Önder Özar Diplomasi Sevgisi: July 2019

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

junk food industry in developing nations-Let them eat junk

Wednesday, July 31, 2019 - 8:15am

Let Them Eat Junk

Snack and Soda Companies Seek Political Cover in the Developing World

Eduardo J. Gómez

EDUARDO J. GÓMEZ is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Development at King’s College London. He is completing a book about the political influence of the junk food industry in developing nations.

In the United States and Europe, junk food sales have precipitously declined [1] since the late 1990s. Analysts have put the change up to greater health consciousness, increasing labor costs, decreasing purchasing power among the poor [2], new tastes among millennials [3], and the rise of “fast casual [4]” dining options, among other market shifts. For their part, the soda and snack food companies, such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Nestlé, have turned to emerging markets to secure profits. And they are doing everything they can to keep their new markets pliable.

The soda and snack food industries are not just investing in franchises and vending machines in countries such as Mexico, Brazil, and India. They are also building political and social alliances that can help them deflect political opposition, duck public scrutiny, and avoid stiff regulations on the sale of their products.

Companies such as Coca-Cola and Nestlé have worked closely with health-care officials in Mexico to create innovative public health programs, for example, with a focus on avoiding obesity and type 2 diabetes. They have also contributed to anti-poverty and economic development initiatives that help particular politicians deepen their bases of political support. In some cases, the companies have reached out directly to communities. Nestlé won favor among the poor in Brazil by offering a generous employment program. Coca-Cola has underwritten community sports and health-care initiatives in Mexico, making itself a part of the local culture.

The alliances that the snack food and soda industries cultivate today will have grave policy consequences in the future. Politicians who have benefited from the companies’ largesse will be hard pressed to stiffen regulations limiting the marketing and sale of junk food products. And such limits are critical at a time when obesity and type 2 diabetes are on the rise among children and the poor in countries such as Mexico and Brazil.

STRIKING OUT FOR NEW TERRITORY

Just as the junk food industry has taken a nose dive in the industrialized West, soda and snack food sales have burgeoned in emerging markets [5]. Snack food sales increased by 92% in developing nations in 2002, while soda sales recently quadrupled [6].

There is much to attract the big junk food companies to these emerging market countries. Middle-class [7] consumers are on the rise, and in many cases, even the poor have more to spend thanks to anti-poverty programs. The Internet has raised global brand awareness, allowing foreign companies to quickly and easily gain market share. Snack and soda companies have taken advantage of these trends to open franchises, sell vending [8] machines, and aggressively advertise their products.

They have also apparently determined that they will do all they can to preempt the sort of regulatory and cultural backlash that interfered with their performance in Europe and the United States. To this end, they seek to shape the political and social landscape to their advantage.

Mexico has become a particularly important staging ground for this new mode of business. There, Coca-Cola has built a strong network of supporters within government, ranging from presidents to senior health-care officials. PepsiCo went so far in 2007 as to work with the country’s Secretariat of Public Education to create a school exercise program, Vive Saludable Escuela, which won PepsiCo political favor and burnished its public image. And Nestlé locked in the support of former President Enrique Peña Nieto by providing prepackaged biscuits for his government’s anti-hunger program.

The junk food industry has invested not only in Mexico’s politics but also in its society, with the objective of fending off public criticism and driving sales. Coca-Cola has sponsored sporting events and joined other companies in providing lucrative grants to academic researchers and nongovernmental organizations. Through the Mexican Diabetes Federation, a nongovernmental organization, the soda company has organized prestigious presentations at which scientists emphasize the importance of physical exercise over improved nutrition. At a time when Mexico is battling a major obesity problem, with obesity rates climbing [9] from 10 to 35 percent from 1980 to 2012, the junk food industry has a stake in public opinion on matters of nutrition and health.

A similar dynamic prevails in Brazil, where Nestlé is a particularly powerful player. During the presidential administration of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, the Swiss snack company cozied up to and influenced members [10] of Congress, while helping to advance Lula’s anti-hunger program, Zero Fome, by supplying various foods to the poor [11]. In exchange, Lula showered Nestlé with praise, awarding the company the government’s first Zero Hunger Partnership Certificate and helping it open a new factory in the state of Bahia in 2007 [12]. For Nestlé, investing in the poor was not only a political win but a means of safeguarding the company’s public image, deflecting criticism, and ensuring sales. The company created its own employment program for the poor, called Nestlé AteVc, which offered decent salaries during a recession in 2011, when unemployment was particularly high.

