Bret Stephens - static01.nyt.com
1
Weekend .. INTERNATIONAL EDITION | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25-26, 2021 ARTISTS AND QUILTERS IN THE U.S. SOUTH GET HELP IN SAVING THEIR WORK HAVENS PAGE 20 | CULTURE DELVING INTO THE DEPTHS OF ICY CAVES TO STUDY GLACIERS AND CLIMATE CHANGE BACK PAGE | TRAVEL SPACIOUS SUBURBS BECKONED, BUT THIS COUPLE FOUND A WAY TO STAY IN THE CITY PAGE 13 | INTERNATIONAL HOMES A SWIRLING VORTEX IS NO MATCH FOR THIS DEEP-SEA SPONGE PAGE 16 | SCIENCE LAB WIKIPEDIA’S NEXT LEADER DISCUSSES WORKING TO PREVENT MISINFORMATION PAGE 8 | BUSINESS and its frequent target. The compound is next to a middle- class housing development and a prima- ry school, which terrifies residents, teachers and parents. “We are very afraid,” said Maimouna Mohammed, a teacher at the primary school, glancing at the camp’s wall, 50 yards from her classroom. “We don’t know their minds.” Nigerian military and justice officials For over a decade, the extremist group Boko Haram has terrorized northeast- ern Nigeria — killing tens of thousands of people, kidnapping schoolgirls and sending suicide bombers into busy mar- ketplaces. Now, thousands of Boko Haram fight- ers have surrendered, along with their family members, and are being housed by the government in a compound in the city of Maiduguri, the group’s birthplace say that in the past month, as many as 7,000 fighters and family members, along with their captives, have left Boko Haram, the largest wave of defections by far since the jihadist group emerged in 2002. The turning point for its fortunes ap- pears to have been the death of Abubakar Shekau, Boko Haram’s long- time leader, who blew himself up in May after being cornered by a rival faction. However weakened Boko Haram may be, though, it does not necessarily mean an end to terror for the people of north- eastern Nigeria, hundreds of thousands of whom have died and millions of whom have fled. Fighters from Boko Haram’s rival splinter group — the Islamic State West Africa Province, or ISWAP — are mov- ing into the vacuum, observers in the re- gion say, ferrying truckloads of military equipment from their strongholds in the Lake Chad area southward to Mr. Shekau’s former dens in the Sambisa forest. ISWAP broke off from Boko NIGERIA, PAGE 5 A 29-year-old midlevel Boko Haram commander who said he had worked his way up from washing the motorcycle of the group’s feared leader, Abubakar Shekau. A teenager who was abducted and married to a fighter at age 10. She is living in a camp in Maiduguri, Nigeria, with many men who kidnapped and enslaved girls like her. The wife of a senior commander, age 30. Shortly after surrendering, she gave birth in the Hajj Camp, where Boko Haram defectors are being housed by the government. A high-ranking Boko Haram commander who said he had surrendered because his leaders were gone and he wanted to give his children a chance to live normal lives. PHOTOGRAPHS BY TOM SAATER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES Terrorists next door MAIDUGURI, NIGERIA BY RUTH MACLEAN AND ISMAIL ALFA A Nigerian city is on edge as thousands of defectors from Boko Haram move in When Michael Gandolfini was filming his role in “The Many Saints of Newark,” a period crime drama that casts him as a precocious teenage troublemaker named Tony Soprano, he was having trouble sleeping and would stay up late at night, working on his scenes for the next day. Sometimes he would reflect on the motivations of his character, whose loy- alty is torn between two paternal fig- ures: his frequently absent father, a New Jersey gangster named Johnny Boy; and the film’s protagonist, a char- ismatic mobster named Dickie Molti- santi. In his efforts to get inside his charac- ter, Gandolfini would try to identify with Tony’s desire to please both men. He would find himself drawn back to Johnny Boy and repeat the wish to him- self like a mantra. As Gandolfini recalled recently, “I was always like, ‘I want to make my dad proud. I want to make my dad proud.’” It didn’t take