Brain Power - Israel's Secret Weapon

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn

IS it some international conspiracy — or perhaps a secret weapon — that allows Israel to lord over the Mid­­dle East? How did a country of nine million — between one-half and one-third of Karachi’s population — manage to subdue 400m Arabs? A country bui­lt on stolen land and the ruins of destroyed Pal­estinian villages is visibly chuckling away as every Arab government, egged on by the khadim-i-haramain sharifain, lines up to recognise it. Economically fragile Pakistan is being lured into following suit.

Conspiracy theorists have long imagined Israel as America’s overgrown watchdog, beefed up and armed to protect American interests in the Middle East. But only a fool can believe that today. Every American president, senator and congressman shamefacedly admits it’s the Israeli tail that wags the American dog. Academics who chide Israel’s annexation policies are labelled anti-Semitic, moving targets without a future. The Israeli-US nexus is there for all to see but, contrary to what is usually thought, it exists for benefiting Israel not America.

It was not always this way. European Jews fleeing Hitler were far less welcome than Muslims are in today’s America. That Jewish refugees posed a serious threat to national security was argued by government officials in the State Department to the FBI as well as president Franklin Roosevelt himself. One of my scientific heroes, Richard Feynman, was rejected in 1935 by Columbia University for being Jewish. Fortunately, MIT accepted him.

What changed outsiders into insiders was a secret weapon. That weapon was brain power. Regarded as the primary natural resource by Jews inside and outside Israel it is an obsession for parents who, spoon by spoon, zealously ladle knowledge into their children. The state too knows its responsibility: Israel has more museums and libraries per capita than any other country. Children born to Ashkenazi parents are assumed as prime state assets who will start a business, discover some important scientific truth, invent some gadget, create a work of art, or write a book. 

In secular Israel, a student’s verbal, mathematical, and scientific aptitude sets his chances of success. By the 10th grade of the secular bagut system, smarter students will be learning calculus and differential equations together with probability, trigonometry and theorem proving. Looking at some past exam papers available on the internet, I wondered how Pakistani university professors with PhDs would fare in Israeli level-5 school exams. Would our national scientific heroes manage a pass? Unsurprisingly, by the time they reach university, Israeli students have bettered their American counterparts academically.

There is a definite historical context to seeking this excellence. For thousands of years, European anti-Semitism made it impossible for Jews to own land or farms, forcing them to seek livelihoods in trading, finance, medicine, science and mathematics. To compete, parents actively tutored their children in these skills. In the 1880s, Zionism’s founders placed their faith solidly in education born out of secular Renaissance and Enlightenment thought.

But if this is the story of secular Israel, there is also a different Israel with a different story. Ultra-orthodox Haredi Jews were once a tiny minority in Israel’s mostly secular society. But their high birth rate has made them grow to about 10 per cent of the population. Recognisable by their distinctive dress and manners, the Haredim are literally those who “tremble before God”.

For Haredis, secularism and secular education are anathema. Like Pakistan, Israel too has a single national curriculum with a hefty chunk earmarked for nation-building (read, indoctrination). In the Israeli context, the ideological part seeks to justify dispossession of the Palestinian population. Expectedly, the ‘Jewish madressah’ system accepts this part but rejects the secular part ie that designed to create the modern mind.

The difference in achievement levels between regular and Haredi schools is widening. While all schools teach Hebrew (the holy language), secular schools stress mastery over English while ‘madressahs’ emphasise Hebrew. According to a Jerusalem Post article, Haredi schools (as well as Arab-Israeli schools) are poor performers with learning outcomes beneath nine of the 10 Muslim countries that participated in the most recent PISA exam. A report says 50pc of Israel’s students are getting a ‘third-world education’.

The drop in overall standards is causing smarter Israelis to lose sleep. They fear that, as happened in Beirut, over time a less fertile, more educated elite sector of society will be overrun by a more fertile, less-educated religious population. When that happens, Israel will lose its historical advantage. Ironically, Jewish identity created Israel but Jewish orthodoxy is spearheading Israel’s decline.

There is only one Muslim country that Israel truly fears — Iran. Although its oil resources are modest, its human resources are considerable.

The revolution of 1979 diminished the quality of Iranian education and caused many of Iran’s best professors to flee. But unlike Afghanistan’s mullahs, the mullahs of Iran were smart enough to keep education going. Although coexistence is uncomfortable, science and religion are mostly allowed to go their own separate ways. Therefore, in spite of suffocating embargos, Iran continues to achieve in nuclear, space, heavy engineering, biotechnology, and the theoretical sciences. Israel trembles. 

Spurred by their bitter animosity towards Iran, Arab countries have apparently understood the need of the times and are slowly turning around. Starting this year, religious ideology has been de-emphasised and new subjects are being introduced in Saudi schools. These include digital skills, English for elementary grades, social studies, self-defence and critical thinking. Of course, a change of curriculum means little unless accompanied by a change of outlook. Still, it does look like a beginning.

Israel has shown the effectiveness of its secret weapon; it has also exposed the vulnerability of opponents who don’t have it. There are lessons here for Pakistan and a strong reason to wrest control away from Jamaat-i-Islami ideologues that, from the time of Ziaul Haq onward, have throttled and suffocated our education. The heights were reached under Imran Khan’s Single National Curriculum which yoked ordinary schools to madressahs. But even with Khan’s departure, ideological poisons continue to circulate in the national bloodstream. Until flushed away, Pakistan’s intellectual and material decline will accelerate.

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Madina state and ‘naya’ Pakistan

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn


PRIME MINISTER Imran Khan says naya Pakistan shall soon resemble the seventh-century state of Madina. Beginning with his inaugural address of Aug 20, he has repeated his vow on no less than 11 separate occasions. Although all Muslims acknowledge the Madina state as a model of perfection, Khan leaves unsaid just how closely naya Pakistan shall be its image. Is achieving egalitarianism and welfarism the goal? Is the Madina state also a template for Pakistan’s political and judicial reconstruction?

To create a prosperous welfare state is an admirable — and universal — objective. Serving the needs of their citizens without prejudice, a few modern states already have operational systems in place. To join them, just five minutes of serious contemplation can tell you what needs to be done here in Pakistan.

It’s almost a no-brainer: eliminate large land holdings through appropriate legislation; collect land and property taxes based upon current market value; speed up the courts and make them transparent; make meritocratic appointments in government departments; change education so that skill enhancement becomes its central goal; make peace with Pakistan’s neighbours; choose trade over aid; and let civilians rule the country rather than soldiers.

That’s pretty hard! Implementation shall need no less than a revolution, bloodless or otherwise. But if Imran Khan wants to emulate the Madina state as a political entity, it will be way trickier. Modern states have geographical boundaries, a practice that followed the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) between European powers. But for the Madina state, borders were irrelevant — where you lived did not matter.

Built around a tribal accord, Misaq-i-Madina, citizenship required only that an individual submit to the authority of the Holy Prophet (PBUH). Perhaps anticipating that his followers would someday spread beyond the oases of Makkah and Madina, he very wisely left unspecified which territories constitute Dar-ul-Islam.

How to reconcile the contradictory notion of a borderless ummah versus an Islamic state with borders? Islamic scholars from the time of Al-Mawardi (972-1058) to the anthropologist genius Ibn-i-Khaldun (1322-1406) have differed. Another, Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, while residing in pre-Partition Hyderabad (India), opined that creating Pakistan as a separate entity was contrary to Islamic teachings and traditions. Instead, he said, India as a whole must be converted to Islam. This wasn’t easy and so ultimately he supported the demand for Pakistan.

Time has increased, not decreased, territorial affiliations. Everywhere, inside and outside Islam, large national armies protect borders and nationalism competes fiercely against religion as an emotive force. Imran Khan’s pledge to grant citizenship to 1.5 million desperate Afghan refugees was potentially a first step towards the Madina state, one inclusive of all Muslims.

Human rights activists were ecstatic. But, once the adverse reaction set in, Imran’s U-turn followed. He cannot be blamed alone: previous Pakistani governments refused to naturalise Bengali refugees and Burma’s persecuted Rohingya minority. Nationalism often trumps religious solidarity these days.

Moving on: what about judicial matters? Shall laws of the Madina state apply in naya Pakistan? Viewed through the prism of history, the accord negotiated by the Holy Prophet was perfectly logical at a time of bitter intertribal wars. The interested reader may consult Dr Tahirul Qadri’s PhD thesis on the Misaq-i-Madina. This lists 63 rules for determining diyat (blood money); ransoms to settle tribal feuds; life protection for Muslims and Jews; apportioning of war expenses; etc. These led to peace within the framework of Arab tribal justice.

