This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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We continue our look at COP29’s ongoing negotiations for an international climate finance agreement, which is still under contention as of Thursday morning due in large part to wealthy countries’ refusal to commit to a proposed monetary target on the financing of developing nations’ transition from fossil fuels. Countries that have already industrialized off the backs of fossil fuel exploitation have a “responsibility” to offset these “injustices,” according to Indian climate activist Harjeet Singh. “Developed countries are trying to pose themselves as climate leaders … but back home they’re expanding fossil fuels,” says Singh. “The core of the issue remains finance. Unless money is put on the table, the transitioning away from fossil fuels is not going to be a reality in developing countries.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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COP29 was always going to be memorable, for no other reason than the hosting country, Azerbaijan, is a petrostate indifferent to the issue of emissions and scornful of ecological preachers. It has seen its natural gas supply grow by 128% between 2000 and 2021. Between 2006 and 2021, gas exports rose by a monumental 29,290%. A dizzying 95% of the country’s exports are made up of oil and gas, with much of its wealth failing to trickle down to the rest of the populace.
The broadly described West, as stated by President Ilham Aliyev in his opening address to the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, was in no position to be lecturing his country about cutting back on the use of fossil fuels. They were, he grandly claimed, “a gift from God”. In this, he should have surprised no one. In April 2024, he declared that, as a leader of a country “which is rich in fossil fuels, of course, we will defend the right of these countries to continue investments and to continue production.”
A few days later, Aliyev played the other side of the climate change divide, suggesting at a meeting with island leaders that France and the Netherlands had been responsible for “brutally” suppressing the “voices” of communities in such overseas territories as Mayotte and Curaçao concerned with climate change. (Aliyev himself is no stranger to suppressing, with dedicated brutality, voices of dissent within his own country.) This proved too much for France’s Ecological Transition Minister, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, who cancelled her planned attendance to the summit while attacking Baku for “instrumentalising the fight against climate change for its undignified personal agenda.”
On the second day of the summit, the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, tried to turn the attention of delegates to the urgent matter at hand. “The sound you hear is the ticking clock – we are in the final countdown to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C, and time is not on our side.” Others, however, heard the sound of money changing hands, with the fossil fuel industry lurking, fangs and pens at the ready, presided over by the good offices of a petrostate.
In the background lie assessments of gloomy inevitability. The Climate Change Tracker’s November 2024 briefing notes this year was one characterised by “minimal progress, with almost no new national climate change targets (NDCs) or net zero pledges even though government have agreed to (urgently) strengthen their 2030 targets and to align them with the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement.”
As easy as it is to rage against the opportunistic Aliyev, who crudely blends environmentalism with ethnic cleansing, few attending the summit in Baku come with clean hands. As with previous COP events, Baku offers another enormous event of emitters and emission, featuring tens of thousands of officials, advisors and minders bloviating in conference. That said, the 67,000 registrants at this conference is somewhat lower compared with the 83,000 who descended on Dubai at COP28.
The plane tracking website FlightRadar24 noted that 65 private jets landed in the Azerbaijani capital prior to the summit, prompting Alethea Warrington, the head of energy, aviation and heat at Possible, a climate action charity, to tut with heavy disapproval: “Travelling by private jet is a horrendous waste of the world’s scarce remaining carbon budget, with each journey producing more emissions in a few hours than the average person around the world emits in an entire year.”
COP29 is also another opportunity to strike deals that have little to do with reducing emissions and everything to do with advancing the interests of lobby groups and companies in the energy market, much of it of a fossil fuel nature. In the spirit of Dubai, COP29 is set to follow in the footsteps of the wily Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who chaired COP28 in Dubai. Prior to the arrival of the chatterati of climate change last year, the Sultan was shown in leaked briefing documents to the BBC and the Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR) to be an avid enthusiast for advancing the business of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc). It was hard to avoid the glaring fact that Al Jaber is also the CEO of Adnoc.
The documents in question involve over 150 pages of briefings prepared by the COP28 team for meetings with Jaber and various interested parties held between July and October this year. They point to plans to raise matters of commercial interest with as many as 30 countries. The CCR confirms “that on at least one occasion a nation followed up on commercial discussions brought up in a meeting with Al Jaber; a source with knowledge of discussions also told CCR that Adnoc’s business interests were allegedly raised during a meeting with another country.”
The COP29 chairman, Samir Nuriyev, had already put out feelers as early as March this year that a “fair approach” was needed when approaching countries abundant with oil and natural gas, notably in light of their purported environmental policies. He went so far as to argue that Azerbaijan was an ideal interlocutor between the Global South and Global North. His colleague and chief executive of the COP29 team, Elnur Soltanov, showed exactly how that process would work in a secret recording ahead of the conference in which he discusses “investment opportunities” in the state oil and gas company with a person posing as a potential investor. (The person in question purported to be representing a fictitious Hong Kong investment firm with a sharp line in energy.) “We have a lot of gas fields that are to be developed,” Soltanov insists. “We will have a certain amount of oil and gas being produced, perhaps forever.”
In many ways, the Baku gathering has all the hallmarks of a criminal syndicate meeting, held under more open conditions. Fair play, then, to the Azerbaijani hosts for working out the climate change racket, taking the lead from Dubai last year. Aliyev and company noted months in advance that this was less a case of being a theatre of the absurd than a forum for business. And so, it is proving to be.
The post Thank You for Emitting: The Hypocrisies of COP29 first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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By Eloise Gibson, RNZ climate change correspondent
New Zealand’s Climate Change Minister Simon Watts is going to the global climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan next week, where he will be co-leading talks on international carbon trading.
But the government has been unable to commit to using the trading mechanism he is leading high-level discussions about, and critics say he is also vulnerable over New Zealand’s backsliding on fossil fuels.
New Zealand has consistently pushed for two things in international climate diplomacy — one is ending government subsidies for fossil fuels globally, and the other is allowing carbon trading across international borders, so one country can pay for, say, switching off a coal plant in another country.
- READ MORE: COP29: UN chief warns world is in ‘final countdown’ to limit global warming to 1.5C
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- COP29: Pacific countries cannot be conveniently pigeonholed
- COP29 Azerbaijan: What’s at stake at the 2024 global climate summit?
- Rising Tide climate crisis ‘Protestival’ to go ahead despite court ruling
- Other COP29 climate reports
COP29 BAKU, 11-22 November 2024 Nailing down the rules for making sure these carbon savings are real will be an area of focus for leaders at the COP29 summit, starting on 11 November.
But as Watts gets ready to attend the talks, critics say his government is vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy on both fronts.
In a bid to bring back fossil fuel exploration, the government wants to lower financial security requirements on oil and gas companies requiring them to set aside money for the costs of decommissioning and cleaning up spills.
The coalition says the current requirements — brought in after taxpayers had to pay to deal with a defunct oil field — are so onerous they are stopping companies wanting to look for fossil fuels.
Billion dollar clean-ups
At a recent hearing, Parliament’s independent environment watchdog warned going too far at relaxing requirements could leave taxpayers footing bills of billions of dollars if a clean-up is needed.The commission’s Geoff Simmons spoke on behalf of Commissioner Simon Upton.
“The commissioner was really clear in his submission that he wants to place on record that he doesn’t think it is appropriate for any government, present or future, to offer any subsidies, implicit or explicit, to underwrite the cost of exploration.”
The watchdog said that would tilt the playing field away from renewable energy in favour of fossil fuels.
Energy Minister Shane Jones says the government’s Bill doesn’t lower the liability for fixing damage or decommissioning oil and gas wells, which remain the responsibility of the fossil fuel company in perpetuity.
But climate activist Adam Currie says that only works if the company stays in business.
“The watering down of those key financial safeguards increases the risk of the taxpaper having to yet again pay to decommission a failed oil field.
“Simon Watts is about to go to COP and urge other countries to end fossil fuel subsidies while at home they are handing an open cheque to fossil fuels .. This is a classic case of do as a say, not as I do.”
Getting flack not feared
Watts says he does not fear getting flack for the fossil-friendlier changes when he is in Baku, citing the government’s goal of doubling renewable energy.“No I’m not worried about flak, New Zealand is transitioning away from fossil fuels . . . gas [from fossil fields] is going to need to be a means by which we need to transition.”
Nor does he see an issue with the fact he is jointly leading negotiations on a trading mechanism his own government seems unable to commit to using.
Watts is leading talks to nail down rules on international carbon trading with Singaporean Environment Minister Grace Fu. Her country has struck a deal to invest in carbon savings in Rwanda.
New Zealand also needs international help to meet its 2030 target, but the coalition government has not let officials pursue any deals. NZ First refuses to say if it would back this.
Watts says his leadership role is independent of domestic politics and ministers around the world are keen to nail down the rules, as is the Azerbaijan presidency.
“Our primary focus is to ensure that we get an outcome form those negotiators, our domestic considerations are not relevant.”
Paris target discussions
He said discussions on meeting New Zealand’s Paris target were still underway.His next challenge at home is getting Cabinet agreement on how much to promise to cut emissions from 2030-2035, the second commitment period under the Paris Agreement.
Countries are being urged to hustle, with the United Nations saying current pledges have the planet on track for what it calls a “catastrophic” 2.5 to 2.9 degrees of heating.
A new pledge is due for 2030-2035 in February.
A major goal for host Azerbaijan is making progress on a deal for climate finance.
Currently OECD countries committed to pay $100 billion a year in finance to poorer countries to adapt to and prevent the impacts of climate change.
Not all the money has been paid as grants, with a large proportion given as loans.
Countries are looking to agree on a replacement for the finance mechanism when it runs out in 2025.
Watts said New Zealand would be among the nations arguing for the liability to pay to be shared more widely than the traditional list of OECD nations, bringing in other countries that can also afford to contribute.
Oil states such as UAE have already promised specific funding despite not being part of the original climate finance deal.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
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COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle
Despite being appalled at my government, I winced as a New Zealander to hear my country described as part of the “Axis of Genocide”. With increasing frequency I hear commentators on West Asia/Middle East news sites hold the collective West responsible for the genocide.
It’s a big come-down from the Global Labrador Puppy status New Zealand enjoyed recently.
Australia too has a record of being viewed as a country with soft-power influence, albeit while a stalwart deputy to the US in this part of the world. That is over.
- READ MORE: Israeli air strikes kill more than 100 across Gaza, Lebanon
- All in all, Trump’s election is a calamity in he making – Paul Buchanan
- Other Israeli war on Gaza reports
Professor Mohammad Seyed Marandi talks to Piers Morgan Uncensored. Video: Middle East EyeRegrettably, Australia and New Zealand have sent troops to support US-Israel in the Red Sea (killing Yemeni people), failed to join the International Court of Justice (ICJ) case against Israel, shared intelligence with the Israelis, trained with their forces, provided R&R to soldiers fresh from the killing fields of Gaza while blocking Palestinian refugees, and extended valuable diplomatic support to Israel at the UN.
British planes overfly Gaza to provide data, a German freighter arrived in Alexandria this week laden with hundreds of thousands of kilograms of explosives to kill yet more Palestinian civilians.
Genocide is a collective effort of the Collective West.
Australia and New Zealand, along with the rest of the West, “will stand by the Israeli regime until they exterminate the last Palestinian”, says Professor Mohammad Seyed Marandi, an American-Iranian academic. What our governments do is at best “light condemnation” he says, but when it counts they will be silent.
‘They will allow extermination’
“They will allow the extermination of the people of Gaza. And then if the Israelis go after the West Bank, they will allow for that to happen as well. Under no circumstances do I see the West blocking extermination,” Marandi says.Looking at our performance over the past seven decades and what is happening today, it is an assessment I would not argue against.
But why should we listen to someone from the Islamic Republic of Iran, you might ask. Who are they to preach at us?
I see things differently. In our dystopian, tightly-curated mainstream mediascape it is rare to hear an Iranian voice. We need to listen to more people, not fewer.
I’m definitely not a cheerleader for Iran or any state and I most certainly don’t agree with everything Professor Marandi says but he gives me richer insights than me just drowning in the endless propaganda of Tier One war criminals like Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu, Antony Blinken and their spokespeople.
Dr Marandi, professor of English literature and orientalism at the University of Tehran, is a former member of Iran’s negotiating team that brokered the break-through JCPOA nuclear agreement (later reneged on by the Trump and Biden administrations).
He is no shrinking violet. He has that fierceness of someone who has been shot at multiple times. A veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, Marandi was wounded four times, including twice with chemical weapons, key components of which were likely supplied by the US to their erstwhile ally Saddam Hussein.
Killed people he knew
Dr Marandi was in South Beirut a few weeks ago when the US-Israelis dropped dozens of bombs on residential buildings killing hundreds of civilians to get at the leader of Hezbollah (a textbook war crime that will never be prosecuted). It killed people he knew. To a BBC reporter who said, yes, but they were targeting Hezbollah, he replied:“That’s like saying of 7/7 [the terror bombings in London]: ‘They bombed a British regime stronghold.’ How would that sound to people in the UK?”
Part of what people find discomforting about Dr Marandi is that he tears down the thin curtain that separates the centres of power from the major news outlets that repeat their talking points (“Israel has a legitimate right to self-defence” etc).
The more our leaders and media prattle on about Israel’s right to defend itself, the more we sound like the Germany that terrorised Europe in the 1930s and 40s. And the rest of the world has noticed.
As TS Eliot said: “Nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself.”
Not a man to mince words when it comes to war crimes.
To his credit, Piers Morgan is one of the few who have invited Dr Marandi to do an extended interview. They had a verbal cage fight that went viral.
Masterful over pointing out racism
Dr Marandi has been masterful at pointing out the racism inherent in the Western worldview, the chauvinism that allows Western minds to treasure white lives but discount as worthless hundreds of thousands of Muslim lives taken in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere.“There is no reason to expect that a declining and desperate empire will conduct itself in a civilised manner. Iran is prepared for the worst,” he says.
“In this great moral struggle, in the world that we live in today — meaning the holocaust in Gaza — who is defending the people of Gaza and who is supporting the holocaust? Iran with its small group of allies is alone against the West,” he told Nima Alkhorshid from Dialogue Works recently.
The Collective West shares collective responsibility.
Dr Marandi draws a sharp distinction between our governments and our populations. He is entirely right in pointing out that the younger people are, in countries like Australia and New Zealand, the more likely they are to oppose the genocide — as do growing numbers of young Jewish Americans who have rejected the Zionist project.
“All people within the whole of Palestine must be equal — Jews, Muslims and Christians. The Islamic Republic of Iran will not allow the US, EU, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Zionist regime to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza.”
I heard Mohammad Seyed Marandi extend an interesting invitation to us all in a recent interview. He said the “Axis of Resistance” should be thought of as open to all people who oppose the genocide in Gaza and who are opposed to continued Western militarism in West Asia.
I would never sign up to the policies of Iran, especially on issues like women’s rights, but I do find the invitation to a broad coalition clarifying: the Axis of Genocide versus The Axis of Resistance. Whose side are you on?
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
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Israel is genociding the Palestinians one neighborhood at the time, one hospital at the time, one school at the time, one refugee camp at the time, one ‘safe zone’ at the time
– Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt,
10 August 2024One would expect that human rights organisations would spring into action during an impending or unfolding genocide – the ultimate violation of human rights. Maybe human rights NGOs actions should be proportional to the level of the crimes they are concerned with. Thus, the more killing, torture, arbitrary imprisonment, bombing…, etc., that is plainly evident, the more action one would expect. So, what is the output of some of the leading human rights organisations in the face of the genocide in Gaza? Below is an analysis of Amnesty International’s press releases and announced actions [1].
Will they come clean?
First things first. To assess the credibility of any organisation, one should know their relationship with Israel and the United States – both participants in the unfolding genocide. On this account, Amnesty International has never come clean about its relationship with the Israeli government. Uri Blau, a Haaretz investigative journalist, recently revealed that Amnesty_Intl.-Israel was taken over and run by Israeli operatives paid for by the Foreign Ministry. [2] They ran interference in reporting on the situation in the occupied territories, participated in conferences, and even set up a "human rights" institute at Tel Aviv university. This was a nice way to co-opt the human rights industry. The principal who ran AI-Israel even gave an interview boasting of his exploits.
And did AI-Israel have a hand editing any Amnesty reports about the situation in the occupied territories or its many wars in the region? Some Palestinian lawyers reported having problematic encounters with AI-Israel officials, to the extent that they refused to have any dealings with it thereafter. One could well imagine AI-Israel officials reporting on Palestinians who reached out to them. So how ethical is it for Amnesty International to expose Palestinians contacting AI-Israel to imminent danger? When will Amnesty International acknowledge this dirty relationship and ensure that it maintains the requisite distance from the Israeli government in the future?
The genocide will be televised
Next, one must establish if what we witness amounts to a genocide. Craig Mokhiber, the former UN official in the High Commission for Human Rights, resigned because his agency was not reacting given the unfolding situation in Gaza, and stated in his resignation letter; "this is a textbook case of genocide". NB: the letter was submitted on 28 October 2023. Mokhiber stated that it is usually difficult to establish whether a genocide is taking place because one doesn’t know the motivation of the leading military and political leadership. [3] In the current context, there is no doubt about the motivation; one only has to listen to Netanyahu, Gallant, Ganz, Smotrich, Ben Gvir… And also most of the parliamentarians – they made genocidal statements in the Knesset; they were competing with each other to see who would be most truculent.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) statement on the case brought in front of the court by South Africa also suggests that we are witnessing a genocide – at least most of the justices urged Israeli action to forestall a genocide.
Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, and in particular, the refugee camps exhibit a high population density. The Israeli military is bombing these locations using huge bombs recently delivered by 500+ of American military cargo planes. [4] There is no doubt about this, one can even witness the bombing realtime on Al Jazeera. Civilians are directed to evacuate areas only to be bombed in locations that had been putatively named "safe areas," hospitals, schools, UN compounds, etc. Fleeing civilians were targeted; all bakeries were destroyed; hundreds of wells destroyed; scores of chicken farms ravaged; entire families wiped out…. Thus it is not only the level of killing, but also the destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure that is happening now. The weaponry is very accurate, thus the targeting was done intentionally; so it is not an issue of "collateral damage," but it is intentional and indiscriminate targeting. A principle of International humanitarian law is that actions should be proportionate, but Israeli military and politicians revel at the disproportionate nature of the destruction; it is the Dahiya doctrine applied to Gaza. [5] This doctrine refers to the disproportionate violence perpetrated against the Lebanese population in the Dahiya neighbourhood in Beirut in 2006; the neighbourhood was entirely flattened with huge bombs. Alastair Crooke, the former British diplomat, summarises the situation succinctly: "Gaza is already a monument to callous inhumanity and suffering. It will get worse…" [6]
One thing is certain: if it quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck, then it is genocide. [7] Under these circumstances, one would expect all human rights organisations to spring into action and demand court actions, UN Security Council resolutions, calls for key officials to be held accountable for crimes against humanity, and for the US, UK, Germany… and others to stop enabling Israel’s genocidal actions.
