Another step forward treating Cancer for Free

 5 April 2019

A Memorandum of Understanding was signed on April 1, 2019, between the Ministry of Health, Nutrition and Indigenous Medicine and the Kadijah Foundation’s Fight Cancer Team with plans to purchase Tomotherapy and LINAC ( Linear Particle Accelerator)  machines for Apeksha Hospital, Maharagama. Minister of Health, Nutrition and Indigenous Medicine Dr. Rajitha Senarathne, State Minister of Health, Nutrition and Indigenous medicine Faizal Cassim, Director General of the Ministry of Health Dr. Anil Jayasinghe, Secretary to the Health Ministry Nimal Balasuriya and Director of the Apeksha Hospital Dr. Wasantha Dissanayake were among the distinguished guests at the event. 

The project 

The Fight Cancer movement was commenced following a request by Humaid, a cancer victim, on March 4,  2016.
The awe-inspiring story of his father M. S. H Mohamed who through tireless campaigning with the Fight Cancer teams raised over Rs. 250 million to purchase the PET scanner for the Maharagama Hospital, is one known to all.  Fuelled by the dreams of his deceased son, the movement spearheaded by Mohamed has taken on an even bigger goal of further developing cancer treatment in Sri Lanka and raising it to meet international standards.
“This project demands One billion Rupees. And we have 20 million people comprising our population, so each person only needs to contribute 50 Rupees. I have absolute faith in our people’s generosity,” Mohamed declared to the gathering. 

Impact on health system

Elaborating on the journey of development that had transformed Apeksha Hospital to its present state was Minister of Health, Nutrition and Indigenous Medicine Dr. Rajitha Senarathne. He credited the pillars of the project for their roles played in this regard.
“Today Maharagama is a hospital for hope. We have changed both its name board and its treatments. Back then in the Maharagama hospital lives were lost by 50%. Patients would enter through its gates expecting it to be their final journey. Today it is not so. Today Apeksha Hospital is a state of the art facility,” the minister said.
Dr. Senaratne continued on the institute’s achievements and plans for the future.  “We have brought most of the latest pharmaceuticals to give chemotherapy. The other part is radiotherapy for which we now have support. We currently have two PET scanners, and now we would have new linear accelerators. We will be bringing another 10 linear accelerators to the country, to distribute to many hospitals.” said Senarathne while adding, “When I took over there was only one hospital to treat cancer and that was at Maharagama, and now there are six; even one in the North. We have also started at Apeksha, the Bone Marrow Transplants for the first time in Sri Lanka. This can treat Leukaemia, Haemophilia, Myeloma, Thalassaemia etc. By now we have done 52 BMTS without one death. That is why we call Apeksha a hospital for hope, not just for cancer”. 

On the evolution of the health service of Sri Lanka as a whole, he expressed that, “We have made cancer treatment free of charge for lifetime and provide cardiac stents, hearing aids, cochlear implants and cataract lens free to patients. We have completed all types of transplants successfully, with only the lung transplant left to be achieved”.
Dr. Jeyakumaran Nadarajah of Apeksha Hospital spoke about the impact the project has made on the poor Cancer patients of Sri Lanka. He expressed that in order to materialise the visions expressed by the minister, massive funding is required. Within the private sector, to gain access to such technologies it would cost a patient roughly Rs. 1 million. In light of this, the fight cancer project was revealed to be a saving grace.

"We found out that there are many waiting patients who want to be treated for cancer within Sri Lanka because of the non-availability of machines. The Halcyon in India treats 130-150 per day during fifteen hour shifts. This will do wonders for Sri Lanka"

“After the Tomotherapy we may go for the Cyber Knife and later on for proton treatment,” he added spelling out future plans.
What is Tomotherapy and LINAC?
The event not only launched the project, but also introduced the new technologies it was trying to integrate into the health system.
 As presented by Piyush Singh of Accuray India, the TomoTherapy system intends to ‘not only give cancer patients a palliative care, but also provide curative treatments and help patients to live longer with a quality of life’.
According to him, 38, 630 new cancer diagnoses are made every day globally, and by 2030, the cancer incidence will rise by 25 million.
Moreover, the economic cost of cancer as recorded in 2010, was 1.6 Trillion US Dollars.
Addressing these realities, Tomotherapy was put forward as a solution. Tomotherapy is a type of radiation therapy that integrates a CT scanner to perform daily imaging before each treatment session.

