Four people — two teachers and two students — were killed in a school shooting in Georgia on Wednesday, the latest mass shooting in an educational setting and the first major shooting in the U.S. this school year. The shooting took place at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, in the middle of the school day. The shooter, who was taken into custody by law enforcement shortly after the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Despite much grandstanding in the Biden administration about halting specific arms shipments to Israel over feigned concerns about how they might be used (inflicting death is the expected form), US military supplies have been restored with barely a murmur. In a report in Haaretz on August 29, a rush of weapons to Israel has been noticed since the end of July.
August proved to be the second busiest month for US arms deliveries to Israel’s Nevatim Airbase since the October 2023 attacks by Hamas. This has taken place alongside an increased concentration of US forces in the region since Israel’s assassinations of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr and Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh at the end of last month. Two aircraft carriers, a guided missile submarine, and deployments of advanced F-22 stealth aircraft in Qatar, have featured in a show intended to deter Tehran from any retaliatory strikes.
After examining open-source aviation data from the end of July, Haaretz concluded that the issue of delayed shipments of US weapons had “been solved.” Dozens of flights by US military transport planes, along with civilian and military Israeli cargo planes, mostly from Qatar and the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, had been noted. Demands by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his July 24 speech to Congress that US military aid be “dramatically” expedited to “end the war in Gaza and help prevent a broader war in the Middle East”, had been heeded.
On August 26, Israel received its 500th aerial shipment of weapons and military supplies from the United States since the latest war’s commencement. The 500 flights have also been supplemented by 107 sea shipments, altogether facilitating the transfer of 50,000 tons of military equipment in an initiative between the US military, Israel’s Defence Ministry’s Directorate of Production and Procurement and Mission to the United States, the IDF’s planning Directorate and the Israeli Air Force.
During the same month, the Democratic National Convention, which saw no debate about the candidature of Kamala Harris as its choice for presidential candidate, had tepidly promised some agitation on continued arms to Israel. Ahead of the event, the Uncommitted movement’s 30 delegates, picked by voters alarmed by US support for Israel’s war machine in Gaza, were hoping to convince the 4,000 pledged delegates Harris had captured to add an arms embargo to its campaign in order to induce a ceasefire.
A petition by the group sought two outcomes: the adding of language to both the party and campaign platform “that unequivocally supports a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and a cessation of supplying weapons for Israel’s assault and occupation against Palestinians.”
These wishes proved much too salty for the apparatchiks and party managers. The Democratic Party’s 2024 national platform ironically enough begins with an effusive “land acknowledgment” to “the ancestors and descendants of Tribal Nations” but plays it safe regarding an ally very much the product of territorial seizure, violence and occupation. Despite mutterings in the party room about a split between moderate and progressive members on Israel’s conduct of the war, the topic of a ceasefire never made it to the committee hearings when the document was drafted.
In firmly insisting on continued US support for Israel in its war against Hamas, much is made in the platform about US efforts to forge a way that will see a release of the hostages, “a durable ceasefire”, the easing of “humanitarian suffering in Gaza” and the “possible normalization between Israel and key Arab states, together with meaningful progress and a political horizon for the Palestinian people.” The language is instructive: the Palestinians are objects of pitiful charity, at the mercy of Israel, the US, and various Arab states. Like toddlers, they are to be managed, steered, guided, their political choices forever mediated through the wishes of other powers.
With Israel remaining Washington’s paramount ally in the Middle East, that process of steering and managing the unruly Palestinians has been, thus far, lethal. During her first interview given after the convention (she has an aversion to them), Harris scotched any suggestions on going wobbly on Israel. “I’m unequivocal and unwavering in my commitment to Israel’s defence and its ability to defend itself, and that’s not going to change,” she told CNN’s Dana Bush. In what has become a standard refrain, Harris lamented that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” while acknowledging Israel’s right to self-defence.
When asked whether she would alter President Biden’s policy on furnishing military assistance to Israel, “No” came the reply. “We have to get a deal done. The war must end, and we must get a deal that is about getting the hostages out. I’ve met with the families of the American hostages. Let’s get the hostages out. Let’s get the ceasefire done.”
This middle-management lingo says much about Harris’s worldview; in wishing to “get the ceasefire done”, she is encouraging a range of factors that will make sure nothing of the sort will be achieved. The Netanyahu formula has worked its usual black magic. Hence, the lack of an arms embargo, and the continued, generous supply to the IDF from their largest military benefactor.
The post A Return to Form: Expediting US Arms to Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Vice President Kamala Harris has sparked fury after saying that she would not break from President Joe Biden’s policies toward Israel and its U.S.-sponsored genocide of Palestinians in Gaza if she were elected president this fall. In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Harris said she would not stop sending Israel weapons and that Israel “has a right to defend itself” — after it has killed…
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The DNC showed a party that has successfully metabolized movement energy and insurgent campaigns while distancing itself from demands deemed harmful to its electoral prospects.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
DNC delegates unfurl banner during Biden’s speech at the DNC. Photo credit: Esam Boraey
An Orwellian disconnect haunts the 2024 Democratic National Convention. In the isolation of the convention hall, shielded from the outside world behind thousands of armed police, few of the delegates seem to realize that their country is on the brink of direct involvement in major wars with Russia and Iran, either of which could escalate into World War III.
Inside the hall, the mass slaughter in the Middle East and Ukraine are treated only as troublesome “issues,” which “the greatest military in the history of the world” can surely deal with. Delegates who unfurled a banner that read “Stop Arming Israel” during Biden’s speech on Monday night were quickly accosted by DNC officials, who instructed other delegates to use “We 
Joe” signs to hide the banner from view.
In the real world, the most explosive flashpoint right now is the Middle East, where U.S. weapons and Israeli troops are slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly children and families, at the bidding of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. And yet, in July, Democrats and Republicans leapt to their feet in 23 standing ovations to applaud Netanyahu’s warmongering speech to a joint session of Congress.
In the week before the DNC started, the Biden administration announced its approval for the sale of $20 billion in weapons to Israel, which would lock the US into a relationship with the Israeli military for years to come.
Netanyahu’s determination to keep killing without restraint in Gaza, and Biden and Congress’s willingness to keep supplying him with weapons to do so, always risked exploding into a wider war, but the crisis has reached a new climax. Since Israel has failed to kill or expel the Palestinians from Gaza, it is now trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, a war to degrade Israel’s enemies and restore the illusion of military superiority that it has squandered in Gaza.
To achieve its goal of triggering a wider war, Israel assassinated Fuad Shukr, a Hezbollah commander, in Beirut, and Hamas’s political leader and chief ceasefire negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran. Iran has vowed to respond militarily to the assassinations, but Iran’s leaders are in a difficult position. They do not want a war with Israel and the United States, and they have acted with restraint throughout the massacre in Gaza. But failing to respond strongly to these assassinations would encourage Israel to conduct further attacks on Iran and its allies.
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The assassinations in Beirut and Tehran were clearly designed to elicit a response from Iran and Hezbollah that would draw the U.S. into the war. Could Iran find a way to strike Israel that would not provoke a U.S. response? Or, if Iran’s leaders believe that is impossible, will they decide that this is the moment to actually fight a seemingly unavoidable war with the U.S. and Israel?
This is an incredibly dangerous moment, but a ceasefire in Gaza would resolve the crisis. The U.S. has dispatched CIA Director William Burns, the only professional diplomat in Biden’s cabinet, to the Middle East for renewed ceasefire talks, and Iran is waiting to see the result of the talks before responding to the assassinations.
