The encampments have gone. Tall metal riot fences ring USC. Underpaid security hovers nervously at metal detectors. They paw through your bag when you enter, past the receipts, gum, phone, AirPods, and the overdue library book you never even opened. They’re searching for something. A tent? A Palestinian flag? A keffiyeh? A signed declaration of your commitment against genocide? What they are searching for is unclear, and it’s apparent they themselves don’t even know. The result is not the point; the display is. Like most college campuses, USC is invested in the performative, the circus act in all its summer and acrobatics and glory, something to distract us, for the moment, from the mundanity of reality. The mundanity that college campuses are really just another business: meaningless, archaic, and invested only in its commodification and profit.
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China has considerable appeal in the Pacific as it offers market and donation benefits that are unencumbered by the regulatory millstones of Western countries, which are also offering deals like Australia’s “Step Up” initiative and development aid, and the US “Pacific Partnership Strategy” on diplomatic engagement and security. These projects have bigger geopolitical agendas than aid projects and are mainly concerned with countering China and undermining Pacific Island autonomy by setting up a donor-recipient dynamic.
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By Friday, at least 110,000 Palestinians had been forced to flee Rafah, which is now under bombardment. Many of them have already been displaced two or three times. But all of them know nowhere is safe in Gaza now. There’s no refuge, no place free of bombs and tank shellings and sniper fire, no tent camp or temporary shelter with a reliable source of water or working toilets or beds or food, no mosque to pray in as death hovers all around.
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The student-led movement against the genocide in Gaza that is sweeping college campuses across the United States, has made “divestment” from Israel central to its demands. It’s what the “D” in BDS stands for—Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions—a Palestinian-led international and nonviolent means of holding Israel accountable for decades of colonization, occupation, and war.
Now, just as apartheid South Africa lost global prestige after U.S. university students successfully forced many universities to financially divest from the then-pariah state, there appears to be some momentum toward a parallel impact on Israel. The administration of the prestigious Brown University is the latest to have agreed to explore divestment from Israel in response to student demands.
Divestment can mean different things depending on the nature of the institution’s financial ties. But the idea behind it is simple: It means removing all financial ties, such as withdrawing investments, and therefore ending direct complicity in criminal and unjust actions. American institutions of higher learning are economic powerhouses with massive endowments, and ultimately can be described as “big businesses.” Many of them use their funds to directly or indirectly invest in Israel. Harvard University, for example, was found in 2020 to have invested nearly $200 million of its $40 billion endowment in companies with ties to Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
While the latest wave of student-led encampments is new in its scope, motivated especially by the horrors of Israel’s latest wave of mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza, the student demands for divestment are not new. They are built on a decades-long foundation for protest constructed by an international solidarity movement in support of Palestinian liberation.
The BDS movement, launched by Palestinian unions and other civil society institutions in 2005, explains on its website that “Israel is only able to maintain its oppressive regime over the Palestinian people and avoid accountability for its genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the besieged and occupied Gaza Strip because of international state, corporate and institutional complicity.”
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), with a long history of organized and coordinated boycott and divestment campaigns, has crafted helpful guidelines on how to divest, and has offered context for such efforts: “[W]e recognize that the Israeli occupation is not the only illegal occupation in the world, although it is the longest and deadliest one.” Moreover, according to AFSC, “It is also the only place in the world from which a call was issued by the occupied people to the international community to use economic activism tools such as boycott and divestment to help end the occupation.”
Columbia University in New York, an epicenter of the current student-led campus actions, has a history of using divestment as a tool of protest that far predates the encampment launched by students on April 17. Although many media outlets cite Columbia’s 1968 sit-ins against the Vietnam War as a parallel, Omar Barghouti, Tanaquil Jones, and Barbara Ransby wrote in The Guardian, that the university’s 1985 anti-apartheid student sit-ins are even more relevant to today’s protest. The Coalition for a Free South Africa successfully pushed Columbia University to divest from apartheid South Africa. Nearly three decades later, a campaign called Columbia Prison Divest also forced the university to pull investments from for-profit prison companies.
And, four years ago, Columbia’s undergraduate school, called Columbia College, passed a historic student vote calling for divestment from Israel. The list of campus divestment-related victories specific to Israel is surprisingly long. Nearly a decade ago, in 2015, the Associated Press called student-led divestment demands against Israel “increasingly commonplace on many American college campuses.”
What’s different today is that the pace of Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians has significantly ramped up and is a bona fide genocide-in-progress, so much so that Israeli officials fear the International Criminal Court could issue arrest warrants against them. The official figures of Israel’s victims in Gaza since last October number more than 34,000, with more than 40 percent of those being children. Israel has decimated so much of Gaza that authorities are unable to keep track of the dead, meaning the death toll is likely even higher.
Young people, including Jewish students, are deeply moved by Israel’s savagery and the resulting Palestinian suffering. They are closely monitoring the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza on social media, forming digital ties with Palestinians, and grieving over the deaths of Gaza’s children. It’s only natural that they are pouring their rage toward the institutions they have the most proximity to and power over: The administrations of the schools where they pay exorbitant fees to attend, and that have invested in or partnered with Israel.
Until the tide fully turns against Israel for being an oppressive apartheid state, educational institutions will embrace it as a matter of pride. Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Central Florida, and University of Michigan are examples of schools that tout their collaborations with Israeli institutions. And there are Israeli efforts specifically aimed at legitimizing the colonial state at U.S. universities through donations of “Israel bonds.”
Whether or not calls for divestment by the current student-led movement and the long-standing BDS movement succeed or have a concrete result, the symbolic impact of labeling Israel’s actions as immoral can have a ripple effect, potentially discouraging schools from taking on such a controversial affiliation. The fact that students at Brown University, Northwestern University, and the University of Minnesota have successfully forced their schools’ administrations to vote on divesting from Israel is a major step toward delegitimizing Israel. Smaller colleges such as the Seattle-based Evergreen State College are also following suit.
Detractors of divestment say the efforts will have little effect on Israel. Others say they are antisemitic even though the initiatives are aimed at the Israeli state and institutions complicit in apartheid and genocide, not against Jewish individuals. Indeed, the current student movements in solidarity with Palestinians have the support and participation of many justice-seeking Jewish groups and individuals.
Minnesota’s congressional representative Ilhan Omar put it best in 2019 when the House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning the BDS movement. She said, “We should condemn in the strongest terms violence that perpetuates the occupation, whether it is perpetuated by Israel, Hamas or individuals… But if we are going to condemn violent means of resisting the occupation, we cannot also condemn nonviolent means.”
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
In November of last year, the Tonawanda Seneca Nation sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) over its illegal approval of a wastewater disposal pipeline that would service STAMP. According to the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, the USFWS approved the Genesee County Economic Development Center’s (GCEDC) construction of the 9.5-mile pipeline without conducting a sufficient environmental review and without a government-to-government consultation with the Nation—in direct violation of their sovereign rights.
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Photo: Student protest against BlackRock Vice Chairman and then Pitzer Trustee Robert Fairbairn, on the wall of a Pitzer College dorm in Fall 2019. | Donnie Denome – The Student Life.
On April 1, the administration of Pitzer College in Claremont, California, outside of Los Angeles, announced that it would be suspending its student exchange program with the University of Haifa in Israel. The following day, the Dean of Faculty’s Office claimed in a statement that the decision to suspend the program did not “reflect an academic boycott,” but “lack of enrollments for at least five years, exchange imbalance, or curricular overlap.” The statement could have passed for a belated April Fool’s Day joke, seeing as how students and faculty at Pitzer and other schools belonging to the consortium of Claremont Colleges had been demanding their institutions sever ties with the Israeli economy and academia due to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, which has killed at least 34,488 Palestinians, including 14,500 children and 8,400 women, according to Al Jazeera at the time of this writing.
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Had she not been murdered in Rafah protecting Palestinian homes from demolition, Rachel Corrie could have become the mother of today’s protesters on US campuses. They’re certainly the inheritors of her fierce moral spirit and unflinching courage…
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California Highway Patrol riot squads firing “rubber” bullets and tear gas at antiwar students on the campus of UCLA.
America, why are your libraries full of tears?
– Allen Ginsburg, “America”
+ As America’s liberal elites declare open warfare on their own kids, it’s easy to see why they’ve shown no empathy at all for the murdered, maimed and orphaned children of Gaza. Back-of-the-head shots to 8-year-olds seem like a legitimate thing to protest in about the most vociferous way possible…But, as Dylan once sang, maybe I’m too sensitive or else I’m getting soft.
+ Here’s the political background to the police raids against antiwar students on campuses across the country this week, violent crackdowns that have Joe Biden’s fingerprints all over them: On Tuesday, Biden demonized the protesters as hate groups. On the same day 22 Democratic House members called for the students at Columbia to be cleared from the campus, this was followed by Chuck Schumer speaking on the floor of the Senate denouncing the occupation of Hind Hall as an act of terrorism. Then the NYPD did its vicious nightwork at Columbia and CCNY. On Wednesday morning, the Biden White House compared these brave students–from Columbia to UCLA, Indiana to Texas–to the white power tiki torch thugs at Charlottesville. On Thursday, Biden gave a speech that would have condemned the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement, women’s movement, Native American Rights movement, anti-Vietnam War movement, Stonewall, anti-apartheid movement, BLM and the labor movement he claims to venerate (not to mention the Boston Tea Party) as outside the American tradition of free speech. Biden is the author of the most repressive crime laws in the history of a nation whose statutes are full of repressive crime laws. He hasn’t changed. In fact, he’s gotten worse as his brain demyelinates and his grip on power becomes more and more tenuous.
+ In contrast to Biden’s reactionary blandishments of the antiwar movement, here are the words of the most successful progressive leader in the US today, Shawn Fain, head of the UAW:
The UAW will never support the mass arrest or intimidation of those exercising their right to protest, strike, or speak out against injustice. Our union has been calling for a ceasefire for six months. This war is wrong, and this response against students and academic workers, many of them UAW members, is wrong. We call on the powers that be to release the students and employees who have been arrested, and if you can’t take the outcry, stop supporting the war.
+ Perhaps the UAW will now retract its premature endorsement of Biden? Unlikely, of course. The endorsement itself probably doesn’t matter much. Many of the UAW’s rank-and-file will still vote for Trump. The campaign money might. The endorsement lends Fain’s very clear statement even more weight. Fain’s statement is not going to change Biden’s mind. He’s encased himself in 50 years of pro-Israeli political concrete. But it helps to undermine the disgusting narrative put out by the White House and top Democrats that the students are naive dupes of Hamas, justifying these brutal crackdowns.
+ The “naive” students at Columbia understand the historical context of their movement and the previous movements on their campus better than any of the administrators seeking to evict, suspend, expel & imprison them. It is why, despite the police raids, expulsions and arrests, they will win and their tormentors fall in disgrace.
