End Times Antisemitism

 This is my backup copy of a Political Research Associates link by Steven Gardiner. 

This article is heavily documented by sixty-plus endnotes. This Blogger copy is not hyperlinked but all are available at the PRA site.

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End Times Antisemitism
Christian Zionism, Christian Nationalism, and the Threat to Democracy
by Steven Gardiner 

July 9, 2020

I first encountered Christian Zionism—political support for the modern State of Israel grounded in beliefs about its prophetic significance in End Times scenarios—in 1992, while working as a fight-the-Right researcher in Portland, Oregon. A big part of my job was explaining the implications of Christian Right ideas and drawing out the connections between the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA), a local group best known for its anti-LGBTQ politics, and the broader program of the national movement. One critical element of that work was opposing a particularly anti-democratic OCA-sponsored initiative, Ballot Measure 9, which sought to amend Oregon’s constitution to require “all levels of government” to “discourage homosexuality” and prohibit the inclusion of “sexual orientation” in any civil rights protections. It also sought to define homosexuality as “abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse.”[1] This ballot measure, in all of its obvious bigotry, was eventually rejected by Oregon voters, who shot it down in a 56 to 44 percent result.[2] But that outcome wasn’t a given in the year-long campaign preceding the vote—a period saturated with both anti-LGBTQ violence and vitriolic culture war rhetoric.[3]

The “No on 9” campaign focused on issues of fairness and legal equality, both of which were under attack by the ballot measure. And it was an urgent message in the final year of the Reagan-Bush era, when bigoted policies resulted in AIDS becoming the leading cause of death in U.S. men aged 25–44,[4] and the first same-sex marriage law was still almost a decade away.[5] But it was also only a small part of the threat posed by the Christian Right, not just to LGBTQ or reproductive rights, but to the basic institutions of democracy. It was my job to help lead public education about the broader dangers of the Christian Right, and in that context, I often spoke at public meetings in partnership with rural LGBTQ and allied groups—to churches, civic organizations, anyone who would listen.

One such meeting was held at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center on Portland’s West Side. For the most part the audience responded enthusiastically to the fairness message. They could also see that the OCA was trying to impose a narrow version of a particular variety of Christian morality on the legal system. But understanding how the Christian Right could be the enemy of democracy was more complicated.

“I understand the fairness issue,” said one man in the audience, “but how much do we as Jews have to be worried about the Christian Right? I mean, they are strong supporters of Israel.”

The question hung in the air. Then as now, the Israel/Palestine issue is an important one for many American Jews. As the resident expert on the Christian Right, the panel’s moderator nodded at me to respond. Almost three decades later I remember the gist of my answer:

Yes, the Christian Right supports Israel. They see the establishment of the modern State of Israel as fulfillment of prophecies they believe to be necessary to the Second Coming of Jesus. They want to see the Temple rebuilt and for Israel to expand to control all of the territory described in Scripture. They believe a tiny minority of living Jews will, in the End Times, convert to Christianity and the rest will be damned to hell for their disbelief. They are, on those grounds, no friends of Jews.

I was making a point that is increasingly relevant in the Trump era: that untempered support for Israel’s most reactionary policies is no bulwark against antisemitism, just as criticism of Israeli policy is no indication of such. Many in the room nodded their agreement. Even the man who’d asked the question seemed, if not exactly satisfied, to have something to think about.

But even then, I recognized that it was a partial response, because Christian Zionism is much more than a set of beliefs about the role of Israel and the Jews in the Second Coming, beliefs that are all too easy to trivialize for those who don’t share them. Rather, Christian Zionism is part of a set of interlocking, theologically grounded beliefs about how Christians should engage with the political world.

Today, President Trump’s administration is staffed by Christian Zionists at the highest levels, including Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.[6] And adherents of the belief system form a key component of Trump’s electoral base. Up to 81 percent of White evangelicals voted for him in the 2016 elections.[7] Of that number only a slim majority, about 53 percent, unequivocally supported his recognition, in 2019, of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, but it would never be a make-or-break issue for doubters.[8] For full-throttle Christian Zionists, however, the embassy move prompted comparisons of Trump to Cyrus the Great, the Persian king celebrated as a friend of the Jewish people for his decision to allow those in exile to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.[9]

All this may be good for mobilizing the President’s base, but it is deeply corrosive to any prospect for peace and regional stability in the Middle East. Nor, ultimately, are Christian Zionists separable from the broader Christian Right with its now decades-old plan to realign U.S. society with their particular version of Christian virtue, whatever the cost to democratic inclusion.

What is Christian Zionism?

For the purposes of this article, Christian Zionism refers to a movement among Christians, mostly Charismatic and evangelical, whose interpretation of the Bible mandates their political support not just for the modern state of Israel, but an expansionist version thereof. The movement believes that the entirety of Jerusalem—particularly the Temple Mount, where they expect to see the Temple rebuilt—the Gaza Strip, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Golan Heights, all rightfully belong to Israel: a biblical land-grant that doesn’t merely fulfill a scriptural promise to the Jewish people, but stands as the cornerstone of Christian prophecies and as a sign that the End Times are close upon us. In other words, they claim the authority of religion in formulating a no-compromise position with respect to sharing land with the Palestinian people. Pastor Robert Jeffress, the Trump-aligned Baptist minister who blessed the relocation of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, put it like this: “Jerusalem has been the object of affection of both Jews and Christians down through history and the touchstone of prophecy. But most importantly, God gave Jerusalem—and the rest of the Holy Land—to the Jewish people.”[10]

Jeffress’s “touchstone of prophecy” comment is shorthand for the Christian Zionist belief that the establishment of Israel is a sign that prophecies are being fulfilled. It’s a common belief among U.S. evangelicals, some 63 to 80 percent of whom profess that the establishment of Israel in 1948 was the fulfillment of prophecy and an indication that the Second Coming is drawing near.[11] How near? According to one 2010 poll by the Pew Research Center, 58 percent of White evangelicals, and 41 percent of all Americans, believe that Jesus will “probably” or “definitely” return by 2050.[12]

Recent scholarly work on Christian Zionism has sought to complicate contemporary understandings of the movement, offering a more sympathetic and revisionist interpretation than the suggestion that Christian Zionism is exclusively driven by apocalypticism.[13] Especially as presented in the popular press, this new scholarship denies the movement’s underlying antisemitism and minimizes the influence of End Times prophecies and quid-pro-quo support for divine blessings, casting the movement as primarily about “mutual and covenantal solidarity.”[14] While this scholarship may be a necessary corrective to some easy generalizations, it focuses little on the most politically active Christian Zionist organizations today, especially Christians United for Israel, or its rapidly growing support among Charismatics.[15]

Strands of Christian Zionism

Politicized Christian Zionists fall into two broad theological camps: (1) premillennial dispensationalists and (2) Dominionist-influenced Charismatics, particularly those involved with the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement.[16] While the contemporary movement that finds so much prophetic significance in the founding of the modern state of Israel has its origins in the former, it is increasingly dominated by the latter. Megachurch pastor and televangelist John Hagee acts as a bridge between these two factions. Hagee, as head of the largest and most visible Christian Zionist group in the United States, Christians United for Israel (CUFI), does not claim NAR theology, but it’s clear that many CUFI insiders have been NAR allies or part of that movement.[17]

Dispensationalism refers to belief in a progression of ages of the world in which the calendar of salvation is moved forward by pre-ordained events. In most dispensationalist accounts, we are currently living in the “Church Age,” during which gentiles find salvation through accepting Jesus as their savior.[18] Premillennial dispensationalists believe that Jesus must return before the establishment of his thousand-year reign on earth. Many premillennialists also believe that before the millennium, there will be a Rapture of the Christian faithful, whom God will transport, body and all, to heaven before a period of seven years called the Great Tribulation.[19] The Tribulation, as described in Revelations, will include violent death that sweeps “over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, with hunger, with death, and by the beasts of the earth.”[20] As Journalist Michelle Goldberg writes, premillennial dispensationalists also tend to “believe that God has a special plan for the nation of Israel, which will play a key role in the end of days and the return of Christ.”[21]

