He also said that his government would not allow any American shipments to Yemen, and called on other Arab countries to boycott not only Israeli but also American trade in the region.

The Gaza conflict has several theaters. There is the Israeli war of genocide on the Palestinians of Gaza, which has killed over 18,000 people and wounded tens of thousands, the vast majority of them innocent noncombatants, and destroyed or damaged about half the region’s housing stock along with other essential infrastructure and buildings. It has also left the civilian population without sufficient food or water and exposed to deadly infectious diseases.

Then there is the tense Israeli-Lebanese border, where Israel has bombed from fighter jets and Hezbollah has fired rockets, necessitating the evacuation of some of northern Israel.

There have been Shiite militia attacks on US personnel in Syria and Iraq, with more threatened.

And then there is the really important Red Sea front, where the Houthi government has targeted commercial vessels it says are ferrying goods and supplies to Israel, though it seems also to be hitting just any old merchant ship. The Houthis are Zaydi Shiites and form part of the Iran-led Axis of Resistance to Israeli political dominance in the Levant and the occupation of the Palestinians. The Houthis survived an eight-year war with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, wealthy oil states allied with the United States that either recognize Israel (in the case of the UAE) or are considering it (the Saudis).

Yemen is a rugged country of impenetrable highlands and wildernesses. I’ve been there several times. The winding mountain roads outside Sanaa made me carsick. The Yemenis gave me khat for the nausea.

The country sits athwart the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the 20-mile-wide Bab al-Mandeb or Mandeb Straits through which traffic between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean passes. The UAE and its allies control the southern coast along the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea, but the Houthis control some of the Red Sea coast and use their window on the sea to threaten shipping for their geopolitical purposes with drones, including Iran-made KAS-04 unmanned aerial vehicles. The Houthis have hit several container ships and a Norwegian oil tanker.

The Houthi government announced Saturday that it had launched a large number of drones toward the region of Eilat, Israel’s port city on the Gulf of Aqaba just off the Red Sea.

At the same time, the United States Central Command announced that its destroyers in the Red Sea had shot down 14 one-way attack drones.

The British Navy also weighed in, saying that a Sea Viper missile from the HMS Diamond had taken out a Houthi drone that threatened merchant shipping.

CBS News: “Houthis target ships in Red Sea, U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria face daily attacks”

As a result of the ongoing Houthi drone attacks on freighters, some of the world’s biggest and most important shipping corporations have announced that they will avoid the Red Sea and the Suez Canal for now. They are not only fleeing danger but also the dramatically spiking cost of insuring any vessels that ply those waters. The companies include Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), whose MSC PALATIUM III freighter was taken out of commission by a Houthi drone attack on Friday. They also include CMA CGM of France, Maersk of Denmark, and Hapag-Lloyd of Germany, according to the BBC.

Israeli shipping costs have shot up over 250%, and some insurers are refusing to insure their vessels.

The US plan to form a naval task force to escort container ships and protect them from the drones won’t work, because it won’t push down insurance costs. They could try to strike the Houthis, but 8 years of Saudi and UAE bombing of them did no good, so I wouldn’t hold my breath that lashing out would be effective. Moreover, the Biden administration doesn’t want the Gaza conflict to spread throughout the region and further destabilize it.

Some 10 percent of world trade goes through the Suez Canal on 17,000 ships a year. Nowadays, about 12% of the petroleum shipped by tanker goes through the Suez Canal, along with Liquefied Natural Gas shipments. These ships will now have to go around the Cape of Good Hope and skirt the west coast of Africa, adding over 10,000 nautical miles (over 12,000 landlubber miles) and 8 to 10 days to the journey, with all the consequent extra expenses of fuel and provisions. The shipping companies will be hurt by this change, as well as the countries along the Red Sea such as Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel. The detour will contribute to supply chain shortages and cause an increase in the price of imported goods for many countries in Europe.

Pre-colonial African history is alive with tales of civilisations rising and falling and of different cultures intermingling across the continent. We have now shed more light on some of these societies using the science of genetics.

