• How appropriate that on the day you note that Katherine Rundell, the author of The Golden Mole, has won the Waterstones book award with Impossible Creatures (Report, 30 November), we also learn of a golden mole reappearing after being feared extinct (Report, 30 November). Jim Golcher Greens Norton, Northamptonshire
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Corinne Adams’ son Charlie came home from school with notes from his teacher saying he was doing great in reading. But during the pandemic, Adams had to give him a reading test at home, and she realized her son couldn’t read. He’d been memorizing books that were read to him, but he didn’t know how to read new words he’d never seen before.
It’s a surprisingly common story. And kids who aren’t on track by the end of first grade are in danger of never becoming good readers. Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient readers. The problem is even worse when you look beyond the average and focus on specific groups of children: 83% of Black fourth graders don’t read proficiently.
American Public Media reporter Emily Hanford digs into a flawed theory that has shaped reading instruction for decades. The theory is that children can learn to read without learning how to sound out words, because there are other strategies they can use to figure out what the words say – strategies like “look at the picture” or “think of a word that makes sense.”
But research by cognitive scientists has demonstrated that readers need to know how to sound out words. And some teacher training programs still emphasize the debunked theory, including books and classroom materials that are popular around the world.
Hanford looks at the work of several authors who are published by the same educational publishing company. One, Lucy Calkins, is a rock star among teachers. Her books and training programs have been wildly popular. Calkins has now decided to rewrite her curriculum in response to “the science of reading.” But other authors are sticking to the idea that children can use other strategies to figure out the words.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in February 2023. Since then, Teachers College at Columbia University announced that the teacher training project founded by Calkins would be “dissolved.” The word “dissolved” was later removed from the statement, and the college instead characterized the move as a “transition” to ensure its “programs are informed by the latest research and evidence.” Since Sold a Story was first released, at least 22 states have introduced bills to overhaul reading instruction, and several have banned curricula that include cueing strategies.
As she gears up to release her second cookbook, Plantasia, Singapore-born chef and food writer Pamelia Chia tells Green Queen about why she hates the term ‘meat substitute’, why vegetables rule, and the three things you should always have in your pantry.
Meat was part and parcel of Pamelia Chia’s identity as a child. Growing up in Singapore – where vegetarian cooks are often stigmatised or judged – she knew her way around the nooks and crannies of a fish head or a pig trotter. And it’s something she felt very proud of.
So it comes as no surprise that she never envisioned writing a vegetarian cookbook. There is some precedent, however. While not vegetarian, her first cookbook, Wet Market to Table, centred around the produce you’d find at Singapore’s fruit and vegetable stalls.
“In Singapore, if you were to say that you don’t eat meat, people would think that you either have a health condition that prevents you from doing so, or are hyper-religious,” she tells me. “Vegetarian food is its own category in Singapore, and it is mostly characterised by meat analogues fashioned out of wheat gluten rather than being vegetable-forward.”
Courtesy: Pamelia Chia
Falling in love… with vegetables
Suffice it to say, vegetables weren’t her specialty when it came to cooking as a professional chef. It was only when she got married and moved to Australia – a country renowned for its produce – that she realised the true potential of vegetables. “I was working in Melbourne and was exposed to how thoughtfully crafted many vegetable dishes on the menu were,” she recalls. “They were dynamic, satisfying and very exciting to eat – them being vegetarian or vegan was beside the point.”
At the time, her diet was very meat-heavy. “Between my husband and I, we would buy kilos of meat and poultry every week,” she says. But that was a while ago – pre-pandemic and pre-bushfires. While she now lives in the Netherlands, the wildfires that ravaged Australia in 2018-20 forced Chia to look closely at the impact of her diet on the environment.
It was something she was conscious of, but could never pull the plug on. The bushfires were “the wake-up call that I needed”, she says. Now, she’s on a more balanced diet. Some days, she’ll use the thighs of the chicken she’s bought; another day, the carcass will flavour a vegetable-froward soup. And some days, the food she and her husband eat will be entirely vegetarian or even vegan.
“The idea now,” she outlines, “is to think of meat more as a seasoning to flavour dishes, or as a side dish to be eaten alongside rice and other dishes, rather than being the main thing on the plate.”
So while not vegetarian, vegetables are Chia’s thing. She stopped cooking in restaurants at the height of Covid-19 in 2020, a year after she published her first book. With the pandemic, she found more time to tend to her aspirations. “I felt a strong desire to document Asian traditions, recipes, and cooking techniques because we are so underrepresented in the English-speaking world.”
And so she set out to write her new cookbook, Plantasia: A Vegetarian Cookbook Through Asia. When I ask her why the meat-affecting-the-climate argument doesn’t extend to dairy, she says: “I wrote Plantasia with meat lovers in mind.” While the book contains plenty of inspiration for vegans and vegetarians, the mission is “not necessarily to convert anyone” – but instead “demonstrate the pleasures of vegetables” to encourage people to eat more greens.
“With people who might already find it a tall order to abstain from meat, I find it easier to wean them into loving vegetables by introducing a little egg, cream or butter in some recipes,” she explains. “That said, 95% of the recipes in Plantasia are vegan or vegan-friendly.”
Courtesy: Pamelia Chia
Interviewing Asian culinary pioneers
Accompanying those 88 recipes – which include savoury soy milk with preserved mustard stem, thunder tea kimbap, and sambal goreng with charred coconut – are interviews with 24 chefs from across the world, discussing plant-based eating, Asian food and sustainability. Think Vietnamese chef Andrew Nguyen, Taiwanese chef Cathy Erway (both are James Beard-winning authors), Celestial Peach founder Jenny Lau, and Made in Taiwan founder Ivy Chen – to name a few.
Chiu wanted to shake up the modern cookbook. What used to be your only source of recipes outside word of mouth or family diaries, are now crowded out by the endless stream of online recipes. “I like to think of the stories interspersed between the recipes as providing readers with the cultural context of some of the dishes, philosophies that underpin the way they cook and appreciate vegetables, as well as personal anecdotes – all of which I feel are extremely important to highlight,” Chiu tells me. Indeed some of the most popular cookbooks of late, such as Joanne Lee Molinaro’s The Korean Vegan Cookbook: Reflections and Recipes from Omma’s Kitchen are full of rich, intimate prose that elevates the recipes.
I ask her – perhaps cheekily – who were the sources of her favourite conversations. Her answer is what you’d expect (“I learnt so much from all of them”), but she does offer up the subjects she felt most strongly about. “A big highlight for me was understanding how traditional Asian diets evolved as Asians began interacting with people from the West,” she says.
Citing specific interviews, she continues: “Maori Murota [Japanese chef-author] outlines how the Japanese diet leaned more heavily towards meat and dairy after the Japanese people first came into contact with the Americans, whom they perceived to be of stronger builds and attributed that to their heavy meat and dairy consumption.
“A similar narrative was told by [Filipino vegan chef] RG Enriquez-Diez about the Filipino diet, which was influenced by the Spanish conquistadors’ zest for meat. There were also stories of how Asians started altering their diets when they left their homelands – Andrea Nguyen details how her family started eating lots of meat because it was abundant and affordable in the US. In the same vein, Zoey Xinyi Gong, who grew up in Shanghai, discovered how she was getting sick from her new American diet, and was forced to revisit her past eating habits in China.”
Spanakopita with spiced ghee and fried onions | Courtesy: Pamelia Chia
Taking inspiration from the best
“It was fascinating to recognise common threads throughout stories of Asians of seemingly disparate backgrounds, and to realise for myself that the journey of embracing vegetables is in fact one that also speaks of rediscovering my own heritage.”