But justice is an ever-evolving concept in every culture and religion. So, for example, 2,000 years ago, Aristotle had argued that some individuals and races are “natural slaves” better enslaved than left free. And, until 200 years ago, socially respectable Americans were slave owners. Kinder ones treated slaves better but slave-owning is now viewed as utterly abhorrent.

Among today’s Muslims, apart from the militant Islamic State group and Boko Haram and a few others, no one defends slavery. Countries legally forbid it even if slaves are to be treated extremely well. In Pakistan too, owning slaves is a criminal offence. Pakistani law also makes it illegal to barter women as goods or as booty. Owning another human being was considered okay once but isn’t kosher anymore and anywhere — and under any circumstance.

The notion of egalitarianism has evolved as well. Nearly all societies now accept, or give lip service, to the idea that all people are equal before the law. Limited to men at first, it was extended later to include women as well. In 2009, Pakistan legally recognised transgender as a separate category; earlier this year some transgender candidates ran for elections, albeit unsuccessfully.

Blood money, common in earlier times, also takes on a very different flavor. Pakistanis were outraged when a grinning Shahrukh Jatoi emerged from jail after murdering 20-year old Shahzeb Khan in cold blood. Jatoi’s wealthy parents had purchased his pardon through diyat, probably by pressuring Khan’s family. Months earlier, CIA contractor Raymond Davis had been released after the families of the two men he had killed were paid $2.4m as blood money.

The world of yesterday and the world of today bear no comparison. One marvels at the Holy Prophet’s sagacity in negotiating a better deal for all warring Arabian tribes. Still, we should appreciate just how different the world has become from those times. The combined population of Makkah and Madina was less than Kharadar’s, a typical Karachi neighbourhood. Joblessness and lack of housing were non-issues; air pollution and load-shedding hadn’t been conceived; and white-collar crime was awaiting invention centuries later. No police or standing army existed in the Madina state. There were no jails.

It is easy to see why certain religious slogans appeal to the popular imagination. In a country that is deeply unequal and plagued by huge class asymmetry, people yearn for an unblemished past when everything was perfect. But when political leaders promise to take us there, how seriously should we take them? The masses had responded favourably when Gen Ziaul Haq had raised a similar slogan in the 1980s — that of Nizam-i-Mustafa. Disappointment soon followed. Can it be different this time?

Why rightwingers are desperate for Sweden to ‘fail’

Christian Christen in The Guardian

Of course Sweden isn’t perfect, but those who love to portray it as teeming with terrorists and naive towards reality, are just cynical hypocrites

‘When terrible events take place, they are framed as evidence of the decline and fall of the European social democratic project, the failure of European immigration policies and of Swedish innocence lost.’ Photograph: Fredrik Sandberg/AFP/Getty Images



There are few countries in the world that have “lost their innocence” as many times as Sweden. Even before a suspected terrorist and Isis supporter killed four and injured many more in last week’s attack in central Stockholm, Sweden’s policies were being portrayed on the programmes of Fox News and pages of the Daily Mail as, at best, exercises in well-meaning-but-naive multiculturalism, and at worst terrorist appeasement.
So, when terrible events take place, they are framed as evidence of the decline and fall of the European social democratic project, the failure of European immigration policies and of Swedish innocence lost.

When Donald Trump argued against the intake of Syrian refugees to the US earlier this year, he used supposed problems in Sweden as part of his rationale. “You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden,” the president said at a rally in Florida in February. “Sweden. Who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.” The White House later clarified that Trump had been speaking about general “rising crime”, when he seemed to be describing a then non-existent terror attack.


Sweden is a capitalist, economic power – usually found near the top of rankings of innovative and competitive economies


The obsession with Sweden has a lot to do with the country’s history of taking in refugees and asylum seekers, combined with social democratic politics. Both are poison to the political right. When prime minister Olof Palme was shot walking home (without bodyguards) from a cinema in 1986, we were told that Swedish innocence and utopian notions of a non-violent society had come to an end. But Swedes miraculously regained their innocence, only to lose it again in 2003 when the popular foreign minister Anna Lindh (also without bodyguards) was stabbed to death in a Stockholm department store. This possession and dispossession of innocence – which some call naivety – has ebbed and flowed with the years.

The election to parliament and subsequent rise of the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats were discussed in similar terms, as was the decision in late 2015 by the Swedish government to halt the intake of refugees after a decades-long policy of humanitarian acceptance.

Yet the notion of a doe-eyed Sweden buffeted by the cruel winds of the real world is a nonsense. Sweden is an economic power – usually found near the top of rankings of innovative and competitive economies. Companies that are household names, from H&M to Ericsson and Skype, and food packaging giant Tetra Pak, are Swedish. It plays the capitalist game better than most (and not always in an ethical manner. The country is, per capita, one of the largest weapons exporters in the world. As for the argument that Swedes are in denial, unwilling to discuss the impact of immigration? This comes as news to citizens who see the issue addressed regularly in the Swedish media, most obviously in the context of the rise of the Sweden Democrats.

Stockholm attack suspect 'known to security services'



Between 2014 and 2016, Sweden received roughly 240,000 asylum seekers: far and away the most refugees per capita in Europe. But the process has not been smooth. Throughout 2016 and 2017, the issue of men leaving Sweden to fight for Isis has been a major story, as has the Swedish government’s perceived lack of preparation about what to do when these fighters return. There is also much debate on the practice of gender segregation in some Muslim schools in Sweden.

As Stockholm goes through a period of mourning for last week’s attack, it is worth asking: is Sweden the country divorced from reality? If we are speaking of naivety in relation to terrorism, a good place to start might be US foreign policy in the Middle East , and not Sweden’s humanitarian intake of the immigrants and refugees created (at least in part) as a result of that US policy.

Has Swedish immigration policy always been well thought-out? No. Is Sweden marked by social and economic divisions? Yes. But the presentation of Sweden as some kind of case study in failed utopianism often comes from those who talk a big game on democracy, human rights and equality, but who refuse to move beyond talk into action.
So, when pundits and experts opine on Swedish “innocence lost” it is worth remembering that Sweden has never been innocent. It is also worth remembering that Sweden was willing to put its money where its mouth was when it came to taking in refugees and immigrants fleeing the conflicts and instability fuelled by countries unwilling to deal with the consequences of their actions. This shirking of responsibility while condemning the efforts of others is far worse than being naive. It’s cynical hypocrisy.

The struggle to be British: my life as a second-class citizen

Ismail Einashe in The Guardian

I used my British passport for the first time on a January morning in 2002, to board a Eurostar train to Paris. I was taking a paper on the French Revolution for my history A-level and was on a trip to explore the key sites of the period, including a visit to Louis XIV’s chateau at Versailles. When I arrived at Gare du Nord I felt a tingle of nerves cascade through my body: I had become a naturalised British citizen only the year before. As I got closer to border control my palms became sweaty, clutching my new passport. A voice inside told me the severe-looking French officers would not accept that I really was British and would not allow me to enter France. To my great surprise, they did.

Back then, becoming a British citizen was a dull bureaucratic procedure. When my family arrived as refugees from Somalia’s civil war, a few days after Christmas 1994, we were processed at the airport, and then largely forgotten. A few years after I got my passport all that changed. From 2004, adults who applied for British citizenship were required to attend a ceremony; to take an oath of allegiance to the monarch and make a pledge to the UK.

These ceremonies, organised by local authorities in town halls up and down the country, marked a shift in how the British state viewed citizenship. Before, it was a result of how long you had stayed in Britain – now it was supposed to be earned through active participation in society. In 2002, the government had also introduced a “life in the UK” test for prospective citizens. The tests point to something important: being a citizen on paper is not the same as truly belonging. Official Britain has been happy to celebrate symbols of multiculturalism – the curry house and the Notting Hill carnival – while ignoring the divisions between communities. Nor did the state give much of a helping hand to newcomers: there was little effort made to help families like mine learn English.

But in the last 15 years, citizenship, participation and “shared values” have been given ever more emphasis. They have also been accompanied by a deepening atmosphere of suspicion around people of Muslim background, particularly those who were born overseas or hold dual nationality. This is making people like me, who have struggled to become British, feel like second-class citizens.

When I arrived in Britain aged nine, I spoke no English and knew virtually nothing about this island. My family was moved into a run-down hostel on London’s Camden Road, which housed refugees – Kurds, Bosnians, Kosovans. Spending my first few months in Britain among other new arrivals was an interesting experience. Although, like my family, they were Muslim, their habits were different to ours. The Balkan refugees liked to drink vodka. After some months we had to move, this time to Colindale in north London.

