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Hungarys sponsorship of the Geneva declaration put the country at the helm of a motley coalition of pro-life hardliners that reject any international obligation on the part of states to finance or facilitate abortion, the document reads.

Most of its 30-odd signatories make up the 20 worst countries around the world for women to live in, according to the Women, Peace and Security Index compiled by Georgetown University. Hungary, ranked 49th, is the third worst among all EU countries and ranks even below the likes of Mongolia and Kazakhstan.

None of the people on the list could care less about women, Gillian Kane from Ipas, an international safe access to abortion advocacy group, summed up for The Guardian newspaper.

The declaration is legally void and does not change any laws already in place. But Hungarys stamp on the family-touting document was still a rude awakening to many, even in the face of the governments years-long pursuit of a policy to spur procreation within predominantly middle-class families with the motif of jumpstarting population growth, Reka Safrany, who chairs the Hungarians Womens Lobby, told BIRN.

Though the governments mounting hostility toward reproduction rights was palpable, we didnt see [the Geneva Consensus Declaration] coming, Safrany added.

Since its return to power in 2010, Orbans government has introduced several obstacles to obtaining an abortion. It wasted no time in slotting language about protecting the foetus since its conception in the constitution, a first for Europe at the time.

Though abortion has remained legal, women can only request the procedure within a narrow set of circumstances, as in the case of grave damage to the foetus, when the mothers health is at risk or when the pregnancy is the result of a crime. Pregnancies can also be mandated by the womans precarious socio-economic situation, which provides a walkable trail for abortions within the public health system in spite of the laws limiting scope, Safrany explained.

The message is clear: if you choose abortion, the state wants you to have it the hard way.

Noa Nogradi, womens rights expert and political philosopher

Women are also subject to mandatory waiting periods and two counselling sessions that are deliberately intended to change minds and dissuade them from going ahead with an abortion. Yet according to research by the PATENT association, a reproductive rights watchdog, these counselling sessions only seem to add to the womens mental strain. Of the more than a hundred women we asked, not a single one came away from it dissuaded. But they all felt humiliated, expert Nogradi, who took part in the study, said.

And its getting harder to book an appointment, even though abortions are extremely time sensitive and you simply cant have the procedure without it, Nogradi added.

Permits for medical abortions that rely on pills have been revoked, leaving many women with surgery as their only option other than going abroad. Nogradi thinks this policy is tinged with ideology. The message is clear: if you choose abortion, the state wants you to have it the hard way.

The past two decades has seen a steady decline in the number of abortions carried out in Hungary. Last year, close to 26,000 pregnancies were surgically terminated in the country, half the tally from 15 years ago, according to the Central Statistical Office. Yet the governments anti-abortion tirade continues.

Minister of Human Resources Miklos Kasler famously blamed abortion for Hungarys population decline, brushing off data that showed the countrys death rate twice outstrips the number of abortions.

And Family Minister Novak has spoken out against abortion in an oft-cited interview with the alt-right website Breitbart. She branded the pro-choice movement as pro-killing and applauded Hungarys family-oriented mentality.

A state-sponsored schoolbook published at the outset of the past academic year reportedly contained several anti-abortion references.

This worldview is reflected in the governments family planning program that offers free in vitro fertilisation to couples in a bid to boost fertility rates. But the policy leaves many people behind, activist Safrany suggests, as its focused on middle-class families. Family planning is also about affordable contraception and adequate education. Why dont these programs have the same backing when many women lack the means to afford them?

The governments family-centric orientation is extreme, Judit Zeller from the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union told BIRN, and could lead to completely shutting out non-married couples or singles from fertilisation treatments.

Conscientious objections to abortions from doctors, often incentivised by government funding, are also on the rise. Yet even in the current legal framework, abortion is a right that should be upheld. After all, abortions are part of the specialists job, thats what they learn at university, Safrany said.

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Activists Fear Abortion at Risk in Hungary from Orban's Family-First Crusade - Balkan Insight

The 2020 U.S. presidential election brought into sharp relief the contrast between the American and Israeli Jewish communities, the two main centers of the Jewish world. According to post-election surveys, American Jewish support for the Democrats remains extremely high, at 77 percent (up from 70 percent in 2016). President Donald Trump was estimated to have received a mere 21 percent of the Jewish vote. In Israel, however, surveys have shown that Israeli Jews prefer Trump to Biden by 70 percent to 13 percent.

