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Australian historian Sheila Fitzpatrick has spent her career documenting the history of the USSR. She tells Jacobin about her latest project, which looks at the Soviet citizens who migrated to Australia and their complicated relationship with their homeland.

Memorial service held by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Sydney, Australia, to commemorate the Holodomor, June 28, 1953. (Wikimedia Commons)

Since the 1960s, the Australian historian Sheila Fitzpatrick has devoted her career to trying to understand the USSR — what it was, how it worked, and what it meant. Her work, based always on close reading of the archives, became in the 1970s the leading part of an unofficial “revisionist” school of social historians who rejected the notion that the USSR was a completely controlled totalitarian state.

Fitzpatrick was born and raised in postwar Australia, where her father Brian was a nonconforming socialist journalist — an experience she wrote about in her memoir My Father’s Daughter. A few years ago, Fitzpatrick returned to her native country, where she has been applying the same methods of archival research and revisionist attention to histories from below to the story of postwar migration to Australia.

Owen Hatherley talked to her about her new book White Russians, Red Peril, which tells the story of the thousands of Soviet citizens and ethnic Russians who migrated to Australia in the 1940s and ’50s.

Owen Hatherley

You grew up in Melbourne, and have moved back there recently.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

I was so keen to get out of Melbourne way back. It’s very funny to return to it.

Owen Hatherley

It was pejorative, right? Melbourne in the ’50s as an incredibly businesslike, bleak city.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Everything was closed on Sunday, and pubs closed at 6:00 p.m.

Owen Hatherley

This comes up in White Russians, Red Peril, these people being amazed that there’s only one entertainment and it’s the pub and it closes at 6:00 p.m.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

I don’t know whether my deep sympathy for them came through because I just think it must have been awful. Arriving I mean. It was bad enough having grown up there, but at least if you’d grown up there, you could leave when you grew up. But a migrant can’t think like that, not a migrant from postwar Eastern Europe.

At least if you’d grown up in Melbourne, you could leave when you grew up. But a migrant can’t think like that.

Owen Hatherley

But they could get a car incredibly quickly, which these people seemed to appreciate.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

They could build a house. There was a great shortage of builders, but while you couldn’t get a house built, you could save enough for a plot of land on the outskirts, and build your own house in five years, and then you’d have the little house and the car.

Owen Hatherley

Whereas you grew up in a flat, which was pretty unusual in Australia at the time.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Yeah. Real Australians didn’t live in flats, so that was part of our complete outsider status. I’m sure that, first of all, my father didn’t have the money to buy a house, but on the other hand they could probably have rented one. There was something they liked about living in a flat — but then they sent me to a private school.

Among the grievances against my parents, or really the main one, was that they insisted on sending me to a private school. First of all, it was academically awful. Secondly, it was anti-communist, and therefore I got all this “your father’s a Communist,” although he wasn’t. But it was against the family code of honor to say you were not a Communist if you were not a Communist, because somebody who wasn’t a Communist had to not deny it.

This was all very tedious. I kept saying, “please, I want to go to the state school,” which was on the tram line. They just wouldn’t do it, which made me very annoyed and frustrated.

The architect Robin Boyd lived in a Roy Grounds–designed house directly opposite ours. These were architecturally much better than ours, which was built in the late ’30s in that kind of style — it’s called art deco by the estate agents, but the only art deco thing you can really discern is there’s the odd curve. Émigré architects like Frederick Romberg built flats in St Kilda because basically flats were considered a Jewish form of life. Everybody in our block of flats was a European migrant except for us.

But on the other hand, we didn’t seem to feel any particular kinship with them either, despite my father’s close involvement with left-wing Jewish intellectuals, because these people were not left wing and they were not intellectuals. They were refugees. That didn’t cut it for him. Perhaps it was just because they weren’t drinking people. In other words, he was a person whose sociability revolved around drinking, either in the house or in the pub. If they don’t drink, then how do you get on good terms?

Owen Hatherley

I wanted to start by asking about your relationship with the Left. Obviously, it’s biographically important, with the influence on you of your father, the socialist journalist Brian Fitzpatrick, when you were growing up in Melbourne, but also of your mentor as a young historian in the 1960s, the old Bolshevik writer and editor Igor Sats. But how do you think of it now?

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Fathers as much as mentors — Igor was also a father figure as well as a mentor. I saw them as similar, but in my mind they probably figured as dissidents. Igor was not what was called a dissident in the Soviet Union because he was a critic from within the system, but in a broader sense one could regard him as somebody who is always “agin [against] the government,” like my father.

It interested me, the comparison between what that meant in the two systems, because it was a somewhat heroic role in the Soviet Union — it was a given that you were on the side of right. There was a sense that that was a matter of bravery, whereas in Australia you might try to cultivate a heroic mode, but the people around you only thought it was a bit ridiculous.

My relationship to the Left is certainly that I come from it. That is to say, it’s my tribal origin.

