BACKGROUNDER

Chile’s famed pensions system faces an existential crisis

Investor fears intensify that the model is disintegrating after congress approves second round of saver withdrawals

A woman holds a sign that calls for ‘Decent Pensions’. Pensions were at the heart of protests that roiled the country last year © AFP via Getty Images

Benedict Mander in Buenos Aires

 and Michael Stott in London 

NOVEMBER 15 2020

Chile’s celebrated $200bn private pensions system has served as a model for dozens of emerging markets since it was introduced in the 1980s. Now, it faces an existential crisis as public support for the model fades and populist politicians allow savers to withdraw funds during the coronavirus crisis.

The lower house of congress voted to allow Chileans to withdraw another 10 per cent of their pension funds last week, following a similar measure in July that saw withdrawals of some $17bn.

Congress could yet approve a third withdrawal next year, putting at risk a pool of savings that has driven the growth of Chile's capital markets and jeopardising future returns. 

Investors are increasingly concerned that the country’s famed economic model that has driven decades of steady growth is disintegrating. 

“Chile is a country in Latin America but it is not a Latin American country because there [have been] no attacks on investors or crazy economic policies. This is exactly what is at risk now,” said a senior pensions industry executive familiar with the Chilean market.

Since the outbreak of violent protests late last year demanding greater equality in Chile — with inadequate pension payouts a particular bone of contention — the pro-business government of President Sebastián Piñera “has presided over a degradation of institutional quality of such magnitude that we wonder what the future will be”, added the executive.

No one thinks that it is optimal to confront the crisis with money from pensions. Even so, Chilean families still need money to get to the end of the month . . . We have no other option

Maite Orsini, a leftist opposition legislator

Few would deny that Chile’s pension system needs reform.

Established almost 40 years ago during General Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship, Chile’s defined contribution model was the first fully private pensions system in the world. It was widely praised by institutions such as the World Bank and seen as a key part of the Chilean economic success story.

But problems with the model have become more apparent in recent years. The 10 per cent contribution rate is low, and paid fully by employees with nothing from employers except disability insurance. While the number of years of contributions varies between people, it is generally considered to be not long enough. The result is that about 80 per cent of pensioners receive less than the minimum wage.

The private pensions industry believes it is being made the scapegoat for a government failure to make employers contribute their fair share.

In a referendum last month, Chileans voted to replace the country’s dictatorship-era constitution with a new charter, which is likely to lead to a greater role for the state in the economy. The government has put together generous fiscal spending packages amounting to about 12 per cent of GDP since the outbreak of the pandemic, but critics say this is still not enough to heal the economic damage and stop people from making early withdrawals.

“No one thinks that it is optimal to confront the crisis with money from pensions,” said Maite Orsini, a leftist opposition legislator. “Even so, Chilean families still need money to get to the end of the month . . . We have no other option.”

“There are two ways of looking at this,” said Andras Uthoff, a pensions expert in Santiago. “If you look at the people most in need who can't support themselves, given that the government has been very mean in terms of social protection policy [during the coronavirus crisis], it would be reasonable to accept the withdrawal. But in terms of the pension system, it's a very bad idea.” 

Many are worried that by draining resources from pension funds now, the state will eventually be forced to pick up the slack and pour more resources into Chile’s pension system. That could raise the spectre of a permanent deterioration in public finances, as has happened in Brazil. Some believe that this is the covert agenda of Chile's left: to replace the private system with a fully state-funded model.

Chile’s government spends less than 3 per cent of GDP on pensions, compared with an average of 8 per cent in the OECD. But critics of the new withdrawals argue that taking out up to a fifth of the system’s assets to be spent now will only further weaken it. 

“Effectively what they are doing today means lower pensions in future,” said Fernando Larrain, director-general of the association of pension administrators. He said he was worried that the second pension withdrawal will put more than 4m people — or nearly half of the system’s 10-11m contributors — in a critical situation.

“These people will have zero funds and they are predominantly young and female,” he added.

One of the greatest problems is that there is little consensus over how to reform Chile’s pension system, according to Andrés Solimano, an economist and former World Bank country director in Santiago. He said this was compounded by a crisis of legitimacy of the political system reflected in the push for a new constitution.

“It doesn't make sense to decide today on a new pension system for the next 30 years. Now is not the time to embark on structural reform,” he said, suggesting that a question about pensions reform could be included in elections to draw up a constitutional assembly next April.

Hanging in the balance is a hefty pension pot that some fear is an attractive prize for populist politicians that have their eyes set on presidential elections next year.

“There is a lack of leadership by the government,” warned another industry executive. “They are not protecting what made the Chilean economy successful, and they are being led by populism. They are mortgaging the future of Chile.”

https://www.ft.com/content/3c25b7e0-b31f-4d5b-9845-3514af2970a3

Israel-Gaza: How Palestinian resistance is challenging the tech supremacy of war

Ideology that reserves advanced technology and firepower for western superpowers is troubled by non-western players laying claim to these technologies

Ahmed D Dardir
23 July 2021 

An Israeli firefighter extinguishes a blaze caused by incendiary balloons launched from the Gaza Strip on 9 May 2021 (AFP)

In its latest confrontation with Israeli occupation forces, and in response to continued Israeli aggression against al-Aqsa Mosque and Jerusalem residents, the Gaza-based Palestinian resistance unleashed a fleet of incendiary balloons targeting the colonial settlements bordering the Gaza Strip.

