Ademola Araoye

By Ademola Araoye

Since the story of the resurgence of slavery of black Africans in Libya broke, global reactions to the inundation of Africans in Europe and the United States have continued to evolve. Policy responses to uncontrolled black immigration by various extra African establishments have ranged from unvarnished cleansing policy as in the case of Israel or benevolent extra territorial containment as in the case of Italy. The variation in responses has been driven by divergences in the character of the host national society, the dominant social and political ideology and evolved sensibilities in each of the responding state. Israel, with policy seemingly directed by hatred of blacks, and Italy in its subtle diplomatic intervention, represent two contrasting polarities in the distillations of approaches to the perceived nuisance that black humanity now poses to the world. Israel, under the Likud party, officially, the Likud-National Liberal Movement, is a centre-right to right-wing political party in Israel. The Likud has very low threshold for the expansion of social justice. Italy is governed by the Democratic Party (Italy). The Partito Democratico, PD, is a social-democratic political party.  The PD’s main ideological trends are social democracy and the Italian Christian leftist tradition. The party has been also influenced by social liberalism. Social liberalism is a political ideology that believes the individual requires a level of social justice. Social liberalism endorses a market economy and the expansion of civil and political rights. Under social liberalism, the good of the community is viewed as harmonious with the freedom of the individuals.

The news of Israel’s decision to deport all estimated illegal 38,000 Africans that the Israeli government terms “migrant infiltrators” because they did not cross into the country through a legal border crossing, should not exactly be bad news for discerning Africans. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu observed that illegal immigrants from Africa threaten the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. To avert this threat, African migrants will be given around $3,500 to leave Israel and can choose to go to their home countries or to a third country. The government will also close the Holot detention center, where more than 1,000 Eritrean and Sudanese refugees are held awaiting deportation.

Related story: https://thenewsnigeria.com.ng/2018/01/well-pay-you-3500-to-leave-israel-or-you-get-jailed-netanyahu-tells-african-migrants/

The offer of United States Three thousand Five hundred dollar (U$ 3500) incentive to the unwanted guests to leave Israel within three months or be sent to jail shows how desperate Israel is to get rid of the perceived nuisance of black migrants outside of the rehabilitated black Jewry, the Falashas, descendants of the immigrants of the Beta Israel communities of Ethiopia. And again, the incentive to ‘voluntarily’ leave offered black migrants is contemptuous of one humanity to another. Some analysts have located this controversial policy in the context of the politics around age old perceived threats to the tribal purity of the Jewish character of the state of Israel as a result the threat posed by the minority Arab to the preeminence of Jews in the demographics of Israel. But the demographic facts in relation blacks do not support Netanyahu’s fabricated and politically and historically insensitive excuse.

Meanwhile, a more diplomatic variant of this policy was unveiled by Italian Foreign Minister Angelino Alfano in a letter of 4 January, 2018 written in Senegal, the second leg of the minister’s three-nation mission that began in Niger on January 3. The mission ends in Guinea on Jan. 5. In the letter, Angelino Alfano affirmed that although enormous investments are ongoing in Europe and Italy, Europe’s future security and prosperity is at stake in Africa. Italy’s Africa policy in fine and nuanced diplomatese “conjugates security with solidarity” and solidarity with development. Alfano stressed that the linkage is strategic because the only way to keep tens of thousands of people from fleeing their homelands and ending up as refugees and migrants in Italy is to provide them with better lives in their own countries. In plain language, Africa has become a security threat to European wellbeing. To combat this threat, the Italian Foreign Minister announced that to contain the unending stream of African human defections to Europe, Italy has allocated 50 million euros (60 million U.S. dollars) to step up controls on the Niger-Libya border, causing “migratory flows to drop from 70,000 people in May 2016 to 4,000 in July 2017,” Alfano revealed that Italy has earmarked 31 million euros to “improving the conditions of local populations” and another 15 million to voluntary repatriations and refugee resettlement programs run by the United Nations-affiliated International Organization for Migration (IOM).