I thought in a certain sense it was easier to be a dissident in the Soviet Union. There was a lot more reinforcement and solidarity and so on. Now, mind you, because my father was on the Left, on the far left, but not a Communist, that cut him out of some of what solidarity would have been around. Because if you were brought up actually as a child of Communists you then had a community, and my father’s strange position didn’t give him a community.

To address that question directly, my relationship to the Left is certainly that I come from it. That is to say, it’s my tribal origin, and I therefore have a loyalty to it, but I have stayed out of any kind of political engagement.

I wanted to find out what the Soviet Union was like. On the Left, they hoped it was good, but they didn’t know anything. And on the Right, they hoped and affirmed that it was bad but also didn’t know that much. So I was really curious to know — what can this be like? — which was the main stimulus for going there.

In fact, this involved an argument with my father, in that I thought it was not a very important thing to him. He hoped the Soviet Union was okay and was prepared to defend it against criticism, because he assumed the criticism was biased. As a teenager when I started criticizing him for all kinds of things, one of those things was basically: How do you know anything about the Soviet Union?

So it was a curiosity about something unknown. Being a Sovietologist who is trying not to run a particular political line was very difficult because of the pressures on both sides to do that. It was simply very difficult to extract yourself from that sort of mode of thinking that anything you say about the Soviet Union is either praise or condemnation.

Owen Hatherley

White Russians, Red Peril follows on in some ways from Mischka’s War, your book about your husband, the Latvian physicist Misha Danos. What was it like merging these two places — the country that you grew up in and the country you’ve devoted your career to studying?

Sheila Fitzpatrick

I had never intended to come back to Australia, and nobody thought I would, unlike most Australian expatriates, including most of my friends, not all of whom came back, but they always meant to, and I didn’t. But then after my husband died, I didn’t want to keep on living in America — or I wanted not to end my life in America, you might say — I thought, where will I go? I thought of a bunch of places, and in the end decided on coming to Sydney.

But I thought that if I come back, first of all, in Australia, I thought nobody cares about Russian history here, so I need another specialty: namely the history of migration. They care more now, of course, because of Ukraine. At that point I thought that this was a matter of indifference there. I wasn’t even sure that, once I was in Australia, I would keep going to Russia to work in the archives, and in that case, I would certainly have needed another research area.

So I’m now making it sound incredibly rational. But there’s also the fact that I was uprooting myself again. I’ve done migration before, in my twenties, and then I went from Britain, where I probably thought I’d stay, to America. And so finally I’m moving again, and that, of course, made me interested in the process of migration.

When I wrote Soviet history, I was, of course, an outsider looking in. I was not a part of it.

In part in the same terms, in Tear off the Masks!, I was interested in the phenomenon of self-reinvention. When the society you’re in changes, come the revolution, you’ve got to give a different account of yourself. Migration is the same. Your account of yourself has to change.

But then back to the practical: I thought, well, I can also do migration history, and specifically that of those Russians who found themselves displaced after World War II who came to Australia. I was thinking about a different kind of book to write about Russians in Australia, and in part because of the connections with Tear off the Masks! that I’ve mentioned.

But also when I wrote Soviet history, I was, of course, an outsider to that, an outsider looking in. I was not a part of it. Now, in general, Australian historians writing about Australia tend to think of themselves very much as a part of it. I didn’t think of myself as a part of Australia, although I do increasingly.

My Russians coming to Australia, they’re arriving in a strange place. And I have just done that, too, although it’s a strange place that I also know. My knowledge of Australia is actually very strange because up to 1964, I had a reasonably good knowledge of its politics and social life. And then I didn’t pay very much attention until 2012.

But on the other hand, all my contemporaries and friends, they had a whole life in that time, and all kinds of dramatic things happened, including in the public realm, that I didn’t participate in. I like trying to understand things that I don’t fully understand, so that it was really interesting to go to the Soviet Union in the ’60s, because there I fully didn’t understand it and worked hard to understand it.

Now, coming back to Australia, I have this sort of partial understanding with a tremendous forty-eight-year gap in the middle. That makes finding out about the forty-eight years in the middle really quite interesting as well.

Owen Hatherley

And during that time Melbourne and Sydney became multicultural cities, which they hadn’t been before.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Oh, yes, absolutely. I mean, they’re unrecognizable from what I left. It is very much improved, in my opinion, from what I left.

Owen Hatherley

And in a way this starts with those people recruited at the end of the war by the Australian Labor government. But they’re not the people the Labor minister for immigration, Arthur Calwell, thinks he’s getting — they go to the displaced persons (DP) camps and think that with these Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Ukrainians, and Croats, they’re getting good (and of course white and non-Jewish) working-class folk who will join trade unions and vote Labor, and of course what they’re actually getting is middle-class professionals who are very hostile to the Left.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

They did manual labor for two years — they were indentured for two years — but that’s the end of it. At a certain point early on, Calwell and some of his people did think that they were getting the equivalent of Dutch Protestant social democrats or something. That was not what they got. They got anti-communists whose votes probably helped keep the Australian Labor Party out of office for decades.

