TBR News September 2, 2018
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8
Washington, D.C. September 2, 2018: “The shift in power in the Middle East from a triangular US-Israel-Saudi Arabia one to a Russian-Iranian one is causing frenzied both in Israel and the United States. Iran is more than capable of blocking the Gulf and seriously impacting world oil needs and also, with Russian assistance, has built up a significant anti-aircraft defense system. The US military believes an attack on Iran in force could bring strong and very destructive retaliation from that country but these beliefs do not matter to Israelis who are still pressing for an American attack on Iran. If they get through to Trump and he is convinced a war is necessary, it will be interesting to see the results. If, as it is believed, Iran has nuclear weapons and a delivery system, the allegedly “secret” bunkers installed at Charlotttesville, Virginia will have many distinguished tenants.”
The Table of Contents
- Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 13
- From Criminal Convictions to Ethical Lapses:The Range of Misconduct in Trump’s Orbit
- Declassified docs reveal how Pentagon aimed to nuke USSR and China into oblivion
- The MV Deyanat scenario: What is past is often present
- US Military Presence in Africa: All Over Continent and Still Expanding
- Turkey’s Erdogan says Turkey needs S-400 missile defence systems
- UK ex-chief rabbi warns of Jewish exodus over anti-Semitism
- Separating anti-Semitism from criticism of Israel
- Swedish Exceptionalism Hits a Wall
Donald Trump has said 2291 false things as U.S. president: No. 13 August 8, 2018
by Daniel Dale, Washington Bureau Chief
The Toronto Star, Canada
The Star is keeping track of every false claim U.S. President Donald Trump has made since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Why? Historians say there has never been such a constant liar in the Oval Office. We think dishonesty should be challenged. We think inaccurate information should be corrected
If Trump is a serial liar, why call this a list of “false claims,” not lies? You can read our detailed explanation here. The short answer is that we can’t be sure that each and every one was intentional. In some cases, he may have been confused or ignorant. What we know, objectively, is that he was not teling the truth.
Last updated: Aug 8, 2018
- May 5, 2017
“Right now, America’s businesses are taxed at the single highest rate in the developed world. This is a self-inflicted economic wound that sends jobs to other countries. And believe me, before I got here, they were fleeing fast, but we’ve stopped it.”
Source: Weekly address
in fact: There is no evidence that companies have stopped sending jobs to other countries during Trump’s presidency.
Trump has repeated this claim 7 times
“We pay the highest taxes anywhere in the world. No country is higher.”
Source: Weekly address
in fact: The U.S. corporate tax rate is among the highest in the world, as Trump correctly said a few sentences later in this address. But it is actually below average when all taxes are included.
Trump has repeated this claim 28 times
“Of course the Australians have better healthcare than we do – everybody does. ObamaCare is dead!”
Source: Twitter
in fact: We allow Trump rhetorical license to call Obamacare “collapsing” and even “exploding,” though experts say neither is true. But it is plainly false to say the law is “dead.” While its marketplaces have problems, they are still functioning and providing insurance to millions; so is its Medicaid expansion.
Trump has repeated this claim 33 times
“Why is it that the Fake News rarely reports Ocare is on its last legs and that insurance companies are fleeing for their lives? It’s dead!”
Source: Twitter
in fact: We allow Trump rhetorical license to call Obamacare “collapsing” and even “exploding,” though experts say neither is true. But it is plainly false to say the law is “dead.” While its marketplaces have problems, they are still functioning and providing insurance to millions; so is its Medicaid expansion.
Trump has repeated this claim 33 times
- May 7, 2017
“Republican Senators will not let the American people down! ObamaCare premiums and deductibles are way up – it was a lie and it is dead!”
Source: Twitter
in fact: We allow Trump rhetorical license to call Obamacare “collapsing” and even “exploding,” though experts say neither is true. But it is plainly false to say the law is “dead.” While its marketplaces have problems, they are still functioning and providing insurance to millions; so is its Medicaid expansion.
Trump has repeated this claim 33 times
- May 10, 2017
“For years, as a pol in Connecticut, (Democratic Sen. Richard) Blumenthal would talk of his great bravery and conquests in Vietnam – except he was never there.”
Source: Twitter
in fact: Here, Trump takes a kernel of truth and turns it into a false claim. He is correct that Blumenthal falsely claimed he had served in Vietnam, when, in fact, Blumenthal had obtained several deferments and eventually served in the Marine Reserve in the U.S. But Blumenthal did not speak of “his great bravery and conquests” in Vietnam, merely of being there.
Trump has repeated this claim 2 times
- May 11, 2017
“You know we’ve gotten billions of dollars more in NATO than hat (sic in transcript) we’re getting. All because of me. I mean it’s not like a bragging thing, I’m just saying. If Hillary Clinton would have gotten in, she wouldn’t even know that we’re getting screwed by everybody. But we have gotten billions of dollars more coming in.”
Source: Interview with Time
in fact: A case can be made that Trump deserves partial credit for some NATO countries boosting their defence spending, but “all because of me” is objectively false. Several NATO countries already planned to increase their spending before Trump took office, and some of them appear to be spending more because of Russia’s recent regional aggression. While European leaders are taking Trump’s demands “very seriously,” it’s “way too early to tell” if there will be a real Trump effect on their spending, Magnus Nordenman, director of the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative, told the publication Government Executive.
“But they said the F-35 program is now straightened out and the costs are way down. They’re down because of me.”
Source: Interview with Time
in fact: Trump was not responsible for these savings: Lockheed Martin had been moving to cut the price well before Trump was elected, multiple aviation and defence experts say. Just a week after Trump’s election, the head of the F-35 program announced a reduction of 6 to 7 per cent — in the $600 million to $700 million range. “Trump’s claimed $600 million cut is right in the ballpark of what the price reduction was going to be all along,” wrote Popular Mechanics. “Bottom line: Trump appears to be taking credit for years of work by the Pentagon and Lockheed,” Aviation Week reported, per the Washington Post.
Trump has repeated this claim 13 times
“I don’t watch CNN.”
Source: Interview with Time
in fact: All available evidence suggests that Trump is at least an occasional CNN viewer. Though he has repeatedly claimed since May 2016 that he was boycotting the network, he has frequently commented on its content within a week of doing so — sometimes live, during a show. In this interview, he followed his claim to not watch CNN with a detailed critique of hosts Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo, plus a review of panel shows on which ally Jeffrey Lord tries to defend him.
Trump has repeated this claim 2 times
“When I did (Stephen Colbert’s) show, which by the way was very highly rated. It was high — highest rating. The highest rating he’s ever had.”
Source: Interview with Time
in fact: His episode did not give Colbert his highest rating. Colbert’s first episode drew 6.6 million viewers, compared to 4.6 million for the Trump show.
“The other thing is the Russians did not affect the vote. And everybody seems to think that.”
Source: Interview with NBC’s Lester Holt
in fact: Many people — including much of the Democratic Party — do not agree. While the true impact of the hacking is impossible to prove either way, it is inaccurate to say there is a consensus view that it was inconsequential.