Much has been written on the growing gap between American Jews and Israel in terms of values and Jewish identity. In particular, the entrenchment of the occupation and the growing authoritarianism of the Benjamin Netanyahu regime has provoked growing disillusionment with Israel, especially among young Jewish progressives in North America. On the one hand is Israels unmistakable shift to the nationalist right; on the other, American Jews commitment to liberal, pluralistic, and progressive ideals, exemplified by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The liberal icon symbolized for many the role that Jewish Tikkun Olam can play in the struggle for universal social justice.

Now, the two communities find themselves not only drifting apart, but also increasingly at loggerheads. Most American Jews see Trump as a clear threat, while most Israeli Jews view him as an ally who offers security and hope. This divergence has to do not only with the two communities different values, but also their structural positions.

For a relatively prosperous and largely white minority, the extent of American Jewish backing for the Democrats is striking. A 2015 study found that Jewish support for Democrats was 40 percent higher than that of non-Jews in similar socio-economic positions. And while some of it can be explained in Jewish levels of education and concentration in metropolitan areas, this is clearly far from the whole story.

The Democratic Partys model of inclusive citizenship fits American Jewish aspirations to cultivate a cultural and religious minority identity alongside civic participation. In such a model, Jewish particularism and universal American citizenship reinforce each other as two sides of the same coin. The Republican Partys overwhelmingly white Christian character, on the other hand, is far less accommodating in this regard. The GOPs strong Evangelical base, and its Christian-infused social conservatism, have dissuaded most Jews from considering it a political home.

In the last four years, Trumps connections with the extreme right have added an explicit antisemitic dimension to this equation. Trump has repeatedly refused to denounce white supremacist groups and the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy. GOP politicians routinely invoke conspiracies regarding the Hungarian Jewish financier George Soros, while using their support for Israel to deflect charges of antisemitism.

The Womens March on New York, January 21, 2017. (Gili Getz)

The shift in the GOPs rhetoric under Trump has revealed that the general assimilation of white Jews into whiteness has clear limits. Trumps comments to American Jews, in which he referred to Israel as your country and Benjamin Netanyahu as your prime minister, betrayed his understanding of U.S. Jews as not fully American, in keeping with his overall exclusivist notion of citizenship.

The 2018 deadly attack on the Pittsburgh synagogue by a white nationalist who subscribed to GOP-amplified conspiracy theories involving Soros and immigration, meanwhile, showed in the starkest terms the dangers of Trumps normalization of white supremacy. The place of Jews in a nativist America is far from secure, and it is clear why they reject overwhelmingly this political vision.

Israeli support for Trump is similarly rooted in structural realities, and is tied to the transformation of Israels political system in the last 20 years. The slow but sure demise of the two-state solution, and the effective incorporation of the occupied West Bank into Israel, mark the emergence of a one-state political system in which Jewish dominance is secured through the erosion of Israels democratic features. If American Jews are a minority, Israeli Jews are in the opposite position. They constitute a hegemonic group of about 50 percent of the population in Israel-Palestine.

As Raef Zreik recently wrote on +972 Magazine, the 2018 Jewish Nation-State Law spells out the new model of Jewish political dominance, with the downgrading of citizenship for Palestinians in Israel and commitment to Jewish settlement as a national value. As the permanence of the occupation becomes increasingly obvious, Israel can no longer maintain its democratic credentials and present itself as an island of liberalism in the Middle East.

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This explains why Israel has sought in the last decade to position itself as a strategic ally of the rising global authoritarian, revanchist, and Islamophobic right, headed by Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbn and, of course, Trump. For now, this alliance appears to be working in Israels interests, in an increasingly illiberal world. Israeli right-wing commentators supportive of Trump have adopted alt-right rhetoric, and have spoken in disparaging and even antisemitic terms about U.S. Jews support for liberal values. Key Netanyahu surrogates have described J Street as Jew boys, referred to American Jews as suburban rich people with private police, and routinely circulated Soros conspiracies.

Could this change under a Joe Biden presidency? It is almost certain that Bidens White House will try to revert, at least rhetorically, to previous patterns. No doubt the administration, very much like the EU, will try to revive the charade of the peace process and two-state solution. This will not change any of the existing dynamics, but it would enable international actors to continue ignoring the reality of effective Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Yet it is doubtful that this could work for much longer.