In a study published in Science Advances, my co-authors and I used DNA information from people from the present-day continent to shed light on important civilisations that existed before colonialism. Genetic information from cheek swabs was extracted by machines. Once the sequence of “letters” in the DNA code had been read, or sequenced, we could use computers to compare genetic differences and similarities between the populations in the study.

One striking result concerned two ethnic groups in the north of present-day Cameroon, in west-central Africa, the Kanuri and Kotoko peoples. We found that these two groups were descended from three ancestral populations.

These ancestral groups most resembled people now living in coastal regions of west Africa as well as in parts of east Africa such as Ethiopia and populations living today in north Africa and the Levant. The populations intermixed – had children together – roughly 600 years ago. But what caused them to migrate thousands of kilometres across a desert into northern Cameroon?

We think the answer is the Kanem-Bornu empire, a civilisation that existed for over 1,000 years – beginning around 700 AD. At its height, the empire spanned what is now northern Cameroon, northern Nigeria, Chad, Niger and southern Libya. It operated vast trade networks across the Sahara and attracted populations from every direction.

This example highlights how our genomes hold information about major events of the past. Merchants travelling along trade routes or the formation of empires from smaller political units can leave footprints in our DNA. Previous work shows that the Roman empire, the Mongol empire, and Silk Road trade probably all left lasting legacies in the genomes of modern-day people across Eurasia.

Hidden in the genome

We analysed 1,300 newly collected genomes of people from across Africa. They came from 150 ethnic groups within five countries. We collaborated with anthropologists, archaeologists and linguists from Africa and elsewhere. They helped us understand the historical context of these events.

African genome data is underrepresented compared with that from other world regions. This means that lots of genetic diversity – or variety – in the DNA of populations is probably being missed by scientists.

Studying genetic diversity has many potential uses – such as understanding risks to health and developing new treatments for disease. Our group was concerned with genetic diversity as a window into the past.

Dating events

We modelled a person’s genome as a mixture of segments of DNA inherited from their ancestors. If a person had DNA segments closely matching two groups of people – for example, Europeans and west Africans – it suggested that this person descended from mixing between those two groups.

Present-day human groups that were formed from a recent mixture of Europeans and west Africans should have long sections of DNA from both populations. Those ancestral DNA segments get shorter as the genetic material of their descendants is shuffled with each new generation.

This provides a way of dating when mixture events took place. The longer the DNA segments matching, for example, west Africans or Europeans, the more recent the mixture event was.

Peace treaty

Another historical event we found evidence for was the Arab expansion in Africa. This began in the seventh century, when separate Arab armies travelling south along the Levantine coast and north from Medina in today’s Saudi Arabia crossed the Sinai desert and conquered Egypt.

In Sudan at this time, the Kingdom of Makuria ruled along the Nile river. Makuria signed a peace treaty with the Egyptian Arabs in the middle of the seventh century that lasted almost 700 years.

The majority of mixing between these two ancestral groups, one closely related to Arabs and the other to Sudanese, dates to after the peace treaty began breaking down. This in turn coincided with the decline and eventual collapse of Makuria itself, which would have allowed Arab groups to continue down the Nile into Sudan.

Aksum. Via Unsplash.

But we also found evidence of earlier migrations into Africa from the Arabian peninsula, which occurred by sea. This intermixing coincided in time with the Kingdom of Aksum, located in northeast Africa and southern Arabia, during the first millennium AD.

Aksum was once considered one of the world’s four great powers, alongside contemporary empires in China, Persia and Rome.

The expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples

Genetic studies have also found evidence of a continent-wide migration known as the expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples. “Bantu” is a language group, now spoken by around one-quarter of Africans.

There has been debate about whether the Bantu languages spread largely as a transmission of culture, or whether large-scale migration was involved. The latest research shows that the latter explanation is the likeliest. This migration started in a small area of western Cameroon roughly 4,000 years ago, before rapidly spreading south and east. It covered more than 4,000 kilometres in less than 2,000 years.