Burns is working with Qatari and Egyptian officials to come up with a revised ceasefire proposal that Israel and Hamas can both agree to. But Israel has always rejected any proposal for more than a temporary pause in its assault on Gaza, while Hamas will only agree to a real, permanent ceasefire. Could Biden have sent Burns just to stall, so that a new war wouldn’t spoil the Dems’ party in Chicago?
The United States has always had the option of halting weapons shipments to Israel to force it to agree to a permanent ceasefire. But it has refused to use that leverage, except for the suspension of a single shipment of 2,000 lb bombs in May, after it had already sent Israel 14,000 of those horrific weapons, which it uses to systematically smash living children and families into unidentifiable pieces of flesh and bone.
Meanwhile the war with Russia has also taken a new and dangerous turn, with Ukraine invading Russia’s Kursk region. Some analysts believe this is only a diversion before an even riskier Ukrainian assault on the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Ukraine’s leaders see the writing on the wall, and are increasingly ready to take any risk to improve their negotiating position before they are forced to sue for peace.
But Ukraine’s recent incursion into Russia, while applauded by much of the west, has actually made negotiations less likely. In fact, talks between Russia and Ukraine on energy issues were supposed to start in the coming weeks. The idea was that each side would agree not to target the other’s energy infrastructure, with the hope that this could lead to more comprehensive talks. But after Ukraine’s invasion toward Kursk, the Russians pulled out of what would have been the first direct talks since the early weeks of the Russian invasion.
President Zelenskyy remains in power three months after his term of office expired, and he is a great admirer of Israel. Will he take a page from Netanyahu’s playbook and do something so provocative that it will draw U.S. and NATO forces into the potentially nuclear war with Russia that Biden has promised to avoid?
A 2023 U.S. Army War College study found that even a non-nuclear war with Russia could result in as many U.S. casualties every two weeks as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did in two decades, and it concluded that such a war would require a return to conscription in the United States.
While Gaza and Eastern Ukraine burn in firestorms of American and Russian bombs and missiles, and the war in Sudan rages on unchecked, the whole planet is rocketing toward catastrophic temperature increases, ecosystem breakdown and mass extinctions. But the delegates in Chicago are in la-la land about U.S. responsibility for that crisis too.
Under the slick climate plan Obama sold to the world in Copenhagen and Paris, Americans’ per capita CO2 emissions are still double those of our Chinese, British and European neighbors, while U.S. oil and gas production have soared to all-time record highs.
The combined dangers of nuclear war and climate catastrophe have pushed the hands of the Doomsday Clock all the way to 90 seconds to midnight. But the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties are in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial complex. Behind the election-year focus on what the two parties disagree about, the corrupt policies they both agree on are the most dangerous of all.
President Biden recently claimed that he is “running the world.” No oligarchic American politician will confess to “running the world” to the brink of nuclear war and mass extinction, but tens of thousands of Americans marching in the streets of Chicago and millions more Americans who support them understand that that is what Biden, Trump and their cronies are doing.
The people inside the convention hall should shake themselves out of their complacency and start listening to the people in the streets. Therein lies the real hope, maybe the only hope, for America’s future.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Democratic National Convention is taking place this week in Chicago, and efforts to smear, co-opt and deflate the planned massive protests — and the Uncommitted movement within the convention itself — are already underway. Since securing the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Vice President Kamala Harris has not only refused to signal any real break from President Joe Biden’s Gaza…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In a speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) on Monday night, President Joe Biden said that “both sides” in Israel’s genocide of Gaza are experiencing civilian death — a blatant lie that ignores any semblance of reality on the ground in Gaza, where the Palestinian civilian death toll rises each day. “Those protesters out in the street, they have a point,” Biden said…
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On Monday evening, President Joe Biden returned to headline the Democratic National Convention stage, as he has many times in the past — though this time, it was not in the way he had probably prepared for just two months ago. Instead of returning as a presidential candidate, Biden spoke as a supportive incumbent who had opted not to run again, backing the campaign of his vice president…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This week in Chicago, thousands of Democrats and their supporters — as well as tens of thousands of demonstrators planning huge protests — will meet in Chicago, Illinois, for the quadrennial Democratic National Convention. Vice President Kamala Harris, who has already become the official candidate for the party through a virtual roll call vote, will formally accept the Democratic Party’s…
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Noam Chomsky (95) famous dissident and father of modern linguistics, considered one of the world’s leading intellectuals, is recovering from a stroke he suffered at age 94 and now living with his wife in Brazil. According to a report in Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now d/d July 2, 2024, this past June Brazilian President Lula personally visited Chomsky, holding his hand, saying: “You are one of the most influential people of my life” personally witnessed by Vijay Prashad, co-author with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal (The New Press).
Indeed, Noam Chomsky is established as one of the most influential intellectuals of the 21st century.
A pre-stroke video interview with Chomsky conducted at the University of Arizona is extraordinarily contemporary and insightful with a powerful message: What Does the Future Hold Q&A With Noam Chomsky hosted by Lori Poloni-Staudinger, Dean of School of Behavioral Sciences and Professor, School of Government and Public Policy, University of Arizona.
Chomsky joined the School of Behavioral Sciences in 2017 and taught “Consequences of Capitalism.”
This article is a synopsis of some of Chomsky’s responses to questions, and it includes third-party supporting facts surrounding his statements about the two biggest risks to humanity’s continual existence.
What Does the Future Hold?
Question: geopolitics, unipolar versus multipolar
Chomsky: First there are two crises that determine whether it is even appropriate to consider how geopolitics will look in the future: (1) threat of nuclear war (2) the climate crisis.
“If the climate crisis is not dealt with in the next few years, human society is essentially finished. Everything else is moot unless these two crises are dealt with.”
(This paragraph is not part of Chomsky’s answer) Regarding Chomsky’s warning, several key indicators of the climate crisis are flashing red, not green. For example, nine years ago 195 nations at the UN climate conference Paris ‘15 agreed to take measures to mitigate CO2 emissions to hold global warming to under 1.5°C pre-industrial. Yet, within only nine years of that agreement amongst 195 nations, according to Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), global temperatures exceeded 1.5°C (2.7°F) above preindustrial for the first time in human history for a 12-month period from February 2023 to January 2024 and now fast approaching danger zones. Obviously, nations of the world did not follow their own dictates, and if not them, who will?
Paleoclimatology has evidence of what to expect if the “climate crisis,” as labeled by Chomsky, is not dealt with (The following paragraph is also not part of Chomsky’s answer): “While today’s CO2-driven climate change scenario is unprecedented in human history, similar circumstances existed in the geological record that give us an idea of what to expect in the way of global sea level rise, and the process that will get us there. About 3.2 million years ago, during the Pliocene epoch, CO2 levels were about 400 ppm (427 ppm today) and temperatures were 2-3°C above the “pre-industrial” temperatures of 1850-1880. At the same time, proxy data indicate global sea level was about 52 feet (within a 39-foot to 66-foot range) higher than today.” (Source: The Sleeping Giant Awakens, Climate Adaptation Center, May 21, 2024)
Maybe that is why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) strongly suggests keeping temperatures ideally below 1.5°C and certainly not above 2.0°C pre-industrial.