Embracing vegetables is the mantra of one of Chiu’s key gastronomic influences, Yotam Ottolenghi, the Isreali-British chef who – and I couldn’t describe it any better – “was pretty much the first chef to completely change the way people thought about vegetables and vegetable cookery”. Ottolenghi’s cookbooks and restaurants all champion vegetables, even in his meat-based dishes and recipes – and a similar aesthetic runs through Plantasia, albeit with a more Southeast Asian slant, of course.
Chiu’s other culinary inspirations include Alice Waters, founder of California’s legendary farm-to-table eatery Chez Panisse, “for her work championing eating within your locality and emphasising the importance of ‘slow food’”; Dan Barber, co-owner of New York’s Blue Hill and author of The Third Plate, “for showing how sustainable diets are compatible with pleasure, and for demonstrating that the role of a chef or cook could extend beyond the kitchen”; and Malcolm Lee, owner of Singaporean Michelin-starred restaurant Candlenut and Chiu’s former boss, “who showed me that food from Asia could stand proudly next to other celebrated cuisines around the world”.
Meat ‘substitutes’? It’s complicated
At several points in Plantasia – whose foundations are centred on flavour, accent, technique and texture, and which is divided into chapters highlighting different cooking methods – Chiu touches upon meat substitutes, like in her conversations with Erway, Korean chef Sunny Lee and Sri Lankan chef Gayan Pieris.
Chiu has spoken about her wish to empower vegetables for themselves – but she does think plant-based meat alternatives have a role to play. “In many parts of Asia, meat analogues such as wheat gluten or konnyaku are a big part of vegetarian cuisines,” she says, recalling what she said about vegetarianism in Singapore being pigeonholed into seitan-led meat analogues.
Split pea tofu salad with chilli crisp | Courtesy: Pamelia Chia
“That said, I’m not a fan of – and harbour scepticism towards – a lot of highly processed meats on the market right now. For example, some of these faux meat companies are owned by companies that support factory farming – so there seems to be quite a bit of greenwashing involved,” she explains.
She’s not a fan of calling it a meat substitute or alternative either. “Products such as tofu, tempeh, and young jackfruit are commonly described as ‘meat substitutes’ in the West, but when I was growing up in Singapore, I never understood them as such.” It echoes what Pieris tells her in the book: “Sometimes when there is a protein source, the easiest way for Westerners to wrap their heads around it is to label it a meat substitute.”
And it’s not that Chiu doesn’t understand why they’re labelled this way, it’s more that she honours vegetables on their own merit. “Sure, they offer substantial chew and could replicate certain textural attributes of meat, but I never recognised these products as being substitutes for anything else. I loved them for what they are – doused in curry, slathered in sambal, simmered in stews,” she tells me, sounding very much like Amanda Cohen, chef-owner of Dirt Candy in New York City, whose dishes extolls vegetables as the main gastronomic event and Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park, also in NYC. It’s a topic that plant-forward, vegetable-centric food writers such as Alicia Kennedy discuss in detail, eschewing the idea that a diet without meat, dairy and eggs is one of deprivation and one that requires substitutes.
“When we call something a substitute for meat, we’re setting up unrealistic expectations. I remember coming across a headnote of a recipe describing how young jackfruit could be shredded and tossed in a sweet, sticky, savoury sauce to replicate BBQ pulled pork… only to be disappointed after trying the recipe out at how it was nothing like the real deal.”
She provides another example: “A quick internet search for tempeh recipes brings up countless recipes for ‘tempeh bacon’. It is such a shame to fixate on pushing tempeh into a ‘meat box’ when well-made tempeh is so creamy and rich in flavour that a quick marinade in turmeric powder and deep-frying brings out its natural flavour and texture, and transforms it into something I’d snack on obsessively.” (I would too, for the record.)
“I find that when we set aside these expectations for plants to deliver the exact same experience as meat does, that’s when we truly begin to respect and celebrate them for what they are.”
And celebrate she does. Plantasia features stunning recipes that feel as innovative and delicious as they are pretty. Her favourites? Grilled rice paper with tofu sisig, for one! And the charred Brussels sprouts with grapefruit and yuba (tofu skin).
“I’m proud of both because they aren’t vegan versions of existing meat or seafood dishes – they celebrate vegetables or plant-based products for what they are in an original way, are relatively easy to make, and are so incredibly delicious. Nobody would eat them and feel that they lack flavour or texture.”
Charred Brussels sprouts with grapefruit and yuba | Courtesy: Pamelia Chia
Authenticity and approximations
This is a topic Chiu has broached previously. In an interview with the South China Morning Post, she explained why she didn’t want to offer “veganised” versions of traditional meat- or seafood-based dishes. “To produce vegan laksa, to me, is like offering someone a second-rate substitute,” she said of the Southeast Asian noodle dish that uses seafood stock as a base.
But what of those vegans, then, who’d like to have a taste of the dish? Should they abstain from – or miss out on – eating these foods? “I’m sorry if this seems blunt or too direct,” she says politely, “but I think people who’d like to ‘experience these dishes’ would never truly be able to ‘experience’ them per se.”
She continues: “If a laksa’s flavour is defined by that of dried prawns and shrimp stock, and its texture is gritty from the texture of dried prawns (the word laksa translates to ‘spicy sand’), would someone be really experiencing ‘laksa’ if they were to consume a vegan version?”
However, she adds, it is possible for vegetarians and vegans to “experience very good vegan approximations of laksa”. The caveat? “For it to be as close a replica to the original as possible, the person who is preparing the laksa would have to be someone who has tasted the traditional, non-vegan version of the dish in the first place, so that he or she has an ‘authentic’ reference point.”
Okay, then, how does Chiu feel about cultivated meat, which is biologically identical to meat – because it is meat, just from an animal cell? It can be a controversial food, given its relationship with fetal bovine serum and the novelty element. “I would be open to it,” she says. “But I reflexively recoil a little when I think about cultivated meat because the way I think about it, food is inextricably linked to our sense of place and identity. They are a gift from nature. What ‘terroir’ can cultivated meat purport to have?”
Courtesy: Pamelia Chia
The MSG question
Speaking of controversy, one ingredient that bitterly divides people around the world is MSG (aka Monosodium Glutamate), renowned for its umami-lending characteristics and reviled for its (debunked) health ill-effects. It’s a compound originally that occurs naturally in many foods (Parmigiano Reggiano, for example) and has been used in Asia for centuries. Its use as a flavour enhancer in industrially processed food production has contributed to its bad rep in the West, alongside what came to be known as the unfortunately-named Chinese Restaurant Syndrome in the US in the 1960s.
“There seems to be a growing number of voices of Asians who live in the West who are advocating for MSG,” Chiu points out. “I believe that it is mainly to encourage others to not demonise the ingredient, for it is something that is widely used in home cooking, restaurant cooking and street food.
“However, I do sometimes feel that this advocacy, when taken to the extreme, can paint all Asians in the same brushstroke. I certainly never had MSG around the house when I was growing up. My mom was Cantonese, and she believed strongly in the purity of flavours. I don’t have a problem with the use of MSG – as many have pointed out, it is a compound that is naturally occurring in ingredients such as meat, dried shiitake mushrooms, tomatoes and seaweed.
“What I have a problem with, however, is when people begin to use the powder as a crutch for flavour. For example, products such as soy sauce or miso are traditionally fermented over a long period of time. But, to cut costs, a company might cut the fermenting time short and add MSG to enhance the flavour.”
TLDR: there’s nothing wrong with using MSG, she says, but it’s “far better to harness it from natural sources” and introduce umami in your dish through cooking techniques.
It makes sense, then, that when I ask her what three pantry items people should never run out of, her list is umami-rich: fermented tofu, chilli crisp (a Szechuan chilli oil that features crunchy ingredients like fried shallots) and kecap manis (a syrupy Indonesian condiment that is often described as a sweet soy sauce).