On the Left, when I was growing up in the late 1940s and ’50s, there was a lot of suspicion of the DP migrant. The Left in Melbourne had a strong Jewish component, and the Jewish component was not happy about what it perceived as the letting in of collaborators. And of course, the immigration authorities did let in Nazis, and there was a lot of distress about that within the left wing of the Jewish community and in the Left in general.

When my father thought of Baltic migrants, he would tend to assume that they were likely to be collaborators and Nazi sympathizers.

Therefore, in writing about the Russians, I’m sort of writing against the grain of my tribal loyalty, because from our family point of view, we were in favor of the Jewish migrants and against anybody who criticized them, but we were not keen on other DPs. When my father thought of Baltic migrants, he would tend to assume that they were likely to be collaborators and Nazi sympathizers, and that was a widespread view in the trade unions as well.

I was reminded of that when I was writing Mischka’s War, because Misha (later my husband) was a Latvian who became a DP at the end of the war and was therefore open to that accusation of collaboration. I gave a paper on it at the Australian National University, in an academic context, and somebody basically jumped up and said, “well, why do you take Misha at face value? After all, he was a Latvian and therefore almost certainly a Nazi.” I was really taken aback by that, and angry at the attack on Misha. But that attitude was a common one, and I’m sure that my family had it when I was growing up.

Owen Hatherley

Certainly what unites many of the Russians in White Russians, Red Peril with the better-known Baltic and Ukrainian and I guess also Croatian and Serbian migrants is that they were people who preferred living under Nazi occupation to living under Soviet occupation.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Yes, that’s right. Another characteristic of Russian migrants once they get to Australia, as well as to the United States and other places, is that there’s a celebration of identity in terms of patriotism (Russian), religion (Orthodoxy), and anti-communism — this doesn’t apply only to the Russians, but to all the Slavic and Eastern European migrant groups.

In the Russian case, this is particularly interesting in that these are historically markers of identity for “White Russians,” the émigrés who left Russia after the revolution and lived in Europe between the wars, who were among those who were resettled in Australia and other countries as DPs after World War II. But that’s not so for the former Soviet Russians who arrived at the same time.

Many of them had in fact passed themselves off as White Russians in the DP camps after the war, to avoid being repatriated to the Soviet Union. Once they arrived in Australia, many of the Russian migrants preferred to forget that they had ever been Soviet — all the more because, during the Cold War, that wasn’t going to make them popular in Australia.

Once they arrived in Australia, many of the Russian migrants preferred to forget that they had ever been Soviet.

They tended to take a very strong anti-communist position, with regard to both domestic and international affairs. Probably in most cases they really did dislike the Soviet Union, but whether they privately did or didn’t, they needed to take that position, for fear of being labeled “Red” just because they were Russian. So that gives me, as a social historian, the interesting question of how people handle a flawed identity, which is what “Soviet Russian” was in Australian Cold War terms.

Owen Hatherley

Some of them, I suppose, dealt with that ideologically, in that many of them were active on the Right, in organizations like the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS), the far-right Russian émigré organization that had been based in Yugoslavia before the war. But also a lot of them would go to the pro-Soviet Russian Social Club in Melbourne and watch Soviet films.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Yes. But they would also contribute to the building of an Orthodox church in the suburbs they were living in, and there was more effort being put into that. Now, if you were a Soviet person, inventing an Orthodox identity was sometimes quite challenging.

Some Soviets would have retained Orthodox faith to a degree, particularly in the villages, but those who grew up in towns much less. But once you got to Australia as a Russian new Australian, Orthodoxy was the core of the identity — Orthodoxy and anti-communism. And of course, the Church (which was the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad) was very active against Communism, too.

Owen Hatherley

In terms of flawed identities, a lot of these Russians came into Australia through claiming to be Ukrainian. But later you write that one of the problems of the Russian identity was shown when Ukrainian émigrés gradually came to organize around an anti-colonial identity, based on the memory of the Holodomor and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Even though the Russians had their “Day of Irreconcilability” on the anniversary of the October Revolution, and published books with titles like Russians Are Not Communists, they couldn’t be part of that anti-colonial identity the Ukrainians were building, because they were mostly Russian monarchists.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Yes. Although I haven’t really got the whole Russian-Ukrainian relationship in Australia straight yet. Some of these people called themselves Russian and some of them called themselves Ukrainian, and they went to Orthodox churches that defined themselves as either Russian or Ukrainian, depending on which one happened to be there.

In Australia, the situation was different from that of Canada, where you had a relatively large Ukrainian diaspora already in situ for the postwar migrants to join. In Australia, there was a small prewar Russian community, about five thousand people, which included people who might later identify as Ukrainian.