Chomsky on World Power: Currently the center of world power, whether unipolar or multipolar is very much in the news. This issue has roots going back to the end of WWII when the US established overwhelming worldwide power. But now the Ukraine war has the world very much divided with most of world outside of the EU, US and its allies calling for diplomatic settlement. But the US position is that the war must continue to severely weaken Russia.
Consequently, Ukraine is dividing the world, and it shows up in the framework of unipolar versus multipolar. For example, the war has driven the EU away from independent status to firm control by the US. In turn the EU is headed towards industrial decline because of disruption of its natural trading partners, e.g., Russia is full of natural resources that the EU is lacking, which economist have always referred to as a “marriage made in heaven,” a natural trading relationship that has now been broken. (footnote: EU industrial production down 3.9% past 12 months)
And the Ukrainian imbroglio is cutting off EU access to markets in China e.g., China has been an enormous market for German industrial products. Meanwhile, the US is insisting upon a unipolar framework of world order that wants not only the EU but the world to be incorporated within something like the NATO system. Under US pressure NATO has expanded its reach to the Indo-Pacific region, meaning NATO is now obligated to take part in the US conflict with China.
Meantime, the rest of the world is trying to develop a multipolar world with several independent sectors of power. The BRICS countries Brazil, Russia, India, China, Indonesia, South Africa, want an independent source of power of their own. They are 40% of world economy that’s independent of US sanctions and of the US dollar.
These are developing conflicts over one raging issue and one developing issue. Ukraine is the raging issue; the developing issue is US conflict with China, which is developing its own projects in Eurasia, Africa, Middle East, South Africa, S9uth Asia, and Latin America.
The US is determined to prevent China’s economic development throughout the world. The Biden administration has “virtually declared a kind of war with China” by demanding that Western allies refuse to permit China to carry out technological development.
For example, the US insist others do not all0w China access to any technology that has any US parts in it. This includes everything, as for example, Netherlands has a world-class lithographic industry which produces critical parts for semi-conductors for the modern high-tech economy. Now, Netherlands must determine whether it’ll move to an independent course to sell to China, or not… the same is true for Samsung, South Korea, and Japan.
The world is splintered along those lines as the framework for the foreseeable future.
Question: Will multinational corporations gain too much power and influence?
Chomsky suggests looking at them right now… US based multinationals control about one-half of the world’s wealth. They are first or second in every domain like manufacturing and retail; no one else is close. It’s extraordinary power. Based upon GDP, the US has 20% of world GDP, but if you look at US multinationals it’s more like 50%. Multinationals have extraordinary power over domestic policy in both the US and in other capitalistic countries. So, how will multinationals react when told they cannot deal with a major market, like China?
How does this develop over future years? The EU is going into a period of decline because of breaking relationships in trade and commercial business with the East. Yet, it’s not sure that the EU will stay subordinate to the US and willingly go into decline, or will the EU join the rest of the world and move into a more complex multipolar world and integrate with countries in the East? This is yet to be determined. For example, France’s President Emmanuel Macron (2017-) has been vilified and condemned for saying that after Russia is driven out of Ukraine, a way must be found to accommodate Russia within an international system, an initial crack in the US/EU relationship.
Threat of nuclear war question: Russia suspended the START Nuclear Arms Treaty with the US and how important is this to the threat of nuclear war?
Chomsky: It is very significant. It is the last remaining arms control treaty, the new START Treaty, Trump almost cancelled it. The treaty was due to expire in February when Biden took over in time to extend it, which he did.
Keep in mind that the US was instrumental in creating a regime which somewhat mitigates the threat of nuclear war, which means “terminal war.” We talk much too casually about nuclear war. There can’t be a nuclear war. If there is, we’re finished. It’s why the Doomsday Clock is set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s been.
Starting with George W. Bush the US began dismantling arms control. Bush dismantled the ABM Treaty, a missile treaty very significantly part of the arms control system and an enormous threat to Russia. So, the dismantling allowed the US to set up installations right at the border of Russia. It’s a severe threat to Russia. And Russia has reacted.
The Trump administration got rid of the INF Treaty, the Reagan-Gorbachev treaty of 1987 which ended short-range missiles in Europe. Those missiles are now back in place on the borders of Russia. Trump, to make it clear that we meant business, arranged missile launches right away upon breaking of the treaty.
Trump destroyed the Open Skies Treaty which originated with Eisenhower stating that each side should share information about what the other side was doing to reduce the threat of misunderstanding.
Only the new START Treaty remains. And Russia suspended it. START restricts the number of strategic weapons for each side. The treaty terminates in 2026, but it’s suspended by Russia anyway. So, in effect there are no agreed upon restraints to increasing nuclear weapons.
Both sides already have way more nuclear weapons than necessary; One Trident nuclear submarine could destroy a couple hundred cities all over the world. And land based nuclear missile locations are known by both sides. So, if there is a threat, those would be hit immediately. Which means if there’s a threat, “you’d better send’em off, use’em or lose’em.” This obviously is a very touchy, extraordinarily risky situation because one mistake could amplify very quickly.
The new START Treaty that’s been suspended by Russia did restrict the enormous excessive number of strategic weapons. So, we should be in negotiations right now to expand it, restore it, and reinstitute the treaties the US has dismantled, the INF Treaty, Reagan-Gorbachev treaty, ABM Treaty, Open Stars Treaty should all be brought back.
Question: Will society muster the will for change for equity, prosperity, and sustainability?
Chomsky: There is no answer. It’s up to the population to come to grips with issues and say we are not going to march to the precipice and fall over it. But it’s exactly what our leaders are telling us to do. Look at the environmental crisis. It is well understood that we may have enough time to control heating of the environment, destruction of habitat, destruction of the oceans which is going to lead to total catastrophe. It’s not like everybody will die all at once, but we’re going to reach irreversible tipping points that becomes just a steady decline. To know how serious it is, look at particular areas of the world.
The Middle East region is one of the most rapidly heating regions of the world at rates twice as fast as the rest of the world. Projections by the end of the century at current trajectories show sea level in Mediterranean will rise about 10 feet.
Look at a map where people live, it is indescribable. Around Southeast Asia and peasants in India are trying to survive temperatures in the 120s where less than 10% of population has air conditioning. This will cause huge migrations from areas of the world where life will become unlivable.
Fossil fuel companies are so profitable that they’ve decided to quit any sustainable efforts in favor of letting profits run as fast and as far as possible. They’re opening new oil and gas fields that can produce another 30-40 years but at that point we’ll all be finished.
We have the same issue with nuclear weapons as with the environment. If these two issues are not dealt with, in the not-too-distant future, it’ll be all over. The population needs to “have the will” to stop it.
Question: How do we muster that will?
Chomsky: Talk to neighbors, join community organizations, join activist’s groups, press Congress, get out into the streets if necessary. How have things happened in the past? For example, back in the 1960s small groups of women got together, forming consciousness-raising groups and it was 1975 (Sex Discrimination Act) that women were granted the right of persons peers under US domestic law, prior to that we’re still back in the age of the founding fathers when women were property Look at the Civil Rights movement. Go back to the 1950s, Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat on a bus that was planned by an organized group of activists that led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, big change… in 1960 a couple of black students in No. Carolina decided to sit in at a lunch counter segregated. Immediately arrested, and the next day another group came… later they became organized as SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinated Committee. Young people from the North started to join. Next freedom buses started running to Alabama to convince black farmers to cast a vote. It went on this way, building, until you got civil rights legislation in Washington.
