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Germany continues supporting Ukraine despite its involvement in sabotage of energy flows.

“The university requires a complete overhaul, top to bottom,” says group advocating for Jewish and pro-Israel students and staff.

By Adina Katz, World Israel News

Senior officials associated with the City University of New York (CUNY) were ordered to avoid cooperating with an ongoing investigation into antisemitism on campus, a Jewish rights watchdog group announced in a media statement on Wednesday.

The S.A.F.E. CUNY group, which has advocated on behalf of Jewish and Zionist CUNY students and staff who have been made to feel unsafe due to rampant antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiments at the institution, revealed that CUNY officials were instructed to skip critical meetings on the subject.

“For a year, the Chancellor of CUNY [Félix V. Matos Rodríguez] has deservedly taken flak… for skipping out, at the last minute, from not one but two City Council hearings probing CUNY antisemitism,” S.A.F.E wrote on its Twitter account.

“We have just learned from an immaculate source that his absence goes higher than the chancellor. The decision was made above him,” the group continued, adding that they “learned that CUNY Board of Trustees Chair Bill Thompson told the chancellor not to attend the antisemitism hearings.

“If this is true, [New York Governor] Kathy Hochul must get involved in this horrifying antisemitic mess immediately.

“The university requires a complete overhaul, top to bottom. Governor Hochul Must step in. Bill Thompson, Felix Matos Rodriguez, and [CUNY Chief Diversity Officer] Saly Abd Alla must be out,” S.A.F.E stated. “Today. Right now.”

Jewish students and staff have been subject to an intensely antisemitic environment at CUNY for years.

In late May, CUNY’s law school released a video of a commencement ceremony speech in which the speaker accused Israel of “indiscriminate” murder, “raining bullets and bombs,” encouraging “lynch mobs against Palestinians,” and “settler colonialism.”

That marked the second consecutive year in which the law school’s commencement speaker used the graduation as a platform to promote anti-Israel views. Nasreen Kiswani, a pro-Palestinian activist, delivered the May 2022 speech.

Kiswani, the founder of pro-Palestine advocacy group Within Our Lifetime, has repeatedly called for the state of Israel to be destroyed and ‘liked’ an Instagram post praising the Palestinian terrorists who brutally murdered four Israelis with an axe in Elad.

In July 2021, Kiswani advocated for the murder of people who support Israel. “I hope that a pop-pop [of gunfire] is the last noise that some Zionists hear in their lifetime,” she said.

The post CUNY ordered chancellor to skip antisemitism probe: Watchdog group appeared first on World Israel News.

The History Wars – internecine academic fights over historical interpretation – have existed for as long as humans have been chronicling events. The most famous recent version of this recurring battle, the Historikerstreit, came in late 1980s Germany and roiled the world of German letters. It involved two divergent interpretations of the Nazi period’s place in German history, but it also reflected arguments over contemporary West German politics. Disputes over the singularity of the Holocaust, the culpability of German society for Nazi atrocities, and the teleological unfolding of German history blended with arguments on German nationalism, potential future reunification, and social and historical guilt. The fracas was erudite, high-brow, and philosophical. Its influence is still felt today, during similar debates over Germany’s role in the world and how historical memory should inform it.

Not all historical disputes are as serious-minded and carefully-argued as the Historikerstreit. In fact, the current version taking over the Anglosphere is much less sober and much more antagonistic than its German predecessor. Instead of a debate over issues of interpretation and context, we are in the midst of a full-bore attack on Anglo-American history as such. This new History War crosses the Atlantic: American history is under siege by revisionist views of the founding, while British history is routinely lambasted as terroristic, genocidal, and morally indefensible. Mobs have destroyed statues, historic names have been changed under activist pressure, and frenzied protests surround any prominent figure who dares espouse a nuanced view of the past. The revisionist idea that Anglo-American history is profoundly evil is now regnant in the academy, the media, and the political left.