Owen Hatherley

There’s something interesting that John-Paul Himka and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe have written about with reference to Ukraine, where the often quite apolitical Ukrainian DPs, many of whom had been forced laborers in the Third Reich, came to be led in the camps by veterans of the OUN. Something similar happened here with the way the NTS came to speak for the Russian DPs.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

I wouldn’t see the camps as an ideological training ground so much, as that would suggest strongly that it was coming from outside, but as the cauldrons where ideology was being fired. In the Russian case, it seems to me that what tended to happen was that immigrants from the earlier, postrevolutionary immigration, who were better educated, more upper class, basically ran the camps almost by right.

NTS was the organization that united many of them. I mean, obviously there were lots of White Russians who were not NTS, but the ones who ran the camps were. That’s where I think you saw established the model where a former Soviet person was helped by these intellectuals who were running the council of the immigrants to acquire a false passport, saying that one was stateless — in other words, White Russian.

Then after having the passport, you also acquired the identity you were learning. If you look at some of the memoirs from the White Russian immigrants running the camps, they’re really fascinating in their emphasis on their pedagogical role. They gave classes with the bigger purpose of reforming the thinking of these people.

Owen Hatherley

You write about two groups of migrants, one from the DP camps in Europe, and one from China, when the Russian communities in Shanghai and especially Harbin gradually made their way to Australia between the revolution in 1949 and the Cultural Revolution in the ’60s. Did you find much difference in the way these two émigré groups saw each other?

Sheila Fitzpatrick

There is a real difference. The World War II people were the ones whose children complained that their parents never said anything about the past, never gave them a clear account of anything, wouldn’t even clearly say where they were born, leaving the whole question of origins very murky. All sorts of things were simply not mentioned, including previous marriages and wives and children left back in the Soviet Union.

Whereas the DP migrants from Europe often came as single people, the Harbin people generally came as families, and often came along with not only their own family from Harbin, but lots of other families who also come — and they were interested in their past. They told their children about the past. They had a nostalgia for Russian Harbin, but also sometimes they even had a nostalgia for China. It was a much easier, less tortured relationship to the past.

Owen Hatherley

Even though the Russia that they were nostalgic for was located in China.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Yes, that’s the irony of it. Many of the Russian migrants who came to Australia from China had never actually lived in Russia. On the other hand, in one sense they had closer connections with the Soviet Union than the European DPs who had actually lived there.

Many of the Russian migrants who came to Australia from China had never actually lived in Russia.

One of the fascinating things is that as far as I can gather, practically everybody who came to Australia from Harbin or Shanghai had either a family member or quite close friends who decided to repatriate to the Soviet Union, and to a degree contact was kept up. So there’s another big difference.

I’m not saying they were not anti-communist, it’s just that it was different. For the World War II migrants, the European lot and their children, the Soviet Union becomes a sort of devil’s land that you couldn’t even think of. It wasn’t so for the China Russians. On the one hand there was the myth of prerevolutionary Russia, but you would also know a few people that lived in the Soviet Union now.

Many of those who arrived in the Soviet Union in the late ’40s did end up in the gulag, though not forever — but it’s not that they had an easy passage. I’m not at all suggesting that they heard good things about the USSR, just that the place was real to them in a way it wasn’t for most Australians at the time.

Owen Hatherley

Did you start writing White Russians, Red Peril as a result of Mischka’s War — did one lead to the other?

Sheila Fitzpatrick

I started thinking about writing Mischka’s War after Misha died in 1999. I went through his papers and as a historian I couldn’t help cataloguing them. I saw that there was something that I could write and wanted to write, but I couldn’t write it straight away. It was about ten years later, but it was in my mind for all that time.

Probably when I was thinking about choosing the topic of migration, I chose DPs because I knew an awful lot about two DPs: Misha and his mother Olga. I had read their correspondence when they were living in Germany as DPs but in different places, since it was among Misha’s papers. Those letters were fascinating because they showed the range of things that DPs could do in practice, as opposed to what you would gather from the archives of the international organizations (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration [UNRRA] and International Refugee Organization [IRO]) that looked after them.

They simply often did things that were not meant to be in the repertoire for DPs: for example, DPs are never meant to set up businesses, but Olga keeps setting up little businesses. That was very interesting for me, because I knew the Misha stuff before I went to the archives and read the literature and saw that practically everything about Misha and his mother’s DP status, including the fact that they didn’t live in camps, was unusual.

They were what were called “free living” DPs. Then I gradually realized that the whole literature is based on information from the people who lived in camps, because those are the people whom the UNRRA knew most about.

Owen Hatherley

There are so many things in that story that are so deeply strange and unusual, like when he went on this jolly off to Germany in 1944 — and accidentally found himself in Dresden during the firebombing.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

He did take my breath away when he first mentioned that he had gone to Germany to study in June 1944. He did it because if he had stayed in Riga he would have been conscripted into the Waffen-SS.

Owen Hatherley

Even more odd is his nationality — Latvian but also Hungarian, and also, though it’s unclear whether he knew it or not (the Germans clearly didn’t), Jewish.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

It was interesting to me that his brother in Latvia insisted on telling me that “we were part of the German society” in Riga, which was not Misha’s view at all, although they were German-speaking and he went to the German high school. I think the reality is that a Hungarian, probably Jewish, was not that welcome in Riga’s German society, even if he speaks German. But for Misha’s younger brother, it was a mark of social standing.