What’s happening right now as an example of what people can do? The Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, IRA. It’s mostly a climate change act. The only way you can get banks and fossil fuel companies to stop destroying the world is to bribe them. That’s basically our system. But IRA is not the substantial program that Biden presented. It is watered down. The original came out of Bernie Sander’s office. As for the background for that, young people, from the Sunrise Movement, were active and organizing and sat in on Congressional offices. AOC joined them. A bill came out of this, but Republican opposition cut back the original bill by nearly 100% They are a denialist party. They want to destroy the world in the interest of private profit. The final IRA bill is nowhere near enough.
Summation: Chomsky sees a world of turmoil trying to sort out whether unipolar or multipolar wins the day with the Ukrainian war serving as a catalyst to change. Meanwhile, the EU carries the brunt of its impact. Meantime, nuclear arms treaties have literally dissolved in the face of a tenuous situation along the Russia/EU borders with newly armed missiles pointed at Russia’s heartland. In the face of this touch-and-go Russia vs. the West potentially explosive scenario, the global climate system is under attack via excessive fossil fuel emissions cranking up global temperatures beyond what 195 countries agreed was a danger zone.
Chomsky sees a nervous nuclear weapons-rattling high-risk world flanked by unmitigated deterioration of ecosystems that global warming steadily, assuredly takes down for the count, as global temperatures set new records. He calls for individuals to take action, do whatever necessary to change the trajectory of nuclear weaponry and climate change to save society. Chomsky offered several examples of small groups of people acting together, over time, turning into serious protests and ultimately positive legislation.
AmThis article covers the first 34 minutes of a 52-minute video: Noam Chomsky: About the Future of Our World.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” (Margaret Mead, Anthropologist)
The post The Future of Our World by Noam Chomsky first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
According to the New York Times, U.S. officials say there’s no excuse, on the warmakers’ own terms, for the genocide they are arming:
“Israel has achieved all that it can militarily in Gaza, according to senior American officials, who say continued bombings are only increasing risks to civilians while the possibility of further weakening Hamas has diminished…. William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, is due in Qatar on Thursday. Brett McGurk, President Biden’s Middle East coordinator, has headed to Egypt and Qatar. Amos Hochstein, a senior White House adviser, landed in Lebanon. One of the messages the officials are expected to deliver is that there is little more Israel can accomplish against Hamas.”
But there’s another message they’re delivering:
the weapons will never stop flowing from the United States to Israel.
According to opinion polls, the majority of U.S. voters want the weapons shipments to stop now and have wanted that for some time.
But there’s another message many of them are delivering:
OMG it’s so awesome how Kamala tells peace advocates to shut up, she and Walz bring joy to my life like like like like yeah you know?
If Harris were to demand that Biden or Congress or the UN stop the weapons shipments, and were they to stop, I would start campaigning for Harris-Walz to take office in Washington. As long as that doesn’t happen, I’ll support Biden-Harris taking seats in the dock at The Hague.
Unless of course somebody takes a notion to uphold U.S. laws and prosecute them here. Every weapons shipment violates the Conventional Arms Transfer Policy, the Foreign Assistance Act, the Arms Export Control Act, the U.S. War Crimes Act, the Genocide Convention Implementation Act, and the Leahy Law. Just ask former Senator Leahy who says the U.S. government is making a mockery of the law that bears his name.
Biden is still scheduled to be officially president for about as long as the Gulf War took from start to finish, about twice as long as the Spanish-American war, about three times the Falklands war, several times various U.S. wars in Latin America and around the globe, and several times what it took for the U.S. to overthrow the government of Afghanistan prior to failing to grasp the need to leave that place for decades.
Biden’s remaining months are also longer than it has taken for polls to show dramatic turns of opinion against wars, commonly labeled “war fatigue” as though noticing the horror of the mass killing requires sleepiness rather than insight. But the “fatigue” has already been awakened.
Of course, politicians also hear messages from war-profiting bribers of their campaigns, and from weapons-funded stink-tankers. The war machine has a great deal of inertia even when it has no excuse. Peace making has been bizarrely redefined as “anti-Semitism.” Opposition to genocide is now “terrorism.” And all the microphones have been gathered up in a big pile and placed in front of corporations peddling that BS.
But too many people know better. Too many people grew up believing genocide was evil. We’ve been here before, and it didn’t work out well for the forever-war candidate. His losing worked out horribly for everyone, of course, but his winning would likely have done the same.
We need an election in which people insist on not voting for war. We need an election in which people develop too much self-respect to give a flying F-35 what kind of tacos a candidate eats, which candidate you’d like a beer with, which you’d hire as a babysitter, which you’d vote for as prom king or queen.
Why does the killing never end? Panem et circenses.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
An interview with Waleed Shahid.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
Democrats could drive support in key swing states this fall if Vice President Kamala Harris calls for an end to weapons transfers to Israel amid its genocide in Gaza, new polling finds even as the Biden administration doubles down on its military support of Israel. The latest Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project/YouGov poll released Wednesday finds that large…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
To a warmonger, every problem calls for a war.
WAR! WAR! FOREVER WAR! UNENDING WAR!
Our current leaders are hypnotized by war. They lack the vision and resourcefulness to consider negotiation and cooperation. Peace is not in their thoughts. ‘Peace’ is not in their vocabulary. They are addicted to war. They are obsessed with war.
The lesson we must take from this is this: Talking to them, trying to change their minds, trying to alter their policies and methods, is a complete waste of time. It’s like yelling at storm clouds and telling them to stop raining. It’s like telling a bumble bee it should get a pilot license. It’s like talking to a wall and expecting a reply.
Which means, there is only one sensible, rational, effective course of action …
Current U.S. leadership, at all levels — we’re probably looking at 99% of those now in positions of power — must be replaced.
This is the only possible way to stop U.S. aggression and wanton promotion of chaos and violence in the world.
This must be the entire focus of peace activism going forward. We have no choice in the matter. The record is clear — an unblemished record of total failure to stop, or even slow down, the war machine.
Make no mistake about it! Replacing these misfits, psychopaths, sociopaths, and enemies of peace now in power, will not be easy.
But it can — and must — be done!
Our survival as a nation, perhaps the survival of the entire human race is at stake!
Here’s what it will take.
The two major parties will not give us the choices we need to make. Both the Republicans and Democrats are in the pockets of the military-industrial complex. And to bolster their commitment to this vast money laundering enterprise, where hundreds of billions of dollars end up in the coffers of giant defense companies and ultimately into the bank accounts of the ultra-wealthy, both major parties are fanatically committed to making the U.S. an empire.
If we want peace, we will have to elect peace candidates. And to elect peace candidates, we must on our own initiative put peace candidates on the ballot.
Identifying and choosing alternatives to the pro-war establishment candidates will not be complicated. At least for now, here’s the litmus test, consisting of three questions to be put to prospective candidates:
If a candidate answers ‘yes’ to all three, he or she deserves our full support and our vote. We then do everything it takes to get this person on the ballot. There are three ways to get them on the ballot:
First option is to use primaries. That is, run them in the next primary against one of the major party candidates.
Second option is to run the candidates as “third party”, e.g. as a Green or Libertarian or other minor party candidate.
Third option is to put them on the ballot as an independent. Right now, this is what Dennis Kucinich is doing in Ohio’s 7th District.
Whatever strategy we adopt certainly will require some serious dedication and hard work. We’ll have to organize locally and talk to voters face-to-face, we’ll have to marshal all of the power of social media, we’ll have to badger local media for news coverage. We’ll have to organized rallies and bake sales, visit churches, convalescent homes, community clubs and organizations.
