21stcenturywire--2019-08-06--US-backed Opposition in Thailand Exposed After Recent Bombings

Several small bombs detonated across Bangkok on Friday, August 2, amid a meeting between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) the US, China, and Russia.  There were several injuries reported, but no deaths.  Despite a Western media deliberately feigning confusion over motives and possible suspects while attempting to depict the capital as “in chaos” and the current Thai government “humiliated” – its image “tarnished” – US-backed opposition groups are the prime suspects, their motives including growing desperation.  Also absent from Western media coverage was any genuine context surrounding Thailand’s ongoing political crisis as foreign-backed opposition groups attempt to  reverse the nation’s growing ties with China, Russia, and developing nations across Eurasia.  The US-backed opposition consists of former prime minister, billionaire fugitive Thaksin Shinawatra, his Pheu Thai Party (PTP), his violent street front – the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD) better known as “red shirts,” and a number of new parties Thaksin created to hedge his bets in elections earlier this year.  The most prominent among these parties is Future Forward headed by billionaire Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit.  Thanathorn faces multiple criminal charges including election law violations. His political future is nonexistent – a miniature Thaksin Shinawatra minus the initial success and popularity Thaksin once enjoyed when first coming to power in 2001.  Thaksin’s various proxies parties faired poorly in the last election, with Palang Pracharath Party (PPRP) winning the popular vote and forming a larger coalition. PPRP is headed by military figures responsible for ousting Thaksin  in 2006 – and his sister Yingluck Shinawatra from power in 2014.  Having lost elections and lacking public support – with expensive and violent protests a now exhausted option – few options are left besides violence. Many hardcore Thaksin supporters are fond of repeating the quote, “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”  While they are by no means interested in any sort of principled revolution, they are most certainly fond of pursing violence.  Thaksin – since his ouster in 2006 – has resorted to large scale violence in a bid to seize back power. This is in addition to his poor human rights record during his time in power which saw over 2,000 people extrajudicially executed during a 90 day “drug war.”  Should evidence tie Thaksin to the recent blasts – it wouldn’t be the first time he and his political allies would have targeted an important ASEAN summit hosted by Thailand.  The Guardian in its article, “Protesters storm Asian leaders’ summit in Thailand,” would admit that in 2009 during another large ASEAN meeting, Thaksin’s red shirts would storm the convention center forcing ASEAN representatives to flee by helicopter. During related protests, Thaksin’s red shirts would kill two shopkeepers while trying to loot their businesses.  In 2010, Thaksin would deploy between 300-500 heavily armed militants who – even according to Human Rights Watch – murdered soldiers, police, and civilians. Despite HRW admitting this, it and the Western media still depicts the violence as a “government crackdown” to this day.  Leading up to the protests, Thaksin’s militants threatened judges deciding on a court case over the seizure of $1.4 billion of his assets. This included grenade attacks on court buildings.  There were also other senseless grenade and bomb attacks carried out throughout Bangkok as a crude attempt to coerce the government to meet Thaksin’s demands in 2010.  In 2014 when protesters took to the street to oppose Thaksin Shinawatra’s sister – Yingluck Shinawtra – his militants would once again return, carrying out gun and grenade attacks leaving up to 20 dead including women and children. Violence continued until the military intervened, ousting Yingluck, and taking over as an interim government.  In fact, only Thaksin Shinawatra and his political supporters have a verified record of carrying out violence and terrorism in and around Bangkok – and for over a decade.  Three of Thailand’s southern-most provinces have faced a low-intensity insurgency since Thaksin took power in 2001 and violated a 20-year peace deal.  Claims that separatists in Thailand’s deep south might have been responsible for the recent blasts are dubious at best. Separatists have never attacked Bangkok.  Additionally, as revealed by Thailand’s HRW representative Sunai Phasuk in a Wikileaks cable – Thaksin maintains, “strong organization and funding” for activities in the deep south and could organize violence in Bangkok meant to scapegoat separatists.  This would fit Washington’s agenda as well – as separatists also happen to be ethnic Malay and Muslim. Washington has worked diligently in other nations throughout Southeast Asia to fuel inter-religious tensions and divisions – most notably in Myanmar where violence flaring up in Rakhaine state between Buddhists and Muslims just so happens to be threatening Chinese investments and infrastructure there – which helps provide insight into possible motivations behind the recent blasts in Bangkok.  On a petty domestic political level, Thaksin and his supporters have run out of options and have repeatedly ridiculed PPRP’s campaign promise to maintain peace and stability after winning elections. Of course, the only way the current PPRP-led government can fail to carry out its promise is if its opponents carry out violence and attempt to destabilize the country.  On a geopolitical level – Thaksin and his political forces are the preferred proxies of Washington, London, and Brussels. Thaksin faithfully served their interests between 2001-2006 for everything form privatizing Thailand’s natural resources to sending Thai troops to fight Washington’s wars.  By destabilizing the current government, Washington hopes – as it does in all other nations it is fostering destabilization and even violence in – to create the conditions within which regime change may become possible – or at the very least creation conditions suitable for coercing Bangkok into making concessions.  Among these concessions would be demands for Bangkok to distance itself from Beijing, Moscow and other US rivals whom Bangkok has been building steady ties with. China alone has helped Thailand update its aging US military equipment, including main battle tanks, armored personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles, and even a submarine. Thailand has also bought several Russia military transport helicopters as well as hardware from Europe.  Bangkok is already building major infrastructure projects with China including a high-speed rail network that will connect Thai cities together, and Thailand to Laos and China.   This growing relationship significantly blunts US influence in both Thailand and the wider region.  Nothing “Absurd” About Implicating the US and its Proxies  The Western media and the US Embassy in Bangkok itself – after being suspected in the past of being behind terrorism in Thailand – attempt to portray the notion of the US carrying out or approving of deadly violence to achieve its political goals around the globe as “absurd.”  Yet it was the US who used extreme violence in 2003 to invade and topple the government in Iraq – predicated on a deliberate lie and leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis along with thousands of America’s own soldiers. To claim somehow the US is capable of that, but “above” using lesser violence to coerce other nations around the globe is in fact incredibly absurd.  The US destroys entire nations around the globe. It is not above sponsoring relatively minor terrorism to coerce a nation.  Investigations will begin, but Bangkok is unlikely to directly implicate Thaksin or his proxies, no less his sponsors. The goal of the string of bombings is to heighten tensions and deepen divisions between the Thai public and what remains of Thaksin’s support base. Time is on Bangkok’s side. As it rises alongside China and the rest of Eurasia, US influence wanes. While the US is still an incredibly dangerous and destructive force around the globe – its ability to influence the path of global development has atrophied.  As public awareness grows of Washington’s true intentions and methods – and more specifically its abuses and crimes, further violence carried out by it or its proxies will only accelerate global backlash against it and its “international order,” in favor of a multipolar world where cooperation and national sovereignty hold primacy over coercion and regime change.  ***   Author Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher, writer and special contributor to 21st Century Wire. Over the last decade, his work has been published on a number of popular news and analysis websites, and also on the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.


