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Thursday, February 22, 2024
Megatron on X: "BREAKING: ⚡ 🇮🇱 Israeli Knesset member Hanoch Milbitsky: "You will die, your children will die, your grandchildren will die, there won't be a Palestinian state, there will never be," He shouted at Arab member Ayman Odeh following the voting regarding the possible recognition… https://t.co/gNAHJ2FwEH" / X
I’m Heartbroken by the War in Israel - TomDispatch.com
I’m Heartbroken by the War in Israel - TomDispatch.com
Tom writes:
Robert Lipsyte, What Kind of Jew Am I?
Posted on February 22, 2024
I grew up in the least-Jewish Jewish family around in the 1950s. We celebrated Christmas every year in a big-time fashion: tree, decorations, and all. And despite the desires of my dear grandmother, there would be no temple, no Sunday Hebrew school, no religion of any sort. I actually went to a Quaker school and I suspect that the first temple I ever entered was at 13 for a friend’s bar mitzvah. I did have one Israeli buddy for a few years, a neighbor who got a black-and-white TV before we did and so I spent as much time as I could in his apartment until his family went back to the Middle East. Yes, sometime in those early years, I was on the street with my own father when a passing stranger made an antisemitic slur and, being a tough, no-nonsense guy (“Major” Engelhardt as he liked his friends to call him from his years in World War II), my dad went right after him. And yes, one of my first roommates at Yale (which had only removed its Jewish quotas a year or two before I arrived in 1962), someone I grew to like, later told me that his dad, undoubtedly a Yale alumni, had specifically warned him to watch out for any Jew at Yale whose father was in the insurance business. (Consider that a knife through the heart!)
And none of that has ever changed. I married an ex-Catholic, brought my kids up without religion, and though there’s a temple catty-corner to the apartment building I’ve lived in for almost the last half-century, I’ve only been inside it once (for a Pete Seeger concert). And yet, explain it as you will, I take what Benjamin Netanyahu and crew, the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, are doing in Gaza in a strangely personal fashion. Yes, I was horrified when Hamas committed its grim crimes on October 7th, but somehow, somewhere deep in my heart, I never thought that the Israelis would respond not just in kind but in a fashion even more horrifying and without end.
I mean, honestly, given the historic suffering of Jews, who the hell kills untold thousands of children in a 25-mile-strip of land; attacks every hospital in sight; instantly cuts off food, fuel, and water to more than two million people; causes massive deaths (a daily toll higher than any other significant twenty-first-century conflict); destroys more than half of that area’s housing; and leaves untold thousands of Gazan civilians starving to death and with untreated illnesses of all sorts — and, after all of that, still isn’t faintly done? Somehow — yes, call it the hidden Jew in me — I take offense at that. And in that context, let me turn to TomDispatch regular Robert Lipsyte who offers his own very personal look at what being Jewish has meant to him and means to him now in this all-too-hellish world of ours. Tom
Erst Xinjiang, dann China - GERMAN-FOREIGN-POLICY.com
Erst Xinjiang, dann China - GERMAN-FOREIGN-POLICY.com
https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/9492
First Xinjiang, then China . . .
German corporations are withdrawing from Xinjiang due to US pressure. Sinologists warn that the accusations of forced labor are "not conclusively proven". Activist brings into play demand for the withdrawal of Western companies from all over China.
22
FEB
2024
Fact check
Among other things, the accusation that Uyghurs are subjected to forced labor in Xinjiang was investigated, among others, by the sinologist Björn Alpermann from the University of Würzburg. Alpermann, who cannot be considered a political partisan of the Chinese government, concludes in an extremely detailed analysis that "direct coercion or even 'slave work'" could be proven "not conclusively". 1] Although there are also "programs [...] for poverty eradication" in Xinjiang, within the framework of which Uyghurs have to work in industry or in the service sector; there one can "at least assume strong mobilization pressure". However, the long-term unemployed may also be obliged to work in Germany; the fact that non-profit activities are remunerated lower in such cases than activities on the "regular labor market" is "also common in democratic social states," says Alpermann. He explicitly warns against "taking the companies socially associated with Xinjiang into liability" or even "putting the whole region under an embargo": In my opinion, this "goes too far and harms the people living there rather than that it helps them." 2]
Burden of proof reversed
However, this is exactly the case in the United States. The Biden administration has on the 1st June 2022, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) came into force, which in principle prohibits the import into the USA of products that were completely or only partially manufactured in Xinjiang. Exceptions are at best possible if it can be proven "clearly and convincingly" that not at any point in the supply chain was forced labored to produce the products. 3] This is hardly possible in everyday life, especially under the given political conditions. By mid-April last year alone, US customs had seized goods worth 961 million US dollars because they actually or allegedly contained components from Xinjiang. This only affected in the least part direct imports from the People's Republic; while goods imported from there were fixed worth 80 million US dollars, these were also goods worth 370 million US dollars from Vietnam and goods worth 461 million US dollars from Malaysia. 4] In fact, the UFLPA aims to force all companies worldwide that export their products to the USA to dispense with goods including raw materials from Xinjiang and thus economically isolate the area.
