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by JackRiddler » Mon Feb 01, 2016 7:51 pm
by American Dream » Wed Feb 03, 2016 1:57 pm
These are interesting times, there seems to be a shift in atmosphere.
Reports of boats being paddled for five hours, with the two emergency paddles and hands, to the Greek shore, because the Turkish coast guard cut the fuel lines.
Just this morning I hear a boat came in at 5am, packed with exhausted, shivering people and crying children. Some of the petrol from cut pipes flowed into the boat. All breathed in the petrol fumes, and a five month pregnant women was sick and vomiting on shore.
While here in Greece, three Spanish lifeguards have been arrested for towing in a stranded dinghy with 51 refugees, and charged with human trafficking.
Well-regarded back in Spain as Firefighters, and well known here for tireless humanitarian work as Basque lifeguard group Proem Aid, they are one of dozens of non-government aid groups helping thousands of refugees and migrants on the beaches saving lives. They are now in prison pending sentencing.
This follows moves to require volunteers and NGOs to register with police, and an agreement between authorities on Lesvos and the International Rescue Committee that effectively gives the IRC control over aid efforts in the north of the island.
Frontex has shut down a spotting station run by volunteers. Used to spot the boats from Turkey, it sent signals to the beach crews alerting them where boats were landing.
Greece came under pressure to "secure Europe's borders", threatened even with exclusion from Schengen, accused that it wasn't doing enough to control the refugee exodus.
Now I believe the reports are that European "help" has been accepted, and there is this strange deal with the American IRC. The first actions are to close down infrastructure like soup kitchens and the watchtower, and establish fast deportation routes back to Turkey, without the option to claim asylum here, and arrest volunteers.
Independent volunteers can act quickly and provide support and avoid the bureaucracy that slows larger NGO's down. The evidence is here for all to see that when we all work together the results are incredible.
Every day I can see if it weren't for the small NGOs and individual volunteers stepping up to help a lot of people would have drowned, starved or died of hypothermia and lack of medical treatment.
What's happening in Greece is the inevitable outcome of a Europe that doesn't know what to do with itself.
The problem is not "too many NGOs." It's "too little action, too late, by those who should be acting."
The atmosphere seems to have turned as cold as the winter storms threatening the horizon.
American Dream » Sun Jan 31, 2016 9:30 am wrote:January 2016: the deadliest month so far
Posted by clandestina on 31 January 2016
January 2016 has been the deadliest month ever in the Aegean: 257 migrants have died in the cold sea. A dozen more migrants died either after reaching Europe or traveling to a launch point in Turkey and 26 migrants died trying to reach Italy.
On Saturday (30/1) 39 migrants died trying to reach the island of Lesvos.
On Thursday (28/01) 26 migrants died near the island of Samos.
On Wednesday (27/01) 7 migrants died near the island of Kos.
by backtoiam » Wed Feb 03, 2016 2:46 pm
The vast amounts of cruelty, racism and bigotry that get a free pass in the anti-immigrant activity should be obvious:
by seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 03, 2016 3:07 pm
Denmark, Decency, and Decay
by Jan Oberg / January 31st, 2016
Once again Denmark appears in the international community and media for the wrong things, this time for a law package with three main, draconian anti-refugee laws. One legalises stealing – that’s what it is – valuables owned by refugees upon arrival if they exceed US$ 1450; the second cuts down on the already meagre daily benefit and the third extends the family reuinion period from 1 to 3 years.
188 MPs voted yes, 108 No and 37 abstained. The main argument is that Denmark wants to “signal” that asylum seekers should go elsewhere. Otherwise marketing-conscious politicians have overlooked that there are millions upon millions out there who are not asylum seekers and they get an extremely bad impression of Denmark. Like they did when Denmark put ads in Middle Eastern newspaper some time ago to deter potential refugees.
The three laws – of which the first clearly provokes memories of what the Nazis did to the Jews – are just a peak point in a long (mal)development of Denmark’s foreign policy. It can be characterised by incremental absence of ethics, solidarity, compassion, empathy and sound human judgement – all concepts outside the domain of ‘real’ politics – combined with increased interventionism, militarism and lofty contempt for international laws.
By passing these laws, the country’s parliamentarians – with a few exceptions – have soiled the image of the country abroad even more and for a very long time ahead, one must fear.
It is not unreasonable to assume that terrorists will pay attention to this development which is de facto targetting refugees which are almost 100% Muslims.
Many Danish citizens including myself now recognise that ‘Dane’ rhymes with ‘Shame’. This trend in Danish policitics doesn’t happen in our name.
Once upon a time
Denmark used to be known and appreciated around the world as a welfare state with equality – gender and otherwise – and solidarity with the disadvantaged. Known for citizens with a diversified free education – also at people’s colleges and elsewhere where culture and good manners were taught.
Quite a lot of it was based on Danish pastor, author, poet, philosopher, historian, teacher and politician, Grundtvig – others inspired by Kierkegaard. Out there educated people associated Denmark with composer such as Carl Nielsen, painters like Asger Jorn, entertainers like Victor Borge. It didn’t go for nuclear energy but became a major producer of windmills.
Danes were proud of being democratic and peaceful – remember the poster with the policeman who stops the cars to let some ducks pass a road? Or, say, furniture design, Carlsberg, H.C. Andersen and the Little Mermaid. Piet Hein.
It was known for rescuing 7000 Jews to safety across the Øresound to Sweden in October 1943. And known for talking about problems, not killing people.
Perhaps a bit idyllic, too good to be true? Yes, but still! There was something one could be proud of.
Militarist and interventionist “active” foreign policy
And what’s the image the rest of the world is getting these years?
A rogue state, a warrior country any time it’s called upon by US/NATO – five wars or occupations: Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya – and then Iraq again. And now special forces on their way to Syria.
When I was a member of the Danish government’s Commission on Security and Disarmament all through the 1980s no one even thought about Denmark as a war-fighting country far away. Defence, not offence, was the issue. International law was important. The Commission even produced a report on the Nordic areas as a nuclear-free zone – not bad for a NATO country. At the time there were elements of independent thinking about Denmark’s role in the world.
The first war participation – bombing Serbia two nights in 1999 – was decided by a government led by a social democratic prime minister, Nyrup Rasmussen and a foreign minister from a small historically anti-militarist, liberal party, Helweg Petersen.
They broke the traditional image of Denmark as adhering to peace and international law (the destruction of Yugoslavia had no UN mandate).
The doctrine of an active foreign policy was good in and of itself. Small countries have to be active and work together when the big ones play their games. But in Denmark’s case it was destructive – active meant joining wars, not being active in terms of early warning, conflict-resolution, mediation or any of the sort.
This was only the beginning of the road to rogueness.
Denmark and the “War on Terrorism”
Part 2: Denmark, Decency, and Decay
by Jan Oberg / February 1st, 2016
2001
The war on terror was initiated after 9/11 – Afghanistan 10/7. Denmark went along without thinking. The idea came from Washington, so what was there to think about?
At the time about 400 people were killed in international terrorism per year; today the Global Terror Index informs us that 32.000 people are killed in terrorism. It must be the stupidest war in modern time and the majority of the victims are found in the Middle East, not in Europe and not in the US.
But we bomb – and create more terrorism. And more refugees. Politics having become anti-intellectual and devoid of ethical considerations, few connect the dots. Fewer see Denmark’s own co-responsibility for causing the problems and even fewer see the moral responsibility of taking care. No, steal their belongings.