+ Columbia University has an endowment of $13.6 billion and still charges students $60-70,000 a year to attend what has become an academic panopticon and debt trap, where every political statement is monitored, every threat to the ever-swelling endowment punished.
+ Doesn’t the White House have anyone who speaks Arabic on staff? Perhaps they didn’t hire any–that would be a Biden thing to do. Or perhaps they’ve all quit. Who could blame them, hearing the administration equate “intifada” with hate speech? “Intifada” means “shaking off,” as in a protest or uprising, the kind of public action allegedly protected by the Constitution. In Arabic, the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war protests, the women’s movement, the OWS protests, and the BLM protests were all called “intifadas,” as was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.This Intifada will likely spell the end of the Biden presidency without a single stone being thrown.
+ The Biden administration is not only incapable (more likely unwilling) of practicing peace-seeking diplomacy in Gaza or Ukraine, but here at home, as riot police batter unarmed students from coast to coast, in raids the White House’s own belligerent and bigoted statements instigated and justified. It’s a dereliction of the duties of his office and should be as impeachable an offense as any malfeasance Trump engaged in.
+ In 1970, Richard Nixon famously made a trip to the Lincoln Memorial to actually talk with anti-war protesters for more than two hours. Biden sneers at them, encourages the liberal press to smear them and university presidents to send in riot squads to clear them off campus…
+ Columbia student organizer Jon Ben-Menachem: “Joe Biden should immediately stop making statements which manufacture consent for threats to the physical safety of American students.”
+ One of the Columbia trustees that Baroness Shafik “consulted” with before “inviting” the NYPD Riot Squad to invade campus, break into Hind Hall and arrest the students in her care was Jeh Johnson, Obama’s former director of Homeland Security who now sits on the board of Lockheed. Johnson once claimed that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
+ For nearly two days, the NYPD covered up the fact that one of their officers had fired a gun inside Hind Hall, while they were arresting students. Ultimately, the shooting was only revealed by the New York City DA’s office. If you call in the NYPD, you can pretty much guarantee there will be bang-bang…Is there any doubt now that the NYPD raid did more damage to the buildings at Columbia than the students? The people who invited these cops on their campus should never be guardians of students again.
+ Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich: “We must obliterate Rafah, Deir al-Balah, and Nuseirat. The memory of the Amalekites must be erased. No partial destruction will suffice; only absolute and complete devastation.” While chastizing college students for calling their campaign an “intifada,” Biden is shipping Israel the weapons to carry out Smotrich’s putsch into Rafah…
+ Yousef Munayyer: “No one asks how Palestinian students are supposed to “feel safe” at institutions who invest in and profit off of the murder of their relatives.”
+ Prem Thakker: “The dilemma for American college students is that their tax and tuition dollars are helping fund a plausible genocide; if they protest that fact, their tax and tuition dollars are then used to beat and arrest them & their teachers.”
+ Daniela Gabor: “Minouche Shafik wrote a 2021 book – ‘What We Owe Each )ther’ – where she proposes a reset of the social contract to improve intergenerational fairness. Then she went to Columbia and brought a notoriously violent police force into that social contract.”
+ John Fetterman, the oafish senator from Pennsylvania, went from being a quirky political clown to Pennywise, the clown from Stephen King’s “It”: “The protesters at Columbia demonstrated that there are two factions of the protesters–there’s the pro-Hamas and then there’s the really pro-Hamas.”
+ The great jazz pianist Vijay Iyer: “Gen Z has agitated for action on gun control, climate change, reproductive justice, trans rights, voting rights, racial justice, immigrant rights, reducing police violence, and stopping genocide. Elders have failed them at literally every turn.”
+ Judith Butler: “If calling for an end of genocide is understood as making a Jewish student feel unsafe, then the safety of the situation has been oddly co-opted by that particular Jewish student. Palestinians are the ones in need of safety [from genocide].”
+ At Dartmouth, the police threw to the ground Professor Annelise Orleck, the 65-year-old head of the university’s Jewish Studies program.
+ Raphael Orleck on the bodyslamming arrest of the chair of Dartmouth’s Jewish Studies program, Annelise Orleck: “That’s my fucking mom—-she’s okay now and bailing out the students who got arrested. I’m so proud.” Orleck has been banned from the Dartmouth campus, where she’s taught for 34 years, for the next six months for trying to protect her students from NH riot police. Orleck has been banned from the Dartmouth campus, where she’s taught for 34 years, for the next six months for trying to protect her students from riot police.
+ The pro-Israel fanatics who attacked UCLA students Tuesday night with clubs and bottle rockets, as campus security cowered inside a building like deputies of the Ulvade police force, shouted out it’s time for a “Second Nakba!” Don’t wait for Biden or CNN to condemn this eliminationist rhetoric and violence.
+ Around 3:30 on Weds., morning, the pro-Israel mobs attacked four student journalists for the Daily Bruin on the campus of UCLA. The gang surrounded the Bruin reporters, including editor Catherine Hamilton, sprayed them with mace, pointed laser lights at their faces and verbally harassed them. Hamilton said she was punched repeatedly in the chest and upper abdomen as she tried to break free. Another student journalist was shoved to the ground, beaten and repeatedly kicked. “We expected to be harassed by counter-protestors,” Hamilton said. “I truly didn’t expect to be directly attacked.”
+ Momma, we’ve found the “outside agitators”… The Daily Beast reports that before the violent attack on anti-war demonstrators at UCLA, Jessica Seinfeld (wife of the comedian) and Bill Ackman (billionaire husband of the plagiarist Neri Oxman) gave thousands of dollars for a pro-Israel demonstration on campus.
+ UCLA professor Danielle Carr: “It’s hard to overstate the degree of outrage & betrayal on behalf of all the faculty now, especially after what happened last night, after about 200 very violent pro-Israel protesters descended on the camp and were shooting fireworks and acting real violent. And it took the university several hours to respond and secure the students’ safety. The irony that in the name of student safety the encampment will be facing a militarised police invasion tonight, probably including tear gas, it’s just hard to say fully how disgusted many of the faculty are finding this.”
+ As Professor Carr predicted, the day after the pro-Israel mob assaulted UCLA students and faculty, the California Highway Patrol arrived on campus, not to protect the students from “outside” assailants, but to open fire on them with tear gas and rubber bullets…
+ The Los Angeles Public Defenders’ Union called the UCLA arrests “shameful and a complete failure of leadership”. President Garrett Miller said they are ready to “represent every person facing charges.”
+ There’s something happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Joe…?
Biden: Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It is against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations, none of this is a peaceful protest. pic.twitter.com/0Nkttggsy4
+ From Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”:
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”
+ Biden on the George Floyd protests: “We will not allow any President to quiet our voice. We won’t let those who see this as an opportunity to sow chaos throw up a smokescreen to distract us from the very real and legitimate grievances at the heart of these protests.” But that was then under Him, this is now under Me…
+ Contrary to Biden’s deplorable speech denouncing the student anti-war demonstrations as violent, a new report by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) found that 99% of campus protests over Palestine at US colleges have been peaceful.
+ Biden received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War but, like Trump, never took part in the student movement to end the genocidal war in Southeast Asia. He was happy for others–poor whites, Hispanics and Blacks–to serve, kill and die in his place. No surprise he condemns the students protesting to end his wars.
+ In his memoir, Promises to Keep, Biden admitted he “never saw the war as a great moral issue.” While enjoying his draft deferment to attend Syracuse University, he described being irritated by the anti-war protests on campus. His irritation rose to fury after SDS occupied the chancellor’s office and hung banners out the window of the Administration Building. “They were taking over the building,” Biden wrote, “and we looked up and said, ‘Look at those assholes.’ That’s how far apart from the antiwar movement I was.”
+ The bike lock the NYPD held up as proof that “outside agitators” were behind the occupation of Hind Hall is available for sale on campus via Columbia’s Public Safety department under their “Crime Prevention Discount Bike, Locker and Laptop Lock Program”.
+ Chris by Bike: “Cops don’t know this is a bike lock because they’ve never investigated a bike theft in their lives.”
+ Ralph Nader: “The enforcer president of Columbia University— Minouche Shafik—is one of the wealthiest people in America. As president, she makes over $2000 an hour every weekday. In three days, she makes more than many blue-collar workers at Columbia make in a year.”
+ Professor Sami Schalk, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “At the hospital, the nurse took photos ‘in case you want to file a report.’ Report to whom? The very people who strangled me at work in broad daylight with cameras rolling? Those people?”
+ During a week of ever-escalating assaults on students and faculty, Jill Biden is hosting the first ever “Teachers of the Year” State Dinner at the White House. Some of the best won’t be there because they’re in jail, in the hospital or trying to arrange bail for their incarcerated pupils…
+ Ari Fleischer was better at his job and he was one of the worst hired liars I’ve ever seen. To compare the racist violent mob at Charlottesville to students on campuses large and small across the US is just repulsive at a personal level and self-destructive on a political one.
The evil that would have to be in your heart to compare campus protests against a US supported mass murder to white supremacists Charlottesville. Jeane Pierre underscores the false connection to antisemitism again at the end of her comments sanctioning violence against students pic.twitter.com/9CplA0MLIy
+ On May 6th, the Pulitzer Prizes are scheduled to be announced at Columbia University. On Wednesday., night student journalists at Columbia, many of them reporting from inside Pulitzer Hall, were threatened with arrest if they moved across their own campus to report on a police raid targeting their fellow students and faculty. They won’t win any Pulitzers, but their reporting has been far more vivid, informative and less biased than the elite media the administration and NYPD allowed on university grounds.
+ One of the lies the Adams administration used to justify the paramilitary raids on Columbia was that “a wife of a known terrorist” was inside Hind Hall with the protesters. NYC media ran with this obvious lie. This morning Deputy Police Commissioner Rebecca Weiner said the woman wasn’t in Hind Hall, wasn’t part of the protests, but had been seen on campus last week and that they “have no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing on her part.”
+ The woman Adams slanderously smeared was Nahla al-Arian wife of Sami-al Arian, the former professor of computer engineering at South Florida (and CounterPunch contributor), who was never convicted of a crime by a jury but pled to one count after a mistrial, then was wrongly held under house arrest for refusing to testify in a federal case…the charges were later dismissed. Adams falsely Sami al-Arian was “arrested for and convicted for terrorism on a federal level” and implied that Nahla, a retired elementary school teacher, had somehow helped to train the students in civil disobedience. In fact, she was in NYC with her two daughters Laila and Lama, both journalists, stopped by the encampment for about 20 minutes and, according to her daughter Lama, had some hummus and left because she was tired. Nahla called the Columbia students “beautiful and busy.”
+ “The whole thing is a distraction because they are very scared that the young Americans are aware for the first time of what’s going on in Palestine,” Nahla Al-Arian said. “They are the ones who influenced me. They are the ones who gave me hope that at last the Palestinian people can get some justice. I sat and I felt happy to see those students fighting for justice for the oppressed people in Palestine.”