“Fermented tofu, also known as Chinese cheese, is incredibly versatile. I use it to stir-fry veggies, dissolve it in water for a quick savoury broth, and add it to my stews and braises for more oomph,” she explains. “Chilli crisp is more of a finishing product in my household – I drizzle it over dumplings, or make a quick salad dressing with it. Kecap manis is great for stir-fries, dipping sauces, or for glazing roasted or barbecued items.”
Just the thought of these mentions makes me want to go straight into the kitchen and whip up something Asian-inspired. And that’s exactly what Chiu wants for her readers, especially those who don’t live in Asia: “I hope that they will get a sense of the richness and depth of wisdom that Asia has to offer to the growing global conversations of vegetarianism and veganism, which are at the moment still very Eurocentric.”
As for the rest of us? “I hope that readers would realise that to eat vegetables is not to be deprived, but a celebration of everything that nature has to offer.”
Plantasia: A Vegetarian Cookbook Through Asia is available for pre-order online and in bookstores in select countries for S$49.90 ($36.40).
Héctor Oesterheld and his family were murdered under the military dictatorship. As Netflix adapts his beloved El Eternauta, his literary legacy is dragged into the culture wars
The story tells of a masked figure who joins an isolated band to mount a seemingly hopeless resistance against sinister forces which have seized control of planet Earth.
The eponymous hero of Héctor Oesterheld’s comic serial El Eternauta – the traveller through eternity – fights in a world where humans have been turned against each other, and grapples with his own doubts that individuals can make any difference in the face of inhuman horrors.
Officially, the end of summer is marked by the autumnal equinox on September 23. Unofficially, summer ends some weeks earlier, with the start of classes in the nation’s schools and colleges. This year, however, there is a third way to define “the end of summer;” a growing chorus of voices wonders whether “summer” itself has ended, whether climate change has irrevocably contradicted our traditional, cheery visions of the season.
Can our traditional notions of “summer reading” survive this radical revision of the season?
With this month’s bookshelf, Yale Climate Connections offers a “yes and no” answer to this question. Yes, we’ll still have books that thrill, books that offer quirky takes on history, books that take us to new places, and books that connect us with nature and the soil. In short, we’ll still have enticing and eminently readable selections of fiction and nonfiction. But, no, the carefree vibe of summers past is gone.
In the list below, readers will find a harrowing but bestselling story of heatwaves, an offbeat history of climate science and politics, a personal account of a scientific expedition to Antarctica, two studies of the impacts of climate change on American locales, a history of dams, two travelogues, and reflections on gardening and birding.
Rounding out the list is a selection of fiction: a collection of short stories and two immersive novels.
All but one of these titles were published in 2023. Several are August releases; they are “end of summer” books for the year that summer as we knew it may have ended.
As always, the descriptions of the titles are adapted from copy provided by their publishers.
The Heat Will Kill You First is about the extreme ways in which our planet is already changing. It is about why spring is coming a few weeks earlier and fall is coming a few weeks later. It is about what will happen to our lives and our communities when typical summer days in Chicago or Boston go from 90° F to 110 °F. A heat wave, environmental reporter Jeff Goodell explains, is a predatory event — one that culls the most vulnerable people. But as heat waves become more intense and more common, they will become more democratic. Masterfully reported, mixing the latest scientific insight with on-the-ground storytelling, Goodell’s new book tackles the big questions and shows how extreme heat is a force beyond anything we have reckoned with before.
In 1956, the New York Times prophesied that once global warming really kicked in, we could see parrots in the Antarctic. In 2010, when science deniers had control of the climate story, Senator James Inhofe built an igloo on the Washington Mall and plunked a sign on top: “Al Gore’s New Home: Honk If You Love Climate Change.” In The Parrot and the Igloo, best-selling author David Lipsky tells the astonishing story of how we moved from one extreme to the other. Featuring an indelible cast of heroes and villains, mavericks and swindlers, The Parrot and the Igloo traces the long, strange march of climate science and delivers a real-life tragicomedy — one that captures the extraordinary dance of science, money, and American character.
In 2019, fifty-seven scientists and crew set out onboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer. Their destination: Thwaites Glacier, believed to be both rapidly deteriorating and capable of making a catastrophic impact on global sea-level rise. In The Quickening, Elizabeth Rush documents their voyage, offering the sublime—seeing an iceberg for the first time—alongside the workaday moments of this groundbreaking expedition. Along the way, she takes readers on a personal journey around a more intimate question: What does it mean to bring a child into the world at this time of radical change? From the author of Rising, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, The Quickening is an astonishing, vital book about Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood.
One morning in Miami Beach, an unexpected guest showed up in a luxury condominium complex’s parking garage: an octopus. The image quickly went viral. But the octopus — and the combination of infrastructure quirks and climate impacts that left it stranded—is more than a funny meme. It’s a potent symbol of the disruptions that a changing climate has already brought to our doorsteps. Rob Verchick examines how we can manage the risks we can no longer avoid. Although reducing CO2 emissions is essential, we need to address the damage we have already caused, especially for disadvantaged communities. Engaging and accessible, The Octopus in the Parking Garage empowers readers to face the climate crisis and shows what we can do to adapt and thrive.
At least 13 million Americans will have to move away from American coasts in coming decades, as rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms put lives at risk and cause billions in damages. In Charleston, South Carolina, denial, widespread development, and public complacency about racial issues compound these problems. In her new book, legal scholar Susan Crawford tells the story of a city that has played a central role in America’s painful racial history and now stands at the intersection of climate and race. With its explosive gentrification, Charleston illustrates our tendency to value development above all else. But Charleston also stands for the need to change our ways—to build higher, drier, densely-connected places where all citizens can live safely.
During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the messy truth about the legacy of last century’s dam-building binge has come to light. Governments plugged the nation’s rivers in a misguided attempt to turn them into revenue streams. Water control projects’ main legacy will be one of needless ecological destruction, fostering a host of unnecessary injustices. Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot, Crazy World is a speed date with the history of water control. Examples from the American West reveal that the costs of building and maintaining a sprawling water storage and delivery complex in an arid world is well beyond the benefits furnished. But success stories elsewhere point to a possible future where rivers run free and the Earth restores itself.
Many accounts of climate change depict disasters striking faraway places. How can seeing the consequences of human impacts up close help us grasp how global warming affects us and our neighbors? Michael M. Gunter, Jr. takes readers around the United States to bear witness to the many faces of the climate crisis: sea level rise in Virginia, floods in Tennessee, Maine lobsters migrating away from American waters, and imperiled ecosystems in national parks, from Alaskan permafrost to the Florida Keys. But Gunter also finds inspiring initiatives to mitigate and adapt to these threats. By showing how travel can help bring the reality of climate change home, Gunter offers readers a hopeful message about how to take action on the local level themselves.
As a farmer with decades spent working in fields, Scott Chaskey has been shaped by daily attention to the earth. He has combined a longstanding commitment to food sovereignty and organic farming with a belief that humble attention to microbial life and diversity of species provides invaluable lessons for building healthy communities. In this lively collection of essays, Chaskey explores the evolution of his perspective — as a farmer and as a poet. He recalls learning to cultivate plants and nourish reciprocal relationships among species, even as he was reading Yeats and beginning to write poems. “Enlivened by decades of work in open fields washed by the salt spray of the Atlantic” — Scott Chaskey has given us a seed of hope and regeneration
Christian Cooper is a self-described “Blerd” (Black nerd) who devotes every spring to gazing upon the migratory birds that stop to rest in Central Park, just a subway ride away from where he lives. While in the park one morning in May 2020, an encounter with a dog walker exploded age-old racial tensions. Cooper’s video of the incident went viral. In his new book, Cooper tells the story of his extraordinary life leading up to the now-infamous incident in Central Park and shows how a life spent looking up at the birds prepared him, in the most uncanny of ways, to be a gay, Black man in America today. Equal parts memoir, travelogue, and primer on the art of birding, Better Living Through Birding shares what birds can teach us about life, if we would look and listen.
