Day: December 16, 2023
By Robert Coalson
(RFE/RL) — Many Kremlin-watchers expected President Vladimir Putin’s December 14 question-and-answer marathon to be the launching point for a drive to secure a fifth term in office in a poll set for March 15-17. Instead, he made the announcement in a seemingly offhanded way on December 8.
And the televised four-hour event six days later passed with barely a mention of the fact that the 71-year-old Putin is poised to become the longest-serving Russian leader since tsarist times.
Aside from a brief mention at the start, the most direct reference to the upcoming campaign came from a young journalist from the Far Eastern city of Magadan, who prefaced his question by saying: “We all support your decision to run for president next year.”
“Because, as long as I can remember, you have always been at the helm, so to speak,” the journalist said to Putin, who has ruled Russia as president or prime minister since Boris Yeltsin stepped aside on New Year’s Eve 1999.
‘A New Level…No Illusions’
Russia has been trending toward authoritarianism since the beginning of Putin’s tenure. But since its last presidential election in 2018, that trend has been more firmly entrenched than ever.
The already marginalized opposition has been crushed. Leading opposition figures Aleksei Navalny, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and Ilya Yashin have been handed long prison terms.
A raft of constitutional amendments imposed in 2020 have enabled Putin to seek two additional six-year terms and, conceivably, hold power until 2036.
Draconian laws restricting free speech have been adopted since Moscow’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and, together with laws on “foreign agents” and “extremism,” have been used to quash dissent.
“The 2018 election was absolutely tyrannical,” said Dozhd TV journalist Mikhail Fishman. “It was the election of a dictator that can hardly be called an ‘election.’ But now we are at a new level where there are obviously no illusions about what this process is.”
Economist and political scientist Kirill Rogov said Russia has entered a state of “mature authoritarianism.”
“Its main characteristic is that the opposition has insufficient resources to exercise any significant influence on the results of the voting or the election,” he told RFE/RL’s Russian Service.
In addition, said sociologist Lev Gudkov of the Levada Center research group, the level of anxiety in Russian society at large is “very high” and “has a chronic nature.” In addition to “concrete” concerns about issues such as wages and inflation, there is a “second type” of anxiety.
“It is a vague, diffuse anxiety tied to the fact that people do not have the ability to influence decisions made by the authorities,” he said. “And [people feel] there are no institutions that can guarantee their future for any foreseeable period.”
“All this, naturally, leads to the fragmentation of society, to what we call ‘the passive adaptation to the state,’” he added.
‘A War President’
Russia is a country at war, although it is illegal to say so there.
The war will hang over the campaign, but it will not be an issue, despite rising discontent and justifiable fears that a new mobilization will come as soon as Putin takes another oath of office. Even slight or perceived criticism of the war has been criminalized as “discrediting the armed forces.”
“Putin’s new term will be a war term,” said sociologist Igor Eidman, noting that given the indeterminate economic costs of the war, it will be difficult for Putin to make populist gestures. “He cannot seriously offer voters anything new…. Voters are interested in wages, pensions, housing, and so on. But Putin can’t offer anything in these areas of greatest interest.”
“Judging by the start of the campaign, the presidential administration will stress Putin as a war president, as a ‘victorious’ president around whom everyone must rally,” Eidman added. “One can’t change horses in mid-stream and so on.”
Controlling the messaging on the war will be central to the next few months, Fishman said.
“The war that will be presented [in Putin’s campaign] will not be the war we see in the trenches,” he said. “It will be a ‘parade war.’ A war of medals on lapels, a war of annexed territory…. It will be a reincarnation of the victory in World War II and will ignore the blood and death that this war is really bringing. There won’t be any blood or death in this election.”
Operation ‘Operetta’
Within hours of Putin’s announcement that he wanted another term – a desire that surprised no one — the ruling United Russia party and the pro-Putin All-Russia Popular Front (ONF) announced the formation of an “initiative group” to organize the campaign. United Russia secretary Andrei Turchak told state media that the party, which controls executive and legislative bodies across the country, would provide all necessary resources for the effort.
According to Russian media reports, the Kremlin has ordered local officials to produce results along the lines of 80 percent for Putin – higher than ever before — with a turnout of about 70 percent.
“Of course, they can present any result they want,” Eidman said, noting that such factors as expanded electronic voting, the elimination of independent election monitoring, a three-day voting period, and voting in the partially occupied regions of Ukraine offer ample opportunities for falsification.