“The Electoral College is almost impossible for a Republican to win. Very hard. Because you start off at such a disadvantage.”
Source: Interview with NBC’s Lester Holt
in fact: It is, of course, not “almost impossible” for a Republican to win the presidency. Six of the last nine presidents have been Republicans — and since the 1870s, every elected Republican president except for George W. Bush and Richard Nixon (in 1968) has won a bigger share of the Electoral College than Trump did.
Trump has repeated this claim 17 times
“Part of the problem with NAFTA is that Mexico’s a VAT. So Mexico is paying almost…we pay 17 per cent. So we are now down 17 per cent, going into Mexico when we trade. So that’s like, you have a football team and every time they play a game, they’re down, you know, 25 points. How can you possibly do good?”
Source: Interview with The Economist
in fact: This is so inaccurate as to be incomprehensible. As economists have pointed out since Trump began making this claim during his campaign, Trump is wrong to describe Mexico’s value added tax as a trade disadvantage. Unlike a tariff that applies only to goods imported from abroad, Mexico’s VAT is applied on all goods consumed in Mexico — whether they are made in Mexico or made in the U.S.
“Number two, they’re actually not a currency (manipulator). You know, since I’ve been talking about currency manipulation with respect to them and other countries, they stopped.”
Source: Interview with The Economist
in fact: Trump’s timeline is incorrect: China stopped devaluing its currency in 2014, a year before he launched his campaign and began claiming that they were a “champion” of currency devaluation.
Trump has repeated this claim 3 times
“Of course by China standards, it’s very short (laughter), you know when I’m with (Xi Jinping), because he’s great, when I’m with him, he’s a great guy. He was telling me, you know they go back 8,000 years, we have 1776 is like modern history.”
Source: Interview with The Economist
in fact: Chinese officials always claim that China has 5,000 years of history, not 8,000 years.
Trump has repeated this claim 2 times
“Obamacare is dead, just so we understand. Obamacare is absolutely dead…there is no Obamacare, it’s dead.”
Source: Interview with The Economist
in fact: We allow Trump rhetorical license to call Obamacare “collapsing” and even “exploding,” though experts say neither is true. But it is plainly false to say the law is “dead.” While its marketplaces have problems, they are still functioning and providing insurance to millions; so is its Medicaid expansion.
Trump has repeated this claim 33 times
“I don’t know who the people are that would put us into a NAFTA, which was so one-sided. Both from the Canada standpoint and from the Mexico standpoint. So one-sided. Wilbur (Ross, the secretary of commerce) will tell you that, you know, like, at the court in Canada, we always lose.”
Source: Interview with The Economist
in fact: Trump is wrong to say that NAFTA disputes are decided at a “court in Canada.” The agreement includes a special arbitration process separate from the domestic courts of either Canada or the U.S.
“Have you heard that expression (prime the pump) used before? Because I haven’t heard it. I mean, I just…I came up with it a couple of days ago and I thought it was good.”
Source: Interview with The Economist
in fact: Trump did not invent this expression, of course. The phrase “prime the pump” has been used in the context of government expenditures since at least 1933, the Merriam-Webster dictionary said on Twitter. What’s more, Trump himself used the phrase in December.
“(The U.S.) has about a $15 billion trade deficit with Canada.”
Source: Interview with The Economist
in fact: According to the website of the U.S.’s own Trade Representative: “The U.S. goods and services trade surplus with Canada was $12.5 billion in 2016.” Even when only counting trade in goods, it is a $12 billion deficit, not $15 billion.
Trump has repeated this claim 15 times
“We’re the highest-taxed nation in the world.”
Source: Interview with The Economist
in fact: The U.S. corporate tax rate is among the highest in the world, as Trump correctly said a few sentences later in this address. But it is actually below average when all taxes are included.
Trump has repeated this claim 28 times
From Criminal Convictions to Ethical Lapses:The Range of Misconduct in Trump’s Orbit
September 1, 2018
by Larry Buchanan and Karen Yourish
The New York Times
Since President Trump’s inauguration, numerous campaign and administration officials have been convicted of or pleaded guilty to crimes. Others were found to have violated federal ethics rules, or were forced to resign over security clearance issues. The criminal charges were all connected to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.
Criminal Charges
- Michael D. Cohen, Trump’s former longtime personal lawyer
Pleaded guilty to tax evasion, bank fraud and violating campaign finance laws by paying off two women who said they had had affairs with Mr. Trump in exchange for their silence. Mr. Cohen’s charges stemmed from evidence originally found by the special counsel’s inquiry
- Paul J. Manafort, Former Trump campaign chairman
Convicted of financial fraud related to a scheme in which he lobbied for a pro-Russia party in Ukraine and hid proceeds in foreign bank accounts.
Faces seven other charges, including obstruction of justice, failure to register as a foreign agent and conspiracy to launder money.
- George Papadopoulos, 2016 Trump campaign foreign policy adviser
Pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I.
- Rick Gates, Former Trump deputy campaign chairman
Pleaded guilty to charges of money laundering, tax evasion and bank fraud.
- Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser
Pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about conversations he had with Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, during Mr. Trump’s presidential transition.
Officials Who Misspent Taxpayer Dollars or Violated Ethics Rules
Some misconduct forced officials to resign while other offenses were less serious.
- Scott Pruitt- Former Environmental Protection Agency administrator
Resigned under a cloud of ethics scandals, including alleged spending abuses, cozy relationships with lobbyists and enlisting aides to obtain special favors for him and his family
- Ben Carson- Housing and urban development secretary
Forced to cancel an order for $31,000 in furniture for his office, which was above the limit imposed on cabinet secretaries for redecorating their offices. He blamed his wife and staff for ordering the furniture before finally admitting he was involved in the decision
- David J. Shulkin– Former veterans affairs secretary
Used taxpayer dollars to pay for his wife to go on an official trip to Europe with him, spent a good part of the trip sightseeing and improperly accepted Wimbledon tickets as a gift, according to the Department of Veteran Affairs’s inspector general.
- Wilbur Ross-Commerce secretary
Faulted by the Office of Government Ethics for continuing to maintain investments he was required to divest and entering into new ones.
- Tom Price- Former health and human services secretary
Forced to resign after repeatedly violating government travel rules and wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars by using chartered jets and military aircraft
- Brenda Fitzgerald– Former director of the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention
Resigned after buying shares in a tobacco company one month into her tenure as the nation’s top public health official.
- Nikki R. Haley- American ambassador to the United Nations
Violated the Hatch Act, according to the Office of Special Counsel, by retweeting Mr. Trump’s endorsement of a Republican congressional candidate. The law prohibits federal employees from engaging in government-funded political activity.
White House Staff With Security or Ethics Issues
- Rob Porter– Former White House staff secretary
Forced to resign after domestic abuse accusations
- Dan Scavino Jr.- White House social media director
Violated the Hatch Act, according to the Office of Special Counsel, by posting a political message on a Twitter account that included a photo of him in the White House and identified him as a federal employee
- Kellyanne Conway- President’s counselor
Violated ethics rules, according to the Office of Government Ethics, by endorsing Ivanka Trump’s product line during an interview to Fox News from the White House briefing room.