Like Mexico, Brazil has seen a recent rise in obesity [13], with rates estimated to have risen from 15 percent to 18 percent between 2010 and 2014, due in large part to insufficient physical exercise, poor dietary choices, and greater access to junk food. And as in Mexico, in Brazil, soda and fast food companies have organized national conferences and financed research emphasizing individual responsibility and exercise over nutrition.

These companies have made strong political inroads in India, where Nestlé has a partnership with the national Food Safety and Standards Authority (FSSA) to train food regulators [14]. Coca-Cola works with local Indian governments to provide much-needed health-care services [15] (the company won Delhi’s prestigious Bhagidari Award as a result in 2009). And Coca-Cola and PepsiCo agreed to purchase more fruit from Indian farmers in order to support Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Made in India campaign, the objective of which is to create an independent, prosperous agricultural sector [16]. PepsiCo’s former CEO Indra Nooyi has lent public support to Modi’s efforts to revive India’s flagging agricultural sector.

CONSEQUENTIAL ALLIANCES

As the rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes rise in middle-income countries, the junk food industry’s political and social investments will complicate—and perhaps even reverse—these governments’ willingness to introduce stiffer regulatory policies.

In Mexico just in May, legal efforts to improve the clarity and accuracy of food labels came before the Supreme Court. The court ruled that current labels were sufficiently clear [17], notwithstanding vehement protests to the contrary from nutrition organizations and academic researchers. The Supreme Court’s decision aligns with the preferences of the industry to leave food labels as they are.

In Brazil, junk food companies have succeeded in convincing politicians to allow them to regulate the marketing and sale of their own products. The powerful Brazilian Association of Food and Beverage, a junk food lobbying group, has been instrumental in securing this arrangement, which is then overseen by a government-supported organization called the Council of Self-Regulatory Policy [18]. Thus Brazil’s congress has never aggressively regulated the junk food industry’s marketing and sales, nor has it seriously broached the issue of a soda tax [19].

Finally, in India, the Modi government perceives companies such as Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo as vital to agricultural development. Delhi therefore has little incentive to effectively limit the marketing and sale of these companies’ products. In fact, Modi’s mandate that all flavored sodas include two percent locally produced fruit [20] ensures that what profits the soda companies also serves the prime minister’s political and economic agenda. The Modi government is considering imposing a junk food “sin tax,” but it fears a backlash [21] from the industry too much to have yet introduced more aggressive marketing and sales regulations.

Mexico, Brazil, and India’s governments have done a commendable job of recognizing the need to improve public health. But for efforts to that end to remain vigorous and independent, the governments will have to limit the junk food industry’s relationship with government and civil society. Such limits are at least as important—if not more so—as introducing “sin” taxes and altering consumer habits. Taking politics seriously means limiting the junk food industry’s interference.

Brazil's Massive Crime Against Humanity

Brazil’s Massive Crime Against Humanity
By Paul Craig Roberts

July 30, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  The corrupt Brazilian government installed by Washington has decided to destroy the Amazon Rain Forest.  This will adversely affect the Earth’s climate by eliminating a massive carbon sink.
The beneficiaries of the destruction of the rain forest are the timber loggers who are buddies with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, environmental minister Ricardo Salles, and farming lobbyist Tereza Cristina Dias.

One might have thought that the build-up of CO2 and the impact of carbon emissions in raising the temperature of Earth would result in more careful and responsible policies than one that destroys a unique ecological habitat that stabilizes the Earth’s climate. For no other reason than to maximize profits for timber loggers, the Amazon Rain Forest is to be destroyed. This is unregulated international gangster capitalism at work.  Destroy the planet for everyone else so that a handful of gangsters can acquire fortunes.
We cannot expect any intelligence in a government where Dias dismisses global warming as “an international Marxist plot.” Dias sounds like a parrot for the anti-global warming think tanks sponsored by the carbon energy lobby. Anything that would constrain short-run profits regardless of their long-run costs is dismissed as a hoax or a communist plot.

President Lula de Silva and his successor Dilma Rousseff attempted to run Brazil in the interests of a broader segment of the population than the robber-baron capitalists. In its unbridled form, capitalism is an exploitative mechanism that permits a few people to grab large profits in the near term by imposing massive external costs on the broader society and the environment.  The more responsible policies of Lula and Rousseff enraged the Brazilian robber barons and their backers in Washington.  Using the capitalist controlled press, Brazil’s gangster capitalists demonized Lula and Rousseff. They were accused of money laundering and “passive corruption.”  The most corrupt elements on the political scene framed them up on false charges. Lula was imprisoned and Rousseff was impeached and removed from office, thus turning the country back over to Washington and the corrupt Brazilian capitalists. The idiot Brazilian population accepted this.  The fools believed their enemies.