“How would it help? It can cater to the entire range and spectrum of disease from paediatric patients, to bone marrow cancers, sarcomas, breast cancers, head and neck cancers, you name it the machine will do it,” Singh explained.
The TomoTherapy System minimises the surrounding healthy tissue from being exposure to radiation through precision, and has reported fewer side effects from patients.
Its helical delivery capabilities allow it to address the full range of diseases as mentioned.
Balaji Jagannathan of Varian Medical Systems, India introduced ‘Halcyon’; as the latest Linear Accelarator equipment, suited for the needs of Sri Lanka.
“We found out that there are many waiting patients who want to be treated for cancer within Sri Lanka because of the non-availability of machines. The Halcyon in India treats 130-150 per day during fifteen hour shifts. This will do wonders for Sri Lanka,” he expressed.
It was evident that the lack of efficiency, accuracy and advancement have been resolved by the project’s targets.
“The PET will recognise the cancer and these new equipment will treat it. We plan to gift the Tomotherapy and LINAC machine within this year and we don’t intend to stop there. Future projects have already begun,” Mohamed concluded on an ambitious note. 

Israel injures dozens of Palestinian prisoners

Tamara Nassar -27 March 2019

Israeli forces injured dozens of Palestinians in Ketziot prison in the southern Naqab region this week in its latest crackdown on detainees.

The Israel Prison Service raided cells on Monday, beating prisoners and using tear gas and stun grenades. Some were hospitalized and then returned to the prison.

Prisoners rights group Addameer called the crackdown part of “a systematic policy that aims at deteriorating the prisoners’ life conditions,” adding that “it holds the occupation authorities fully responsible for the lives and safety of all Palestinian prisoners.”

Photos and videos show Israeli forces raiding the prison earlier this week:

شبكة قدس | الأسرى@asranews

صور| جانب من الاقتحامات التي شنتها قوات القمع لغرف الأسرى في عدة أقسام بسجن النقب.

1

10:56 AM - Mar 25, 2019

هكذا اقتحمت قوات القمع غرف الأسرى في سجن النقب اليوم.#معركة_الأسرى pic.twitter.com/tPPUH3Dvot

— شبكة قدس | الأسرى (@asranews) 25 March 2019

Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq demanded that the International Committee of the Red Cross intervene to “halt further attacks against Palestinian prisoners,” determine the condition of the injured and ensure the rights of all detainees are met.

Stabbing

The raids came after Israel alleged that two prison guards were stabbed at the Naqab prison on Sunday following a crackdown by prison authorities.

The two Palestinian prisoners who allegedly committed the stabbing were identified as Odai Salem and Islam Wishahi from the occupied West Bank cities of Bethlehem and Jenin, respectively.

Wishahi was serving the last two years of his 19-year sentence, and Salem was serving his last year of nine. Both had been sentenced by Israeli military courts that lack basic due process rights.

One of the guards was airlifted to the Soroka hospital in Beersheva and is in moderate condition, and the other was lightly wounded.

The prisoners were shot and seriously wounded, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Center for Studies. They are being treated at the Soroka hospital as well.

Israeli daily Haaretz contradicted that claim, stating that prison forces “fired no shots during the altercation” but tried to disarm the prisoners, who were injured in the process.

Haaretz did not clarify how the prisoners were injured or the severity of their wounds.

Israel is considering the stabbings a “terrorist attack,” according to the publication Arab48.

Crackdown on Palestinian prisoners

The stabbing occurred during the last stage of the transfer of some 100 Palestinian prisoners affiliated with Hamas from Ketziot prison and Megiddo prison in the north to designated wings in other Israeli prisons, according to Haaretz.

The transfer began last week when it was announced by Israel Prison Service head Asher Vaknin.
Unrest began when the Israel Prison Service installed devices that block cell phone reception for “all the wings housing security prisoners,” to prevent Palestinians from communicating with the outside world, according to Haaretz.

Israel intends to keep expanding the system to other prisons.

Palestinians in Rimon prison in southern Israel protested the measure by burning mattresses in their cells, Haaretz reported.

Prison authorities imposed fines totalling $70,000 on the prisoners, and will be confiscating the money from the accounts in which families transfer funds for their detained loved ones to spend at the canteen.

Withholding prisoner’s body

Rimon prison is where Palestinian prisoner Faris Baroud, 51, died in February after years of medical neglect. Baroud, from Gaza City, was in his 28th year of imprisonment.