Nature of coverage
A few things are evident when reviewing AI’s press releases: one is struck by the paucity of coverage, the trite and generic form of statements, the unwillingness to call out the nature of some crimes, and unwillingness to debunk some of the crass Israeli propaganda meant to further de-humanise the Palestinians, and to justify Israel’s crimes.
Since 7 October 2023, there have only been 60 press releases – none of any substance. One is struck also that there are a number of press releases about Israel/OPT that don’t mention the ongoing genocide at all! [8] Or the commentary is part of a discussion of human rights in general.
Ahistorical
Gaza has been subject to numerous massacres – several not even registering in the media accounts in the so-called West. There were several of the post-2006 attacks (aka "mowing the lawn" operations) usually referred to by their Israeli sugar-coated operation names. After each such operation AI dutifully produced its trite reports, but was rather circumspect in calling out Israeli crimes; and whenever it did issue a statement about a particular crime, it was immediately offset by references to Palestinian crimes.
A good historical starting point to assess the current violations of international humanitarian law would be the Goldstone report (2008) – which documented and established serious Israeli crimes during "Operation Cast Lead". [9] Alas, one is struck by the ahistorical nature of AI’s press releases and reports. It is as if history started yesterday, but then this is the nature of the "rights-based reporting," where there is virtually no reference to history. When it suits Amnesty it will ignore history. [10] Would one’s assessment of a criminal be altered by the fact that he was a serial criminal? If so, then it behooves AI to emphasise Israel’s long history of mass crimes against the Palestinian population. But acknowledging the long history of dispossession and brutality against the native population would suggest that "we" should be in solidarity with the Palestinians. Alas, that is not a position Amnesty is willing to take. It prefers to utter its clucking sounds, and admonish "both sides" as if there were a moral equivalence between the violence perpetrated by oppressor and oppressed.
False balance
Amnesty wants to appear impartial, and clamours for both Palestinian and Israeli rights. Thus AI will issue a report outlining some of the Israeli crimes, but will then issue a report on the "Palestinian war crimes". In general, according to AI, most of the actions perpetrated by the Palestinians are ipso facto war crimes; there is no need for further investigation or discussion. A disgraceful example is an article discussing Palestinian war crimes published on 12 July 2024. Thus after more than nine months of bombings, maybe 186,000+ dead [11], calculated starvation, summary executions and evidence of rampant mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners… Amnesty chose to demand the release of the Israeli hostages! According to Erika Guevara Rosas, AI’s "Senior Director for Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns," holding Israeli civilian hostages is a war crime. [12] Lost in this narrative is an explanation as to why the hostages are held – they are the only means to obtain the release of some of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners. And true to form, a few days later AI released a longish press release critical of the Israeli brutal treatment of prisoners. Producing reports critical of "both sides" are attempts to claim impartiality.
It is rather odd that when Palestinians take hostages, Amnesty considers this a war crime. Yet when Israel imprisons thousands without charges, routinely kidnaps and keeps prisoners in deplorable conditions, then this is not a war crime. In the West Bank, Israeli military take the parents of “wanted” Palestinians hostage, but Amnesty doesn’t condemn this practice to the same extent.
Amnesty ignores the 1960 UNGA resolution acknowledging the right for an oppressed/colonised population to defend themselves – this includes armed struggle; and that Israel has an obligation to protect the oppressed population. The nature of the violence suggests that it is not possible to assume a “neutral” position. Thus, Amnesty’s proclivity to admonish “both sides” is ethically suspect.
Not countering Israeli propaganda
One useful function AI could play would be to debunk Israeli propaganda meant to dehumanise Palestinians to serve as a pretext for its genocidal campaign. The day after the Palestinian incursion, the Israeli propaganda machine was ready to push stories about rapes, babies cooked in microwave ovens, brutal murders, and so on. However, Amnesty has not countered these fabricated stories; in fact it has helped propagate the Israeli narrative. For example, it repeatedly referred to the 7 October attack as "horrific" – a term almost exclusively used to describe Palestinian actions. It doesn’t account for the fact that it was the Israeli military who killed more than half the Israeli civilians on that day. [13] There were no babies cooked to death or impaled on bayonets. Alas, even with a pompous sounding "Evidence Investigation Unit," Amnesty doesn’t seem to care to separate facts from hateful slander. If the latter is meant to dehumanise the Palestinians, then exposing this propaganda would go some way to humanise the victim. It seems that that is not in Amnesty’s purview.
In the press release demanding the release of Israeli hostages, Erika Guevara Rosas stated: "Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza that has resulted in the death of over 38,000 Palestinians". This is factually correct, but contextually challenged. Guevara is using the Palestinian Health ministry’s figures that are based on the actual recovery of bodies; it misses all the victims under the rubble. The Lancet study estimates that about 8% of the Gazan population has been killed – that is in the order of 186,000 dead. Furthermore, the deaths attributable to epidemics, starvation, etc., are also missed in the Health Ministry’s statistics. The London School of Hygiene and Johns Hopkins University have attempted to estimate this mortality rate. [14]. Their estimates and methodology are complex, and it is best to read it directly from their reports. Suffice it to say that the mortality rate has increased dramatically.
Maybe a clearer explanation of the available statistics would be in order.
Lets investigate!
There are plenty of daily criminal attacks, but it is only the particularly outrageous ones when AI feels compelled to utter some comment. The discovery of mass burial sites near hospitals that had recently been invaded by the Israeli military elicited some commentary [15]. Instead of pointing a finger at Israel, and suggesting serious crimes had been perpetrated, it calls for an "independent investigation". If only AI’s sanctimonious investigators could enter the scene, then one could establish what really happened. The other implication of AI’s call for investigation is that it doesn’t value the voice of the victims of Israeli crimes. Thus it is not up to Palestinians to call out their oppressor, but some "independent" body has to take its jolly good time determining whether a crime was committed; a report will follow a few years later. In the meantime, all Israeli crimes are merely "alleged" crimes.
There is a more problematic aspect to AI’s call for investigations, namely, that it is giving credence to Israeli exculpatory claims and justifications for its attacks. Thus bombing the Al Shifa hospital was justified on the spurious grounds that there was an Al Qassam bunker in the vicinity. Or, bombing a location with many refugees in tents by stating that some of the resistance commanders were in the area. Given the history of Israeli lies about all the massacres that it has perpetrated, one would think that Amnesty would be more sceptical of Israeli claims, and to challenge them outright. Instead it calls for investigations. Furthermore, when is it justified to kill 100+ civilians in order to kill two fighters? It is curious that a human rights organisation doesn't reject this outright – there is no need for an investigation. Maybe an analogy could clarify the objection. Imagine that a rapist justified his crime by stating that the victim wore provocative clothing. Amnesty’s actions are akin to investigating if the victim’s clothing was actually sexy.
On 26 August 2024, AI issued a press release on two of the bombings of camps of displaced people killing hundreds. [16] A priori, one would say that it is a welcome report, but one is struck by the fact that these incidents "need to be investigated as war crimes". Amnesty even reviewed the statements made by the Israeli military to justify the bombing. And to add a comic element, Amnesty sent a note to "Ministry of Justice officials," i.e., Hamas, to determine if its fighters were sheltering in the bombed locations. In other words, it is asking the Palestinians whether the Israeli bombings were justified! And to top things off, Amnesty regurgitated its accusation that the Palestinian actions, e.g., taking hostages amounted to clear war crimes. On the one hand, AI asks that Israeli actions be investigated, yet for the Palestinians the accusation is clear: these are war crimes.
Amnesty usefully states that using civilians as human shields is "prohibited under international law." Suggesting that if any fighter mingles with the civilian population, this amounts to a crime. The Palestinian fighters have little choice about where they can operate given that the population is constantly forced to move – the fighters included. But there is a difference between fighters being in close proximity to civilians, and the Israeli practice of placing Palestinian civilians on top of military vehicles or forcing them to enter houses ahead of Israeli soldiers. The difference is the coercion involved, and the fact that the fighters are in the midst of their own people. Thus in the press release, Amnesty wags its finger about fighters finding themselves together with civilians. However, Amnesty has yet to issue one of it missives about the civilians Israeli military forces to act as human shields. We await another press release.
Losing the forest for the trees
The crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians, i.e., genocide, crimes against humanity, and so on, must be described as mass crimes – referent to the population at large. However, Amnesty’s favourite technique to avoid mentioning the mass crimes is to dwell on individual stories to the exclusion of the totality of the crimes. On 19 August 2024, Amnesty issued a press release about the flouting of the Arms Trade Treaty. Thus: "Amnesty International has long been calling for a comprehensive arms embargo on both Israel and Palestinian armed groups because of longstanding patterns of serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, including war crimes…". True to form Amnesty bleats about an embargo on "both sides," as if there were hundreds of military cargo airplanes delivering weapons to the Palestinians. But instead of mentioning the total tonnage of bombs dropped on Gaza, it provides two examples [17]:
- Amnesty has documented the use of US-manufactured weapons in a number of unlawful airstrikes, including US-made Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) in two deadly, unlawful air strikes on homes in the occupied Gaza Strip, which killed 43 civilians – 19 children, 14 women and 10 men – on 10 and 22 October 2023.
- A GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb, made in the US by Boeing, was used in an Israeli strike in January 2024 which hit a family home in the Tal al-Sultan area of Rafah, killing 18 civilians, including 10 children, four men, and four women.
According to Euromed Human Rights: "Israel dropped 70,000 tons of bombs on Gaza Strip since last October, exceeding World War II bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, London combined." [18] Maybe providing such statistics would be more effective.
Similarly, on 18 July 2024, AI released a rather lengthy report on prison conditions. [19] To its credit, the press release was better than most AI output, but again, after a cursory mention of the total number of cases, it emphasises a few examples of prisoner’s conditions. It is dwelling on a few items to the exclusion of the mass injustice condition.
Long list of neglect
Ever since 7 October 2023, there have been many incidents that didn't elicit a single comment by Amnesty International. Here are a few items:
- Israel bombed Palestinians waiting to obtain food from a humanitarian aid delivery truck; there were about 210 killed.
- Triple-tap bombings. Israelis bomb an area killing civilians, and then those who come to rescue them, and those who seek to rescue the rescuers.
- Al Jazeera showed a video of airplanes dropping supplies in Gaza. A few minutes later Israelis bombed the locations where the parachutes landed.
- Several hundred medical and emergency rescue staff have been killed; 170+ journalists, and in some cases the journalists’ families were also killed.
- Destruction of universities, schools and hospitals. Israeli soldiers themselves posted videos of rejoicing soldiers when hospitals and universities were blown up.
- There is a serious shortage of potable water for most Gazans. The quality and quantity of water available in Gaza was already a serious issue prior to October 2023. Groundwater had saline seepage, and thus the sodium level was above safe limits. With the destruction of wells, and the inoperability of desalination plants, the access to safe water became a serious challenge. Furthermore, the Israeli military are flooding tunnels with sea water, further contaminating groundwater.
- Israeli military declared a large garbage dump site to be a "safe zone".
- The Israeli military forced relocations of population from North to South, and later on South to North. And of course more houses were destroyed in the meantime. There are no places where civilians can escape to safety.
- The condition of prisoners held in Israeli jails is appalling: brutality, neglect, meagre access to food and water. Al Jazeera featured the case of Moazez Abayat [20] A man who suffered torture, brutal treatment, meagre access to food and water. It was clear that Abayat had lost his mind in prison, and this is certainly not an isolated case. In August, soldiers sodomised prisoners… and +972 magazine published an article about the conditions at a military prison with a jarring statement: "The situation there [Sde Teiman detention center] is more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo."
- The Hannibal killings, i.e., Israeli military killed Israelis to avoid having them taken as hostages. Haaretz reported that more than half the Israeli civilians killed on 7 October were killed by the military.
- Israeli propagandists were ready to make allegations of widespread rape and murder of children. Most of those claims were false.
- The grand larceny and theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank continues, and in the process hundreds have been killed.
- Israeli drones broadcast recordings of children in distress to entice people to investigate, and consequently kill them.
- The day after rulings by international courts (ICJ or ICC), the Israelis engaged in massive bombardments and other destructive actions. It is their means to send a "FU" message. On the eve of Netanyahu’s trip to the US, the Israeli military bombed a refugee camp killing dozens. On the day Netanyahu addressed the US Congress, 100+ Palestinians were killed.The point of this: Israel can do whatever it wants, and it has the US’s backing.
- On the eve of negotiations, Israel perpetrates particularly serious mass crimes. Early in August the US announced "negotiations," but with meagre Israeli interest. On 10 August, Israel bombed a school killing 100+. Furthermore, Israelis murdered two of the Palestinian negotiators. Who will want to negotiate with Israel now?
- The lack of medicines is causing the certain deaths of those with chronic diseases. The protracted war is a death sentence to diabetics, renal patients, cancer victims….
Impotence and futility
Amnesty issues a few press releases and maybe a report thereafter, but there is no meaningful action. Thus far Amnesty has organised a petition calling for a ceasefire! One can fill the petition form with gibberish, and press the button however many times, and it will register in this preposterous exercise. [21] Liberal souls will be assuaged.
There have been three instances where AI urged its members to write very polite letters to Israeli officials. Thus mass crimes are happening at present, and these "urgent actions" merely plead for the fate of three individuals. All sample letters start with "Dear General…"; that is the way Amnesty likes its members to address the genocidal creeps. These letter writing campaigns are a means to get young idealistic activists to engage in "actions" that are of virtually no consequence.
Every year Amnesty claims to have more members – in the millions. Appealing to this membership base to do something meaningful could possibly be more effective. Palestinian civil society groups have long clamoured for BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions). Why can’t AI urge its members to boycott Israeli products? The answer is evident: the mega donors (e.g., Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood’s notorious sex predator and Israel cheerleader; the Sackler Foundation) funding Amnesty’s activities would revolt. [22]
Manifest double standards
Amnesty has produced several press releases advocating intervention in Syria, even using holocaust memes ("never again") to emphasise its point. It even produced a melodramatic multimedia production on the "horrors" at a notorious prison. [23] When it comes to Israel, Amnesty doesn’t call for intervention; it certainly doesn’t refer to holocaust memes as "never again" seems not to apply to the Palestinians. Amnesty also doesn’t produce melodramatic videos on the most notorious Israeli prisons where inmates are tortured, brutalised and killed.
Regarding the situation in Venezuela, Amnesty demands "urgent actions from ICC prosecutor”. [24] When it comes to Israel doesn’t call upon the international courts to prosecute Israel for war crimes or worse. According to Donatella Rovera, a senior AI investigator, Amnesty doesn’t issue such calls. [25] Another standard applies.
On 21 May 2024, Amnesty issued a press release urging the ICC to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu, Gallant and three Palestinian resistance leaders. What Agnes Callamard, AI’s Secretary General, doesn’t explain is the fact that whereas an arrest warrant was issued for Putin, when it comes to Netanyahu, the prosecutor merely petitioned the court to consider issuing a warrant. Given the uproar and threats issued by US politicians, the ICC quietly dropped the matter – thus there are no warrants issued against Netanyahu and Gallant at present. There is scant evidence of a moral backbone at the ICC. But the ICC statements allows Amnesty to posture by wagging its finger at “both sides”.
On 2 September 2024, Amnesty issued a demand for Mongolia to arrest President Putin, and did so in a rather hectoring tone. [26] And although the ICC no longer seeks to prosecute Netanyahu, this doesn’t stop other organisations to call on governments hosting Netanyahu for his arrest. Alas, Amnesty didn’t send a similar demand to the US. Maybe such a call would have tarnished Netanyahu’s reputation during his recent address to the US Congress.
On the eve of the Gulf War against Iraq, Amnesty produced a report on the purported case of Iraqi soldiers “throwing babies out of incubators”. President Bush appeared on TV showing this report and using it as a justification for war. After the hoax was exposed Amnesty didn’t issue any apology or explanation. But now we face a real situation in Gaza where the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of Gaza’s largest hospital and consequently dozens of newborns had to be taken off incubators or other equipment. The doctor attending the children noted that most of them would die. One would say that this would provide emotive material to campaign to obtain a ceasefire; the plight of babies might resonate with Western liberal souls. Alas, Amnesty was silent in this instance.
And there are blind spots
One must marvel at the long list of press releases and reports Amnesty produces on a regular basis. No corner of the planet is exempt of an Amnesty commentary or reprimand. From commenting on transexual rights in Mongolia, sex workers rights, climate change, migrant rights and discrimination, etc. And many of its missives wag a finger at the offending state with titles including "… must do this". Amnesty frequently waves its human rights magic wand. Somehow they think they have the standing of a UN-like organisation to pontificate on any topic anywhere in the world.
But one encounters blind spots in AI’s coverage. There are very few admonishing press releases regarding US, UK, or Israeli atrocious behaviour. When offending actions are mentioned at all, one finds them couched with terms such as "alleged"; and certainly not calling for a tribunal to hold criminals to account. The war in Ukraine has elicited minor critical commentary except chastising Russia; the US role in causing and fuelling the war are not mentioned. In general, AI’s position on issues aligns with US, UK and Israeli state policy. There is no criticism or even mention of the US’s penchant for forever wars; for waging violent actions in many places in the world. These seem to be just fine by Amnesty’s standards.
The United Nations Security Council has become a joke – where one finds the US and its acolytes brazenly lying, and exhibiting monumental hypocrisy and cynicism. Any relevant resolution delivering a modicum of justice is routinely vetoed. This is plainly evident regarding calls for a ceasefire in Gaza with such resolutions vetoed. On 21 December 2023, the US put forth a "compromise" resolution regarding a ceasefire and humanitarian aid. The curious thing is that on the same day the diplomats acknowledged that Israel would not be bound by the resolution – it was merely an exercise of hypocrisy on steroids. Yet the next day, Agnes Callamard, AI’s Secretary General, stated that: "This is a much-needed resolution…”!
[27]. To her credit, she also stated: "It is disgraceful that the US was able to stall and use the threat of its veto power to force the UN Security Council to weaken a much-needed call for an immediate end to attacks by all parties.”There is no pushback
An important role any organisation could play would be to confront local supporters of regimes involved in mass crimes. There are notorious cases:
- Nikki Haley, the failed presidential candidate, went to Israel to express her support to the extent that she wrote “kill them all” on an Israel artillery shell.
- At the August 2024 Democratic National Convention attendees were active cheerleaders for the Israeli actions.
- The US Congress welcomed Netanyahu and gave him 57 standing ovations.
Maybe these outrageous statements and actions would elicit critical commentary. It is not only a generic trite statement about what is happening “over there,” but what is also necessary is to challenge the local enablers of mass crimes. Alas, Amnesty would rather consort with US politicians rather than to confront them.
