The Vatican announced Monday that Pope Francis has died at the age of 88, hours after he appeared at an Easter mass and appealed for an end to Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip. The pope’s Easter address, read aloud by Archbishop Diego Ravelli, decried the “terrible conflict” in Gaza that “continues to cause death and destruction and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation.”…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The Vatican announced Monday that Pope Francis has died at the age of 88, hours after he appeared at an Easter mass and appealed for an end to Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip. The pope’s Easter address, read aloud by Archbishop Diego Ravelli, decried the “terrible conflict” in Gaza that “continues to cause death and destruction and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation.”…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The bombed remains of automobiles with the bombed Federal Building in the background, April 19, 1995.
In other circumstances, we don’t have to wonder. We know.
It happens to writers a lot. It’s often our and stock-in-trade.
I know exactly what I was thinking after the Oklahoma City bombing thirty years ago today, and it was not popular. But I recorded it in the April 25, 1995 edition of The Shorthorn at the University of Texas-Arlington. And the math sucks. It’s aged much better than the author.
In the Aftermath
To terrorize is to dominate or coerce by intimidation, the threat of violence, or the calculated perpetration of destruction, catastrophe, assassination, murder, etc. In the popular mind, terrorism is qualified by additional connotations. People recognize it as a vicious, cold-blooded attack on defenseless civilians or bystanding innocents. Few crimes are judged with such an unchallenged sense of vehement righteousness. Perpetrators of terrorism are hounded with unparalleled sanctimony and fanatic zeal. I read President Clinton’s pledge in the newspaper: “Nobody can hide any place in this country; nobody can hide any place in this world from the terrible consequences of what has been done.”
Indeed, I think . . . unless they are American.
Reports of the Oklahoma City bombing shock, enrage, and sadden me, but an ancient adage haunts my conscience: Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.
For the last four decades, the United States has perpetrated terrorist activities around the world. Our remorseless work in Vietnam, before and during the war, provided a chilling catalogue of American terrorism. The CIA-planned and CIA-executed assassination of the democratically-elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, evidenced a harrowing propensity for terrorist realpolitik. And the United States has repeatedly installed and/or subsidized puppet dictators around the world who perform terrorist acts on their own constituencies.
On a subtler level, in cases such as Israel and, until recently, South Africa, we support governments that permit, if not directly sanction, terrorist enterprises against their own indigenous populations, ranging from summary executions to simple violations of the most basic human rights.
I see tattered infant-victims of the bombing in Oklahoma City and cringe, rueful and angry.
But my jaw also stiffens as I recall the Guatemalan and El Salvadoran “Death Squads,” the genocidal military wings of regimes we encouraged and assisted in rises to power in Central America.
In Guatemala, we supported the coup against and eventual overthrow of democratically elected president Jacob Arbenz. The faction we bet on—and invested in—began an incomprehensible reign of terror, decimating over 440 indigenous villages, conducting an estimated 100,000 political killings (more than 40,000 termed “disappearances”), and leaving over 200,000 children orphaned. And our man in Chile, General Augusto Pinochet, upstaged his Guatemalan counterparts, employing tortures that included inserting sabers in vaginas and disemboweling female victims while their families watched.
And who can forget the “fraidy-Eighties” under Ronnie Reagan?
No one in Nicaragua can.
Men, women and children no different than the citizens of Oklahoma City were afraid all the time, and not just over one incident, but several every week. Besides funding and arming the Contras, we also published and distributed a terrorist handbook for their training. The CIA called it a “Freedom Fighters Manual,” but it included, among other things, detailed instructions (with illustrations) for making and utilizing Molotov cocktails.
And these are just are just a few of the examples where U.S. involvement in terrorist activities actually became public. There were no doubt countless others. In fact, by popular definition, the largest single terrorist atrocity in human history was the allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany in World War II. Although it occurred during wartime, it was a vicious, calculated attack on a virtually defenseless civilian community.
The second and third largest terrorist atrocities in world history were probably our nuclear strikes in Japan. These incidents pale in comparison to the widespread pogroms of Hitler, Belgium’s King Leopold, and the Catholic Church, but genocide is not a single act or terrorism—it constitutes a regimen of terrorism (of which our nation could be accused of domestically regarding indigenous people and Blacks and also in much of the Third World in general).
As Americans, we are largely and more recently unaccustomed to displays of first-hand terrorist bloodshed, but, for much of the rest of the world, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. They live with it every day.
I shudder at the scenes from Oklahoma City; but I also quake at our bloody ignorance. Did we think our acts of terror would never be reciprocated? Or that our fellow citizens were incapable of them?
Did we really think we could be immune from terrorism after having so long been one of its chief contagions?!
