When the National Football League’s Washington Redskins franchise traveled to the University’s TCF Stadium to play the Vikings, they brought with them a considerable amount of controversy. It has been difficult to avoid the debate surrounding the Washington team and their controversial moniker. This is not solely a Minnesota phenomenon; nearly all of the team’s away games have seen a significant amount of protest by both sides. The use of the redskin name has pitted advocates of a change to a more inclusive name against supporters of the football team and their more than eighty year history.  While fans of the franchise argue that the name does not reflect any racism, it is important to understand the origins of the term redskin and how it fits into the wider context of the Native American genocide.

The Washington Redskins are amongst the oldest NFL franchises, having been established in 1932. However, the origins of the term redskin run much deeper. Its first usage is uncertain, but the term entered American lexicon sometime in the late eighteenth century. In the 1840’s at the height of Manifest Destiny, racism towards Native people began to increase. Using redskin and other derogative language to describe Native people was used to differentiate them from ‘civilized’ European culture. This would make it easier for the influx of settlers migrating west to confiscate tribal lands.

By the 1860’s, we can find evidence of the term being used for bounties on Native Americans in Winona. Even beloved children’s author L. Frank Baum, who wrote the Wizard of Oz, used the term redskin while openly advocating for the elimination of Native American people. The usage of the term helped reinforce the us versus them mentality of the United States at the time, making it easier to initiate the American-Indian Wars, which totally destroyed Native American culture in the U.S. In 1915, Redskin Rimes was published. It included a direct rebuttal of James Fennimore Cooper’s (author of The Last of the Mohicans) assessment of the noble Native. By this time, the term redskin was firmly entrenched as a slur against Native people. With this historical understanding it is impossible to understand Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder’s claims that the team name honors Native communities.

In the months before the November 2nd game, the University made an attempt to block the use of the Redskin name, but agreements between the school, the Vikings and NFL restricted the university’s ability to dictate any changes, including the usage and display of the controversial team name. Before the game, thousands of protesters gathered outside TCF Stadium to vocalize their anger at institutionalized racism. It is easy to think of the 21st century as being far removed from the atrocities committed in the United States against Native American people, but the insistence on keeping the Redskins name is a stark, ugly reminder that progress has not come as far as we think. Until the National Football League and its Washington franchise agree to change its name, it will forever be stigmatized with an aura of ignorance and racism.

Joe Eggers is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, focusing his research on cultural genocide and indigenous communities. His thesis project explores discrepancies between the legal definition and Lemkin’s concept of genocide through analysis of American government assimilation policies towards Native Nations.

One of the lasting effects of the genocide in Rwanda is that all African conflicts are always compared to Rwanda. The metric always seems to be whether or not they will be as bad as Rwanda if intervention does not occur. Rwanda has become a sign of guilt, a reminder that we as humanity did nothing to stop one of the more atrocious and rapid killings of peoples in an African country. Of course this ignores that the Democratic Republic of Congo has been embroiled in some variation of the same conflict for as almost as long as I’ve been alive (and I’m somewhat old enough to remember images of the late Mandela walking free from Robben Island holding Winnie Madikizela’s hand).

When the atrocities in Darfur first made international headlines several politicians and advocacy groups were quick to categorise it as a conflict pitting Christians against Muslims. There was a sense of déjà vu; a clearly identifiable group (Muslims/Arabs) was killing another discernable group (Christians/black African). Samantha Power,  (herself an advocate of intervention) would subsequently start working on raising awareness with a rising star in intervention advocacy circles- John Prendergast. Soon, celebrities like George Clooney (Sudan), Ben Affleck (DRC) and Don Cheadle (Genocide and the environment) had pet projects in African countries. Africa as a whole, and Sudan specifically, has provided the opportunity for foreigners to “find themselves” what scholars refer to as individuation.  As eloquently expressed by Alex Perry’s wonderful piece for Newsweek a few weeks ago, no place has suffered more from individuation than South Sudan.

