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Category: Feature Articles

  • Buying Democracy with Dirty Money

    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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  • Zone of Extermination

    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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  • The Banality of Sir Keir Starmer

    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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  • Israel’s War Psychosis

    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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  • Who’ll Stop the Rain?

    + 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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  • How Israeli Propagandists Reach Journalists

    Image by Annie Spratt.

    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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  • Larry Hogan’s Dead Chief-of-Staff

    The coroner couldn’t say whether it was Roy McGrath or the FBI who fired the fatal shot, but after two to the head McGrath was dead at 53. Publicly, Larry Hogan said all the right things in the wake of the death of his former chief of staff; thoughts and prayers for the family, etc. But privately Hogan, the former Republican governor of Maryland now running for Senate, must have breathed a sigh of relief. He no longer had to worry about his longtime friend running his mouth, or releasing secret recordings.
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  • The Famine-Makers

    If you want an idea of just how miserably the media has failed in its coverage of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, in a recent Pew survey only about half of American adults could correctly identify whether more Israelis (1,550) or Palestinians (33,000+) had been killed in the war.
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  • Cop Cities, Borders, and Bombs

    Image by Ray Acheson.

    Last month, organizers and activists from around the United States gathered in Tucson, Arizona for a nationwide summit to Stop Cop City—or, more accurately, Cop Cities. As new research has revealed, there are at least 69 militarized police training facilities in the works across the country. Each was put in motion in or after 2020, clearly a direct response to the Black Lives Matter uprisings that dominated city streets for months to condemn racialised police violence and demand the defunding of police.

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  • Why Should We Give All Our Money to Landlords?

    Image by Jon Tyson.

    Who decided we should give all our money to landlords? Did you vote for that? I didn’t. You didn’t, either. And if you have thoughts of leaving renting behind to buy, the costs of mortgages are, not surprisingly, rising dramatically as well.

    As far as I know, no landlord has been recorded as holding a literal gun to the head of tenants to sign a lease. But then there is no need for them to do so, as “market forces” do the work for them. At bottom, the problem is that housing is a capitalist market commodity. As long as housing remains a commodity, housing costs will continue to become ever more unaffordable. To put this in other words: As long as housing is not a human right, but instead something that has to be competed for and owned by a small number of people, the holders of the good (housing) will take advantage and jack up prices as high as possible.

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  • It Can Happen to You

    The greatest tribute the Academy Awards made to Zone of Interest was to reenact its basic premise for nearly four hours, wrapping itself in a cocoon of distraction and self-infatuation, amid the horrors taking place outside, a swirl of superficiality only briefly interrupted by the unsettling sound of Jonathan Glazer’s trembling voice bringing an urgent message from the dead and dying to those who have retreated into a simulation of innocence.
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  • The New York Times’ Bret Stephens, Hasbarist

    Bret Stephens speaking at the 92nd Street Y, Youtube screenshot.

    On October 15, 2023, a week after Hamas’s attack on Israel and in the early days of an indiscriminate Israeli response, New York Times editorialist Bret Stephens wrote a column titled “Hamas Bears the Blame for Every Death in This War.”

    After allowing that “[r]easonable people can criticize Israel for not allowing enough time for civilians to get out of harm’s way,” Stephens, having rhetorically covered himself, endorses the impending ground invasion and arrives at the conclusion inscribed in the column’s title. “The central cause of Gaza’s misery is Hamas,” he writes. “It alone bears the blame for the suffering it has inflicted on Israel and knowingly invited against Palestinians.”

    After five months of war, at least 30,000 Palestinians dead (12,000 children, certainly an undercount), innumerable documented atrocities, a partial indictment for genocide, and the prospect of a spiraling Middle East conflagration, you might think his tune would have shifted, even a little. After all, even Tom Friedman has managed to squeeze out some criticism of Israel.

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  • What Biden and the Democrats Can Appear to Do About Gaza

    When it comes to the genocide that the United States is helping Israel inflict on Gaza, Joe Biden is never more repugnant than when he pretends to care. I actually prefer his one-sided regional empathy: tedious reminiscences of chats with Golda Meir and odious references to Israel’s psychopathic Prime Minister as “Bibi”. { A  term […]
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  • Starvation Games

    With more than a half-million Gazans already facing starvation and more and more children dying of hunger, Biden’s solution, a floating port, will take 30-60 days to build and even then Israeli forces will still be in charge of inspecting the trucks of supplies, the main reason trucks are backed up for miles at the entry points into Gaza. Even the trickle of humanitarian supplies and food Biden has pledged to provide to Palestinians in Gaza won’t do much, if any, good, if there’s no one there to distribute it and Israel just moved to deny visas to the aid workers who have the experience and means to get the aid where it needs to go, a clear strategy to double down on its warfare by starvation.
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  • Homo What?