But recognize: this is democracy at its best! It is citizens, locally, community-by-community, working together to signal their priorities, put their values before the public, and introduce real choice at the polls.
Once peace candidates are on the ballot, then it’s up to the voting public. If we the people want to end the wars, reverse the rampant militarization of our society, if we truly want peace, then …
WE ONLY VOTE FOR PEACE CANDIDATES!
It’s that simple.
This is how we “fire” the warmongers who now populate the halls of Congress and other seats of power.
This is how we stop the squandering of our national wealth, the theft of our money!
This is how we inaugurate a nation at peace!
And guess what?
The whole world will thank us!
The post A Nation at Peace first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Vice President Kamala Harris in August 2021. (White House /Erin Scott)
Two college professors who studied and lived in the 1960s recently published an opinion piece in The Los Angeles Times urging dissidents not to protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The first paragraph is a stark example of uber-liberals suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome:
A collection of fringe radical groups are calling for demonstrations in Chicago this August at the Democratic National Convention — a ‘March on the DNC’ for Palestine. We study political movements, and we’ve participated in more than a few ourselves. We share the concerns of many Americans about Israel’s actions in Gaza, the need for an immediate cease-fire and the release of hostages and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel. But we’re not going to heed the call to protest in Chicago. We hope others will stay away as well.
Cheri Honkala, an advocate for decades for the poor and homeless in the streets of Philadelphia, plans to lead the Poor People’s Army in a march to the steps of the United Center on the convention’s opening day. If she is “radical fringe,” then so am I.
The tireless and fearless founder of Philadelphia’s Kensington Welfare Rights Union in 1991, Honkala is now the Poor People’s Army’s national spokesperson and national coordinator of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign.
She has been arrested over 200 times, but says that her worst was at the July Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee where she tried to serve an arrest warrant on Trump and the Republican Party for crimes against humanity.
Police cuffed her, then drove her alone in a van to a closed prison where 200 military police officers sat at tables, ready to be of service to convention security on demand. They locked her in a room with glass walls for hours, then drove her to an empty warehouse district where they let her out at night in a thunder and lightning storm, with no wallet and no phone.
She is now preparing to confront the Democrats. Chicago was compelled to grant the Poor People’s Army a permit to march to the steps of the convention at Chicago’s United Center after failing to respond to her appeal of a permit denial. Authorities are now attempting to reroute the march, but the Poor People’s Army does not plan to back down.
The protests will address domestic crises as well as the genocide against Palestinians. Honkala talks about the reality of the streets, telling Black Agenda Report that:
More Americans have died because of the opiate crisis than died in the Vietnam War. Millions of dollars have come into Philadelphia, supposedly to help with recovery programs and housing and services here, but it never makes it to the people.
However, these learned professors of the 1960s writing in the LA Times assert that those preparing to protest must support the Democratic Party and its candidates because Donald Trump is a new Hitler who will end democracy. They say this is not the time for protest.
Malcom X Comes to Mind
But who determines when to be patient and ask for incremental change, and when to demand radical change? At this point even national health care, closing Guantanamo, or increasing the national minimum wage to minimum subsistence, would be radical change. Malcom X comes to mind: “That’s not a chip on my shoulder. That’s your foot on my neck.” Sometimes, incrementalism doesn’t work.
Though the professors express “concern” about the genocide in Gaza, their piece speaks only of the Israeli hostages, not of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners, many of them children, held without charges, sexually assaulted, and tortured. A Knesset member recently said that rape of Palestinian prisoners is legitimate.
October 7 happened in part because of all the Palestinians in prison with no charges or hope of a trial. The only ceasefire after October 7 brought Palestinian prisoners home at a 3:1 ratio to Israeli hostages but the ratio of remaining Palestinian prisoners to Israeli hostages is still far higher. Prisoner release will be part of any negotiation and must be one of the demands of the Palestinian solidarity movement.
Palestinian Youth Accord for Prisoners rally in Gaza support of Palestinian administrative detainees on a mass hunger strike, May 12, 2014. (Joe Catron, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
The professors say they support a two-state solution, but that dream is long dead; members of the U.N. Security Council and the General Assembly have repeated it like a mantra for decades as Israel colonized more land in the West Bank and rained bombs on Gaza. President Joe Biden and the U.S. State Department continue to invoke it but say that it can only be created by negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians, which is to say not at all.
October 7 happened because 75 years of negotiations failed. The recent Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh dimmed hopes of a negotiated settlement any time soon.
These men of the ’60s claim that “the convention protests of 1960 and 1964 followed a sophisticated and pragmatic strategy of working within and without the party apparatus.” But why would anyone trust their “within and without” strategy after the Democratic Party elite stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 and kept Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from running as a Democrat this year?
The long cover-up of Biden’s decline and his unceremonious replacement with Kamala Harris, a lock-em-up candidate who has never won a single delegate, reeks of Deep State. Many are asking, “Who is in charge, given the president’s obviously impaired faculties?”
Notice how Tony Blinken keeps addressing nation regarding all conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine over the last week?
Joe Biden is effectively AWOL & Kamala can’t be bothered to be questioned on what looks like could potentially be WWIII.
The U.S. gov is on autopilot pic.twitter.com/yZjBDXpfuX
— Duopoly Destroyer (@realnikohouse) August 6, 2024
While praise is showered on Biden’s alleged prowess in negotiating the recent historic and complicated international prisoner exchange, his incompetence was evident in the disastrous June 27 debate. He confuses Haifa with Rafah, and Mexico with Egypt. There is no way he negotiated the prisoner exchange.
According to the LA Times editorialists, Chicago in 1960 and 1964 had good protesters who “worked within the party apparatus.” The 1968 protesters, they say, were bad and “set back the cause.”
The DNC protests are allegedly why Hubert Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon, who continued the Vietnam War longer — they hypothesize — than Humphrey would have. Of course, the anti-war candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, had probably just been assassinated by the Deep State, after winning the California primary, all but assuring his nomination. But rather than protest, we should have quietly urged an anti-war platform?
Humphrey promised to stop bombing North Vietnam and seek a ceasefire after the convention and before the election, because it was clear that the anti-war movement couldn’t be ignored. Would he have made those promises without the protests in Chicago? Would he have kept them if elected? There is no way to know for sure.
As one who was on the streets protesting the Vietnam War, I knew that it was imperative to let the Vietnamese know we were in solidarity with them, and the Palestinians deserve no less. We must express our outrage at both parties for their support of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Demonstration outside the The Watergate Hotel in Washington, where Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu was staying, July 22. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
“The key organizers,” the professors write:
the ones who will determine the message this protest conveys by its slogans and actions, are members of the ultra-leftist Party for Socialism and Liberation, and its front organization, the ANSWER coalition. This is the same group behind the demonstration that burned an American flag and defaced monuments in a ‘day of rage’ as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress last week.
If burning an American flag, a form of protest protected by the Supreme Court, and defacing monuments as acts of rage against war criminal Netanyahu make protestors “ultra-leftist,” then sign me up.
Rather than using labels like “ultra-leftist”, why not challenge what this group actually says, specifically and factually? The global stakes are quite high, so clarification and accuracy are essential. The Poor People’s Army and Code Pink are also among the organizers. The protests are organized by a coalition of groups determined to challenge the Democrats in the streets over their position on Palestine. Let’s not bring back Red baiting.