aljazeera--2019-06-24--The Palestinian refugees and the monologue of the century

The Palestinian refugees and the 'monologue of the century'

In 1948, about 450 Palestinian villages were razed to the ground by Israeli forces and about 770,000 people - including about 20,000 Jews expelled by Arab militias from Hebron, Jerusalem, Jenin, and Gaza - were evicted in a matter of few days and then forcibly denied the return. Some of them fled out of fear, often after witnessing the tragic fate of their relatives and friends.  A case in point is the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the towns of Lydda and Ramle in July 1948, which accounted for one-tenth of the overall Arab-Palestinian exodus. Most among the 50,000-70,000 Palestinians that were expelled from the two cities did so following an official expulsion order signed by the then commander of the Harel Brigade, Yitzhak Rabin: "The inhabitants of Lydda", Rabin clarified, "must be expelled quickly without attention to age". Several hundreds of them died during the exodus from exhaustion and dehydration.  Over 70 years later, it is becoming increasingly common to come across analogies between Palestinian refugees such as the ones from Lydda and Ramle, and the "simultaneous uprooting" of Jews living in Arab countries. Israel's Deputy Minister of Finance Yitzhak Cohen, for example, has said that: "The uprooted Jews' problem is equal to, if not greater than, the Palestinian refugees' problem."  The analogy, which aims primarily to remove the issue of the Palestinian refugees from any future peace negotiations, is usually presented in the following terms: Due to "the Arab rejection" of the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947, a conflict erupted and 770,000 Palestinians "fled" what is today Israel"; at the same time some 800,000 Jews living in Arab countries faced "mass displacement"; hence, there was a "population exchange" between "Arab and Jewish refugees". Palestinians should then accept this "reciprocity" and renounce to their demands for return and/or compensation.  But this attempted moral equivalence is a misleading one. Palestinians and Jews fled their homes in different contexts and the former cannot be blamed for the fate of the latter. The complex history of the Palestinian refugees should not be reduced to a simple analogy with no evidentiary basis.  A plethora of observers and scholars have linked the beginning of the Palestinian refugee problem, and more generally the Israeli-Arab-Palestinian conflict, to "the Arab rejection" of the 1947's UN partition for Palestine. While on the surface this claim may appear to make sense, the reality of who rejected what in the 1940s is more complicated than that.  Indeed, as the late Israeli journalist and activist Uri Avnery has noted, if Palestinians "had been asked, they would probably have rejected partition, since - in their view - it gave a large part of their historical homeland to foreigners". The more so, he noted, "since the Jews, who at the time constituted a third of the population, were allotted 55% of the territory - and even there the Arabs constituted 40% of the population".  But from the perspective of the Arab Palestinians, who at the turn of the century constituted about 90 percent of the population, 1947-48 did not mark the beginning of the struggle, but coincided instead with the final chapter of a war which started with some Zionist leaders adopting policies and strategies of rejectionism in the early 20th century.  The beginning of the conflict can be traced back to 1907, when the Eighth Zionist Congress created a "Palestine Office" in Jaffa, under the direction of Zionist leader Arthur Ruppin, whose main objective was - in his own words - "the creation of a Jewish milieu and of a closed Jewish economy, in which producers, consumers and middlemen shall all be Jewish". Indeed, "rejectionism" featured very prominently in Ruppin's mindset.  The goal of a "closed Jewish economy" was partially implemented from 1904 on by the leaders of the second and third aliyot (waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine) through policies like the kibbush ha'avoda (conquest of work) and the practice of avodah ivrit (Jewish work, or the idea that only Jewish workers must work Jewish lands).  While both were dictated by the need to offer greater job opportunities to the new immigrants, they resulted in the creation of a system of exclusion that blocked at its inception, primarily on an ideological level, any potential integration with the local Arab population.  Some researchers have emphasised that the Arab population likewise tended to avoid hiring Jewish settlers. This, however, takes no account of the fact that Arabs had only a marginal interest in employing a minority of new immigrants who had much more limited agricultural experience and did not speak the language used by the rest of the local inhabitants. Their avoidance of Jewish workers was not part of an organised political campaign.  It should also be noted that the "system of exclusion" and the two parallel social and economic structures that it triggered affected other crucial issues such as those of the land and its resources. For instance, the Jewish National Fund (KKL) was established with the task of buying land in Palestine (it succeeded in buying 9/10 of the land bought in Palestine by Zionist buyers) while banning the alienation of this newly acquired area to non-Jews.  KKL's areas were managed in a discriminatory way in relation to the Arab population. KKL farmers who were found employing non-Jewish workers were subject to fines and/or expulsions. Such policies were indeed alarming, especially considering their intended purpose, which the future first President of the State of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, outlined in a letter sent to his wife in 1907:  "If our Jewish capitalists, say even only the Zionist capitalists, were to invest their capital in Palestine, if only in part, there is no doubt that the lifeline of Palestine - all the coastal strip - would be in Jewish hands within twenty-five years […] The Arab retains his primitive attachment to the land, the soil-instinct is strong in him, and by being continuously employed on it there is a danger that he might feel himself indispensable to it, with a moral right to it."  All this further confirms that the tendency to link "Arab rejectionism" to the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem ignores too much history and cannot but foster a limited understanding of a far more complex issue.  Rejectionist policies had an immensely disruptive effect on intercommunal relations in Palestine. A plethora of primary sources produced by local actors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries confirm that before the implementation of these policies relations between different communities were much less confrontational than has been claimed recently.  An unsigned editorial published on the daily Arab-Palestinian journal Filastin on 29 April 1914 contended, for instance, "Until ten years ago the Jews constituted a native fraternal Ottoman element. They lived and mixed freely in harmony with other elements and entered into working relationships, lived in the same neighbourhoods and sent their children to the same schools."  These words, despite their apologetic tones, were not far from the truth. The attitudes shown by several prominent figures and religious groups in the region, and the pressure exerted by the Porte so that local Jews could become full Ottoman citizens, give credit - at least as a general tendency - to such a consideration.  Speaking at a public square in Beirut in the spring of 1909, Jewish lawyer Shlomo Yellin stated that "it is not lawful to divide according to race; the Turkish, Arab, Armenian, and Jewish elements have mixed one with other, and all of them are connected together".  