Bantu speakers mixed with local groups, changing patterns of genetic diversity in Africa forever. We showed that migrations not only occurred to the south and east of Cameroon, but also to the west. Why so much movement took place at this time is unknown, but climate change may have played a role.

It’s vital that scientists analyse more DNA from genomes of African people. As we do so, it will undoubtedly reveal an intricate picture of the continent’s rich past.

Nancy Bird, Postdoctoral research associate, UCL

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

I must confess that I, too, am part of this trend. Over the last year, I’ve written more on the Ukraine conflict than any other issue. Every Monday morning for the last six months, I’ve appeared on KPFA radio out of the Bay Area to provide a weekly update of the situation in Ukraine. In part, I’ve followed the war there because I have a background in Russian and Soviet studies. I feel a certain obligation to write about a region of the world that has occupied so much of my attention over the years.

But as many voices especially in the Global South have pointed out, other wars are going on around the world. Why aren’t they getting as much media attention? Why hasn’t the West rallied so readily behind the victims of those wars? Where is the determination to punish the aggressors in those other conflicts?

These are good questions, which deserve answers regardless of what one feels about the conflict raging in Ukraine.

The Centrality of Geopolitics

The importance of Ukraine, some argued in the days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February, boiled down to race. White folks in majority White countries—in Europe, North America, and Australia/New Zealand—sympathized with the plight of White Ukrainians in ways that they didn’t with the non-White victims of wars in other places like Yemen or Ethiopia. Ukrainian refugees in Europe have been welcomed with an enthusiasm that was largely lacking during earlier waves of Syrian, Afghan, and Libyan refugees. In the most extreme case of this racial sympathizing, White supremacists have largely backed Russia, seeing Putin as their staunchest global ally, though some White nationalists have instead backed openly far-right formations in Ukraine.

It’s true that White folks in the Global North have routinely thrown up their hands in the face of conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. Skipping over those articles in the newspaper, they refuse to figure out the reasons for the fighting or accept the role of European or U.S. governments in the perpetuation of the wars. In the American case, at least, this tendency to ignore large swathes of the world is part of a general refusal to learn other languages or pay attention to other countries except as part of tourist itineraries. Race and racism may indeed play a role, but never discount the importance of sheer laziness and ignorance.

But let’s look at some other reasons for the current focus on Ukraine. For instance, the country is of supreme interest to Europeans because of sheer proximity. Ukraine is on the edge of Europe, has expressed strong interest in joining the European Union, and has extensive economic connections through energy and food to European consumers. Then there are the ties of genealogy, with many people of Ukrainian heritage now living in Western Europe, the United States, and Australia.

Ultimately, though, the war in Ukraine garners the lion’s share of the headlines—and thus the intellectual bandwidth of journalists, pundits, and policymakers—because it historically lies at the very center of geopolitics.

The originators of geopolitics—Mackinder, Mahan, Spykman—focused on the control of the Eurasian “heartland” and the waters surrounding it. Preoccupied with global hegemony, they were naturally drawn to the huge expanse of territory, resources, and industrial capacity of the Eurasian continent. Africa, Latin America, Australasia: these were peripheral concerns.

By this distorted view of the globe—a perspective that still informs the policies of the United States, Europe, and (arguably) Russia—Ukraine is at the very heart of the struggle for control of the globe. It is at the center of the Eurasian territory, and its coastline provides critical access to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean beyond.

A war in Ukraine matters in a way that, say, the current conflict in Ethiopia does not, because it is vitally important in the internecine battles within the countries of the Global North over control of the entire game board.

But let’s take a look at some other reasons why Ukraine dominates the headlines.

Scale of Conflict

There actually aren’t that many interstate wars going on in the world today. The internal conflict in Yemen has become international with the intervention of Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies. The civil war in Ethiopia has an interstate dimension because Ethiopian leader Abiy Ahmed has allied with Eritrea to defeat a Tigray insurgency. Armenia and Azerbaijan have sparred over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, but that fight has abated, at least for the time being.