Iraq
It was prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen of the liberal Party, Venstre (meaning left but it’s neo-liberal right) whose government made Denmark an occupying power in Iraq over four years (2003-2007). By any standards the most serious foreign policy blunder of Danish foreign policy since 1945.
Asked recently on Danish television how he felt about the tragic situation in today’s Iraq he answered that – well, we stretched out our hand to the Iraqi people but unfortunately they didn’t take it.
No remorse there, Mr. Always Right. But quite a statement when you are a non-convicted war criminal having joined a project that killed about 1 million Iraqis during war, occupation and 13 years of sanction. The Danish politicians and people are still, it seems, unable or unwilling to understand the dimensions of this blunder – which is one reason they also don’t understand today what it means to be a refugee.
Mohammed caricatures
It was under his leadership – or lack if it – the Mohammed caricatures became a diplomatic disaster. He refused to meet with Muslim leaders in Denmark and also ignored a letter of concern from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the global voice of Muslims with 57 member states and 1,6 billion people.
Probably no one in the PM’s and foreign minister’s office had a clue what the OIC was.
But he did know who Muammar Gaddafi was when later, rewarded for his good deeds by the US and catapulted to S-G of NATO, he spearheaded the coalition member states’ violation of the very limited UN mandate, their destruction of that country and the killing of Gaddafi.
A social democratic prime minister re-invents rogue Denmark
Former female prime minister, Helle Thorning Schmidt – at the time leader of the social democratic party – will be remembered for bringing Denmark into Iraq for a second time, a decision to bomb taken in less than 24 hours after Washington’s call on September 24, 2014.
She will also be remembered for three other foreign policy-related blunders:
1) Supporting without any limitations the freedom of expression after Charlie Hebdo and saying that in Denmark we shall be able to speak and write and make the any drawing we want – while Danish police arrested youngsters who had used politically incorrect words on their Facebook pages.
2) She defined a socially marginalised young Muslim’s killing of two individuals in Copenhagen in early 2015 as terrorism without the slightest evidence. These two tragic events brought the official Denmark to the verge of hysteria with a memorial event in a park in Copenhagen – led by the royal house, the government and military plus 40.000 Danes where a song written against the German occupation (!) was sung followed, pathetically, by Lennon’s “Imagine” …
3) Thorning Schmidt committed herself and Denmark to follow the US/Denmark to also bomb in Syria – a plan only prevented by Putin’s intervention and the chemical disarmament agreement with Syria.
The extreme populist People’s Party has been shaping and promoting these trends for decades with a manifest xenophobic profile that spoke, at least originally to the petty bourgeoisie.
Whatever there once was of a the genuine social democratic party and a liberal party, of socialism and liberalism, has been buried long ago. The extreme right has become mainstream – thus time to change party names to fit reality. However the right social democratic party is wrong.
The third re-invention of rogueness
The present liberal party prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen’s, first foreign policy action was to kill the already established commission for investigating how Denmark under the leadership of his party comrade, Fogh Rasmussen, got involved in the war on Iraq.
The possibility that Mr. Always Right should be proved just a little wrong was a risk not to be taken.
It characterises the decay of democratic politics that elites across the political spectrum have more in common with each other than each has with their voters and constituencies.
The decision to bomb Libya was a milestone in the Nordic countries in that it was the first time ever that all parties, left to right – with one exception – voted for the bombing of Libya. The exception was the far-right, xenophobic Swedish Democrats. The Nordic public opinion against war and for peace – and there are some – no longer has more than a handful of individuals that represent them.
In a TV interview in October 2015 prime minister Løkke Rasmussen advocated safe zones to be established in Syria for refugees. One must assume to keep them away from Europe. In his view these zones should be protected from the air by combat aircraft – deliberately omitting any mention of UN peacekeepers.
This is an indication as good as any that he has no knowledge about such matters and no advisers either. Such an arrangement would create more than one Srebrenica in a war environment such as Syria which is worse by any standards than Bosnia where there were at least some UN troops at the time.
The underlying racism embedded in the idea of gathering citizens of a country in camps because you think it is necessary to destroy their country and culture – a kind of warfare Bantustans – speak of the Zeitgeist of a Denmark inside a Western world that is in moral free fall. Decaying.
Mr. Løkke Rasmussen further maintained more than once that he could not imagine Danish boots on the ground. But that was October last year.
It took only to January 2016 when it was revealed that his government now intends to send special forces to Syria. And rest assured: before long Denmark will again be at war in a foreign country in full violation of international law and UN norms.
Why the Anti-refugee Policies in Denmark?
Part 3:
by Jan Oberg / February 2nd, 2016
But why?
One can point to many reasons for such a tragic development in an otherwise decent, wealthy and hitherto well-respected country.
• It’s become too easy to go to war. The generation of politicians who might have a sense of war are long gone. If you take property owned by people who have fled thousands of kilometres because their life opportunities have been smashed and who carry just what they could grab in a hurry and carry – you simply have no idea of what life is like in a war zone. Neither do you see any need for advisers.
• Only a small percentage of Danish politicians have any international experience, no special competence, in international affairs – in sharp contrast to the 1970s-80s.
• Knowledge, broad civic education and cultured manners have been replaced by marketing consultants, styling experts, and fast politics salesmanship.
• Politics nowadays attracts a different kind of people than before. They fight more for their power positions than for an ideology, values, norms or a vision of a better world – all of which is totally outdated in today’s politics.
• Politics is a job or profession, not a calling based on deepy held individual values and visions about a better society for all.
• Anyone mentioning ethics or existential responsibilities would be ridiculed. And neither do media people raise such dimensions. An expert in ethics is hardly ever invited to the TV debates.
• Since the end of the Cold War, there has been no international balancing factor to take into account – the US/NATO and EU could do virtually what they pleased, riskfree violations of all good norms and international law – and implicit, if not intended, humiliation of Russia.
• The social democratic party developed from a working class solidarity movement to a middle class power elite losing on the way all ideals, ideology and solidarity with disadvantaged classes domestically and internationally. It lost its narrative and party identity as a social transformation agent for the better sometime in the 1980s.
• Earlier politicians relied to some extent on knowledge and expert analyses on subject matters. Today the budget for these kinds of things is spent on ‘styling’, public relation, ads and video promotions as well as marketing companies who sell politics as if it was fashion clothes.
• Today’s European leaders are not even pale copies of former leaders like Adenauer, de Gaulle, Brandt, Finnbogadottir, Kreisky, Kekkonen, etc. They are not copies of anyone, no comparison possible. To future historians Angela Merkel may be the only great European leader – but she is being squeezed constantly by lesser minds from all sides, her crime being that she is decent, uncorrupted, principled and compassionate and knows, indeed embodies, history.
• The Danes have lived a very good material life, expecting it to become more and more luxurious by the year – totally unaware there in their idyllic parish pump what life is like where their F16s bomb. Today many seem unable to distinguish between happiness-seekers and asylum-seekers. And the more you own, the more you have to feel threatened that somebody will one day come and steal it. Thus the propensity to turn off people at the borders.
• Turning their backs to the world out there and having a nice cosy time with themselves – to “hygge sig” – is a well-known characteristics of what some stupid ranking index has called the world’s happiest people. Other people’s unhappiness doesn’t throw a shadow over the Danes’ happiness.
• In today’s Denmark, you get neither the political nor the media ear if you tell the truth – namely that behind every refugee stands an arms trader and war-making government. Connecting the dots in general and between warfare and refugees is a taboo. And complex issues like this cannot be explained in soundbites of 30 secs.
