A Republican senator has sparked outrage after he spewed Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism at an Arab American witness during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about rising hate crimes across the U.S. on Tuesday. In the exchange between Sen. John Kennedy (Louisiana) and Arab American Institute Executive Director Maya Berry, the Republican badgered Berry, parroting much of the same racist…
Palestine Action has revealed that the Labour government’s attorney general, Richard Hermer, personally signed off on the terrorism charges the state is bringing against the group’s co-founder Richard Barnard.
Palestine Action: terror charges signed off by Labour government
Barnard, Palestine Action co-founder, appeared for a plea hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court on Wednesday 18 September. It was over three charges relating to two speeches.
After the hearing, Palestine Action revealed that Labour’s attorney general Hermer approved the charges against Barnard:
At Richard Barnard's court hearing, the prosecution confirmed that Labour's Attorney General consented to the terrorism charge.
Palestine Action's co-founder will next appear at court on October 4th at the Old Bailey, London. pic.twitter.com/u6qDqSL2LU
Cops first arrested Barnard for the accusations he has been charged on 9 November 2023.
This was four days before he was due to begin trial at Snaresbrook Crown Court as part of Palestine Action’s ‘Elbit Eight’. During that trial, the state accused him of several offences. The court acquitted him of three of them, including a charge of encouraging criminal damage.
Authorities previously stopped him under Schedule 7 counter-terrorism powers in November 2020 alongside fellow activist Huda Ammori.
Charges
Palestine Action co-founder Barnard’s charges this time were first authorised by director of public prosecutions Stephen Parkinson. However, for the terror-related charges, the government had to intervene. They are as follows:
On 8 October 2023 Richard Loxton Barnard did an act capable of encouraging the commission of an offence, namely criminal damage, and intended to encourage its commission contrary to section 44 Serious Crime Act 2007.
On 8 October 2023, Richard Loxton Barnard expressed an opinion or belief that was supportive of a proscribed organisation, namely Hamas, being reckless as to whether it encouraged support of that organisation contrary to section 12(1A) of the Terrorism Act 2000.
On 11 October 2023 Richard Loxton Barnard did an act capable of encouraging the commission of an offence, namely criminal damage, and intended to encourage its commission contrary to section 44 Serious Crime Act 2007.
His charges relate to speeches during a Manchester protest on 8 October and in Bradford on 11 October. The decision to charge came after 10 activists from Palestine Action were detained without charge for seven days under the Terrorism Act, following an action which cost Israel’s biggest weapons producer, Elbit Systems, over £1million in damages.
‘We will not stop’
Outside court, Palestine Action co-founder Ammori said that both her and Barnard had previously been acquitted of the same charge last year by a jury. She said:
It’s a very vindictive charge. It’s one that has been spurred on by a Zionist campaign, an adoption campaign against Richard and Palestine Action. But I also want to remind everyone that we have 16 political prisoners.
16 people from Palestine Action are in prison for trying to stop a genocide. The Filton Ten were held under the Terrorism Act and interrogated day after day, whilst being held in solitary confinement in this country for taking action against Elbit Systems.
They are wielding counter-terrorism powers in a bid to protect Israel’s weapons trade. And they are doing it because they know Palestine Action is a threat to the companies arming genocide.
But Palestine Action will not stop. We will not give in. We will not surrender. And Elbit’s days in this country are numbered. And this trial and this prosecution proves that.
Palestine Action co-founder speaks out against the state's attempt to intimidate our movement pic.twitter.com/qA5ofmMp7G
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Sep. 18, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Several news outlets confirmed late Tuesday what was widely suspected: Israel’s military and intelligence services were behind the explosions of pagers recently purchased by the Lebanese political party and militant group Hezbollah.
The explosions, reportedly set off earlier Tuesday by a message that appeared as if it was from Hezbollah’s leadership, killed at least 11 people—including an 8-year-old girl—and wounded thousands more.
Citing both an unnamed former Israeli official with knowledge of the operation and an anonymous U.S. official, Axiosreported that “Israeli intelligence services planned to use the booby-trapped pagers it managed to ‘plant’ in Hezbollah’s ranks as a surprise opening blow in an all-out war to try to cripple Hezbollah.”
“But in recent days, Israeli leaders became concerned that Hezbollah might discover the pagers,” the outlet continued. “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his top ministers, and the heads of the Israel Defense Forces and the intelligence agencies decided to use the system now rather than take the risk of it being detected by Hezbollah, a U.S. official said.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department publicly denied that the Biden administration was involved in the attack or aware of the operation in advance.
Heidi Matthews, an associate professor at the Osgoode Hall Law School of York University, wrote Tuesday that “each explosion constitutes an indiscriminate attack,” pointing to video footage of a pager detonating in a crowded market.
“Under these circumstances,” Matthews added, “this is an act of terror.”
The New York Timesreported Tuesday that Hezbollah ordered thousands of pagers from the Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo, but the company denied making the devices. According to the Times, which cited unnamed officials, Israeli operatives “tampered with” the devices “before they reached Lebanon,” planting in them “as little as one to two ounces” of explosive material and a switch “that could be triggered remotely to detonate the explosives.”
Heightening fears of a broader conflict, Hezbollah pledged Tuesday to retaliate against Israel over the attack, which reportedly injured Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon as well as Hezbollah fighters and medics.
The Guardian‘s Andrew Roth noted Tuesday that just “a day before the coordinated sabotage, Amos Hochstein, a senior adviser to [U.S. President] Joe Biden, was in Israel urging Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials against an escalation in Lebanon.”
Netanyahu has repeatedly sabotaged cease-fire negotiations with hardline demands in recent weeks as the Israeli military—heavily armed by the U.S.—continues to assail the Gaza Strip.
“While U.S. officials have said that the basis for peace along Israel’s northern boundary with Lebanon would come through a cease-fire in Gaza, that agreement has proven elusive and appears no closer to fruition,” Roth wrote Tuesday. “The White House had hoped that a period of quiet around Israel would allow for cease-fire negotiators to achieve a breakthrough, as intermediaries shuttle between Hamas and Israel to thread the needle of both sides’ complex demands regarding a hostage exchange and territorial claims.”
“That period of quiet has now been shattered with a breathtaking act of subterfuge and Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate,” Roth added.
Israel has intensified its siege of Gaza. 15 aid organisations have delivered a joint report that Israel is blocking 83% of food aid deliveries to the enclave. Israel has long been restricting aid deliveries, but now it has gotten worse.
Palestinians in Gaza need at least 500-600 trucks to enter daily. But in August Israel only allowed an average of 69 trucks per day, according to the organisations – which include Oxfam, Save the Children, ActionAid, and CARE International.
This has resulted in people eating just one meal every two days, the entire 2.2m population being hungry, and half a million at risk of starvation.
Israel’s actions “beyond catastrophic”
Jolien Veldwijik, CARE Country Director in the West Bank and Gaza, said:
The situation was intolerable long before last October’s escalation and is beyond catastrophic now. Over 11 months, we have reached shocking levels of conflict, displacement, disease and hunger. Yet, aid is still not getting in, and humanitarian workers are risking their lives to do their jobs while attacks and violations of international law intensify. Aid, which is urgently required for 2.2 million people at risk of dying in the coming weeks and months, should never be politicised. We demand an immediate and sustained ceasefire, and the free flow of humanitarian aid into and throughout Gaza.
The group points out that over 50,000 children under five years old may need malnutrition treatment by December.
The blockade does not only impact food, but also other essentials like medicine, emergency shelter and hygiene items. The organisations, which work on the ground in Gaza, report that 65% of necessary insulin and half the required blood supply is not available.
Israel had destroyed 60% of the homes in Gaza by January, yet the blockade has only allowed 25,000 tents to enter since May, the aid group further stated.
A UN impact snapshot from 11 September, meanwhile, reports that Israel has displaced 90% of Gaza and destroyed the majority of hospitals, which are now out of service, with only 17 out of 36 partially functional.
It’s more than the siege that is obstructing aid
The 15 aid organisations also noted the ways Israel obstructs their work:
The denial of safety, with more than 40,000 Palestinians and nearly 300 aid workers killed since last October; the sharp tightening of a 17-year blockade to a full siege, which prevents aid from entering Gaza; delays and denials which restrict the movement of aid around Gaza; tightly restrictive and unpredictable control of imports; the destruction of public infrastructure such as schools and hospitals; and the displacement of civilians and humanitarian workers
In addition, the group issued demands for governments, including an “immediate and lasting ceasefire”, an “arms embargo”, and “compliance with the International Court of Justice’s findings” including “its advisory opinion to end the occupation of Palestinian territory”.