Colindale was home to a large white working-class community, and our arrival was met with hostility. There were no warm welcomes from the locals, just a cold thud. None of my family spoke English, but I had soon mastered a few phrases in my new tongue: “Excuse me”, “How much is this?”, “Can I have …?”, “Thank you”. It was enough to allow us to navigate our way through the maze of shops in Grahame Park, the largest council estate in Barnet. This estate had opened in 1971, conceived as a garden city, but by the mid-1990s it had fallen into decay and isolation. This brick city became our home. As with other refugee communities before us, Britain had been generous in giving Somalis sanctuary, but was too indifferent to help us truly join in. Families like mine were plunged into unfamiliar cities, alienated and unable to make sense of our new homes. For us, there were no guidebooks on how to fit into British society or a map of how to become a citizen.

My family – the only black family on our street – stuck out like a sore thumb. Some neighbours would throw rubbish into our garden, perhaps because they disapproved of our presence. That first winter in Britain was brutal for us. We had never experienced anything like it and my lips cracked. But whenever it snowed I would run out to the street, stand in the cold, chest out and palms ready to meet the sky, and for the first time feel the sensation of snowflakes on my hands. The following summer I spent my days blasting Shaggy’s Boombastic on my cherished cassette player. But I also realised just how different I was from the children around me. Though most of them were polite, others called me names I did not understand. At the playground they would not let me join in their games – instead they would stare at me. I knew then, aged 11, that there was a distance between them and me, which even childhood curiosity could not overcome.

Although it was hard for me to fit in and make new friends, at least my English was improving. This was not the case for the rest of my family, so they held on to each other, afraid of what was outside our four walls. It was mundane growing up in working-class suburbia: we rarely left our street, except for occasional visits to the Indian cash-and-carry in Kingsbury to buy lamb, cumin and basmati rice. Sometimes one of our neighbours would swerve his van close to the pavement edge if it rained and he happened to spot my mother walking past, so he could splash her long dirac and hijab with dirty water. If he succeeded, he would lean out of the window, thumbs up, laughing hysterically. My mother’s response was always the same. She would walk back to the house, grab a towel and dry herself.

At secondary school in Edgware, the children were still mostly white, but there was a sizeable minority of Sikhs and Hindus. My new classmates would laugh at how I pronounced certain English words. I couldn’t say “congratulations” properly, the difficult part being the “gra”. I would perform saying that word, much to the amusement of my classmates. As the end of term approached, my classmates would ask where I was going on holiday. I would tell them, “Nowhere”, adding, “I don’t have a passport”.

When I was in my early teens, we were rehoused and I had to move to the south Camden Community school in Somers Town. There, a dozen languages were spoken and you could count the number of white students in my year on two hands. There was tension in the air and pupils were mostly segregated along ethnic lines – Turks, Bengalis, English, Somalis, Portuguese. Turf wars were not uncommon and fights broke out at the school gates. The British National party targeted the area in the mid-1990s, seeking to exploit the murder of a white teenager by a Bengali gang. At one point a halal butcher was firebombed.

Though I grew up minutes from the centre of Europe’s biggest city, I rarely ventured far beyond my own community. For us, there were no trips to museums, seaside excursions or cinema visits. MTV Base, the chicken shop and McDonald’s marked my teen years. I had little connection to other parts of Britain, beyond the snippets of middle-class life I observed via my white teachers. And I was still living with refugee documents, given “indefinite leave to remain” that could still be revoked at some future point. I realised then that no amount of identification with my new-found culture could make up for the reality that, without naturalisation, I was not considered British.

At 16, I took my GCSEs and got the grades to leave behind one of the worst state schools in London for one of the best: the mixed sixth form at Camden School for Girls. Most of the teens at my new school had previously attended some of Britain’s best private schools – City of London, Westminster, Highgate – and were in the majority white and middle-class.

It was strange to go from a Muslim-majority school to a sixth form where the children of London’s liberal set attended: only a mile apart, but worlds removed. I am not certain my family understood this change. My cousins thought it was weird that I did not attend the local college, but my old teachers insisted I go to the sixth form if I wanted to get into a good university. A few days after starting there, I got my naturalisation certificate, which opened the way for me to apply for my British passport.

Around the time I became a British citizen, the political mood had started to shift. In the summer of 2001, Britain experienced its worst race riots in a generation. These riots, involving white and Asian communities in towns in the north-west of England, were short but violent. They provoked a fraught public conversation on Muslims’ perceived lack of integration, and how we could live together in a multi-ethnic society. This conversation was intensified by the 9/11 attacks in the US. President George W Bush’s declaration of a “war on terror” created a binary between the good and the bad immigrant, and the moderate and the radical Muslim. The London bombings of 7 July 2005 added yet more intensity to the conversation in Britain. 

Politicians from across the spectrum agreed that a shared British identity was important, but they couldn’t agree on what that might be. In 2004, the Conservative leader Michael Howard had referred to “The British dream” when speaking about his Jewish immigrant roots. After 2005, he wrote in the Guardian that the tube attacks had “shattered” complacency about Britain’s record on integration. Britain had to face “the terrible truth of being the first western country to have suffered terrorist attacks perpetrated by ‘home-grown’ suicide bombers – born and educated in Britain”. Many commentators questioned whether being a Muslim and British were consistent identities; indeed whether Islam itself was compatible with liberal democracy.

Howard defined a shared identity through institutions such as democracy, monarchy, the rule of law and a national history. But others argued that making a checklist was a very un-British thing to do. Labour’s Gordon Brown, in a 2004 article for the Guardian, wrote that liberty, tolerance and fair play were the core values of Britishness. While acknowledging such values exist in other cultures and countries, he went on to say that when these values are combined together they make a “distinctive Britishness that has been manifest throughout our history and has shaped it”.

For me, at least, becoming a British citizen was a major milestone. It not only signalled that I felt increasingly British but that I now had the legal right to feel this way.

But my new identity was less secure than I realised. Only a few months after my trip to Paris, the Blair government decided to use a little-known law – the 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act – to revoke the citizenship of naturalised British persons, largely in terrorism cases. Before 1914, British citizenship, once obtained, could only be given up voluntarily by an individual, but that changed with the advent of the first world war. According to the Oxford politics professor Matthew Gibney, the 1914 act was a response to anti-German sentiment and fears about the loyalty of people with dual British-German citizenship. A further law, passed in 1918, created new and wide-ranging grounds to revoke citizenship.

In theory, since 1918, the home secretary has had the power to remove a naturalised person or dual-nationality-holder’s British citizenship if it was considered “conducive to the public good”, but a 1981 law prevented them from doing so if it made the person stateless. Since 9/11, that restraint has been gradually abandoned.

In 2006, the home secretary was given further powers to revoke British citizenship. At the time, the government sought to allay concerns about misuse of these powers. “The secretary of state cannot make an order on a whim,” the home office minister Angela Eagle had said when the law was first proposed, “and he will be subject to judicial oversight when he makes an order”.

Although the post-9/11 measures were initially presented as temporary, they have become permanent. And the home secretary can strip people of their citizenship without giving a clear reason. No court approval is required, and the person concerned does not need to have committed a crime. The practice is growing. Under Labour, just five people had their citizenship removed, but when Theresa May was at the Home Office, 70 people were stripped of their citizenship, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Yet these near-arbitrary powers have caused remarkably little concern.

 

‘Before, citizenship was a result of how long you had stayed in Britain, but now it was supposed to be earned through active participation in society.’

People have largely accepted these new powers because they are presented as a way to keep the country safe from terrorism. After 9/11, the public became more aware of the Islamist preachers who had made London their home in the preceding decades. Abu Hamza, who was then the imam of Finsbury Park mosque, and became a notorious figure in the media, was, like me, a naturalised British citizen. For several years as a teenager, I attended the Finsbury Park mosque. It was small; I remember the smell of tea, incense and feet that greeted you every time you walked in. I also remember the eclectic mix of worshippers who visited – Algerians, Afghans, Somalis and Moroccans. Unlike Muslims of south-Asian background, few of these people had longstanding colonial ties to Britain. Most had fled civil war in their home countries, while some of the North Africans had left France because they felt it treated Muslims too harshly. The mosque was not affiliated with the Muslim Association of Britain, and its preachers promoted a Salafi form of Islam.

I remember Abu Hamza as a larger-than-life character, whose presence dominated mosque life, especially at Friday prayers when he would go into very long sermons – usually about the dangers of becoming too British. Attending this mosque was like being cocooned from the realities of modern life. I recall Abu Hamza once going off about how, as young Muslim teens, we were not to follow the “kuffar” in their habit of engaging in premarital sex. For much of my teens, this mosque held a kind of control over me, based on fear. That changed when I moved to my new sixth form and felt able to start exploring the world for myself, and began to realise that I could be secular, liberal and humanist.

