Professor Henry Srebrnik

Professor Henry Srebrnik

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Is a New Black African-Jewish Alliance Emerging in the United States?

   By Henry Srebrnik, [Winnipeg] Jewish Post 

As we know, the historic Black American-Jewish alliance in the United States, so prominent during the civil rights movement of the 1940s-1960s, has frayed in recent decades. Many Black American organizations have become anti-Zionist.

Black Lives Matter, for example, has even defended Hamas and sees an affinity between American Blacks and Palestinians, considering both ethnic groups as people of colour oppressed by a white society that includes Jews.

The historic Black American community comprises the descendants of the people from the west coast of Africa who were brought to and enslaved in the United States. The Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the early 19th century, but slavery remained legal until the American Civil War that ended in 1865.

However, in recent decades, thanks to liberalized immigration laws, there are increasing numbers of new Africans in the U.S., who have come as immigrants to the country, from nations such as Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Sudan.

They remain concerned with slavery – but as it currently exists on the African continent. And most of it is carried on by Arabs. Along the east coast of Africa, this has been the case for centuries. Exports of slaves to the Muslim world from the Indian Ocean coast began after traders won control of the coast and sea routes during the ninth century.

The island of Zanzibar was an Omani-ruled sultanate that served as a notorious entrepot for slaves sent to the Arab Middle East. (A recent BBC report found women workers from Malawi abused in near slavery in Oman itself today.) And across the Sahel, particularly in Sudan, raids to capture Black African people were routine.

According to the NGO Walk Free, an international human rights group focused on the eradication of modern slavery, an estimated seven million men, women, and children are living in modern slavery in Africa. Contemporary reports of slavery exist in Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Chad, and Sudan, where people, often from minority ethnic groups, are born into slavery and bought, traded, and sold.

Poverty and economic inequality drive vulnerability in the Africa region. About 35 per cent of people in Sub-Saharan Africa live in poverty. Perpetrators of slavery-related abuses were largely members of armed groups who deliberately exploit populations displaced by conflict.

Boko Haram in northern Nigeria periodically kidnap Christian schoolgirls for ransom or to become sex slaves. In early March, over 280 students were abducted in an assault on a school. More than 4,000 Christians were murdered in Nigeria last year. Africans are sold in slave markets in Libya and Mauritania. There are an estimated 47,000 enslaved Africans in the former and 149,000 in the latter.

Most North Americans know little of this. But maybe this is now changing. Some in the American Jewish community are forging ties with African Blacks, to create a new Black-Jewish alliance. Created this past February in Washington, a coalition of groups came together to educate the public about the mass murder, kidnapping, and enslavement of Africans, and to campaign for their liberation.

The members of this African-Jewish Alliance (AJA) represent victims, along with their allies and champions. One prominent activist, Simon Deng, is a former slave from South Sudan, who works to raise awareness of Khartoum’s jihad, which killed more than three million Black Africans, mostly Christians, between 1955 and 2005. While South Sudan is now a sovereign country, an estimated 35,000 enslaved Africans remain in the north of Sudan.

The alliance includes the Damanga Coalition for Freedom and Democracy, which supports Black Muslims from Darfur in Sudan, whom Arab Muslims have victimized through rape, massacre, and slavery. The world has acknowledged this as a genocide.

The International Committee on Nigeria (ICON) educates and advocates for the victims of Boko Haram raids in Nigeria where Christian villagers are attacked and women and children abducted. Many Americans were first alerted to terrorist attacks on Nigerian villages in 2014 by Michelle Obama, who briefly led the well-advertised “#BringBackOurGirls” campaign. ICON is now reviving the hashtag.

Also focused on Nigeria are the LEAH (Leadership Empowerment Advocacy and Humanitarian) Institute, which advocates for the freedom of Leah Sharibu and other Nigerian women and girls held in captivity, and American Veterans of Igbo Descent (AVIDUSA). The Igbo of southeastern Nigeria are a largely Christian people.

The Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel (IBSI), under Pastor Dumisani Washington, condemns the “Zionism is racism” ideology; defends Israel’s right to live in peace with its Arab neighbors; and seeks to help cultivate a mutually beneficial Israel-Africa alliance.