At least 12 people were killed and over 2,800 people were injured Tuesday in Lebanon when electronic pagers used by many members of Hezbollah — who had switched to the older technology over concerns of mobile phones’ vulnerability to security breaches — exploded simultaneously across the country in a coordinated attack on the group. Individual explosions occurred in supermarkets, cafes, houses and in other public places. Many of the injuries were sustained by civilians who were not carrying the pagers themselves, including at least two children who died from their wounds. According to a Reuters report, Israel’s Mossad spy agency had managed to plant explosive material in a batch of pagers bought in recent months by Hezbollah, which has vowed to retaliate, deepening the risks of a broader regional war. We discuss the attack with three guests: Beirut-based journalist Mohamad Kleit, Human Rights Watch’s Ramzi Kaiss and Palestinian American journalist Rami Khouri. Kaiss says the “indiscriminate attack” on the Lebanese population — which Kleit additionally describes as “terrorist” — is “unlawful under the rules of war.” “What the Israeli attack using the pagers did was completely throw out the rulebook,” says Khouri, as eyes are on the region in preparation for another possible Israeli escalation.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Israeli officials are denying visas to humanitarian groups and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has warned — an attempt not only to disrupt aid in Gaza, but also to undermine Palestinians’ refugee status and their right to return to their homeland. On Tuesday, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said that the…
Israel infiltrated a supply chain to cause the simultaneous explosion of hundreds of Hezbollah pagers. That’s the verdict of some analysts. Israel killed at least nine people and wounded around 2,800, including the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, when the pagers exploded across the country in an unprecedented simultaneous attack.
It all begs the question: are we allowed to call Israel a terrorist state, yet?
Israel: setting off bombs in other countries
With Hezbollah appearing to prefer the use of pagers for internal communications over smartphones for security reasons, analysts said it appeared Israel had corrupted the devices before delivery, allowing them to explode at a specific time.
A source close to Hezbollah, asking not to be identified, told AFP that:
the pagers that exploded concern a shipment recently imported by Hezbollah of 1,000 devices… which appear to have been sabotaged at source.
Brussels-based military and security analyst Elijah Magnier said:
For Israel to embed an explosive trigger within the new batch of pagers, they would have likely needed access to the supply chain of these devices. Israeli intelligence has infiltrated the production process, adding an explosive component and remote triggering mechanism into the pagers without raising suspicion.
This, he said, raised the prospect the third party which sold the devices could have been an “intelligence front” set up by Israel for the purpose.
Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute said:
This was more than lithium batteries being forced into override. A small plastic explosive was almost certainly concealed alongside the battery, for remote detonation via a call or page.
“Mossad infiltrated the supply chain,” he concluded, referring to Israel’s intelligence agency. The Wall Street Journal cited people familiar with the matter as saying the affected pagers were from a new shipment that the group received in recent days.
Chaos in Lebanon as pagers explode
The countless explosions caused chaos across Lebanon.
At one hospital in Beirut’s southern suburbs, an AFP correspondent saw people being treated in a car park on thin mattresses, with medical gloves on the ground and ambulance stretchers covered in blood.
At another hospital in the area, the correspondent saw one person wounded in the face, eye and hand, and another on the side of his waist, with a third person being treated in a car.
Musa, a resident of Beirut’s southern suburbs requesting to be identified only by his first name, said:
In all my life I’ve never seen someone walking on the street… and then explode. My wife and I were going to the doctor, I found people lying on the ground in front of me.
People didn’t know what was happening.
One witness, requesting anonymity, told AFP he saw a Hezbollah member’s pager explode immediately after he received a message on the device.
Dubai-based analyst Riad Kahwaji said that Israel had taken advantage of Hezbollah’s move away from smartphones to pagers:
Without a doubt, one of the factories it (Israel) owns manufactured and shipped these explosive devices that exploded today.
Can we call Israel a terrorist state, yet?
So, an organised group corrupts the supply chain of its enemy’s communications technology; turns the devices into bombs, and then denotates them in busy public places in a foreign country. It seemingly has the aim of striking fear into both the government and the public. Yet it and the other country are not officially at war.
Meanwhile, the terrorist group’s members celebrate the atrocity openly – with no concern for the non-combatants the bombings had killed or injured:
Breaking: Tens of Hezbollah communication devices are exploding during the past hour. Initial reports state that over one hundred Hezbollah terrorists already injured.
It’s reported that possibly over a thousand Hezbollah terrorists were killed or injured when a cyberattack on their secure cellphones and pagers caused them to explode.
Top United Nations human rights experts have condemned Western nations for supporting Israel’s devastating war on Gaza, urging the world to stop an unfolding genocide in Palestine. This comes as the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, is accusing Israel in a new report of carrying out a deliberate starvation campaign in Gaza. “What we are witnessing in Gaza is the…
Once upon a time a group of Marxist vegan scientists weren’t happy with the way the world was going.
They noted that most USians more easily imagined the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
They also noted that the capybara, a large rodent found in South America, seemed to get along very well with all other creatures, sleeping and playing with turtles, cats, rats, rabbits, humans, monkeys, birds, dogs, sometimes even caimans.
So these Marxist vegan scientists, building on the work of Harry Harlow’s infamous maternal deprivation experiments on baby rhesus monkeys and Martin Seligman’s dog-shocking experiments at Penn, applied for a government grant to make capybaras turn against other animals and other animals to hate the capybaras. The National Institutes of Health immediately recognized how useful this would be in US-instigated color revolutions and funded the proposal with $100 million.
However, the Marxist vegan scientists’ real covert plan was to create the “capyvax,” a genetically-engineered treatment that had a happy-sounding name which would make the inoculated humans become more capybara-like and less anti-social and quarrelsome.
So the Marxist vegan scientists traveled to a capybara sanctuary in Big Sur California to obtain hair and fecal samples – it was the old Esalen – where the capybaras played and mated in the hot tubs on cliffs fifty feet above the Pacific Ocean, listening to the waves and wind roar every day and night. (Capybaras only mate in water.)
In no time at all the capyvax was created and ready to be tested. One of the scientists said:
“To be valid, we have to test this on the most violent, hideous anti-social people we can find.”
“You’re not proposing to use prisoners are you?”
“Of course not. Here’s the plan: We’re going to use the grant money to go into all the homeless encampments in Los Angeles –”
“Wait a minute! That’s even more depraved! You’d be making the most disenfranchised members of the working class get even more used to this diabolical system! This is one step away from… from therapy!”
“Will you let me finish! Jesus, Frankie says relax! We’re going to go into the homeless encampments to find all the homeless vets – there will be former army snipers among them. We’re going to make these people rich with only a fraction of the grant money, equip them with dart guns and then set about inoculating the most depraved people walking the planet.”
“OK. But who?”
“We need a diverse, scientifically valid sample population of Nazis – we need the Mississippi K Street delta bluesman Antony Blinken, the pasty blood-sucked actually already dead Jake Sullivan, the rancid Victoria Nuland, the creepy clown John Wayne Gacy Kirby, the blood sucking Matthew Miller (see his happy meal Sullivan above), the box-checked triple threat Karine Jean-Pierre and the least ahimsa-like Indian on the planet and future Breezewood, Pennsylvania Super 8 proprietor, Vedant Patel. We need the master planners like Blinken and Nuland but we also need the little Eichmans and Streichers like Patel, KJP, Count Smirkula, Kirby and members of US state media – like New York Times reporters.”
“Isn’t The New York Times Israeli state media?”
“Whatever. Don’t nitpick. These parasites are all war mongering genocide-consent-manufacturing media soldiers. All that matters is that they aren’t reporters. They aren’t journalists.”
Within weeks of being darted Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland quit their jobs and began volunteering with Food Not Bombs. (“What a novel idea!” said Blinken. “Previously, I would have started a 501 (c) (3) called Hellfire Missiles Not Food!”) Similar altruistic things happened with all the other Nazi functionaries. They stopped wasting their lives, humiliating and dehumanizing themselves every day with laughable lies and brazen hypocrisies. They stopped being repulsive loathsome abject disgraces to their families, friends and country.
There were physical changes too. Blinken, Nuland and Count Smirkula, for example, became less rat-like as their snouts grew out and more squarish. They still spoke English and walked on their hind legs but they grew thick hairy coats that covered their bodies and, over time, they shed their clothes altogether, leading Blinken to defend his bare ass – instead of his bare-ass lies – by performing an updated version of Dylan’s “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”: “Even the real president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked!”
As soon as the worlds’ intelligence agencies saw Blinken and Nuland making sun bread and passing out vegan burritos to homeless people they knew something was up in the US.
Russian spies quickly tracked down the Marxist vegan developers of the capyvax and approached them about selling the formula. The scientists were true US patriots, however, and held firm, saying, “For season tickets to the Bolshoi, decent lifetime healthcare for our babushkas, dachas in Sochi and a Chinese commitment to fix the 405, it’s yours.”
“Done, comrade veganskya.”
Vladimir Putin confabbed with China’s President Xi and said, “You know what this means in the end?”
“Yes, happybaras of the world unite!”