The bane of HR NGOs
In Europe, various governments and NGOs provide scholarships for students to specialise in Human Rights. The courses are offered in several countries, and hundreds of students attend Human Rights centres each year. Italians get to study in Finland for a year…. And we find the grotesque situation of Dutch students studying human rights in Israel; it is a bit like going for education on animal rights to a slaughterhouse. This is all courtesy of EU largesse. The graduates then work for hundreds of NGOs or government agencies. Each of them will then wave their human rights wand over a topic that may be fashionable, invariably gay/trans rights, women’s reproductive rights, sex worker’s rights, etc. Further fuelling the human rights industry is the lavish funding obtained from various lottery funds – much of the profits from such institutions are disbursed to NGOs. The human rights industry experiences subsidised growth. Thus each NGO with its own warped agenda receives funds directly or indirectly. The directors of some NGOs command six figure salaries – a favourite for out-of-office politicians seeking a sinecure. [28]
In the Netherlands where this process has been in place for decades, the human rights lobby has mushroomed in size and now manifests a dysfunctional dynamic, i.e., the NGOs bring incessant lawsuits against the government tying it down in court.
Do NGOs advocating Palestinian human rights get to play in this merry-go-round? Fat chance!
Human rights are for the birds
When confronted with mass crimes what is needed is justice, and not one of its bastardised, neutered, malleable and ineffective substitutes. If one wants justice then it behooves one to speak in terms of justice, and to avoid the human rights mumbo jumbo. This is specially the case when human rights have been cynically exploited and weaponised by the US and UK. [29] A framework that can be used to justify wars, the so-called humanitarian interventions, cannot be a framework that advances justice or motivates people to act against mass crimes. The criminals react accordingly, i.e., they aren’t bothered if they are called transgressors of human rights, but may fear being accused of mass crimes.
The mask comes off
The current wars in Gaza, Ukraine, etc., and the reactions surrounding them has torn off the mask of the American empire revealing its hypocrisy, cynicism and sadism. Many of the "values" so dear to the neoliberals have been shown to be a sham. "Democracy," "International law," "freedom of speech,"…., and of course "human rights” have fallen off their pedestals. The collateral damage of the collapse also tears into the United Nations, the ICC, ICJ, and also the human rights industry because they also have been shown to be so ineffective and compromised. Amnesty International is demonstrably a conflicted organisation steeped in hypocrisy. It is a tool used by the UK and US governments to weaponise “human rights” to suit its own ends: the justification of wars, and the demonisation of "regimes," i.e., the governments that the empire doesn’t like. It has been a conduit for pro-war propaganda in the past, and even calling for so-called humanitarian military interventions.
What is needed are critical voices that highlight the daily massacres, that call for the criminals and their enablers to be held to account, and to sue for a modicum of justice. Calling for a ceasefire is the bare minimum. Alas, most human rights NGOs don’t even fulfil this task. When Amnesty International postures about all sorts of trendy human rights everywhere in the world, but then doesn’t cover genocide and spring into effective action, then let it shut up entirely.
One thing is certain: Amnesty International is not part of the solution, it is part of the problem.
Notes
- [1] This is an analysis of Amnesty’s press releases and reports. These can be found here: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ Amnesty’s position are also available on Twitter, but these are not covered here. The press releases and reports by other HR organisations are very similar and exhibit the same bias.
- [2] Uri Blau, Documents reveal how Israel made Amnesty’s local branch a front for the Foreign Ministry in the 70s; The Israeli government funded the establishment and activity of the Amnesty International branch in Israel in the 1960s and 70s. Official documents reveal that the chairman of the organization was in constant contact with the Foreign Ministry and received instructions from it; Haaretz, 18 March 2017.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2017/3/22/israels-human-rights-spies-manipulating-the-discourse
Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, "Israel’s human rights spies": Manipulating the discourse Revelations about Israel’s infiltration of NGOs in the 1970s shocked many, but human rights ‘spies’ are still out there, 22 Mar 2017. - [3] Craig Mokhiber (Director of the New York Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights), The resignation letter.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2023/11/a-textbook-case-of-genocide/ - [4] Avi Scharf, Weapons shipments to Israel: A Dizzying Pace, Then a Drop: How U.S. Arms Shipments to Israel Slowed Down subtitle: Publicly available flight tracking data shows how many U.S. arms shipments have arrived in Israel each month since the Gaza war started, revealing a sharp rise and then gradual tapering off in the pace of deliveries, Haaretz, 27 June 2024.
- [5] Israel wants to be feared to maintain its morally bankrupt deterrence policy. Thus any resistance must be smashed with disproportionate power. The Dahiya neighbourhood in Beirut was brutally bombed, and the politicians ordering the bombing were very pleased with the level of destruction. Thus the Dahiya doctrine.
- [6] Alastair Crooke, Trickery, Humiliation, Death – and the Timeless Hunger for ‘Honour and Glory’, Strategic Culture, 30 December 2023.
- [7] Ilan Pappe, the great Israeli historian, once replied to a question of whether Israel was an apartheid state by stating: "if it quacks like a duck, and waddles like a duck, then it is apartheid".
- [8] Some examples of AI Press releases about OPT that don’t mention Gaza at all. AI, Dutch Investor pushes for human rights safeguards to stop use of surveillance technology against Palestinians, 4 July 2024. Refers to the intrusive video spying. AI, Israel’s attempt to sway WhatsApp case casts doubt on its ability to deal with NSO spyware cases, 25 July 2024.
- [9] Operation "Cast Lead" is a curious name for a military operation. It actually refers to a passage in Deuteronomy where the Hebrews exterminate their opponents to the extent that they pour molten lead down their throats.
- [10]Contrast AI’s ahistorical reporting on the situation in Gaza with that of Syria. When it comes to Syria, the history of the “regime” is suddenly an issue.
- [11] Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee and Salim Yusuf, “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential”, The Lancet, Volume 404, Issue 10449, pp237-238, 20 July 2024.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext - [12] AI, Israel/ OPT: Hamas and other armed groups must immediately release civilians held hostage in Gaza,12 July 2024
- [13] By Yaniv Kubovich • Haaretz 7 July 2024 IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive Subtitle: “there was crazy hysteria, and decisions started being made without verified information: Documents and testimonies obtained by Haaretz reveal the Hannibal operational order, which directs the use of force to prevent soldiers being taken into captivity, was employed at three army facilities infiltrated by Hamas, potentially endangering civilians as well”
- [14] Crisis in Gaza: Scenario-based Health Impact Projections
https://gaza-projections.org/gaza_projections_report.pdf - [15] AI, Gaza: Discovery of mass graves highlights urgent need to grant access to independent human
rights investigators, 24 April 2024. - [16] AI, Israel/OPT: Israeli attacks targeting Hamas and other armed group fighters that killed
scores of displaced civilians in Rafah should be investigated as war crimes, 26 August 2024. - [17] AI, Global: Governments’ brazen flouting of Arms Trade Treaty rules leading to devastating loss of life, 19 August 2024.
- [18] https://www.sgr.org.uk/resources/gaza-one-most-intense-bombardments-history
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/amount-of-israeli-bombs-dropped-on-gaza-surpasses-that-of-world-war-ii/3239665 - [19] AI, “Israel must end mass incommunicado detention and torture of Palestinians from Gaza”, 18 July 2024.
- [20] https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/7/10/freed-former-palestinian-bodybuilder-alleges-abuse-by-israeli-jailers
and https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/palestine-west-bank-muazzaz-abayat-prison-interview - [21]
https://www.amnesty.org/en/petition/demand-a-ceasefire-by-all-parties-to-end-civilian-suffering/ - [22] Thomas Frank, Hypocrite at the good cause parties, Le Monde Diplomatique, February 2018. Frank reports that Harvey Weinstein made "AI-USA possible”.
- [23] Paul de Rooij, Amnesty International trumpets for another "Humanitarian" war… this time in Syria, MintPress, 23 March 2018.
- [24] Amnesty, Venezuela: Scale and gravity of ongoing crimes demand urgent actions from ICC prosecutor, 9 August 2024
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/08/venezuela-crimes-demand-urgent-action-icc-prosecutor/ - [25] Personal communication with Donatella Rovera, January 2003.
- [26] AI, “Mongolia: Putin must be arrested and surrendered to the International Criminal Court”, 2 September 2024.
- [27] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/12/israel-opt-adoption-of-un-resolution-to-expedite-humanitarian-aid-to-gaza-an-important-but-insufficient-step/
Israel/OPT: Adoption of UN resolution to expedite humanitarian aid to Gaza an important but insufficient step, 22 Decemeber 2024. - [28] Irene Khan, the former Amnesty general secretary, received a £533,000 "golden handshake" when she departed.
- [29] For some of the background history of Amnesty International, see: Kirsten Sellars, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights, Sutton Publications, 2002. Also, Alfred de Zayas, The Human Rights Industry, Clarity Press, 2023.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Asia Pacific Report
Officials in the United States have said that Washington still does not “know with full certainty what transpired” when a US citizen was killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank last week, stressing that they were waiting for the findings of an Israeli investigation.
The US on Monday also appeared to reject calls for an independent investigation into the fatal shooting of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, reports Al Jazeera.
State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel declined to acknowledge that Eygi was killed by an Israeli soldier, but he called for the process to “play out and for the facts to be gathered”.
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He also urged Israel to “quickly and robustly conduct” its probe and make the findings public but confirmed the administration is not planning to independently investigate the killing — as Eygi’s family had requested.
“We are working closely to ascertain the facts, but there is not a State Department-led investigation that is going on,” Patel told a press briefing yesterday.
Eygi, 26, a Turkish-American citizen, was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper on Friday while attending a demonstration against the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in Beita, south of Nablus.
Israeli forces fired live ammunition, stun grenades and tear gas at demonstrators, with eyewitnesses saying Eygi was intentionally targeted even as she posed no threat.
Palestinian rights advocates and Eygi’s loved ones have been calling for accountability for her killing.
Earlier this month, following the killing in Gaza of US-Israeli captive Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the US Department of Justice quickly announced it was investigating his killing “and each and every one of Hamas’s brutal murders of Americans”.
Procession for Turkish American activist killed by Israeli forces. Video: Al JazeeraPressed on the double standard yesterday, Patel sought to differentiate Goldberg-Polin’s killing from the shooting of Eygi.
“Let’s make sure we are not conflating the direct murder of American-Israeli citizens, hostages, being held by a terrorist group,” he told reporters.
“Each circumstance is unique and different,” he added.
The department did not immediately answer a request by Al Jazeera to elaborate on that comment.
Patel also did not directly answer questions about how Eygi’s family and those of others killed by Israel could trust an investigation process handled by the perpetrators of their killings.
No US investigation
After the White House said on Friday that it was “deeply disturbed” by the killing and that it had requested Israel to conduct an investigation, Eygi’s family pushed back and called for an independent one.
American activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi . . . shot dead by an Israeli sniper and her family has called for an independent investigation. Image: Al Jazeera screenshot “We welcome the White House’s statement of condolences, but given the circumstances of Aysenur’s killing, an Israeli investigation is not adequate,” they said in a statement.
A spokesperson for the White House said on Monday that US President Joe Biden had not yet spoken to the family.
Ahmad Abuznaid, the executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USPCR), dismissed the US call for Israel to investigate its own forces.
Israeli authorities rarely ever prosecute troops for abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories despite reports of rampant rights violations against Palestinians.
“The first investigation should be into how the State Department continues to arm the state of Israel as it’s killed several US citizens and tens of thousands of Palestinians in the last year alone. That’s the primary investigation we’re waiting on the results for,” Abuznaid told Al Jazeera.
Margaret DeReus, executive director of the Institute for Middle East Understanding, also described the US call for an Israeli investigation as “wholly insufficient”.
“Israel doesn’t conduct transparent investigations and neither Israel nor the US hold the perpetrators of these killings accountable. You don’t rely on the criminal to investigate his crime,” DeReus said.
“Over the past nearly 11 months, President Biden has shown daily which lives he values and which lives he deems dispensable. He cannot place his allegiance to this genocidal regime over the lives of his own citizens,” she added.
‘Cover-ups’ over US citizens
Israeli forces have killed several US citizens in recent years, but the Biden administration has consistently rejected calls for independent investigations into those incidents as well.For example, in 2022, Washington resisted demands for a US-led probe into the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by the Israeli military in the West Bank, urging Israel to conduct its own probe instead.
Israeli authorities eventually dismissed the fatal shooting as an “accident” and refused to pursue criminal charges in the case.
Israeli and US media outlets reported months after the killing of Abu Akleh that the US Justice Department opened a probe into the shooting. But US officials have not publicly confirmed the existence of the investigation, whose findings remain unknown.
Families of the victims have condemned the decision to once again allow Israel to investigate a killing by its own forces.
“Israel does not do investigations; they do cover-ups,” Cindy Corrie, Rachel Corrie’s mother, told Democracy Now on Monday.
An Israeli soldier crushed Rachel Corrie to death with a bulldozer in Rafah in 2003. Her family spent years lobbying multiple administrations to launch an independent, US-led probe — to no avail.
“Our family worked for an investigation into Rachel’s killing, and we wanted some consequences out of that. And we hoped — even though we didn’t know the names of the people that would be killed in the future, we hoped that that would stop and it would not happen,” Cindy Corrie said.
Some advocates have argued that even a US-led investigation would not suffice.
“An international investigation, ideally by the ICC, must commence because Israeli authorities cannot be trusted to credibly investigate the killings of American citizens, and the US government is unwilling to hold Israel accountable,” human rights lawyer Jamil Dakwar, who co-represented the Corrie family in their civil case in Israeli courts, said.
Eygi, who was born in Antalya, Turkey but grew up in Seattle, Washington in the US, had recently graduated from the University of Washington, where she had participated in campus protests against US support for Israel’s war on Gaza.
She was a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a pro-Palestinian organisation.
In recent years, Beita has been the site of weekly demonstrations against the construction of new illegal Israeli outposts. Before Eygi, 17 Palestinian protesters were killed there since 2020, according to the group.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
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Max Weber (1864-1920) was a prominent German sociologist who developed influential theories on rationality and authority. He examined different types of rationality that underpinned systems of authority. He argued that modern Western societies were based on legal-rational authority and had moved away from systems that were based on traditional authority and charismatic authority.
Traditional authority derives its power from long-standing customs and traditions, while charismatic authority is based on the exceptional personal qualities or charisma of a leader.
According to Weber, the legal-rational authority that characterises Western capitalist industrial society is based on instrumental rationality that focuses on the most efficient means to achieve given ends. This type of rationality manifest in bureaucratic power. Weber contrasted this with another form of rationality: value rationality that is based on conscious beliefs in the inherent value of certain behaviour.
While Weber saw the benefits of instrumental rationality in terms of increased efficiency, he feared that this could lead to a stifling “iron cage” of a rule-based order and rule following (instrumental rationality) as an end in itself. The result would be humanity’s “polar night of icy darkness.”
Today, technological change is sweeping across the planet and presents many challenges. The danger is of a technological iron cage in the hands of an elite that uses technology for malevolent purposes.
Lewis Coyne of Exeter University says:
We do not — or should not — want to become a society in which things of deeper significance are appreciated only for any instrumental value. The challenge, therefore, is to delimit instrumental rationality and the technologies that embody it by protecting that which we value intrinsically, above and beyond mere utility.
He adds that we must decide which technologies we are for, to what ends, and how they can be democratically managed, with a view to the kind of society we wish to be.
A major change that we have seen in recent years is the increasing dominance of cloud-based services and platforms. In the food and agriculture sector, we are seeing the rollout of these phenomena tied to a techno solutionist ‘data-driven’ or ‘precision’ agriculture legitimised by ‘humanitarian’ notions of ‘helping farmers’, ‘saving the planet’ and ‘feeding the world’ in the face of some kind of impending Malthusian catastrophe.
A part-fear mongering, part-self-aggrandisement narrative promoted by those who have fuelled ecological devastation, corporate dependency, land dispossession, food insecurity and farmer indebtedness as a result of the global food regime that they helped to create and profited from. Now, with a highly profitable but flawed carbon credit trading scheme and a greenwashed technology-driven eco-modernism, they are going to save humanity from itself.
The world according to Bayer
In the agrifood sector, we are seeing the rollout of data-driven or precision approaches to agriculture by the likes of Microsoft, Syngenta, Bayer and Amazon centred on cloud-based data information services. Data-driven agriculture mines data to be exploited by the agribusiness/big tech giants to instruct farmers what and how much to produce and what type of proprietary inputs they must purchase and from whom.
Data owners (Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet etc.), input suppliers (Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, Cargill etc.) and retail concerns (Amazon, Walmart etc) aim to secure the commanding heights of the global agrifood economy through their monopolistic platforms.
But what does this model of agriculture look like in practice?
Let us use Bayer’s digital platform Climate FieldView as an example. It collects data from satellites and sensors in fields and on tractors and then uses algorithms to advise farmers on their farming practices: when and what to plant, how much pesticide to spray, how much fertiliser to apply etc.
To be part of Bayer’s Carbon Program, farmers have to be enrolled in FieldView. Bayer then uses the FieldView app to instruct farmers on the implementation of just two practices that are said to sequester carbon in the soils: reduced tillage or no-till farming and the planting of cover crops.
Through the app, the company monitors these two practices and estimates the amount of carbon that the participating farmers have sequestered. Farmers are then supposed to be paid according to Bayer’s calculations, and Bayer uses that information to claim carbon credits and sell these in carbon markets.
Bayer also has a programme in the US called ForGround. Upstream companies can use the platform to advertise and offer discounts for equipment, seeds and other inputs.
For example, getting more farmers to use reduced tillage or no-till is of huge benefit to Bayer (sold on the basis of it being ‘climate friendly’). The kind of reduced tillage or no-till promoted by Bayer requires dousing fields with its RoundUp (toxic glyphosate) herbicide and planting seeds of its genetically engineered Roundup resistant soybeans or hybrid maize.
And what of the cover crops referred to above? Bayer also intends to profit from the promotion of cover crops. It has taken majority ownership of a seed company developing a gene-edited cover crop, called CoverCress. Seeds of CoverCress will be sold to farmers who are enrolled in ForGround and the crop will be sold as a biofuel.
But Bayer’s big target is the downstream food companies which can use the platform to claim emissions reductions in their supply chains.
Agribusiness corporations and the big tech companies are jointly developing carbon farming platforms to influence farmers on their choice of inputs and farming practices (big tech companies, like Microsoft and IBM, are major buyers of carbon credits).
The non-profit GRAIN says (see the article The corporate agenda behind carbon farming) that Bayer is gaining increasing control over farmers in various countries, dictating exactly how they farm and what inputs they use through its ‘Carbon Program’.