Kremlin aides “have to conduct this election, this spectacle, this farce, this rigged clown show they are calling an ‘election,’ in such a way that the public will applaud and call for an encore – so that everything goes off without a hitch,” he added.
Putin “is the main spectator of this operetta,” Eidman said, and his political operatives must make sure he is convinced that a large portion of the population supports him.
“It is hard to say exactly why, but he has always been very sensitive about his popularity,” he said.
The Opposition’s Dilemma
In a social-media post on December 7, imprisoned opposition politician Aleksei Navalny called on Russians to “come out to the polls and vote against Vladimir Putin” by voting for “any other candidate.”
Acknowledging that “a parody of the election process awaits us,” Navalny argued that, at a moment when people are thinking at all about the country’s leadership and future, it is the obligation of the opposition to do anything it can to feed the public’s doubts.
“Anyone who is afraid of losing their freedom if they hang a flyer in their building or send a link to a friend or make a couple of phone calls should stop and think about what they really need freedom for,” Navalny wrote.
Much of Russia’s organized political opposition has been driven abroad by the government’s repression, which intensified following the 2018 election and has accelerated steadily since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Unable to participate in or influence Putin’s election, many opposition figures are searching for ways to prevent the Kremlin from using the poll to boost its perceived legitimacy.
“The delegitimization of the election is the basic topic for the opposition in this situation,” Rogov said.
“The results of the voting will be falsified, but our task is to make sure it’s clear to everyone, even without [genuine results], that Russia no longer needs Putin,” Russia Without Putin, an online campaign supported by Navalny, said on its website.
Opposition activist and former State Duma deputy Igor Yakovenko argued that the opposition must keep its focus on undermining Putin without getting caught up in the March election.
“I support a broad ‘No Putin’ campaign, but I don’t see any sense in the opposition carrying out any actions connected with the thing that is planned for next March 17,” he told RFE/RL’s Russian Service.
“Delegitimization comes when we proclaim that this is a ritualistic event that has no electoral significance,” Yakovenko added. “Any attempt to organize flash mobs or a campaign to destroy ballots would mean that we consider this process somehow connected with the expression of our will. This process is an internal matter for the presidential administration and has nothing to do with the population of Russia.”
“I think any effort to draw the people into this process would be a very serious mistake,” he concluded.
Rogov predicted the March vote will “leave some traces” on Russian society. After listening to the Kremlin’s voting and turnout results, he said, Russians “will sit down and think: So what?”
“They will feel somehow let down,” he said. “The aftertaste will be unpleasant: Six more years of this?”
Written by RFE/RL’s Robert Coalson with reporting by RFE/RL’s Russian Service.
- Robert Coalson is a senior correspondent for RFE/RL who covers Russia, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe.
By Andrew Selth
In late October, an alliance of three ethnic armed organisations (EAO) launched a major offensive against Myanmar’s military regime in the north of the country. Soon afterwards, other EAOs and militia groups, including members of the opposition People’s Defence Force (PDF), took advantage of the regime’s troubles by opening new fronts in western, eastern and southern Myanmar.
To the surprise of many, the junta’s armed forces (or Tatmadaw) suffered a series of major defeats. According to unconfirmed news reports, at least four military bases, up to 300 smaller outposts and several major towns fell to the insurgents. Important trade and communications links to China and India were cut. Large quantities of arms and ammunition, including some heavy weapons, were captured.
As Richard Horsey has written, these victories constituted ‘the biggest battlefield challenge to the military since the February 2021 coup’. Indeed, they may be the most significant setbacks to a central government in Myanmar since independence in 1948. As a result, there has been a strategic shift in the civil war, and in the balance of power in the country.
Inevitably, perhaps, these developments prompted a rash of stories in the news media and online, trumpeting the insurgents’ successes. Myanmar was said to be ‘at a tipping point’. Pundits, journalists and activists claimed that the junta was ‘mortally wounded’, ‘in a death spiral’, even ‘on the brink of collapse’.
There were also some statements to the effect that the junta had lost control of the country, which was ‘on the verge of disintegration’. The Council on Foreign Relations called on the US government to prepare for the end of the Myanmar Army, which one analyst predicted would ‘collapse in waves across the country’.
Other commentators pointed to recent cabinet reshuffles in Naypyidaw, the rotation of senior Tatmadaw positions and the arrest of a few corrupt generals, to describe a military regime that was ‘desperate’ and facing crippling internal divisions. The Washington Post warned that the US ‘should prepare for its collapse’.