A collection of inspiring, funny, dark, mysterious, tragic, romantic, dramatic, upbeat and fantastical short stories. These 24 stories are written by a variety of authors, with the aim to inspire readers with positive visions of what a sustainable society might look like and how we might get there. The stories are diverse in style, ranging from whodunnits to sci-fi, romance to family drama, comedy to tragedy, and cover a range of solution types from high-tech to nature-based solutions, to more systemic aspects relating to our culture and political economy. ‘There’s an abundance of imagination in these stories,” says climate activist Bill McKibben. “They’ll make you think again, and in new ways, about the predicament of the planet and its people.”
The Deluge: A Novel by Stephen Markley (Simon & Schuster 2023, 896 pages, $32.50)
In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock even as an ecological crisis advances. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters — a drug addict, an advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, a religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of history. A singular achievement, The Deluge is a once-in-a-generation novel that meets the moment as few works of art ever have.
Emi Vargas, whose parents helped save the world, is tired of being told how lucky she is to have been born after the climate crisis. But following the public assassination of a dozen climate criminals, Emi’s mother Kristina disappears. A determined Emi and her father, Larch, journey from their home in Nuuk, Greenland to New York City. Thirty years earlier, Larch first came to New York with a team of volunteers to save the city from rising waters and torrential storms. Kristina was on the frontlines of a different battle, fighting massive wildfires that ravaged the western U.S. They became part of a movement that changed the world. A triumphant debut, The Great Transition is a breathtaking rendering of our near future, told through the story of one family.
This article originally appeared in Yale Climate Connections here.
For author Ellen Miles, planting in public spaces is a radical act that’s about community ownership and belonging
Anarchism gets a bad rep. In the popular imagination, anarchists dress in black, they smash windows and hurl firebombs at police. Or else, they are young social misfits with green hair and too many piercings. Often they are both.
But what if anarchy could be beautiful, what if it could bring local communities together planting flowers in the streets? For Ellen Miles, the new doyenne of guerrilla gardening, it is. “I call it botanarchy,” she says.
What is special is that the report is not a country overview but thematic, including this paragraph on HRDs:
“Assistance to human rights defenders through both political and financial means is one of the flagship EU human rights activities, having a direct impact on individuals, groups and organisations defending human rights. In 2022, human rights defenders continued to face threats and attacks such as killings, arbitrary detention, smear campaigns or judicial harassment. They are also increasingly victims of illegal online surveillance, transnational repression or criminalisation due to ill-motivated “foreign agent” or counterterrorism laws. To counter this trend, the EU raised specific cases of human rights defenders at risk in all its human rights dialogues, subcommittee meetings and consultations (e.g. dialogue with Colombia or India). The protection of human rights defenders was also discussed in EU- supported civil society seminars preceding human rights dialogues (e.g. EU-Brazil and EU-Mexico seminars). The EU also continued to make its voice heard with public statements and declarations to support human rights defenders at risk (for instance on cases in Iran, Russia, or Mexico). Global support for human rights defenders was voiced by The High Representative on the occasion of the World NGO Day in February 2022 and during the 24th EU-NGO Forum on Human Rights in December 2022. EU Delegations and Member States’ embassies engaged and met with human rights defenders, monitored trials, and visited human rights defenders in detention. Annual meetings between EU diplomats and human rights defenders have become an established practice in non-EU countries, increasing the visibility of human rights defenders where appropriate and allowing for in-depth analysis of the challenges they face. Some EU Delegations provided awards to Human Rights Defenders (for instance in Uganda). The support and protection of human rights defenders is also a priority for the EUSR for Human Rights. Throughout 2022, the EUSR continued to raise individual cases of human rights defenders, particularly those in long-term detention, and to meet with human rights defenders, both in Brussels and during country visits. He availed of every opportunity to express support and solidarity directly to the defenders themselves or their families. He raised specific cases during visits to several countries, including India, Uganda, Pakistan, Egypt and Colombia and in other bilateral contacts, notably with Cuba and Brazil. He also participated in a number of high profile events aimed at raising awareness and visibility around their work and the need for their protection, such as the ProtectDefenders.eu beneficiary meeting in September, or the Front Line Defenders Dublin Platform in October. The EUSR was very active on individual cases on social media, notably regarding Belarus. He also highlighted the situation of Palestinian prisoners on hunger-strike and their deteriorating health conditions. The EU remained active in multilateral fora in particular in the United Nations Human Rights Council and the United Nations General Assembly. The EU actively collaborated with the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, regularly exchanging information on cases and thematic priorities. The EU advocated for the recognition of human rights defenders in several UN General Assembly resolutions. At the Human Rights Council, the EU highlighted the critical role that human rights defenders play in the protection and promotion of human rights and spoke out in their defence inter alia during the interactive dialogues with several Special Procedures.””Assistance to human rights defenders through both political and financial means is one of the flagship EU human rights activities, having a direct impact on individuals, groups and organisations defending human rights. In 2022, human rights defenders continued to face threats and attacks such as killings, arbitrary detention, smear campaigns or judicial harassment. They are also increasingly victims of illegal online surveillance, transnational repression or criminalisation due to ill-motivated “foreign agent” or counterterrorism laws. To counter this trend, the EU raised specific cases of human rights defenders at risk in all its human rights dialogues, subcommittee meetings and consultations (e.g. dialogue with Colombia or India). The protection of human rights defenders was also discussed in EU- supported civil society seminars preceding human rights dialogues (e.g. EU-Brazil and EU-Mexico seminars). The EU also continued to make its voice heard with public statements and declarations to support human rights defenders at risk (for instance on cases in Iran, Russia, or Mexico). Global support for human rights defenders was voiced by The High Representative on the occasion of the World NGO Day in February 2022 and during the 24th EU-NGO Forum on Human Rights in December 2022. EU Delegations and Member States’ embassies engaged and met with human rights defenders, monitored trials, and visited human rights defenders in detention. Annual meetings between EU diplomats and human rights defenders have become an established practice in non-EU countries, increasing the visibility of human rights defenders where appropriate and allowing for in-depth analysis of the challenges they face. Some EU Delegations provided awards to Human Rights Defenders (for instance in Uganda). The support and protection of human rights defenders is also a priority for the EUSR for Human Rights. Throughout 2022, the EUSR continued to raise individual cases of human rights defenders, particularly those in long-term detention, and to meet with human rights defenders, both in Brussels and during country visits. He availed of every opportunity to express support and solidarity directly to the defenders themselves or their families. He raised specific cases during visits to several countries, including India, Uganda, Pakistan, Egypt and Colombia and in other bilateral contacts, notably with Cuba and Brazil. He also participated in a number of high profile events aimed at raising awareness and visibility around their work and the need for their protection, such as the ProtectDefenders.eu beneficiary meeting in September, or the Front Line Defenders Dublin Platform in October. The EUSR was very active on individual cases on social media, notably regarding Belarus. He also highlighted the situation of Palestinian prisoners on hunger-strike and their deteriorating health conditions. The EU remained active in multilateral fora in particular in the United Nations Human Rights Council and the United Nations General Assembly. The EU actively collaborated with the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, regularly exchanging information on cases and thematic priorities. The EU advocated for the recognition of human rights defenders in several UN General Assembly resolutions. At the Human Rights Council, the EU highlighted the critical role that human rights defenders play in the protection and promotion of human rights and spoke out in their defence inter alia during the interactive dialogues with several Special Procedures.“
Other sections specially relevant for HRDs include:
The death penalty…………………………………………………………………………………………….page.21 Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 24 Freedom of religion or belief ………………………………………………………………………..33 Human rights of persons belonging to minorities………………………………. 38 Gender equality ………………………………………………………………………………………………..40 LGBTI ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..50 Migration and mobility – migrants, refugees and asylum seekers ..59 Empowering women ……………………………………………………………………………………….62 Rights of indigenous peoples …………………………………………………………….. 75 Freedom of expression ………………………………………………………………………..78 Safety and protection of journalists…………………………………………………. 80 Countering disinformation, hate speech, extremist and terrorist content………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 81 Academic freedom and protection of the academic community at risk…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 84 Labour rights ……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 90
Support to Human Rights Defenders in the Digital Sphere ……………..175
Brown University’s Costs of War project released a study this year estimating that US-led wars since 9/11 have contributed directly and indirectly to 4.5 million deaths in the targeted countries. Those countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia and Syria—have also seen an estimated 40–60 million people displaced from their homes. This refugee crisis is as destructive as any war, and marks the largest number of refugees since the end of World War II. By all accounts, the US-led Global War on Terror has been a disaster for tens of millions of people.