Even though the vote-harder US working class wasn’t aware of this, the rest of the world understood that nothing positive was able to arise from within the US and Israel. These entities were no longer capable of self-correcting even to save themselves. The last line of defense against barbarism – the working class majority – was now a corrupt, obedient, cowardly, defeated, kiss up, kick down, empathy-less entity. These were Nazi societies of longstanding, Israel for over seven decades and the US since the early 1970s and for US blacks and indigenous peoples, centuries. Every day was 1940 Germany and past the point of no return. Change would have to be imposed on the US and Israel from the outside.
So Russia quickly sent planeloads of new-fangled cluster munitions to Iran – basically paintballs that released aerosolized versions of the capyvax and, because it was the hard case of Israel, LSD was added. These capyvax/window pane speed balls were trucked from Iran to Syria and into Lebanon for Hezbollah who launched them on occupied Palestine.
Israel, of course, was still holding raves twenty feet from their new concentration camps in the West Bank – but always in that ironic Israeli post-apocalyptic Hunger Games way, like their soldiers wearing Gaza women’s panties and bras after summarily executing them in their homes, labeling one music festival the Shlomotown Massacre featuring all you can drink Kha-kha-kha-mas Kool Aid. Bibi Netanyahoo, wearing both a kippah and a headband, proclaimed from the nosh pit, “Israel is safe! Israel is back!”
However, Hebrew-speaking Hezbollah operatives had finished the northern section of the Gaza Metro underneath all of Israel, infiltrated the rave and spiked the Kool Aid. Bibi, taking an Area C-size ladleful, off-handedly said, “Oh, wow, the colors. It’s so amazing. My fellow Israelis, my comets, my bon ami, my ethnic cleansers, maybe we should all go to Miami and be there now with my son, Yair. Don’t bogart those knish edibles, man!”
Then ravers yelled out: “Right on!” “It’s all coming together!” “I see everything now all at once!” “Yes! The past, the present, the future, that radioactive planet-poisoner Herzl!” “The Zio-tonium half-life of 76 years!” “Those true antisemites behind Balfour!” “Those whack jobs so attached to our ancient Biblical homeland that they originally wanted to put us in Madagascar and Suriname!” “El Al hell yeah!” “We haven’t had this spirit here since 1969!” “No, man, my trip is turning bad – are we in the Zionist roach motel…?”
Very soon it became apparent that something was happening all over the world. Happybaras were here, there and everywhere. A new slogan went viral: “Four legs great – two legs not so bad!”
As humans morphed into happybaras, they had to learn the ways of the original capybaras. For instance, people were mating, walking on two legs and speaking their native tongues as always but they now were completely covered with body hair. As one wag said about the mass adoption of body hair and “nudity”: “In the old days, sonny, all I can say is – thank God for clothes! Humans were so out of shape and ugly at nearly all stages of development. It was blind shithouse luck or really hard work to get any of them aesthetically appealing.”
Sports teams were now proud to be linked to vegan animals like capybaras and manatees – witness the newly-named Chicago Capybearas, the Dallas Seacow Boys and the Cleveland Cavies (nee Cavaliers) who kept their Cavs nickname.
One crappy thing that people had trouble with is that capybaras are auto coprophagous. Some people excitedly thought this was a new form of sex and others had no idea what it was though a few of them had been doing it for years. Auto coprophagous means that capybaras eat their own feces.
Like the protein, iron, B-12 and manhood panics, a general alarm sounded across US social media. The Marxist vegan scientists parried back with, “Look, capitalism has been making all of us eat shit for our entire lives. Is this a back road, a bridge too far for a peaceful and just world? We have to evolve. We humans haven’t stepped up to the “plate,” so to speak, and learned how to manage all the waste we create. Our new transition to happybarahood is going to be a boon to the planet. This is more symbolic, more asspirational than literal. It gets us in the mindset of looking closer at what we produce and where it goes.”
As time passed the savvy cavies cum happybaras assumed prominent positions in waste management, international diplomacy and mediation, replacing lawyers, police and judges. Crime disappeared. Raises and promotions ceased being based on appearance. It was all about the content of the cavy. The capybaras’ practice of alloparenting (it takes a village) became widely accepted. Although capybaras practice the Bumble mating system (females choose males), once male humans learned that there would eventually be twice as many female happybaras for every male happybara they started embracing their inner nutria.
Capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) San Martin River, Beni Department of Bolivia.
Eventually the original capybaras’ barks, chirps, grunts, and purrs became widely influential and understood throughout the world, especially their ability to whistle through their noses. As my high school Spanish teacher once told us, “Class, are you now getting an idea how dumb and difficult the English language is? All these words that sound the same but are spelled differently or look the same but are pronounced differently or mean different things. Compound adjectives and possessive plurals are always a matter of luck. Is a misplaced modifier a big deal really? It’s ridiculous. If you go to a foreign country you need to learn how to say two things: One, how much does it cost? And two, where’s the bathroom? Don’t get it twisted, it’s always socialism or extinction and dinero y bano.” Oh, if she could have lived to see the day when a bunch of evolved commie happybaras didn’t care about either one!
The capyvax and happybaras ushered in a lazy new world with the capybara replacing the eagle as the US national symbol. The US national motto became what author Henry Miller always wanted it to be: Where Nothing Happens – goof off, stop working so hard, visit friends, there’s nothing noble about money, conquering and wage slavery.
And that, children, is how the world became a peaceful and just place.
There was one disturbing thing that happened. A minor internet grifter who once publicly said he wanted to have sex with a horse went to Brazil to have sex with a 100% old-style she/her capybara. He was turned down over 500 times by both male and female capybaras, three anacondas, two peccary swingers and an entire school of piranhas. But there was one blind mentally-challenged underage female orphaned capybara that he succeeded in mating with. Disappointingly, generations of capybaras began appearing that left 5% tips at restaurants, drove slowly in the passing lane, argued about invisible Gods and were soon ostracized by all other creatures. Huh.
Thousands have been injured and at least nine killed after handheld devices exploded en masse across Lebanon, and in some parts of Syria, in an apparent attack on Tuesday. According to Lebanon’s health minister, Firas al-Abyad, at least 2,750 people have been wounded, while more than 200 are in critical condition. That count was preliminary, as the reported toll was rising rapidly shortly…
The Israeli military has admitted that one of its own airstrikes is likely responsible for killing three Israeli captives whose bodies were recovered from Gaza last year, confirming what Hamas officials had said about the hostages’ deaths at the time. In a release on Sunday, the Israeli military said that an investigation into the deaths of the three captives found there was a “high…
German news media outlets have called on Israel to grant them access to genocide-ravaged Gaza, saying that the war-criminal state’s “almost complete exclusion of international media… is unprecedented in recent history”.
Israel: hiding its war crimes in Gaza
“After almost a year of war, we call on the Israeli government: allow us to enter the Gaza Strip,” a group of newspapers, agencies and broadcasters wrote in an open letter.
They also urged Egypt to permit them entry to the widely devastated Palestinian territory via the Rafah border crossing in the south of the Gaza Strip.
The media organisations wrote that:
Anyone who makes independent reporting on this war impossible is damaging their own credibility. Anyone who prohibits us from working in the Gaza Strip is creating the conditions for human rights to be violated.
The open letter was addressed to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and had been delivered on Monday 16 September, they said.
Signatories included editors and reporters from Der Spiegel, Die Welt, public broadcasters ARD and ZDF, and the German Journalists Association.
They said they have decades of experience in conflict reporting and wrote:
We know the risk. We are prepared to take it. Grant us access to the Gaza Strip. Let us work, in the interest of everyone.
Israel’s genocide has killed at least 41,226 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, which does not provide a breakdown of civilian and militant deaths.
Crickets from the UK media
So far, UK media organisations have done nothing similar to its German counterparts. In fact, many outlets have been complicit in Israel’s genocide and war crimes, by promoting anti-Palestinian narratives and bias.
However, individual journalists and global organisations did previously take action.
A petition appeal by the Foreign Press Association filed with the Israeli Supreme Court on 19 December has been rejected over “security concerns.” The National Union of Journalists has joined the International Federation of Journalists in condemning the ruling, noting its significant harm on press freedom.
The letter is signed by correspondents and presenters for broadcasters with UK bases, including the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen, Lyse Doucet and Mishal Husain.
It says the need for comprehensive on-the-ground reporting is “imperative”…
In the letter, external, the 55 journalists write that “foreign reporters are still being denied access to the territory, outside of the rare and escorted trips with the Israeli military”.
Top United Nations human rights experts have condemned Western nations for supporting Israel’s devastating war on Gaza, urging the world to stop an unfolding genocide in Palestine. This comes as the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, is accusing Israel in a new report of carrying out a deliberate starvation campaign in Gaza. “What we are witnessing in Gaza is the starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians. We’ve never seen a civilian population made to go hungry so quickly and so completely,” says Fakhri, who joins us from Brazil. We also speak with Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, who says Israel’s assault on Gaza is part of a larger plan of “getting as much control as possible over maximum land with minimum Palestinian people.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
A moment of prayer and meditation at the opening of the UN General Assembly, September 10, 2024 (Photo credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe)
On September 18th, the UN General Assembly is scheduled to debate and vote on a resolution calling on Israel to end “its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” within six months. Given that the General Assembly, unlike the exclusive 15-member UN Security Council, allows all UN members to vote and there is no veto in the General Assembly, this is an opportunity for the world community to clearly express its opposition to Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine.