In December, 2017 the government of center-left Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni said Italian peacekeeping troops should be shifted from Iraq to Niger to help fight human traffickers and Islamist extremists. Italy’s policy is therefore is direct military intervention on the continent to help African governments simply to keep Africans where they are. The policy combines token fiscal intervention accompanied with robust military control of Africa’s borders. The Italian approach represents a benevolent variant of containing the perceived African nuisance to the world. In the past, Italy had deployed special forces to neutralize the lynchpins of human trafficking in Libya. The operations had achieved modest success. Hence the new approach from Rome. All the same, what an indictment of a continent with 56 so called sovereign governments and many loud regional bodies and continental.

What seems compelling is that the policy of incentivized cleansing of blacks from Israel is based on racial hatred. It is thus an Israeli expression of a global trend of unprovoked deep antagonism against the presence of black humanity everywhere. The internal treatment of blacks in Israel, both citizens and migrants, are indicative of the hatred of blacks by the Israeli establishment. An unattributed piece on AfricaW.com reveals the tribulations of the African migrant in Israel. The author notes that the tears of Africa flow like mighty streams in the “holy land”. The blood of Africa weeps all day and night in the “promised land”. African women are beaten and stripped naked and men are reduced to nothing but stray dogs. Little black children are looked at with scornful eyes and sometimes kicked right in the face. This is the reality of life in God’s “holy land”.

What seems compelling is that the policy of incentivized cleansing of blacks from Israel is based on racial hatred. It is thus an Israeli expression of a global trend of unprovoked deep antagonism against the presence of black humanity everywhere. The internal treatment of blacks in Israel, both citizens and migrants, are indicative of the hatred of blacks by the Israeli establishment. An unattributed piece on AfricaW.com reveals the tribulations of the African migrant in Israel. The author notes that the tears of Africa flow like mighty streams in the “holy land”. The blood of Africa weeps all day and night in the “promised land”. African women are beaten and stripped naked and men are reduced to nothing but stray dogs. Little black children are looked at with scornful eyes and sometimes kicked right in the face. This is the reality of life in God’s “holy land”. Africans living in Israel today are like sacrificial lambs whose blood must atone for the sins of the multitude. Africans living in Israel today are like scapegoats who get blamed for even the things they know nothing about. It is so bad to the point where even some Rabbis blame African immigrants for their unanswered prayers. Whether the African acknowledges this reality or not, the fact is that the mere presence of black humanity in Israel is perceived as a curse.

The internal discourse on the criticality of strategic management of national demographics within the Israeli establishment since the founding of the state on 14 May, 1948 bears no relevance to its policy on blacks. The estimated population of Israel as of Thursday, January 4, 2018 is 8,388,300. The largest ethnic group are Jews with 75% of the population. They are followed by Arabs (20%). Other minorities constitute (5%). It is a youthful population with a median age of 30.3 years. Israel is the only state with a Jewish majority and explicitly Jewish state in the world. The aspiration to remain so is national policy. So new statistics in November, 2017 showing that the Israeli-Jewish fertility rate has now surpassed that of the Israeli-Arab population for the first time, defying analysts who have made long-term projections of a Jewish minority in Israel is reassuring. Meanwhile, Ethiopian Jews (Falashas) descendants of the immigrants of the Beta Israel communities of Ethiopia in Israel brought into the country in Operation Moses (1984) and Operation Solomon (1991) survive only along the margins of society. They numbered 125,500 in 2011. They are mainly assembled in the smaller urban areas of central Israel. This crucial demographic development and statistics belie any pretensions of a black threat to the purity of Israel as a Jewish state. Yet still, many Ethiopian Israelis and black immigrants complain of institutionalized racism, police brutality and discrimination. The humiliation of blacks in Israel is so bad to the point where some are stripped naked in public places and several others butchered often in the dark. Controversial health policies with racist implications in violation of medical ethics to curtain the fertility of black women have been reported. Israeli treatment of blacks would seem to have been copied from SS – Heinrich Luitpold Himmler’s Nazi handbook on breaking the Jew. Heinrich Himmler was one of the most feared men in Nazi Germany and Europe once World War Two broke out.