It is in this context that Nigel Biggar, renowned ethicist and Regius Professor of Moral & Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, has released his latest book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. Inspired to weigh the moral record of British imperialism by the strident efforts to paint it as uniquely immoral, Biggar compiled a complete dossier on the most common revisionist claims, putting them – and the Empire they decry – to the ethical test. A Sunday Times bestseller in the United Kingdom, the book serves as a strong counteroffensive in the Imperial History Wars, working through the myriad moral arguments modern anti-colonialists make against the British Empire and assessing their veracity.

The organization of the book lends itself well to this complicated task. Colonialism is segmented into eight main chapters, each on a distinct critique of the British Empire. There are chapters on imperial motives, slavery, racism, land, cultural assimilation, economics, governance, and the use of force. Since each chapter deals with an overarching issue, the book bounces around chronologically. This could be challenging to follow, but Biggar’s writing is so clear that it works. The author presents the simplistic anti-colonial case, assesses its claims by referencing primary source documents and the testimony of other historians, and enters an informed judgment based on the evidence. The seriousness with which Biggar treats this task is quite contrary to the approach of his opponents: “One surprising thing I have seen is that many of my critics are really not interested in the complicated, morally ambiguous truth about the past.” When reading Colonialism in comparison to the work of its detractors, this is self-evident.

Unlike those critics, Biggar is curious about the complexities of Empire and has a strong moral framework for judging it. In a book which makes moral assessments about colonialism, having such a consistently applied, clearly-stated ethical rubric is necessary. One may agree or disagree with the framework Biggar chooses, but his holding to it allows the reader to fairly assess whether he has proven his claims – and, more importantly, whether the anti-colonialists prove theirs. The book relentlessly hits on the crux of the matter: that context and intentions are vital for making historical moral judgments. Context is key, as is the question of comparison; this is evident in the chapter on economics, which correctly evaluates colonial outcomes against contemporary alternatives, not idealistic utopias. When this is done, anti-colonialist claims collapse.

With respect to intentionality, a factor that imperial critics often deliberately obscure, Biggar provides transparency. Anti-colonialist activists assume – without evidence – the intentions of colonial administrators were uniformly evil and irredeemably bigoted. When the historical record is examined, the reality is far more complex. Biggar shows the aims of these imperial figures were often benign, even when implementation was flawed. A case study involves the controversies over famine relief: administrators sought to ameliorate suffering and rectified early failures. Famine was a fact of life for all of human history, and global relief campaigns were far more difficult to accomplish in the era before air travel. Still, imperial policy tried to reduce famine through irrigation, incentivized farming, and targeted relief efforts – the intentions were good, even if the results were lacking.

One excellent chapter breaks down the Empire’s use of force and whether it was morally justifiable. As with earlier sections, the moral frame being used – in this case the Christian theory of ‘just war’ – is detailed and defended. Contrary to critics who view any and all imperial uses of force as unjustifiable, Biggar lives in reality, where state violence, or the threat thereof, is necessary for the perpetuation of governance. He delves into several highly-criticized events over the history of the British Empire, from the Opium Wars to the Mau Mau Uprising, and weighs the moral claims made about them. The analysis is fair-minded, direct, and thorough. What matters most to Biggar is whether the force used is consistent with a distinct rule of law or whether it is arbitrary and capricious. In this respect, the Empire stands strong, especially when compared to its contemporary substitutes.

Biggar shines perhaps brightest when Colonialism debunks various myths about the Empire which have been promulgated as fact by the anti-colonial left. One such falsehood is of a centralized, London-directed British Empire; this could not be further from the truth. In reality, the Empire was decentralized and the influence of the metropole in the colonies was often quite weak. Biggar explains this reality and usefully focuses on the on-the-ground administrators over the purported decision-makers in London. This reorientation of the imperial story enlightens the reader about the actual powers in the colonies. The light-touch approach of the Empire after the loss of the American colonies in 1783 – in part due to overly-intrusive governance – forced colonial authorities to work with locals, not simply rule them. The interplay between governor and governed created native partnerships that proved highly useful upon decolonization, as they laid the groundwork for competent independent authority.

Biggar also takes on a chronic issue in the Imperial History Wars: the tendency for anti-colonial advocates to wildly exaggerate claims of British perfidy while downplaying the barbarity of native cultures. This hypocritical relativism is anathema to a considered review of the Empire’s morality, and Biggar rightly skewers it.

