Fuel tanker explosion injures 7 in inferno at Afghan-Iran border
French politicians, intellectuals and others say social theories from US are a real threat to national identity as well as the republic
HERAT, Afghanistan — A fuel tanker exploded Saturday at the Islam Qala crossing in Afghanistan’s western Herat province on the Iranian border, injuring at least seven people and causing a massive fire that consumed more than 500 trucks carrying natural gas and fuel, according to Afghan officials and Iranian state media.
It wasn’t clear what caused the blast.
Wahid Qatali, Herat’s provincial governor, said Afghan first responders did not have the means to put out the huge fire and had requested support from Iran in the form of firefighting aircraft.
“For the time being, we can’t even talk about the casualties,” Qatali said.
The intensity of the flames meant ambulances were having trouble reaching the wounded or getting close to the site of the blast, said Mohammad Rafiq Shirzy, spokesman for the regional hospital in Herat’s capital city, also named Herat.
Seven people injured by the fire had been admitted to the hospital, he said.
Iran’s semi-official ISNA news agency quoted truck drivers as saying more than 500 trucks carrying natural gas and fuel had burned.
Two explosions at the border crossing were powerful enough to be spotted from space by NASA satellites.
The fire spread to the Dogharoon customs facilities on the Iranian side of the border and first responders — including the fire department, the Iranian army and border forces — were assisting in extinguishing the blaze, according to Iranian state television. The Afghan side of the border crossing has its own fire department, but officials in Herat said they weren’t in control of the fire even in the first few minutes.
The Islam Qala border crossing is about 75 miles west of the city of Herat, and is a major transit route between Afghanistan and Iran.
The United States allows Afghanistan to import fuel and oil from Iran as part of a special concession that exempts Kabul from U.S. sanctions against Iran.
Japan earthquake: A large temblor shook a broad area across eastern Japan late Saturday, with its epicenter off the coast of Fukushima, near where three nuclear reactors melted down after a quake and tsunami nearly 10 years ago.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said there were no irregularities at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant.
The earthquake left nearly 900,000 households without power across the Fukushima region and forced the closure of roads and suspension of train services. While rattled residents braced for aftershocks, a landslide cut off a chunk of a main artery through Fukushima prefecture.
TEPCO said electricity was gradually being restored, according to government spokesperson Katsunobu Kato.
Japan’s meteorological service reported the quake’s magnitude as 7.3, up from the initial report of 7.1, but said there was no danger of a tsunami.
Coming a little less than a month before the 10th anniversary of what is known as the Great East Japan earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster, the quake rattled the greater Tokyo area for about 30 seconds starting at 11:08 p.m. and was felt powerfully i n
Fukushima and Sendai.
The quake was a reminder of the 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan in 2011, killing 16,000 people.
After the subsequent nuclear disaster in Fukushima, 160,000 people fled or were evacuated from around the plant.
A federal judge has rejected a request from a group of Apaches to keep the U.S. Forest Service from transferring a parcel of land to a copper mining company.
Apache Stronghold made the request as part of a lawsuit it filed against the Forest Service earlier this year.
It’s the latest attempt to preserve the land in eastern Arizona that Apaches consider sacred because of the spiritual properties there at least temporarily while the court hears arguments on the merits of the case.
U.S. District Judge
Arizona copper mine:
Steven Logan said Friday that because the group is not a federally recognized tribe with a government-to government relationship with the United States, it lacks standing in arguing that the land belongs to Apaches under an 1852 treaty with the United States.
Proposed tax in Poland:
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Saturday defended a new advertising tax opposed by media outlets, arguing the measure would protect Polish broadcasters and news publishers from international companies.
Morawiecki, in a strongly worded Facebook post, denied the tax would be detrimental and said it would not apply to small, regional media but will break the dominance of giant international corporations.
Independent media in Poland have protested the right-wing government’s proposal for the tax, saying it would put many small
news outlets out of business and undermine the freedom and variety of the country’s media landscape. The government wants it implemented July 1.
The government argues that its proposed “solidarity” tax would force giant companies like Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon pay their fair share of taxes. It says the tax, which is linked to the size of companies, would raise some 800 million zlotys ($215 million) and provide funds for health care and culture at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has strained state finances.