Owen Hatherley

You also mention something that I found very much when I spent two months in Latvia in 2016, mostly in Kuldiga, in Courland — that its history is totally compartmentalized. The people working on Latvian Latvia, German Latvia, Russian Latvia, Jewish Latvia, don’t seem to talk to each other or factor the other’s experience into the history.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

I came across that in a more scholarly, practical way. In other words, I was trying to get the sense of the history of opera in Riga, but there are no books on the history of opera in Riga. It’s the Russian opera, the German opera, or the Latvian opera. They’re all separate history. They have nothing in common with each other.

At the moment I’m working on another DP book, about Soviet and Baltic migration, this time — Soviet and Baltic DPs in Europe and their dispersal. It’s called Lost Souls, which is a reference to the Soviet view that DPs in Europe ought to be returned to them as Soviet property (a bit like serfs, referred to in property dealing as “souls,” in old Russia). In other words, the resettlement and repatriation of a small group of voluntary repatriates.

I have terrific archival material on it, and I find that really quite fascinating. Obviously, I’m drawing to some extent on the Australian diaspora, but North America is going to have to come up strongly. I had lots and lots of archival material from doing White Russians, Red Peril, and that meant that in COVID lockdown, I could write more or less from what I had.

If you were a DP, you were in the camps, and one of three things was going to happen to you. One, you went back. Two, you’d resettle. And the third was that you couldn’t make up your mind to do anything and so you stayed in Germany.

The first option, repatriation, is one I found terrific material on in Russian archives, so it plays a much larger role in this book than in White Russians, Red Peril. As far as resettlement is concerned, a big theme is the differences between White Russians and former Soviet citizens, something that hasn’t really been noticed in the scholarship so far.

I’m adding the Baltic DPs, a group the Soviets claimed as Soviet (on the basis of the incorporation of the three Baltic states in 1939) but that the Western Allies quickly decided were not subject to Soviet repatriation. When I say Baltic, I really always focus on Latvia, because that’s where I know most about and respond to most.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan are leading “intense” negotiations.

By World Israel News Staff

Saudi Arabia has demanded that the Biden administration enter a military alliance with it that would include approval for a civilian nuclear program in return for a normalization agreement with Israel, the Jewish state’s Channel 12 news reported on Tuesday.

In ongoing and “intensive” talks, the Gulf kingdom also demanded that Israel launches a peace process for a two state solution with the Palestinians, the report said.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan are leading the negotiations with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman while Mossad chief David Barnea is representing the Israeli side.

As part of the deal, Riyadh has also demanded that Washington accelerate several major arms deals.

In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that a normalization deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel would be conditioned on a U.S. commitment to back the Gulf kingdom’s aspirations for a civilian nuclear program.

Saudi Arabia has long sought to utilize its extensive uranium reserves for a civilian nuclear program.

Riyadh also seeks to gain a commitment from Washington on weapon supplies as well as security guarantees.

Riyadh’s demands constitute “daunting obstacles to a deal, as some Washington lawmakers will likely oppose those measures,” the report said at the time.

It cited former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro as saying that it would be “a very tough Gordian knot to cut.”

A normalization deal would mark a “diplomatic victory” for President Joe Biden, the report said, who has bristled with Riyadh on several fronts including oil prices and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The post Saudi Arabia demands US backing for nuclear program for peace with Israel – report appeared first on World Israel News.

The prime minister spoke after briefings on Iran and counterterror efforts.

By JNS

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited an IDF Intelligence base on Tuesday together with the head of IDF Intelligence Maj.-Gen. Aharon Haliva and additional commanders.

The prime minister received an in-depth briefing on the efforts being made in various fields regarding the Iranian threat.

He was also presented with details of the daily efforts to thwart terrorism in Judea and Samaria, and reviewed intelligence information that enabled the targeting of the senior Islamic Jihad commanders in the Gaza Strip during “Operation Shield and Arrow” earlier this month

“I have just finished visiting one of our intelligence bases and I leave very encouraged,” Netanyahu said.

“Israel has opened a gap against all of our enemies and it has done so with a combination of human intelligence and artificial intelligence. What I saw here is that the future is already here today. So let all of our enemies know: We are far ahead of you.”

Also participating in the visit were National Security Council Director Tzachi Hanegbi and the prime minister’s Chief of Staff Tzachi Braverman and Military Secretary Maj.-Gen. Avi Gil.

After the visit, the prime minister was briefed on the “Bridges project,” the goal of which is to impart technological know-how to pupils from the periphery.

The post Netanyahu: Israel is ‘far ahead’ of its enemies appeared first on World Israel News.

An entire chapter containing harmful material about Israel had been removed from a core social studies textbook.

By World Israel News Staff

Saudi Arabia has removed “practically all antisemitism” from school textbooks, according to a report released Tuesday by education watchdog Impact-se.