Currently, the rain forest is being destroyed at the rate of 3 football fields per minute.  The rain forest has already lost 17 percent of its tree cover.  Scientists report that when deforestation reaches 20 to 25 percent the rain forest converts to savanna and loses its ability to absorb carbon.  But the concerns expressed at Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research are not as important to Bolsonaro and his cronies as the profits temporarily gained by destroying the rain forest along with the many species dependant on the habitat of the rain forest.

The policies for which a small handful of Brazilian capitalist gangsters, backed by Washington, are responsible will have massive effects and impose massive costs on the rest of mankind.  More melting of ice and release of methane, rising and more acidic oceans, drought, water stress, more intense storms all of which affect food production. The extinction rates of species increase. The external costs are many and massive. The profits of the capitalists from plundering the Amazon rain forest will be exceeded a billion times over by the external costs imposed on the rest of the world by a handful of Brazilian political gangsters.

What is happening right now in Brazil is a massive crime against humanity.  It is such a massive crime that the countries on Earth should unite and give the corrupt gangster Brazilian government an ultimatum:  Stop the deforestation of the Amazon Rain Forest or be invaded and put on trial for crimes against humanity. There is no greater crime than to make the Earth uninhabitable. There is no better case for war than to protect the global climate and life on earth.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order. Donate and support Dr, Roberts Work.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.

Greece : suicide or murder?

Greece – Suicide or Murder?
By Peter Koenig

July 30, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - Pundits from the left, from the right and from the center cannot stop reporting about Greece’s misery. And rightly so. Because Greece, the vast majority of her people live in deep economic hardship. No hope. Unemployment is officially at 18%, with the real figure closer to 25% or 30%; pensions have been reduced about ten times since Syriza – the Socialist Party – took power in 2015 and loaded the country with debt and austerity. In the domain of public services, everything that has any value has been privatized and sold to foreign corporations, oligarchs, or, naturally – banks. Hospitals, schools, public transportation – even some beaches – have been privatized and made unaffordable for the common people.

While the pundits – always more or less the same – keep lamenting about the Greek conditions in one form or another, none of them dares offer the only solution that could have rescued Greece (and still could) – exiting the euro zone; return to their local currency and start rebuilding Greece with a local economy, built on local currency with local public banking and with a sovereign Greek central bank deciding the monetary policy that best suits Greece, and especially Greece’s recovery program. – Why not? Why do they not talk about this obvious solution? Would they be censured in Greece, because the Greek oligarchy controls the media – as oligarchs do around the (western part of the) globe?

Instead, foreign imposed (troika: IMF, European Central Bank – ECB – and European Commission – EC; the latter mainly pushed by German and French banks – and the Rothschild clan) austerity programs have literally put a halt on imports of affordable medication, like for cancer treatments and other potentially lethal illnesses. So, common people get no longer treatment. They die like flies; a horrible expression to be used for human beings. But that’s what it comes down to for people who simply do not get the treatment they humanely deserve and would have gotten under the rights of the Greek Constitution, but do simply not get treated because they can no longer afford medication and services from privatized health services. That is the sad but true story.
As a consequence, the suicide rate is up, due to foreign imposed (but Greek government accepted) debt and austerity, annihilating hope for terminally ill patients, as well as for pensioners whose pensions do no longer allow them to live a decent life – and especially there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

Now, these same pundits add a little air of optimism to their reporting, as the rightwing New Democracy Party (ND Party) won with what they call a ‘landslide’ victory on the 7 July 2019 elections; gathering 39.6% of the votes, against only 31.53 for Syriza, the so-called socialist party, led by outgoing Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who represents a tragedy that has allowed Greece to be plunged into this hopeless desolation. The ND won an absolute majority with 158 seats in the 300-member Greek parliament. Therefore, no coalition needed, no concessions required,

The new Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis (51), son of a former PM of the same party, in his victory speech on the evening of 7 July, vowed that Greece will “proudly” enter a post-bailout era of “jobs, security and growth”. He added that “a painful cycle has closed” and that Greece would “proudly raise its head again” on his watch.
We don’t know what this means for the average Greek citizen living a life of despair. What the “left” was unable to do – stopping the foreign imposed (but Greek accepted) bleeding of Greece; the strangulation of their country – will the right be able to reverse that trend? Does the right want to reverse that trend? – Does the ND want to reverse privatization, buy back airports from Germany, water supply from the EU managed “Superfund”, and repurchase the roads from foreign concessionaires, or nationalize hospitals that were sold for a pittance and – especially – get out from austerity to allow importing crucial medication to salvage the sick and dying Greek, those who currently cannot afford treatment of their cancers and other potentially deadly diseases?

