Photo by Diana Vargas

Daniel Volman concludes his excellent recent article for CounterPunch, “Why African Homophobia is Still the Real Western Import,” with these words:

African homophobes say they are standing up to the West and saving the continent and the world from homosexuality, but they are just serving their own selfish interests and the interests of right-wing Christian nationalists in the West.

Few Americans are aware just how significant is the role of “right-wing Christian nationalists” in promoting and sustaining the reactionary sexual politics prevalent within many African countries. It is estimated that more than 20 U.S. Christian groups are actively subsidizing campaigns against LGBT people as well as opposing access to safe abortions, contraceptives and comprehensive sexuality education.

The British-based openDemocracy estimates that these groups have spent at least $54 million in their campaigns in Africa since 2007.  It notes, “Between 2008 and 2018, this group sent more than $20m to Uganda alone.”

OpenDemocracy singles out the Fellowship Foundation as the U.S.’s big spender at $34.5 million.  It dubs the organization “a secretive US religious group” whose associate, David Bahati, wrote Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill.  It was founded in 1942 and, until 2023, hosted Washington’s annual National Prayer Breakfast at which every president since Dwight Eisenhower attended.  For the last 25 years, the Fellowship hosted Uganda’s National Prayer Breakfast and, in 2022, Pres. Yoweri Museveni spoke.

Among the leading U.S. organizations that have funded anti-gay and other conservative campaigns in Africa include:

+ Billy Graham Evangelistic Association = $7.6 million.

+ Human Life International = $4.1 million.

+ Bethany Christian Services = $3.3 million.

+ Focus on the Family = $1.9 million.

+ Intervarsity Christian Fellowship = $1.1 million.

Exodus International (aka Exodus Global Alliance) was founded in 1976 as a proponent of what was dubbed “ex-gay” conversion movement.  It argued that conversion therapy programs, based on religious and counseling methods, could make gay individuals straight.  The strategy was embraced by leading anti-gay spokesmen, including Archbishop Henry Orombi, chair of the Africa Host Committee of the 2010 Lausanne Congress; pastor Martin Ssempa; and David Bahati, the sponsor of Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill.

Often forgotten, before the current Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson (R-LA), launched his political career, he was a lawyer advising Exodus International.  According to CNN, he “partnered with the groups to put on an annual anti-gay event aimed at teens.”

in 2013, Alan Chambers, the president of Exodus, posted a public apology for the “pain and hurt” his organization caused by promoting conversion therapy. He shut the organization down, accepting the fact that “conversion therapy” did not work and had been condemned by leading medical groups.  As he admitted, “I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced.”  He added:

I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change. I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents.

After Exodus formally ending, many within the organization regrouped as the Restored Hope Ministry.  (Pray Away, a 2021 documentary by Kristine Stolakis, examines Exodus.)

Bethany Christian Services was founded in 1944 and is one of the U.S.’s largest Protestant adoption and foster care agencies. It operates in Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, Ghana and South Africa. It long opposed placing children with LGBT adoptive parents but, in 2021, announced that it would begin providing services to same-sex parents.

According to one source, Bethany has close ties to the family of former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.  Between 2001 and 2015, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation, run by DeVos and her husband, gave $343,000 to Bethany.  In addition, between 2012 and 2015, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, run by the Sec. DeVos’s father-in-law, the billionaire founder of Amway Richard DeVos, and his wife Helen, gave Bethany $750,000.

Family Watch International was founded in 1999 as Global Helping to Advance Women (Global HAWC) by longtime anti-LGBT and anti-choice activist Sharon Slater, a Mormon.  It has close ties with anti-LGBT movements in Uganda and Nigeria. According to The Guardian, it backed Uganda’s anti-gay laws. However, on its website it declared, “Family Watch has never supported any efforts in Africa to promote anti-homosexual bills.”  It has been a strong supporter of conversion therapy and opposes “Comprehensive Sexual Education,” age-appropriate and medically accurate information on topics related to sexuality.

But, as Emerson Hodges, research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), points out, “Family Watch International’s plays downs its role in the anti-gay legislation, including the death penalty for someone revealed to have had homosexual relations.” He stresses: There’s a hypocritical, a sort of “cognitive dissonance,” that’s like: These groups want to be proud for what they are doing, they want to be named and recognized for what they are doing by powerful figures in these foreign countries, but don’t really want the backlash for being the reason why people are being violently attacked.

Looking deeper, he notes, “If you look at the groups that are doing this anti-LBGTQ work in African, you’re looking at “old-guard” groups – Focus on the Family, Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council, World Congress of Families.”  He added, “They’re very much old guard, they were part of an extensive battle to keep sodomy laws in the U.S. and prevent gay marriage. If you look at the old-guard groups, there are clearly using old-school rhetoric.”

Hodges singles out Scott Lively as the most prominent of the “old-guard.”  Lively is an attorney, author (e.g., The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party), a rightwing Christian activist and a long-term anti-LGBTQ+ crusader.  In the 1990s, he was the assistant director of the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA), a branch of Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition.  In 1997, he founded the Abiding Truth Ministries (ATM) that promoted campaigns like “Take Back The Schools Campaign” that sought to “eject the ‘gay’ movement from California schools.”

Lively went to Uganda in 2002 to speak out against pornography, denouncing what he called “the globalists who use the sexual revolution and the Planned Parenthood Federation and the global homosexual movement” to accumulate power and control population. Going further, he insisted that these forces were backed by the financier George Soros and were “infiltrating” Uganda, including “introducing pornography” to the country.

In 2007, Lively declared:

… homosexuality is destructive to individuals and to society and it should never publicly promoted. The easiest way to discourage gay pride parades and other homosexual advocacy is to make such activity illegal in the interest of public health and morality.

In March 2009, Lively joined Caleb Lee Brundidge and Don Schmierer as speakers at a Kampala anti-LGBT conference organized by the Family Life Network, “Exposing the Truth behind Homosexuality and the Homosexual Agenda.” Brundidge was a self-described former gay man who led “healing seminars”; and Schmierer was a board member of Exodus International whose mission was “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality.”

Lively gave a five-hour presentation that was broadcast on local television.  In it, he claimed that homosexuals were aggressively recruiting Uganda’s children and argued that human rights protections shouldn’t be extended to these “predatory’ figures.”  He denounced gay men in no uncertain terms:

They’re sociopaths. There’s no mercy at all. There’s no nurturing. There’s no caring about anybody else. This is the kind of person that it takes to run a gas chamber. Or to do a mass murder. The Rwandan stuff probably involved these guys.

Lively got even more extreme in his denunciations of “gay” people in a 2017 post: “Ultimately, the ‘gay’ agenda is simply a sub-plot of the larger Satanic agenda and now that LGBTQ goals appear nearly fully realized, the hidden hands behind them (both human and demonic) are coming into view.”  Going further, he added:

We are witnessing the end-game before our very eyes but few recognize what they are seeing. What is next in the LGBTQ agenda is transhumanism, the redefinition of humanness and emergence of human/animal/machine chimeral forms.

He concluded, noting “Satan is fashioning a final comprehensive counterfeit alternative to the creation over which Man finally assumes that he has accessed the Tree of Life and is persuaded that he is God, destroying himself and ‘goodness” itself in the process.”

The post U.S. Christian Money Funds African Homophobia appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: U.S. Department of State – Public Domain

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius has always been an apologist for the Central Intelligence Agency; then he added the Pentagon to his list for institutional apologies.  But now Ignatius is going much further; he has become the mouthpiece for both the administrations of President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  His most recent editorial (“The U.S. is assembling the pieces of a Gaza war endgame”) foresees the “contours of a possible exit ramp” in Gaza that is constructed out of sheer fantasy.

First, let’s examine the bizarre support for President Biden.  Ignatius argues that Biden “rightly called” the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor’s support for arrest warrants for the top Israeli leaders as “outrageous.”  No one in the U.S. government or the mainstream media is questioning the war crime charges against the Hamas leadership, and there is no reason to question comparable charges against Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

In fact, Gallant’s very words offer the best explanation for charging the Israelis with war crimes and for supporting arrest warrants for Israeli leaders.  On the third day of the war, it was Gallant who offered this: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip.  There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.  We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”  For the past seven months, the Israeli government and the Israeli Defense Forces have done everything possible to carry out Gallant’s orders.

As part of this campaign, the Israelis have done their best to make Gaza uninhabitable.  They have destroyed farms, schools, libraries, mosques, and essential infrastructure.  Some of Israel’s worst crimes are the destruction of the health care infrastructure of Gaza, and the killing of more than 200 courageous Palestinian aid workers.  The latter went largely unnoticed until six international workers for the World Central Kitchen were killed in an operation that Israel said was the result of a “misidentification.”  This was the same explanation that Israel offered 57 years ago, when the Israelis attacked the U.S.S. Liberty and killed 34 sailors and wounded 171 others.  I’ll be writing about the Liberty next week in order to demonstrate that Israeli duplicity over the years has destroyed any possibility for accepting Israeli claims.

Ignatius believes that “some clarity is emerging about the shape of a possible endgame,” which is outrageous in view of Netanyahu’s unwillingness to accept any discussion of the so-called “day after.”  Ignatius sees a “gradual end to Israeli combat operations” in Gaza, and the “beginning of a still-fuzzy ‘day after’.”  He offers the West Bank as a “model for how Gaza evolves going forward.”  If the West Bank is a “model,” then it can only be a model for Israeli fascism and terrorism.  The war crimes in Gaza are so overwhelming that the war crimes committed in the West Bank are largely ignored.  Fortunately, a long essay in the New York Times’ Magazine last Sunday exposed the violence and terrorism that Jewish ultranationalists with the support of the Israeli Defense Forces have been conducting without notice over the past several decades.

If there is some change in Israeli conduct in Gaza and the West Bank, it will not have anything to do with the Biden administration or the occasional criticisms of Israel in the mainstream media.  If there is a change, it will be because the Israels are “unequivocally losing” the struggle.  These were the words of a former Mossad deputy chief and member of the Knesset, Ram Ben-Barak, who identifies Israel’s losses on the international scene, the deterioration of U.S.-Israeli relations, and the economic problems that the war has created.

It has been conventional wisdom that the October War in 1973 and the Hamas invasion in 2023 were intelligence failures because the Israelis had premonitory intelligence months in advance of the attacks and were still totally unprepared.  No, these were not intelligence failures; these were political and strategic failures.  The United States has stood by and fed the Israeli war machine, ignoring the violent system of Israeli oppression in the West Bank and Gaza as well as the system of apartheid that has compromised Israel’s claim that it is the only democracy in the Middle East.