The proposed tax is still at an early stage while the government tries to secure backing.
Water sale protest: Water rights activists in Maine decried the potential sale of bottled water brand Poland Spring, saying the buyer identified in news reports represents a new threat to the state’s resources.
A crowd of about 100 gathered Saturday for the rally sponsored by Community Water Justice to express their worries.
Nickie Sekera, co-founder of the group, said she is worried that a private equity firm could be less responsive than Nestle, relieving the company of any accountability it promised to Maine communities.
Nestle announced in June that it was considering selling its bottled water brands in North America.
The brands to be sold include Arrowhead, Deer Park, Ice Mountain, Ozarka, Poland Spring and Zephyrhills.
Rally participants are worried about news reports suggesting the Swiss company was negotiating the potential sale with One Rock Capital Partners LLC, a New York-based private-equity firm.
Ne s t l e d e c l i n e d to comment on negotiations. A spokesperson for One Rock didn’t return a message.
PARIS — The threat is said to be existential. It fuels secessionism. Gnaws at national unity. Abets Islamism. Attacks France’s intellectual and cultural heritage. The threat? “Certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States,’’ said President Emmanuel Macron.
French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned Macron’s education minister.
Emboldened by these comments, prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture.
Pitted against them is a younger, more diverse guard that considers these theories as tools to understanding the willful blind spots of an increasingly diverse nation that still recoils at the mention of race, has yet to come to terms with its colonial past and often waves away the concerns of minorities as identity politics.
Disputes that would have otherwise attracted little attention are now blown up in the news and social media. The new director of the Paris Opera, who recently said he wants to diversify its staff and ban blackface, has been attacked by the far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, but also in Le Monde because, though German, he had worked in Toronto and had “soaked up American culture for 10 years.”
The publication this month of a book critical of racial studies by two veteran social scientists, Stephane Beaud and Gerard Noiriel, fueled criticism from younger scholars — and has received extensive news coverage. Noiriel has said that race had become a “bulldozer’’ crushing other subjects, adding, in an email, that its academic research in France was questionable because race is not recognized by the government and is merely “subjective data.’’
The fierce French debate over a handful of academic disciplines on U.S. campuses may surprise those who have witnessed the gradual decline of American influence in many corners of the world. In some ways, it is a proxy fight over some of the most combustible issues in French society, including national identity and the sharing of power.
With its echoes of the American culture wars, the battle began inside French universities but is being played out increasingly in the media. Politicians have been weighing in more and more, especially following a turbulent year during which a series of events called into question tenets of French society.
Mass protests in France against police violence, inspired by the killing of George Floyd, challenged the official dismissal of race and systemic racism. A #MeToo generation of feminists confronted both male power and older feminists. A widespread crackdown following a series of Islamist attacks raised questions about France’s model of secularism and the integration of immigrants from its former colonies.
Some saw the reach of American identity politics and social science theories. Some center-right lawmakers pressed for a parliamentary investigation into “ideological excesses’’ at universities and singled out “guilty’’ scholars on Twitter.
Macron — who had shown little interest in these matters in the past but has been courting the right before elections next year — jumped in last June, when he blamed universities for encouraging the “ethnicization of the social question’’ — amounting to “breaking the republic in two.’’
“I was pleasantly astoni s h e d ,’ ’ said Nathalie Heinich, a sociologist who last month helped create an organization against “decolonialism and identity politics.’’ Made up of established figures, many retired, the group has issued warnings about American-inspired social theories in major publications like Le Point and Le Figaro.
For Heinich, last year’s developments came on top of activism that brought foreign disputes over cultural appropriation and blackface to French universities. At the Sorbonne, activists prevented the staging of a play by Aeschylus to protest the wearing of masks and dark makeup by white actors; elsewhere, some speakers were disinvited following student pressure.
“It was a series of incidents that was extremely traumatic to our community and that all fell under what is called cancel culture,’’ Heinich said.
To others, the lashing out at perceived American influence revealed something else: a French establishment incapable of confronting a world in flux, especially when the government’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic has deepened the sense of ineluctable decline of a once-great power.