Critics accuse the British of killing millions by choice or neglect, but these claims are decontextualized at best and invented at worst. In an egregious case of the latter, scholar James Daschuk argues that Canada perpetrated a “genocide” on native people via its deliberate mismanagement of an 1880s famine. Contrary to these explosive assertions, Biggar details the actual famine-suppression efforts and seeks to put the episode into perspective, writing: “the number of native deaths attributable to starvation on the Canadian plains from 1879-1883 was somewhere in the region of forty-five. No, that is not a typographical error.” The other side of the coin, the purposeful indulgence of native atrocities, is deftly handled in Colonialism, particularly in a discussion of the Benin Expedition of 1897. Activists falsely claim that Britain’s intervention was murderous and unprovoked, while excusing the manifest evils of the Benin regime, including widespread, gruesome human sacrifice. Biggar focuses his fire on Oxford archaeologist Dan Hicks and his book The Brutish Museums, which typifies the “ethical schizophrenia” of the anti-colonial mind. In just ten pages, Hicks’s work is thoroughly and masterfully dismantled both philosophically and historically.

The chapters on racism, slavery, and cultural genocide tackle the most commonly-proffered anti-colonial arguments. When discussing the history of British abolitionism, Biggar sums up the failure of anti-colonial arguments perfectly: “The basic problem with the anti-colonialists’ equation of British colonialism with slavery, and their consequent demand for cultural ‘decolonisation’, is that it requires amnesia about everything that has happened since 1787.” Likewise, a tidbit later in the book is a powerful, factual riposte to cries that the Empire was imbued with racism: “in New Zealand the vote was extended to all Māori adult males in 1867, twelve years ahead of being given to their European counterparts, when the property qualification was abolished.” Colonialism is replete with memorable lines that distill essential moral truths, including in the discussion of so-called ‘cultural genocide’, when Biggar posits that “No culture has a moral right to be immune to change or even to survive. … That may be sad, but it was not unjust.”

But Colonialism is not merely a discussion of history and ethics; it has a great deal to say about the current age as well. The historical distortions promoted by anti-colonialists are in service to a contemporary political project, one which is illiberal and anti-Western. Their critiques are based entirely on the desires of the present, not the verities of the past. It is this broader project that Colonialism seeks to expose and attack, a task which the book excels at. The recasting of British history from a source of pride to an infinite well of shame requires society to forget the reality of its past, and it is this forgetting that anti-colonial activists wish to inculcate across the Anglosphere. Biggar cuts to the core of this problem, writing:

If the anti-colonialist narrative were true, Britain should abandon its post-1945 role as a main supporter of the US-dominated liberal world order and settle down instead to emulating penitent, virtually pacifist Germany. But, as this book has shown, the anti-colonialist narrative is not true.

He is correct here; the anti-colonialist narrative is not true. But it is seductive. Cultural self-confidence is what drove the British Empire to abolish slavery, fight and win two world wars, liberalize the international order, and bring prosperity and the rule of law to billions. It is what propelled the United States to defeat the Nazis and Imperial Japanese, take on the Soviet juggernaut and prevail, and maintain and expand the British-built liberal world order. The Anglosphere needs a confidence boost if it is to overcome the challenges of the 21st century. In that respect, Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism is a welcome shot in the arm.

The post <strong><u>Reckoning with </u><em><u>Colonialism</u></em></strong> appeared first on Providence.

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Narendra Modi’s government has launched a relentless clampdown in a bid to suppress its critics. As part of this drive, it is developing new tools to stifle free expression on the internet while extending the reach of online surveillance over India’s citizens.

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi, January 8, 2019.(Money Sharma / AFP via Getty Images)

It has been nine years since Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in India. During that time, Modi and his party have launched an escalating crackdown on their political opponents and media critics.

In March of this year, Rahul Gandhi, one of India’s most prominent opposition leaders, was convicted of defamation for a speech he had made attacking Modi in 2019. Defamation is a criminal offense in India, and Gandhi received a two-year prison sentence as well as being excluded from India’s parliament.

