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The coronavirus pandemic has been with us for about four months, sickening and killing people and disrupting economies around the world. In all probability, years will elapse before it is finally eradicated.

An equally deadly virus, which mutates across borders and cultures and has caused the deaths of millions of people, has endured for centuries.

It is known as antisemitism, a malicious conspiracy theory that scapegoats Jews for all the ills and troubles that beset societies, from the Black Plague in the 14th century to robber baron capitalism in the 19th century. Its rooted in the idea that Jews are intrinsically evil.

American filmmaker Andrew Goldberg examines this perennial phenomenon in a one hour and twenty minute documentary, Viral: Antisemitism in Four Mutations, which is to be broadcast on the PBS network on Tuesday, May 26 at 9 p.m.

Goldberg examines this enduring form of hatred graphically against the backdrop of rising global antisemitism and anti-Zionism. He starts in the United States, moves on to Hungary, and then investigates its migration into the far left in Britain and into the ranks of Islamic radicalism in France.

There are no shocking disclosures or original observations, just a steady drip of useful information that places the topic in its proper perspective. Viewers who are not up to speed about it will find this film of considerable interest.

He launches his investigation with the deadliest antisemitic rampage in American history, the Tree of Life Synagogue attack in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018 which resulted in the murder of 11 worshippers. The killer, a 46-year-old neo-Nazi, regarded Jews as the children of satan and blamed Jewish organizations for encouraging the immigration of non-whites into the United States.

Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, the synagogues spiritual leader, fatalistically believes that this assault on a Jewish community was inevitable because a small minority of Americans regard Jews as unsavory foreigners. By one estimate, 10 percent to 12 percent of Americans hold strong antisemitic views.

Goldberg also interviews Russell Walker, a retired engineer who ran for a seat in North Carolinas legislature. A white supremacist, he believes that Jews were created to destroy the white Christian nation. Walker lost the election, but 37 percent of the electorate voted for him, a disturbing commentary on public opinion in this southern state.

Bill Clinton, the former president, argues that antisemitism, driven by anxiety and anger, has gone viral on the internet.

Goldberg believes that the Make American Great Again campaign slogan advanced by the current president, Donald Trump, has been leveraged by white nationalists in general and by the alt-right in particular.

Richard Spencer, one of the alt-rights chief ideologues, dismisses the notion that Trump is a white nationalist, but adds, We were connected to Trump on a psychic level.

Trumps critics claim he has tolerated antisemitism by failing to condemn it or by resorting to dog whistles.

In Hungary, whose pro-Nazi collaborationist regime facilitated the murder of more than 400,000 Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, Prime Minister Viktor Urban demonizes the Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor and U.S.-based financier George Soros.

Urban and his conservative supporters smear Soros, a liberal, with the unsubstantiated claim that he seeks to destroy Hungary by means of encouraging a massive influx of Muslim migrants. Urban, in his speeches and campaigns, avoids mentioning Jews out of concern of being branded an antisemite, says Goldberg.

Goldberg, in the third part of his film, discusses the travails of the left-of-center Labor Party after its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was accused of tolerating antisemitism within its membership and backbenchers.Corbyn, who resigned recently, is portrayed as a politician from the partys far-left fringe who was deeply hostile to Israel and regarded Hezbollah and Hamas as friends.

Several of his critics, including Luciana Berger and Margaret Hodge, resigned from the party in protest over its toleration of anti-Jewish tropes and its pro-Palestinian stance. Blair, the partys ex-leader and former prime minister, concedes it was difficult to disentangle old forms of antisemitism from far-left antisemitic rhetoric during the Corbyn era.

In conclusion, Goldberg travels to France to gauge the relationship between Islamic radicalism and antisemitism. France is an important testing ground due to its large Jewish and Muslim populations.

Goldberg focuses on two French Jews, Jean-Luc Slakmon and Valerie Braham, both of whom were directly affected by a violent incident in a kosher supermarket in Paris on January 9, 2015. On that day, an Islamic extremist and Islamic State sympathizer burst into the store and murdered four Jewish shoppers. Slakmon was traumatized by the event, while Braham lost her husband, Philippe, in the attack.