Looking further ahead, a few observers suggested that it was ‘Time to start planning the post-war future of Myanmar’s military’. One academic even floated the idea of UN intervention, along the lines of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) in 1992–93.
Opposition supporters following events in Myanmar can be forgiven for feeling buoyed by the junta’s recent string of defeats. Some of their responses betray an element of triumphalism, but their optimistic prognostications are based on firmer ground than similar claims made in the past.
The EAOs, assisted by the PDF and other militias, have enjoyed a remarkable degree of success. There are still political differences between them, but they seem to have achieved an unprecedented measure of cooperation at the military level. This has permitted them to conduct joint and coordinated operations over two thirds of Myanmar, with dramatic results.
This level of cooperation between Myanmar’s insurgent forces is one of the junta’s worst nightmares. The Tatmadaw simply does not have the manpower to maintain a strong presence everywhere, or to conduct major operations in several places at once. Moving its mobile strike forces to key trouble spots leaves other vulnerable areas exposed.
All that said, predictions of the junta’s imminent demise are premature. Many are based on limited and often unverified sources, a fair degree of speculation and not a little wishful thinking. The junta has undoubtedly been gravely weakened, but it is too early to write it off. The recent operational losses, while significant, do not pose an existential threat.
As Anthony Davis has written, there are no good options for the junta. However, this does not mean that it is powerless to regroup and respond to recent developments. In the past, Myanmar’s generals have shown surprising pragmatism and an ability to survive even the most difficult circumstances. Their resilience should not be underestimated.
For all its problems, the Tatmadaw is a strong, well-armed and well-trained force that still poses a major obstacle to the opposition movement’s stated goal of a federal union. Many of the so-called ‘bases’ that were recently overrun, for example, were small, under-manned and outgunned by the insurgents. Not all Tatmadaw units would be defeated as easily.
The armed forces still seem to be reasonably loyal and cohesive. There are internal tensions and other issues but, as Bertil Lintner has written, there has been no sign of a serious breakdown in discipline, a mutiny in a major combat unit or irreconcilable differences between elements of the state’s coercive apparatus, of a kind that would spell the junta’s downfall.
Also, there is a possibility that the insurgents will over-reach themselves, or once again fall prey to discord. As the Economist magazine wrote last year, there is a danger too that the resistance movement will start to believe its own propaganda. The recent rather exaggerated claims by its supporters and sundry commentators can only add to this problem
The Tatmadaw has struggled to fight a multitude of guerrilla forces scattered around the country and in the cities. Should the EAOs and PDF start conducting more conventional operations, however, employing larger formations and trying to capture, hold and administer territory, then they become more vulnerable. The junta’s air power, artillery and armour are most effective against such targets.
The momentum is currently with the opposition forces. However, time may be on the side of the junta. It has access to economic resources that the EAOs and PDF do not. Also, it has external allies to protect it, and to replenish its stocks of arms and ammunition. The EAOs and the shadow National Unity Government are more isolated, poorly resourced and divided over many issues.
As the US intelligence community has observed, for the junta this is an existential struggle. The generals have nowhere else to go. If they are determined and ruthless enough, they could last a long time, albeit at great cost to the country. The opposition movement too is looking for a total military victory. Neither side is contemplating a negotiated outcome.
All this argues for greater caution in evaluating the impact of recent insurgent victories.
- About the author: Andrew Selth is an adjunct professor at the Griffith Asia Institute. His most recent book is A Myanmar Miscellany (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, in press)
- Source: This article was published by East Asia Forum
In the midst of Netanyahu’s annihilation of innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza, many of them children, women and the elderly, there is a rising urgency from many Israeli and domestic Jewish groups for an immediate ceasefire and greatly increasing the flow of humanitarian aid.
In the U.S. Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now have vigorously engaged in public non-violent civil disobedience – an American tradition – to challenge the inhumane unconditional co-belligerency by Congress and Joe Biden of the present extremist regime’s genocidal destruction of Palestinians. Many U.S. Jewish Americans are standing tall either individually or in groups to exclaim “not in our name” to the U.S.-funded civilian slaughter in Gaza.
A most remarkable, little-noticed open letter to President Joe Biden appeared in December 13, 2023, New York Times,paid for by the legendary Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem and signed by 16 other Israeli peace, human rights, veterans and religious associations. (See the letter here).