In the first half of the 20th Century, premillennial dispensationalism and its associated beliefs often led to a kind of political quiescence—standing aside from worldly events and letting prophecy unfold. But beginning in the 1970s, a new leadership—largely drawn from the Charismatic movement or influenced by a radical theology known as Christian Reconstructionism—led to the formation of the panoply of new public education and lobbying organizations, including the Moral Majority, Christian Coalition, Traditional Values Coalition and others. Premillennialists, like many attracted to the Christian Right, were drawn by the proactive character of Reconstructionist, or more broadly “Dominionist” ideas about the responsibilities of Christians in society. As Frederick Clarkson has argued, while Reconstructionism was itself a tiny movement, its influence in the broader evangelical world is hard to overestimate.[22]

The second strand of support for contemporary Christian Zionism comes from the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). The NAR is difficult to summarize in a few sentences. It is a diffuse movement within Charismatic and Pentecostal churches that typically includes vehement anti-denominationalism coupled with extreme hierarchical discipline of individuals and whole churches to authoritarian “apostles.” Many NAR beliefs and practices—including exorcism, “spiritual mapping” (coordinating prayer and ritual to expel demonic influences from a geographic region), and faith healing—invite mockery rather than analysis.[23]

But far from being laughable, the NAR’s “spiritual warfare” is deeply influenced by Dominionist thinking and actualized around a network of authoritarian leaders styled as “apostles” and “prophets” who, in many instances, insist on micromanaging the lives of their followers in ways reminiscent of and genealogically related to the defunct “shepherding” movement.[24] The potential for interpersonal abuse inherent in relationships that combine extreme hierarchy with unaccountable leadership was on display in that earlier movement.[25] These “apostolic” authorities, and the Dominionist imperative to Christianize otherwise secular institutions, combine to form a potent threat to democratic pluralism, as represented in the NAR-linked Seven Mountains campaign—a holistic model for the faithful to follow in taking control of not just state institutions, but media, education, business, and entertainment—all in service of forming an unabashed “Christian nation.”[26]

CUFI claims eight million members.[27] It’s unlikely that the majority of that number are well-versed in the nuances of End Times theology, either in the dispensationalist or the NAR version. Theological consistency is largely the domain of thought leaders and religious professionals. But the opinions of thought leaders in this milieu, endlessly broadcast via Christian media networks and in the pulpits of megachurches, are in and of themselves significant.

Why It Matters: Antisemitism

Christian Zionism is both like and unlike more familiar Christian Right culture war targets. As with LGBTQ rights or reproductive choice, the interpretive contortions of movement leaders regarding Scripture are not the only reasons many Christian Zionists support Israel.

Christian Rightists who use Bible verses to justify anti-LGBTQ policies may also be motivated by homophobic bigotry; similarly, Christian Zionists who support Israeli state policies because of End Times prophecies might also be driven by anti-Muslim views. But Christian Zionism bridges foreign and domestic politics in some unique ways that exacerbate both antisemitism and anti-Muslim bigotry.

Often, the sort of antisemitism in Christian Zionism circles is obscured by the surface philosemitism of many in the movement and by the fallacy that what is nominally good for Israel is good for Jews. Since not all Jews are Israeli, and Jews have a wide range of political opinions about Israeli policies, the presumption that all U.S. Jews do, or should, support the current Israeli government is at base antisemitic. It follows the same political logic that led to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, flowing from fear of their prior or higher ethnic loyalty to Japan than the U.S. It is also, of course, the contemporary form of a long-standing antisemitic trope, that by a more-or-less immutable nature, Jews are incapable of loyalty to a non-Jewish state.

For most of the years between the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945 and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the “dual loyalty” slander about Jews has been confined to an explicitly antisemitic periphery of White nationalists. With Trump’s election, however, this is no longer the case. President Trump has repeatedly called into question the loyalty of U.S. Jews who fail to support his policies toward Israel, claiming they “don’t love Israel enough.”[28] Going further, in speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition in April 2019, Trump referred to Netanyahu as “your Prime Minister.”[29]

In an otherwise benign context, such statements might be taken as the partisan hyperbole of a President not known for his rhetorical constraint. Even when an average of 71 percent of U.S. Jews have voted for Democratic presidential candidates since 1968, if the only consequences were rhetorical, Trump’s statements could possibly be seen as mere excess.[30] But both U.S. policy in Israel/Palestine and on-the-ground violence against U.S. Jews suggest that Trump’s statements are both more than rhetoric and that his rhetoric is not only callous, but reckless.

Many of the most consequential Trump policies relating to Palestine/Israel are a continuation of long-standing, bipartisan U.S. support for Israel, which amounts to around $3 billion in military and economic aid per year.[31] There are, however, several Trump initiatives that have marked a significant departure from previous administrations. Key among these is the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the relocation of the U.S. embassy there,[32] as well as recognition of Israel’s claim to the Golan Heights.[33] Then there is the administration’s decision to end U.S. contributions to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN agency tasked with supporting Palestinian refugees.[34] On the domestic front, Trump issued an executive order charging Title VI civil rights enforcement agencies in the federal bureaucracy to consider “the non-legally binding working definition of anti Semitism adopted on May 26, 2016, by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)” including “the ‘Contemporary Examples of Anti-Semitism’ identified by the IHRA.”[35] The “Contemporary Examples” include the controversial item “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”[36] Ken Stern, one of the authors of the IHRA definition, has suggested that the Trump executive order turns their words to a purpose they never intended—the regulation of campus speech. Stern writes, “This order is an attack on academic freedom and free speech, and will harm not only pro-Palestinian advocates, but also Jewish students and faculty, and the academy itself.”[37] Civil liberties advocates fear this definition will suppress any speech critical of Israel on campuses, forcing university administrations to act as censors of students and faculty.[38]

These breaks with previous policy have been interpreted by prominent Christian Zionists as part of a divine plan to hasten the End Times, as when Robert Jeffress declared of the embassy move, “We’re seeing prophecy unfold. I don’t know when the Lord is coming back, but I know today it got a little bit closer.”[39] Or when John Hagee, in October 2017, predicted that Trump’s campaign promise to relocate the embassy would likely happen that year “because God’s clock is ticking.”[40]

In addition to discussing prophecies, Christian Zionists also understand U.S.-Israel through a transactional lens. Many point to Genesis 12:3, wherein God promises Abram, “I will bless those who bless you/And I will curse him who curses you.”[41] For example, Hagee claims he told Trump that, “the moment that he really began to bless Israel, God would bless him in a very, very special way.”[42] The importance of such a blessing looms much larger in New Apostolic Reformation circles, which believe these blessings can manifest as increased supernatural spiritual potency—leading to highly performative displays of support for Israel. In the words of Christian anti-NAR activist Holly Pivec, “NAR people often wear the Star of David on necklaces. They participate in Jewish religious feasts. They take pilgrimages to Israel, where they hold large prayer gatherings and blow shofars (a Jewish trumpet made of a ram’s horn). Some even move to Israel.”[43]

Even among the NAR, however, some of the most popular preachers remain committed to prophetic apocalypticism. For example, Mike Bickle, one of the most prominent Christian Zionists linked directly to the movement,[44] is known for his assertion that, as a prelude to the End Times, a great many Jews will be rounded up and placed in “prison camps” and “death camps”—not in reference to the Holocaust, but to future actions that will be taken by followers of the Anti-Christ.[45] As horrific as Bickle’s prediction sounds, he takes an activist stance concerning the End Times, asserting, “The Tribulation is not something that happens to us. The Tribulation is something that happens through us.”[46]

Similarly, in an infamous 2005 sermon, Hagee declared that Hitler and the Holocaust were predicted in Scripture and part of the divine plan to coerce Jews to move to Israel.[47] While video of the sermon has since been scrubbed from the internet, in a transcript made by researcher-activist Bruce Wilson, Hagee preaches the distinction between “fishers,” who lure their prey, and “hunters,” who kill them outright. In this parable, Hagee suggested that diasporic Jews insufficiently enthusiastic about moving to Israel led directly to the Holocaust. That is, their failure to respond to the fisher, Hagee said, meant that, “Then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter.”[48]

This quote, which Hagee has protested was “intentionally mischaracterized,” is often seen as the smoking gun for Christian Zionist antisemitism.[49] Like the Bickle discussion of hastening the Tribulation and Jews in death camps, these quotations help highlight just how bigoted Christian Zionist beliefs can be. But they also draw us so much into the trees that we miss the forest of antisemitic power, often presented in the guise of supposedly philosemitic policy—such as the embassy move or recognition of Golan Heights as part of Israel. Here we see explicitly Christian Zionist organizations such as CUFI, and megachurch pastors like Bickle and Jeffress, working with high administration officials such as Mike Pompeo, to justify expanding support for a right-wing, authoritarian Israeli government as the fulfillment of prophecy.[50] The closeness of this relationship should give us pause, leading as it has to condemning the majority of U.S. Jews as disloyal, allying our country with the most authoritarian and reactionary elements in Israeli politics, and justifying further escalation of tensions in the wider Middle East.

