Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 184
August 14, 2014
“One Must Respect These Old Names”
As a college student on study-abroad in France, I was riding a commuter train, when suddenly I noticed I’d been sitting under some graffiti that read, “Mort aux juifs.” At the time, I took this to be anti-Semitic graffiti – after all, it translates to “Death to the Jews” – and was somewhat unnerved. But it turns out I had no reason to be concerned. It was probably just hometown nostalgia on the part of someone from La Mort aux juifs, the town. Yes, the town.
Dylan Matthews the story of current efforts to change that name:
The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s director of international affairs, according to , has sent a letter to France’s interior minister demanding the name be changed. But Courtemaux’s deputy mayor Marie-Elizabeth Secretand told AFP it’s unlikely the municipal council would agree to a change. Anti-racism activists tried to change it in 1992, and came up short.
The closest thing to a reason for continuing to name a town “Death to the Jews” in the year 2014 that Secretand offers is that it “goes back to the Middle Ages or even further.” It’s not really clear how this supports her case, given that Middle Ages France was, like the rest of the Christian world at that time, extremely anti-Semitic.
So two things jump out here immediately. First, that this effort comes from outside France – the account in Le Monde emphasizes that the Center is “aux Etats-Unis,” in the US – and not from petitioning on the part of French Jews, of whom there are several hundred thousand. It’s wrong – I mean, painfully and obviously so – that the town has this name, but still worth considering why and how this has come up. On this, Rick Noack sheds some light:
The outrage of the Wiesenthal Center comes at a sensitive time for French Jews. European Jews in general and French Jews in particular are increasingly worried about strong anti-Semitic tendencies that are related not just to the ongoing Gaza conflict. According to a 2013 survey by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, about 30 percent of European Jews have thought about emigrating because of a general feeling of insecurity. In June, The Post reported that no nation in Western Europe has seen the climate for Jews deteriorate more than France. While anti-Jewish protests had previously often been linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Jewish leaders now fear a more fundamental shift tied to homegrown anti-Semitism.
The second striking thing in the passage from Matthews, though, is point about medieval France – he later includes “19th century, Dreyfus-era France” – being “extremely anti-Semitic.” I feel obliged, given the years I spent in grad school studying this topic, to point out that scholars in this area have long sought to dismiss the notion that all of French-Jewish history amounted to fending off anti-Jewish bigotry.
In 1791, France was the first country to emancipate its Jewish population. When conducting dissertation research, I found that the nineteenth-century French-Jewish press was full of sad-but-slightly-smug (or just nationalistic) tales of just how horrible things were for their coreligionists in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. And scholars have even found a positive spin on the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906). Sure, there were anti-Jewish riots, but at least a Jew could become a captain in the French military, and at least Dreyfus was ultimately exonerated. While my own interpretations are somewhat less rosy than that of the field at large, there’s a reason French Jews were understood even beyond French borders to have it good.
But as Matthews points out, researching the town’s name leads to layer upon layer of French anti-Semitism. First there’s the origin of the name, which may relate to a medieval king’s attempt to “save” the town from Jewish usurers, which is to say, to slaughter the town’s Jews. (What was I saying about how anti-Semites always have a pretext?) Then is the calm discussion, from 1883, of whether the town was or was not named in reference to Jews who had “oppressed the populace.”
Ultimately, though, what concerns me here is less that France of yore was not always delightful for the Jews, and more the deputy mayor’s reasons for brushing off the concern. Matthews writes that Marie-Elizabeth Secretand wants to keep the name because it’s from the Middle Ages, which is indeed part of what she says. But consider the following sentence of her statement, as quoted in Le Monde: “Il faut respecter ces vieux noms,” or, “One must respect these old names.” It’s pretty amazing, really – what she’s doing is spinning around the issue, making it so that the problem isn’t a town name that demands the genocide of a still-significant part of the French population, but rather that the great terroir of old French place names has been disrespected. While I think if anyone’s going to challenge the name, it should ideally be French Jews, it’s hard not to look at that response and figure that if the Center’s goal was to highlight everyday French anti-Semitism, they succeeded.
Faces Of The Day
Edinburgh Festival Fringe entertainers perform on the Royal Mile on August 14, 2014. The largest performing arts festival in the world, this year’s festival hosts more than 3,000 shows in nearly 300 venues across the city. By Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images.