When the study was released in May, there was only one report (Washington Post, 5/15/23) in all of America’s top newspapers that brought attention to the staggering figure. The Hill (5/16/23) and a few smaller outlets (NY1, 5/17/23; UPI, 5/16/23) published pieces on the topic, but the bulk of corporate media did not deem it worthy of any coverage at all.
No solemn reflections about the war machine, no policy pieces about how we might avoid such devastation in the future, and certainly no op-eds calling for the wars’ architects to stand trial for their crimes.
How does our media environment so easily dismiss carnage of this scale? Norman Solomon’s new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its War Machine (New Press), offers a deep look at the media system that enables a monstrous war machine to extract such a heavy toll on the world with impunity.
Solomon’s book attempts to show how our institutions came to be so casual about burying the costs of US wars. He challenges the traditional myth of the American “free press” as a check on power, and instead shows how the media act as “a fourth branch of government.” This book serves as a survey of media malfeasance in recent history, but also as a meditation on the role of our media system in manufacturing consent for a brutal foreign policy for the entire world.
Useful victims
Solomon takes aim at the common, unchallenged assumptions that often shape how media portray conflicts. Persistent tropes, like the constant appeal for America to “lead the world,” and dangerously common euphemisms like “defense spending” contribute to a culture that worships a mythical version of America, while the empire’s true nature remains hidden.
FAIR.org (3/18/22): In the Ukraine War, US corporate media discovered a “newfound ability to cover the impact on civilians—when those civilians are white and under attack by an official US enemy, rather than by the US itself.”
One key aspect of that myth-building is the selective way US media cover civilian victims. Some are covered extensively, eliciting calls for revenge, while others are ignored entirely—depending on who the aggressor is. Solomon recalls a critical moment just a few weeks into the US invasion of Afghanistan—at a time when, as the Washington Post (10/31/01) reported, “more errant US bombs have landed in residential areas, causing damage to such places as a Red Cross warehouse and senior citizens’ center.” Images of these atrocities had sparked “criticism of the American war effort.”
At CNN, chair Walter Isaacson declared in a memo to staff that it “seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” When the network did cover the toll on civilians, Isaacson told the Washington Post (10/31/01), “You want to make sure people understand…it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” John Moody, the vice president of Fox News at the time, called the directive “not at all a bad thing,” because “Americans need to remember what started this.” The coverage was designed to reinforce the US government line of a noble cause, to shield viewers from the toll on civilians, and justify them if they were shown.
The media’s expedient treatment of civilian suffering has continued to this day. In the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where civilian casualties supported rather than hindered the message the media wanted to send, the coverage was reversed (FAIR.org, 3/18/22). “By any consistent standard,” Solomon writes, “the horrors that the US military had brought to so many civilians since the autumn of 2001 were no less terrible for the victims than what Russia was doing in Ukraine.” Despite that, the media coverage of Ukraine was “vastly more immediate, graphic, extensive and outraged about Russia’s slaughter than America’s slaughter.”
During April 2022, the New York Times published 14 front-page stories on civilian casualties from Russia’s military offensive. During a comparable period after the US invasion of Iraq, there was only one front-page story about civilian victims of the US attack (FAIR.org, 6/9/22).
Media boundaries
Looming over any current discussion of news media is their abysmal reporting of the Global War on Terror. Solomon uses the case of Iraq to demonstrate the boundaries of our media system, both top-down and self-imposed.
Through social filtering, the journalists who end up covering wars for elite institutions often have internalized the assumptions that justify the empire. Journalist Reese Erlich (Target Iraq, Solomon and Erlich) recounted that he “didn’t meet a single foreign reporter in Iraq who disagreed with the notion that the US and Britain have the right to overthrow the Iraqi government by force.” This selection bias was clearly reflected in the West’s acquiescent coverage of the war.
Ashleigh Banfield (4/24/03): “There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you’re getting the story.”
Other times, boundaries can be rigidly and publicly reinforced, as in the case of the young journalist Ashleigh Banfield. Banfield was a journalist who ascended the heights of cable news. A rising star, Banfield’s career at NBC hit a wall after she made a speech in April 2003 deeply critical of how the media obscured the harsh realities of the Iraq War. She told an audience at Kansas State University:
What didn’t you see? You didn’t see where those bullets landed. You didn’t see what happened when the mortar landed… There are horrors that were completely left out of this war.
Television coverage of the war, Banfield said, was “a glorious wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited.”
NBC announced that it was “deeply disappointed and troubled by her remarks.” Her punishment was swift and harsh:
I was officeless for ten months. No phone, no computer…. Eventually after ten months of this, I was given an office that was a tape closet…. The message was crystal clear.
The message wasn’t just for Banfield. Journalists could not help but pay close attention to this destruction of one of their own. If they stray outside the unspoken bounds set by corporate media’s owners, they could share Banfield’s fate or worse.
Accepting forever wars
Even war critics give the US military credit for being “more humane” (New York Times, 9/3/21).
As of 2021, the last soldiers exited Afghanistan, solidifying a new era of US warfare dubbed “over the horizon.” This is a reference to the constant high-tech, “lower intensity” slaughter emanating from the hundreds of military bases the US still has across the world.
US drone warfare has been a persistent source of horror for millions. But, as Solomon notes, “the systems of remote killing get major help from reporters, producers and editors who detour around the carnage at the other end of US weaponry.” One clear way they help is by endorsing and repeating the idea that America’s campaign of air assassinations is a new form of “humane war.”
Even some of the more thoughtful critics of this kind of war fall into linguistic traps that minimize its true toll. In a New York Times op-ed (9/3/21) that described the trend as “disturbing,” Yale historian Samuel Moyn wrote that “America’s bequest to the world…over the last 20 years” was an “endless and humane” form of “counterterrorist belligerency,” one in which “Human Rights Watch examined for violations of the law of war and…military lawyers helped pick targets.” Moyn is concerned that “more humane war became a companion to an increasingly interventionist foreign policy”—but seems to miss the irony of calling a strategy “humane” that kills innocents by the millions.
Moyn seems partially aware that the “humane” war is more rebranding than restraint, but insists that the “improved humanity of our wars” is both “ostensible and real.” References to “humane” war should ring just as hollow as Lyndon Johnson’s proclamation in 1966 about soldiers on the way to Vietnam: “No American army in all of our long history has been so compassionate.”