• The Danes see themselves as innocent victims and shy away from recognising that, like other NATO/EU countries, Denmark with its war participation is a refugee-creating country. It refuses to carry its burden of the consequences. “We stretched out our hand but…”
• The Nordic countries in general have thrown the welfare state and solidarity thinking over board; neo-liberal, profit-making economy, not a mixed economy or new economies, are in vogue. Paradoxically, the more globalised the world gets, the more growing segments of the people have turned inward.
• So too the news media. Compared with, say, 20 years ago, there is simply much less global stuff in the news relative to domestic issues – also in the public service media. The Danish Broadcasting Corporation relies on much fewer permanent correspondents stationed abroad over long time in one place than earlier; the rest is stringers and cutting Western news bureau telegrams, re-editing them here and there – little research, if any.
The myth that justifies: Denmark and Europe as generous
Enigmatically Denmark still sees itself as a generous country and people. And, yes, it has received comparatively many refugees per capita. That ought to be a proud measuring rod for the future too, not a reason to egoistically pass the buck to neighbouring countries who will be forced to do the same and thus eventually harming millions of people in existential need.
Here a few facts from UNHCR, IOM and others reliable sources:
• Russia is the European country that has received most asylum applications. Secondly, it is the developing countries that host more than 86% of the world’s refugees compared to 70% ten years ago – and often internally displaced persons too.
• Turkey, Pakistan, and Lebanon host 30% of the world’s 15 million refugees.
• The EU is 503 million people and the richest region on earth. And it can’t do better when 1,2 million people – 0,2% – knock on their doors? If there is a will – and some leadership – there is a way. Not directly comparable of course, Europe could handle 582 million tourists in 2014.
• In addition, due to demographic trends all the European countries need – or will need – to import labour of various kinds to not fall hopelessly back in the future world economy. Here a lot of qualified people turn up at our shores (albeit for the wrong reasons) and Europe turns them off. How short-sighted!
The fourth and last article in this series begins with a few observations about Sweden – and ends with why one must still see hope.
by seemslikeadream » Fri Feb 05, 2016 9:47 am
Sweden, Denmark, and Refugees: Still Hope?
Part 4: Denmark, Decency, and Decay
by Jan Oberg / February 4th, 2016
Sweden
Permit a digression to neighbouring Sweden.
Sweden has – shamefully – not only closed its borders for people without valid documents, scrapped the right to asylum embedded in the Human Rights Declaration. It has declared (January 28, 2016) that it intends to deport 60,000-80,000 refugees already inside Sweden.
It was Sweden’s ambassador, the courageous Harald Edelstam, who in 1973 stood at the stadium in Santiago after the Pinochet coup and murder of president Allende and told thousands that they would always be welcome in Sweden. Thousands came and made a good life in Sweden. (There were 90 Chileans living in Sweden before the coup, today over 40,000). A small internationalist country took humanitarian leadership and we could all be proud.
But we can’t take that many people now, I hear many say.
The head of the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Region (SKL) has stated that 40-50 municipalities are facing crisis in Sweden but that, significantly, 200-220 municipalities “say they can do more.”
But then what about the country’s security and stability? The risk of social disorder, criminality, hatred?
Of course that is a risk. But that is an old one – xenophobia and racism has been around for long in Sweden, however less visible at the surface. An enlightened government’s response should be to serve as a role model and combat racism, Islamophobia in particular – not to combat and deport refugees.
Sweden’s new overall refugee-repelling strategy is a deplorable bending down for the worst forces in society instead of mobilising a demonstratively humanitarian and visionary policy for the common good – good for Sweden and good for Europe. If you behave like Denmark and Sweden you lose your goodwill and certainly every chance to influence or take leadership among other EU countries.
Where there is a will there is a way. But it also requires a little creativity.
The Swedish government lacks the will. Like Denmark – albeit in different ways.
Are we moving from democracy towards some kind of kakistocracy – i.e., “government by the worst, least qualified or most unprincipled citizens”?
New Danish fighter planes and reduced development assistance
Back to Denmark and one more piquant aspect.
Denmark is close to making a decision about the acquisition of new fighter aircraft to a purchase value of US$ 5 billion and maintenance cost over 20 years of US$ billion 15, combined US$ 4000 per capita. (The real price will be higher as no pre-sale estimates hold through the production phase).
This is just around the corner from the new anti-refugee laws described above.
It deserves mention that Denmark has already reduced its development aid over the years – the latest reduction was justified with this argument: Since an increased number of refugees are likely to seek asylum in Denmark, we need to find the funds for that somewhere – and that will be in the budget for development assistance.
It remains to be seen how the new fighter planes shall be financed. To put in sarcastic terms, the income from the stolen jewellery of refugees will hardly buy that many planes.
In summary, Denmark already lets the poorest of the poor contribute to its allegedly generous refugee policy. Few seem to have recognised that cutting down on development assistance in the long run may create both more terrorists and more refugees.
Denmark’s moral compass lost
A great small country has lost the opportunity to uphold – indeed fight for – basic values and meaning of civilisation. With its rampant militarism, xeno- and Islamophobia, its self-righteousness and lack of human compassion it has reinvented itself into decay.
In a global situation of death and destruction and ever increasing refugee and IDP flows – a situation where we all ought to find the best in ourselves and roll up our sleeves – Denmark and Sweden, the latter a major profiteering arms exporter, walk into the self-isolation and shame, losing the goodwill and good branding they once had.
The decay of the West
And there is a larger perspective: Just follow Sweden, Denmark and the EU’s maldevelopment – and NATO’s development into a global bombing association outside international law – during the last 20 years and a few years ahead and you’ll begin to see it: the relative decline of the West as a bloc and of Western civilisation.
The West itself will be in denial as long as it can.
Catchword that comes to mind is loss of identity, compass and legitimacy. Another is lack of leadership. Militarism combined with decreasing compassion and a virtual absence of a sense of global responsibility – can only be rooted in subsconscious fear for the future, nationalism and egoism.
Add to that modern versions of the outdated imperialism legacy – bombing and seeking to control foreign lands with a mission civilisatrice…
The West has, to a large extent but not exclusively, of course – caused the refugees to flee. A hundred years of arrogant, insensitive politicies in the Middle East from Sykes-Picot and onwards culminating recently in ruthless and failed wars in four countries and full support for a military dictatorship in Egypt. Sadly, the lack of principles seems to have become the leading principle.
This is not a refugee crisis
In conclusion, there is no ‘refugee’ crisis. By far the majority of those arriving could be integrated with a generous EU cost-sharing scheme, mobilisation of many and different resources and planning mechanisms and with much more cooperation with European civil society. 503 million – or just half of them – doing a little extra today for a better tomorrow for all. For their own decency’s sake too. For the good Europe.
With Europe’s need for manpower in decades to come, refugees could – should – be seen as a blessing, an opportunity to do good and create inter-cultural dialogues.
Instead, however, Europe panics, gives in to populist sentiments and confirms the terrorists’ worst assumptions about the hollowness of Western culture, generosity and compassion.
The EU, devoid of visionary leadership, continues to ‘solve’ all problems by more bombing, more terrorism-creation and more inhumanity – that lead to more terror and more refugees. And hatred.
No this is not a refugee crisis!
It’s a European crisis of crisis management – and it threatens potentially the whole EU construction because it fools around with both international law, human rights, peace, Schengen, and Dublin. In short, Europe the greedy. The miserly. The self-defeating.