American terrorism has, however, evolved. Now, it’s openly encouraged and sanctioned by our commander-and-chief.
The post Bad Math first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Israel, both materially and rhetorically, has made their intent to destroy the Palestinian people clear. One of the most renowned and courageous Middle East scholars, Norman Finkelstein, has assiduously documented the Palestinian plight for decades and he joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report. Finkelstein and Hedges assess the current state of the genocide in Palestine as well as how the media and the universities have all but abandonded their principles in servitude to the Zionist agenda.
Finkelstein makes clear the gravity of Israel’s unprecedented actions: “If you take any metric—number of UN workers killed, number of medics killed, number of journalists killed, proportion of civilians to combatants killed, proportion of children killed, proportion of women and children killed—if you take any metric, Israel for the 21st century is in a class all its own.”
The post The Chris Hedges Report: Emptying Gaza appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on American Jewish World Service – AJWS.
This post was originally published on American Jewish World Service – AJWS.
The Maldives announced on 15 April an immediate ban on the entry of Israelis into the island nation in response to Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
President Mohamed Muizzu ratified the legislation on Tuesday after it was approved by parliament.
“The ratification reflects the government’s firm stance in response to the continuing atrocities and ongoing acts of genocide committed by Israel against the Palestinian people,” the president’s office said in a statement.
“The Maldives reaffirms its resolute solidarity with the Palestinian cause.”
The Maldives, a small Islamic republic of 1,192 strategically located coral islets in the Indian Ocean, is a popular luxury tourist destination known for its beaches.
The post Maldives Bans Entry Of Israeli Tourists ‘In Solidarity’ With Palestine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Taxpayers Against Genocide (TAG), a nongovernmental grassroots mass movement comprised of more than 2,000 taxpayers who have been protesting their congressional representatives’ votes to fund Israel’s genocide in Gaza, filed an unprecedented report with the UN Human Rights Council on April 7.
“We have gone through all the channels open to us in our effort to stop U.S. officials from using our tax dollars to fund genocide. We have called and met with these officials, we have peacefully protested, and we have taken them to federal court. To date, none of this has stopped them,” Seth Donnelly, lead taxpayer plaintiff in the federal lawsuit, told Truthout.
The post Appalled At Funding Genocide, US Taxpayers Turn To The UN For Redress appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
Israel’s defense minister has pledged a permanent military occupation of the “buffer zone” that constitutes over half of Gaza and an indefinite continuation of the total aid blockade, vowing an escalation of Israel’s plans for the genocide as Israeli officials dubiously accuse Hamas of rejecting ceasefire deals. In a statement on Wednesday, Defense Minister Israel Katz said that the Israeli…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A group of Shompen men in the Great Nicobar Island rainforest. ©Survival
One of the world’s most isolated tribes will be wiped out if the Indian government presses ahead with a mega-development project on their island, according to a new report published today.
The report “Crushed: How India plans to sacrifice one of the world’s most isolated tribes to create ‘the new Hong Kong’” is published by Survival International.
It warns that the uncontacted Shompen people, who live only on Great Nicobar Island in the Indian Ocean, will not survive if the Great Nicobar Development Project goes ahead.
The project includes plans to build a mega-port, defense base, power station and new city of 650,000 people, and bring in around a million tourists and other visitors to the small island each year.
Indian government visualisation of the Great Nicobar mega-port, just one part of the huge project planned for the island.
Survival International said today that it is sending the report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, UN Special Rapporteurs, and other UN officials, and urging them to call for the project to be scrapped.
Thirty-nine genocide scholars wrote to the Indian government in February 2024 warning that the project would wipe out the Shompen if it went ahead.
Around 300 Shompen people live in the lush rainforests of the island’s interior, the majority of whom are uncontacted. Great Nicobar is part of the same island chain that is home to the uncontacted Sentinelese people, where an American influencer was arrested this month for trying to contact the tribe.
Survival International Director Caroline Pearce said today: “It’s appalling that the authorities in India are pressing ahead with this project that will wipe out the Shompen, one of the world’s most isolated tribes. While they’re prosecuting someone for going to the island of the Sentinelese, they cannot justify building a city of 650,000 people on the island of their uncontacted neighbors the Shompen.
“This project would seem absurd if it weren’t so deadly. The Shompen have the right to survive, and just want to be left in peace. The government must allow them to do so by scrapping this project, rather than pressing ahead and condemning the Shompen to annihilation.”
The post Indian Government Plans Spell Disaster for Uncontacted Island Tribe first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The post-WW2 ‘international rules-based order’ that supposedly underpins global affairs in the interests of peace, democracy and prosperity has always been largely a charade. But Israel’s continuing Gaza genocide, carried out with seeming impunity and with the complicity and even active participation of the US and its allies, has exposed the charade like never before.