Titled “The Humanitarian Catastrophe in the Gaza Strip,” the letter condemns the Hamas “horrific and criminal attack on Israeli civilians” and demands the release of the Israelis in Gaza. What follows are excerpts from their message to the White House:
“Since the war began, Israel’s policy has driven the humanitarian crisis in Gaza to the point of catastrophe – not only as an inevitable outcome of war. As part of this policy, soon after the fighting began, Israel stopped selling Gaza electricity and water, closed its crossings and blocked all entry of food, water, fuel and medicine.”
Citing international law and committed war crimes, the signers continue:
“UN agencies and humanitarian organizations report that the situation in Gaza is catastrophic and they have almost no way left to help the population. The few truckloads that are allowed in – a drop in the ocean, according to the reports – cannot be distributed due to the ongoing bombardments, the destruction of infrastructure and restrictions imposed by Israel. This leaves more than two million people hungry and thirsty, without access to proper medical care, and with infectious diseases spreading due to unhygienic overcrowding and lack of water. This inconceivable reality grows worse by the day.”
“You [Biden] have the power to influence our government to change its policy and allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, in accordance with Israel’s legal obligations ….”
“We are in the final throes of an emergency. Many deaths can still be prevented. Israel must change its policy now.”
The estimated death toll in Gaza at “more than 18,000” is a gross undercount. Well over ten times more children in Gaza have been killed in nine weeks than the number of children lost in the Russian war on Ukraine over nearly 22 months. In addition to the unprecedented intense bombing, large numbers of Palestinian infants, children, women, the infirmed, and disabled are homeless, facing the elements, dying by the minute from the homicidal conditions described by these Israeli human rights groups, journalists, and recorded by U.S. drones above Gaza.
Being reduced to rubble, Gaza has no fire trucks or water to put out spreading fires. The Israeli military has destroyed or rendered the vast majority of hospitals and health clinics inoperative. UN relief agencies are shelled and have seen over 130 of their staff slain.
The Israeli war machine has also taken the lives of over 60 Palestinian journalists (many with their families), including three Israeli reporters. Consistent with its long-time exclusion of outside journalists, the Israeli government doesn’t want the world to see and hear from unembedded, mainstream Israeli or foreign journalists.
Day after deadly day, President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken and Secretary of Defense Austin used words to urge minimizing Palestinian casualties while they deploy deeds of massive shipments of bombs, missiles and UN vetoes. Small wonder our government officials are having little restraining influence. The Israeli Air Force even bombs and contaminates the small agricultural areas destroying olive groves and fields growing grain, vegetable and fruit crops. It is even against Israeli law for Palestinians to collect rainwater which is decreed to be the property of the state.
Pope Francis, long a protector of Jewish rights when he was a cleric in Argentina, called Israeli President Isaac Herzog to express his deep concern about the plight of the Palestinians, saying that “it is forbidden to respond to terror with terror.” The Vatican reported that the Holy Father is in constant touch with the “Christian Church” in Gaza and the West Bank. For decades, Christians in the West Bank have been harassed, discriminated against and encroached upon (e.g., Bethlehem) with little media coverage, except for the courageous Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Oblivious to world opinion, including that of our allies, Biden and the Democrats are pushing for another $14.3 billion in U.S. taxpayer monies to further annihilate the defenseless, now homeless, human beings in Gaza, screaming in pain and fear, sick, starving and dying, unable to bury their kin. Rotting corpses are piling up, and being eaten by stray dogs.
Meanwhile, people in the U.S. who speak out for stopping this brutality are charged with being “antisemitic” – a grotesque cheapening and misuse of a word that was used to describe the savage Russian pogroms and Nazi horrors of extermination. Silencing peaceful criticism with this slander is a conscious tactic. Note the statement by Shulamit Aloni, a former Minister of Education and winner of the Israel Prize:
“It’s a trick. We always use it. When from Europe, somebody criticizes Israel, we bring up the Holocaust. When, in the United States, people are critical of Israel, then they are anti-Semitic.”
It works all too often. Americans are smeared, being suspended or losing their jobs, their careers, and their customers because they oppose the carnage in Gaza. It is a sign of the partisan censorship that incurring such penalties is not experienced by Americans exclaiming their full support for this genocidal obliteration of Gaza – a multiple war crime pointed out by both Jewish and non-Jewish international law scholars here and abroad.
The least that humane citizens can do is to tell their members of Congress to demand a permanent ceasefire, the release of the Israeli hostages and the large number of Palestinian prisoners (children, women and men) in Israeli jails without charges or due process, and serious movement toward a two-state solution.