That would indeed be a step towards PM Mitsotakis’ promise to end the “painful cycle” of austerity, with import of crucial medication made affordable to those in dire need, with job creation and job security – and much more – with eventually a renewed Greek pride – and Greek sovereignty. The latter would mean – finally – it’s never too late – exit the euro zone. But, that’s an illusion – a pipe-dream. Albeit – it could become a vision.
If the ND is the party of the oligarchs, the Greek oligarchs that is, those Greek who have placed literally billons of euros outside their country in (still) secret bank accounts in Switzerland, France, Lichtenstein, Luxemburg and elsewhere, including the Cayman islands and other Caribbean tax havens – hidden not only from the Greek fiscal authorities, but also impeding that these funds could, crucially, be used for investments at home, for job creation, for creation of added value in Greece – if the ND is the party of the oligarchs, they are unlikely to make the dream of the vast majority of Greek people come true.

Worse even, these Greek oligarch-billionaires call the shots in Greece – not the people, not those who according to Greek tradition and according to the Greek invention, called “democracy” (Delphi, some 2500 years ago) have democratically elected Syriza and have democratically voted against the austerity packages in July 2015. Now, that they are officially in power, they are unlikely to change their greed-driven behavior and act in favor of the Greek people. – Or will they?
Because, if they do, it may eventually also benefit them, the ND Party and its adherents – a Greece that functions like a country, with happy, healthy and content people, is a Greece that retains the worldwide esteem and respect she deserves – and will by association develop an economy that can and will compete and trade around the world, a Greece that is an equal to others, as a sovereign nation. – A dream can become a reality – it just takes visionaries.

Back to today’s reality. The Greek Bailout Referendum of July 5, 2015, was overwhelmingly rejected with 61% ‘no’ against 39% ‘yes’, meaning that almost two thirds of the Greek people would have preferred the consequences of rejecting the bailout, euphemistically called “rescue packages”, namely exiting the euro zone, and possible, but not necessarily, the European Union.
Despite the overwhelming, democratic rejection by the people, the Tsipras government reached an agreement on 13 July 2015 – only 8 days after the vote against the bailout – with the European authorities for a three-year bailout with even harsher austerity conditions than the ones rejected by voters. What went on is anybody’s guess. It looks pretty obvious, though, that “foul play” was the name of the game – which could mean anything from outright and serious (life) threats to blackmail, if Tsipras would not play the game – and this to the detriment of the people.

President Tsipras’ betrayal of the people resulted in three bailout packages since 2010 and up to end 2018, in the amount of about €310 billion (US$ 360 billion). Compare this to Hong Kong’s economy of US$ 340 billion in 2017. In that same period the Greek GDP has declined from about US$ 300 billion (€ 270 billion) in 2010 to US$ 218 billion (€ 196 billion), a reduction of 27%, hitting the middle- and lower-class people by far the hardest. This is called a rescue.
The democracy fiasco of July 2015 prompted Tsipras to call for snap elections in September 2015, hélas – he won, with a narrow margin and one of the lowest election turnouts ever in Greek postwar history; but, yes, he ‘won’. How much of it was manipulated – by now Cambridge Analytica has become a household word – so he could finish the job for the troika and the German and French banks, is pure speculation.
Today, the ND has an absolute majority in Parliament, plus the ND could ally with a number of smaller and conservative parties to pursue a “people’s dream” line policy. But they may do the opposite. Question: How much more juice is there to be sucked out of broken Greece? Of a Greece that cannot care for her people, for her desperate poor and sick, cannot provide her children with a decent education, of a Greece that belongs into the category of bankruptcy? – Yes, bankruptcy, still today, after the IMF and the gnomes of the EU and the ECB predict a moderate growth rate of some 2%? – But 2% that go to whom? – Not to the people, to be sure, but to the creditors of the €310 billion.