I went in one direction, but other people I knew chose different paths. Before 2001, I don’t recall many women wearing the niqab, but as the years wore on it became a more common sight on the streets of London. My sister even began to wear one – contrary to media stereotypes of women being coerced, she chose to, as did many of the young women I had gone to school with. The way that young Muslims practised Islam in Britain changed, in line with global developments. They dropped the varied cultural baggage of their parents’ versions of the religion and began a journey to a distinct British Islam – something that connected the Somali refugee and the second-generation Bangladeshi, the Irish and Jamaican converts.

Some of the white working-class kids I grew up with converted to Islam. Daniel became Yusef and Emma became Khadija. Before I knew it, they were giving me advice about how Muslims should behave. I observed this role reversal with amusement. One boy in particular would preach to me while incessantly saying “bruv”. I also saw the young men I had grown up with move away from a life sat on bikes wearing hoods under bridges in Camden listening to grime, to practising their Islam more visibly. Out went the sneaky pints, spliffs and casual sex. Now it was beards, sermons about the faith and handing out Islamic leaflets on street corners. But I did not heed their words. When I was 16 I stopped attending the mosque and I began to question my faith.

Mahdi Hashi was one of the young men I grew up with. Hashi was another child refugee from Somalia. As a teenager he used to complain that he was being followed by the British security services. He said they wanted to make him an informant. Hashi was not alone. In 2009, he and other young Muslim men from Camden took their allegations to the press. One said that a man posing as a postal worker turned up at his door and told him that if he did not cooperate with the security services, then his safety could not be guaranteed if he ever left Britain.

For most newcomers, citizenship is not just confirmation of an identity, it is also about protection: that you will be guaranteed rights and treated according to the law. Hashi lost that protection. In 2009, he left for Somalia because, his family say, of harassment by the security services. In June 2012, his family received a letter informing them that he was to lose his British citizenship. Later that summer Hashi turned up in Djibouti, a tiny former French colony on the Red Sea. He was arrested. He alleges that he was threatened with physical abuse and rape if he did not cooperate with authorities in Djibouti – and he alleges that US officials questioned him. In November 2012, he was given over to the Americans and taken to the US without any formal extradition proceedings. In 2016, Hashi was sentenced in New York to nine years in prison for allegedly supporting the jihadist group al-Shabaab. He will be deported to Somalia upon his release.

Hashi’s case is not unique. Bilal Berjawi, who came to Britain from Lebanon as a child, had his British citizenship revoked in 2012 and was killed in a US drone strike on the outskirts of Mogadishu. His friend Mohamed Sakr, who held dual British-Egyptian nationality, was also killed by a drone strike in Somalia after he had been stripped of his UK citizenship. Together with a third friend, the two young men had visited Tanzania in 2009 on what they claimed was a safari trip, but were arrested, accused of trying to reach Somalia and returned to the UK. The third friend was Mohammed Emwazi, now better known as the Isis executioner “Jihadi John”.

The war in Syria, and the attraction that Isis and other jihadist groups hold for a small minority of British Muslims, has led to a further increase in citizenship-stripping. In 2013 Theresa May, who was then home secretary, removed the citizenship of 13 people who had left for Syria. The government has a duty to protect people, but the tool it is using will have wider, damaging consequences.

The right of newcomers to be considered fully British has been a long struggle. The first border controls of the 20th century were introduced to stop the movement of “alien” Jewish refugees from eastern Europe. In 1948, the British Nationality Act gave citizenship to anyone who had been a subject of empire, but those black and Asian migrants who took up the offer – indeed, who often thought of themselves as British – were met with shocking racism: with “no Irish, no blacks, no dogs”. The 1962 Immigration Act began to limit the citizenship rights of people from the non-white colonies, and by the 1982 Act it was all over.

Now we are caught in a paradox, where the state is demanding more effort than ever on the part of the migrant to integrate, but your citizenship is never fully guaranteed. Fifteen years on from the events of 9/11, gaining British citizenship is a much tougher process. And becoming a naturalised citizen is no longer a guarantee against the political whims of the day: you are, in effect, a second-class citizen. Citizenship-stripping is now a fixture of the state, and it is defended in the usual vein, which is to say: “If you have not done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.” The usual caveat is that this concerns terrorists and criminals – a red herring that masks the true purpose of such laws, which is to empower the state at the expense of ordinary people. The philosopher Hannah Arendt memorably described citizenship as “the right to have rights”, but for people of migrant background such as myself, this is being eroded. We are not a small group: according to the 2011 census, there are 3.4 million naturalised Brits.

As I was writing this piece, Donald Trump issued his executive order that bans people from seven majority-Muslim countries, including Somalia, from entering the US – even if they hold dual nationality. I happened to be visiting New York at the time, and the ban has left me wondering if I will ever be allowed to again. Despite assurances from Britain’s government, it remains unclear whether the ban applies to people who hold a British passport, but were born overseas. Trump’s ban did not happen in a vacuum: there is a thread linking the anti-terror policies of western governments and this extreme new step.

Today, I no longer feel so safe in my status as a naturalised British citizen, and it is not just the UK. In other liberal democracies such as Australia and Canada, moves are under way to enable citizenship-stripping – sending people like me a clear message that our citizenship is permanently up for review.

Wolfgang Streeck: the German economist calling time on capitalism

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

Outside was panic. Barely a couple of hours after Donald Trump had been declared the next president of the United States and even the political columnists, those sleek interlocutors of power, were in shock. At the National Gallery in London, however, one of the few thinkers to have anticipated Trump’s rise was ready to see some paintings. Over from Germany for a few days of lectures, Wolfgang Streeck had an afternoon spare – and we both wanted to see the Beyond Caravaggio exhibition.

Nothing in his work prepares you for meeting Streeck (pronounced Stray-k). Professionally, he is the political economist barking last orders for our way of life, and warning of the “dark ages” ahead. His books bear bluntly fin-de-siecle titles: two years ago was Buying Time, while the latest is called How Will Capitalism End?(spoiler: not well). Even his admirers talk of his “despair”, by which they mean sentences such as this: “Before capitalism will go to hell, it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way.”

What does such gloom look like in the flesh? Small glasses, neat side parting and moustache, a backpack, a smart anorak and at least a decade younger than his 70 years. Alluding to Trump’s victory, he cheerily declares “What a morning!” as if discussing the likelihood of rain, then strolls into the gallery.

Decadence… Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard. Photograph: The National Gallery London

You don’t merely look at a Caravaggio; you square up to one. The scenes are tightly cropped, with characters that jostle and stare at the viewer. Their mordancy is a tonic to Streeck, who laughs with delight. He pauses in front of Boy Bitten by a Lizard and admires how the lizard clings on with its teeth to the boy’s finger. At a scene of cardsharps he exclaims, “Feel the decadence! The threat of violence!”

He notes how many paintings date from just before the thirty years’ war: “They’re full of the anticipation that the world is about to fall apart.”

Then comes The Taking of Christ, a dark, dense painting that shows Jesus just after his betrayal by Judas. Gripped by his treacherous former disciple, Christ looks down, ready to be bundled off by the armoured Roman centurions. “Caravaggio is always there just before the explosion,” Streeck observes. “This morning might have been a Caravaggio moment: just before the election of Trump.”

Like Caravaggio before the explosion, Streeck has been hanging around this crash scene for years – long before the plane came hurtling down and the centrist politicians and pundits began rushing around.

At a time when macroeconomists have failed and other academics have retreated into disciplinary solipsism, Streeck is one of the few (other exceptions include Mark Blyth, Colin Crouch and the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change) to have risen to the moment. Many of the themes that will define this year, this decade, are in his work. The breakup of Europe, the rise of plutocrat-populists such as Trump, the failures of Mark Carney and the technocratic elite: he has anatomised all of them.


Why should oligarchs be interested in their countries’ democratic stability if, apparently, they can be rich without it?

This summer, Britons mutinied against their government, their experts and the EU – and consigned themselves to a poorer, angrier future. Such frenzies of collective self-harm were explained by Streeck in the 2012 lectures later collected in Buying Time:

Professionalised political science tends to underestimate the impact of moral outrage. With its penchant for studied indifference … [it] has nothing but elitist contempt for what it calls “populism”, sharing this with the power elites to which it would like to be close … [But] citizens too can “panic” and react “irrationally”, just like financial investors … even though they have no banknotes as arguments but only words and (who knows?) paving stones.

Here he is in 2013, foreshadowing the world of LuxLeaks, SwissLeaks and the Panama Papers and their revelations of a one-sided class war – by the 1% against the rest of us:


Why should the new oligarchs be interested in their countries’ future productive capacities and present democratic stability if, apparently, they can be rich without it, processing back and forth the synthetic money produced for them at no cost by a central bank for which the sky is the limit, at each stage diverting from it hefty fees and unprecedented salaries, bonuses, and profits as long as it is forthcoming – and then leave their country to its remaining devices and withdraw to some privately owned island?