The switchboard in Congress is 202-224-3121.
By Ryan McMaken
The Bill of Rights turns 232 years old today. Adopted in 1791 as a consolation prize for the Anti-Federalists, it has been perhaps the most important part of American legal history since the eighteenth century, and has served as an inconvenient reminder of the laissez-faire libertarian philosophy that permeated American political theory in the late 18th century.
As I noted in “Magna Carta and the Fantasy of Legal Constraints on States,” words written on parchment do not actually protect anyone’s freedoms, and legal constraints on state power are only as good as the ideological backing they receive from the population.
Nevertheless, for all its weaknesses, the Bill of Rights—when taken seriously by the general population—has played a part in preserving basic human rights for Americans that were eviscerated in many nations long ago. Thanks to the First Amendment and those who support it, for example, freedom of speech is often more respected in the United States than is almost any place one might hold up as an example. One can be arrested and imprisoned for saying unpopular things in France and Germany, to just name two examples. (And we’re not even considering the far more illiberal states of Asia.)
How absurd it was, for example, to hear the French pretend to be supporters of freedom of speech in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre when the French state imposes legal sanctions on people for saying allegedly anti-Semitic or racist things. In Germany, one can be imprisoned for saying unpopular things about Nazis or the Holocaust. What most (but not all) Americans understand—and what the French and Germans don’t—is that in a free country, some people will say repugnant things.
The First Amendment can also be partly credited for the lack of strong anti-defamation laws in the United States. For example, thanks to the First Amendment, federal law makes it very difficult for government agents to sue members of the public for alleged “defamatory” behavior. The whole concept of defamation, of course, is just a way to shut people up who say things the “victims” don’t like.
Moreover, religious freedom has never been more than a temporary convenience for people in most of the world. The French government seized Catholic churches long ago, and most of Europe shut down religious services during the Covid Panic. In the United States, these shut downs were shorter, less widespread, and more haphazard due primarily to the lingering power of the First Amendment, as written. And certainly, for all the anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism that has reared its head in America over the decades, nothing compares to the government-sanctioned anti-Semitism that has at times permeated France, Germany, Austria, and a host of other “free” countries in Europe.
And as far as being Catholic goes, even the worst anti-Catholic persecutions in American history have nothing on the persecutions concocted by anti-Catholic regimes of the Spaniards, French, Mexicans, Brits, Japanese, and many others.
As for property rights — which includes the right to own weapons for self-defense — the US regime has managed to find new exceptions to this every year, but even in that case, the US often comes off looking relatively less awful. We need look no further than the French regime’s scattered jihads against basic privacyand property.
Of course, most regimes do this every time there’s an “emergency.” In Canada, during World War II, the federal government mandated registration of all firearms, which it claimed was necessary to fight domestic subversion. Human rights go right out the window in the UK whenever the state feels the “need.” The US itself suspended habeas corpus and a host of other human rights during the Civil War. And the Bill of Rights didn’t prevent the internment of the Japanese-Americans, many of whom, unlike the Reservation Indians of old, were full-blown American citizens.
In the long sordid history of conquest and colonialism, the US has held its own (in a bad way) whether in the Philippines or in Iraq or on the Western frontier of North America. And yet, the presence of the Bill of Rights, and the ideology it represents, has long been an inconvenience and an impediment — albeit often a weak one —to an even more aggressive state in terms of prosecuting “enemies” of the state who oppose American militarism.
A Bright Spot in an Unnecessary Constitution
Bizarrely revered by many as a “pro-freedom” document, the document now generally called “the Constitution” was originally devoted almost entirely toward creating a new, bigger, more coercive, more expensive version of the United States. The United States, of course, had already existed since 1777 under a functioning constitution that had allowed the United States to enter into numerous international alliances and win a war against the most powerful empire on earth.
That wasn’t good enough for the oligarchs of the day, the crony capitalists with names like Washington, Madison, and, Hamilton. Hamilton and friends had long plotted for a more powerful United States government to allow the mega-rich of the time, like George Washington and James Madison, to more easily develop their lands and investments with the help of government infrastructure. Hamilton wanted to create a clone of the British empire to allow him to indulge his grandiose dreams of financial imperialism.
The tiny Shays Rebellion in 1786 finally provided them with a chance to press their ideas on the masses and to attempt to convince the voters that there was already too much freedom going on in America at the time.