- John McEntee-President’s former personal assistant
Violated the Hatch Act twice by advocating for and against candidates in the December 2017 Alabama special election for United States Senate, according to the Office of Special Counsel
Declassified docs reveal how Pentagon aimed to nuke USSR and China into oblivion
September 2, 2018
RT
Plans for a nuclear war devised by the US Army in the 1960s considered decimating the Soviet Union and China by destroying their industrial potential and wiping out the bulk of their populations, newly declassified documents show.
A review of the US general nuclear war plan by the Joint Staff in 1964, which was recently published by George Washington University’s National Security Archive project, shows how the Pentagon studied options “to destroy the USSR and China as viable societies.”
The review, conducted two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, devises the destruction of the Soviet Union “as a viable society” by annihilating 70 percent of its industrial floor space during pre-emptive and retaliatory nuclear strikes.
A similar goal is tweaked for China, given its more agrarian-based economy at the time. According to the plan, the US would wipe out 30 major Chinese cities, killing off 30 percent of the nation’s urban population and halving its industrial capabilities. The successful execution of the large-scale nuclear assault would ensure that China “would no longer be a viable nation,” the review reads.
The Joint Staff had proposed to use the “population loss as the primary yardstick for effectiveness in destroying the enemy society with only collateral attention to industrial damage.” This “alarming” idea meant that, as long as urban workers and managers were killed, the actual damage to industrial targets “might not be as important,” the George Washington University researchers said.
The 1964 plan doesn’t specify the anticipated enemy casualty levels, but – as the researchers note – an earlier estimate from 1961 projected that a US attack would kill 71 percent of the residents in major Soviet urban centers and 53 percent of residents in Chinese ones. Likewise, the 1962 estimate predicted the death of 70 million Soviet citizens during a “no-warning US strike” on military and urban-industrial targets.
The Pentagon continues to rely heavily on nuclear deterrence, and – just like in the 1960s – the US nuclear strategy still regards Russian and Chinese military capabilities as main “challenges” faced by Washington. The latest Nuclear Posture Review, adopted in February, outlined “an unprecedented range and mix of threats” emanating from Beijing and Moscow. The document, which mentions Russia 127 times, cites the modernization of the Russian nuclear arsenal as “troubling” for the US.
The existing nuclear strategy also allows the US to conduct nuclear strikes not only in response to enemies’ nuclear attacks, but also in response to “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks” on the US, its allies and partners.
The newest US Nuclear Posture Review was heavily criticized by Russia and China. Moscow denounced the strategy as “confrontational,” while Beijing described the Pentagon’s approach as an example of “Cold-War mentality.”
The MV Deyanat scenario: What is past is often present
September 2, 2018
by Christian Jürs
This heavily-suppressed story about the Iranian ship laden with highly radioactive waste, bound for the eastern end of the Mediterranean, is typical of how the government sits on inconvenient stories. They imposed a silence on the Forward Base Falcon disaster and have not posted all the U.S.dead in Iraq and now we have the interrupted saga of the MV Iran Deyanat being blocked from all regular media sites. The story, cut off initially by a dismissive article in late September in the ‘Long War Journal,’ a “very friendly government (DoD) entity” was renewed by an article by Brian Harring at the beginning of October. It then got a tremendous reading around the world…in the millions…but never a word in our controlled press, or government-controlled sites like ‘Wikipedia’ basically controlled in toto by the CIA.
On August 21st, 2008, the Iranian MV Iran Deyanat, a 44468 dead weight tonnage carrier that was owned and operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) – a state-owned company run by the Iranian military that was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury for its false manifests and traffic in forbidden nuclear materials, was seized by Somali pirates to be held for their usual ransom.
The ship had set sail from Nanjing, China, July 28, 2008
The Old Nanking Port of Nanjing is the largest inland port in China, yearly reaching 108.59 million tons in 2007. The port area is 98 kilometers (61 mi) in length and has 64 berths including 16 berths for ships with a tonnage of more than 10,000. Nanjing is also the biggest container port along the Yangtze River; in March 2004, the one million container-capacity base, Longtan Containers Port Area opened, further consolidating Nanjing as the leading port in the region.
During her stay at Nanjing, the MV Iran Deyanat was loaded primarily with eight cargo containers, lined with lead and with electronic locks. The 20 ft containers are 8’ wide, and carry a load of 48,060 lb per container. This special container cargo had a total load of 384,480 pounds which consisted of packaged of nuclear waste that originated at the Tianwan 1&2 Atomic plants from Jiangsu Province (built in 2007) Once the radiation death of many of the pirates (16) became known, reporters attempting to contact responsible officials in the Pentagon and the Department of State were told these officials refused to comment on any of the implications of the cargo. The ship’s manifest was falsified but the deadly cargo was supposed to be headed for Rotterdam and an unspecified “German client.”
Much of the story was covered in a London Times article which was subsequently removed from that paper’s archive and the initial story was tailored by the ‘Long War Journal,’ a website with close connections to the Department of Defense and the CIA. It tended to dismiss the entire question of a radioactive cargo and instead, discussed unspecified chemicals.
Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, Commander, US Fifth Fleet based in Bahrain Combined Maritime Forces, said the U.S.-led coalition patrolling the Gulf of Aden “does not have the resources to provide 24-hour protection for the vast number of merchant vessels in the region,”
Russia said it will soon join international efforts to fight piracy off the Somalia coast.However, it will conduct its operations independently, RIA-Novosti news agency reports Navy commander Adm. Vladimir Vysotsky as saying . “We are planning to participate in international efforts to fight piracy off the Somalia coast, but the Russian warships will conduct operations on their own,” he said.
Russian nationals are frequently among the crews of civilian ships hijacked by pirates off the Somalia coast, notes RIA-Novosti.
At the beginning of June, the UN Security Council passed a resolution permitting countries to enter Somalia’s territorial waters to combat “acts of piracy and armed robbery at sea.”
The American media has given no coverage of any kind to this incident,
Russian sources have disclosed that when American Naval personnel, attached to the U.S. Fifth Fleet, finally boarded the MV Iran Deyanat and took all of her crew, including the Iranian captain, into what was called “protective custody,” and while the opened cargo container containing Chinese atomic waste was being sealed and decontaminated, the bridge and the captain’s quarters were thoroughly searched. An “intensive” interrogation of the initially recalcitrant captain plus documents obtained from his safe showed a truly horrifying picture to the trained naval intelligence people.
The Deynant was not the only cargo ship to load containers of radioactive waste at Nanjing; and two others had preceded her July, 2008 visit. The problem is that the captain did not know either the names of the two Iranian -controlled ships nor their destinations.
His destination was the eastern end of the Mediterranean but it now appears that the ship was not intended to be blown up. Instead, the eight cargo containers were to be taken to the Israeli port of Haifa on the Mediterranean. Haifa is the largest of Israel’s three major international seaports, which include the Port of Ashdod, and the Port of Eilat. It has a natural deep water harbor which operates all year long, and serves both passenger and cargo ships. Annually, 22 million tons of goods pass through the port..In 2007, the U.S. DHS’ CBP initiated a joint security agreement with Israel whereby U.S. agents, working with Israel, would develop and install programs to protect the ports from terrorist attacks..