    As some members of our species are at it, hell for leather, killing other members of it wholesale and openly, aided and abetted by “democratic” national and international institutions in the “crime of all crimes”—genocide—humanity’s current situation is one in which the end of our species, and all the rest, is looming in the even […]
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  • Fani Willis’ Other Scandal

    Four days before the January 6 insurrection, then-president Donald Trump infamously told a state official to “find” the votes needed to overturn his 2020 loss to Joe Biden in the key state of Georgia. News of Trump’s put-me-in-jail-please phone call broke just as Fani Willis took the reins as the newly elected district attorney for […]
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    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Pete Tucker.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Burning All Illusions

    The desperate attempts to smear Aaron Bushnell as “insane” are absurd. They are the kind of absurdity that Camus dissects in The Myth of Sisyphus, which begins by saying “There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide.”  If Camus ultimately comes down on the side of living, it’s a close call that takes many pages to reason out in a world where one civilized culture gave us Auschwitz and another Hiroshima. Our own cultural guardians want us to believe Bushnell was mad and not the war that drove him to take his own life.
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  • Assange’s High Court Appeal

    Assange’s attorneys had informed the court that he simply could not attend in person, though it would hardly have mattered.  His absence from the courtroom was decorous in its own way; he could avoid being displayed like a caged specimen reviled for his publishing feats.  The proceedings would be conducted in the manner of appropriate panto, with dress and procedure to boot.
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  • The Storm in Gaza, Ericka Huggins, and the Right to Remain Ridiculous

    I don’t know about you, but my heart is broken. And I am nothing special – I’m guessing there are at least two to twenty million people in this country – a whole other mainstream – who feel something similar. But I am profoundly privileged, demographically secure with the genome of a Mary Poppins – what right have I to mention my self-indulgent feelings? Because I wasn’t aware I had a heart condition until I talked about Gaza to Ericka Huggins. “Your heart is broken,” she told me.
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  • Everybody Knows

    Where we stand after 140 days of war:  At least 29,514 Palestinians have been killed and 69,616 wounded since the war began. Another 7,000 are presumed dead, buried under the rubble. More than 500,000 Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from severe hunger, another 350,000 suffer from chronic hunger conditions, while 60,000 pregnant women and more than 700,000 children suffer from malnutrition and dehydration.
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  • Does Clean Energy Mean Indian Relocation From the Colorado Plateau? 

    Energy Fuels, Inc. opened a uranium mine called Pinyon Plain Mine, 7 miles from the rim of the Grand Canyon on December 21, 2023, according to the company’s press release. They plan to mill the ore into high assay low energy-enriched uranium (HALEU) suitable for power-plant use at their uranium mill in White Mesa, Utah. […]
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  • Israel Counting All Men Killed in Gaza as Militants

    Last month, The Wall Street Journal published an article on the disparities between estimates by the Israeli military of the number of Palestinian militants killed in Gaza and estimates by US intelligence agencies of the same. Although the article focuses on the Israeli military’s over-estimations, it also shares two revealing figures: 1. According to the Health Ministry of Gaza, which does not distinguish between civilians and militants, at least 8,000 Palestinian men were killed by the Israeli military in Gaza; 2. According to the Israeli military, its forces killed 9,000 militants in Gaza. The only possible way to square those two numbers is for the Israeli military to count every single Palestinian man it has killed in Gaza as a militant, and then add some. As absurd as that sounds, that appears to be precisely what the Israeli military has been doing for months — and the United States and United Kingdom have done the same in their wars in the Middle East too.
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  • Shooting the Messengers

    “America accepts a ceasefire whereby Hamas ceases and Israel fires.” – Marwan Bishara + Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza that are so brazen and outrageous that no one even considered legislating against them…until now. + Consider this: On Tuesday afternoon, the IDF sent a handcuffed Palestinian man named Jamal Abu Al-Ola into Nasser […]
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  • Israelism Bucks Blind Faith in Israeli Occupation, Apartheid and “the Jewish Disneyland”

    Still from Israelism.

