The Biden administration is claiming the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction to charge Israeli officials for war crimes. This comes after rumors that the ICC may be close to issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials over possible crimes in Gaza. The International Court of Justice has rejected a request by Nicaragua to order Germany to halt exporting arms to Israel, but the court declined to throw out the case. For more, we speak with human rights attorney and war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody, who says ICC charges would be a “huge” development. “Since Nuremberg, no international tribunal has issued an arrest warrant for a Western official. For decades, we’ve had this double standard where international justice has only been effective for crimes committed by leaders of developing countries or by enemies of the U.S. like Vladimir Putin,” says Brody.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Tourists visiting Spanish cities like Córdoba, Toledo and Sevilla have the option of whiling away an hour or so at a ‘Museum of the Inquisition’, sometimes known as a ‘Gallery of Torture’. For around three euros, visitors can view an exotic range of devices used to impale, immolate, strangle and dismember human beings in the name of God.
It’s tempting to reassure ourselves that these are relics of a far-distant past, horrors that could never happen now. But did the Dark Ages ever really end? Noam Chomsky commented:
‘Part of the tragedy of the Palestinians is that they have essentially no international support. For a good reason – they don’t have wealth, they don’t have power. So they don’t have rights. It’s the way the world works – your rights correspond to your power and your wealth.’
It is indeed the way the world works. It is also the way the medieval world worked. UK Foreign Secretary, Lord David Cameron (Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton), recently passed judgment on the war in Ukraine at a Washington press conference:
‘It is extremely good value for money… Almost half of Russia’s pre-war military equipment has been destroyed without the loss of a single American life. This is an investment in the United States’ security.’
According even to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, 31,000 Ukrainians have been killed in the conflict. US officials estimate 70,000 dead, while Russia claims to have killed 444,000. Are these deaths ‘good value for money’?
And what about the 50,000 Russians estimated by the BBC to have died? Do they matter? After all, European civilisation is supposed to be founded on Christ’s teaching that we should love, not just our ‘neighbour’ but our ‘enemy’. On Britain’s Channel 5, BBC stalwart Jeremy Vine offered a different view to Bill, a caller from Manchester:
‘Bill, Bill, the brutal reality is, if you put on a uniform for Putin and you go and fight his war, you probably deserve to die, don’t you?’
Elsewhere, the Most Reverend and Right Honourable Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, commented after Iran retaliated to Israel’s bombing of an Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, killing 16 people, including two senior Iranian generals:
‘The attacks on Israel by Iran this weekend were wrong. They risked civilian lives and they escalated the already dangerous tensions in the region. I pray for the peace and security of Israel’s peopleat this time and I appeal to all parties both for restraint and to act for peace and mutual security.’ (Our emphasis)
If Christ had done political commentary, he would have declared both the Iranian and Israeli attacks wrong, and he would have prayed ‘for the peace and security’ of the peoples of Israel and Iran, and also Palestine.
‘[It was] a reckless and dangerous thing for Iran to have done, and I think the whole world can see. All these countries that have somehow wondered, well, you know, what is the true nature of Iran? It’s there in black and white.”
He was immediately asked: ‘What would Britain do if a hostile nation flattened one of our consulates?’
Cameron’s tragicomic response:
‘Well, we would take, you know, we would take very strong action.’
Naturally, ‘we’ would do the same or worse, but it’s a grim sign of Iran’s ‘true nature’ when ‘they’ do it. The ‘Evil’ have no right even to defend themselves when attacked by the ‘Good’. Standard medieval thinking.
‘Murderous’ And ‘Brutal’ – Tilting The Language
In idle moments, we sometimes fantasise about opening our own Media Lens Chamber of Propaganda Horrors, a Hall of Media Infamy. It would be a cavernous space packed with examples of devices used to strangle and dismember Truth.
A special section would be reserved for the sage effusions of BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner, who wrote recently of Israel:
‘It responded to the murderous Hamas-led attacks of 7 October… and then spent the next six months battering the Gaza Strip.’
The Hamas attack was ‘murderous’, then, with Israel administering a mere ‘battering’ with its attack that has caused at least 30 times the loss of life. A ‘battering’ is generally bruising but not necessarily fatal. The term is certainly not synonymous with genocide. Is this biased use of language accidental, or systemic?
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) commented on their careful study of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal:
‘Looking at all attributions, 77% of the time when the word “brutal” was used to describe an actor in the conflict, it referred to Palestinians and their actions. This was 73% of the time at the Times, 78% at the Post and 87% at the Journal. Only 23% of the time was “brutal” used to describe Israel’s actions…’
The Intercept reported on a leaked memo which revealed that the New York Times had ‘instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land’. The Intercept added:
‘The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.’
The memo was written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling, international editor Philip Pan, and their deputies. A Times newsroom source, who requested anonymity ‘for fear of reprisal’, said:
‘I think it’s the kind of thing that looks professional and logical if you have no knowledge of the historical context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But if you do know, it will be clear how apologetic it is to Israel.’
Our Chamber of Propaganda Horrors might feature this barely believable sentence from a BBC report by Lucy Williamson, which reads like something from the film ‘Dr. Strangelove’:
‘If you wanted to map the path to a healthy, functioning Palestinian government, you probably wouldn’t start from here.’
Probably wouldn’t start from where? From the middle of a six-months genocide, with two million civilians starving, with children literally starving to death, with tens of thousands of children murdered, with Gaza in ruins? It is hard to imagine a more ethically or intellectually tone-deaf observation. The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen added to the sense of surreality:
‘The decision not to veto the Ramadan ceasefire resolution is also an attempt by the Americans to push back at accusations that they have enabled Israel’s actions.’
Is it an ‘accusation’ that the US has supplied billions of dollars of missiles and bombs without which Israel could not conduct its genocide? Is there any conceivable way the US could ever ‘push back at’ that unarguable fact? The Guardiandescribed how the US has worked hard to avoid Congressional oversight:
‘The US is reported to have made more than 100 weapons sales to Israel, including thousands of bombs, since the start of the war in Gaza, but the deliveries escaped congressional oversight because each transaction was under the dollar amount requiring approval.
‘The Biden administration… has kept up a quiet but substantial flow of munitions to help replace the tens of thousands of bombs Israel has dropped on the tiny coastal strip, making it one of the most intense bombing campaigns in military history.’
These hidden sales are in addition to the $320m in precision bomb kits sold in November and 14,000 tank shells costing $106m and $147.5m of fuses and other components needed to make 155mm artillery shells in December.
In response to the latest news of a massive additional supply of arms to Israel, Edward Snowden posted on X:
‘ok but you’re definitely gonna hold off on sending like fifteen billion dollars’ worth of weapons to the guys that keep getting caught filling mass graves with kids until an independent international investigation is completed, right?
‘…right?’
Because we no longer live in the Dark Ages, right?
Waiting For The Hiroshima Bombing Scene
People are generally not tortured on the rack in Western societies, but are we really any less callous?
Christopher Nolan’s film ‘Oppenheimer’ has been lauded to the skies. It earned 13 nominations at the Academy Awards, winning seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. It also won five Golden Globe Awards.
And yet the film is a moral disgrace. It focuses on the life of physicist Robert J. Oppenheimer, and particularly, of course, on his key role in developing the first atomic weapons. The direct results of his efforts were the dropping of nuclear fireballs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan that killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people.
These were the first acts of nuclear terrorism, by far the greatest single acts of terrorism the world has ever seen. Although the moral doubts haunting the ‘Manhattan Project’ then and since feature strongly in the film, a portrayal of the hideous impact of Oppenheimer’s invention on civilians is almost completely absent. This single, dignified comment from an elderly Japanese viewer reported by the Guardian says it all:
‘“I was waiting for the Hiroshima bombing scene to appear, but it never did,” said Mimaki, 82.’
Although the BBC sought out the opinion of cinemagoers in Hiroshima, ‘only meters away’ from where the bomb exploded, the film’s shocking moral failure was not mentioned.
On reflection, our museum might be better called, The Museum Of Media Madness. Thus, the BBC reported on the refusal of event organisers, The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), to ban Israel from the Eurovision Song Contest. The EBU opined:
‘We firmly believe that the Eurovision Song Contest is a platform that should always transcend politics, promote togetherness and bring audiences together across the world.’
The BBC claims to be obsessed with reporting ‘both sides of the story’, but it conveniently forgot to mention that Russia has been banned from the song contest since 2022 for a reason that did not ‘transcend politics’ – its invasion of Ukraine.
Martin Österdahl, EBU’s executive supervisor for Eurovision, was asked to explain the contradiction. He responded that the two situations were ‘completely different’. True enough – Israel’s crimes in Gaza are much worse even than Russia’s crimes in Ukraine. Österdahl’s casual brush off:
‘We are not the arena to solve a Middle East conflict.’
Media and political voices seeking to challenge the reigning brutality are not burned alive, but they are buried alive in high security prisons like Julian Assange, beaten up on the street like George Galloway, and forced into exile like Edward Snowden. Dissidents may not be pelted with rotten fruit and vegetables in the stocks, but they are pelted with relentless media attacks intended to discredit them.
In the Guardian, John Crace greeted the news that Galloway had returned to parliament, with a piece titled:
‘The Ego has landed: George Galloway basks in his swearing in as MP’
Crace wrote:
‘Wherever he goes, his giant ego is there before him. Like most narcissists, the only fool for whom he makes allowances – for whom he has a total blindspot – is himself.’
He added:
‘… there is a lot about Galloway to dislike. His self-importance is breathtaking. Most MPs suffer from an excess of self-regard, but George is off the scale. It has never crossed his mind that he is not right about everything.’
Before Galloway’s victory, a Guardian news piece commented:
‘“A total, total disaster”: Galloway and Danczuk line up for Rochdale push – Two former Labour MPs are back to haunt the party in what has been called “the most radioactive byelection in living memory”’
As we have discussed many times, this is the required view, not just of Galloway, but of all dissidents challenging the status quo – they (and we) are all toxic ‘narcissists’. Thus, the BBC observed of Galloway, a ‘political maverick’:
‘To his critics and opponents, he is a dangerous egotist, someone who arouses division.’
What percentage of Tory and Labour MPs under (and including) Sunak and Starmer are not dangerous egotists? Are the thousands of MPs who, decade after decade, line up to vote for US-UK resource wars of aggression of first resort, for action to exacerbate climate collapse, not dangerous egotists? Of course they are, but they are not labelled that way. The only egotism perceived as ‘dangerous’ by our state-corporate media system is one that threatens biocidal, genocidal and suicidal state-corporate narcissism.
We have to travel far from the ‘mainstream’ to read a more balanced view of Galloway. Former British ambassador Craig Murray commented:
‘I have known George Galloway my entire adult life, although we largely lost touch in the middle bit while I was off diplomating. I know George too well to mistake him for Jesus Christ, but he has been on the right side against appalling wars which the entire political class has cheer-led. His natural gifts of mellifluence and loquacity are unsurpassed, with an added talent for punchy phrase making.
‘… But outwith the public gaze George is humorous, kind and self-aware. He has been deeply involved in politics his entire life, and is a great believer in the democratic process as the ultimate way by which the working classes will ultimately take control of the means of production. He is a very old-fashioned and courteous form of socialist.’
We strongly disagree with Galloway’s views on fossil fuel production and climate change – in fact, he blocked us on X for robustly but politely challenging him on these issues. Nevertheless, it is clear to us that Murray’s view of Galloway is far more reasonable.
Neon-Lit Dark Age
In ‘Brave New World Revisited’, Aldous Huxley wrote:
‘The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.’ (Huxley, ‘Brave New World Revisited’, archive.org, 1958, p.109)
This is certainly true of corporate journalists. Borrowing illiberally from authentically dissident media, a recurring Guardian appeal asks readers to support its heroic defence of Truth. The declared enemy:
‘Teams of lawyers from the rich and powerful trying to stop us publishing stories they don’t want you to see.
‘Lobby groups with opaque funding who are determined to undermine facts about the climate emergency and other established science.
‘Authoritarian states with no regard for the freedom of the press.
‘Bad actors spreading disinformation online to undermine democracy.
‘But we have something powerful on our side.
‘We’ve got you.
‘The Guardian is funded by its readers and the only person who decides what we publish is our editor.’
They have indeed ‘got you’, many of you, and not in a good way. The real threat to truth in our time, quite obviously, is the fact that profit-maximising, ad-dependent corporate media like the Guardian cannot and will not report the truth of a world dominated by giant corporations. The declared aspiration is a sham, a form of niche marketing exploiting the gullible.
The truth is that ‘mainstream’ media and politics are now captured in a way that is beyond anything we have previously seen. All around the world, political choices have been carefully fixed and filtered to ensure ordinary people are unable to challenge the endless wars, the determination to prioritise profits over climate action at any cost. The job of the corporate media system is to pretend the choices are real, to ensure the walls of the prison remain invisible.
The only hope in this neon-lit Dark Age is genuinely independent media – the blogs and websites that are now being filtered, shadow-banned, buried and marginalised like never before.
Suddenly, western politicians from US President Joe Biden to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak have become ardent champions of “restraint” – in a very last-minute scramble to avoid regional conflagration.
Iran launched a salvo of drones and missiles at Israel at the weekend in what amounted a largely symbolic show of strength. Many appear to have been shot down, either by Israel’s layers of US-funded interception systems or by US, British and Jordanian fighter jets. No one was killed.
It was the first direct attack by a state on Israel since Iraq fired Scud missiles during the Gulf war of 1991.
The United Nations Security Council was hurriedly pressed into session on Sunday, with Washington and its allies calling for a de-escalation of tensions that could all too easily lead to the outbreak of war across the Middle East and beyond.
“Neither the region nor the world can afford more war,” the UN’s secretary general, Antonio Guterres, told the meeting. “Now is the time to defuse and de-escalate.”
Israel, meanwhile, vowed to “exact the price” against Iran at a time of its choosing.
But the West’s abrupt conversion to “restraint” needs some explaining.
After all, western leaders showed no restraint when Israel bombed Iran’s consulate in Damascus two weeks ago, killing a senior general and more than a dozen other Iranians – the proximate cause of Tehran’s retaliation on Saturday night.
Under the Vienna Convention, the consulate is not only a protected diplomatic mission but is viewed as sovereign Iranian territory. Israel’s attack on it was an unbridled act of aggression – the “supreme international crime”, as the Nuremberg tribunal ruled at the end of the Second World War.
For that reason, Tehran invoked article 51 of the United Nations charter, which allows it to act in self-defence.
Shielding Israel
And yet, rather than condemning Israel’s dangerous belligerence – a flagrant attack on the so-called “rules-based order” so revered by the US – western leaders lined up behind Washington’s favourite client state.
At a Security Council meeting on 4 April, the US, Britain and France intentionally spurned restraint by blocking a resolution that would have condemned Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate – a vote that, had it not been stymied, might have sufficed to placate Tehran.
At the weekend, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron still gave the thumbs-up to Israel’s flattening of Iran’s diplomatic premises, saying he could “completely understand the frustration Israel feels” – though he added, without any hint of awareness of his own hypocrisy, that the UK “would take very strong action” if a country bombed a British consulate.
The foreign secretary is asked about Israel bombing the Iranian consulate in Syria & he says he understands Israels frustration!
Hes then asked what the UK would do if another country flattened one of our consulates & he says we would take very strong action pic.twitter.com/l3E0A8gzri
By shielding Israel from any diplomatic consequences for its act of war against Iran, the western powers ensured Tehran would have to pursue a military response instead.
But it did not end there. Having stoked Iran’s sense of grievance at the UN, Biden vowed “iron-clad” support for Israel – and grave consequences for Tehran – should it dare to respond to the attack on its consulate.
Iran ignored those threats. On Saturday night, it launched some 300 drones and missiles, at the same time protesting vociferously about the Security Council’s “inaction and silence, coupled with its failure to condemn the Israeli regime’s aggressions”.
Western leaders failed to take note. They again sided with Israel and denounced Tehran. At Sunday’s Security Council meeting, the same three states – the US, UK and France – that had earlier blocked a statement condemning Israel’s attack on Iran’s diplomatic mission, sought a formal condemnation of Tehran for its response.
Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, ridiculed what he called “a parade of Western hypocrisy and double standards”. He added: “You know very well that an attack on a diplomatic mission is a casus belli under international law. And if Western missions were attacked, you would not hesitate to retaliate and prove your case in this room.”
There was no restraint visible either as the West publicly celebrated its collusion with Israel in foiling Iran’s attack.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak praised RAF pilots for their “bravery and professionalism” in helping to “protect civilians” in Israel.
In a statement, Keir Starmer, leader of the supposedly opposition Labour party, condemned Iran for generating “fear and instability”, rather than “peace and security”, that risked stoking a “wider regional war”. His party, he said, would “stand up for Israel’s security”.
The “restraint” the West demands relates only, it seems, to Iran’s efforts to defend itself.
Starving to death
Given the West’s new-found recognition of the need for caution, and the obvious dangers of military excess, now may be the time for its leaders to consider demanding restraint more generally – and not just to avoid a further escalation between Iran and Israel.
Over the past six months Israel has bombed Gaza into rubble, destroyed its medical facilities and government offices, and killed and maimed many, many tens of thousands of Palestinians. In truth, such is the devastation that Gaza some time ago lost the ability to count its dead and wounded.
At the same time, Israel has intensified its 17-year blockade of the tiny enclave to the point where, so little food and water are getting through, the population are in the grip of famine. People, especially children, are literally starving to death.
The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, chaired by an American judge, ruled back in January – when the situation was far less dire than it is now – that a “plausible” case had been made Israel was committing genocide, a crime against humanity strictly defined in international law.
And yet there were no calls by western leaders for “restraint” as Israel bombed Gaza into ruins week after week, striking its hospitals, levelling its government offices, blowing up its universities, mosques and churches, and destroying its bakeries.
Rather, President Biden has repeatedly rushed through emergency arms sales, bypassing Congress, to make sure Israel has enough bombs to keep destroying Gaza and killing its children.
When Israeli leaders vowed to treat Gaza’s population like “human animals”, denying them all food, water and power, western politicians gave their assent.
Sunak was not interested in recruiting his brave RAF pilots to “protect civilians” in Gaza from Israel, and Starmer showed no concern about the “fear and instability” felt by Palestinians from Israel’s reign of terror.
Quite the reverse. Starmer, famed as a human rights lawyer, even gave his approval to Israel’s collective punishment of the people of Gaza, its “complete siege”, as integral to a supposed Israeli “right of self-defence”.
In doing so, he overturned one of the most fundamental principles of international law that civilians should not be targeted for the actions of their leaders. As is now all too apparent, he conferred a death sentence on the people of Gaza.
Where was “restraint” then?
Missing in action
Similarly, restraint went out of the window when Israel fabricated a pretext for eradicating the UN aid agency UNRWA, the last lifeline for Gaza’s starving population.
Even though Israel was unable to offer any evidence for its claim that a handful of UNRWA staff were implicated in an attack on Israel on 7 October, western leaders hurriedly cut off funding to the agency. In doing so, they became actively complicit in what the World Court already feared was a genocide.
Where was the restraint when Israeli officials – with a long history of lying to advance their state’s military agenda – made up stories about Hamas beheading babies, or carrying out systematic rapes on 7 October? All of this was debunked by an Al Jazeera investigation drawing largely on Israeli sources.
Those genocide-justifying deceptions were all too readily amplified by western politicians and media.
Israel showed no restraint in destroying Gaza’s hospitals, or taking hostage and torturing thousands of Palestinians it grabbed off the street.
All of that got a quiet nod from western politicians.
Where was the restraint in western capitals when protesters took to the streets to call for a ceasefire, to stop Israel’s bloodletting of women and children, the majority of Gaza’s dead? The demonstrators were smeared – are still smeared – by western politicians as supporters of terrorism and antisemites.
And where was the demand for restraint when Israel tore up the rulebook on the laws of war, allowing every would-be strongman to cite the West’s indulgence of Israeli atrocities as the precedent justifying their own crimes?
On each occasion, when it favoured Israel’s malevolent goals, the West’s commitment to “restraint” went missing in action.
Top-dog client state
There is a reason why Israel has been so ostentatious in its savaging of Gaza and its people. And it is the very same reason Israel felt emboldened to violate the diplomatic sanctity of Iran’s consulate in Damascus.
Because for decades Israel has been guaranteed protection and assistance from the West, whatever crimes it commits.
Israel’s founders ethnically cleansed much of Palestine in 1948, far beyond the terms of partition set out by the UN a year earlier. It imposed a military occupation on the remnants of historic Palestine in 1967, driving out yet more of the native population. It then imposed a regime of apartheid on the few areas where Palestinians remained.
In their West Bank reservations, Palestinians have been systematically brutalised, their homes demolished, and illegal Jewish settlements built on their land. The Palestinians’ holy places have been gradually surrounded and taken from them.
Separately, Gaza has been sealed off for 17 years, and its population denied freedom of movement, employment and the basics of life.
Israel’s reign of terror to maintain its absolute control has meant imprisonment and torture are a rite of passage for most Palestinian men. Any protest is ruthlessly crushed.
Now Israel has added mass slaughter in Gaza – genocide – to its long list of crimes.
Israel’s displacements of Palestinians to neighbouring states caused by its ethnic cleansing operations and slaughter have destabilised the wider region. And to secure its militarised settler-colonial project in the Middle East – and its place as Washington’s top-dog client state in the region – Israel has intimidated, bombed and invaded its neighbours on a regular basis.
Its attack on Iran’s consulate in Damascus was just the latest of serial humiliations faced by Arab states.
And through all of this, Washington and its vassal states have directed no more than occasional, lip-service calls for restraint towards Israel. There were never any consequences, but instead rewards from the West in the form of endless billions in aid and special trading status.
‘Something rash’
So why, after decades of debauched violence from Israel, has the West suddenly become so interested in “restraint”? Because on this rare occasion it serves western interests to calm the fires Israel is so determined to stoke.
The Israeli strike on Iran’s consulate came just as the Biden administration was finally running out of excuses for providing the weapons and diplomatic cover that has allowed Israel to slaughter, maim and orphan tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza over six months.
Demands for a ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel have been reaching fever pitch, with Biden haemorrhaging support among parts of his Democratic base as he faces a re-run presidential election later this year against a resurgent rival, Donald Trump.
Small numbers of votes could be the difference between victory and defeat.
Israel had every reason to fear that its patron might soon pull the rug from under its campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza.