Twenty years ago, at the 2005 World Summit, the United Nations General Assembly endorsed the doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’ or ‘R2P’. The key concerns were to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Whenever populations are at risk of such crimes, the international community is supposed to take collective action ‘in a timely and decisive manner’ to prevent mass atrocities from taking place.
In practice, only some massacres matter, whether threatened or actual: namely, those that can be exploited by Western powers to further their own geostrategic interests (for example, see our media alerts here and here). The Nato-led attack on Libya in 2011 is a textbook example. Western politicians and their cheerleaders across the media ‘spectrum’ declared that the world had to act to prevent a ‘bloodbath’ in Benghazi when Gaddafi’s forces there were allegedly threatening to massacre civilians.
In fact, the public were subjected to a propaganda blitz to promote the Perpetual War that had already wreaked havoc in Iraq, resulting in the deaths of over one million people, the virtual destruction of the Iraqi state and the proliferation of Al-Qaeda and other militia groups.
In 2016, a report from the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee summarised the destructive consequences of Nato’s 2011 intervention in Libya:
‘The result was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL [Islamic State] in North Africa.’
As for the supposed threat of a massacre by Gaddafi’s forces in Benghazi, the alleged motivation for Nato’s ‘humanitarian intervention’, the report concluded that this ‘was not supported by the available evidence’. Likewise, claims that Gaddafi used African mercenaries and employed Viagra-fuelled mass rape as a weapon of war were invented.
Nato’s actual goals were regime change and Libya’s oil, long pursued by the UK. After years of the West cosying up to Gaddafi, including by Tony Blair, the Libyan leader had become a hindrance to Western interests.
As historian Mark Curtis observed:
‘three weeks after [then UK prime minister David] Cameron assured parliament in March 2011 that the object of the intervention was not regime change, he signed a joint letter with President Obama and French President Sarkozy committing to “a future without Gaddafi”.’
Curtis added:
‘That these policies were illegal is confirmed by Cameron himself. He told Parliament on 21 March 2011 that the UN resolution “explicitly does not provide legal authority for action to bring about Gaddafi’s removal from power by military means”.’
Like Blair, Cameron should have ended up in The Hague facing charges of war crimes.
‘Unapologetic Genocide’
If the doctrine of ‘R2P’ was authentic, then there would have been massive international action to prevent Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as Israeli terror acts committed in the occupied West Bank, including the routine killing of Palestinian children.
It took Amnesty International 14 months after the attacks of 7 October 2023 to publish a finding of genocide against Israel on 5 December 2024. A further four months have passed. In March, Israel shattered the ceasefire it never intended to keep, killing almost 1,600 Palestinians since then. According to the Health Ministry in Gaza, around 51,000 people have been killed by Israel since October 2023. The actual death toll is likely much higher. Israel has also halted all supplies of food, fuel and humanitarian aid into Gaza.
The killing of 15 medics and emergency workers last month by Israeli soldiers, and the attempted Israeli cover-up, with bodies and vehicles buried in a shallow mass grave, provoked not a single public condemnation of Israel from Western leaders, as far as we are aware.
BBC News, no doubt aware of public scrutiny and perhaps also under internal pressure from some of their own journalists, set its ‘BBC Verify’ team to work. This followed the publication of harrowing video footage of Israel’s attack found on the mobile phone of Rifaat Radwan, one of the victims. Heartbreakingly, he could be heard saying moments before his killing:
‘Forgive me mother because I chose this way, the way of helping people. Accept my martyrdom, God, and forgive me.’
The 19-minute clip revealed that the vehicles in the convoy of the Palestinian Red Crescent had their headlights and emergency lights on, with high-vis jackets being worn, flatly contradicting Israel’s dishonest statements of the convoy behaving ‘suspiciously’ and constituting a ‘threat’.
Early BBC reports carried the headline: ‘Israel admits mistakes over medic killings in Gaza.’
This was the BBC once again bending over backwards to minimise Israel’s crimes.
The headline was later updated to a more accurate, but still soft-pedalling:
‘Israel changes account of Gaza medic killings after video showed deadly attack’
Notably, BBC News did not use the word ‘massacre’ in its reports, which it plainly was. Nor did they spell out that Israel’s spokespeople had been deceitful in their statements. In fact, Israel has a long history of spreading disinformation and even outright lies: a crucial fact that is routinely missing from ‘mainstream’ news reports.
Instead, the BBC said that Israel had merely ‘changed its account’ of what had happened. Likewise, the Guardian went with:
‘Israeli military changes account of Gaza paramedics’ killing after video of attack’
The 15 victims were but statistics, with little or no attempt to name or humanise them; no interviews with grieving relatives or account of their lives, their hopes, their ambitions.