The Palestinian Prisoners Center for Studies is demanding Israeli authorities release Baroud’s body, still withheld by Israeli authorities weeks after his death, despite an Israeli court ruling to return it after an autopsy.

Israel’s autopsy revealed that Baroud primarily died of a heart attack, but also had several other illnesses.

Earlier this month, an Israeli court issued a decision not to bury Baroud in Israel’s so-called cemeteries of numbers until a final decision on whether to hand his body to the Palestinian side, according to Wattan TV.

These are graveyards where Israel buries Palestinians and identifies them only by numbers.

Aggression “most severe in years”

Al-Haq stated that Israel’s attack on prisoners in the Naqab “must be seen within the context of Israel’s escalating and systemic crackdown against Palestinian prisoners over the past few months.”
The Palestinian Prisoners Club said that Israeli aggression against prisoners this year has been the “most severe in years.”

Israeli forces injured more than 100 Palestinian prisoners at Israel’s Ofer military prison near the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah in a series of raids in January.

Israeli public security minister Gilad Erdan announced earlier this year the formation of a committee to worsen conditions for detained Palestinians and reduce their standard of living to “the minimum required,” including imposing water rations.

Palestinian prisoners have announced a mass hunger strike to start a couple of days before Israeli elections next month in protest of Israel’s crackdown.

REVEALED: UK government met with BAE Systems weeks after Khashoggi murder to discuss response

Trade Secretary Liam Fox met with company officials to see how government's reaction could impact corporate relations, document shows

The Eurofighter Typhoon, made by BAE, is used by the Saudi air force in Yemen (AFP)

By Ian Cobain- 8 April 2019

The British government met representatives of the country’s largest arms manufacturer to discuss its response to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi within weeks of the crime.

The UK’s International Trade Secretary, Liam Fox, met with representatives of BAE Systems to talk about how the government’s reaction could impact the corporation’s relations with Saudi Arabia.

A one-line confirmation that the meeting was held on 29 October, “to discuss the UK government response to the killing of Khashoggi and BAE Saudi interests”, has been disclosed by the Department for International Trade (DIT).

Although the department said it was making that disclosure in line with its commitment to government transparency, no further details were forthcoming. Neither the DIT or BAE answered questions from Middle East Eye.

Khashoggi, a critic of the direction Saudi Arabia has been taking under the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was murdered after walking into the country’s consulate in Istanbul on 2 October. His body was then dismembered and his remains have not yet been found.

The meeting with BAE came less than four weeks after the murder and a few days after the Riyadh investment forum known as “Davos in the Desert” was held, which Fox and many other politicians and business leaders had declined to attend.

UK arms sales to Saudi challenged

The disclosure that the meeting took place comes at a particularly sensitive moment for both BAE Systems and the DIT, with campaigners about to renew a legal challenge to British arms exports to Saudi Arabia for use in the civil war in Yemen.

Around 14 percent of the corporation’s sales were to Saudi Arabia in 2018, while the UK has licensed £4.7bn ($6.1bn) worth of arms sales to Saudi forces since March 2015, when a coalition led by the Gulf kingdom intervened in the civil war.

The UK has licensed £4.7bn worth of arms sales to Saudi forces since March 2015

The UK has supplied military aircraft and a steady supply of bombs and missiles, components, training and technical support. As of February, there were 17 UK military personnel embedded with Saudi forces, including three in the Saudi Air Operations Centre.

In late 2018, Human Rights Watch reported that around 6,900 civilians had been killed and 11,000 injured during the war - mostly by the Saudi-led coalition - while the charity Save the Children estimates that as many as 85,000 children under the age of five have died from hunger and disease.

On Tuesday, the Court of Appeal in London will begin to hear an appeal by a UK NGO, the Campaign Against Arms Trade, which is attempting to overturn a 2017 ruling by a lower court that permitted the UK to continue to export arms to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen.

CAAT argues that the exports should be halted as a number of bodies, including UN Panel of Experts and the European Parliament, have concluded that Saudi air strikes are causing disproportionate harm to civilians, in violation of international humanitarian law.

'Narrowly on the wrong side'

Earlier this year the international relations committee of the UK Parliament’s upper house, the House Of Lords, also concluded that the UK is “narrowly on the wrong side” of international humanitarian law, and should be prepared to suspend some exports.

REVEALED: The full extent of US arms deals with Saudi Arabia and UAE

Read More »

UK government lawyers are questioning the reliability of the reports on which human rights groups, NGOs and international panels have reached their conclusions and argue that Britain has a robust system of arms export controls.