The risk of truth-telling
Jacobin (8/21) notes that “the Espionage Act makes no distinction between spies who steal information for hostile foreign governments and government employees who share information of public interest with the press, journalists, or even members of the public.”
As a sharp contrast to the media who shield the empire from any reckoning, Solomon highlights the people who take a risk to bring the world the truth about this detached, mechanized warfare. He talks to Cian Westmoreland, who “spoke sadly of the commendations he received for helping to kill more than 200 people with drone strikes.” Brandon Bryant lamented that the entire system was designed “so that no one has taken responsibility for what happens.” There was Heather Linebaugh, who recounted how she and her colleagues “always wonder if we killed the right people.”
One of these heroes was Daniel Hale, who remains in prison today for leaking information that showed that over a five-month period in 2012, 90% of the people killed in Afghanistan drone strikes were not the intended target. Solomon quotes Hale’s touching letter explaining that he leaked the information so that “I might someday humbly ask forgiveness.”
Other whistleblowers have suffered immensely for their acts of bravery. In 2010, army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning leaked the infamous “Collateral Murder” video, showing US forces using an Apache helicopter to gun down a dozen civilians in Iraq. The dead included two Reuters employees. For leaking the video and other documents, Manning spent seven years in prison, much of that in solitary confinement. In 2019, Manning spent another year in prison for refusing to testify against the publisher of her documents, Julian Assange—who is himself incarcerated in Britain, facing extradition to the United States to face charges related to exposing US war crimes.
These whistleblowers and truth-tellers only exist on the margins in public discourse. When the 20-year US occupation of Afghanistan was bookended by yet another “unintentional” drone strike on ten civilians, the words of these whistleblowers had long left the public mind. Media shrugged when the Pentagon cleared itself of any wrongdoing, as they have done countless times before. In this so-called free press, Solomon writes, “outliers can’t compete with drumbeats.”
It really is no surprise that US media had so little to say when Brown University’s Cost of War Project released its estimates for the death toll of the US’s post-9/11 wars. They ensured America’s 4.5 million victims barely registered in the public consciousness, as they diverted audiences’ attention to another noble US cause in Ukraine. War Made Invisible lays bare the very heart of the system that allows the US war machine to grind onward, with minimal resistance from a confused and misled public.
The Incommunicados is a 180-page compilation of unanswered letters to government officials and prominent figures in other non-governmental institutions who have become impenetrably cocooned and unresponsive to the public. Ralph Nader and Bruce Fein present their unrequited correspondences to major public figures on pressing issues facing the United States. These include the COVID-19 pandemic, foreign…
This post was originally published on Ralph Nader.
Next time you have a twenty dollar note in your hands, take a close look at who is honoured on it. You will note that Mary Reibey is on one side and John Flynn is on the other. Flynn (about whom I wrote the book ‘The Man on the Twenty Dollar Notes’) is a legend …
This week on CounterSpin: If corporate news media didn’t matter, we wouldn’t talk about them. But elite, moneyed outlets do, of course, direct public attention to some issues and not to others, and suggest the possibility of some social responses, but not others. It’s that context that the African American Policy Forum hopes folks will bring to their new book, based on years of research, called Say Her Name: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence. It’s not, of course, about excluding Black men and boys from public conversation about police violence, but about the value of adding Black women to our understanding of the phenomenon—as a way to help make our response more meaningful and impactful. If, along the way, we highlight that ignoring the specific, intersectional meaning that policies and practices have for women who are also Black—well, that would improve journalism too. We’ll talk about Say Her Name with one of the key workers on that ongoing project, Kevin Minofu, senior research and writing fellow at African American Policy Forum.
CounterSpin230721Minofu.mp3
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of campaign town halls.
Journalist and critic of Israeli apartheid Antony Loewenstein wrapped up his New Zealand tour with another damning address in Auckland last night but was optimistic about a swing in global grassroots sentiment with a stronger understanding of the plight of the reoressed 5 million Palestinians. He says that for more than a half century the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has given the Israeli state invaluable military experience in “controlling” a population.
By Antony Loewenstein
The Israeli defence industry inspires nations across the globe, many of which view themselves as under threat from external enemies.
The Taiwanese foreign minister, Joseph Wu, recently told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that: “Every aspect of the Israeli fighting capability is amazing to the Taiwanese people and the Taiwanese government.”
Wu explained that he appreciated how Israel protected its own country because, “basically, we [Taiwan] have barely started. The fighting experiences of Israel are something we’re not quite sure about ourselves. We haven’t had any war in the last four or five decades, but Israel has that kind of experience”.
Wu also expressed interest in Israeli weapons, suggesting his country had considered their usefulness in any potential war with China.
“Israel has the Iron Dome,” he said, referring to Israel’s defence system against short-range missiles. “We should look at some of the technology that has been used by the Israelis in its defence. I’m not sure whether we can copy it, but I think we can look at it and learn from it.”
It isn’t just Taiwan imagining itself as akin to Israel. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in April 2022 that his vision for his nation was to mimic “the Jewish state“.
Two months after Russia’s illegal invasion of its territory, Zelensky, who is a long-time supporter of Israel, argued that “our people will be our great army. We cannot talk about ‘Switzerland of the future’ — probably, our state will be able to be like this a long time after. But we will definitely become a ‘big Israel’ with its own face.”
Zelensky went on to explain that what he meant was the need in the future to have “representatives of the armed forces or the national guard in all institutions, supermarkets, cinemas; there will be people with weapons.”
The Women’s Bookshop’s Carole Beu with author Antony Loewenstein at his book signing in Auckland last night. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report
The Palestine laboratory This admiration for Israel is both unsurprising and disturbing. The praise for Israel almost always completely ignores its occupation of Palestinian territory — one of the longest in modern times — and the ways in which this colonial project is implemented.
When Taiwan, Ukraine or any other country looks to Israel for innovation, it’s a highly selective gaze which completely disappears the more than five million Palestinians under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.
The Palestine Laboratory . . . uncovers how Israel has used the occupied Palestinians as the ultimate guineapigs.
The appeal of the Palestine laboratory is endless. I’ve spent the last years researching this concept and its execution in Palestine and across the globe.
My new book, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, uncovers how Israel has used the occupied Palestinians as the ultimate guineapigs when developing tools of repression, from drones to spyware and facial recognition to biometric data, while maintaining an “enemy” population, the Palestinians, under control for more than half a century.
Israel has sold defence equipment to at least 130 countries and is now the 10th biggest arms exporter in the world. The US is still the dominant player in this space, accounting for 40 percent of the global weapons industry.
Washington used its failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a testing ground for new weapons. During the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war has been a vital “beta test” for new weapons and sophisticated forms of surveillance and killing.
But Israel has a ready-made population of occupied Palestinians over which it has complete control. For more than five decades, Israeli intelligence authorities have built an NSA-level system of surveillance across the entire occupied Palestinian territories.
In the last decade, the most infamous example of Israeli repression tech is Pegasus, the phone hacking tool developed by the company NSO Group. Used and abused by dozens of nations around the world, Mexico is its most prolific adherent.
I spoke to dissidents, lawyers and human rights activists in Togo, Mexico, India and beyond whose lives were upended by this invasive, mostly silent tool.
Israeli state and spyware However, missing from so much of the western media coverage, including outrage against NSO Group and its founders who were Israeli army veterans, is acknowledgement of the close ties between the firm and the Israeli state.
NSO is a private corporation in name only and is in fact an arm of Israel’s diplomacy, used by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Mossad to attract new friends in the international arena. Despite being blacklisted by the Biden administration in November 2021, the company still hopes to continue trading.
Unregulated Israeli spyware . . . a global threat.