This was hardly the first crime of its kind committed by French Islamic radicals. In Toulouse, a Jewish day school was attacked, resulting in the deaths of several students and a rabbi, and in Paris, an elderly Jewish woman was killed after being stabbed and thrown from her balcony.

The brother of the Toulouse assailant, whose family emigrated from Algeria, discloses they were raised to hate Jews, who are seen as oppressors due to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Gunther Jikeli, a German scholar affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism in Berlin, claims that 75 percent of antisemitic incidents in France are not even reported.

If Jikeli is correct, the problem posed by antisemitism in France runs deeper than most people think.

Read more:
Viral: Antisemitism In Four Mutations | Sheldon Kirshner | The Blogs - The Times of Israel

The Washington Post published a picture of Stacey Abrams wearing a cape this weekend.

You may have seen it, since in certain corners of the conservative news media, this fawning coverage of the becaped former state representative and vice-presidential hopeful was the single most noteworthy piece of news from the weekend.

And Id like to preface the impending rant by saying, for the record, that in the narrowest possible sense, these conservative media critics have a sliver of a point. It is true that the number of glowing profiles given over to a failed gubernatorial candidate and long-shot vice presidential contender is absurd. And yes, it is impossible to imagine a losing Republican candidate being given this sort of treatment.

And yes, its telling that the biggest media outlets are unable to have even a modicum of self-awareness in situations like this. I wish they would stop. (See also: Cuomo, Andrew).

But while the professional media critics, anti-anti-Trumpers, and assorted both-siders were obsessing over the Stacey Abrams Caped Crusader feature, there were some other things happening in the actual real world.

Here are some of them:

(1) The president of the United States quote-tweeted an avowed alt-right account that flirts with Holocaust denial,

(2) The president also texted supporters false allegations that he had been illegally spied on by the previous vice president.

(3) The president also fired another independent inspector general without providing cause.

(4) The official American death toll from COVID-19 inched close to 90,000 souls while the president spent his time live tweeting cable TV.

(5) One of the presidents large adult sons grotesquely suggested that Joe Biden is a pedophile.

(6) Another of his large adult sons claimed that the virus was a hoax perpetrated by the left and the media and that it will disappear after the election.

(7) The President sent a tweet encouraging protesters who aggressively shouted down and chased after a random local news reporter with calls of you are the virus, traitor, and enemy of the people. (Note: This was entry number seven because I even forgot about it until after writing the article because Trump does so much insane stuff every day)

But who could find the time to care about any of this when the Washington Post publishes a picture of Stacey Abrams in a cape. #Capegate. What an outrage.

Three and a half years into the Trump experiment, the president is still using chaff to prevent people from zeroing in on any one of his actions. He veers from incident to incidentat any point in U.S. history, any of the above seven items would have been an all-encompassing scandal, a few couldve been career enders. Meanwhile, Trumps defenders run content farms of counter scandals which they litigate and re-litigate and then litigate some more. Which has the effect of paralyzing the mainstream media, which has produced a great deal of good journalism, but has been unable to change its fundamental priorities, which create recency bias, kabuki balance, and an evolutionary imperative for clicks.

The current conservative content farm scandal is Obamagate, in which Trump has fabricated an espionage claim against both his predecessor and general election opponent. This scandal has been a public-private partnership, created both with the tools of the federal government as well as Trumps campaign and its proxies in conservative media.

The very creation of this fake scandal is, as I wrote last week, being largely treated as a sideshow by those who either think it too stupid to be taken seriously or dont understand how the Department of Justice and director of National Intelligence are leveraging government assets in order to aid the presidents reelection campaign.

For those who have not followed it, the tl;dr of what the government is doing is this:

The Department of Justice has deputized U.S. Attorney John Durham to oversee a team of investigators aimed at looking into whether the Russia investigation was actually a Deep State plot. Durham has access to a grand jury and the resources to scour the globe. Meanwhile the acting director of National Intelligence, someone whose main experience for the job was pleasing President Trump with his aggressive trolling of reporters on Twitter, is selectively leaking innocuous intelligence gathering efforts in order to advance this conspiratorial narrative.