A Cure For Ebola? Ctd
Doctors Without Borders physician Armand Sprecher argues that it would be unwise to administer the unproven Ebola treatment ZMapp to every West African patient:
If the patients have a more than seventy percent chance of dying, why not try something, even if it is not guaranteed to work? One reason is that doctors have a limited amount of time that we can spend with our patients. … There is not a lot of extra time to experiment with unproven therapies. And there are many such therapies. Dozens are brought to my attention with every outbreak. Some have shown promise in rodent models, others in test tubes, and some are of only theoretical benefit. Experience has shown that such potential almost always fails to produce a benefit in non-human primate studies, our best analog of human disease. We cannot subject our patients to all of the possible things that might work. We have to choose wisely.
He adds:
It is not because these drugs are expensive or intended just for North Americans and Europeans that they are unavailable to Africans. They are unavailable because they are not yet ready.
For the antibodies used for the two Americans, only a handful of treatments exist in the world. None of these drugs has gone through the clinical trials needed for their approval for use by drug regulatory agencies. Médecins Sans Frontières hopes to play a role in facilitating the eventual trials that will bring these drugs to market, and from there to see to it that they are made available to the patients that need them.
Meanwhile, Jason Millman examines how public health organizations are working to incentivize companies to develop cures for diseases such as Ebola:
The [World Health Organization] has looked into a “prize fund” approach, among other ideas. Under this model, a centralized fund would reward drug manufacturers at the end of the drug development process or for hitting research and development milestones along the way.
The United States has its own efforts, too. In 2007, the Food and Drug Administration created a voucher program meant to encourage the development of cures for neglected diseases — if a company receives FDA approval for such a drug, the company would then receive a voucher to speed up the agency’s review time for another drug application. However, just four vouchers have reportedly been awarded under this program so far. The National Institutes of Health has also run the Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network since 2012 to try to fill in the funding gap. The NIH network is studying about 90 rare diseases at almost 100 U.S. and international academic institutions, according to an agency fact sheet.
On a related note, New Scientist‘s Andy Coghlan observers that the specific way Ebola kills “has only just been discovered.” He explains:
In essence, the virus blocks what would usually be an instant response to infection, paralyzing the body’s entire immune system … Normally, the body responds to infections by producing a substance called interferon, which acts as a fast-track message to white blood cells, telling them to mobilize genes and proteins. [Researcher Gaya] Amarasinghe’s team found that the Ebola virus produces a substance called VP24, which blocks the channel through which interferon usually travels, crippling the immune system. With its usual protective mechanisms knocked out, a cell is then defenseless against the virus. Amarasinghe says that drugs which target VP24 might provide alternative ways to combat the virus.
Recent Dish on Ebola here.
Spain’s Border Crisis
Tom Burridge notes that more than 1,200 Africans have crossed the Mediterranean into Spain this week. Reid Standish has details:
The summer months typically see large numbers of migrants crossing from Africa to Spain in search of asylum or illegal work. But according to the Spanish coast guard, this summer has been one of the worst on record because of calmer seas and lax policing by authorities in Morocco, which migrants use as their launching pad for Spain. Frontex, the European Union’s agency for external border security, told the Spanish daily El País on Wednesday that Moroccan authorities were probably turning a blind eye to the situation in order to alleviate their own migratory pressures, adding that Morocco’s police and coast guard had not been out on patrol since Monday.
Lauren Frayer calls it “the biggest mass migration push into Spain in decades”:
In addition to this week’s arrivals by sea, some 1,600 migrants have tried to scale fences that separate Morocco from Spain’s North African enclaves. Many of them couldn’t get across, since Spain recently fortified the fences with anti-climbing mesh. But on Wednesday, about 80 men managed to climb it, and got stuck atop a three-story-high fence, with border guards watching below, poised to grab them. After more than 10 hours in the August heat, they were helped down to safety — dehydrated and weak, but alive.
A Threat To Abortion Clinics Outside The South
So far, the inane battle over whether abortion-clinic doctors must have admitting privileges at a local hospital has largely been clustered in Southern states. In Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas, the needless regulatory requirement would force some or all abortion clinics to shut down; clinics have been fighting back, with some recent encouraging successes in the courts. But unconstitutional abortion restrictions are like whack-a-moles – strike one down in some state and three more states will pass them in its place.