In 1969, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger offered a description of the U.S. failure in Vietnam that is applicable to the Israeli failure in the occupied territories: “We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one.  We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion.  In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose.  The conventional army loses if it does not win.”

Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died after these perceptive remarks from Kissinger, a war criminal himself.  How many Palestinians will have to die because Israel will not stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestine?

The post The Washington Post’s Mouthpiece for Israel: David Ignatius appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

While statements that “No one is above the law,” are repeated in the U.S. over the trials of former President Donald Trump, can the same be said internationally? By analogy, Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan of the International Criminal Court (ICC) said yes when he announced he was seeking arrest warrants for Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Israeli and Hamas leaders are being held accountable for their drive for battlefield victory outside internationally accepted laws of war. For example, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with U.S. officials in December 2023, he said in a video statement; “I told our American friends: Our heroic soldiers have not fallen in vain. Out of the deep pain of their having fallen, we are more determined than ever to continue fighting until Hamas is eliminated – until absolute victory.” Netanyahu’s goal; not just victory, but “absolute victory” with Hamas’ elimination.

On February 25, 2024, Netanyahu told U.S. television: “Once we begin the Rafah operation, the intense phase of the fighting is weeks away from completion. Not months,” he told CBS. “If we don’t have a deal, we’ll do it anyway. It has to be done because total victory is our goal and total victory is within reach.”

Khan said in announcing the request for search warrants to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that he made a distinction between the crimes committed by Hamas and Israeli leaders: “The charges against Netanyahu and [Israeli Defense Secretary Yoav] Gallant include ‘causing extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies, deliberately targeting civilians in conflict.’” Netanyahu’s actions for “total,” “absolute victory” are, according to the ICC’s chief prosecutor, in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.

As for Hamas, Khan said he believes Hamas leaders Yehia Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh are responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip and Israel. In his statement about Hamas, Khan wrote: “It is the view of my Office that these individuals planned and instigated the commission of crimes on 7 October 2023, and have through their own actions, including personal visits to hostages shortly after their kidnapping, acknowledged their responsibility for those crimes.”

Hamas responded to Khan in a statement that it “strongly condemns the attempts of the ICC Prosecutor to equate victims with aggressors by issuing arrest warrants against a number of Palestinian resistance leaders without legal basis.”

“Hamas calls on the ICC Prosecutor to issue arrest warrants against all war criminals among the occupation leaders, officers, and soldiers who participated in crimes against the Palestinian people, and demands the cancellation of all arrest warrants issued against Palestinian resistance leaders,” they added.

External international legal experts who assisted the ICC in examining the evidence confirmed Khan’s findings against Israel and Hamas. Objectively, they wrote in their published report; “we unanimously agree that the prosecutor’s work was rigorous, fair and grounded in the law and facts. And we unanimously agree that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the suspects he identified have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity within the jurisdiction of the ICC.”

While the answer within the United States about Trump’s being above the law remains to be seen – Trump’s having immunity or giving himself pardons if he is found guilty and then re-elected – the international answer by analogy is more problematic. The ICC has no police force; states who have signed the Rome statutes (there are 124) are supposed to arrest fugitives. The ICC cannot try defendants in abstentia.

Moreover, Israel and the United States have strongly rejected Khan’s position if not the ICC’s legitimacy. Neither has signed the Rome statutes. Prime Minister Netanyahu said that the country “will never accept any attempt by the I.C.C. to undermine its inherent right of self-defense.” Just as the Kremlin called a previous warrant against President Putin “outrageous,” President Biden, cherry-picked his attitude towards the Court, also calling the prosecutor’s demand for search warrants against Israel “outrageous” while previously praising the Court’s warrant for Putin. (Under President Trump, in 2020 the U.S. even went so far as to authorize economic sanctions against ICC officials investigating or prosecuting U.S. military personnel for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan. Sanctions against the ICC are once more being discussed in Congress and hinted at by Antony Blinken.

Khan has boldly given his answer to the tension between national subjectivity and international objectivity: “”Nobody is above the law,” he clearly stated. His demand for warrants strongly counters a typical American position expressed by President Trump before the U.N. General Assembly in 2018; “We reject the ideology of globalism, and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism. Around the world, responsible nations must defend against threats to sovereignty…”

The international system is inherently different from domestic sovereignty. There is no international sovereignty. We duly note the German sociologist Max Weber’s classic definition of a state as a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” The international system has no such monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force on a global scale.

What does make the ICC’s chief prosecutor’s request for warrants unique in the tension between state sovereignty and international law is that “It is the first time the court has targeted a Western democracy with a vibrant court system or the top leaders of a close U.S. ally,” law professor David Kaye wrote. Karim Khan has taken on an enormous challenge. His very request for warrants has caused an enormous stir. If successful – the warrants issued – his victory will be a victory for objectivity over subjectivity; a victory far removed from any win on a battlefield, and far, far away from some simple athletic competition. It will be a profound victory for justice.

The post Who’s Above the Law? Israel, Hamas and the ICC appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday night spoke on the floor of the U.S. Senate about the decision of the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor to seek arrest warrants for Hamas and Israeli leaders amidst the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Gaza. Sanders’ remarks, as prepared for delivery, are below and can be watched here.

There has been a lot of attention and controversy attached to a recent action by the international criminal court, the ICC.

The core purpose of the ICC is to prosecute the most serious international crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. I believe it is very important that all of us support accountability for these crimes and the important mission of the ICC.

Last year the ICC declared that President Vladimir Putin of Russia was in violation of international law and that he was a war criminal.

The ICC issued arrest warrants for Putin and one of his senior officials saying there are reasonable grounds to believe that they had committed the war crime of unlawful deportation and transfer of population for their systematic kidnapping of thousands and thousands of Ukrainian children.

I supported the ICC decision, and, in fact, that is the tip of the iceberg of what Putin has done in Ukraine. Putin started the mostly destructive war in Europe since World War II. He has bombed civilians and devastated civilian infrastructure, killing at least 30,000 civilians and displacing millions more. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded as a result of Putin’s horrific invasion of Ukraine.

On that occasion, when the ICC declared Putin a war criminal, the United States government welcomed the ICC decision. A White House spokesperson said “there is no doubt that Russia is committing war crimes and atrocities in Ukraine, and we have been clear that those responsible must be held accountable. The ICC prosecutor is an independent actor and makes his own prosecutorial decisions based on the evidence before him. We support accountability for perpetrators of war crimes.” That is what a U.S. government spokesperson said in March 2023, and I agree. In my view, Mr. Putin is in fact a war criminal.

We live in a world of increasing division, tension, and hostility. Around the globe, countries are dramatically increasing their military budgets. More countries are attempting to gain nuclear weapons and other dangerous weapons systems. It is in times like these that we most need international law. Without it, we will have an even more violent world where might makes right and where war criminals can act with impunity.

In recent years, the ICC has attempted to hold governments and political leaders accountable for crimes against humanity. That is what they do, and that is what they are supposed to do. All wars are terrible, and very often civilian casualties are unavoidable. But after the horrors of the second World War, countries throughout the world came together to try to establish rules to govern the conduct of war and to limit civilian casualties. The ICC’s role is to enforce these limits.

On Tuesday, the ICC prosecutor announced that he was requesting arrest warrants for three top Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, the group’s leader in Gaza.

To my mind, Sinwar and his Hamas accomplices are clearly war criminals. The horrific October 7th terrorist attack on Israel began this war and included the mass murder of 1,200 innocent men, women, and children, the taking of hundreds of hostages, and sexual violence against captives. These war crimes are well documented, and very few people would dispute the merits of those charges.

The ICC prosecutor also asked for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant. The ICC charges focus on the use of starvation of civilians as a method of war as well as intentional attacks against the civilian population. Those are the charges. The use of starvation of civilians as a method of war – clearly a war crime – as well as intentional attacks against the civilian population.

Specifically, the prosecutor says that Netanyahu is responsible for “depriving [civilians] of objects indispensable to their survival, including willfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions.”

Now, many people here in the Beltway, in Washington, have responded negatively to this decision from the ICC prosecutor. It seems that some folks here were comfortable with what the ICC did in terms of Putin and in terms of Sinwar, but not with Netanyahu. Some have argued that it is unfair to compare the democratically elected head of the Israeli government to Putin, who runs an authoritarian system, or Sinwar, the head of a terrorist organization.

But that is not what the ICC has done. In fact, the ICC prosecutor has looked at what each of these leaders has done – looked at their actions – and then compared those actions to established standards of international law. In other words, the ICC is not making some claim of equivalence, as some have charged, but is in fact holding both sides in this current war to the same standard.

Yes, democratically elected officials can commit war crimes. Let me repeat: democratically elected officials can commit war crimes.

The ICC is doing its job. It’s doing what it is supposed to do. We cannot only apply international law when it is convenient. And the independent panel of international legal experts the ICC appointed to help with this case unanimously – unanimously – agreed with the charges.

People may be uncomfortable to see the Prime Minister of Israel charged with war crimes, but let us take a hard look at what he has actually done. And we must determine whether his actions meet the standards of being a war crime.

In seven and a half months, more than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed and almost 80,000 injured. Thousands more are still under the rubble, but their bodies have not been fully identified. Some 60% of the victims are women, children, or the elderly. More than 250 aid workers have been killed, including 193 U.N. staff, more than any previous conflict.

There are 2.2 million people living in Gaza, and more than 1.7 million of them have been forced from their homes – 75% of the population. I’m trying to think of my own state, what it would be like if three-quarters of the people were driven out of their homes. These are by and large poor people. In the last few weeks, more than 900,000 have been displaced – many of them chased out of one place, chased to another place, gone to another place. Many of these people are children, Gaza has a young population. Many of them are elderly. Many of them are sick. These are people who have been forced out of their homes and moved, and moved again, often without adequate food, without adequate water supplies, and certainly without adequate health care.

When we talk about war crimes, talk about attacks on civilians, let’s understand: Gaza’s housing stock has been demolished. Again, I try to think of my own state, what it would mean if 60% of the housing was destroyed. Now, if these people who have been chased their homes, displaced from their homes, are ever able to return to their communities, where are they going to live? Over 60% of the housing units in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, including 221,000 housing units that have been completely destroyed, leaving more than a million people homeless. Entire neighborhoods have been wiped out both by bombing and planned detonations of explosive charges.

Looking at the war, we understand that Hamas is a difficult enemy that often uses civilians to protect their own people. But what we’re talking about over 60% of the housing units in Gaza have been destroyed. It’s hard to believe that there was a terrorist in every one of those buildings.