Netanyahu: wants immigrants to leave of their own free will, or be forced out

In a recent report on the national politics on demography, Ariel Ben Solomon cites demographic expert Yoram Ettinger who notes that with the upward-trending Jewish rate of 3.16 births per woman, and the corresponding downward-trending figure of 3.11 for Israeli Arabs, the Israeli government can afford to articulate more confident policy decisions. Ettinger is also optimistic that given the prospects for continued Jewish immigration to Israel, particularly from Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, France, the U.K., Germany, Holland, Belgium and Argentina, the consolidation of the purity of the Israel as a Jewish state is further enhanced. He debunks the establishment’s prophets of demographic doom, and affirms that there is no Arab demographic time bomb. Rather there is an unprecedented Jewish demographic tailwind. In any case, demographic projections of establishment Israel has always been controversial as conventional demography has been systematically mistaken and misleading. He illustrates that in 1898, the leading Jewish demographer, Shimon Dubnov, opposed [Theodor] Herzl’s Zionist idea, contending that by 1998 there would be 500,000 Jews in the land of Israel. Also in 1944, another renowned Jewish demographer, Prof. Roberto Bachi, urged [David] Ben-Gurion to postpone declaration of independence, since 600,000 Jews were not the critical mass required to maintain Jewish majority….He had projected that in 2001 there would be, at best, 2.3 million Jews, a 34-percent minority. These had proven to be far off the mark.

The other aisle in the debate internal to Jewish establishment is represented by Efraim Inbar, president of the recently established Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies. He counters that the new demographic figures do not significantly change realities on the ground. He proposes that even if Israel’s Jewish fertility rate is higher than the Arabs in Israel or in the West Bank, the demographics of the region will not change rapidly, leaving 1.5-2 million Arabs, mostly living in the cities under the full civil and security control of the Palestinian Authority. The main question for him does not revolve around birth rates, but whether it is wise for the Jewish state to incorporate in its midst such a large hostile population, he added, referring to the Palestinian Arabs. Nowhere in the politically sensitive discourse on Israeli demographics does the meager black population in Israel, citizen or immigrant, feature. The policy of black cleansing in Israel therefore cannot be in the context of politics of demographics of the Jewish state

That the Israeli government touts the historically debunked tiresome argument that expelling black Africans (emphasis on black) is necessary to maintain the Jewish character of the state is not supported by the demographic stats and trends and is all more tragic for Israel. Were it that blacks are beginning to constitute some demographic threat, and they are not, to the purity of the Jewish state, it would still be a disingenuous fabrication. For the argument of seeking to sustain the racial purity of a state or people is not original. The recourse to base primordial national sensibilities as the fundamentals of social policy has antecedents with chilling connotation for all humanity. In the course of seeking to create a master race in the Volksduestche, the Third Reich classified Jews, Poles, Czechs, Gipsies, Ukrainians among others as inferior to the German master race. Paradoxically all the classified inferiors from Poles, Latvians, Romanians, Czechs were all responsible for some of the horrendous anti-Semitic violence against Jews, who had been their neighbors. Worst of all, Niall Ferguson avers that collaborators in the humiliation and decimation of Jews included people not only in countries collaborating with the Third Reich in Italy, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria, but also people in Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Greece and the Soviet Union. And the horrors of racial hatred should resonate with Israel and Jews. Israel needs be reminded of Adolf Hitler’s statement on July 22, 1941 speaking to the Croatian Commander -in Chief Slavko Kvaternik that “if there were no more Jews in Europe, then the unity of European states would no longer be destroyed. …But if one state for whatever reason tolerates one Jewish family in it, then this (the Jewish family) will become the bacillus source of a new decomposition” of European peoples. Yet, the intense madness of it all was clear to all. For even the definition of a Jew was insane. A Jew was anyone who is or has been a member of Jewish religion, had one Jewish parent or whose membership of the Jewish race was apparent.

And as the experience of the Third Reich and the history of early United States of America demonstrated the very concept of preserving the purity of a race with pretensions of superiority over other races is false and imbued with national hypocrisy. For the Third Reich wanted a Judenrein state in an expansive lebensraum. But before attempting to kill off Jews, the Germans had experimented with the heartless mechanics of race extermination of Namibians from their own homeland in Namibia. During German rule in Namibia, so called South West Africa then, colonial officers studying eugenics developed ideas on racial purity and their forces tried to exterminate two ethnic groups, the Herero and Nama, some of them in concentration camps. These events in Namibia in 1904 to 1908 was the harbinger of Nazi ideology and the Holocaust. As a result about 80 per cent of the Herero population were killed. They were shot, hung by the tree by Germans or died in the desert. The Germans had also sealed off all watering holes in the desert, while preventing survivors from returning. Even in 2004, at the centennial of the German genocide in Namibia, Germany has been reluctant to acknowledge the genocide. This has set off accusations of racism in how white victims in Europe and black victims in Africa of genocide are treated.