But having destroyed the entire infrastructure needed to support life in the enclave, Israel needs time for the consequences to play out: either mass starvation there, or a relocation of the population elsewhere on supposedly “humanitarian” grounds.
A wider war, centred on Iran, would both distract from Gaza’s desperate plight and force Biden to back Israel unconditionally – to make good on his “iron-clad” commitment to Israel’s protection.
And to top it all, with the US drawn directly into a war against Iran, Washington would have little choice but to assist Israel in its long campaign to destroy Iran’s nuclear energy programme.
Israel wants to remove any potential for Iran to develop a bomb, one that would level the military playing field between the two in ways that would make Israel far less certain that it can continue to act as it pleases across the region with impunity.
That is why Biden officials are airing concerns to the US media that Israel is ready to “do something rash” in an attempt to drag the administration into a wider war.
The truth is, however, that Washington long ago cultivated Israel as its military Frankenstein’s monster. Israel’s role was precisely to project US power ruthlessly into the oil-rich Middle East. The price Washington was more than willing to accept was Israel’s eradication of the Palestinian people, replaced by a fortress “Jewish state”.
Calling for Israel to exercise “restraint” now, as its entrenched lobbies flex their muscles meddling in western politics, and self-confessed fascists rule Israel’s government, is beyond parody.
If the West really prized restraint, they should have insisted on it from Israel decades ago.
For weeks, as Gaza was battered with bombs and the body count in the tiny enclave rose inexorably, western publics had little choice but to rely on Israel’s word for what happened on 7 October. Some 1,150 Israelis were killed during an unprecedented attack on Israeli communities and military posts next to Gaza.
Beheaded babies, a pregnant woman with her womb cut open and the foetus stabbed, children put in ovens, hundreds of people burned alive, mutilation of corpses, a systematic campaign of indescribably savage rapes and acts of necrophilia.
Western politicians and media lapped it up, repeating the allegations uncritically while ignoring Israel’s genocidal rhetoric and increasingly genocidal military operations these claims supported.
Then, as the mountain of bodies in Gaza grew still higher, the supposed evidence was shared with a few, select western journalists and influencers. They were invited to private screenings of footage carefully curated by Israeli officials to paint the worst possible picture of the Hamas operation.
These new initiates offered few details but implied the footage confirmed many of the horrors. They readily repeated Israeli claims that Hamas was “worse than Isis”, the Islamic State group.
The impression of unparalleled depravity from Hamas was reinforced by the willingness of the western media to allow Israeli spokespeople, Israel’s supporters and western politicians to continue spreading unchallenged the claim that Hamas had committed unspeakable, sadistic atrocities – from beheading and burning babies to carrying out a campaign of rapes.
The only journalist in the British mainstream media to dissent was Owen Jones. Agreeing that Israel’s video showed terrible crimes committed against civilians, he noted that none of the barbarous acts listed above were included.
What was shown instead were the kind of terrible crimes against civilians all too familiar in wars and uprisings.
Whitewashing genocide
Jones faced a barrage of attacks from colleagues accusing him of being an atrocity apologist. His own newspaper, the Guardian, appears to have prevented him from writing about Gaza in its pages as a consequence.
Now, after nearly six months, the exclusive narrative stranglehold on those events by Israel and its media acolytes has finally been broken.
Last week, Al Jazeera aired an hour-long documentary, called simply “October 7”, that lets western publics see for themselves what took place. It seems that Jones’ account was closest to the truth.
Yet, Al Jazeera’s film goes further still, divulging for the first time to a wider audience facts that have been all over the Israeli media for months but have been carefully excluded from western coverage. The reason is clear: those facts would implicate Israel in some of the atrocities it has been ascribing to Hamas for months.
Middle East Eye highlighted these glaring plot holes in the West’s media narrative way back in December. Nothing has been done to correct the record since.
The BBC and other media outlets keep revisiting the crimes Hamas committed on October 7, but have failed to report on growing evidence that Israel killed its own citizens that day, often in grotesque fashion.
The establishment media has proved it is not to be trusted. For months it has credulously recited Israeli propaganda in support of a genocide.
But that is only part of the indictment against it. Its continuing refusal to report on the mounting evidence of Israel’s perpetration of crimes against its own civilians and soldiers on 7 October suggests it has been intentionally whitewashing Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.
Al Jazeera’s investigations unit has gathered many hundreds of hours of film from bodycams worn by Hamas fighters and Israeli soldiers, dashcams and CCTV to compile its myth-busting documentary.
It demonstrates five things that upend the dominant narrative that has been imposed by Israel and the western media.
First, the crimes Hamas committed against civilians in Israel on 7 October – and those it did not – have been used to overshadow the fact that it carried out a spectacularly sophisticated military operation on 7 October in breaking out of a long-besieged Gaza.
The group knocked out Israel’s top-flight surveillance systems that had kept the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants imprisoned for decades. It smashed holes in Israel’s highly fortified barrier surrounding Gaza in at least 10 locations. And it caught unawares Israel’s many military camps next to the enclave that had been enforcing the occupation at arms’ length.
More than 350 Israeli soldiers, armed police and guards were killed that day.
A colonial arrogance
Second, the documentary undermines the conspiracy theory that Israeli leaders allowed the Hamas attack to justify the ethnic cleansing of Gaza – a plan Israel has been actively working on since at least 2007, when it appears to have received US approval.
All the signs are in place that, once again, Israel is seriously considering a massive ethnic cleansing operation of Palestinians, conducted at lightning speed and with US assistance.
True, Israeli intelligence officials involved in the surveillance of Gaza had been warning that Hamas was preparing a major operation. But those warnings were discounted not because of a conspiracy. After all, none of the senior echelons in Israel stood to benefit from what unfolded on 7 October.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is finished politically as a result of the Hamas attack, and will likely end up in jail after the current carnage in Gaza ends.
Israel’s genocidal response to 7 October has made Israel’s brand so toxic internationally, and more so with Arab publics in the region, that Saudi Arabia has had to break off plans for a normalisation agreement, which had been Israel and Washington’s ultimate hope.
And the Hamas operation has crushed the worldwide reputation of the Israeli military for invincibility. It has inspired Yemen’s Ansar Allah (the Houthis) to attack vessels in the Red Sea. It is emboldening Israel’s arch-enemy, Hezbollah, in neighbouring Lebanon. It has reinvigorated the idea that resistance is possible across the much-oppressed Middle East.
No, it was not a conspiracy that opened the door to Hamas’ attack. It was colonial arrogance, based on a dehumanising view shared by the vast majority of Israelis that they were the masters and that the Palestinians – their slaves – were far too primitive to strike a meaningful blow.
The attacks of 7 October should have forced Israelis to reassess their dismissive attitude towards the Palestinians and address the question of whether Israel’s decades-long regime of apartheid and brutal subjugation could – and should – continue indefinitely.
Predictably, Israelis ignored the message of Hamas’ attack and dug deeper into their colonial mindset.
The supposed primitivism that, it was assumed, made the Palestinians too feeble an opponent to take on Israel’s sophisticated military machine has now been reframed as proof of a Palestinian barbarousness that makes Gaza’s entire population so dangerous, so threatening, that they have to be wiped out.
The Palestinians who, most Israelis had concluded, could be caged like battery chickens indefinitely, and in ever-shrinking pens, are now viewed as monsters that have to be culled. That impulse was the genesis of Israel’s current genocidal plan for Gaza.
Suicide mission
The third point the documentary clarifies is that Hamas’s wildly successful prison break undid the larger operation.
The group had worked so hard on the fearsome logistics of the breakout – and prepared for a rapid and savage response from Israel’s oppressive military machine – that it had no serious plan for dealing with a situation it could not conceive of: the freedom to scour Israel’s periphery, often undisturbed for many hours or days.
Hamas fighters entering Israel had assumed that most were on a suicide mission. According to the documentary, the fighters’ own assumption was that between 80 and 90 per cent would not make it back.
The aim was not to strike some kind of existential blow against Israel, as Israeli officials have asserted ever since in their determined rationalisation of genocide. It was to strike a blow against Israel’s reputation for invincibility by attacking its military bases and nearby communities, and dragging as many hostages as possible back into Gaza.
They would then be exchanged for the thousands of Palestinian men, women and children held in Israel’s military incarceration system – hostages labelled “prisoners”.
As Hamas spokesman Bassem Naim explained to Al Jazeera, the breakout was meant to thrust Gaza’s desperate plight back into the spotlight after many years in which international interest in ending Israel’s siege had waned.
Of discussions in the group’s political bureau, he says the consensus was: “We have to take action. If we don’t do it, Palestine will be forgotten, totally deleted from the international map.”
For 17 years, Gaza had gradually been strangled to death. Its population had tried peaceful protests at the militarised fence around their enclave and been picked off by Israeli snipers. The world had grown so used to Palestinian suffering, it had switched off.
The 7 October attack was intended to change that, especially by re-inspiring solidarity with Gaza in the Arab world and by bolstering Hamas’ regional political position.
It was intended to make it impossible for Saudi Arabia – the main Arab power broker in Washington – to normalise with Israel, completing the marginalisation of the Palestinian cause in the Arab world.
Judged by these criteria, Hamas’s attack was a success.
Loss of focus
But for many long hours – with Israel caught entirely off-guard, and with its surveillance systems neutralised – Hamas did not face the military counter-strike it expected.
Three factors seem to have led to a rapid erosion of discipline and purpose.
With no meaningful enemy to confront or limit Hamas’ room for manoeuvre, the fighters lost focus. Footage shows them squabbling about what to do next as they freely wander around Israeli communities.
That was compounded by the influx of other armed Palestinians who piggybacked on Hamas’ successful breakout and the lack of an Israeli response. Many suddenly found themselves with the chance to loot or settle scores with Israel – by killing Israelis – for years of suffering in Gaza.
And the third factor was Hamas stumbling into the Nova music festival, which had been relocated by the organisers at short notice close to the fence around Gaza.
It quickly became the scene of some of the worst atrocities, though none resembling the savage excesses described by Israel and the western media.
Footage shows, for example, Palestinian fighters throwing grenades into concrete shelters where many dozens of festivalgoers were sheltering from the Hamas attack. In one clip, a man who runs out is gunned down.
Fourth, Al Jazeera was able to confirm that the most extreme, sadistic and depraved atrocities never took place. They were fabricated by Israeli soldiers, officials and emergency responders.
One figure central to this deception was Yossi Landau, a leader of the Jewish religious emergency response organisation, Zaka. He and his staff concocted outlandish tales that were readily amplified not only by a credulous western press corps but by senior US officials too.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken graphically told of a family of four being butchered at the breakfast table. The father’s eye was gouged out in front of his two children, aged eight and six. The mother’s breast was cut off. The girl’s foot was amputated, and the boy’s fingers cut off, before they were all executed. The executioners then sat down and had a meal next to their victims.
Except the evidence shows none of that actually happened.
Landau has also claimed that Hamas tied up dozens of children and burned them alive at Kibbutz Be’eri. Elsewhere, he has recalled a pregnant woman who was shot dead and her belly cut open and the foetus stabbed.
Officials at the kibbutz deny any evidence for these atrocities. Landau’s accounts do not tally with any of the known facts. Only two babies died on 7 October, both killed unintentionally.
When challenged, Landau offers to show Al Jazeera a photo on his phone of the stabbed foetus, but is filmed admitting he is unable to do so.
Fabricating atrocities
Similarly, Al Jazeera’s research finds no evidence of systematic or mass rape on 7 October. In fact, it is Israel that has been blocking efforts by international bodies to investigate any sexual violence that day.
Respected outlets like the New York Times, the BBC and Guardian have repeatedly breathed credibility into the claims of systematic rape by Hamas, but only by unquestioningly repeating Israeli atrocity propaganda.
From obscuring the West’s role in starving Gaza to sensationalised accounts of mass rape by Hamas, journalists are playing the role of propagandists, not reporters.
My latest piece, on how the western media built the case for Israel to commit genocide:https://t.co/AwbVHryfqB
Madeleine Rees, secretary general of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, told Al Jazeera: “A state has instrumentalised the horrific attacks on women in order, we believe, to justify an attack on Gaza, of which the majority suffering are other women.”
In other cases, Israel has blamed Hamas for mutilating the bodies of Israeli victims, including by driving over them, smashing their pelvises. In several cases, Al Jazeera’s investigation showed that the bodies were of Hamas fighters mutilated or driven over by Israeli soldiers.
The documentary notes that reporting by the Israeli media – followed by the western media – “focuses not on the crimes they [Hamas] committed but on the crimes they did not”.
The question is why, when there were plenty of real atrocities by Hamas to report, did Israel feel the need to fabricate even worse ones? And why, especially after the initial fabrication of beheaded babies was debunked, did the western media carry on credulously recycling improbable stories of Hamas savagery?
The answer to the first question is that Israel needed to manufacture a favourable political climate that would excuse its genocide in Gaza as necessary.
Netanyahu is shown congratulating Zaka’s leaders on their role in influencing world opinion: “We need to buy time, which we gain by turning to world leaders and to public opinion. You have an important role in influencing public opinion, which also influences leaders.”
The answer to the second is that western journalists’ racist preconceptions ensured they would be easily persuaded that brown people were capable of such barbarity.
‘Hannibal directive’
Fifth, Al Jazeera documents months of Israeli media coverage demonstrating that some of the atrocities blamed on Hamas – particularly relating to the burning alive of Israelis – were actually Israel’s responsibility.
Deprived of functioning surveillance, an enraged Israeli military machine lashed out blindly. Video footage from Apache helicopters shows them firing wildly on cars and figures heading towards Gaza, unable to determine whether they are targeting fleeing Hamas fighters or Israelis taken hostage by Hamas.
In at least one case, an Israeli tank fired a shell into a building in Kibbutz Be’eri, killing the 12 Israeli hostages inside. One, 12-year-old Liel Hetsroni, whose charred remains meant she could not be identified for weeks, became the poster child for Israel’s campaign to tar Hamas as barbarians for burning her alive.
The commander in charge of the rescue efforts at Be’eri, Colonel Golan Vach, is shown fabricating to the media a story about the house Israel itself had shelled. He claimed Hamas had executed and burned eight babies in the house. In fact, no babies were killed there – and those who did die in the house were killed by Israel.
The widespread devastation in kibbutz communities – still blamed on Hamas – suggests that Israel’s shelling of this particular house was far from a one-off. It is impossible to determine how many more Israelis were killed by “friendly fire”.
These deaths appear to have been related to the hurried invocation by Israel that day of its so-called “Hannibal directive” – a secretive military protocol to kill Israeli soldiers to prevent them from being taken hostage and becoming bargaining chips for the release of Palestinians held hostage in Israeli jails.
In this case, the directive looks to have been repurposed and used against Israeli civilians too. Extraordinarily, though there has been furious debate inside Israel about the Hannibal directive’s use on 7 October, the western media has remained completely silent on the subject.
Woeful imbalance
The one issue largely overlooked by Al Jazeera is the astonishing failure of the western media across the board to cover 7 October seriously or investigate any of the atrocities independently of Israel’s own self-serving accounts.
The question hanging over Al Jazeera’s documentary is this: how is it possible that no British or US media organisation has undertaken the task that Al Jazeera took on? And further, why is it that none of them appear ready to use Al Jazeera’s coverage as an opportunity to revisit the events of 7 October?
In part, that is because they themselves would be indicted by any reassessment of the past five months. Their coverage has been woefully unbalanced: wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli claim of Hamas atrocities, and similar wide-eyed acceptance of any Israeli excuse for its slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.
But the problem runs deeper.
This is not the first time that Al Jazeera has shamed the western press corps on a subject that has dominated headlines for months or years.
Back in 2017, an Al Jazeera investigation called The Lobby showed that Israel was behind a campaign to smear Palestinian solidarity activists as antisemites in Britain, with Jeremy Corbyn the ultimate target.
That smear campaign continued to be wildly successful even after the Al Jazeera series aired, not least because the investigation was uniformly ignored. British media outlets swallowed every piece of disinformation spread by Israeli lobbyists on the issue of antisemitism.
A follow-up on a similar disinformation campaign waged by the pro-Israel lobby in the US was never broadcast, apparently after diplomatic threats from Washington to Qatar. The series was eventually leaked to the Electronic Intifada website.
Then 18 months ago, Al Jazeera broadcast an investigation called The Labour Files, showing how senior officials in Britain’s Labour Party, assisted by the UK media, waged a covert plot to stop Corbyn from ever becoming prime minister. Corbyn, Labour’s democratically elected leader, was an outspoken critic of Israel and supporter of justice for the Palestinian people.
Once again, the British media, which had played such a critical role in helping to destroy Corbyn, ignored the Al Jazeera investigation.
There is a pattern here that can be ignored only through wilful blindness.
Israel and its partisans have unfettered access to western establishments, where they fabricate claims and smears that are readily amplified by a credulous press corps.
And those claims only ever work to Israel’s advantage, and harm the cause of ending decades of brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people by an Israeli apartheid regime now committing genocide.
Al Jazeera has once again shown that, on matters that western establishments consider the most vital to their interests – such as support for a highly militarised client state promoting the West’s control over the oil-rich Middle East – the western press is not a watchdog on power but the establishment’s public relations arm.
Al Jazeera’s investigation has not just revealed the lies Israel spread about 7 October to justify its genocide in Gaza. It reveals the utter complicity of western journalists in that genocide.
How delicious is political hypocrisy. Abundant and rich, it manifests in the corridors of power with regularity. Of late, there is much of it in the US Congress, evident over debates on whether the platform TikTok should be banned in the United States. Much of this seems based on an assumption that foreign companies are not entitled to hoover up, commodify and use the personal data of users, mocking, if not obliterating privacy altogether. US companies, however, are. While it is true that aspects of Silicon Valley have drawn the ire of those on The Hill in spouts of select rage, giants such as Meta and Google continue to use the business model of surveillance capitalism with reassurance and impunity.
In May 2023, the disparity of treatment between the companies was laid bare in a Congressional hearing that smacked the hands of Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pinchai with little result, while lacerating TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew. “Your platform should be banned,” blustered Chair Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA) of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The ongoing concern, and one with some basis, is TikTok’s link with parent company ByteDance. Being based in China, the nexus with the authoritarian state that wields influence on its operations is a legitimate concern, given national security laws requiring the company to share data with officials. But the line of questioning proved obtuse and confused, revealing an obsession with themes resonant with McCarthyite hysteria. On several occasions, the word “communists” issued from the lips of the irate politicians, including regular references to the Chinese Community Party.
Alex Cranz, writing for The Verge, summarised the hectoring session well: “Between their obsession with communism, their often obnoxious and condescending tone, and the occasional assumption that Chew was Chinese, despite his repeated reminders that he is Singaporean, the hearing was a weird, brutal, xenophobic mess.”
TikTok, for its part, continues to tell regulators that it has taken adequate steps to wall off the data of its 150 million users in the US from ByteDance’s operations, expending US$1.5 billion in its efforts to do so. A January investigation by the Wall Street Journal, however, found that “managers sometimes instruct workers to share data with colleagues in other parts of the company and with ByteDance workers without going through official channels”. How shocking.
Cranz might have also mentioned something else: that the entire show was vaudevillian in its ignorance of US government practices that involved doing exactly what ByteDance and TikTok are accused of: demanding that companies share user data with officials. If he is to be forgotten for everything else, Edward Snowden’s 2013 disclosures on the National Security Agency’s collaboration with US telecom and internet companies on that point should be enshrined in posterity’s halls.
The PRISM program, as it was called, involved the participation of such Big Tech firms as Google, Facebook, YouTube and Apple in sharing the personal data of users with the NSA. Largely because of Snowden’s revelations, end-to-end encryption became both urgent and modish. “An enormous fraction of global internet traffic travelled electronically naked,” Snowden remarked in an interview with The Atlantic last year. “Now it is a rare sight.”
The US House of Representatives has now made good its threats against TikTok in passing a bill that paves the way for the possible imposition of a ban of the app. It gives ByteDance a six-month period of grace to sell its stake in the company, lest it face a nationwide block. Whether it passes the Senate is an open question, given opposition to it by certain Republicans, including presidential hopeful Donald Trump. Other politicians fear losing an invaluable bridge in communicating with youthful voters.
On March 13, however, the righteous were shining in confidence. The House’s top Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries, claimed that the bill would lessen “the likelihood that TikTok user data is exploited and privacy undermined by a hostile foreign adversary” while Wisconsin Republican Mike Gallagher declared that the US could no longer “take the risk of having a dominant news platform in America controlled by a company that is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party.” The subtext: best leave the despoiling and abuse to US companies.
The blotted copybooks of such giants as Meta and Google have tended to only feature in morally circumscribed ways, sparing the model of their business operations from severe scrutiny. On January 31, the Senate Judiciary Committee gave a farcical display of rant and displeasure over the issue of what it called “the Online Child Exploitation Crisis.” Pet terrors long nursed were on show: the mania about paedophiles using social media platforms to stalk their quarry; financial extortion of youth; sexploitation; drug dealing.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) made much of Zuckerberg on that occasion, but only as a prop to apologise to victims of Meta’s approach to child users. The Meta CEO has long known that such palliative displays only serve as false catharsis; the substance and rationale of how his company operations gather data never changes. And the show was also all the more sinister in providing a backdrop for Congressional paranoia, exemplified in such proposed measures as the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has rightly called KOSA a censorship bill which smuggles in such concepts as “duty of care” as a pretext to monitor information and conduct on the Internet. The attack on TikTok is ostensibly similar in protecting users in the US from the prying eyes of Beijing’s officials while waving through the egregious assaults on privacy by the Silicon Valley behemoths. How wonderfully patriotic.
The Israeli government is like the bad friend who only calls to ask for money or favors. For 75 years, Jewish supremacists beguiled our nation into believing their problems were America’s problems too. By using the tragedy of the Holocaust, they captured our sympathies and eventually played us for suckers — now democrats are angry.
Not all, but a growing number are once they find out the 260 billion dollars U.S. taxpayers have given the Israeli government since WWll is money down the rathole when measured next to their broken promises, outright lies and deplorable treatment of Palestinians. No wonder these dems are trying to put the kibosh on Israeli funding after learning that Israelis along with their apologists, have done everything they could for decades to surreptitiously steer U.S. foreign policy toward a favorable view of Israel. Netanyahu, the Israeli imperial wizard of deception, made this abundantly clear in his infamous 2001 comment “ America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in the way.”