GRAIN argues that, for corporations, carbon farming is all about increasing their control within the food system and is certainly not about sequestering carbon.
Digital platforms are intended to be one-stop shops for carbon credits, seeds, pesticides and fertilisers and agronomic advice, all supplied by the company, which gets the added benefit of control over the data harvested from the participating farms.
Technofeudalism
Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece, argues that what we are seeing is a shift from capitalism to technofeudalism. He argues that tech giants like Apple, Meta and Amazon act as modern-day feudal lords. Users of digital platforms (such as companies or farmers) essentially become ‘cloud serfs’, and ‘rent’ (fees, data etc) is extracted from them for being on a platform.
In feudalism (land) rent drives the system. In capitalism, profits drive the system. Varoufakis says that markets are being replaced by algorithmic ‘digital fiefdoms’.
Although digital platforms require some form of capitalist production, as companies like Amazon need manufacturers to produce goods for their platforms, the new system represents a significant shift in power dynamics, favouring those who own and control the platforms.
Whether this system is technofeudalism, hypercapitalism or something else is open to debate. But we should at least be able to agree on one thing: the changes we are seeing are having profound impacts on economies and populations that are increasingly surveilled as they are compelled to shift their lives online.
The very corporations that are responsible for the problems of the prevailing food system merely offer more of the same, this time packaged in a genetically engineered, ecomodernist, fake-green wrapping (see the online article From net zero to glyphosate: agritech’s greenwashed corporate power grab).
Elected officials are facilitating this by putting the needs of monopolistic global interests ahead of ordinary people’s personal freedoms and workers’ rights, as well as the needs of independent local producers, enterprises and markets.
For instance, the Indian government has in recent times signed memoranda of understanding (MoU) with Amazon, Bayer, Microsoft and Syngenta to rollout data-driven, precision agriculture. A ‘one world agriculture’ under their control based on genetically engineered seeds, laboratory created products that resemble food and farming without farmers, with the entire agrifood chain, from field (or lab) to retail in their hands.
This is part of a broader strategy to shift hundreds of millions out of agriculture, ensure India’s food dependence on foreign corporations and eradicate any semblance of food democracy (or national sovereignty).
In response, a ‘citizen letter’ (July 2024) was sent to the government. It stated that it is not clear what the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) will learn from Bayer that the well-paid public sector scientists of the institution cannot develop themselves. The letter says entities that have been responsible for causing an economic and environmental crisis in Indian agriculture are being partnered by ICAR for so-called solutions when these entities are only interested in their profits and not sustainability (or any other nomenclature they use).
The letter raises some key concerns. Where is the democratic debate on carbon credit markets. Is the ICAR ensuring that the farmers get the best rather than biased advice that boosts the further rollout of proprietary products? Is there a system in place for the ICAR to develop research and education agendas from the farmers it is supposed to serve as opposed to being led by the whims and business ideas of corporations?
The authors of the letter note that copies of the MoUs are not being shared proactively in the public domain by the ICAR. The letter asks that the ICAR suspends the signed MoUs, shares all details in the public domain and desists from signing any more such MoUs without necessary public debate.
Valuing humanity
Genuine approaches to addressing the challenges humanity faces are being ignored by policymakers or cynically attacked by corporate lobbyists. These solutions involve systemic shifts in agricultural, food and economic systems with a focus on low consumption (energy) lifestyles, localisation and an ecologically sustainable agroecology.
As activist John Wilson says, this is based on creative solutions, a connection to nature and the land, nurturing people, peaceful transformation and solidarity.
This is something discussed in the recent article From Agrarianism to Transhumanism: The Long March to Dystopia in which it is argued that co-operative labour, fellowship and our long-standing spiritual connection to the land should inform how as a society we should live. This stands in stark contrast to the values and impacts of capitalism and technology based on instrumental rationality and too often fuelled by revenue streams and the goal to control populations.
When we hear talk of a ‘spiritual connection’, what is meant by ‘spiritual’? In a broad sense it can be regarded as a concept that refers to thoughts, beliefs and feelings about the meaning of life, rather than just physical existence. A sense of connection to something greater than ourselves. Something akin to Weber’s concept of value rationality. The spiritual, the diverse and the local are juxtaposed with the selfishness of modern urban society, the increasing homogeneity of thought and practice and an instrumental rationality which becomes an end in itself.
Having a direct link with nature/the land is fundamental to developing an appreciation of a type of ‘being’ and an ‘understanding’ that results in a reality worth living in.
However, what we are seeing is an agenda based on a different set of values rooted in a lust for power and money and the total subjugation of ordinary people being rammed through under the false promise of techno solutionism (transhumanism, vaccines in food, neural laces to detect moods implanted in the skull, programmable digital money, track and trace technology etc.) and some distant notion of a techno utopia that leave malevolent power relations intact and unchallenged.
Is this then to be humanity’s never-ending “polar night of icy darkness”? Hopefully not. This vision is being imposed from above. Ordinary people (whether, for example, farmers in India or those being beaten down through austerity policies) find themselves on the receiving end of a class war being waged against them by a mega rich elite.
Indeed, in 1941, Herbert Marcuse stated that technology could be used as an instrument for control and domination. Precisely the agenda of the likes of Bayer, the Gates Foundation, BlackRock and the World Bank, which are trying to eradicate genuine diversity and impose a one-size-fits-all model of thinking and behaviour.
A final thought courtesy of civil rights campaigner Frederick Douglass in a speech from 1857:
The post The War on Food and the War on Humanity: Platforms of Control and the Unbreakable Spirit first appeared on Dissident Voice.Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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During a week of action focused on UN potential to end Israel’s genocidal attacks, I was part of a coalition that met with twelve different permanent missions to the United Nations. We urged that if countries that are parties to the Genocide Convention or the Geneva Conventions stop trading with Israel as international law demands, (cf. the July 19th advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice), the genocide will end quickly.
In each encounter at a Permanent Mission to the UN, its staff asked if we, as U.S. citizens, have addressed our government’s unwavering support for the genocide against impoverished and forcibly displaced people.
It was a deeply meaningful moment when the Irish Ambassador to the United Nations showed our delegation a miniature replica of John Behan’s poignant statue depicting the Irish exodus – it showed weary, hungry people disembarking from a boat after a stormy ocean voyage.
“You have to see each one of these as a human being,” he said.
My mother was an Irish indentured servant first in Ireland and then in England. As things go, she was among the more fortunate. She never endured being chained day and night in the Middle Passage of a slave ship carrying captives here, or in a human trafficker’s overcrowded, lethally airless truck container. Nor did she have to cling to the remains of an overcrowded ship to keep from drowning after it capsized in the Mediterranean.
Life in Gaza is a desperate moment-to-moment ordeal of clinging to such wreckage, trying to stay above water, to stay alive, while both major U.S. political parties struggle to push you under.
In an article published by The Guardian, Israeli-American Omer Bartov, an eminent Holocaust historian and expert on genocide, lamented the unwillingness of many Israelis—some of whom are his friends, neighbors, colleagues, and even former students—to see Palestinians as human beings. He comments: “Many of my friends…feel that in the struggle between justice and existence, existence must win out…it is our own cause that must be triumphant, no matter the price… This feeling did not appear suddenly on 7 October.”
Is it futile to ask Israelis to reconsider this vengeance – avenging hundreds of civilians with several hundred thousand, half of them children – while the U.S. continues to arm Israel for the task?
Bartov continues: By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that …Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. … the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, … as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, … Israel was acting ‘with intent to destroy, in whole or in part’, the Palestinian population in Gaza, ‘as such, by killing, causing serious harm… inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction’”.
How can United States citizens cope in a nation not just gone mad on war, but gone mad on genocide? We do not have to cope with lingering, state-enforced starvation or the memory of our lifeless children pulled from under rubble. But we must cope with our complicity.
When we can, we must act.
We cannot say we did not know. The United Nations member states watch the entire edifice of international law crumble as a genocide is broadcast across our screens. Israeli military forces may have killed close to 200,000 Gazans although only 40,000 bodies have been recovered for counting. The Israeli government’s siege is starving Palestinian children and has brought Gaza to the brink of a full-blown famine. Meanwhile, polio has made a return.
From September 10 – September 30, World BEYOND War, Code Pink, Veterans For Peace, Pax Christi and other coalition partners will leaflet, demonstrate, and nonviolently act to expose and oppose Israeli and U.S. actions which flout international law. We will gather before both the United States’ U.N. Mission and the Israeli consulate demanding both nations desist from further massacres, forcible displacement, and the use of starvation and disease as weapons.
We will remind people that Israel possesses thermonuclear weapons but refuses to acknowledge this fact and thereby avoids any assessment or safeguards by the International Atomic Energy Association and any involvement in the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
We will express earnest concern both for Hamas’ prisoners and the more than a thousand Palestinians incarcerated without charge by Israel, many of them women and children.
Currently, the United States and Israel have effectively decided on death for the remaining hostages rather than a settlement that would free Palestinian women and children. In a reckless bid to spark a U.S.-Iran war, Israel recently assassinated, in Tehran, the chief Hamas negotiator for a hostage release.
And still the U.S.’ arms flow continues.
Last week, the world watched as the Democratic Party leadership, at its convention, squelched voices of the uncommitted delegates. DNC speakers repeated the lie that their party was seeking a ceasefire, while flatly refusing to stop replacing the guns and missiles Israel has used to shed blood and destroy infrastructure.
We all should rely on the covenant virtues of traditional Judaism, those virtues celebrated as essential for survival: truth, justice, and forgiving love. We should appeal to secular and faith-based people across the United States as we face precarities of nuclear annihilation and ecological collapse. Securing a better future for all children requires bolstering respect for human rights, searching always for ways to abolish war.
The U.S. government is complicit in genocide, and we, in whose name it is acting, are also complicit if we remain silent.
It is time for the United Nations to liberate itself from a Security Council structure giving five permanent, nuclear armed members a vise-like grip on the world’s ability to counter the scourge of war. We must join with the call of the South African government which bravely upheld international law. We must clamor for the General Assembly to enact the “uniting for peace” resolution.
As the forthright Jewish delegate at last week’s DNC, after he and two others unfurled a banner “STOP ARMING ISRAEL”, said, “Never again means never again!”
We invite you to join us. https://events.worldbeyondwar.org/
• A version of this article first appeared on World BEYOND War’s website. https://worldbeyondwar.org/hanging-on-with-gaza/
The post Hanging On with Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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As an observer of foreign affairs, I’ve often written about the hypocrisy of Liberal and Conservative governments’ failure to uphold “an international rules-based order” despite claims of its importance. In the case of Israel, the duplicity is even more glaring. Our governments, past and present, repeatedly fail to uphold Canadian law.
Activists have long shown how arms sales and military recruitment to Israel violates the law. But Global Affairs, Minister of Justice, RCMP and other government agencies have generally ignored their legal responsibilities when it comes to the genocidal apartheid state.
Issuing arms permits to Israel contravenes Canada’s Export and Import Permits Act. According to the law, Canada shouldn’t export arms to a country if there is “a substantial risk” they would undermine peace and security or be used to violate international law. As a signatory to the UN Arms Trade Treaty Canada is also obliged to not transfer arms to a country responsible for grave human rights violations. Two recent International Court of Justice rulings strengthen the legal case against Canadian arms sales to Israel. Still, Global Affairs allows arms transfers.
The Minister of Justice and RCMP have also failed to apply the law regarding Israel, refusing to enforce the Foreign Enlistment Act and Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act. In 2020 a formal legal complaint and public letter signed by numerous prominent individuals were released calling on the federal government to investigate individuals for violating the Foreign Enlistment Act by inducing Canadians to join the Israeli military. The Trudeau government effectively ignored the public letter and legal complaint even though it was published on the front page of Le Devoir. Then Justice Minister David Lametti responded by simply saying it was up to the police to investigate. For their part, the police refused to seriously investigate. Partly in response to the police’s unwillingness to take the matter seriously, a case was launched through a private prosecution against Sar-El Canada, which brings Canadians to volunteer on Israeli military bases. A Justice of the Peace agreed the evidence warranted a hearing, but the Crown interceded to dismiss the case against Sar-El. They clearly didn’t want a court to adjudicate the matter.
More recently, Canadians fighting in a force that’s slaughtered tens of thousands should be investigated under Canada’s Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act. Highlighting reports of Canadians in the Israeli military, a Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East letter to Justice Minister Arif Virani called on him to “Issue a warning to Canadian nationals that serving or volunteering with the Israeli military may make them criminally liable under the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act”. CJPME’s January letter also requested the minister “launch an investigation under its War Crimes Program into the participation of Canadian nationals involved in Israel’s military offensive.”
Thousands messaged the minister calling on him to investigate Canadians committing war crimes in Gaza. Following up on this push, I asked Virani directly if he’d investigate those killing Palestinians under the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act. He refused to answer, walking down the wrong hallway to escape my questioning.
While staying mum on Canadians killing Palestinians, the Trudeau government actually interceded to block a bureaucratic move to properly label wines from illegal colonies. After David Kattenburg repeatedly complained about inaccurate labels on two wines sold in Ontario, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) notified the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) in 2017 that it “would not be acceptable and would be considered misleading” to declare wines produced in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as “products of Israel”. But, immediately after the decision became public the government reversed the advisory and then appealed a judge’s ruling to block accurate labelling of wines produced in the occupied West Bank.
In a major form of Israel-focused criminality, dozens of registered charities violate the Income Tax Act by supporting the Israeli military, racist organizations and West Bank colonies. In a bid to press the CRA to uphold the law, formal complaints have been submitted to the revenue agency detailing a dozen charities’ – with over $100 million in annual revenue – violating the rules. That campaign contributed to the recent revocation of the charitable status of Canada’s second most powerful Zionist charity, the Jewish National Fund of Canada (as well as the Ne’eman Foundation). While its recent revocations restore some confidence in the CRA’s ability to act independently, a law-abiding revenue agency would do far more to curtail illegal subsidies to Israel.
To press the CRA to revoke the charitable status of other Israel-focused organizations violating the law, actions will be held at CRA offices across the country on International Day of Charity. On September 5 join one of the many protests calling on the CRA to stop subsidizing war crimes and apartheid.
One has to wonder why we must take to the streets to convince our government to uphold Canadian law.
The post Israel supporters flout Canadian law with impunity first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Be happy. Think of your wellness. Across organisations, private and public entities, government bodies and social clubs, the cult of contrived happiness abounds with ritualistic, clotting repetition. In such cases, the forced grin, the pressured smile, the affected giggle, have become part of a project of puppeteering, manipulation and manufacture. Critics of such approaches are ostracised, treated as leprous reminders of reality.
The cult of orchestrated happiness is intended to veil, covering the moonscape scars and lingering mutilations of life. The forced smile, as it has so often been, repels reality. It is also intended as a transferral of responsibility for problems one complains about to the complainant. To be happy by design is to excuse defect and injustice, casually skipping over larger imperfections. “Toxic positivity,” writes Mita Mallick, “is the idea that no matter how bad or stressful a situation, no matter how difficult the circumstances are, you can change your outcome simply by being positive and thinking positively.”
Mallick goes on to suggest that when toxic positivity, as a practice, makes its unwelcome appearance, “we put the responsibility on individuals to endure and persevere in toxic, dysfunctional and broken structures and systems.” Negative views are shunned, seen as unhelpful and disruptive. Their holders, in turn, are encouraged to feel shame, guilt and cherish immaturity.
The nature of such forced happiness has become industrialised and marketed. Rina Raphael, who has studied the wellness industry, notes its effects on certain groups as well. Women, she argues, are being sedated “with consumerist self-care”. Stress can be banished as an act of faith and salvation, dispelled through yoga classes or taking soothing bubble baths. The actual culprit – the issue of overwork, for instance – can be ignored. Even more critically, forget the collective dimension at play, which the wellness market reduces to a matter of individual action and choice.
Tim Lott also reminds us that this has roots in a specific understanding of economic organisation. He takes the prod to capitalism, where happiness is aim and object, involving shopping, playing, exercising, granting funds to charity and such. Companies ensure that workplaces include gimmicks, distractions, and treats in the name of building the resilience of their worker bees: the workplace, for instance, modelled on a nightclub, with open bars and zones of mandatory tranquillity. The workplace, monitored by such creepily absurd commissars as the “funsultants”, have become a domain for the wellness police, agents of what the late Barbara Ehrenreich called the “epidemic of wellness”.
Ehrenreich, in her snappy book Natural Causes, offered a mischievous critique of such an epidemic in the context of postponing death. “You can think of death bitterly or with resignation … and take every possible measure to postpone it.” On the other hand, “you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.” Sober words of philosophical sting which, sadly, have done little to arrest the growth of the wellness industry.
Toxic happiness, the cult of happiness, has become an imperative of iron clad worth. Carl Cederström and André Spicer note in The Wellness Syndrome that even the most mundane tasks of the day must be seen as acts of improvement and wellness. “When we engage in boring activities, such as washing up at home, we should think of them as improving our mindfulness. Even baking a loaf of bread is now recast as a way of nurturing our wellbeing.”
The cult of forced happiness acts as a conscious program to defang and dilute opposition, maligning critics who refuse to join the fascists of the grin, the authoritarians of the forced smiled. It stiffens the sinews of groupthink and discourages naysayers who wish to challenge organisational behaviour or correct errors. Whistleblowers worried about reporting corporate malfeasance or criminality in government organisations find themselves hounded and scolded for not being loyal in patriotic silence. They should have tasted wellness and its therapeutic properties. To be unhappy, it follows, is to be critical and dangerously free.
Wellness as a principle of organisational behaviour has also become a rigid legal component. Employers remind their employees that they must take time off, rush off on annual leave and ensure that the organisation does not labour under “liabilities” that will cut into budgets and raise questions about the quality of the workplace. Most cringingly of all, many employers insist that the public holiday becomes the perfect point at which to take that leave.
Unhappiness has become the hunted enemy, and stomped upon. The time has come for a constructive sense of informed unhappiness to take over, the sulky, the gravely sullen and the profoundly introspective to have their time in necessary bleakness. Wellness industry, begone!
The post Wellness as Tyranny: The Cult of Toxic Happiness first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Ekecheiria, also known as the “Olympic Truce,” is a quaint notion dating to Ancient Greece, when three kings prone to warring against each other – Iphitos of Elis, Cleosthenes of Pisa and Lycurgus of Sparta – concluded a treaty permitting the safe passage of all athletes and spectators from the relevant city-states for the duration of the Olympic Games. The truce had a certain logic to it, given that many of those granted safe passage would have been serving soldiers or soldiers in waiting.
In 1894, the founder of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Pierre de Coubertin, fantasised about the Games as a peace promoting endeavour which, when read closely, suggests the sublimation of humanity’s warring instincts. Instead of killing each other, humans could compete in stadia and on the sporting tracks, adoring and admiring physical prowess. “Wars break out because nations misunderstand each other. We shall have no peace until the prejudices which now separate the different races shall have been outlived. To attain this end, what better means than to bring the youth of all countries periodically together for amicable trials of muscular strength and agility.”