+ According to Lama, one of the best young documentary filmmakers around, her mother found out this week that more than 200 of her relatives have been killed in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
+ Anyone who wants to know more about the bogus case against Sami Al-Arianand the decades-long harassment of his family should watch the documentary, The USA v. Al-Arian, which shows how in the post-9/11 mass hysteria the Patriot Act was used against a university professor for merely knowing someone who was a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad years earlier.
+ Two days after the raid, Adams was still being pushed to name how many “outside agitators” had been arrested by the NYPD. Adams had no answers, because there weren’t any and shrugged off the questions, saying: “I don’t think that matters…One professor poisoning a classroom of students is just as bad as 50.”
+ A year ago, NYC Mayor Eric Adams vowed to bring what he’s learned from Israeli Police to the NYPD. That rare promise kept…
+ Adams justifying the police raids: “These are our children and we can’t allow them to be radicalized.” Adams and the Democrats have done more damage to academic freedom than Ron DeSantis and Christopher Rufo.
+ In Eric Adams, the people of NYC must endure the hybridization of the lies of a politician with the lies of an NYPD cop.
+ The real “outside agitators” on the campuses of Columbia, NYU, and CCNY were the police themselves. (For example, less than half of all NYPD officers live in NYC and only 25% of LAPD officers live in Los Angeles.)
+ Dana Bash’s first husband, Jeremy Bash, was chief of staff of the CIA (2009-2011) and later chief of staff of the Pentagon, under Obama. Daughter of an ABCNews producer, she is a creature of DC.Raised there. Went to GW, then right to work for CNN, which she’s never left.
+ Remember months ago, when Bash scolded Rep. Pramila Jayapal for having the audacity to voice her concern about 15,000 (at that time) Palestinians killed by Israel by saying: “You don’t see Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women.” (They do, as the State Department’s Country Report on Israel recently confirmed.) The IDF doesn’t even have to vet Bash’s stories, they come out fully synched with the Israeli theme of the day.
+ On the very day the Biden administration condemned Russia’s use of choking gas in Ukraine, it applauded police raids on campuses across the US where riot cops drenched non-violent students in tear gas who were protesting a genocidal war in Gaza, where Israel has repeatedly used, in violation of international law, US-made white phosphorous munitions.
+ Someone in the Biden campaign should take notice of this, but apparently they’ve written off anyone under 30 (along with anyone who has a conscience.)
+ Six faculty members from Washington University in Missouri — four of whom were arrested at Saturday’s protest — are not only banned from campus, but are forbidden from speaking with Wash U staff and students even in off-campus settings.
+ The windbags who bellow the most bombastically about the sanctity of the Constitution are almost always shown to know almost nothing about it. I give you the senator from Tennessee…
+ Melanie Newport: “Hearing that the students in our UConn campus jail are not being fed. Also we have a campus jail.”
+ How will they divide the spoils?Now, on to the University of Chicago!
+ Columbia Encampment response to the use of police force and the refusal of divestment: “If the University does not come forward with real, concrete proposals that address our demands, we will have no choice but to escalate the intensity of protest on campus.”
+ Marisa Kabas: “For years conservatives derided college kids as liberal snowflakes… Now that their power is clear, universities are trying to shut them down, and cops are beating the shit out of them. You don’t beat the shit out of snowflakes.”
+ If a video emerged of Joe Biden sticking a lit cherry bomb up Commander the German Shepherd’s ass, Aaron Rupar would find some way to defend it and still excoriate the disgusting Kristi Noem for shooting the family puppy Cricket in a South Dakota gravel pit…
+ Columbia doctoral candidate Rachel H H: “Insane that Columbia has locked down campus to everyone. No research, no books, no labs. No libraries, no medical services appointments, no studio or practice space. No lectures, no concerts. Just the pure administrative university and its disciplinary power.”
+ In reply to a question from FoxNews about the campus protests,White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and the Department of Education will be involved in the investigations, suggesting that the Biden administration may be pursuing federal “hate crime” charges against student protestors
+ Before you take out that student loan, which you’ll be paying off until you get that first social security check when you’re 85, you might consider whether the school you choose allows snipers on campus…
+ Imagine the reaction from the White House, Congress and the US media if Putin had used these violent police tactics to suppress anti-Ukraine war protests on campuses in Russia.
+ Is there any doubt that USAID would be funding these student protests if they were happening in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Brazil, Russia, Belarus, South Africa, Syria, Iran, China, North Korea, Colombia, Chile…?Russia, Belarus, South Africa, Syria, Iran, China, North Korea, Colombia, Chile…?
+ The country has lost its friggin’ mind…
+ According to a database compiled by the Appeal, nearly 2,000 people have been arrested at 72 campus protests this month. The fate of many of the students, some of whom face absurd charges like “hate crimes against law enforcement,” is in the hands of local prosecutors.
+ Move over NYC firefighters who raised the US flag over the still-smoking ruins of the World Trade Towers and your fallen comrades, you’ve been replaced by heroic NYPD riot cops beating up unarmed students to the soundtrack of Woody Friggin’ Guthrie…
+ More embarrassing than the US triumphalism after the invasion of Grenada…
+ Judith “Free Speech” Miller should be hiding her face for the rest of her life and afterlife…
+ This one’s for you, Rachel: The Evergreen State College has agreed to“divestment from companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian Territories.”.
+ Despite the police crackdowns (or perhaps as a solidarity response to them), the Palestinian solidarity & anti-war student actions have now spread to at least 154 college campuses in the US over the past two weeks…
+++
+ A new study in Nature: “Using an empirical approach… the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices.”
+ Temperatures every month between July and December of 2023 beat the prior record by at least 0.3C. And September shattered the previous record by 0.5C.
+ A UN labor agency report warns of the rising threat of excess heat, and climate change on the world’s workers. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that over 2.4 billion workers — more than 70% of the global workforce — are likely to face excessive heat as part of their jobs at some point, according to the most recent figures available, from 2020. That’s up from over 65% in 2000.
+ The two families (Ferrero and Mars) who own the biggest chocolate corporations have more wealth than the combined GDP of the two countries (Ghana and Ivory Coast), which supply the most cocoa beans.
+ In the last ten, severe storm outages increased by 74% compared with the prior decade. High winds, rains, winter storms, tornadoes and hurricanes, accounted for 80% of all power interruptions over the last 20 years.
+ In China, EV sales have quadrupled in four years. Chinese EVs now account for about two-thirds of all global EV sales.
+ Sixty corporations are responsible for half of the world’s plastic pollution, led by Phillip Morris, Danone, Nestlé, Pepsico and Coca-Cola.
+ Almost half of China’s major cities are sinking because of water extraction and the increasing weight of their rapid expansion. One in six are subsiding by more than 10mm per year.
+ Pollution levels near freeways are 3 to 4 times higher than neighborhoods farther away, leading to an increased risk of respiratory, cardiovascular and reproductive health problems. The effects of this pollution get worse as the traffic volume increases.
+ This has the flavor of a BP ad after Deepwater Horizon…The US is producing more oil (13 million barrels on average every day in 2023) and exporting more LNG than at any time in history.
+ Last year was by far the most destructive wildfire season on record in Canada. But the total burn area so far in 2024 is 20 times what it was by this time lie 2023.
+ Ten years after the Flint water crisis became public and 7 years after the city was ordered to replace the lead service it still hasn’t done so.
+ Florida’s coral reefs have experienced a 90 percent decline in the past 40 years, largely due to warming oceans.
+ The recent storms that flooded Dubai were made 40% more intense by climate change.
+ Taxing big fossil fuel firms could raise $900 billion for climate finance by 2030.
+ The rate of primary forest loss in Indonesia soared by 27% last year according to a World Resources Institute analysis of deforestation data.
+ According to Consumer Reports, climate change will cost a typical child born in 2024 at least around $500,000 over their lifetime—and possibly as much as $1 million—through a combination of cost-of-living increases and reduced earnings.
+ Since 1976, more than 4 billion solar panels have been manufactured worldwide and the cost per panel has declined by 96 percent.
+ US emissions declined by 3% last year, almost all of it in the power generation sector, as emissions continued to climb in the transportation, industrial and agricultural sectors.
+ Mashable: “The last time CO2 levels were as high as today, ocean waters drowned the lands where metropolises like Houston, Miami, and New York City now exist.”
+ A new report from the International Energy Agency forecasts that by 2030 1 in 3 cars in China is expected to be electric, while only 1 in 5 in USA/Europe.
+ Our friends at the Alliance for the Wild Rockies are running this ad on the bison slaughter outside Yellowstone, which is really pissing off all the right people. Pass it around to help them piss off more…
+++
+ Corrections officers in NY’s Broome County Jail assure pretrial detainees will be paid for their labor. However once assigned a job, they receive no compensation and are forced to work under threat of disciplinary sanctions and solitary confinement.
+ NYC’s attorneys, who are required to report all settlements and judgments against the NYPD, failed to report $1.2 billion in payouts over a 10-year period–about half of the total payouts during that period.
+ Tough on crime, anti-bail reform DA Sandra Doorley got caught speeding (55 in a 35 mph zone), refused to pull over, called the police chief, and then berated the patrol officer.
Doorley: “Sorry, I’m the DA. I was going 55 coming home from work.”
Cop: “Fifty-five in a 35.”
Doorley: “I don’t really care.”
Then Doorley calls the police on her cell, demanding: “Can you please tell him to leave me alone?”
Then she handed the phone to the officer and went back into her garage to the door of the house, saying, dismissively: “This is ridiculous. Just go away.”
The cop orders her not to go into the house several times.
Cop: “Ma’am, come outside, you can’t just go inside, this is a traffic stop.”
Doorley: “Listen, I know the law better than you. Would you just leave? Would you just leave me alone?”
+ At least 94 people died after they were given sedatives and restrained by police from 2012 through 2021, according to findings by the AP in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS) and the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism. That’s nearly 10% of the more than 1,000 deaths identified during the investigation of people subdued by police in ways that are not supposed to be fatal. About half of the 94 who died were Black. Behind the racial disparity is a disputed medical condition called excited delirium, which fueled the rise of sedation outside hospitals. Critics say its purported symptoms, including “superhuman strength” and high pain tolerance, play into racist stereotypes about Black people and lead to biased decisions about who needs sedation.
+ The Miami mother of a mentally ill son who was fatally shot by a cop is jailed simply for sharing news stories about the cop, without comment, on Facebook.
+ Since 1991, homicide rates have fallen in New York City by 86% and in Los Angeles by 73%.
+ The last growth industry in America: “Florida is charging formerly incarcerated people $50 a day even if they’re no longer in prison. The “pay to stay” fee is based on the length of the original sentence, so even when they’re released they must keep paying for a prison bed they’re not using.”
+++
H5N1 virus. CDC/ Courtesy of Cynthia Goldsmith; Jacqueline Katz; Sherif R. Zaki.