Biden, who sometimes resembles an ineffectual palace eunuch more than a wise king, confirms this every time he shakes a finger at Israeli leaders during their incursions or implores them to be more careful with their two and five-thousand pound bombs while they’re ethnically cleansing. His reluctance to call Netanyahu out for the genocidal slaughter in Gaza is beyond disappointing and embarrassing.
dwhat can these democrats do when so many others only give lip service to a ceasefire? Congress hasn’t been much help — so far, less than 60 members have called for one. At a grassroots level, groups typically on the front lines in fights for equal rights and fair play like liberal artists, musicians, feminists and Jews are noticeably absent.
In early February this year, the Minneapolis City Counsel passed a ceasefire resolution after Jewish and Democratic Party mayor Jacob Frey vetoed it because he believed the proposal was “one-sided.” One might wonder what the other side of an unstopped genocidal war would be. According to the StarTribune “Frey said he is open to signing a “truly unifying ceasefire resolution,” but noted his office has not drafted its own version yet. He told reporters the veto was “not an easy decision” and that he made it after listening to “people in my family, my extended Jewish community, and people throughout the city.” There was no mention of him talking with Palestinians.
Just before the resolution passed, thirty-four Minnesota rabbis signed a statement supporting the mayor’s veto. To date, this city counsel resolution has the strongest language in the country because it calls for the U.S. to stop military funding to Israel. One of the signatories was a Senior Rabbi I wanted to interview for a local anti-war newsletter, but she turned me down a couple months ago. That makes five refusals from rabbis in less than a year.
Even those progressive artists who do publicly support a ceasefire can get wish-washy about it later. One recently qualified his online ceasefire statement with a call for lowering rhetorical tones and suggested that the U.S. facilitate discussions between Israel and surrounding Arab countries. Turning down the volume is one thing, but why anyone would still believe that an inveterate liar such as Netanyahu or his murderous gang of sociological mutants should be trusted again is beyond me. If there ever is an agreement, it would have to come with enforceable, ironclad guarantees from the outside.
Then there was a luminary folk singer/songwriter who shared a green room with Bob Dylan who soon removed his ceasefire post and replaced it with a flower. He later posted the words to a lullaby-like song he wrote about poets, artists and doctors parachuting into war zones. When I commented on his FB page about the futility of airdropping poets and artists who have yet to condemn the Israeli government, he removed the post and blocked me.
One can only imagine the impact Bob Dylan might have if he called for sanctions and a ceasefire, but that might be too much to expect. According to a two-year old NWC/FORBES report, he has 70 cars, 15 mansions, 3 yachts, over 180 luxury watches and a nuclear bunker. Maybe he became one of the people he warned us about. On the other hand, Taylor Swift went to a comedy club last December that was raising money for Gazans. Bless her 1.1 billion dollar heart.
It can be especially irksome when artists with long histories of showing sympathy to Native Americans don’t use their personas and platforms to publicly damn the US for supporting the genocidal Israeli government. Perhaps that’s understandable given all the whispers about Zionist Jews holding so many purse strings in the arts and entertainment business. It might seem prudent then for artists to focus on fairness issues concerning women and the LGBT community instead of the beleaguered Palestinians After all — a show of support for Palestinians may reduce audience sizes or wreck chances for an audition, gig or a place on the arts-grants-gravy-train.
Artist Frank Big Bear combines early dreams from his childhood on the White Earth Reservation along with tribal and urban imagery in personal storytelling narratives told largely through surrealistic and cubistic traditions. He also drove a cab in Minneapolis for over thirty years to support his family.
I think maybe people are starting to speak out more about what’s happening in Gaza around the country — maybe not on my Facebook page, because most of them are democrats who voted for Biden. I still speak out on Facebook knowing that I might be blacklisted because of Jewish influences in the art market and other institutions. I know I was kinda ignored by museums and institutions that supported native art around the country before the war in Gaza, especially for shows and grants. I guess you have to play the game by their rules and be popular and know the juries. It was difficult for me to play the game when I was younger because I was raising six children and had a full time job. I didn’t have the money or time to fly around the country and promote my work. I had to rely on and trust art dealers who are not exactly trustworthy. But getting back to why some people are not saying anything, I think it’s because they’re afraid of losing their jobs which would devastate their livelihood, especially in this economy.
— Frank Big Bear
Feminists too have been slow to join the call for a ceasefire and ending support for Israel. Member of the European Parliament and Irish firebrand Clare Daly recently voiced a call for the United Nations to look into how war affects women: Particularly in Gaza where “70% of the victims are women and children” and those giving birth still go without anesthetics or professional help and use tent scraps sometimes to mop up postpartum bleeding. She went on at length about the horrific, war-related traumas mothers and kids experience and ended her talk with a scathing rebuke to feminists who have not shown any solidarity with Gazan women “that’s not feminism, that’s an abomination and I don’t know if God will forgive them, but I and millions of others certainly won’t.”
Meanwhile, the chatter classes drone on about how the Israel/Palestine dilemma is unsolvable, too complicated or how they have sympathy for both sides or feel so emotionally torn they can’t bring themselves to take a stand — perhaps they need some new material.
A West Papuan pro-independence leader has accused Indonesia of new human rights atrocities this week while the republic has apparently elected a new president with a past record of violations in Timor-Leste and West Papua.
Indonesian Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto has declared victory in the presidential election on Wednesday after unofficial vote counts showed him with a significant lead over his rivals, reports Al Jazeera.
The 72-year-old former Kopassus special forces commander, who had run unsuccessfully for president twice before, was given a dishonourable discharge in 1998 after claims that his force kidnapped and tortured political opponents of Soeharto as his regime crumbled.
Former Kopassus general Prabowo Subianto … declared victory in Indonesia’s presidential election this week after unofficial polls gave him at least 57 percent of the vote. Image: Politik
He has also been accused of human rights abuses in East Timor, which won independence from Indonesia amid the collapse of the Soeharto regime, and also in West West Papua.
On the day that Indonesia went to the polls — Valentine’s Day, February 14 — Benny Wenda, president of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), accused Jakarta’s military of continuing its “reign of terror” in rural West Papua.
“The latest tragedy they have inflicted on my people occurred in the Puncak regency,” Wenda said in a statement.
‘Villagers tortured, houses burnt’
“Numerous houses were burnt to the ground, villagers were tortured, and at least one Papuan died from his wounds — though Indonesian control of information makes it difficult to know whether others were also killed.”
Wenda said that “as always”, the military had claimed the victims were TPNPB resistance fighters — “a grotesque lie, immediately denied by the villagers and their relatives”.
Wenda also accused Indonesia of “hypocrisy” over Israel’s war on Gaza.
“We have complete sympathy with [Palestinians over their suffering] in what is happening in Gaza,” he said.
“But Indonesian hypocrisy on Palestine cannot be ignored. They are bringing a legal case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) about Israel’s occupation of Palestine while intensifying their own brutal and bloody military occupation of West Papua.
“They are supporting South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ while conducting their own genocide in West Papua.
Denying West Papuan rights
“They are crying about Palestinians’ right to self-determination while continuing to deny West Papuans that same right.”
More than 500,000 West Papuans have been killed since the occupation began in 1963, says the ULMWP.
In the past six years, more than 100,000 Papuans were estimated to have been displaced, made refugees in their own land as a result of Indonesian military operations.
“Genocide, ecocide, and ethnic cleansing — West Papuans are victims of all three. The world must pay attention to our plight.”
There were no reports of reaction from the Jakarta authorities.
Israel is urging western states to rally to its side as the International Court of Justice prepares to hear this week South Africa’s case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
The court is being asked by Pretoria to issue an immediate injunction ordering Israel to halt its military assault on the tiny enclave, to avoid further casualties.
Some 23,000 Palestinians are known to have been killed by Israel so far, a majority of them women and children, and many thousands more are believed to be lying under the rubble. Tens of thousands are seriously wounded. A majority of the population have lost their homes to the three-month bombing campaign.
Israel has intensively and repeatedly targeted the supposedly “safe zones” to which it has ordered Palestinian civilians to flee.
It has destroyed almost all of Gaza’s infrastructure and is blocking most aid from reaching the enclave. Famine and disease are likely to rapidly increase the death toll.
South Africa’s 84-page brief argues that Israel’s bombing campaign and siege breaches the 1948 Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
Israel expects support from western capitals because they have nearly as much to fear from a verdict against Israel as Israel itself. They have staunchly backed the killing spree, with the US and UK, in particular, sending weapons that are being used against the people of Gaza, making both potentially complicit.
According to a cable from the Israeli foreign ministry, leaked to the Axios website, Israel hopes that, given the difficulties of making a legal case in defence of its actions, diplomatic and political pressure on the court’s justices will win the day instead.
The Biden administration led the way late last week in dismissing South Africa’s detailed legal brief as “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever”.
That would sound patently ridiculous to western audiences had they been provided with serious coverage of Gaza. But Israel has been heavily restricting access to the enclave, while killing Palestinian journalists there at an unprecedented rate to stop their reporting.
In addition, western media are willingly – and secretly – submitting to an onerous Israeli censorship regime.
Incitement to genocide
Israel’s “strategic goal” at the court, according to the leaked cable, is to dissuade the judges from making a determination that it is committing genocide. But more pressing is Israel’s need to prevent the Hague court from ordering an interim halt to the attack.
Israeli officials will argue, Axios reports, that its sustained assault on Gaza fails to reach the threshold of genocide, which requires “creating conditions that don’t allow the survival of the population, together with the intent to annihilate it”.
Israel will try to convince the judges that it has been seeking to increase humanitarian aid to Gaza and minimise the toll on civilians.
Its argument flies in the face of the evidence South Africa has amassed.
Its brief contains nine pages of declarations by Israeli leaders showing clear genocidal intent, including statements from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, senior figures in the cabinet, President Isaac Herzog and many serving and former Israeli military commanders.
Giora Eiland, an adviser to war council minister, Benny Gantz, has called Israel’s goal the creation of “conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable”. An Israeli military spokesman stated from the outset that the aim was to inflict “maximum damage” on Gaza.
Herzog suggests the entire civilian population is a legitimate military target, while Netanyahu refers to the Palestinians as “Amalek”, a biblical enemy. In the Old Testament, God commands the Israelites to annihilate the Amalekites, putting “to death men and women, children and infants”.
One of the provisions of the Genocide Convention is an absolute prohibition on incitement to genocide. Israel’s most senior politicians and military commanders have indisputably breached that section of the convention.
A letter to Israel’s attorney general last week from a group of Israeli academics, lawyers, human rights activists and journalists underscored that point. They warned that incitement to genocide had become “an everyday matter in Israel”.
The letter added: “Normalised discourse which calls for annihilation, erasure, devastation and the like is liable to impact the manner by which soldiers [in Gaza] conduct themselves.”
Taking the gloves off
But dehumanisation – the precursor to genocide – is not the only problem.
Israel’s prosecution of what it terms a “war to eradicate Hamas” has fully met its own definition of genocide. “Conditions that don’t allow the survival of the population” were already being created long before the onslaught Israel unleashed immediately after Hamas broke out from Gaza on 7 October. Some 1,140 Israelis and other nationals were killed in the ensuing carnage.
The BBC and other media outlets keep revisiting the crimes Hamas committed on October 7, but have failed to report on growing evidence that Israel killed its own citizens that day, often in grotesque fashion.
Mostly forgotten in the back and forth about what is unfolding in the enclave is the context: United Nations officials warned nearly a decade ago that Israel’s siege of Gaza – now 17 years in duration – was designed to make the enclave “uninhabitable”.
In other words, Israel was precisely “creating conditions that don’t allow the survival of the population”.
Even before its current, extended assault, Israel had placed severe restrictions on access to water for the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants. As a direct result, overstretched aquifers under Gaza were allowing in seawater, making the enclave’s drinking water unfit for human consumption.
Food was similarly in short supply. Back in 2012, Israeli human rights groups managed to make public a secret document showing that the army had been tightly controlling food going into Gaza from 2008 onwards. As a result, two-thirds of the population was food insecure, and every 10th child was stunted by malnutrition. The aim was to induce long-term food poverty, effectively putting the population on a starvation diet.
Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza over the past 15 years – what Israel calls “mowing the grass” – destroyed many of its homes and much of the infrastructure, creating ever greater overcrowding and unsanitary conditions.
Israel’s repeated bombing of Gaza’s only power station, and its chokehold on supplying additional energy, limited electricity to a few hours a day.
The Israeli siege blocked medicines and medical equipment from entering the enclave, often making serious health conditions difficult or impossible to treat. And given the Israeli-imposed restrictions of goods in and out of Gaza, the economy was already in ruins, with nearly half the population unemployed.
Long ago, back in 2016, the head of Israeli military intelligence, Herzi Halevi, warned that the catastrophe Israel was engineering in Gaza could blow up in its face – as indeed it did on 7 October.
Israel’s three-month rampage has simply accelerated and intensified all the genocidal policies that had long been established. Hamas’s break-out simply gave Israel licence to take the gloves off.
Gaza ‘uninhabitable’
This is why the UN’s head of humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths, declared last week that Gaza had reached the point where it was indeed “uninhabitable”.
He added: “People are facing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded. Famine is around the corner.”
With the vast majority of the population homeless and most hospitals no longer functioning, infectious disease was spreading.
Israel’s “complete siege” policy meant aid could not get in. According to Griffiths, Israel had destroyed roads, blocked communication systems, and was shooting at UN trucks and killing aid workers.
Returning from a visit to the border crossing with Egypt, two US senators observed at the weekend that Israel had imposed unreasonable conditions creating endless delays that prevented aid from reaching the people of Gaza.
In other words, Israel has now successfully “created conditions that don’t allow the survival of the population”.
The aim of the 1948 Genocide Convention, drafted in the immediate wake of the Second World War and the Nazi Holocaust, was not simply to punish those who carry out genocides.
It was designed to help identify a genocide in its early stages, and create a mechanism – through the rulings of the International Court of Justice – by which it could be halted.
In other words, the purpose of South Africa’s case is not to arbitrate what happens once Israel has annihilated the Palestinians of Gaza, as far too many observers appear to imagine. It is to stop Israel from annihilating the people of Gaza before it is too late.
Based on strange logic, Israel’s supporters imply that the genocide charge is unwarranted because the real aim is not to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza but to induce them to flee.
Israeli leaders have encouraged this assumption. In an interview on Sunday, the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, noted of Gaza’s population that – after being bombed, made homeless, starved and left vulnerable to disease – “hundreds of thousands will leave now”. Duplicitiously, he termed this a “voluntary” mass emigration.
But such an outcome – itself a crime against humanity – entirely depends on Egypt opening its borders to allow Palestinians to flee the killing fields. If Cairo refuses to submit to Israel’s violent blackmail, it will be Israel’s bombs, the famine it inflicted, and the lethal diseases it unleashed that decimate Gaza’s population.
The International Court of Justice must not adopt a wait-and-see approach, pondering whether Israel’s bombing campaign and siege lead to extermination or “only” ethnic cleansing. That would strip international humanitarian law of all relevance.
Line in the sand
If Israel and its western allies fail to bludgeon the court into submission, and South Africa’s case is accepted, it will not only be Israel in legal difficulties.
A genocide ruling from the court will impose obligations on other states: both to refuse to assist in Israel’s genocide, such as by providing arms and diplomatic cover, and to sanction Israel should it fail to comply.
An interim order halting Israel’s attack will serve as a line in the sand. Once made, any state that fails to act on the injunction risks becoming complicit in genocide.
That will put the West in a serious legal bind. After all, it has not just been turning a blind eye to the genocide in Gaza; it has been actively cheering it on and colluding in it.
Leaders in the UK such as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and opposition leader Keir Starmer have steadfastly opposed a ceasefire and thrown their weight behind a central pillar of Israel’s genocidal policy: the “complete siege” of Gaza that has left the population starving and facing lethal epidemics.
The British and US governments have rejected all calls to stop the flow of arms. The Biden administration has even bypassed Congress to speed up the supply of weapons to Israel, including indiscriminate “dumb” bombs that are laying waste to civilian areas.
Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, has regularly been featured by British media making genocidal statements. Just last week, when an interviewer noted that she appeared to be calling for the destruction of the whole of Gaza – every school, mosque and home – she answered: “Do you have another solution?”
British and US media have given airtime to Israeli officials who openly incite genocide.
All that would have to stop immediately after a ruling. The police in western nations would be expected to investigate and the courts prosecute those inciting genocide or providing a platform for incitement.
States would be expected to deny Israel weapons and impose economic sanctions on Israel – as well as on any states that collude in the genocide.
Israeli officials would risk arrest for travelling to western countries.
Double standards
In practice, of course, none of that is likely to happen. Israel is far too important to the West – as a projection of its power into the oil-rich Middle East – to be sacrificed.
Any effort to enforce a genocide ruling through the UN Security Council will be blocked by the Biden administration.
Meanwhile, the UK, along with Canada, Germany, Denmark, France and the Netherlands, have already demonstrated how unabashed they are about their own double standards.
Weeks ago they submitted formal arguments to the International Court of Justice that Myanmar was committing genocide against the Rohingya ethnic group. Their central argument was that the Rohingya were being subjected “to a subsistence diet, systematic expulsion from homes, and the induction of essential medical services below minimum requirement”.
But none of these western states is backing South Africa’s genocide submission to the same court – even though conditions in Gaza engineered by Israel are even worse.
The truth is that a genocide ruling by the court will open up a can of worms for the West, and its readiness to accept that the provisions of international law apply to it too.
Israel has been at the forefront of efforts to unravel international law in Gaza for more than a decade. Now it is ostentatiously flaunting its perpetration of the crime of genocide, as if daring the world to stop it.
Perversely, it is reversing the very international safeguards put in place to stop a repeat of the Nazi Holocaust.
Will the West defy Israel or the court? The post-war consensus that serves as the foundation for international law – already shaken by the failure to address the West’s war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan – is on the verge of complete collapse.
And no one will be happier with that outcome than the state of Israel.
These are difficult, perilous, and frustrating times. Many cherished beliefs are coming unraveled. Many once-shared values are no longer shared. And distrust of unshakeable institutions is widespread.
Yet it was only a little more than three decades ago that North America and European intellectuals joined in acknowledging the triumph of the Western world’s “gift” to all: political and economic liberalism. For nearly half a century, Western liberalism had waged a “cold” war against the most serious challenge to its dominance. Apart from the fascist counter-revolution of the 1930s against political liberalism, no movement shook the Western liberal establishment and its self-confidence as did revolutionary socialism. Seemingly, that threat ended in 1991.
In that crowning moment, many saw the values of the European enlightenment as proven to be universal and timeless. It was Francis Fukuyama who boldly stated the unstated in 1992: history had found its dialectical resolution with the victory of capitalism and its political institutions.
If it was a victory in the minds of many, it was a victory in two respects: it proved that there were states — nested in two continents, Europe and North America — that won because they adhered to and promoted the victorious values and also that those values were, in fact, the most advanced, most righteous values of all time.
Europe’s sordid twentieth-century history of imperialism, war, and inhumanity make for a poor example of sustaining enlightenment thought, of meeting standards of equality, democracy, and social justice.
The US, on the other hand, embracing its isolation from European misanthropy, celebrating its youth, vigor, and revolutionary tradition, and whitewashing its own destruction of indigenous peoples, posed as the paragon of political and economic liberalism. Fixated on continental expansion (displacing native peoples), the US came late to the global imperialist scramble, relying more on economic coercion than military might in international affairs.
With some merit, the US points to its progress: its endurance through a great civil war to cast off the bonds of chattel slavery, its past openness to immigration, its uninterrupted history of electoral practice and enduring social and political stability. Of course, on closer inspection, none of these glories bear the weight that they carry within the national mythology.
Nonetheless, for better or worse, they have stood as the best example of the West living up to standards set by the revolutionary transition from feudal despotism, from economic backwardness, and from religious oppression. The US Declaration of Independence remains one of the most advanced ideological reflections of those moments.
Ironically, soon after the dissolution of the USSR — the ending of a great struggle for the allegiance of billions of people — that US liberal image was quickly and greatly tarnished beyond repair. With the need to show an enlightened face to the world apparently gone, the mask came off, revealing a country ruled by an intolerant, privileged, and rapacious ruling class with little regard for the long-professed values of classical liberalism.
A refreshed militarism constructed around a ludicrous war on “terrorism” shaped a destructive, bullying foreign policy. The blowback jihadist attack upon US civilians in 2001 served as the excuse for a government war on citizens’ privacy and civil liberties that was unprecedented in its sweep and its technological sophistication. Little attempt, beyond a feeble, transparent weapons-of-mass-destruction lie, was made to clothe the unprovoked 2003 invasion of Iraq. After only a few years of the twenty-first century, an Orwellian curtain had dropped on US public and private life. The myth that the US was never an aggressor was in tatters.
Both Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib destroyed another myth, the deception that the liberal icon would never torture its prisoners. Philosophical musings about the efficacy of torture were no longer hypothetical.
US pundits freely embraced imperialism, speaking openly of the Old World and ancient empires as precedents for US intervention globally and for the US role as global arbiter and enforcer. The US refused to accept international courts’ findings or democratically determined United Nations resolutions as binding. The negative findings of human rights organizations — willing, useful tools in the Cold War — were shrugged off when they were even modestly critical of US practices.
Liberalism’s promise of universality and equality before the law was shattered by an explosion of racially skewed, draconian incarcerations in the 1990s, filling the US prison system beyond capacity and making a mockery of judicial process and fairness.
The vast inequalities of wealth and income in the US — rising geometrically over the last fifty years — are like sand in the gears of the heralded liberal political mechanism: frequent, informed, and trusted elections. As more than half of the jaded citizens do not bother to register or vote, as election to most significant offices requires a campaign investment well beyond the means of most citizens, as most candidates have sold their souls to wealthy funders, as the media sensationalizes and trivializes issues, the value of “democratic” procedures diminishes sharply.
The sharpest edge of these economic inequalities strikes those minority populations historically denied full participation in civic life — the center-piece of liberalism. Racism, anti-immigrant nationalism, and intolerance rage through the former liberal bastions of Europe and North America.
The failings of economic liberalism have only added to the stresses on political liberalism. Global capitalism has endured several severe shocks since the dawn of the twenty-first century: financial crises, debt crises, and now inflation.