a psychiatrist to deci- pher what it all meant. “Of course that was something inside of me,” he said. Gandolfini is the son of the actor James Gandolfini, who played the men- acing but undeniably engrossing Mafia boss Tony Soprano for six seasons on the revered HBO series “The Sopranos,” and who died unexpectedly of a heart at- tack at age 51 in 2013. The 22-year-old Michael has inher- ited many of his famous father’s fea- tures. They share the same immersive eyes and smirking smiles; like his dad, Michael is soft-spoken with a salty vo- cabulary, and he admits to an occasion- ally argumentative temper. And when Michael — who was born four months after “The Sopranos” made its debut in 1999 and had barely watched the show before preparing for “The Many Saints of Newark” — thinks of his GANDOLFINI, PAGE 2 A son’s turn to solve the riddle of Tony Soprano Michael Gandolfini, left, the son of James Gandolfini, as a young Tony Soprano opposite Jon Bernthal in “The Many Saints of Newark.” “I want to make my dad proud,” he said. BARRY WETCHER/WARNER BROS. Michael Gandolfini plays a younger version of his father’s iconic role BY DAVE ITZKOFF The New York Times publishes opinion from a wide range of perspectives in hopes of promoting constructive debate about consequential questions. They promised they would “hunt” the elites. They questioned the need for a Holocaust memorial in Berlin and de- scribed Muslim immigrants as “head scarf girls” and “knife men.” Four years ago the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, arrived in the German Parliament like a wrecking ball, the first far-right party to win a place at the heart of Germany’s democracy since World War II. It was a political earthquake in a country that had once seen Hitler and his Nazi party rise from the fringes to win power in free elections. As another election arrives this week- end, the worst fears of many Germans have not been realized: Support for the party has dipped. But neither have the hopes that the AfD would disappear from the political scene as suddenly as it appeared. If Germany’s fate in this elec- tion will not be settled by the far right, political analysts say, Germany’s future will partly be shaped by it. “The AfD is here to stay,” said Matthias Quent, professor of sociology at Magdeburg University of Applied Sci- ences and an expert on the far right. “There was the widespread and naïve hope that this was a short-lived protest phenomenon. The reality is that the far right has become entrenched in the Ger- man political landscape.” The AfD is polling at roughly 11 per- cent, just below its 2017 result of 12.6 per- cent, and is all but guaranteed to retain its presence in Parliament. (Parties with less than 5 percent of the vote do not get any seats.) But with all other parties re- fusing to include the AfD in talks about forming the next governing coalition, it is effectively banned from power. “The AfD is isolated,” said Uwe Jun, a professor of political science at Trier University. Yet with Germany’s two main parties having slipped well below the 30 percent mark, the AfD remains a disruptive force, one that complicates efforts to build a governing coalition with a major- ity of votes and parliamentary seats. Tino Chrupalla, one of the AfD’s two lead candidates in the election, believes that eventually the firewall other parties GERMANY, PAGE 5 The far right in Germany: Isolated but ‘here to stay’ BERLIN AfD, a pariah force, seeks a growing role in shaping the future of the county BY KATRIN BENNHOLD There’s little doubt that Congress will pass and President Biden will sign legislation to provide $1 billion in fund- ing for Iron Dome, the Israeli-Ameri- can missile defense system. Steny Hoyer, the majority leader in the House, promised as much after a hand- ful of progressive members managed in the last few days to get the funding stripped from a must-pass bill to keep the U.S. government afloat. The Israel-bashing progressives won the news cycle, but Hoyer intends to bring Iron Dome to a vote in