Why it Matters: Anti-Muslim Bigotry

The Christian Zionist logic that calls on the U.S. to unconditionally support Israeli policies simultaneously reinforces the adversarial stance toward the Muslim world that has been on display since 9/11. Some Christian Zionist leaders have long supported war with Iran and general belligerence toward the Islamic world. Here the language is often much less guarded, with Hagee referring to Iran as the “head of the snake” with “a theology based on suicide and mass murder,”[51] and NAR “prophet” Chuck Pierce declaring that Islam “is controlled by satanic principalities and powers.”[52] Within the NAR, such claims aren’t rhetorical devices, but accusations of actual demonic possession.[53] And Christian Right leader Pat Robertson, also a Christian Zionist, has made similar accusations, holding that “Militant Islam is motivated by the devil.”[54] In fact, journalism professor Eric Gormly found in an analysis of Robertson’s flagship 700 Club program that references to satanic and demonic influence in Islam were commonplace in the post-9/11 era.[55]

As with antisemitism, anti-Islamic bigotry is a fluid construct, adaptable as a technique of power. During the Obama administration—alongside aspersions about the president’s citizenship and Christian faith—anti-Muslim groups like ACT for America focused on the threat of terrorism and on the supposed spread of Sharia law in the United States.[56] According to Steven Fink, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire professor of philosophy and religious studies, “American Christian Zionist leaders connect Islam categorically with violence.”[57] For example, John Hagee has written that “Islam not only condones violence; it commands it.”[58]

It is usually White Nationalists and their ideologically adjacent friends in the Trump administration who are associated with conspiracy-tainted claims about invading foreigners and the hidden forces that egg them on.[59] These claims are usually grounded in antisemitism. Sometimes this is explicit, as for the Pittsburgh and Poway synagogue shooters. More often, flowing from the administration staff or Fox News, the antisemitism is ever-so-slightly veiled, taking the form of accusations against Jewish philanthropist George Soros or unnamed “globalists.”[60] In the case of Christian Zionism, antisemitism and anti-Muslim bigotry go hand-in-hand. American Jews who criticize Israeli policy or see themselves primarily as U.S. citizens are accused of disloyalty. According to Christian Zionist thought, they promote the cosmopolitan, anti-nationalist ideas of Soros, supporting the mass entry of culture-destroying immigrants, including Muslim immigrants intent on undermining White Christian civilization.

For Christian Zionists, U.S. Jews who refuse to participate in their prophetic fantasies and economy of curses and blessing are an obstacle to God’s plan. Christian Zionists like Lt. Col. (Ret.) Robert Maginnis, a former senior fellow of the Family Research Council, and Stephen Strang, the leading publisher of Charismatic and Pentacostal media, echo the language of White nationalists, giving it their own twist. Like their more secular colleagues, they paint Soros as the wellspring of all manner of “globalist” and “cultural Marxis[t]” attacks on the nation. At the same time, their unwavering support for right-wing Israeli policies serves to shield them from accusations of antisemitism. As S. Jonathan O’Donnell, a postdoc in American Studies at University College Dublin has argued, “Christian Zionist anti-globalism cannot be classified as straightforwardly antisemitic, nor fully divorced from it.”[61] That shield, however, is something they wield against the political preferences of a majority of U.S. Jews.

The Christian Zionist stance toward Muslims is not nearly so nuanced. Muslims are constructed largely as an undifferentiated enemy, not just through the blurring of right-wing Israeli interests with those of all Jews and all Americans, but as cultural invaders bent on undermining U.S. culture and society. This is largely in-line with positions taken by the U.S. Right more generally, including the anti-Muslim group ACT for America.[62] Christian Zionists add their signature apocalyptic voice. In an article titled “The Coming Fourth Reich,” Hagee writes:

America has been invaded by an invisible army of millions who intend to destroy this nation. They aren’t coming to America; they’re already here. This army of radical Islamic extremists have poured across our open borders and are waiting patiently for the hour of their unified attack, designed to bring chaos and governmental collapse.[63]

Corrosive to Democracy

Christian Zionism is politically opportunistic, mobilizing both antisemitism and anti-Muslim bigotry in ways calculated to capitalize on the fears of the moment. This opportunism is wedded to shifting interpretations of prophecy. In his book Beginning of the End: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Coming Antichrist (1996), Hagee interprets the prophetic significance of the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin’s role in the Oslo Accords, in Hagee’s interpretation, led to the possibility of his assassination being used as an excuse to double-down on peace. He wrote, “based on the words of the prophets of Israel, I believe this peace process will lead to the most devastating war Israel has ever known. After that war, the longed-for Messiah will come.”[64]

By 2016, of course, it wasn’t an imminent war that was signaling the close arrival of the Messiah, but rather Trump’s relocation of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.[65] Such convenient interpretive moves must not be reduced to a penchant for charlatanism. Between Rabin’s assassination and the embassy move, Hagee built CUFI into a juggernaut with millions of members and staunch allies in the Trump administration, including Vice President Pence and Secretary of State Pompeo. So, when CUFI takes credit for the embassy relocation, it’s more than boasting. Through one-on-one meetings with both Trump and Pence, Hagee stressed the move was important to his constituency—a claim backed up by 137,000 supportive emails from CUFI members to the White House.[66]

Christian Zionist organizations are thus in a feedback loop relationship with the Trump administration, watching their allies get appointed as insiders who are then validated by constituent activism. Pence has not only spoken at CUFI events, his public statements put him firmly in the camp of Christian Zionism.[67] Pompeo is similarly committed to Christian Zionist principles and has aligned himself with CUFI.[68] While there is no religious test for holding high office in the United States, such public support for a cause so openly biased, by the very people responsible for guiding U.S. foreign policy, is cause for the gravest concern. At the very least, such positioning undermines the capacity for the U.S. to engage in peace-making not just in Israel/Palestine, but more broadly.

At a deeper level, the influence of the Christian Zionist movement on both foreign and domestic policy poses a challenge to the democratic process itself. Democracy, in the best sense, is not merely the will of the majority, or competition between constituencies, but the temperance of such competition by fundamental rights. These include religious freedom, but not the freedom to impose religious belief or practice on others. The apocalyptic rhetoric of Christian Zionists and their exaggerated claims of prophetic certainty—recall Hagee’s claim about “millions” of Muslim invaders bent on destroying the United States—demonstrate how they hide behind democratic claims (like freedom of speech or religion) even as they shamelessly attack the rights of others. They wield the democratic process of constituent mobilization in causes shot through with bigotry.

Moreover, democracy only functions inclusively when decision-making criteria are transparent. Practices of prophetic interpretation, orientation to the End Times, and the transactional chasing after supernatural blessings are anything but clear to the vast majority of people in the United States. With Trump in the White House and Christian Zionists as core members of his policy team, this is an ignorance the rest of us can no longer afford to sustain. 

Endnotes 

[This article is heavily documented with sixty-plus endnotes. This Blogger copy is not hyperlinked but all are available at the PRA site.]