Contrary to Francis Fukuyama and other smug celebrants of Communism’s “demise,” the wheels began to rapidly fall off of the liberal train. By 2023, confidence in the destiny of liberalism had collapsed.
Voters have little recourse but to stay the course or to turn to a new populism with one foot in the past (“Make America Great Again!”) and one foot in the promise of a vague, shapeless future without the corruption and hypocrisy of the mainstream parties.
To be sure, hip, youth-driven new movements arose to meet the collapse of mainstream consensus, promising new, fresh wine in shiny new bottles. Movements like OCCUPY and formations like SYRIZA, PODEMOS, and FIVE STAR dazzled many with their ultra-liberal, ultra-tolerant agenda, aimed at an educated middle and upper-middle strata economically relatively secure, but pushing past older lifestyle and cultural frontiers. When these movements matured, often into politically influential parties confronting the old guard, they proved to be the same old wine, leaving their supporters with an ugly taste.
Today’s politics are at a miserable impasse, with much noise and fractiousness, but, nonetheless, still contained in the narrow vessel of classical liberalism in one flavor or another. Remarkably, the unease among the intellectual strata and the anger of the citizenry has stoked a kind of tribalism. Academics and pundits write and speak of saving “our democracy” as though anyone believes that we can have democracy when candidates, votes, and the news are bought and sold. Their right-wing-oriented counterparts celebrate the sanctity and virtues of the US Constitution, as though it were from God rather than enlightenment reason.
But left and right, in the confines of mainstream politics, are now ready to cast away the tolerance and civility of liberalism to thwart — even proscribe — their political opponents. Freedom of expression, of speech, of association, of advocacy carry little value in today’s sordid world with liberalism’s most self-righteous advocates violating liberalism’s most sacred values and supporting censorship and cancellation.
The once hallowed doctrine of rights has been stretched so far beyond human rights as to be trivial and meaningless, by including corporations, all organic creatures, and even inanimate objects. All now widely accepted to be rights-bearers.
Liberty– the cornerstone of liberal constitutions — is today divorced from its roots in liberation and reduced to personalized and individualized self-indulgence, the decadent product of corporate consumerism.
The few remaining true-believing liberals — people like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi — are roasted by all sides for their defense of free speech for everyone and “neutral” journalism. In an age of gross hypocrisy, they are true naïfs.
If Karl Marx were alive, he would not be surprised by this turn. He associated classical liberalism’s emergence with the origin and maturation of capitalism. The rise of the bourgeoisie as a class spawned its own ideology, an ideology that broke the chains of hereditary noble privilege and religious obscurantism, and spread hope for the masses consigned to an unchanging future of peasant labor and grinding poverty. That hope for working people — based on the potential of natural, universal human rights, fraternity, and universal suffrage — served to cement the alliance of the bourgeoisie with working people against the nobility and its supporters.
Bourgeois ideology, classical liberalism, challenged the foundations of Medieval privilege based on Divine Right and on fixed stations in life. In place of the old thinking, enlightenment thinkers proposed natural rights– the social counterparts to the natural laws of the emerging sciences. Like the laws of nature, social laws were to be grounded in reason and not God or birthright.
For Western societies, the new ideology was a welcome gift, broadening political participation, enhancing social mobility, freeing economic and scientific development, and creating more democratic political institutions. Accompanying these advances came a conceit that the ascendant classes had revealed universal truths, that the new economic, social, and political orders were the best that could be devised.
Bourgeois academics have been obsessed with providing a rational foundation for this conceit for centuries, but without success.
The young Karl Marx would have none of it; writing dismissively of the bourgeois fetish for natural rights in Bruno Bauer, Die Judenfrage, he said: “None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic man… that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accord with his private caprice…”
He recognized that the bourgeois social apparatus — classical liberalism — “fit” and served, in its time, the emancipation, the liberation of the bourgeois class and to a limited degree the working class. But he also recognized that it was limited by its class perspective. With property and the sanctity of private ownership at the center of classical liberalism, the emancipation of humanity could not be completed.
In the revolutions of 1848 that rocked Europe, all three classes — the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat — participated and forged temporary, unstable alliances to secure their diverse goals, a time beautifully captured by Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire. But the differences between the ascending bourgeois order and a future proletarian order were tersely conveyed by the popular slogan: “Not freedom to read, but freedom to feed!”
Today, capitalism is moribund. Its decline was in plain sight in the last decades of the twentieth century, only to be lifted by its expansion in People’s China and the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, capitalism’s ability to deliver an adequate standard of living, safety, and security grows weaker with every economic crisis and war. It should come as no surprise that its political and social superstructure, inclusive of the ideologies of economic and political liberalism, would also be in crisis, showing similar signs of decline and dysfunction.
Just as political liberalism rose with the ascent of capitalism, it is falling with capitalism’s decline. The cancer of corruption and greed, the rot of political practice, and the decadence of culture and social media ensure the further demise of the institutions of classical liberalism.
What will replace them?
It is a good time to recall and consider Rosa Luxemburg’s words: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”
A senior Nine staff journalist has resigned and readers are angrily cancelling their newspaper subscriptions as Sydney Morning Herald and Age editors defend a decision to ban staff who signed a letter protesting about Australian media’s handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict from covering the war.
The fallout continues from a last Friday afternoon announcement in response to the open letter addressed to Australian newsrooms that called on them to “support ethical reporting on Israel and Palestine”.
The petition, which had more than 100 signatures from journalists, including some from Nine’s mastheads, advocated covering credible allegations of war crimes and disclosing whether staff had taken sponsored trips to the region.
Editors for Nine’s metro papers SMH, The Age, Brisbane Times and WAToday — comprising executive editor Tory Maguire, SMH editor Bevan Shields, Age editor Patrick Elligett and SMH national editor David King — reacted by saying they would remove any staff who signed the letter from reporting or producing content related to the war.
Part of the Australian journalists’ open letter . . . claims that the “devastating” Israeli bombing of Gaza and the media blockade “threatened newsgathering and media freedom in an unprecedented fashion”. Image: MEAA
Following the letter, the editors organised an in-person meeting on Tuesday morning and invited Nine’s signatories to the open letter along with the mastheads’ house committee members of journalist union Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA).
According to five staff who spoke to Crikey on the condition of anonymity, little was known about the meeting prior to it being held. Initially, some staff were concerned the meeting would be about further repercussions for the letter’s signatories while others wondered if the editors were planning on softening their stance.
What became clear soon into the 90-minute meeting was that the editors had no intention of backing down. Multiple staff described them as “doubling down” in a “tense” meeting.
‘Mostly defensiveness’
“I would say the vibe was a lot of open discussion but mostly defensiveness from the editors,” one staff member told Crikey.
Editors stressed that their decision to sideline staff who had signed the letter was motivated by a desire to protect their mastheads’ reputations from a perception of bias.
They argued that the bans — while saying they were hesitant to use the word “ban” to describe them — were not punitive and were set to last as long as the conflict does.
A point of contention was the “hypocrisy” of treating staff as potentially biased for signed the letter about media coverage, while not applying that same standard to staff who have attended sponsored trips to Israel. (Crikeyreported earlier this week that Maguire, Shields, Elligett and King have all made such trips.)
When one editor raised that a hypothetical reader coming across a Nine journalist’s name on the open letter would affect their perception of the paper, a staff member asked why it would not be the same for someone who had been on a trip, especially given that they were not required to disclose it.
While saying that going on a junket “years ago” would not affect a journalist’s coverage, editors singled out two journalists in the newsroom for having gone on trips — one supported by a movie studio and the other by environmental advocacy group Greenpeace — and whether they would need to disclose this.
In both cases, these journalists, who declined to comment to Crikey, had disclosed the relationship as part of their coverage.
“They [the editors] tried to make comparisons that weren’t really comparisons,” one journalist said.
‘Punished’ over backgrounds
Staff also used the meeting to raise concerns about what management was doing to retain diverse staff, describing feeling as being “punished” for their own backgrounds.
Maguire, Shields, Elligett and King did not respond to questions from Crikey about the meeting, including asking what Nine’s leadership was doing to retain diverse staff. A Nine spokesperson responded with a general statement instead.
“The editorial leaders are in constant communication with a vast range of newsroom staff, representing all perspectives, and will continue to encourage open dialogue on all issues, including this one,” they said in an emailed statement.
Shortly after the meeting on Wednesday afternoon, 17-year Age veteran and environment reporter Miki Perkins posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) that she was resigning from her role.
“I have made the decision that it’s time to seek broader horizons and I will be leaving,” she wrote.
Perkins, who hopes to stay working in journalism, was one of the journalists singled out in the meeting and had been assisting in circulating the open letter to journalists. She did not mention the meeting but Age staff believe that Nine management’s handling of the matter was the final straw.
Angry comments
Meanwhile, Nine’s Slack channel #feedback-smh-website, which automatically posts responses to a feedback survey, has been filled with angry comments from current and former readers who took issue with the editors’ response to the letter.
One metro paper journalist said that the last time they had seen such directed reader feedback was during the backlash to SMH‘s outing of Rebel Wilson.
“My family has been a subscriber to the Age consistently for around 100 years — but this is too far. Please end my subscription immediately,” wrote one respondent.
“Vale Herald. You shall be missed,” wrote another.
On Tuesday, after Congress returned from its Thanksgiving break, California Democrat Robert Garcia filed what is known as a “privileged resolution” calling on his colleagues to expel the embattled Long Island Republican George Santos from the House. According to congressional rules, once such a resolution has been filed, House leaders are obligated to schedule a vote within two days. As a result…
Biden was also set to meet Palestinian and Arab leaders in the Jordanian capital Amman. But Jordan cancelled the meeting after a reported airstrike on October 17 killed about 500 people at a Gaza hospital.
In the days after Hamas launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood against Israel, European and North American governments (with few exceptions) were quick to provide a unified and consistent message of support for Israel.
That message contains at least four interconnected elements:
Israel is the victim of an unprovoked terrorist attack;
The West fully stands with Israel against the barbaric and wanton violence of the Palestinians; and
Hamas is to blame (either partially or fully) for all civilian deaths on both sides since they began these hostilities and forced Israel’s hand while hiding behind civilians.
Palestinians erased There are a few important features of this message, but I want to focus on two that highlight the West’s double standards.
This is a dynamic which has its roots in the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) and erases Palestinian voices, history, presence, aspirations and identity from public discourse.
Political, media and educational institutions in the West regularly sideline and silence Palestinians and their supporters. This is not just an issue among the right-wing or even centrists, but occurs across the political spectrum.
Here in Canada, a statement by progressive Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow painted a rally in support of Palestinians as allegedly supporting violence and as a threat to the safety and security of Canadian Jews. That statement is still up on her X account.
This is precisely the anti-Palestinian narrative that has permeated in the West for years: that all support for Palestine is inherently violent and driven by antisemitic hatred of all Jews. Thus, in the name of anti-racism, Palestinians and their supporters are denounced and even criminalised.
Differing reactions to civilian death Second, the double standard is on display in the reactions we have seen to the killing of Israeli civilians and the reactions — or lack thereof — to the killing of Palestinian civilians. Many are rightly highlighting Western hypocrisy by drawing comparisons to how the West responded to Russia’s war on Ukraine.
We need to look at how Western governments have responded to the killing of Israeli civilians versus the killing of Palestinian civilians. For the Israeli state and Israeli victims, political, military, economic, cultural and social institutions have fully mobilised to provide support.
The same is entirely absent for the Palestinians. For the Palestinians, there are no evacuations. Aircraft carriers are not sent to provide military support. Mainstream political and cultural discourse does not humanise Palestinian life and mourn Palestinian death.
Aid relief is withheld and used as a bargaining counter. Economic support is not forthcoming. Institutions do not send Palestinians messages of support.
In some ways, this silence is not surprising. No one expressing support for Israel risks losing their livelihood. Many who have voiced solidarity with Palestinians have lost their jobs, been rebuked, suspended and faced doxing.
More than 400 congressional staffers signed a letter urging Congress to back a cease-fire in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/WT99B79n4f
Western self-interest States are not moral entities, but act purely in self-interest. Palestinian freedom and liberation does not align with the interests of the US-led West.
Therefore, Western institutions repeat the increasingly weak talking point that “terrorism” is the cause of all the violence. This talking point is used to provide Israel with the green light to unleash uninhibited violence against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and Jerusalem.
The idea that Western governments and institutions are horrified by violence against civilians rings hollow because of their silence when it comes to violence against Palestinian civilians and other groups around the world.
This only scratches the surface of the violence that Palestinians continuously experience, and have experienced, since well before Hamas was formed.
I’m confused. When Ukrainians attacked back after Russia’s invasion, the US celebrated them. When Palestinians do the same against Israeli occupation, they’re condemned.
Filter the propaganda through this lens: the US empire will always choose sides based on its own interests.
Palestinians continue to suffer what Palestinian scholars Nahla Abdo and Nur Masalha have called an ongoing Nakba and genocide of the Palestinian people. Yet, when Palestinians suffer, as they are now in Gaza, what Israeli historian and expert on genocide Raz Segal has called “a textbook case of genocide,” Western governments remain silent.
Western condemnations of the rampage were muted or non-existent.
Hundreds of scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies and genocide studies are now sounding the alarm about the possibility of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The stories of Palestinian lives that end with the sudden drop of a bomb are not told. Palestinian voices that explain the settler colonialism they suffer remain sidelined. And Palestinian aspirations for decolonised liberation are denied.
The West’s institutional reaction is not just hypocritical, it is an expression of where Western governments stand on the question of Palestine. The West is an active participant in the erasure of Palestine, and when moments of intensified violence like this happen, the West’s true position becomes clear for all to see.
However, people power across the world, including in the US, provide reason for hope. Increasingly, many in the West are disgusted and ashamed by the erasure of Palestine and the killing of Palestinian civilians.
More people are joining the protests and calling for the siege on Gaza to be lifted once and for all. More people power is needed to demand that governments do everything they can to resolve this issue, which can only begin to move towards peace and justice when the Palestinian people are free.
The current outpouring of sympathy for Israel should make anyone with half a heart retch.
Not because it is not awful that Israeli civilians are dying and suffering in such large numbers. But because Palestinian civilians in Gaza have faced repeated rampages from Israel decade after decade, producing far more suffering, but have never elicited a fraction of the concern currently being expressed by western politicians or publics.
The West’s hypocrisy over Palestinian fighters killing and wounding hundreds of Israelis and holding dozens more hostage in communities surrounding and inside besieged Gaza is stark indeed.
This is the first time Palestinians, caged in the coastal enclave, have managed to inflict a significant strike against Israel vaguely comparable to the savagery Palestinians in Gaza have faced repeatedly since they were entombed in a cage in 2007, when Israel began its blockade by land, sea and air.
Western media are calling the jailbreak and attack by Palestinians from Gaza “unprecedented” – and the most dismal intelligence failing by Israel since it was caught off-guard during the Yom Kippur War exactly 50 years ago.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Hamas, which nominally runs the open-air prison of Gaza, of starting “a cruel and evil war”. But the truth is that the Palestinians have “started” nothing. They have managed, after so much struggle, to find a way to hurt their tormentor.
Inevitably for the Palestinians, as Netanyahu also observed, “the price will be heavy” – especially for civilians. Israel will inflict on the prisoners the severest punishment for their impudence.
Watch how little sympathy and concern there will be from the West for the many Palestinian men, women and children who are killed once again by Israel. Their immense suffering will be obscured, and justified, by the term “Israeli retaliation”.
The real lessons
All the current analysis focusing on Israel’s intelligence “blunders” distracts from the real lesson of these rapidly evolving events.
No one really cared while Gaza’s Palestinans were subjected to a blockade imposed by Israel that denied them the essentials of life. The few dozen Israelis being held hostage by Hamas fighters pale in comparison with the two million Palestinians held hostage by Israel in an open-air prison for nearly two decades.
No one really cared when it emerged that Gaza’s Palestinians had been put on a “starvation diet” by Israel – only limited food was allowed in, calculated to keep the population barely fed.
No one really cared when Israel bombed the coastal enclave every few years, killing many hundreds of Palestinian civilians each time. Israel simply called it “mowing the lawn”. The destruction of vast areas of Gaza, what Israeli generals boasted of as returning the enclave to the Stone Age, was formalised as a military strategy known as the “Dahiya doctrine“.
No one really cared when Israeli snipers targeted nurses, youngsters and people in wheelchairs who came out to protest against their imprisonment by Israel. Many thousands were left as amputees after those snipers received orders to shoot the protesters indiscriminately in the legs or ankles.
Western concern at the deaths of Israeli civilians at the hands of Palestinian fighters is hard to stomach. Have not many hundreds of Palestinian children died over the past 15 years in Israel’s repeated bombing campaigns on Gaza? Did their lives not count as much as Israeli lives – and if not, why not?
After so much indifference for so long, it is difficult to hear the sudden horror from Western governments and media because Palestinians have finally found a way – mirroring Israel’s inhumane, decades-long policy – to fight back effectively.
This moment rips off the mask and lays bare the undisguised racism that masquerades as moral concern in western capitals.
Hypocrisy distilled
Distilling that hypocrisy is Volodymr Zelenskiy, Ukraine’s president. At the weekend, he issued a lengthy tweet condemning Palestinians as “terrorists” and offering Israel his unwavering support.
He averred that “Israel’s right to self-defense is unquestionable”, adding: “The world must stand united and in solidarity so that terror does not attempt to break or subjugate life anywhere and at any moment.”
The inversion of reality is breath-taking. The Palestinians cannot “subjugate life” in Israel. They have no such power, even if a few briefly managed to break out of their cage. It is Israel that has been subjugating Palestinian life for decades.
Not all forms of “terrorism”, it seems, are equal in the eyes of Zelenskiy, or his patrons in Western capitals. Certainly, not the state terrorism of Israel that has made Palestinian lives a misery for decades.
How does Israel have an “unquestionable right” to “defend itself” from the Palestinians whose territory it occupies and controls? To apply Zelenskiy’s logic, how does Russia then not have an equal claim to be “defending itself” when it kills Ukrainians trying to liberate territory from Russian occupation?
Israel, the much stronger, belligerent party, is now laying waste to Gaza “in retaliation”, as the BBC puts it, for the latest Palestinian attack.
So on what grounds will Zelenskiy or his officials be able to condemn Moscow when it fires missiles “in retaliation” for Ukraine’s strikes on Russian territory? How, if Palestinian resistance to Israel’s occupation of Gaza is terrorism, as Zelenskiy asserts, is Ukrainian resistance to Russian occupation not equally terrorism?
No hiding place
By indulging Israel in its deceptions, Israel’s allies have allowed it to perpetrate ever more outrageous lies. At the weekend, Netanyahu warned Palestinians in Gaza to “leave now” because Israeli forces were preparing to “act with all force”.
But Netanyahu knows, as do his Western enablers, that Gaza’s population has nowhere to flee. There is no hiding place. Palestinians have been sealed into Gaza since Israel besieged it by land, sea and air.
The only Palestinians able to “leave Gaza” are the armed factions who broke out of their Israeli-imposed jail and are being denounced as “terrorists” by Western politicians and media.
Western governments so horrified by the Palestinian attack on Israel are also the governments that are remaining silent as Israel turns off the electricity to the prison that is Gaza – again in supposed “retaliation”.
The collective punishment of two million Palestinians in Gaza, dependent on Israel for power because Israel surrounds and controls every aspect of their lives, is a war crime.
Strangely, Western officials understand it is a war crime when Russia bombs power stations in Ukraine, turning off the lights. They scream for Russian President Vladimir Putin to be dragged to the International Criminal Court in the Hague. So why is it so difficult for them to understand the parallels of what Israel is doing to Gaza?
Daring escape
There are two immediate, and contrasting, lessons to be learnt from what has happened this weekend.
The first is that the human spirit cannot be caged indefinitely. Palestinians in Gaza have been constantly devising new ways to break free from their chains.
They have built a network of tunnels, most of which Israel has located and destroyed. They have fired rockets that are invariably shot down by ever more sophisticated interception systems. They have protested en masse at the heavily fortified fences, topped by gun towers, Israel surrounded them with – only to be shot by snipers.
Now they have staged a daring escape. Israel will batter the enclave back into submission with massive bombardments, but only “in retaliation”, of course. The Palestinians’ craving for freedom and dignity will not be diminished. Another form of resistance, doubtless more brutal still, will emerge.
And the parties most responsible for that brutality will be Israel and the West that supports it so lavishly, because Israel refuses to stop brutalising the Palestinians it forces to live under its rule.
The second lesson is that Israel, endlessly indulged by its Western patrons, still has no incentive to internalise the fundamental truth above. The rhetoric of its current government of fascists and Jewish supremacists may be particularly ugly, but there is a broad consensus among Israelis of all political stripes that the Palestinians must continue to be oppressed.
Which is why the so-called opposition will not hesitate to support the military pounding of the long besieged enclave of Gaza, killing yet more Palestinian civilians to “teach them a lesson”, a lesson no one in Israel can articulate beyond asserting that Palestinians must accept their permanent inferiority and imprisonment.
Already, the “good Israelis” – opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz – are in discussions with Netanyahu to join him in an “emergency unity government”.
What “emergency”? The emergency of Palestinians demanding the right not to live as prisoners in their own homeland.
Israelis and Westerners can continue their mental gymnastics to justify the Palestinians’ oppression and refuse them any right to resist. But their hypocrisy and self-deceptions stand exposed for the rest of the world to see.
— Aeschylus, Greek tragic dramatist (525 BC – 456 BC)
How many of us learn about Russia from a Russian point of view? Or about Syria from a loyal Syrian? Or Cuba from a Cuban supporter? Or Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, China or many others on our current list of adversaries, from the point of view of those adversaries? We supposedly pride ourselves on listening to both or many sides of an issue before forming an opinion (or, better still, a sound analysis). It’s the core of our system of justice, however flawed. It’s why we value free speech.
It’s not that the viewpoints we commonly hear are not different from each other, or that we don’t hear from people with foreign accents from the parts of the world in question. It’s that mainstream news, information and analysis are from a very narrow spectrum. The differences in the viewpoints are in the details, not the fundamentals. In the case of Ukraine, for example, the differences are mainly about how, and how much, to support Ukraine, not whether to do so. Do we hear the Russian view that they were compelled to come to the rescue of Ukraine’s Russian population, which was being massacred by racist, pro-Nazi elements running the Ukrainian government and supported by NATO? Not from the mainstream news, we don’t.