Israel has destroyed the civilian infrastructure of Gaza. You know, wiped out their ability to have electricity. Virtually no electricity in Gaza right now, virtually no clean water, and raw sewage is running through the streets, spreading disease. Now, if that’s not an attack on civilians, I don’t know what is.

The healthcare system in Gaza has been systematically annihilated, 21 hospitals have been made inoperable. In fact, of the 36 hospitals in Gaza, only four have not been damaged by bombardment, raided by the Israeli military, or closed. More than 400 healthcare workers have been killed.

Well, what do we say when we have a war in which the healthcare system is annihilated at a time when you have tens and tens of thousands of people who are wounded, many of them seriously?

The education system in Gaza has been virtually destroyed. Every one of Gaza’s 12 universities has been bombed. Got that? Every one of the 12 universities in Gaza has been bombed. More than 400 schools have suffered direct hits and 56 schools have been totally destroyed. Today, 625,000 children in Gaza have no access to education at all.

And I’ll tell you something else. When you talk about what’s going on in Gaza, what is not talked about almost at all – I think I read one article on it – I want you to think about the psychic damage being done to children. The children who see housing being destroyed, their parents or relatives being killed, who see drones flying around them, some of which have guns, being pushed out of their homes, deafening noise, inadequate food, inadequate water, pushed, shoved into any place, everyplace. If there is one child in Gaza that does not suffer psychic damage from this horror, I will be very surprised.

As a result of the destruction and Israeli policies restricting the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, more than a million people today face catastrophic levels of hunger and Gaza remains on the brink of famine. Hundreds of thousands of children face starvation. Even now, more than seven months into this war, Israel’s invasion of Rafah has severely disrupted the humanitarian relief operation, closing the two main border crossings and making it almost impossible for the U.N. to access warehouses or distribute aid.

Very little aid has gotten in for more than two weeks, bakeries have had to shut down, and hospitals are running low on fuel. Just today, the U.N. announced that it had been forced to halt all food distribution in Rafah after running out of supplies. The World Food Programme said “humanitarian operations in Gaza are near collapse,” saying that if food and other supplies don’t resume entering Gaza “in massive quantities, famine-like conditions will spread.”

Now, Mr. Netanyahu’s been on TV today, and elsewhere. He denies it all. Ain’t true, says Mr. Netanyahu. He claims that Israel is deeply worried about the civilian population, worried about the children, and that Israel is not blocking humanitarian aid at all. Not at all. Well, it turns out that the United Nations and virtually every other humanitarian group involved in the humanitarian disaster in Gaza strongly disagrees with Mr. Netanyahu.

Now, we can trust the words of a Prime Minister under criminal indictment in Israel, or we can trust the people whose function in life is to provide humanitarian aid.

The U.N. Secretary General says that much more aid is urgently needed to “avert an entirely preventable human-made famine” and that “there is no alternative to the massive use of land routes.”

Cindy McCain, the wife of our former Republican colleague John McCain, who is now the head of the World Food Programme, said of Gaza, “there is famine, full-blown famine in the north and it is moving south.”

A month ago, more than 50 humanitarian organizations called on Israel to allow greater humanitarian access and stop unnecessarily restricting aid. That’s 50 humanitarian organizations. Mr. Netanyahu says one thing, but 50 organizations who are desperately trying to the get food to hungry people say something else. Let the world decide who is telling the truth. And this group of humanitarian organizations included Catholic Relief Services, CARE, Mercy Corps, Oxfam, Save The Children, Refugees International, and scores of other well-respected humanitarian organizations – they say that Netanyahu and his team have blocked humanitarian aid.

Two of our colleagues, Senator Van Hollen and Senator Merkley, visited Rafah in January, and I heard their presentation to the Democratic caucus. Upset by the unreasonable Israeli restrictions on aid, they talked about trucks being inspected and inspected, sent back, that things that should have been allowed to get through were not allowed to get through. They said afterward that the U.S. must, “demand that the Netanyahu government lift the impediments for delivery of basic goods needed to sustain life in Gaza.” Netanyahu denies it, two of our colleagues who were there say that Israel has blocking aid.

The United States government also disagrees with Netanyahu. USAID Administrator Samantha Power said, “food has not flowed in sufficient quantities to avoid this infinite famine in the south and it is giving rise to child deaths in the north.” In March, Secretary of State Blinken said, “the bottom line is food is getting in, but it is insufficient.” In April he said, “there has been progress, but it is not enough. We still need to get more aid in and around Gaza.” In a formal report this month, the State Department said, “Israel did not fully cooperate with the United States government efforts and the United States government-supported international efforts to maximize humanitarian assistance flow to and distribution within Gaza.”

I got a kick out of hearing Mr. Netanyahu this afternoon. He talked about airlifts. My god, they’re supporting air drops, they’re supporting food coming in from the sea. The reason the United States is spending millions of dollars getting food in from the sea is precisely because Israel is blocking the ability to get trucks in! And the reason that Jordan and the other countries and the United States are doing air drops is once again because trucks cannot get through. Netanyahu is taking credit, and yet the reason we’re having to do those things is precisely because of the policies of his government.

President Biden himself has said, “a the major reason that distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza has been so difficult [is] because Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers trying to deliver desperately needed help to civilians… Israel has also not done enough to protect civilians,” President Joe Biden.

So, it is fair to say that most of the world disagrees with Mr. Netanyahu.

Think about all of that destruction. Think about the tens of thousands of civilians killed, the schools and hospitals blown up. Take a look at the pictures of emaciated children starving to death while food sits miles away.

One of the interesting things to my mind is that we don’t see enough of those pictures. And maybe that has something to do with the fact that the Israeli military has killed dozens and dozens and dozens of journalists. I just met with some journalists last week, including a young man who happens to come from my home state of Vermont who had no doubt he was targeted, along with other press people. Big press symbols on their coats, and they were attacked. He was slightly injured, one of his colleagues was killed, and another one was severely injured.

Now, if you add all that stuff up, are these actions war crimes?

Yeah. I believe that they are. I believe that there is substantial evidence that the extreme right-wing Israeli government led by Netanyahu has used starvation as a weapon of war and has clearly targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure.

As I think we all agree, I certainly do, Israel had the right to defend itself against the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7th. But it did not – and this is where we get into the issue of war crimes – yes, you have the right to defend yourselves. Yes, Israel has the right to go after Hamas, very few people doubt that. But Netanyahu and his government do not have the right to wage an all-out war against the children, against the women, against the innocent people of Gaza. And for that, there must be consequences.

What the ICC has done is important for the global community, in the sense that we cannot allow the human race to descend to barbarity. Somebody has got to say: look, war is terrible, and it’s a little bit embarrassing as a human being that we’ve been at war for thousands of years and have not seemed to make much progress at eliminating war. But if there is war, let us learn from what happened in the past and do our best to protect the women, the children, the innocent people. So, Israel had a right to defend itself against a terrible enemy in Hamas, but it does not have the right to wage an all-out war against the people of Gaza.

Now, what the ICC is doing is important for the world. It’s [a message] to leaders all over the world – dictators, people in democratic countries – that if you go to war you cannot wage all-out war against civilians. That’s what the ICC is doing, that’s important. But it is also important, Mr. President, for those of us in the United States. Our nation claims to be the leader of the free world, and at our best we try to mobilize countries to uphold international war and prevent crimes against humanity. That is what we try to do and have done.

But how can or how will the United States be able to criticize any country in the world, whether it is Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, or anyone else – any other country in the world – if we actually believe what Netanyahu is saying?

If we turn our backs and ignore the crimes against humanity that are being committed in Gaza right now, what credibility will we ever have in criticizing the actions of any country, no matter how terrible those actions may be? Because people will say, oh, really? You’re attacking China, Turkey, anybody else, really? You’re really deeply concerned? But apparently for Netanyahu, it’s allowed. We don’t believe you.

And I don’t want to see this great country of ours be in that position. I want to see this country respected all over the world as a country that does believe in human rights, that does believe in international law.

The ICC as I see it is trying to uphold international law and minimum standards of decency. Our government should do no less.

The post The ICC is Doing Its Job appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image: Priti Gulati Cox.

One of the first things that I heard from people when I immigrated to the United States from the Global South in early 2000 was, “Oh, you speak our language so well.” To which I would reply politely that it was one of the things that the British left behind, but would think to myself that well, actually, I learnt it from the same imperialists you did.

In fact, if you look around, some of the same people liberals are wanting to spare a second Trumpistan are as anti-Biden and anti-genocide as can be: Muslim women who are being harassed on the streets of this country, professors, students, Indigenous people, climate justice activists, LGBTQ people. Not only are they on the right side of history; they’re making history. Right now.

Image: Priti Gulati Cox.

The post Dear White Friends: Can You Smell the Yellow Roses of Dier al-Balah? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In April 2024, during Passover, a group of American rabbis approached a border crossing in Israel. Affiliated with Rabbis for Ceasefire, the group joined Jewish Israeli activists attempting to deliver food to Gazans.

It had been seven months since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack and Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza.

One of the American rabbis told reporters at Democracy Now! that this was the only way she could imagine marking Passover, a holiday that celebrates the story of liberation from oppression and slavery. Marching to the gates of Gaza with food for starving Palestinians was consistent with Passover’s imperative to invite the hungry to every table.

As of April 2, 62% of American Jews believe Israel has responded to Hamas’ attack in an “acceptable” way. Yet that support drops to 52% among U.S. Jews ages 18-34, with 42% saying Israel’s response has been “unacceptable,” according to Pew Research Center polling.

Many of those young people are involved in the variety of Jewish organizations that have mobilized for a cease-fire since October, such as IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace. Public attention has focused on campus protests, which included many Jewish students – I am a member of Faculty for Justice in Palestine, which formed in response to concerns about freedom of speech for U.S. students mobilizing for Palestinian rights.

But as a peace and religion scholar, I know that some U.S. Jews’ involvement in Palestinian solidarity movements began years before the current war. In my ethnographic research, which included in-depth interviews and participant observation work, activists emphasized that they were inspired to act because of their Jewish identity and values, not in spite of them.

Journey toward activism

Many interviewees came to activism for Palestinian rights after wrestling with how to square their beliefs and ideals with the reality of Israeli policies they do not support – policies that they feel are often invoked in their name.

My 2019 book, “Days of Awe,” examines American Jewish critics of Israeli policy and Zionism – support for a Jewish state in the Middle East. Some activists focused on the Palestinian territories Israel has occupied since 1967, which they consider a departure from the country’s ideals as a Jewish democracy. Others found themselves in complete disagreement with the idea of Zionism, given how the creation of the new state necessitated Palestinian displacement.