The Federalists didn’t mention that they’d benefit personally from the new constitution, of course, but instead focused on the idea that without a stronger central government, they country would be overthrown by the powers of “faction.”
Patrick Henry and the Anti-Federalists pointed out—correctly—that the US already had proven it had sufficient means to deal with European powers, and that in the bloody history of states, the true threat to freedom lay not in there being too much freedom, as the Federalists claimed, but in the overweening power of centralized states.
Virtually no one believed that a new constitution was necessary to secure what they had earlier called their “English Liberties,” including freedom of speech, a right to due process, jury trials, and more. Those freedoms were already assumed to be assured to all non-slaves. Those freedoms had been won in the Revolution. The people didn’t need a more powerful Congress to protect them. If their freedoms were threatened, the people could rely on highly-democratic (for the time) state legislatures and a decentralized militia system.
But, in the end, the Federalists won out after they promised to adopt a Bill of Rights to limit the power of Congress. As we know, though, the Bill of Rights began to break down immediately, and it was only a matter of time until the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson’s embargo, and other even worse crimes perpetrated on the states and the people.
It was the Constitution of 1787, after all, that strengthened the institution of slavery, set the stage for the fugitive slave acts, and made provision for the criminal prosecution of those who attempted to help set escaped slaves free.
That’s what sort of “pro-freedom” document the Constitution was and is.
What the Constitutions Should Have Said
The Bill of Rights would never have been necessary, however, if so much power had not been granted to the central government by the constitution of 1787 in the first place
Indeed, the earlier constitution of 1777 (the so-called Articles of Confederation) had itself been too detailed and powerful.
After all, the whole idea of a national constitution had always been sold on really just two premises: 1) It would assist in national defense and 2) it would facilitate trade among the member states.
In other words, it should never have been anything more than a customs union and a mutual defense agreement. So, in the service of sound political science, I have composed a new constitution for us:
Article 1. The United States shall meet every two years in Congress assembled to negotiate terms for the maintenance of a union of independent states. There shall be no duties or taxes imposed on trade among the states or the people therein. The states, in Congress assembled shall set the standards for membership in the United States and provide provision for member withdrawal and the conditions for receiving the benefits of mutual defense as a member of the Union.
The End.
Nothing more is necessary or prudent. Independent states enter into mutual defense agreements quite frequently, without surrendering their independence, and trade agreements are a quite mundane affair in the history of states.
Any appeal to “patriotism” or lofty ideas of “America” or the fanciful notion that people in Arizona are the countrymen of people in New York has no backing in the day to day realities of living. Never in history was there a group of 330 million people spread across four million square miles who were part of the same community and who shared the same experiences, interests, or even the same economic ties.
In reality, the people of Colorado, for example, have more in common with the people of Saskatchewan—in terms of economic interests, culture, and history—than with the people of Georgia or Delaware of Pennsylvania. People only believe the residents of the US states make up “one people” because they were told as much by their third-grade teachers. Actual experience tells us otherwise.
Those who demanded the Bill of Rights had attempted to preserve this idea of government on a human scale: government that reflects the realities of daily life, human relationships, and the necessity of free commerce—rather than the ideological fantasies of nation builders. Even to this day, the idea that the minutiae of life and commerce should be governed by a group of millionaires sitting in luxury 2,000 miles away is repugnant to the the reasonable mind. In preventing this, the Bill of Rights has largely failed, although things most certainly could have been worse.
- About the author: Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is executive editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power and Market, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in public policy, finance, and international relations from the University of Colorado. He was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Breaking Away: The Case of Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities and Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.
- Source: This article was published by the Mises Institute
Almost all parents love their own children much more than they love the children of their neighbors. This is only natural. Most parents are also able to acknowledge that some of their neighbor’s children exceed their own children in some, even occasionally in many, aspects of character, personality or talent. Nevertheless, normal parents still love their children much more than their neighbor’s children.
The same preference is also found among religious believers. In every religious community, people think that their own prophet, their holy book, their saints and their religious traditions are the truest and the best. This natural human feeling can sometimes lead to an arrogant pride that results in verbal abuse that can lead to physical conflict between believers in different religions.
This arrogant pride in the superiority of one’s own religion should be condemned by all religious leaders. An excellent account of just this kind of condemnation is found in the Sunnah of Prophet Muhammad, when he was called upon to judge between a Jew and a Muslim in a conflict-laden situation.