If Israel predictably fails to heed a General Assembly resolution calling on it to withdraw its occupation forces and settlers from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the United States then vetoes or threatens to veto a Security Council resolution to enforce the ICJ ruling, then the General Assembly could go a step further.
It could convene an Emergency Session to take up what is called a Uniting For Peace resolution, which could call for an arms embargo, an economic boycott or other UN sanctions against Israel – or even call for actions against the United States. Uniting for Peace resolutions have only been passed by the General Assembly five times since the procedure was first adopted in 1950.
The September 18 resolution comes in response to an historic ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on July 19, which found that “Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the regime associated with them, have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law.”
The court ruled that Israel’s obligations under international law include “the evacuation of all settlers from existing settlements” and the payment of restitution to all who have been harmed by its illegal occupation. The passage of the General Assembly resolution by a large majority of members would demonstrate that countries all over the world support the ICJ ruling, and would be a small but important first step toward ensuring that Israel must live up to those obligations.
Israel’s President Netanyahu cavalierly dismissed the court ruling with a claim that, “The Jewish nation cannot be an occupier in its own land.” This is exactly the position that the court had rejected, ruling that Israel’s 1967 military invasion and occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories did not give it the right to settle its own people there, annex those territories, or make them part of Israel.
While Israel used its hotly disputed account of the October 7th events as a pretext to declare open season for the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, Israeli forces in the West Bank and East Jerusalem used it as a pretext to distribute assault rifles and other military-grade weapons to illegal Israeli settlers and unleash a new wave of violence there, too.
Armed settlers immediately started seizing more Palestinian land and shooting Palestinians. Israeli occupation forces either stood by and watched or joined in the violence, but did not intervene to defend Palestinians or hold their Israeli attackers accountable.
Since last October, occupation forces and armed settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have now killed at least 700 people, including 159 children.
The escalation of violence and land seizures has been so flagrant that even the U.S. and European governments have felt obligated to impose sanctions on a small number of violent settlers and their organizations.
In Gaza, the Israeli military has been murdering Palestinians day after day for the past 11 months. The Palestinian Health Ministry has counted over 41,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, but with the destruction of the hospitals that it relies on to identify and count the dead, this is now only a partial death toll. Medical researchers estimate that the total number of deaths in Gaza from the direct and indirect results of Israeli actions will be in the hundreds of thousands, even if the massacre were to end soon.
Israel and the United States are undoubtedly more and more isolated as a result of their roles in this genocide. Whether the United States can still coerce or browbeat a few of its traditional allies into rejecting or abstaining from the General Assembly resolution on September 18 will be a test of its residual “soft power.”
President Biden can claim to be exercising a certain kind of international leadership, but it is not the kind of leadership that any American can be proud of. The United States has muscled its way into a pivotal role in the ceasefire negotiations begun by Qatar and Egypt, and it has used that position to skillfully and repeatedly undermine any chance of a ceasefire, the release of hostages or an end to the genocide.
By failing to use any of its substantial leverage to pressure Israel, and disingenuously blaming Hamas for every failure in the negotiations, U.S. officials are ensuring that the genocide will continue for as long as they and and their Israeli allies want, while many Americans remain confused about their own government’s responsibility for the continuing bloodshed.
This is a continuation of the strategy by which the United States has stymied and prevented peace since 1967, falsely posing as an honest broker, while, in fact, remaining Israel’s staunchest ally and the critical diplomatic obstacle to a free Palestine.
In addition to cynically undermining any chance of a ceasefire, the United States has injected itself into debates over the future of Gaza, promoting the idea that a post-war government could be led by the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, which many Palestinians view as hopelessly corrupt and compromised by subservience to Israel and the United States.
China has taken a more constructive approach to resolving differences between Palestinian political groupings. It invited Hamas, Fatah and 12 other Palestinian groups to a three-day meeting in Beijing in July, where they all agreed to a “national unity” plan to form a post-war “interim national reconciliation government,” which would oversee relief and rebuilding in Gaza and organize a national Palestinian election to seat a new elected government.
Mustafa Barghouti, the secretary-general of the political movement called the Palestinian National Initiative, hailed the Beijing Declaration as going “much further” than previous reconciliation efforts, and said that the plan for a unity government “blocks Israeli efforts to create some kind of collaborative structure against Palestinian interests.” China has also called for an international peace conference to try to end the war.
As the world comes together in the General Assembly on September 18, it faces both a serious challenge and an unprecedented opportunity. Each time the General Assembly has met in recent years, a succession of leaders from the Global South has risen to lament the breakdown of the peaceful and just international order that the UN is supposed to represent, from the failure to end the war in Ukraine to inaction against the climate crisis to the persistence of neocolonialism in Africa.
Perhaps no crisis more clearly embodies the failure of the UN and the international system than the 57-year-old Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories it invaded in 1967. At the same time that the United States has armed Israel to the teeth, it has vetoed 46 UN Security Council resolutions that either required Israel to comply with international law, called for an end to the occupation or for Palestinian statehood, or held Israel accountable for war crimes or illegal settlement building.
The ability of one Permanent Member of the Security Council to use its veto to block the rule of international law and the will of the rest of the world has always been widely recognized as the fatal flaw in the existing structure of the UN system.
When this structure was first announced in 1945, French writer Albert Camus wrote in Combat, the French Resistance newspaper he edited, that the veto would “effectively put an end to any idea of international democracy… The Five would thus retain forever the freedom of maneuver that would be forever denied the others.”
The General Assembly and the Security Council have debated a series of resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and each debate has pitted the United States, Israel, and occasionally the United Kingdom or another U.S. ally, against the voices of the rest of the world calling in unison for peace in Gaza.
Of the UN’s 193 nations, 145 have now recognized Palestine as a sovereign nation comprising Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and even more countries have voted for resolutions to end the occupation, prohibit Israeli settlements and support Palestinian self-determination and human rights.
For many decades, the United States’ unique position of unconditional support for Israel has been a critical factor in enabling Israeli war crimes and prolonging the intolerable plight of the Palestinian people.
In the crisis in Gaza, the U.S. military alliance with Israel involves the U.S. directly in the crime of genocide, as the United States provides the warplanes and bombs that are killing the largest numbers of Palestinians and literally destroying Gaza. The United States also deploys military liaison officers to assist Israel in planning its operations, special operations forces to provide intelligence and satellite communications, and trainers and technicians to teach Israeli forces to use and maintain new American weapons, such as F-35 warplanes.
The supply chain for the U.S. arsenal of genocide criss-crosses America, from weapons factories to military bases to procurement offices at the Pentagon and Central Command in Tampa. It feeds plane loads of weapons flying to military bases in Israel, from where these endless tons of steel and high explosives rain down on Gaza to shatter buildings, flesh and bones.
The U.S. role is greater than complicity – it is essential, active participation, without which the Israelis could not conduct this genocide in its present form, any more than the Germans could have run Auschwitz without gas chambers and poison gas.
And it is precisely because of the essential U.S. role in this genocide that the United States has the power to end it, not by pretending to plead with the Israelis to be more “careful” about civilian casualties, but by ending its own instrumental role in the genocide.
Every American of conscience should keep applying all kinds of pressure on our own government, but as long as it keeps ignoring the will of its own people, sending more weapons, vetoing Security Council resolutions and undermining peace negotiations, it is by default up to our neighbors around the world to muster the unity and political will to end the genocide.
It would certainly be unprecedented for the world to unite, in opposition to Israel and the United States, to save Palestine and enforce the ICJ ruling that Israel must withdraw from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The world has rarely come together so unanimously since the founding of the United Nations in the aftermath of the Second World War in 1945. Even the catastrophic U.S.-British invasion and destruction of Iraq failed to provoke such united action.
But the lesson of that crisis, indeed the lesson of our time, is that this kind of unity is essential if we are ever to bring sanity, humanity and peace to our world. That can start with a decisive vote in the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, September 18, 2024.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has added to a growing chorus of voices in Congress demanding that the Biden administration open its own investigation into Israel’s killing of American activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, saying that U.S. officials have ignored Israel’s pattern of killing Americans — and Palestinians — with impunity for too long. In a long statement released Friday…
As Israeli forces launch repeated attacks on civilian areas in Gaza, expand their deadly incursion into the West Bank and threaten retaliation for strikes by Hezbollah and Houthis, we discuss ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas with Palestinian writer Amjad Iraqi and former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy. Despite apparent divisions among Israeli leadership over the terms of an…
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets in recent days to demand that their government secure a deal that would release Israeli hostages held in Gaza. Nearly two-thirds of Israelis support such a deal — if not to put an end to the genocide, to at least put an end to the war for the sake of their own population. Why won’t their government listen? U.S.