CBP’s Container Security Initiative, (CSI), is a cooperative effort with host country governments to identify and screen high-risk shipments before they leave participating ports. More than 80 percent of all cargo containers destined for U.S. shores originate in or are transshipped through 55 CSI ports in North, South and Central America, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
CSI addresses the threat to border security and global trade posed by the potential for terrorist use of a maritime container to deliver a weapon. CSI proposes a security regime to ensure all containers that pose a potential risk for terrorism are identified and inspected at foreign ports before they are placed on vessels destined for the United States.
The initiative seeks to:
- Identify high-risk containers. CBP uses automated targeting tools to identify containers that pose a potential risk for terrorism, based on advance information and strategic intelligence.
- Prescreen and evaluate containers before they are shipped. Containers are screened as early in the supply chain as possible, generally at the port of departure.
- Use technology to prescreen high-risk containers to ensure that screening can be done rapidly without slowing down the movement of trade. This technology includes large-scale X-ray and gamma ray machines and radiation detection devices.
If a cargo container ship sails from another port that has the U.S. –controlled CBP system, and does not stop at another port enroute, it is able to enter another port equipped with the CBP system and unload its cargo without interference.
Let us say that a mythical ship, the Extreme Venture, picks up a cargo at an approved port and sails off to another port that is also approved. Again, if a country or entity wanting to take a dangerous cargo to the same port, it need only paint out its name, change its radio call signs, and using the methodology instituted by the U.S., enter, for example, the port of Haifa a day in advance of the real Extreme Venture. Having passed all the approved requirements, it can enter the harbor, proceed to an assigned dock, unload its containers onto waiting trucks and sail out of the harbor without let or hindrance. And the next day when the real Extreme Venture arrives, one can expect that the security people would be in a state of frenzy. By that time, the fake Extreme venture has put yet another name on her bows and stern, run up another flag and using shipping information easily available on the internet, become another innocent cargo ship among many.
The American view, known to several other countries, is that as both the United States and Israel have been at the forefront of violent verbal attacks against, and threats of violence to, Iran, they are now the prime targets of what, at the worst case scenario, could amount to a commercial delivery of least 16 containers of deadly radioactive material, mixed with high explosives.
One of the largest cargo container ports in America, Long Beach, California, has DHS inspection teams at work on a round the clock basis but because of the huge volume of traffic, only 2% of the cargo containers can be checked thoroughly at any given time. This means that should another Iranian cargo container, sailing under a false flag and with a false manifest, dock at Long Beach and offload her deadly cargo, there is a 98% chance that it could avoid any kind of inspection, be loaded onto waiting trucks and shipped to destinations all over the United States.
It is not certain if the erratic Trump administration would attack Iran but because they have been in loud support of an even louder and more threatening Israel, our useless President, has, by his loud but empty threats against Iran, put millions of Americans at potential risk of a terrible death by radiation poisoning.
This explains the stunned silence on the subject of the Deyanat affair and the tight blackout imposed on any news of her or the purpose of her cargo of powdered death.
US Military Presence in Africa: All Over Continent and Still Expanding
by Arkady Savitsky
August 30, 2018
Strategic Culture
Around 200,000 US troops are stationed in 177 countries throughout the world. Those forces utilize several hundred military installations. Africa is no exemption. On August 2, Maj. Gen. Roger L. Cloutier took command of US Army Africa, promising to “hit the ground running.”
The US is not waging any wars in Africa but it has a significant presence on the continent. Navy SEALs, Green Berets, and other special ops are currently conducting nearly 100 missions across 20 African countries at any given time, waging secret, limited-scale operations. According to the magazine Vice, US troops are now conducting 3,500 exercises and military engagements throughout Africa per year, an average of 10 per day — an astounding 1,900% increase since the command rolled out 10 years ago. Many activities described as “advise and assist” are actually indistinguishable from combat by any basic definition.
There are currently roughly 7,500 US military personnel, including 1,000 contractors, deployed in Africa. For comparison, that figure was only 6,000 just a year ago. The troops are strung throughout the continent spread across 53 countries. There are 54 countries on the “Dark Continent.” More than 4,000 service members have converged on East Africa. The US troop count in Somalia doubled last year.
When AFRICOM was created there were no plans to establish bases or put boots on the ground. Today, a network of small staging bases or stations have cropped up. According to investigative journalist Nick Turse, “US military bases (including forward operating sites, cooperative security locations, and contingency locations) in Africa number around fifty, at least.” US troops in harm’s way in Algeria, Burundi, Chad, Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan Tunisia, and Uganda qualify for extra pay.
The US African Command (AFRICOM) runs drone surveillance programs, cross-border raids, and intelligence. AFRICOM has claimed responsibility for development, public health, professional and security training, and other humanitarian tasks. Officials from the Departments of State, Homeland Security, Agriculture, Energy, Commerce, and Justice, among other agencies, are involved in AFRICOM activities. Military attachés outnumber diplomats at many embassies across Africa.
Last October, four US soldiers lost their lives in Niger. The vast majority of Americans probably had no idea that the US even had troops participating in combat missions in Africa before the incident took place. One serviceman was reported dead in Somalia in June. The Defense Department is mulling plans to “right-size” special operations missions in Africa and reassign troops to other regions, aligning the efforts with the security priorities defined by the 2018 National Defense Strategy. That document prioritizes great power competition over defeating terrorist groups in remote corners of the globe. Roughly 1,200 special ops troops on missions in Africa are looking at a drawdown. But it has nothing to do with leaving or significantly cutting back. And the right to unilaterally return will be reserved. The infrastructure is being expanded enough to make it capable of accommodating substantial reinforcements. The construction work is in progress. The bases will remain operational and their numbers keep on rising.
A large drone base in Agadez, the largest city in central Niger, is reported to be under construction. The facility will host armed MQ-9 Reaper drones which will finally take flight in 2019. The MQ-9 Reaper has a range of 1,150 miles, allowing it to provide strike support and intelligence-gathering capabilities across West and North Africa from this new base outside of Agadez. It can carry GBU-12 Paveway II bombs. The aircraft features synthetic aperture radar for integrating GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munitions. The armament suite can include four Hellfire air-to-ground anti-armor and anti-personnel missiles. There are an estimated 800 US troops on the ground in Niger, along with one drone base and the base in Agadez that is being built. The Hill called it “the largest US Air Force-led construction project of all time.”
According to Business Insider, “The US military presence here is the second largest in Africa behind the sole permanent US base on the continent, in the tiny Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti.” Four thousand American servicemen are stationed at Camp Lemonnier (the US base located near Djibouti City) — a critical strategic base for the American military because of its port and its proximity to the Middle East.