Since its last review of the Saudi curricula in 2019, Impact-se also found positive changes in the depiction of Israel and Zionism, citing one social studies textbook in which an entire chapter containing harmful material about Israel had been removed.

One textbook chapter heading on Israel’s pre-state history was changed from “The Attempt to Create the Zionist Entity” to “British Mandate in Palestine.”

“Highly inflammatory hadiths and texts” have been removed from textbooks, as have statements condemning homosexuals, infidels, and Christians, the report said.

Nonetheless, the report notes, problematic examples remain: a first-grade textbook teaches that “any other religion [than Islam] is false,” and another describes atheists as “souls that the devil has taken over.”

Zionism is still described as a “Jewish racist political movement” that “aims to expel the Palestinian people and establish a Jewish state by force,”

“Practically all the previously identified antisemitic material in Saudi Islamic Studies textbooks has now been removed,” the group’s CEO Marcus Sheff said in a statement. “This follows the previous removal of significant amounts of antisemitism in other subjects over the last four years. While all textbook reform is important, Saudi Arabian textbooks are particularly consequential. Kudos is due to the Saudi government for this multi-year and systematic removal of Jew hate and moderation of content on Israel in the textbooks of over six million Saudi children, and of many more who study the textbooks outside of Saudi Arabia.”

The changes come amid warming ties between Israel and the Gulf Kingdom, as well as a wide-sweeping education reform by Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Sultan.

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Renowned attorney has said he would represent bereaved husband and father Leo Dee pro bono in a $1.3 billion case against CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour for falsely stating that his wife and two daughters were killed “in a shoot-out.”

The post WATCH – ‘Let’s see Amanpour under my cross-examination:’ Dershowitz to represent Leo Dee against CNN appeared first on World Israel News.

Hassan Katnani and Ma’ad Masri were glorified as “heroic Jihad fighters.”

By World Israel News Staff

The terrorists responsible for the murder of British-Israeli Lucy Dee and her two daughters, Maia and Rina Dee, were hailed as Palestinian heroes by the Palestinian Authority leadership.

Spokesman for PA President Mahmoud Abbas Nabil Abu Rudeina condemned Israel for the “crime of murdering” Hassan Katnani and Ma’ad Masri, whom he referred to as “martyrs,” according to a translation of his remarks by monitoring group Palestinian media watch.

Israeli security forces killed Katnani and Masri, who were members of the Hamas terror group, during a gun battle in the Palestinian Authority-controlled city of Shechem (Nablus) earlier this month.

PA Prime Minister Shtayyeh “condemned the Israeli act of aggression due to which 3 Martyrs ascended to Heaven” and called on the European Union to issue a condemnation against Israel. Shtayyeh also shared a photo of the murderers.

Abbas’ ruling Fatah faction glorified the two as “heroic Jihad fighters,” dubbing them “the heroes from the Jordan Valley.” The terrorists were also referred to as grooms on their way to “their wedding” – referencing the 72 virgins that martyrs are believed to wed in paradise according to Islam.

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The US workplace is a private dictatorship where bosses exercise extraordinary power and systematically union bust. “Salting,” or getting a job with the intent to organize a workplace, is a completely justifiable response to this workplace despotism.

Activists participate in a picket line against Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s union busting on July 19, 2022 in New York City. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)

Today’s revival of union “salting” could not be more welcome or more urgently needed.

A tactic as old as the labor movement itself, salting describes going to work in an unorganized workplace where there may be a chance to help initiate new union organizing.

It’s also a label for taking jobs at already unionized employers, hoping to play a positive role. But here I will deal with the former: taking jobs to help spur new organizing.

Labor’s Crisis

Whatever amount of salting is underway today — it’s impossible to precisely measure — it cannot come soon enough. The US labor movement is mired in a crisis that threatens its very existence.

A bare fringe of the working class, 10 percent, belongs to a union. The rate of unionization has been cut in half in the past forty years.

Virtually all employers are ferociously anti-union, and they’ve been able to construct enormous legal and illegal obstacles to unionization efforts.

The unorganized workplace is a de facto dictatorship of ever-lower wages and living standards, where blue-collar, white-collar, and even professional workers are in the employer’s grip.

With an army of unorganized workers arrayed against the dwindling union garrison, it is unlikely that any further forward progress for the existing unions or the working class as a whole will be possible without a revival of union organizing on a larger scale.

Widespread salting can and must be a component of these urgently needed organizing campaigns.

Crisis by the Numbers

Union-organizing efforts today are at best incidental and sporadic. Occasional large or name-brand campaigns achieve some media attention and provide an illusion of union vitality.

Several recent sizeable graduate student wins, the Starbucks movement, Amazon, and activity in the nonprofit sector are all welcome — but are still collectively too small to reverse the overall decline.

Organizing efforts in the public sector are largely stalled, with union recognition still banned in many states and localities. In the private sector, the number of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)–supervised union authorization elections now hovers at historically low levels.