Other international wars have now become almost entirely national. The withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan allows the Taliban to refocus on fighting against its internal enemies. The war in Iraq has settled mostly into a simmering civil conflict, though a full-blown civil war could indeed return. The war in Syria, which still engages the United States, Turkey, and Russia, failed to dislodge Bashar al-Assad and has burned down to the embers, though another flare-up is possible. Similar conflicts in Kashmir, Libya, and Palestine have become intermittent, with relatively few casualties, though these conflicts could escalate quickly and become regional conflagrations.

Civil wars remain active in Myanmar and Somalia, while various extremist factions such as the Islamic State continue to launch sporadic attacks throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

Finally, there are the frozen wars—between the two Koreas, between China and Taiwan, inside Georgia—that could heat up if the various adversaries decide to supply the necessary spark.

But in terms of actual casualties, the conflict in Ukraine is clearly the most troubling war going on today, with tens of thousands of military and civilian deaths. The closest conflict in terms of scale would be the civil war in Myanmar with about 13,000 casualties so far in 2022. Other conflicts have generated fewer death tolls with about 5,000 deaths each in Ethiopia and Yemen this year.

Ukraine has also been in the news because of the number of refugees who fled the country—more than 7.6 million Ukrainians went to Europe in the aftermath of the February invasion— along with the hundreds of thousands who have left Russia to avoid the draft, prison, or economic uncertainty. Of course, Ukraine is not unique with regard to refugees. Nearly 7 million Syrians escaped persecution and civil war, over 6 million Venezuelans have left for other countries, and approximately 6 million Afghans have fled their homes.

Then there are the reports of war crimes taking place in Ukraine, involving summary executions, torture, rape, and indiscriminate targeting of civilians. Here, too, the Ukraine war faces stiff competition from the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar, the ongoing repressions in Syria, and the deliberate starvation of Yemenis by Saudi Arabia and its allies.

Yet, today’s horrors tend to crowd yesterday’s horrors out of the spotlight. As conflicts drag on, those with attention-deficit disorder—in some sense, all of us in this brave new world of information overload—begin to focus on something else. The sheer length of a conflict inevitably increases both attention fatigue and compassion fatigue. If the Ukrainian conflict goes into a second or a third year, a lot of people will begin to turn the dial and change the channel.

Beyond Good and Evil

Another reason why Ukraine is so much in the news is that the victims are “relatable.” That’s a term used to explain the popularity of characters in fiction and film. In the case of Ukraine, the average reader is drawn in by what they believe—and what so much media coverage implies in so many ways—is a basic conflict between “good guys” ad “bad guys.”

Most people love an underdog, and the Ukrainians have battled hard against a band of merciless invaders. So strong is this basic moral narrative that various complications fall to the wayside. Many Russians oppose the war. Some Ukrainian fighters come from the extreme right. Russia has some legitimate grievances about NATO expansion. The Ukrainian government has made some stupid moves like a state language law that “requires that Ukrainian be used in most aspects of public life.” Nothing is ever black and white.

Still, the Ukraine conflict can be explained in relatively simple language to people who know nothing of the complexities of the region. Russia has invaded a country to seize as much of its territory as possible; Ukraine is fighting back to avoid disappearing as a country. It’s hard not to stand on the sidelines and cheer the victories of the victims.

Other ongoing wars do not lend themselves so readily to such packaging. Take, for instance, the war in Ethiopia.

Prime Minister Ahmed, of Oromo background, has waged a political struggle against what had once been the ruling party from 1991 to 2018: the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. That political struggle turned violent when the TPLF, sidelined from Ahmed’s government, relocated to northern Ethiopia and, in November 2020, attacked an Ethiopian army garrison in Mekelle, the regional capital of the Tigray region. To defeat this Tigray insurgency, Ahmed teamed up with Eritrea, which battled Ethiopia until a 2018 peace agreement, brokered largely by Ahmed, finally ended the dispute. In addition to Eritrea, Ahmed enlisted the help of another ethnic group, the Amhara. The Oromo Liberation Army has also been involved in the fighting, though its role in committing atrocities is controversial. The Ethiopian government also stands accused of trying to starve the Tigrayans into submission through siege tactics.