Already in 2011, the British Lancet stated “the Greek Ministry of Health reported that the annual suicide rate has increased by 40%”, presumably since the (imposed) crisis that started in 2008. From this date forward the suicide rate must have skyrocketed, as the overall living conditions worsened exponentially. However, precise figures can no longer be easily found.
The question remains: Is the Greek population dying increasingly from diseases that could be cured, but aren’t due to austerity- and privatization-related lack of medication and health services – and of suicide from desperation? – Is Greece committing suicide by continuing accepting austerity and privatization of vital services, instead of liberating herself from the handcuffs of the euro and very likely the stranglehold of the EU? – Or is Greece the victim of sheer murder inflicted by a greed-driven construct of money institutions and oligarchs, who are beyond morals, beyond ethics and beyond any values of humanity? You be the judge.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; TeleSUR; The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! - Essays from the Resistance. Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

First published by the New Eastern Outlook - NEO

New Captain for a Sinking Britain

New Captain for a Sinking Britain

By Eric Margolis

July 30, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - Britain’s new prime minister, Boris Johnson, is being called by many ‘the British Trump.’ It’s an easy comparison, given their quirky, confrontational styles, prominent blond hair, tribal politics and xenophobic policies.
But they are not alike. Johnson is a literate, witty product of Britain’s finest educational institutions, Eton and Oxford, who down-plays his erudition and upper class roots. Trump is just the opposite. But both are consummate entertainers, which is essential in today’s TV-driven politics.

Trump and Johnson are allowed political license to act outrageously and say taboo things that would get other politicians kicked out of office. Last week, in a threat barely noticed by US media, Trump boasted to Pakistan’s leader, Imran Khan, that he could kill ten million people in Afghanistan if he really wanted to and end the 18- year old war there. The lapdog US media barely noticed this genocidal threat by a leader whose grip on reality appears to be weakening.
Boris Johnson’s claim to fame is his ardent support of getting Britain out of the European Union – aka Brexit.

He vows to crash out of the union even without an orderly exit deal to ease the blow to Britain’s economy, which does about half of its export business with the EU.
After Brexit, most British exports to the continent will fall under new EU taxes, duties or tariffs. British businesses are, to no surprise, in a panic. Chaos is expected at British ports. Supplies of agricultural products and auto manufacturing face chaos. All in all, Brexit threatens to throw Britain into a gigantic muddle. But Brits are famous for muddling through the toughest of times. For many pro-Brexit Brits, trade chaos is a price worth paying to escape the EU’s rules on free movement of people, the European Court of Justice, and the `bloody bureaucrats’ in Brussels.
Britons will never be slaves, neither to the French or the EU bureaucrats!
All very jolly. Except that Brexit will transform Britain from a mid-level European power into a lonely, isolated appendage of the United States that takes orders from Donald Trump, a far less stable monarch than occasionally mad king George III.

Brexit will compel Britain to join a lopsided trade pact with the US that will see the further gutting of British industry and farming. Ever weaker British military forces, still one of Europe’s more potent, will become auxiliaries to US forces in America’s endless imperial wars – rather the way Nepal’s Gurkhas have so long served the British Crown.
The unruly Irish are having their revenge on the Brits for centuries of exploitation and violence. No one seems to have an answer to what to do about Ireland’s ‘soft border’ with the UK or the desire of most Irish – and now add the Scots – to remain part of the European Union. Trump-style chanting ‘wall them off’ won’t resolve this thorny problem. Making matters worse, the feeble Conservative hold on Parliament rests on ten Northern Irish members of parliament of the pipsqueak Democratic Unionist Party. If they get their Irish up, the government will fall.

If Britain really abandons the EU, the English language will begin to fade away on the continent, replaced by French and German. Similarly, Britain struggled for three centuries to prevent the French, then the Germans, from dominating Europe. After Brexit – which is due to happen in October – the French and Germans will finally become Europe’s paramount powers. The EU will become a joint Franco-German condominium – unless, of course, Russia joins. Britons will gnash their teeth. Jolly bad show, chaps!

The EU is ardently backed by Europe’s – and Britain’s – youth who bitterly oppose Brexit’s old duffers, rustics and romantics who believe Brittania still rules the waves. The same type of out of touch oldsters who back Trump in the US. Many of these obsolescent British may be content to become members of a new US colony and take orders from the Great White Father in Washington.
But not the more modern British. Except, of course, for political opportunists, like Johnson and his cabinet. Now is the time for Britain’s opposition Labour Party to go into battle. It has been kept on the defensive by false charges of anti-Semitism. Like US candidate Bernie Sanders, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, has been sabotaged by his own party’s big money potentates.

Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times, Nation – Pakistan, Hurriyet, – Turkey, Sun Times Malaysia and other news sites in Asia. ericmargolis.com

Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2019

The Real Reason So Many Republicans Love Israel? Their Own White Supremacy

By Peter Beinart

July 30, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -

If you listened earlier this month to Republican responses to Donald Trump’s call for Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley to “go back” to the “places from which they came,” you noticed something odd. Trump’s defenders kept mentioning Israel.
“They hate Israel,”replied Lindsey Graham when asked about Trump’s attacks on The Squad. Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin called Omar and Tlaib “anti-Israel.” Trump himself responded to the controversy by declaring that Omar “hates Israel.”