Officially, the camp is the only US base on the continent or, as AFRICOM calls it, “a forward operating site,” — the others are “cooperative security locations” or “non-enduring contingency locations.” Camp Lemonnier is the hub of a network of American drone bases in Africa that are used for aerial attacks against insurgents in Yemen, Nigeria, and Somalia, as well as for exercising control over the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. In 2014, the US signed a new 20-year lease on the base with the Djiboutian government, and committed over $1.4 billion to modernize and expand the facility in the years to come.
In March, the US and Ghana signed a military agreement outlining the conditions of the US military presence in that nation, including its construction activities. The news was met with protests inside the country.
It should be noted that the drone attacks that are regularly launched in Africa are in violation of US law. The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), adopted after Sept. 11, 2001, states that the president is authorized to use force against the planners of those attacks and those who harbor them. But that act does not apply to the rebel groups operating in Africa.
It’s hard to believe that the US presence will be really diminished, and there is no way to know, as too many aspects of it are shrouded in secrecy with nothing but “leaks” emerging from time to time. It should be noted that the documents obtained by TomDispatch under the United States Freedom of Information Act contradict AFRICOM’s official statements about the scale of US military bases around the world, including 36 AFRICOM bases in 24 African countries that have not been previously disclosed in official reports.A
The US foothold in Africa is strong. It’s almost ubiquitous. Some large sites under construction will provide the US with the ability to host large aircraft and accommodate substantial forces and their hardware. This all prompts the still-unanswered question — “Where does the US have troops in Africa, and why?” One thing is certain — while waging an intensive drone war, the US is building a vast military infrastructure for a large-scale ground war on the continent.
Turkey’s Erdogan says Turkey needs S-400 missile defence systems
August 31, 2018
Reuters
ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkey needs Russian-made S-400 surface-to-air missile batteries and will procure them as soon as possible, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday.
The United States has expressed concern that NATO ally Turkey’s planned deployment of the S-400s could risk the security of some U.S.-made weapons and other technology used by Turkey, including the F-35 jet.
Speaking at a graduation ceremony for military officers, Erdogan said Turkey also needs F-35 fighter jets and will continue to pay its installments to procure them from the United States, but would procure jets elsewhere if the United States halts the delivery of the F-35 fighter jets.
Reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu; Writing by Sarah Dadouch; Editing by David Dolan
UK ex-chief rabbi warns of Jewish exodus over anti-Semitism
The row over anti-Semitism in the UK’s main opposition Labour Party is set to reach fever pitch this week. Britain’s former chief rabbi warns that Jews are increasingly mulling leaving the country over safety fears.
September 2, 2018
DW
Many of the UK’s approximately 300,000 Jewish citizens were questioning whether it was safe to raise children in the country, Britain’s former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said on Sunday.
Sacks, an independent member of the UK parliament’s upper house, said the opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, in particular, must “recant and repent” and said he risked engulfing the country “in the flames of hatred.”
Corbyn has been accused of dragging his feet on unequivocal support for an internationally recognized definition of anti-Semitism and of failing to acknowledge the depth of the problem in the center-left party, which has traditionally been sympathetic towards the plight of the Palestinians in Israel.
“Corbyn poses a danger as prime minister unless he expresses clear remorse for past statements,” Sacks said in a BBC interview.
When people hear the kind of language that has been coming out of Labour, that’s been brought to the surface among Jeremy Corbyn’s earlier speeches, they cannot but feel an existential threat,” Sacks went on.
Corbyn has said anti-semitism has no place in the Labour Party, but it remains uncertain if the party’s executive committee meeting this week to discuss its definition of anti-semitism will endorse the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition in Labour’s new code of conduct.
The IHRA has been signed by 31 countries and is used by many British institutions.
The Labour leadership has argued the definition does not allow for full criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Calls for an apology
Ex-PM and Labour leader Gordon Brown on Sunday called on Labour to endorse the IHRA.
“It is needed now to deal with practical threats, to confront gathering dangers and on-the-ground realities of very real, week-by-week threats to Jewish communities that demand an unequivocal response and unqualified resolve,” Brown told the Jewish Labour Movement conference.
Brown, prime minister between 2007 and 2010, said the issue touched at “the soul of the Labour Party.”
“This is a problem that is real and present and something that’s got to be dealt with now,” he said.
“I want to say to you very clearly today that the IHRA definition of anti-semitism is something we should support unanimously, unequivocally and immediately,” Brown went on. “Jews have been in Britain since 1656, I know of no other occasion in these 362 years when Jews… are asking ‘is this country safe to bring up our children’,” he told the BBC.
Leading Jewish organizations called on Corbyn to end the row last week. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC) and the Community Security Trust (CST) wrote letters to Labour’s general secretary before Labour’s ruling executive committee meets on Tuesday.
Separating anti-Semitism from criticism of Israel
Anti-Semitism continues to be a serious problem. But it is also being instrumentalized and used as a blanket rebuke of anyone who criticizes Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories
July 18, 2018
by Ofer Waldman
DW
“There is neither a standard answer, nor a clear definition,” said Israeli Ambassador to Germany Jeremy Issacharoff when asked by the Berlin Hebrew magazine Spitz this month at what point legitimate criticism of the state of Israel crosses the line and becomes anti-Semitism.
The debate over anti-Semitism is gathering steam in Germany: A few weeks ago the German government appointed a special anti-Semitism commissioner. And, of course, recent attacks on Jewish citizens wearing yarmulkes in public as well as the mobbing of a Jewish student in Berlin have raised questions about the safety of Jews in Germany. Moreover, an old/new form of anti-Semitic expression seems to be reappearing: Criticism of Israeli policy as a thin veil for the hatred of Jews.
But how can one differentiate between justified criticism of Israeli policies and anti-Semitism?
Seemingly objective methods
There is no question that a refusal to acknowledge the state of Israel’s right to exist cannot be justified — that is agitation. But what about harsh criticism of Israel’s policy of occupation in the Palestinian territories, or accusations of human rights violations? Are these automatically anti-Semitic attacks?
Seemingly objective methods designed to assess the anti-Semitic content of Israel-related expressions may use scientific sounding names (such as the 3D Method, which looks for demonization, double standards and delegitimization), but they reflect the one-sided desires of those conducting the searches with conspicuous regularity. Ambassador Issacharoff, on the other hand, says: “I do not contend that every criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. And I think, in the end, legitimate criticism seeks to use legitimate methods in order to express itself constructively.”
Thus, the defining issue remains the political aim and the overall context in which such criticisms are made. Nevertheless, the same question must be posed when accusations of anti-Semitism are immediately leveled against those who criticize Israel. This has become a ritual too often repeated: A person criticizes Israeli policies or an institution hosts a critical discussion on the situation in the occupied territories and accusations of anti-Semitic motives are instantly thrown around.
No doubt, unbearable and extremely one-sided criticism of Israel and its policies is heard all too regularly. But when criticism is well-founded, its confrontation with the 3D or similar methods suggests that those looking to rebut criticism lack sound arguments for doing so. Yet, stifling discussion can only be the ultimo ratio in a democracy. And that is exactly what makes the inflationary use of anti-Semitism accusations so dangerous. More than that, the frequency of the accusation devalues it when it is actually justified. Above all, it sends the message that people should simply avoid topics specific to Israel, or better still, to just stay away from Israel in general. Is that really a desirable aim?