+ There are reports out of Ranchi, India of 8 human H5N1 cases: 6 poultry farm workers & 2 doctors (which is of particular concern if accurate as canaries of H2H spread)
+ CDC found one virus from a cow with a marker known to be associated with reduced susceptibility to neuraminidase inhibitors (a change at NA-T438I).
+ RNA analysis shows that bird flu has been spreading in US cattle since December. The USDA didn’t make an announcement until March. In April USDA shared only partial data, making it hard to track the virus’s spread. (Imagine the outrage if the Chinese did this. Well, you don’t have to imagine.)
+ One in five milk samples in the US has shown genetic traces of bird flu. The question is why aren’t we testing cattle herds?
+ Out of 33 dairy farms in 8 U.S. states, only 23 people have been tested for highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 by states–less than 1 person per farm.
+ Rick Bright, virologist: Seeing a mutation that confers resistance to flu antivirals is a huge concern actually. If this were to spread, it could render flu drugs in stockpiles less effective. There are not many alternatives in abundant supply…This is not something to minimize; something to watch very closely.
+ Why aren’t American chickens vaccinated? Not only has an H5N1 vaccine always been available for day-old chicks, but it’s regularly updated for circulating variants.The US is the only major country that doesn’t have mandatory #H5N1 vaccines for poultry, even though an H5N1 vaccine for day-old chicks has been widely available and regularly updated for newly circulating variants.
+++
+ More than three years into the Biden administration, the FDA is finally poised to ease restrictions on marijuana. But it turns out to be another Bidenian half-measure, since, as our friend Sanho Tree, a drug policy expert at IPS, pointed out, “dropping marijuana down to Schedule III still allows criminalization of people using it without a prescription.”
+ Teenage suicide rates in the US are much higher on school days and in school months, and are lowest in July when most schools are out.
+ There are now 2.4 million more female than male undergraduates on U.S. campuses (8.9 million women compared to 6.5 million men).
+ The fertility rate in the US dropped to its lowest level in nearly a century at 1.6–.5 points below the replacement rate. Immigration is the only thing propping up the US economy.
+ Pro Publica: “Cigna tracks every minute that its staff doctors spend deciding whether to pay for health care. Dr. Debby Day said her bosses cared more about being fast than being right: ‘Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers,’ Day said.”
+ In the last 10 years, the number of people shot in road rage incidents quadrupled. Two of the three cities with the highest # of incidents are in Texas, Houston and San Antonio.
+ By 2022, the number of people living in extreme poverty reversed course and began to rise.
+ Between 2019 and 2022 inequality in both rural and urban China has increased; the higher the quintile, the higher the cumulative real per capita growth. The gap is more extreme in rural areas.
Chotiner: A lot of people still think of Iran-Contra when your name comes up. Do you think that’s fair?
Abrams: Well, it’s fair because that’s what comes up when you Google my name.
Chotiner: Right. Do you feel reformed in some way?
Abrams: Reformed from what?
Chotiner: Oh, just the crimes. People should always have a chance to reform.
Abrams: I think that’s a really offensive and, frankly, quite despicable question.
+ The Biden administration has been secretly sending long-range missiles to Ukraine. The ground-based ATACMS have a range of 190 miles. Previously the US had been shipping Ukraine short-range M777 Howitzers, with a range of 25 miles, and medium-range Himars, with a range of 55 miles. The Russians have been using BM-30 Smerch (range: 43 miles), 2A36 Giansint B Howitzers (range: 25 miles) and the D-30 Howitzers (range: 13.6 miles)
+ According to Naalsio, an open-source researcher who has created a spreadsheet of documented equipment losses during Russia’s ongoing Pokrovsk Raion offensive, in central Donetsk, the Russian military seems to be suffering a 6-to-1 ratio of equipment loss compared to the defending Ukrainians. The Russians appear to think the sacrifice is worth it in order to seize the strategically and logistically important city of Chasiv Yar, which is located nearly 50 miles north of Avdiivka.
+ Internal emails show U.S. border agents joking about killing immigrant children and committing other abuses, while referring to immigrants by the derogatory slur “tonk.”
+ TIME: Don’t you see why many Americans see such talk of dictatorship as contrary to our most cherished principles?
Trump: “I think a lot of people like it.”
+ Trump said this week that he’s good with states tracking women’s menstrual data and pregnancies to prosecute abortions. Laura Bassett recounts the grim history of the police already engaged in that kind of surveillance.
+ Before the Supreme Court, the lawyer defending Idaho’s law preventing medically necessary abortions for wanted pregnancies admitted that doctors would be prohibited from performing the procedure even if it meant that the woman would lose an organ…
+ Around 200 people gathered near Lake Como, Italy this week to mourn Mussolini on the 79th anniversary of his death.
+ Washington Senator Maria Cantwell, the top recipient of airline industry campaign donations, inserted language into a spending bill that will undermine Biden’s rule meant to give passengers automatic refunds when their flights are canceled.
+ From Macron’s speech to the EU: “The EU must demonstrate it is never a vassal of the United States.”
+ Brazil’s unemployment rate has hit a 10-year low, with 244,000 new, formal sector jobs in March – 35,000 in manufacturing.
+ Brett Chapman: “The biggest problem facing Native Americans in the U.S. today is being invisible as members of modern society. Because Indigenous history has been whitewashed out of U.S. history in schools, we are largely seen as a historical people.”
+ Bianca Tylek, director of Worth Rises: “There is no way to incarcerate our way out of drug addiction … there is nothing about prisons—the way they are built, the way they are designed, the way they are financed, the way they are structured—that is meant to help deal with drug addiction.”
+ $100 million: the amount private companies banked from forcibly removing homeless people in California alone.
+++
+ David Menschel: “It’s kind of bizarre to feel the need to say it, but it’s a very very bad sign for a society if one cannot freely protest a genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, mass graves, and the mass incineration of children. That is a very bad place for a culture to be.”
+ In Kai Bird’s biography of Oppenheimer, warped unrecognizably by Christopher Nolan’s film, Bird recounts how Berkeley’s administration routinely used the football team and frats to bust striking teachers and student protesters on campus.
+ Former British PM first-week book sales…
Tony Blair: 92,000
David Cameron: 21,000
Liz Truss: 2,228
+ A senior at Columbia: “There are so many cameras on campus my mom is going to find out I vape on the cover of the New York Times.”
+ Strange, I seem to recall Cicero’s hands being nailed to the rostra of the Forum Romanum…
+ With an awareness of how traffic pollution and congestion have distressed the lives of many residents of west Oakland, the owners of Oakland’s new baseball team, the Oakland Ballers are encouraging fans to bike and walk to games at Raimondi Park this summer. Go Ballers!
+ Puppy killing is the most depraved way yet to own the libs. But we know it will just keep getting sicker, in a game of political gross-out. I remember when Sen. Joni Ernst ran campaign ads in Iowa showing her castrating hogs. That seems almost pastoral, after South Dakota Gov. Kristi Neom’s depraved account of dragging her 14-month-old puppy Cricket to a gravel pit for summary execution because Cricket wouldn’t “hunt right.” Then she killed the family goat.
+ In response to Gov She-Ra, the puppy killer, people have been posting photos of their dogs. We’ve had several over the years but none quite like Boomer the Aussie: escape artist, mountain climber, goose chaser, food larcenist, sock-shredder, & hole-digger, who’d chase & return a ball once but never saw the point of doing it again. His smile was often evidence that something nefarious was a-foot…a-paw, I guess. An anti-authoritarian whom Gov She-Ra would’ve considered a “bad dog” and sent for execution in the gravel pit. Boomer had his own psychic for a while, a woman in Texas, who would send him calming messages over the phone for $10 a minute–messages he treated with his customary indifference to human commands, rational, disciplinary or esoteric. A loyal, free-thinking, protector of everyone who showed him the affection he was due. He was the raucous epicenter of our family for 13 years. Boomer ¡Presente!
+ Boy George accepting the Grammy Award for Culture Club in 1984: “Thank you, America. You’ve got taste, style, and you know a good drag queen when you see one.”
+ Bob Marley: “Punks not Rasta but them fight down the Babylon system an’ love black people.”
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” Mario Savio
Celebration in San Jose de Bocay. Photo: Becca Renk.
“I was three years old when he was killed,” says Xiomara Hernández. “My little brother who is here with me today is the baby, he was just six months old.”
Xiomara is standing on a rock above a rushing stream, looking down on the spot where her father, Sergio Hernández, was murdered along with U.S. engineer Ben Linder on April 28th, 1987. Another fifty meters downstream, Pablo Rosales was killed; shot and bayoneted through the heart. The three were ambushed and murdered by U.S.-backed Contra forces while they were building a weir, measuring the stream to install a hydroelectric system so the rural community of San José de Bocay could have electricity.
We’ve brought a small delegation from Casa Ben Linder in Managua to commemorate the 37th anniversary of the murders, joining 200 people from San José de Bocay for the annual event organized by the Bocay Electrical Service Development Association, APRODELBO. This organization was founded to finish the work Ben, Pablo and Sergio started on the hydroelectric plant and continues to provide electricity to 2,000 people in the region today.
From the beautiful pond created by the small hydro system, we have hiked up the heavily wooded trail to the spot where the three were killed. Xiomara tells me this is only the second year that Sergio’s family has participated – for many years no one knew where they were, and Pablo Rosales’ family still hasn’t been located. Through the magic of the internet, however, Sergio’s family now been found and Xiomara feels it is important to be here.
“It’s very hard, you know?” she says. “It’s painful to be here today, but it’s important to remember.”
In 1987, Sergio and his family were war refugees, having been displaced from their home further north by Contra attacks. For a time, they were part of a farming cooperative near El Cuá, but the El Cedro co-op was attacked by the Contras twice in three years – they killed 17 members and kidnapped 9 others, burned the homes and slaughtered the cattle. Sergio and his wife moved their seven children to San José de Bocay, where he volunteered to work with Ben Linder on a project to bring electricity to the town.
Ben Linder was a peace activist and engineer from Portland, Oregon, who had moved to Nicaragua in 1983 to contribute his skills to the popular Sandinista Revolution. He was a clown and a unicyclist who worked with the popular circuses in Managua. As an engineer, Ben worked to bring electricity to war zones in northern Nicaragua where U.S.-funded contra guerillas attacked villages in the dark – electricity made them safer. After building a successful hydroelectric plant in El Cuá, Ben and his coworkers began work on a new plant in San José de Bocay, near the Honduran border.
Pablo Rosales was a young farmer who had been kidnapped by the Contras the previous year and forced to fight with them. He managed to escape, and then brought his wife and four children into town where they were living in a plastic house in the refugee settlement in San José de Bocay.
On 28 April 1987, Sergio and Pablo went to work with Ben along with other farmers from the refugee settlement. Sergio took the lead as the small group hiked to the construction site. When Ben sat down to write in his notebook, Sergio stood nearby and Pablo Rosales waited aways downstream.