And in a 2015 essay, he warns that resentment against such elites will not be wholesomely Fabian but will instead take the form either of “public entertainment” or “some politically regressive sort of nationalism”. It will look less like Hillary than Donald:

Politicization is migrating to the right side of the political spectrum where anti-establishment parties are getting better and better at organising discontented citizens dependent upon public services and insisting on political protection from international markets.

In such long, precise, comfortless sentences, Streeck sets out the crises facing Britain, the US and the continent. His diagnosis is both political and economic, and it makes him what Chris Bickerton, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge, thinks might be “the most interesting person around today on the subject of the relationship between democracy and capitalism”.

 Lehman Brothers headquarters in New York’s Times Square, 2008. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP

Which makes him the most interesting person on the most urgent subject of our times. Eight years after Lehman Brothers keeled over and nearly took the entire banking system down with it, capitalism remains broken. British workers are suffering their most severe pay squeeze in at least seven decades. And even though politicians and the policymakers have pulled on every lever – cuts, investment, housing boom, hundreds of billions pumped into the markets – still the engine refuses to purr. The failure is international: the Bank of International Settlements, the central banks’ central bank, warned a few months ago that “the global economy seems unable to return to sustainable and balanced growth”.

Not for the first time, the sandwich board-wearers are declaring the end of capitalism – but today Streeck believes they are right. In its deepest crises, he says, modern capitalism has relied on its enemies to wade in with the lifebelt of reform. During the Great Depression of the 30s, it was FDR’s Democrats who rolled out the New Deal, while Britain’s trade unionists allied with Keynes.
Compare that with now. Over 40 years, neoliberal capitalism has destroyed its opposition. When Margaret Thatcher was asked to give her greatest achievement, she nominated “Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.” The prime minister who declared “There is no alternative”, then did her damnedest to extirpate any such alternative. The result? The unions are withered, the independent tenants’ associations have disappeared along with the stock of council housing, the BBC is forever on the back foot, and local, regional and national newspapers are now the regular subjects of obituaries. A similar story can be told across the rich world.

Public discontent is fitful and fragmented, ready to fall into Trump’s tiny hands. Meanwhile, capitalism – unrestrained and unreformed – will die.

This isn’t the violent overthrow envisaged by Marx and Engels. In The Communist Manifesto, they argued that capitalism’s “gravediggers” would be the proletariat. Nearly 170 years later, Streeck is predicting that the capitalists will be their own gravediggers, through having destroyed the workers and the dissidents they needed to maintain the system. What comes next is not some better replacement but is more akin to the centuries-long rotting away of the Roman empire.

And, yes, his latest book is out just in time for Christmas. Not so long ago, such catastrophism would have been the stuff of Speakers’ Corner. Today, it goes right to the brokenness of politics.

Streeck is admired by the team around Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, and was invited to this year’s Labour conference in Liverpool (work commitments forced him to decline). One senior adviser described his relevance to British politics thus: “He is pretty blunt about how serious the situation is, for social democracy and capitalism.”


That we could modify capitalism towards equality and tame the beast – now those are utopian ideals
What gives Streeck’s analysis extra force is that he comes from the very establishment he now attacks. He has played many key roles: joint head of Germany’s top social science institute, an adviser in the late 90s to Gerhard Schröder’s government, one of Europe’s most eminent theorists of capitalism. While never a Third Way-er, he was friendly with David and Ed Miliband.

“I spent a long time in my life exploring the possibilities for an intelligent social democratic solution of the class conflict,” he explains over lunch. “The idea that we could modify capitalism towards equality and social justice. That we could tame the beast. Now I think those are more or less utopian ideals.”

He is thus a case study in the very thing he writes about: the demoralisation of centrist politics – and its radicalisation.

The great disillusionment came upon returning to Germany in 1995, after years teaching industrial relations in the US. It was the era of Germany being labelled “the sick man of Europe”, when one in five east German workers were unemployed. Through the metalworkers’ trade union, Streeck was invited to join a committee of trade unions, employers and government. Called the Alliance for Jobs (Bündnis für Arbeit), its task was to reform labour laws. Streeck believed this was “the last call for trade unions and social democracy”: the final chance to get more people into work without stripping workers of their rights.

“We came up with a good model, but everything we proposed was blocked – not just by the employers but by the unions, too.”

The Alliance fell apart and within a couple of years, Schröder had brought in the Hartz reforms – policies drawn up by a former Volkswagen executive that set up a new regime of workfare and benefit sanctions, and kicked the bottom out of the labour market.

A member of the Social Democratic Party, Germany’s counterpart to Labour, since the age of 16, Streeck finally cancelled his subs a few years ago. Would he still place himself as a social democrat? He quotes Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind.” In another interview he has described “the most urgent task for the left” as “sobering up”.

The constant sobriety might prove wearing, were it not for his easy companionship. Listening back to the recording, the primary sound is Streeck’s laughter – that and “Jajaja!”, a Bren gun enthusiasm for any new idea or argument.

He also gives good gossip. A “power breakfast” with financial policymakers and investment bankers is dismissed as “clueless and so stereoptypical. They complained about the stupidity of the masses who didn’t understand the expertise that someone like Alan Greenspan was able to bring to central banking.” This is the same Greenspan who, as head of the US central bank in the bubble years, believed financiers could regulate themselves.

On this trip he went to a conference on Brexit. “I was shocked by the unanimous sense of guilt.” One former British ambassador “began by saying we have to apologise to our foreign friends for the vote to leave Europe. I said, ‘You ought to be happy to have sent a warning to the European Union.’”

He sees the support for Brexit and Trump as stemming from the same source. “You have a growing group of all people, who, under the impact of neoliberal internationalisation, have become increasingly excluded from the mainstream of their society.

Visions of London wealth … Canary wharf financial district. Photograph: DBURKE / Alamy/Alamy

“You look out here,” He gestures out of the windows of the National Gallery, at the domes and columns of Trafalgar Square, “And it’s a second Rome. You walk through the streets at night and you say, ‘My God, yes: this is what an empire looks like’.” This is the land of what Streeck calls the Marktsvolk – literally, the people of the market, the club-class financiers and executives, the asset-owning winners of globalisation.

But this space – geographic, economic, political – is off-limits to the Staatsvolk: the ones who fly yearly on holiday rather than weekly on business, the downsized, the indebted losers of neoliberalism. “These people are being driven out of London. In French cities it’s the same thing. This both reinforces them as a political power structure, and puts them completely on the defensive. But one thing they do know is that conventional politics has totally written them off.” Social democrats such as the outgoing Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi are guilty, too. “They’re on the side of the winners.”

International flows of people, money and goods: Streeck accepts the need for all these – “but in some sort of directed, governable way. It has to be, otherwise societies dissolve”.

Those views on immigration landed him in another fight this summer, when he wrote an essay attacking Angela Merkel for her open-door policy towards refugees from Syria and elsewhere. It was a “ploy”, he said, to import tens of thousands of cheap workers and thus allow German employers to bring down wages. Colleagues accused him of spinning a “neoliberal conspiracy” theory and of giving cover to Germany’s far right. Streeck’s defence is simple: “It is impossible to protect wages against an unlimited labour supply. Does saying that make me some proto-fascist?”

What gives this back-and-forth a twist is the little-known fact that Streeck is himself the child of refugees. Both 25 years old when the second world war ended, his parents were among the 12 million displaced people to arrive from eastern Europe in West Germany. Streeck was born just outside Münster in a room requisitioned by the state from a shoemaker. His parents were poor. “I remember they stole vegetables from the fields and coal from passing trains.”

His mother was a Sudeten German in Czechoslovakia, who was given 24 hours’ notice to leave when the war ended, taking only what she could carry. After Streeck left home she began to study the Czech language. “It was a sense of ‘If I can’t go back there I at least want to speak the language of those people who now live where I used to’.”

Her son went to a grammar school founded by Martin Luther, where he was taught Greek and Latin and expected to become a theologian. Instead, he fell in with the then-illegal Communist party. Aged 16, he was in charge of organising the reading circle – “suppressed literature such as the Communist Manifesto and Rosa Luxemburg” – and held it at the local employers’ association “because no one would ever suspect”.

In 1968, he was a student radical at Frankfurt, “but I never had any truck with the ‘marijuana left’. I felt closer to the working class than to the pot-smoking classes”.

Now he lives with his wife in part of a farmyard of a castle in Brühl, a small town just outside Cologne. The retiree is still up by six every morning and at his desk for 8.30. “I have learned to write only till 1pm. After that I give myself over to academic intrigues.” And to novels: when we meet, he is reading I Hate the Internet, by Jarett Kobek, a Silicon Valley engineer who claims that the internet has “fucked up” his life.