As Jon Lee Anderson writes in The New Yorker:

Most of the international observers I spoke with believe that Abiy’s soldiers and the Eritreans have committed violence on a greater scale than the Tigrayans, but none of the partisans in the conflict seem to have avoided brutality. A recent U.N. report described war crimes and human-rights violations on both sides. In addition to the widespread starvation caused by the siege, Abiy’s forces and allies had killed and raped civilians, and carried out scores of air strikes on civilian targets, including one on a displaced-persons camp in which some sixty civilians died. The Tigrayan forces, the report said, had committed “large-scale killings of Amhara civilians, rape and sexual violence, and widespread looting and destruction of civilian property.” The senior Western official told me, in disgust, “They’re all as bad as each other.”

Similarly, although the Saudi coalition has committed an enormous number of human rights abuses in Yemen, their adversaries, the Houthis, are no angels either. Both India and Pakistan are responsible for human rights abuses in the areas of Kashmir that they occupy. The United States acted abysmally in Afghanistan, but it’s not like anyone in the world was exactly rooting for the Taliban to take over.

Meanwhile, despite the various defects of its government, Ukraine remains a democracy. Defending Ukraine is essential in this age of creeping authoritarianism. It is today’s version of Republican Spain trying to fend off fascism. In other words, there are sound political reasons for standing up for the underdog. Ukraine is not just a country, it’s a symbol.

Still, none of these reasons justifies the scant coverage that other conflicts have been accorded in the media compared to Ukraine. Just because a war drags on, takes place far from the Eurasian heartland, or doesn’t easily resolve into a battle of good versus evil, it still deserves the attention of journalists (who need to cover the casualties and explain the complexities) and policymakers (who need to try to end the bloodshed). The deaths of a few score people in a war is a lesser tragedy than a full-scale genocide, but it is a tragedy nonetheless.

But Ukraine also commands the world’s attention for understandable reasons. The war there is the result of an unprovoked attack, and it represents a gross violation of international law. When it comes to fighting injustice and promoting peace, we must embrace the dictum of improvisational comedy: “yes and…” Yes, the wars elsewhere in the world deserve our attention and we must decry Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

( Middle East Monitor) – Since the 2011 Arab Spring the United Arab Emirates has been taking an active role in a number of hotspots from Egypt, Libya to Yemen. The Gulf nation has spent $26 billion annually on its defence budget since 2016 and this is expected to increase to $37.8 billion by 2025, according to Research and Markets.

A growing security and war industry with military deployments abroad, US generals often refer to the Sheikhdom as ‘Little Sparta’. As of 2020, The UAE has military bases in Eritrea, Djibouti and Somaliland, which further indicates the importance of the Horn of Africa to Abu Dhabi. The region offers excellent access to the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Aden, all of which are vital to the Emirates’ economic future as a global trading hub. The military bases ensure Abu Dhabi can see off threats to its interests and secure its influence over East Africa at a time when it is expanding its income streams away from the petrodollar.

The 2015 war in Yemen and the 2017 blockade of Qatar have seen Abu Dhabi take a more aggressive role in East Africa.

Countries in the Horn of Africa have by and large welcomed growing ties with the Arab World, but in 2017 following the breaking of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt with Qatar, countries across the world were pushed to take sides.

Somalia

Although the 2017 Gulf Crisis now looks like it is coming to an end, the countries in the Horn of Africa have already paid the price for it. Somalia found itself at the unwelcome end of the dispute.

Like other Horn of Africa countries, the Somali government adopted a neutral stance towards the Qatar dispute. The UAE, however, saw Mogadishu as silently in the pro-Qatar camp and Abu Dhabi was not pleased.

In 2017, as President Mohamed Abdul lahi Farmaajo assumed office, reports circulated that Qatar and Turkey had funded his campaign and further claims of officials appointed to prominent positions within Farmaajo’s administration having ties to Doha and Ankara unnerved Abu Dhabi.

The Somali government alleges the UAE is now actively destabilising the country, accusing it of funding opposition forces. These suspicions intensified after Dubai Ports World, DP World, bypassed the central government of Somalia and signed a deal with the semi-autonomous region of Somaliland to develop and operate Berbera port. DP World even brought in Ethiopian investment and gave Addis Ababa a stake in the port.