Their activism has taken different shapes: from protests in the West Bank against the occupation, to forming anti-Zionist synagogues in the U.S., to rewriting Jewish liturgy to reflect solidarity with Palestinians and other oppressed people.

For example, one interviewee in his mid-20s shared an experience from a 2008 Birthright trip to Israel, a free tour designed to strengthen young Americans’ connection with the country. The trip coincided with Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, which lasted about three weeks and resulted in about a dozen Israeli deaths, approximately 1,400 Palestinian deaths and thousands of people displaced.

A tour guide was reluctant to respond to the young man’s questions about the conflict. This prompted the student, upon his return to campus in the U.S., to read about the Palestinian experiences of the Nakba – meaning “Catastrophe” in Arabic – of 1948, the year the state of Israel was established, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced off their lands or fled.

This interviewee and others say their journeys toward activism began because their understanding of Jewish values was inconsistent with what Israel was doing in the name of Jews’ safety. It was also a journey of “unlearning” or critique – challenging narratives that emphasize the concept of Jewish return to Israel or that downplay Palestinian displacement.

They were tapping into Jewish tradition in new ways – what I refer to as “critical caretaking.”

Take IfNotNow, an American Jewish group opposed to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. The movement was born during the 2014 Israel-Hamas War, when a group of young Jews organized a public recitation of the mourner’s kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. By reciting both Jewish and Palestinian victims’ names, they hoped to use Jewish tradition to challenge the devaluation of Palestinian lives.

When I asked Rebekah – a pseudonym for a college student in the American South whom I interviewed for my book – how she understood her Jewishness, she told me: “I have always maintained that the basis for my activism was my Jewish ideals, the radical equality I had absorbed at home.”

Shadow of history

For Rebekah and many other American Jews, the cultural memory of the Holocaust, and the common refrain “Never Again,” inspires their activism for Palestinian rights.

“Growing up in Hebrew schools, you grow up with the nightmarish Holocaust films,” she stressed. “The conclusion of this education should have been clear: ‘You can’t do it to another group of people!’”

This lesson is reflected in the cry “Never again to anyone,” heard at demonstrations over the past few months.

Another interviewee likewise asserted that her solidarity with Palestinians is grounded in the legacy of the Holocaust: “For me, understanding the Holocaust was hard because of the enormity of it – it happened because masses of people made a conscious decision to do nothing. I didn’t want to do nothing.”

For these interviewees, discriminatory or violent policies contradict their understanding of Jewish values, which they assert by standing in solidarity with Palestinians.

Another interviewee told me: “I consider myself a spiritual Jew. I am able to separate Zionism from Judaism and I believe in equality. Because I am Jewish, I protest – I am informed by values of humanism, which is the main framework for organizing. The experience of doing solidarity work actually strengthened my Jewish identity. … My Judaism translates into my commitment to uphold universal humanist values.”

Here and now

In 2017, several dozen Americans gathered with other activists in the southern hills of Hebron, in the West Bank. They established what they called a “sumud” camp – a Palestinian concept denoting steadfastness – to protest the Israeli military’s decision to declare the area a “closed military zone,” meaning Palestinians must leave.

The activists wore shirts exclaiming “Occupation is Not My Judaism.” Occupation, they say, dehumanizes Palestinians and Jews alike – so they are seeking their own liberation, too. Therefore, their “critical caretaking” is not just about underscoring what Judaism is not. It is also about rewriting what they believe Judaism is.

For example, many of these organizations decenter Zionism’s role in Jewish texts and liturgies. Rather than emphasizing the idea that the “Jewish home” is in the historical region of Palestine and Israel, some emphasize “doykayt,” Yiddish for “hereness”: the concept that Jews’ true home is wherever they are in the world.

Doykayt is just one example of how these activists embrace often-overlooked aspects of Jewish history, including marginalized voices such as Arab Jews and Ethiopian Jews, as they discover new ways to live their Jewish values. Through their activism, they are trying to convey their understanding that Jews cannot be free until Palestinians are free.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post For Many American Jews Protesting for Palestinians, Activism is a Journey Rooted in Their Jewish Values appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

There can be little doubt that neoliberalism has undermined, if not crippled, the notion of higher education as a democratic public sphere—a protective and courageous space where students can speak, write, and act from a position of agency and informed judgment. This should be a space where education does the bridging work of connecting schools to the wider society, connects the self to others, and addresses important social and political issues. It should also provide conditions for students to develop a heightened sense of social responsibility, coupled with a passion for equality, justice, and freedom. Instead, as Chris Hedges notes, universities increasingly have become “a playground for corporate administrators [who] demand, like all who manage corporate systems of power, total obedience, Dissent. Freedom of expression. Critical thought. Moral outrage. These have no place in our corporate-indentured universities.”

In the spirit of ruthless equity firms and asset-stripping hedge fund managers, pedagogies of conformity, silencing, and ethical abandonment now proliferate under the guise of budget cuts or overt attempts to transform higher education into white nationalist indoctrination centers. Universities are now viewed as businesses, students as clients, and faculty as a serf-like, casual labor force. Furthermore, administrative leadership has regressed, modeling itself after hedge fund managers and embracing a market-driven ideology that believes the irrational belief that the market to solve all problems and control not only the economy but all aspects of social life. Central to this hedge-fund neoliberal ideology is a moral vacuity that separates economic activity from social costs. Central to educational/ideological mantra is the notion that historical consciousness, critical thinking, informed faculty, and critical pedagogy are at odds with the market. Consequently, it posits that the role of government and institutions such as higher education only exists to further market interests and avoid making the power of markets and the financial elite accountable.

Pedagogies of repression now take place in the name of financial cuts, a politics of precarity, and hollow appeals to efficiency, or, as in the politics of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, outright calls for turning higher education into white nationalist indoctrination centers. Moreover, administrative leadership now occupies a regressive state which models itself after the practice of hedge fund managers and the ruthless values of a market-driven ideology that separates economic activity from social costs.

University leaders now follow policies that resemble the suffocating profit-driven values of Jamie Damon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, rather than the democratic values of John Dewey. At the same time, billionaires such as Bill Ackman, Leslie Wexner, Joh Huntsman, and  Robert Kraft now exercise extraordinary influence over higher education policy, particularly at the elite universities. They wield accusations of antisemitism and leverage the power of their wealth to silence criticism of the right-wing Israeli government, call for the firing of professors who are deemed too critical and outspoken regarding genocidal crimes, and dox and punish students for their criticism of scorched earth Israeli attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. Furthermore, they advocate for silencing protests on campuses by calling in the police, effectively transforming higher education into a police state. Certainly, Trump echoes this authoritarian view, indicating his willingness to use military force to suppress student dissent if he is elected in 2024. He has referred to the protesters setting up encampments on college campuses as “radical-left lunatics” who must be vanquished, adding that “they’ve got to be stopped now.” He also described the police arresting students at Columbia University as “a beautiful thing to watch.”

[i] Robin D. G. Kelley, “UCLA’s Unholy Alliance,” Boston Review (May 18, 2024). Online: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/uclas-unholy-alliance/

[ii] Chris Stein, “US campus protests give Trump a target for his violent rhetoric of vengeance,” The Guardian (May 11, 2024). Online: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/11/us-campus-protests-donald-trump?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=40a2f3e5a1-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_05_20_01_38&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-40a2f3e5a1-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

[iii] Ibid. Stein.

Hedge-fund politics and pedagogy exemplify gangster capitalism’s destruction of institutions that champion free speech, social responsibility, and strong democracy. This influence is pernicious, echoing fascist politics of the past, and undermines free speech and the critical role of higher education. What we are witnessing is a new form of McCarthyism, cloaked in the alleged wisdom of a ruthless billionaire elite. This ideology has been normalized, perceived by the public as a permanent social formation for which there is no alternative. The education promoted by the hedge-fund crowd aims to dismantle the university as a democratic public sphere and convert democracy itself into what one of their heroes, Viktor Orbán, calls an illiberal democracy—one that, as he puts it, is free of mixed races and any vestige of liberal democracy.

In this cloning hedge-fund ideology, budget cuts become a cover for a discourse that reveals an astonishing vacancy of vision regarding the public and democratic purpose of education. Cuts are now made to valuable and critical educational programs in the name of economic expediency and fear of deficits, echoing the language of accountants in pencil factories. Under such circumstances, the liberal arts and humanities are disparaged either because they are labeled “woke”—an idiotic, self-serving label used to undermine the critical role of education–or because they do not serve the immediate interest of creating depoliticized workers for a global economy marked by staggering inequities, increasing de-regulation, and exploitative working conditions.

In an age when the landscape of tyranny casts a dark shadow across the globe, the weight of conscience carries both a burden and the potential for a profound moral and political awakening. This courageous generation of students exemplifies that when social responsibility is guided by the demands of moral witnessing, politics can effectively challenge the pervasive influence and grasp of an emerging authoritarianism. In such times, conscience emerges as an unwavering force, compelling individuals to stand firm and resist the rising tides of ultra-nationalism, racism, state violence, and militarism. It urges them to resist the encroachment of oppression upon those individuals and groups, who in their struggle for freedom, are too often deemed disposable.

Students across the country and globe are making it clear that if we wish to talk about democracy in the United States and other countries, we must confront the rise of authoritarianism. Only by awakening the stirrings of morality and embracing an emancipatory notion of politics can we envision a strong democracy that ignites, inspires, and energizes the public imagination, galvanizing the burden of conscience to action. Today’s student protesters recognize that the military-industrial-academic complex, aligned with gangster capitalism, is writing them out of the script of democracy, while engaging in the slow cancelation of the future. Instead of vilifying campus protesters, as so many liberals and conservatives are doing, we need to acknowledge that they represent the moral conscience of a new generation—one that is on the right side of history.

The post Welcome to the Hedge-Fund Driven Neoliberal University appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In 2014, we wrote an article titled “The Blind Alley of J Street and Liberal American Zionism.” At the time, Benjamin Netanyahu was in his sixth continuous year as Israel’s prime minister, while President Obama was well into his second term. And J Street, an emerging organization of Jews aligned with the Democratic administration, had momentum as “the political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans.”

From the outset, ever since its founding in 2007, J Street has implicitly offered itself as a liberal alternative to the hardline American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which was established more than four decades earlier. An avowed purpose of J Street has been to seek a humane resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while maintaining fervent allegiance to Israel as “the Jewish state.”

