On the Middle East, voting rights, and CHINA !

All quoted verbatim.  [Ed: I'm liking this format, straight-up plagiarism, zero original thought!]

1. Yousef Munayyer on Jared Kushner's peace plan:

'...President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser questioned [Palestinians'] right to self-determination, putting the burden on them to prove they are deserving of freedom, justice, equality and human rights.

The distinction of being innately less deserving of human rights and freedom is reserved for peoples facing the brutal oppression of colonialism and racism. In the role of historical colonizers, white men considered themselves a superior people with a right to deny everything and anything to others who are less than—only the white man could know what is best for the backwards and savage peoples under his rule. [...Recently,] these attitudes have been dressed up in the language of democratization, as perhaps best captured in the policy of the George W. Bush administration. No form of self-determination for Palestinians could be supported, Bush made clear, until "the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbors." Sounds an awful lot like Kushner.

In other words, the fundamental sequence remains the same: The Palestinian people must prove they are deserving of their human rights, their freedom and their equality—until they do so, their oppression is justified. Such a formula is only possible in a framework where people are not created equal. Those who are inferior must accept the dictates of the superior group, including acquiescing to external actors' decisions in regards to their governance, quality of life and rights.[...]

A just peace cannot be built on a foundation of racism. The burden should not be placed on those whose rights and freedom are denied, but rather on those who are denying them. We must move away from outdated frameworks that present the Palestinian people with false choices and threats that seek to strong-arm them into accepting their own subjugation.'

2. David Graham on the voting rights debate:

'The Democratic presidential field has spent most of the week tying itself in knots over whether prisoners should be able to vote—an important but largely abstract debate. Meanwhile, Florida Republicans are close to passing a law that allows felons to vote after serving their time, but places serious hurdles before them.

The debate demonstrates much about the two parties. It contrasts the Democratic tendency to focus on national solutions to problems with the Republican emphasis on state-level policy. It shows a Democratic tendency toward abstraction, and a Republican emphasis on action. And it suggests why conservative policy ideas are winning across the nation, despite evidence that America is a center-left country.

The Democratic Party [...] tends to believe in top-down government solutions, making Washington a natural locus for policy, while Republicans have long emphasized local control. It’s also historically contingent. Starting from the 1930s, Democrats often held a strong advantage over Republicans in national politics.

Since the 2010 election, Democrats have also been badly overmatched at the local level, and while the party made significant gains in 2018, Republicans still have the upper hand in state capitals. That has allowed the GOP to implement its policy views on a range of issues. Republican-led legislatures have expanded gun rights, restricted abortion rights, and hamstrung organized labor, to choose just a few.  On the question of felons and voting, [...] Republican actions on the state level speak louder than Democrats’ conversations.'

3. Narges Bajogli on the source of Iranian determination:

'...what motivated Iranians to support the revolution en masse was a desire to rid the country of imperialism. As a prominent historian of Iran, Ervand Abrahamian has argued that the 1979 revolution should be seen as a continuation of the national struggle for liberation that was cut short in 1953 by a U.S.-orchestrated coup.

In a first for the CIA, the United States deposed democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, reinstated Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and took control of Iran’s oil fields. Domestically, no matter what the shah did in that 26-year interim between 1953 and 1979, the coup cast its long shadow over his rule. His perceived illegitimacy was tied to the sentiment that he did the bidding of the Americans and Brits and sold out his country’s national integrity for power and wealth. [...]

Now, what does this have to do with Iran’s relationship with its proxies? In the 40 years since the revolution, the Islamic Republic has supported groups that are actively engaged in struggles against foreign occupation, whether in Lebanon, Iraq, or the occupied Palestinian territories. (This analysis also drove its policies in Syria, where it believed the United States, Europe, and Israel were using domestic groups, and later mercenaries, to topple Assad for geopolitical purposes.) When one pays close attention to the discourse of these groups, from their official statements to their media output, the emphasis is on sovereignty and the fight against imperialism. Of course the symbolism of Islam as a cultural and political identity is also present, but it is not the driving force...'

4. Nithin Coca on Tiananmen's legacy and Asia's democratic backsliding:

'Tiananmen would be the last mass democracy movement in China. China has not seen anything even remotely approaching the scale of what happened in 1989, when students and workers took not just to the streets of Beijing but occupied the center of many major Chinese cities. The only major anti-government actions since then have been fueled by national or ethnic sentiment in marginal territories such as Xinjiang and Tibet.  [... ]

China is now the top trading partner of, and foreign investor in, most of its neighboring countries. That may be having a coercive effect on neighbors such as Cambodia, where long-term dictator Hun Sen’s crushing of the civil opposition in the last few years took place with Beijing’s backing and blessing. In Thailand, while the junta maintains a veneer of democracy, relations with China have grown ever closer even as Washington has chastised them.

“China’s influence has been there after countries took an authoritarian turn,” said Maiko Ichihara, an associate professor at the School of International and Public Policy at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. Chinese money and investment can buffer what could have been, in the past, sanctions or other reprisals from Western countries. “Democratic backsliding has been maintained due to the economic influence of China.”

It also means the role of the region’s democracies is limited. Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan were, in previous decades, democratic and highly developed, and offered models for China. Now, the tables have turned.  “In the 90s there was the idea that countries like Taiwan and Japan could push for change in China,” said [China expert Isaac] Stone Fish. “Now, a lot of those countries are trying to figure out how to prevent China from changing them.”'