As the conflict in South Sudan has raged on over the past several months one thing has become clear, president Kiir and his erstwhile deputy Dr. Machar appear to be in no hurry to solve the crisis. Despite numerous peace meetings, renewed hostilities seem to appear each day with both sides blaming each other.  What is frustrating is that the same voices that were keen on pushing for South Sudan’s independence appear content with issuing statements lamenting the humanitarian crisis.

You may ask, “shouldn’t the onus to stop the conflict be on the government of South Sudan?” Yes it should, however this question assumes that South Sudan had a proper functioning government to begin with. It assumes that the state apparatus was such that accountability and transparency were built-in from the get-go. The truth is that none of these things existed prior to this crisis and they certainly do not exist now. All the humanitarian help that was poured into South Sudan once it became a country never seemed particularly interested in this. Neither was president Kiir’s government ever held accountable.

The guilt of having not done anything to stop Rwanda in 1994 meant that a lot of humanitarians were willing to turn a blind eye to massive levels of corruption and lawlessness. They went as far as setting up a $526 Billion fund for infrastructure project (in a country with plenty of oil). Moreover, the impact of the Clooney-Prendergast type of intervention has meant that even South Sudanese government officials are willing to forgo their responsibility to protect if it means continued humanitarian intervention. No one epitomises this more clearly than South Sudan’s former ambassador to the US (on trial for treason) remarking, “George Clooney must get more engaged now to help shape the future of this country.”

And that is the complicated and incongruous nature of the relationship between humanitarians and conflicts in Africa.

Wahutu Siguru is the 2013 & Spring 2015 Badzin Fellow in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and PhD candidate in the Sociology department at the University of Minnesota. Siguru’s research interests are in the Sociology of Media, Genocide, Mass Violence and Atrocities (specifically on issues of representation of conflicts in Africa such as Darfur and Rwanda), Collective Memory, and perhaps somewhat tangentially Democracy and Development in Africa. 

This past weekend, Germany launched three days of celebrations marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, which led eventually to a reunified German state. The bright lights of the jubilee, however, may cast a shadow on other important events in German history that also took place on November 9, events to which the German post-war division can be traced back. On November 9, 1923, Adolf Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch marked the emergence of the Nazi Party as an important player in Germany’s political landscape. On the night of November 9, 1938, Nazis set hundreds of synagogues on fire throughout Germany and annexed Austria, vandalized Jewish homes, schools and businesses and killed close to 100 Jews in what became known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass.

Both pasts, the Nazi crimes and the partition of Germany, are connected. This twofold remembrance on November 9 may serve Germans as a counterbalance to the flood of self-congratulation that is engulfing the country during these days of celebration.

Alejandro Baer is the Stephen Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He joined the University of Minnesota in 2012 and is an Associate Professor of Sociology.

European Muslim Antisemitism: Why Young Urban Males Say They Don’t Like Jews

By Günther Jikeli

Antisemitism from Muslims has become a serious issue in Western Europe, although not often acknowledged as such. Looking for insights into the views and rationales of young Muslims toward Jews, Günther Jikeli and his colleagues interviewed 117 ordinary Muslim men in London (chiefly of South Asian background), Paris (chiefly North African), and Berlin (chiefly Turkish).

The researchers sought information about stereotypes of Jews, arguments used to support hostility toward Jews, the role played by the Middle East conflict and Islamist ideology in perceptions of Jews, the possible sources of anti-Semitic views, and, by contrast, what would motivate Muslims to actively oppose antisemitism. They also learned how the men perceive discrimination and exclusion as well as their own national identification.

This study is rich in qualitative data that will mark a significant step along the path toward a better understanding of contemporary antisemitism in Europe

Professor Vidal, who taught at the University of Minnesota from 1972 until his retirement in 2003, is widely known as an innovative, original, and productive scholar in the field of Latin American studies. The collective impact of his work and influence opened up new fields of intellectual inquiry to which he contributed through his high intellectual standards, independent spirit of inquiry, and unwavering commitment to human rights.