Froylan Jarquín was there that day. “I was part of the Ministry of the Interior at that time, working nearby and my boss called me to say, ‘Get over there.’ When I arrived here at the site, I found the three of them dead. A group of Contra came here and killed them.” Froylan points to the thick tree cover where the Contras had waited to ambush the group, emptying 30 bullets into the clearing.
“They threw a grenade, it landed in the sand and shot fragments everywhere. Down there is where Ben fell,” Froylan says, pointing to a large flat rock in the stream. “And Sergio fell there next to him. Pablo was 50 meters downstream.” The Contra were waiting for them that day because they had orders to kill Ben for the work he was doing on behalf of the Nicaraguan people. Ben was the first North American to be killed by the Contra, killed by the government of his own country of origin, the United States.
Back at the pond, students from the Ben Linder public elementary school and other schools dance folklore, recite a biography of Ben Linder, and have a drawing contest. Our group contributes songs and a juggling show, and everyone breaks four piñatas. The children’s joy is palpable; the spirit of Ben’s playful clowning is present.
“Last year was the first year I was here, I came on my own,” says Xiomara. “But this year, three of my father’s kids are here and many of his grandkids. My dad has 31 grandkids now, and our family is still growing.”
Xiomara introduces us to her sister via video call, Isabel Hernández grins at us from her hammock in the North Caribbean Autonomous Region, and assures us that she’ll be here next year with her family in tow.
After the event, we go to see the hydroelectric plant run by APRODELBO, the Nicaraguan organization that represents the legacy of Ben Linder, continuing to fulfill his dream of renewable energy for the region.
They tell us that just this week they have just finished installing electricity to 85 houses built for families living in extreme poverty in the Barrio Benjamín Linder. The new homes were built by the Nicaraguan Housing Institute and the municipality of San José de Bocay, and were given free of charge to the families, complete with a stove and gas tank. José Luis Olivas, head of the environmental management unit of APRODELBO, drives our group out north of town to see the new houses at dusk, just as the lights are coming on in the yellow and lavender and green homes.
I marvel at the sight, thinking that the project is a worthy tribute to the spirit of Benjamin Linder: the joy of colorful houses, the most vulnerable families cared for, the renewable energy that provides electricity, light and safety. We can feel the spirits of our heroes and martyrs, Ben, Pablo and Sergio, are indeed ¡presente, presente, presente!
After seeing how much things have changed for the better for the people of Bocay in recent years, we return to the hotel where I am immediately reminded that the treatment of Nicaragua by the United States remains the same as it was in 1987. We find urgent messages waiting for us from our colleagues in the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition in the U.S. “We just found out that the new sanctions package against Nicaragua will be voted on by the full Senate any day now!”
We wave goodbye to Xiomara and her family and immediately sit down to send out emails and post on social media to gather signatures against the latest in a long list of U.S. aggressions against Nicaragua going back 200 years to the Monroe Doctrine.
Why is the U.S. targeting tiny Nicaragua yet again? Two weeks ago, Nicaragua brought Germany to the International Court of Justice for aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. This Tuesday, the ICJ will hand down its initial ruling, and the U.S. Senate plans to immediately punish Nicaragua for defending Palestine with further illegal unilateral coercive measures. In the spirit of Ben Linder, the peace activist who gave his life for Nicaragua, I will do everything I can to stop these sanctions. I hope you will join me – please sign here to tell the U.S. Senate to say NO to more sanctions on Nicaragua.
One of the two major-party candidates for the presidency of the United States has allowed an decades-long ethnic cleansing to morph into a genocide, a horror that could be stopped with one phone call; has escalated the drilling of oil and gas despite the existential threat of global warming; forced railroad workers to swallow a bad contract by breaking their strike; and spent his Senate career as an errand boy for banks. And that’s the lesser evil!
Joe Biden really is the lesser evil in this dismal race for the White House, and that such an office holder is easily not the worst candidate is surely sufficient to illustrate the decline of the world’s still extraordinarily dangerous superpower. Out of more than 300 million people, this is the best the country can do? Given the quite understandable reluctance (to put it mildly) for the types of folks who are reading these words to contemplate voting either for President Biden or Donald Trump, what do we do when the lesser evil is so evil that he has the sobriquet “Genocide” attached to his name?
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It isn’t easy, being a liberal mainstream reporter these days, what with big news stories about “the Israel-Hamas war” passing you by, as you wrestle fecklessly with your two major journalistic goals: (a) to objectively document evil by exposing corruption; and (b) to keep your job and get everybody to like you. I’ve investigated pro-Palestine […]
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+ Jonathan Greenblatt, the president of the ADL, posted a video outside of the Columbia University campus which included a call to “bring in the National Guard.” Three of the four students fatally shot on May 4, 1970, by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University were Jews: Allison Krause, Sandra Lee Scheuer, and […]
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Protests in and around Columbia University in support of Palestine and against Israeli occupation. Photograph Source: SWinxy – CC BY-SA 4.0
The student protests on the campus of Columbia University this April have reminded me of the protests that took place there 56 years ago. Along with about 700 or so other men and women, I was arrested and jailed at the Tombs in Manhattan. Those arrests didn’t curtail student protests. Indeed, there were demonstrations later that year and again in 1969, 1970, 1971 and 1972. When push comes to shove, Columbia has called on the police again and again and the police have arrived in force and have made arrests.
The current president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, an Egyptian-born American economist and a baroness, has surely not acted on her own impulses to establish what she might call “Law and Order.” Rather, she has surely followed the orders, the prayers and wishes of trustees, deep pockets and alumni who have wanted to see demonstrators punished for exercising freedom of speech and for practicing old-fashioned American civil disobedience.
Robert Kraft, the New England Patriots CEO, and a major financial contributor to Columbia —and my classmate— recently said, “I am no longer confident that Columbia can protect its students and staff and I am not comfortable supporting the university until corrective action is taken.” He also said, “I believe in free speech, say whatever you want, but pay the consequences.” That doesn’t sound like free speech, not if it comes with a price tag. Back then, the protests were largely about Vietnam. Now, they’re largely about Gaza and Israel. The names have changed, but the underlying story is much the same. Shouldn’t students today have a significant role to play when and where it comes to university investment?
Columbia University president Shafik was deputy governor of the Bank of England, and a vice president at the World Bank. She surely knows who has buttered her side of the crumpet and who has poured her cup of tea. Over many decades, Columbia has known very well how to make cosmetic changes and alter its image. It is now, as it was in the 1960s, about making money, expanding and occupying more and more of the island of Manhattan, and about mass-producing students to become consumers and citizens loyal to the social institutions that have made the US a global superpower.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, we raised awareness about the university’s collaboration with the war machine and with institutions of racism and patriarchy. Columbia began to hire women and Black and brown intellectuals and to revise the curriculum in response to student demands to make education relevant to their own lives and their times.
In 1968, I was not a student at Columbia. I was already a professor at the State University of New York who had graduated from the college in 1963 when it was still locked in the mindset of the Cold War, and McCarthyism and could not be accurately described as an “Ivory Tower.” In 1968, my beef with Columbia had its roots in my undergraduate years when I was rebuked for using Marxist sources for essays I wrote for teachers and slammed for thinking critically and questioning academic dogma. In 1969 when I was arrested again for my role during a campus protest, one of my former professors said that since I was a “Columbia scholar and a Columbia gentleman” I should apologize to the university. When I declined to knuckle under, the powers that be had me arrested and jailed. Who then was the scholar and the gentleman?
My freshman year at Columbia, my classmates and I were required to read Jacques Barzun’s tome The House of Intellect. It didn’t take long for me to see that the house of intellect was a house of cards. In 1968, we didn’t blow it down or blow it up, but we rocked it for a time and then watched as it put its house back in order and restored its foundations.
I don’t believe it’s possible to dismantle Columbia now, much as it wasn’t possible to dismantle it in 1968. It’s too big, too powerful, too wealthy and too rapacious. But protesters today can certainly raise awareness about the political and economic ties between the US “power elite,” as Columbia professor, C. Wright Mills called it, and the power elite in Israel. Things may not improve in the Middle East any time soon, but they won’t stay the same way they have been for the past half-century, either. The student protesters with their tents on campus are a sure sign that the times have changing and will go on “a-changin’” as Dylan suggested.
Too bad Columbia is locked in the past. Too bad it has given up on meaningful dialogue with student protesters today. Too bad it doesn’t see the handwriting on the wall. Over the past few weeks, I’ve wondered what Columbia professor Edward Said, the author of Orientalism—and for a time an independent member of the Palestinian National Council—would think and say. Indeed, he seemed to occupy a kind of middle ground when he observed in 2003, the year he died, that with regard to Palestine, “nobody has a claim that overrides all the others and entitles that person with that so-called claim to drive people out!”
That middle ground seems to have evaporated. Indeed, the ground under our own feet has shifted dramatically. There is less room for dissenting opinions today than there was in ’68, near the height of the war in Vietnam. There are also more virulent anti-Arab and more virulent anti-Jewish voices today than there were then. Better prepare for the rocky road ahead.
Australian Nuclear Free Alliance gathering, March 2024. Image by Ray Acheson.
AUKUS is the awkward-sounding acronym for “Australia-United Kingdom-United States”—a trilateral military alliance that stands poised to waste billions of dollars, proliferate high-level radioactive material and impose its safekeeping on First Nations communities for hundreds of thousands of years, increase global militarism and potentially provoke a nuclear war. If this doesn’t sound like a good investment to you, you’re not wrong. The deeper one digs into the details of this deal, the more one becomes flummoxed by cascading levels of absurdity. It is strikingly disadvantageous for Australia, yet other countries including Canada, Japan, and New Zealand/Aotearoa, have expressed interest in collaborating. Australian activists have been mobilizing to stop AUKUS for several years; it’s past time those living in other AUKUS states or those clamouring to partner with the alliance get informed and active, too.
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Though Utah’s state government has failed to pull the Great Salt Lake from the verge of collapse, on March 20, 2024, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed a law that prohibits the state and local governments from granting legal personhood to animals, plants, or major ecosystems like the Great Salt Lake. The law is a reaction to a growing rights of nature movement in Utah seeking to secure legal personhood for the Great Salt Lake. By passing this law, Utah joins Ohio and Florida in banning rights of nature as a response to popular, grassroots campaigns seeking to secure rights-based protections for the ecosystems all life depends on. Because rights of nature laws would disrupt corporate exploitation of the natural world, these legislative efforts to squash the rights of nature movement are entirely predictable and similar to historical efforts to squash other rights-based movements like the civil rights and women’s suffrage movements. Instead of giving up in the face of setbacks like these, rights of nature advocates must learn how to enforce rights of nature outside of courtrooms and the legislative process along with adapting tactics and strategies for the long game of transforming the legal system into one with a rights of nature framing.
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Columbia students were right in 1968. History proved it. Columbia students are right today. The university has no good answers to their demands that the school stop investing in genocide. Calling in the NYPD proves it.