Many journalists have been jailed for reporting on issues that displeased Modi’s government. The Indian authorities have raided the offices of human rights organizations like Amnesty International and frozen their bank accounts, accusing them of money laundering. In February of this year, there were raids on the BBC’s local offices after the British channel broadcast a documentary that criticized Modi’s handling of the 2002 anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat when he was the state’s chief minister.

Most of the Indian media supports Modi and has either misrepresented this crackdown or ignored it altogether. New Delhi Television (NDTV) was one of the last remaining news channels that maintained a semblance of neutrality and reported on uncomfortable issues. However, a wealthy Gujarati businessman and Modi supporter, Gautam Adani, recently purchased NDTV in a hostile takeover. Many of NDTV’s leading news anchors resigned after the takeover, anticipating a change in its editorial policies.

Narendra Modi and his party have launched an escalating crackdown on their political opponents and media critics.

With near-total control of the conventional print and broadcast media, one can only find unbiased and critical reporting in the independent news platforms that are available online. But Modi and the BJP are now seeking to crack down on the space offered by the internet for dissenting voices. The moves it is making could establish a wider template for authoritarian control of online space and platforms.

Censoring the Internet

Over the last year, the Modi government has brought forward a series of laws and regulations that will fundamentally change how the internet operates in the country. The newly amended Information Technology (IT) Rules, first introduced in 2021, allow for the establishment of a “fact-checking unit” to determine the truthfulness of online posts that are related to the government’s activity.

Any post, opinion, or news report that the fact-checking unit deems to be false will have to be removed from social media platforms. In other words, the government will have the power to decide what people are allowed to say about it online.

The Modi government has brought forward a series of laws and regulations that will fundamentally change how the internet operates in the country.

The principle of safe harbor, which protects online platforms from legal action for content posted by their users, is a cornerstone of the modern-day internet, ensuring that social media providers do not have to overregulate and can maintain a certain level of free speech. However, these protections might now be removed in India. Modi’s junior IT minister, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, recently claimed that the safe harbor principle was responsible for “toxicity” on the internet and could be done away with.

The Modi government has already forced platforms like Twitter to remove user content that criticized its policies. By invoking the specters of hate speech, misinformation, and fake news, it is seeking to legitimize political censorship of the internet.

Controlling Data

The plans for control don’t end there. At an event last November, the Indian foreign minister S. Jaishankar referred to his doctorate on the Manhattan Project in the United States, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.

Jaishankar used this example to stress how important it is to “restrict” and “steer” the use of technology. He went on to speak about the political implications of technology and suggested there was growing concern about where people’s data was being stored and who would collect and process it.

The BJP’s overriding objective is to create an online ecosystem with multiple levels of government control.

The speech gave us a sense of how the Modi government wants to manage the internet and the tech sector in general. It does not see the internet merely as a tool for economic growth and social change but also as a political battleground that it must dominate and exploit in order to control the country’s citizens. The overriding objective is to create an online ecosystem with multiple levels of government control.

Take the example of the proposed Digital Personal Data Protection Bill that Modi introduced in November 2022. The new law imposes several duties on companies collecting data on Indian citizens, yet it allows the Indian state to exempt its own agencies from most of these provisions, even though it is one of the largest data collectors in the country.

State Surveillance

State bodies gather data on the people of India through welfare schemes and biometric identity databases like Aadhaar, a twelve-digit unique identity number that is the largest system of its kind anywhere in the world. In effect, the authorities will be allowed to store data for indefinite periods of time and use it for any purpose they deem fit. These provisions go against the standards established by legislation like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which enforce limitations on the storage of data and the uses to which it can be put so as to protect the rights of citizens.

The Indian government has been promoting public technologies such as the Unified Payments Interface or UPI, which allows for instant real-time payments through smartphones. This is being done under the rubric of India Stack, a cluster of digital public goods that the government is developing, which will collect even more data from the public. The lack of privacy safeguards means that this data can be used for surveillance and public monitoring without people’s consent.