In the 10 years since our article, J Street — at pains to reconcile the contradictions between its “pro-Israel” bond and the increasing Israeli brutality toward Palestinians — has remained committed to the basic goal (or mirage) of a “Jewish and democratic” state. The war on Gaza since October has heightened those contradictions, thrusting into clearer view Israel’s actual creation-and-expansion story, illuminating the violent repression and expulsion of Palestinian people.

A significant number of American Jews are now willing to challenge the Zionist project while pointing out that it is inherently fated to suppress the human rights of non-Jews in Palestine. Speaking at a protest near Sen. Chuck Schumer’s home in Brooklyn last month, Naomi Klein said: “We don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name.”

Standard claims about “democratic Israel” have fallen into notable disrepute on U.S. college campuses, with both Jewish and non-Jewish students this spring protesting against the manifest torture and slaughter of Gaza’s population. Rumblings were audible a decade ago, when the Jewish student group Hillel was roiled with a dispute over whether its national leadership could ban Hillel chapters on college campuses from hosting strong critics of Israeli policies. That dispute, we wrote at the time, “emerged from a long history of pressure on American Jews to accept Zionism and a ‘Jewish state’ as integral to Judaism.” Back then, some Jewish students — “pushing to widen the bounds of acceptable discourse” — were “challenging powerful legacies of conformity.”

This year, in mid-February, J Street issued a statement addressed to President Biden that urged him to propose recognition of a “demilitarized” Palestinian state as a solution leading to acceptance of Israel by Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region. This is a rough equivalent of fiddling with the roof of a structure built on a grievously cracked foundation: the forced exile of non-Jews from much of Palestine — what is now Israel — and the refusal of their right of return, while maintaining a right of return (including to the occupied West Bank) for whoever can claim Jewish identity.

Whether Jewish or not, many Americans have come to question the arrogant absurdity of enabling an American in Brooklyn to claim Palestine while denying any such claim by ethnically cleansed Palestinians. In concordance with other Zionist groups, J Street presupposes that Palestinians should settle for areas designated by the Israeli colonizers (who must not be called colonizers), while they reserve a “right of return” only for themselves and their coreligionists.

J Street offers weak tea with its proposal for “a conflict-ending agreement in which Israel also ultimately recognizes Palestinian statehood.” Under such a scenario, Palestinians as a group would dedicate themselves to cooperation, non-resistance, and — in effect, given the one-sided requirement of “demilitarization” — acceptance of Zionist rights to control Palestine.

J Street’s idea of a fix is that the U.S. government will initiate a plan for “specific steps Palestinians must take to revitalize and reinvent their government with new leadership committed to addressing corruption, demilitarization, renouncing terror and violence, and reaffirming recognition of Israel.” The plan includes “specific steps Israel must take to ease occupation and improve daily life on the West Bank, crack down on settler violence and address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.” And President Biden would offer “American recognition of Palestinian statehood, reaffirmation of the Arab Peace Initiative and security guarantees for all parties, commitments to supporting international law” — and finally, “a UN Security Council Resolution affirming global and unanimous support for the vision, the process and the parameters for negotiation leading to a final status agreement and admission of Palestine as a full member state in the United Nations.”

The J Street “comprehensive diplomatic initiative” proposal is remarkable for what it does not do. The proposal’s failure to acknowledge Israel’s taking of East Jerusalem and West Bank lands for Jewish settlement (even increasing since its war on Gaza began) dodges realities of a Palestine that is riven with settlements of Israeli citizens – a strategy since 1967 to fragment Palestinian populations into de facto Israeli versions of Bantustans.

The number of Israelis who’ve settled in East Jerusalem and occupied West Bank has increased 35% — to 700,000 — since our article 10 years ago, making it that much harder to realistically imagine a “two-state solution.” There is nothing in J Street’s new “bold” vision that conceives of Israeli ceding land it has taken for “Judaizing” increasing portions of Palestine.

Liberal American Zionists and U.S. administrations have sometimes objected to the latest illegal and immoral “facts on the ground” imposed by Israel, only to later accept them as immutable facts that could not possibly be rolled back. And so, as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights recently reported, a “drastic acceleration in settlement building is exacerbating long-standing patterns of oppression, violence and discrimination against Palestinians.”

The UN human rights official, Volker Türk, reported that “the policies of the current Israeli Government appear aligned, to an unprecedented extent, with the goals of the Israeli settler movement to expand long-term control over the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and to steadily integrate this occupied territory into the State of Israel.”

Meanwhile, J Street’s proposal for a “demilitarized” Palestinian state matches Netanyahu’s plan for Israel to retain “security control” of all of Palestine to the Jordan River.

Israeli scholar David Shulman, in the midst of this latest crisis, writes: “The wave of anti-Israel feeling that is engulfing large numbers of people in the Western world has emerged not merely from the Gaza war, with its unbearable civilian casualties and now mass starvation. What that wave reflects, more profoundly, is the justified disgust with the ongoing occupation, its seemingly eternal and ever more brutal continuation, and the policies of massive theft and apartheid that are its very essence.”

The crux of our commentary 10 years ago holds even more terribly true today, after another decade of systemic, often-lethal cruelty toward Palestinian people: J Street continues its attempt to create a humane lobby group for Israel, without questioning the manifestly unjust — and thus perpetually unstable — settlement and expulsion project that created Israel in the first place and has sustained it ever since. In essence, while presenting itself as a caring alternative to Netanyahu-brand extremism, liberal Zionism’s yearning for “peace” assumes perpetuation of basic Israeli transgressions and gains over the last 75 years, while calling for acceptance and submission from a defeated and colonized people.

Ten years ago, we wrote of American Jews’ acquiescence to Jewish nationalism: “During the 1950s and later decades, the solution for avoiding an ugly rift was a kind of preventive surgery. Universalist, prophetic Judaism became a phantom limb of American Jewry, after an amputation in service of the ideology of an ethnic state in the Middle East. Pressures for conformity became overwhelming among American Jews, whose success had been predicated on the American ideal of equal rights regardless of ethnic group origin.”

Long story short, the dream of humanistic Zionism is collapsing, but — like other entrenched Jewish groups and a declining number of American Jews — J Street is desperate to keep the fantasy on life support. The nostrum of a two-state solution for the small tormented land of Palestine is more and more flimsy, but organizations like J Street and a large majority of elected Democrats refuse to concede that it has been made nonsensical by Israel’s ever-expanding settlements and escalating Jewish nationalism comfortable with inflicting genocide on Palestinian people.

We were touched, reading through successive J Street statements after the surprise and devastating Oct. 7 raid on “Gaza Envelope” Israeli settlements, causing 1,200 deaths and 240 kidnapped. Their first responses were expressions of solidarity with stunned Israelis, beginning with “J Street Stands with Israelis Facing Hamas Terror Onslaught.” Anguish was evident as J Street statements changed their tone, when Israel escalated assaults on Palestinian civilians. Alarmed at the Israeli military’s blockading and devastating Gaza, and also intensifying paramilitary settler raids on Palestinian communities in the West Bank, J Street pleaded repeatedly that the U.S. restrain Israel — to rescue J Street’s dream image of a humane and well-meaning Jewish state.

Unfortunately, these words that we wrote in 2014 have remained accurate, with steadily horrific consequences: “Every conceptual lane of J Street equates being ‘pro-Israel’ with maintaining the doctrine of a state where Jews are more equal than others. Looking to the past, that approach requires treating the historic Zionist conquest as somewhere between necessary and immaculate. Looking at the present and the future, that approach sees forthright opposition to the preeminence of Jewish rights as extreme or otherwise beyond the pale. And not ‘pro-Israel.’”

J Street’s current self-definition begins: “J Street organizes pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy Americans to promote U.S. policies that embody our deeply held Jewish and democratic values and that help secure the State of Israel as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people.”

In an unpublished autobiography, former Zionist Baltimore Rabbi Morris S. Lazaron wrote of political Zionism’s “nationalist philosophy expressed in this country under the guise of promoting ‘Jewishness,’ ‘Jewish unity,’ ‘Jewish education.’” And he summed up: “Finally I came to the conclusion that the Zionists were using Jewish need only to exploit their political goals. Every sacred feeling of the Jew, every instinct of humanity, every deep-rooted anxiety for family, every cherished memory became an instrument to be used for the promotion of the Zionist cause.”

Jews are going to have to make a painful reappraisal of the project that imposes a “Jewish” state in Palestine. Understanding our willful blindness and self-deception that facilitate the abuse of the non-Jews of Palestine will mean giving up the evasive palliative of pseudo-humanistic posturing from groups like J Street. The essential fight against antisemitism cannot mean ongoing degradation and suppression of another people. After 75-plus years of violently taking, while piously talking of a desire for peace, the disconnect between that ostensible peace-seeking and the assertion of Zionist control of the land will need to be resolved.

No matter how much it might be paved with good intentions, J Street serves as a well-trafficked avenue for liberal American Zionism that continues to support the subjugation of Palestinian people, with steady patterns of deadly violence. J Street has rigorously lobbied for the U.S. aid that provides Israel with the weaponry to inflict mass casualties.

“Since we launched J Street 15 years ago, we’ve supported every dollar of every U.S. security package to Israel,” J Street’s longtime president Jeremy Ben-Ami wrote in a May 9 email to supporters. As usual in lockstep with the Democratic White House, Ben-Ami went on to reassure supporters: “The decision to hold back certain weapons shipments is one the President doesn’t take lightly. And neither do we.”

J Street’s support for continuing huge quantities of military aid to Israel belies the organization’s humane pose. “U.S. aid to Israel must not be a blank check,” Ben-Ami wrote. “The Israeli government should be held to the same standards of all aid recipients, including requirements to uphold international law and facilitate humanitarian aid.” But those words appeared in the same email pointing out that J Street has always “supported every dollar” of U.S. military aid. Given that Israel has been flagrantly violating “international law” for decades — and had lethally blocked “humanitarian aid” in Gaza for more than six months by the time Congress approved $17 billion in new military aid in late April — J Street’s blanket support for military aid to Israel epitomizes the extreme disjunctions in the organization’s doubletalk.

“Voices on the extreme left are slamming the President for failing to do enough and enabling a genocide, even if one might think they would consider this a step in the right direction,” Ben-Ami wrote — the implication being that it’s unreasonably extreme to demand an end to U.S. policies enabling genocide.

In 2024, “pro-Israel, pro-peace” is an oxymoron, with denial stretched to a breaking point. Israel is now what it is now, not a gaslit fantasy that backers of groups like J Street want to believe. To whistle past the graveyard of a humanistic Zionist dream requires holding onto the illusion that the problem is centered around Netanyahu and his even-farther-right government allies. But a country cannot be meaningfully separated from its society.