Similarly, when we hear from nationals of adversary countries, our media rarely offer space or air time to persons who represent the adversarial point of view. We are rather more likely to hear from exiles seeking to overthrow the government and hoping for western support. When have we heard from a representative of Hezbollah or Hamas? Or of the government of China or North Korea, or the Sandinista government of Nicaragua? The point is not whether their point of view is correct or whether we decide that it’s reasonable or not, but rather whether we even know what it is, and whether we try to understand it. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do in order to negotiate with our adversaries, solve our differences and achieve peace? The closest we come to that in our media is to invite such representatives to an on-air ambush where we browbeat them and shout them down instead of listening to them.
But it’s worse than that. Our vaunted “free press” closes down the offices and facilities of journalists from countries or movements selected for vilification, and blocks their websites within the boundaries of our country. Thus, the Russian RT media channel and the Iranian Press TV, among others, are no longer permitted to operate within most western countries. Apparently, their words are considered hazardous to western ears. Similarly, many journalists and other individuals have found themselves banned from western-based social media for revealing unwelcome facts or contradicting official truth. Many have been banned from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms.
It’s not just censorship, either. Our journalistic media have been taken over by advertising and PR principles, going so far as to fabricate stories and substitute lies for the truth on a massive scale. Even “fact checking” has become the province of distortion, where the “authorized” version of events has displaced actual facts. The mainstream media remove journalists who tell too much truth, contradicting the lies. The New York Times “disappeared” war correspondent Chris Hedges for reporting on war crimes committed by Israel and similar news. Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal used to report their investigative journalism on Democracy Now, which has now ceased inviting them, in order to become more of a mainstream outlet. Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersch migrated from The New Yorker and the New York Times to foreign media and eventually alternative outlets as his investigative journalism began to cast doubt on mainstream accounts of the Syrian war, the death of Osama Bin Laden, the destruction of the Nordstream gas pipelines and other events. Julian Assange is paying the highest price for publishing a modern-day equivalent of the Pentagon Papers, originally published by a younger, more courageous New York Times.
Sadly, many members of the public consider themselves well-informed and openminded if they read the most prestigious U.S. newspapers, watch or listen to the BBC and Deutsche Welle, and subscribe to Asia Times. To the extent that this may have been true in the past, it no longer is. Today, the ownership and funding sources of the major news media are all oligarchs and powerful corporations. Their job is no longer to inform the public, but rather to inculcate them with whatever information and ideas will manufacture consent for the policies that the powerful wish to enact. And no more, please.
This explains the actions of those who rule us, who are not just the elected leadership. In fact, even the elections themselves are limited to candidates selected by the powerful interests, and centered upon a few issues that do not threaten those interests (e.g. abortion and civil rights), and where the campaigning takes place almost exclusively in the few “swing” states that will determine the outcome of the election. As Emma Goldman said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
If we want to be worthy of calling ourselves educated, we cannot depend solely upon the mainstream press; we will have to do a lot of the work ourselves. There is bias in all media, but we can expose ourselves to opposing biases in order to get a wider variety of facts and analyses, and form our views accordingly. We have choices, if we only seek them out. The biases of Yahoo and Google are different from those of Russian and Chinese search engines. If we don’t find what we’re looking for on one, we might find it on another. The same is true with social media. Telegram is becoming increasingly popular, especially with those who have been banned elsewhere. Substack.com is a website that thus far has accommodated most subjects and viewpoints. Many of the journalists who are less than welcome in the mainstream media can be found at serenashimaward.org, a project that rewards journalists who present alternate views and information (and for which I am proud to serve as Treasurer). Due diligence is worth the rewards.
Headline news, no: “AOC Casts House Democrats’ Sole Vote Against Omnibus Spending Bill: Rep. Ocasio-Cortez cited ‘the dramatic increase in DHS and ICE spending’ as the reason behind her vote.”
Oh, wouldn’t it be a fine thing in the neighborhood if this AOC went rogue, Independent Party, on her hands and knees, and apologizing:
I should have never supported any 350 (dot) org or Al Gore or Hollywood’s “new green deal” because it’s all smoke and mirrors and carbon credits and more millionaires and billionaires making hay on the big green lie
I should have called out the accused rapist Biden as “not in my name, not in my party,” early on and just weathered whatever storm would follow
I should have never supported one dime for Israel or the Hebrewization of Politics-Business-Media-Finance-Banking
I should have called out Pelosi for what she is — stock investor (sic) in war, chemicals, energy, and of course, recepient of inside trader dealing for her hubby
I should have brought Cynthia McKinney and Jill Stein into my fold
Oh, cry for me Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran: should have showed guts and not supported regime change
Should have called a Jewish Conspiracy Spade a Spade with the Maidan, with Nato, with EuroTrashLandia’s sickness and hate against Russia
Should have stood against corruption and thieving and murder and cancelling parties that Ukraine is all about
RE: Green as the New Black =
Resistance is imperative | A panel discussion on dismantling the “New Normal” nightmare
Cory Morningstar has very meticulously, and very brilliantly, analyzed the deep connections that Greta has to the many power-structures, all of which seek to change the world. This excellent research should be widely read.
But why Greta? Why her photo? The clue lies in what she really advocates – the Fourth Industrial Revolution, aka, the New Green Deal. This is, very simply, transhumanism, which is the creation of a bio-digital world, where technology merges with humanity.
The oft-heard mantra of the environmentalists, “Change Everything,” means changing what it means to be human, what it means to work, what it means to be free, what it means to live a happy life. In short, it is Neo-Eugenics – or, the improvement of humanity by way of technology. This gives a whole new meaning to Greta’s iconic phrase, “I want you to panic.”
Thunberg is the eldest of two girls and is the daughter of actor Svante Thunberg and opera singer Malena Ernman. She was born Jan. 3, 2003, in Stockholm, Sweden.
She is distantly related to Svante August Arrhenius, the first scientist to predict that carbon emissions would lead to global warming. He received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1903, becoming the first Nobel laureate from Sweden. So an influence in Thunberg’s mindset might be understood.
A NEW PIECE of evidence has emerged buttressing the credibility of Tara Reade’s claim that she told her mother about allegations of sexual harassment and assault related to her former boss, then-Sen. Joe Biden. Biden, through a spokesperson, has denied the allegations. Reade has claimed to various media outlets, including The Intercept, that she told her mother, a close friend, and her brother about both the harassment and, to varying degrees of detail, the assault at the time. Her brother, Collin Moulton, and her friend, who has asked to remain anonymous, both confirmed that they heard about the allegations from Reade at the time. Reade’s mother died in 2016, but both her brother and friend also confirmed Reade had told her mother, and that her mother, a longtime feminist and activist, urged her to go to the police.
Hebrews and Nazis = “Medvedev: Israel arms shipments to Ukraine will destroy relationship with Russia — ‘If they are supplied with weapons, then it is time for Israel to declare Bandera and Shukhevych their heroes.’”
Listen to Matt on how all of this is an Anglo Saxon conspiracy:
“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has accrued millions from husband’s trades: report”
McKinney =
In April, U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., got in a whole heap of trouble after she called for a thorough investigation of what George W. Bush knew before September 11 about the potential for the sort of terrorist attacks that would shake the nation and the world on that fateful day. McKinney is one of the most outspoken members of the current Congress and her statements were typically blunt. “We know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on September 11th,” she told a radio interviewer.
“What did this administration know and when did it know it, about the events of September 11th? Who else knew, and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered? … What do they have to hide?” McKinney’s call for a real investigation of what Bush knew — along with her parallel suggestion that it was necessary to conduct a review of possible war profiteering by members of the Bush administration and corporations with close ties to the president — drew a firestorm from pundits and partisans. By John Nichols
Jill Stein =
Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua =
U.S. President Joe Biden’s top Latin America advisor has admitted U.S. sanctions against Russia over Ukraine intentionally seek to hurt Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba.
The United States imposed a series of harsh sanctions on Russia following Moscow’s recognition of the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region on February 21, and its subsequent military intervention in Ukraine on February 24.
Juan S. González, Biden’s special assistant for Latin America and the U.S. National Security Council’s senior director for the Western Hemisphere, made it clear that these coercive measures against Russia are also aimed at damaging the economies of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba.
Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba have socialist governments that Washington has long tried to overthrow. All three currently suffer under unilateral U.S. sanctions, which are illegal according to international law. (Ben Norton)
Nuland and Kagan and Blinken and … =
Who is Victoria Nuland? Most Americans have never heard of her, because the U.S. corporate media’s foreign policy coverage is a wasteland. Most Americans have no idea that President-elect Biden’s pick for deputy secretary of state for political affairs is stuck in the quicksand of 1950s U.S.-Russia Cold War politics and dreams of continued NATO expansion, an arms race on steroids and further encirclement of Russia.
Nor do they know that from 2003 to 2005, during the hostile U.S. military occupation of Iraq, Nuland was a foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney, the Darth Vader of the Bush administration.
You can bet, however, that the people of Ukraine have heard of neocon Nuland. Many have even heard the leaked four-minute audio of her saying “Fuck the EU” during a February 2014 phone call with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt.
During the infamous call on which Nuland and Pyatt appeared to be plotting to replace or undermine elected Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, Nuland expressed her not-so-diplomatic disgust with the European Union for favoring former heavyweight boxer and austerity champ Vitali Klitschko to take over as prime minister, instead of the U.S. first choice, Artseniy Yatsenyuk, who indeed took power after Yanukovych was ousted about three weeks later. (source)
Although many of you have heard about its Trotskyite origins, the neoconservative movement as we know it today dates mainly from the 1960s. It was in that decade that you see the startling rise of Holocaust consciousness beginning with the Eichmann trial and the Oscar-winning movie Judgment at Nuremberg, both of which had a major impact not only on the Jewish community but on the general public here as well. These events were followed by the rise of the New Left, the Counter-Culture, and the anti-war and Black Power movements, as well as the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. All of these left a number of mainly—but by no means exclusively—Jewish public intellectuals and liberals feeling, in the words of Irving Kristol, “mugged by reality” in a way that launched them on a rightward trajectory.
That trajectory gained momentum in the early 1970s, when the anti-war candidate, George McGovern, won the Democratic nomination for president, and when Israel seemed to teeter briefly on the edge of defeat in the early stages of the 1973 war, which itself was immediately followed by the Arab oil embargo. Two years later, the UN General Assembly passed the “Zionism is Racism” resolution, and U.S. power globally seemed in retreat after the collapse of its clients in Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. These all created a context in which neo-conservatism gained serious political traction.
At this point, it may be useful to address an important ethno-religious issue. Neoconservatism has largely been a Jewish movement. By no means, however, are all neoconservatives Jewish. The late Jeane Kirkpatrick, former Education Secretary Bill Bennett, former CIA chief James Woolsey, and Catholic theologians Michael Novak and George Weigel are just a few examples of non-Jews who have played major roles in the movement.
That said, it’s true that most neoconservatives are Jewish and, increasingly, Republican.
“Ukrainian Regime Led by Media Darling Volodymyr Zelensky Kidnaps Student Dissidents, Bans Opposition Parties, Shuts Down Independent Media, Commits Egregious War Crimes and Imposes Regressive Labor Laws”
Oh, well, AOC is not made of that fiber, and she is not anything special, and she is a product of celebrity cultism, backroom dealing, and, well, who the hell would okay a Netflix documentary (sic) on her so, so short life?
And what does the DSA have to show for a half century of working within the Democratic Party? The party has abandoned any pretense to social reform, it has waged permanent war and overseen a massive growth in social inequality. The “realignment” strategy paved the way for the Democratic Party’s rapid movement ever further to the right. It succeeded in facilitating the Democrats’ adoption of identity politics, based on doling out privileged positions to corrupt representatives of various racial groups, and a more open acceptance of human rights imperialism.
Ocasio-Cortez and the DSA are carrying forward their pro-imperialist, anti-communist traditions into the 21st century. Their main role, as expressed in the interview, is to serve as gatekeepers of the bourgeois political left, channeling social opposition into the Democratic Party and placing its left opponents beyond the pale. Those who fight to mobilize the working class (“class essentialism”) for a break with the Democratic Party are “cynical bad faith actors” who want to “destroy.” (source: “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounces socialists and praises Biden administration, Democratic Party”)
Note
My apologies for any false hope here: Oh well, just a thought experiment for my blog, really, just 15 minutes of ruminating. Now get back to your day! No room for beyond hope: by Derrick Jensen “Beyond Hope“!
Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.
To start, there is the false hope that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change. Or technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or beings from Alpha Centauri. Or Jesus Christ. Or Santa Claus. All of these false hopes lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness. One reason my mother stayed with my abusive father was that there were no battered women’s shelters in the ’50s and ’60s, but another was her false hope that he would change. False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and blind us to real possibilities.
“Ditto,” said Tweedledum.
“Ditto, ditto!” cried Tweedledee.
– Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking-Glass, December 27, 1871
Sometimes a trifling contretemps can open a window onto significant issues.
As a case in point, The New York Times, a newspaper that regularly publishes U.S. propaganda without a bit of shame or remorse, recently reported on a controversy involving Simon & Schuster and Bob Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. The report with the same information was repeated across the media.
The publishing company had offered limited-edition, authenticated, hand-signed copies of the book for $600 each. Nine Hundred collectors and die-hard fans bought a copy, many, no doubt, caught in hero worship and the thought that a Dylan-penned signature would grant them a bit of his fame through the touch of his hand upon their lives.
The quest for immortality takes many forms, and the laying on of hands, even when done remotely through a signature, has long been a popular form of sleight-of-hand.
I once shook hands with an Elvis hologram impersonator and the thrill vibrated for days.
But these Dylan aficionados noticed something strange about the signatures: They didn’t seem to be actual signatures individually written with a pen by Dylan. As anyone knows from their own handwriting, no two signatures are the same, since the human hand is not a copy machine. These signatures were identical.
It turned out that those who smelled a deception were right. Under pressure from astute purchasers, Simon & Schuster had to come clean – sort of. They offered to refund all purchasers for the deception. They released the following statement:
To those who purchased The Philosophy of Modern Song limited edition, we want to apologize. As it turns out, the limited editions books do contain Bob’s original signature, but in a penned replica form. We are addressing this immediately by providing each purchaser with an immediate refund.
This statement is a perfect example of double-talk, and more.
Then Dylan also apologized, saying that he used an auto-pen since he was suffering from vertigo and “during the pandemic, it was impossible to sign anything and the vertigo didn’t help.” His apology seems sincere compared to the publisher’s double-talk, but then again, so did his signatures. And the controversy has spread to the limited edition prints of his artwork.
“Limited edition prints” – a deception in itself, as if limiting the number of copies of an original painting makes them more original. Ten dittos instead of eleven.
However, I am not primarily concerned with the nuances of this tempest in a teapot, which might disappear as fast as yesterday’s bluster, or it may forever tarnish Dylan’s reputation, which would be a shame if it also damaged the genuine greatness of his songs.
I would like to focus on the following matters that I have seen through its window: language usage, a society of copies, reading texts closely, and the degradation of literacy, all of which are tangled together with non-stop government propaganda disseminated by the corporate mass media to form a major social issue.
First, language. Note in the Simon & Schuster apology the words: “As it turns out, the limited editions books do contain Bob’s original signature, but in a penned replica form.” This is a clear deception twice over. The books do not contain original signatures; they contain machine copies of it. Phrasing it that way allows the company to plead innocent while also apologizing for its innocence as if they consider themselves guilty. What exactly are they saying they are apologizing for? Deceptions dittoed?
And the phrase “As it turns out,” implies that Simon & Schuster was surprised that the signatures were machine generated, which is highly improbable. It also suggests they are not responsible; such verbiage approximates the common, passive introductory phrase “it so happens” or the equally non-literate “hopefully” to begin a sentence.
“It so happens” that I am writing these words and “it so happens” that you are reading them…as if we are victims of our own free choices. Passive language for victims of fate who have learned to write and talk this way to avoid responsibility even for their own hope, as in: “I hope.” Or maybe the widespread copycat use of “hopefully” is an unconscious attempt to deny pervasive hopelessness. No matter how many times you repeat something doesn’t make it true.
The use of such language is a reflection of an age in which determinism has for decades been repeatedly promulgated to extinguish people’s belief in freedom. Ditto: Saying “the exact same” doesn’t make the same more same through redundancy. You can’t get any more same than same since same means identical, or any more opposite than opposite even if you say “the exact opposite.” The English language is suffering.
To top it off, an esteemed book publishing company nearly a century old concludes with a sentence that a high school freshman – circa 1960 before all the dumbing-down of schooling – would realize was redundant with the words “immediately” (misplaced) and “immediate,” as if repetition would emphasize their contrition. “We are addressing this immediately by providing each purchaser with an immediate refund.” Ditto.
But who notices these things?
Discerning readers – whether of the examples above or of a subtle controlled- opposition media article suggesting one thing while meaning another – are becoming rarer and rarer. Ideology, political party allegiances, and plain stupidity block many from grasping propaganda and media claims made out of thin air.
Anonymous sources, subtle phrasing, real or imagined intelligence sources, the use of words such as may, might, possible, could be, etc., are a staple of so much writing and broadcast news that they fly by people used to the speed of the digital life with texting and internet browsing where repetition and copying are king. Yes, speed kills in so many ways. The repetition of talking points across the major corporate media, something carefully studied and confirmed years ago, has become so obvious to anyone who chooses to take the time to investigate. It’s not hard to do but few bother; they are too “busy.” Thus propaganda and gibberish pass unnoticed.
Just as “The Real McCoy” (see the opening “Refrain” of Hillel Schwartz’ The Culture of the Copy) was a fake and the phrase came to represent the genuine to supposedly confirm authenticity, we are now living in an era of the counterfeit everywhere. Counterfeits of counterfeits. Imposters. Actors playing actors. Counterfeit traitors. Fabricated reality and copies of copies. Ditto. Ditto. Ditto. Lies about not lying. (See The New York Times’, The Guardian’s, etc. deceptive, hypocritical, and self-serving joint letter asking the U.S government to end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets.)
The Dylan controversy is a very minor example of a major issue that is little appreciated for its devastating impact on society.
For another minor example, we may ask how many times does one have to see the replay of Christian Pulisic’s recent goal against Iran in the 2022 World Cup to grasp its brilliance and to see that he was injured? Two, three, five, ten? And this is a sporting event, not some mall shooting or serious issue of war. In a digital high-tech world repetition is the norm. What does repetition do to the mind?
What does repetition do to the mind?
Despite the great sportsmanship shown by the players from both the U.S. and Iran on the pitch, U.S. Men’s Soccer executives, by deleting the Islamic Republic emblem from Iran’s flag on its social media sites, and the U.S. media tried repeatedly to politicize the game into a battle between the good Americans and the evil Iranians, even while a U.S. regime change color revolution was being attempted on the streets of Iran.
What does repetitious propaganda do to the mind?
Technology has not just allowed for machine signatures but has made us in many ways machine people who need to be hammered over the head time and again – and to like it. To go back again and again for more. Everything but life has become repeatable.
Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby’s reply to Nick’s statement In The Great Gatsby – “You can’t repeat the past,” Nick tells Gatsby, who responds, “Can’t repeat the past? Why, off course you can!” – perfectly captures the “reality” of a digital screen culture of illusions in which many people have unconsciously come to believe that you can instantly replay life as well.
Indeed, to make people into machines is the goal of trans-humanists Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum with its Great Reset and the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda. Artificial intelligence (AI) for artificial people. While there are innocent examples of repetition, the use of it is a fundamental tactic of propaganda, whether that be through words or images. And we are drowning in repeated media/government propaganda about the U.S. war against Russia in Ukraine, Covid19, Iran, China, Syria, etc.
It’s as easy as pie to innocently repeat, as I learned recently when my wife asked me to use her cell phone to take a photograph. Bumpkin that I am who despises these machines, rather than briefly hitting the button I held it down for a few seconds and took the same photo 67 ½ times. It just so happened.
But the propagandists’ repetitions are no accident. You can’t condemn Julian Assange year after year for posting U.S. war crimes – the Afghanistan War Logs – and then try to save your own ass after the man has been persecuted for more than a decade and counting. The media who did this and then wrote the recent letter are counterfeit traitors to the truth and agents of the war criminals. To call them journalists is to misuse language: They are imposters.
What does repetition do to the mind? asked Tweedledum to his identical twin Tweedledee.
The European Union’s Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell is not particularly perceived by the EU’s political elite or mainstream media as a rightwing ideologue or warmonger. But seen through a different, non-western prism, it is hard not to mistake him for one.
Borrell’s recent comments that “Europe is a garden” and that “the rest of the world is a jungle” were duly condemned as ‘racist’ by many politicians around the world, but mostly in the Global South. Borrell’s remarks, however, must also be viewed as an expression of superiority, not only of Borell personally, but of Europe’s ruling classes as a whole.
Particularly interesting about the EU top diplomat’s words are these inaccurate depictions of Europe and its relationship with the rest of the world: “We have built a garden”, “everything works” and “the jungle could invade the garden”.
Without delving too deep into what is obviously an entrenched superiority complex, Borell speaks as if an advocate of the so-called ‘Replacement Theory’, a racist notion advocated by the West’s – Europe especially – rightwing intellectuals, which sees refugees, migrants and non-Europeans as parasites aiming to destroy the continent’s supposedly perfect demographic, religious and social harmony.
If stretched further into a historical dimension, one also feels compelled to remind the EU leadership of the central role that European colonialism, economical exploitation, political meddling and outright military intervention have played in turning much of the world into a supposed ‘jungle’. Would Libya, for example, have been reduced to the status of a failed state if the West did not wage a major war starting in March 2011?
The imagined ‘jungle’ aside, Europe’s past and present reality strongly negates Borell’s ethnocentric view. Sadly, Europe is the birthplace of the most horrible pages of history, from colonialism and slavery to the nationalistic, fascist and nihilistic movements that defined most of the last three centuries.
Despite the desperate attempt to rewrite or ignore history in favor of a more amiable narrative focused on great splendors, technological advancement and civilizational triumph, Europe’s true nature continues to smolder underneath the ashes, ready to resurface whenever the geopolitical and socioeconomic factors take a wrong turn. The Syrian and Libyan refugee crisis, the Covid pandemic and, more recently, the Russia-Ukraine war are all examples of the proverbial wrong turn.
In fact, Borrell’s words, aimed to reassure Europe of its moral superiority, are but a foolhardy effort meant to conceal one of the most dramatic crises that Europe has experienced in nearly a century. The impact of this crisis on every aspect of European life cannot be overstated.