Finally, the alliance includes the American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG), and the Jewish Leadership Project (JLP). All these groups make it clear that what happened in Israel last Oct. 7 is in some parts of Africa an almost daily occurrence.

The AJA, following meetings with government officials in Washington, launched its first public campaign on March 1, with jumbotron truck messages bearing graphics about attacks against Africans. They drove along a major thoroughfare in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from Harvard Square to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Various newspapers have featured stories about the alliance, and a Jewish News Service (JNS) podcast hosted an interview in February with activists Ben Posner and Charles Jacobs of the AASG about the new coalition, entitled “Why the World Cares About Gaza and Not About Africa.” Awareness about this issue is finally spreading.

Saturday, March 23, 2024

Has China Damaged Canadian Democracy?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

I’m guessing that most Canadians, if they’re not ostriches, now realize that the Chinese government has for quite a long time been interfering, in ways big and small, in Canada’s politics. This has included trying to help certain candidates win, and others lose, their seats in recent Canadian federal elections. That cat is now out of the bag.

As it happens, one of the people who has contributed to this awareness is Michel Juneau-Katsuya, who spoke to two of my classes March 14 about foreign interference in Canada and the current public inquiry looking into it. He was a senior intelligence officer and manager with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in counter-intelligence, as head of its Asia Pacific operations.

Juneau-Katsuya was on PEI because of his contribution to the launch of two newly published books, “The Mosaic Effect: How the Chinese Communist Party Started a Hybrid War in America’s Backyard” and “Under Cover: Inside the Shady World of Organized Crime and the RCMP.”

He has long been critical of the Canadian government’s failure to recognize the threat of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Canada. “Regrettably, throughout my 40-year career I’ve encountered these attitudes from our Canadian political elite,” he stated. In 2010 he co-authored “Nest of Spies: The Startling Truth About Foreign Agents at Work Within Canada’s Borders.”

Testifying last May before a House of Commons committee studying foreign interference, he told them that CSIS had known since the 1990s that Conservative and Liberal governments, as well as political parties have been compromised by China. 

The Chinese were of course not equal-opportunity obstructionists: they were mostly helping Liberals. Why? The Liberals have long had a love affair with China’s political system, going all the way back to Pierre Trudeau. More recently, Trudeau’s longtime political ally Jean Chretien, and Trudeau’s own son, Justin, have carried on this tradition.

While rumors of Beijing’s ever-expanding influence, interference and infiltration operations have long circulated, the Trudeau government was successful in keeping them contained. Ever since coming to power in 2015, the Liberals have chosen to hide the scope and extent of Beijing’s role.

That year was also, as it happens, that Chinese president Xi Jinping began pouring immense resources into the Chinese Communist Party’s overseas operations, via the “United Front” strategy. The Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, the superstructure devoted to enforcing compliance with the regime’s policies among overseas Chinese, and under the control of the party’s Central Committee, was seemingly no issue with Trudeau. Anyhow, why stop it? After all, they were doing the job of helping his party!

Meanwhile, various Chinese community centres were accused of acting as hubs hosting illegal “police stations” on behalf of the PRC to harass and intimidate members of the large Chinese diaspora in Canada.

By 2018 these tactics of harassment, infiltration and “elite capture” were well under way. And they got worse during the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, in order to tilt support towards the Liberals in ridings with large numbers of ethnic Chinese voters. At least eleven constituencies in the greater Toronto and Vancouver regions were affected.

As well, CSIS said former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole was specifically targeted for defeat by Chinese diplomats and by Beijing’s Canadian proxies during the 2021 federal election.

Yet warnings from CSIS and other agencies were largely kept under wraps. Trudeau also ignored it, confident that it would never be revealed. After all, a joint report into Chinese interference in Canada drawn from an RCMP and CSIS investigation, Project Sidewinder, which found evidence of foreign agents working in this country to influence important leaders and “neutralize” criticism of China, was written 26 years ago! But it was never made public.

“We have not taken this seriously,” Juneau-Katsuya declared. “There was a lack of political will to work on these issues. We do not have a culture of national security. We have national insecurity. Even when we have the evidence, the elite doesn’t want to know it.” Politicians, even cabinet ministers, had “become addicted to Chinese money” and could be “seduced” to help China. It has taken 10 years to even begin to act to craft a law to define what foreign interference entails.