“It’s the sign of a small, frightened republic, declining, provincializing, but which in the past and to this day believes in its universal mission and which thus seeks those responsible for its decline,’’ said Francois Cusset, an expert on American civilization at Paris Nanterre University.
France has l ong l aid claim to a national identity, based on a common culture, fundamental rights and core values like equality and liberty, rejecting diversity and multiculturalism. The French often see the United States as a fractious society at war with itself.
But far from being American, many of the leading thinkers behind theories on gender, race, post-colonialism and queer theory came from France — as well as the rest of Europe, South America, Africa and India, said Anne Garreta, a French writer who teaches at universities in France and at Duke in North Carolina.
“It’s an entire global world of ideas that circulates,’’ she said. “It just happens that campuses that are the most cosmopolitan and most globalized at this point in history are the American ones. ‘’
The French state does not compile racial statistics, which is illegal, describing it as part of its commitment to universalism and treating all citizens equally under the law. To many scholars on race, however, the reluctance is part of a long history of denying racism in France and the country’s slave-trading and colonial past.
“What’s more French than the racial question in a country that was built around those questions?’’ said Mame-Fatou Niang, who divides her time between France and the United States, where she teaches French studies at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania.
Niang has led a campaign to remove a fresco at France’s National Assembly, which shows two Black figures with fat red lips and bulging eyes. Her public views on race have made her a frequent target on social media, including of one of the lawmakers who pressed for an investigation into “ideological excesses’’ at universities.
Pap Ndiaye, a historian who led efforts to establish Black studies in France, said it was no coincidence that the current wave of anti-American rhetoric began growing just as the first protests against racism and police violence took place in June.
“There was the idea that we’re talking too much about racial questions in France,’’ he said. “That’s enough.’’
Three Islamist attacks last fall served as a reminder that terrorism remains a threat in France. They also focused attention on another hot-button field of research: Islamophobia, which examines how hostility toward Islam in France, rooted in its colonial experience in the Muslim world, continues to shape the lives of French Muslims.
Abdellali Hajjat, an expert on Islamophobia, said that it became increasingly difficult to focus on his subject after 2015, when devastating terror attacks hit Paris. Government funding for research dried up. Researchers on the subject were accused of being apologists for Islamists and even terrorists.
Finding the atmosphere oppressive, Hajjat left to teach at the Free University of Brussels, in Belgium, where he said he found greater academic freedom.
“On the question of Islamophobia, it’s only in France where there is such violent talk in rejecting the term,’’ he said.
Macron’s education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, accused universities, under American influence, of being complicit with terrorists by providing the intellectual justification behind their acts.
A group of 100 prominent scholars wrote an open letter supporting the minister and decrying theories “transferred from North American campuses” in Le Monde.
A signatory, Gilles Kepel, an expert on Islam, said that American influence had led to “a sort of prohibition in universities to think about the phenomenon of political Islam in the name of a leftist ideology that considers it the religion of the underprivileged.’’
Along with Islamophobia, it was through the “totally artificial importation’’ in France of the “American-style Black question” that some were trying to draw a false picture of a France guilty of “systemic racism’’ and “white privilege,’’ said Pierre-Andre Taguieff, a historian and a leading critic of the American influence.
Taguieff said in an email that researchers of race, Islamophobia and post-colonialism were motivated by a “hatred of the West, as a white civilization.’’
“The common agenda of these enemies of European civilization can be summed up in three words: decolonize, demasculate, de-Europeanize,’’ Taguieff said. “Straight white male — that’s the culprit to condemn and the enemy to eliminate.”
Behind the attacks on U.S. universities — led by aging white male intellectuals — lie the tensions in a society where power appears to be up for grabs, said Eric Fassin, a sociologist who was one of the first scholars to focus on race and racism in France, about 15 years ago.
Back then, scholars on race tended to be white men like himself, he said. He said he has often been called a traitor and faced threats, most recently from a right-wing extremist who was given a four-month suspended prison sentence for threatening to decapitate him.
But the emergence of young intellectuals — some Black or Muslim — has fueled the assault on what Fassin calls the “American boogeyman.’’
“That’s what has turned things upside down,’’ he said. “They’re not just the objects we speak of, but they’re also the subjects who are talking.’’