Open Adoption and Other Matters

Prior to this blog and after I lost my original blog (long story) I was a guest blogger at two other blogs. This is a backup of one of many posts at Ruchira's Accidental Blogger in 2012.

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Story Corps Atlanta aired a great audio snapshot this morning well worth the three and a half minutes it takes to listen. [Link no longer available.]

This summer and fall, 41 year old Atlanta attorney Kirsten Widner has been living with her biological son, Alex Locke, for the first time.
Alex is now 19 years old. He was adopted as an infant to the parents he calls Mom and Dad, and he grew up on the other side of the country. At StoryCorps Atlanta, Kirsten told Alex about her decision to put Alex in an open adoption, in which they’d still have the possibility of a relationship.

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As I listened to yet another first-person account of how the idea of family has changed during our lifetime, I reflected on my own experience. Mine was a very traditional upbringing. Marriage on both sides meant "til death do you part" and I can't recall even whispers about anybody having to get married because they were "in trouble" (i.e. she got pregnant). The oldest of my first cousins was the first person in the family to dare marry anyone who had been divorced, a woman with three children, and they never had any together. That was in the Fifties, and since then our family, like most, has come to terms with divorce and more, including gender orientation and racial differences.

The difference between today's families and those of the past is more about facing realities that have always been there rather than discovering anything new. Attractions between cultural, religious and racial groups have always been around, and not always limited to young people either. The difference in today's global village is that we can no longer remain in denial because the numbers are simply too big. Those old bad apple and black sheep arguments no longer have credibility.

Following my cousin's example, I married with a divorced woman with two children, one of whom had been adopted by her and her first husband, and we then had two more together, making a blended family of six. In the early years we were also licensed foster parents to several pre-adoptive newborns, one of which was a very promising little boy we hated parting with after more than a year when he was finally placed with his adoptive family.

We persuaded the case workers to do adoptions from our home instead of the usual family services facilities which despite the toys and other stuff seemed too alien. It was a three-day process. The first day the adoptive parent came and met us as a family as well as the baby, and they spent as much time as possible with the baby. Second day any siblings came along and our two families spent a little time together, but the adoptive family might take the baby for a ride to have more time to bond. By the third day the baby would be going to a new home, not with total strangers but with people he had already known a little while.

In the case of our last one we did the third day differently. We took our three girls out of school that day and delivered the baby to his new home where our kids played with their kids for a couple of hours before we left. In fact, they weny back once or twice later to visit before we lost touch. That baby would now be about thirty years old and we still think of him from time to time.

In the meantime, there have been grandchildren and step-grandchildren as the next generation multiplied, with the most recent count being ten, with ages from a few weeks to twenty-six years. The two youngest, aged three and infant, are the result of assisted reproduction because our youngest daughter has no need for a man in her life but wanted to be a mother. She did her homework, found a clinic specializing in these matters, selected a donor from a veritable catalog of candidates, and became pregnant via IUI. Intrauterine insemination or implantation is not the same as in vitro fertilization which most people know about in that there is no deselecting of fertilized eggs. With IUI sperm is injected and timed to coordinate with the mother's natural ovulation cycle.

It's an exciting time to be alive. But it's also a challenge for those of us pushing seventy. When a single mom decides that her firstborn might feel cheated if she doesn't have a sibling, all you can do is pray that all goes well in their lives for the next decade or two. One of the hard lessons we all learn is that you can't tell your adult children how to live their lives. The reassuring part is that we get to watch the drama unfold daily on Facebook where there are literally scores of supportive online contacts, many of whom may never have known each other except on line. It turns out there is a voluntary online registry of siblings for parents who want to compare pictures and experiences! Our two youngest grandchildren (who have the same donor father, by the way, so they are true biological siblings) have at least forty-plus other half-siblings with the same donor/ father. (They are geographically widespread and the donor has been "retired" because the clinic restricts the number of donations from any one donor.)

Now you know why this morning's Story Corps feature caught my attention.

Wade Davis: The Unraveling of America

This article by anthropologist Wade Davis appeared August 6, 2020 in Rolling Stone.

The Unraveling of America
Anthropologist Wade Davis on how COVID-19 signals the end of the American era

Never in our lives have we experienced such a global phenomenon. For the first time in the history of the world, all of humanity, informed by the unprecedented reach of digital technology, has come together, focused on the same existential threat, consumed by the same fears and uncertainties, eagerly anticipating the same, as yet unrealized, promises of medical science.

In a single season, civilization has been brought low by a microscopic parasite 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt. COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies, but also the cultural foundations of our lives, the toolbox of community and connectivity that is for the human what claws and teeth represent to the tiger.

Our interventions to date have largely focused on mitigating the rate of spread, flattening the curve of morbidity. There is no treatment at hand, and no certainty of a vaccine on the near horizon. The fastest vaccine ever developed was for mumps. It took four years. COVID-19 killed 100,000 Americans in four months. There is some evidence that natural infection may not imply immunity, leaving some to question how effective a vaccine will be, even assuming one can be found. And it must be safe. If the global population is to be immunized, lethal complications in just one person in a thousand would imply the death of millions.

Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. In the 14th Century, the Black Death killed close to half of Europe’s population. A scarcity of labor led to increased wages. Rising expectations culminated in the Peasants Revolt of 1381, an inflection point that marked the beginning of the end of the feudal order that had dominated medieval Europe for a thousand years.

The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis. It will mark this era much as the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the stock market crash of 1929, and the 1933 ascent of Adolf Hitler became fundamental benchmarks of the last century, all harbingers of greater and more consequential outcomes.

COVID’s historic significance lies not in what it implies for our daily lives. Change, after all, is the one constant when it comes to culture. All peoples in all places at all times are always dancing with new possibilities for life. As companies eliminate or downsize central offices, employees work from home, restaurants close, shopping malls shutter, streaming brings entertainment and sporting events into the home, and airline travel becomes ever more problematic and miserable, people will adapt, as we’ve always done. Fluidity of memory and a capacity to forget is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species. As history confirms, it allows us to come to terms with any degree of social, moral, or environmental degradation.

To be sure, financial uncertainty will cast a long shadow. Hovering over the global economy for some time will be the sober realization that all the money in the hands of all the nations on Earth will never be enough to offset the losses sustained when an entire world ceases to function, with workers and businesses everywhere facing a choice between economic and biological survival.

Unsettling as these transitions and circumstances will be, short of a complete economic collapse, none stands out as a turning point in history. But what surely does is the absolutely devastating impact that the pandemic has had on the reputation and international standing of the United States of America.

In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.

For the first time, the international community felt compelled to send disaster relief to Washington. For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.” As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.

No empire long endures, even if few anticipate their demise. Every kingdom is born to die. The 15th century belonged to the Portuguese, the 16th to Spain, 17th to the Dutch. France dominated the 18th and Britain the 19th. Bled white and left bankrupt by the Great War, the British maintained a pretense of domination as late as 1935, when the empire reached its greatest geographical extent. By then, of course, the torch had long passed into the hands of America.

In 1940, with Europe already ablaze, the United States had a smaller army than either Portugal or Bulgaria. Within four years, 18 million men and women would serve in uniform, with millions more working double shifts in mines and factories that made America, as President Roosevelt promised, the arsenal of democracy.

When the Japanese within six weeks of Pearl Harbor took control of 90 percent of the world’s rubber supply, the U.S. dropped the speed limit to 35 mph to protect tires, and then, in three years, invented from scratch a synthetic-rubber industry that allowed Allied armies to roll over the Nazis. At its peak, Henry Ford’s Willow Run Plant produced a B-24 Liberator every two hours, around the clock. Shipyards in Long Beach and Sausalito spat out Liberty ships at a rate of two a day for four years; the record was a ship built in four days, 15 hours and 29 minutes. A single American factory, Chrysler’s Detroit Arsenal, built more tanks than the whole of the Third Reich.