These leaks, in turn, are being driven by the Trump campaign. On Saturday the president used the leads from the director of National Intelligence to advance an elaborate lie that accuses his opponent of committing illegal espionage against him.

Just read that sentence again.

The president used the leads from the director of National Intelligence to advance an elaborate lie that accuses his opponent of committing illegal espionage against him.

This is the most outrageous and pernicious lie that a president has levied against his opponent in my lifetime.

And despite the president himself elevating this lie on Saturday, it was not discussed on front pages across the country. Forget front pages, its hard to find any article at all addressing the Presidents insane charges.

Most coverage of the issue is framed around discussing whether or not Obama and Biden did anything wrongthere is literally no evidence to suggest that they didrather than focusing on how the Trump administration is guilty of weaponizing American intelligence agencies for political ends by perpetrating this falsehood.

Drawing historical analogies to Trumps behavior is more or less impossiblethere is no true analog. The best I can do is this: Imagine if, in 2012, President Obama had deputized a U.S. attorney to investigate claims that 9/11 was an inside job perpetrated by the Bush family, while asserting that the GOP engaged in illegal espionage against his campaign because the government was investigating the Tony Rezko scandal. And that he somehow tied Mitt Romney to the fiction, too.

Set aside the fact that this would be Wuhan batshit level crazy that would have caused people to wonder if Obama was even mentally fit for office. There is a 100 percent chance that these actions would have become the all-encompassing scandal for the rest of Obamas administration.

Trumps actions combine the politicization of intelligence, the misuse of tax dollars, and the creation of a phony investigation using the Department of Justice in order to advance the presidents reelection campaign. And thats just the nuts-and-bolts, the stuff you can probe with your hands. The president has also created a propaganda campaign that will lead millions to believe that one party actively spied on the other, further tearing the fabric of our country in ways that wont be repaired for a generation. Or maybe ever.

And if that isnt giving you cause for concern, the president has systematically fired the independent inspectors general overseeing the departments most intertwined with his COVID-19 response and his Obamagate abuses. The fired IGs include the State and Defense Departments, the pandemic response, and the intelligence community. The only person in the Republican Senate majority who seems to give a damn about this is Mitt Romney.

And for good measure the president elevated an avowed white nationalist and Holocaust denier who proceeded to brag about how Trump is helping him get around deplatforming.

Put all this together with beyond the pale defamation and the COVID lies and the Trump family went exponentially further than any previous president in eroding our norms rhetorical, political, and legal and that was just one weekend.

But hey, dont forget that cape pic.

***

Correction:An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Stacey Abrams is a former state senator, she is a former state representative.

Read the original here:
Trumps Weekend of Scandal Was Hiding in Plain Sight - The Bulwark

We fought two world wars in the 20th Century in defence of liberal values in this country. Then, after 9/11, we fought a series of engagements that attempted to impose those same values in other peoples countries. Now, the handle is turning again and even that recent aberration appears a long time ago. A new strategic epoch seems to indicate that we no longer need to go looking for a fight. Conflict will come to us.

The front line is no longer a nameless hillside in Afghanistan but the firewalls inside the computer systems of the power grid or what masquerades as news on social media. The digital revolution and globalisation have, in combination, dramatically increased the vulnerability of Western societies to severe disruption. We no longer have to speculate what a rupture of the distribution systems of the major supermarkets would look like. The creation of a black market in loo rolls at the start of the pandemic was a darkly comic moment but showed just how quickly the normal conventions of an apparently ordered society can unravel. And that wasnt even the result of a break in supply, but simply human frailty; what if the same systems were subject to a sophisticated and concerted cyber-attack?

Ever mindful that it might have to pick up the pieces, Lloyds Insurance conducted a recent study into the implications of a successful cyber-attack on 50 suppliers of the power grid covering the north east of America. It concluded that 93 million people would be without power immediately and for up to two weeks. During that time, and in the biting cold of a New York winter or the suffocating heat of a Washington summer, the immediate consequences of a blackout would be compounded by the secondary effects of opportunist crime and civil unrest, both of which would test the competence of government.