I joined the labor movement in 1979; that year 7,266 NLRB elections were held, with a union win rate of almost 45 percent.

In 2021, the number of union elections fell below one thousand, with a win rate not much more than 50 percent. The 2022 numbers show some improvement, but nothing approaching what’s needed.

The size of the units organizing today has also shrunk significantly, translating into far fewer workers organized.

While the US union movement is the most financially wealthy union movement on planet Earth, allocations of resources to tackle the organizing crisis are minuscule and often short-lived.

The 2022 AFL-CIO Convention’s much-publicized “transformational” organizing initiative remains invisible. Some individual unions have increased the resources they are dedicating to new organizing, but the sheer size of the task demands far more. Salting is one way that activists can dive in to initiate organizing and pull the institution along.

Salting Controversial?

Employers decry salting as illegitimate. In fact, they routinely allege that workers who help lead any union-organizing campaign in the workplace are “union plants.”

Bosses allege this even when it’s an absurdity — the sincerity and authenticity of everyone who challenges their total control must be discredited.

Anti-labor politicians occasionally team up with employers to denounce salting in an attempt to somehow scandalize it. Bogus congressional hearings have been held from time to time to denounce salting.

The current salting efforts at several name-brand corporations may catch the attention of these extremist anti-union elements in the current Congress. So be it. Their clumsy efforts in the past, given to shrill hyperbole and wild exaggeration, have always fallen flat.

The defense of labor’s salting projects must take an aboveboard, straight-on approach: salting is often the required form of resistance to the employer’s workplace dictatorship.

When organizing is a de facto illegal act — when workers are fired and victimized by the tens of thousands for exercising their paper right to unionize — salting is the completely justified response.

It acts as a catalyst for the workers already on the job who are frequently supportive of unions but nearly purged of hope and terrified of organizing, for fear of retaliation. When the workplace has been reduced to this situation, those who confront it as salts are doing truly commendable work.

Ultimately, all of us are salts. We have no means to earn a living other than finding a boss to hire us — and why shouldn’t we desire to start a union, or strengthen an existing union, while we’re there?

Don’t let the Democrats tell you Joe Biden’s hands are tied on the debt ceiling. If he really wanted to, he could use any number of maneuvers to refuse Republicans’ anti-worker, anti-poor demands and still avoid default.

Joe Biden meets with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in the Oval Office of the White House on May 22, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images)

Within the US constitutional system, the power to make laws is vested in Congress. This power includes the power to raise revenue through taxation and other means, to borrow money, and to engage in public spending. The president is then required to execute these fiscal laws as written.

There is a potential problem in this structure, which is that Congress could pass laws directing the president to spend a certain amount of money without passing laws to finance that spending. In this scenario, it is impossible for the president to follow the law. If he executes the spending by unilaterally financing it through tax hikes, bond sales, or similar, then he has usurped financing authority that is vested solely in Congress. If he unilaterally forgoes some or all of the spending mandated by Congress in order to stay within the financial constraints, then he has usurped the spending authority that is vested solely in Congress.

As far as I know, this potential problem has never arisen historically. Before 1917, Congress financed all of the spending it mandated, including by authorizing each and every bond sale. After 1917, Congress made it so that the president was always authorized to sell bonds in order to finance any spending that exceeded other revenue sources. So, in this scenario, bond sales became the residual funding mechanism used to ensure that the following equation was always in balance.

But this permanent authorization to sell bonds to balance this equation has one caveat, which is that it is subject to a debt limit. This means that when the total face value of the bonds outstanding hits a certain dollar amount, currently $31.4 trillion, the president is no longer authorized to sell bonds in order to balance this equation.

But if he can’t use bond sales to balance the equation, then how is he supposed to balance it?

As discussed already, he can’t refuse to do spending that Congress has directed him to do. He also can’t unilaterally raise taxes or sell off public assets like the United States Parcel Service or federal lands. The return on federal assets is not something that you can just dial up through executive fiat as it depends on market conditions. Lastly, the right to engage in seigniorage (i.e. money creation) is something that the Federal Reserve has, but not something the Treasury is generally regarded as having.

So, if you approach this issue conventionally, you are forced to conclude that, when the debt limit is hit, it is literally impossible for the president to follow the law, that Congress has essentially passed a set of laws that direct the president to do X and not-X at the same time.

All of the unconventional approaches to this conundrum work by finding authority for the president to do one of the financing activities that he appears to not be allowed to do. So far, this search for authority has primarily focused on the last two financing streams in the equation above: seigniorage and bond sales.

Although the Treasury is not generally regarded as having the right to engage in seigniorage, 31 USC 5112(k) gives the Treasury the authority to mint platinum coins in any denomination. On its face, this could be read as giving the Treasury unlimited authority to engage in seigniorage provided it is done through the minting of platinum coins. And logically, if such authority exists, and if the president cannot sell more bonds because of the debt limit, then the president must use this kind of seigniorage to finance the spending mandated by Congress. It is the only way for the president to not violate any laws.