Denmark and Sweden – with Austria and Hungary – leading the way to the common bad instead of the common good.
It is a crisis of ethics, empathy, compassion caused by Euro-racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia. Too strong words? Then ask yourself this:
Would any government in Europe have dared to treat Jews this way in 2016? Imagine that a catastrophe, say an earthquake or nuclear accident in Israel, had forced a million Jews to flee to Europe. Would we have taken their last possessions or tried to close our borders. Sent those out who had already come in?
In this sense, this policy is based on Islamophobia and it will eventually come boomeranging back. Blow-back terrorism – and we will once again see Europeans feel that they are only innocent victims.
And it’s a crisis of generosity and humanity by a culture that is, underneath all its military prowess and glittering consumerism and superficial info-tainment, getting weaker, losing the grip – and knows it deep down.
And thus Fortress Europe builds walls again and can’t ‘afford’ to care better for fellow global citizens in need.
History will judge hard these dark trends growing in a region that is still one of the world’s most wealthy. And Denmark – and Sweden – in the forefront of it: What a tragedy for Europe! What dark times for Swedes and Danes (and others too).
The rest of the world is watching in consternation and waiting out the consequences. Perhaps democracy cannot be taken for granted forever? Are we heading – step-by-step – for kakistocracy – i.e.“government by the worst, least qualified or most unprincipled citizens”?
Is there any hope?
Yes! Of course. Such trends also carry their dialectics – opposite forces will be mobilised.
• Good-hearted citizens rise and create the necessary debate and take action – “Not in our names” and “Welcome refugees”… and much more.
• Business people in Denmark will protest because a bad image of Denmark will impact on future business.
• Civil disobedience by police and others, turning their heads, overlooking the ‘excessive’ valuables, refusing to carry out the dirty work.
• International business people, politicians and tourists will increasingly boycot Denmark and go elsewhere.
• Like Chinese heavyweight artist, Ai Weiwei, artists and other people of culture will stop co-operating with and in Denmark.
• Danish humanitarian and human rights organisations have already protested, so will many more around the world. International media pressure. Denmark’s image damage limitation attempts may soften manifest criticism – but then there is the anger you can’t measure. People still remember the Mohamed caricatures. Iraqis and Libyans know what Denmark did to their people.
• The laws will end up in the European Court of Human Rights.
• Assuming that the refugee stream will continue for as long as Western countries conduct warfare in the Middle East, the pressures over time to either devise a completely new refugee reception and integration or stop the militarist adventures will mount – and it may go fast during the spring.
• Refugees can be seen as the largest non-violent movement against warfare at the moment – and they may join hands with peace, women, minority and other human rights movements to achieve a huge anti-war opinion – somewhat resembling the anti-nuclear movement in Europe of the 1980s that lead to the end of the Cold War. Could the refugees be seen as the embryo of the fundamental change that is necessary to once and for all stop Western attempts to dominate in the Middle East – perhaps as an embryo also to the necessary de-legitimization of interventionist warfare?
If some of these and similar steps do not change the Danish “jewellery law”, they may at least help teach the Danish decision-makers a much-needed lesson and make them re-think their next steps more carefully.
Denmark should pay a price for its morally unacceptable policies.
This is not the time to stay silent. Every refugee coming to Europe today could say what Martin Luther King said:
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” [Ed’s note — this quotation is unsourced.]
by jakell » Fri Feb 05, 2016 10:50 am
by American Dream » Tue Feb 09, 2016 8:38 am
by semper occultus » Tue Feb 09, 2016 11:46 am
JackRiddler » 01 Feb 2016 23:51 wrote:semper, that's a pretty horrible list from the ARSSE poster. It is obviously not an acceptable situation.
Now imagine a list, not of assaults and rapes and attempted rapes by migrants, but of ALL assaults and rapes in Germany during the same period. And imagine this included all police reports, not just those that make it to media or social media.
How much longer would that list be?
Truly, here, "We see what we want to see."
by American Dream » Wed Feb 10, 2016 9:10 pm
After Cologne, We Can't Let the Bigots Steal Feminism
Why can't we always take sexual assault as seriously as we do when migrants and Muslims are involved as perpetrators?
by Laurie Penny
In a perverse sort of way, it's progress. After months of dog-whistle xenophobia, European authorities have finally started to treat migrants as they would treat any other citizen. They have achieved this by choosing not to make a fuss when migrants are accused of raping and assaulting women.
On New Year's Eve in Cologne, Germany, hundreds of men, almost all of reportedly 'Arabic and North African' appearance and including many asylum seekers, viciously attacked women who were celebrating in the central plaza, robbing and groping and tearing off clothes. At least one rape complaint has been filed. The police and the press were initially slow to react, and the Mayor of Cologne reacted to eventual protests by suggesting that women should adopt a code of conduct in public and keep an ‘arm’s length’ distance between themselves and strange men.
This is not the first time a European city administration has responded to an outbreak of sexual violence by blaming the women. It is the first time in recent history that the right-wing press has not joined in the condemnation of these wanton strumpets who dare to think they might be able to have a good time without worrying what ‘invitation’ they’re sending to men. Instead, the right wing blames… liberals. Who apparently caused all this by daring to suggest that refugees should be able to come to Europe in safety.
"The oppression of women is a global phenomenon because patriarchy is a global phenomenon."
It'd be great if we could take rape, sexual assault and structural misogyny as seriously every day as we do when migrants and Muslims are involved as perpetrators.The attacks in Cologne were horrific. The responses - both by officials and by the armies of Islamophobes and xenophobes who have jumped at the chance to condemn Muslim and migrant men as savages - have also been horrific. Cologne has already seen violent protests by the far-right anti-migrant organisation Pegida, a group not previously noted for its dedication to progressive feminism. Angela Merkel has responded by tightening the rules for asylum seekers, but for many commentators, it’s not enough.
It’s a miracle! Finally, the right wing cares about rape culture! Finally, all over the world, from Fox News to 4chan, a great conversion has taken place and men who previously spent their time shaming, stalking and harassing women are suddenly concerned about our rights! And all it took was a good excuse to bash migrants and Muslims and tell feminists they don’t know what’s good for them.
You know what has never yet prevented sexual violence? Unbridled racism.
by American Dream » Thu Feb 11, 2016 1:01 pm
The Cologne Sexual Assaults in Historical Perspective
JANUARY 19, 2016
Michelle Lynn Kahn
“Are you safe?” Emails from loved ones flooded my inbox the first days of 2016. All assumed the worst-case scenario: that I was among the victims of the coordinated sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve at the Central Train Station in Cologne, Germany, where I am writing my dissertation. “Watch out for those Arab and Muslim types,” one warned.
Feminist protesters at the Cologne Cathedral on January 9 balance denunciation of sexual violence with pro-refugee sentiment.
In a post-9/11 Europe and United States consumed by Islamophobia and anti-migrant sentiment, the media instigated a hostile backlash by emphasizing the perpetrators’ “Arab or North African” descent and that 18 of the 31 suspects were asylum-seekers. Many associated this sexual violence with Islam. On January 9, three simultaneous protests took place at the scene of the assaults. The right-wing, anti-Muslim group PEGIDA condemned Chancellor Merkel’s acceptance of “rapefugees,” while police shot water cannons, and counter-demonstrators shouted “Nazis out!” Simultaneously, hundreds of feminists rallied, “No means no.”
