Tag: nationalist

Sudan Becomes Third Arab State to Set Aside Hostilities With Israel This Year

US President Donald Trump sealed the agreement in a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok.

Washington: Israel and Sudan agreed on Friday to take steps to normalise relations in a deal brokered with the help of the United States, making Khartoum the third Arab government to set aside hostilities with Israel in the last two months.

US President Donald Trump, seeking re-election on November 3, 2020, sealed the agreement in a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and Transitional Council Head Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, senior US officials said.

Trump’s decision this week to remove Sudan from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism paved the way for the accord with Israel, marking a foreign policy achievement for the Republican president as he seeks a second term trailing in opinion polls behind Democratic rival Joe Biden.

Netanyahu hailed it as a “new era” for the region, but the Palestinian leadership, watching as more of their Arab brethren appear to give their quest for statehood a lower priority, called it a “new stab in the back.”

“The leaders agreed to the normalisation of relations between Sudan and Israel and to end the state of belligerence between their nations,” according to a joint statement issued by the three countries that also promised US help for Khartoum to secure international debt relief.

Israel and Sudan plan to begin by opening economic and trade links, with an initial focus on agriculture, the joint statement said. A senior US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said such issues as the formal establishment of diplomatic ties would be resolved later.

Trump touted the deal to reporters in the Oval Office with the Israeli and Sudanese leaders on the line in a three-way phone call, saying at least five other countries wanted to follow suit and normalise relations with Israel.

“Do you think ‘Sleepy Joe’ could have made this deal?” Trump asked Netanyahu, using the president’s pejorative nickname for Biden a day after their final, rancorous debate of the 2020 presidential campaign. “Somehow I don’t think so.”

Netanyahu, reliant on bipartisan support for Israel in Washington, responded haltingly: “Well, Mr President, one thing I can tell you, is, um, uh, we appreciate the help for peace from anyone in America.”

Trump’s aides view his pro-Israel policies as appealing to Christian evangelical voters, who are among his biggest supporters.

In recent weeks the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain became the first Arab states in a quarter of a century to agree to formal links with Israel, forged largely through shared fears of Iran.

Trump insisted the Palestinians also “are wanting to do something” but offered no proof. Palestinian leaders have condemned recent Arab overtures to Israel as a betrayal of their nationalist cause and have refused to engage with the Trump administration, seeing it as biased in favour of Israel.

Also read: Breaking Taboo, UAE, Bahrain Sign Formal Agreements With Israel at White House

“No one has the right to speak in the name of the Palestinian people and the name of the Palestinian cause,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said in a statement.

Terrorism list

Trump announced on Monday he would take Sudan off the terrorism list once it had deposited $335 million it had pledged to pay in compensation. Khartoum has since placed the funds in a special escrow account for victims of al Qaeda attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

The White House called Trump’s intention to remove Sudan from the terrorism list a “pivotal turning point” for Khartoum, which is seeking to emerge from decades of isolation.

The military and civilian leaders of Sudan‘s transitional government have been divided over how fast and how far to go in establishing ties with Israel. A sticking point in the negotiations was Sudan‘s insistence that any announcement of Khartoum’s delisting from the terrorism designation not be explicitly linked to relations with Israel.

The Sudanese premier wants approval from a yet-to-be formed parliament to proceed with broader, formal normalisation, and that may not be a quick process given sensitivities and civilian-military differences. It is still unclear when the assembly will be created.

“Agreement on normalisation with Israel will be decided after completion of the constitutional institutions through the formation of the legislative council,” Sudanese Foreign Minister Omar Gamareldin said on state television shortly after Friday’s announcement.

The new agreement was negotiated on the US side by a team that included Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, who called the normalisation deals the start of a “paradigm shift” in the Middle East.

He said Sudan‘s decision was symbolically significant because it was in Khartoum in 1967 that the Arab League decided not to recognise Israel‘s right to exist.

Sudan‘s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism dates to its toppled ruler Omar al-Bashir and has made it difficult for its transitional government to access urgently needed debt relief and foreign financing.

Many in Sudan say the designation, imposed in 1993 because Washington believed Bashir was supporting militant groups, has become outdated since he was removed last year.

US congressional legislation is needed to shield Khartoum from future legal claims over past attacks to ensure the flow of payments to the embassy bombing victims and their families.

(Reuters)

The Connection Between Hipsters and Right-Wing Nationalism

Hipsters exhibit a nostalgia for the past that echoes past right-leaning political movements around the world.

From Maboneng in Johannesburg to Bandra in Mumbai, Neukölln in Berlin to Gulou in Beijing and Crown Heights in Brooklyn to Hackney in London, hipsters are everywhere.