According to the professors, “…the primary goal has to be to defeat Donald Trump, and to help Democratic candidates win in the House and Senate.”
They don’t want to lose voters “to a perception that Democrats are the party of chaos…” But it is past time to expose the chaos to the light of day. We would be immoral to stand passively by as the U.S. funds genocide in Palestine and plays a game of nuclear chicken with Russia in Ukraine.
Rather than conceding all political space to the Democratic Party’s coronation of Kamala Harris, we must expose how fundamentally undemocratic it is. They stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders twice, kept RFK Jr out of this year’s Democratic primary, then shoehorned Kamala Harris into place with the barest semblance of Democratic process; a bunch of no-name delegates quickly met and agreed to throw their support to her.
According to renowned journalist Seymour Hersch, Barack Obama threatened Biden with the 25th Amendment if he didn’t step down. It’s all about backroom deals and Deep State manipulations, while the rest of us wonder who’s really in charge. Yet the professors scoff at the notion that the Democratic Party is “a tool of billionaires and corporations.” It’s not?
Insane story from Seymour Hersh…
Biden was threatened with the 25th Amendment by top level Democrats.
"Obama called Biden after breakfast [on July 21] and said, ‘Here’s the deal. We have Kamala’s approval to invoke the 25th Amendment.’” pic.twitter.com/pxL27A7fhB
— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) July 28, 2024
Ajamu Baraka recently wrote:
The fact that select oligarchs, in this case, the cabal that actually runs the Democrat Party, can remove a presidential nominee and expeditiously anoint Kamala Harris as his replacement cannot be characterized as anything else but a coup…The oppressed must have a clear and sober understanding of the class and power dynamics in the Democrat Party but also in the broader society. The gangster move by the oligarchs who control the Democrats stripped away any pretense that any real structures of democracy exist in that party.
People who went to Chicago in 1968 to protest the Vietnam War at the DNC were courageous and righteous. People planning to go to Chicago’s DNC this year to protest Democratic Party complicity in the ongoing Gaza genocide are also courageous and righteous. Crash the party is a slogan of the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. Sign me up. We need to get that foot off our necks.
• First published in Consortium News
The post On the Call Not to Protest in Chicago first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Requests from immigrants to obtain U.S. citizenship status are being processed at the fastest rate seen in over a decade, according to a new report. The fast clip of people receiving citizenship status could play a role in the outcome of the 2024 presidential contest, although it’s not clear yet which states these new citizens are living in or whom they intend to vote for.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
From his own redoubt of critical inquiry, the former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating has made fighting the imperialising leprosy of the AUKUS security pact between Australia, the UK and the United States a matter of solemn duty.
In March 15, 2023, he excoriated a Canberra press gallery seduced and tantalised by the prospect of nuclear-powered submarines, calling the Albanese government’s complicit arrangements with the US and UK to acquire such a capability “the worst international decision by an Australian Labor government since the former Labor leader, Billy Hughes, sought to introduce conscription to augment Australian forces in World War one.”
His latest spray was launched in the aftermath of a touched-up AUKUS, much of it discussed in a letter by US President Joe Biden to the US House Speaker and President of the Senate. The revised agreement between the three powers for Cooperation Related to Naval Nuclear Propulsion is intended to supersede the November 22, 2021 agreement between the three powers on the Exchange of Naval Nuclear Propulsion Information (ENNPIA).
The new agreement permits “the continued communication and exchange of NNPI, including certain RD, and would also expand the cooperation between the governments by enabling the transfer of naval nuclear propulsion plants of conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines, including component parts and spare parts thereof, and other related equipment.” The new arrangements will also permit the sale of special nuclear material in the welded power units, along with other relevant “material as needed for such naval propulsion plants.”
The contents of Biden’s letter irked Keating less than the spectacular show of servility shown by Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles, and Foreign Minister Penny Wong on their visit to Annapolis for the latest AUSMIN talks. In what has become a pattern of increasing subordination of Australian interests to the US Imperium, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken played happy hosts and must have been delighted by what they heard.
The details that emerged from the conversations held between the four – details which rendered Keating passionately apoplectic – can only make those wishing for an independent Australian defence policy weep. Words such as “Enhanced Force Posture Cooperation” were used to describe the intrusion of the US armed forces into every sphere of Australian defence: the domains of land, maritime, air, and space.
Ongoing infrastructure investments at such Royal Australian Air Force Bases as Darwin and Tindal continue to take place, not to bolster Australian defence but fortify the country as a US forward defensive position. To these can be added, as the Pentagon fact sheet reveals, “site surveys for potential upgrades at RAAF Bases Curtin, Learmonth, and Scherger.”
The degree of subservience Canberra affords is guaranteed by increased numbers of US personnel to take place in rotational deployments. These will include “frequent rotations of bombers, fighter aircraft, and Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Aircraft”. Secret arrangements have also been made involving the disposal of nuclear propulsion plants that will feature in Australia’s nuclear powered submarine fleet, though it is unclear how broad that commitment is.
The venomous icing on the cake – at least for AUKUS critics – comes in the form of an undisclosed “Understanding” that involves “additional related political commitments”. The Australian Greens spokesperson on Defence, Senator David Shoebridge, rightly wonders “what has to be kept secret from the Australian public? There are real concerns the secret understanding includes commitments binding us to the US in the event they go to war with China in return for getting nuclear submarines.”
Marles has been stumblingly unforthcoming in that regard. When asked what such “additional political commitments” were, he coldly replied that the agreement was “as we’ve done it.” The rest was “misinformation” being spread by detractors of the alliance.
It is precisely the nature of these undertakings, and what was made public at Annapolis, that paved the way for Keating’s hefty salvo on ABC’s 7.30. The slavishness of the whole affair had made Keating “cringe”. “This government has sold out to the United States. They’ve fallen for the dinner on the White House lawn.”
He proved unsparing about Washington’s intentions. “What AUKUS is about in the American mind is turning [Australia into suckers], locking us up for 40 years with American bases all around … not Australian bases.” It meant, quite simply, “in American terms, the military control of Australia. I mean, what’s happened … is likely to turn Australia into the 51st state of the United States.”
Having the US as an ally was itself problematic, largely because of its belligerent intentions. “If we didn’t have an aggressive ally like the United States – aggressive to others in the region – there’d be nobody attacking Australia. We are better left alone than we are being ‘protected’ by an aggressive power like the United States.”
As for what Australian obligations to the US entailed, the former PM was in little doubt. “What this is all about is the Chinese laying claim to Taiwan, and the Americans are going to say ‘no, no, we’re going to keep these Taiwanese people protected’, even though they’re sitting on Chinese real estate.” Were Australia to intervene, the picture would rapidly change: an initial confrontation between Beijing and Washington over the island would eventually lead to the realisation that catastrophic loss would simply not be worth it, leaving Australia “the ones who have done all the offence.”
As for Australia’s own means of self-defence against any adversary or enemy, Keating uttered the fundamental heresy long stomped on by the country’s political and intelligence establishment: Canberra could, if needed, go it alone. “Australia is capable of defending itself. There’s no way another state can invade a country like Australia with an armada of ships without it all failing.” Australia did not “need to be basically a pair of shoes hanging out of Americans’ backside.” With Keating’s savage rhetoric, and the possibility that AUKUS may collapse before the implosions of US domestic politics, improbable peace may break out.