In the US, Congress has approved a resolution to end American assistance for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. The resolution is likely to be met by a veto from President Donald Trump.

The US is by the far the largest exporter of arms to Saudi Arabia, and is estimatedto have struck at least $68bn worth of deals since March 2015.

A number of countries, including Germany, suspended arms sales to Saudi Arabia following the murder of Khashoggi.

Theresa May prepares to head to Europe to seek a Brexit extension

Gary Gibbon-8 Apr 2019Political Editor

Theresa May will head off around  Europe tomorrow to try to get a further Brexit extension.

She will meet Angela Merkel in Berlin and Emmanuel Macron in Paris ahead of the emergency EU summit in Brussels on Wednesday.

She spent today in talks with Cabinet Ministers and senior Tory backbenchers.

There were no cross-party talks with Labour – they resume between officials tonight.

But Jeremy Corbyn said he still doesn’t know what concessions the Prime Minister is prepared to make.

Revisiting The Brutal Massacre At Jallianwala Bagh

General Dyer was malignance personified. His action ensured the rapid end of the British Empire.

 

by K Natwar Singh-7 Apr 2019

 

On 13 April is the hundredth anniversary of the brutal massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar. The man responsible was a British military officer, Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer. He was malignance personified. It is not possible to make any allowance for his frightfulness. He was thick skinned, meanly obdurate, self-righteous, with an insane sense of duty. His action at Jallianwala Bagh ensured the rapid end of the British Empire. His misguided admirers (more about them later) called him the saviour of the Empire.

 

Following the arrest of Congress leaders Dr Saifuddin Kitchlu and the Cambridge educated Dr Satyapal, in early April, tensions ran high in Amritsar. Agitators stoked the fires of discontent. This unrest was spontaneous, no conspiracy was planned, as claimed by many British officials. Tempers were running high on account of the Rowlatt Act, Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, which Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress opposed.

 

The response of the Punjab government was to issue a proclamation, which stated that “All meetings and gatherings are hereby prohibited and will be dispersed at once by Military Law.” Two: “No person residing in the Amritsar City is permitted to leave his house after 8 P.M. Any person found in the streets after 8 P.M will be shot.”

 

Not even one tenth of the people of Amritsar had heard of the proclamation. It was written in Urdu and was distributed by hand.

 

A meeting was called at Jallianwala Bagh on Baisakhi day, 13 April. Over 5,000 people came to the meeting, including women and children. Hardly any of them had heard of the proclamation—Dyer himself acknowledged that people might not have heard of the proclamation. The meeting was not held to challenge the government or Dyer. In fact Dyer had arrived in Amritsar with orders from the government. This lapse was covered up by the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, the lamentable, arch-Empirewalla, Michael O’Dwyer. He loathed Indians. He was, till the very end, a staunch supporter of Dyer and the massacre he masterminded. O’Dwyer was shot dead in London in 1940 by Udham Singh.

 

The crowd at Jallianwala Bagh had no arms, not even lathis. Yet, Dyer decided that this was a part of an intended revolt, which had to be put down by force. When Dyer reached the Bagh, he asked his troops to fire at the crowd. In ten minutes 379 (official estimate) men, women and children were killed. Nearly 2,000 were wounded. There was only one exit. People tried to climb over the wall. They were shot in the back. Having performed his duty Dyer withdrew his force. No offer of medical aid was made.

 

Then followed the crawling outrage. Dyer ordered that men be asked to crawl in the narrow Kucha Kaurianwala Street leading to the Bagh. If anyone raised his head he was beaten with lathis. Next came the whipping order. A whipping post was erected. Teenagers were given thirty whiplashes. There was no escape—they were fastened to the flogging post. Their families were asked to watch the flogging. One boy shrieked with pain: “Oh mother, I am dead. Oh sahib, leave me.”

 

Very slowly the news of the massacre began to leak out. The Viceroy Lord Chelmsford, after reading the Hunter Committee report, wrote to the Secretary of State Edward Montagu: “I cannot contemplate the retention of a man of his mentality and with his record.”

 

Dyer was summoned to Delhi and asked to resign his command and also told that he would receive no further post in India. A few days later Brigadier General Dyer sailed for England.

