In 2007, the writer Tal Nitsán isolated instances where Israeli male combatants systematically used sexual violence against Palestinian women to the war of 1948. In essentially marking off such conduct from more contemporary practices, she relied on media accounts, archival sources, the reports of human rights organizations and the testimony of 25 Israeli reserve male […]
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Whatever frail hope people had for Kamala Harris making a clean break from Biden’s unrelenting and unapologetic support for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians living in Gaza was repeatedly and irrevocably shattered this week in Chicago. And not just Harris. The entire leadership of the party, from AOC to the Obamas joined in. Even Bernie […]
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But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence, … truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree […]
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+ Here’s a brief recap of the last week in US/Israeli relations. The IDF shot an American citizen, Amado Sison, in the West Bank. The US announced it would continue funding the notorious IDF unit that shot the American citizen. The IDF bombed a school being used as a shelter for Palestinians who’d been bombed […]
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Image by Evgeniy Smersh.
Any rock music fan worthy of being considered as such knows that the Pacific Northwest was a major focal point of the music in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Indeed, a sound the industry called grunge began there. Essentially, grunge is punk rock with a lot more fuzz and a few more hooks in the melody lines. In its artistic heyday, so-called punk bands like Nirvana, Mudhoney, the Melvins and TAD played clubs, dorm rooms, basements, bars and art galleries in their quest for the fulfillment playing music brings. Somewhere along the line, the media and industry recognized the phenomenon and labeled it grunge. Some of the bands were able to make a living at it and some became incredibly wealthy—something which wasn’t necessarily the best (or the intended) outcome. Other bands brought in other sounds and styles to the music and the scene it created. Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell brought in his version of a soaring and melodic metal guitar; Bikini Kill and Mecca Normal brought in a feminist anger and a legion of female fans. The Gits did a bit of everything and, in doing so, stood alone in the scene; they weren’t grunge, metal, or riot grrl. Their singer Mia Zapata had a voice that sometimes sounded a little like Pat Benatar, sometimes a little like Patti Smith, and sometimes like that folksinger you heard one afternoon in the park. Comparisons barely help describe her singing because it remained distinctly her own. The guitar of Joe Spleen, the bass of Matt Dresdner, and the percussion section that included Bob Lee, Bruce Docheneaux and Steven Moriarty completed the sound.
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From 1933 to 1939, Hitler provided the future government of Israel with the assets of German Jews in exchange for aid undermining an international anti-Nazi boycott. On March 19, 1933 — less than three months after Adolph Hitler had been elected chancellor of Germany — flags of the reigning National Socialist German Workers’ Party bearing […]
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Seeing Donald Trump aggress top Black journalists at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) made for uncomfortable viewing. The gasps of disgust, even from Harris Faulkner, were unsurprising. Trump’s unskilled wordplay actually reminded me of a cab ride made in Detroit just under forty years ago, including the redeeming nature of what happened afterwards. […]
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For about the 30th time since last October, we’re being asked to believe that Biden has reached his limit with Netanhayu. Two spoke by phone last week, after Israel’s dual assassination strikes in Beirut and Tehran. Supposedly Biden said during the call that the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran was “poorly timed,” […]
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Although the movie Sing Sing is, as the promos say, “based on a true story,” it’s a work of art. The film, directed by Greg Kwedar and co-written by Kwedar and Clint Bentley, is also about art: in this case, a play performed inside Sing Sing prison, via a program called Rehabilitation Through the Arts. […]
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A new U.N. report revealed that “Palestinians detained by Israeli authorities since the Oct. 7 attacks faced waterboarding, sleep deprivation, electric shocks, dogs set on them, and other forms of torture and mistreatment.” These abuses are clear war crimes. The report contains testimonies of men held in Gaza by the Israeli military “including UNRWA staff […]
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Image by Heather Mount.