In the 1980s, Professor Vidal undertook a line of research that continued to expand the canon of literary studies and at the same time responded to the tragic reality of Chile, Argentina, and neighboring countries. He began to analyze subaltern or marginal literatures, and questions of authoritarian and military discourse, as they emerged and were answered in plays, songs, films, and other modes of popular culture, as well as in the practices which constitute and transform everyday life. This research resulted in the publication of several books, among them Dar la vida por la vida: la Agrupación de Familiares de Dentenidos Desaparecidos  [A Life for a Life: The Families of the “Disappeared”] (1982), El movimiento contra la tortura “Sebastián Acevedo”: Derechos humanos y la producción de símbolos nacionales bajo el fascismo chileno [The “Sebastián Acevedo” Movement against Torture: Human Rights and the Production of National Symbols under Chilean Fascism] (1986, with an updated version published by Mosquito Editores in Chile in 1996).

Professor Vidal linked, in a profoundly humanistic way, the practice of literary criticism with the defense of human rights. He will be greatly missed by the academic community.

Dr. Günther Jikeli is a research fellow at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies at Potsdam University. He is the co-director of the International Institute for Education and Research on Antisemitism (IIBSA). He earned his Ph.D.at the Center for Research on Antisemitism in Berlin and has served as an advisor to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe on combating antisemitism. In 2013, he was awarded the Raoul Wallenberg Prize in Human Rights and Holocaust Studies by the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation and Tel Aviv University. 

Recent reports indicate that antisemitism is on the rise in most European countries. How do you explain the causes?

Historically, antisemitism has often come in waves and we are now witnessing a global rise. This has multiple, overlapping causes. Holocaust memory is stirring resentment against Jews, while at the same time the Holocaust is being diminished and equated to all sorts of incidents. Additionally, many people in Western Europe have developed an obsession with Israel, encouraged by a media that disproportionately focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and often disseminates a Manichean view upon it. A study from Germany showed that 90% of those who harbor hostile feelings against Israel also harbor anti-Semitic feelings. Another major factor for the rise of antisemitism in Western Europe is open hatred against Jews among large sections of Muslim minorities, which is all too often tolerated. In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, we can observe the rise of revisionist and ultra-nationalist parties, whose aim is to honor historical leaders of their country who fought against Stalinism. The problem with that is they were mostly Nazi collaborators and often directly responsible for the mass killings of Jews.

How do you distinguish between anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism? 

It depends what the “anti-Israel sentiment” is. If this is criticism of the Israeli government for a particular decision then there is a clear difference to antisemitism. If Jews, and only Jews, are denied a viable nation-state as a people, then it is hard not to see the bias. The dissolution of the State of Israel or a “one state solution” would seriously put all Jewish Israelis (and probably also Israeli Arabs) into danger. Willfully ignoring this threat can be seen as a form of assistance to anti-Semites.

Is the problem acknowledged by the institutions and the media?

No, it is usually ignored by the media. However, the wave of anti-Semitic incidents in summer 2014 in many European cities has led to strong condemnation by many political leaders and the media.

Is Germany facing similar problems? Is there more responsiveness to anti-Semitic manifestations?

There are no major differences in these questions between the authorities lets say in France and in Germany. The condemnation of antisemitism in all its forms is even stronger by French politicians. Manuel Valls, now French Prime Minister, has declared that anti-Zionism is antisemitism and should not be tolerated. No similar statement has come from leading German politicians (although, Chancellor Merkel should be praised for her firm stand on the issue). However, while antisemitism is condemned in general terms, the political will to combat it is effectively weak. In 2011 a German parliament commission on combating antisemitism recommended several actions that still have not been initiated and anti-Semitic Muslim groups are tolerated instead of condemned for their rhetoric.

Your scholarship focuses on antisemitism among individuals of Muslim background in Europe. What are the specific traits?