In an editorial published last September on the European Environment Agency (EEA) website, Hans Bruyninckx described the “state of multiple crises” that characterizes the European continent at the moment. “It seems as if we have been living through one crisis after another — a pandemic, extreme heatwaves and drought due to climate change, inflation, war and an energy crisis,” he wrote.
Instead of taking responsibility for this impending catastrophe, Europe’s ruling elites choose a different, though predictable route: blame others, especially the inhabitants of the non-European ‘jungle’.
Naturally, ordinary people throughout Europe who are already experiencing this harrowing reality hardly feel reassured by Borrell’s proclamation that “everything works”.
The risk of the resurgence of the far-right movements in Europe is now a real possibility. This danger was relatively mitigated by the setback of the extremist ‘Alternative for Germany’ and the victory of the Social Democrats in last year’s elections. Germany, however, is not the exception, as the European far-right is now back, virtually everywhere, and with a vengeance.
In France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right party gained a record 41% of the total vote (over 13 million) in April. True, Emmanuel Macron managed to hold off the advance of Le Pen’s National Rally, but his coalition has lost its parliamentary majority, and his leadership has been significantly weakened. Currently, the country is rocked by massive rallies and strikes, all protesting the soaring prices and deepening inflation.
Sweden is another example of the determined rise of the far-right. A right-wing coalition, which won the general elections last September, now dominates the country’s parliament. On October 17, it elected a new prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, whose government was made possible because of the support of the Sweden Democrats, a party with neo-Nazi roots and a harsh anti-immigration agenda. SD was crucial in determining the victory of the coalition and it is now suited to play the role of the kingmaker in critical decisions.
In Italy, too, the situation is dire. A future government is expected to bring together Giorgia Meloni – the leader of Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) – former right-wing Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia, and the extremist Matteo Salvini’s La Lega. Meloni’s party is rooted in the post-fascist tradition of the Italian Social Movement, which was formed in the aftermath of World War II by fascist politicians after their party was officially outlawed by the country’s progressive 1948 Constitution.
The shifting political grounds in Germany, France, Italy and Sweden have little to do with the ‘jungle’, and everything with the illusory European ‘garden.’ Europe’s extremism is a by-product of exclusively European historical experiences, ideologies and class struggles. Blaming Asians, Arabs or Africans for Europe’s “state of multiple crises” is not only self-deluding, indeed spiritless, but also obstructive to any healthy process of change.
Europe cannot fix its problems by blaming others, and the European ‘garden’, if it ever existed, is actually being ravaged by Europe’s own ruling elites – rich, detached and utterly dishonest.
• Romana Rubeo, an Italian journalist, contributed to this article.
Regardless of the outcome of the latest Israeli elections, Arab parties will not reap meaningful political benefits, even if they collectively achieve their highest representation ever. The reason is not about the parties themselves, but in Israel’s skewed political system which is predicated on racism and marginalization of non-Jews.
Israel was established on a problematic premise of being a homeland of all Jews, everywhere – not of Palestine’s own native inhabitants – and on a bloody foundation, that of the Nakba and the destruction of historic Palestine and the expulsion of its people.
Such beginnings were hardly conducive to the establishment of a real democracy, perfect or blemished. Not only did Israel’s discriminatory attitude persist throughout the years, it actually worsened, especially as the Palestinian Arab population rose disproportionally compared to the Jewish population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
The unfortunate reality is that some Arab parties have participated in Israeli elections since 1949, some independently and others under the ruling Mapei party umbrella. They did so despite Arab communities in Israel being ruled by a military government (1951-1966) and practically governed, until this day, by the unlawful ‘Defense (Emergency Regulations)’. This participation has constantly been touted by Israel and its supporters as proof of the state’s democratic nature.
This claim alone has served as the backbone of Israeli hasbara throughout the decades. Though often unwittingly, Arab political parties in Israel have provided the fodder for such propaganda, making it difficult for Palestinians to argue that the Israeli political system is fundamentally flawed and racist.
Palestinian citizens have always debated among themselves about the pros and cons of taking part in Israeli elections. Some understood that their participation validates the Zionist ideology and Israeli apartheid, while others argued that refraining from participating in the political process denies Palestinians the opportunity to change the system from within.
The latter argument has lost much of its merit, as Israel sank deeper into apartheid, while social, political and legal conditions for Palestinians worsened. The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Adalah) reports on dozens of discriminatory laws in Israel that exclusively target Arab communities. Additionally, in a report published in February, Amnesty International describes thoroughly how the “representation of Palestinian citizens of Israel in the decision making process … has been restricted and undermined by an array of Israeli laws and policies.”
This reality has existed for decades, long before July 19, 2018, when the Israeli parliament approved the so-called Jewish Nation-State Basic Law. The Law was the most glaring example of political and legal racism, which made Israel a full-fledged apartheid regime.
The Law was also the most articulate proclamation of Jewish supremacy over Palestinians in all aspects of life, including the right to self-determination.
Those who have argued that Arab participation in Israeli politics served a purpose in the past should have done more than collectively denounce the Nation-State law, by resigning en masse, effective immediately. They should have taken advantage of the international uproar to convert their struggle from a parliamentary to a popular grassroots one.
Alas, they have not. They continued to participate in Israeli elections, arguing that if they achieved greater representation in the Israeli Knesset, they should be able to challenge the tsunami of Israeli discriminatory laws.
This did not happen, even after the Joint List, which unified four Arab parties in the March 2020 elections, achieved its greatest turnout ever, becoming the Knesset’s third largest political bloc.
The supposed historic victory culminated to nil because all mainstream Jewish parties, regardless of their ideological backgrounds, refused to include Arab parties in their potential coalitions.
The enthusiasm that mobilized Arab voters behind the Joint List began to dwindle, and the List itself fragmented, thanks to Mansour Abbas, the head of the Arab party, Ra’am.
In the March 2021 elections, Abbas wanted to change the dynamics of Arab politics in Israel altogether. “We focus on the issues and problems of the Arab citizens of Israel within the Green Line,” Abbas told TIME magazine in June 2021, adding “we want to heal our own problems”, as if declaring a historic delink from the rest of the Palestinian struggle.
Abbas was wrong, as Israel perceives him, his followers, the Joint List and all Palestinians to be obstacles in its efforts to maintain the exclusivist ‘Jewish identity’ of the state. The Abbas experiment, however, became even more interesting, when Ra’am won 4 seats and joined a government coalition led by far-right, anti-Palestinian politician Naftali Bennet.
By the time the coalition collapsed in June, Abbas achieved little, aside from splitting the Arab vote and proving, again, that changing Israeli politics from within has always been a fantasy.
Even after all of this, Arab parties in Israel still insisted on participating in a political system that, despite its numerous contradictions, agreed on one thing: Palestinians are, and will always be, the enemy.
Even the violent events of May 2021, where Palestinians found themselves fighting on multiple fronts – against the Israeli army, police, intelligence services, armed settlers and even ordinary citizens – did not seem to change the Arab politicians’ mindset. Arab population centers in Umm Al-Fahm, Lydda and Jaffa, were attacked with the same racist mentality as Gaza and Sheikh Jarrah, illustrating that nearly 75 years of supposed integration between Jews and Arabs under Israel’s political system hardly changed the racist view towards Palestinians.
Instead of converting the energy of what Palestinians dubbed the ‘Unity Intifada’ to invest in Palestinian unity, Arab Israeli politicians returned to the Israeli Knesset, as if they still had hope in salvaging Israel’s inherently corrupt political system.
The self-delusion continues. On September 29, Israel’s Central Election Committee disqualified an Arab party, Balad, from running in the November elections. The decision was eventually overturned by the country’s Supreme Court, urging an Arab legal organization in Israel to describe the decision as ‘historic’. In essence, they suggested that Israel’s apartheid system still carries the hope of true democracy.
The future of Arab politics in Israel will remain grim if Arab politicians continue to pursue this failed tactic. Though Palestinian citizens of Israel are socio-economically privileged if compared to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, they enjoy nominal or no substantive political or legal rights. By remaining loyal participants in Israel’s democracy charade, these politicians continue to validate the Israeli establishment, thus harming, not only Palestinian communities in Israel but, in fact, Palestinians everywhere.
No one took responsibility for the explosion over the weekend that ripped through a section of the Kerch Bridge that links Russia to Crimea and was built by Moscow after it annexed the peninsula back in 2014.
But it was not just Kyiv’s gleeful celebrations that indicated the main suspect. Within hours, the Ukrainian authorities had released a set of commemorative stamps depicting the destruction.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was under no illusions either. On Monday, he struck out with a torrent of missiles that hit major Ukrainian cities such as Kyiv and Lviv. It was a pale, Slavic echo of Israel’s intermittent bombardments of Gaza, which are expressly intended to send the Palestinian enclave “back to the Stone Age“.
If the scenes looked familiar – an attack by one party, followed by a massive retaliatory strike from the other – the mood and language that greeted the Ukrainian attack and the Russian counter-attack felt noticeably different from what passes for normal western commentary about Israel and Palestine.
The blast on the Kerch Bridge was welcomed with barely concealed excitement from western journalists, politicians and analysts, while Moscow’s strikes on Kyiv were uniformly denounced as Russian brutality and state terrorism. That is not the way things work when Israel and Palestinian factions engage in their own rounds of fighting.
Had the Palestinians openly celebrated blowing up a bridge in East Jerusalem, a territory illegally annexed by Israel in the 1960s, and killed Israeli civilians as collateral damage in the process, who can really imagine western media reports being similarly supportive?
Nor would western academics have lined up, as they did for Ukraine, to explain in detail why destroying a bridge was a proportionate act and fully in accordance with the rights in international law of a people under belligerent occupation to resist.
Instead, there would have been thunderous denunciations of Palestinian savagery and “terrorism”.
In reality, Palestinian resistance nowadays is far more modest – and yet still receives western censure. Palestinians need only to fire a home-made rocket, or launch an “incendiary balloon”, usually ineffectually out of their cage in Gaza – where they have been besieged for years by their Israeli persecutors – to incur the wrath of Israel and the western powers that claim to constitute the “international community”.
Even more perversely, when Palestinians solely target Israeli soldiers, as they are unambiguously entitled to do under international law, they are similarly reviled as criminals.
Regular rampages
But the double standards do not end there. Western media and politicians were unreservedly appalled by Moscow’s retaliatory strikes on the Ukrainian capital. Despite the media’s emphasis on Russia’s targeting of civilian infrastructure, the number of civilians killed across Ukraine by the wave of missile hits on Monday was reported to be low.
Western media are far less horrified when it comes to Israel’s regular rampages across Gaza – even when Israel “retaliates” after much less provocation and when its strikes inflict far greater suffering and damage.
And, of course, it is not just Israel that is benefiting from this hypocrisy. The United States’ “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign that initiated the war on Iraq in 2003 – and so impressed western commentators – killed many thousands of Iraqi civilians. Russia’s strikes on Kyiv pale in comparison.
There are other glaring inconsistencies. After Russia’s missile strikes, Ukraine is gaining an even more receptive ear in western capitals to its demands for additional weaponry to help regain the eastern territories Moscow has annexed.
By contrast, no one in the West is suggesting that the Palestinians should be armed to help them fight off decades of Israeli occupation and siege. Quite the reverse. It is invariably western weapons that rain down on Gaza, supplied to the belligerent Israeli occupier by the very parties now condemning Russia.
And in stark contrast to Britain’s whole-hearted support as Ukraine battles to stop Russia’s annexation of its eastern territories, the UK’s prime minister Liz Truss stated only last month that she may reward Israel for its illegal annexation of Jerusalem by moving the British embassy there.
Whereas Palestinians are constantly inveigled to postpone their liberation struggle and wait for their occupier to agree to peace talks, even when Israel openly scorns engagement, Ukrainians are pushed by the West to do the exact opposite. They are expected to delay any negotiations with Russia and focus on the battlefield.
Similarly, those who promote talks between Israel and Palestine that are never going to take place are praised as peacemakers. Those who advocate for talks between Ukraine and Russia – when Moscow has expressed a repeated willingness to negotiate, even if its overtures are disparaged by the West – are rounded on as appeasers.
Russia, meanwhile, faces sustained and comprehensive sanctions imposed by western states to bring it to heel.
By contrast, those proposing a far weaker tool – grassroots boycotts – to pressure Israel to loosen its choke-hold on Gaza are smeared as antisemites and face legislation to outlaw their activities by the same western states sanctioning Moscow.
It is almost as if the “freedom-loving” West has an entirely inconsistent agenda when it comes to the plights of Ukraine and Palestine. Israel’s hold on Palestine is unfortunate but justified; Russia’s over Ukraine is emphatically not.
Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s “unprovoked aggression” is heroic. Palestinian resistance to Israel’s violence – invariably presented as self-defence – is terrorism.
Double standards
Western news at the moment is a litany of these double standards and legal and ethical contradictions – and yet barely anyone seems to notice.
Westerners, for example, are currently cheering the protests in Iran, where women and girls have taken to the streets and created mass disturbances in schools. Their protests were sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini after she was taken into custody for wearing her hijab head covering too loosely.
Western media celebrate these young women casting aside the hijab in defiance of the unaccountable clerics who rule over them. The West bewails the beatings and attacks they receive from a tyrannous, patriarchal Iranian theocracy.
And yet there is no comparable solidarity with Palestinians when they collectively defy an unaccountable Israeli occupation army that rules over them. When they turn out to protest at the fence Israel has built all around Gaza to imprison them, preventing them from leaving for work or to see family overseas, or to reach hospitals much better equipped than their own that have been under Israeli blockade for years, they are shot down by Israeli snipers.
Where is the applause for those brave Palestinian protesters standing up to their oppressors? Where are the denunciations of Israel for compelling Palestinians to endure a tyrannous, apartheid-enforcing Israeli military?
Why is it entirely unremarkable that Palestinians – young and old, men and women – are regularly beaten or killed by Israel, while the death of a single Iranian woman is enough to reduce the western media to paroxysms of outrage?
And why, just as pertinently, does the West care so much about the lives of young Iranian women and their hijab protests when it appears not to give a damn about these women’s lives, or those of their brothers, when it comes to enforcing decades of western sanctions? Those restrictions have plunged parts of Iranian society into deep and sustained poverty that puts Iranian lives at risk.
Such is the reflexive hypocrisy that Israeli women who have shown no solidarity with Palestinian women abused and killed by the Israeli army turned out last week to cut their hair in a public act of sisterhood with Iranian women.
Western dictates
There is nothing new about these double standards. They are entrenched in western thinking, based on a profoundly racist, colonial worldview – one that sees “the West” as the good guys and everyone else as morally compromised, or irredeemably evil, if they refuse to bow to western dictates.
That is highlighted by the current battle of an 88-year-old Palestinian businessman, Munib al-Masri, to win an apology from Britain.
At his instruction, two eminent lawyers – Luis Moreno Ocampo, a former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, and Ben Emmerson, a former United Nations expert on human rights – have been reviewing evidence of crimes committed by British forces in the years before 1948, when the UK ruled Palestine under a mandate.
When Britain withdrew, it effectively allowed Zionist institutions to take its place and create a self-declared Jewish state of Israel on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.
The evidence documented by Ocampo and Emmerson – which they describe as “shocking” – includes crimes such as arbitrary killings and detentions, torture, use of human shields, and home demolitions weaponised as collective punishment.
If that all sounds familiar, it should. Israel has been terrorising Palestinians with these same exact policies over the past 74 years. That is because Israel incorporated the British mandate’s “emergency regulations” permitting such crimes into its legal and administrative codes. It simply continued what Britain had started.
Masri hopes to present the 300-page dossier to the UK government later this year. According to the media, it will be “reviewed thoroughly” by the Ministry of Defence. But do not hold your breath waiting for an apology.
The reality is that Ocampo and Emmerson did not need to conduct their research. Nothing they tell the UK government will be a revelation. British officials already know about these crimes. And there is no remorse – as demonstrated by, if nothing else, the fact that Britain continues to back Israel to the hilt even while the Israeli military continues the same reign of state terror.
Israel’s task was to rebrand as a “western-style democracy” the British mandate’s brutal colonial rule over the Palestinian population. It is the reason Israel receives billions of dollars in aid from the US every year, and why it never faces consequences for any of the crimes it commits.
The ugly truth is that westerners dwell permanently inside their own bubble of disinformation, one puffed up by their leaders and the media, that allows them to imagine themselves as the good guys – whatever the evidence actually proves.
The double standards in the West’s treatment of Ukraine compared to Palestine should be a moment when that harsh realisation finally dawns. Sadly, western publics just seem to sink ever deeper into the comforting illusion of self-righteousness.
For a time, the confused and muddled approach from Australian football (soccer to some) did much of a side-step regarding the human rights imbroglio and Qatar’s hosting of the FIFA World Cup. There was ample cash and participation in one of the world’s biggest tournaments on the line. There was FIFA’s reluctance that footballing sides show any political streak; such figures, it was hoped, should best focus on kicking a ball on a pitch. And then there was the sport itself. Here was a chance to take football to the desert reaches and build new bastions.
Qatar, for its part, has taken a softening voice in disguising reform. The number of deaths among the toiling workers behind the various venues and stadia for the World Cup has been calculated to be in the order of 37 between 2014 and 2020. The Guardianreport from February 2021, using records from a number of embassies, suggests that 6,500 Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan nationals had perished since 2010.
A number of footballing teams, however, could not contain themselves. While not wanting to seem totally complicit in a regime’s atrocious labour practices and archaic punishments, there was the sense that something had to be done. But how could disagreement with Doha’s policies possibly take place alongside continued attendance?
A stretch of air-gun salutes filled with vanilla anger has been the answer, a measure of displeasure from teams who would still be participating in Qatar 2022. Yes, of course they would go, and never mind such silly notions as a boycott or any naff idea of staying at home. All those contracts; all that publicity! They would put in an appearance and keep the broadcasters happy. Such players merely wanted to let those organising the festivities and sponsorships know about a moral awakening.
Denmark decided to use a form of protest so stealthy as to be unnoticeable, a case of monochrome shirts freed of logos and integrity. Such a protest was also free of sense and strength, but that did not bother the manufacturer Hummel, which had a product to promote on the world stage.
The teams of other footballing nations, including Germany, France and England, are promising an even meeker response: wearing rainbow coloured armbands as part of anti-discrimination campaign featuring the message “One Love”.
As has been the case before, Australia wanted to go one step further in foolishness; and mightily foolish its players turned out to be. Sixteen were given a chance to vent at the host country, salving their troubled consciences without so much as lifting a finger. In video recordings, the players claimed to “stand with FIFPro, the Building and Wood Workers’ International, and the International Trade Union Confederation, seeking to embed reforms and establish a lasting legacy in Qatar.”
Policy suggestions follow. “This must include establishing a migrant resource centre, effective remedy for those who have been denied their rights, and the decriminalisation of all same-sex relationships.” The players insist that, “These are the basic rights that should be afforded to all and will ensure continued progress in Qatar – a legacy that goes well beyond the final whistle of the 2022 FIFA World Cup.”
Such venting came with mighty qualifications and veiled praise. No player wanted to suggest that Qatar had not made genuine steps to improve the state of labour rights. There was even a heaving acknowledgment that the kafala system has been dismantled, which raised the question why migrant workers have engaged in strike action, with others promising to do so during the tournament.
The statements had their cinematic effect. They even caught the interest of a number of Australian politicians, including the Treasurer Jim Chalmers, whose interest in football is scant relative to his enthusiasm for rugby league. “These guys make me proud to be an Australian and they’re going to turn this rugby league tragic into someone who’s going to follow them more closely than I might have.”
The unsavoury Piers Morgan, former host of Good Morning Britain, was unimpressed. “Fine virtue-signalling words… presume you will now be boycotting the tournament? Or don’t you guys care THAT much.”
The Morgan formula was one that has fallen out of favour in modern sport: the boycott. “Either go and play football, or don’t go. Pretending you’re outraged by a country’s morality but then actively promoting the country is hypocritical.”
The impression left is that of a bunch of political interns schooled in the fine art of hypocrisy. It gave Qatari officials and the tournament’s organisation committee room to co-opt the players’ collaboration. Yes, some of the criticism might have been stinging, but not all of it.
A spokesman for the Qatari organising committee revealed Doha’s chosen strategy: “We commend footballers using their platforms to raise awareness for important matters. We have committed every effort to ensure that this World Cup has had a transformative impact on improving lives, especially for those involved in constructing the competition and non-competition venues we’re responsible for.”
The “health, safety, security, and dignity of every worker contributing to this World Cup” was a priority. And a number of government labour reforms had been implemented, as “acknowledged by the IL, ITUC, and numerous human rights organisations as the benchmark in the region.” Their “robust implementation” was “a global challenge, including in Australia.” From a public relations perspective, this was solid play.
In language turned inside out to justify Doha’s own malfeasant practices and “lethargy” on the issue of labour reform, the World Cup could be blessed for leaving “a legacy of progress, better practice and improving lives”. It would be one that would “live long after the final ball is kicked.”
Another legacy is more likely. The kicking of the first ball will induce a collective sporting amnesia for which the Socceroos will be complibcit, their consciousness reassured. The glitzy, environmentally depraved, humanly costly show will go on.
On October 12, 2022, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) passed a resolution rejecting the accession to Russia of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions in Ukraine.
The resolution is titled, “Territorial Integrity of Ukraine: Defending the Principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” It reads, in part:
[The UNGA] Declares that the unlawful actions of the Russian Federation with regard to the illegal so-called referendums held from 23 to 27 September 2022 in parts of the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine that, in part, are or have been under the temporary military control of the Russian Federation, and the subsequent attempted illegal annexation of these regions, have no validity under international law and do not form the basis for any alteration of the status of these regions of Ukraine…
A majority of the 193 countries of the UNGA votedIN FAVOR of the resolution. Here was the final tally:
143 In Favor
5 Against
35 Abstentions
10 Not Voting
Let’s call the votes in the last three categories: NO, ABSTENTION and NOT VOTING, or NAN for short. The tally then looks like this:
143 In Favor
50 Nan
From this result it appears the resolution won overwhelming support, just as Western media reports. But voting in the UNGA is undemocratic in the extreme. For example, Tuvalu (population 12,000), Principality of Liechtenstein (population 38,128) and China (population 1,439,323,776) each get one vote in the UNGA. 1 That is why the vote tally looks very different when measured by world population:
54.56% of world population: Nan
45.44% of world population: In Favor
If the vote were measured by population, then this resolution failed decisively. The Western press casually and routinely buries this obvious fact. But that’s the least of the deceptive reporting of the vote. When it comes to the October 12 resolution, and this year’s other UNGA resolutions condemning Russia, the press has also avoided reporting that these votes are consistently marked by the global divide of race, wealth, and position in the world economic order: the whitest, richest, most powerful and imperial countries support these resolutions, and the poorer, weaker countries of color, in general, tend not to.