The post Resisting AUKUS: The Paul Keating Formula first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Israeli forces used at least one U.S.-provided bomb in its massacre in a school-turned-shelter that killed nearly 100 Palestinians as they were conducting morning prayers on Saturday, a report finds. CNN reports that Israel used a GBU-39 small diameter bomb in the strike, citing an analysis by former U.S. army explosive ordnance disposal technician Trevor Ball who was shown footage of…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The infamous 920-page Project 2025, which provides a blueprint for a radical right-wing agenda under a second Donald Trump presidency, doesn’t recommend any reforms to the Supreme Court — and for good reason. The conservative extremists who seek to install Trump have already taken over the high court. But the reforms President Joe Biden advocates — and Kamala Harris endorses — could go a long way…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Less than a full week after saying he was “terminating” a planned debate with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, Donald Trump announced he would agree to do that debate after all — and suggested two dates for additional debates. Trump discussed the issue of debating Harris during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. For several weeks, Trump had called into…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In the world of nuclear weapons, there are many secrets; warhead designs, infrastructure security details, historical vulnerabilities and mishaps, and the locations of nuclear-armed submarines are all highly classified. But what is not secret — at least not in the United States — is the total number of weapons that make up the country’s nuclear stockpile. Although not closely examined by the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A new poll demonstrates that nearly two-thirds of Americans back a reform to the U.S. Supreme Court that President Joe Biden recently announced his support for: the implementation of term limits for justices. Currently, Supreme Court justices are appointed to lifetime tenures, and can only be removed through impeachment by Congress. Only one justice in U.S. history was ever impeached…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Massacre after massacre is occurring in Palestine, with immense human suffering and destruction, all enabled by the U.S. government. Even with the International Court of Justice declaring Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories as unlawful, President Joe Biden has shown that there is, in fact, no “red line” for the United States military support for Israel. What more evidence do we…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone
President Biden — if you feel like pretending Biden is still serving as President and still making the decisions in the White House — has pledged to support Israel against any retaliations for its recent assassination spree in Iran and Lebanon which killed high-profile officials from Hamas and Hezbollah.
A White House statement asserts that Biden spoke with Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday and “reaffirmed his commitment to Israel’s security against all threats from Iran, including its proxy terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis,” and “discussed efforts to support Israel’s defence against threats, including against ballistic missiles and drones, to include new defensive US military deployments.”
Hilariously, the statement also claims that “the President stressed the importance of ongoing efforts to de-escalate broader tensions in the region.”
Yep, nothing emphasises the importance of de-escalating broader tensions in the region like pledging unconditional military support for the region’s single most belligerent actor no matter how reckless and insane its aggressions become.
This statement from the White House echoes comments from Secretary of “Defence” Lloyd Austin a day earlier, who said “We certainly will help defend Israel” should a wider war break out as a result of Israel’s assassination strikes.
Biden promises Netanyahu the U.S. will defend Israel from any reprisal attacks pic.twitter.com/9meq2hTBmq
— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) August 1, 2024
All this babbling about “defending” the state of Israel is intended to convey the false impression that Israel has just been sitting there minding its own business, and is about to suffer unprovoked attacks from hostile aggressors for some unfathomable reason.
As though detonating military explosives in the capital cities of two nations to conduct political assassinations would not be seen as an extreme act of war in need of a violent response by literally all governments on this planet.
Helping Israeli attacks
In reality, the US isn’t vowing to defend the state of Israel, the US is vowing to help Israel attack other countries.
If you’re pledging unconditional support to an extremely belligerent aggressor while it commits the most demented acts of aggression imaginable, all you’re doing is condoning those acts of aggression and making sure it will suffer no consequences when it conducts more of them.
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has reiterated its calls for Israeli forces “to minimize the impact of military operations on civilians in Gaza and to end the killing of journalists.”
LIVE updates: https://t.co/zy5TRLrI15 pic.twitter.com/U3wHa464IQ
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) August 1, 2024
Washington’s position is made even more absurd after all the hysterical shrieking and garment-rending from the Washington establishment following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
Israel murdered the leader of the Hamas political bureau, not a military commander, and he was the primary negotiator in the mediated ceasefire talks with Israel.
This was a political assassination just like a successful attempt on Trump’s life would have been, but probably a lot more consequential. And yet the only response from Washington has been to announce that it will help Israel continue its incendiary brinkmanship throughout the Middle East.
Washington swamp monsters talk all the time about their desire to promote “peace and stability in the Middle East”, while simultaneously pledging loyalty and support for a Middle Eastern nation whose actions pose a greater obstacle to peace and stability in the region than any other.
These contradictions are becoming more and more glaring and apparent before the entire world.
Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
The Economist published a cover story on July 6 with the stark image of a walker, a mobility device typically used by disabled people, with the United States presidential seal on it. “No Way to Run a Country,” the headline stated. Disabled people responded angrily on social media at the implication that mobility aids are disqualifying for office, mentioning former President Franklin Roosevelt, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Sen. Tammy Duckworth, all wheelchair users.
Similar visual messages previously appeared on a New Yorker cover (10/2/23) and in a Roll Call magazine political cartoon (9/6/23), both from the fall of 2023. The New Yorker cover showed President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Mitch McConnell using walkers while competing in an athletic race. The joke was that it would be absurd for such elderly people to compete in a race, but the implication was that anyone similarly disabled might not be fit to serve in political office. None of these leaders use walkers in real life.
Economist (7/6/24)
The Roll Call cartoon showed the US Capitol transformed into the “Senate Assisted Legislating Facility,” with a stairlift and elderly people with walkers. Disability advocates often write about how the media and others should avoid using disabilities and medical conditions as metaphors, as it’s usually done to negatively stigmatize them.
The Economist cover appeared during a period of intense media conversation over presidential fitness, which ramped up just after the last presidential debate on June 27, and continued until Biden withdrew from his campaign for re-election on July 21. With Biden and Trump both older than any other presidential candidates in history—and both showing many common signs of age—media have been discussing their capabilities for years.
Ability and age shouldn’t be off the table as media topics during elections, but there are ways to have these conversations without promoting harm. By not interrogating “fitness for office” as a concept, the media has contributed to a culture in which two elderly presidential candidates constantly bragged about their prowess, culminating in the surreal moment of their competitive discussion of golfing abilities during the debate.
Disability organizations have created style guides for non-ableist journalism in general. In terms of covering political campaigns, some common pitfalls to avoid include: stating or implying that all disabilities or conditions are inherent liabilities, even cognitive disabilities; diagnosing candidates without evidence; using illness or disability as a metaphor; conflating age with ability; conflating physical and cognitive health; using stigmatizing language to describe incapacities; and highlighting issues with ability or health without explaining why they are concerning.
New Yorker (10/2/23)
Biden’s struggles with articulating and completing his thoughts during the last debate prompted a flurry of news stories, including reporting on his tendency to forget people and events (e.g., Wall Street Journal, 6/4/24; New York Times, 7/2/24). Some of the same outlets that had previously defended him against claims of being cognitively impaired (New York, 7/31/23) were suddenly diagnosing him with possible medical conditions and doubting his ability to lead (New York, 7/7/24).
The Hill (7/20/24) called Biden’s verbal gaffes “embarrassing,” and casually quoted insiders referring to “brain farts” with scorn. “It was agony to watch a befuddled old man struggling to recall words and facts,” the Economist wrote in an editorial (7/4/24), which accompanied the cover image of the walker and called for Biden to drop out. The piece linked to another Economist piece (6/28/24) which argued that Biden had failed to prove he was “mentally fit,” and called on him to stand down and make room for a “younger standard-bearer.”