This is not an abstract, hypothetical threat the massive attack against Estonia in 2007 and the 2017 NotPetya malware attack against a variety of Western companies reveal cyber operations as a weapon of choice in contemporary conflict. And its not just the bad guys who are at it. The Stuxnet attack on the Iranian nuclear programme set the standard for cyber intervention and seemed to leave a trail back to America and Israel.

At the same time, Russian attempts to influence the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election by disinformation and fake news and even the faintly risible Iranian attempt to encourage Scottish separatism using the same methods during the 2014 referendum are a matter of public record. Cyber and information operations are being directed against this country on a daily basis in a form of conflict that is pervasive, insidious, ambivalent and rarely attributable. The attack on the Skripal family in Salisbury breathtaking in both its audacity and incompetence showed that chemical attack could also be part of contemporary conflict. What if, on the back of Covid-19, biological weapons became part of this sinister equation too?

Hittite texts written beyond 1000 BC speak of infiltrating people infected with deadly, communicable disease into rival communities in what is probably the first historical reference to biological warfare. The grotesque idea of using disease as an instrument in conflict has come and gone over the subsequent millennia and it was only in 1990 that Gruinard Island, off the west coast of Scotland, was declared safe after it had been used for experiments with weaponised anthrax in 1942. Today, an objective observer might see a Covid-19 death toll that will eventually run into millions, global economic dislocation and debt levels of individual nations that equate to multiples of GDP. These are conditions only normally associated with large scale conflict and is it entirely irrational for nation states, terrorist groups or even criminal organisations to ponder cause and effect?

In 2011, Dutch virologists working at the Erasmus Centre in Rotterdam caused a mutation of the H5N1 (bird flu) virus. Around the same time, research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was working on grafting the H5N1 spike gene on to H1N1 swine flu virus. The mortality rate of bird flu is higher than 50 per cent and an animated academic debate ensued about whether both pieces of research should be published or whether the risk of rogue scientists replicating the work was too great. In the event, the research was published in Science and Nature respectively and is now available in the public domain.

So, bad stuff is out there, but the problem has always been in weaponising it in a way that creates mass dissemination, as the failed attempts of the Aum Shinriyko millenialist cult to use anthrax in Tokyo in the 1990s illustrated. Unfortunately, advances in genetic engineering and delivery techniques mean this challenge becomes ever more soluble and a determined programme could probably overcome the technical hurdles. If it did, a biological weapon would have a number of advantages over other forms of anonymised attack: even miniscule quantities can be lethal; symptoms can have delayed onset; and, subsequent waves of infection can manifest beyond the original attack site. The effect would be pervasive, insidious, ambivalent and perhaps unattributable exactly the fingerprints of contemporary conflict.

Lets go one step further and explore the very boundaries of rational action. Is it inconceivable that a state actor lets call it China for the sake of argument might contemplate a form of biological self-immolation? If it was confident in the ability of its large and compliant population to absorb an epidemic, its ubiquitous security and surveillance apparatus to impose control and with the advantage of foreknowledge, might it seek strategic advantage in creating a pandemic in the certain knowledge that strategic competitors would suffer far more?

It probably is inconceivable but not in the conspiracy-obsessed social media echo chambers that pass for news reportage among the more fevered parts of the American alt-right community. And so this article turns full circle: a piece of thin analysis and opinion feeds a conspiracy debate and adds to the dead weight of fake news that bends our sense of reality. Or, alternatively stated, this is what future conflict might look like.

The implications are profound and beg questions such as: what is now the point of nuclear weapons; how do we deter these forms of attack; and is a defence doctrine built around expeditionary operations and platforms like the Queen Elizabeth class of aircraft carriers remotely relevant to the future?

Continue reading here:
After Covid-19, what is the future of conflict? Part 1 - TheArticle

A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound, wrote Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, in his 1862 classic Fathers and Sons.

But for some pictures, Turgenev might be undershooting the mark. Select snapshots are worthy of hours of reflection; others deserve volumes written about them. One recent photo sums up not just Americas politics in 2020, but its culture over the past decade.

On March 4, a photographer caught Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz wearing a gas mask on the floor of the House of Representatives. In the photo, Gaetz is sitting alone, wearing the mask while scrolling through his phone.