After lunch, we cross the Thames to King’s College where Streeck is to deliver a lecture. There is more gossip, this time about Greek politics and the hollowing out of the Syriza government. As teenagers, Streeck’s class travelled to Greece to look at antiquities. Instead, he began reading local newspapers on the king’s attempts to chuck out prime minister Georgios Papandreou. “I wrote a report in the school newspaper that was almost entirely concerned with the emerging military dictatorship.” Sixty years later, he is working on a book about democracy in southern Europe.

The lecture room is packed, students spread across the floor and peering around the wall at Streeck, absent-mindedly playing with a paperclip and quoting Gramsci: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born. [pause] In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms can appear.” In the lecture’s interval, a variety of students buy his books and hover about for him to sign them. At the end, a student asks: “what should the left do?”

Occupy protest in Frankfurt, 2011. Photograph: Arne Dedert/EPA

It is the same question I’d put a few hours earlier. Both times, Streeck warns he is about to disappoint us. To me he cites an Occupy protest in Frankfurt. Days before that, he says, thousands of police were deployed to Germany’s capital of finance. “The authorities were scared shitless. I think more such scariness must happen. They must learn that in order to keep people quiet they need extraordinary effort.”

No mention of ballot boxes; nor of any need for a bigger vision “because the others don’t have a blueprint”.

But, I say, Nigel Farage and the rest are at least pretending to have an answer.

“And we should criticise them.” The press always talks of a lack of business confidence, he says; now is the time for the voters to demonstrate a lack of public confidence.

The analogy doesn’t work and, listening back to the tape, I can hear agitation in my voice. A businessperson can go on an investment strike; he or she can hoard cash. Even if voters sat out an election, they would still face the consequences. Muslim mums would get their headscarves ripped off, a Polish man could get stabbed to death for going in the wrong kebab shop.

In a phone call a couple of weeks later, I press Streeck again. “If I look 10 or 20 years out, I don’t like what I see,” he says. Nor is he alone: he quotes a new book by the former head of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, and his projection of “great uncertainty” ahead.

But doesn’t he want something better than a new dark ages for his grandchildren? “If I am honest, now I am thankful for every passing year that is good and peaceful. And I hope for another one. Very short-term, I know, but those are my horizons.”

Why we need a left exit from Fortress Europe

Tariq Ali

Tariq Ali: The Twilight of Democracy, Festival of Dangerous Ideas 2015

Bomb both sides in Syria and we’ll fix the country in a jiffy

We could also bomb Hell, and within a month the residents would say ‘We were better off under Satan’

Mark Steel in The Independent


Some people get confused by events in Syria, but they’re not that complicated. Quite simply, we need to bomb somewhere or other out there, like we should have done two years ago. Back then we should have dropped bombs to support the Isis rebels fighting against the evil Assad. But as we didn’t bother, we now need to put that right by bombing the Isis rebels, and protecting Assad.

Because if only we had bombed Assad back then, it would be much easier to bomb Isis and their allies now, as we would be one of their allies so we could bomb ourselves. And we could do that without the fuss of going all the way to Syria, which would cut down on carbon emissions as well.

Also, we could ask Isis if they had any bombs left over that we had given them, “as we need them back to bomb you please”.

The change has happened because back then, you may recall, Assad was so unspeakably evil he had gassed his own people. But now we have decided we support Assad so I suppose we have found out the gas wasn’t so much a chemical weapon as a Syrian version of Febreze, that has left Aleppo with an alluring scent of lemon.

Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned against bombing, saying “Syria is not Libya, it won’t implode but explode beyond its borders.” So that might not be too cheery, if he is saying things will not necessarily go as smoothly as they have turned out in Libya.

If you were really fussy, you could look for another example of a western invasion in the Syria/Iraq region in the recent past, and find out how well that went. But where we went wrong in Libya and Iraq, is we only bombed one side.

This is the sort of pacifist behaviour that causes the trouble. We should have bombed all the different sides, to make sure we annihilate the right people.

Sometimes we have tried this to a certain extent, so at different times we have armed Assad and Gaddafi and Saddam and Bin Laden and then bombed them for using the bombs we had sold them. But it is not organised properly and leaves the poor sods confused.

Instead of supporting Arab dictators for 20 years, then opposing them for three, and then supporting them again, we should arrange it on a rota system. We could bomb them on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, bomb their opponents on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and leave Sundays for US construction companies to make some money rebuilding the stuff we have bombed, so there is something new to bomb.

Otherwise we are left with the predicament Tony Blair finds himself in. He complains that we didn’t bomb Assad two years ago. But, in 2002, Blair invited Assad to stay at Buckingham Palace and praised his modernising outlook. If he had used my suggested system, he could have grovelled to him on Thursday, then bombed him in his bedroom on Friday. I’m sure the Queen wouldn’t have minded sleeping on a mate’s settee for a couple of weeks while builders repaired the damage.

The silly thing is, it’s now claimed there are secret units of the IRA – who have kept their weapons against the rules of the peace process. It would have kept them out of mischief if they had been asked to bomb Blair’s pals such as Assad and Gaddafi, as long as they did it on one of the agreed days, and it would have strengthened the Northern Ireland peace process as well.

There could also be a surprise element to which side we bomb, with vast commercial potential. Instead of the same predictable places popping up, there should be an international body that chooses the venue, with Sepp Blatter opening an envelope to reveal “next year the place we have to bomb as we can’t just do nothing is… Finland”.

Then, whenever someone suggests bombing Finland will make things worse, columnists and politicians and blokes in pubs can shout “well, we can’t do NOTHING”.

This argument, that we can’t do NOTHING, is powerful and well thought through, because it’s clear from Western military interventions in the Middle East that no matter how bad the situation is before we go there, we manage to make it worse. This must have taken immense planning in Libya, but was worth it because everyone seems to agree that most of the country looks back on their days under the foul, despotic, murderous tyranny of Gaddafi with a dreamy nostalgic affection.

We could bomb Hell, and within a month the residents would say “We were better off under Satan. At least he kept the demons under some sort of control.”

Maybe the problem is we are not entirely trusted. This goes to show what a touchy people they are out there. We do all we can to support the spread of democracy by arming the royal family of Saudi Arabia and the Amir of Kuwait and the honourable folk who rule Qatar, and go out of our way to support people with titles such as “Mighty Wizard of Eternal Vengeance and Holy uber-King who can make up laws as he goes along, Divinely Grand Swisher of the Majestic Whip and his Million Wives of Bahrain”, and the little sods still doubt our honourable intentions.

But now there is an even more urgent reason to back the bombing of somewhere or other, which is we must do it for the refugees. The Sun newspaper, in particular, has been running a campaign that we “Do it for Aylan”, the three-year-old lad who was drowned as his family fled from the horrors of Isis.

I suppose they must have spoken to Aylan’s family, who would have told The Sun that bombing somewhere or other is exactly what he would have wanted.

Awaiting India’s Corbyn moment

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

LIBERAL politicians in India could speak like Jeremy Corbyn once, and, like him, believe in what they said. Take his speech at the refugees’ rally in London moments after the brilliant win as Labour Party chief. He spoke with conviction about a man-made human plight because he could feel like an ordinary, caring person, a man of reason with a hundred selfless concerns. What he said, in fact, was so straightforward and untangled in its simplicity that he made one wonder why today’s liberal leaders in India can’t be like that.

Refugees are not illegal people, Corbyn said. They are men, women and children rendered homeless, searching for the dignity and warmth which we took away from them. Does it take too much to say it that way? Refugees are made by wars we wage, he said. Indian leaders have said all this, and with conviction too, but much of that is in the past.

A disturbing moment that failed to evince a sound response from Indian liberals came when Prime Minister Modi churlishly welcomed non-Muslim refugees from Pakistan and Bangladesh. He was in violation of the constitution, but his opponents were busy not heeding. A Corbyn moment would have found someone speaking up: ‘Every community in India’s neighbourhood, regardless of their faith, in need of refuge from oppressive regimes, or who face threats to their lives from vigilante groups or other terrorists, are welcome in India.’ Indira Gandhi did open the doors to Gen Zia’s Pakistani victims.

Did the Indian left turn a Nelson’s eye to the communally fraught Modi musings because of its own past problems in West Bengal? Did the influx of Muslims from Bangladesh into West Bengal during its 30 years in office influence the left’s silence?  

The religious revival we are witnessing worldwide, riding on the upsurge in right-wing politics, has seen upright thinkers and liberal groups wilt under the blow. This luxury could not be allowed to the communists. For years, Indian followers of the dominant Marxist party were led to believe that the annual Durga Puja festival religiously staged by the comrades in West Bengal was a cultural rather than a religious event. Perhaps it was the same cultural quest that saw the comrades in Kerala this time celebrating ‘Krishna Lila’.