Abu Huraira related: Two men, a Muslim and a Jew, verbally abused one another. The Muslim said, “By Him Who gave superiority to Muhammad over all the people.” At that, the Jew said, “By Him Who gave superiority to Moses over all the people.” The Muslim became furious at that and slapped the Jew in the face.
The Jew went to God’s Apostle and informed him of what had happened between him and the Muslim. God’s Apostle said, “Don’t give me superiority over Moses, for everyone will fall unconscious on the Day of Resurrection and I will be the first to gain consciousness, and behold Moses will be there holding the side of God’s Throne.
“I will not know whether Moses has been among those people who have become unconscious and then has regained consciousness before me, or has been among those exempted by God from falling unconscious.” (Bukhari Vol. 8, Book 76, #524)
God’s Messenger is so well known for his sense of justice that a Jew can appeal to him, even in a conflict with a Muslim who has attacked this Jew. It is only natural for Jews to think that Moses is the best; and for Muslims to think that Muhammad is the best.
Muhammad rebukes the Muslim, telling him not to claim that Muhammad is superior to Moses, because even on the day of Resurrection, Muhammad himself will not know their relative merit, for although Muhammad will be the first of all the comatose to be revived, Moses will already be there holding the side of God’s throne.
Prophet Muhammad teaches us that claims of religious superiority are wrong, for no human in this world, and perhaps even in the world to come, will know who is the best prophet. Only God knows. Such arrogant comparisons do not help anyone to become a better believer in the one God all mankind should worship, but only polarize believers by inciting partisan fervor.
I am a Reform Rabbi, and I can state that all Reform Rabbis would applaud this teaching of Prophet Muhammad because we are all aware that during the Middle Ages all three religion’s adherents claimed religious superiority over each other. If Jews, Christians and Muslims had only followed this teaching of Prophet Muhammad, we could have avoided many centuries of bloodshed and massacres: three of the best-known examples being the many Christian Crusades in Spain, Poland and the Middle East; the Roman Catholic Inquisition in Spain and Portugal; and the 30 year war between Catholics and Protestants in Germany and central Europe.
One of the wonderful aspects of the Qur’an is that it is the only book of revelation that includes within itself a theory of prophethood which includes other religions. Of course, there have always been (since the days of Adam) people inspired by Allah who urged their community to avoid destruction by turning away from their corrupt and unjust ways and turning to the One God who created all humans.
Unfortunately, almost all prophets are unsuccessful. They are like Hud, who was sent to Ad; or Salih, who was sent to Thamud. They come to warn their own people of their impending destruction due to their corrupt and immoral ways, and to call them to repentance. In almost all cases, their teachings are rejected; or if these prophets were successful in influencing their own people to embrace monotheism and abandon idols, their influence faded away in a few generations, and their people reverted to polytheism and idolatry and then disappeared.
The prophets of the Children of Israel are different. First, Abraham is the only prophet we know of who has two sons, Prophets Isma’il (Ishmael) and Ishaq (Isaac) both of whom were also prophets. Indeed, Abraham’s grandson Ya’qub (Jacob) and great grandson Yusuf (Joseph) were also prophets. Thus, starting with Prophet Abraham, Allah established a family dynasty of prophets which is as far as we know was a unique event for as far as we know this was a unique event which began with Prophet Abraham and ended with Prophet Muhammad.
None of the recent messengers like Joseph Smith of the Mormon Church were descendants of Prophet Abraham.
With Joseph and his brothers (the tribes) the extended family of Ya’qub became the 12 tribes of Israel, or as they are usually called, the Children of Israel/Ya’qub. The Children of Israel did succeed in establishing an ongoing monotheistic community because they were blessed with many of God’s prophets, who were all descendants of the Children of Israel/Ya’qub, who, generation after generation, urged the Jewish people to stay firm in their covenant with God.
This ongoing prophetic concern is expressed clearly in the Qur’an: “When death approached Ya’qub, he said to his sons, ‘Who will (you) worship after I am gone?’ They answered, ‘We will worship your God, the God of our forefathers, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, the One God. Unto Him we will surrender ourselves.’” (2:132) For Jews, the ongoing continuity of God’s covenant with the Jewish People is achieved through the faithful linked chain connection of endless successive loyal generations. This is why the Jewish Umma is both a religious and an ethnic community.
The miracle of Islam’s birth is that this 14 century-old religion was established by just one Prophet of Tawhid (imageless monotheism) acting all by himself. Even Prophet Jesus was preceded by Prophet John the Baptist.