a stand-alone bill. It will pass with overwhelming bipar- tisan support. That’s the good news. Whatever the tensions between the Democratic Party and Israel, they aren’t anywhere near the point that the mainstream of the party would begrudge the Jewish state funding for a technological marvel that, over a decade of operation, has saved count- less civilian lives by shooting down thousands of rockets fired indiscrimi- nately at Israel by Hamas and other terrorist groups. The bad news: You will almost cer- tainly not see Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Repre- sentative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan or their fellow travelers in the House progressive caucus paying any serious reputational cost for this supremely foul piece of political grandstanding. Democrats tried that in 2019 with an effort to rebuke Minnesota’s Repre- sentative Ilhan Omar for a string of antisemitic remarks. But the effort fizzled, and Omar’s star in the party has only risen since. Last month, Tlaib gave a talk to the Democratic Social- ists of America in which she darkly A foul play over Israel’s Iron Dome OPINION Progressive Democrats are wrong to target a defensive weapon system. STEPHENS, PAGE 10 Bret Stephens nytimes.com/thedaily How the news should sound. A daily audio report on demand. Hosted by Michael Barbaro. Y(1J85IC*KKOKKR( +.!"!?!@!: Issue Number No. 43,086 Andorra € 5.00 Antilles € 4.50 Austria € 4.00 Belgium € 4.00 Bos. & Herz. KM 5.80 Britain £ 2.60 Cameroon CFA 3000 Croatia KN 24.00 Cyprus € 3.40 Czech Rep CZK 115 Denmark Dkr 37 Estonia € 4.00 Finland € 4.00 France € 4.00 Gabon CFA 3000 Germany € 4.00 Greece € 3.40 Hungary HUF 1100 Israel NIS 14.00/ Friday 27.50 Israel / Eilat NIS 12.00/ Friday 23.50 Italy € 3.80 Ivory Coast CFA 3000 Sweden Skr 50 Switzerland CHF 5.20 Syria US$ 3.00 The Netherlands € 4.00 Tunisia Din 8.00 Turkey TL 22 Poland Zl 19 Portugal € 3.90 Republic of Ireland 3.80 Serbia Din 300 Slovenia € 3.40 Spain € 3.90 Luxembourg € 4.00 Malta € 3.80 Montenegro € 3.40 Morocco MAD 35 Norway Nkr 40 Oman OMR 1.50 NEWSSTAND PRICES U.A.E. AED 15.00 United States Military (Europe) $ 2.30
Transcript of Bret Stephens - static01.nyt.com
Weekend
..
INTERNATIONAL EDITION | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25-26, 2021
ARTISTSANDQUILTERSIN THE U.S.SOUTHGET HELPIN SAVINGTHEIRWORKHAVENS
PAGE 20 |CULTURE
DELVINGINTO THEDEPTHSOF ICYCAVESTO STUDYGLACIERSANDCLIMATECHANGE
BACK PAGE |TRAVEL
SPACIOUS SUBURBSBECKONED, BUT THISCOUPLE FOUND A WAYTO STAY IN THE CITYPAGE 13 | INTERNATIONAL HOMES
A SWIRLING VORTEXIS NO MATCH FOR THISDEEP-SEA SPONGEPAGE 16 | SCIENCE LAB
WIKIPEDIA’S NEXTLEADER DISCUSSESWORKING TO PREVENTMISINFORMATION
PAGE 8 | BUSINESS
and its frequent target.The compound is next to a middle-
class housing development and a prima-ry school, which terrifies residents,teachers and parents.
“We are very afraid,” said MaimounaMohammed, a teacher at the primaryschool, glancing at the camp’s wall, 50yards from her classroom. “We don’tknow their minds.”
Nigerian military and justice officials
For over a decade, the extremist groupBoko Haram has terrorized northeast-ern Nigeria — killing tens of thousandsof people, kidnapping schoolgirls andsending suicide bombers into busy mar-ketplaces.
Now, thousands of Boko Haram fight-ers have surrendered, along with theirfamily members, and are being housedby the government in a compound in thecity of Maiduguri, the group’s birthplace
say that in the past month, as many as7,000 fighters and family members,along with their captives, have left BokoHaram, the largest wave of defectionsby far since the jihadist group emergedin 2002.
The turning point for its fortunes ap-pears to have been the death ofAbubakar Shekau, Boko Haram’s long-time leader, who blew himself up in Mayafter being cornered by a rival faction.
However weakened Boko Haram maybe, though, it does not necessarily meanan end to terror for the people of north-eastern Nigeria, hundreds of thousandsof whom have died and millions of whomhave fled.