“Israel has hardened, and the signs of it are in plain view,” foreign correspondent Megan Stack wrote last week in an extraordinary New York Times opinion piece. “Dehumanizing language and promises of annihilation from military and political leaders. Polls that found wide support for the policies that have wreaked devastation and starvation in Gaza. Selfies of Israeli soldiers preening proudly in bomb-crushed Palestinian neighborhoods. A crackdown on even mild forms of dissent among Israelis.”

The social fabric is anything but a fringe in control of the prime minister’s office and war cabinet. As Stack explained:

Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, the creeping famine, the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods — this, polling suggests, is the war the Israeli public wanted. A January survey found that 94 percent of Jewish Israelis said the force being used against Gaza was appropriate or even insufficient. In February, a poll found that most Jewish Israelis opposed food and medicine getting into Gaza. It was not Mr. Netanyahu alone but also his war cabinet members (including Benny Gantz, often invoked as the moderate alternative to Mr. Netanyahu) who unanimously rejected a Hamas deal to free Israeli hostages and, instead, began an assault on the city of Rafah, overflowing with displaced civilians.

Meanwhile, Stack added, “If U.S. officials understand the state of Israeli politics, it doesn’t show. Biden administration officials keep talking about a Palestinian state. But the land earmarked for a state has been steadily covered in illegal Israeli settlements, and Israel itself has seldom stood so unabashedly opposed to Palestinian sovereignty.”

Likewise, if J Street officials understand the state of Israeli politics, it doesn’t show. The organization’s officials also keep talking about a Palestinian state. But in reality, the “two-state solution” has become only a talking-point solution for liberal American Zionists, elected Democrats, and assorted pundits who keep trying to dodge what Israel has actually become.

Last week a founder of Human Rights Watch, Aryeh Neier, wrote: “I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.” It is a horrific truth that J Street’s leaders keep evading.

In 2024, the meaning of “pro-Israel, pro-peace” is macabre: J Street refuses to call for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel while that country continues to use American weapons and ammunition for mass murder and genocide.

The post The Dead End of Liberal American Zionism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or committed Communist, but for people for whom the distinction between facts and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

– Hannah Arendt

With the Vietnam War six decades behind us, and the demise of the U.S.S.R. almost thirty years in the rear-view mirror, is American Imperialist society’s anti-communist dogmatism finally peaking?

It’s taken multiple generations of public-corporate-sponsored propaganda, gaslighting, false-flags and psyops to eradicate nearly all the “Communist” influence from the compromised worlds of tenured intellectuals and partisan organized labor.  Obviously, this retreat came at a heavy cost.

Empire’s brain has been so dumbed down by censorship, pseudoscience, social media, surveillance technology, biblical literalism, and institutional corruption, that even the most thoughtful “post-Marxist” critics can’t seem to articulate a coherent 21^st Century alternative to replace global capital’s neoliberal structure.

Nor can today’s bumbling “experts” (economists, social engineers, and media prima donnas) recall that class, not gender, race, or ethnicity drives the social-cultural division that matters most.

The self-appointed ruling elite work overtime to deflect blame for their failure.  In “Our Democracy,” political appointments to high government offices are awarded only to the most proven bootlickers and loyal sycophants who worship the high priests of Global Capital.  But the masks are coming off, revealing power’s long-kept secrets about sources and methods.

Once an enemy (scapegoat) has been singled out, usually among the weakest and least politically connected (disenfranchised poor, immigrants, and minorities), suppression of free speech, scapegoating and fearmongering ramps up to restore the ruling class’s dominion and privilege.

To a working family “camping” on the street or a homeless single mother, this is what political collapse feels like.  The UK is #1 in homelessness, the USA “leads” the developed world in percentage of its population living on the street.  Meanwhile, endless billions are borrowed and sent abroad to senselessly genocide millions.  These sure signs of Imperialist decline can’t be ignored forever.

Worldwide, young adults quickly discover that the intelligence level of most hierarchically structured groups is inversely proportional to their size, and that global military-authoritarian empires have become so ossified, unwieldly, and dumb, that it’s unlikely they will ever learn much of anything.

The ruling class’s mantra is simple but effective: “Double-down – add loyal bureaucrats, NGOs, police and military as needed to violently drive the point home – and repeat.”

Capital is now global.  Markets are global.  Capital seeks nothing beyond quantitative growth and accumulation expressed in numeric profit. Capital has no incentive to value anything qualitatively if it can’t be monetized.  Critique of the neo-liberal, supply-side market fundamentalism promoted by the United States is intensifying.

Financializing Nature and human capital (property) is risk exemplified.  How about a Nature Impact Bond or a Human Capital Performance Bond?  Anyone?

Capital is legal property; its legal owner is a capitalist (slave-owner).

This leaves all two-legged beings who value (non-monetized, non-financialized) relationships with Mother Nature and all of Creation with an enormous intractable problem.

If nation-states lack effective regulatory mechanisms to constrain or enforce accountability over the actions of international finance and trade, what earthly good is it to have any faith at all in a national legislative body, a national president, or national ‘supreme’ court?

Global capital – at bottom, a colonial adventure – reigns supreme.

I can’t provide a viable alternative “paradigm shift” that leads out of this darkness.  For this I am self-critical.  I must, however, dream, work to decolonize my mind, and trust in myself. Resist, dissent and imagine the end to this tyranny.

The post Empire Stumbling Toward Irrelevance appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Karim Khan, chief prosecutor, International Criminal Court. Photo: ICC.

It had been widely anticipated that, to maintain any institutional respect, the International Criminal Court would have to indict some Israeli leaders, unavoidably including Prime Minister Netanyahu, in connection with the Gaza genocide and that, for balance, it would choose to indict at least one Hamas leader at the same time.

Its announcement Monday of applications for five arrest warrants and the strong language of its announcement, particularly coming from a British Prosecutor who had previously been suspected of being totally subservient to the British government, is excellent news.

However, it offered three surprises:

(1) ANNOUNCING APPLICATIONS FOR ARREST WARRANTS

It is normal ICC practice to announce the issuance of arrest warrants only after the court’s judges have approved them on the basis of an application from the Prosecutor.

This was the procedure followed last year when the court announced the issuance of arrest warrants for President Putin and for Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights.

The decision to announce these applications for arrest warrants prior to their formal approval may have been motivated by a sense that the conditions under which the people of Gaza are striving to survive are deteriorating so rapidly and horrifically that there is no time to waste and by a hope that announcing the applications now might have a positive impact on the decisions of relevant decision-makers for whom arrest warrants are not yet being sought but could be sought later.

(2) NOT SEEKING AN ARREST WARRANT AGAINST GENERAL HALEVI

When rumors of imminent ICC indictments started swirling several weeks ago, three Israeli leaders were cited as targeted — Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defense Minister Gallant and General Herzi Halevi, Chief of General Staff of the IDF. Arrest warrants are now being sought only against Netanyahu and Gallant.

The Prosecutor may be hoping that not indicting General Halevi or other top military officers for the time being while stating explicitly that his office “will not hesitate to submit further applications for warrants” if conditions are met might encourage them, in their own self-interests, to try to rein in their poltical leadership and to wind down or even wind up Israel’s genocidal assault against the people of Gaza.

(3) SEEKING AN ARREST WARRANT AGAINST ISMAIL HANIYEH

It was widely reported at the time that Hamas Political Bureau head Ismail Haniyeh and other members of the external leadership of Hamas had no advance knowledge of the October 7 operation, which makes attributing “criminal responsibility” to Haniyeh for the events of that day surprising.

It is possible that, in the hope of mitigating American fury and the publicly threatened American retaliation for any indictments of Israelis, the Prosecutor thought it desirable to seek arrest warrants for more Palestinians than Israelis. Within Gaza, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif are the only widely recognized personalities to whom responsibility might be attributed. Hence, perhaps Haniyeh was added to achieve the desired Palestinian majority.

In these circumstances, it is possible that the court’s “independent judges” might show their independence by not issuing an arrest warrant against Haniyeh, which should not upset the Prosecutor if he was adding Haniyeh primarily to achieve a Palestinian majority.

If an arrest warrant were to be issued against Haniyeh, he might, with good reasons to hope for an acquittal, choose to turn himself in to the court and, thereby, to set a good example for (and contrast to) Netanyahu and Gallant.

Indeed, Sinwar and Dief might at least be tempted to do likewise if they could find a way to be safely extricated from the Gaza Strip.

Since October 7, their future has offered only martyrdom — and not necessarily a quick and easy one. They may well be reconciled to martyrdom or actively seek it, but they could also view the chance to live out their natural lives and to defend themselves and their acts on the basis of the right of an occupied and oppressed people to self-defense against perpetual occupation and oppression and on the basis of 10/7 Truth as a viable and even attactive alternative.

It has also been widely reported that Netanyahu is personally obsessed with killing Sinwar and Deif and determined to pursue his assault against Gaza until he achieves that goal.

If that goal were to become impossible because Sinwar and Deif had successfully turned themselves in to the court, thousands of lives might be saved.

The post On the ICC’s Announcement of Arrest Warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant and Hamas’ Leadership appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: thierry ehrmann – CC BY 2.0

I have been a history professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst for twenty years. On May 7, I was one of a handful of faculty members arrested for standing in support of hundreds of students who were engaged in nonviolent protest of university complicity in the ongoing slaughter and suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. They want the school to divest from companies profiting from the carnage.

In the hours before UMass Chancellor Javier Reyes called in more than a hundred state police in riot gear to arrest anyone who did not disperse from the area in and around a small encampment, I wrestled with questions of conscience and practicality. Am I willing to be arrested? Is it the right thing to do? Could it make a difference? Would there be negative consequences for my career?

In the end, it was not a hard choice. I simply asked myself, “what would Daniel Ellsberg do?”

In 1971, Ellsberg released to the press and public the Pentagon Papers–a 7000-page classified history of the Vietnam War exposing decades of government lies about its causes and conduct. For that act of moral courage, he sabotaged his career and faced a possible 115-year sentence. Outside a federal court in Boston, Ellsberg was asked if he was worried about going to jail. His response: “Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?”

Ellsberg asked himself that very question in 1969 when he met some of the 3,250 young men who went to prison rather than submit to the Vietnam War draft. “It was the first time that I had come face-to-face with Americans willing to go to prison for refusing to collaborate in an unjust war.” Their bravery inspired his own. As he often said, “courage is contagious.”