The language of xenophobia and nationalism has long been staged on women’s bodies. Cologne is no exception. Right-wing and nationalist interpretations of the New Year’s Eve attacks drew on longstanding ideas that use images of vulnerable women to express fears of vulnerable national borders. Ethnic and religious pluralization threaten the far-right’s sense of nationhood, and their hostility toward foreigners is the outgrowth of a white, Christian-identifying Europe that has long feared defilement by foreign “Others”—from Jews and “Gypsies” to post-colonial subjects and Turkish labor migrants. Now, scorn has turned to asylum-seekers from the non-western, Muslim world.
Consensual or not, the cross-cultural sexual encounters facilitated by migration have long been fraught with existential concerns about national contamination by predatory, yet often wildly tempting, foreign men. Especially in Germany, fears about uncontrolled immigration have been conflated with fears of sexual violence against German women by unassimilable foreigners. These gendered and racial stereotypes neither address the problem of sexual violence nor assist the victims. They can, however, reveal the profound social anxieties surrounding foreign bodies that have elicited a reactionary populism promoting the subordination of an entire demographic group.
The metaphor of the woman as the nation—as the dutiful and heroic mother of the Fatherland—has survived the tumultuous timeline of modern German history. Facing some of the lowest birth rates in the world, many Germans have subsumed the Cologne sexual assaults within a pre-existing concern about the rising number of “foreigners” within the country’s borders. The tense immigration debates of the last five years have involved not only the quantity of newcomers but also the high birth rates of those already there. The fertility of Muslim immigrants has become an object of fear. In 2010, politician Thilo Sarrazin became a household name upon the publication of his controversial book Deutschland schafft sich ab [Germany is Abolishing Itself], in which he argued that the country’s rising Turkish and Arab populations were diluting its intellectual stock. In a 2013 campaign stunt, the youth wing of Germany’s far-right National Democratic Party offered a eugenic solution: condoms labeled, “For foreigners and certain Germans.” Since the Cologne assaults, this decreasingly marginalized hostility toward foreigners has adopted a language with disturbing parallels to Nazi discourse.
Reproducing “Aryan” bodies and annihilating all others was the core ideological tenet of the Nazi “racial state” (1933–1945), whose leaders imagined a life-or-death struggle for national existence. While eugenic concerns were present in the German Empire (1871–1918) and Weimar democracy (1918–1933), efforts to preserve the purity of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed racial community (Volksgemeinschaft) undergirded Nazi policy. As they purged Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, political dissidents, and disabled children, they encouraged genetically pure population growth. “Child-rich” mothers were awarded medals of honor, racially passable Polish children were “Germanized,” and SS men impregnated unwed Aryan women at the state-supported Lebensborn breeding centers.
An undated Nazi campaign poster, “The NSDAP protects the Volksgemeinschaft.”
by American Dream » Tue Feb 16, 2016 10:27 pm
Europe: Between Rape and Racism
As Europe descends further into nationalism and xenophobia, we are seeing feminist, atheist, and progressive discourses appropriated to serve reactionary ends. Following the assaults in Cologne and the media feeding frenzy about “migrant violence,” many people have struggled to find a way to speak about the situation without minimizing the issue of sexual assault or contributing to the demonization of migrants. Yet displacement and sexual assault are not distinct issues—they are interrelated components of a larger context that must be confronted as a whole.
Nationalist graffiti in Slovenia: “Let’s rape leftist women.”
The Story Thus Far
The past decade has seen a series of cascading disasters in the Middle East and Europe. First, there was the bloody occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, which destabilized the region and ultimately enabled the Islamic State to seize weapons and power. Then a series of civil wars from Mali to Libya and Syria, combined with economic hardship throughout the region, triggered a mass influx of migrants seeking a new life in Europe. In response, European nations closed their borders and attempted to trap migrants in internment camps. Then, in November, Islamist attacks in Paris gave the French government an excuse to declare a state of emergency and intensified the momentum of an already violent backlash against migrants.
In this charged environment, news reports circulated that “gangs of migrants” had carried out a series of sexual assaults in Cologne and elsewhere around Europe on New Year’s Eve. A new series of xenophobic attacks followed, along with demonstrations from Pegida and other nationalist groups. Many demonstrators appropriated slogans from anti-border movements, transforming “Refugees Welcome” into “Rapefugees Not Welcome” and demanding security for “Fortress Europe”—the Nazi expression for Occupied Europe during the Second World War. The overwhelming sentiment from participants was “We need to protect our women.”
On one side, nationalists and fascists sought to exploit the trauma of sexual assault survivors as a tool for promoting hatred. On the other, many people who consider themselves to be feminists and advocates of migrants’ rights struggled to find a way to speak about the situation, afraid of minimizing the issue of sexual assault or contributing to the demonization of migrants.
These are precisely the sort of difficult situations that we will be confronting as the world slides further into crisis, forcing populations into conflict and rupturing the neat and tidy narratives of a seemingly simpler era. If we don’t develop a language with which to articulate the nuances of such situations, reactionaries of all stripes will have a free hand to capitalize on them. In many regions, old-fashioned progressive politics are quickly losing ground to new waves of nationalism, while the state uses security concerns as a pretext to target anyone proposing a radical solution. Rather than ceding the discourse to those who would force us to choose between opposing rape and opposing racism, we have to articulate the ways that displacement and sexual assault are interrelated components of a larger context of oppression that has to be confronted in its entirety.
by American Dream » Thu Feb 25, 2016 6:20 pm
Germany: Racist Mob Hinders Fire Fighters & Celebrates as Refugee Shelter Burns Down
BY RENÉ SCHUIJLENBURG ON 2016-02-23
In Bautzen, Germany a racist mob celebrated as a planned refugee center burned down on Sunday. The mob also hindered firefighters from extinguishing the blaze.
Police spokesperson Thomas Knaut said: “Some people reacted to the arson with derogatory comments and undisguised joy.” Two men were detained as they refused to leave the area around the burning building and repeatedly obstructed police work. The two men were released a few hours later, and according to police, questioned as witnesses about the fire. Police suspect an arson attack caused the fire.
The racist mob that blocked a bus with refugees in Clausnitz, Germany on Thursday, and the cheering crowd in Bautzen are not the only signs that fascism is on the rise again in Germany and other European countries. On top of that, the conduct of the police and reactionary politicians are part of the problem.
by American Dream » Tue Mar 01, 2016 11:10 am
The “Taharrush” Connection: Xenophobia, Islamophobia, and Sexual Violence in Germany and Beyond
Portrayals and Politicization of the New Year’s Eve Sexual Assaults
Even prior to 10 January, reports of the sexual harassment and assaults that took place around the train station of Cologne on New Year's Eve identified Egypt as the reference point for understanding these incidents. On that date, Die Welt stated that this form of attack was so far non-existent in Germany but evoked “scenes of the Egyptian Tahrir Square.” Much of the coverage similarly referenced Tahrir, using descriptive framing techniques that evoked media coverage of the collective sexual harassment, assaults, and rapes that occurred during years of revolutionary protest in Egypt. The effect of this framing was to position what happened in Cologne as an iteration of the Tahrir incidents, with the common – and problematic – link being the Middle Eastern and North African populations pouring into Europe. In other words, the media positioned migrants and refugees, regardless of their origin, as responsible for bringing Egypt’s sexual harassment problem to Europe.