For Israel, the global hard right is now a natural and perhaps inevitable choice. Israels preference for a Trumpist GOP is therefore a logical conclusion, while for most American Jews, Trumpism is an anathema and a threat. Under these conditions, the rift between the communities could deepen and become about much more than values or disillusionment. It represents the clash of radically different alignments, rooted in the political trajectories and positions of both communities. This is no longer only about the future of Israel, but also about the future of Jews in the United States.

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The global right is threat to US Jews but a natural home for Israelis - +972 Magazine

Demonstrations promoted by right-wing conspiracy theorists and white nationalists are expected downtown Saturday. Will people come by the thousands, or dozens?

WASHINGTON There was intense trepidation that the 2018 Unite the Right 2 rally could live up to its namesake, serving as a sequel to Charlottesville and unleashing violence in the nations capital. Police prepared for hundreds of alt-right protesters, as the event garnered attention on social media channels and in the global press.

But ultimately, only a few dozen provocateurs boarded a train at the Vienna / Fairfax-GMU Metro station to begin their pilgrimage. When they alighted in Foggy Bottom, their bullhorns were drowned out by the jeers of a city that knew they were coming.

Far-right protesters were dwarfed in size and spirit on Aug. 12, 2018. What was supposed to conclude in a crescendo in Lafayette Park ended awkwardly without ceremony, in a whimper.

Could the same dynamic unfold on Saturday, when events promoted by conservative conspiracy theorists and white nationalists converge in Freedom Plaza?

The reason that was such a small number of people in 2018, versus the year before in Charlottesville, was the lawsuits and criminal charges that were pending related to the homicide of counter-protester Heather Heyer, retired FBI special agent Tom OConnor said. The people organizing the Unite the Right 2 rally were being sued civilly, and there was also internal strife within the organizations that brought the event together, which happens very often in extremist activity.

OConnor served for 23 years on the FBIs Joint Terrorism Task Force in the Washington field office, and now serves as principal consultant with FEDSquared Consulting LLC.

Faced with the preliminary details of the weekend events and a far-right social media ecosystem seemingly unwilling to accept President Trumps defeat, OConnor said the outcome of this weekend's demonstrations will be far more difficult to predict than the events of August 2018.

My fear is that, as we go forward through this cycle, moving towards the inaugural, the side that feels like theyve had this election stolen from them, youre going to have extremist elements in these groups, that could act out in lone offender violence, O'Connor said. That would be unfortunate for the country, but it is far from unlikely.

O'Connor stressed the careful balancing act federal and District law enforcement will be undertaking - protecting First Amendment assemblies while monitoring the main events and peripheries for potential violence.

"On the outsides of these protected activities, you're going to have fringe elements that have violence in their nature," he said. "And some of these groups you're hearing about have had individuals who pare off to do violent actions."

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Could MAGA protests in DC end like Unite the Right 2 rally, in a whimper? - WUSA9.com

November 15, 2020| By Kumar Sanjay Singh

This was the first election since 1992 when an incumbent president failed to win re-election for a second term. With over 75 million votes, Biden received the most votes ever cast for a presidential candidate, beating Barack Obamas record of 69.5 million votes from 2008.

The 2020 election saw a record number of ballots cast early and by mail, due to many states relaxing restrictions on mail-in voting in response to the COVID19 pandemic. As a result of a large number of mail-in ballots, some swing states saw delays in vote counting and reporting, leading to major news outlets not projecting a winner until four days later, on 7th November 2020.

Most significantly, Joseph R Bidens running mate Kamala Harris became the first coloured women to be elected as the Vice President of the United States.

Such achievements notwithstanding, mandate in the 59th presidential election was not as decisive and emphatic as was being anticipated by pollsters. Trump expanded the support for his policy, as reflected in the voting pattern between 2016 and 2020. In 2016, presidential election Trump polled 62, 984, 828 votes, which is approximately 46 % of the total votes cast. In 2020, votes polled in favour of Trump increased to 71,098,559, which is approximately 48% of the total votes cast. (At the time of writing approximately 93 % of the votes have been counted.)

It is apparent that despite the electoral defeat of Donald J Trump in the 59th presidential election, popular support for Trumpism has expanded.

The pyrrhic victory of the Democrats is underscored by the existing state of play in the US Senate election 2020. The Republican Party won 18 seats, thus having a tally of 48 seats in the US senate. The Democratic Party won 13 seats and holds 46 seats in the Senate. Two seats are held by the Independents. Requiring 51 seats to have a majority, the fate of the US Senate rests on the two runoff elections in Georgia, where neither party managed to secure 50% or more of the total votes cast.