Muslim antisemitism is a major factor in the global rise of antisemitism we are witnessing today. It is estimated that in many European countries between 30 and 50% of perpetrators of violent anti-Semitic acts have a Muslim background (Muslims form less than 8% in any Western European country). Many anti-Semitic tropes that are popular among Muslims are also widespread amongst the general population, such as “Jews are rich”, “Jews control the media, the business world, etc…”In addition, many Muslims refer to Islamic scriptures and to a Muslim identity for their hatred of Jews. “Jews are Muslims’ enemies,” is a widespread belief among these Muslims. In some social circles, hatred of Jews has become the norm.

How do organizations like the International Institute for Education and Research on Antisemitism (IIBSA) combat antisemitism?

Combating antisemitism is important. Speaking out and not tolerating antisemitism- as well as encouraging people to act as anti-antisemites is of the upmost importance. Education is surely key and we find that younger people are often willing to reflect critically upon their prejudices (of which antisemitism is only one of many). Unfortunately, there are very few grassroots non-Jewish organizations that work in the field. There is the German association Heroes, which specializes in exploring prejudices and authoritarian structures within Muslim families and the IIBSA (with projects in Berlin, London, and Morocco) works both in research and education on these questions. Antisemitism at first targets Jews but what many people fail to realize is that it is also a threat to all democratic and civilized societies.

As a student studying genocide and mass atrocity in the media, I often wonder whether we as consumers of the news can only take one atrocity at a time or if the media only thinks we can handle one at a time?  Over the past year, I have watched as reporting on the atrocities in the Central Africa Republic, South Sudan and the campaign #BringBackOurGirls gain momentum only to lose it as quickly as it was gained.

Now, almost all the news sources are focused on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and it appears that the watchful eye of the media has moved away from the other hot spots. Apparently the news outlets have come to a consensus that we the audience have suffered from what Susan Moeller calls compassion fatigue and have moved from the black (famine) and red (war) horses of the apocalypse, in CAR and South Sudan, to the white horse (often referred to as infectious disease) of the apocalypse in West Africa. Compassion fatigue dictates that the news will only report on stories that resonate with an American audience and thus a focus on West Africa fits this understanding since two recent Ebola patients were American and that another patient who is British were airlifted to the UK for treatment. The shift to the white horse of the apocalypse has also seen the Democratic Republic of Congo make an appearance in the news this month and not for the on-going hostilities.

This new focus, however, should not be conflated necessarily as a concern for what the disease is doing to Liberian families and rural populations. This focus has been, almost singularly, how Ebola may affect the U.S. Thus Ebola is not seen as dangerous because of its brutal effects on Liberian, Guinean, and/or rural west African populations, it is dangerous because it may show up on these shores which is a trope that has been accurately critiqued as not only misinformed but as inherently racist as well. As someone that studies representation of atrocities in Africa in the media, this type of sensationalizing is one that is familiar. The creation of a sensational story sells newspapers and increases circulation numbers-only one horseman at a time. All four will cause too much panic and eventual disengagement.

As the academic year begins, this column will continue to highlight the flash-points across the continent. There will also be updates on the positive actions being taken in these dangerous areas, such as the continued peace efforts by several countries to end hostilities in South Sudan. It is my belief that this year will mostly be one of improvements more than it will be about renewed hostilities. However, two countries need to be on our radars this fall. The first country to keep an eye on is Nigeria as it prepares for elections in the spring and reports of soldiers blatantly refusing to obey orders to deploy against Boko Haram due to its being outmatched (in terms of weaponry) by the group. The other is Lesotho, which seems to either have barely missed a coup (at best) or (at worst) the coup plotters were testing the waters and may attempt another coup later.