In the wake of the war, with Europe and Japan in ashes, the United States with but 6 percent of the world’s population accounted for half of the global economy, including the production of 93 percent of all automobiles. Such economic dominance birthed a vibrant middle class, a trade union movement that allowed a single breadwinner with limited education to own a home and a car, support a family, and send his kids to good schools. It was not by any means a perfect world but affluence allowed for a truce between capital and labor, a reciprocity of opportunity in a time of rapid growth and declining income inequality, marked by high tax rates for the wealthy, who were by no means the only beneficiaries of a golden age of American capitalism.

But freedom and affluence came with a price. The United States, virtually a demilitarized nation on the eve of the Second World War, never stood down in the wake of victory. To this day, American troops are deployed in 150 countries. Since the 1970s, China has not once gone to war; the U.S. has not spent a day at peace. President Jimmy Carter recently noted that in its 242-year history, America has enjoyed only 16 years of peace, making it, as he wrote, “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.” Since 2001, the U.S. has spent over $6 trillion on military operations and war, money that might have been invested in the infrastructure of home. China, meanwhile, built its nation, pouring more cement every three years than America did in the entire 20th century.

As America policed the world, the violence came home. On D-Day, June 6th, 1944, the Allied death toll was 4,414; in 2019, domestic gun violence had killed that many American men and women by the end of April. By June of that year, guns in the hands of ordinary Americans had caused more casualties than the Allies suffered in Normandy in the first month of a campaign that consumed the military strength of five nations.

More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose. In wide swaths of America, the family as an institution lost its grounding. By the 1960s, 40 percent of marriages were ending in divorce. Only six percent of American homes had grandparents living beneath the same roof as grandchildren; elders were abandoned to retirement homes.

With slogans like “24/7” celebrating complete dedication to the workplace, men and women exhausted themselves in jobs that only reinforced their isolation from their families. The average American father spends less than 20 minutes a day in direct communication with his child. By the time a youth reaches 18, he or she will have spent fully two years watching television or staring at a laptop screen, contributing to an obesity epidemic that the Joint Chiefs have called a national security crisis.

Only half of Americans report having meaningful, face-to-face social interactions on a daily basis. The nation consumes two-thirds of the world’s production of antidepressant drugs. The collapse of the working-class family has been responsible in part for an opioid crisis that has displaced car accidents as the leading cause of death for Americans under 50.

At the root of this transformation and decline lies an ever-widening chasm between Americans who have and those who have little or nothing. Economic disparities exist in all nations, creating a tension that can be as disruptive as the inequities are unjust. In any number of settings, however, the negative forces tearing apart a society are mitigated or even muted if there are other elements that reinforce social solidarity — religious faith, the strength and comfort of family, the pride of tradition, fidelity to the land, a spirit of place.

But when all the old certainties are shown to be lies, when the promise of a good life for a working family is shattered as factories close and corporate leaders, growing wealthier by the day, ship jobs abroad, the social contract is irrevocably broken. For two generations, America has celebrated globalization with iconic intensity, when, as any working man or woman can see, it’s nothing more than capital on the prowl in search of ever cheaper sources of labor.

For many years, those on the conservative right in the United States have invoked a nostalgia for the 1950s, and an America that never was, but has to be presumed to have existed to rationalize their sense of loss and abandonment, their fear of change, their bitter resentments and lingering contempt for the social movements of the 1960s, a time of new aspirations for women, gays, and people of color. In truth, at least in economic terms, the country of the 1950s resembled Denmark as much as the America of today. Marginal tax rates for the wealthy were 90 percent. The salaries of CEOs were, on average, just 20 times that of their mid-management employees.

Today, the base pay of those at the top is commonly 400 times that of their salaried staff, with many earning orders of magnitude more in stock options and perks. The elite one percent of Americans control $30 trillion of assets, while the bottom half have more debt than assets. The three richest Americans have more money than the poorest 160 million of their countrymen. Fully a fifth of American households have zero or negative net worth, a figure that rises to 37 percent for black families. The median wealth of black households is a tenth that of whites. The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.

With the COVID crisis, 40 million Americans lost their jobs, and 3.3 million businesses shut down, including 41 percent of all black-owned enterprises. Black Americans, who significantly outnumber whites in federal prisons despite being but 13 percent of the population, are suffering shockingly high rates of morbidity and mortality, dying at nearly three times the rate of white Americans. The cardinal rule of American social policy — don’t let any ethnic group get below the blacks, or allow anyone to suffer more indignities — rang true even in a pandemic, as if the virus was taking its cues from American history.

COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease. The nation that defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand.

As a number of countries moved expeditiously to contain the virus, the United States stumbled along in denial, as if willfully blind. With less than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon accounted for more than a fifth of COVID deaths. The percentage of American victims of the disease who died was six times the global average. Achieving the world’s highest rate of morbidity and mortality provoked not shame, but only further lies, scapegoating, and boasts of miracle cures as dubious as the claims of a carnival barker, a grifter on the make.

As the United States responded to the crisis like a corrupt tin pot dictatorship, the actual tin pot dictators of the world took the opportunity to seize the high ground, relishing a rare sense of moral superiority, especially in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The autocratic leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, chastised America for “maliciously violating ordinary citizens’ rights.” North Korean newspapers objected to “police brutality” in America. Quoted in the Iranian press, Ayatollah Khamenei gloated, “America has begun the process of its own destruction.”

Trump’s performance and America’s crisis deflected attention from China’s own mishandling of the initial outbreak in Wuhan, not to mention its move to crush democracy in Hong Kong. When an American official raised the issue of human rights on Twitter, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, invoking the killing of George Floyd, responded with one short phrase, “I can’t breathe.”

These politically motivated remarks may be easy to dismiss. But Americans have not done themselves any favors. Their political process made possible the ascendancy to the highest office in the land a national disgrace, a demagogue as morally and ethically compromised as a person can be. As a British writer quipped, “there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid”.

The American president lives to cultivate resentments, demonize his opponents, validate hatred. His main tool of governance is the lie; as of July 9th, 2020, the documented tally of his distortions and false statements numbered 20,055. If America’s first president, George Washington, famously could not tell a lie, the current one can’t recognize the truth. Inverting the words and sentiments of Abraham Lincoln, this dark troll of a man celebrates malice for all, and charity for none.

Odious as he may be, Trump is less the cause of America’s decline than a product of its descent. As they stare into the mirror and perceive only the myth of their exceptionalism, Americans remain almost bizarrely incapable of seeing what has actually become of their country. The republic that defined the free flow of information as the life blood of democracy, today ranks 45th among nations when it comes to press freedom. In a land that once welcomed the huddled masses of the world, more people today favor building a wall along the southern border than supporting health care and protection for the undocumented mothers and children arriving in desperation at its doors. In a complete abandonment of the collective good, U.S. laws define freedom as an individual’s inalienable right to own a personal arsenal of weaponry, a natural entitlement that trumps even the safety of children; in the past decade alone 346 American students and teachers have been shot on school grounds.

The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care. What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many signs of weakness.

How can the rest of the world expect America to lead on global threats — climate change, the extinction crisis, pandemics — when the country no longer has a sense of benign purpose, or collective well-being, even within its own national community? Flag-wrapped patriotism is no substitute for compassion; anger and hostility no match for love. Those who flock to beaches, bars, and political rallies, putting their fellow citizens at risk, are not exercising freedom; they are displaying, as one commentator has noted, the weakness of a people who lack both the stoicism to endure the pandemic and the fortitude to defeat it. Leading their charge is Donald Trump, a bone spur warrior, a liar and a fraud, a grotesque caricature of a strong man, with the backbone of a bully.

Over the last months, a quip has circulated on the internet suggesting that to live in Canada today is like owning an apartment above a meth lab. Canada is no perfect place, but it has handled the COVID crisis well, notably in British Columbia, where I live. Vancouver is just three hours by road north of Seattle, where the U.S. outbreak began. Half of Vancouver’s population is Asian, and typically dozens of flights arrive each day from China and East Asia. Logically, it should have been hit very hard, but the health care system performed exceedingly well. Throughout the crisis, testing rates across Canada have been consistently five times that of the U.S. On a per capita basis, Canada has suffered half the morbidity and mortality. For every person who has died in British Columbia, 44 have perished in Massachusetts, a state with a comparable population that has reported more COVID cases than all of Canada. As of July 30th, even as rates of COVID infection and death soared across much of the United States, with 59,629 new cases reported on that day alone, hospitals in British Columbia registered a total of just five COVID patients.