And see what horrendous state and social activism of grossly distorted ethical values of humanity and the aftermath that the search for a cleansed German nation unleashed in a genocidal campaign across Europe. Israel’s African immigrant/ asylum policy is very much ironical from a nation born out of the derelict immorality of the Third Reich and, if truth be said, of all Europe. The founding of the United States and its early years began with informal consensus on keeping out inferior Southern European races, annihilating indigenous Americans and encouraging freed black men to leave voluntarily in the era of the reconstruction. Yet, the United States failed in keeping out Southern Europeans, including the Italians, Greeks, Irish and peoples of the Mediterranean littoral who were considered inferior. The Indians indigenous to America survived massive haunting, hunting and policy of annihilation by poisoning. Black America proved most resilient in the face of centuries old abhorrent persecution.

By 1842 some American blacks ended up in Haiti and Liberia encouraged by racist President James Monroe to avoid contaminating the white race through miscegenation with white American women. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866. The Klan extended into almost every southern state of the United States and by 1870 and became a vehicle for white southern resistance to the Republican Party’s Reconstruction-era policies aimed at establishing political and economic equality for blacks who whites generally perceived as a burden on society. The Klan members waged a ferocious underground campaign of intimidation and violence directed at white and black Republican leaders. Although United States Congress passed legislation designed to curtail Klan terrorism, the Klan was largely successful in its primary objective of the reestablishment of white supremacy. This was achieved through Democratic victories in state legislatures across the South in the 1870s. After a period of decline, white Protestant nativist groups revived the Klan in the early 20th century, burning crosses and staging rallies, parades and marches denouncing immigrants, Catholics, Jews, blacks and organized labor. The prominence of the Ku Klux Klan continued throughout American social and political life during the 1920s. There has been a resurgence of its influence in American public life with the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency.

In all this, avoiding miscegenation has been a powerful motif in the ugly history of humanity. Yet still, in the Third Reich, despite the threat of death, in September 1943 the Propaganda Ministry of the Reich, determined to enforce apartheid rules on sexual behavior to forge the master race out of Germans had been forced to remind German citizens that every sexual act with a foreigner-Poles, Ukrainian and guest workers required for the armament industrial complex for the war effort constituted a defilement of the German people and was coded as treasonous act against the master race. Given the rise in the number of children being born resulting from copulation between Germans and peoples classified as inferior, the Reich had to issue a statement that anyone molesting or accosting a German woman or girl will receive exemplary punishment and Polish women who accosted or molested Germans will be confined to brothels. Nial Ferguson records that in August 1940, a seventeen year old polish farm worker was publicly hung for having sex with a German prostitute. And today, to think of Poles and Eastern Europeans as arch racists!! Paradoxes of history and the recidivist nature of humanity.

Meanwhile, for most observers of Israel’s complicated multi-level diplomatic relations with an Africa possessed of iron determination to be very indolent, irresponsible, irrational, careless, naive and beggarly, Israel’s jettisoning of political correctness that has sustained and protected intra-human harmony is a national policy that is consistent with the revolved era of a polluted human geist and, some might even say, the upending of authentic human spirituality. Israel’s unfortunate policy can be squarely located in the enveloping turpitude of a Trumpist global violence at the beginning of the third millennium. This has resulted from a global conjuncture of three deleterious factors: moral degeneration at the beginning of the Third millennium and the relative ascent of amorality as a exculpatory license on social policy, the rise and revalidation of ultra nationalist ideologies including re-ascendance of neo-liberal ideology across Europe and the United States and, finally, the appropriation of the sharply factionalized global hegemonic religious space and realm, in both Islam and Christianity, by extreme fanatical fringes in the global interactive space. This is not an entirely new evolution in human history, but technological advances have accentuated the dangers that they pose. These horrors can be cyclical to reflect the lack of humanity’s corporate memory and a very dim nativist prism, especially in relation to humanity’s own historic failures. The emerging response to these challenging global developments in an Africa still mired in a debilitating quagmire is a sorry one.