Scholar and author Yaacov Yehoshua wrote in his memoir, Yaldut be-Yerushalayim ha-yashena (Childhood in Old Jerusalem) published in 1965, that in Jerusalem "there were joint compounds of Jews and Muslims. We were like one family […] Our children played with their [Muslim] children in the yard, and if children from the neighborhood hurt us the Muslim children who lived in our compound protected us. They were our allies."  In the same period, in a religious city par excellence such as Jerusalem, almost 80 percent of the inhabitants lived in mixed neighbourhoods and quarters.  All this should not suggest that interreligious and/or confessional conflicts were unknown. Cleavages and clashes of this type can be documented as early as the Middle Ages. Yet, their nature and scope are hardly comparable to those of more recent times. More importantly, they do not reflect the actual history of most of the region's past.  If the Palestinian refugees' question has little to do with "Arab rejectionism", the same can be said regarding the attempt to link Palestinian refugees to the victimisation and expulsion of Jewish communities.  Indeed, thousands of Jews in Arab countries suffered discrimination, oppression, threats and various forms of violence. The most well-known example is the Farhud - a 1941 pogrom against Jews in which over 180 Jews were brutally killed in Baghdad. According to Hayyim J Cohen, it "was the only [such event] known to the Jews of Iraq, at least during their last hundred years of life there".  Regardless of whether we agree or disagree with Cohen's words, it is still undeniable that Palestinians were not responsible for what happened in Baghdad or elsewhere in the Middle East. They may be Arab, but they were and are not the same people as Iraqis.  Jews who suffered discrimination and brutality in certain Arab countries have legitimate claims; all forms of violence are equally unacceptable and must be acknowledged and condemned. At the same time, it must be noted that, contrary to Palestinian refugees, many of whom were expelled or fled in fear, a large percentage of Jews left out of a desire to join their "Eretz Yisrael" (Land of Israel).  One figure that is often used to justify the alleged moral responsibility of Palestinians for the conditions of Jews in Arab countries is Hajj Amin al-Ḥusayni, the "Grand Mufti of Jerusalem".  Al-Husayni was a supporter of Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gaylani in Iraq who sought to establish stronger ties with Nazi Germany and Italy. It was in the aftermath of the collapse of al-Gaylani's governments that the riots in Baghdad erupted which led to the Farhud.  In 1941, al-Husayni made his way first to Italy and then to Germany. Two years later, he participated in the formation of the Handschar, a Nazi division created in collaboration with SS commander Heinrich Himmler, which fought the communist partisans in Yugoslavia and committed various crimes against the local population, including many Jews. Given his alleged Islamic credentials, he was tasked with recruiting Bosnian and Serbian Muslims who, along with some Catholic Croatian volunteers, formed the core of the unit.  There were no Palestinians enlisted in the Handschar; by contrast, about 12,000 Arab Palestinians joined the British army to fight Axis powers in 1939.  Due to his collusion with the Nazi regime, al-Ḥusayni is often used as an example of why the Palestinian people were supposedly responsible for their own tragic destiny. Yet, as recent studies have shown, he was not a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, as he was very much imposed on them by the British authorities.  The analogy between Palestinian refugees and Jews from Arab countries is misplaced on a number of other grounds. One of the most obvious ones is the issue of how and why Palestinian refugees and Jews expelled or emigrating from Arab countries have (or have not) been "absorbed".  During and after the 1948 war, many Palestinians were forced to flee to neighbouring Arab countries. Until the recent past, many of them were prohibited from getting citizenship and practising certain professions. The suffering of the Palestinian refugees has been - and in some cases still is - exploited by the leadership of those countries for political gain.  Yet, a comparison between Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon or Syria, and the ma'abarot, the immigrant absorption camps in Israel in the 1950s, would be misleading.  The reason why the last ma'abara was closed in 1963 partially has to do with the establishment of a number of development towns in Israel where displaced Jews were provided with homes. Many new immigrants had to go through a painful and violent process of being settled into emptied Palestinian houses.  Any person who has visited Ein Hod, Musrara, Qira and a few hundreds of other former Palestinian villages, quarters or cities, is familiar with the thousands of houses that are still perfectly intact. Most (if not all) of them are today inhabited by families of former immigrants.  It should, therefore, not be surprising that many Israeli officials have rejected the term "refugee". As Knesset speaker Yisrael Yeshayahu noted in 1975, "We are not refugees. [Some of us] came to this country before the state was born. We had messianic aspirations."  Former Knesset member Ran Cohen went a step further by saying: "I have this to say: I am not a refugee […] I came at the behest of Zionism, due to the pull that this land exerts, and due to the idea of redemption. Nobody is going to define me as a refugee."  By contrast, a large part of the Palestinian population is now second, third or fourth-generation refugees still living in camps.  In fact, they are the only refugees who do not fall under the UNHCR and instead have their own agency (UNRWA). The reason for this is rooted in the full recognition of the heavy price paid by Palestinians for the decisions - fully legitimate in the eyes of some, completely or partially unlawful according to others - taken by the international community in the late 1940s.  In other words, 70 years ago, UNRWA was established by the UN General Assembly as a humanitarian agency to support those very same refugees that lost their homes in 1948, a few months after the UN partition plan of Palestine in November 1947. Still today, UNRWA mirrors the international community's obligation to provide a just and durable solution for them.  "People [adapt] their memories to suit their sufferings," wrote Athenian historian Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War. Today, this statement seems especially relevant to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  A certain degree of mutual acceptance of the other's narratives and traumas, through reconciliation and empathy, is the key to any sustainable peace.  Yet, when visible and invisible scars are exploited for political or ideologically-driven purposes, they cannot but pave the way for what Austrian-born Jewish philosopher Martin Buber called "monologue disguised as dialogue", i.e. the dialogue "in which two or more men, meeting in space, speak each with himself in strangely tortuous and circuitous ways and yet imagine they have escaped the torment of being thrown back on their own resources".  The so-called "deal of the century", the details of which are to be released during the Bahrain Economic Workshop on June 25, is yet another example of a long list of monologues disguised as dialogues.  All signs suggest that those behind the "deal" will try to remove the Palestinian refugee issue from any future peace negotiation. It is the past presented as the future. This is why it is doomed to fail.  The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.