As you might expect, just as with the UNGA resolutions condemning Russia on March 2 and April 7 of this year, the NAN vote includes the world’s most socialist-leaning and redistributive governments, as well as the leading anti-imperialist countries in the US crosshairs, such as China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Eritrea, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela and Viet Nam. 2
Statistics on the race/wealth divide in the March 2 and April 7 UNGA votes can be found in two articles, here and here. 3 But take just the racial split in the March 2 vote, since that result was very like the result for the October 12 vote. On March 2 the UNGA voted to condemn the Russian intervention of February 24. That condemnation won the support of only 41% of the world’s population. The racial split in the vote was plain. Although “white” countries account for roughly 14% of the world’s population they made up one-third of the vote IN FAVOR of the March 2 resolution, and only 3% of the recorded NAN vote.
Before comparing the March 2 and October 12 votes, note that whiteness is closely associated with the richest countries, as well as a central, or “core,” position in the world order, according to world-systems analysis.4 In that analysis, the “core” states of the world-system are the countries of North America and Western Europe, plus Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan and Singapore, while all other countries belong to the “periphery” or “semi-periphery” of the world-system.5
With that in mind, compare the March 2 vote to the October 12 vote. The October 12 anti-Russia resolution won slightly more support than the March 2 resolution (45% on October 12 vs. 41% on March 2). 6 Yet the breakdown of the two votes by wealth, color and core/periphery status of the countries was virtually identical.7 Which means that by population, the majority of countries of color, poorer countries, and countries of the global periphery have for eight months maintained their refusal to condemn Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
This is remarkable given the world-historic events in Ukraine. Eight months of the war have now passed, tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed, with many more severely injured and millions displaced. The Western press has been relentless in its uncritical support of the US/NATO effort in Ukraine, including near daily accounts of Russian atrocities while ignoring all reports that refute them, and ignoring as well many reports of Ukrainian atrocities and war crimes. The US and the EU have placed severe sanctions on Russia, which, curiously, seem to be harming Western Europeans and the people of the Global South more than the ostensible target.8
Most important, perhaps, for the nations of the UNGA, is that the October 12 resolution concerns the most significant events in Ukraine since February 24: the accession to Russia of Ukrainian territory. This is presumably a much more serious violation of the UN Charter than the assumed violation Russia committed with its February 24 intervention. And yet a majority of the world’s population still refuses to condemn the territorial acquisitions.
Just as notable is the opposite phenomenon: the unbroken unity of the wealthy, almost entirely white, nations of the imperial core. Every single one of these countries voted IN FAVOR of the October 12 resolution. In the face of world-shaking events stemming from the war, this privileged voting block has proved unbreakable in its animosity toward Russia.
But UNGA resolutions are not the only measure of this global divide on Russia/Ukraine. If support for the West’s sanctions regime against Russia is any indication, the split is perhaps more dramatic. As Gfoeller and Rundell wrote in Newsweek (9/15/22), “While the United States and its closest allies in Europe and Asia have imposed tough economic sanctions on Moscow, 87% of the world’s population has declined to follow us.” And note that countries agreeing to the sanctions on Russia are nearly all countries of the imperial core.
Racialized imperial relations are different than personal racism. Russia is a white country, though it is not among the rich nations and belongs to the periphery of the world-system. Japan and Singapore are rich, core countries, even though they are countries of color. Yet Russia, like the Soviet Union before it, has aligned politically with the Global South. This is especially true now, with regard to Syria, Iran, China and the Left governments of Latin America, such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. This earns Russia a special racialized status in the Western press and the global order. 9 On the other hand, Japan and Singapore have long been given a national status comparable to one that existed for some individuals in apartheid South Africa, that of “honorary whites.” Neither fact belies the racism of the global system. On the contrary, it becomes more obvious. People of the Global South seem to recognize this when they watch Russia confront the global hegemon in Europe.
And so, just as with previous UNGA votes condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine, the Western press, with maximum duplicity, continues to treat the October 12th vote as a resounding world condemnation of Russia, when, in fact, it is proof of the world majority’s refusal to condemn Russian actions in Ukraine.
Ukraine is now the tragic battlefield of the Global North, but the vote on this UNGA resolution and world rejection of sanctions against Russia reveal a deeper, global conflict drenched in the blood of centuries of imperialism and white supremacy.
Abstention on such resolutions should not be read as silence. For example, the NAN vote includes the abstention of China, which recently expressed support for Russia’s actions in Ukraine: “On Russia’s core interests and major issues of concern, China expresses its understanding and full support for Russia. On the Ukraine issue, for example, the United States and NATO are expanding directly on Russia’s doorstep, threatening Russia’s national security and the lives of Russian citizens. Given the circumstances, Russia has taken necessary measures. China understands, and we are coordinating on various aspects. I believe Russia was cornered. In this case, to protect the core interests of the country, Russia gave a resolute response.” (Li Zhanshu, chairman of China’s National People’s Congress Standing Committee, September 8, 2022).
“The UN Condemnation of Russia is Endorsed by Countries Run by the Richest, Oldest, Whitest People on Earth But Only 41% of the World’s Population” (March 28, 2022), here, here, or here; “Global Divide: 76% of Humanity (& Nearly All Poorer Nations of Color) Did Not Vote To Kick Russia Off the UN Human Rights Council” (April 25, 2022), here, here, or here.
World-systems theory puts the global wealth split into relief, dividing the nations of the world into the “core” and “periphery” of the global system. In world-systems theory the surplus value of labor flows disproportionately from the periphery to the core: “The countries of the world can be divided into two major world regions: the ‘core’ and the ‘periphery.’ The core includes major world powers and the countries that contain much of the wealth of the planet. The periphery has those countries that are not reaping the benefits of global wealth and globalization.” (Colin Stief, ThoughtCo.com, 1/21/20).
According to Salvatore Babones (2005), the core countries are: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States.
The slight difference between the March 2 and October 12 votes is accounted for by a reshuffling of the votes of five countries which voted IN FAVOR in March and NAN in October, and seven countries that voted NAN in March and IN FAVOR in October. The first group includes Djibouti, Honduras, Lesotho, Sao Tome and Principe, and Thailand. The second group includes Angola, Bangladesh, Guinea-Bissau, Iraq, Madagascar, Morocco, and Senegal.
See fn. 3.
The United Nations reported on statements at October 12 session considering the resolution: “India joined several other speakers in expressing deep worry that the people of the global South were feeling pain from a food, fuel and fertilizer shortage, and sky-high price increases, as a result of the war.”
Occasionally the animus is stated boldly. Here is Former US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on NBC’s Meet the Press in 2017: “…the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, almost genetically, [are] driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever…”
There is, these days, no shortage of blathering and entirely dangerous statements being made, and precedents being set, by Trump and his acolytes, and by the cowed political leaders of the Trumpified GOP.
But, even in an era of debased politics, we are seeing some entirely extraordinary events.
Late last month, Trump took to his Truth Social site to attack Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. So far, so normal. Except on September 30, his rant took an extra sinister turn, even by his diabolic standards. In casting his vote in the Senate (on unspecified measures) in a way the ex-president opposed, McConnell had, Trump wrote, shown that he has a “DEATH WISH.” Moreover, in an explicitly racist, albeit incoherent, attack against McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao — one of Trump’s own ex-cabinet members — Trump ranted that the Republican leader in the Senate must “immediately seek help and advise [sic] from his China loving wife, Coco Chow!”
Now, put to one side for the minute that this line makes absolutely no sense, and just consider the raw racial animus of this statement. It was the sort of bone-headed racist diatribe that, in a bygone television era, Archie Bunker might have launched. Perhaps more of the moment, it represented the sort of racist bile that has driven up violent anti-Asian hate crimes around the country since the COVID pandemic hit the U.S. in early 2020.
So, how did the GOP leadership respond to Trump whipping up his mob to attack McConnell and Chao?
McConnell and his office responded with a series of no comments, which is pretty much a cowardly par for the course for a man who enabled Trump’s escalating fanaticism throughout his four-year presidency, who said that he held Trump “morally responsible” for the January 6 insurrection but then turned around and marshaled his Senators to vote “not guilty” in Trump’s impeachment trial — thus ensuring that he has remained a loud, and menacing, presence hanging over the GOP to this day.
Most GOP senators simply headed for the hills and declined to get involved in this latest intra-party brouhaha.
And the ones who did make statements were so milquetoast in their observations that they would have maintained more dignity by staying silent. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Florida) mustered up enough courage, when asked about the “death wish” comment to say, simply, “What I want to make sure is what I can do. I can try my best to bring people together.” As for Trump’s racist attack on Chao, Scott noted, “The president likes to give people nicknames.”
It just so happens that the nicknames the Trump-troll likes to give are saturated in the nastiest, most toxic, most inflammatory of racist marinades.
Coherence and moral dignity are in perilously short supply in today’s retrograde version of the GOP. Take, for example, the allegations, published by the Daily Beast, that in 2009 Herschel Walker — at the time a football star, now the GOP’s bumbling, ban-abortion-in-all-circumstances-including-rape-and-incest, fringe candidate for U.S. Senator in Georgia — paid for a girlfriend to get an abortion.
Instead, Walker has issued a series of increasingly incoherent pronouncements on the event, including one saying that, hypothetically, had his ex-girlfriend had an abortion and had he paid for it, there would be “nothing to be ashamed of.” Which is actually, of course, true… except, according to previous statements made by Walker, abortion is equivalent to murder, and anyone who has, or facilitates, an abortion is guilty of a crime that ought to result in years behind bars.
In more normal political times, the GOP would have dropped Walker like a hot potato months ago. But these aren’t normal times. Trump backs Walker, and that’s good enough for the Trumpian base; and because it’s good enough for the Trumpies, who terrify the Mitch McConnells of the world through their ability to bring fire and fury to all who stand in their way, it’s good enough for the broader party.
Instead of denouncing Walker, GOP bigwigs continue to make excuses. My personal favorite came out of ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s mouth mid-week. “I think he is the most important Senate candidate in the country because he’ll do more to change the Senate just by the sheer presence, by his confidence, by his deep commitment to Christ. You know, he’s been through a long, tough period. He suffered a lot of concussions coming out of football.” In other words, don’t hold Walker accountable, blame the game of football for his blatant lies and dangerous ideas, and then elect him despite it all because he has God on his side.
In the wake of these cascading scandals, other candidates might have chosen to quit the political arena and cite a need to spend more time with their families. But that path would be rather awkward for Walker, since at least some of his close relatives have, in recent days, publicly denounced him.
And so, despite all the scandals, Walker is headed into the November election still a viable candidate aiming to take down Senator Warnock. And in similar fashion, despite all the egregious evidence against him, Trump continues to terrify his Grand Old Party into a degraded submission.
Back in 2016, Trump boasted that he could shoot someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and not lose the backing of his supporters. Now, six years later, Trump is whipping up a violent mob against Mitch McConnell, in much the same way as he whipped up the hangmen of January 6 against his own vice president, and the entire GOP leadership, including McConnell himself, simply have no comment.
Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid threw a wrench into the works when he declared from the United Nations General Assembly podium: “An agreement with the Palestinians, based on two states for two peoples, is the right thing for Israel’s security, for Israel’s economy and for the future of our children.”
The statement took many by surprise, including the Palestinian leadership.
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has been addressing the UNGA every September, every year, recycling the same speech about how he has fulfilled his commitments to peace and that it is Israel that needs to engage in serious negotiations toward a two-state solution.
This time, too, Abbas did his part as expected. In his latest speech, he referred to Israel’s “total impunity” and “premeditated and deliberate policies” aimed at “destroying the two-state solution”.
Lapid, like Naftali Bennet and Benjamin Netanyahu before him, was also expected to stick to the script: accusing Palestinians of terrorism and incitement, reeling against the UN’s supposed ‘bias’, and making a case of why Israel should be more invested in its own security than in a Palestinian state.
Lapid, however, did not go that route. True, he regurgitated much of the typical Israeli discourse, accusing Palestinians of “firing rockets and missiles at our children”, and the like. However, he also spoke, unexpectedly, about Israel’s desire to see a Palestinian state.
Hence, Lapid linked the theoretical Palestinian state on the condition it does not become “another terror base from which to threaten the well-being, and the very existence of Israel”.
Conditions aside, Lapid’s reference to a Palestinian state remains interesting and politically risky. Indeed, the majority of Israelis – 58 percent, according to the Israel Democracy Institute – do not support a Palestinian state. Since Israel is embarking on yet another general election – the fifth in less than four years – swimming against Israel’s dominant political current does not, initially, seem like a winning idea.
In fact, immediate condemnations of Lapid’s statement by Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked, indicate that Lapid’s UN comments will definitely be a contentious campaign issue in the coming weeks.
So, why did Lapid utter these words?
To begin with, Lapid is not serious about a Palestinian state.
Israeli leaders have used this line since the start of the so-called peace process as a way to demonstrate their willingness to engage in a political dialogue under the auspices of Washington, but without going any further. If anything, for 30 years, Tel Aviv – and Washington – waved the Palestinian state carrot before the Palestinian leadership to win time for illegal settlement expansion and to, ultimately, cite Palestinian supposed rejection, incitement and violence as real obstacles before the establishment of such a state.
Lapid’s language – on the Palestinian state becoming a “terror base” threatening “the very existence of Israel” – is entirely consistent with the typical Israeli discourse on this issue.
Moreover, Lapid aimed to upset the predictable routine at the UN, where Palestinians make their case, which is usually supported by most UN members, and where Israel goes on the defensive. By alluding to a Palestinian state – a day before Abbas made his appeal for Palestinian full UN membership – Lapid wanted to regain the initiative and appear a pro-active leader with a plan.
Though it may appear that Lapid’s statement was a bad political move within the context of the rightwing-dominated Israeli politics, this might not be the case. For years, the Left and Center in Israel have been embattled, as they appeared to have no answers to any of Israel’s external and internal problems.
Contrastingly, the Right, along with its growing alliances within the religious and ultra-nationalist camps, seemed to have the answer to everything: their answer to Palestinian demands for freedom and sovereignty was annexation. Their answer to Palestinian protests against home demolitions in occupied East Jerusalem is more home demolitions, mass-scale destruction, and widening the circle of expulsions.
Unable to stop the tidal wave of the Right, Israel’s nominally Left, like the Labor party, and Center, like Kahol Lavan, moved closer to the Right. After all, the latter’s ideas, though sinister and violent, are the only ones that seem to be gaining traction among Israeli voters.
Israel’s political dichotomy, however, grew larger, as expressed in the stalemates of four previous elections, starting in April 2019. The Right failed to manage stable coalitions, and the Left failed to catch up. Lapid and his Yesh Atid party hope to change all of this by presenting a potentially stable Center-Left coalition that can offer more than mere opposition to the Right’s ideas, visions and plans of their own.
Though a Palestinian state is hardly a popular idea among most Israelis, Lapid’s target audience is not just Israel’s Left, Center, and possibly Arab parties. Another target audience is the Biden Administration.
US President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party, which remains, at least verbally, committed to a two-state solution, are embarking on very difficult times ahead: the Mid-term November election, which could cost them dearly in the House and Senate, and the subsequent Presidential elections in 2024. Biden is keen to present his administration as that of military strength and a vision of peace and stability. Lapid’s words about a Palestinian state were meant to entice the US administration, which will likely engage with Lapid’s party, and possible coalition government in the future, as a ‘peacemaker’.
Finally, Lapid is aware of the impending transition in the Occupied Palestinian territories. As an armed Intifada is growing in the northern Occupied West Bank, PA leader Abbas, 87, will soon leave the scene. A potential successor, Hussein al-Sheikh, is particularly close to Israel’s security apparatus, thus completely mistrusted by most Palestinians.
The talk of a Palestinian state is, therefore, meant to give whomever is to follow Abbas, political leverage that would allow him to stave off an armed revolt and take Palestinians into another futile hunt in search of another political mirage.
It remains to be seen if Lapid’s strategy will pay dividends – whether it will cost him in the coming Israeli elections, or whether his words will evaporate into the dustbin of history, as did many such references by Israeli leaders in the past.
The 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly was, in many ways, similar to the 76th session and many other previous sessions: at best, a stage for rosy rhetoric that is rarely followed by tangible action or, at worse, a mere opportunity for some world leaders to score political points against their opponents.
This should surprise no one. For many years, the UN has been relegated to the role of either a cheerleader for the policy of great powers, or a timid protester of sociopolitical, economic or gender inequalities. Alas, as the Iraq war proved nearly thirty years ago, and as the Russia-Ukraine war is proving today, the UN seems the least effective party in bringing about global peace, equality and security for all.
As is often the case, voices like those of Antonio Guterres – who called for “achieving and sustaining peace” – were drowned by those with the big guns and financial means to turn the Ukraine war into a long-drawn battlefield for their own strategic reasons.
Similar to Guterres, the words of the new UN General Assembly President Csaba Kőrösi seemed least practical or, sadly, even relevant.
“Responding to humanity’s most pressing challenges demands that we work together, and that we reinvigorate inclusive, networked and effective multilateralism and focus on that which unites us”, Kőrösi said in his speech at the opening session on Tuesday, September 20.
Kőrösi’s frame of reference to what, at least for now, seems like wishful thinking, is his understanding that the UN was created out of the “ashes of war” with the intention of being a “well of solutions”.
In truth, the UN Charter was signed in June 1945 to reflect an emerging new power paradigm that resulted from World War II. The UN power structure simply confirmed the gains of the victors of that war and granted the victorious countries far greater influence through their permanent membership in the UN Security Council and veto power, than the rest of the world combined.
This was not a deviation from the historical norm. After all, the League of Nations, the predecessor of the current UN, was founded in 1920 to confirm the new geopolitical realities that resulted from World War I.
The League of Nations was scrapped as it was deemed ‘ineffective’. This, however, was not the real reason behind its dismissal. In actuality, the League’s old structure and makeup simply did not correspond to the new power formations resulting from the Second World War, where old enemies became new friends and old friends became new enemies.
Effectiveness had little to do with the switch from the League to the UN, as the latter hardly managed to seriously address or resolve major political issues, from Palestine, to Kashmir, to Sudan, Mali, Afghanistan, and numerous other conflicts, including today’s war in Ukraine.
Even the hype over the UN’s role in addressing the climate change crisis, arguably the most pressing for all of humankind, has petered out quickly. Thanks to the polarization and self-serving ‘diplomacy’ generated by the Ukraine crisis, many countries that led the way in the use of clean energy are now backtracking.
Indeed, the environmental crisis has now been moved to the back burner, to the extent that US President Joe Biden has reportedly skipped the roundtable talks on climate action, which were scheduled to take place in New York on September 21. A year ago, this would have generated much discussion and even anger among US environmentalists. Now it seems a trivial and politically inconsequential issue.
Still, despite its many contradictions, and overall failure to deliver on its promises of peace and security, the UN continues to serve a role. For the US and its western allies, it remains a stage for their political power, which they have inherited from the legacy of WWII.
However, for smaller countries – in Africa, the Middle East and much of the Global South – the UN gives them a voice, albeit barely audible, and grants them an occasional chance at relevance. This relevance, however, is temporary and ultimately intangible. After all, all the fiery, impassioned, and articulate speeches of all the leaders of the Global South combined hardly ever influenced outcomes, discouraged neocolonialism, economic exploitations, racism, military interventions or political meddling.
In an open letter on September 20 addressing world leaders, over 200 humanitarian organizations, including OXFAM and Save the Children, stated that one person is likely to be dying every four seconds as a result of the “spiraling global hunger crisis”.
This crisis is more palpable in Africa than on any other continent. Though food shortages in Africa are an ongoing challenge, many signs have already indicated that an unprecedented crisis is looming, initiated by climate change, worsened by the Covid pandemic, and further accentuated by the Ukraine war and the disruption of critical supply routes.
Despite repeated pleas by UN organizations to prioritize Africa in terms of food shipments, the opposite became true. This begs the question: If the UN does not have the means and power to provide life-saving food to starving children, isn’t it, then, time to question the very mission, structure, and mechanisms of the world’s largest organization?
True, there has been talking about urgent and long overdue UN reforms. Some want the UN to be reformed to reflect new democratic or economic realities, while others feel deserving of being permanent members of the UNSC. The West, of course, wants to keep the convenient power distribution in place as long as possible.
However, for a reformed UN to serve a noble mission and to live up to its lofty promises, the new power distribution should allocate places for all, regardless of military power or economic might. Till then, the UN will remain a sad expression of the world’s existing problems, not, in the words of Kőrösi, a “well of solutions”.
The introduction of an Israeli Mossad agent as the latest Marvel movie character crosses the line, even by Hollywood’s poor moral standards. However, the Israeli superhero, Sabra, must be understood within the rational progression of the Israelification of Hollywood, a phenomenon that is surprisingly new.
Sabra is a relatively old character, dating back to a Marvel comic, the Incredible Hulk, in 1980. On September 10, however, it was announced that the Israeli character will be included in an upcoming Marvel film, ‘Captain America: New World Order’.
Expectedly, many pro-Palestine activists in the United States and around the world fumed. It is one thing to introduce an ordinary Israeli character, with the mere aim of normalizing Israel, an unrepenting apartheid state, in the eyes of Marvel’s impressionable young audiences; but it is far more sinister to normalize a state intelligence agency, the Mossad, known for its numerous bloody assassinations, sabotage and torture.
By adding Sabra to its cast of superheroes, Marvel Studios has shown its complete disregard for the massive campaign by millions of fans around the world who, in 2017, protested the inclusion of a former Israeli soldier, Gal Gadot, as Marvel’s Wonder Woman. Gadot is a vocal supporter of the Israeli government and military.
In response to the news, many rightly highlighted Hollywood’s inherent bias, starting in the 1960’s movie, Exodus, by Otto Preminger, with Paul Newman as the lead actor, which provided pseudo-historical justification for the colonization of Palestine by the Zionists. Ever since, Israel has been elevated, celebrated and included in an ever-positive context by Hollywood, while Muslims, Arabs and Palestinians continue to be vilified.