Panting over torsos, sinews and muscles, de Coubertin gushingly wrote his “Ode to Sport” in 1912. Sport was peace, forging “happy bonds between the peoples by drawing them together in reverence for strength which is controlled, organised and self-disciplined.” It was through the young that respect would be learned for “one another,” thereby ensuring that “the diversity of national traits becomes a source of generous and peaceful emulation.” Sport was also other things: justice, daring, honour, joy and, in the true spirit of eugenic inspiration, the means to achieve “a more perfect race, blasting the seeds of sickness”. Athletes would, accordingly, “wish to see growing about him brisk and sturdy sons to follow him in the arena and [in] turn bear off joyous laurels.”
The Olympic Charter also states that Olympism’s central goal “is to place at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.”
In the 1990s, the IOC thought it prudent to revive the concept of such a truce. As the organisation explains, this was done “with a view to protecting, as far as possible, the interests of the athletes and sport in general, and to harness the power of sport to promote peace, dialogue and reconciliation more broadly.” In 2000, the IOC founded the International Olympic Truce Foundation, adopting the dove as a signature symbol of the Games. By the London Olympics of 2012, the 193 nations present had signed onto an Olympic Truce.
From such lofty summits, hypocrisy and inconsistency will follow. The IOC, hardly the finest practitioner of fine principle, has been prone to injudicious standards, rampant corruption and tyrannical stupidity. The IOC recommendation to ban Russian athletes took all but four days after the attack on Ukraine in February 2022 on the premise that Russia had breached the sacred compact of sporting peace. In the mix, Belarus, designated as arch collaborator with Russian war aims, was also added.
During the 11th Olympic Summit held on December 9, 2022, the IOC Executive Board noted that the Olympic Games would not “address all the political and social challenges in the world. This is the realm of politics.” Having advocated that platitudinous, false distinction, the Executive Board could still claim that the Games “can set an example for a world where everyone respects the same rules as one another.”
The IOC did make one grudging concession: Russian and Belarusian athletes could compete as Individual Neutral Athletes (AINs) subject to meeting eligibility requirements determined by the Individual Neutral Athlete Eligibility Review Panel. Each athlete’s participation was subject to respecting the Olympic Charter, with special reference to “the peace mission of the Olympic Movement”.
These statements and qualifications, intentionally or otherwise, are resoundingly delusional. The Games are events of pompous political significance, with athletes often being administrative and symbolic extensions of the nation stage they represent. Authoritarian regimes have gloatingly celebrated hosting them. They have been staging grounds for violence, notably in the killing of 12 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Games by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September.
They have also been boycotted for very political reasons. The United States did so in 1980 for the Moscow Games, along with 64 other nations, in response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The Soviet Union returned the favour at the Los Angeles Olympics held in 1984, giving President Ronald Reagan a chance, in an election year, to speak of the “winning” American ideal and “a new patriotism spreading across our country.”
In keeping with the erratic nature of such a spirit, it was appropriately hypocritical and distasteful of IOC practice to permit the Israeli athletic contingent numbering 88 athletes to compete at the Paris Games. All this, as slaughter and starvation continued to take place in Gaza (at the time, the Palestinian death toll lay somewhere in the order of 39,000).
Permitting Israel’s participation prompted Jules Boykoff, an academic of keen interest in the Games, to suggest that “the situation is more and more resembling the situation that led the IOC forcing Russia to participate as neutral athletes.” The body’s “approach to ignore the situation places its selective morality on full display and throws into question the group’s commitment to the high-minded ideals it claims to abide.”
These ideals remain just that, a cover that otherwise permits political realities to flourish. Predictably, the Paris spectacle, both before and after, was always going to feature the tang and sting of resentment. Far from being apolitical exponents of their craft, various members of the Israeli Olympic team have been more than forthcoming in defending the warring cause. Judokas Timna Nelson-Levy and Maya Goshen have been vocal in their defence of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Palestinian participants have also done their bit. During the opening ceremony, boxer Wasim Abusal wore a shirt showing children being bombed, telling Agence France-Presse that these were “children who are martyred and die under the rubble, children whose parents are martyred and are left alone without food and water.” Such views are not permitted for Russian or Belarusian athletes, who must compete under the deceptive flag of neutrality.
The organisers of the Paris Games also found it difficult to keep a lid on an occasion supposedly free of political attributes. The Israel-Paraguay football march was marked by scornful boos as the Israeli national anthem was performed. Reports also note that at least one banner featured “GENOCIDE OLYMPICS”. Three Israeli athletes also received death threats, according to a statement from the Paris prosecutor’s office.
It’s such instances of political oddities that permit the following suggestion: make all athletes truly amateurish by abolishing their associations with countries. Most nation states, soldered and cemented compacts of hatred, based upon territory often pinched from previous occupants, are such a nuisance in this regard. If Olympism is to make sense, and if the ravings of the physique obsessed de Coubertin are to be given shape, why not get rid of the State altogether, thereby making all participants neutral, if only for a few weeks?
The post The Distasteful Nonsense of Olympism first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The push towards an all-out war in the Middle East is moving out of its sleepwalking phase to that of conscious eschatological reckoning. A blood filled, fiery Armageddon will reveal the forces of virtue, linking the evangelicals of the United States with the right-wing Jewish nationalists in Israel. That appalling prospect is certainly not one to discount: the messianic are always a frightful bunch, thinking history and selectively pruned religions texts to be on their side.
Each week now comes with some measure of sabotage, mutilation and disruption to prospects of peace. In his July 24 address to the US Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlined his crude Manichean vision in routine barking fashion. In doing so, his intention, as Noa Landau pithily put it, was not to end the war in Gaza so much as prolong it.
For Netanyahu, the strained chords of civilisational rhetoric are never far away. He would like other powers to muck in, battling the fiends he calls an “axis of terror”. Impediments to the Jewish state’s war efforts had to be rejected. To impose them would see other countries of similar kidney shackled. “If Israel’s hands are tied, America is next. I’ll tell you what else is next: the ability of all democracies to fight terrorism will be imperilled.”
Room was reserved to attack the International Criminal Court, whose chief prosecutor has sought warrants of arrest against himself and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, and the presidents of notable US universities. As for protesting students, they had chosen to “stand with evil. They stand with Hamas. They stand with rapists and murderers.” With daring outrage, he blotted out any notion that Palestinian civilians were being butchered, despite a death toll in the densely populated strip hovering near 40,000. Indeed, civilian deaths had been “practically none,” with Israel scrupulous in “getting civilians out of harm’s way, something people said we could never do”.
With this blood crusted Weltanschauung, acts of destabilising mayhem are automatic. Showing an utter contempt for Israeli hostages, let alone any humanity for the Palestinians they regard with expansive condescension, the Netanyahu government thought it wise to carry out two assassinations: that of Hamas’ political chief and chief negotiator Ismail Haniyeh, and Hezbollah’s top military chief Fuad Shukr, both killed within twenty-four hours in Beirut and Tehran respectively.
The response to the assassinations in Israel was one of relish – at least for those of the Itamar Ben-Gvir school of thought. As David Issacharoff, writing in Haaretz, described it, “Israel has become a Matryoshka doll of pyromaniacs.” From his skewed vantage point as National Security Minister, assassinations are staple food for the state. The killing of Hezbollah’s second in command, ostensibly for his alleged role in an attack on a Druze village in the Golan Heights, drew the gleeful response that “Every god has his day”.
Despite certain Israeli media reports claiming an order from Netanyahu that ministers were to stay silent over Haniyeh’s killing, the enthusiasts were voluble in rapture. Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, also of Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, expressed his glee on social media, claiming that “this is the right way to clean the world of this filth.” There were to be “No more imaginary ‘peace’/surrender agreements, no more mercy for these sons of death.”
Other cabinet ministers also joined the gloating chorus. “Careful What You Wish For,” wrote Minister for the Diaspora Amichai Chikli over a video of Haniyeh in a conference hall while people chanted “Death to Israel.” Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi resorted to biblical verse: “So may all your enemies perish, O Lord.”
Despite no official confirmation of Israel’s role in the killing of the senior Hamas official, the Government Press Office posted, if only briefly, an image of Haniyeh which left no room for nuance: “Eliminated: Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas highest-ranking leader, was killed in a precise strike in Tehran, Iran.”
The richly violent musings of Ben-Gvir and his circle of sanctified terror have even proven indigestible for some members of the war cabinet. Defence Minister Gallant, not immune from the urge to dehumanise the residents of Gaza, accused his national security counterpart of being a “pyromaniac”. On the X platform, he declared his opposition against “any negotiations to bring him into the war cabinet – it would allow him to implement his plans.” The same Gallant, however, was also in celebratory mood about the assassinations.
Even outside the war cabinet, the views of Ben-Gvir, not to mention his overall influence, travel with toxic rapture. In the background, incandescently inspiring, is Rabbi Dov Lior, a figure of glowing nationalist fury. It was he who incited members of the Jewish Underground to conduct various terrorist attacks in the 1980s against Palestinians. (The same group also unsuccessfully plotted to blow up the Dome on the Rock.)
This, as former UK diplomat Alastair Crooke observes, is the State of Judea doing battle against the State of Israel. He quotes Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon, former Chief of Staff of the IDF, who sees such bloody eschatology as resting on a fundamental concept: “Jewish supremacy” or “Mein Kampf in reverse”. For Rabbi Lior, the next big war cannot come soon enough, one, he anticipates, that is bound to feature Gog and Magog.
The post Bloody Eschatology: Israel and the next Big War first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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They say Iran “masterminded” a Canadian student encampment and is “destabilizing” West Asia. But these crude ‘blame Iran’ claims are nothing more than pathetic attempts to legitimate genocidal Zionism.
Recently, various commentators, politicians and Zionist groups promoted a deranged report Iran “masterminded” the student divestment encampment at McGill. Seeking to frame student opposition to their university’s complicity with Israel’s holocaust as Iranian interference, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, Canada Proud, MP Kevin Vuong, senator Leo Housakos, conservative candidate Neil Oberman, influencer Yasmine Mohammed, journalist Sam Cooper, Hampstead mayor Jeremy Levi and others shared an Iran International report headlined “Iran masterminded anti-Israel protest in Canadian university”. Drawing from an analysis by an unnamed official at US cyber company XPOZ, the article claims large numbers of social media posts about the McGill encampment were in Farsi and may have come from Iranian government aligned accounts. A National Post article “Disinformation experts warn Iran, Russia and others encouraging anti-Israel protests in Canada” used the same data though it was slightly more circumspect in concluding Iran “masterminded” the encampment. It was shared by Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.
As someone who went to the encampment regularly and has followed activism at McGill for a quarter century it’s hard to not laugh at the absurdity. In the lead up to the encampment several students went on a two-month hunger strike to pressure the university to divest and there were a number of large anti-genocide protests on campus during the last academic year. For a decade there have been referendums on Palestine and in November 78.7% of undergraduates called on the administration to sever ties with “any corporations, institutions or individuals complicit in genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid, or ethnic cleansing against Palestinians.” It was the largest referendum turnout in the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) history.
The broader context in which the encampment grew out of also demonstrates the silliness of the ‘blame Iran’ claim. The students who set up the McGill encampment were quite obviously mimicking the tactics of their US counterparts. And the tactic had little to do with social media. I doubt the reliability of the data quoted by Iran International and the National Post but even if lots of Farsi language Iranian government bots promoted the encampment what impact did this have on a physical occupation of a campus in Montreal?
At a higher level of ‘blame Iran’ idiocy, foreign affairs minister Melanie Joly is claiming Iran is “destabilizing” the region. A statement she released on Sunday regarding rising tensions in the region concluded, “I reiterated our call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, for the immediate release of all hostages, and demand that Iran and its proxies refrain from destabilizing actions in the region.” On July 26 Canada, Australia and New Zealand released a joint statement with a similar formulation. It noted, “We condemn Iran’s attack against Israel of April 13-14, call on Iran to refrain from further destabilizing actions in the Middle East, and demand that Iran and its affiliated groups, including Hizballah, cease their attacks.”
Canadian officials never refer to Israel as “destabilizing” the region even though that country has killed hundreds of thousands in Gaza and stolen ever more Palestinian land in the West Bank all the while repeatedly attacking Lebanon and Syria and assassinating the Palestinians’ main ceasefire negotiator in Iran.
As part of its blame Iran nonsense, Ottawa has ignored Israel’s recent assassination of the Hamas leader in Tehran and top Hezbolah military commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut. But they will no doubt denounce Iran or Hezbollah when they respond.
Four months ago, Ottawa remained silent when Israel damaged Canada’s embassy in Damascus while murdering eight Iranian officials at the country’s diplomatic compound. Then the Canadian government condemned Iran when it responded to Israel’s flagrant war crime.
As part of this blame Iran mantra Ottawa recently joined the US in designating the 100,000-member Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist organization. Listing the IRGC bolsters Israeli violence in the region.
Canada continues to strengthen Israel as it commits horrific crime after horrific crime across the region. As death from illness and malnutrition grows due to 10 months of IOF barbarism in Gaza, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently said it may be “justified and moral” to starve 2 million Palestinians but the world won’t let Israel do it. At the same time, Knesset members are openly debating the legitimacy of raping the 10,000 Palestinian hostages Israel holds in what a recent B’tselem report refers to as “torture camps”.
But instead of focusing on Israel’s crimes we’re told to look away. At first, we were told Israel’s genocide was all Hamas’ fault. Now it’s Iran that is to blame.
Israel and its supporters are like 4-year-olds caught with their hands in the cookie jar. It’s always someone else’s fault. Except this is not about a stolen sweet. This is about the world watching a genocide in real time and doing nothing about it.
The post Look away from Israel’s crimes, they say, blame Iran first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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President Biden is hosting heads of government from NATO member nations for a three-day summit in Washington, D.C., to mark the 75th anniversary of the expanding nuclear-armed military alliance as leaders pledge to continue supporting Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. We get response from German lawmaker Sevim Dağdelen, who is in D.C. to protest the summit and is the author of the new book NATO: A Reckoning with the Atlantic Alliance. She lays out how NATO is based on a series of myths about its purpose, respecting democracy and upholding human rights — as exemplified by member states’ staunch support for Israel’s war on Gaza. “You have rising contradictions and crisis within the European Union and the NATO states,” Dağdelen says.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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On June 26th, the Committee on Oversight and Accountability sat down for a Congressional Hearing titled, “Defending America from the Chinese Communist Party’s Political Warfare.” This was one of many Congressional hearings aimed at tackling the “China threat.”
As a general premise, I didn’t have a lot of hope for the hearing. Language is crucial, and the title says it all: any action by the US is merely “defense” against acts of political warfare committed by China. And still, I was disappointed. Not only was it filled with racist, paranoid rhetoric, but it was supremely unjust, lacking any level of self-awareness, and almost certainly operated solely as an agenda-pushing cover for whatever act of warfare our government sought to commit next.
Three witnesses took to the stands. The first was Erik Bethel, a finance professional selected to represent the US at the World Bank. He was followed by Mary Kissel, Former Senior Advisor to the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Third was James E. Fanell, the Former Director of Intelligence and Information Operations for the US Pacific Fleet and current Government Fellow.
Big people with big titles. That is the usual order of things: a few “experts” are selected to “teach” members of Congress about complex subjects they may lack background in. The Committee of Oversight and Accountability certainly lacks China expertise. Representative Lisa McClain spent ten years working for American Express before she was elected to represent the state of Michigan. Chairman James Comer was a Kentucky farmer. Representative Paul Gosar was a dentist in Arizona. Marjorie Taylor Green was a part-time CrossFit gym coach. Many of them have never traveled to China, let alone held a productive conversation with a member of China’s government.
Their lack of expertise didn’t stop them from sounding their opinions. I listened carefully, hoping to give them the benefit of the doubt. It was a fruitless endeavor.
Representative McClain spoke about her district: “In Michigan, we have the Gotion plant… We have a Chinese-owned company and the only spot they can figure out that is feasible for them to build is next to a university and next to a military base. Anybody think that’s a coincidence?”
In the audience, the new summer Hillterns listened with rapt attention.
“I’m not much for coincidences,” McClain continued. “We talk about, well it’s gonna create jobs. Jobs for who? I’m very concerned, and I’m not much for coincidences.”
She was talking about the plans to build a new plant in Michigan for electric vehicle components under the company Gotion, which has headquarters in Shanghai. The plan is speculated to bring thousands of jobs to the area, with wages about 150% of the current average. McClain, having no substance on which to defend her opposition to the plant, instead decided to speculate on its geographic location, implying the company is purposefully building near a university and military installation. Clearly, the plant is a spy base for the Chinese government, as surely as any 18 to 26-year-old Chinese immigrant is an undercover Chinese soldier sent to wreak havoc upon our country– all baseless, unfounded claims that promote Asian American hate and shift public perception to support anti-China policies.
The military base she’s talking about is Camp Grayling, which is actually over 100 miles away from Big Rapids, where the EV plant will be built. As for the proximity to Ferris State University, the relevance of that statement is questionable. There are around 77 colleges and universities in the entire state– 198 if you include community colleges and trade schools. It would be difficult not to build near one. But that’s beside the point. This is merely one example of the outlandish and absurd claims made in the hearing, backed by anecdotal and unreliable “evidence” based on feelings and a strange paranoia that anything with links to China has malicious intentions.
In response to McClain’s statements, Mary Kissel said, “Let’s not give them too much credit as long-term thinkers. Let’s remember they almost destroyed their country several times over.” The words were spoken derisively, reaffirming my suspicion that Ms. Kissel boasts severe negative prejudices towards China and Chinese people. She continued to cite the Cultural Revolution, the debt crisis, and “etcetera.” In truth, the US is a mere baby in comparison to China’s 5,000 years of history. As for Ms. Kissel’s claims, to say Chinese people nearly destroyed their country is misleading and tinged with a disturbing colonialistic self-superiority that the West does everything better.
Ms. Kissel also stated her opinion of how China operates: “China is a party state. The function of China is not to better the interests of the Chinese people– it is to promote, strengthen, and expand the power and influence, and reach of the Chinese Communist Party.”
I challenge this claim, not just for its wrongful absolutism, but because China has repeatedly shown immense interest in improving the everyday lives of its citizens. China is unparalleled in its developmental growth aimed at providing infrastructure and opportunities to the people. Housing, public transportation, health care, and education are all convenient and affordable. The average retirement age is 54 years old. Over the past few decades, the government has been working ceaselessly to eradicate extreme poverty with tremendous success. Over 800 million people have been taken out of poverty and afforded a better quality of life. Not only that, but China continues to emphasize the importance of green energy in building a sustainable future. Shenzhen, one of the country’s biggest high-tech cities, has even switched over all public transportation to electric vehicles. This isn’t pro-China propaganda, it’s simply fact.