Israel’s anti-Semitic friends
All the while, politicians like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the ruling national-conservative government in Poland are embraced by the Israeli government and absolved of justified accusations of anti-Semitism simply because they present themselves as friends of Israel. It seems that not even the mockery of Europe’s Jewish history is too high a price to pay for the political support of Europe’s worst populists.
On the other hand, the most carefully formulated criticisms of Israel are immediately branded as anti-Semitic when voiced by Muslim citizens — especially in Germany. The accusation serves as a means to call into question the ability of Muslims to integrate into European society — currently the worst of all accusations in the German context. Consequently, the far-right populist Alternative for Germany party uses accusations of anti-Semitism as a justification for its own racist, anti-Muslim policies — things, it seems, could not be more macabre.
Ambassador Issacharoff is right: It is hard to define the difference between justified criticism and anti-Semitic agitation. Nevertheless, one must not avoid the task of doing so — nor lose the courage to make such differentiations.
Swedish Exceptionalism Hits a Wall
August 2, 2018
by Henrietta Horn
The American Interest
The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats are poised to strike a body blow to the country’s image as a progressive model.
The “Swedish model” is popular among many members of the American Left, who see a progressive heaven: a healthy social democracy that combines a strong economy with an all-encompassing welfare state. But that image is dated. Sweden today is angry. In its upcoming September elections, the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats party could well become the largest political force in the country as the political establishment whistles past the graveyard.
The model’s bubble burst in 2015, when Sweden took in more than 160,000 asylum seekers—nearly 2 percent of the population. By November of that year, Green Party leader and Deputy Prime Minister Åsa Romson—the leading advocate of open borders—announced, unable to hold her tears back, that Sweden’s borders would now be closed. There was no more space.
Immigration is only part of the problem: For years, core elements of the state showed evidence of significant dysfunction. After the 180-degree turn in immigration policy, normally deferential Swedish voters suddenly began questioning their political class as never before. Once begun, the public’s willingness to obey their thought police in government and media dissipated rapidly; it was as though a magic spell of some sort had been broken. Since then, Swedes have begun to remake their country’s politics, and there is now no going back. But exactly what lies ahead is not yet clear.
The Rise of Swedish Exceptionalism
To understand how Sweden got to this point requires a short review of Swedish exceptionalism: how Sweden’s elites convinced themselves, and their population, that their country is more moral and righteous than the rest of the world.
Sweden used to be a poor country: In the 1860s, it experienced one of the last great famines in Europe, which among other factors triggered massive emigration to North America. Yet by 1900, Sweden had recovered and began to build what would become an immensely successful economy. An advantageous geographic location and political leaders that kept the country out of two world wars certainly helped. But so did a market economy, a homogenous population where farmers had been free and never experienced feudalism, and an ensuing culture of consensus that rendered society peaceful and orderly. Sweden spawned industries that figured among the world’s leading brands: Which other country of just seven million in 1960 could boast brands like Volvo, Saab, Ericsson, Electrolux, or IKEA, and build its own fighter jets?
The economic boom was remarkable. From the turn of the 20th century to the 1970s, Sweden’s GDP grew by an average of 2.4 percent—compared to less than 2 percent for the United States and Western Europe. Sweden’s GDP per capita soared from the global average in 1850 to double the average by 1930 and triple in 1965.
This export-fueled growth occurred in a peculiar political setting: From 1928 to 1991, Sweden was ruled by a single political party—the Social Democrats—for all but six years. This single-party rule presided over a corporatist state that was extremely friendly to large corporations, while building a cradle-to-grave welfare system on the back of very high levels of taxation. This stifled small business and entrepreneurship, but that mattered little as long as big industry and government provided sufficient employment for the population.
The Social Democratic “Swedish model” became in effect a hegemonic state ideology: a third, allegedly morally superior path in opposition to both Soviet-style communism and American-style capitalism. With this came a public rejection of all political or military alliances with a view to maintaining neutrality in wartime. In private, Sweden’s Social Democrats—who in the interwar period had taken a clear stance against communism—threw their lot in with the West, including far-reaching covert defense planning with NATO. But only a select few in the country’s military and political leadership knew this; the population at large, and the left-wing grassroots, did not.
Following the events of 1968, the Swedish Left became mesmerized by an increasingly intense Left-radical ideology that embraced Third World leftist revolutionaries, and identified the United States, NATO, and Israel as the enemy. During the 1970s, this powerful leftist wave took over much of the Social Democrat Party, the bureaucracy, and even the Lutheran State Church. Cooler heads ensured they never gained influence over finance and the economy, but they became dominant in foreign policy and particularly foreign assistance. During the long tenure of the charismatic Olof Palme, Sweden’s foreign policy became increasingly focused on supporting leftist causes. The growing aid budget largely went toward left-wing regimes, in particular the “African socialism” experiment in Tanzania, for which Sweden provided a whopping US$7 billion. As the late Per Ahlmark has documented, the Swedish Left fawned over all sorts of left-wing demagogues and tyrants. While Palme compared American bombings in Vietnam to Nazi Germany, during the 1970s and 1980s his government championed left-wing “liberation movements” across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. During a visit to Cuba in 1975 Palme hailed Castro’s revolution; in 1984, he was the first European leader to visit Nicaragua’s Sandinistas.
The extent and depth of the ideological zeal that gripped Sweden for a generation can hardly be overstated. In the 1970s, many young leftists like Birgitta Dahl publicly defended Cambodia’s genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, and rejected allegations of their mass murder as “lies.” Dahl rose to become Speaker of Parliament in 1994, without having to recant. Pierre Schori, a life-long advocate for communist dictators like Castro and the Sandinistas, was elevated to Deputy Foreign Minister and then Development Minister. Crucially, whereas Swedish Social Democrats had been ardent supporters of Israel in the past, in the 1970s they turned against Israel and embraced Yasser Arafat long before he publicly renounced terrorism.
The end of the Cold War only temporarily slowed this left-wing juggernaut. The Swedish Left quickly reinvented itself by embracing the postmodern causes of the New Left and repackaging itself accordingly. It now presented itself as a world champion of globalism. It had embraced “New Left” issues such as feminism and environmentalism already in the 1970s, but now expanded and fortified them with postmodern and postcolonial theorizing. At home, the Social Democrats determined that Sweden suffered from “structural discrimination,” was essentially a racist society suffused with deeply ingrained prejudices against “the other,” and had to be transformed from above by policies that counteracted all real or supposed manifestations of “white privilege.” A growing element was climate alarmism: Hardly a day goes by without dire warnings of impending doom unless Swedes, who are responsible for about 0.2 percent of world carbon emissions, radically change their lifestyle.