Owen Jones put it well via X and, at greater length, in a video:
‘Imagine Russia executed 15 Red Cross medics and first responders, burying them in a mass grave.
‘Imagine it lied about this grave war crime. Imagine footage then proved this.
‘Would the BBC frame that as “Russia admits mistakes over medic killings in Ukraine”?
‘No it would not.’
On BBC News at Six on 7 April, international editor Jeremy Bowen concluded his account of Israel’s massacre of the 15 medics and emergency workers with a shameful piece of bothsidesism:
‘Israel now admits that its soldiers made mistakes when they attacked the convoy. It consistently denies it commits war crimes in Gaza. The evidence indicates that all the warring parties have done so.’ [Bowen’s own emphasis]
The egregious false balance, the failure to point out Israel’s long and disreputable record of lying, and the BBC’s refusal to use words such as ‘massacre’ and ‘genocide’ are all glaringly obvious to the public.
Historian and political commentator Assal Rad observed via X that Western media have no compunction giving headline coverage whenever ‘Russia lies’. But, in the case of Israel, the headlines use the weasel phrase: ‘Israel changes account’.
As mentioned, it is possible that both public and internal pressure on BBC News are occasionally having an impact on the broadcaster. As trade unionist Howard Beckett pointed out, the BBC initially reported the appalling Israeli attack on 13 April on the al Ahli Arab Hospital, the last fully functional hospital in Gaza City, with the headline:
‘Gaza hospital hit by Israeli strike, Hamas-run healthy ministry says’
BBC News systematically includes the phrase ‘Hamas-run healthy ministry says’ in its headlines, implying that the source may not be trustworthy. The headline was later updated to:
‘Israeli air strike destroys part of last functioning hospital in Gaza City’
As ever with BBC News, Israel’s excuse for the attack appeared near the top of the article:
‘The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it targeted the hospital because it contained a “command and control centre used by Hamas”.’
Richard Sanders, an experienced journalist and filmmaker, noted via X:
‘BBC again reports the Israeli claim the Al-Ahli Baptist hospital was a “command and control centre used by Hamas” without caveats – despite the fact such claims in the past have proved to be entirely untrue again and again. Bad, bad journalism.’
‘Bad, bad journalism’; namely, propaganda. But entirely standard for BBC News and much of what passes for ‘mainstream’ news.
Readers may recall that this is the same hospital where a devastating explosion occurred on 17 October 2023, killing 471 people, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Israel mounted a huge propaganda operation to try to convince the world that the cause was a ‘misfiring’ Palestinian rocket. However, detailed analysis by Forensic Architecture, a multidisciplinary research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London, which investigates human rights violations, revealed that a more likely conclusion is that the cause was an exploding Israeli interceptor rocket.
In the hours after the explosion, doctors who treated the wounded held a news conference at nearby al-Shifa Hospital. There, the British-Palestinian surgeon Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, currently Rector of the University of Glasgow, said that: ‘This is a massacre’, predicting that ‘more hospitals will be targeted’.
Dr Abu-Sittah would later say that the blast at al Ahli hospital was the moment when it seemed clear to him that Israel’s military campaign ‘stopped being a war, and became a genocide’.
Sky News correspondent Alex Crawford pointed out that this was the fifth time the hospital had been bombed by Israeli military forces since October 2023.
As investigative journalist Dan Cohen noted of the latest attack:
‘This is the same hospital Israel bombed in October 2023 and waged a massive media disinformation campaign to blame a Palestinian rocket. Now they don’t even pretend. Unapologetic genocide.’
Does Italy Have A Right To Exist?
Last November, perhaps seeking a viral ‘gotcha’ moment, a journalist challenged Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, with the clichéd question, ‘Does Israel have a right to exist?’
Albanese’s cogent response is worth contemplating:
‘Israel does exist. Israel is a recognised member of the United Nations. Besides this, there is not such a thing in international law like a right of a state to exist. Does Italy have a right to exist? Italy exists. Now, if tomorrow, Italy and France want to merge and become Ita-France, fine, this is not up to us. What is enshrined in international law is the right of a people to exist. So, the state is there. The state of Israel is there. It’s protected as a member of the United Nations. Does this justify the erasure of another people? Hell, no. Not 75 years ago. Not 57 years ago. Surely not today. Where is the protection of the Palestinian people from erasure, from annexation, from illegal occupation and apartheid? This is what we need to discuss.’