 

Gen. Dyer

He was welcomed as a hero and not shunned as a villain. Dyer’s case was discussed in the House of Commons in July 1920. The Secretary of State, Montagu said, “Are you going to keep your hold upon India by terrorism, racial humiliation, and subordination, and frightfulness, or are you going to rest it upon the goodwill, and the growing goodwill, of the people of your Indian Empire?” Montagu was heckled and interrupted by racial diehards. One of them, Austin Chamberlain observed, that he had not seen the House, “so fiercely angry… A Jew, (Montagu) rounding on an Englishman and throwing him to the wolves—that was the feeling”. Most uncharacteristically, Winston Churchill, then Minister of War, called Dyer’s action un-English and that he had betrayed British values. The House censured Dyer—the vote was 230 to 129.

 

However, in the House of Lords, Dyer found many conservative supporters, the most prominent being Lord Salisbury. The House of Lords voted 129 to 86 in favour of Dyer.

 

The Morning Post launched an appeal to patriots for monetary subscriptions for helping Dyer, “the man who saved India”. The response was massive: 26,000 pounds were donated (Kipling gave ten pounds) so that the butcher of Jallianwala Bagh could spend the rest of his life in comfort.

New electoral laws place Thai democracy in danger

A Thai anti-junta protester displays placards during a demonstration in Bangkok on March 31, 2019, disputing results of the country's first general election since a 2014 coup. Thai demonstrators on March 31 protested against alleged cheating in the junta-ruled kingdom's first election since a 2014 coup, a week after the controversial poll sowed confusion over the ballot results. Source: Jewel Samad/ AFP

7Apr 2019

ON 24 March, for the first time since a May 2014 military coup, Thailand held a general election. The election was not free and fair. The rules under which it was conducted were designed to decrease the electoral chances of large parties and increase those of a pro-junta party.

Parties who opposed the junta faced harassment and sometimes had their campaign events blocked. And, there have been reports of serious irregularities during the collecting and counting of votes.

Despite this lack of fairness, on 27 March a seven party anti-junta coalition, led by the pre-coup governing party Pheu Thai announced that they were likely to win a majority of seats in the House of Representatives and that they intended to form government.

This development is promising as it shows that there is political will to end junta dominance. It does not, however, mark a return to genuine democracy. Even if this group is allowed to govern, they will have to govern under a non-democratic constitution and likely with the junta leader as prime minister.

SEE ALSO: Can Thailand’s junta manage the election’s outcome?

There also remain many ways that the rights of this group may be further impeded. Vote counts may mysteriously change. The elections may be invalidated by exercise of Article 44 or due to irregularities. And, even if the results stand, junta-enacted laws may be used to obstruct the parties.

To understand the impact that junta-enacted laws may have, it is useful to consider the impact that one of the laws has already had. On 7 March, the Constitutional Court relied on one of the laws to dissolve Thai Raksa Chart — a party understood to have split from Pheu Thai in order to maximise the chance that between them the parties may win enough seats to form government.

Some have portrayed this dissolution as a continuation of a form of politics prevalent in Thailand since at least 2006. That the dissolution was achieved under a new law was, however, significant.

A protester displays a placard with a caricature depicting Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha as Pinocchio during a demonstration to mark the fourth year of junta rule in Bangkok on May 22, 2018. Source: Jewel Samad/AFP

The new law applied in the case required that if parties engaged in acts that ‘may be adverse to the democratic regime of government with the King as Head of State’ they must be dissolved (Section 92(2) of the Organic Act on Political Parties B.E. 2660 (2017)). The law was draconian, both because it set the bar for dissolution very low, and because it denied the court discretion.

Before the 2014 coup, the closest law set the bar higher, requiring that parties engage in acts ‘in order to overthrow the democratic regime of government with the King as Head of State’. It also gave the court more discretion, providing only that it may dissolve parties, not that it must.

Before the 2014 coup, the court sometimes used that discretion. A notable example is in cases decided between 2012 and 2014, in which the court used that law to block abusive constitutional amendments, but did not dissolve the parties that had proposed or supported the amendments.

SEE ALSO: Thailand’s elections in 2019 will test Prayuth’s political strategy

In contrast, in the Thai Raksa Chart case, despite finding that Thai Raksa Chart had not intended to overthrow or to oppose the democratic regime of government with the King as Head of State, had withdrawn its action and had not caused serious harm, the court dissolved the party.

While some reasons given by the court were overly broad, it must be conceded that for the court to have not dissolved the party the court would have had to read the law against its clear terms.

Since 2006, discussion of the role of Thai courts in political cases has tended to focus heavily on the role of judges, and not on ways that judges may have been constrained by the laws that they have had to apply or the cases that have come before them. The laws and cases have, however, had an impact. It is only by recognising this that the current situation can be appreciated.