But this whole bubble has now burst. Last September, the government finally appointed Quebec Court of Appeal Justice Marie-Josee Hogue to lead a public inquiry into alleged election interference. This was a victory for Conservative politicians who have accused the Trudeau government of failing to adequately respond to the allegations.

Trudeau had previously assigned former Governor General David Johnston to look into the allegations, but he stepped down last June after saying that a “highly partisan atmosphere” had made it impossible to complete his task.

Canada was considered a “high-priority” target for Chinese interference ahead of the September 2021 election, according to a top-secret July 2021 CSIS intelligence assessment viewed by the Hogue commission inquiry Feb. 21.

Another declassified document, dated Feb. 24, 2023, titled “Briefing to the Minister of Democratic Institutions on Foreign Interference,” called China “by far the most significant threat.”

Justice Hogue is tasked with submitting an interim report by May 3. So there’s been progress – though, as Juneau-Katsuya told my students, “Canadian democracy is in trouble.”

 

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Haiti in Perpetual Crisis

 Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax] Chronicle Herald

Mehran Kamrava is Director of the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar. A prominent scholar researching the political systems of the Middle East, in particular Iran, he also teaches comparative politics and political development.

His textbook, “Understanding Comparative Politics: A Framework for Analysis,” which I assign in one of my political science courses, explores the concept of political culture and its significance in understanding political systems.

We can apply many of his concepts to the Caribbean nation of Haiti, the western third of the island of Hispaniola, now an independent state for 220 years. Indeed, it is the second oldest nation in the western hemisphere after the United States.

Yet it remains in perpetual turmoil, a seemingly permanent failed state. The underlying assumption is that Haitians cannot manage their own affairs. The government is corrupt or ineffective or both.

But is that the whole story? History says otherwise. Even after two centuries, Haiti has rarely, if ever, been allowed to manage its own affairs.

Haiti had been a French colonial possession with perhaps the most brutal plantation system built on the enslavement of Africans. Between 1697 and 1804, French colonists brought 800,000 slaves to what was then known as Saint-Domingue to work on the vast plantations, accounting for seven percent of the entire Atlantic slave trade.

It wrested its independence from France in a revolution during the Napoleonic wars in Europe. Napoleon had tried to destroy them, but the Haitians won. He lost more troops than he did at Waterloo and withdrew.

Yet few countries got off to as inauspicious a start as Haiti. It remained surrounded by British, French, Dutch and Spanish colonies where slavery remained legal and so it was shunned by European powers.

France, reluctantly, after failing to recapture the country, finally acknowledged Haitian sovereignty. But it demanded the then enormous sum of 150 million francs in return for “losing” its colony.

The debt was not paid off in its entirety until 1947. Haiti became the first and only country where the descendants of enslaved people paid the families of their former masters for generations. Some economists called the burden imposed on Haiti “perhaps the single most odious sovereign debt in history.”

At the same time, the United States, the only other independent republic in the Americas, was wary of a free “Negro republic,” whose example might encourage rebellions by its own enslaved people. Succeeding U.S. presidents refused to recognize Haiti until 1862, when Abraham Lincoln, during the American Civil War against the slave-holding southern Confederacy, established an American Legation to the country.

Even then, Washington treated Haitian sovereignty very cavalierly. It sent the U.S. Marines to govern the country in 1915 and they remained until 1934. In some years, more of Haiti’s budget went to paying the salaries and expenses of the American officials who controlled its finances than to providing health care to the entire nation, then around two million people.

It has intervened militarily a number of times since then, for example restoring President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1994, three years after he had been exiled in a coup.

In the 1950s the U.S. acquiesced in the establishment of a brutal dictatorship under the reign of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, when thousands died of disease, starvation and torture. It lasted until his death in 1971, when he was succeeded by his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. The latter was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1986.

A succession of ineffectual leaders, often deposed by violence, followed over the next four decades. Fourteen presidents have ruled the country, some for only days, since then. Haiti has been in even greater turmoil since the assassination of the most recent president, Jovenel Moise, in 2021.

Such is the background to the gang warfare that has now broken out, reducing the state to near anarchy. Ironically, it may take Africans to help quell the violence.  A force of 1,000 Kenyan police are to be dispatched to Haiti under a directive from the United Nations to restore order.