A powerful reply indeed. Where is the much-vaunted ‘R2P’ when it comes to Palestine? Instead of discussing how best to protect the Palestinian people and, more importantly, taking immediate decisive action to do so, the West continues to support the apartheid and genocidal state of Israel: arming it, providing diplomatic cover, colluding with the Israeli air forces with RAF spy flights over Gaza and war operations, including the secret supply of weapons to Israel, being conducted from the RAF base in Cyprus.
As is well known by now, the International Court of Justice in The Hague is currently deliberating over a case of genocide against Israel. Last year, the ICJ declared that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories – Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem – is illegal. And the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant. And yet, Netanyahu was recently welcomed with open arms in Washington, DC, having flown through airspace in France and other European countries which, under their ICC obligations, should have denied him that privilege.
Palestinian journalist Lubna Masarwa, Middle East Eye’s Palestine and Israel bureau chief, observed that:
‘To western leaders, there are no red lines for Israel’s slaughter. Emboldened by the US and other western powers, Israel feels it can get away with unleashing hell on all Palestinians.’
She added: ‘The inhumanity of these times scares me, as a journalist and as a person.’
Last Friday, Mirjana Spoljaric, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said that Gaza has become ‘hell on earth’. Israel was ‘threatening the viability of Palestinians continuing to live in Gaza at all’. What is happening in Gaza is, she said, an ‘extreme hollowing out’ of international law.
As Andrew Feinstein, the author, activist and former South African MP, stated in a recent powerful video for Double Down News:
The post Global Charade: Israel, Palestine and the “Rules-Based Order” first appeared on Dissident Voice.‘The West has a choice: stop supporting genocide or mutate their own democracies and destroy international law forever. The West has chosen the latter.’
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Taxpayers Against Genocide (TAG), a nongovernmental grassroots mass movement comprised of more than 2,000 taxpayers who have been protesting their congressional representatives’ votes to fund Israel’s genocide in Gaza, filed an unprecedented report with the UN Human Rights Council on April 7. “We have gone through all the channels open to us in our effort to stop U.S. officials from using our…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This April 17, we, a collective of academic workers, students, union members, and activists within multiple higher education associations and unions, trade unions, and other organizing spaces, call for a coordinated national direct action in protest of the ongoing genocide abroad and the escalating repression at home. As academic workers and students united with other labor sectors, we aim to take back public places and uplift the right to dissent and the right to collective organizing for liberation. We stand against the neoliberal and colonial logic of higher ed that represses speech and academic freedom in the US and that enables genocide, carceral tactics, and the long-running destruction of education and historical memory in Gaza and throughout Palestine.
The post Stop The Genocide Abroad And The Repression At Home appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Israel is poised to carry out the largest campaign of ethnic cleansing since the end of World War II. Since March 2, it has blocked all food and humanitarian aid into Gaza and cut off electricity, so that the last water desalination plant no longer functions. The Israeli military has seized half of the territory — Gaza is 25 miles long and four to five miles wide — and placed two-thirds of Gaza under displacement orders, rendered “no-go zones,” including the border town of Rafah, which is encircled by Israeli troops.
On Friday Defence Minister Israel Katz announced that Israel will “intensify” the war against Hamas and use “all military and civilian pressure, including evacuation of the Gaza population south and implementing United States President [Donald] Trump’s voluntary migration plan for Gaza residents.”
The post Israel Is About To Empty Gaza appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
The fragile Gaza ceasefire, which served as a lifeline for Gaza’s health care sector, lasted less than two months before it collapsed under a barrage of Israeli airstrikes. In March, Israel resumed its war on hospitals, with its first strikes targeting the intensive care unit (ICU) at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, followed by the bombing of the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
When they shelled us with the second missile, I woke up and was surrounded by rubble. I realized that my leg had been cut off…. My father and mother were martyred. My brother Mohammad and my sister Dalia, too. I only want one thing: for the war to end.
— Dunia, 12 years old, in an interview with Defense for Children-International. Read her story in our most recent visual, Stolen Steps.
The ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians has made Gaza “the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.” For every child Israel kills, many more are wounded or maimed, causing mass amputations and disablement that amount to a direct assault on the collective Palestinian body. Our latest visual, created in partnership with Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP), tells the stories of children whose lives and limbs have been stolen by Israel, and how Israel’s targeted destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system makes it impossible for them to access much-needed medical supplies and rehabilitation services.
From forced starvation, to scholasticide, to mass displacement, to mass disablement, to mass killing, to separation from caregivers and loved ones, children in Gaza are facing conditions that no child should ever face anywhere in the world.
The post Stolen Steps first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
At 7:30 a.m. on April 9, the heavy traffic flow into California’s Travis Air Force Base came to a sudden stop. As they have done numerous times, the “People’s Arms Embargo” blocked the main road into the base. The action this time commemorated the recently deceased long-time peace advocate David Hartsough, one of the co-founders of the Peoples Arms Embargo.