When American friends ask for an explanation, I encourage them to reflect on the last time they bought groceries at their neighborhood Safeway. In the U.S. there is almost always a racial, economic, cultural, and educational chasm between the consumer and the check-out staff that is difficult if not impossible to bridge. In Canada, the experience is quite different. One interacts if not as peers, certainly as members of a wider community. The reason for this is very simple. The checkout person may not share your level of affluence, but they know that you know that they are getting a living wage because of the unions. And they know that you know that their kids and yours most probably go to the same neighborhood public school. Third, and most essential, they know that you know that if their children get sick, they will get exactly the same level of medical care not only of your children but of those of the prime minister. These three strands woven together become the fabric of Canadian social democracy.

Asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi famously replied, “I think that would be a good idea.” Such a remark may seem cruel, but it accurately reflects the view of America today as seen from the perspective of any modern social democracy. Canada performed well during the COVID crisis because of our social contract, the bonds of community, the trust for each other and our institutions, our health care system in particular, with hospitals that cater to the medical needs of the collective, not the individual, and certainly not the private investor who views every hospital bed as if a rental property. The measure of wealth in a civilized nation is not the currency accumulated by the lucky few, but rather the strength and resonance of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that connect all people in common purpose.

This has nothing to do with political ideology, and everything to do with the quality of life. Finns live longer and are less likely to die in childhood or in giving birth than Americans. Danes earn roughly the same after-tax income as Americans, while working 20 percent less. They pay in taxes an extra 19 cents for every dollar earned. But in return they get free health care, free education from pre-school through university, and the opportunity to prosper in a thriving free-market economy with dramatically lower levels of poverty, homelessness, crime, and inequality. The average worker is paid better, treated more respectfully, and rewarded with life insurance, pension plans, maternity leave, and six weeks of paid vacation a year. All of these benefits only inspire Danes to work harder, with fully 80 percent of men and women aged 16 to 64 engaged in the labor force, a figure far higher than that of the United States.

American politicians dismiss the Scandinavian model as creeping socialism, communism lite, something that would never work in the United States. In truth, social democracies are successful precisely because they foment dynamic capitalist economies that just happen to benefit every tier of society. That social democracy will never take hold in the United States may well be true, but, if so, it is a stunning indictment, and just what Oscar Wilde had in mind when he quipped that the United States was the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization.

Evidence of such terminal decadence is the choice that so many Americans made in 2016 to prioritize their personal indignations, placing their own resentments above any concerns for the fate of the country and the world, as they rushed to elect a man whose only credential for the job was his willingness to give voice to their hatreds, validate their anger, and target their enemies, real or imagined. One shudders to think of what it will mean to the world if Americans in November, knowing all that they do, elect to keep such a man in political power. But even should Trump be resoundingly defeated, it’s not at all clear that such a profoundly polarized nation will be able to find a way forward. For better or for worse, America has had its time.

The end of the American era and the passing of the torch to Asia is no occasion for celebration, no time to gloat. In a moment of international peril, when humanity might well have entered a dark age beyond all conceivable horrors, the industrial might of the United States, together with the blood of ordinary Russian soldiers, literally saved the world. American ideals, as celebrated by Madison and Monroe, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Kennedy, at one time inspired and gave hope to millions.

If and when the Chinese are ascendant, with their concentration camps for the Uighurs, the ruthless reach of their military, their 200 million surveillance cameras watching every move and gesture of their people, we will surely long for the best years of the American century. For the moment, we have only the kleptocracy of Donald Trump. Between praising the Chinese for their treatment of the Uighurs, describing their internment and torture as “exactly the right thing to do,” and his dispensing of medical advice concerning the therapeutic use of chemical disinfectants, Trump blithely remarked, “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” He had in mind, of course, the coronavirus, but, as others have said, he might just as well have been referring to the American dream.

Another disaster with American Fingerprints

* Backup copy of an article at the Guardian *

Behind the Beirut explosion lies the lawless world of international shipping

The disaster has roots in a global network of maritime capital and legal chicanery designed to protect businesses at any cost

Laleh Khalil August 8, 2020

At about 6pm on Tuesday, a seemingly small warehouse fire near Beirut port’s grain silos began to fizz with red sparks. The sparks led to an enormous explosion, a mushroom cloud of water and debris, and a column of orange-red and black smoke rising out of the warehouse.

The shockwave pulverised nearby warehouses and apartment blocks, lifted doors off their hinges and shattered windows several miles away. At the time of writing, 154 people have been reported killed over 5,000 injured and 300,000 have been left homeless. Dozens of people are still missing.

While attention and anger has focused on the incompetence and dysfunction of the Lebanese government and authorities, the roots of the catastrophe run far deeper and wider – to a network of maritime capital and legal chicanery that is designed to protect businesses at any cost.

Whatever sparked the initial fire, the secondary explosion that destroyed the port and so much of the city was caused by 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored in a port warehouse. A chemical used in both agriculture and construction, ammonium nitrate is associated with the 1993 Bishopsgate bombing in London and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. It was also the cause of huge explosions in Galveston, Texas in 1947 and Tianjin port in China in 2015, both of which killed scores of people. How did such a dangerous incendiary end up in a warehouse so close to residential areas of Beirut?

In September 2013, the cargo vessel the MV Rhosus – owned by a Russian, registered to a company in Bulgaria and flagged to Moldova – set sail from Batumi in Georgia to Mozambique. It carried a cargo of ammonium nitrate purchased by Fábrica de Explosivos de Moçambique, a company that makes commercial explosives. The vessel was operated by eight Ukrainian and two Russian crew members who came onboard not knowing that the previous crew had left the ship in protest at non-payment of their wages.

When the Rhosus was forced by its owner to make an additional stop in Beirut to pick up more cargo, Lebanese officials impounded the ship for breaching International Maritime Organization standards and failing to pay charges including port fees. Ships can be “arrested” if they do not have the necessary paperwork, are considered unsafe or environmentally hazardous, or as a holding security payment on a debt owed, among other reasons.

The ship’s owner Igor Grechushkin had registered his vessel in Moldova, where ship registry is more lax than most in enforcing labour, health and safety and environmental regulations. Open registries like these are considered “flags of convenience”, where a ship flies a flag of a country different to that of its owner.

Flags of convenience were first devised by American lawyers in client states such as Panama, Liberia and Honduras. Even today, much of the profit of some of the largest open registries is expatriated to private companies in the US. The “convenience” in “flags of convenience”, according to the American essayist John McPhee, is “that taxes could be avoided, insurance could be to a considerable extent ignored, and wages attractive to shipowners could be paid to merchant sailors drawn from any part of the world”.

When Grechushkin realised what the impounding of the Rhosus could cost him, he began bankruptcy proceedings and effectively abandoned the ship and its crew. The Mozambican consignees of the ammonium nitrate also forsook the cargo.

Ships are abandoned by their owners with alarming regularity, often to avoid paying the crew wages they are owed. So often, in fact, that the International Labour Organization maintains an abandoned seafarers database. Sometimes an abandoned ship’s cargo is auctioned off to pay creditors, or the crew’s unpaid wages, or clean-up and disposal costs.

In Lebanon, the resale of the cargo did not happen, and the authorities refused to allow four of the seafarers off the ship without a replacement crew. The captain and remaining crew members were left aboard the ship, still carrying its explosive cargo, for almost a year, with no wages, no access to electronic communications and with dwindling food and fuel provisions.

In effect the crew of the Rhosus were hostages in the negotiation between the Lebanese port authorities – who did not want to assume the responsibility for the ship’s dangerous cargo – and the shipowner. In August 2014, a Lebanese judge ordered the seafarers’ release, and the 2,750-tonne cargo of ammonium nitrate was subsequently moved from the vessel to a warehouse in the port of Beirut.

Although most Lebanese are rightfully outraged by the incompetence of the Lebanese authorities, the deadly dealings of international maritime capital are also to blame.