My research, along with that of other reporters, has shown a clear connection between the sale of Israeli cyberweapons and Israel’s attempts to neuter any potential backlash to its illegal occupation.
From Rwanda to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to India, Israeli spyware and surveillance tech are used by countless democracies and dictatorships alike.
Beyond Pegasus, many other similar tools have been deployed by newer and lesser-known Israeli companies, though they’re just as destructive. The problem isn’t just Pegasus — it could close down tomorrow and the privacy-busting technology would transfer to any number of competitors — but the unquenchable desire by governments, police forces and intelligence services for the relatively inexpensive Israeli tech that powers it.
Perhaps the most revealing was the deep relationship between apartheid South Africa and Israel. It wasn’t just about arms trading, but an ideological alignment between two states that truly believed that they were fighting for their very existence.
In 1976, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin invited South African Prime Minister John Vorster, a Nazi sympathiser during the Second World War, to visit Israel. His tour included a stop at Yad Vashem, the country’s Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
Israel’s then President Reuven Rivlin (right) welcomes his Philippine counterpart Rodrigo Duterte at the presidential compound in Jerusalem on 4 September 2018. Image: MEE/AFP
When Vorster arrived in Israel, he was feted by Rabin at a state dinner. Rabin toasted “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence”. Both nations faced “foreign-inspired instability and recklessness”.
Israel and South Africa viewed themselves as under attack by foreign bodies committed to their destruction. A short time after Vorster’s visit, the South African government yearbook explained that both states were facing the same issue: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”
A love of ethnonationalism still fuels Israel today, along with a desire to export it. Some arms deals with nations, such as Bangladesh or the Philippines, are purely on military grounds and to make money.
Israel places barely any restrictions on what it sells, which pleases leaders who don’t want meddling in their actions. Pro-Israel lobbyists are increasingly working for repressive states, such as Bangladesh, to promote their supposed usefulness to the West.
Israel and the global far right But Israel’s affinity with Hungary, India and the global far right, a group that traditionally hates Jews, speaks volumes about the inspirational nature of the modern Israeli state. As Haaretz journalist Noa Landau recently wrote, while explaining why Netanyahu’s government defended the latest arguably antisemitic comments by Elon Musk about George Soros:
A Palestinian flag at the Auckland venue for author Antony Loewenstein’s address about his new book The Palestine Laboratory last night. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report
“The government’s mobilisation in the service of stoking antisemitism is not surprising. It is the fruit of a long and consistent process in which the Netanyahu government has been growing closer to extreme right-wing elements around the world, at the expense of Jewish communities it purports to represent.”
It’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on this undeniable reality. Israel, which claims to represent global Jewry, is encouraging an alignment between itself and a hyper-nationalist, bigoted and racist populism, regardless of the long-term consequences for the safety and security of Jews around the world.
Israel has thrived as an ethnonationalist state for so long because the vast bulk of the world grants it impunity. European nations have been key supporters of Israel, willing to overlook its occupation and abuse of Palestinians.
According to newly declassified documents from the files of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, between 1967 and 1990 it’s clear that West Germany was becoming more critical of Israel’s settlement project in Palestine, but the main concern was protecting its own financial interests in the region if a regional war broke out.
In a document written on 16 February 1975 to the deputy director of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Western Europe, Nissim Yaish, before Israel’s Foreign Minister Yigal Allon’s visit to West Germany, Yaish explained the thinking in his country’s diplomatic bureaucracy:
“There is unanimity that this time such a war will have a far-reaching impact on all its affairs internally and externally and that it could wreak a Holocaust on the German economy. Based on this attitude, West Germany is interested in rapid progress toward a [peace] agreement.”
Western silence But there has rarely been any serious interest in pursuing peace, or holding Israel to account for its blatantly illegal actions, because the economic imperative is too strong. Even today, when another Nakba against Palestinians is becoming more possible to imagine, there’s largely silence from Western elites.
Germany has banned public recognition of the 1948 Nakba and criminalised any solidarity with the Palestinian people. Germany is also keen to buy an Israeli missile defence system, confirming its priorities.
This is why Israeli apartheid and the Palestine laboratory are so hard to stop; countless nations want a piece of Israeli repression tech to surveil their own unwanted populations or election meddling support in Latin America or Africa.
Without a push for accountability, economic boycotts and regulation or banning Israeli spyware — the EU is flirting with the idea — Israel can feel comfortable that its position as a global leader in offensive weapons is secure.
This article was first published in the Middle East Eye.
Whenever I hold launch functions for any of my (4) books, I always donate to a real good cause the royalties I get from my publisher for book sales at the function. So it is that at the Linville Launch of my book CATCHING THE LINVILLE TRAIN, I will be giving the royalties to ARE …
PUT THIS DATE IN YOUR DIARY RIGHT NOW. THURSDAY 20 JULY NOON – LINVILLE HOTEL – LUNCH WITH EVERALD Send an email today to contact@thelinvillehotel.com.au to book your seats at the table. They will send you banking details. Cost is 50 dollars per person for a wonderful lunch at an historic hotel while you enjoy …
When Australian Hazem Hamouda was whisked from Cairo airport to the notorious Tora prison, his daughter had no idea where he was – or that she’d spend the next year trying to get him out
Hazem Hamouda will never forget the emptiness of Cairo airport on the day he was imprisoned by the Egyptian authorities in 2018.
The Brisbane father of six had arrived to his homeland to see his Australian-born daughter Lamisse, who was studying at the American University in Cairo. The duo planned to holiday with family. But as Hamouda stood at the customs counter trying to establish his identity, a plainclothes security officer appeared quietly at his side.
Ukrainian novelist who became a war crimes investigator following the Russian invasion, and fought to uncover the true stories of her compatriots’ experiences under occupation
Victoria Amelina, who was wounded in a Russian missile attack in Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine on 27 June and died, aged 37, of her injuries four days later, knew that being a writer made her a target for Russia. She was aware that the invading forces had lists of activists and intellectuals to eliminate, but she also understood her country’s history: in March 2022, summoning one of the darkest pages in Ukrainian literary history – the murder of a generation of Ukrainian writers during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, known as the “executed renaissance” – she wrote that “there is a real threat that Russians will successfully execute another generation of Ukrainian culture – this time by missiles and bombs”.
Victoria sought to protect and promote Ukrainian culture as the country came under attack: in 2021 she founded a literature festival in her husband Oleksandr’s home town, New York, in the Donetsk region. The town (whose unlikely name is thought to have been originally Neu Jork and to have come from 19th-century German settlers) was occupied by the Russian army in 2014 and has been on the frontline ever since.
Was there a time when our white ancestors lived in harmony with nature and respected women? How far back would we have to go to find such a time, if it ever existed at all? How did we lose respect for the natural world and for women? The answers to these questions opens the door to finding a way to change the course of history.
This post was originally published on Estuary Press.
Linville is in the Brisbane River Valley just 125 kilometres from my Aspley home in Brisbane if you travel via Caboolture and Kilcoy. It is where I started school 86 years ago and the place where my book CATCHING THE LINVILLE TRAIN begins a lively account of my journey through the world. I am travelling …
In the heritage of Indigenous Australians a GOONDEEN is ‘ a father figure; a very wise, smart and respected person, a clever fella who shares his life with others and cares for all. Let me tell you a story that began in 2016 when I accepted with humility an invitation to become GOONDEEN EVERALD. A …
I write books as a delightful way to relax as I enjoy trying to relate my life experiences in an entertaining way that my friends will enjoy. So it is that, in the six years since my 85th birthday, I have written and published 4 books and have just begun the fifth. May I suggest …
On 17 April 2023, ISHR sent its annual submission to the report of the UN Secretary-General on reprisals and intimidation against defenders engaging or seeking to engage with the UN and its human rights mechanisms. The submission presents a disturbing pattern of intimidation and reprisals in 23 countries.