Perhaps this is why Natan’el al-Fayyumi, a prominent 12th-century Yemenite rabbi and theologian, wrote in his philosophical treatise Bustan al-Uqul (“Garden of Wisdom”) that God sends prophets to establish religions for other nations, which do not have to conform to the precepts of the Jewish Torah.
Nethan’el explicitly considered Muhammad a true prophet, who was sent from Heaven with a particular message that applies to the Arabs, but not to the Jews. Al-Fayymi’s explicit acceptance of Muhammad as a Prophet of Tawhid for non-Jews throughout the world in general, and all idol-worshiping polytheists in particular, was rare and virtually unknown until recent times beyond his native Yemen, because Yemen was very remote from almost all the other Jewish settlements in the Muslim world.
Some scholars might object that Orthodox Jews like Rabbi Nethan’el of Yemen could not possibly believe Muhammad was a legitimate prophet because Orthodox Jews believe that prophecy had ended two to three centuries prior to the birth of Jesus.
Just as Muslims believe that there will be no more prophets after Muhammad, and Christians believe that there will be no more ‘sons of God’ after Jesus, Jews believed Jews would receive no more Jewish prophets until the Messianic Age. But that only applied to Jewish prophets.
There is no statement in rabbinic literature that states that no non-Jewish prophet will ever come. Muhammad’s tribe traced their descent from Abraham and Ishmael, so Muhammad is a Abrahamic non-Jewish prophet like Job (Eiyov in Hebrew- Ayyub in Arabic), who has his own book in the Bible, and is considered to be a non-Jew in most, but not all, rabbinical opinions.
There is no reason why a rabbi could not believe that Prophet Muhammad had been sent by Allah as a Prophet of Tawhid and mercy, to all idol-worshipping polytheists worldwide to deliver the book of the Qur’an to them, and to also be a reforming prophet for those groups among the Jews and Christians who had strayed from their own book and needed reforming.
Thus, the Qur’an proclaims, “That which We reveal to you of the book (the Qur’an) confirms the (books) revelations prior to it. Surely God is fully aware of His servants (deeds) and sees well. Then We made those of Our servants whom We chose, heirs to the Scripture. However, among them (the followers of each revealed book) are those who wrong their own selves (by straying), and among them are those who follow a moderate way (average followers) and among them are those who, by God’s leave, are foremost in doing good deeds (the exemplary). That is the great favor.” (35:31&32)
I believe Prophet Jesus was also sent to offer Tawhid to non-Jews as a way of attaching themselves to Abraham’s and Israel’s monotheistic Tawhid faith; without converting to Judaism and committing themselves to all, or even a large part of the Torah’s commandments. This is why, although the Gospels are attached to the Hebrew Bible, Christians are not duty bound to observe Jewish holy days.
I also believe that Prophet Muhammad was sent to offer another whole Tawhid sacred scripture, confirming the previous ones, to all idol-worshipping polytheists, so they could join a new universal ummah of monotheists. This book, the Qur’an, also serves as a guide to help both Jews and Christians reform some aspects of the orthodox teachings of their own religion that had developed over the previous five and a half centuries.
For over six decades I have been studying the Qur’an and reading other Islamic books, and I think of myself as a Reform (called Liberal in UK) Jewish Rabbi who is an Islamic Jew. As a Rabbi, I am faithful to the covenant that God made with Abraham—the first Jew who was a hanif muslim (a faithful monotheist) and I submit to the covenant and its commandments that God made with the people of Israel at Mount Sinai.
As a Reform Rabbi I believe that Jewish spiritual leaders should modify Jewish tradition as social and historical circumstances change and develop. I also believe we should not make religion difficult for people to practice by adding an increasing number of restrictions to the commandments we received at Mount Sinai.
These are lessons that prophet Muhammad taught 12 centuries before the rise of Reform Judaism in the early 19th century Germany. Although most Jews today are no longer Orthodox, if the Jews of Muhammad’s time had followed these teachings of Prophet Muhammad, Reform Judaism would have started 1,400 years ago.
The world’s largest container carrier, the Danish company Maersk, has announced that all its vessels whose route runs through the southern Red Sea will stop operating in that direction from Friday, 15 December, due to attacks by Husitic militants. “Following yesterday’s incident with Maersk Gibraltar and another attack on a container ship, we have instructed all Maersk vessels in the area that are due to pass through the Bab el-Mandab Strait to suspend their traffic until further notice from 15 December,” Azernews reports, citing Bloomberg news agency.