Reports say last week’s act of unprecedented public devotion was necessitated by the need to prevent families of communist comrades from joining similar celebrations to Lord Krishna organised by Hindutva groups who are hoping to ease out the left from its oldest bastion in Kerala. With close to half the West Bengal cadre having defected to the Bharatiya Janata Party in Bengal since the recent poll debacles, the left, it seems, has yet to learn the lessons of mixing religion (in the garb of culture) with politics.

How would a Corbyn-like approach pitch the mosque versus temple politics that has dominated much of liberal Indian politics in recent decades? Indian rationalists, including Marxists, have scurried to look for ideological compromises so as not to offend the majority Hindus nor unduly rile the Muslim groups. In playing it safe, India’s liberals are hiding away what would have been their attraction. The much-maligned Indian state offered to rescue the enlightened politicians out of the horrible mess, but they continued to wallow in it.

What did the Indian state do, which was so out of character with its known political inclination, for it to deserve kudos? In the midst of a political controversy over a mythical bridge three years ago, the Manmohan Singh government plainly told the Supreme Court that there was no historical evidence to establish the existence of Lord Ram or the other characters in Ramayana.
In an affidavit filed before the apex court, the Archaeological Survey of India rejected the claim of the existence of the Ram Sethu bridge. It was a bold rejection of Hindutva’s claims.

Referring to the Ramayana, the Indian government’s affidavit said there is no “historical record” to incontrovertibly prove the existence of the character, or the occurrences of the events, depicted therein. This should ideally have been the position of Indian Marxists, not in their closed study circles, but on public platforms. What harm could have befallen the left had they played it straight, instead of deflecting the argument to perhaps woo certain constituencies? They would have lost the polls, perhaps. Did they win by being less than forthright?

India-Pakistan ties were a major issue on which the left and liberal voices counted for much. In recent days, other than an uncharacteristic nationalistic statement about terrorism that came from the Communist Party of India, there was little by way of a nudge much less an argument for peace from the left. They were busy dethroning the foreign minister, unsuccessfully eventually, when they were needed on the streets to stop the consolidation of fascism. They could have put their foot down on the hounding of Teesta Setalvad, the freeing of the accused in Gujarat pogrom cases, the gagging of NGOs.

Now we are watching the left — all five or six communist parties — hurtling into a potentially disastrous election mode in Bihar. They claim they are jointly fighting (which they should have done in Jawaharlal Nehru University) on all the assembly seats to challenge Narendra Modi’s quest to conquer Bihar. In reality, they will be cutting into the votes of Modi’s secular opponents. What would Corbyn have reasoned? ‘Granted that the secular alliance is tainted with corruption and deep-seated anti-Dalit prejudices. This needs to be corrected at the earliest. However, first we have to remove the fascist threat. Else we are all doomed.’

The refugee crisis - Payback time?

F S Aijazuddin in The Dawn


IMMIGRATION can be a messy business. It leaves stains.

It is a subtle challenge to the notion that the world is a global village. The recent exodus by refugees fleeing insecure poverty in southern Europe to the stable affluence of its north puts this misconception to the test. Without warning, a human horde has swept across the continent of Europe. This phalanx of disturbed humanity has floated across seas, swum through rivers, trudged over mountains, permeated through city streets, and barged blithely through border check-posts in search of a German Paradise.

Countries in their way like Hungary have been subjected to pressures they have not had time to anticipate. Consequently, their resources are being strained, their public services overburdened, and their patience stretched. Nations that had cocooned themselves comfortably within the European Union are now questioning the very fundamentals of the EU, in particular its egalitarian commitment to free movement across invisible borders.

The combustible unrest in Syria alone does not explain this sudden surge. There have been other wars in the region — in Lebanon, for example, which its harried citizens quit in Mercedes overladen with monogrammed suitcases. Or Iraq, from which its nationals — bombarded and har­ried by the US-led coalition forces — fled to neighbouring countries. This latest influx of migrants though is different. It is determined. It is coordinated. And it seems to have foreknowledge which countries should be targeted, and where their vulnerabilities lie.

Such information does not come off the internet, nor can it be bought in the grey market. How and where did these displaced persons obtain this crash course in gate-crashing?

Euro-cynics contend that this could be a covert attempt by inimical powers to desta­bilise the complacency of European societies, using desperate civilian families in lieu of trained military forces. Euro-optimists are convinced that this flood will recede, as tsunamis do. Whenever it does, it will leave behind a detritus of disorder and discontent for host governments to manage.

No political bleach has yet been invented that can remove these lasting stains. They will remain. Recall: West Germany reunified with East Germany in 1990, but a united Germany has yet to absorb its Turkish guests. France quit its Muslim colony Algeria in 1962, yet it still has difficulties with non-designer headscarves. The United Kingdom has done more than most to accommodate West Indians, East Africans, South Asians, and now Russian oligarchs. But even Great Britain has geographical limitations.

Shakespeare described his island home as a “precious stone set in the silver sea,/ Which serves it in the office of a wall/ Or as a moat defensive to a house,/ Against the envy of less happier lands”. Shakespeare had not foreseen the Chunnel. Envious refugees at Calais peer into it, attracted like moths by the light at the British end — alluring, irresistible, and maddeningly within reach.

The vast Atlantic Ocean once separated the continents of Europe and America, but even that expanse of seawater could not prevent tenacious migrants navigating across it, landing on its eastern shores, and then cloning New England, New York, New Prague, New Vienna, New Orleans.

“Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore...” beckons the Statue of Liberty. Shoals of immigration have now forced the United States to reconsider this open invitation. In 1847, it tried to reverse the flow. It created Liberia in West Africa for its Afri­can and Carib­bean freed slaves. Not all of them wanted to return. None agreed with Liberia’s national motto: “The love of liberty brought us here”.

Today’s Ameri­cans are hyphena­ted with every nationality in the world. This ethnic diversity contributes to its superpower strength; yet, in that mix lies its weakness, its Kryptonite. By 2050, the US population will exceed 430 million. Whites will reduce from 67pc (2005) to 47pc (2050). Blacks will remain static at 13pc of the total. Asians will creep up from 5pc to a projected 9pc (blame it on Muslim fundamentalists). Hispanics, how­ever, will increase dramatically from 14pc in 2005 to almost 30pc by 2050, to be­come United States’ largest ethnic community.

That explains why President Obama felt the need to restore ties with Cuba. It was not an act of belated condescension by a super­power to a villain with a Spanish accent. It was a farsighted admission by the US of its geographic, ethnic, linguistic affinity with Hispanic countries in South America.

Future historians will interpret the unfurling of the US flag in Havana as a defining moment in its history, when the US — not in war, not in retaliation, not out of folie de grandeur, but voluntarily — shifted its worldview from a West-East axis to a North-South one, from military interventions to neighbourly cooperation.

Discrimination UK style: Meet the professional refugees lucky to get the minimum wage in the UK

They were professionals in their own countries – lawyers, doctors, academics. Now, having fled and sought asylum in the UK, they're lucky if they can get a minimum-wage job. We meet six refugees adjusting to a very different way of life

• 
• • Amelia Gentleman
  • The Guardian, Saturday 8 March 2014

 

Wahid Ahmad: ‘The people I work with are very kind. They know I am an educated person.’ Photographs: David Emery for the Guardian

Wahid Ahmad, 33

Was: civil engineer, Afghanistan
Now: shelf stacker, north London

Wahid Ahmad trained as a civil engineer in Afghanistan, where he worked in a senior role for the UN on infrastructure projects, overseeing road- and bridge-building. "I was proud of the job I was doing, helping with the development of my country," he says. It was a well-paid job and very satisfying: the new roads he worked on helped farmers get produce to the markets more quickly and children to school more safely. But his role working for an international agency attracted disapproving attention from the Taliban and after receiving a series of threats, in 2008 Ahmad fled to the UK with his wife and two children.

For six months, while his asylum application was being considered, Ahmad was not allowed to work. He studied to pass high-level English language exams, so he could take a one-year post-graduate certificate in construction management. While studying, he worked part-time in a cafe, making pizzas, kebabs and burgers, and delivering takeaway meals.

When he started applying for engineering jobs, he was so discouraged by the constant rejections that he was prescribed antidepressants. Most of the time he gets no response to his applications, just an automated email that tells him to assume his application has been unsuccessful if he hears nothing back within four days. When he calls to ask why, despite his excellent qualifications, he has not been invited for an interview, he is told he has no UK experience. At this point, he often proposes that he volunteers with the company, but the offer is always rejected. "How am I to get experience if they won't even let me volunteer?"

He took on a job in a food shop, working first as a halal butcher and later on the shop floor. "For a while it was very new to me. I would be preparing the fruit and vegetables, and it would keep coming to my mind what I was and what I am now. To be honest, it made me cry, but I have no option but to continue. The people I work with are very kind. They know I am an educated person. They tell me, 'Please don't be sad. You will find a job in your own field eventually.'"