Gaetz later tweeted a photo of himself wearing the gas mask while consulting with a staff member.

At the time, only 130 cases of COVID-19 had been identified in the United States, with 11 Americans having died from the virus.

Despite the warnings of the devastation the coronavirus could cause, Gaetz thought it was hilarious to mock people who were trying to sound the alarm about the virus by wearing a full-face gas mask. After all, this was back before Donald Trump was a wartime president, when he was still downplaying the threat from COVID-19, dismissing the concerns of experts, and insisting that it would all go away on its own. As Gaetzs constituents panicked over the arrival of the deadly virus, their elected representative decided to carry Trumps water by ridiculing the people who were trying to warn the public of the looming danger.

But, as we would soon find out, if idiocy were currency, Jeff Bezos would be Gaetzs butler.

Within days, Gaetzs first constituent died of the disease. Around the same time, Gaetz announced that he had been in contact with an attendee at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference and would be self-quarantining for 14 days.

Gaetz said his gas mask stunt was sincere. Thats difficult to believe. Had he been sincere he would have worn a surgical mask and gloves, not a contraption designed for chemical warfare. And his outlandish behavior over the years suggests that theres no reason to grant him the benefit of the doubt. After all, this is the same guy who invited a holocaust-denying white supremacist alt-right troll to the State of the Union speech. The same guy who attempted to blackmail a witness before Congress in order to try to protect Trump.

And Gaetz is the guy who orchestrated a stunt during a presidential impeachment trial that compromised national security. Remember last October when Gaetz and his fellow Republicans staged a sit-in at a secure hearing facility demanding Republicans be allowed to take part in the hearing even when nearly 1-in-4 House Republicans were actually members of the Intelligence, Oversight or Foreign Affairs committeesall of which were allowed to take part in the impeachment inquiries?

But Gaetz isnt the whole story here. In virus-speak, he is merely a symptom of how we got to a place in American politics where trolling has overtaken expertise and self-promotion has eclipsed competence.

People of the future who look back to the photo will see a political era when acting as a loathsome, self-aggrandizing grifter was the quickest way to earn credibility within ones party. An era when no problems were addressed until they had spiralled out of control and seriousness and expertise were viewed with suspicion and contempt.

You can think of this era as Americas Golden Age of Anti-Knowledge. And soon it will have cost upwards of 100,000 Americans their lives.

To paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in the virus. But the virus is interested in you.

Whatever happens nextwith the pandemic, with Trumpism, with Americawe will always have that photo to remind us of exactly what this time in our lives was like: A time when toadies like Matt Gaetz tried to ignore mass death with sarcasm. A time where we picked the leader of the free world not because we believed he could manage the ship of state in crisis, but because he seemed very forceful when he fired Meat Loaf that one time on his reality show.

News moves quickly these days, with each days ridiculous headlines supplanted by tomorrows even more absurd ones.

But Gaetzs gas mask photo should stay with us for a very long time, an artifact reminding America how one man gleefully lowered himself to match the moment.

Read more here:
A Picture Is Worth 100,000 Lives - The Bulwark

Some people say it doesnt even exist that its meaningless, or even a term of abuse. But from the 2008 financial crisis to the vote for Brexit in 2016, from the rise of the alt-right to the Covid-19 pandemic, there is no way of properly grasping our world without thinking about how neoliberalism informs our politics and economy.

But what is it? Broadly speaking, neoliberalism can be defined as the raft of policies and overarching political ethos that enabled governments in the late-1970s to turn away from state-directed economic planning, towards an economic model that extended competitive markets into every sphere of human activity and initiated the reign of finance capital (the kind dreamed up in the City of London and Wall Street) by removing constraints on capital mobility.

Importantly, neoliberalism is not merely a policy agenda but also a moral framework that teaches individuals to conceive of themselves not as, say, wage earners but rather as risk-taking entrepreneurs who should expect to shoulder the financial risks of their participation in higher education, the credit system and deregulated labour markets.