Not all countries of the world are signatories to the international maritime treaties that regulate working conditions and dangerous cargo. Even if they were, many states do not have the resources to pursue claims against unscrupulous shipping companies. Further, international disputes between governments and foreign investors are rarely decided in favour of governments.

Flags of convenience, essentially an offshoring tool intended to protect capital, allow unsafe ships to sail with crews who are vulnerable to the depredations of unscrupulous employers. Even the wealthiest shipping companies in the world, with headquarters in Europe and east Asia, flag their ships to open registries to save on wages, taxes and insurance.

The removal of these offshoring provisions, eliminating flags of convenience, and an overhaul of the arbitration mechanisms that so often disadvantage seafarers and less powerful states are only the first steps towards addressing the malfeasance that created Tuesday’s tragedy. As the dust settles in Beirut, there is a great deal of work to be done.

• Laleh Khalili is professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London and author of Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula

Palestinian village Farasin

 Palestinian village Farasin defiant despite threats of being wiped off the map
The tiny West Bank village has been hit with a series of demolition orders from Israeli authorities - but residents say they are going nowhere

By Akram Al-Waara, Yumna Patel in Farasin, occupied West Bank
7 August 2020

Wajdi Amarneh and his five children stand in front of their
 single-room home in Farasin. Israeli authorities gave
Wajdi 96 hours to demolish the home
(MEE/Akram al-Waara)

Sitting on the porch of his neighbour’s home, Mahmoud Amarneh, 56, shuffles through his briefcase, filled to the brim with papers and red-tabbed folders.

As the summer breeze passes through the tiny village of Farasin, the papers, printed in Hebrew and stamped with the insignia of the Israeli Civil Administration, go flying across the outdoor seating area.

Up until last week, Amarneh’s job was mostly symbolic, keeping the peace between the 200 residents of Farasin, who are mostly descendents of the same two families, settling any land disputes, and welcoming any visitors that may come to the village. Amarneh is the head of the village council in Farasin, a tiny hamlet in the northern occupied West Bank district of Jenin, just a few kilometres east of the Green Line.

Now, he’s in charge of fighting what he says is a concentrated effort on the part of Israeli authorities to expel the people of Farasin from their land.

Over the past year and a half, Amarneh says Israeli authorities have ordered the demolition, evacuation, or construction freeze on every single of the 36 structures in Farasin.

“They have not left a single structure untouched,” he told Middle East Eye.

“Every home, every livestock pen, our local cistern, even these fences, they have some kind of order on them,” Amarneh said, pointing to a fence erected by locals to protect their livestock from wild boars in the area.

While the stop-work and demolition orders in Farasin have been distributed across the village for over a year, the vast majority of them were handed down to the villagers last week.

The 18 orders delivered on 29 July “finished off the village,” Amarneh said. “On 29 July, just before the Eid holiday, Israeli soldiers and Civil Administration authorities came into the village and delivered 18 orders at once,” Amarneh said. Just a few days before that, he said, four more stop-work and demolition orders had been given.

Of the 18 orders handed down last week, 15 were stop-work orders, while the remaining three gave 96 hours for residents to “remove” the structures in question, which included a well, a home, and an ancient cave still inhabited by residents of Farasin.

“We didn’t get to celebrate Eid this year,” Amarneh told MEE. “Usually, during Eid we exchange gifts, and give some money to the children. But this year, Israel’s Eid gift to us was 18 orders to ruin our village.”

First came settlers, then the demolitions

Like hundreds of other Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank, all of Farasin’s land was designated as Area C under the Oslo Accords, putting it under the full Israeli military control.

The small hamlet consists mostly of tents and tiny homes made out of cement and tin sheets, scattered across a vast area of more than 6,800 dunams (1,690 acres) of land. It’s home to around 200 people, mostly shepherds and farmers, a quarter of whom are children under the age of 18.

Farasin was officially established in the 1920s, but Mahmoud Amarneh says Palestinians have inhabited the village’s natural caves for hundreds of years.

Over the years, as families grew, locals began to adapt their way of life, and started building permanent structures to live in.

Since Farasin is in Area C, any form of construction must be approved by the Israeli army’s Civil Administration - a nearly impossible task to achieve for Palestinians due to exorbitant fees and very low approval rates. But over the years, locals had faced little push back over the minor construction and home improvement projects that they undertook without permits.

All of that changed, however, when an Israeli settler moved onto Farasin’s land and established an illegal outpost there in 2019.

“You can see his caravans there, beyond those trees,” Mahmoud Amarneh said, pointing towards the 60-hectare forest on the edge of Farasin.

“It’s just one settler living there, but within months the Israeli government paved a road for him, hooked him up to the electricity network, and connected water lines to his outpost.”

Under international law, civilian settlements on occupied lands are illegal. While outposts are also technically illegal under Israeli law, in practice they are often dealt with leniently, if not outright supported by authorities.

Shortly after the settler moved in, Farasin’s problems began.

“At the same time that the Israeli government was setting up everything that the settler needed, they were coming and delivering demolition notices and stop work orders on our homes,” Mahmoud Amarneh said.

“The settler will fly his drone overhead, and soon afterwards, the Civil Administration will come and conduct more surveillance in person,” he said, adding that when Israeli forces came to demolish two livestock pens in Farasin during Ramadan earlier this year, the bulldozers came from the direction of the settlement outpost. Any time residents would be working on construction of their homes or other structures, they would find surveillance drones, which they suspect were being controlled by the settler, flying above their homes.

Amarneh emphasised that while not all of the homes have explicit demolition orders against them, the villagers believe it is only a matter of time before the “stop-work” orders will turn into demolition notices.

If that happens, he warned, it will not only displace the 200 residents of the village, but completely erase Farasin from the map.

“It is ironic that this is our land, but we are being treated as if we are living here illegally,” Amarneh said. “Meanwhile, the settler who is actually here illegally is being treated like the owner of this land.”

“Our village has been here forever,” he continued. “And not just before the Oslo Accords were signed and this became Area C, but before the state of Israel was even created.”

Destruction in the name of preservation

On the highest point of Farasin, crumbling stone structures reportedly dating back 500 years overlook the village and the surrounding area.

Local merchants erected the buildings in the 1800s, using them as a resting and trading point for travellers and merchants coming from countries like Lebanon and Syria, through what is now Farasin, and into Palestine.

Now, the buildings are home to 42-year-old Yusuf Amarneh, his wife, and five children. Over the past few years, after living in tents and makeshift houses, Yusuf has dedicated his time to restoring the ancient buildings, whose ownership was passed down in his family for generations.

“Over time, the structures have started to crumble, but I’ve managed to restore much of the main house, using mostly the original stones,” Yusuf says proudly, emphasising the fact that while making a home for his family, he’s prioritised preserving the integrity of the original structure.

“They told me that if I did not stop working on the house, that they would fine me and destroy it,” he said. “How does that make sense? They say that I am destroying cultural artifacts by rehabilitating this structure, but at the same time they want to demolish it?”So when Israeli authorities arrived at his doorstep last week and ordered him to stop work under the pretext that he was “destroying a cultural artifact”, Yusuf was shocked.

In addition to the order on his home, Yusuf Amarneh was also ordered to remove the water tanks he had set up on his property to make life easier for himself and his family.

According to Mahmoud Amarneh, similar stop-work and “removal” orders were given to families living in ancient caves in the village, also under the pretext of “destroying cultural artifacts”.

“These are ancient caves that people have lived in for hundreds of years,” he said, asking, “how do they intend on ‘removing’ these caves? They are part of the land.”

“This is our way of life, so how can the Israeli occupation say that we are destroying culture, when this is our culture and our land to begin with?”

Dreams shattered

Yusuf Amarneh’s story is one shared by all the residents of Farasin. Every single family, including that of village council leader Mahmoud, is under threat.


“We have a simple life here,” he told MEE. “We live off the land, and farm mostly for sustenance, rather than as a business.”Wajdi Amarneh, 37, is a husband and father of four young children. Like most other residents of the village, he is a subsistence farmer, and spends his time growing and harvesting crops and raising livestock to feed his family.