With traffic into the base stopped, one angry airman jumped out of his pickup truck and threatened to assault the peaceful protestors. He finally thought better of it and returned to his truck. Other waiting airmen and airwomen were patient and a few indicated support for the protest.
The post Protest At Travis AFB Against US Weapons For Israeli Genocide appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
As Americans prepare their taxes for Tax Day on April 15, remember that the U.S. government continues to spend the citizen’s money to fund mass violence against Palestinians. What could the U.S. fund instead of more weapons to Israel? In collaboration with our partners, U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights-Action (USCPRA), we updated our visual series, Fund Care Not Killing, to show that the $17.9 billion in military funding that U.S. lawmakers sent to Israel to fuel genocide in 2024 could have been used to fund housing, healthcare, education, and solar electricity for millions of Americans instead.
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Despite support from over 60% of Americans to halt military funding to Israel, the U.S. continues to aid and abet Israel’s genocide against Palestinians with the American people’s tax dollars. In February, the Trump administration approved an additional $8 billion in arms sales to Israel to fuel its genocidal campaign in Gaza.
While Senator Bernie Sanders attempted to block the sale, it was rejected by the majority of the U.S. Senate.
It is important to continue to push U.S. Congress members to represent the will of the American people. If you are an American citizen or resident, you can take action by emailing your members of Congress to call for an arms embargo on Israel. USCPRA’s site, NotMyTaxDollars.org, has more graphics and posters you can use to tell Americans how much of their tax money is spent fueling Israeli violence.
The post Fund Care Not Killing first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
As the Jewish community prepares to observe Passover this year, I’m thinking a great deal about the centrality of children to the Exodus story we tell around the seder table. In particular, I’m struck that this narrative from the Torah begins with a terrifying description of atrocities committed against children. As Exodus opens, a new pharaoh arises over Egypt who openly dreads the demographic…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Palestinians across the West Bank observed a general strike on Monday protesting the renewed Israeli genocide in Gaza. The strike was observed in all West Bank cities and towns and joined by all civil society bodies. The Palestinian Teachers’ Union announced the halt of all classes, while the Palestinian Bar Association announced that all lawyers and judges were called to abstain from attending court hearings. The “national and Islamic forces,” the coalition of all Palestinian political parties, also called for the general strike. It was observed by all of Palestinian society in the West Bank, including businesses and public transportation.
The post Strike Highlights Palestinian Frustrations With ‘Symbolic’ Protest appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Two Youth Demand supporters have laid body bags at David Lammy’s door to highlight his role in continuing to facilitate Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The supporters are demanding that the UK government impose a total trade embargo on Israel, and make the super rich and fossil fuel elite pay damages to communities and countries most harmed by fossil fuel burning. At around 11am on Tuesday 8 April, two Youth Demand supporters displayed a sign over the foreign secretary’s hedge which read- ‘Lammy Stop Arming Genocide’. At his door the pair laid child-sized body bags representing the 17,400 children that we know of who have been murdered during Israel’s genocidal rampage since 7 October 2023.
The post Youth Demand Line Up Child-Size Body Bags Outside David Lammy’s Door appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
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The latest phase of Israel’s genocide in Gaza has made the Strip into “a killing field,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres has warned as Israel is blocking the entry of all humanitarian aid and is continuing its relentless bombardments. “More than an entire month has passed without a drop of aid into Gaza. No food. No fuel. No medicine. No commercial supplies. As aid has dried up…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
I am not just a survivor, but a witness. A witness to destruction, resilience and countless stories of suffering and survival. So many stories will never be told, so many names will never be remembered.
The Occupier asked us to surrender, but I don’t know what surrender means anymore. The war took away my ability to choose, instead I endured. Every tear marks the beginning of another story, every pain marks the birth of hope. I was pregnant when the war began, and for months all I knew were hunger, thirst, heat and cold. As my due date approached, my heart raced, for I did not count myself among the mighty. I was more fragile than you could imagine. I mourned without ceasing, yet my heart burned with the desire to live. Sometimes, I let my tears fall freely; other times, I wiped them away before they betrayed me. Each tear was a surrender to circumstance, but with every sob, I grew stronger.
My baby came prematurely. The air was thick with smoke, and the sky was filled with war. This was not the beautiful day I had been waiting for. Three weeks earlier, I had registered to leave Gaza, and I started counting down the days one by one: ten, nine, eight… But instead of inhaling the scent of freedom the evening before my evacuation day, I started feeling the pains of labor.