Which brings us to Ohio. This is my home state, and an abortion clinic a few miles from where I grew up is currently suing it. Thank goodness. Take a look at the absurd scheme the state has enacted to force clinics into closing, via the Cincinnati Enquirer (emphasis mine):
The health department ordered the (Lebanon Road Surgery Center) closed, declining to grant an exception to a state rule that all outpatient surgery centers must have an agreement that allows it to transfer patients to a local hospital. The state prohibits abortion clinics from forming those agreements with public hospitals. Plus, many private hospitals, in part facing political pressure brought by abortion opponents, no longer grant abortion clinics a transfer agreement. Without it, the clinics are in violation of state rules and must be closed unless they get a variance from the health department. The Sharonville clinic had such a variance, but the health department decided in 2012 to deny it, requiring the clinic to get a hospital transfer agreement or close.
This is slightly different than the situations in Alabama, etc., where the fight is over doctors getting admitting privileges at a local hospital. The Ohio rule requires clinics to have a relationship with a hospital, in what is known as a transfer agreement. But the same Catch-22 applies to both situations, with the state effectively saying to clinics, hey, just jump through this hoop and you can stay open – oh, but p.s., jumping is illegal and we’re out of hoops.
In Ohio, all outpatient surgery centers are required to have hospital transfer agreements, but only abortion clinics are barred from seeking them with public hospitals. This is thanks to a law passed by Republican legislators last year. And don’t think they didn’t know that getting a transfer agreement from a private hospital would be virtually impossible for abortion clinics: The private system in Ohio is composed largely of religiously-affiliated hospitals. In Cincinnati, where Lebanon Road Surgery Center is located, the market is dominated by a Catholic health system that won’t even cover birth control in employee health plans.
Some insisted this whole thing was no big deal because clinics could simply seek an exemption—which the state is now refusing to grant. Emails uncovered by the Enquirer show the Governor’s office and Ohio Right to Life corresponding with health department officials about how it should reject the clinic’s exemption request. This is despite the fact that the clinic has several doctors who do have admitting privileges at several area hospitals, so clinic patients are perfectly poised to get hospital care should an emergency arise.
According to the Enquirer, two of Ohio’s 14 abortion clinics closed last year; two are in the midst of court battles over being ordered to close; and two are trying to get reprieve from the health department from the transfer-agreement rule. Can we hear again how this isn’t about banning abortion but protecting women’s health?
(Photo of Cincinnati clinic from WomensMed.com)
August 13, 2014
Chart Of The Day
Sonali Kohli breaks down the demographics of suicide:
Though suicide awareness and prevention efforts in the US are largely targeted toward either teens or the elderly, Williams represents a demographic of the country—middle-aged, white, male—with an increasing incidence of suicide. Suicide occurrence in the US is most common among middle-aged people. Between 1999 and 2011, more than 48,600 people between the ages of 45 and 49 committed suicide, compared with 20,930 teens between the ages of 15 and 19.
A Cure For Ebola? Ctd
Yesterday the World Health Organization determined that it is “ethically sound” to administer promising but unproven Ebola treatments on a wide scale, countering earlier criticism that one such treatment, the experimental antibody therapy ZMapp, had been made available exclusively to Westerners. The Liberian government has announced that it will be administering the drug to two afflicted doctors in the country, but as Josh Lowensohn notes, it remains unclear just how much medicine will ultimately make it to West Africa:
Supplies of the drug have also dwindled due to difficulties producing it, though Canada today said it would donate 800 to 1,000 doses of the drug to be used in aid efforts. A separate drug called TKM-Ebola, which is also developed in Canada, could end up being used as well after getting a nod from the US Food and Drug Administration last week to restart human testing of the drug on those who are already infected.
Peter Loftus notes ominously, “The maker of the experimental Ebola drug that was given to two infected Americans said Monday that its supply has been exhausted after the company provided doses to a West African nation [presumably Liberia]“:
Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc. said in a brief online statement it had complied with every request for the drug that had the necessary legal and regulatory authorization. The company said it provided the drug, called ZMapp, at no cost in all cases. San Diego-based Mapp didn’t name any countries that requested the drug and didn’t release additional details.