The prevailing ideology also led Sweden to adopt one of the world’s most liberal immigration policies. The number of people granted residence permits grew exponentially, the yearly average climbing from 20,000 a year in the 1980s to 40,000 in the 1990s and 70,000 in the 2000s. Between 2010 and 2015, the average hit 110,000: more than 1 percent of the country’s population each year, exceeding the peak of U.S. immigration over a century ago. Between 1995 and 2017, Sweden took in more than 1.8 million people. Meanwhile, the country’s leftist establishment in government and media branded as “racist” anyone daring to use the term “volumes” when speaking of immigration policy. The Left’s media dominance is palpable: Polls have showed that over half of print journalists, and two thirds of those in state TV and radio, sympathize with the Green or Left parties, which have never achieved a combined vote of more than 16 percent.
While the globalist agenda was driven by the Left, the center-right gradually accommodated to its rhetoric. Indeed, Fredrik Reinfeldt, who took over as leader of the supposedly conservative Moderate Party in 2003, gained power in 2006 largely be realigning the party with prevailing dogma. He slashed defense budgets and labeled national defense a “special interest,” while memorably stating that “only barbarism is genuinely Swedish. All development has come from abroad.” When the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats were first elected to parliament in 2010, Reinfeldt reacted by concluding an immigration pact with the Green Party to further liberalize immigration. His explicit purpose was to show that a vote for the Sweden Democrats would not cause him to change policies.
Key to the dominant leftist dogma has been to divide people into oppressor and oppressed groups. In the spirit of this “intersectionality,” the Swedish Left at home and abroad embraced Islamists because they claim to represent oppressed Muslims. The driving force has been the Social Democrats’ influential religious organization, which in a formal agreement with the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Swedish Muslim Council pledged to secure political representation for Swedish Muslims—or rather, their self-proclaimed representatives. In 2013, the Social Democrats elected Omar Mustafa, leader of the Brotherhood-aligned Islamic Association in Sweden, to its party board—only to backtrack following reports of his connections to anti-Semitic and anti-gay statements. The Green Party has similarly been embroiled in Islamists scandals: In 2016, Housing Minister Mehmet Kaplan was forced to resign over connections to Turkish far Right and Islamists, and a candidate to the party board was forced to withdraw after his refusal to shake women’s hands caused a furor.
The confusion of the Swedish Left as its simultaneous embrace of feminism and Islamism clashed with one another would be amusing if the consequences were not so dire. Left-wing anti-Semitism has grown rapidly in the country, often bolstered by immigrants from the Middle East. The Swedish Left has been remarkably reluctant to deal with the problem in its own ranks. And in foreign policy, this romance with Islamism helps explain the harshly anti-Israel positions that have characterized Swedish foreign policy in recent years.
Trouble in Paradise
Left-wing elites gained firm control over agenda setting, which they exercised through Sweden’s media and political landscape. But as pollster Markus Uvell has detailed, this agenda did not correspond to the views of most Swedes, surprising numbers of whom espouse conservative views. How, then, did the Left succeed?
Swedes as a whole differ from Americans with their contentious civic associations and raucous debate. By contrast, Swedes are reluctant to speak out against a perceived consensus, which they tend to follow—until it fractures. In recent times, this phenomenon has been named the “opinion corridor”: a society with a very narrow space of acceptable political speech, with everything outside considered beyond the pale and leading to the exclusion or banishment of the perpetrator. In this sense, Swedish society as a whole could be likened to a liberal U.S. college campus, where views challenging the dominant Left-liberal ideology are voiced only at one’s own peril.
But reality has a tendency eventually to break even the most rigid dogmas. In Sweden the reality that ate away at the national fantasy was the gradual decay of four core functions of the state: education, health, public order, and defense. All the dominant parties were complicit in this failure: the Social Democrats who ruled from 1994 to 2006, Reinfeldt’s center-Right coalition that ruled until 2014, and particularly the Left-Green coalition in power since then. It stems from a combination of mismanagement, opportunism, and political correctness, exacerbated by the massive challenge posed by large-scale immigration. Leftist ideology played a key role in this. But mishandled privatization efforts played their part, too, as did fads in public administration, such as New Public Management theories, which imposed enormous administrative and reporting requirements on public service providers.
Sweden’s defense was long based on a healthy deterrent force. But after 1989 Swedish politicians surpassed their counterparts elsewhere in Europe in concluding that national defense was anachronistic in the new and peaceful era they believed to be emerging. Defense spending is headed toward less than 1 percent of GDP. By 2013, the Chief of Sweden’s General Staff announced that if faced with a foreign invasion, Sweden had the capacity to defend itself only for one week. It was in response to this sober assessment that Prime Minister Reinfeldt angrily dismissed defense and everyone connected with it as merely a “special interest.”
As for education, the Swedish public school system became a kind of guinea pig for the social experiments conjured up by the 1968 generation. Grades and report cards were banned until the eighth grade. Schools came to focus on social skills and “values” rather than knowledge. The authority of teachers was downgraded, so that they can no longer discipline students. Classrooms are notoriously chaotic, with students chatting, playing, and spending time on their smartphones. A firm selling hearing protection now actively markets its products to teachers and children with brands like “Silenta” and “Coolkids,” which motivated students use because it is the only way to shut out the noise and concentrate on learning.
Meanwhile, new public administration practices have imposed huge administrative and reporting requirements on teachers, while their pay in real terms shrunk to under $40,000 per year. Teachers burn out and quit at an alarming rate, while schools are unable to recruit replacements. By 2022 the country will need 77,000 new teachers, but they are nowhere to be found. The impact on test results has been predictable, with Sweden sinking like a stone in the Program for International Student Assessment rankings. In 2003, Sweden was above average in reading, math, and science; by 2012, it was below average in all three. The downward trend was halted by 2015, but Swedish schools are far below the performance of their counterparts in neighboring countries.
Generous and high-quality healthcare has been another signature of the “Swedish model.” Sweden’s medical system does continue to deliver high-quality treatment—the problem is getting access to it. To reduce wait times, the government guarantees that patients see a primary care doctor within seven days, a specialist within ninety days, and receive surgery or other action within another ninety days. These are among the longest waiting times in all Europe, but even these goals are not being met. The National Healthcare Board in 2018 concluded that health providers fail to meet this timetable in more than 25 percent of cases.
Politicians respond by pouring money into the healthcare system. But the problem is not money: Sweden ranks fourth in the OECD on healthcare spending. The average German doctor treats over 2,400 patients per year, but in Sweden the number is under 700. Swedish doctors, again because of mismanagement and the quest for quantifiable reporting, spend so much of their time doing paperwork that they have less time to see patients. Meanwhile, real salaries in healthcare have plummeted. Specialist doctors receive half the salary of their counterparts in France or Britain; nurses earn so little and have such heavy workloads that group resignations are now commonplace. Sweden now has the lowest hospital bed capacity per capita in Europe, at 2.4 per thousand, compared to an EU average of 5.1.
Law and order is the last core area of state decline. Sweden has always prided itself on being a safe country, but things have decisively changed. Most dramatic is the unrelenting rise in gang crime, including deadly shootings, in Swedish cities. Gang criminals regularly target each other in public places in broad daylight, and they increasingly issue threats or take action against law enforcement officials. Swedish women, in particular, express growing concerns about crime, making it the top issue ahead of the September 2018 elections. A third of women now report fearing violence in the vicinity of their homes at night.