Although Israel was represented in a positive light by Hollywood filmmakers, the Israelis themselves were quite marginal in the content creation process. Until recently, the Israel construct was mostly built on behalf of Israel, not by Israel itself. “Things began to change in 1997,” wroteBrian Schaefer in Moment Magazine. It was then that the L.A. Federation’s Entertainment Division and the Jewish Agency launched the project, the ‘Master Class’, which, “for nearly 15 years … brought countless actors, directors, producers, agents, managers and top studio and network executives to Israel, introducing many of them to the country for the first time, and taught Israelis how to pitch their projects.”
The indoctrination of American actors and filmmakers through these visits and the introduction of many Israeli actors and filmmakers to Hollywood paid dividends, leading to a major change of narrative on Israel. Instead of simply communicating Israel to American and international audiences using references to historical victimization, positive association or even humor, Israelis began to make their case through Hollywood directly. And, unlike the haphazardness of past messages – good Israel, bad Arabs – the new messages are far more sophisticated, tailored around specific ideas, and designed with full awareness of the politics of each era.
Steven Spielberg’s movie, Munich (2005), was released within the cultural context of the US invasion of Iraq as part of Washington’s so-called ‘war on terror’, where human rights were violated on a global scale. Munich was a selective ‘historical’ account of the supposedly difficult choices that Israel, namely the Mossad, had to make to fight its own ‘war on terror’. That was the era when Tel Aviv tirelessly underscored its affinity to Washington, now that both countries are purportedly victims of ‘Islamic extremists’.
Unlike Munich, the widely popular TV series Homeland was not just another pro-Israel American argument that justifies Israeli wars and violence. The series itself, one of the most racist, islamophobic shows on television, was entirely modeled after the Israeli show HaTufim – ‘Prisoners of War’ or ‘Abductees’. The writer and director of the Israeli show, Gideon Raff, has been included in the American version of the show, serving as an executive producer.
The change in the ownership of the narrative may seem superficial – as pro-Israel Holywood propaganda is being replaced by organic Israeli propaganda. However, this is not the case.
The pro-Israel agenda of the past – the romanticization that followed the creation of Israel in 1948 – did not last long. The Israeli defeat of Arab armies in 1967 – thanks to the massive US military support of Tel Aviv – replaced the image of nascent, vulnerable Israel with that of the brave Israeli army, capable of defeating several militaries at once. It was then that Israeli soldiers toured US colleges and schools talking about their heroism on the battlefield. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent massacres, like that of Sabra and Shatila, forced a rethink.
Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, Israel largely existed in Hollywood as a comic relief, from shows like Friends, Frasier and, more recently, the Big Bang Theory. References to Israel were often followed by a laugh – a clever, and effective way of linking Israel with positive, happy associations.
The ‘war on terror’, starting in 2001, coupled with the creation of the ‘Master Class’ project, allowed Israel to return to the Hollywood universe, not as an occasional reference, but as a staple, with Israeli shows, or joint US-Israeli productions, defining a whole new genre: making difficult choices to fight terrorism and ultimately save the world.
The exploitation of Israeli women on Magazine covers – for example, Maxim – was a whole different shady business, catering to a different audience. The half-naked Israeli army girls have succeeded, in the minds of many, in justifying war through sexual imagery. This genre became particularly popular following the bloody Israeli wars on Gaza, which killed thousands.
Israel’s growing influence on the Marvel movies is a combination of all of these elements: the sexualization of the supposedly strong, empowered woman, the normalization of those who carry out Israeli crimes – Gadot, the soldier, Sabra, the Mossad agent – and the direct injection of Israeli priorities as part of everyday American reality.
Yet, there is a silver lining. For decades, Israel has hidden behind false, romanticized historical notions, making its case to the US and other western public, often indirectly. The wars on Gaza, the exponential growth of the Palestinian boycott movement and the proliferation of social media have, however, forced Israel out of hiding.
The new Hollywood Israel is now a warrior, often forced to make difficult moral choices, but it is, like its American counterpart, ultimately a force for good. Whether Israel will succeed in maintaining this image will depend on several factors, including the pro-Palestinian communities’ ability to counter such falsehood and hasbara.
In March 2022, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of a “hurricane of hunger and a meltdown of the global food system” in the wake of the crisis in Ukraine.
Guterres said food, fuel and fertiliser prices were skyrocketing with supply chains being disrupted and added this is hitting the poorest the hardest and planting the seeds for political instability and unrest around the globe.
We see an abundance of food but skyrocketing prices. The issue is not food shortage but speculation on food commodities and the manipulation of an inherently flawed global food system that serves the interests of corporate agribusiness traders and suppliers of inputs at the expense of people’s needs and genuine food security.
The war in Ukraine is a geopolitical trade and energy conflict. It is largely about the US engaging in a proxy war against Russia and Europe by attempting to separate Europe from Russia and imposing sanctions on Russia to harm Europe and make it further dependent on the US.
Economist Professor Michael Hudson recently stated that ultimately the war is against Europe and Germany. The purpose of the sanctions is to prevent Europe and other allies from increasing their trade and investment with Russia and China.
Neoliberal policies since the 1980s have hollowed out the US economy. With its productive base severely weakened, the only way for the US to maintain hegemony is to undermine China and Russia and weaken Europe.
Hudson says that, beginning a year ago, Biden and the US neocons attempted to block Nord Stream 2 and all (energy) trade with Russia so that the US could monopolise it itself.
Despite the ‘green agenda’ currently being pushed, the US still relies on fossil fuel-based energy to project its power abroad. Even as Russia and China move away from the dollar, the control and pricing of oil and gas (and resulting debt) in dollars remains key to US attempts to retain hegemony.
The US knew beforehand how sanctions on Russia would play out. They would serve to divide the world into two blocks and fuel a new cold war with the US and Europe on one side with China and Russia being the two main countries on the other.
US policy makers knew Europe would be devastated by higher energy and food prices and food importing countries in the Global South would suffer due to rising costs.
It is not the first time the US has engineered a major crisis to maintain global hegemony and a spike in key commodity prices that effectively trap countries into dependency and debt.
In 2009, Andrew Gavin Marshall described how in 1973 – not long after coming off the gold standard – Henry Kissinger was integral to manipulating events in the Middle East (the Arab-Israeli war and the ‘energy crisis’). This served to continue global hegemony for the US, which had virtually bankrupted itself due to its war in Vietnam and had been threatened by the economic rise of Germany and Japan.
Kissinger helped secure huge OPEC oil price rises and thus sufficient profits for Anglo-American oil companies that had over-leveraged themselves in North Sea oil. He also cemented the petrodollar system with the Saudis and subsequently placed African nations, which had embarked on a path of (oil-based) industrialisation, on a treadmill of dependency and debt due to the spike in oil prices.
It is widely believed that the high-priced oil policy was aimed at hurting Europe, Japan and the developing world.
Today, the US is again waging a war on vast swathes of humanity, whose impoverishment is intended to ensure they remain dependent on the US and the financial institutions it uses to create dependency and indebtedness – the World Bank and IMF.
Hundreds of millions will experience (are experiencing) poverty and hunger due to US policy. These people (the ones that the US and Pfizer et al supposedly cared so much about and wanted to get a jab into each of their arms) are regarded with contempt and collateral damage in the great geopolitical game.
Contrary to what many believe, the US has not miscalculated the outcome of the sanctions placed on Russia. Michael Hudson notes energy prices are increasing, benefiting US oil companies and US balance of payments as an energy exporter. Moreover, by sanctioning Russia, the aim is to curtail Russian exports (of wheat and gas used for fertiliser production) and for agricultural commodity prices to therefore increase. This too will also benefit the US as an agricultural exporter.
This is how the US seeks to maintain dominance over other countries.
Current policies are designed to create a food and debt crisis for poorer nations especially. The US can use this debt crisis to force countries to continue privatising and selling off their public assets in order to service the debts to pay for the higher oil and food imports.
This imperialist strategy comes on the back of ‘COVID relief’ loans which have served a similar purpose. In 2021, an Oxfam review of IMF COVID-19 loans showed that 33 African countries were encouraged to pursue austerity policies. The world’s poorest countries are due to pay $43 billion in debt repayments in 2022, which could otherwise cover the costs of their food imports.
Oxfam and Development Finance International have also revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member states face public expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion over the next five years.
The closure of the world economy in March 2020 (‘lockdown’) served to trigger an unprecedented process of global indebtedness. Conditionalities mean national governments will have to capitulate to the demands of Western financial institutions. These debts are largely dollar-denominated, helping to strengthen the US dollar and US leverage over countries.
The US is creating a new world order and needs to ensure much of the Global South remains in its orbit of influence rather than ending up in the Russian and especially Chinese camp and its belt road initiative for economic prosperity.
Post-COVID, this is what the war in Ukraine, sanctions on Russia and the engineered food and energy crisis are really about.
Back in 2014, Michael Hudson stated that the US has been able to dominate most of the Global South through agriculture and control of the food supply. The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has transformed countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.
The oil sector and agribusiness have been joined at the hip as part of US geopolitical strategy.
The dominant notion of ‘food security’ promoted by global agribusiness players like Cargill, Archer Daniel Midland, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus and supported by the World Bank is based on the ability of people and nations to purchase food. It has nothing to do with self-sufficiency and everything to do with global markets and supply chains controlled by giant agribusiness players.
Along with oil, the control of global agriculture has been a linchpin of US geopolitical strategy for many decades. The Green Revolution was exported courtesy of oil-rich interests and poorer nations adopted agri-capital’s chemical- and oil-dependent model of agriculture that required loans for inputs and related infrastructure development.
It entailed trapping nations into a globalised food system that relies on export commodity mono-cropping to earn foreign exchange linked to sovereign dollar-denominated debt repayment and World Bank/IMF ‘structural adjustment’ directives. What we have seen has been the transformation of many countries from food self-sufficiency into food deficit areas.
And what we have also seen is countries being placed on commodity crop production treadmills. The need for foreign currency (US dollars) to buy oil and food entrenches the need to increase cash crop production for exports.
The World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) set out the trade regime necessary for this type of corporate dependency that masquerades as ‘global food security’.
This is explained in a July 2022 report by Navdanya International – Sowing Hunger, Reaping Profits – A Food Crisis by Design – which notes international trade laws and trade liberalisation has benefited large agribusiness and continue to piggyback off the implementation of the Green Revolution.
The report states that US lobby and trade negotiations were headed by former Cargill Investors Service CEO and Goldman Sachs executive – Dan Amstutz – who in 1988 was appointed chief negotiator for the Uruguay round of GATT by Ronald Reagan. This helped to enshrine the interests of US agribusiness into the new rules that would govern the global trade of commodities and subsequent waves of industrial agriculture expansion.
The AoA removed protection of farmers from global market prices and fluctuations. At the same time, exceptions were made for the US and the EU to continue subsidising their agriculture to the advantage of large agribusiness.
Navdanya notes:
With the removal of state tariff protections and subsidies, small farmers were left destitute. The result has been a disparity in what farmers earn for what they produce, versus what consumers pay, with farmers earning less and consumers paying more as agribusiness middlemen take the biggest cut.
‘Food security’ has led to the dismantling of food sovereignty and food self-sufficiency for the sake of global market integration and corporate power.
We need look no further than India to see this in action. The now repealed recent farm legislation in India was aimed at giving the country the ‘shock therapy’ of neoliberalism that other countries have experienced.
The ‘liberalising’ legislation was in part aimed at benefiting US agribusiness interests and trapping India into food insecurity by compelling the country to eradicate its food buffer stocks – so vital to the nation’s food security – and then bid for food on a volatile global market from agribusiness traders with its foreign reserves.
The Indian government was only prevented from following this route by the massive, year-long farmer protest that occurred.
The current crisis is also being fuelled by speculation. Navdanya cites an investigation by Lighthouse Reports and The Wire to show how speculation by investment firms, banks and hedge funds on agricultural commodities are profiting off rising food prices. Commodity future prices are no longer linked to actual supply and demand in the market but are based purely on speculation.
Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus and investment funds like Black Rock and Vanguard continue to make huge financial killings, resulting in the price of bread almost doubling in some poorer countries.
The cynical ‘solution’ promoted by global agribusiness to the current food crisis is to urge farmers to produce more and seek better yields as if the crisis is that of underproduction. It means more chemical inputs, more genetic engineering techniques and suchlike, placing more farmers in debt and trapped in dependency.
It is the same old industry lie that the world will starve without its products and requires more of them. The reality is that the world is facing hunger and rising food prices because of the system big agribusiness has instituted.
And it is the same old story – pushing out new technologies in search of a problem and then using crises as justification for their rollout while ignoring the underlying reasons for such crises.
Navdanya sets out possible solutions to the current situation based on principles of agroecology, short supply lines, food sovereignty and economic democracy – policies that have been described at length in many articles and official reports over the years.
As for fighting back against the onslaught on ordinary people’s living standards, support is gathering among the labour movement in places like the UK. Rail union leader Mick Lynch is calling for a working class movement based on solidarity and class consciousness to fight back against a billionaire class that is acutely aware of its own class interests.
For too long, ‘class’ has been absent from mainstream political discourse. It is only through organised, united protest that ordinary people will have any chance of meaningful impact against the new world order of tyrannical authoritarianism and the devastating attacks on ordinary people’s rights, livelihoods and standards of living that we are witnessing.
It was, all and all, an odd spectacle. The Ladies’ Singles victor for Wimbledon 2022 had all the credentials that would have otherwise guaranteed her barring. Being Russian-born, news outlets in Britain walked gingerly around The All England Club’s decision to ban Russian players yet permit Elena Rybakina to play. Sky News noted that, “Moscow-born Elena Rybakina, who represents Kazakhstan, has won the Wimbledon women’s singles title in a year that Russians are banned from the tournament.”
The April decision by The All England Club to ban both Russian and Belarussian players in response to the Ukraine war did not go down well with the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals) and WTA (Women’s Tennis Association). Their gruff response was to strip Wimbledon of ranking points. “It is with great regret and reluctance that we see no option but to remove ATP Ranking points from Wimbledon for 2022,” stated the ATP in May. “Our rules and agreements exist in order to protect the rights of players as a whole. Unilateral decisions of this nature, if unaddressed, set a damaging precedent for the rest of the Tour.”
For the ATP, discrimination regarding individual tournaments was “simply not viable.” The WTA followed in step. “Nearly 50 years again,” declared the body’s chairman Steve Simon, “the WTA was founded on the fundamental principle that all players have an equal opportunity to compete based on merit and without discrimination.” Individual athletes engaged in an individual sport “should not be penalised or prevented from competing solely because of their nationalities or the decisions made by the governments of their countries.”
In solidarity, a number of tennis players also opposed the measure. Serbia’s Novak Djokovic thought the decision “crazy”. Spain’s Rafael Nadal noted how it was not the fault of players as to “what happening in this moment with the war.” The decision made by the Wimbledon organisers had been taken unilaterally. “The government didn’t force them to do it.”
Rather than taking a position of stout, unflagging independence, The All England Tennis Club revealed a craven streak in response to the UK government, which had sought to “limit Russia’s global influence”. The decision regarding banning Russian and Belarussian players from Wimbledon was “the only viable decision” given its standing as “a globally renowned event and British institution”. In taking such a position, the Club members had shown they could be as political, aligned and patriotically discriminatory as any other institution claiming fairness.
The Club also claimed to be doing this for the players. “We were not prepared to take any actions which could risk the personal safety of players, or their families. We believe that requiring written declarations from individual players – and that would apply to all relevant players – as a condition of entry in the high-profile circumstances of Wimbledon would carry significant scrutiny and risk.” Would it not have been better to simply avoid such a scandalous loyalty (or, in this case, disloyalty) test from the start?
Equally implausible was the argument that the Russian regime was somehow unique in extolling the virtues of its athletes as part of its “propaganda machine”, a point that served to diminish the humanity and individual worth of the sporting figures in question.
While we can accept the notion that high profile sportspeople are often puppets of the State in question, show ponies watered, fed and even, on occasion, drugged, the decision to specifically target Russia and Belarus could just as well have extended to many other players in many other sports. A rotten government, in other words, would immediately disqualify the athlete from entering the tournament. It should have cast grave doubt on Kazakhstan, a country stacked with its own oligarchs and corruption woes. Little wonder that the entities responsible for the tennis tour were furious.
At the tournament’s end, the merits of the ban were there for all to see. The Duchess of Cambridge presented the winning trophy to a Russian-born player, the very thing the Club had sought to avoid. Tennis fans responded by lighting up the social media scene with acid scorn. In the biting assessment of tennis writer Mark Zemek, the move by the Club had been exposed “for the morally unimaginative and stupidly cruel decision it was, is, and always will be.”
Instead of heaping ridicule on the organisers, some press outlets preferred to focus on Rybakina’s switch to Kazakhstan four years ago, something done in the spirit of receiving greater monetary reward. (So much for the patriotic element.) “Her win is historic because she is the first player to represent Kazakhstan to win a Grand Slam title.”
When the press sought to sniff out any lingering Russian loyalties, Rybakina responded to the nonsense with gusto. “What does it mean for you to feel? I mean, I’m playing tennis, so for me, I’m enjoying my time here.” As for how much time she continued to spend in Moscow, Rybakina suggested with mystic obliqueness that she did not “live anywhere, to be honest.” If only that treatment had been afforded to Daniil Medvedev and his compatriots.
15 years have passed since Israel imposed a total siege on the Gaza Strip, subjecting nearly two million Palestinians to one of the longest and most cruel politically-motivated blockades in history.
The Israeli government had then justified its siege as the only way to protect Israel from Palestinian “terrorism and rocket attacks”. This remains the official Israeli line until this day. Not many Israelis – certainly not in government, media or even ordinary people – would argue that Israel today is safer than it was prior to June 2007.
It is widely understood that Israel has imposed the siege as a response to the Hamas takeover of the Strip, following a brief and violent confrontation between the two main Palestinian political rivals, Hamas, which currently rules Gaza, and Fatah, which dominates the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank.
However, the isolation of Gaza was planned years before the Hamas-Fatah clash, or even the Hamas’ legislative election victory of January 2006. Late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was determined to redeploy Israeli forces out of Gaza, years prior to these dates.
What finally culminated in the Israeli Disengagement from Gaza in August-September 2005 was proposed by Sharon in 2003, approved by his government in 2004 and finally adopted by the Knesset in February 2005.
The ‘disengagement’ was an Israeli tactic that aimed at removing a few thousand illegal Jewish settlers out of Gaza – to other illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank – while redeploying the Israeli army from crowded Gaza population centers to the border areas. This was the actual start of the Gaza siege.
The above assertion was even clear to James Wolfensohn, who was appointed by the Quartet on the Middle East as the Special Envoy for Gaza Disengagement. In 2010, he reached a similar conclusion: “Gaza had been effectively sealed off from the outside world since the Israeli disengagement … and the humanitarian and economic consequences for the Palestinian population were profound.”
The ultimate motive behind the ‘disengagement’ was not Israel’s security, or even to starve Gazans as a form of collective punishment. The latter was one natural outcome of a much more sinister political plot, as communicated by Sharon’s own senior advisor at the time, Dov Weisglass. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in October 2004, Weisglass put it plainly: “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process.” How?
“When you freeze (the peace) process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem,” according to Weisglass. Not only was this Israel’s ultimate motive behind the disengagement and subsequent siege on Gaza but, according to the seasoned Israeli politician, it was all done “with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.” The President in question here is no other than US president at the time, George W. Bush.
All of this had taken place before Palestine’s legislative elections, Hamas’ victory and the Hamas-Fatah clash. The latter merely served as a convenient justification to what had already been discussed, ‘ratified’ and implemented.
For Israel, the siege has been a political ploy, which acquired additional meaning and value as time passed. In response to the accusation that Israel was starving Palestinians in Gaza, Weisglass was very quick to muster an answer: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”
What was then understood as a facetious, albeit thoughtless statement, turned out to be actual Israeli policy, as indicated in a 2008 report, which was made available in 2012. Thanks to the Israeli human rights organization Gisha, the “redlines (for) food consumption in the Gaza Strip” – composed by the Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories – was made public. It emerged that Israel was calculating the minimum number of calories necessary to keep Gaza’s population alive, a number that is “adjusted to culture and experience” in the Strip.
The rest is history. Gaza’s suffering is absolute. 98 percent of the Strip’s water is undrinkable. Hospitals lack essential supplies and life-saving medications. Movement in and out of the Strip is practically prohibited, with minor exceptions.
Still, Israel has failed miserably in achieving any of its objectives. Tel Aviv hoped that the ‘disengagement’ would compel the international community to redefine the legal status of the Israeli occupation of Gaza. Despite Washington’s pressure, that never happened. Gaza remains part of the Occupied Palestinian Territories as defined in international law.
Even the September 2007 Israeli designation of Gaza as an “enemy entity” and a “hostile territory” changed little, except that it allowed the Israeli government to declare several devastating wars on the Strip, starting in 2008.
None of these wars have successfully served a long-term Israeli strategy. Instead, Gaza continues to fight back on a much larger scale than ever before, frustrating the calculation of Israeli leaders, as it became clear in their befuddled, disturbing language. During one of the deadliest Israeli wars on Gaza in July 2014, Israeli right-wing Knesset member, Ayelet Shaked, wrote on Facebook that the war was “not a war against terror, and not a war against extremists, and not even a war against the Palestinian Authority.” Instead, according to Shaked, who a year later became Israel’s Minister of Justice, “… is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people.”
In the final analysis, the governments of Sharon, Tzipi Livni, Ehud Olmert, Benjamin Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett failed to isolate Gaza from the greater Palestinian body, break the will of the Strip or ensure Israeli security at the expense of Palestinians.
Moreover, Israel has fallen victim to its own hubris. While prolonging the siege will achieve no short or long-term strategic value, lifting the siege, from Israel’s viewpoint, would be tantamount to an admission of defeat – and could empower Palestinians in the West Bank to emulate the Gaza model. This lack of certainty further accentuates the political crisis and lack of strategic vision that continued to define all Israeli governments for nearly two decades.
Inevitably, Israel’s political experiment in Gaza has backfired, and the only way out is for the Gaza siege to be completely lifted and, this time, for good.
(@OnlinePalEng) 