Media analysts and pollsters are crediting Trumps carnivalesque campaign for the enthusiastic in-person voter turnout on November 3, for presidential election 2020.

Trumps success in eliciting overwhelming turnout of supporters is fundamentally a consequence of his connect with a subterranean ideology that has been a part of US politics since the inception of the US as a nation. That which we know as Trumpism is an amalgamation of deeply conservative dispositions, beliefs and ideas on, inter alia, race, gender, class and scientific temper. This neo-conservative ecosystem is certainly not Trumps creation, but he became the bridgehead for the intrusion of these ideas in mainstream politics.

The topography of neo-conservative politics is constituted by an ensemble of organizations and groups. It will be difficult to establish systematic ties between them; they adhere to widely different organizational principles and have little in common except for a filiation to the subterranean ideology. At one end of this ensemble of organizations are amorphous groups with no recognized leader, political centre or structured organization, QAnon is a typical example of such groups, at the other extreme are the clandestine, highly disciplined and hierarchically organized groups of white supremacists and right-wing militias and finally, there are radio talk shows, cable news and far-right websites such as Breitbart News, a website which is the platform for the alt-right.

This subterranean ideology and the groups affiliated to it, even when it provided a significant proportion of the votes cast for the Republican party, is neither a part of the party nor is within its control. The coupling of alt-right with the Grand Old Party is entirely the handiwork of Trump and his acolytes.

Herein lies the basis of the stranglehold that Trump seems to have over the Republican Party. It follows that electoral defeat notwithstanding; Trump and his trusted lieutenants would be firmly in the saddle of the party and it will be obligated to continue the collision course with the Democrats and other perceived enemies. In short, divisive politics that was the hallmark of the Trump presidency would persist even after his electoral defeat.

Any analysis of the increasing fragility of polity in the US of A will be incomplete without accounting for the significant mutations in the formal political parties of the USA. Significant fault lines have emerged within both the Republican and the Democratic Party.

Since the 58th presidential election 2016, the establishment of both the Republican and Democratic party is under the threat of being swamped by a radical wing. The Democratic party is facing a mounting challenge from the left that is growing increasingly impatient with the glacial pace of socio-political and economic reforms.

Bernie Sanders and The Squad Democrats (a group of four women elected in the 2018 United States House of Representatives elections, made up of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan) have been articulating the anxieties and aspirations of the left-wing of the Democratic party. This group has already mounted two unsuccessful challenges to occupy CenterStage of Democratic party. They have also been the motivating force behind movements of police, medical and educational reforms as well as an equitable and just wage structure.

The establishment in the Republican party has already been vanquished by the alt-right challenge mounted under the leadership of Trump and Stephen Kevin Bannon. It is a symptom of this capitulation of the establishment conservatives that Abraham Lincolns party has lately become the vehicle for the remnants of confederate ideology in US politics.

Establishment in both the parties has displayed ineptitude in addressing this challenge. Democrats pulled defeat from the jaws of victory in the 58th presidential elections owing to the mishandling of the left-wing of their party. That the conservative establishment had some role to play in Trumps electoral defeat is evident in the voting trends in the election of the Senate and the President in some important swing states.

Bidens victory in Arizona and Massachusetts had the weight of the Republican supporters -late John McCain and Mitt Romney. The upshot of this challenge is that while the Democrats are increasingly being pushed towards a left-wing agenda of reforms that alt-right is pushing the Republicans towards a politics of cultural wars.

In spite of the pious enunciation of Biden, this growing chasm in US domestic politics will be hard to plaster over. In fact, the burning questions that evoked unprecedented voter turnout even in the time of pandemic can hardly be ignored by the Biden administration. However, any decisive action by the Biden administration on COVID19 related public health measures, on police reforms, especially in the face of growing sensitivity on disproportionate police action on coloured communities, on relaxations of emigration norms are all capable of igniting passions and acrimonious street wars.

The founding fathers of the United States may have visualized it as a beacon of freedom for the world, a shining city on a hill; in the current turbulent times, it may be reduced to a house on fire.

Should this concern India or the South Asian sub-continent? One must speculate the impact of a divided US on its capacity to regain the leadership of multilateral institutions in the face of the rise of China as a potential hyperpower.