bbc--2019-09-05--The priest who survived the siege of Marawi

For five months in 2017, Islamist militants took over the city of Marawi in the south of the Philippines. One of their prisoners was a Catholic priest, Father Chito, who was forced to make bombs under threat of torture. The experience shook him deeply, but he continues to hope Christians and Muslims will be able to live in peace.  It was dinner time at the Bato Mosque, and 20 people were gathered around the long table in the basement, ready to eat. On one side of the table, 15 jihadists. On the other, Father Chito, a Catholic priest, and and handful of other Christians.  Suddenly, the sound of gunfire startled them and they jumped into action. Father Chito reached for the AK47 at his feet and threw it across the table to one of the jihadists, who caught it and crouched at the entrance of the mosque, ready.  After a few minutes, the gunfire passed into the distance and they settled back around the table.  It had become a familiar routine. Father Chito had been held hostage for more than two months. He couldn't say he liked his captors, but he had developed what he describes as a "human closeness" with them. They were a little community, eating together, working together. And when he heard that one of the jihadists had died fighting the Philippine Army, he would grieve.  Father Chito was taken hostage on 23 May 2017, the day the city of Marawi was besieged by militants affiliated to Islamic State.  Before this, Marawi was a beautiful city, with tall, densely packed houses and ornate mosques. Located on the Philippines' southern island of Mindanao, it is a majority-Muslim city in an overwhelmingly Catholic country.  Islam first arrived in the south of the Philippines in the 13th Century via traders from the Middle East and the Malay and Indonesian archipelagos. Missionaries and mosques followed and those who converted became known as the Moro people. When the Spanish colonised the Philippines in the 16th Century, bringing with them Catholicism, they failed to conquer the Moro in the south of the country.  Since then, many Muslims in the south have felt marginalised. The region is among the poorest in the country and there have been calls for autonomy from what is widely seen as the Catholic powerbase of Manila.  Listen to The Story of the Philippines' Lost City on Crossing Continents, on BBC Radio 4 at 11:00 on 5 September  Or catch up later on BBC Sounds  When Father Chito was sent to Marawi 23 years ago, with the aim of building an inter-religious dialogue between Christians and Muslims, the vast majority of people in the city welcomed him and his colleagues. But in the months before the siege, he started to feel increasingly uneasy.  In early 2016, two brothers from the Maute tribe returned from studying in the Middle East to their hometown, Butig, south of Marawi. They started preaching a militant version of Islam and assembled a group of around 200 followers, who began attacking government forces in the area.  In 2017, the attacks drew closer and closer to Marawi. Fighters from Indonesia and Malaysia had already swelled the militants' ranks when, in late May, another IS-allied group, Abu Sayyaf, or "bearer of the sword", was spotted in the city.  The stage was set for the siege of Marawi.  In the middle of the day, Father Chito was woken up from a nap by the sound of gunfire. Then his tablet, computer and mobile phone all started beeping, as he was bombarded with messages from Muslim and Catholic friends, all saying same thing: "Get out of Marawi!"  Instead, he prayed. "I told myself, 'I trust everything to God's hands so I will not get out,'" he says.  At 5.30pm, the city fell silent, the streets emptied, windows were closed and lights turned off. The militants raised the black flag of Islamic State over the hospital. On the horizon the police station burned.  And then the jihadists arrived at the gate of the cathedral. As Father Chito approached the gate, two men raised their guns. Behind them, he saw over a 100 more armed fighters.  Along with five of his colleagues, he was forced into the back of a van and held inside all night, as the militants preached their version of Islam.  "During the whole evening, they are indoctrinating us: 'We are here because we would like to clean Marawi. This is called an Islamic city but there are drugs here, there is corruption here, there is wine and music here. We are here to establish the caliphate.'"  But there were thousands of civilians trapped in the city, who didn't want to be governed by allies of Islamic State. In the first days of the siege, there was chaos. People were stranded in their houses, desperate to escape but terrified of being caught in the crossfire.  Tong Pasacum was working in the town hall at the time, his job was to respond to floods and natural disasters. So when the conflict began, his phone began to ring.  "When we got the first call for the rescue operation, I was thinking twice about going out the gate because I know if I go out I'm not sure if I'll be making it back," he says. "But then you get overwhelmed with the situation, so you're left with no other option than to go, even if it means risking your life."  Tong brought together a team of volunteers from Marawi's Muslim community and together they went on death-defying rescue missions into the conflict zone. Their vehicles were shot at as they wound their way through piles of rubble and burning buildings. Tong decided that they needed a way to identify themselves as neutral. He remembered a pile of white construction helmets in his office, and he cut up a white table cloth to make arm bands. The team was soon branded the "Suicide Squad" by the local media.  But Father Chito and 100 other hostages, were far beyond the reach of the Suicide Squad. They were being kept in the basement of Bato Mosque, the militants' command centre.  They were told they would face "disciplinary action" if they didn't co-operate. Father Chita knew this meant torture, and feared it would cause him to lose his mind. So he worked for the militants, cooking and cleaning, and even - with a heavy heart - making bombs.  Urban guerrilla tactics - including punching holes through walls to create "rat runs" between buildings - helped the fighters evade capture. But aided by US and Australian intelligence the Philippine army carried out relentless aerial bombing.  The pattern of the airstrikes grew familiar to Father Chito. There were always two planes, each carrying four bombs, each explosion closer than the last.  He experienced more than 100 airstrikes in his four months in captivity, both wanting and not wanting to be hit. "I prayed and asked God for the next bomb to hit me," he says. But then he'd quickly change his mind. "No Lord, don't hit me. I don't want to be hit."  "There are moments when I didn't know how to pray," he says. "I complained to the Lord, 'If I sinned and you are punishing me, this is too much, this is not commensurate.' My faith in God was really challenged, to the point of blaming God."  On 16 September the Philippine army was so close to the mosque that Father Chito could hear their commands. Once darkness fell, he and one of the other hostages decided that this was their chance: they sneaked out the back of the mosque and ran. Two streets away they were greeted by a group of men brandishing guns - and whisked away to safety.  A month later, the Philippine defence secretary declared the country's longest siege over. The Maute brothers, Omar and Abdullah, and Abu Sayyaf leader Isnilon Hapilon had been killed, and their remaining fighters routed.  Over 1,000 people lost their lives in the five-month siege.  Nearly two years on, the city remains in ruins. The reconstruction has been painfully slow, with 100,000 people still displaced, living in camps or with relatives.  A square mile of streets in the centre of the city is now referred to as Ground Zero or the Most Affected Area. The scale of the devastation is akin to Raqqa, Aleppo or Mosul. Every single building has been damaged; many are leaning at awkward-looking angles or entirely reduced to rubble. We drive into the area with Father Chito, towards the cathedral that he was taken from.  As we pull up he excitedly points out the window. "That's our church!" he shouts. But as we enter, the mood changes. The cathedral has been reduced to a ruin. Bullet holes cover the walls, the tiles on the floor crack under foot and the roof has been blown apart leaving only the metal structure, which creeks eerily in the wind. The church is scheduled to be demolished and so this may be the last time he sees it.  Approaching the altar, my attention is grabbed by a statue of Jesus. There's a bullet hole in his stomach, his hands have been cut off and a crown of feathers is perched on his head. Father Chito leaves us for a moment to pray, he stands silently with his hand on a crumbling figure of the Virgin Mary, picking the plaster off it and crying.  Tong is one of those who lost his house during the siege and he has now been given a portable building. But instead of living in it, he stays with relatives and uses it as a base for a new organisation he's set up, called the Early Response Network.  Its aim is to stop radical Islam gaining a foothold in the community. A man hunches over a radio in the corner, doing the daily roll call to the network's 40 volunteers around the region. They report early signs of radicalisation and pass information to authorities, in the hope of preventing anything like the siege happening again.  Marawi is a clan-based society, and family feuds are common here. Tong says that in the years before the siege, extremist groups exploited grudges between families to recruit. Now, he and his colleagues try to mediate quarrels between households before they escalate.  In the immediate aftermath of the siege, all was quiet. The command structure of the militant groups had been decimated and the war had caused so much destruction that there was an overwhelming desire for peace and reconciliation.  But in the last few months, they have started picking up on some worrying incidents: sightings of armed militants, reports of young women attending radical training camps and recruiters targeting families bereaved during the siege.  "There's a small group trying to regroup," says Tong. "The root cause of this is what happened to Marawi. People's lives have been damaged. If the rehabilitation takes longer, more people will definitely be attracted to join."  Father Chito doesn't live in Marawi any more, he says it's too dangerous. But he sometimes visits to lead mass at the university, in a makeshift church set up in the gymnasium. He says that this is the only place in the city where Catholics can gather in large numbers and feel safe.  He's a local celebrity now and after the service, students queue up to take selfies with him. He is upbeat and excitable and recounts even the most distressing experiences with irony. It's a coping mechanism, he tells me.  "The sense of humour is an instrument that can make life lighter, that can balance so that you do not go to the extreme trauma, extreme stress. It can neutralise the worry and the painful experiences."  "I already lost my psychiatric balance, I was devastated. So although I'm happy I survived physically, my feeling of happiness is not on its full blast. Time heals and so we wait for the time."  But he is optimistic about the prospects for inter-religious peace in Marawi.  "After the war, people learned a lot of lessons. Because Muslim people and Christian people, they know that through violence, no-one will be victorious, everybody is a loser."  In January 2018, Greek pilot Vasileios Vasileiou checked into a luxury hilltop hotel in Kabul. The Intercontinental was popular with foreign visitors - which is why, on 20 January, Taliban gunmen stormed it, killing at least 40 people. Vasileios explains how he survived.  The bed that saved me from the Taliban