First implemented as an economic programme in the UK and the United States by the Thatcher government and the Reagan administration, its principles continued to underwrite the third way politics of New Labour and Clintonite Democrats. Although centre-left politicians reject the applicability of the term to their politics, a wealth of scholarship produced by economists, sociologists and historians demonstrates how third-way politicians advanced the neoliberal project.

So, where does the ideology stand today? Some are calling time on the neoliberal age. In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Paul Mason declared that the exigencies of the crisis would mean that, in short order, the UKs political class would soon consist entirely of either enthusiastic or reluctant socialists progressive state intervention was inevitably back on the agenda. However, claims of this sort should be treated with caution, not least because similar predictions were made following the financial crisis, and after the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump as US president. And those predictions turned out to be seriously awry.

For instance, at the height of the financial crisis, the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz announced, Neoliberalism is dead. Yet it soon became abundantly clear that this was premature. It is true that the crisis seemed to pose a serious threat to the veneration of markets, as governments were forced to bail out the financial sector. But, as scholars such as Philip Mirowski have shown, neoliberals have long understood that their project requires state intervention to create and maintain markets. Rather than thinking of the crisis-fighting of governments in 2008 as a repudiation of market-friendly policy, its more useful to think of it as an extreme instance of pro-business government intervention that aimed to maintain the long-term primacy of the market.

On the face of it, the vote for Brexit and the election of Trump appeared to more plausibly represent a break with neoliberalism. But that diagnosis arose from a failure to understand how neoliberalism can adaptively recombine with elements of other ideologies.

While the Brexiteers may loathe the European Union (an institution that neoliberal intellectuals have long disagreed about) they remain committed to the core of neoliberal ideology. For example, the Australian points-based immigration system so beloved by the Brexiteers is perfectly congruent with the neoliberals view of human beings as bundles of assets (of greater or lesser value). The post-Brexit immigrants educational background, work experience and connections are redefined as forms of capital that may or may not be worth investing in (by letting them in) in order to secure a future return on that investment for the national economy. Points-based immigration systems, in other words, do not represent a straightforward shift away from neoliberal, free-market orthodoxy towards rightwing protectionism.

If neither the crises of 2008 nor 2016 signalled the end of neoliberalism, what about Covid-19? Today, as in 2008, politicians such as Rishi Sunak have been forced to implement policies that seem to contradict their adherence to market supremacy, but the intention is again to do so in order to swiftly return to normal and wean the public off their addiction to state support. The governments frustrated desire to curtail the furlough scheme, and the clear opposition to implementing a universal basic income, indicate a commitment to maintaining the core of neoliberal welfare policy. This means opposing generous, non-means-tested payments, which neoliberals view as detrimental to fostering entrepreneurial activity and disciplining the workforce.

More disturbingly, in the context of pandemic and the climate crisis, the persistence of the neoliberal view of individuals as human capital raises the possibility of governments treating populations of low value as disposable. Increased state intervention to protect incomes is welcome, but could be used by governments to implement a kind of economic triage, with populations deemed not worth bailing out excluded from state support. As Michel Feher has shown, there are milder precedents for this in welfare reforms carried out by mainstream political parties in Ireland and Portugal, which reduced benefits for younger cohorts in order to encourage emigration and, in the case of Portugal, to swap young, relatively poor Portuguese for wealthier retirees from abroad. In a context of ballooning national debt, where migrant populations are being treated as vectors of disease, its not difficult to see how an exclusionary neoliberal politics that supports investment in certain populations and disinvestment in others could gain traction.

All of this is not to deny that the Covid-19 crisis poses a real threat to neoliberal orthodoxy. Physical distancing and enforced quarantine have disrupted the labour market, potentially shifting the balance of power between labour and capital in favour of workers. The increase in wildcat strikes and the emergence of mutual aid groups are certainly encouraging. And the furlough scheme has temporarily revealed the artificiality of government spending constraints. But given the persistence and adaptability of neoliberal ideology over the past 10 years, any sober assessment of the current situation needs to be attuned to the possibility of its survival (or successful mutation), as well as its possible demise.

Alex Doherty is the host of the Politics Theory Other podcast

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Has the coronavirus crisis killed neoliberalism? Don't bet on it - The Guardian