For example, news outlets focused on the “circles of hell” that Egyptian activists began reporting in protests since June of 2012. In these collective sexual assaults that took place in Tahrir, women were isolated, encircled by concentric rings of men and sexually assaulted, allegedly by state-hired “thugs.”[1] As this form of sexual violence increased,European and US news positioned sexual harassment as endemic to Egypt and as an example of a prevalent rape culture that was exacerbated following the rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood-backed government of Mohammad Morsi. Reflecting these same notions with regards to the New Year’s Eve attacks, the New York Times reported that in Cologne “groups of young men began encircling young women.” Citing Welt am Sonntag, Deutsche Welle stated, “A group of young men would encircle the female victim, close the loop, and then start groping the woman.” In a Bloomberg News wire piece reprinted in theChicago Tribune, the coverage highlighted how politically commissioned sexual harassment and assaults in Egypt derived from a historical cultural practice of sexual harassment. By situating politicized violence within a “long-standing culture of treating lone women as acceptable targets for harassment,” this news agency drew distinctly cultural conclusions about the Arabized and Islamicized “nature” of sexual violence in the Cologne assaults.By means of this associative framing strategy, the coverage managed to align two separate circumstances of sexual harassment and assault and to portray them as manifestations of the same process of collective sexual violence. Here, the social, economic and political specificities associated with each circumstance were ignored. The events in Tahrir, therefore, became evidence of a larger culture of sexual violence particular to the Middle East and North Africa.
This culture of sexual violence is purportedly underpinned by a “great paradox” in this region, where sex “determines everything that is unspoken” yet “desire has no outlet,” as Kamel Daoud notes in his 12 February New York Times op-ed, “Sexual Misery in the Arab World.” Accordingly, the resulting misery “descend[s] into absurdity and hysteria,” which positions Middle Eastern and North African populations as exhibiting an unruly hypersexuality that ostensibly helps to explain the events of Cologne on New Year’s Eve.[2]
The connection made between the sexual assaults in Cairo and Cologne as a practice imported from the Middle East and North Africa into Europe by an undifferentiated refugee mass found further traction in the Charlie Hebdo cartoon claiming that Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee whose family was seeking asylum in Europe and whose body washed ashore in Turkey after their boat capsized in the Mediterranean, would be a “groper” had he lived. Through the body of the male Syrian refugee, and by rendering indistinguishable the Egyptian and the Syrian contexts, the media not only presented an essentialized image of Arab/Muslim men but also promoted the more troublesome idea of an inherent biological compulsion among such men to become sexual deviants.
From 10 January on, reporting and commentary fixated on the term taharrush as a uniquely Middle Eastern and North African phenomenon. In particular, the conservative tabloid The Daily Mail defined taharrush or taharrush gamea as collective harassment, “the Arabic gang-rape phenomenon,” and the “taharrush game.” The specific use of the Arabic term, instead of the more common English word “harassment,” emphasizes its cultural link to populations from this region. Moreover, its use ignores the complex construction of meanings that have constituted taharrush as “harassment” in Arabic, as we examine below. With the collective sexual assaults in Tahrir underpinning the discussion, The Daily Mail noted that Cologne was the first such instance of taharrush in Europe. The article claimed that this phenomenon first emerged in Egypt with the attack on former CBS correspondent Lara Logan in Tahrir Square on 11 February 2011, the day of Hosni Mubarak’s ouster.
The Daily Mail mentioned Egyptian activists’ beliefs in the politicized nature of collective sexual assaults in Tahrir, and referred to their claim that the state hired thugs to attack women in order to “stem public protest,” noting that the Logan case signaled a turn. Here, The Daily Mail cited Abdelmonem as saying, “this [perception] shifted” (“perception” added by The Daily Mail) among activists of presumed state involvement in commissioning sexual violence after Logan's attack.[3] This representation deliberately misread Abdelmonem’s article, which drew on Langohr’s more detailed study of politicized sexual violence to highlight how the first eighteen days of protest in Tahrir were described by activists as relatively free of sexual harassment.[4] In relation to these narratives, Abdelmonem stated that the collective sexual assault on Logan shifted the perception of a Tahrir free from sexual violence, and further discussed the nature of politicized assaults that unfolded in the years of revolutionary protest. The Daily Mail, however, deployed the idea of a “shift” to imply a turn away from politicized attacks to widespread assaults by mobs of average men against lone women in Tahrir. The effect was to represent sexual violence as a particularly widespread cultural problem in Egypt, which, in turn, could be rendered a problem for Europe following the influx of migrants and refugees.
The framing of sexual harassment in Europe as imported by immigrant populations and as linked to some generalized notion of Arab culture is powerful. It makes possible the kind of racist rhetoric that reproduces and reinforces a European sense of self as defender and protector of human rights (notably women’s rights and the rights of minorities). Meanwhile, it also projects an image of Europe as distinct from, and superior to, the culture of the migrants and refugees now flooding its borders seeking asylum from conflicts and structural inequalities resulting from decades of western interventions in the Middle East and North Africa. Here, Europe is positioned as a civilized site of tolerance and freedom, an idea underpinned by elements of the ideology that supports the “war on terror:” the notion that Muslim women need to be saved from a misogynistic culture imposed by “dangerous” Muslim men.[5]
The idea of European superiority and of oppressive Arab men has helped to legitimize imperialist military interventions like the war in Afghanistan, exemplified in statements like Laura Bush’s or Cherie Blair’s, who justified this war as a fight for the rights and dignity of women. In similar fashion, with the increase in migration from predominantly Muslim countries, European women are also positioned as under threat from ‘dangerous’ Arab men, made all the more explicit in the recent publication on 16 February of the Polish right-wing magazine wSieci with the cover title “Islamic Rape of Europe” and illustrated with an image of a woman wrapped in the European flag, her blond hair pulled and her white body grabbed by brown hands. In particular, since the summer of 2015, stories of sexual violence and forced prostitution in refugee shelters and of sexual assaults in German towns, all of them supposedly perpetrated by refugee men, have circulated in online media, echoed by far-right blogs and news pages. This representation ignores that many refugees are escaping from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in which successive European and American governments have been the primary aggressors, and which Tony Blair has admitted played a role in the rise ofISIS. Culturalist explanations of these sexual assaults therefore help to further legitimize, but also to conceal, violent and exclusionary foreign/domestic policies in relation to people from the Middle East and North Africa.
Not surprisingly, far-right leaders have welcomed the connection between sexual violence and refugee/migrant populations across Europe. These same leaders have been quick to proclaim their concern for women’s rights. In a column published on 13 January inThe Post Online, the head of the Dutch right-wing anti-Islam PVV party, Geert Wilders, and party member Machiel de Graaf wrote an article under the title “After Cologne: Allow Women to Defend Themselves.” Citing Jadaliyya, the two politicians presented taharrush as common in Arab countries, proclaiming: “[A] culture that has its own word for group sexual assaults of women is a threat to all women. The existence of the term proves that it’s a widespread phenomenon there.” Cynically mimicking feminist voices that criticize blame-the-victim discourses that focus on women’s clothes and public conduct, Wilders and De Graaf wrote that it was “a shame that our women are advised to modify their behavior” and encouraged them to use pepper spray (currently illegal in the Netherlands, though legal in Germany) against foreign harassers. In a similar tone,Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right French Front National, quoted Simone de Beauvoir to point to the refugee and migrant crisis as “the beginning of the end of women’s rights.”[6] By co-opting feminist demands for women's emancipation and their right to self-defense, these conservative forces instrumentalize the Cologne sexual assaults for their xenophobic ends.