ISHR’s annual submission to the report of the UN Secretary-General on reprisals demonstrates the need for the UN and States to do more to prevent and ensure accountability for intimidation and reprisals against human rights defenders and others cooperating or seeking to cooperate with the UN and its human rights mechanisms. ISHR’s submission outlines developments in the international human rights system, and documents a number of new cases, as well as follow-up on previously submitted cases.
“In order for the international human rights system to function to its fullest potential, human rights defenders must be able to share crucial information and perspectives, safely and unhindered. However, many defenders still face unacceptable risks and are unable to cooperate safely with the UN.” Madeleine Sinclair, New York Office Co-Director and Legal Counsel. “The vast majority of cases remain unresolved year after year. More must be done to ensure the efforts to document and address reprisals cases also include sustained and consistent follow up. Otherwise, the cost of carrying out reprisals remains too low, impunity reigns and perpetrators are further emboldened“.
The submission presents a disturbing pattern of intimidation and reprisals in 23 countries, with the addition this year of Algeria and France. Cases of reprisals featured in the submission range from States defaming and stigmatising defenders, to criminalising their work, but also to arbitrarily detaining, arresting and killing them.
In Israel, Palestinian defenders face ongoing intimidation and repression as reprisals for their cooperation with UN human rights mechanisms.
In Bahrain, the situation still shows no signs of improving, with human rights defenders continuing to be arbitrarily detained and denied timely and adequate medical treatment by the government.
In Algeria, Andorra, Cameroon and India defenders continue to be criminalised.
In China defenders are still facing online surveillance, harassment and enforced disappearance.
In Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela and Yemen many more defenders face arbitrary detention, ill-treatment and criminalisation.
Other cases of reprisals include threats, harassment, hate speech, surveillance, property damage, disbarment, death threats, travel bans, enforced disappearances, unjustified raids, dissolution of associations, judicial harassment, smear campaigns, forced deportations, confiscation of travel documents, red tagging, denial of healthcare and family visits as well as accusations of terrorism, among others. Other countries cited in the report include cases in the Andorra, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Burundi, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, France, The Maldives, Morocco, Nicaragua, The Philippines, Russia, and Thailand.
ISHR also submitted follow-up information on a large number of cases, demonstrating that incidents of reprisals and intimidation are very rarely, if ever, adequately resolved.
This year, ISHR is running again its #EndReprisals campaign. The campaign will raise the profile of 6 cases (all included in the submission) and seek to achieve a more sustained attention on the issue of reprisals and follow-up of the cases throughout the UN system. In particular, we want the UN Secretary General to include all the reprisal and intimidation cases in his upcoming report and UN member States to use the opportunity of the interactive dialogue at the Human Rights Council on the Secretary-General’s report in September, as well as Item 5 debates at all sessions, to raise specific cases and hold their peers accountable.
Some people on social media regularly accuse me of being a WOKE and they do not mean it as a compliment. So, I typed WOKE into Google recently and it instantly came up with this description. Woke is a name given to people who are – ‘AWAKE TO THE NEEDS OF OTHERS, WELL INFORMED, THOUGHTFUL, …
Men have controlled the world since time began and in our modern era there are far too many males who want a strong degree of control to continue forever. The cold hard facts of the matter are that they remain in charge of the domination stakes as women are still not paid equal money for …
Vast-scale human rights abuses are being committed in Ukraine, women’s rights have been trampled on in Afghanistan and LGBTQI+ people’s rights are under assault in Uganda, along with several other African countries. Military rule has been normalised in countries such as Mali, Myanmar and Sudan, and democracy undermined by autocratic leaders in El Salvador, India and Tunisia, among others. Even supposedly democratic states such as Australia and the UK are undermining the vital right to protest.
But civil society continues to strive to make a crucial difference to people’s lives. It’s the force behind a wave of breakthroughs in respecting abortion rights in Latin America, most recently in Colombia, and in making advances in LGBTQI+ rights in countries as diverse as Barbados, Mexico and Switzerland. Mass protests in response to the high cost of living have won concessions on economic policy in countries including Ecuador and Panama, while union organising has gained further momentum in holding big-brand companies such as Amazon and Starbucks to account. Progress on financing for the loss and damage caused by climate change came after extensive civil society advocacy. The events of the past year show that civil society – and the space for civil society to act – are needed more than ever.
Key findings
Civil society is playing a key role in responding to conflicts and humanitarian crises – and facing retaliation
Civil society is playing a vital role in conflict and crisis settings – including in conflicts in Ethiopia, Syria and Ukraine – providing essential services, helping and advocating for victims, monitoring human rights and collecting evidence of violations to hold those responsible to account. But for doing this, civil society is coming under attack.
Catastrophic global governance failures highlight the urgency of reform
Too often in the face of the conflicts and crises that have marked the world over the past year, platitudes are all international institutions have had to offer. Multilateral institutions have been left exposed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s time to take civil society’s proposals to make the United Nations more democratic seriously – starting with the appointment of a civil society champion.
People are mobilising in great numbers in response to economic shock – and exposing deeper problems in the process.
As it drove a surge in fuel and food prices, Russia’s war on Ukraine became a key driver of a global cost of living crisis. This triggered a mass wave of protests in at least 133 countries – from Argentina to Indonesia and from Ghana to Kazakhstan – demanding economic justice. Civil society is putting forward progressive economic ideas, connecting with other struggles for rights, including for climate, gender, racial and social justice.
The right to protest is under attack – even in longstanding democracies
Many states, unwilling or unable to concede the deeper demands of protests have responded with violence, including in Iran, Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka. The right to protest is under attack all over the world, including when people are mobilising to seek economic justice, democracy, human rights and environmental action. Civil society groups are striving to defend protest rights.
Democracy is being eroded in multiple ways – including from within by elected leaders
Economic strife and insecurity are providing fertile ground for the emergence of authoritarian leaders. In more democratic contexts, there are distinct trends of a further embrace of far-right extremism, and of the rejection of incumbency. In volatile conditions, civil society is working to resist regression and keep making the case for inclusive, pluralist and participatory democracy.
Disinformation is skewing public discourse, undermining democracy and fuelling hate
Disinformation is being mobilised, particularly in conflicts and during elections, to sow polarisation, normalise extremism and attack rights. Powerful authoritarian states and far-right groups are key sources, and social media companies are doing nothing to challenge a problem that’s good for their business model. Civil society needs to forge a joined-up, multifaceted global effort to counter disinformation.
Movements for women’s and LGBTQI+ rights are making gains against the odds
In the face of difficult odds, civil society continues to drive progress on women’s and LGBTQI+ rights. But breakthroughs have made civil society the target of a ferocious backlash. Civil society is working to resist attempts to reverse gains and build public support to ensure that legal changes are backed by shifts in attitudes.
Civil society is the major force behind the push for climate action
Civil society continues to be the force sounding the alarm on the triple threat of climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss. Civil society is urging action using every tactic available, from street protest and direct action to litigation and advocacy in national and global arenas. But the power of the fossil fuel lobby remains undimmed and restrictions on climate protests are burgeoning. Civil society is striving to find new ways to communicate the urgent need for action.
Civil society is reinventing itself to adapt to a changing world
In the context of pressures on civic space and huge global challenges, civil society is growing, diversifying and widening its repertoire of tactics. Drawing on its special strengths of diversity, adaptability and creativity, civil society continues to evolve. Much of civil society’s radical energy is coming from small, informal groups, often formed and led by women, young people and Indigenous people. There is a need to support and nurture these..
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