Mogadishu declared the deal illegal and tried to block it by taking out a complaint with the Arab League. Somaliland leader, Muse Bihi Abdi, said Farmaajo’s government was declaring war by attempting to block the deal. Under the deal, Somaliland stands to get investments of up to $442 million and a separate agreement with Abu Dhabi to allow the UAE’s military bases in the region could bring in a further $1 billion, according to the International Crisis Group.

Decades of civil war and the presence of extremist groups makes Somalia a very fragile country, fears UAE involvement could harm the country are a cause of constant concern for Mogadishu.

Sudan

In 1989, Omar Al-Bashir, a military commander, launched a coup and seized political power in Sudan. By 1993, he declared himself president and his political party, the National Congress, became the dominant political force. The National Congress is Muslim Brotherhood aligned and as such was generally treated with suspicion by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. However, in the 2010s, Al-Bashir’s regime began distancing itself from the brotherhood in order to improve its relations with the GCC countries.

Closer relations with Saudi Arabia and the UAE had a price. In 2015, Riyadh formed a coalition to intervene militarily in Yemen. In 2011, the Yemeni government led by Ali Abdullah Saleh faced mass street protests known as the ‘Arab Spring’, the pressure would force him to step down in 2012. The power vacuum led to large parts of the country being taken over by the Iranian-backed Houthi group. The Saudi-led coalition aimed to crush the Houthis and declared war on them. Sudan became an important member of the war coalition.

In 2018, a popular uprising took place against Omar Al-Bashir and in April 2019 the military forced him from power. The military then formed a new government with civil opposition groups with the aim of transforming Sudan into a fully-fledged democracy and the UAE moved to minimise the potential damage to its interests caused by the revolution.

However, the fall of Al-Bashir means the UAE’s position in Sudan is not guaranteed and some fear the Emirates could try to subvert Sudan’s democratic transition.

Ethiopia

Ethiopia seems to have benefitted hugely from its partnership with the UAE, as the East African country has emerged as a big investment opportunity.

In February 2020, the UAE agreed to invest $100 million to support micro, medium and small scale projects across the country. Additionally, the UAE has pledged to build an oil pipeline between Ethiopia and Eritrea, which will provide the landlocked nation much needed energy.

Indeed this energy deal is possible after the UAE engineered a peace treaty between Eritrea and Ethiopia in 2018. The peace agreement was held up as an example of the UAE’s prowess. Ethiopia managed to gain these benefits while avoiding the polarising effects of the Qatar blockade.

In November 2020, armed conflict broke out in Ethiopia’s Tigray region between government forces and a powerful regional rebel army. The rebels’ leader openly accused the United Arab Emirates of carrying out a drone strike on Tigray, from its base in Eritrea, at the behest of Addis Ababa. While evidence has yet to emerge of the strike, it does indicate there is some local anxiety about the role Abu Dhabi might be playing in this potentially explosive situation.

Ethiopia could cause issues for the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as another close ally of the Gulf States, Egypt, has expressed anger at Addis Ababa’s dam across the River Nile. The Renaissance Dam built by Ethiopia reduces Nile water levels in Egypt, harming its energy, economic and environmental needs. Negotiations to find a solution keep breaking down and regional tensions are high.

The Horn of Africa is the playground for rising UAE aspirations and is a microcosm of what the UAE aims to replicate across the African continent. Much of this is driven by the decline of US influence globally, new regional alliances and powerhouses are emerging to manage international security. However, the UAE does not exercise total control over East Africa and is still in the early stages of developing its reach and influence. The Horn is full of flashpoints and the UAE could either help stabilise or destabilise the region.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

MEMO: “UAE: The scramble for the Horn of Africa”

Yesterday Boston responded with its vigorous spirit of community and transcendence to the cowardly terrorism that marred the Boston Marathon in 2013, coming out in record numbers for the 2014 event. The fastest man in the competition is being touted as the first American male to win since 1983. But of course Meb Keflezighi is a naturalized American (like some 10 percent of the current US population), an immigrant from Eritrea.