Alexandra Sifferlin considers how health officials will make the tough decisions about administering the drugs:
[N]ow the question is: With not enough to go around, who gets them? That’s ultimately at the discretion of the countries themselves, and before that happens, there’s a waiting period as the WHO formulates another panel of technical experts to create guidelines for the best use of these drugs. Some of the questions they will try to answer are: At what stage of the disease are the drugs or vaccines effective? Are they effective at the beginning of the disease or at the later stages? What are the safety issues related to the drugs? What’s the efficacy of the drug—do 30 percent of people respond or 50 percent?
“It think [who gets the drugs] is one of the most difficult questions to answer,” says Dr. Abha Saxena, the coordinator for the global ethics team at WHO. “There is a limited supply and there is a lot of demand. But who gets it is contextual, it will depend upon on the country, the situation, and they type of drug that will eventually go forward into either trial or compassionate use.” The panel will meet by the end of this month.
Meanwhile, Amanda Taub suggests that “most of the people Ebola kills may never actually contract it”:
New, worrying information from Sierra Leone suggests that damage from the disease may go far beyond deaths from the Ebola virus itself. Rather, Ebola is claiming more victims by damaging already-weak local health systems and their ability to respond to other medical problems, from malaria to emergency c-sections. The ebola-driven rise in deaths from those other maladies may outpace the deaths from ebola itself.
The effect of the loss of services may be severe. Even before the Ebola outbreak, Sierra Leone was ranked the seventh-worst country in the world for maternal and child mortality. In 2012, the aid group Save the Children reported that 18 percent of children in Sierra Leone did not survive to age 5, and one in 25 women died of childbirth or pregnancy-related causes. If these fears prove correct, those numbers may be about to get much worse.
Egypt Is Led By A Mass Murderer
#sisi democrat? If you’ve seen a picture which screams “DICTATORSHIP!” louder than this I’ll be surprised. pic.twitter.com/fFEhAFs0vs“
— Gis Gestu (@antoniolarotta) August 10, 2014
That’s the conclusion of a Human Rights Watch investigation into the killings of at least 817 and probably over 1,000 Egyptians during the dispersal of pro-Morsi demonstrators from Rabaa al-Adawiya Square a year ago tomorrow. The massacre, HRW contends, was deliberate, premeditated, and readily qualifies as a crime against humanity:
The 195-page investigation based on interviews with 122 survivors and witnesses has found Egypt‘s police and army “systematically and deliberately killed largely unarmed protesters on political grounds” in actions that “likely amounted to crimes against humanity”. The report recommends that several senior individuals within Egypt’s security apparatus be investigated and, where appropriate, held to account for their role in the planning of both the Rabaa massacre and others that occurred last summer – including Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, Egypt’s then defence minister and new president. As head of the army at the time, Sisi had overall responsibility for the army’s role at Rabaa, and has publicly acknowledged spending “very many long days to discuss all the details”.
HRW’s executive director Kenneth Roth, who was refused entry into Egypt for “security” reasons when he arrived in Cairo on Sunday to present the report’s findings, further details the role of Sisi:
There is every reason to believe that this was a planned operation implicating officials at the very top of the Egyptian government. Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim was the lead architect of the dispersal plan. His immediate supervisor, in charge of all security operations, was Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who was then defense minister and deputy prime minister for security affairs and is now Egypt’s president. In discussions prior to the dispersal, senior Interior Ministry officials spoke of anticipating thousands of deaths. The day after the slaughter, Ibrahim said it had all gone exactly according to plan, and later gave bonuses to participants.
The Rabaa dispersal was part of a pattern of cases across Egypt in which security forces used excessive force, including killing 61 participants at a sit-in protest outside the Republican Guard headquarters on July 8, and another 95 protesters near the Manassa Memorial in eastern Cairo on July 27.