Along with forged criticism of China’s internal dynamics and history, the hearing also challenged China’s position when it comes to the US.
The overall goal of China, Ms. Kissel proclaimed, is to “upend our way of life and to dominate and change our way of life.” They are “committed to destroy(ing) us.”
At first glance, it sounds absurd that an individual so ostensibly high up on the policy advisory hierarchy would make such a condemnatory and extreme claim. But considering that Ms. Kissel served under Mike Pompeo during Donald Trump’s presidential term, it is not so surprising. It was not an administration known for its truth-telling.
First and foremost, China has no plans to destroy the United States. We can easily cipher this through both statement and action. To claim otherwise is false and promotes a dangerous narrative that guides our policy-makers down a one-way path to war.
Erik Bethel’s claim that “China is encircling us” is also highly deceptive. Adversely, it is the US that has encircled China with over 300 military bases and countless troops. China has no military bases in the entire Western hemisphere. There is no “encircling” occurring.
Former US Representative Tom Malinowski criticized China for trying to make the US “look bad to the rest of the world.” This is, at best, overwhelmingly hypocritical. Just recently it was uncovered that the US launched a secret anti-vax operation in the Philippines during the deadliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic to undermine China’s influence in the region. According to a senior US military official, “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective. We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”
As the hearing drew on, the claims grew more and more unhinged.
“They’re teaming up with the Mexican drug cartels and they’re killing Americans,” Congressman Fallon told everyone, backing his claim that China is killing nearly as many Americans per day as died during WW2.
“They know how many paperclips you all are using in the Longworth building,” Representative Tim Burchett said, reminiscing on a Mike Pompeo quote.
“What if they were to develop some kind of biological entity that can, say, wipe out females of child-bearing ages or something?” Burchett queried.
“If you’re using this app (Tiktok), they can listen to you,” Another added.
“We should do the opposite of what China wants us to do,” Malinowski put forth as a general solution.
“We need to construct not just a defensive strategy, but an offensive strategy,” Ms. Kissel spoke decisively. Twice it was mentioned that her last name rhymes with missile– nominative determinism perhaps.
It was as if the hearing took lines straight out of an SNL skit. It’s unfathomable that these are the people sitting in our Congressional hearing rooms, talking about war. These are the people voting on legislation that could propel us into a conflict with China that would bring death and destruction to millions, and most likely end in nuclear catastrophe or total destruction of the planet.
Our politicians, although ignorant and lacking expertise, are willing cogs in the war machine. They bring the most anti-China and pro-military witnesses to the stands to reaffirm their own paranoid delusions about an all-knowing, all-hateful “other” across the sea that seeks to destroy everything bright and beautiful about the world. This is happening on a weekly basis.
The truth is that it is not China gearing up for war, but our very own government. Our politicians are pumping billions of dollars into hyper-militarizing the Asia Pacific and writing it off as “deterrence.” They’re spouting lies and fear-inducing narratives at Congressional hearings in a bid to garner support for anti-China legislation. These stories are trickling down through the media and infecting the minds of the general public, priming the US military for its next conquest. Why? Because the US is self-interested and directed solely by its desire to maintain global hegemony, even at the expense of all others. China is not a threat because it’s threatening our security– China is a threat because it’s successful.
Tucked securely in their offices, our politicians will sign bill after bill funding proxy conflicts around the world, but they will never know the many hideous faces of war. They’ll point fingers and make accusations, but they will never turn the mirror around to acknowledge their own hypocrisies. They’ll stand there saluting when bodies come home in boxes and claim it was for the greater good, but they will never face the consequences of their actions– they will never be forced to die for another’s deceptions.
The post Inside China-Focused Congressional Hearings, Panic, Paranoia, and Hypocrisy Reign first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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By a crushing majority, the 17 judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled more than five months ago that Israel was “plausibly” committing genocide in Gaza.
The highest court in the world put Israel on trial, accused of the ultimate crime against humanity.
Much has happened since that decision – and all of it is even more incriminating against Israel than the evidence considered by the World Court back in January.
Tens of thousands more Palestinian civilians are dead or missing, most likely under rubble. Gaza is now a wasteland, one that will take many decades to rebuild.
Till then, the population has nowhere to live, nor institutions such as hospitals, schools, universities and government offices to care for them, nor infrastructure like functioning electricity and sewage systems to rely on.
In violation of a second ICJ ruling, Israel has invaded and repeatedly bombed Rafah, a small “safe zone” into which Gaza’s population had been herded by Israel, supposedly for their own protection.
And Israel has intensified its blockade of aid, now to the point where there is famine across much of the enclave. Children, the sick and the vulnerable are dying in growing numbers from an entirely man-made catastrophe.
Presented with so much evidence, how is the World Court dealing with Israel’s genocide trial?
The answer: it is moving at a snail’s pace.
Most experts agree that the ICJ is unlikely to issue a definitive ruling for at least a year. Until then, it seems, the western powers will continue giving Israel a licence to shed far more of Gaza’s blood – that is, to continue much further on the trajectory of a plausible genocide.
At this rate, the court will determine conclusively whether Israel is guilty of genocide only when that genocide is all but finished.
Eyes tight shut
Back in the mid-1990s, the world was confronted by another genocide, in Rwanda.
Then, the West vowed that it and the legal institutions supposedly there to uphold international law and protect the weakest should never drag their feet again, permitting a crime of such monstrous proportions to unfold without hindrance.
But 30 years on, the West is not just dragging its feet in addressing the crimes against the people of Gaza. Washington and its closest allies, including Britain, are actively arming Israel’s slaughter, and assisting with its starvation of the population.
In ruling against Israel, the ICJ would, by implication, also be finding the sole global superpower and its allies guilty of complicity in genocide.
In the circumstances, the reasons for caution at the World Court, rather than urgency, are all too obvious.
The ICJ’s sister court, the International Criminal Court (ICC), showed late last month that it too was in no hurry to stop the slaughter and mass starvation in Gaza.
Whereas the World Court judges the behaviour of states, the ICC judges the actions of individuals. It is empowered to identify and put on trial those who carry out crimes on behalf of the state.
In May, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, incensed western capitals by announcing that he was seeking an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with three Hamas leaders.
All five were accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In Netanyahu and Gallant’s case, that included the crime of exterminating Gaza’s Palestinians, using starvation as a “weapon of war”.
In truth, the ICC swung into action very late indeed – some eight months after Israel began its war crimes spree.
Nonetheless, Khan’s decision offered a brief moment of hope to Gaza’s bereaved, destitute and starving.
While the World Court’s lengthy genocide trial offers the prospect of a remedy potentially years away, arrest warrants from the ICC pose a far more direct and pressing threat to Israel.
Once signed, those warrants would obligate all parties to the Rome Statute, including Britain and other European states, to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant should they step on their soil.
Israeli media have reported on panicked army commanders worried about carrying out orders in Gaza for fear they may be charged next with war crimes.
For a moment, it looked as though Israel might have to weigh whether it could afford to continue the slaughter of Palestinians.
Superpower bullying
But the ICC’s judges agreed to lift the sword from Netanyahu and Gallant’s necks – while leaving Gaza’s women and children, the sick and elderly, exposed once again to the full force of Israel’s bombs and starvation policy.
Rather than approving, as expected, the arrest of Netanyahu and his defence minister for war crimes, the ICC caved into pressure from the United States and Britain.
It revealed that it was willing to revisit the question of whether it had jurisdiction over Gaza – in other words, whether it had the authority to put Netanyahu and Gallant on trial for crimes against humanity.
It was an extraordinary moment – and one that confirmed quite how dishonest the West’s professions of humanitarianism are, and quite how feeble are supposedly independent institutions like the ICC and ICJ when they run up against Washington.
The question of jurisdiction in Gaza and the other occupied Palestinian territories was settled by the ICC long ago. Were that not the case, Khan would never have dared to request the arrest warrants in the first place.
Nonetheless, the ICC’s judges accepted submissions, secretly made by the outgoing British government, that question the legal body’s jurisdiction powers. The UK was undoubtedly waging this campaign of intimidation against the war crimes court in coordination with the US and Israel.
Neither have standing at the ICC because they have refused to ratify the war crimes statute that founded the court.
The UK’s move was a transparent delaying tactic, relying on a piece of standard Israeli sophistry: that the Oslo Accords, from 30 years ago, did not give Palestinians criminal jurisdiction over Israeli nationals, and therefore Palestine cannot delegate that power to the ICC.
The flaw in this argument is glaring. Israel violated the terms of the Oslo Accords decades ago and no longer considers itself bound by them. And yet it now insists – via Britain – that the Palestinians still be shackled by these obsolete documents.
Even more to the point, the Oslo Accords were long ago superseded by a new legal and diplomatic reality. In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to recognise Palestine as a state.
Three years later, Palestine was allowed to become a member of the ICC. After a long delay, the court finally ruled in 2021 that it had jurisdiction in Palestine.
Since then, and again at a snail’s pace, the ICC has been investigating Israeli war crimes, including atrocities against Palestinians and the building of armed, exclusively Jewish settlements on Palestinian territory, denying the Palestinians any chance to exercise their right to statehood.
In a properly functioning system of international law, arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Israel’s top brass would have been issued years ago, long before the current plausible genocide in Gaza.
Buying time
The question of jurisdiction is no longer a matter of legal debate. But revisiting it unnecessarily does buy time, time in which Israel can kill more Palestinians, level even more of Gaza, and starve more Palestinian children.
It is just such delays that lie at the heart of the matter. It is the endless deferments of accountability that directly enabled the current genocide in Gaza.
Israel’s cynical evasions in implementing the Oslo Accords of the mid-1990s led to a growing backlash from Palestinians, culminating in the eruption of a violent uprising in 2000.
The endless postponements by western powers, led by Washington, in recognising Palestinian statehood destroyed the credibility of the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians’ government-in-waiting.
The obvious futility of the Oslo process drove many Palestinians into the arms of militant rival groups like Hamas that promised to let Palestinians take back control of their fate.
The reluctance in the West to put any kind of pressure on Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories gave Israeli leaders the confidence to tighten their stranglehold: through settlement building and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and a blockade that led to the isolation and immiseration of Gaza.
Inaction in addressing Gaza’s increasingly dire conditions motivated Hamas to smash apart the status quo, one that was quietly suffocating the Palestinian population there. Hamas did so by carrying out a surprise and bloody attack on Israel on 7 October.
And the West’s refusal to intervene after 7 October opened the door to Israel’s current slaughter in Gaza, an extermination campaign designed to drive the people of Gaza out of the enclave, becoming someone else’s – ideally Egypt’s – problem.
The World Court’s delay in ruling on genocide, and the ICC’s delay in issuing arrest warrants, presage yet more, unpredictable disasters down the road.
One certainty, however, is that, through more bloodletting, Israel will be entirely unable to realise its professed goal of “eliminating” Hamas.
The most Israel can achieve by inflicting mass death and destruction in Gaza is to prove to Palestinians that Hamas is right: that Israel is unwilling to allow any form of Palestinian statehood, and has been since it belligerently occupied the Palestinian territories 57 years ago – long before Hamas even existed.
In killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, Israel has served as Hamas’ biggest recruiting sergeant. More young Palestinian men in Gaza are throwing their lot in with armed resistance, if only to avenge the deaths of their loved ones.
Israel’s approach is obviously self-defeating – but only if the goal is truly to live in peace with their neighbours, and not to be engaged in permanent war with the region.
Abuse to continue
Responding to the ICC’s latest delay, Clive Baldwin, a legal adviser at Human Rights Watch, observed that the UK had to end its “double standards in victims’ access to justice”.
He added: “The next government will need to immediately decide if it supports the ICC’s essential role in bringing accountability and defending the rule of law for all.”
That next government is now led by Sir Keir Starmer, who won last week’s general election with a landslide of seats based on a paltry share of the votes.
Starmer benefited massively from a split in the right-wing vote. But a near-record low turn-out and a fall in votes for Labour compared to his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, hinted at the profound lack of enthusiasm both for Starmer and his evasive platform.
Throughout his election campaign, Starmer was keen to send signals to Washington and the establishment media that – in keeping with the outgoing Conservative government’s stalling tactics – he would buy time for Israel too.
He paid a price for that at the election: he alienated many party workers and lost seats to a handful pro-Palestine candidates running as independents, including Corbyn himself, on huge swings of the vote. Several senior Labour MPs also found themselves within a hair’s breadth of losing their seats.
That may explain why Labour officials lost no time emphasising that Starmer had called Netanyahu to talk tough with him and was distancing himself from the previous government’s efforts to openly run interference for the US and Israel at the ICC.
According to a report this week in the Guardian, Starmer is expected to drop the current move to stall at the ICC over issuing arrest warrants.
Important decisions remain, however. Will Labour quickly restore funding to Unrwa, the UN refugee agency that is best placed to tackle the Israeli-engineered famine in Gaza? And will it halt arms sales?
But most crucial of all, will it recognise Palestine, sending a signal both to the ICJ and ICC and to Israel that a ruling protecting the Palestinians from genocide will be enforced by a major western power and close ally of Washington’s?
No good signs
Back in January, days before the World Court announced it was plausible that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza, Starmer quietly tore up the Labour Party’s long-standing policy on recognising Palestine as a state.
More than 140 other countries have already recognised Palestine, including recently Spain, Ireland and Norway.
Instead, Starmer declared that Palestine could only come into being once Israel agreed to such recognition. In other words, Israel – the serial abuser – will be the one to decide whether it will ever end its serial abuse of the Palestinian people.
Starmer, let us note, made his name as a human rights lawyer.
Next, in the final stages of the election campaign, Starmer’s aides briefed The Times of London of a further obstacle in the way of recognition of Palestinian statehood.
The paper reported that Starmer would refuse to recognise a Palestinian state until he had received the blessing of the United States, reportedly to avoid the risk of a diplomatic falling out. Israel is Washington’s most favoured client state.
Such a delay would once again reassure Israel that it can do as it pleases to the Palestinians.
And as should be all too clear by now, buying time for Israel means allowing it to carry out a genocide in Gaza and intensify ethnic cleansing policies begun decades ago.
Tissue of lies
Starmer’s own political trajectory suggests an uncomfortable truth about international power politics. The closer western leaders move to power, the more pressure they feel to do Washington’s bidding – and that invariably means casting aside principle.
Devotion to Israel – and a willingness to abandon the Palestinians to the death camp Gaza has become – has been one of the major conditions of entry into the West’s power club.
During the election campaign, Starmer passed that test with flying colours. Which is why he – unlike his predecessor – received an easy ride from the British establishment, including its public relations arm, the corporate media.
Ultra-rich donors, including those with close ties to Israel, have been lining up to throw money at Starmer’s Labour party, at the same time as membership numbers have plummeted.
The reality is that we live in a world where the powerful pay lip service to human rights and international law, a world where they profess to aid the weak even as they assist in their slaughter.
Oppression flourishes, obscured by their empty promises and endless dithering.
For three decades, the West has advertised its benevolence and humanitarianism. It has launched invasions and waged wars supposedly to protect the weak and vulnerable – from Kosovo to Ukraine, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya. Democracy and women’s rights have supposedly been the West’s watchwords.
But in truth, as Gaza demonstrates only too clearly, those claims were a tissue of lies. It was always about treating the world as a giant chessboard, and one where Washington’s right to achieve “full-spectrum dominance” was the driving principle, not protection of the weak.
Talk of humanitarianism was there to obscure a deeper, more savage truth: might still makes right. And no one is stronger than the US and those it favours.
The Palestinians, unlike Israel, have no weight in the international system. They are denied an army, and have no warplanes. They are denied control over their borders and their airspace. They have no real economy or currency – they are entirely reliant on the goodwill of Israeli financial institutions. They have no freedom to move from their slivers of territory, their ghettoes, unless Israel first agrees.
They cannot even stop Israel from bulldozing their homes, or arresting their children in the middle of the night.
No one on the international stage, least of all governments in Washington and London, really needs to take account of Palestinian interests.
Abusing Palestinians comes at minimal political cost. Protecting them would offer few tangible political gains. Which is precisely why their abuse continues day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade.
We live in a world of deceit, hypocrisy and bad faith. Britain’s new prime minister has shown he is already an arch-exponent of those dark political arts. Listen not to what he says, but watch closely what he actually does.
• First published in Middle East Eye
The post Starmer Learnt that the Price of Power was Support for Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The WikiLeaks project was always going to put various noses out of joint in the journalistic profession. Soaked and blighted by sloth, easily bought, perennially envious, a good number of the Fourth Estate have always preferred to remain uncritical of power and sympathetic to its brutal exercise. For those reasons, the views of Thomas Carlyle, quoting the opinion of Edward Burke in his May 1840 lecture that “there were Three Estates in Parliament; but in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all” seem quaintly misplaced, certainly in a modern context.
The media response to the release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from his scandalous captivity after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the US Espionage Act of 1917 provides a fascinating insight into a ghastly, craven and sycophantic tendency all too common among the plodding hacks.
Take, for instance, any number of journalists working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, official national broadcaster and devotee of the safe middle line. One, a breakfast news anchor for the network’s meandering twenty-four-hour service, has a rather blotted record of glee regarding the mistreatment of Assange over the years.
Michael Rowland, torturously insipid and ponderously humourless, had expressed his inexpressible joy when the Ecuadorian government cut off Assange’s access to the Internet while confined to the country’s London embassy. “A big gold star to Ecuador,” he chirped on March 28, 2018. Andrew Fowler, another journalist and far more seasoned on the rise of WikiLeaks, reproached Rowland on Twitter, as the X platform was then called. “Why would silencing a fellow journalist be supported?” For Rowland, the matter was as clear as day. “That remains a disputed opinion, Andrew. Publisher and activist yes. But you put yourself in a small camp calling him a journalist.”
These points matter, because they go to the central libelling strategy of the US government’s prosecution so casually embraced by mainstream outlets. In such a generated smokescreen, crimes can be concealed, and the revealers shown to be those of bad faith. Labels can be used to partition truth, if not obscure it altogether: a publisher-activist is to be regarded more dimly than the establishment approved journalist.
The point was rather well made by Antony Loewenstein, himself an independent journalist keen to ferret out the grainier details of abusive power. When interviewed by none other than Rowland himself, he explained, with unflagging patience, the reasons why Assange and Wikileaks are so reviled by the orthodox scribblers of the Fourth Estate. WikiLeaks, he stated with salience, had confronted power, not succumbed to it.