More generally, these assaults have added fuel to the fire of journalists, politicians, and movements that have used them as evidence for the need to crack down on refugees. As discussed above, far-right groups who seek to overturn Germany’s refugee policies have successfully sought to hold Chancellor Merkel accountable. As a result, Merkel recently promised to deny asylum to those who commit crimes. Individuals have also taken matters into their own hands and attacked local mosques in response. In a broader framework, moreover, the New Year Eve’s attacks are also shaping the debate on the UK’s referendum on the EU, as “the safety and security of British women” is now presented as under threat by the EU’s (and especially Germany’s) loss of “control of the refugee crisis,” as discussed in a recent Telegraph article. The instrumentalization of sexual violence by the media and conservative politicians taps into the myth of the “Arab street,” understood as a site of backwardness, brutality and “predatory sexuality.”[7] According to this logic, the Arab street would be re-created in Europe following the massive arrival of refugees. These racializing discourses serve to stoke public fears about an oppressive Arab culture infiltrating Western society, thus bolstering the backlash against both migrants and refugees.
by American Dream » Tue Mar 08, 2016 11:22 pm
Kamel Daoud: Sexual Demonization and the Secularist Select
Mar 09 2016
by Mehammed Amadeus Mack
(Y. Gastaut, "L'immigration et l'opinion en France sous la Ve République",
Paris: Editions du Seuil)
In a controversial NYT op-ed, the Algerian journalist and prize-winning author Kamel Daoud weighed in on the infamous events of last New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Germany. He wrote of the sexual harassment and rape authored by Muslim migrants and refugees as symptoms of a “sick” relationship with sex and women in general, and that this “disease” was now spreading to Western lands. This spectacular episode of sexual violence had managed to turn what had been general sympathy for refugees fleeing terrorism into anger, fear, and hatred. A large group of men had congregated at Cologne’s central train station before breaking off into smaller groups to commit robberies and sexual assaults. Subsequently, Angela Merkel’s “open-door” asylum policy was roundly criticized, as well as the lack of police response to the crimes as they happened. The event also led to a miraculous occurrence, the alignment of secular left and right-leaning voices in a unified stance: new checks on migration and asylum policy were now being proposed in the name of feminism and the protection of women’s bodies, in conjunction with the already familiar call to limit the influx of non-Christian men in the name of preserving Europe’s traditional “character.” The sudden influx into Germany over the course of last year—of more than 1.1 million asylum seekers fleeing the aftermath of US intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan and civil war in Syria—threatened to become a ticking “sexual time bomb,” if sensational press headlines were to be believed.
This controversy recently took another turn when a group of respected academics, some of whom are Algeria specialists, published a letter in Le Monde taking Daoud to task for the Orientalism and especially the Islamophobia they attributed to his article, which contained myriad generalizations linking Islam with sexual delinquency (translated and later published on Jadaliyya). On the one hand, these scholars saluted Daoud’s courageous journalism in the face of real threats to his person during the Algerian civil war between Islamists and the military government, referred to as “The Dirty War.” However, his brave condemnations of violent puritanism in Algeria signify differently when transposed to a Euro-American context: in this way his formerly minoritarian secular voice joined the choir of an “islamophobic majority.” This failure to address power differentials (as well as the shifting sands of majority minority balances) when one moves from the global south to the north, is actually a quite common characteristic of what I’d like to call the anti-Muslim or “secularist Arab select,” who find a ready audience in the Euro-American press. Recently, a Jadaliyya article profiled commentators the mainstream media has chosen to weigh in on the greater significance of ISIS: among them one finds a select group, Arab polemicists who repeatedly occupy center stage in US coverage, who claim ISIS shows “the true face of Islam.” When gender and sexuality are added to the equation, this seems to amplify the process by which Arab secular or anti-Muslim voices are called upon, and indeed deemed qualified, to represent the Muslim point of view. Often this comes at the expense of qualified voices whose research has been dedicated to understand the complexities of Arab gender and sexuality in an international frame. Brigitte Gabriel, Nonie Darwish, Jeanine Pirro, and Wafaa Sultan—now stars of US conservative media—have all presented themselves as refugees and/or critics of their sexually intolerant “home” cultures and have obtained pulpits that specialists of gender and sexuality in the Islamic world can only dream of reaching.
With much drama, Daoud declared on February 20th that he would no longer pursue journalism, as resolved in a public exchange between himself and his friend Adam Shatz, an American essayist. Daoud cited the “immorality” of academics, privileged in their ivory towers, who would “pronounce him guilty of Islamophobia” from comfortable shelters “in western capitals (or) café terraces where comfort and security reign.” He went on to say that he found it shameful that specialists who have never lived through what he has survived were inciting “local hatred” against him by imposing the verdict of Islamophobe, a sentence that “today can also be used as a tool of Inquisition,” he claimed. Indeed, some of the signatories to the letter accused of being too comfortable on café terraces are Algerian, and are all too familiar with the ravages of war: historian Noureddine Amara penned an open letter to Daoud stressing this point, marveling at how quickly his signature had landed him in the “gang of academics” said to be bullying Daoud. Allegations of bullying are hard to support when Manuel Valls, the security-minded Prime Minister of France known as the “muscle” to President François Hollande’s “softness,” publishes a letter in support of Daoud and in condemnation of the “peremptory” academics’ “indictment.” Valls praised the path Daoud has tread, a path that “France (also) treads, making it known to all those who have abandoned thought, that a Muslim will never by essence be a terrorist, not any more than a refugee will ever by essence be a rapist.” This statement however seems to lose all meaning when placed in conjunction with Daoud’s assertion that “sex is the greatest destitution and deprivation (misère) in Allah’s world,” a place where “woman is negated, refused, killed, raped, imprisoned or possessed.”
While Daoud’s lament is poignant, it takes on the tonality of a journalist upset at the fact-checkers for checking his facts. His is a familiar refrain, one that those in positions of influence use to conveniently deflect critique, especially from those who bring persuasive arguments against their right to speak for entire groups of people. Professor Jocelyne Dakhlia, one of the signatories of the Le Monde letter, weighed in again when a throng of voices coalesced in defense of Daoud saying that, by asking for more critical perspective after the Cologne attacks, the academic signatories were in some way justifying them. With the frustration of someone who has to underline the obvious, Dakhlia wrote that “a public personality must expect that they’ll have to respond to objections or critiques, and it is surprising that a man who has held strong against the Islamists for so long, a man whose Algerian chronicles I’ve personally admired, a man of his moral stature, would withdraw from debate after only two critical texts.” She went on to decry the fact that very few media outlets were giving a voice to male migrants condemning the attacks, and lamented the lack of media coverage of reports from Cologne’s refugee camps that Muslim women were being sexually harassed by camp guards. She also underlined the basic unoriginality of Daoud’s claims, caught between two pre-existing French representations, that of the 1970s isolated migrant worker whose lack of sexual outlets leads to depression (seen in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s psychiatric study The Highest of Solitudes), and that of the 1960s spectre of the Algerian “rapist,” which anti-immigration forces promoted during the Algerian War and in the aftermath of decolonization.