A supporter displays a placard of Action Coalition for Thailand party candidate Man Charoenwan, depicted as ‘Superman’ during registration with the election commission in Bangkok on February 4, 2019. Source: Romeo Gacad/AFP

Before 2014 there were already laws that set problematic standards. There were also already distortions in the ability of actors to initiate cases. Now, thanks to the junta, however, there are even more problematic laws and even more distortions in the ability of actors to initiate cases.

There are also signs that the laws will be applied unevenly. The junta-appointed Election Commission and Ombudsman have already dismissed dissolution cases against the pro-junta party on grounds that are unconvincing. Meanwhile, dissolution cases against anti-junta parties, the basis of many of which is bizarre, continue to amass, leaving open the possibility of their dissolution.

As these laws continue to be applied, it is important that critiques focus not only on the actions of judges, but also on those of the initiators of cases and on the nature of the laws themselves.

It is also important, if Thai democracy is to have a chance, that such draconian laws be abolished, and that in enacting new laws attention be paid not only to the need to discourage corruption, but also the equally important need to respect the right of the people to make their own choices.

Sarah Bishop is a PhD candidate within the ANU College of Law undertaking research on Thai Constitutional Law focusing on court interpretation of constitutional rights provisions.

This article is republished from East Asia Forum under a Creative Commons licence. 

Barack Obama is stuck in the past. He represents the old Democratic party 

The former president says he’s worried about ‘purity’ tests in the Democratic party. What he’s really worried about is his surrogates losing control of the party
Former president Barack Obama during a town hall meeting at the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT) in Berlin, on 6 April. Photograph: Clemens Bilan/EPA

Bhaskar Sunkara-Mon 8 Apr 2019 

Barack Obama is worried about the Democratic party. This weekend, he told a crowd at an Obama Foundation event in Berlin that the party is becoming a “circular firing squad” targeting those “straying from purity” on certain issues.

Leading figures around the party have indeed moved to the left since he left office two years ago.

Thanks in no small part to the Bernie Sanders campaign and the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Medicare for All, free public higher education, a $15 minimum wage, and action on climate change have become mainstream positions.

The self-described “political mainstream” hasn’t caught up to this new reality, however. Obama’s former vice-president, Joe Biden, hasn’t announced his presidential candidacy yet, and is getting attacked not just for his behavior toward women but for a decades-long record that includes support for military interventions, mass incarceration, immigrant deportations, and more. The subtext of Obama’s remarks is this undermining of Biden.

Are things getting meaner? Maybe, the internet is a pretty terrible place. But few campaign seasons were more vitriolic than the 2008 Democratic primaries. Hillary Clinton called Obama “elitist and out of touch”, who couldn’t reach “hard-working Americans, white Americans”. For his part, Obama campaign’s negative ads about Clinton were recirculated by Trump in 2016.

By comparison, Bernie played softball in 2016. But he certainly gave voice to grassroots anger. People are fed up with the status quo, and they’re starting to demand more of their politicians. Incumbents used to moving to an imaginary center are running up against the fact that their “center” is an illusion. When most Americans support Medicare for All and a jobs guarantee, when they want an end to overseas wars, welcome unions, and even are starting to get comfortable with the idea of socialism, is it really “centrist” to stubbornly oppose all these things?

The Democratic party has been transformed. Formerly fringe ideas are now winning ones

Of course, Obama retorts, “You have to recognize that the way we’ve structured democracy requires you to take into account people who don’t agree with you, and that by definition means you’re not going to get 100% of what you want.” But the real problem the Democrats faced in 2016 wasn’t that they were too strident in putting forward a purist progressive vision. Rather, Clinton ran a campaign mostly about shielding Americans from the nightmare of Trumpism and not presenting dreams for the future. When people say they have been falling behind for the last 30 years and your retort is: “I can fix that, I’m experienced, I’ve been in politics for 30 years,” you might end up losing an election.

This primary, Sanders and Warren are actually giving people a positive, comprehensible agenda to vote for, one that can speak to the justified rage of so many who are not willing to settle for a world destroyed by climate change, another year without basic healthcare, or continued precarious employment feel. For Obama, “We have to be careful in balancing big dreams and bold ideas with also recognizing that typically change happens in steps.” But incrementalism during the Obama years was small steps to nowhere, ones that far from cementing a new progressive majority actually helped open the door to the populist right.