I’m very proud that UMass acquired Ellsberg’s papers in 2019, funded many projects to promote his legacy, and in 2023 awarded him an honorary degree. Those commitments are one reason why I was so shocked and grieved by the UMass administration’s decision to crackdown on peaceful antiwar protest at an encampment that had been in place only seven hours. It was a betrayal not only of Ellsberg’s example, but the university’s own bold motto, “Be Revolutionary.”

The police arrest of faculty came first, and we were treated with reasonable restraint. However, as many videos and personal testimonies demonstrate, there was widespread use of excessive force against students. One of my graduate students was thrown face down to the ground, with a knee pressed so hard in his back he struggled to breathe. He was zip-cuffed so tightly his hands soon began to swell. He was then put in the back of a small windowless police van for several hours before being driven to the Mullins Center arena to join many of the 134 arrested protestors. His experience was not exceptional; some arrestees were subjected to greater violence. At the arena, many were held all night (still zip-cuffed), denied food or water, and were only allowed to use the bathroom after hours of pleading, if at all.

The Chancellor and his supporters, including Governor Maura Healey, have defended the mass arrests on the grounds that they were necessary to ensure safety. Yet no one’s security was at risk until the police were ordered onto campus. Nor should we take seriously the Chancellor’s claim that he had negotiated in good faith with a delegation of protestors prior to the arrests. As a detailed report of the meeting makes clear, he told the students repeatedly that he would not even consider discussing their demands until the encampment was taken down. Moreover, although the Chancellor insisted that calling the police was an “absolute last resort,” they were massing on campus even as the “negotiations” were just beginning.

What would Daniel Ellsberg do? We can’t know with complete certainty because he died last June at the age of 92. We do know that in the 50 years after he released the Pentagon Papers, he devoted his life to principled nonviolent activism and was arrested more than 80 times for acts of civil disobedience in the struggle for peace and nuclear disarmament. And when I wrote his widow, Patricia, to tell her of my arrest she wrote back these words, used with her permission: “I’m sure Dan would have advised you to get arrested. In some ways, I’m glad he is no longer here because he would have been anguished over the horror perpetrated by Israel on Gaza and probably arrested many times in protest.” I am also quite sure he would have been, as I am, deeply inspired by the passion and commitment of this generation of young activists.

The post UMass Arrests: What Would Daniel Ellsberg Do? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Omar Prestwich

Workers in Towson, Maryland, have earned the distinction of becoming the first Apple retail workers in the nation to vote to strike over failed union negotiations with their employer. The approximately 100 Apple workers were also the first in the nation to successfully form a union. They did so in 2022, as the Coalition of Organized Retail Employees (CORE), joining the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM). Two-thirds of the store’s workers voted to join the union, a resounding success at a company that has long staved off union activity.

Apple could have embraced the Towson store union, respecting the legal right of its workers to bargain collectively for their rights. Instead, the company chose a depressingly familiar path of using its economic power to break labor laws and resist the union at all costs.

Among Apple’s earliest tactics, a bold one even by corporate standards, was to offer all but the Towson store workers new educational and medical perks, saying that the nascent union would have to negotiate for those perks while nonunion workers would be able to enjoy them immediately. The IAM CORE members claimed it was a “calculated” move by Apple, timed just ahead of a second retail union vote at a store in Penn Square, Oklahoma, ostensibly as a warning to those workers, and any others considering union drives, that they could lose out. The National Labor Relations Board, which under President Joe Biden has tended to adhere to its mandate by actually protecting workersmore often than not, accused the company of violating the workers’ labor rights. Luckily, the bid failed and a majority of Penn Square’s Apple workers chose to unionize.

Apple’s ugly maneuver echoed that of Starbucks corporation a year later. The coffee giant increased hourly pay for all but its union workers. The NLRB also ruled against Starbucks.

Both Apple and Starbucks may have learned such machinations from Littler Mendelson P.C., the notorious union-busting firm that both corporations have retained to counter worker organizing. Starbucks alone has made use of the services of 110 of the law firm’s attorneys to aggressively resist organized labor at their stores. A former National Labor Relations Board attorney Matthew Bodie called the massive army of anti-union lawyers “unprecedented.” On its website, Littler boasts of the work it has done to “shape workplace practices in a direction that is favorable to employers.”

Union busting is lucrative, raking in more than $400 million in revenues a year for anti-union law firms like Littler Mendelson and Morgan Lewis (which is Amazon’s go-to union buster). It’s no wonder that a large part of their work is advising corporate employers on how best to break laws. Starbucks, for example, is a repeat offender. And so are Apple and Amazon.

The practice of labor law violations in countering unionization is so widespread that the Economic Policy Institute found in 2019 that “Employers are charged with violating federal law in 41.5 percent of all union election campaigns.” Given that these are officially deemed violations that have gone through the process of reporting and adjudicating, the number is likely an underestimate.

The reason these major corporations choose lawlessness is that often it works to their benefit. A company like Apple may well see millions of dollars toward union-busting lawyers as money well spent. After all, breaking the law costs very little, with fines for labor law violations capped at meager amounts. There are likely cold, hard calculations behind the cost-benefit analysis of breaking labor laws versus allowing workers to organize for what they want.

Even though workers in two Apple stores have successfully unionized, Apple prevailed in Short Hills, New Jersey where workers organized under the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and failed to win a union vote. Ahead of the vote, CWA accused Apple of illegal anti-union retaliation against one of the Short Hills employees leading the union drive. To Apple, such illegal behavior was likely worth the price. While individual employees have their livelihoods at stake, the company has nothing to lose but a few thousand dollars.

It’s not just about money but also power (which ultimately translates into more money). Workers wanting union representation aren’t just fighting for better pay and benefits but for humane treatment. Corporate profiteering is built on worker insecurity, the ability to hire and fire at will, and offering unpredictable shifts that best serve the company. Indeed, shift scheduling is a key sticking point in IAM CORE’s negotiations with Apple for its Towson store workers who voted to strike.

There are good reasons why corporations fight unions: hundreds of studies point to the negative impact that unions have on corporate profits. Conversely, there is a clear correlation between unions and higher wages, benefits, and worker protections. Even more encouragingly, unions lead to better wages even for non-union employees, putting upward pressure on employers to compete with unionized workers.

Many modern corporate employers who fight unions market themselves as having liberal values and being pro-worker. Apple touts itself as one of the biggest job creators in the U.S., responsible for 2 million jobs in all 50 states, and boasts that “unlike with many companies, both full- and part-time employees are eligible for such benefits as health insurance, matching retirement contributions, and an employee stock purchase plan.”

But, when forced to live up to their stated ideals, such corporations transform into profit-hungry gangsters. “Progressive-branded companies therefore offer free, built-in leverage to worker organizing campaigns,” wrote labor journalist Hamilton Nolan. “There is nothing that will force an employer to live up to all the stuff it said about caring for employees faster than a demand for union recognition.”

Some companies choose to lean into their stated liberal values, most notably Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, which refreshingly decided to embrace the newly formed Scoopers United union instead of unleashing union-busting law firms on its workers.

Even Microsoft, a major tech company that has a history of being what the New York Times called a “poster child for corporate ruthlessness,” is seemingly choosing the path of union acceptance. The company’s vice chair and president, Brad Smith announced in 2022 that Microsoft would work collaboratively with unions.

The Times speculated that Microsoft’s decision to embrace unions was an attempt to appease the pro-labor Biden administration ahead of a corporate acquisition of a video game company. Regardless of its reasoning, working with organized labor instead of against it is good for society, even if it’s bad for individual corporate bottom lines.

The good news is that in spite of union membership rates continuing to drop precipitously, the percentage of people who see unions in a favorable light has increased to 71 percent, and among young people a whopping 88 percent. The number of workers petitioning to join unions has jumped, as has strike activity. The only thing standing in the way of converting the union dreams of Apple workers and others into reality is corporate willingness to break labor laws.

The post Why Corporations Choose Lawlessness to Fight Unions appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photographer unknown, Colonel Ernst Bloch, (German Mischling), c. 1944. 

For many people, the question is inflammatory. The crimes of the German Nazis were of such magnitude that comparison with any other historical violence is invidious. The genocide of the Jews was deliberate and methodical and intended to eliminate every last one. The goal was the same with the Romani and Sinti people. By comparison, the Israelis – currently accused of genocide — are rank amateurs. They have so far killed some 35,000 Palestinians in Gaza out of a population of 2.3 million.

But the question, “Can Jews be Nazis?” is nevertheless important for challenging claims of moral inoculation by virtue of the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. If Israeli leaders are indeed committing a genocide in Gaza – as seems the case — they inhabit the same moral universe as the German Nazis, regardless of the suffering of past generations. In addition to the 35,000 killed, the war in Gaza has injured another 75,000 and displaced 2 million. Most of the victims are women and children – how can their deaths be justified? Israeli cabinet ministers, Knesset members, military personnel, and police have all freely spoken of their wish to force Palestinians into Egypt, establish Jewish-only settlements in Gaza, and even use an atomic bomb to kill everyone in the Gaza strip. (U.S. senator Lindsay Graham recently also suggested using a nuclear weapon against Gaza.)

Last week, the Israeli government suspended food and fuel deliveries to Gaza as collective punishment for a Hamas rocket attack that killed four soldiers. Such retribution is banned under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, by which Israel is bound. It also violates the teaching of the Hebrew prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel – “The person who sins; only he shall die.” One of the Hebrew sages, Hillel the Elder, reiterated the point in the Mishna, the “oral” Torah: “Each by his own sin will die’.

The 1948 U.N. Convention on the Crime of Genocide, describes it as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” By that definition, Israel has joined the club of violators and is subject to international sanction. When the International Criminal Court levels charges of genocide against Prime Minister Netanyahu, National Security Minister Ben-Gvir, Defense Minister Gallant, IDF Chief of Staff Halevi, and Finance Minister Smotrich – indictments could be announced any day — the men will be subject to arrest by all convention signatories, including the U.S. (Genocide is also prohibited under U.S. law, but to be prosecutable, the crime must be committed in the U.S. or by U.S. nationals.) The punishment for genocide is 30 years imprisonment, or in exceptional circumstances, life in prison. If Netanyahu manages to avoid trial for corruption in Israel, and if he lives long enough (he’s 74), he could be arrested and held in detention at an ICC facility outside the Hague in Scheveningen. His jailers there are unlikely to let him to indulge his taste for pink champagne and Cuban cigars.