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A still from director Alex Garland’s film “Civil War.” (Courtesy A24)
My derriere still hurts from sitting on the edge of my seat at an IMAX theater while gawking at London-born director Alex Garland’s Civil War, which draws its inspiration from the USA’s contemporary red-state-versus-blue-state zeitgeist. Civil War marks the second time in US history – since Major-General Robert Ross’ British soldiers invaded the White House on August 24, 1814 – that the Executive Mansion has been attacked by Brits. But although this chilling movie’s director is indeed an Englishman, the armed invaders in the provocative Civil War are actually Americans engaged in this insurrectionary, incendiary fable that has the ring of truth.
In Civil War Garland brings the war home with his stark, startling dramatization of the type of fierce combat Americans are used to watching from afar on screens – and from their perches in imperialist cockpits and tank turrets – but are being fought right here in the homeland. As armed rebels march on Washington, D.C. – not on some hapless Third World country du jour – we witness shocking scenes of the Lincoln Memorial and White House, as well as the heartland, under attack in Civil War. (However, a closeup of machine gun nests in the Statue of Liberty’s torch, which is depicted in posters, does not seem to actually appear per se onscreen.)
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Imagine yourself in Taiwan—living a nightmare of epic proportions. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army, two million strong, invades Taipei in the dead of winter. Within hours, it assumes control over the island’s other major cities, steadily moving south. Technologies enabled with artificial intelligence (AI) help China’s military synchronize its air, sea, and land forces. The […]
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Since Nancy Pelosi put her name on a letter calling on Biden to halt “offensive” weapons sales to Israel, she’s been frantically rounding up votes for a bill that would give Israel $14 billion in weapons, with no restrictions at all on their use.
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It begins with an unstoppable flood of unbearable images. A child stripped naked beaten in a preschool bathroom. A visiting priest with a sinful smile. Two nude men in a rectory bedroom. An unrecognizable reflection in that same bathroom mirror… Quickly, this nightmarish montage forms a narrative like a terrible bedtime story you’ve heard a thousand times before for the first time. A story about a little girl trapped inside a scary body whose dysphoria was exploited by sexual predators at a Catholic school so they could have a good time with someone, some thing, too frightened to ever tell.
This narrative was too much for that little girl to bear, so she blacked it out, she blacked out everything she saw in that mirror, including her gender identity, for decades. Until years of nightmares became an unstoppable flood of unbearable images, and those images formed a narrative of repressed memories that now feed an insatiable thirst for revenge.
This has become my life over the last several months. This waking nightmare has become the new normal. The trauma surrounds me, like living in an active warzone. Everything triggers flashbacks and the flashbacks have become so menacingly jarring that they have begun to trigger seizures. I feel like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, vomiting up secrets and bodily fluids that belong to men sent to save my soul. My life has become a horror movie that no one can bear to watch.
I have been abandoned by all but my most devoted friends. I have formed multiple personalities that represent the children that the Catholic Church conspired to destroy. One of them is also a five-year-old girl who was passed around by priests until she became physically ill. I spend my nights consoling that child while she screams. Some nights she consoles me. My own therapist now refuses to see me, telling me over the phone like some cheap fling that I require a level of care that she cannot provide.
This has become my life and the only thing that has kept me from taking it is war. That word pounds in my head like a drumbeat. War. War. Over and over again. War. War. War. The moment that I stop shaking and sobbing. War. War. War. That five-year-old girl and her fourteen-year-old protector join the chant like a chorus. War. War. War. This is what keeps me going, the fact that there are still children coming and going from the churches and schools that those vile men combed like a brothel, the fact that those buildings are still standing after thirty years of them tearing me down and burning the pieces.
I want to kill. I want to shoot, stab, hack, and bludgeon. But that isn’t enough. Any one act of violence, no matter how justified, would be little more than a senseless indulgence considering the depth of the conspiracy that inspires my rage. Burn one church and there are still thousands more standing. Kill one priest and there are still millions left walking, groping, hunting, lying, escaping.
Revenge is not enough because I am not alone. I am one of legions of broken children who have been mercilessly degraded and discarded by the Catholic Church. The only thing more horrifying than stories like mine are how many of them there are. In the United States alone, more than 11,000 complaints of abuse have been lodged against more than 6,000 Catholic clergy members by the children who survived their sexual degradation. Diocese across the country have paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in out of court settlements just to keep them silent and my home state of Pennsylvania has hosted some of the vilest transgressions of this colossal conspiracy.
The entire Keystone State was turned into a veritable harem. For decades, over 300 predator priests were given free reign over nearly every diocese in the state while the Church leadership compiled detailed records of their crimes and moved these monsters around like game pieces on a map of hell. Cases were reported to bishops and bishops reported them to the Vatican, but the only actions taken by Rome were in defense of the accused and the silence that kept them active. And Pennsylvania is far from the only hunting ground either.
216,000 children in France between 1950 and 2020. 3,677 minors in Germany between 1946 and 2014. Nearly 15,000 underage victims in Ireland between 1970 and 1990. And this doesn’t even include the generations of children subjected to the horrors and humiliations of institutionalized corporal punishment, or the emotional abuse of homophobia and transphobia, or the slut shaming of children for even having a sexuality outside of a holy man’s fist… or the Magdelene Laundries, or the mother and baby homes, or the dungeon-like orphanages and the illegal adoptions… The Catholic Church is not a religious organization, it is an international misery industrial complex that runs on shattered childhoods, and the responsibility for this monstrosity runs straight to the top of the Vatican.
At least three consecutive popes have been complicit. In 2001, Pope John Paul II, a man now considered a saint by the Catholic Church, issued a global papal rescript compelling all of the Church’s bishops to forward cases of abuse to Rome so that the Vatican could decide the appropriate course of action rather than the public. That same year, a high-ranking Vatican prefect who would go on to become Pope Bennedict in 2005 issued a document mandating that all cases of clerical sex abuse be reported directly to his office where they were to be kept under lock and key. Those files soon numbered in the thousands and were further secured under the Vatican’s Crimen Sollicitationis, which required total silence from victims, perpetrators, and witnesses alike under the threat of excommunication.
Pope Francis was supposed to be different, swept into power in 2013 after Bennedict made the unprecedented decision to resign under a cloud of scandals going back to his days as the Archbishop of Munich in the 1980s, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was carefully marketed to the fleeing faithful as a caring reformer. He has reformed nothing. While touring the globe making heartfelt apologies to the victims of his church, the man they now call Francis has also carefully avoided making any formal admission of responsibility on the part of the Vatican so as to avoid ever having to pay a dime in reparations.
Francis can also be judged by the company he keeps. The man he appointed as his anti-corruption czar and continues to praise in death, Cardinal George Pell, was a convicted pedophile only released from prison because Australia’s High Court chose not to believe his victims on acquittal.
Pope Francis is not a reformer; he is a cleaner sent by an evil institution to mop up the scene of the crime and reign in a dwindling flock who is fleeing the church in droves. Pope Francis is proof that what the Vatican requires is not reform but revolution. This is a recognized nation state responsible for centuries of grisly crimes against humanity. An ancient imperial relic that has conspired with dictators, Nazis, mafioso, and death squads, and continues to horde billions of dollars in its bank, including gold picked from the teeth of the gassed Jews at Auschwitz. This monstrosity must be razed to the ground and fed to the woodchippers. But even this fate is not enough.
The only way to possibly call any revolution an act of justice is if this jihad ensures that the crimes that inspired it will never happen again. This is bigger than any one church. This is about a society that grooms its children to be prey by denying them any rights as individuals. There will always be adults that rape children as long as institutions of power afford them that right and childhood itself as we understand it has become one of those institutions.
We must liberate our children by empowering them with the same rights we afford adults and teach them that their bodies belong to them and no one else, not the state, not the church, not even their parents. We must emancipate childhood and raise proud individuals instead of silent dutiful citizens.
If this is impossible then I will die fighting endlessly for the impossible. I will fight forever because it is the only thing that keeps me from destroying myself beneath the weight of the horror that has become my existence. I must become Che Guevara because it is the only fate keeping me from becoming Charles Whitman. I will not die a statistic. I will rage furiously unto my dying breath until the whole world can hear that five-year-old girl scream. Maybe then she can sleep and so can I.
Ever since July 1, 2021, student-athletes have been able to pursue endorsement deals. But when it comes to getting paid by the universities for which they play, the students have been shut down. Here, Cyntrice Thomas, a professor of sport management at the University of Florida, answers questions about the hurdles that stand in the way of college athletes being compensated for their athleticism.
What stands in the way of paying college sports players?
NCAA rules are the main obstacle.
Not long after it was formed in 1906, the NCAA prohibited schools from compensating student-athletes for their athletic ability. In 1948, the NCAA adopted the Sanity Code, which also prohibited athletic scholarships for students who couldn’t demonstrate financial need or economic hardship.
In 2009, Ed O’Bannon, a former UCLA basketball player, sued the NCAA over its rules that limited the amount in scholarships that schools could offer as well as the compensation for student-athletes with regard to the use of their image in video games. O’Bannon was successful in showing that the NCAA’s rules were unlawful, and the court allowed for schools to offer scholarships up to the cost of attendance.
Most recently, in 2021, the Supreme Court ruled in NCAA v. Alston that colleges must be allowed to compensate students for education-related expenses up to $5,980 annually. The Supreme Court found that the NCAA rules against this were a violation of antitrust law. The purpose of antitrust law is to protect and promote competition in the marketplace to keep prices competitive for consumers.
NCAA rules negatively affected competition because schools could offer only up to the cost of attendance in scholarships – not additional incentives that may attract student-athletes.
Currently, several lawsuits – including Johnson v. NCAA, Carter v. NCAA and House v. NCAA – have plaintiffs using different legal arguments to challenge NCAA rules that limit their access to compensation. In Carter v. NCAA, the plaintiffs claim the limitations on compensation are unlawful and that they are entitled to a share of the million-dollar television contracts of the conferences and NCAA.
Why are ‘name, image and likeness’ deals not enough?
States have passed laws that require student-athletes to be compensated by third parties for the use of their name, image and likeness. These laws directly contradict past NCAA rules that made this type of compensation an explicit NCAA violation because they threaten the notion of amateurism.
However, these laws do not apply to schools and universities. The laws apply only to third parties such as corporations like Gatorade or sport manufacturers like Nike, and that’s where these laws arguably fall short. Schools can continue to make millions of dollars from intercollegiate athletics without having to share that with student-athletes.
Should college athletes make money from name, image and likeness deals?
Schools and universities, however, can continue to use student-athletes’ names and images to promote their sports and do not have to compensate them. This is because NCAA rules prohibit schools from compensating student-athletes for their publicity or fame related to athletic ability.
Barbara Osborne, a sports scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, argues that through scholarships, student-athletes do receive compensation. However, when recognizing that Division I schools, especially those in a Power Five conference, generate billions of dollars in revenue, other scholars, such as Mark Nagel and Richard Southall, argue that a scholarship is insufficient and that “profit-athletes,” as he refers to them, deserve the fair market value of their labor.