Rowland could only reiterate the standard line that Assange had admitted guilt for a “very serious offence”, refusing to examine the reasons for doing so, or the implications of it. Again, the vulgar line that Assange had “put US lives at risk” with the WikiLeaks disclosures was trotted out like an ill-fed nag. Again, Loewenstein had to remind Rowland that there was no evidence that any lives had been exposed to harm, a point made in several studies on the subject from the Pentagon to the Australian Defence Department.
The tendency is pestilential. While more guarded in his current iteration as a professor of journalism, Peter Greste, formerly a journalist for Al Jazeera, was previously dismissive in the Sydney Morning Herald of Assange’s contributions as he was brutally evicted from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. “To be clear, Julian Assange is no journalist, and WikiLeaks is not a news organisation.” An organisation boasting “the libertarian idea of radical transparency” was “a separate issue altogether from press freedom.”
While approving the publishing activities centred on the release of the Collateral Murder video showing the killing of civilians including two Reuters journalists by Apache helicopters, and the release of the Afghanistan War Logs, the Iraq War Logs and “Cablegate”, Greste fell for the canard that the publisher did not redact names in documents to “protect the innocent” by dumping “them all onto his website, free for anybody to go through, regardless of their contents or their impact they might have had.”
There is no mention of the decrypting key carelessly included in WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy by its bumbling authors David Leigh and Luke Harding, or the fact that the website Cryptome was the first to publish the unredacted files ahead of WikiLeaks. There is certainly no discussion of the extensive redacting efforts Assange had made, as many of his collaborators testify to, prior to the release in November 2010.
Writing on June 25 in The Conversation, Greste displays the emetic plumage of someone who has done an about face. “It is worth pausing for a moment to consider all Assange has been through, and to pop a bottle of champagne to celebrate his release,” he writes distastefully, also reflecting on his own carceral experiences in an Egyptian prison cell. He also claims that the role of WikiLeaks, in checking “the awesome power that governments wield”, should be celebrated, while stating, weakly, that he never believed that Assange should “have been charged with espionage.”
In such shifting views, we see wounded egos, cravenness, and the concerns about an estate whose walls had been breached by a usurping, industrious publisher. By all means use the spoils from Assange and his leakers, even while snorting about how they were obtained. Publish and write about them in the hope of getting a press award. Never, however, admit that Assange is himself a journalist with more journalism awards than many have had hot dinners. In this grotesque reality, we are now saddled with a terrifying precedent: the global application of a US espionage statute endangering journalists and publishers who would dare discuss and run material on Washington’s national security.
The post Assange’s Release: Exposing the Craven Media Stable first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Like the proverbial boiling frogs, the government has been gradually acclimating us to the specter of a police state for years now: Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality.
This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.
You don’t scare them by making dramatic changes. Rather, you acclimate them slowly to their prison walls. Persuade the citizenry that their prison walls are merely intended to keep them safe and danger out. Desensitize them to violence, acclimate them to a military presence in their communities, and persuade them that only a militarized government can alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.
It’s happening already.
Yet we’re not just being acclimated to the trappings of a police state. We’re also being bullied into silence and subservience in the face of outright injustice and heavy-handed political correctness, while simultaneously being groomed into accepting government tyranny, corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude as societal norms.
What exactly is going on?
Whatever it is, this—the racial hypersensitivity without racial justice, the kowtowing to politically correct bullies with no regard for anyone else’s free speech rights, the violent blowback after years of government-sanctioned brutality, the mob mindset that is overwhelming the rights of the individual, the oppressive glowering of the Nanny State, the seemingly righteous indignation full of sound and fury that in the end signifies nothing, the partisan divide that grows more impassable with every passing day—is not leading us anywhere good.
Certainly, it’s not leading to more freedom.
This draconian exercise in how to divide, conquer and subdue a nation is succeeding.
It must be said: the various protests from both the Right and the Left in recent years have not helped. Inadvertently or intentionally, these protests have politicized what should never have been politicized: police brutality and the government’s ongoing assaults on our freedoms.
We may be worse off now than we were before.
Suddenly, no one seems to be talking about any of the egregious governmental abuses that are still wreaking havoc on our freedoms: police shootings of unarmed individuals, invasive surveillance, roadside blood draws, roadside strip searches, SWAT team raids gone awry, the military industrial complex’s costly wars, pork barrel spending, pre-crime laws, civil asset forfeiture, fusion centers, militarization, armed drones, smart policing carried out by AI robots, courts that march in lockstep with the police state, schools that function as indoctrination centers, bureaucrats that keep the Deep State in power.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
How do you persuade a populace to embrace totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none?
You persuade the people that the menace they face (imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so fearsome that the only way to surmount the danger is by empowering the government to take all necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing government jackboots to trample all over the Constitution.
This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship.
It works the same way every time.
Strangely enough, in the face of outright corruption and incompetency on the part of our elected officials, Americans in general remain relatively gullible, eager to be persuaded that the government headed up by their particular brand of political savior can solve the problems that plague us.
We have relinquished control over the most intimate aspects of our lives to government officials who, while they may occupy seats of authority, are neither wiser, smarter, more in tune with our needs, more knowledgeable about our problems, nor more aware of what is really in our best interests.
Yet having bought into the false notion that the government does indeed know what’s best for us and can ensure not only our safety but our happiness and will take care of us from cradle to grave—that is, from daycare centers to nursing homes—we have in actuality allowed ourselves to be bridled and turned into slaves at the bidding of a government that cares little for our freedoms or our happiness.
The lesson is this: once a free people allows the government inroads into their freedoms or uses those same freedoms as bargaining chips for security, it quickly becomes a slippery slope to outright tyranny.
Nor does it seem to matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican at the helm anymore. Indeed, the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government, whose priorities are to milk “we the people” of our hard-earned money (by way of taxes, fines and fees) and remain in control and in power.
Modern government in general—ranging from the militarized police in SWAT team gear crashing through our doors to the rash of innocent citizens being gunned down by police to the invasive spying on everything we do—is acting illogically, even psychopathically. (The characteristics of a psychopath include a “lack of remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial charm, conning and manipulative behavior, and refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions, among others.”)
Indeed, we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic. Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.”
We are walking a dangerous path right now.
No matter who wins the presidential election come November, it’s a sure bet that the losers will be the American people.
We have been saddled with a two-party system and fooled into believing that there’s a difference between the Republicans and Democrats, when, in fact, the two parties are exactly the same. As one commentator noted, both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty.
Never forget, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that the lesser of two evils is still evil.
The post Mission Creep: How the Police State Acclimates Us to Being Modern-Day Slaves first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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By Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist
West Papuan pro-independence supporters are calling Indonesia’s condemnation of Israel hypocritical considering its occupation of Papua for 61 years.
The Indonesian government, through the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the President, has condemned the Israeli government’s handling of the conflict in Gaza.
In a statement, a United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) spokesperson said: “Indonesia’s stance on the international stage contrasts with its actions in Papua”.
“Indonesia mediates conflicts in several Asian countries but lacks a roadmap for resolving the conflict in Papua.”
The group is calling for the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to immediately form a fact-finding mission to investigate alleged human rights violations. They have also asked for a review of Indonesia’s UN membership.
In November last year, the Pacific Islands Forum appointed the Fiji and Papua New Guinea prime ministers as special envoys to Indonesia to “address the West Papua issue“.
The ULMWP are asking for Indonesia to let the two leaders visit Papua.
Hard to compare with Gaza
Human Rights Watch researcher in Indonesia Andreas Harsono said the situation in West Papua was hard to compare to Gaza.“Palestine, Gaza and the West Bank, of course, is recognised by more than 130 countries, members of the United Nations. Meanwhile, West Papua is being discussed mostly among seven or maybe 10 other countries, so this is difficult to compare.”
He said Indonesia — the most populous Muslim majority country — had religion in common with Palestine.
But Harsono said West Papua did need more international attention and there was little understanding of the conflict inside Indonesia because of propaganda.
ULMWP executive secretary Markus Haluk reiterated calls for a UN fact-finding mission.
“We want the UN to send their fact-finding mission to West Papua to witness and to prove that there is a slow-motion genocide, ethnocide and ecocide happening in West Papua,” Haluk said, speaking to RNZ Pacific through a translator.
It is an ongoing plea for the United Nations to visit. In 2019, the Indonesian government agreed in principle to a visit by the Human Rights Commissioner but that promise has not been fulfilled.
Haluk said the “big brothers” in the region — referring to New Zealand and Australia — could bring up the UN fact-finding mission when the nation’s leaders meet with their Indonesian counterparts.
“There has been several visits by the leaders but it seems like the issue of West Papua is not as important as the other issues such as trade,” he said.
‘Refusing to take responsibility’
Former New Zealand Greens MP Catherine Delahunty said she felt frustrated that West Papua had not got the attention it should, especially considering it was in “our own backyard”.Nearly all foreign media has been banned from entering West Papua.
“Anyone that criticises the regime has great difficulty getting into that country to report and local journalists are subjected to sustained threats and so we’re in a very unhealthy situation in terms of public understanding of just how drastic the situation is,” she said.
Delahunty said Indonesia had been intimidating smaller nations, while larger ones like New Zealand and Australia were “refusing to act”.
“They are refusing to take responsibility for their own part in allowing this to continue.”
She said New Zealand and Australia could create consequences for Indonesia if it continued to not allow the fact-finding mission, by doing things like stopping military exchanges.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said New Zealand “follows human rights developments closely, and takes all allegations of human rights violations seriously”.
“New Zealand continues to register concerns about the human rights situation in Papua via appropriate fora. New Zealand encourages Indonesia to promote and protect the rights of all its citizens, and to be transparent in policy relating to Papua.
“New Zealand recognises Indonesia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, including in Papua.”
In a statement to RNZ Pacific, the Indonesian Embassy in Wellington said the government of Indonesia was committed to accelerate the development of all provinces, “including our brothers and sisters in Papua”, to lead and enjoy a prosperous way of life.
“Papua is highly respected as an honourable region and will continue to be maintained as such,” it said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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We live in a world of make-believe politics, a world where strings pulled in the interests of the super-rich are ever more visible. And yet we are expected to pretend we cannot see those strings. More astonishing still, many people really do seem blind to the puppet show.
1. The “leader of the free world”, President Joe Biden, can barely maintain his attention for more than a few minutes without straying off topic, or wandering offstage. When he has to walk before the cameras, he does so like he is auditioning for the role of a geriatric robot. His whole body is gripped with the concentration he needs to walk in a straight line.
Anyone who denies this is extremely uncomfortable and embarrassing to watch at this point isn't being honest.
And I don't understand how Democrats and their pundits believe they can convince Americans it's not happening.
And he wants 4 more years:pic.twitter.com/j1jrzc34u8
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 13, 2024
And yet we are supposed to believe he is carefully working the levers of the western empire, making critically difficult calculations to keep the West free and prosperous, while keeping in check its enemies – Russia, China, Iran – without provoking a nuclear war. Is he really capable of doing all that when he struggles to put one foot in front of the other?
2. Part of that tricky diplomatic balancing act Biden is supposedly conducting, along with other western leaders, relates to Israel’s military operation in Gaza. The West’s “diplomacy” – backed by weapons transfers – has resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children; the gradual starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians over many months; and the destruction of 70 per cent of the enclave’s housing stock and almost all of its major infrastructure and institutions, including schools, universities and hospitals.
And yet we are supposed to believe that Biden has no leverage over Israel, even though Israel is entirely dependent on the United States for the weapons it is using to destroy Gaza.
We are supposed to believe Israel is acting solely in “self-defence”, even when most of the people being killed are unarmed civilians; and that it is “eliminating” Hamas, even though Hamas doesn’t appear to have been weakened, and even though Israel’s starvation policies will take their toll on the young, elderly and vulnerable long before they kill a single Hamas fighter.
We are supposed to believe that Israel has a plan for the “day after” in Gaza that won’t look anything like the outcome these policies appear designed to achieve: making Gaza uninhabitable so that the Palestinian population is forced to leave.
And on top of all this, we are supposed to believe that, in ruling that a “plausible” case has been made that Israel is committing genocide, the judges of the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, have shown they do not understand the legal definition of the crime of genocide. Or possibly that they are driven by antisemitism.
3. Meanwhile, the same western leaders arming Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, have been shipping hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to Ukraine to assist its armed forces. Ukraine must be helped, we are told, because it is the victim of an aggressive neighbouring power, Russia, determined on expansion and land theft.
And yet we are supposed to ignore the two decades of western military expansion eastwards, via Nato, that has finally coming knocking, in Ukraine, on Russia’s door – and the fact that the West’s best experts on Russia warned throughout that time that we were playing with fire in doing so and that Ukraine would prove a red line for Moscow.
We are supposed to make no comparison between Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians. In the latter case, Israel is supposedly the victim, even though it has been violently occupying its Palestinian neighbours’ territory for three-quarters of a century while, in flagrant violation of international law, building Jewish settlements on the territory meant to form the basis of a Palestinian state.
Antony Blinken: "We can never let the crimes Russia's committing become our new normal… bombing schools and hospitals and apartment buildings to rubble is not normal" pic.twitter.com/W2rBYE8CVk
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) November 15, 2023
We are supposed to believe that the Palestinians of Gaza have no right to defend themselves comparable to Ukraine’s right – no right to defend against decades of Israeli belligerence, whether the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967, the apartheid system imposed on the remnant Palestinian population afterwards, the 17-year blockade of Gaza that denied its inhabitants the essentials of life, or the “plausible genocide” the West is now arming and providing diplomatic cover for.
In fact, if the Palestinians do try to defend themselves, the West not only refuses to help them, as it has Ukraine, but considers them terrorists – even the children, it seems.
4. Julian Assange, the journalist and publisher who did most to expose the inner workings of western establishments, and their criminal schemes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, has been behind bars for five years in Belmarsh high-security prison. Before that, he spent seven years arbitrarily detained – according to United Nations legal experts – in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, forced to seek asylum there from political persecution. In an interminable legal process, the US seeks his extradition so he can be locked away in near-isolation for up to 175 years.
And yet we are supposed to believe that his 12 years of effective detention – having been found guilty of no crime – is entirely unrelated to the fact that, in publishing secret cables, Assange revealed that, behind closed doors, the West and its leaders sound and act like gangsters and psychopaths, especially about foreign affairs, not like the stewards of a benign global order they claim to be overseeing.
The leaked documents Assange published show western leaders ready to destroy whole societies to further western resource domination and their own enrichment – and eager to wield the most outrageous lies to achieve their goals. They have no interest in upholding the supposedly cherished value of freedom of the press, except when that freedom is being weaponised against their enemies.
President Biden at White House Correspondents' Dinner: "Journalism is clearly not a crime."#WHCA #WHCD #nerdprom pic.twitter.com/MpEmg7trz2
— CSPAN (@cspan) April 28, 2024
We are supposed to believe that western leaders genuinely want journalists to act as a watchdog, a restraint, on their power even when they are hounding to death the very journalist who created a whistleblowers’ platform, Wikileaks, to do precisely that. (Assange has already suffered a stroke from the more than a decade-long strain of fighting for his freedom.)
We are supposed to believe that the West will give Assange a fair trial, when the very states colluding in his incarceration – and in the CIA’s case, planned assassination – are the ones he exposed for engaging in war crimes and state terrorism. We are supposed to believe that they are pursuing a legal process, not persecution, in redefining as the crime of “espionage” his efforts to bring transparency and accountability to international affairs.
5. The media claim to represent the interests of western publics in all their diversity, and to act as a true window on the world.
We are supposed believe that this same media is free and pluralistic, even when it is owned by the super-rich as well as western states that were long ago hollowed out to serve the super-rich.
We are supposed to believe that a media completely dependent for its survival on revenues from big corporate advertisers can bring us news and analysis without fear or favour. We are supposed to believe that a media whose primary role is selling audiences to corporate advertisers can question whether, in doing so, it is playing a beneficial or harmful role.
We are supposed to believe that a media plugged firmly into the capitalist financial system that brought the global economy to its knees in 2008, and has been hurtling us towards ecological catastrophe, is in a position to evaluate and critique that capitalist model dispassionately, that media outlets could somehow turn on the billionaires who own them, or could forego the income from the billionaire-owned corporations that prop up the media’s finances through advertising.
We are supposed to believe that the media can objectively assess the merits of going to war. That is, wars waged serially by the West – from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, from Ukraine to Gaza – when media corporations are embedded in corporate conglomerations whose other big interests include arms manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction.
We are supposed to believe that the media uncritically promotes endless growth for reasons of economic necessity and common sense, even though the contradictions are glaring: that the forever growth model is impossible to sustain on a finite planet where resources are running out.
6. In western political systems, unlike those of its enemies, there is supposedly a meaningful democratic choice between candidates representing opposing worldviews and values.
We are supposed to believe in a western political model of openness, pluralism and accountability even when in the US and UK the public are offered an electoral scrap between two candidates and parties that, to stand a chance of winning, need to win favour with the corporate media representing the interests of its billionaire owners, need to keep happy billionaire donors who fund their campaigns, and need to win over Big Business by demonstrating their unwavering commitment to a model of endless growth that is completely unsustainable.
We are supposed to believe that these leaders serve the voting public – offering a choice between right and left, between capital and labour – when, in truth, the public is only ever presented with a choice between two parties prostrated before Big Money, when the parties’ policy programmes are nothing more than competitions in who can best appease the wealth-elite.
We are supposed to believe that the “democratic” West represents the epitome of political health, even though it repeatedly dredges up the very worst people imaginable to lead it.
In the US, the “choice” imposed on the electorate is between one candidate (Biden) who should be in pottering around his garden, or maybe preparing for his final, difficult years in a care home, and a competitor (Donald Trump) whose relentless search for adoration and self-enrichment should never have been indulged beyond hosting a TV reality show.
In the UK, the “choice” is no better: between a candidate (Rishi Sunak) richer than the British king and equally cosseted and a competitor (Sir Keir Starmer) who is so ideologically hollow that his public record is an exercise in decades of shape-shifting.
Compare Keir Starmer's statements on the siege of Gaza with his arguments at the International Court of Justice in 2014, where he argued that the Serb siege of Vukovar was a case of genocide.
A thread on Starmer, international law and Gaza. pic.twitter.com/lu0X6sgXfB— Nicholas McGeehan (@NcGeehan) November 28, 2023
All, let us note, are fully signed up to the continuing genocide in Gaza, all are unmoved by many months of the slaughter and starvation of Palestinian children, all are only too ready to defame as antisemites anyone who shows an ounce of the principle and humanity they all too obviously lack.
The super-rich may be just out of view, but the strings they pull are all too visible. Time to cut ourselves loose.
The post In our make-believe politics, the strings pulled by the super-rich are all too visible first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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[Photo by: Celâl Güneş]I was arrested again inside of Congress for speaking out against US-backed genocide. Myself and others were brutally tackled and carried out of the room by Capitol Police. I was charged with “crowding, obstructing, or incommoding” for speaking out and holding a sign as the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense testified in Congress for more money for the endless US war machine.