It bears highlighting that President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan of “Making America Great Again” translates into making “Making America White Again”: Rewasping or whitening America again is founded on perceptions of threat to the integrity of the presumed whiteness of America. The objective is returning America to White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) again. This is a return to the era of great national cognitive dissonances in the United States. The dangerous policy resonates with many kindred ultra-nationalists across the United States and Europe. This is the ideological bond between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump that has emboldened ultra right movements in both the United States and Israel. Populist right wing groups have shared a number of causes, which typically include opposition to globalization, criticism of immigration and multiculturalism, opposition to the European Union, and social conservatism. The ideological spectrum of the radical right extends from right-wing populism to white nationalism and neo-fascism. Right-wing parties include conservatives, Christian democrats, classical liberals, nationalists and on the far-right racists and outright fascists. It may be noted that ultra-nationalist parties and movements have been on the rise in Europe since the early 2010s due to, according to some analysts, economic factors and immigration. In a number of key European states, extreme right wing  parties are major players in politics, such as Ireland’s Sinn Féin, France’s National Front Finland’s True Finns, Estonia’s Conservative People’s Party, Italy’s Lega Nord, Austria’s Freedom Party of Austria Hungary’s Jobbik, Turkey’s MHP.

Different reasons have however been adduced for the rise of nationalist parties and populist movements across European countries. Ruth Wodak has classified nationalist parties into four groups to include “parties that gain support through an ambivalent relationship with fascist and Nazi pasts. These would include the ultra right parties in Austria, Hungary, Italy, Romania, and France. Some ultra nationalist parties focus primarily on a perceived threat from Islam. These are largely found in the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland. In Hungary, Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom, nationalist parties restrict their propaganda to a perceived threat to their national identities from ethnic minorities. Finally are parties that endorse a fundamentalist Christian conservative-reactionary agenda. These are located in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. In Scandinavian countries, the main theme of far-right parties is perception of threat to the national culture. Against the rise of far right movements and parties across the world, it should be clear that Africans and black humanity would bear the brunt of the evolved roll back of humanity’s moral consensus on the inalienable commonality of human dignity across all races.

In the rapidly evolving global moral and strategic landscape that has reached critical satiation point in absorbing, even if grudgingly, the consequences of Africa’s irresponsibility, Africa must take responsibility. The absolute lack of coordinated continent wide response by irresponsible black establishments in virtually all over Africa to the emerging global trend of hatred against black humanity is a compelling imperative for revolutionary change: geo-physical (structural) metaphysically and attitudinal, if black humanity is to mobilize itself for its elusive emancipation. In the only one instance of African response to the Israel moral affront on Africa, Rwanda is reportedly soliciting the repatriation of the black migrants to Rwanda on their paying United States dollar 5000.00 (U$5000) per migrant.

Africa as configured, structurally, attitudinally and in the vacuity of its leadership cadres, is far too compromised to be of any good to black humanity in the evolving meltdown of humanity. Africans must force a radical departure from more than half a century of entrenched regimes of charlatans. The age of preeminent charlatans, no matter how dignified that these dominant cultic personas appear to be, is marked by a massive deficit in constructive ideational capital in leadership cadres. Constructive ideational capital is defined as an Africa interest driven and focused denominated policy profiles. Proxy regimes as in most of Francophone countries acting on behalf and in advancement of extra African strategic interests have degenerative consequences for Africa’s long term emancipation. Africa’s retreat from the rational to the illogical must be halted. Our institutions must educate to develop critical faculties than to indoctrinate to consolidate hegemonic falsehoods Decayed revolutionaries holding their often diminutive countries hostage are, positively, drawbacks to urgently needed rapid revolutionary transitions in Africa. Given the evolution to the existential crisis of black humanity, Africans have no alternative than to galvanize the continent for radical change to meet the evolved challenges against its very essences of its humanity. Whether the world responds to the evolved existential crisis of black humanity in humane interventions or in brutal expulsions and denunciations, black humanity must act fast to institute its own redemption. In this Africa needs the dynamism of its youthful returnees.