One wonders if the academics’ “hostility” is truly to blame, or rather, Daoud’s unwillingness to engage in uncomfortable debate with those who might have the research credentials to contest his claims? While some leftists and post-colonial academics do indeed occupy a position of relative privilege, they are “first responders” of a sort: they have historically come to the defense of the otherwise defenseless, alerting the public to ethnic scapegoating before it is too late, cautioning against generalizations that could later lead to violence, and always pointing out differentials of power so easily ignored in the sensational media. Daoud however believes that it is excessive to ask him to pay attention to power differentials, maintaining that he cannot be held fully responsible for the uses to which others put his (very strong) words in outside contexts. With mock irony he states: “I suddenly find myself responsible for what will be read differently in different lands and in different atmospheres. Denouncing the surrounding theocracy here at home becomes an islamophobic argument elsewhere. Is it my fault? In part. But it’s also the fault of our times.” This kind of statement is of a piece with the common refusal of those who belong to the secularist Arab select to consider the politics of instrumentalization, to question how criticism of a religion held by the majority in one country changes meaning when transposed to a country where that religion is under the microscope. He justified his withdrawal from journalism by interrogating the very role of Islam Insider he had comfortably occupied up till that point: “The writer who comes from the lands of Allah today finds himself the object of intolerable press solicitations. I can’t do anything about it except subtract myself from it: via caution, as I had once thought, but also via silence, as I have since chosen.”
A similar argument to the one Daoud makes about the incitement of “local hatred” could be made in reverse: Daoud, in generalizing about Muslims and their “sick” relationship to sex, has imperiled the image of Muslims living in Europe (and indeed that of all Muslims living in the “West”). European Muslims are the ones who will have to deal with the aftermath of being painted as potential rapists, who will have to face angry stares in the metro, and passersby changing over to the opposite sidewalk, among other consequences of guilt by association.
In their collective op-ed, the academics asked “Of what is Kamel Daoud the name?” Those of us working on North Africa who were overjoyed to see Daoud decorated with prizes for the Meursault Investigation were less so when it became clear that proponents of Islamophobic secularism were citing him in order to anchor their xenophobic arguments. Nowadays, when I am asked for the umpteenth time if I have read (and enjoyed!) this or that piece authored by Daoud, I feel a certain apprehension in regard to the real reasons behind Daoud’s popularity and almost universal celebration in the European and American cultural spheres.
Even Daoud’s good friend Adam Shatz told Daoud, after the latter’s turn to sexual demonization in the New York Times, that it was “hard to imagine you could really believe what you have written.” He brought up a hidden transatlantic parallel, the portrayal of Puerto Ricans in the US, in his letter to Daoud: “I remind you that we saw similar events, not on the same scale of course, but still, at the New York Puerto Rican Day Parade a few years ago. The Puerto Ricans who had molested women in the street were not under the influence of Islam but of alcohol… Without proof that Islam was acting on the spirits of those men in Cologne, it seems curious to make such propositions (as the ones you made), and to suggest that this ‘sickness’ threatens Europe.” This parallel between North Africans in France and Puerto Ricans in New York, both of them populations settling in the colonists’ mainland in the aftermath of colonialism, both routinely accused of machismo, has an infamous precedent: the late Charles Hirsch, Paris police prefect in the 1950s, had compared North Africans, who were for him “an endless source of conflicts,” to the “Puerto Ricans in New York” and “wetbacks in Texas.”[1]
The sexual demonization Daoud has reinforced has a still longer history. Borrowing from lingering Orientalist ideas about the Islamic sexual menace, this portrayal usually targets young male Arabs and Muslims and emphasizes a lack of civilization rooted in an inability to contain one’s primal urges. Medical historian Richard Keller amply documented this racialist view in his book on the Algiers school, a group of psychiatrics in colonial French Algeria that made the first “scientific” links between Islam and sexual delinquency. This portrayal is highly ambivalent in the way it presents Muslim men as both sexually conservative in their views of women and sexually aggressive in their frustrations about them. In contemporary times, researchers like Nacira Guénif-Souilamas have explained how this portrait of the young Arab as sexually unassimilated has given new life to what should by now have been a moot question: that of the integration of Muslims born in Europe, already several generations removed from their immigrant ancestors. In this way, the figure of the brown sexual menace has provoked feelings of sexual nationalism, and caused politicians who previously had sought to curtail the rights of women and homosexuals to suddenly come to their defense in the face of a common “foreign” enemy. The “black sexual menace” and the “black peril” are American tropes that we have, one hopes, critiqued to the point of its unacceptability: such rhetoric about black men’s violent designs upon white women have been exposed for their obvious racism. However, similar rhetoric appears about European Muslims today in a different form, not yet politically incorrect.These tropes shape women as well: the Arab woman mute and hidden away, and the white woman taught to be careful.
In response to fear-mongering about this menace, the Netherlands and the German state of Baden-Württemberg decided in the 2000s to create what Daoud euphemistically called “guides to good conduct” in his New York Times article. In reality, these were nothing other than citizenship tests designed to highlight Muslims’ supposed incompatibility with European sexual values; Germany’s test for instance was divided between questions about national security and questions of a sexual nature, implicitly asking whether it is appropriate to, for example, beat one’s wife, kick out one’s gay son, or oppose a daughter’s mixed marriage. These European sexual values find little consensus among European nations, who cannot agree on them even within EU frameworks.
Despite what some sensational European media outlets may imply, it is important to stress that no religion or ethnicity has the monopoly on sexual violence or harassment. Cases in point are the public beatings of homosexuals in Eastern Europe, or closer to home, the mob sexual violence committed on college campuses (as evidenced in the remarkable documentary on the epidemic of rape in our nation’s universities, The Hunting Ground). Yet the calls for an honest analysis of the Christian or Caucasian “tendency” toward sexual violence have not been forthcoming. Daoud often alludes to the “sexual misery” of young Muslim men—uneducated, poor, without marriage prospects. This is rhetoric that we have more familiarly heard from far-right politicians in Europe stoking fears about the culture of poverty and how it imperils the daughters of the nation: young and unemployed young men of color, haunting Europe’s housing projects, whose dissatisfaction with life supposedly translates into sexual violence against the women they can’t “have.”
It would be hard to imagine a white, male politician repeating any of the generalizations and unsourced claims about Muslim sexual violence contained in Daoud’s op-ed without facing serious criticism. It is possible for Daoud to not only say but get away with this kind of character assassination because he is part of the secularist Arab select the xenophobic right (and now left) depends on to say unsayable things about Muslims, who can declare whatever he likes in the name of cultural “authenticity.” The danger here is in engaging in what researcher Eric Fassin has called a “sexual clash of civilizations,” a line in the sand that will lead to new and fictitious distinctions between Muslims, secularists and Christians.
In many ways, Orientalism makes possible such fictions of difference by erasing distinctions of time and space, such that Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi fundamentalism and the highly dynamic societies of Indonesia and Tunisia can be mentioned in the same reductive term repeatedly employed by Daoud: “the lands of Allah.” It is ironic that Mr. Daoud’s op-ed would mention Orientalism, a critique of demonizing and Othering representations, just as he reinforces the most stale Orientalist stereotypes about the Middle East’s “intolerant and intolerable” sexualities.
[1] Hirsch, Charles-A.. “La criminalité des Nord-africains en France est-elle une criminalité par défaut d'adaptation ?”. Revue internationale de criminologie et de police technique. Vol. XIII, n° 2, avril-juin, 1959, p. 129-141.
by justdrew » Tue Mar 08, 2016 11:34 pm
However, his brave condemnations of violent puritanism in Algeria signify differently when transposed to a Euro-American context: in this way his formerly minoritarian secular voice joined the choir of an “islamophobic majority.” This failure to address power differentials (as well as the shifting sands of majority minority balances) when one moves from the global south to the north, is actually a quite common characteristic of what I’d like to call the anti-Muslim or “secularist Arab select,” who find a ready audience in the Euro-American press.
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