This is strange. As reprehensible as it is to demand that an American politician leave America for allegedly expressing insufficient patriotism, the demand is at least familiar.
“America, love it or leave it,” has been a conservative slogan since the 1960s. What’s virtually unprecedented is demanding that an American politician leave America because they’ve expressed insufficient devotion to a foreign country. Can anyone imagine Republicans defending Trump’s calls for expelling Omar and company by accusing them of hating Canada, India or Japan?
Of course not. The reason is that Republicans no longer talk about Israel like it’s a foreign country. They conflate love of Israel with love of America because they see Israel as a model for what they want America to be: An ethnic democracy.

In the press, commentators often overlook the right’s affinity for ethnic democracy in favor of other explanations for GOP support of Israel. But those other explanations are at best incomplete. One common argument is that Republicans love Israel because of its commitment to democracy and human rights.Israel is a Jewish state. Trump and many of his allies want America to be a white, Judeo-Christian state. Israel, despite its free elections and parliamentary institutions, structurally privileges one ethnic and religious group over others. That’s what many Republicans want here.

But in the Trump era, democracy and human rights are not Republican foreign policy priorities. It’s not just Trump who admires authoritarian leaders. Rank and file Republicans do too. They hold a more favorable view than Democrats of both Russia and Saudi Arabia. And when The Economist and YouGov askedAmericans last December whether “Human rights abuses should be a principal concern in our dealings with countries,” Republicans were only half as likely as Democrats to say yes.
Most Republicans also want Israel to rule the West Bank, where Palestinians live under military law without the right to vote for the government that controls their lives. If you support Israel’s undemocratic control of the West Bank, democracy is probably not the reason you support Israel.

Another common argument for why Republicans love Israel concerns theology. Journalists often note that many evangelical Christians — most of whom vote Republican — see Jewish control of the holy land as necessary to bring about the second coming of Jesus. But it’s easy to exaggerate religion’s role. According to a 2019 Gallup study, “even the least religious Republicans are significantly more positive about Israel than the most religious Democrats. The impact of religiosity is swamped by the power of partisanship.”

A primary reason for this is race. Many religious Democrats are African American or Latino, and African American and Latino Christians — even African American and Latino evangelical Christians — are far more critical of Israel than their white counterparts. This spring, according to the Pew Research Center, members of historically black churches disapproved of the Israeli government by a margin of 34 points.
Republican support for Israel, in other words, isn’t driven by American Christians as a whole. It’s driven by conservative white Christians, whose political identity sits at the intersection of religion and race. In the Trump era, conservative white Christians have grown increasingly obsessed with preserving America’s religious and racial character, and they see Israel as a country that’s doing just that.

Most Republicans fear a less white, less Christian America. Earlier this year, Pew asked Americans whether it would strengthen or weaken “American customs and values” if whites ceased being the majority. By a margin of 46 points, Republicans said America would become weaker. And if Republicans fear America becoming less white, they also fear it becoming more Muslim. A New America poll last November found that 71 percent of Republicans believe Islam is incompatible with American values and 74 percent, according to an Economist/YouGov survey last June, think Muslims should be temporarily banned from entering the United States.

These racial and religious fears form the backbone of Republican opposition to immigration. As Clemson University’s Steven V. Miller has shown, Americans who want less immigration are almost six times more likely to be motivated by racial resentment than by economic anxiety.
So it’s a measure of the power of racial resentment inside the GOP that immigration is now, by far, the issue that Republicans care about most. Last December, when Quinnipiac College asked Americans what Congress should make its top priority, more Republicans answered immigration than all the other choices combined.
In June, when Reuters asked Republicans to name their top political concern, immigration again trounced the second most common answer by a factor of more than three to one.

For Republicans who want to preserve America’s demographic character, Israel — which makes immigrating and gaining citizenship easy for Jews but extremely difficult for non-Jews — represents a model. In her 2016 book, Adios America, which shaped Trump’s immigration rhetoric, Ann Coulter wrote that “Israel says, quite correctly, that changing Israel’s ethnicity would change the idea of Israel. Well, changing America’s ethnicity changes the idea of America too.”
In 2017, in response to a news article about Israel’s plan to deport African migrants, she tweeted, “Netanyahu for President!”

When the New York Times reported in 2018 on Israeli soldiers shooting Palestinians who were marching towards the fence that encloses the Gaza Strip, sheasked, “Can we do that?”