Gaza’s Ministry of Health on Sunday released a document containing the names and ages of Palestinians killed by Israel’s assault since the Hamas-led October 7 attack, an incomplete list that nonetheless runs 649 pages — the first 14 of which are filled with the names of babies. The list, published to the health ministry’s Telegram account, is limited to those for whom Gaza officials had…
There has been growing criticism of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful pro-Israel lobbying operation that is spending record amounts to unseat elected officials who criticize the Israeli government’s war against Palestinians and who are also some of the strongest congressional advocates for workers’ rights and racial and climate justice.
In The Black Image in the White Mind, historian George M. Frederickson writes, “In the years immediately before and after 1800, white Americans often revealed by their words and actions that they viewed [Black people] as a permanently alien and unassimilable element of the population.” Within the context of white American domination, anti-Black racist stereotypes framed Black people as inherently…
In Bradford Crown Court, a two-week trial ended against four Palestine Action activists, with the jury on Friday 13 September refusing to convict them of charges of ‘criminal damage’ after they shut down an Israel-supplying military electronics firm in April 2024.
Palestine Action: a jury concurs, kind of
The jury had been out for deliberations since 2:30pm on 11 September, after the trial commenced on 3 September. The Palestine Action activists will now face a retrial.
The ‘Shipley Four’ occupied the premises of ‘Teledyne Defence and Space’, at Airedale House, Shipley, for over 14 hours on 2 April, six months into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, to prevent its manufacture of weapons parts used for war crimes.
For the duration of the occupation, Palestine Action activists used sledgehammers to break apart the site – smashing the roof, windows, and the interior premises – with damage of £571,383 alleged in Court:
This damage was purposeful; intended to halt Teledyne Shipley’s manufacture of missile parts for Israel’s war machine. The site, between 2009 and 2014, was granted at least 86 licenses for the export of weapons to Israel – mostly for ‘ML11’-category military electronics equipment, and ‘ML4’ category explosive weapons, munitions, or parts therefor.
Teledyne: complicit in, and profiting from, Israel’s genocide
After 2014, the company’s sales and licensing was handled by the parent company ‘Teledyne UK’, which continued to export vast quantities of ML4 and ML11 weapons to Israel as part of its 48 export licenses granted between 2014 and 2020.
The American company Teledyne has a $5.6bn yearly turnover and is, along with its subsidiary ev2, the largest exporter (by volume of licenses granted) of weaponry from Britain to Israel. A significant proportion of the company’s almost 200 export licenses for weapons and weapons parts to the US, 2009-2020, will also form into finished products ultimately exported to Israel.
Teledyne Defence and Space, Shipley, manufactures key components for missile systems – specifically missile filters – which will comprise the ML4 exports made yearly from the site. Teledyne Defence and Space boasts of its involvement with missile products procured by Israel including the AGM-Harpoon, AIM-120 AMRAAM, and AGM-114 Hellfire missiles deployed by Israel against Gaza – the latter reportedly being used to strike Al-Shifa hospital.
Teledyne Defence and Space also produces components for the American’s Tomahawk and Patriot missiles, deployed by US forces against Yemen. The Shipley site also produces parts, including filters and multi-function assemblies, for UAVs (drones) and aircraft, along with radar systems including the AN/APG-81 (AESA) type fitted in Lockheed Martin F-35 Fighter jets
A necessary action
Following their arrest, one of the four Palestine Action activists was remanded in prison for one month, and another remanded for three months.
While one of the four self-represented throughout the trial, the other three opted to dismiss their counsel following the conclusion of evidence – and the judge’s decision to deny them all of their defences.
While making closing speeches, the activists reminded jurors of their right to acquit according to their conscience. When the judge was asked for clarification on this by the jury, she told the jury that no one is able to direct the jury to convict but they must follow the legal directions which rule out any lawful excuse for the action taken.
Subsequently, they refused to return a verdict. Despite the lack of public interest in pursuing the prosecution, a retrial is expected to happen in February 2026.
In their evidence, the Palestine Action activists spoke of the necessity of taking action against Israel’s crimes, and particularly in Britain – which fostered the Zionist project and continues to arm it. One activist, Ruby Hamill, 20, stated:
This country has had a hand in these crimes from the beginning and it is therefore our duty to stop them. We acted on the 2nd April out of necessity. Lives and property were on the line. We acted in defence of both, not to the contrary as accused. And in doing so we gave hope.
I hope to continue to be a part of a movement that was giving people in such depraved circumstances a bit of hope, hope that the self-proclaiming democracies would listen to the citizens, despite not listening to the millions weekly on the streets, choosing to demonise us instead. Hope that systems of oppression and companies like Teledyne would suffer financially and fall.
Palestine Action: it could be any of us
A second Palestine Action activist testified that they were motivated to act upon seeing images of a boy in Gaza, carrying parts of his brothers’ corpse in his backpack – with the brother dismembered by missiles possibly contributed to by Teledyne.
This recalled, for them, how their family members were slaughtered as children by Japanese forces:
I know that the families targeted by the missiles Teledyne Defence and Space are involved with could have looked like mine and their Grandchildren could be standing in my very place.
Another Palestine Action activist, Syed Najim Shah, also commented on these motivations, having seen unbearable reports of the torture of children – which is something he has seen from Israel dating back decades, including to the murder of children in Sabra and Shatila exactly 42 years ago.
Another activist, Daniel Jones, commented that at the time of the action, Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza was under siege – babies lying dead in incubators as a result. The damage caused to Teledyne, Shipley, intended to halt the flow of arms to Israel and protect human life.
The CPS has said it will re-try the case against the Palestine Action activists.
Featured image and additional images via Palestine Action
Emad, a thirty-five-year-old Palestinian man, has a dog named Shuhaybar. He’s a small, white fluffy guy with hair hanging over his eyes. Americans call him a West Highland White Terrier. Emad calls him a friend. He looks completely out of place in Gaza, yet somehow he fits. Maybe it’s Emad’s handmade chamois sombrero that he places on the dog to protect him from the sun. Or the piece of silver tarp he uses as a dog collar. Whatever the reason, this snowball, nose to the ground, never complaining canine, who accompanies Emad wherever he goes—bread lines, water lines, charging lines…et cetera—would rather die than run away from his master.
Emad documents their times together with videos and photographs on social media. Shuhaybar walks, plays and sleeps like any other dog, but these simple activities have taken on a new meaning. From the bodies and the rubble at the edge of Khan Yunis, to the pieces of cardboard, wood and plastic strung together that form the barest of shelters, Emad lives a life made of misery. Yet Shuhaybar makes us laugh, and humor is a relief for Emad, his Facebook friends and me. Its momentary lapse of reason transcends the daily scenes of death and destruction, and for an instant we see nothing but the beauty of Palestine and the love of its people.
Reem Bandaged
That’s important for Emad, because his wife Abeer (Arabic for aroma) and three-year-old daughter Reem (Arabic for graceful) went to live with their aunt after the shelter they shared burned down in an airstrike on June 7th, 2024. The IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) has chased them from place to place, but this is the first time his family’s been separated and it hurts. I can tell by studying his selfies that he’s lonely. At least I think that’s true, but I’m not always right. I used to think that Emad was naturally thin. Then I saw photographs of him before the war. He’s lost forty kilograms (eighty-eight pounds) since the war began. I now realize why his wife and child look so skinny. They’re starving! And Emad’s losing hope, just like he’s losing weight. His eyes and face radiate a sadness I see throughout Gaza: the look of an oppressed population desperate to be free.
A mutual online friend led Emad to me. He has a lot of things to say about what’s going on behind the scenes. But, like many refugees, he understands that sometimes it’s better to say nothing, less you offend the powers that be. So I go to the place where he finds relief: Shuhaybar. Two days after losing his wife and child indefinitely, he gained a canine companion—a faithful animal sent by God to ease his suffering.
But some pains cannot be healed overnight. And Emad’s pain is immense, for he has lost far more than the scent of his beautiful wife and the gracefulness of his three-year-old daughter. He has another child. Heba is her name. No one knows if she’s alive or dead. In February, when she was born, she had trouble getting oxygen to her brain. She remained in the NICU at the Emirati hospital in Rafah throughout the spring. In May, the Emirati evacuated its patients to the Indonesian hospital. Then the Israelis came. At the end of the month Emad called the new hospital to check up on his daughter.
“I’m sorry, but we don’t have any records of your daughter ever being here,” they told him.
Those words sound like something you hear in a horror movie. But this is a horror movie. Emad fears the occupation took her. They did. They took her away before she was even born, before she was thought of, before her parents were born or thought of. In 1948 her great-grandparents were taken out of their homeland during the Nakba, the expulsion of the Palestinians from the places they had lived in for centuries. They were placed in an internment camp called the Gaza Strip, a jail-state protectorate, obedient first to Egypt, then to Israel, and then to a blockade as they were told “Now you’re free!” Free to work as day laborers on Israeli farms like paid slaves.