breitbart--2019-11-20--Exclusive: Philippine Monsignor: Christian Survivors of Jihad Carry a Faith 'Tested by Fire'

The tiny Christian minority in Jolo, Philippines – a majority-Muslim area in an overwhelmingly Catholic nation – has seen renewed energy in its churches now that its faith has been “tested by fire,” Monsignor Romeo S. Saniel, vicar administrator of the Vicariate of Jolo, told Breitbart News in an interview on Tuesday.  Jolo’s Our Lady of Mount Carmel Cathedral was partially destroyed on January 27, when jihadists, later identified as a couple from Indonesia, detonated suicide bombs minutes apart inside, killing 22 people and wounding 111. It was the latest in years of violent attacks Saniel had witnessed or experienced while caring for the Christians of Jolo – including a failed assassination attempt he survived because the gun touching his head jammed when the assailant pulled the trigger.  Saniel told Breitbart News he is now endeavoring to help rebuild the cathedral and bring spiritual and economic support to the survivors of the attack. The Catholic Church is also working to help improve educational and economic opportunities for all residents of Jolo, holding on to the belief that economic desperation can attract young Muslims to jihadist ideology.  Saniel spoke with Breitbart News in anticipation of several events to bring awareness to the dangers facing Philippine Christians in Muslims territories, and other Christians who live as minorities, in the United States this week. The first, “Listening to Survivors of Religious Persecution: The Call for Religious Freedom,” will take place Wednesday at the United Nations, hosted by Aid to the Church in Need, a papal charity of the Catholic Church that supports persecuted Christians globally.  Aid to the Church in Need will also host a Night of Witness event – to pray, reflect, and listen to the victims of Christian persecution – at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, on Saturday.  Saniel highlighted the resilience of the Christian faith in Jolo – located in an autonomous Muslim region where, he says, Catholics amount to about three percent of the population – even in the face of bombs going off during Mass.  “The bombing and the persecution sometimes … can create a lot of blessings in disguise in our lives,” he said. “The number one blessing is, we have been persecuted in this community but really remained steadfast in our faith. I believe the faith of our minority Christians has been tested by fire and we have a deeper commitment to the life of the church and the life of following Jesus today.”  “Some are exposed to so much danger, but they don’t walk away and they still witness the Christian faith that they have,” he added.  Young Christians, he noted, have particularly experienced renewed enthusiasm in their faith.  “There are so many young people now who are in the Church in spite of the fact that they are victims of the bombing, but they are back in the Church and they make it so alive, and I really appreciate the energy of the young people,” he said.  Saniel noted that those who attacked the cathedral were foreigners and that, for decades, the vast majority of Philippine Muslims accepted the existence of Christians among them. Most of the southern island of Mindanao, where Jolo is located, is predominantly Christian; nationally, Catholics make up 86 percent of the population. But the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao is an exception, a nation-within-a-nation in which the rules of living as a Christian in the Philippines elsewhere do not apply.  “In Jolo … we are only four percent, three percent Christians, 97 percent are Muslims in our area, so we are a small minority and we feel that we have been persecuted because of our faith,” Saniel told Breitbart News. “But the majority of the Muslims in our area are friendly and very open to dialogue and witnessing of our religion, except a small minority now we call the Wahhabists or the violent extremists. They are threatening us and attacking us and our churches.”  Wahhabism is a fundamentalist strain of Sunni Islam originating in Saudi Arabia and disseminated widely through radical clerics and terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. The Islamic State’s affiliate in the Philippines, Abu Sayyaf, took responsibility for the January cathedral bombing.  Abu Sayyaf’s largest temporary victory was the siege of Marawi, the largest Muslim city in the country, in May 2017. President Rodrigo Duterte announced the death of the head of Abu Sayyaf, Isnilon Hapilon, in Marawi in September, effectively ending the siege.  “We have the influence of the foreign Wahhabists when they attacked Marawi city … of the remnants now are in Jolo,” Saniel noted. “According to intelligence, some of them are Westerners … the suicide bombers who attacked our cathedral were identified as Indonesians.”  Mindanao has for decades struggled against higher poverty levels than the wealthier islands to the north and hosted a Muslim insurgency for decades, organized by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The MILF, who prioritized self-governance, joined with Duterte to fight Abu Sayyaf and foreign jihadis, its leaders warning of a coming wave of jihadists from the collapsing Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in 2018.  While MILF fighters may have come to peace under Duterte, years of conflict between Muslim separatists and the government has made much of Mindanao dangerous to Christians for decades. Saniel noted that, as a newly assigned priest in the region, he survived an assassination attempt by sheer luck – or the grace of God.  “When I was distributing Holy Communion to the Christians of Jolo, two young boys were walking behind me and I felt the .45 caliber muzzle in the back of my head, and I heard ‘click,’ but the gun jammed, so I was saved,” he said. “I think the Lord is the reason why I was saved from the attempt. Since then, I have been working for interreligious dialogue, establishing good relations with our Muslim brothers and sisters, and giving a platform to also prevent the recruitment of these violent extremists in our area.”  Saniel said that, since the bombing, many Muslims living around the cathedral “are more compassionate and merciful to us, and they are extending help, they are expressing their desire to help us in whatever way they can.”  He also credited President Duterte with helping the Christian minority there and offering extensive security to prevent another bombing. Duterte has received criticism from international aid groups for feuding with the nation’s Catholic leadership, who have in turn condemned his violent anti-drug policies in the country. Duterte has countered with police evidence that drug trafficking has enriched and empowered jihadis to attack Christian communities. He has, more often, dismissed Catholic leaders and encouraged people to kill them.  Saniel’s experience offers an alternative to the international headlines on the bombastic Duterte.  “Since the bombing of the cathedral, our president has been very friendly to us,” Saniel said. “He has visited the church many times. He has given us assistance through the military. Also, he has visited the place many times.”  “I feel he treats us differently from the people of Manila because we are minority Christians and we are victimized and so our president has a softer heart and [is helping] rebuild our churches and the lives of Christians and making sure we are also secure through the military,” Saniel added.  Duterte is the first president in Philippine history from Mindanao.  For Saniel, the priority in the aftermath of the bombing is the security of his Christian congregation. He says that, among the policies the Church will use to promote peace will be the development of “social economic projects” and closer ties with local Muslims, to better empower them to reject foreign jihadis.  The programs include as their goals “helping the Muslims become better Muslims, establishing schools, cooperatives, livelihood programs, and we also take care of our small minority Christians. so we have a strong bond with the majority of Muslims who are moderate and most of them are in government and in governance and they are graduates of our Catholic schools,” he said.