    Without presenting a single shred of evidence, Rep. Nancy Pelosi recently contended on CNN that protesters challenging U.S. and Israeli policies in Gaza are doing the Kremlin’s bidding. “For them to call for a cease-fire is Mr. Putin’s message. Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see… I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some, I think, are connected to Russia. And I say that having looked at this for a long time now… I think some financing should be investigated. And I want to ask the FBI to investigate that,” Pelosi squealed.(Paging Joe McCarthy!)

    Nevertheless, undaunted, two thirty-something American Jewish filmmakers have made Israelism, a documentary that is the worst ideological nightmare for the mindless pro-Israel camp. Erin Axelrod and Sam Eilertsen expertly give the lie to the one-sided propaganda about Palestinians that American Jews and others have been indoctrinated with regarding the Israeli occupation, apartheid and other dehumanizing policies, in a skillfully rendered, award-winning 80-minute nonfiction film. Challenging the dominant pro-Israel mythos, American Jewish and Palestinian activists, along with independent presidential candidate/academic Cornel West and intellectual Noam Chomsky, expose the lies that have been perpetrated and perpetuated by the ultra-Zionist militaristic regime and its supporters, threatening their stranglehold over the hearts and minds of Jewish and other Americans.

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  • Investigating the New York Times “Investigation” of Hamas Mass Rape 

    Almost three months after the Hamas attacks of October 7, and well into the international condemnation of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, on December 29, 2023, the New York Times revisited the topic of Hamas sexual violence. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jeffrey Gettleman joined two other writers, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella, in a piece billed […]
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  • Over the Top

    For every Israeli killed on October 7 (some of them, perhaps many) by the IDF, at least 10 Palestinian children in Gaza have been killed in revenge…with no sign the killing is slowing down never mind stopping.
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  • Abstractions and Mass Murder

    Israeli ground operations in Gaza, November 1, 2023. Photo: IDF. CC BY-SA 3.0

    There is nothing new under the sun in terms of incitement to war methods or the dehumanization techniques necessary to create compliant and bloodthirsty populations. The only thing that is new are the shifting and doomed populations who find themselves in the way of empire. Students of history, generally without a shred of self-examination, congratulate themselves for being born to a more enlightened time knowing that even if they were transported to those historical events, they would never have participated. They would have been the principled objector. It’s a comforting thought with absolutely no skin in the game. But when given present-day examples of such horror, and an opportunity to, if nothing else, be on the right side of history, they fall prey to the techniques that always worked in the past. They believe the current troubles are simply too complicated to unravel; that it’s all completely different from historical precedents. Unless a chink in the armor of this thinking takes place, we are doomed to move from genocide to genocide, whenever a population or group is deemed unfavorable or simply in the way. The words may not be exactly the same, but they always bear a striking similarity. That is, they dehumanize the other and make any and all attempts to rid themselves of the so-called savages part of a greater good. You still have to behave in a certain non-murderous ways within your in-group, but all bets are off when combating “the other”. It’s like quantum mechanics don’t seem to apply to everyday macro interactions. You get to murder and annihilate others, but still tuck your kids in at night like you aren’t a monster.

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  • Are Palestinians the New Jews?

    The Israeli leadership is currently engaged in an undoubted genocide against the Palestinian population of Gaza. A complementary mopping-up operation continues (if in slow motion) in the West Bank. During World War II, a certain genocide took place. More than one if one counts the attempted genocide by the Nazis, consciously on racist grounds, of […]
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  • Gaza Delenda Est

    The Biden Administration’s decision to cut off critical funding to UNRWA is the default form of collective punishment for Clintonian liberals, where the denial of humanitarian aid is used as a weapon to punish (ie., starve) people who have no responsibility for the alleged transgression.
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  • ICJ’s Order to Prevent Genocide Applies to the Governments Arming Israel, Too

    Image by mohammed al bardawil.

    War profiteers are on notice. On 26 January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that South Africa’s case against Israel for its genocide of Palestinians has merit. While the Court has not yet ruled on whether Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians since 7 October 2023 is genocide—a ruling at which it may take years to arrive—it did order Israel to prevent and not commit genocidal acts against Palestinians, prevent and punish public incitement to commit genocide, ensure the provision of humanitarian aid, preserve evidence related to allegations of genocide, and submit a compliance report within one month. These orders have a significant impact on the provision of weapons to Israel: governments arming genocide can be held accountable for genocide themselves.
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