As Israel’s aggressive actions in Jerusalem have not technically violated the ceasefire signed in May, the Palestinian response had to eschew military force; instead, it creatively weaponised the mundane. While embodying the spirit of resistance, the Palestinian response had to remain low-impact, so as not to constitute a pretext for a new round of Israeli hostilities.

Yet, Israel responded by launching air strikes against what it claimed were Hamas targets in Gaza, effectively violating the ceasefire. Still, a significant part of mainstream western media and public opinion views this Israeli violation as justifiable self-defence, while the balloons from Gaza are seen as purposeless, misguided and provocative.




This paradox is maintained by racialised hierarchies of conflict that operate beyond the Palestinian context

The same attitude met the May confrontations. Although the Gaza-based resistance was able to use its missiles and drones - relatively primitive compared to Israel’s military capabilities - to maximum political effect, while minimising casualties and destruction on the Israeli side, they were still depicted by the mainstream media as misguided, chaotic or even desperate. On the other hand, Israeli missiles were portrayed as justifiable, with the state’s military power described as targeted and sophisticated.

This leads to a paradox, wherein the unguided missiles of the Palestinian resistance are guilty of targeting civilians, while the precise and targeted missiles of the Israeli occupation forces are innocent of the deaths of victims whom they “mistakenly” target. This paradox is maintained by racialised hierarchies of conflict that operate beyond the Palestinian context.
US war machine

In a world fascinated by cutting-edge, slick, state-of-the-art technology - by buttons, screens and computerised processes - the advancement of technology on one side masks carnage on the other. The computerisation of the US war machine infamously turned American wars at the turn of the century into real-life video games.

US air strikes against civilian and suspected militant targets have become a sanitised, computerised affair - an automated process where the location of targets, threat assessment, and process of launching a drone attack occurs largely in the bloodless circuits of mega-computers, somehow masking and justifying the killings.

Drones are parked in a hangar in the US state of Nevada in 2015 (AFP)

In his memoir, A Promised Land, Obama boasts: “The National Security Agency, or NSA, already the most sophisticated electronic-intelligence-gathering organization in the world, employed new supercomputers and decryption technology worth billions of dollars to comb cyberspace in search of terrorist communications and potential threats”, resulting in “nighttime raids [that] hunted down terrorist suspects mostly inside - but sometimes outside - the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq”. In other words, it was Obama’s signature tactic of targeted, extrajudicial killings.

As the rhetorical deployment of technology here sanitises the killings - of suspected terrorists, it must be stressed - it creates a technical backbone for the ideology of western supremacy, allowing the “civilised” and technologically advanced to exert physical, sometimes lethal, violence against “lesser” forms of human life.

This is the same supremacist ideology that justifies Israel’s crimes under the pretext that it is the “only democracy” in the Middle East - as though people not living under the paradigm of western liberal democracy do not deserve to live. Israel’s crimes are further justified by the fact that its war machine is precise and technologically advanced, as if this somehow legitimises the killing of victims who are precisely targeted.
Cause for alarm

The converse, however, does not apply. Technological advancements achieved outside the exclusive club of western powers do not merit a membership card for “technologically civilised” society, but are rather a cause for alarm that such technology is dangerously spreading beyond the approved clique.


This is the same hierarchy under which advancements by Iran and North Korea, which both face stifling US sanctions, in the nuclear field are treated not as technological advancements, but as cause for alarm that such technology is finding its way into unworthy and unreliable hands that are bound to misuse it. This same alarm, evidently, is not set off by the military nuclear programme of the one country that has used atomic weapons against civilians: the US.

 
 
Israel-Palestine: Apartheid cannot be defeated without armed resistance  Read More »

The dominant narrative reserves technologically advanced firepower - including sophisticated, computerised and smart weapons - for western powers. Non-western states and actors are left with incendiary weapons that are bound to misfire. This partially explains the western obsession with suicide bombing, which it imagines as the sole or predominant modus operandi of non-white insurgents.

The ideology that reserves advanced technology and firepower for western superpowers is, nevertheless, continuously troubled by non-western players laying claim to these technologies, be they other superpowers (China), “rogue states” (Iran and North Korea), or insurgent groups waging wars of liberation against colonial powers and their proxies.

An array of tactical and strategic concerns ultimately pushed the Palestinian resistance towards missile and drone technologies. Although I do not suggest they did this to make a point, it does trouble the dominant racialised assumptions and hierarchies, undermining the white monopoly over targeted, sophisticated and technological fire. The so-called international community can choose to recognise this achievement, or to continue performing mental acrobatics to reassure itself of the primitive and misguided nature of the resistance’s fire.



What matters most is how this advancement “rids the colonised of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude”, to use the words written in a similar context by the great anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon. “It emboldens them, and restores their self confidence.”

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Ahmed D Dardir holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from Columbia University. His forthcoming book is tentatively titled Licentious Topographies: Global Counterrevolution and Bad Subjectivity in Modern Egypt. He is a regular contributor to a number of media outlets. His personal blog can be found at https://textualtrimmings.blogspot.com.