It’s not just Coulter. “Everybody acts like ‘Oh what Trump has said is so amazing,’” exclaimed Mike Huckabee, in defending Trump’s Muslim ban. “It’s not that amazing in Israel. You don’t have open borders to Muslims here.”
Rick Santorum has cited Israel to justify profiling Muslims who come to the United States.
Last December, in a monologue arguing for Trump’s wall on the southern border, Tucker Carlson declared that, “Israelis know how effective walls are.”
Ted Cruz has said, “There is a great deal we can learn on border security from Israel.” And Trump himself has claimed that, “If you really want to find out how effective a wall is, just ask Israel.”
This view isn’t confined to Republican elites. Public opinion surveys suggest a strong correlation between hostility to immigration, hostility to Muslims and support for Israel. When University of Maryland Professor Shibley Telhami, at my request, crunched the data from polling he conducted last fall, he found that Americans who said the United States government should “lean toward the Palestinians” in mediating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict supported making immigration to the US easier by a margin of 60 points.

Americans who said the US should “lean toward Israel,” by contrast, supported making immigration to the United States harder by a margin of 20 points. Similarly, almost 70 percent of respondents who said the US should “lean toward Israel” had an unfavorable of Islam compared with less than 33 percent of respondents who said America should “lean toward the Palestinians.”
But the right’s admiration for Israel’s ethnic democracy extends beyond immigration. Israel doesn’t just maintain Jewish dominance by keeping non-Jews out of the country. It also delegitimizes and limits political participation by the non-Jews under its control.

On Election Day in 2015, Netanyahu warned that, “Arab voters are coming out in droves.” This year, Likud activists placed 1200 hidden cameras in polling stations in Palestinian areas in an effort to intimidate Palestinian citizens of Israel from voting.
Netanyahu’s Likud Party also asked Israel’s election committee to bar a Palestinian party, Ram-Balad, from running for the Knesset on the grounds that it supports terrorism and does not want Israel to be a Jewish state. (Under Israeli law, parties that reject Israel’s existence as a Jewish or a democratic state, or support racism or violence, cannot participate in elections.
Since many Palestinian citizens of Israel don’t want Israel to be a Jewish state, the Israeli right regularly uses this law to challenge their parties’ ability to run. So far, these efforts at barring them have failed in the Israeli Supreme Court.)

These efforts aren’t primarily about race. After all, roughly fifty percent of Israeli Jews hail from North Africa and the Middle East, and thus themselves would not qualify as white by American definitions. Nonetheless, it’s easy to see parallels between the Israeli right’s attempt to limit political participation by Palestinians and the Republican Party’s efforts to impede — or at least delegitimize — political participation by people of color, whether by claiming that Barack Obama was not a United States citizen, by passing laws that make it harder for minorities to vote, or by adding a citizenship question to the census in the hopes that fewer Latinos would then fill it out.

Even Trump’s attack on The Squad echoes an argument that Netanyahu has long employed. In his tweet, Trump argued that the four non-white members of Congress should leave the United States because they hail from “countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.”

The insinuation is that because Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Pressley hail from supposedly uncivilized cultures, they lack the right to participate politically in the United States. That claim has deep roots in American history: It was central to the argument for denying blacks and other non-whites American citizenship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But it has also been central to Netanyahu’s argument for why Palestinians in the West Bank lack the right to citizenship either in Israel or in a state of their own.

In his most important book, A Durable Peace, Netanyahu quotes former British officials as declaring that, “Left to themselves, the Arabs of Palestine would not in a thousand years have taken steps toward the irrigation and electrification of Palestine” and that “The Arab is a poor fighter, though an [sic] adept at looting, sabotage and murder.” The implication is the same as Trump’s: People from uncivilized cultures don’t deserve political rights.

Understanding that Israel serves as a model for the ethnic democracy that many Republicans wish to create in the United States is crucial to understanding the way contemporary Republicans discuss anti-Semitism.

Trump and his defenders have not only called Omar and other members of The Squad anti-Israel, they’ve also called them anti-Semitic. The irony is that Trump has trafficked in exactly the same stereotypes that Omar has.

Omar got in trouble for saying AIPAC’s influence was “all about the Benjamins”; Trump in 2015 told the Republican Jewish Coalition, “You’re not going to support me, because I don’t want your money.”

Omar exacerbated her woes by suggesting that pro-Israel groups “push for allegiance to a foreign country”; speaking to the RJC this April, Trump called Netanyahu “your prime minister.” Of the two, in fact, Trump has the much longer and more egregious history of Jew-baiting. The key to understanding the GOP’s outrage, then, is not what Omar said but who she is: A black Muslim immigrant woman.