A colonial system arose. Palestinians who had been forced from their own land, now returned to it in order to eke out a nominal living. Before October 7th, 2024, the lucky awoke before sunrise and returned late at night after toiling under the blazing heat. After October 7th, those working in Israel would be detained and tortured before being released back into Gaza or the West Bank. The unemployed were the focus of the Occupation who, with midnight raids, removed any trouble makers as they pilfered their homes before bulldozing them to pieces. This is a common experience among Jews in the Ghettos colonized people.
What’s worse is that the Israelis have taken, by some accounts, two thousand bodies out of Gaza. For what? Their organs? Medical experiments? They sound psychotic. What would they want a baby’s body for? To humiliate the Palestinians? Let us go back to our current nightmare.
Emad posts slices of a half-lived life throughout early summer. The sound of jet engines, drones and gunfire moves unimpeded through the atmosphere, while Shuhaybar huddles in the corner seeking shelter and shade. Is he shaking? Does his canine mind think the remains of a corner wall will protect him from the bombs as well as the sun? Emad posts a video of Shuhaybar eating breadcrumbs. It’s a good thing dogs are omnivores just like us, because it’s been nine months since either man or beast has eaten meat.
Abeer keeps Emad updated on his daughter’s life. Photos show Reem’s healed from the head wound she got in an explosion. Now she’s wearing a pink fisherman’s hat to protect her from the summer’s heat. Reem smiles and plays, dancing in the streets. That’s all a father really needs to hear about his child for his mind to be at peace.
Emad posts the same photograph of Heba over and over again, still hoping she’ll be found. She’s rail thin. I’ve never seen a baby that’s just skin and bones. With all of their belongings destroyed, this photo will be all that remains to say she even existed.
On July 2nd, the IDF dropped leaflets foretelling another exodus. Run as fast as you can to get away from thee, the papers seem to be proclaiming. Panic spreads like a disease. Mother and daughter must flee. Chaos reigns on desiccated streets. Emad searches for his family relentlessly. No landmarks, no street signs, no shops, no homes, just avenues of dirt and rubble. In a miracle he finds them. Photos reveal the joy of their reunion. Reem beams with glee, and looks good considering she’s been running for her life. Abeer’s eyes peer out from behind her face covering in an expression of happiness and relief. For a moment their suffering has ceased.
Emad finds a place to erect a new home of tarps and twine in a small grove. Reem plays in a basin of water underneath the canopy of a lemon tree. Olive trees, the symbol of Palestinian fortitude, mill in the background, waiting to be harvested. An orange cat keeps Reem company. Soon, she will stumble upon a cotton candy vendor with her father. The delights of Gaza fill just a slender paragraph.
A few days later Emad posts a photo of his missing daughter with a caption: “Praise be to God… It seems my daughter Heba, after her disappearance, has sent us a gift from Heaven. We have just discovered my wife is pregnant.”
But the celebratory mood is soon over, because Emad now faces the issue of feeding his family. Between his loved ones and his faithful friend, any choice will hurt. Luckily, the dog’s owner has recovered from his injuries, and wants him back. Emad makes a final video bidding farewell to his companion as he walks with him. The caption reads: “Goodbye, my friend Shuhaybar. I am sorry that I can not provide you with enough to eat. I am sending you to a safer place where you will find food, water and a veterinarian.”
And, like the ending of an old Western, our canine hero walks off into the sunset.
Mahankali Parvati (left), Moturu Udayam (middle), and Chintala Koteshwaramma (right) perform an anti-war song during World War II with the group they led, Burrakatha Squad. Credit: Praja Natya Mandali Photography Archives
Mallu Swarajyam (1931–2022) was born with an appropriate name. From deep within the mass movement against British colonialism that was initiated by India’s peasants and workers, and then shaped by M.K. Gandhi into the movement for swaraj (self-rule), Bhimireddy Chokkamma drew her baby daughter into the freedom movement with a powerful name that signalled the fight for independence. Born into a house of reading, and able to get books through the radical people’s organisation Andhra Mahasabha, Mallu Swarajyam obtained a Telugu translation of Maxim Gorky’s Mother (1907). The book was one of many titles that were translated in the Soviet Union, part of that country’s great gift to the cause of literacy around the world and circulated by the communists in India. Gorky’s novel revolves around a mother, Pelageya Nilovna Vlasova, and her son, Pavel Vlasov. The mother works in a factory, the brutal father dies, and the son eventually becomes involved in revolutionary activities. The mother worries for her son but soon begins to read the socialist literature that he brings home and also immerses herself in revolutionary activities. This book had a marked impact on Mallu Swarajyam’s life, which she recounted in her 2019 memoir (as told to Katyayini and Vimala), Naa Maate. Tupaki Tuta (‘My Word Are Like Bullets’).
Having read this book at the age of ten, Mallu Swarajyam was inspired the next year to join the call by the Andhra Mahasabha to fight against bonded labour. She decided to break the barriers of caste and to distribute rice to bonded labourers in her town. ‘My own uncles were against my giving rice to bonded labourers’, she recounted. ‘But I was firm that they deserved their share. And my gesture set a precedent in the entire area where bonded labourers started to demand pay for their work’. Her mother supported these efforts, much like Pelageya Nilovna Vlasova supported Pavel Vlasov in Mother. These early experiences prepared Mallu Swarajyam for the rural uprising that would shake the Telugu-speaking region of India between 1946 and 1951 and is known as the Telangana movement.
Mallu Swarajyam, a communist revolutionary hero (left), with other women fighters of the armed struggle in the late 1940s. Credit: Sunil Janah
Mallu Swarajyam’s radicalisation took her into the emergent peasant movement and the attempt to build the communist party. She threw herself into the work of organising the peasantry in her district and soon across the entire region. When the uprising began, she was named as commander of a dalam (a fighting force), her speeches known as fired bullets. The landlords gathered to place a bounty on her head, offering a reward of Rs. 10,000 – a regal sum of money at the time. But she was undaunted, becoming one of the most beloved young leaders of the armed struggle.
Years later, Mallu Swarajyam recounted her experiences in the organisation of the peasants during the 1940s. Women and oppressed-caste Dalits would fill the village air at night with songs of the oppressed as they worked to de-husk rice. The songs were about god and their lives. ‘Under the moonlight’, Swarajyam recalled, the singing was so beautiful that even ‘people who were asleep enjoyed these songs’. These songs were derived from folk art traditions prevalent in Telugu society such as various forms of storytelling that use song and theatre to re-enact performances of Harikatha (the Hindu mythology of Lord Vishnu), Pakir patalu (a trove of Sufi songs), Bhagavatam (stories from the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata), as well as non-religious practices such as Burrakatha and Gollasuddulu, both of which tell stories of workers and peasants with two drums accompanying the singer. It was in these musical forms that the workers and peasants contested the worldview of the dominant castes. And it was in this part of the popular imagination that the Left intervened very early in the struggle for social transformation. When Mallu Swarajyam went to at least thirty villages to start the revolt, she said, ‘I started a revolutionary fire in the people with the song as our vehicle. What more did I need?’.
Left: Gummadi Vithala Rao, popularly known as Gaddar, one of the most influential Telugu-speaking revolutionary songwriters, performs for spectators, first by singing and dancing to a line in his songs and then pausing to explain its political and historical significance. Credit: KN Hari
Right: Telugu poet Srirangam Srinivas Rao, popularly known as Sri Sri, reads a poem from his anthology Maha Prasthanam (Forward March), yellow cover featured on the bottom right, to marchers joining the struggle to fight for another under the red flag (back right). Credit: Kurella Srinivas, 2009
At the heart of our most recent publication – The Telugu People’s Struggle for Land and Dreams (dossier no. 80, September 2024) – is the relationship of culture to peasant and working-class radicalism. In areas of high illiteracy and colonial education systems, it was impossible to transmit a new world view only through the written word or through cultural forms that were alien to the world of the people. Songs and theatre became the forms for political conversation in places such as India, China, and Vietnam. In Vietnam, the Communist Party formed propaganda teams (Doi Tuyen Truyen Vo Trang) that went amongst the people and through plays and songs mobilised the villages to participate in the liberation struggle. In China, the history of taking plays into rural areas goes back to the 1930s; during the Yan’an decade (1935–1945), the Communist cultural troupes began to perform ‘living newspaper’ concerts, a practice developed by the Soviets in the 1920s, in which the actors would improvise plays based on events in the news. Street theatre, songs, wall paintings, magic lantern shows: these became the textbooks of revolutionary activity. Our dossier attempts to highlight the world of songs as a part of the history of socialist culture.
The songs of these revolutionaries, built on peasant ballads and forms, crafted the elements of a new culture: in their words, they rejected the hierarchies of the countryside and in their rhythm, they allowed the peasantry to lift up their voices louder than they often did in the presence of the landlords. Both the content and the form of these songs encapsulated the boldness of a new world.