For years, Wajdi and his family had been living in a tent. But as his family grew, he wanted to provide his children with more safety and security, so he decided to build a tiny one-room home on his land.

Wajdi began selling whatever crops or livestock not used by his family, and over the years saved up enough money to build his home, which he finished last year. With the help of the village council, he applied to have his house registered and permitted by the Israeli Civil Administration.

“I was shocked when they came last week and told me I had 96 hours to demolish my home,” Wajdi said. “I have an open file with the Civil Administration, so it shouldn’t be allowed to demolish my home while the case is still open.

“How is my little home affecting Israel in any way? I am on my land, just trying to live in peace with my wife and children. This shouldn’t be illegal,” he said.

The 96-hour deadline to demolish his own home passed on Monday, and Wajdi says that while the stress is definitely affecting his family, they aren’t going anywhere.

“Now, any time my kids see any Israeli army or Civil Administration vehicles passing by, they start crying and screaming, saying ‘they are coming to destroy our house’,” Wajdi said. “It’s a terrible feeling.

“Even if they do come, and God forbid, destroy my house, I will not leave. Maybe I will have to live in a tent again, but I would rather live in a tent or even on a mattress on the ground before I leave this place.”
Annexation

As the sun set on Farasin, cloaking the village in pink and orange hues, the residents and their families gathered outside Wajdi’s home for an evening cup of tea.

While the residents of Farasin attribute much of their problems to the arrival of an Israeli settler last year, there’s no denying that regional politics are playing a role in their struggle. In the distance, skyscrapers and buildings from the city of Caesarea in Israel peaked through the haze - a reminder that just a few kilometres away, Israelis were living a completely different reality to the one of Farasin’s residents.

“Israelis are trying to create facts on the ground,” Mahmoud Amarneh said. “So that way, when annexation comes around, or the Trump plan is put into action, they can say that this land belongs to them, and it should be a part of Israel.”

The council leader was referring both to open plans by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to annex large swathes of the West Bank, and US President Donald Trump’s much contested plan for Israel and Palestine.

What’s happening in Farasin, Mahmoud pointed out, is happening across the West Bank.

“This is a small example of Israel’s settler colonialism,” he said. “They want the land, but not the people that are living on it.

“Even if they come tomorrow and destroy our entire village,” he said, “we will not leave. This is our land, and we are here to stay.”

Backup copy from Middle East Eye, also linked in the headline.

MEE is an independently funded online news organisation that was founded in April 2014. We aim to be the primary portal of Middle East news and our target audience are all those communities of readers living in and around the region that care deeply for its fate.
MEE looks at issues from a Middle Eastern perspective and does not tailor our coverage for a specific audience. We aim to bring local voices to the fore in analysis that isn’t shaped to suit political or financial agendas.
We have a large and constantly growing network of freelance correspondents and columnists covering 24 countries, with this coverage strengthened by content from influential think-tanks, news agencies and syndicated content from other quality online publications.

There’s Good News on Dementia, But...

There’s Good News on Dementia. But It Requires Big Changes to How We Live

The Lancet has mapped our best chance to prevent the memory wasting disease.
Crawford Kilian

A commission created by the esteemed Lancet medical journal predicts that the number of people in the world living with dementia will triple, from 50 million today to 152 million by 2050. If that holds true for Canada, our present 420,000 dementia cases will be well over a million in 30 years.

And so the grim curve keeps rising. Two years ago an article in the Lancet Neurology reported that the number of people worldwide living with dementia more than doubled between 1990 and 2016 — from 20.2 million to almost 44 million.

Already, the worldwide cost of dementia care, the Lancet commission says, is US$1 trillion a year.

But if dementia is its own pandemic relentlessly attacking humanity, there is emerging consensus on how to tackle it. The prescription is as radical as it is stark. It would require a revolution in both our lifestyles and our politics.

The good news about dementia is that much of its predictable harm is actually preventable right now, without the need to develop new drugs or vaccines. Indeed, prevention is the first goal of Canada’s own dementia plan.

But if we are to take prevention seriously, it does mean we need to transform our societies. Here’s why.

Earlier studies had confirmed nine major risk factors for dementia. They’re not guaranteed triggers, but your odds aren’t good if you have any of them.

THE 12 RISK FACTORS FOR DEMENTIA   

Identified by the Lancet commission:

• Less education
• Hypertension
• Hearing impairment
• Smoking
• Obesity
• Depression
• Physical inactivity
• Diabetes
• Infrequent social contact
• Excessive alcohol consumption
• Head injury
• Air pollution 

The new Lancet Commission adds scientific confirmation to three new factors: excessive alcohol consumption, head injury and air pollution. Reducing them at all stages of life would prevent or delay dementia in millions of people worldwide.

It wouldn’t be easy to follow that advice. Brewers and distillers and the hospitality industry are invested in expectations that people will keep drinking at current rates, or even more. If brain-jarring sports like hockey, football and soccer are implicated in dementia years later, would there ever be support for banning them? Yes, we have spent decades reducing air pollution, whether from tobacco smoke, cannabis, vaping or industry, but we still have a long way to go.

The good life of junk food and soda

Similar resistance can be expected to tackling the other risk factors, especially in the low- and middle-income countries where dementia is increasing rapidly. Increase education levels? Some people just aren’t quick learners, and schools cost taxpayers money. Fight hypertension, diabetes and obesity? People have a right to eat junk food and drink soda, especially while sitting on the couch for hours on end watching hockey or football and texting their friends.

Not only couch potatoes would hate the idea of “public health programs and individually tailored intervention.” COVID-19 has taught us how ineffective most public health messaging can be, and many already tune out those nagging public-service commercials. No one welcomes “interventions” in their personal lives by government employees.

One such intervention, however, could sharply reduce dementia all by itself: a seasonal flu or pneumonia vaccination. This summer’s Alzheimer’s Association International Conference included research findings that even a one-time seasonal flu shot was associated with a 17 per cent reduction in Alzheimer’s disease. Repeated vaccinations “cut Alzheimer’s incidence by a further 13 percent.” Another study indicated that for people aged 65 to 75, a pneumonia vaccination could reduce Alzheimer’s risk by up to 40 per cent.

These findings are especially significant because dementia patients who are hospitalized because of an infection are 6.5 times more likely to die than persons without dementia. This may help to explain the catastrophic COVID-19 death toll in our long-term care facilities and nursing homes: over 80 per cent of COVID-19 deaths in Canada have been in such facilities.

Widespread vaccination of seniors for flu and pneumonia could therefore prevent many dementia cases and thereby prevent deaths from other infections as well — and perhaps encourage public acceptance of more dementia-prevention measures.

Equality is good for your health

Reducing one risk factor would require something close to a revolution. The Lancet Commission notes that “Many risk factors cluster around inequalities, which occur particularly in Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups, and in vulnerable populations.” Very few power elites, anywhere on the planet, would be prepared to cede power and wealth to such groups — even if it would create happier, healthier, more stable societies.

Still, a few democracies (and perhaps one or two enlightened despots) might see the wisdom in preventing not only dementia but perhaps the next pandemic as well. Their populations would be generally healthier and economically more productive. Seniors in such countries would make fewer demands on health-care systems, which would be focused more on preventing disease than on responding to it.

People in other countries may then legitimately ask their governments why they can’t have nice things like healthy grandparents doting on their healthy, educated grandchildren. What if we put more money into health and schools than into the military and riot police?

As we’ve seen in recent weeks, people are literally dying to go back to the carefree days of 2019, with no social distancing and the kids in school. What we don’t want to admit is that our 2019 lives and lifestyles set us up for this. COVID-19 has found every flaw in our society as well as in our health care, and it will keep sickening and killing us until we start behaving better.

Don’t count on the next pandemic being any easier.

Crawford Kilian is a Canadian born in New York City (1941) reared in LA & Mexico City. 

He writes at The Tyee in British Columbia and is interested in books, online media, and environmental issues. I discovered him over ten years ago at his H5N1 blog and have followed him ever since. The sidebar at his blog is the richest collection of primary links I have ever found in one place.