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Related Topics: Donald Trump, Joe Biden, United States of America

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Resilience of Trumpism and Fragmentation of American Polity in Biden Presidency - Sikh Siyasat News

Paul Gilroy is a writer and academic specialising in Black British culture. His books include There Aint No Black in the Union Jack (1987) , Small Acts (1993), The Black Atlantic (1993) and After Empire (2004). He has taught at Goldsmiths, University of London and Yale, where he was the chair of the department of African American studies. He is currently director of the centre for the study of race and racism at University College London. Gilroy was awarded the 2019 Holberg prize for his outstanding contributions to a number of academic fields, including cultural studies, critical race studies, history and African-American studies.

I know that you are close friends with Steve McQueen, our guest editor. How did you meet?I was teaching at Goldsmiths when he was a student there. One day, he knocked on my door with his friend, Desmond, another Black art student. He just wanted to talk and I was happy to do that. He kept on knocking on the door and he would bring his obsessions and his frustrations. I think that he was eager to be taken seriously in a way. It was clear in talking to him that we had interests in common and that he was a remarkable character.

He often speaks of himself as part of a continuum of Black artists, activists and writers who preceded and paved the way for him. I guess you would be included in that lineage.Well, Im just 15 or 16 years older than Steve, so maybe it was more about the fact that, back then, there were not that many other people writing about Black British art. The fact that I was perhaps helped to make a space in which some of the things he wanted to do could be articulated.

In many ways, Steves Small Axe films, particularly Lovers Rock, seem to me to be an elegy for another time and another kind of Black British communal identity that seems suddenly very distant.Yes, I agree. Demographically, the Caribbean population has shrunk and the dominant Black settler populations in Britain now are African people from different places, who arrived here under different conditions. Some, not all, arrived as refugees, some as middle-class people with more access to capital. So that generates a very different Blackness. It is more divided and more open to looking towards the US, and the generic forms of Black politics coming out of there, rather than being rooted in the aftermath of the slave experience.

The Black Lives Matter protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and then spread globally were seen by many as a moment of real change. Do you agree?I really dont know. It had to happen, but it does not guarantee anything for the future. I know there are people in the US who think that, because of what happened, we may be in the build-up to a new racial settlement there, a third reconstruction if you like, the first being after the civil war, the second the civil rights movement in the 1960s. I want to believe that is true, but I dont have enough information to be able to judge that. What happens next is the issue. At the moment, it feels like fatigue and depression and apathy may be in the ascendant. I dont want to be bleak, but, really, I dont see the momentum of the spring and early summer being maintained.

In your book After Empire you posed the question, could there be a contemporary British multicultural identity? Given all that has happened since, that possibility seems much further away now than when you asked the question.Yes, it does. There was a moment back then, when the reaction against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan created an alignment based on the urgent need to articulate an alternative that was not subject to the traditional belligerence, that was not Americanised. That has faded. The discrepancy between what is going on here and the widespread and sustained protests in America is stark. Here, there is apathy, fatigue, frustration.

How do you feel about the explosion of post-BLM virtue-signalling from the corporate worlds of the art, media and fashion?Well, the eager corporations and brands with their black squares and empty gestures might be enough to nudge some people who are looking for radical answers into the arms of the alt-right. More positively, it showed that some people in high places were watching the uprisings, that even corporate capitalism was listening. Maybe there are sources of hope and possibility in momentarily winning their attention, but I think it has its limits.

In America and Britain, there is the sense that the colonial past and, in particular, the slave trade, has not been engaged with in any meaningful way either culturally, historically or in terms of education. Is it possible to move forward politically without that happening?No. And its not a case of looking for an apology because you are offended, its about looking through that history colonialism, slavery and familiarising yourself with it in all its intimate detail. The education system is broken from top to bottom and teaching the Tudors and the Nazis is never going to fix it. Whats exciting about Steves films, the Mangrove one in particular, is that they are an attempt to offer a historical transfusion that, in the present condition, can give younger viewers and mainstream viewers an alternative sense of what the history of this country might be over the last 50 years.

As someone who has written extensively about race and history, are you pessimistic for the future?I dont think we can afford the luxury of pessimism. I have been dispirited of late, but when I saw those young people out in the streets in the pandemic, with their masks on, spaced apart, announcing to the world that racism is a bad thing, it was inspiring and uplifting. That banner was taken up very widely and some of the people who took it up were very young. That is hopeful. The question is, can that mobilisation of people be the source of a movement that can carry this forward. Thats where my own pessimism bites me, because I dont know if the technologies that get people into the streets are so good at keeping them there.

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Paul Gilroy: 'I dont think we can afford the luxury of pessimism' - The Guardian