Praja Natya Mandali performs a street play. Credit: Praja Natya Mandali Photography Archives
The histories of these cultural actions and the transformations they engendered are often forgotten – the suppression of these histories plays a political role in our time. It was clear that the communist artists of the 1940s closely studied the earlier peasant songs and the history of rebellion embedded in them; they then took that history and developed it further, frequently using new, vibrant rhythms to recount the revolutionary history of the peasants and workers. Songs of the history of resistance build on the past to create their own, new histories. This is the dialectical spiral of culture, a lifting up of memories of past struggles to inspire new struggles, whose memory in turn stimulates newer struggles; each set of struggles pushing the cultural forms to the edge of their own possibility, building new confidence in the people whose sense of themselves has been diminished by old hierarchies and by old poverty.
Our dossier hopes to bring part of that history to light, which is indeed very much along the grain of the work of our art department (for more of this kind of archival and theoretical work, I recommend that you subscribe to the Tricontinental Art Bulletin, initiated in March and published on the last Sunday of each month).
This collage includes photographs of the street play Veera Telangana (Heroic Telangana) taken in the 2000s by Praja Natya Mandali and photographs of a troop (dalam) of the armed struggle marching in the late 1940s taken by Sunil Janah.
Khalida Jarrar (born 1963) is a Palestinian leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and elected member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. A brave and kind person, Jarrar has been in the crosshairs of the Israeli military occupation forces for decades. She has been frequently arrested and held in administrative detention, often with no charge (the first time was in 1989 when she was arrested at an International Women’s Day march in Palestine). Since 2015, she has spent as much time in prison as she has outside of it, with increasingly longer terms behind bars. In prison, Jarrar became an important voice for women prisoners and organised political schools for her fellow inmates. In 2020, from Israel’s Damon prison, Khalida Jarrar smuggled out a letter which was delivered as a speech by her daughters at the Palestine Writes Literature Festival; it speaks about the importance of cultural work amongst the inmates:
Books constitute the foundation of life in prison. They preserve the psychological and moral balance of the freedom fighters who view their detentions as part of the overall resistance against the colonial occupation of Palestine. Books also play a role in each prisoner’s individual struggle of Will between them and the prisons’ authorities. In other words, the struggle becomes a challenge for Palestinian prisoners as the jailors seek to strip us from our humanity and keep us isolated from the outside world. The challenge for prisoners is to transform our detention into a state of a ‘cultural revolution’ through reading, education and literary discussions.
When I read Jarrar’s speech, I was struck by one sentence. She wrote: ‘Maxim Gorky’s novel Mother became a comfort to women prisoners who are deprived of their mothers’ love’. That Jarrar and other Palestinian woman prisoners would experience in 2020 the same sort of sentiments that Mallu Swarajyam experienced in the 1940s with the reading of Mother is extraordinary. It reminds us of the power of certain kinds of fiction to lift the spirits and inspire us to act in ways that we could otherwise not easily imagine.
On 11 July 2021, during one of Jarrar’s periods of confinement in Israel’s prisons, her daughter Suha died. The Israelis rejected Jarrar’s application to attend Suha’s funeral. Grief-stricken, Jarrar wrote a poem to mourn her child,
Suha, my precious.
They have stripped me from giving you a final kiss.
I send you a flower as a goodbye.
Your absence pains me, sears me.
The pain is excruciating.
I remain steadfast and strong,
Like the mountains of beloved Palestine.
Poems, songs, novels, plays: fiction that in the dialectical spiral inspires us to act and then to depict our actions, which in turn inspires others to act and then to write their stories.
Since October 2023, the Israelis have hardened their treatment of Palestinian prisoners, and brought in thousands of new Palestinian political prisoners into already overcrowded prisons. The conditions are now deadly. Khalida Jarrar’s most recent words from prison, published on 28 August, are heartbreaking. During a visit from lawyers of the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Society Prisoners’ Club, she sent the following message:
I am dying every day. The cell resembles a closed small can. There is a toilet in the cell and a small window above, which was closed after one day. They left us no way to breathe. There is a narrow vent that I sat next to most of the time to breathe. I am really suffocating in my cell, waiting time to pass, hoping to find oxygen to breathe and stay alive. The high temperature increased the tragic condition of my isolation, as I feel myself existing in an oven. I can’t sleep due to the high temperature, and they intended to cut off the water in the cell, and when I asked to refill my bottle of water, they bring it after four hours at least. They let me out to the prison’s courtyard only once after eight days of isolation.
We stand in full solidarity with Khalida Jarrar. We will translate our latest dossier into Arabic and send it to her so that she can read the songs of the Telangana heroes and take inspiration from them.
On Wednesday night a man reportedly lit himself on fire outside the Israeli consulate in Boston. They were taken to Massachusetts General Hospital with severe burns, and their current condition is unknown. Boston police told reporters that they are investigating the situation. A witness said the man poured gasoline over himself before lighting himself on fire and surveillance footage shows…
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has repeated an unverified Israeli claim about its killing of at least 18 people, including six UN employees, in its strike of a school in Gaza this week — even as he supposedly called on Israel to do more to protect humanitarian sites in its genocide of Palestinians in the region. On Thursday, Blinken said, “we need to see humanitarian sites protected…
Tonight, the evening of the presidential debate, I sit here wondering, “What’s the point? Does it change anyone’s vote?” Here in East Palestine, Ohio, and the surrounding areas, we have had some great bi-partisan responses in the early days following the Norfolk Southern train derailment, followed by nothing happening at a presidential level. We’ve asked President Biden to issue a disaster declaration for East Palestine; he hasn’t.
I can’t think of a single time in my life someone watched a presidential debate and said “Ya know, that debate really changed my mind,” or, “I had no idea who to vote for prior to this debate, but it really cleared things up for me.” I only hear individuals boasting about their candidate or tearing down the other.
Tonight, instead of the internet being abuzz about a whole region of the country being poisoned by a railroad company and failed by our government at every level, millions will be watching a debate that will only lead to social media posts from people praising their favored candidates and bashing their opponent, not changing anyone’s mind about who they’re going to vote for—friends and family will fight over candidates who will never know their names.
This time, for me, is better spent in meaningful conversations with community members and those who seek to support us, spending time with our family, or preparing for a loved one to come home from a two-week hospital stay after they experienced sudden onset heart and kidney failure. My mind doesn’t have space for this debate—I’m too busy wondering if exposure to toxins from the derailment caused these health issues, and if it’s going to get worse when they return home.
Tonight, watching two adults play word acrobatics and trying to rhetorically one-up each other isn’t a priority. To be honest, I can’t think of a single time in my life someone watched a presidential debate and said “Ya know, that debate really changed my mind,” or, “I had no idea who to vote for prior to this debate, but it really cleared things up for me.” I only hear individuals boasting about their candidate or tearing down the other.
Memes flood social media, yet our voices are unheard. At the local, state, and federal level, candidates on both sides of the aisle have ignored us. They have all shown us what they have to offer, right here in real life. Many actions could still be taken to help the people here, my family included; many laws on the books could have been enforced to prevent what happened here; but the people continue to be abandoned.
Tonight, by not watching the debate, I chose instead to invest my time and attention in my family and my community.
Norman Solomon, National Director of RootsAction.org
In the debate, Kamala Harris helped her campaign against Donald Trump. But she didn’t do anything to help the people of Gaza, who are dying courtesy of US taxpayers.
The debate dramatized how Trump represents extreme bigotry and contempt for basic human rights, while both candidates have a militaristic outlook on the rest of the world.
Harris replayed what has become a familiar tape loop from her—declaring support for Israel’s right to “defend itself” while expressing some brief compassion for Palestinian civilians. It’s a formulaic set of rhetoric that most significantly amounts to refusal to deal with the reality of what makes the ongoing slaughter of those people possible—the unconditional pipeline of weapons and ammunition from the US government to the Israeli military.
The debate underscored Donald Trump’s fascistic qualities, more dangerous than ever as he appears to have a 50-50 chance of winning the presidency. On issue after issue, his demagogic approach combined xenophobia, racism, and nationalism.
In contrast, Harris espoused a combination of social and cultural liberalism that embraces diversity. She also banged the drum for a militaristic and messianic foreign policy that endangers the world—with a far-fetched claim, for example, that if Russia had been allowed to win the war in Ukraine then Vladimir Putin would have “his eyes on the rest of Europe, starting with Poland.”
The debate dramatized how Trump represents extreme bigotry and contempt for basic human rights, while both candidates have a militaristic outlook on the rest of the world. Trump offers domestic repression that would have progressive forces back on their heels for four years. Harris at least would enable progressives to organize with some effects on policies. Not a great choice in this presidential election, but it’s the one we’ve got.
Ju-Hyun Park, TRNN Engagement Editor
The history of massacres is a history of lies—lies told after the fact to erase crimes from history, and lies told in the buildup that make these atrocities possible.
If our political system can only offer two candidates of genocide, are we not already in fascism?
Donald Trump’s lies captured the media spotlight last night. His demonstrably false claim that Haitian migrants are “eating the pets” of Springfield, Ohio, bewildered millions. Yet for millions more, these falsifications are all too real. We need only look to the recent pogroms in the UK to see how quickly this sort of propaganda can instigate a frenzy of racist terror.