cnsnews--2019-04-23--Global Islamic Terrorists Suspected to be Behind Sri Lanka Easter Bombings

(CNSNews.com) – Sri Lanka’s government has blamed a little-known local Islamist group for the Easter Sunday bombings, but officials and security experts suspect global jihadists were connected to the deadly attack.  “There must be a wider international network behind it,” cabinet spokesman Rajitha Senaratne told reporters of the coordinated suicide bombings on churches and hotels in which 290 people were killed and at least 500 more injured.  The group being blamed for the attacks, named as National Thowheeth Jama’ath, was previously linked to the defacing of Buddhist statues, but not to terrorist attacks.  “We do not believe these attacks were carried out by a group of people who were confined to this country,” said Senaratne. “There was an international network without which these attacks could not have succeeded.”  A leading regional expert on terrorism said that, given the nature and scale of the bombings, the likeliest source was ISIS, or perhaps al-Qaeda. Neither terror network has formally claimed responsibility.  “The targets, the sophistication of the coordinated attacks, and the use of suicide bombers suggest this is likely to be the case,” said Ajai Sahni, executive director of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management (ICM) and its South Asia Terrorism Portal.  “There is also significant likelihood that the attacks have been planned, provisioned and mounted from abroad,” he said.  Sahni argued that, if the plot had been developed entirely in Sri Lanka, the scale of the conspiracy and the “extended logistics chain” it would have required would not have remained entirely hidden from the Sri Lankan intelligence services.  He also pointed out that the nature of the attack did not fit into the “domestic conflict dynamic” in Sri Lanka.  The Buddhist-majority Indian Ocean island nation emerged a decade ago from a bloody 26-year civil war between ethnic Sinhalese Buddhist governments and the mostly Hindu Tamil minority.  Where the Christian minority (about seven percent of the population) faces harassment or violence, the perpetrators have tended to be radical Buddhists, not Muslims (who account for less than ten percent of the population).  Converts to Christianity from Buddhist or Hindu backgrounds have faced most persecution, according to Sri Lankan and international religious freedom monitors. Muslims have also been targeted.  Sahni said some commentators have sought to link a climate of interreligious tensions to Sunday’s bombings, but from what is presently known that looks unlikely.  “If anything, an Islamist reaction to Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism would have targeted Buddhist or nationalist symbols, not Christian and purported ‘foreign’ targets (such as luxury hotels),” he said.  Sahni dismissed as “nonsense” the notion that the know-how to build the type of bombs used in the attack was “easily available on the Internet.”  “While very occasional successes are on record, most attempts to build bombs off information downloaded from the Internet end up in failure, or in people blowing themselves up during the process,” he said.  “Assembling a significant number of bombs, with the success rate witnessed in the April 21 attacks and the levels of lethality demonstrated, would require significant and specialized training, as well as access to the necessary materials. This implies the involvement of an experienced and well-coordinated network.”  There was no prior evidence that an Islamist terrorist network of that nature existed in Sri Lanka, he said.  The South Asia Terrorism Portal has on its records a conservative Islamist group in Sri Lanka called Thawheed Jamaath. Sahni said it “adheres to an exclusionary Islamist ideology, but has no known linkages to terrorism.”  He noted that the group has been involved in desecrating Buddhist sites and hate speech against other faiths.  But, he added, “I would be surprised if it had abruptly acquired the capacities and capabilities to execute such a series of attacks without setting off alarm bells across the intelligence and enforcement apparatus, both within the country and in the international [counter-terrorism] community.”  The U.S.-based SITE intelligence group noted that ISIS established its global network by recruiting from existing groups in target regions – such as al-Shabaab in Somalia, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Boko Haram in West Africa.  Amid signs of a serious intelligence failure after authorities were warned by about a plot to bomb churches but failed to act or liaise across agencies, Sri Lankan officials were on Monday blaming each other, highlighting pre-existing tensions between the prime minister and president.  Hemasiri Fernando, the secretary of the ministry of defense, said that FBI officials have arrived to help investigators. Interpol is also deploying a team.  Of the 290 people killed, government officials say at least 39 were foreigners. They included four U.S. citizens or dual citizens, according to the State Department.  The department lifted its advisory for travel to Sri Lanka to level two (“exercise increased caution”), and warned that terror groups “continue plotting possible attacks” in the country.  It said terrorists could attack “with little or no warning,” and target locations including places of worship, hotels and restaurants, transportation hubs, and shopping areas.  Sri Lanka was previously at level one (“exercise normal precautions”) of the four levels used in department advisories. Level three is “reconsider travel,” and level four is “do not travel.”  The U.S. Embassy in Colombo will remain closed on Tuesday.


fortruss--2019-10-07--‘Great Middle East’ plan – Russia’s Orthodoxy, Sufism and Shi’ism against Globalization