He has been getting support from a charity, Transitions, which helped him work on his CV, try to get work experience and stay positive. On his CV, under the section detailing his civil engineering experience, he summarises the skills he has gained in his new job: "Be attentive to customers' needs; handle the payment for any purchases; make the customer aware of any special offers."

Iftikhar-ul-haq Khan, 46

Was: supreme court lawyer, Pakistan
Now: volunteer, Citizens Advice, Liverpool

In March 2010, Iftikhar-ul-haq Khan was dropping his children off at school when his car was stopped and he was kidnapped by a group hostile to the Ahmadiyya Muslim community to which he belongs. He was held for 19 days, in brutal conditions. As soon as he was released (upon the payment of a substantial ransom by his family), he made preparations to flee to England. It was clear to him that he and his wife and children would be in danger if they were to remain.

The transition was stark: "In Quetta, we had maids, a garden. We had a smooth life. In London, we shared one room in a bed and breakfast." It took almost two years before his asylum request was granted, during which time he was not allowed to work. "That was very difficult for me, particularly from a professional point of view." Once he was granted refugee status in October 2012 and began trying to find work, he was told that, without UK qualifications, his professional experience in Pakistan counted for little. "I was a legal adviser to the UN, to the National Bank of Pakistan." He worked on amending the Pakistan constitution and ran a private legal practice. To work here, he has to do an expensive legal conversion course. "After the course, I would need to start from scratch. People will still be asking what experience I have in this country. I achieved the highest level in my profession. Here I am at the beginning again."

The jobcentre is encouraging him to apply for work in the admin sector. "It feels a bit ridiculous. I had status, my own law firm, my profession. After three years here, I am in no man's land. I want to stand on my own two feet. I don't like being on benefits. I'm more used to helping others than taking help."

Khan has volunteered for Refugee Action and for the local Citizens Advice bureau. He enjoys it, but feels occasionally frustrated about the gulf between what he does now and what he once did. "I don't always think of myself as a supreme court lawyer. I try to give what I can. But sometimes it is in my mind that maybe I'm not doing the work I really should be doing."

His eldest daughter, 15, completed a two-year GCSE course in six months and got A*s, and a local newspaper interviewed her. "She made a contribution," Khan says. "We all want to give things back to this country. That makes me happy. I have no regrets. No complaints."

Agnes Tanoh, 57

Was: senior government adviser, Ivory Coast 
Now: destitute asylum seeker, Birmingham

Agnes Tanoh, former government adviser on financial and social affairs in Ivory Coast, fled her country because she faced arrest and long-term imprisonment, after regime change pushed her to the wrong side of the political divide. Before the government fell, she worked for the first lady, as her aide, then as head of her administration. Three years after fleeing to England, Tanoh has swapped a five-bedroom house in Abidjan for a flat paid for by the charity Women for Refugee Women in Birmingham. Her initial claim for asylum has been rejected, which means she has no entitlement to benefits and gets only £20 a week from the Hope Projects, a local asylum charity; £15.50 of that goes on her bus pass, which allows her to travel to language classes; she feeds herself by picking up basic supplies once a month from a food bank.

Most of her family have fled Ivory Coast; her husband of 33 years is in Ghana, her four children scattered in different countries. But for the moment, what makes her unhappy is the enforced idleness: the UK Border Agency stipulates, in emphatic capitals, in correspondence with her, "You are NOT allowed to work."

"Work is health," she says, taking off her glasses and rubbing her eyes. "I started working when I was 21. I am an active person. When you have nothing to do, you look on your situation and start to think. You say to yourself: 'What am I doing? What will become of me?'"

Although she is not a qualified teacher, in Ivory Coast she founded and ran a secondary school. For a while, when she was in a hostel in Bolton, she volunteered with a charity and taught French to retired people. "I enjoyed it a lot. I felt I was bringing something to people."

Hasan Abdalla, 58

Was: academic and artist, Syria
Now: jobseeker, London

Hasan Abdalla had a well-equipped studio in the garden outside his Damascus flat; every morning he would walk past orange, apple, pear and pomegranate trees, to paint inside or in the open when the weather was fine. Now he paints in the bedroom of the south London bedsit where he has been living since he was granted asylum. It's much noisier, and he finds that the sounds from the Iceland loading station in front of the house and the railway tracks behind are often distracting. He has tried listening to music or singing to himself to drown out the noise, but on the whole it has been a difficult period for painting. He misses his wife and three sons, whom he hasn't seen since his hurried departure from Syria in July 2011. He finds London an inspirational place, but he also feels disoriented and alone.

Every stretch of wall in his small flat is covered with the artworks he managed to bring with him, and a few that he has done since arriving here. Beneath his bed he keeps rolled-up 3m canvases. The small kitchen table is covered with old newspaper, ready for him to start painting, but at the moment this happens rarely.

When you are dependent on jobseeker's allowance, painting is an expensive habit. In Syria, Abdalla regularly exhibited with two galleries, and made a good living from selling his work. But his reputation has not travelled with him, and although he has had pictures exhibited in three galleries here, he has sold very little. For three months he went by bus every Sunday to Bayswater Road, with as many paintings as he could carry, to try selling them on the park railings. It was a dispiriting experience, since the pictures got battered on the journey; and although passersby made appreciative comments, they rarely bought pictures.

In Syria and Libya, Abdalla sold his work for around £2,500. He has sold only four pictures since coming to England, each for a fraction of that price. Despite these difficulties, he knows that fleeing Syria, and paying an agent £20,000 of his savings, was the right thing to do. Two of his friends, who had been with him on a protest march in 2011, were shot by the authorities. He had spent time in prison in 2010, and been badly beaten. He was sacked from his job as a university lecturer because he failed security checks. Following his departure, his flat was searched and one of his sons arrested.

He has been supported by the Red Cross and thinks he is lucky to have ended up in England. "People are friendly. They try not to make you feel like a stranger."

Tiegisty Kibrom, 27

Was: IT graduate, Eritrea
Now: hotel cleaner, London

Tiegisty Kibrom graduated with distinction in her computer science degree and hoped to open a computer business. "I wanted to have my own shop, which would be open for people who had no access to computers – I could train people on them. There's a real need for places like that in Eritrea."

She fled after being persecuted for her religious beliefs. When she was gone, her mother was arrested and held for three weeks. She thinks that it would not be safe to return.

With her excellent degree, she thought it would be easy to find work here, but when she realised how hard it would be to get a job, she enrolled on a BSc in internet computing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Even after completing the course, she has not found work in computing; last autumn she took a job cleaning rooms in a five-star hotel near Hyde Park. She works an evening shift, is responsible for cleaning 45 rooms and is paid £6.31 an hour. "I was expecting I'd get a better job. I am not ashamed to do a cleaning job. It just embarrasses me that, with all my skills, I can't find a single opportunity to work in my field." The work is hard. "Sometimes you feel abused. They say: 'If you don't do this, we will sack you.' I have enough stress in my life. They say: 'You know, girls, you have to be more grateful. Some people don't have any jobs.'"

She has volunteered as a computer instructor in a refugee centre; ultimately, she would like to be a database assistant, but mostly her job applications are not acknowledged. "I'm a fast learner, I know I could do it if they gave me a chance," she says.

Helal Attayee, 30

Was: doctor, Afghanistan
Now: healthcare assistant, London

Before qualifying as a doctor, Helal Attayee worked for a US charity, Samaritan's Purse International Relief, as well as the British army and for the International Security Assistance Force as an interpreter and project manager in his home town, Mazar-i-Sharif.

He was repeatedly targeted by local fundamentalists, who branded him a traitor and threatened his family. He decided it would be safer to leave the country for his medical training, and went to Turkey. Once he had qualified, he returned to Afghanistan to work as a doctor, but quickly realised his life was at risk. "The local fundamentalists, who became Taliban later, told me that I was helping the infidels," Attayee says. "They warned me that I should stop."

He was forced to flee to the UK. He has been supported by the Red Cross while he studies for a number of exams he must pass before he can take up his old career, including a very demanding English exam. His English sounds flawless to me (as you would expect from a former UN interpreter), but he has failed the exam three times already. Each time he has to retake it, he has to pay £145. His bedroom, in a shared flat in north London, is filled with books and test papers, and ahead of his next test, he has covered a whiteboard on the wall with words that he finds challenging.

Attayee is currently working as a locum phlebotomist, taking blood for testing. "To become a doctor, you have to study for six or seven years," he says. "For phlebotomy, you just have to complete a four-day course. Anyone can do it. It was very, very difficult to find a job, so I was lucky,. Phlebotomy is fine. I know that it is only temporary."