The discourse on the American far right against immigrants, which has infected even some mainstream politicians, depicts them as dangerous, as importers of alien values, as job-thieves. In fact, immigrants are remarkably well-behaved, valuing their achievement in reaching the United States, with all of its opportunities, and not wanting to ruin it by a run-in with the law. They often do bring distinctive religious or cultural beliefs, but these enrich the American fabric, just as the Puritans, Irish Catholics, Eastern European Jews, Lebanese and Syrian Muslims, and Greek and Syrian Eastern Orthodox had done over the past two centuries. And they for the most part do jobs that other Americans won’t or can’t do, rather than taking away jobs from anyone.

The Tsarnaev brothers, authors of the terror a year ago, seemed to confirm the worst prejudices of the anti-immigrant crowd. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev turned violent, killing three and injuring 264 before killing a further police officer. Tamerlan was killed in a shootout, and Dzhokhar was captured after being badly wounded. The dark political history of modern Chechnya seems to have scarred them; it strove for independence from Russia before being brutally crushed by Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, and then experienced a Muslim extremist movement early in the last decade that was smashed by Vladimir Putin. They were brought up in peaceful Kyrghyzstan in exile, but were apparently haunted by the horrors of Chechnya’s fate, and attracted by Chechnya nationalism in, at one time or another, both its secular and radical Muslim guises. Dzhokhar became a naturalized American.

But in fact both young men showed promise and initiative. Tamerlan had real talent as a boxer. Dzhokhar got into college. They could have built productive lives in their new homeland. That they did not had nothing to do with their being immigrants or aliens. They made personal choices, to bring the terror Chechnya had experienced into the US. A person’s violence tells you that the person has or has developed a violent character. That cannot be read off from background. Some white, native-born Americans turn violent; some, like Timothy McVeigh, commit terrorism. So to do some Jewish-Americans. That is a disorder of their character, not a manifestation of their ethnic background. The few hundred Chechnyan-Americans have been perfectly peaceful citizens.

Keflezighi stands for everything that, in the end, the Tsarnaevs did not. But in fact his background and circumstances were not so different from theirs. He was arguably poorer and more disadvantaged than they growing up. Like Chechnya, Eritrea has had a troubled history during the past decades. It had been an Italian colony, like Libya (and likewise murderously repressed under Mussolini), but Italy lost it during WW II. It became part of Ethiopia in the early 1960s, but some Eritreans immediately launched a nationalist rebellion. (I lived in Asmara 1967-68 and saw the beginnings of the rebellion there with my own eyes). After decades of strife, Eritrea became independent in 1993. But in 1998-2000 Eritrea and Ethiopia fell into a war that left 70,000 dead. Eritrea is a country of 6 million in the horn of Africa, likely about 60 percent Christian and 40 percent Muslim. As with some Chechnyan leaders, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki stands accused of backing terrorist groups— in his case, against Ethiopia. Although he is a Coptic Christian, he is accused of being involved in Somalia’s al-Shabab extremists.

Keflezighi’s autobiography makes clear that his family is Eritrean patriots who resent Ethiopian dominance. He could have nurtured a hatred in that regard. He did not. He went to UCLA, where he was an NCAA athlete, graduating in 1998. He showed character. When he ran yesterday, he had the names of the three who were killed the year before written in marker on his bib. He stood for America, for unity, for overcoming adversity without violence.

Keflezighi’s victory in the competition and in his magnificent spirit, is a vindication of the 30 million living Americans who were born abroad. Whether Buddhist or Hindu, Muslim or Christian, they bring us their talents, their indomitable will, their magnificent contributions, their humane values. As Martin Luther King, Jr., said, Americans ought to be judged not by their ethnicity but by the content of their character. Keflezighi and his birth-country had suffered tremendously. But he overcame that legacy to embrace America with love. We love him right back. Today, he is the face of Boston resurgent.

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CBS Boston: “American Meb Keflezighi Wins Boston Marathon”