Obama says that “if you skip too many steps you end up having bad outcomes”, but we’re now seeing what happens when you go into a negotiation – like he did with the health insurance companies – with an already compromised position. Bernie says “Medicare for All” and he means it, but even if you only wanted a public option, wouldn’t that be a better position to start from anyway?

Like those who think “Uncle Joe” Biden is our only way to stop Trump, Obama is stuck in the past. The Democratic party has been transformed. Formerly fringe ideas are now winning ones. Obama and the centrist Democrats he backs are something like the old “Rockefeller Republicans” of the 70s and early 80s. They didn’t realize how out of step with the times they were until it was too late.
Like Reagan did in 1980, the stage is set for Bernie Sanders to fundamentally realign the Democratic party, wielding together a coalition that can unite working people across the country behind a social democratic agenda for jobs and justice. Barack Obama isn’t afraid of that kind of Democratic party losing to Trump. He’s afraid of it winning.

• Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin magazine and a Guardian US columnist. He is the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

The Double Talk of Trump’s Favorite Dictator

Sisi’s supporters praise his religious tolerance. They shouldn’t.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Coptic Pope Tawadros II during a Christmas Eve Mass at the Nativity of Christ Cathedral outside Cairo on Jan. 6, 2018. (Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images)
Coptic Orthodox Christians packed the newly built Nativity of Christ Cathedral for a Christmas Eve mass after a bloody year for the minority singled out by jihadists for attacks. / AFP PHOTO / KHALED DESOUKI (Photo credit should read KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images)

BY STEPHEN MCINERNEY, AMY HAWTHORNE

 | APRIL 8, 2019, 4:33 PM
Earlier this year, U.S. President Donald Trump’s praise of one of his favorite strongmen, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, was effusive. “El-Sisi is moving his country to a more inclusive future!” Trump exclaimed in a tweet about the opening of a huge new cathedral outside Cairo, which was built by the Egyptian military and is the largest in the Middle East. Trump’s tweet echoed one of the main arguments of Sisi’s backers. Sure, he is a military-backed authoritarian, the thinking goes, but he’s also the kind of Muslim leader who fights Islamist extremism and champions equal rights for religious minorities, especially Egypt’s Christians.

Sisi has worked hard to craft his enlightened image. Since seizing power in a 2013 coup, he has expressly portrayed himself as a heroic reformer of Islam—he has called on scholars at Al-Azhar University, one of the country’s most prestigious religious institutions, to re-examine controversial Islamic teachings—and a protector of Christians, who constitute some 10 percent of the population. Sisi has charmed many a delegation of Americans, who return from Cairo and write glowingly of his courage on religious freedom. When Sisi visits the White House on Tuesday, the U.S. administration is likely to bestow on him yet more compliments in this vein.

But even a quick look at Sisi’s actual record shows how misplaced such praise is. Initially, many Egyptian Christians did welcome Sisi’s ouster of the elected but illiberal Muslim Brotherhood government, hoping he would usher in a new era of security and reform. But over the past several years, disillusionment has set in. Under Sisi’s repressive rule, the Egyptian state continues to treat members of minority faiths as second-class citizens. Sisi has done nothing to address pervasive problems such as economic discrimination toward non-Muslims; the presence of a “blasphemy” clause in the penal code that the government wields against alleged critics of Islam; the authorities’ persistent failure to prevent sectarian attacks on Christians; discriminatory restrictions on church building; and an absence of even the most basic legal rights for members of faiths other than Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.

Sisi has done nothing to remove barriers to hiring or promoting Christians in several key sectors. Samuel Tadros, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, has described how “Copts are excluded from Egypt’s intelligence service and state security, their percentage in the armed services and police force is capped at 1%, and they are similarly discriminated against in the foreign service, judiciary, education sector and government-owned public sector.” The 2018 annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom notes that “only one of [Egypt’s] 36 government ministers is Christian, and there are no Christian governors, even in Christian-majority areas.” Christians are even unofficially barred from playing for the professional clubs of Egypt’s wildly popular national sport, football.

Under Article 98 of the Egyptian penal code, blasphemy—defined to include “ridiculing or insulting a heavenly religion or a sect following it, or damaging national unity”—remains a crime punishable by imprisonment. Although the article in theory applies to those who speak against Christianity and Judaism as well as against Islam, in practice it has been applied exclusively for actions or speech deemed critical of or defamatory to Islam, and the accused are disproportionately Christians and other minorities. In just one shocking example, in 2016 a group of Coptic teenagers were sentenced to prison for allegedly making a video mocking the Islamic State in Libya after it had beheaded 21 Christians.