The government has recently expanded the scope of Aadhaar to the private sector. Having previously been restricted to government agencies, the database will now be available to private companies if they can justify such use as being “in the interest of the state.” The proposed changes do not define what such interests might be.

The centralization of financial, biometric, and other forms of data without privacy protections will create a favorable environment for a mass surveillance system.

As the usage of Aadhaar authentication increases, the authorities will inevitably acquire more data. The absence of a data protection law and the exemptions granted in the proposed legislation create a greater risk of arbitrary surveillance.

For example, the state might record the use of a service from any private company through an Aadhaar identity. There are no legal restrictions on how it chooses to deploy that information, and the legislation may even facilitate its use for surveillance. The centralization of financial, biometric, and other forms of data without privacy protections will create a favorable environment for a mass surveillance system.

Spying on Messages

The BJP administration is also trying to control and monitor private messages. In March of this year, the Financial Times reported that Modi’s government was looking for new surveillance software to replace Pegasus. The military-grade spyware developed by Israel’s NSO Group caused a huge uproar in India last year when the government was accused of deploying it against critical journalists, academics, and politicians.

The Financial Times noted that the “PR problem” associated with Pegasus had prompted the search for a replacement that would be similar but more discreet. The following week, India’s Hindu newspaper reported that an Indian defense agency had already been purchasing equipment from Cognyte, an Israeli firm, to replace Pegasus.

The Indian authorities cannot access private, encrypted messages on apps like WhatsApp and Signal. Existing surveillance laws such as the Information Technology Act prohibit the use of spyware to hack into mobile phones and apps. Several lawyers have informed me that evidence collected using such spyware would not be admissible in an Indian court.

The Indian Telecommunications Bill will allow the government to suspend or surveil communication channels without a court order.

With this in mind, the Modi government introduced the Indian Telecommunications Bill last year, expanding the scope of government surveillance to digital services, including encrypted messaging apps. The bill will allow the government to suspend or surveil communication channels without a court order and without having to make the reasons for doing so public.

The new legislation will force the messaging platforms to break encryption themselves and hand over private messages to the authorities. Messages obtained in this manner will then be admissible as evidence in court. The secrecy and lack of independent oversight makes this bill a dangerous tool that the government will be able to use against its political opponents. It formalizes clandestine surveillance, leaving people with no legal recourse against such monitoring.

Three Prongs

Put together, we can identify a three-pronged approach by Modi and the BJP that involves the control of online discourse, the repurposing of public data for surveillance, and the access to private messages. It will transform how the internet is used in India and discourage the expression of dissent, even in private chats, let alone public posts. This legislative blitzkrieg strikes at fundamental principles of the internet, including free speech and the free flow of information.

The new laws will assume greater importance in the run-up to next year’s general election. The BJP will probably seek to use the new legislative levers to dominate online debate. The government’s approach to the internet is rooted in paranoia and a desire to control and monitor information, not just to deal with external threats but also to neutralize domestic opponents and subvert the democratic process.

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On Wednesday afternoon, a Birmingham, Alabama resident Jermiera Ivory Fowler, a 31-year-old woman, was reported missing after leaving to meet someone to make a Facebook Marketplace purchase.

Less than 24 hours later, police responded to a call claiming a burning body was discovered near Sellers Road, a wooded, dead-end route. When they arrived, they quickly found Fowler’s body had been set ablaze.

Herbert Brown, who lives nearby the road on Tucker Avenue – the street behind Sellers Road – reported to WVTM that he awoke to a fierce blaze and found her charred body when he went to inspect. Nothing more than cinders and kindling remained the next day.

Police believe Fowler was shot before her death, and a separate location revealed her vehicle. Authorities have yet to make any arrests as the case is fully investigated as a homicide, and according to police, it remains uncertain at this time if Fowler’s murderer and assailants were connected to the Facebook Marketplace purchase.

The sudden and devastating loss of Jermiera Ivory Fowler is an incurable tragedy for her family and friends as the police continue their investigations. The occurrence is also a stark warning of the inherent danger of online transactions and meeting up with strangers. As Fowler’s death sadly shows, the importance of being aware, vigilant, and employing basic protective measures when utilizing online marketplaces can not be overstated.