But don’t hold your breath waiting for Sisi to be referred to the International Criminal Court. Owen Jones is outraged that the brutality of the Egyptian regime gets little press in the West, even as the US and UK funnel vast amounts of money, weapons, and other support to Sisi:
Too little has been said about Egypt’s human rights crisis. More than 40,000 people were detained or indicted in the first 10 months after the coup and, according to Amnesty International, the regime is usingmethods of torture from “the darkest days of the Hosni Mubarak era”. With “rampant torture, arbitrary arrests and detentions”, there has been a “catastrophic decline in human rights”. There have been claims of rape against male political dissidents; the use of electrocution, including on prisoners’ testicles; and in one case, a hot steel rod was inserted in the anus of a dissident who later died. …
Egypt is in the grip of a violent tyranny that brooks little dissent. And just as the west is complicit in Israel’s attack on Gaza, it equally shares some responsibility for the actions of Egypt’s regime. The question is surely, how many more corpses until we start holding those responsible to account?
Read the Dish’s extensive coverage of last summer’s bloodshed in Cairo here.
Did Snowden Tip Off Al-Qaeda’s Cryptographers? Ctd
Not by a long shot, Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman answer, hitting back forcefully at the report claiming that al-Qaeda overhauled its cryptography in response to the Snowden leaks. To begin with, they point out that Recorded Future, the intelligence firm that issued the report, has deep and longstanding financial ties to the US intelligence community and as such cannot be considered an independent referee. Furthermore, another Snowden document reveals that al-Qaeda already knew about Western intelligence agencies’ surveillance technologies and how to get around them, long before Snowden came into the picture:
The Recorded Future “report”—which was actually nothing more than a short blog post—is designed to bolster the year-long fear-mongering campaign of U.S. and British officials arguing that terrorists would realize the need to hide their communications and develop effective means of doing so by virtue of the Snowden reporting. … But actual terrorists—long before the Snowden reporting—have been fixated on developing encryption methods and other techniques to protect their communications from electronic surveillance. And they have succeeded in a quite sophisticated manner.
One document found in the GCHQ archive provided by Snowden is a 45-page, single-spaced manual that the British spy agency calls a “Jihadist Handbook.” Though undated, the content suggests it was originally written in 2002 or 2003: more than 10 years before the Snowden reporting began. It appears to have been last updated shortly after September 2003, and translated into English by GCHQ sometime in 2005 or 2006. … So sophisticated is the 10-year-old “Jihadist Manual” that, in many sections, it is virtually identical to the GCHQ’s own manual, developed years later (in 2010), for instructing its operatives how to keep their communications secure[.]
Greenwald and Fishman also stress that the report offers no evidence to support a causal link between the Snowden leaks and al-Qaeda’s recent crypto upgrades:
Critically, even if one wanted to accept Recorded Future’s timeline as true, there are all sorts of plausible reasons other than Snowden revelations why these groups would have been motivated to develop new encryption protections. One obvious impetus is the August 2013 government boasting to McClatchy (and The Daily Beast) that the State Department ordered the closing of 21 embassies because of what it learned from an intercepted “conference call” among Al Qaeda leaders
This speaks to an infraction we in the media are frequently guilty of: lending greater weight to new information when it feeds into a pre-existing narrative, regardless of whether that new information is credible on its own merits. Officials in the government and the intelligence community have spent the past year crying to the press that Snowden’s revelations have weakened America’s defenses against terrorism by revealing our tradecraft to our enemies. Spooks are not wont to provide proof for such claims, because the evidence always seems to be classified, but “if only we knew what they knew”, we’d see that they were right. And it requires no great leaps of logic to intuit that al-Qaeda and its allies, who clearly know a thing or two about the Internet, might have come across the Snowden leaks and used them to their advantage.
So that narrative, underpinned by intuition but not hard evidence, became conventional, at least on one side of the surveillance debate. There was a demand for proof of that received wisdom, and when something purporting to be that proof came to light, the product was delivered to the market with all due speed. And giving people tools to support the opinions they already hold, rather than distinguishing truth from propaganda, is the core business of much of today’s clickbaity media. That’s a serious problem.
On the other hand, the full impact of these leaks won’t be clear for some time, and the question of whether and to what extent they exposed us to new threats is not conclusively settled, so Snowden and Greenwald can’t claim vindication any more surely than their critics can call them traitors and terrorists. But the broader point, that Snowden shouldn’t be convicted of treason in the court of public opinion solely based on accusations and innuendo, stands strong. We’d do well to remember that the next time we come across “evidence” like this.
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