An informal embargo
The UFLPA now also meets the Volkswagen Group. Currently, thousands of vehicles of the Audi, Porsche and Bentley brands have been fixed in US ports. The reason is that the US authorities claim that a single component contained in them was manufactured in Xinjiang. 5] According to Volkswagen, this is a small part of the control unit. The group now wants to replace it, but can only deliver its vehicles with a severe delay. In fact, Washington can force the German group not to use any components from Xinjiang in the production of its export models and to require its suppliers to no longer process raw materials from the region.
role model USA
In addition to the problems with export to the United States, the EU is now planning a law on the model of the UFLPA. The EU Commission has already on the 14th September 2022 proposed a corresponding regulation, which without exception affects all imports into the Member States. The European Parliament further tightened the regulation in October 2023 and thus entered into the final discussions with the Commission and the European Council. 6] Accordingly, a list is to be drawn up on which entire sectors of regions suspected of actual or allegedly forced labor are listed. 7] For all products imported from there, the burden of proof should be reversed - according to the US model. Companies would then have to prove beyond doubt that the production of the goods was one hundred percent without the use of forced labor. As in the case of the UFLPA, this is hardly possible in practice.
The retreat begins
Meanwhile, the withdrawal of German corporations from Xinjiang seems to have begun. On the 9th In February, BASF announced that the exit from two joint ventures based in Xinjiang had already been initiated in the fourth quarter of 2023. 8] The group stated that it is thus drawing the consequences of the fact that there is global overcapacity. However, observers doubt the motive. With a total of around 120 employees, however, the size and importance of the factories were limited. The Volkswagen Group is now also examining whether it will maintain its Urumqi location in Xinjiang. However, according to its own information, this now only has almost 200 employees, so it would probably be replaceable without unjustifiable effort.[ 9]
Decoupling
Of course, it has long been clear that forces close to the US government want to transfer the campaign to break off economic relations with Xinjiang into a campaign to break all economic relations with China. This is evidenced by statements by Adrian Zenz, an activist of the anti-communist Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC), who began his career at the Evangelical Academy for World Mission in Korntal near Stuttgart and is now promoted in Washington as an alleged China expert. 10] Zenz recently said that the supply chains in China are "so non-transparent" that they are hard to see through. However, if you can no longer distinguish whether a concrete product comes from Xinjiang or from another Chinese region, "then you may have to repel the entire country." 11] This would be the decoupling that the former and possibly future US President Donald Trump is striving for.
[1], [2] Björn Alpermann: Xinjiang. China and the Uighurs. Würzburg 2021.
[3] USA - Fight against forced labor. ihk.de 04.05.2023.
[4] Andrea Day, Chris DiLella: Since June, Feds have seized nearly $1 billion in goods tied to forced labor. cnbc.com 17.04.2023.
[5] Christina Kunkel, Florian Müller: Traffic jam in the harbor. Süddeutsche Zeitung 16.02.2024.
[6] Proposal for a ban on goods made using forced labour. europarl.europa.eu 24.11.2023.
[7] Import ban on goods from forced labor. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 16.10.2023.
[8] BASF will sell shares in its two joint ventures in Korla, China. basf.com 09.02.2024.
[9] VW examines the future of the plant in Xinjiang. tagesschau.de 14.02.2024.
[10] Christian Geinitz: China enlightener led by God. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 17.02.2024.
[11] Nikolaus J. Kurmayer: Solar PV industry caught up in China forced-labour controversy. euractiv.com 16.02.2024.
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