When critics of immigration point out the massive over-representation of immigrants and asylum seekers in crime statistics, they step on a hornet’s nest of political correctness. Meanwhile, like teachers and doctors, policemen are mired in paperwork and are quitting in droves. A thousand officers have left the capital region alone in recent times, leaving only 1,300 officers for a metropolitan area of 2.2 million. The result: the percentage of crimes that are ever solved is plummeting. Less than 4 percent of burglaries and 12 percent of assaults were resolved in 2015. Unsurprisingly, alternative and social media are rife with anger and frustration over the breakdown of law and order.
These facts, and the proliferation of social media, lend themselves to exaggeration. Some Swedish populists, as well as Russian news channels like RT and Sputnik, regularly portray Sweden as being on the brink of total collapse. This, of course, is nonsense. But it does feed the rise of violent right-wing extremists who seek to capitalize on the anger in the population.
It is against this background that the dominant dogma began to slip. As Uvell details, a growing rift is now opened between what politicians have said and what regular people have seen in their daily lives. Some 74 percent of Swedes, he reports, agree that politicians “focus too much on odd symbolic issues rather than things that matter in citizens’ life.” The decline of the public services created a powerful disconnect precisely because Swedes had been led to think of themselves as constituting the world’s most perfect society. When it became clear that this was no longer the case, and Swedes saw their country ranked with poorer southern European countries in category after category, the traditional Swedish deference to authority began to crack. As it did, the anti-establishment Sweden Democrats rose to take advantage.
The Rise of the Sweden Democrats
The rise of the Sweden Democrats has been dramatic. In 2010 it gained representation in parliament with less than 6 percent of the vote. Today, polling data predict that it has a realistic shot of becoming the country’s largest party. But unlike the Norwegian Progress Party and the Danish People’s Party, and more like France’s National Front, the Sweden Democrats have nasty roots. When formed in 1988, its leadership included many skinheads and Nazi sympathizers. But by the mid-1990s, a new generation of leaders began to clean the party up—particularly after a “gang of four,” led by the 26-year old Jimmie Åkesson, took over the party in 2005. The four, who had been student friends and built a nationalist association in the university town of Lund, rapidly rebuilt the party with a nationalist and social conservative ideology. Over time, Åkesson and his friends introduced what they called a zero-tolerance approach to racism and fascism, and have used this policy to expel literally hundreds of members. In an important turnaround, the Sweden Democrats are now strongly pro-Israel.
Because of the Sweden Democrats’ shady past, members of the establishment parties did everything in their power to freeze them out. In 2014, to keep the Sweden Democrats down, the established parties agreed to let the largest bloc rule even though it did not command a parliamentary majority. In practice, this means the center-Right has refused to govern even though there is an anti-socialist majority in parliament. But this strategy, which involved high-pitched alarmist rhetoric and public shunning and shaming, backfired spectacularly. In a development that will seem familiar to Americans, the Sweden Democrats turned out to be much more attuned to the sentiments and fears of the rank-and-file of voters than the political and media establishments. Every effort to isolate Åkesson and his group only increased voter sympathies for them: In 2014 they doubled their vote to near 13 percent. Opinion polls now indicate they are on track to receive between a fifth and a quarter of the vote. These new voters are comprised mainly of disillusioned former Social Democrats and conservatives.
These developments, as fundamental as they have been unexpected, show that the deeply engrained status quo in Swedish politics is collapsing. The Social Democrats are tumbling in the polls, amid a deep division between a Left focused on identity politics and those seeking to restore their position among the working class through a pragmatic approach that includes more restrictive policies on immigration. Their leader, Prime Minister Stefan Löfvén, appears at a loss to manage this very public rift.
As for the opposition, Swedish liberals (in the European sense of the term) and conservatives traditionally buried their differences in order to struggle against the almighty Left. Reinfeldt’s Allians för Sverige coalition of four center-Right parties—Moderate, Center, Liberal, and Christian Democrat—succeeded precisely because he took his nominally conservative party in a liberal direction. But the upheavals of recent years brought rising divisions within the Allians to the fore. The Moderates have rediscovered their conservative roots and embraced a restrictive immigration policy. While their new leader, Ulf Kristersson, is well-liked and competent, the party suffers from a credibility problem: All its top leaders were part of Reinfeldt’s inner circle and supported his open-borders immigration policies. Voters concerned with immigration thus ask themselves, “Why not vote for the real thing?” Such reasoning grew in appeal after Kristersson’s would-be coalition partner, the Center Party, refused to jettison its libertarian approach to immigration.
While broad sections of Swedish society are trashing about in this deep turmoil, the establishment has shown little inclination to adapt to reality. Just this spring, the Left-Green coalition government and the Center Party passed a special law to provide residence permits to 9,000 “unaccompanied minors” whose applications for asylum had previously been rejected. Most of these 9,000 were young Afghans who, according to medical examiners, were disqualified by age from the category of “minor.”
Meanwhile, the government’s most visible priority is to free Sweden of dependence on fossil fuels by 2030, a policy it has pursued by instituting punitive taxes on aviation. Opinion pages regularly publish articles that demand the prohibition of domestic air travel altogether. If successful, such a policy may temporarily restore Sweden’s tarnished self-righteousness, but only at the cost of its economic competitiveness. Amid heavy snowfall in 2016, Stockholm’s city government applied a feminist snow-removal policy, prioritizing sidewalks and bike paths supposedly used mainly by women rather than roads in business districts where mainly men work. And while the Russian Air Force simulates a nuclear attack on Sweden, the Swedish government emphasizes that it will be guided in all its actions by its “Feminist” foreign policy.
Light at the End of the Tunnel?
Sweden faces massive challenges in coming decades, challenges that require sober and pragmatic approaches rather than fantasies derived from progressive ideology. But the political and media establishments appear incapable of adapting to changing circumstances. All established political parties continue to proudly proclaim they will never cooperate with the Sweden Democrats. This, of course, is the safest recipe to ensure their continuing rise.
In the meantime, the country could become ungovernable. After the September 2018 elections, there is no realistic scenario in which either the Left-Green or center-Right blocs will be able to achieve a parliamentary majority. There is no denying that a dramatic shift has occurred in what has long been a center-Left society: Swedish voters are revolting against left-of-center parties, who are likely to command less than 40 percent of the vote this coming September. By contrast, right-of-center parties—if we include the Sweden Democrats—are likely to win the support of nearly 60 percent of voters. This is the new Swedish paradox, at least as things stand now: The Left is discredited, but the Right cannot or will not step up to the challenge of ruling the country.
After September, something will have to give if Sweden is to have a government. Liberals could defect to the Left, or conservatives could decide to rule with Swedish Democrat support. In any case, Sweden is destined for the foreseeable future to be ruled by weak coalition governments. That is unlikely either to solve the country’s problems, or to restore the myth of the perfect nation.