Yet Trump was not alone in propagating blood libel. Once again, Kamala Harris promoted the debunked claim of mass rapes committed by Hamas on Oct. 7. This lie has been permitted to circulate unchallenged in US media for nearly a year, remaining a central talking point of genocide supporters.
While Trump’s comments rightfully provoked a fact-check from ABC moderators, Harris’ did not. Israel’s well-documented use of rape and sexual terror against Palestinian men and boys had no space in the debate; neither did the horrific bombings of tents in Khan Yunis on Tuesday morning, when Israel dropped 2,000-pound US-manufactured M-84 bombs on displaced Palestinian families, killing at least 40 people and leaving a 30 meter crater.
Whether from one party or another, the use of dehumanization to justify racist violence has dire political consequences for us all. The conversation on the future of democracy cannot be fixated on a single candidate or party—not when all major political players openly deploy blood libel to justify the slaughter of Palestinians. If our political system can only offer two candidates of genocide, are we not already in fascism?
Taya Graham and Stephen Janis, TRNN Investigative Reporters
The question of who won the first debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is, in some sense, beside the point.
Why does Trump’s bad performance on the stage not equate to significant gains for Harris?
Of course it was a win for Harris. Trump is disturbingly unwell. He took the bait on almost all Harris’ traps, including crowd size and pet eating. The contrast between the two candidates was stark, and Harris was in charge for most of it.
But the more vexing question that has yet to be answered is how the debate will influence voters. And what we learn in the next week as the polls roll out might reveal some troubling truths—especially if an outsized Harris victory at the podium translates into a negligible impact on voter sentiment.
Truthfully, just as Biden appeared unfit in the June debate, Trump appeared similarly incapable of running a country. The two-hour clash showcased an vengeful, incoherent, irrational, and unhinged candidate. But unlike Biden, Trump’s behavior was not surprising. The debate simply emphasized what we already knew.
So if the polls barely budge in light of his poor performance, then a deeper question has to be asked. What exactly is motivating voters? Why don’t they outright reject a man who spews falsehoods, invective, and still refuses the results of the 2020 election? Why does Trump’s bad performance on the stage not equate to significant gains for Harris?
Pundits will cite inflation, housing costs, and a general malaise about the state of the economy. Bear in mind Trump never offers specifics on how he would fix these problems. He certainly didn’t during the debate. And if you think that was a fluke, take a look at Agenda 47, Trump’s meager offering in lieu of a party platform. It reads like a culture war digest woefully short on details.
That leaves us with one more query if the debate fails to shift public opinion: why won’t voters abandon Trump in light of clear evidence he’s not up to the job?
If an erratic man without an articulated policy agenda still polls at 48%, then what does that say about us? What are we missing about what really matters? Is Trump simply a flawed messenger for a deeper unease that we have yet to actually acknowledge, or is mistrust in any and all institutions so deep it has become synergistic with Trump’s own irrational behavior?
The polls will provide some insight into this question. And if they don’t budge, we have to start reconciling with the fact that nearly half of the country thinks Trump is the only answer.
Marc Steiner, Host of The Marc Steiner Show
The lack of substance around policy was glaringly real to this observer. It was a debate and brawl of personalities, and Trump’s falsehoods were glaring. Trump lied repeatedly during the debate, making up falsehoods from immigrants eating our pets, to the world prison population being down, to how tariffs would help bring down prices. Harris got under his skin by raising his criticism of John McCain, his support of racist violence in Charlottesville, and how he would kill parts of the Constitution. Then he said she was the first to drop out of the presidential race. She was not, nor was she the border czar, nor did she talk to Putin—these are all far-right talking points. Harris had a few herself, but overall this was a spitting match with little substance.
He said she was the first to drop out of the presidential race. She was not, nor was she the border czar, nor did she talk to Putin—these are all far-right talking points.
What seemed clear, as well, is that Trump is increasingly unhinged. I couldn’t stop thinking of Mussolini as he stood there scowling. Harris was calm, collected, and in control.
The reality, even though Trump came off a bit unhinged, is that it won’t budge his supporters or hers—it might move some of the undecided to vote for Harris, or not to vote at all. My observations might sound pro-Democrat, but they are not. We are faced with the real danger that the racist right could take over this country. This is akin to the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the Nazis in 1933, when moderates, liberals, and the left could not unite to stop the right. It might sound like hyperbole, but we are in the midst of a very critical historical moment.
The debate was not substantive, but gave us a glimpse of the battle for the future of the United States. The left needs to come together and organize, and needs to help stop the racist right from taking power.
Mel Buer, TRNN Staff Reporter
Vice President Harris came prepared for her first head-to-head with former President Trump, there’s no doubt about that. When you stand the two candidates side by side, Harris’s clear-headed responses and shrewd answers gave her the upper hand against Trump’s increasingly absurd rambling—and I think any reasonable person can look at the two of them together and come to the conclusion that Harris will always look like the adult in the room in comparison to Trump.
The project of creating better working and living conditions for working people will not be decided by the outcome of this election, as neither candidate will do what is ultimately best for the working class in this country. But we knew that already.
At this point in the game, however, that feels like a given. While folks will meme Trump’s racist conspiracies and Harris’s sardonic side-eyes to high heaven, the fact remains that both party representatives hinted at or elaborated on policy objectives that are increasingly conservative (and alarming) in their scope, that prioritize the American military-industrial complex at home and abroad, and present real challenges and pitfalls for the working class now and in the future.
It is also clear that a future Harris administration will respond to the ongoing genocide just as the Biden administration has—with lukewarm ‘condemnation’ of atrocities committed by the IOF in one hand, and a blank check to continue the wholesale destruction of the Palestinian people in the other.
It remains our responsibility as unwilling participants in this American Empire to continue to stand in solidarity with and organize for an end to these genocidal hostilities in Palestine and elsewhere around the world. As anti-genocide organizing continues across this nation, we must be fearless in our support of efforts to bring this slaughter to an end.
In the final analysis, this debate (and really any debate of the last 8, 12, 16 years) brings forth an unrelenting feeling of absolute and utter irritation: the longer those two stood on stage, the more I could feel my cynicism about the state of American politics rise to critical levels. What irks me most about these sorts of political events is that you feel as though you are being mocked, that your intelligence, your power as a worker and a voter, is being derided by the candidates; it doesn’t matter who they are, they don’t respect you and find your participation in the electoral process to be a total nuisance. Certainly what I felt while watching was a sense of falling—against my will—into a great chasm of uncertainty about the future of this country. Not to be hyperbolic, but that shit was grim, man.
I came away from the debate with a renewed sense of what must be done, however, despite my misgivings about the continued success (well, er—things may still run, at least) of this political system. The project of creating better working and living conditions for working people will not be decided by the outcome of this election, as neither candidate will do what is ultimately best for the working class in this country. But we knew that already. As always, it is our job as workers to build the community and conditions that will improve our own quality of life, and the only way to do that is to continue to organize together and bring that change around ourselves.
Some genocidal idiot is always going to be mucking things up from their gilded throne in the White House—the question is what will we be doing for our fellow worker, at home or abroad, despite this fact?
The following is a message from Stop The War Coalition
Israel’s genocide in Gaza could engulf the entire Middle East and the war in Ukraine is currently at a precipice. There is a very real danger of direct war between NATO and Russia, while increasing militarisation in the Pacific has placed the region on high alert.
The new Labour Party government has no plans to move away from the disastrous foreign policy of recent decades, indeed it has pledged to increase military spending to unprecedented levels.
Starmer’s Labour has also enabled the far right and the rise in Islamophobia through its deeply racist election campaign and subsequent smearing of pro-Gaza Muslim MPs. It continues to show utter indifference to the suffering of Palestinians and to threaten the civil liberties of those who protest to demand a more peaceful and just world.
Help us campaign to break with the cycle of violence, hate, militarism and forever wars and to fight for a society based on justice, solidarity and peace.
This past year Stop the War Coalition has helped organise an unprecedented number of demonstrations and played a vital role in the Palestine movement. We have continued to campaign against the war in Ukraine and increased military spending. But campaigning requires money and we have little.
We urgently need to expand our office and output and have set our appeal target at an ambitious £60,000. Please donate generously and help fund the fight for peace.
Ahead of the one-year anniversary of Abdallah’s killing, CPJ joined a September 11 letter urging the commission to conduct its own inquiry into Israel’s October 13 attack. The organizations also called for the commission to investigate accusations of war crimes against journalists as part of its inquiry into possible war crimes committed since the Israel-Gaza war began on October 7, and to recognize the “alarming numbers” of journalists killed in the war and the media’s crucial role in documenting conflict.
The letter also asked the commission to publicly identify the military unit involved in the attack on the journalists and send formal requests for information to the governments of Israel, Lebanon, and the United States, given that one of the survivors of the attack, Dylan Collins, is a U.S. citizen.