Their distinctive look – (beards for the men and ironic retro cardigans for the women) and very particular consumer tastes (most recently, a combination of cream cheese and food colouring that’s called unicorn toast. Yes, really; it looks good on Instagram) – make them a highly visible subculture.

Hipsters are often associated with art, makers, other creative fields and the tech industry. They’re mostly millennial middle-class professionals.

They are also, as I’ve found in my research, considered socially progressive. That’s because they’re often affiliated with progressive political and cultural movements built on socially liberal ideals like anti-racism.

They are environmentalists. They champion women’s rights and queer rights. Many follow vegan diets.

But, my fieldwork also shows that hipsters are a paradox. They appear progressive, but they actually demonstrate some parallels with the practices and ideologies of the settler-colonialism of earlier centuries.

My research on global hipsterification – hipster-led gentrification – focuses on what happens when hipsters move into lower-income urban neighbourhoods. When these areas are “regenerated” by hipsters, real estate developers come too. These areas become more expensive and the original residents are pushed out often causing controversy. This is happening in both developed and developing countries.

The link between hipsters and settler-colonials, then, is more than metaphorical. Both these groups literally displace less powerful occupants.

In the case of hipsters, these displacements are often hidden behind their oft-stated claims of advocating inclusive urban renewal. But there is a vast divergence between hipster progressive rhetoric and the reality of how much they contribute to gentrification and displacement.

And they exhibit a nostalgia for the past that goes beyond their sartorial choices and actually echoes the hearkening back to the past seen in contemporary right-leaning political movements around the world.

Evoking the past

Globally, nostalgia is a general feature of our current political and cultural landscape. Supporters of the UK’s Brexit want Britain to go back in time to a period before immigration supposedly “ruined” the country. US President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” nostalgically refers to an era some time in the past when the US was ostensibly “great”.

India’s ruling Hindu nationalist party relies on the evocation of “past Indian glory” to gain support for its programmes. And Europe’s right-wing nationalist parties traffic in xenophobic notions of a past Europe which was supposedly better because it was more culturally homogeneous.

Hipster culture also demonstrates these nostalgic tendencies. Quite often it harks back to the colonial period, and particularly the Victorian era.

This manifests in several ways. When it comes to architecture, hipsters gravitate towards city neighbourhoods with Victorian-era buildings. Cafes and co-working spaces that are “hipsterified” tend to have a very distinct aesthetic. This includes 19th-century memorabilia and antique industrial machinery like pedal-driven sewing machines as décor.

Even when they don’t use vintage cameras to take photos, they use photo editing apps on their smartphones to give pictures a retro sepia-tinted look. Steampunk – a trend that fuses Victoriana with technology, film, literature, fashion and so on – is very popular. The founders of a food company even named their brand after Sir Kensington, an imaginary Victorian coloniser they made up to give their startup an exciting origin story.

Hipsters are also known for their eclectic fashion. Many of these clothing choices are throwbacks to the colonial period. It isn’t uncommon to see South African hipsters wearing suspenders and veldskoene, which was formerly a shoe associated with the lifestyle of the old-fashioned white farmer.

In the US, hyper-masculine frontiersmen style clothing consisting of work boots, distressed denim and checked plaid lumberjack shirts constitute one hipster look known as the “lumbersexual”. And that brings us back to male hipsters’ general obsession with beards, another potent symbol of the rugged 19th-century frontiersman.

This may all seem fairly harmless. But when hipsters’ nostalgia for the past combines with gentrification, it actually places others at risk.

A dangerous trend

Gentrification can be romanticised by hipsters as living on the edge. As they move in to the “Wild West” of lower-income neighbourhoods, dressed like 19th-century colonials, hipsters often think of themselves as “adventurers” or “pioneers” who are striking out into the urban jungle’s “unsettled frontier”.

But this masks its less than romantic consequences for lower-income residents who are displaced from their homes and neighbourhoods.

Many hipsters don’t recognise the colonial overtones of their “hipsterifying” practices. Even when these are pointed out, some refuse to accept “gentrification guilt”. But that’s another manifestation of their relative privilege. The lower-income residents who are displaced don’t enjoy this luxury – they might only be left with nostalgia for their former homes.

This article is based on a new book, Reversing Urban Inequality in Johannesburg, edited by the author. It will be published in paperback in November 2018 by Jonathan Ball.The Conversation
The Conversation
Melissa Tandiwe Myambo, Research Associate, Centre for Indian Studies, University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured image credit: Reuters