Instead of paying their athletes, schools pour the revenue they make back into the athletic departments and use it to fund salaries, operating costs, facilities and other expenses. This can include funding other sports that do not generate revenue.
Who has the power to change things?
The NCAA, for one. However, the NCAA sees change as the end of amateurism. In fact, at its most recent convention in January, the organization restated its hopes of regaining some of its power to regulate intercollegiate athletics. Specifically, it plans to do this by seeking legal protection from the continuous threat of lawsuits. The organization is also lobbying Congress to declare that student-athletes are not employees.
Another possibility is for schools and universities, specifically those in the Power Five conferences, to simply leave the NCAA. They could then create their own governing body with rules that allow for schools to pay student-athletes, which would allow them to get the best recruits and make more money.
A third possibility is the federal government. Because of the number of legal challenges to the NCAA rules brought by current and former student-athletes, the NCAA has tried to lobby Congress. The organization spent over $750,000 lobbying Congress to create limitations on athlete pay. They also sought to get Congress to pass laws that limit name, image and likeness deals and give the organization an exemption from antitrust laws.
There is reluctance from members of Congress, however, to support an exemption for the NCAA. Some congressional members have actually advocated for more protections for student-athletes. For example, several senators have been working on a bipartisan bill that would include protections for student-athletes with regard to medical care and agent certification.
Published in 1936, “Shooting an Elephant” remains one of George Orwell’s most celebrated essays. In it, the English writer recounts an incident from his time as a police officer in modern day Myanmar, then known as Burma, part of the British Empire. Responding to calls of a rampaging elephant, Orwell finds the animal docile, but nevertheless feels compelled to kill it, rather than appear weak before the crowd who has gathered to watch. In allowing his conscience to be overwhelmed, he experiences how colonialism dehumanizes not just the colonized, but the colonizers as well.
“I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys,” writes Orwell. “He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy …. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”
Although Orwell is writing specifically of the British Empire, he quite clearly intends for his essay to be read more broadly, as applicable to contemporary fascism in Europe as British colonialism in Asia. And so too does his insight extend to today in the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine.
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Japan’s right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP, 自由民主党, Jiyū-Minshutō) is in trouble. Following the assassination of PM Shinzo Abe in 2022, voter abstention and a corruption scandal have eroded the Party’s credibility. The LDP was founded with help from the CIA in 1955 as a weapon against the left. It ruled uninterrupted until 1993 and continues to dominate Japanese politics.
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The Israelis calling the drone strike that killed 7 Western aid workers a “mistake” is like a correction in the New York Times. They both serve the purpose of wanting you to believe everything else was perfectly fine–in the Times’s case, that all of the other stories printed in the paper are true; in Israel’s case, that the airstrikes that have killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, including 14,500 kids, were totally legit.
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What is remarkable about Sir Keir Starmer, however, is that he has not a single, discernible positive quality. If he got lost in Tesco, and his mum put out his description on the tannoy, there would be no possible chance of him being tracked down. He is not a good speaker, his nasal voice drones on and on, a lulling invitation to the most pronounced meaninglessness. When asked about his vision for the future, he says things like this:‘Changing the things that need changing … that is the change I will bring about!’
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The October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israelis followed by the extremely disproportionate IDF assault on Gaza has been accompanied by a slew of racist invective by Israeli leaders. Dan Gillerman, the former Israeli ambassador to the UN referred to Palestinians as “horrible inhuman animals.” Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, used the same hate expression. Netanyahu called Gaza a “city of evil,” summoning the Old Testament tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, in which the Israeli government now gets to play God.
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+ The UN has been used to start many wars, but has it ever stopped one? The Security Council’s ceasefire resolution, temporary as it is, was completely ignored by Israel. Will any of the Council’s members (China? Russia?) use their considerable power to enforce it?
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“Honoring our alliances does not mean facilitating mass killing,” Representative Ocasio-Cortez said on the floor of the House of Representatives on March 22. “We cannot hide from our responsibility any longer.” “Facilitating mass killing” and “responsibility” could include United States legal complicity. While eyes are on a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, a court case in California (Defense for Children International, Palestine, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, et al.) is worth noting; the case directly challenges the United States’ support for Israel. Although the case will not force Israel to withdraw from Gaza, it does raise serious issues about the United States’ complicity in Israel’s continuous violation of human rights and humanitarian law as well as its egregious non-compliance with the provisional measures ordered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
The ICJ ruled on January 26 that Israel was committing “plausible genocide.” In addition, in a March 25 Report to the Human Rights Council by the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese wrote in the Summary: “By analyzing the patterns of violence and Israel’s policies in its onslaught on Gaza, this report concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.”
In the California case, United States leaders are accused of illegal complicity in not preventing genocide as well as contributing to Israel’s genocidal actions.
Over thirty eminent legal scholars and practitioners, including Richard Falk, Philip Alston, and Andrew Clapham, presented a brief (Amicus curiae) supporting the case before The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth District. Without going into all the legalese, the major points in the brief were: 1) The prohibition of genocide, complicity in genocide, and the duty to prevent genocide are fundamental norms of customary international law from which there are no exceptions. 2) Being aware of the risk of genocide obliges states to prevent genocide from occurring. If a state knows genocide is taking place, and the state continues to support the state committing genocide, the supporting state has not fulfilled its legal obligation to prevent genocide and may be held to be complicit in the genocide. 3) Historically, in previous cases before the ICJ, the United States has agreed to these fundamental principles. 4) Domestic courts may enforce fundamental customary international law such as California in this case.
The second major point merits detailed explanation since it refers to two types of violations to the Genocide Convention. The first violation is that the prevention of genocide is a legal obligation. If a state has knowledge that genocide is being committed and does nothing, if it has knowingly not prevented genocide, the state is complicit. Furthermore, as the scholars note; “The duty does not require a finding that genocide is occurring; rather, awareness of a serious risk of genocide places an obligation on all States to take whatever action possible and necessary to prevent its occurrence or continuation.” The ICJ’s decision on “plausible genocide” makes this point relevant for the United States as does the Report of the Special Rapporteur. There is obviously a serious risk of genocide being committed by Israel in Gaza. There can be no doubt of the United States’ “awareness of a serious risk.” Therefore, as the brief argues, the United States, like all states that have ratified the Convention, is legally bound “to take whatever action possible and necessary to prevent its [genocide] occurrence or continuation.”
The second type of violation in the brief is even more damning for the United States. It describes a positive act of commission rather than the negative act of not preventing. If a state continues to support the state committing genocide, the brief points out, the supporting state may be held complicit in genocide’s commission. The United States continues to supply weapons to Israel after October 7. “The United States has quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since the Gaza war began Oct. 7, amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid, U.S. officials told members of Congress in a recent classified briefing,” John Hudson wrote on March 6, 2024, in TheWashington Post. The Wall Street Journal and TheNew York Times confirmed this account of the Congressional briefing in similar reports.
The United States is therefore twice guilty of violating Article IIIe of the Genocide Convention which specifically prohibits complicity.
How does the United States continue to supply weapons to Israel in violation of the Genocide Convention? The U.S. Arms Export Control Act does permit exceptions for arms sales to close allies. The United States uses this loophole to continue sending weapons to Israel. But using this loophole to continue sending weapons does not exonerate complicity in genocide. In the least, it is hypocritical. Using the Arms Export Control Act “doesn’t just seem like an attempt to avoid technical compliance with US arms export law, it’s an extremely troubling way to avoid transparency and accountability on a high-profile issue,” Ari Tolany, director of the security assistance monitor at the Centre for International Policy think tank, was quoted in The Guardian.
Hypocritical and secretive. According to a recent New York Times article: “Last December, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken twice invoked a rarely used emergency authority to send tank ammunition and artillery shells to Israel without Congressional review. These were the only two times the administration has given public notice of government-to-government military sales to Israel since October.”
What about other countries? Have they changed their policies towards Israel following the ICJ ruling? The Canadian government, which provides about $4 billion dollars a year in military aid to Israel, recently announced that it would halt arms sales to Israel after the Canadian Parliament passed a non-binding motion to stop the weapons sales. Canada was not alone. “Canada joins the Netherlands, Japan, Spain, and Belgium in suspending arms sales,” Aljazeera reported.
In addition to countries’ stopping arms sales, TheGuardian revealed that more than 200 members of parliaments (MPs) from 12 countries wrote a letter trying to persuade their governments to impose a ban on arms sales to Israel. The MPs, a network of socialist and activists, argued that they will not be complicit in “Israel’s grave violation of international law” in its Gaza assault. In their letter, the politicians argued that after the ICJ ruling, “an arms embargo has moved beyond a moral necessity to become a legal requirement.”
The MPs were also not alone. U.N. experts stated that “any transfer of weapons or ammunition to Israel that would be used in Gaza is likely to violate international humanitarian law…” The experts, mostly independent rapporteurs for the United Nations Human Rights Council, wrote: “The need for an arms embargo on Israel is heightened by the International Court of Justice’s ruling on 26 January 2024 that there is a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and the continuing serious harm to civilians since then.” As the Genocide Convention requires all states who have acceded to employ all means reasonably available to them to prevent genocide in another state as far as possible, “This necessitates halting arms exports in the present circumstances,” the experts argued.
In relation to the California case, the experts were quite clear; “State officials involved in arms exports may be individually criminally liable for aiding and abetting any war crimes, crimes against humanity or acts of genocide,” they wrote. “All States under the principle of universal jurisdiction, and the International Criminal Court, may be able to investigate and prosecute such crimes.”
In full awareness of the serious risk of “plausible genocide” by Israel taking place in Gaza, the United States has not stopped Israel’s actions and continues to send weapons to Israel. The United States has been and continues to be complicit. “International law does the enforce itself,” the experts concluded. “All States must not be complicit in international crimes through arms transfers. They must do their part to urgently end the unrelenting humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.”
The legal argument is clear. The moral argument is clearer. Will political action follow? Eight senators wrote to Mr. Biden on March 11 calling on him to require Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “to stop restricting humanitarian aid access to Gaza or forfeit U.S. military aid to Israel.” Requiring Israel to allow access to humanitarian aid would be a start. Stopping sending military equipment would be even better. But even a U.N. Security Council ceasefire – where the U.S. meekly abstained – will not absolve the United States of complicity in Israel’s “plausible genocide.”
Last December, one of the most intrusive provisions in the federal statute book was set to expire. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authorizes the National Security Agency to vacuum up trillions of emails and other data. A bevy of bipartisan members of Congress called for radically curtailing those nullifications of Americans’ privacy.
But the effort to put a leash on the federal surveillance failed dismally. Congress voted for a four-month extension of FISA, which will likely be followed in April by a much longer extension. There was a bipartisan congressional conspiracy to entitle the Deep State to continue trampling the Constitution.