While they are arresting peace activists for exercising first amendment rights they are making plans to host Netanyahu- a war criminal with an actual arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court.
For decades, people following CODEPINK’s lead have been protesting inside the halls of Congress. The year before October 7, there were a handful of us protesting the bloated military budgets and the US warmongering. I was arrested several times on my own, but since October, dozens of us have been arrested in Congress, hundreds in DC, and thousands across the US and the world for Palestine.
The sustained energy and activism are the result of the 40,000+ thousands of Palestinians murdered, millions being starved and displaced, their land, water, and air poisoned, and neighborhoods, hospitals, schools, and refugee camps demolished.
The real criminals are the ones we are protesting against–the ones literally sitting directly in front of us inside the hearing room–and should be the ones arrested, charged, and found guilty for the war criminals they are funding and supporting and the war crimes they are committing.
Any of us speaking and acting out on the side of justice know we are taking risks. We see it as our duty as people in the US in solidarity with and inspired by the Palestinian people facing and resisting this horror.
As I await my court date, I think of the people I spent the night with at the DC detention facility. Just this year, there have been 5 deaths inside the D.C. jail. The dozen or so women in there reminded me that poverty is a policy choice and our carceral, systemically racist state perpetuates harm and cycles of violence.
According to the US Center for Palestinian Rights in Washington DC, for this year alone (before our additional billions of aid weresent), $15,596,311 to Israel’s weapons could instead fund 451,735 households with public housing, 1,322,199 children receiving free or low-cost healthcare, 41,490 elementary school teachers, 10,818,505 households with solar electricity produce, and 100,563 students with their loan debt canceled.
The fight against US militarism is one where the climate, feminist, Indigenous, economic, and racial justice movements are all uniting around right now. And as it deepens and strengthens, we must become more organized as we escalate while we continue to make those in power uncomfortable.
The post They’re Arresting the Wrong People Inside of Congress first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Anyone who imagines there is something resembling academic freedom in the US, or elsewhere in the West for that matter, needs to read this article in the Intercept on an extraordinary – or possibly not so extraordinary – episode of censorship of a Palestinian academic. It shows how donors are the ones really pulling the strings in our academic institutions.
Here’s what happened:
1. The prestigious Harvard Law Review was due to publish its first-ever essay by a Palestinian legal scholar late last year, shortly after Hamas’ October 7 attack in Israel. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!
2. However, the essay, which sought to establish a new legal concept of the Nakba – the mass expulsion of Palestinian civilians from their homeland in 1948 to create what would become the self-defined Jewish state of Israel – was pulled at the last moment, despite the fact the editors had subjected it to intense editorial checks and scrutiny. The Harvard Review got cold feet – presumably because of the certainty the essay would offend many of the university’s donors and create a political backlash.
3. Editors at the rival Columbia Law Review decided to pick up the baton. They asked the same scholar, Rabea Eghbariah, to submit a new, much longer version of the essay for publication. It would be the first time a Palestinian legal scholar had been published by the Columbia Law Review too. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!
4. Aware of the inevitable pushback, 30 editors at the Review spent five months editing the essay, but did so in secret and mostly anonymously to protect themselves from reprisals. The article was subjected to unprecedented scrutiny.
5. Alerted to the fact that the essay had been leaked and that pressure was building from powerful figures associated with Columbia university and the Washington establishment to prevent publication, the editors published the article this month, unannounced, on the Review’s website. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!
6. But within hours, the Review’s board of directors, comprising law professors and alumni, some with official roles in the federal government, demanded that the essay be taken down. When the editors refused, the whole website was pulled offline. The homepage read “Website under maintenance.”
7. Hurrah for… the Israel lobby (again).
If even the academic community is so browbeaten by donors and the political establishment that they dare not allow serious academic debate, even over a legal concept, what hope is there that politicians and the media – equally dependent on Big Money, and even more sensitive to the public pressure of lobbies – are going to perform any better.
University complicity in the Gaza genocide – brought out of the shadows by the campus protests – highlights how academic institutions are tightly integrated into the political and commercial ventures of western establishments.
The universities’ savage crackdown on the student encampments – denying them any right to peacefully protest complicity in genocide by the very institutions to which they pay their fees – further underscores the fact that universities are there to maintain the semblance of free and open debate but not the substance. Debate is allowed but only within strictly controlled, and policed, parameters.
Academic institutions, politicians and the media speak as one on the Gaza genocide for a reason. They are there not promote a dialectics in which truth and falsehood can be tested through open discussion, but to confer legitimacy on the darkest agendas of the establishment they serve.
Our public debates are rigged to avoid topics that would be difficult for western elites to counter, like their current support for genocide in Gaza. But the very reason we have a genocide in Gaza is because lots of other debates we should have had decades ago have not been allowed to take place, including the one Eghbariah was trying to raise: that the Nakba that began in 1948 and has continued ever since for the Palestinian people needs its own legal framework that incorporates apartheid and genocide.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza was made possible precisely because western establishments avoided any meaningful scrutiny of, or engagement with, the events of the Nakba for more than 75 years. They pretended either that the ethnic cleansing of 1948 never happened, or that it was the Palestinians’ choice to ethnically cleanse themselves.
In the decades that followed, western establishments pretended that the illegal colonisation of Palestine by Jewish settlers and the reality of apartheid rule faced by Palestinians – hidden under the rubric of a “temporary occupation” – either weren’t happening, or could be solved through a bogus, bad-faith “peace process”.
There was never accountability, there was no truth or reconciliation. The western establishment are still furiously avoiding that debate 76 years on, as Eghbariah’s experiences at the hands of the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews prove.
We can only pray we don’t have to wait another three-quarters of a century before western elites consider acknowledging their complicity in the genocide of Gaza.
The post Academia is only as free as powerful donors allow it to be first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The application for arrest warrants by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim A.A. Khan in the Israel-Hamas War gives us a chance to revisit a recurring theme in the commission of crimes in international humanitarian law. Certain states, so this logic goes, either commit no crimes, or, if they do, have good reasons for doing so, be they self-defence against a monstrous enemy, or as part of a broader civilisational mission.
In this context, the application for warrants regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, merits particular interest. Those regarding the Hamas trio of its leader Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Al-Masri, the commander-in-chief of Al-Qassam Brigades, and the organisation’s political bureau head Ismail Haniyeh, would have left most Western governments untroubled.
From Khan’s perspective, the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant will focus on policies of starvation, the intentional causing of “great suffering, or serious injury to body or health”, including cruel treatment, wilful killing or murder, intentional attacks on the Palestinian population, including extermination, persecution and other inhumane acts falling within the Rome Statute “as crimes against humanity”.
The ICC prosecutor’s assessment follows the now increasingly common claim that Israel’s military effort, prosecuted in the cause of self-defence in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks by Hamas, is not what it claims to be. Far from being paragons of proportionate warfare and humanitarian grace in war, Israel’s army and security forces are part of a program that has seen needless killing and suffering. The crimes against humanity alleged “were committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population pursuant to State policy.”
The reaction from the Israeli side was always expected. Netanyahu accused the prosecutor of “creating a false symmetry between the democratically elected leaders of Israel and the terrorist chieftains”. He rejected “with disgust the comparison of the prosecutor in The Hague between democratic Israel and the mass murderers of Hamas”.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog also found “any attempt to draw parallels between these atrocious terrorists and a democratically elected government of Israel – working to fulfil its duty to defend and protect its citizens in adherence to the principles of international law […] outrageous and cannot be accepted by anyone.”
Israel’s staunchest ally, sponsor and likewise self-declared democracy (it is, in fact, a republic created by those suspicious of that system of government), was also there to hold the fort against such legal efforts. US President Joe Biden’s statement on the matter was short and brusque: “The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous. And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas.”
The democracy-as-purity theme, one used as a seeming exculpation of all conduct in war, surfaced in the May 21 exchange between Senator James Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Was the secretary, inquired Risch, amenable to supporting legislation to combat the ICC “sticking its nose in the business of countries that have an independent, legitimate, democratic judicial system”? (No consideration was given to the sustained efforts by the Netanyahu government to erode judicial independence in passing legislation to curb the discretion of courts to strike down government decisions.)
The response from Blinken was agreeable to such an aim. There was “no question we have to look at the appropriate steps to take to deal with, again, what is a profoundly wrong-headed decision.” As things stand, a bill is already warming the lawmaking benches with a clear target. Sponsored by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act would obligate the President to block the entry of ICC officials to the US, revoke any current US visas such officials hold, and prohibit any property transactions taking place in the US. To avoid such measures, the court must cease all cases against “protected persons of the United States and its allies”.
The Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer similarly saw the prosecutor’s efforts as a pairing of incongruous parties. “The fact however that the leader of the terrorist organisation Hamas whose declared goal is the extinction of the State of Israel is being mentioned at the same time as the democratically elected representatives of that very State is non-comprehensible.”
From the outset, such statements do two things. The first is to conjure up a false distinction – that of equivalence – something absent in the prosecutor’s application. The acts alleged are relevant to each specified party and are specific to them. The second is a corollary: that democracies do not break international law and certainly not when it comes to war crimes and crimes against humanity, most notably when committed against a certain type of foe. The more savage the enemy, the greater the latitude in excusing vengeful violence. That remains, essentially, the cornerstone of Israel’s defence argument at the International Court of Justice.
Such arguments echo an old trope. The two administrations of George W. Bush spilled much ink in justifying the torture, enforced disappearance and renditions of terror suspects to third countries during its declared Global War on Terror. Lawyers in both the White House and Justice Department gave their professional blessing, adopting an expansive definition of executive power in defiance of international laws and protections. Such sacred documents as the Geneva Conventions could be defied when facing Islamist terrorism.
Lurking beneath such justifications is the snobbery of exceptionalism, the conceit of power. Civilised liberal democracies, when battling the forces of a named barbarism, are to be treated as special cases in the world of international humanitarian law. The ICC prosecutor begs to differ.
The post A Misplaced Purity: Democracies and Crimes Against International Law first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The legal world was abuzz. The diplomatic channels of various countries raged and fizzed. It had been rumoured that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with his cabinet colleagues, had been bracing themselves for a stinging intervention from the International Criminal Court, a body they give no credence or respect to.
Then came the words from the Prosecutor of the ICC, Karim A.A. Khan on May 20, announcing that arrest warrants were being sought in the context of the Israel-Hamas War, benignly described as the “Situation in Palestine”, under the Rome Statute. “On the basis of evidence collected and examined by my Office, I have reasonable grounds to believe that Benjamin NETANYAHU, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Yoav GALLANT, the Minister of Defence of Israel, bear criminal responsibility for […] war crimes and crimes against humanity on the territory of the State of Palestine (in the Gaza strip) from at least 8 October 2023”.
Hamas figures responsible for the attacks of October 7 against Israel also feature. They include the essential triumvirate: Hamas chief, Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Al-Masri, the commander-in-chief of Al-Qassam Brigades, and Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas Political Bureau. All “bear responsibility for […] war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on the territory of Israel and the State of Palestine (on the Gaza Strip) from at least 7 October 2023”.
On Israel’s part, Khan’s office points the accusing finger at such alleged war crimes as starvation, the wilful causing of “great suffering, or serious injury to body or health”, including cruel treatment, wilful killing or murder, the intentional direction of attacks against a civilian population, extermination, persecution and other inhumane acts falling within the Rome Statute “as crimes against humanity”.
The ICC prosecutor’s assessment follows the now increasingly common claim that Israel’s military effort, prosecuted in the cause of self-defence, is not what it claims to be. Far from being paragons of proportionate warfare and humanitarian grace in war, Israel’s army and security forces are part of a program that has seen needless killing and suffering. The crimes against humanity alleged “were committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population pursuant to State policy.”
Khan acknowledges Israel’s innate right and marrow to self-defence. He does not consider it estranged from the objects of international humanitarian law. To divorce them would merely enliven barbarism. The means Israel chose to achieve its military aims in Gaza, “namely, intentionally causing death, starvation, great suffering, and serious body or health of the civilian population – are criminal.”
On the part of Hamas, the prosecutor cites extermination, murder, the taking of hostages, the use of rape and sexual violence, the resort to torture, cruel treatment and “[o]utrages upon personal dignity” as crimes worthy of investigation. Khan finds that the accused individuals “planned and instigated the commission of crimes” on October 7 and had “through their own actions, including visits to hostages shortly after their kidnapping, acknowledged their responsibility for their crimes.”
When law intrudes into the violence of war and conflict, the participants and instigators are rarely satisfied. The matter becomes even more testy when international tribunals feature. Concerns about power, bias, and an inappropriate coupling (or decoupling) of potential culprits abound.
No doubt anticipating the fulminating response, Khan convened a panel of experts in international law to advise him whether his applications for arrest warrants met the threshold requirements of Article 58 of the Rome Statute. It would be hard to dismiss the weighty credentials of a group made up of such figures as Lord Justice Fulford, Judge Theodor Meron and Baroness Helena Kennedy.
None of this mattered in the catatonic rage arising from pairing the warring parties in the same effort. The response reads like a decrypting key to hate and exceptionalism. All wage war justly; all wage war righteously. According to Netanyahu, Israel had suffered a “hit job”, with Khan “creating a false symmetry between the democratically elected leaders of Israel and the terrorist chieftains”. The subtext is clear: democracies, at least those declaring themselves as such, are beyond reproach when fighting designated savages.
On the side of the Middle East’s only nuclear power (officially undeclared) came the erroneous argument that lumping Hamas officials with Israeli cabinet members was tantamount to equivalence. “The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous,” declared US President Joe Biden. “And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas.” Ditto the Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer, who thought the pairing “non-comprehensible”.
The prosecutor implied no such thing, focusing on the profile of each of the individuals. The allegations regarding Netanyahu and Gallant, for instance, keenly focus on starvation as a means of waging war, including broader applications of collective punishment against Gaza’s civilian population. For the leaders of Hamas, the interest is on allegations of murder, sexual violence, extermination, torture, hostage taking and incidents of captivity.
The trope of faultless democracy at war against terrorism is a common one. The George W. Bush administration made incessant use of it in justifying illegal renditions and torture during the scandalously named Global War on Terror. Memoranda from the White House and the US Justice Department gave nodding approval to such measures, arguing that “illegal combatants” deserved no human rights protections, notably under the Geneva Conventions.
Unfortunately, many a just cause sprouts from crime, and the protagonists can always claim to be on the right side of history when the world takes notice of a plight. Only at the conclusion of the peace accords can stock be taken, the egregiousness of it all accounted for. Along the way, the law looks increasingly shabby, suffering in sulky silence. These applications for arrest warrants are merely a modest measure to, pardon the pun, arrest that tendency. It is now up to the pre-trial chamber of the ICC to take the next step.
The post The Rages of Equivalence: The ICC Prosecutor, Israel and Hamas first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The most widely reported figure currently used for Palestinian casualties in Gaza since October 7, 2023, is more than 35,000 killed and 78,000 wounded. These are only the civilian casualties, reported by the Ministry of Health. More than two-thirds are women and children. Combatant casualties are not included. The Ministry of Health maintains a list of the casualties, by name, gender and age classification (e.g. “infant”). This usually means that a medical professional has tended to the individual, usually at a hospital. The list is conservative in the extreme: it reports only the casualties that it can identify and confirm.
The inevitable consequence of this sort of tally is that while it provides hard data, it vastly undercounts the actual total, since most of the hospitals have been destroyed, and many of the medical personnel either killed or taken captive. The uncounted casualties are therefore necessarily at least 200 or 300% greater than those reported, as Ralph Nader has pointed out, and as I discussed in “Not all of the genocide is being live-streamed” more than three months ago.
How many have died without ever being reported to the Ministry of Health? How many on the list of wounded die later for lack of treatment, but are never reported as dead from weapons of war? How many are nameless and unidentified bodies? How many are corpses that have not even been found? How many are newborn infants that died without ever having a registered name?
But there is another category, potentially even greater, that is becoming the new focus of Israel’s genocide: deaths by starvation, disease, exposure, and dehydration. These are not currently included in the Ministry of Health statistics, and they are largely anonymous deaths.
Israel loves anonymous deaths. It interprets condemnation of its genocide project as mainly an image problem, generating pressure to stop the elimination of the population in Gaza. Israel therefore loves deaths that do not appear on Al-Jazeera or even in social media. The media are only interested in death from the skies, demolition of neighborhoods, massacres of civilians, masses of refugees fleeing on foot with their few remaining possessions. Deaths due to “natural causes” are not this dramatic.
This is why Israel has modified its plans for the invasion of Rafah: fewer bombs, more starvation and deprivation. The first step was to capture and occupy the Rafah border crossing, in violation of Israel’s treaty with Egypt. This has enabled Israel to entirely stop relief supplies to the people of Gaza, whose limited farms and food production had already been destroyed along with their homes. Then they destroyed the hospitals and the sanitation and health services. In addition, they forced the population – many of them already living in makeshift tents – to flee once again, this time to more desolate locations with even fewer (zero) amenities, such as the barren al-Mawasi sand dunes, and thus more conducive to death by “natural causes”.
This quieter form of genocide suits Israel’s US accomplices in the Biden administration, as well. President Biden and Secretary Blinken have been under public pressure and criticism that they and their allies in the Israel lobby have been unable to quell by control of the news media, censorship of social media, or repression of freedom of speech and assembly, notably in the student movement. They are reluctant to withhold the tools of genocide from Israel, but welcome any change that might reduce the public outrage (and improve their chances in the November presidential elections).
Israel seems to think that removing and preventing the means to sustain life in Gaza, as an alternative to bullets, bombs and explosives, may achieve that objective. They seem to be taking a page from the Armenian genocide, which herded large numbers of the unwanted population into the Syrian desert and abandoned them there, or the native American genocide, where the food supply was destroyed.
If the list of casualties grows more slowly while a vastly larger number of Palestinians die uncounted, this will further the goal of killing and/or expelling the population of Gaza, and advances the day when an empty Gaza can be annexed to Israel, for developers to build beach condos for Zionist settlers, with subsidies and low-cost loans from the US and Germany.
POST SCRIPT: As this article heads for publication, the completion of the US floating pier on the shore of central Gaza was announced. Its ostensible purpose is to provide humanitarian aid to Palestinians. We are permitted to be skeptical. Why create such a cumbersome procedure to deliver aid, when mountains of supplies are waiting at the Egyptian border?
Why indeed? Some possibilities:
- To put the US and Israel in total control of Gaza and shut out the UN
- To export the Palestinians from Gaza
- To create a “Guantanamo East” US naval base
- To garner votes of the faithful for Biden before the election and then let Israel toss the Palestinians into the sea
I don’t have answers or even good speculations at this point, but stay tuned for Gaza Genocide 3.0
The post Gaza Genocide 2.0 first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.