 Wahutu Siguru is the 2013 & Spring 2015 Badzin Fellow in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and PhD candidate in the Sociology department at the University of Minnesota. Siguru’s research interests are in the Sociology of Media, Genocide, Mass Violence and Atrocities (specifically on issues of representation of conflicts in Africa such as Darfur and Rwanda), Collective Memory, and perhaps somewhat tangentially Democracy and Development in Africa. 

Since taking power, the Islamic State has unleashed waves of violence against several minority groups in the region. One of these groups, the Yazidis, has made international news with calls the violence qualifies as genocide. CHGS analyzes these claims.

Who is ISIS?

ISIS/ISIL, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, is a militant group once affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).  In February of 2014 Al Qaeda Central (AQC) officially severed ties with the group as they felt they were giving them a bad reputation. In an article for Foreign Affairs (2-14-2014), Harvard professor Barak Mendelsohn pointed out that the split came about from a lack of shared ideology. Before the attack of the Yazidis in Iraq, ISIS targets had largely seemed to be anyone who stood in their way to creating a caliphate. This was part of the reason AQC had disowned them since attacks on Muslim populations were seen as a step too far even for AQC. Their involvement in the Syrian war has seen them carry out untold violence on peaceful populations that have resisted their advances.

Who are the Yazidis?

Numbering approximately 700,000 world wide, the Yazidis are a largely Kurdish ethnic group whose religion is syncretic and are largely concentrated in northern Iraq. The Yazidi religion was founded by an 11th century Ummayyad Sheikh and is a mix of Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Islam. This syncretic nature saw AQI label them as infidels sanctioning their killing.

Is it Genocide?

ISIS attacks in Syria have largely been indiscriminate. This has, also been the case in Iraq, as the group sought to take control of territories in the two countries and start a caliphate. All of this changed when they encountered the Yazidis living around the Sinjar Mountains. In early August of this year, ISIS specifically target this group for the fact that they were infidels and even sent the group members texts warning them that they were coming to kill them for being “enemies of God and refusing to repent .”

The UN office for the coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that between 35,000- 50,000 Yazidis are seeking refuge up in the mountains, which are surrounded by ISIS fighters on every side ready to kill them. It is this incident that pushed the United States government to act in order to prevent a “potential act of genocide.” If we look at article 2c of the genocide convention then the current situation of the Yazidis can be seen as an on-going genocide with the express and stated intention to kill the members of the Yazidi religion. In this iteration of violence, ISIS has expressly stated that their intent is to kill every member of the religion. Intent is the key ingredient when trying to understand whether a situation is or is not a genocide and this time around, the intent of ISIS is not in question.

One of the less known dimensions of the history of World War II was how Jews living under French colonial rule in North Africa were devastated by the fall of France and the establishment of the French collaborationist government of Vichy in 1940. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC has in recent years amassed a considerable archive related to the Jews of North Africa during the war and has encouraged scholars to research this subject.

In June 2010, Daniel Schroeter, the Amos S. Deinard Memorial Chair in Jewish History at the University of Minnesota, and a member of the CHGS Faculty Advisory Board, co-taught a research workshop at the USHMM and began studying their voluminous collection of documents. He will be returning to Washington, DC, having been awarded the Ina Levine Invitational Scholar Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the USHMM for the 2014-2015 academic year.

During Schroeter’s residency at the USHMM, he will be conducting research for a book on the subject of Vichy and the Jews in the protectorate of Morocco. Jews under French colonial rule were legally classified as indigenous Moroccan subjects of the sultan, a ruler whose power was limited and controlled by the French administration. The anti-Jewish laws, instigated by the central Vichy government in France, and promulgated in Morocco by the French protectorate authorities as royal decrees signed by the sultan Mohammed Ben Youssef, revealed the racism and discrimination inherent in the colonial system and the ambivalent position of the Moroccan monarchy and the Muslim population towards the Jews.

Research conducted at the Center will focus on the legal, social, and economic impact of the Vichy regime on the Moroccan Jewish communities, the response of the Muslim leaders and population to the anti-Jewish measures implemented in different parts of the country, and the contested politics of remembrance of World War II in Morocco.