Since Omar is black and most Jews in contemporary America are considered white, making her the face of anti-Semitism furthers the right’s contention that most discrimination in contemporary America is reverse discrimination: By people of color and Muslims against whites, Christians and Jews.

In addition to calling members of The Squad anti-Semitic, Trump has called them “very Racist,” presumably against whites. This weekend he called African American Congressman Elijah Cummings a “racist” too. On Fox News, Democrats are frequently called “anti-white.”
Republicans also emphasize what Rush Limbaugh has called the “Democrats’ War on Christianity.” Ralph Reed has called hostility to evangelicals “the last acceptable bigotry.” Trump’s Justice Department has made battling discrimination against Christians a centerpiece of its work, even as it defends his Muslim travel ban.

These arguments shape public opinion. According to an April 2019 Pew Research poll, Republicans are more likely to say that whites face “a lot” of discrimination than do blacks. They’re more likely to say Christians face “a lot” of discrimination than do Muslims. This belief that reverse discrimination is the dominant form of discrimination in contemporary America has enormous implications. It allows Republicans to cast their efforts to limit the free speech and political participation of Muslims and people of color not as acts of bigotry but as responses to bigotry.
If boycotting Israel is anti-Semitic, as Trump officials say, then criminalizing Palestinian activism in the US, as many Republicans and some Democrats in Congress have tried to do, is a necessary defense against discrimination.

If Sharia is inherently anti-Semitic and anti-Christian, then passing laws against it — as 14 states have done — doesn’t infringe upon the rights of Muslims. It protects the rights of Christians and Jews. And if Omar — the first Muslim woman ever to sit on the House Foreign Relations Committee — is anti-Semitic, then removing her from that committee, as Vice President Mike Pence has demanded, is simply a way of safeguarding Jews.

People of color are, of course, capable of all kinds of bigotry, including anti-Semitism. But the right’s effort to make Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory and Marc Lamont Hill the face of contemporary American anti-Semitism — despite Trump’s long history of invoking anti-Jewish stereotypes and despite the recent synagogue massacres by white nationalists in Pittsburgh and Poway — constitutes an effort to draw American Jews into the ethnic democracy project.

By calling America a “Judeo-Christian” nation, conservatives offer Jews full inclusion in a national identity that excludes Muslims. It’s an offer some Jews are eager to accept. The Zionist Organization of America’s Mort Klein, for instance, has justified Trump’s ban on admitting Syrian refugees by explaining that, “We’re opposed to bringing in people who have enormous antipathy toward Jews and Israel.”

But to the consternation of many conservatives, most American Jews have spurned the offer and continued voting Democratic, thus allying themselves with the very people of color who Republicans insist threaten them. While most American Jews believe that in a post-Holocaust world it’s important that Israel remain a country with a special obligation to represent and protect Jews, they don’t consider Israel’s ethnic democracy a model for the United States.

Instead, since at least the civil rights movement, American Jews have considered the struggle for equality by America’s most historically oppressed groups integral to their own equality. That continues in the Trump era. By clear majorities, Jews oppose Trump’s immigration policies and hold a favorable view of Muslims.

This helps explain the right’s obsession with George Soros. His high-profile activism on behalf of immigrant and Muslim rights epitomizes American Jewry’s rejection of the right’s invitation to help build a white, Judeo-Christian republic. And it helps explain the strange phenomenon of conservative Christians calling progressive Jews anti-Semitic. If people of color are the real anti-Semites, and limiting their numbers and influence is the way to combat anti-Semitism, then Jews who oppose doing that are complicit in anti-Semitism.

Republican attacks on Omar and her colleagues as anti-Israel and anti-Semitic aren’t ultimately about Israel or Jews. They’re an effort to use Israel and Jews to further the central goal of the Trump-era right: Maintaining white Christian dominance in the face of demographic change.

Rejecting that project may spawn more white nationalist anti-Semitism. The Pittsburgh shooter loathed Jews for supporting the rights of Central American refugees. Ann Coulter earlier this year castigated “Jews who think they’re black.” But most American Jews know in our bones that narrow, exclusive definitions of Americanism only leave us more vulnerable. By contrast, the more America welcomes Somali immigrants and Guatemalan asylum seekers not only into the country but into the political process — the more it truly becomes a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-faith liberal democracy — the safer we will be.

Peter Beinart is a Senior Columnist at The Forward and Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York. He is also a Contributor to The Atlantic and a CNN Political Commentator.

This article was originally published by "The Forward " -