Between armed violence and fascism within the United States and the US government’s support for genocide abroad, manufacturers of weapons are profiting wildly. Within the US, arms producers are responsible for fueling war crimes in Gaza and mass shootings across the United States. The profit models of these companies are the same: more violence means more customers. Stoke the fear, fury, and legitimacy of conflict to sell more of your product. Generate a public culture receptive to the idea of weapons as the answer to insecurity, including through the construction and entrenchment of gender and racial power dynamics.
Profitmaking requires marketing. Enter the so-called militainment industry—the marketing of guns and militarism through films, television, video games, and now social media influencers. Gun manufacturers and military agencies, especially in the United States, have long had an outsized influence on the entertainment industry, and they use gendered and racialized tropes to promote gun sales along with a wider culture of militarism, war, and armed violence. But over the last two decades, the methods by which gun manufacturers and other military contractors have been able to influence people across many geographies—in particular young, white, cisgendered, heteronormative men—have become increasingly insidious. And the ramifications for violence are profound.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ray Acheson.
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Since the first laws and executive orders banning ‘divisive concepts’, such as the idea that racism can be systemic, were implemented in 2021, critics charged that they would censor the past and force teachers to avoid uncomfortable but vital issues of history. Many accused the GOP of attempting to impose a sanitized version of America’s […]
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Whether they want to or not, the Arab people today face a wholesale attack on their future by an imperial power, America, that acts in concert with Israel to pacify, subdue, and finally reduce us to a bunch of warring fiefdoms whose first loyalty is not to their people but to the great superpower (and […]
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The failure of Israel’s two most important allies, the US and UK, to put an end to the slaughter of the civilian population in Gaza in 2023-2024 and the American and British mainstream media’s refusal to contextualize the 7 October attack raises questions about their status as democratic states. What many independent journalists and academics […]
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The International Court of Justice has made definitive what has been obvious for decades: It’s about the apartheid, stupid. In a sweeping ruling announced on Friday at the Hague, the Court ruled that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories violates international law and should be ended. It determined that the occupation amounts to “annexation” of […]
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Image by Koushik Chowdavarapu.
THE TWILIGHT ZONE — Picture if you will the citizens of a small town in Northeast Ohio, facing a daunting toxic threat yet trapped in a maze of regulatory capture at the so-called Environmental Protection Agency. Not the citizens of East Palestine, though they too face a challenging quest for the truth about the environmental health threats they may face. But the citizens in and around Uniontown, Ohio have been trapped in such a quagmire for decades, subjected to a dystopian level of gaslighting from the powers that be in an effort to bury the truth regarding the ultra-hazardous poisons reportedly dumped at the town landfill.
The Industrial Excess Landfill (IEL) in Uniontown closed in 1980 and was designated as an EPA Superfund site in 1984, listed as one of the most contaminated sites in the country. Akron area rubber companies were the biggest known polluters at the IEL, dumping millions of gallons of industrial waste and chemicals in the ‘60s and ‘70s. But local citizen eyewitnesses have long testified that the U.S. military was another covert client in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. This includes the IEL’s former owner Charles Kittinger, who came forward in 2001 to speak of clandestine dumping of three metal eggs of nuclear weapons waste he was eerily warned not to speak of.
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Image by Hennie Stander.
We are endlessly and repetitively treated to sermons on the wonders of capitalism. Everybody will be taken care of, with the proviso that you are willing to work. As I have had frequent cause to note, that a line has to be furiously propagated across every channel speaks to a lack of concrete reality. And as more people, especially young people, see that they have declining possibilities, more questioning inevitably arises.
The only thing worse in capitalism to having a job, however unpleasant, is not having a job. Unemployment benefits are barely at starvation rates and end all too soon. Naturally, that is worse in the United States than most other advanced capitalist countries of the Global North. Six months is the limit set at a rate well less than half of what your wages were in the job you just lost. And given that six months is the average time necessary to secure new employment, that means around half of those collecting unemployment insurance will likely have a spell of no income at all.