For more information on Daniel Schroeter, please click here.

As an African studying in this country, it often heartens me how much regular people in the U.S. generally care about issues on my home continent. From issues in South Sudan, to Central Africa Republic to Darfur and now Nigeria, there has always been heart-warming concern shown. It is for this reason that this month’s post has been rather challenging to write as it seeks to interrogate some of the ways this concern has largely played out.

Over the past few weeks, we have been inundated with news about the missing girls in Nigeria. The girls, almost 300 of them, were abducted by a separatist group known as Boko Haram. The outpouring of emotions by people all around the world through social media was heart-warming but also raised several questions for me. Many, including politicians, begun a social media campaign on several platforms that sought to raise awareness of what was happening in Nigeria (#bringbackourgirls). What is perturbing about this sort of activism is the fact that it, like many campaigns of this nature before, it appeared to be a fad in which celebrities, media personalities and even politicians participated in. A fad that has now died down and left us with a sense of not knowing the complexities of the situation in Nigeria. Who was it meant for? Was it directed towards Boko Haram? If so, why would Boko Haram care about what you and I have to say on the Internet? Was it meant to alert foreign governments so that they would offer help to Nigeria to rescue the girls? Was it meant for you and I, to let us know of the situation in Nigeria?

To put my frustration into context I have to go back to 2012 when the Kony2012 video and the ensuing #StopKony social media campaign were started by Invisible Children. This campaign was heavily criticised not only by scholars but also by Ugandans in Uganda and Africans more generally who argued that it misrepresented the situation on the ground and failed to put the fight against Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony into its proper political context. Ugandans also lambasted the video and subsequent campaign as having exaggerated the extent of Kony’s power and influence while ignoring the very real needs for health care services and the reintegration of former child soldiers into society and schools, as well as ignoring the politics that led to the formation of the LRA in Uganda. Invisible children blatantly represented the situation as one simply between good and evil.

This brings me to the #bringbackourgirls campaign. Nigeria is Africa’s largest economy with a population of approximately 170 million. This year alone they spent $ 2.1 billion on their military and this was a reduction from last year. I say this to highlight that this is not some hapless backwater country in the middle of nowhere. Yet for some reason, Boko Haram was able to waltz into a school, burn it to the ground and kidnap young girls. What do we know about Boko Haram after the hue and cry? How is it that this rag tag group of belligerents were able to abduct these girls with this amount of military presence in the region? The truth is we don’t know and the campaign never addressed these issues in any meaningful way, instead it focused on the simple message of asking that the girls be returned. Somehow we are meant to believe that a social media campaign will do the trick? It is this that frustrates me when looking at social media campaigns.

This is not unique to Nigeria either. As I have been talking about in this column, the same phenomenon has been playing out in Central Africa Republic and South Sudan as well. A recent psychology study finds that social media campaigns often raise moral outrage but not necessarily engagement by everyday citizens. Instead once people realise just how complex the situation is and that Africa, like the rest of the world, is complicated and messy they tend to lose interest in ‘doing something.’ This is not to say that there is no place for social media campaigns. It is a recognition that no amount of tweeting, retweeting, liking or reposting is going to bring back the missing girls. As we feel good about ourselves for being engaged citizens and ‘doing something’ Joseph Kony is still a free man, Central Africa Republic is still fighting, so too is South Sudan and the girls in Nigeria are still missing. The world is messy and there is no magic potion to solving its problems. Sometimes killing the monster will not solve the problem nor is the problem always solely the monster’s responsibility.

Wahutu Siguru is the 2013 Badzin Fellow in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and PhD candidate in the Sociology department at the University of Minnesota. Siguru’s research interests are in the Sociology of Media, Genocide, Mass Violence and Atrocities (specifically on issues of representation of conflicts in Africa such as Darfur and Rwanda), Collective Memory, and perhaps somewhat tangentially Democracy and Development in Africa.