In the middle of the night, a wave of agony swept over me. Outside, plumes of smoke obscured the stars while screams betrayed the terror of my fellow Palestinians. Our refugee camp was no longer safe. I clung to my trembling belly, swallowing my cries amidst the chaos. But then I realized my pain was nothing compared to the suffering of the orphaned children. Their tiny bodies torn by shrapnel, burned by flames, left to face torment without a mother or a father to wake them from this terrible dream. How could the pain of childbirth compare to that? I was overwhelmed with shame.
I huddled against the wall of my tent—its flimsy fabric all shielded me from death. The black night was punctuated by flashes of fiery explosions. Every now and then, I would lift my eyes to the sky, searching for a glimmer of twilight—the indication that it would be safe to leave for the hospital. My contractions felt more powerful than the roar of cannons. But walking in the dark was more dangerous than giving birth in the camp, which lacked even clean water and electric lights. When dawn came I finally stepped outside and was met with a sight more shocking than I could have dreamed.
Every home had been turned into a pile of rubble—refrigerators, washing machines, and even a kitchen sink stuck out from beneath the debris. Sofas had turned to dust, while burnt clothes smothered smoldering mattresses. Amidst the wreckage, remnants of a life once lived lay scattered: family photos and precious memories, covered with blood stains and broken bones. Whole families had died while I was hiding in my tent.
The air was saturated with sorrow. A mother wept for her three children. A wife cried for her husband and baby. People searched for the remains of loved ones. Their homes had become a burial ground with bodies shrouded in coffins made of nightmares and dust. But their pain was not theirs alone; it was shared by all of us.
Through this hell I walked to a hospital overflowing with the wounded and the dead. The patients carried on without medicine or bandages. The walls trembled with each new airstrike. The floors were soaked with blood. There were no empty beds—only bodies barely breathing, or breathing not at all. I was just a number watching doctors rush from one emergency to another, trying to save those who were not yet dead. I sat in a cold corner, waiting for my turn to die, whispering verses from the Quran: For indeed, with hardship comes ease.
The hospital had become a battlefield filled with screams of pain and states of shock; bodies limped for want of limbs, limbs lay still without their bodies.
Many hours later, I gave birth.
*****
My daughter illuminated the world for me—a ray of hope and a light of victory. I named her Talia, a name that carries beauty and salvation. Talia means “dew” in Hebrew, the gentle drops that herald the beginning of a new morning, just as she did. In her, I saw resilience and struggle, a flame in the midst of darkness.
I was never strong. I never claimed to be. I always saw myself as an ordinary woman, trembling in the face of pain, fearing challenges, and avoiding adventure. But life hasn’t granted me the luxury of making choices. It forced me to stand, to endure, to keep moving forward despite the hardships. After the January 2025 ceasefire, I was forced to walk under the scorching sun, the whole length of a day and then some. My steps faltered on the sandy road, carrying my daughter in my arms and my belongings on my back as though I were carrying the world itself. My tired feet were no longer mine; my back screamed in pain, but I walked… I walked because I had no other choice. I had no luxury of surrender, and no time for weakness. Fear made my choices for me. Every step was like combat. It wasn’t just the distance that exhausted me, but the weight of responsibility, the tiny lives that I held in my hands. And when I arrived near my pre-war home, I didn’t know if I had won or if I had just survived for another day. I thought I had reached safety, but soon realized that survival in this place is only temporary. It is a home that has never known peace, only truces to exchange prisoners and collect the dead.
The genocide is not over yet, and now, I realize I am no longer who I once was. That woman who thought she was weak, was never weak. And she would never be weak! The road, the shattered walls, the cold nights, the exhaustion shaped and honed me, until I became a woman who knows nothing but traversing the path of life, no matter the cost.
*****
Today is supposed to be “Eid al-Fitr,” one of the two major celebrations for Muslims throughout the year. However, in Gaza, it is not a celebration, but another chapter of loss and pain.
Before the war, the atmosphere of Eid in Gaza felt like a piece of heaven. The streets were alive with the laughter of children, amusement parks were full of life in every neighborhood, and the scent of delicious sweets and food filled the air. Children wore their finest clothes and, scented with the most beautiful perfumes, their hearts danced like birds, filled with joy.
But today, the children of Gaza have had the joy ripped from their hearts. They wake up to the sounds of bombing and gunfire, they don’t sing the Eid songs or wear their festive clothes. Instead, their mothers dress them in shrouds as they head to play with their toys, some with sweets in their hands. The beautiful Eid songs are replaced with suffering and sorrow.
This is Gaza… our blood is like water, our souls like mirages, and our lives mean nothing to the world. Our wounds are no longer new, but have become a familiar reality.