PENTAPOSTAGMA – A clash of two superpowers (Russia-US) for control of the Middle East and North Africa was published in the Turkish press and illuminates “aspects of an” unknown merciless war “that begins in the Black Sea and the Middle East and ends in North Africa.”  So according to the Russian plan for the Middle East-North Africa region, “Israel’s fate will be determined by its role in the US-led Western coalition.”  The corresponding American plan, called BOP, which was canceled in practice, was prepared in the interests of Tel Aviv. However, the balance of power in the region has changed and now is the opportunity for Israel to abandon the Atlantic camp and cling to the Eurasian camp.  Throughout this plan, Moscow is proclaiming itself as the geopolitical guarantor of the Israeli people’s security, securing an international status for Jerusalem as a global inter-religious city.  All eyes on the world community are now focused on the emerging Russia-Shiite-Sufi alliance, which addresses not only the future of the Middle East and the Maghreb countries, but also the fate of the whole new multipolar world (three superpowers of China, USA, Russia).  In fact, Russia’s expansion to traditional Islam / Sufism is not new. Although all these plans make no mention, links can be made between some of the methods used during the 1st and 2nd Chechen Wars in Russia in the turbulent period of the 1990s.  At that time, we initially had a “civil strife” in Chechnya that was “nurtured” by Russian services, between Hamaism and traditional Islam, which led some of the Chechen forces to overthrow and others to cling to to the Russian side (like Kadyrov).  For example, Hoca Ahmed Nuhayev, one of the leading Chechnya leaders who was injured in the conflict in Chechnya’s first war, was subsequently transferred to Moscow for secret talks, despite being sought for crimes against Russia.  Nuhayev was seen as a new “ally” of anti-Wahhabism, a theory completely contrary to the traditional Islamic concept of the Chechens. In the Second Chechen War, Moscow managed to attract Kadyrov to its side, even though he had initially fought against Russia.  In this way, Chechen “enemy forces” were split into two, while the radical Wahhabi sector was isolated and Russian power was quickly restored in Chechnya. In fact, we see that a similar approach is desirable for Russians in the Middle East and North Africa.  According to the report, such an alliance should not be based on rational win-win or other ways of “exploiting” states, but on centuries-old traditional values, following an anti-globalized ideology that will show respect for the religion of the “other”.  Moscow, Ankara and Tehran will return to their traditional roots and become the center of the three spiritual cultures (Orthodox, Sunni and Shiite) and united in their resistance to the West.  In addition to Iran, the reported geopolitical cover by Russia also concerns Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Bahrain and Afghanistan.  The Shiites live today fragmented as a result of centuries-old Western colonial policy. Iran, in the midst of all this, has devised an institutionalized strategy that turns the country into its sacred origin, but ready to revolt against the modern world, the Russian plan says.  The Russian plan also draws attention to the important role that the Moscow-Ankara-Tehran triangle can play. Sufism, not only in Turkey, the Middle East and the Maghreb, but in almost all countries, even if there is a proportion of “Wahhabism, Salafism and Takfirism” among them, is considered to be the dominant form of Islam.  The Russian report states that in other Islamic countries (Egypt, Jordan, Sudan, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc.), except for the areas of Shiites and Wahhabism (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar), and the tradition of mysticism as an ingredient of Islam.  Another center of Sufism is Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons. Pakistan is said to be “stuck” after the US-British war on Afghanistan, and it is projected that the new Eurasian order will be able to resolve the Afghan conflict, according to the Moscow-Islamabad strategic axis. Ankara and Moscow-Tehran which will be completed soon.  The authors of the project believe that the revival of Sufi philosophy can create a common denominator between Sunni (Arab and non-Arab) communities in the Middle East and this may be the key to solving a number of complex problems in the wider region, such as that of achieving mutual understanding between Sunnis, Shiites, and Christians. These problems should include both the Kurdish and the Palestinian problem, the article concludes.  The only question in all this is which plan will eventually prevail and whether the people of the region have been asked what they want, or are they simply executing two projects in parallel and which prevails?


france24--2019-02-03--Central African Republic reaches peace deal with armed groups

FLORENT VERGNES/AFP | A man shows shell casings of bullets fired by the UN peacekeeping force MINUSCA and Central African troops, in PK5 district, in Bangui, on April 9, 2018.  A peace deal has been reached between the Central African Republic government and 14 armed groups in their first-ever direct dialogue, potentially ending years of conflict in the country, the United Nations and African Union announced Saturday.  The impoverished, landlocked nation has been rocked by violence since 2013 when mainly Muslim Selaka rebels ousted then president Francois Bozizé, prompting reprisals from mostly Christian militias and interreligious, intercommunal fighting.  UN peacekeepers were deployed in 2014. Thousands of people have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced in a conflict that has sent two people to the International Criminal Court (ICC).  The deal, the seventh since 2012, was announced on Twitter by the government of President Faustin-Archange Touadera just a day after African Union (AU) and UN-sponsored talks in Khartoum were suspended amid disagreements over amnesty.  "A peace agreement has been reached," said the tweet. "This agreement should be initialled tomorrow (Sunday) and its signing will take place in Bangui in a few days".  "I am determined to work with the president and his government to address the concerns of our brothers who took up arms," said Central African Republic's Cabinet Director Firmin Ngrebada, according to the UN.  On Sunday, the parties will sign a draft of the agreement, which focuses on power-sharing and transitional justice, Sudan's state media reported, citing Sudan's chief negotiator Atta al-Manan. The final deal is expected to be signed on Wednesday. Talks began January 24 in Khartoum.  "This is a great day for Central African Republic and all its people," said the AU commissioner for peace and security, Smail Chergui.  The fighting has carried the high risk of genocide, the UN has warned. The conflict began in 2013 when predominantly Muslim Seleka rebels seized power in the capital, Bangui. Largely Christian anti-Balaka militias fought back. Scores of mosques were burned. Priests and other religious leaders were killed. Many Muslims fled the country after mobs decapitated and dismembered some in the streets.  The conflict has also uprooted more than one million people, the UN said, and had until now shown little sign of abating.  The vicious fighting in a country known more for coups than interreligious violence was so alarming that Pope Francis made a bold visit in 2015, removing his shoes and bowing his head at the Central Mosque in the last remaining Muslim neighbourhood of the capital, Bangui.  "Together we say 'no' to hatred," the pope said.  The violence has never disappeared, intensifying and spreading last year after a period of relative peace as armed groups battled over lands rich in gold, diamonds and uranium.  After more than 40 people were killed in a rebel attack on a displaced persons camp in November, both the leader of the 13,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission and the country's prime minister both acknowledged shortcomings in the response. "I knew that we did not have all the necessary means to protect our people," the prime minister said.  In a grim report last year marking five years of the conflict, the UN children's agency said fighters often target civilians rather than each other, attacking health facilities and schools, mosques and churches and camps for displaced people.  At least half of the more than 640,000 people displaced are children, it said, and thousands are thought to have joined the armed groups, often under pressure.  Last month the chief of Central African Republic's soccer federation appeared at the ICC for the first time since he was arrested last year in France on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Patrice-Edouard Ngaïssona is accused of leading the anti-Balaka for at least a year early in the fighting.  In November 2018 another Central African Republic militia leader and lawmaker, Alfred Yekatom, made his first ICC appearance, accused of crimes including murder, torture and using child soldiers. He allegedly commanded some 3,000 fighters in a predominantly Christian militia in and around the capital early in the fighting. He was arrested last year after firing gunshots in parliament.  So far no Seleka fighters have been publicly targeted by the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda.  As the peace talks began last month, the Norwegian Refugee Council warned of "catastrophe" if no agreement was reached, saying repeated cycles of violence in one of the world's poorest nations had "pushed people’s resistance to breaking point."  A majority of Central African Republic's 2.9 million people urgently need humanitarian support, the group said.  On Thursday, the UN Security Council voted unanimously to extend an arms embargo on Central African Republic for a year but raised the possibility that it could be lifted.