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“When did you become so anti-social, Anna?” There was no pregnant pause or awkward stammers on Red Scare after Amber A’Lee Frost chided Anna Khachiyan for saying “man kind of did it to himself with all of these political institutions.” After nearly two hours of polite but curt discussion, Frost breaks, frustrated by Khachiyan and […]
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+ The official Palestinian death count in Gaza by the health ministry now stands at 38,345. Another 10,000 are presumed dead, their bodies buried under rubble. + Two months ago, Ralph Nader said he believed the true death toll in Gaza was likely nearer 200,000. + Last week, Nader’s estimate was vindicated by The Lancet, […]
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The New York Times has been justifiably criticized, as you probably know, for its anti-Palestine bias in covering Israel’s war on Gaza. But you may not know that the Times building is located near Manhattan’s theater district. This is why a lot of show people tend to walk past the Times, and why my friend, […]
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Jocelyn Nungaray, a 12-year-old from Texas, was recently found dead in a creek near her home. Video footage from a convenience store and interviews with neighborhood residents led police to two men whom they later arrested. Both suspects are undocumented migrants from Venezuela. Her murder immediately became a narrative about the savagery of illegal aliens […]
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+ This week’s Israeli seizure of nearly five square miles of land in the Jordan Valley of the occupied West Bank is the largest land grab in the more than three decades since the signing of the Oslo Accords. First, the lands were declared “closed military zones,” then the Netanyahu government reassigned them as “state […]
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As someone who works against weapons and militarism, and war, it’s hard not to see everything through that lens—including the relentless and increasing attacks on women, pregnant people, queer folks, and sexual assault survivors. And it’s hard not to see these attacks as connected—to each other and the broader spectrum of violence, including war and genocide. Perhaps understanding these connections can help us stand together in solidarity for all our freedom.
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“You do a massacre in an isolated rural village where no one will ever know about it” Prabowo Subianto, President of Indonesia I’m not going to mince words. Prabowo Subianto must be one of the evilest men who ever stained this bumi manusia (earth of humankind), to cite the title of the marvellous, novel by […]
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In December 2023, Israeli troops laid siege to the Anan apartment building in Gaza City. For more than a week, the building was routinely shelled by Israeli tanks and quadcopters and strafed by sniper fire. The entrances and exits were blocked by bulldozers. The water was cut off. Then on the morning of December 19, […]
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In December 2023, Israeli troops laid siege to the Anan apartment building in Gaza City. For more than a week, the building was routinely shelled by Israeli tanks and quadcopters and strafed by sniper fire. The entrances and exits were blocked by bulldozers. The water was cut off. Then on the morning of December 19, […]
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Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.
Defenders of Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East” had their hands full last month, particularly when it came to freedom of the press, a cornerstone of genuine democracies. On May 5, Al Jazeera reported that its offices in East Jerusalem — internationally recognized Palestinian territory occupied by Israel — were raided and shut down by Israeli police following the banning of the news network by the Israeli government. Al Jazeera continues to operate in the rest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but is still barred from reporting or broadcasting in Israel proper. Then, on May 21, the Associated Press reported that Israeli authorities had confiscated AP’s equipment in Southern Israel, despite the news agency submitting to Israeli military censorship. AP’s equipment was eventually returned, but only after the United States’ government intervened on behalf of the US company. Across the border, in the Gaza Strip, the situation for journalists was much more dire. Among the more than 37,266 Palestinians killed in the ongoing Israeli genocide, as reported by Al Jazeera, were at least 103 journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
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“Why am I finding it difficult to give honest feedback to a poem when I don’t face the same problem with an academic essay?” The question comes from Keshav at the end of a workshop – why this difference, why this hesitation about the articulation of our response to the creative but not the critical? […]
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Anyone who knows Benjamin Netanyahu, and Joe Biden has for nearly 50 years, could see it coming. Sooner or later he was bound to bite the hand that feeds him. Bite it hard enough to draw blood, confident that not only could he get away with it but that he’d get more food as a […]
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After reading a recent update on the consequences of firing up the fossil fuels, a longtime correspondent told me, “I look at my grandchild, age 5, and think about her early death.” The rest of the story is that grandparents have been getting their own lives cut short in heatwaves which have, by the way, […]
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