The post Mary of Palestine first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The chief of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Exterminator-in-Chief, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu jumped on his plane and jetted from one International Criminal Court denier, authoritarian leader, Victor Orban of Hungary, to another ICC denier in Washington, DC, Donald Trump.
Trump is the second U.S. president to give Netanyahu the green light for the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Biden was guilty of 17 months of complicity in the Israeli genocide of Gaza, while Trump is 2.5 months and counting.
The post Exterminator Netanyahu In Washington, DC Again appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
It is all a part of the same phenomenon.
Western governments actively assisting genocide in Gaza; attacks on benefits for the disabled; a deliberate official narrative of Russophobia; rampant Islamophobia boosting the rise of extreme right-wing parties and fueled by government anti-immigrant rhetoric; an incredible accumulation of wealth by the ultra-rich; rampant erosion of freedoms of speech and expression.
It is not happenstance that all of this is happening at the same time. It represents a radical shift in Western philosophy.
This shift is not simple to trace because anti-intellectualism is an essential part of the new philosophy.
The post Craig Murray: This Hell appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
“We are the majority,” declare organizers of a mass demonstration outside the United States Capitol building opposing the genocide in Gaza and Trump’s attacks on students
Thousands rallied in the heart of the US capital Washington, DC on April 5 to oppose Trump administration attacks on free speech and student activism, and demand an end to Israel’s relentless genocidal onslaught against Gaza. Students, organizers, journalists, artists, and workers came to Washington, DC from across the country to call for the release of pro-Palestine students such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk from ICE detention and to declare their fearlessness in the face of Trump’s attacks.
The post Thousands Rally In Washington, DC For Palestine appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Mary E. Gallagher, dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, wrote University of Chicago Professor and In These Times columnist Eman Abdelhadi on Saturday morning to tell her that her upcoming keynote speech was canceled.
“We were unaware of your planned lecture, and since this conference overlaps with two other annual events on campus, we cannot provide security at short notice,” Gallagher wrote in an email. “For this reason, we respectfully request that you do not participate in the conference.”
Abdelhadi is a widely celebrated academic, organizer, author and journalist. She frequently speaks on campuses across the country and from 2023-24 was a faculty fellow at Notre Dame.
The post The Absurd Excuse Notre Dame Gave Me When They Canceled My Talk appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
One thing October 7 did accomplish was getting Israel and its allies to show the world their true face. Getting them to stand before all of humanity to say, “If you resist us, we’ll kill your babies. We’ll deliberately shoot your kids in the head. We’ll massacre medical workers. We’ll systematically destroy all your hospitals. We’ll rape you and torture you as a matter of policy. We’ll lay siege to the entire civilian population. We’ll make your entire land uninhabitable and then we’ll kick you all out and take it for ourselves. We’ll assassinate all your journalists and block foreign journalists from entry so that nobody can see what we’re doing to you. We’ll lie about all of these things the entire time, and you’ll know we’re lying, and we’ll know you know we’re lying, and you’ll know we know you know we’re lying. And we’ll get away with it anyway, because we hold all the cards.”
Sometimes I’ll run into people who say “What did Hamas expect to happen? They had to know Israel would do this!” They say this in an effort to lay the blame for Israel’s genocidal atrocities at the feet of Hamas, as though Israel is some kind of wild animal who can’t be held accountable for its actions if someone gets too close to its mouth.
But of course Hamas knew Israel and its allies would react this way. Of course they did. They knew they were dealing with a murderous and tyrannical civilization who is capable of limitless evil and doesn’t see Palestinians as human beings. They knew it because they’d lived under it all their lives. That is the problem they were trying to address with their actions on October 7.
https://x.com/Rahmazeinegypt/
You can disagree with the decisions Hamas made on that day. You can say they should have used other means to pursue justice. You can denounce them, hate them, do the whole public ritual necessary for mainstream acceptance in western society. But one thing you can’t do is deny that Israel and its allies have been revealing their true face to the world every day since, at levels they previously were not.
It’s all fully visible now. It’s all right there on the surface. We can try to continue pretending we live in a free society that believes in truth and justice and regards all people as equal, but we’ll all know it’s a lie. What we are, first and foremost, is a civilization that will actively support history’s first live-streamed genocide. That’s the single most relevant fact about the western world at this point in history. It’s staring us right in the face every day.
October 7 certainly didn’t make life any easier for the Palestinians, but one thing it did do was take away our ability to hide from ourselves. Hamas reached thousands of miles around the world and permanently destroyed our ability to avoid the truth about the kind of dystopia we are really living in. Our rulers may succeed in eliminating the Palestinians as a people, but one thing they will never be able to do is put those blinders back on our eyes.
What has been seen cannot be unseen.
The post Hamas Succeeded in Exposing the True Face of the Empire first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.