freedombunker--2019-12-12--Trump’s Order Aimed at Fighting Anti-Semitism Is Constitutionally Problematic, but It’s Not Anti-Sem

Trump’s Order Aimed at Fighting Anti-Semitism Is Constitutionally Problematic, but It’s Not Anti-Semitic

When it comes to refuting dubious allegations of anti-Semitism, Donald Trump cannot win, a point dramatically illustrated by the reaction to the executive order he signed yesterday. The order, which is aimed at fighting "anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on university and college campuses," raises serious First Amendment concerns, which I'll get to in a minute. But much of the initial backlash against the order focused on its purported anti-Semitism. That's right: An order targeting anti-Jewish prejudice somehow became yet another example of Trump's anti-Jewish prejudice. On Twitter, the president's reflexive critics described his order as reminiscent of Nazi racial ideology, "fascist," and "as antisemetic [sic] as it gets."  Those comments were based on a New York Times story that erroneously claimed the order "will declare that Judaism may be considered a national origin." That phrase has since been stricken from the article, without any indication of a correction. But the story still says "the order will effectively interpret Judaism as a race or nationality, not just a religion," which is not accurate either.  Here is what the order actually says:  As George Mason University law professor David Bernstein noted yesterday in a Volokh Conspiracy post, that understanding of Title VI is consistent with the policies of the last two administrations. The Justice Department during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations took the position that Title VI "provides protection to Jews, Arab Muslims, Sikhs, and/or members of other religious groups" when "discrimination is based on the group's actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics, rather than its members' religious practice."  The Trump administration's take on Title VI is not new, and it does not reflect a belief that Jewishness resides in one's blood or DNA. "The executive order does not mean that the Trump administration is declaring that Jews are, objectively speaking, a nation or a race," Bernstein writes. "Rather, it's that Jews are protected as a nationality or race if discrimination against them is motivated by the perception that they are a nationality or race. Consider Hispanics. Hispanics are not a 'race,' and indeed can be from any racial group. But no one would raise an eyebrow to discover that Hispanics are protected from discrimination based on race or national origin if subject to discrimination by someone who hates Hispanics as a group."  A Times editorial avoids the mischaracterization of Trump's order presented in the paper's news coverage, saying the administration is trying to "combat anti-Semitism on college campuses by using Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to withhold federal money from schools that fail to counter discrimination against Jews." The Times generously concedes that "Mr. Trump's action might seem like a gesture of real concern" but complains that "it does little to target the larger source of violent anti-Semitism." In other words, Trump is targeting left-wing anti-Semites when he should be targeting right-wing anti-Semites.  The Times compounds its churlishness by averring that "the president himself has trafficked in anti-Semitic stereotypes, frequently endorsing crude, negative caricatures about Jews." To back up that claim, the editorial cites a speech that Trump delivered on Saturday at the Israeli American National Council Summit in Hollywood, Florida. After bragging about his efforts to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem at a reasonable cost, Trump said this:  So we [were] going to spend 2 billion, and one of the [proposed expenditures] was going to buy a lousy location. A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You're brutal killers. (Laughter.) Not nice people at all. But you have to vote for me; you have no choice. You're not going to vote for Pocahontas [i.e., Democratic presidential contender Elizabeth Warren], I can tell you that. (Laughter and applause.) You're not going to vote for the wealth tax. "Yeah, let's take 100 percent of your wealth away." No, no. Even if you don't like me; some of you don't. Some of you I don't like at all, actually. (Laughter.) And you're going to be my biggest supporters because you'll be out of business in about 15 minutes, if they get it. So I don't have to spend a lot of time on that.  In case you doubt that the audience actually greeted Trump's remarks with laughter and applause, you can watch the video here. Although the Jews who listened to Trump's speech evidently were not offended by what he said, the Times is offended on their behalf. But that reaction hinges on an uncharitable interpretation of Trump's comments, colored by the presumption that he "traffick[s] in anti-Semitic stereotypes, frequently endorsing crude, negative caricatures about Jews." Trump may or may not be right that the rich developers who heard his speech will vote their pocketbooks next November (regardless of how they feel about him), but that suggestion is hardly proof of anti-Jewish bias.  The real problem with Trump's executive order is not that it incorporates a Nazi-esque definition of Jewishness, or that the president's sincerity is questionable in light of things he has said that the New York Times editorial board considers anti-Semitic. The real problem (one the Times also notes) is the order's potential impact on freedom of speech.  The order says federal agencies enforcing Title VI should "consider…the non-legally binding working definition of anti-Semitism" adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). That definition, which is also used by the State Department, cites "contemporary examples of anti-Semitism" that include "drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis," "blaming Israel for all inter-religious or political tensions," "applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation," "focusing on Israel only for peace or human rights investigations," and "denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination" or "denying Israel the right to exist."  These positions strike many Jews (including me) as grossly unfair, but they are not necessarily motivated by anti-Semitism, let alone synonymous with it. They raise important questions about the justice of Israeli policies, the sources of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, collective vs. individual rights, and the legitimacy of nation-states. A college campus is precisely the sort of place where issues like these should be hashed out. But if allowing students, faculty members, and outside speakers to express vehemently anti-Israel views can be construed as a Title VI violation, and therefore a threat to federal funding, universities may be inclined to err on the side of censorship. That possibility is not far-fetched, since discrimination can include a "hostile environment" that interferes with a student's education, and a hostile environment can be created by things other people say.  The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which is committed to defending freedom of speech for people across the political spectrum, notes that the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism "may apply to core political speech protected by the First Amendment." FIRE rightly worries that the executive order's "ambiguous directive and fundamental reliance on the IHRA definition and its examples will cause institutions to investigate and censor protected speech on their campuses."  There are legitimate reasons to be concerned about Trump's executive order, but they have nothing to do with his purported anti-Semitism or any other special characteristic of this particular president, his party, or his administration. To the contrary, the order reflects a bipartisan tendency to battle bigotry by suppressing controversial speech.