Fighters from Boko Haram’s rivalsplinter group — the Islamic State WestAfrica Province, or ISWAP — are mov-ing into the vacuum, observers in the re-gion say, ferrying truckloads of militaryequipment from their strongholds in theLake Chad area southward to Mr.Shekau’s former dens in the Sambisaforest. ISWAP broke off from Boko NIGERIA, PAGE 5
A 29-year-old midlevel Boko Haram commander who said he had worked his way upfrom washing the motorcycle of the group’s feared leader, Abubakar Shekau.
A teenager who was abducted and married to a fighter at age 10. She is living in a campin Maiduguri, Nigeria, with many men who kidnapped and enslaved girls like her.
The wife of a senior commander, age 30. Shortly after surrendering, she gave birth inthe Hajj Camp, where Boko Haram defectors are being housed by the government.
A high-ranking Boko Haram commander who said he had surrendered because hisleaders were gone and he wanted to give his children a chance to live normal lives.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY TOM SAATER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Terrorists next doorMAIDUGURI, NIGERIA
BY RUTH MACLEAN AND ISMAIL ALFA
A Nigerian city is on edge as thousands of defectors from Boko Haram move in
When Michael Gandolfini was filminghis role in “The Many Saints of Newark,”a period crime drama that casts him as aprecocious teenage troublemakernamed Tony Soprano, he was havingtrouble sleeping and would stay up lateat night, working on his scenes for thenext day.
Sometimes he would reflect on themotivations of his character, whose loy-alty is torn between two paternal fig-ures: his frequently absent father, aNew Jersey gangster named JohnnyBoy; and the film’s protagonist, a char-ismatic mobster named Dickie Molti-santi.
In his efforts to get inside his charac-ter, Gandolfini would try to identify withTony’s desire to please both men. Hewould find himself drawn back to
Johnny Boy and repeat the wish to him-self like a mantra.
As Gandolfini recalled recently, “I wasalways like, ‘I want to make my dadproud. I want to make my dad proud.’”
It didn’t take a psychiatrist to deci-pher what it all meant. “Of course thatwas something inside of me,” he said.
Gandolfini is the son of the actorJames Gandolfini, who played the men-acing but undeniably engrossing Mafiaboss Tony Soprano for six seasons onthe revered HBO series “The Sopranos,”and who died unexpectedly of a heart at-tack at age 51 in 2013.
The 22-year-old Michael has inher-ited many of his famous father’s fea-tures. They share the same immersiveeyes and smirking smiles; like his dad,Michael is soft-spoken with a salty vo-cabulary, and he admits to an occasion-ally argumentative temper.
And when Michael — who was bornfour months after “The Sopranos” madeits debut in 1999 and had barely watchedthe show before preparing for “TheMany Saints of Newark” — thinks of his GANDOLFINI, PAGE 2
A son’s turn to solve the riddle of Tony Soprano
Michael Gandolfini, left, the son of James Gandolfini, as a young Tony Soprano oppositeJon Bernthal in “The Many Saints of Newark.” “I want to make my dad proud,” he said.
BARRY WETCHER/WARNER BROS.
Michael Gandolfini playsa younger version of his father’s iconic role
BY DAVE ITZKOFF
The New York Times publishes opinionfrom a wide range of perspectives inhopes of promoting constructive debateabout consequential questions.
They promised they would “hunt” theelites. They questioned the need for aHolocaust memorial in Berlin and de-scribed Muslim immigrants as “headscarf girls” and “knife men.”
Four years ago the Alternative forGermany, or AfD, arrived in the GermanParliament like a wrecking ball, the firstfar-right party to win a place at the heartof Germany’s democracy since WorldWar II. It was a political earthquake in acountry that had once seen Hitler andhis Nazi party rise from the fringes towin power in free elections.
As another election arrives this week-end, the worst fears of many Germanshave not been realized: Support for theparty has dipped. But neither have thehopes that the AfD would disappearfrom the political scene as suddenly as itappeared. If Germany’s fate in this elec-tion will not be settled by the far right,political analysts say, Germany’s futurewill partly be shaped by it.
“The AfD is here to stay,” saidMatthias Quent, professor of sociologyat Magdeburg University of Applied Sci-ences and an expert on the far right.“There was the widespread and naïvehope that this was a short-lived protestphenomenon. The reality is that the farright has become entrenched in the Ger-man political landscape.”