In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to outlaw political spying (such as the FBI had committed) on American citizens. FISA created a secret court to oversee federal surveillance of suspected foreign agents within the United States, permitting a much more lenient standard for wiretaps than the Constitution permitted for American citizens.
The FISA court “created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans,” the New York Times reported in 2013 after Edward Snowden leaked court decisions. The court rubber-stamped FBI requests that bizarrely claimed that the telephone records of all Americans were “relevant” to a terrorism investigation under the Patriot Act, thereby enabling National Security Administration (NSA) data seizures later denounced by a federal judge as “almost Orwellian.” In 2017, a FISA court decision included a 10-page litany of FBI violations, which “ranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight.”
FISA Section 702
The latest controversy involved FISA Section 702, first enacted by Congress in 2008. That section authorizes the National Security Agency to surveil targets in foreign nations regardless of how many Americans’ privacy is “incidentally” destroyed. The NSA collects vast amounts of information as part of that surveillance and then permits the FBI to sift through its troves. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warned more than a decade ago that Section 702 “created a broad national-security exception to the Constitution that allows all Americans to be spied upon by their government while denying them any viable means of challenging that spying.”
Professor David Rothkopf explained in 2013 how Section 702 worked: “What if government officials came to your home and said that they would collect all of your papers and hold onto them for safe-keeping, just in case they needed them in the future. But don’t worry … they wouldn’t open the boxes until they had a secret government court order … sometime, unbeknownst to you.” Actually, the law in practice is much worse.
A license for lying
From the beginning, federal agencies brazenly lied about the number of Americans whose privacy was ravaged. In 2014, former NSA employee Edward Snowden provided the Washington Post with a cache of 160,000 secret email threads that the NSA had intercepted. The Post found that nine out of ten account holders were not the “intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.” Almost half of the individuals whose personal data was inadvertently commandeered were American citizens. The files “tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes,” the Post noted. If an American citizen wrote an email in a foreign language, NSA analysts assumed they were foreigners who could be surveilled without a warrant.
FISA perils are compounded because, in practice, the FBI has a blank check for perjury in the name of Total Information Awareness. In 2002, the FISA court revealed that FBI agents had false or misleading claims in 75 cases, and a top FBI counterterrorism official was prohibited from ever appearing before the court again. Three years later, FISA chief judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly proposed requiring FBI agents to swear to the accuracy of the information they presented; that never happened because it could have “slowed such investigations drastically,” the Washington Post reported. So FBI agents continued to have a license to exploit FISA secrecy to lie to the judges.
An abuse of power
In 2018, a FISA ruling condemned the FBI for ignoring limits on “unreasonable searches.” As the New York Times noted,
F.B.I. agents had carried out several large-scale searches for Americans who generically fit into broad categories … so long as agents had a reason to believe that someone within that category might have relevant information. But [under FISA] there has to be an individualized reason to search for any particular American’s information.
The FBI treated the FISA repository like the British agents treated general warrants in the 1760s, helping spark the American Revolution.
But Congress reauthorized Section 702 in 2018 regardless of the perpetual abuses of that power. Subsequent reports revealed that the congressional vote of blind confidence was misplaced. But Congress did oblige the feds to publicly disclose how often the FBI unjustifiably violated Americans’ privacy by snooping in the NSA catch-all archives.
The FBI exploited FISA to target 19,000 donors to the campaign of a candidate who challenged an incumbent member of Congress. An FBI analyst justified the warrantless searches by claiming “the campaign was a target of foreign influence,” but even the Justice Department concluded that almost all of those searches violated FISA rules. Apparently, merely reciting the phrase “foreign influence” suffices to nullify Americans’ rights nowadays. (In March, Rep. Darin LaHood (R-IL) revealed that he had been wrongly targeted by the FBI in numerous FISA 702 searches.)
Warrantless searches
In April 2021, the FISA court reported that the FBI conducted warrantless searches of the data trove for “domestic terrorism,” “public corruption and bribery,” “health care fraud,” and other targets — including people who notified the FBI of crimes and even repairmen entering FBI offices. If you sought to report a crime to the FBI, an FBI agent may have illegally surveilled your email. Even if you merely volunteered for the FBI “Citizens Academy” program, the FBI may have illegally tracked all your online activity. In 2019, an FBI agent conducted an unjustified database search “using the identifiers of about 16,000 people, even though only seven of them had connections to an investigation,” the New York Times reported.
As I tweeted after that report came out, “The FISA court has gone from pretending FBI violations don’t occur to pretending violations don’t matter. Only task left is to cease pretending Americans have any constitutional right to privacy.” FISA court Chief Judge James Boasberg lamented “apparent widespread violations” of the legal restrictions for FBI searches but shrugged them off and permitted the scouring of Americans’ personal data to continue.
Alas, there was no bureaucratic repentance. The feds revealed in 2022 that “fewer than 3,394,053” Americans’ privacy had been zapped by FBI warrantless searches using Section 702. Why didn’t the feds use an alternative headline for the press release: “More than 320,974,609 Americans not illegally searched by the FBI?” That report was issued by the Office of Civil Liberties, Privacy, and Transparency of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. But there was scant transparency aside from a raw number that raised far more questions than it answered.
Almost two million of those searches involved an investigation of Russian hacking. Yet there aren’t that many hackers in the United States. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center presumed that anyone whose tweets agreed with a position of the Russian government should be banned by Twitter for being a Russian agent. Did the FBI use a similar “catch-all” standard to justify pilfering two million Americans’ email and other online data?
Exemption from the Constitution
In May 2023, a heavily redacted FISA court decision revealed that the FBI continued exempting itself from the Constitution. For each American that the FISA court authorized the FBI to target, the FBI illicitly surveilled almost a thousand additional Americans. The FBI admitted to conducting 278,000 illicit searches of Americans in 2020 and early 2021 (the period covered by the FISA court ruling released in May 2023).
The FBI conducted illegal secret searches of the emails and other data of 133 people arrested during the protests after the killing of George Floyd in 2020.
The FBI conducted 656 warrantless searches to see if they could find any derogatory information on people they planned to use as informants. The FBI also routinely conducted warrantless searches on “individuals listed in police homicide reports, including victims, next-of-kin, witnesses, and suspects.” Even the Justice Department complained those searches were improper.
The FBI seems to have presumed that any American suspected of supporting the January 6, 2021, Capitol ruckus forfeited his constitutional rights. An FBI analyst exploited FISA to unjustifiably conduct searches on 23,132 Americans citizens “to find evidence of possible foreign influence, although the analyst conducting the queries had no indications of foreign influence,” according to FISA Chief Judge Rudolph Contreras. The FBI also routinely conducted warrantless searches on “individuals listed in police homicide reports, including victims, next-of-kin, witnesses, and suspects.”
For 20 years, FISA judges have whined about FBI agents lying to the court. As long as the FBI periodically promises to repent, the FISA court entitles them to continue decimating the Fourth Amendment. Chief FISA Judge Contreras lamented: “Compliance problems with the querying of Section 702 information have proven to be persistent and widespread.” The FBI responded to the damning report with piffle: “We are committed to continuing this work and providing greater transparency into the process to earn the trust of the American people and advance our mission of safeguarding both the nation’s security, and privacy and civil liberties, at the same time.”
The FBI crime wave
FBI officials stress that any violations of Americans’ privacy is “incidental.” Since the FBI didn’t intend to violate Americans’ rights, it was a no-fault error — or millions of no-fault errors. There is no chance that police will adopt the same standard for absolving drunk drivers who did not intend to kill anyone they crashed into. Even when a media star such as Tucker Carlson may have been pulled into the 702 mire, the system manages to whitewash itself.
The FBI’s perpetual crime wave created a hornet’s nest on Capitol Hill. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) asked: “How much longer must we watch the FBI brazenly spy on Americans before we strip it of its unchecked authority?” Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA) declared, “We need a pound of flesh. We need to know someone has been fired.”
House Republicans, led by House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), pushed a bipartisan reform of 702 named he Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act, which would have required the FBI to get a warrant from a federal judge for most of its queries to the NSA database. Jordan’s proposal would have also sharply reduced the number of FBI officials with access to the NSA trove. Jordan’s bill included the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which “stops law enforcement from buying data that should require a court order,” a scandal tagged in a New York Post op-ed headlined “Feds are buying your life with your tax dollars.”
Congressional impotence
FISA epitomizes the mirage of constitutional checks and balances in our times. When Congress returns to FISA with the short-term authorization, the House will consider a FISA “reform” bill the Intelligence Committee unanimously approved. The House Intelligence Committee acts like a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Deep State. Unfortunately, these are the members of Congress with special access to federal dirt — and they have largely chosen to ignore the crimes committed by the spies they champion and bankroll.
Former Justice Department lawyer Marc Zwillinger is one of a handful of FISA court amici allowed to comment on cases or policies in the secret court. He issued a public warning that the House Intelligence bill expands the definition of “electronic communication service providers” covered by FISA compliance obligations to include “business landlords, shared workspaces, or even hotels where guests connect to the Internet.”
In other words, the FISA expansion could affect your next visit to Comfort Inn — and you thought Wi-Fi service was already bad! Former Justice Department lawyer Elizabeth Goitein warns, “Hotels, libraries, coffee shops, and other places that offer wifi to their customers could be forced to serve as surrogate spies. They could be required to configure their systems to ensure that they can provide the government access to entire streams of communications.” The bill could also cover any repairman who works on such equipment. That bill should be titled, Biden Big Brother Better Act.
The FISA reauthorization was included in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2024, a 3000-page “must pass” bill that Congress considered in December. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who led the opposition to the bill in the Senate, urged fellow senators not to “trust any bill so large that it has to be delivered by handcart.” But to no avail.
The tyranny of the FISA court
The FISA court has perpetually dismally failed to defend Americans’ constitutional rights. Washington must finally admit that there is no secret “doing God’s work” clause in the Constitution that entitles FBI agents to trample Americans’ privacy and liberty.
Will Congress show more gumption when the short-term FISA reauthorization expires in April? When FISA was up for renewal in 2012, I tweeted, “Only a fool would expect members of Congress to give a damn about his rights and liberties.” Unless Congress puts me to shame, FISA should be renamed the “‘Trust Me, Chumps!’ Surveillance Act.”
This article was originally published in the March 2024 issue ofFuture of Freedom.
Every day, journalists like myself receive dozens, if not hundreds, of emails from publicists pitching their respective clients as sources to consider for this or that story in the current newscycle. It’s not every day, however, that you’re pitched an apologist for genocide.
That is, in essence, the email I received last month from Joshua Steinreich, a publicist with the Steinreich Communications Group, who was pitching Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence official, as a source on the yet-impending Israeli invasion of Rafah, the potential next phase of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Despite the Israeli military having killed 31,726 Palestinians, including more than 13,000 children and 8,400 women, according to Al Jazeera at the time of this writing, the Israeli military “seeks to minimize civilian casualties,” while Hamas “gains from the loss of life,” in Melamed’s estimation.
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