Although the debt limit appears to forbid bond sales beyond $31.4 trillion, this dollar amount is arrived at by adding up the “face value” of all of the outstanding bonds. But the face value of bonds can be manipulated by changing the bond’s coupon. For example, the Treasury could issue bonds with a face value of $0 that only paid its holders a set amount of interest each year for a certain number of years. In this scenario, people would still buy the bonds in order to receive the interest, but there would be no principal and thus no face value. As with the seigniorage scenario above, if the Treasury has the authority to issue zero-principal bonds, then the president must legally do so in order to finance the spending mandated by Congress.

Beyond zero-principal bonds, there are two other approaches to engaging in bond sales despite the debt limit. The first is to point to the part of the 14th Amendment that says “the validity of the public debt of the United States . . . shall not be questioned” in order to argue that the debt limit statute is itself unconstitutional. The second is to rehearse the point above that the situation set up by the debt limit makes it literally impossible for the president to not violate the law (whether tax laws, debt laws, or spending laws) and then say that, between these lawbreaking options, violating the debt limit law is the least lawbreaking course of action.

The president could also illegally raise taxes or illegally sell off public assets to balance the equation, though so far nobody has really advocated for those lawbreaking approaches.

In the last week or so, there has been a bit of a crackup among liberal pundits on this topic, with many now suggesting that Biden can’t use any of these approaches and has to strike a deal on raising the debt limit. According to this argument, none of these alternative approaches will work because ultimately the conservative Supreme Court will rule against them.

But liberals who say this remain very unclear about what they think the Supreme Court ruling would actually be. If you keep the question abstract, you can just say something like “the Supreme Court will uphold the constitutionality of the debt limit” or something very reasonable-sounding like that. But this abstract gloss misunderstands the actual legal question that the Supreme Court would have to answer, which is not whether the debt limit is constitutional, but rather: What must the president do when Congress mandates an amount of spending that exceeds the amount of authorized financing?

Is the Supreme Court going to rule that, in that scenario, the president has the constitutional authority to unilaterally disregard some of the spending Congress has mandated the president to do? In this scenario, does the president get to choose what spending to disregard, sort of like a line-item veto, which the court has already ruled is unconstitutional even when Congress specifically passes a law giving the president line-item veto rights? Could Biden eliminate the entire Department of Defense once the debt limit is hit in order to get aggregate spending down to the levels financed by Congress?

There is no coherent way for the Supreme Court to actually resolve this kind of legal issue and the most ridiculous possible way for them to resolve it — especially within conservative jurisprudence — would be finding that the debt limit statute, without explicitly saying so, gives the president the authority to ignore whatever spending laws he wants in the event of a debt limit breach. Given these difficulties, it seems far more likely to me that the Supreme Court would just decline to rule, citing the political question doctrine.

Based on all of the above, my current thinking on the best way for Biden to deal with the debt limit is to sell zero-principal bonds. These would not count as debt under the wording of the debt limit statute because they have a $0 face value. If this was challenged, then the administration has three different defenses to the challenge: that zero-principal bonds do not contribute to the debt limit, that the debt limit is unconstitutional, and that illegally selling bonds is no more unconstitutional than illegally raising taxes, selling assets, or cutting spending.

But whichever course of action Biden chooses, we should be clear that he has other options than agreeing to crack the whip against America’s poor.

On Monday night, a 19-year-old man from Chesterfield, Missouri, Sai Varshith Kandula, caused a significant security scare outside the White House. Kandula drove a U-Haul box truck into specific security barriers designated to protect Lafayette Park – to the dismay of the Secret Service, United States Park Police, and the public that happened to be around at the time.

The young man was swiftly detained by Secret Service Uniformed Division members and taken into custody for further investigation. A reported statement made by Anthony Guglielmi, Secret Service Chief of Communications, stated that shortly before 10:00 pm on the same night, the driver crashed into the barriers located at 16th Street. Despite his forceful entrance onto the premises, there were no reported injuries to agents or White House personnel.

Repercussions to Kandula’s actions – resulting in charges of assault with a dangerous weapon; reckless operation of a motor vehicle; threatening to kill, kidnap, or inflict harm on the president, vice president, or family member; destruction of federal property, and trespassing – are still being determined and the cause of the incident is being investigated. Following the event, roads and pedestrian walkways were closed to prevent further disruption of the area.

A law enforcement source briefed on the matter told CBS News that candidates for the U.S. Presidency and other family members were the likely source of Kandula’s threatening statements. In addition, authorities have found no evidence of any previous criminal record or placement on various watch lists. However, a CNN affiliate station reported that a Nazi flag was discovered inside the truck, along with a black backpack and a roll of duct tape.

While the incident was ultimately stopped, the message was clear: security and the need to remain watchful of possible threats to the White House and its staff are paramount. Both the Secret Service and United States Park Police have committed to conducting a thorough investigation into the cause of the crash to protect the public and to ensure events like this do not happen again.

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