“I don’t like Palestinians,” the guy making my döner said. “They’re too conservative.” Considering how much the Turkish government has championed their cause in recent years, the statement came as a surprise. That is, if you believe that every Turk ought to think like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Not in Berlin. Few immigrant communities in Germany’s capital city are as candid about their dislike of their ancestral country’s leadership. (More…)
Daft Punk are playing in the background. A young couple is nibbling on croissants, speaking to one other in French. My father brings me a cappuccino from the bar, with a Lavazza advert on the cup. It tastes like the real thing. I down it in two gulps. As though on cue, my stepmother looks at me and says, “You’d be forgiven for thinking you were in Europe.” (More…)
London gets too much credit. Whenever right-wing Israel advocates complain about hotbeds of Palestinian solidarity politics, they look no further. Perhaps its because the British capital is guilty as charged. Or maybe it’s due to a fear of finding out how widespread support for the Palestinian cause actually is, throughout western Europe. (More…)
From Pretoria to Peoria, the whole world is in mourning. For a one-time revolutionary leader from South Africa, that ought to say something. Not just about his political achievements, in helping end his country’s hated Apartheid regime. Rather, what Nelson Mandela’s breakthroughs meant to persons abroad, with little to no immediate stakes in his victories. (More…)
I live in what an expat friend called a “Houthi stronghold.” While Sana’a itself is a majority Sunni city, the neighborhoods surrounding its Old City have, in recent years, been flooded by a migration of Zaidi Shi’a affiliated with the al-Houthi insurgents in northern Yemen. (More…)
He should have been jailed long ago. By all accounts, anyone with a track record like Silvio Berlusconi had no business holding a seat in Italy’s Senate. Still, after two decades of steering the country, if not from its highest office, through the strength of his political parties, the 77-year-old Milanese billionaire was finally expelled from the legislature, on the strength of a successful criminal conviction. (More…)
People with direct experience of totalitarian regimes are understandably wary of iconography. When you’ve been exposed to stylized images of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and their ilk day after day, year after year, seeing anybody flattened into a stereotype is unsettling. And when that celebrity treatment has explicitly political implications, the anxiety mounts. (More…)
We Are All Illegal Immigrants. (“Siamo Tutti Clandestini.”) A message of solidarity to illegal migrants, for anyone who has spent time in Italy, the slogan can be as common as the circle A that often accompanies it. Not that it is necessary to impose anarchist branding. So synonymous is this idea with the politics, the symbol risks overkill. (More…)
What’s the difference between racism and fascism? Nothing, if you take into account the fact that in democratic societies, racism seeks to limit the rights of minorities. Though they may have the ability to vote, and use public services, the privileges they receive, and their treatment, by the state, and by civil society, is not equal to what poor persons, who are members of ethnic majorities, often experience. (More…)
The turmoil in the United States surrounding the Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare”, has baffled onlookers around the globe. Most Americans pay far more for their medical expenses than people in other countries. Yet a sizable percentage of them seem to equate this state of affairs with freedom. (More…)
From the looks of it, they were all members of the same family. Twenty-five, maybe thirty years old, max. Hebrew words were mixed in with their Arabic. I wondered where they were from. Nazareth? The Wadi Ara area? Something told me they were neighbors. Not just from the region, but the Arab towns nearby, close to where my parents live. (More…)
Did the Allies liberate Europe from Fascism? Many leftists would say no. In West Germany, for example, Nazi-era civil servants, judges and police officers remained in place for nearly three more decades. The same could be said of France, not to mention, of course, Italy. Why? For the Allies, quite often, due to pragmatism. How would they run these countries without them? (More…)