Meanwhile, Sisi presides over a vast security state yet has failed to slow terrorist attacks on Christians and their houses of worship. Late last year, Islamic State militants attacked a bus full of Christian pilgrims traveling to a monastery south of Cairo. Seven died, and dozens more were injured—in nearly the exact location as a terrorist attack on Christian pilgrims the year before. In recent years, Islamist militants have also killed Christians in brazen church bombings in mainland Egypt and have targeted Christians in the northern Sinai Peninsula, driving out dozens from their homes.
On top of such jihadi violence, mobs of local Egyptian Muslims whipped up by bigoted religious discourse frequently assault Christians for praying in what they call illegal churches or for carrying on interfaith romances. In December, after a spate of such incidents, Sisi created the Supreme Committee to Combat Sectarian Violence. But like many of Sisi’s so-called reforms, this was public relations, not a serious attempt to tackle the problem. As Timothy E. Kaldas, a fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, noted, the committee “is almost exclusively composed of representatives of Egypt’s varied security bodies” and, worse, includes no representatives at all of the minority faith communities that are especially vulnerable to extremist violence.

To date, Sisi’s only concrete benefit for Egyptian Christians was his much-touted 2016 law on church construction, but it falls far short of what is needed. Christians had hoped Sisi would finally remove onerous controls on building and repairing churches—restrictions that do not exist for mosques. The biased system has left Christian worshippers greatly underserved relative to Muslim ones; the most recent official data suggests that Egypt had one mosque for every 665 Muslims but only one church for every 2,780 Christians.  Yet instead of treating the building of churches and mosques equally, under Sisi’s new rules churches are still subject to a special and laborious approval process, in which security officials have vast and arbitrary power to reject permits for construction—even minor repairs. The justification is that allowing too many churches would inflame the Muslim majority and threaten stability.

Under the new law, the Egyptian state has legalized 24  percent of the unlicensed churches that have applied for formal approval and, remarkably, has approved the building of new churches at an even lower rate than Hosni Mubarak’s regime. Unaccountable security officials continue to unlawfully harass worshippers and to close churches and often do nothing to prevent sectarian assaults on Christian places of worship. Under Sisi, tens of thousands of Christians have been left with nowhere to pray. As the Coptic bishop of Los Angeles lamented, “The church construction law has been revealed to be a church closing law.”

Sisi’s gleaming mega-cathedral in Egypt’s new administrative capital certainly impressedU.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other foreign visitors. Yet not only is this vanity project located in a military-controlled siteinaccessible to most Egyptians, but it has zero impact on the systemic discrimination Christians face daily. Despite the real dangers that come with speaking out in Sisi’s Egypt, in a recent columnYoussef Sidhom, the editor in chief of Egypt’s most influential Christian newspaper, Watani, warned against allowing “talk by President Sisi when he visits the Church” to “obscure the fact that there are Egyptian Copts who experience neither equality nor freedom, nor can they exercise their constitutional rights.” Other prominent Christian figures have expressed similar discomfort.

Christians may be the country’s largest religious minority, but other religious groups have even fewer rights. For example, the Bahai and Jehovah’s Witnesses faiths remain officially banned. Their places of worship, public celebrations of their faiths, and even their marriages remain unrecognized by the state. Official religious institutions such as Al-Azhar and the Ministry of Religious Endowments have engaged in public campaigns warning of the “growing dangers” of the spread of the Bahai faith. And atheists also face growing repression, with Sisi’s parliament even considering making it a crime not to believe in God.

Although the Egyptian president is fond of speaking of religious tolerance, especially in front of foreign audiences, his regime treats Christians and other religious minorities just as his predecessors did: as groups to be controlled and collective security threats to be managed, not as citizens deserving of individual rights and freedoms. Sisi, whose solution to any problem, danger, or conflict is to further curtail rights and boost the military’s powers, has shown no vision or willingness to lead Egypt toward a more open, tolerant society. With his rubber-stamp parliament now pushing through constitutional amendments that will allow him to remain in power until 2034, the prospect for significant improvements in the status of Egypt’s religious minority communities looks grim. Yet if the U.S. administration genuinely cares about religious freedom in the Middle East, Trump should replace superficial praise for Sisi with pressure on him to take long overdue steps such as abolishing the blasphemy law and equalizing the approval system for all places of worship.