The AfD is polling at roughly 11 per-cent, just below its 2017 result of 12.6 per-cent, and is all but guaranteed to retainits presence in Parliament. (Parties withless than 5 percent of the vote do not getany seats.) But with all other parties re-fusing to include the AfD in talks aboutforming the next governing coalition, itis effectively banned from power.
“The AfD is isolated,” said Uwe Jun, aprofessor of political science at TrierUniversity.
Yet with Germany’s two main partieshaving slipped well below the 30 percentmark, the AfD remains a disruptiveforce, one that complicates efforts tobuild a governing coalition with a major-ity of votes and parliamentary seats.Tino Chrupalla, one of the AfD’s two leadcandidates in the election, believes thateventually the firewall other parties GERMANY, PAGE 5
The far rightin Germany:Isolated but‘here to stay’BERLIN
AfD, a pariah force, seeksa growing role in shapingthe future of the county
BY KATRIN BENNHOLDThere’s little doubt that Congress willpass and President Biden will signlegislation to provide $1 billion in fund-ing for Iron Dome, the Israeli-Ameri-can missile defense system. StenyHoyer, the majority leader in theHouse, promised as much after a hand-ful of progressive members managedin the last few days to get the fundingstripped from a must-pass bill to keepthe U.S. government afloat.
The Israel-bashing progressives wonthe news cycle, but Hoyer intends to
bring Iron Dome to avote in a stand-alonebill. It will pass withoverwhelming bipar-tisan support.
That’s the goodnews. Whatever thetensions between theDemocratic Partyand Israel, theyaren’t anywherenear the point that
the mainstream of the party wouldbegrudge the Jewish state funding fora technological marvel that, over adecade of operation, has saved count-less civilian lives by shooting downthousands of rockets fired indiscrimi-nately at Israel by Hamas and otherterrorist groups.
The bad news: You will almost cer-tainly not see Representative JamaalBowman of New York, RepresentativePramila Jayapal of Washington, Repre-sentative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan ortheir fellow travelers in the Houseprogressive caucus paying any seriousreputational cost for this supremelyfoul piece of political grandstanding.
Democrats tried that in 2019 with aneffort to rebuke Minnesota’s Repre-sentative Ilhan Omar for a string ofantisemitic remarks. But the effortfizzled, and Omar’s star in the partyhas only risen since. Last month, Tlaibgave a talk to the Democratic Social-ists of America in which she darkly
A foul playover Israel’sIron Dome
OPINION
ProgressiveDemocratsare wrongto target adefensiveweaponsystem.
STEPHENS, PAGE 10
Bret Stephens
nytimes.com/thedaily
How the news should sound.
A daily audio report on demand.Hosted by Michael Barbaro.
Y(1J85IC*KKOKKR( +.!"!?!@!:
Issue NumberNo. 43,086Andorra € 5.00
Antilles € 4.50Austria € 4.00Belgium € 4.00Bos. & Herz. KM 5.80Britain £ 2.60
Cameroon CFA 3000Croatia KN 24.00Cyprus € 3.40Czech Rep CZK 115Denmark Dkr 37Estonia € 4.00
Finland € 4.00France € 4.00Gabon CFA 3000Germany € 4.00Greece € 3.40Hungary HUF 1100
Israel NIS 14.00/Friday 27.50
Israel / Eilat NIS 12.00/ Friday 23.50
Italy € 3.80Ivory Coast CFA 3000
Sweden Skr 50Switzerland CHF 5.20Syria US$ 3.00The Netherlands € 4.00Tunisia Din 8.00Turkey TL 22
Poland Zl 19Portugal € 3.90Republic of Ireland ¤� 3.80Serbia Din 300Slovenia € 3.40Spain € 3.90
Luxembourg € 4.00Malta € 3.80Montenegro € 3.40Morocco MAD 35Norway Nkr 40Oman OMR 1.50
NEWSSTAND PRICES
U.A.E. AED 15.00United States Military
(Europe) $ 2.30