There are reasonable concerns about the age of candidates, including that our leadership doesn’t represent the majority of the country demographically and that elderly candidates may not live long. But the Economist made implicit assumptions about age and disability, including that a “younger standard-bearer” would likely be more “mentally fit.” According to scientists, slower communication and short-term memory loss are associated with aging, but some other cognitive abilities have been shown to strengthen.
What’s more, Biden’s gaffes might have been “embarrassing” to him, or “agony” for him to experience, but characterizing disability or struggle from the outside as embarrassing or unpleasant to observe is a common form of ableism. It’s reasonable to report on his mistakes without editorializing and stigmatizing language.
Neither Trump nor Biden have a record of supporting the needs of disabled people while in office, especially around the Covid-19 pandemic. Still, their disabilities or capacity issues do deserve sensitivity. By insulting memory lapses and mobility issues, even implicitly, the media insults everyone with those conditions.
It seems some part of the media’s panic around the abilities of presidential candidates has more to do with elections than with who is running the country. Biden’s re-election chances fell into jeopardy after the debate. The Washington Post (7/22/24) recently made this clear. “Trump’s age and health under renewed scrutiny after Biden’s exit,” it reported:
After weeks of intense focus on President Biden’s health and age that ended with his withdrawal from the campaign on Sunday, the script has flipped: Former president Donald Trump is now the oldest presidential nominee in history—and one who has been less transparent about his medical condition than his former opponent.
The Post makes it sound as if media are passively reporting on the next inevitable story, and not actively choosing to focus its disability-related concerns around its election concerns.
Roll Call (9/6/23)
The recent Washington Post article (7/22/24) on Trump’s abilities points out that he hasn’t released his medical records since he was president, when he had “had heart disease and was obese.” It also points out his “elevated genetic risk of dementia.”
With the intense focus on medical records and physical tests, the news media often writes about the bodies of presidential candidates as if they were competing for Best in Show, instead of for a job that primarily involves decision-making, leadership and communication—and for which disability might even be an asset in terms of compassion and understanding.
News outlets have reported with concern on how Biden and Trump walk, despite the fact that the majority of people in their 80s deal with mobility challenges. (Biden is 81; Trump is 78.) According to the Boston Globe (3/12/24), “Joe Biden needs to explain his slow and cautious walk.” The news article does offer his physician’s explanation of neuropathy but doesn’t seem to accept it.
The article argues that Biden’s silence about his gait was contributing to concerns that he might have an illness like dementia or Parkinson’s. The Globe seemed to take for granted that Parkinson’s would be a problem for voters and not, say, an asset. Many voters have similar conditions and might appreciate the representation. The article then mentions that Biden’s slower walking might be a sign of diminished “mental capacity,” conflating physical and cognitive issues.
In 2020, there were similar articles about Trump showing signs of unsteadiness while walking and drinking from a glass of water, with the implication that difficulties with both might undermine his fitness for office (New York Times, 6/14/20).
Bloomberg (7/3/24)
The Americans with Disabilities Act protects disabled people from having to disclose details about their conditions. This is because stigma and bigotry are so widespread that it’s understood such details might be handled with prejudice by employers. Media outlets undermine those principles in their lust for detailed information about the medical records of presidential candidates.
Just after the last presidential debate, Bloomberg (7/3/24) insisted in a headline that “Presidential Candidates Shouldn’t Have Health Secrets.” The article not only demanded clarity on what caused Biden’s “poor performance” in the debate, but also that candidates go through independent medical evaluations, with the full results being released to the public. Implicit in this demand is that pre-existing conditions would be liabilities. Otherwise, why would the public need to know?
“Americans are naturally curious about the health of their president, and any sign of illness or frailty gets subjected to intense public scrutiny,” a follow-up Bloomberg article (7/10/24) insisted. Are Americans curious, or are the media? The article pointed out that the US obsession with presidential health is unusual; in most countries, leaders don’t release their medical records. Still, the article went into intense detail about everything known and speculated about in terms of Biden and Trump’s health, body weight, medications and the like.
The media’s focus on the physical imperfections of presidential candidates is biased not only towards abled people, but towards white men. Women and people of color are more likely to have pre-existing medical conditions, and more likely to face stigma as a result of them. The Washington Post (7/22/24) already noted that Kamala Harris hasn’t released her medical records, or responded to questions about it.
During the 2016 campaign for presidency, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton fainted. Her doctor said she had pneumonia and was overheated. Not surprisingly, right-wing media used it as a chance to portray her as weak and unfit, but even some liberal outlets (CNN, 9/12/16), decided this was a significant incident worthy of endless commentary, speculation and demands for investigations. Fainting is something many people, especially women, experience routinely, as part of illness, heat, exhaustion or just standing for too long. The media worked to denormalize it.
NBC (7/4/24)
Overall, media seem to have a unique preoccupation with the bodies of presidential candidates–more than, say, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices or governors. There is a mythology around presidents, which Trump himself played into by recently referring to himself as a “fine and brilliant young man,” along with celebrating his survival of a recent assassination attempt.
Biden, who has historically portrayed himself as strong, and even claimed to overcome his stutter, finally started to let go of this mythology just before he dropped out of the race. He acknowledged age, exhaustion and slower speech. He joked about being fine besides his “brain.” And he mentioned that he might need more sleep. He was exhibiting another kind of strength through honesty, though it might have been strategic. It turned out to not be the most politically effective approach: Some media outlets highlighted him needing more sleep as headline-worthy and a red flag (NBC, 7/4/24; New York Times, 7/4/24).
The challenges Biden and Trump face in walking and speaking are evident to the public. Questions about underlying health issues are fair, but the implication of all of this “Best in Show” coverage is that people with significant disabilities, or even just a need for regular sleep, might face a hostile, intrusive media if they ran for president. And this discourse trickles down to how people feel permitted to speak about ordinary disabled civilians.
The presidency isn’t a sporting event. If media outlets are going to express concern about a candidate’s physical abilities, they should clarify what assumptions are guiding their concerns. As it stands, most of these articles and images just seem concerned with any signs of disability, which they implicitly associate with not being fit to serve.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
Former President Donald Trump, the Republican Party nominee for president in the 2024 election, indicated in an interview on Monday that he may back out of a planned debate with presumed Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. When asked by Fox News’s Laura Ingraham whether he would debate Harris, Trump gave a vague answer. He is currently scheduled to square off against the likely Democratic…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In an op-ed published on Monday morning, President Joe Biden announced his support for a series of reforms to the Supreme Court, including establishing term limits for justices. Biden opened his op-ed, which appeared in The Washington Post, by stating that “no one is above the law.” “Not the president of the United States. Not a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. No one,”…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In the days after October 7, 2023, the U.S. mainstream media and political establishment — both the Republicans and Democrats — launched once again into anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic rhetoric. Ignoring the conditions of siege, occupation and settler colonialism under which Palestinians in Gaza already lived, Joe Biden’s administration offered full diplomatic, military and financial backing to…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
We speak to two doctors who are part of a group of 45 U.S. doctors, surgeons and nurses who have volunteered in Gaza since October 7 and wrote an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, demanding an immediate ceasefire and an international arms embargo of Israel. The group includes evidence of a much higher death toll than is usually cited…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.