Jewish Nazis in Nazi Germany

“Can jews be Nazis?” is also an historical question. To that, the answer is yes. Though membership in the German Nazi party was barred to Jews, thousands joined the Luftwaffe, Wehrmacht, and Kriegsmarine in the 1930s. They did so for the same reasons as other Germans: To serve the fatherland, forge a career, and continue a family tradition of military service. After passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Jews were barred from enlistment, but some managed to hide their ethnic origins (and lack of a foreskin), or else obtain papers from Nazi Party officials attesting to their deutschblütigkeit. One colonel in the Wehrmacht, Ernst Bloch, a Mischlinge (half-Jewish person) received the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross for bravery, the highest award given to military and paramilitary officers in Nazi Germany. His Judaism remained undetected until 1944, when he came to the attention of SS chief Henrich Himmler. A few weeks later, he received the following letter from his superior, major general Wilhelm Burgdorf, deputy chief of the Wehrmacht personnel office: “The Führer has decided as of 31 January 1945 to discharge you from active duty. It is an honor to thank you on behalf of the Führer for your service rendered during war and peace for our people and fatherland. I wish you all the best for the future. Heil Hitler.” The wonder is not that Bloch was detected after so long, but that he was apparently surprised at his dismissal. A few weeks later, he joined the Volkssturm (people’s militia) and was killed during the Soviet invasion of Berlin. There were thousand of other Jews, not all Mischlinge who attained high roles in the German military. Twenty of them were awarded the Iron Cross.

In all, thousands of Jews in Germany and occupied Europe – out of a population of about 9.5 million — assisted the Nazi regime in some way. Most did so under duress. Jewish ghetto councils, or Judenräte, established by Nazi officials in Poland, Lithuania and elsewhere, were tasked with distributing limited provisions of food and medicine, recruiting forced laborers, confiscating Jewish property, and supervising the Jewish ghetto police. By 1942 or ’43, some Judenräte and ghetto police were directly assisting local Nazis by identifying resistance leaders and organizing Jews for deportation to the death camps. The Jewish police could be cruel, especially the “13 Group,” established in Warsaw in 1940. They ran their own prison and reported directly to the Gestapo. Nevertheless, given the threats and ambient violence – refusal to comply with Gestapo orders usually meant death — it’s difficult to cast judgement on cooperating Jews. By the end of the war, the vast majority of them were dead.

Similar moral and legal complexity concerns Kapos and Sonderkommandos. The former were concentration or death-camp prisoners recruited to supervise and direct other prisoners. They were generally, but not always, selected from criminal-inmates to reduce the likelihood that they would feel solidarity with their charges. Kapos were accorded privileges in exchange for their services and their brutality: separate quarters, better food, and civilian clothes. If someone selected to be Kapo refused service, he would generally be returned to the ranks of regular prisoners, and somebody else appointed to take his place. Thus, it’s easy to see why so few resisted recruitment – if there was always someone available for the job, a prisoner would ask himself: “Why shouldn’t it be me, why shouldn’t I survive?”?

Sonderkommandos were death-camp workers, such as at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Sobibor, who cleared the gas chambers of bodies, put them in the crematoria, and disposed of the incinerated remains. The men who did this were generally recruited immediately upon arrival at the camps and would be shot or gassed at once if they refused. The work was of course unspeakable, and the Nazis made sure that it was unspoken; the Sonderkommandos were segregated from other prisoners to conceal the latter’s fate, and nearly all were themselves killed in an effort to hide the facts of the Holocaust from the world. A few survived however, and the tales they told exposed the harrowing of Hell. To call them collaborators would be to inflict posthumous punishment upon people whose souls were already shattered.

American Jewish Nazis

There is nothing funnier than a Jewish Nazi. That’s the unavoidable conclusion of any survey of post-War American comedy. In 1940, the popular Three Stooges (all Jewish), starred in the short film, You Nazty Spy in which Moe Howard plays a wallpaper hanger who somehow becomes Hailstone, the Hitler-mustachioed leader of the nation of Moronika. Two years later, the radio and TV comic Jack Benny (Jewish) starred with Carol Lombard in To Be or Not to Be (1942), directed by Ernst Lubitsch (Jewish). Benny plays Joseph Tura, a Polish stage actor who dresses up as a Gestapo officer to obtain a list of civilians targeted for Nazi reprisals. (It’s a very complicated plot.)

Immediately after the war, there were a spate of war movies with Jews playing Nazi roles, but few were comedies. Within about a decade, that began to change. On Your Show of Shows (1954) Sid Caesar (Jewish) and Howard Morris (Jewish) performed an eight-minute sketch called The German General in which Howard helps dress Caesar in his elaborate uniform – military tunic, medals, epaulets, sash, sword, and peaked hat — while both speak in pseudo-German (mixed with Yiddish) double-talk. I won’t give away punch line if you haven’t seen it. (Click on the link!) A decade later, Peter Sellers (Jewish) played a former Nazi, now an American nuclear weapons expert in the black comic Dr. Strangelove directed by Stanley Kubrick (Jewish). And in 1967, in what is perhaps the pinnacle of American, Jewish comedy, Mel Brooks (Jewish) wrote and directed The Producers, with a mainly Jewish cast either playing Nazis or abetting them. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder (both Jewish) are the two producers who aim to mount a Broadway musical so tasteless that it closes in one night, allowing them to pocket all their investors’ money. Kenneth Mars (Jewish) plays Franz Liebkind, the Nazi-helmet wearing author of the play “Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden,” and Dick Shawn (Jewish) is the hippy-dippy Fuhrer who steals the show and makes Springtime a success. During the Busby Berkeley-style production number before the play’s intermission, Brooks sings a single line, dubbing for one of the dancers in the chorus: “Don’t be stupid, be a smarty! Come and join the Nazi Party!”

The Producers, Mel Brooks, writer and director, Crossbow, Embassy and Columbia Pictures, 1967, screenshot.

At about the same time, there premiered a television comedy – I’m ashamed to admit it was one of my childhood favorites – called Hogan’s Heroes about a group of American GIs in a German POW camp, Stalag 13. The premise of the show is that the Nazis are comic buffoons, and the Americans are crafty and carefree, running an espionage and sabotage outfit from their barracks. The commandant of the camp, Colonel Klink was played by Werner Klemperer, the Jewish son of the great German conductor and composer, Otto Klemperer, and cousin of the literary scholar and diarist Victor Klemperer, whose three-volume journal of life under the Third Reich, I Shall Bear Witness, To the Bitter End, and The Lesser Evil is one of the essential testaments of the period. The incompetent and good-natured character of Sergeant Schultz, whose oft-repeated catchphrase was “I see nothing, I hear nothing, I know nothing,” was played by the Ukraine-born John Banner (Jewish). He lost much of his family in the Holocaust, as did Robert Clary (Jewish), who played Corporal Louis LeBeau. Clary survived Buchenwald, while 12 other members of his immediate family were sent to Auschwitz, where they were all murdered. How he managed to keep his composure in that show – which ran for six seasons until 1971 – one can only guess.

The reason Jewish Nazis are funny is that with the few exceptions noted above, Jews could not be Nazis. So, a Jewish Nazi is both a contradiction in terms, and an affront to anti-Semites hell-bent on destroying them. In Freudian terms, the laughter arises from the short-circuiting or release of psychic energy (cathexis) that occurs when the logical chain – Nazi killer creates Jewish victim — is broken. The same violation of expectation and laughter follows from Woody Allen’s famous stand-up routine about the Klan, performed from 1962-64. One day, he tells his audience, he was in the Deep South, and some friends invited him to a costume party. He rarely goes to such things, he says, but decided to make an exception and go as a ghost, dressed in a white sheet. But on his way to the party, he is picked up by a car with three other men dressed in sheets and hoods. They are obviously Ku Klux Klansmen who mistake him for one of them. He tries to make small talk (about grits), but soon slips up and they discover Woody’s Jewish identity. Just on the point of being lynched, he makes such an eloquent plea for universal tolerance, that the Klansmen decide to let him go and contribute $2,000 for Israel bonds.

No joke

But the sell-by date for funny, Jewish Nazis is by now well past. What happens when Jews really do become Nazis – not party members, Klansmen or terrorists, but just Jews who, like some other Americans, embrace hatred, violence, racism and war? When Henry Kissinger was called a Nazi during the Nixon years and after, it was no joke. His indifference to mass murder was well-known. After his death, Ron Jacobs in Counterpunch offered the following summary:

“The list of murderous atrocities for which Henry Kissinger was in some part responsible is rivaled only by Adolf Hitler in 20th-century history. That list begins with the secret bombing of Cambodia, the genocide in Timor, the coup in Chile and the subsequent decades of fascist rule. It continues from there. If asked, I would argue that the primary difference between Hitler and Kissinger was the calculating and dispassionate manner in which Kissinger dispatched people to their deaths.  Indeed, when asked about whether or not the bombing of Cambodia was effective, Kissinger responded by saying, “Whether we got it right or not is really secondary.”  The deaths of more than a hundred thousand Cambodians in the bombing (and the subsequent coup and murderous campaign of the Khmer Rouge after the defeat of Saigon) were inconsequential in his mind.”

There have been many other, though perhaps lesser Jewish Nazis than Kissinger, that is, men and women indifferent to human suffering, and complicit in murder, genocide, and ecocide. They include Elliot Abrams, Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs. He helped cover up or even facilitated genocidal attacks upon campesinos in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. He was also a key planner for the Iran-Contra affair, which illegally shipped arms and money to the terrorist contras in Nicaragua.

Madeleine Albright, U.S. Secretary of State under President Clinton, was architect of the Iraq sanctions that killed millions. In 1995 alone, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, more than half a million Iraqi children died from illness and starvation due to the sanctions. When asked by Leslie Stahl if the price was worth it, she replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price? We think the price is worth it.”

Stephen Miller, former special advisor to Trump, was champion of the Muslim travel ban and architect of the policy that separated children from their migrant parents. Lately he has been plotting a new anti-immigrant “blitz” if Trump is elected again. “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest,” Miller said, “are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown. The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.” Miller has been busy lately, accusing of anti-Semitism anyone sympathetic to the plight of Gazans.

And on it goes. Jewish university chancellor Gene Block at UCLA allowed a gang of non-student thugs, a veritable Freikorps, to riot and attack peaceful anti-war student protestors. The violent mob was partly funded and abetted by Jessica Seinfeld, wife of the famous comedian. Another Jewish billionaire, Bill Ackman, also offered support for the UCLA counter-protesters, before withdrawing it when press and public responses to it turned soured. (He also funded raucous, pro-Israeli rallies at George Washington University and elsewhere.)

The point of this is not is not to say that wealthy and powerful Jews are uniquely abetting a genocide in Gaza or are masterminds behind global criminality. Those are versions of the anti-Semitic canards that enabled the rise of fascism and Nazism and that still animate the far-right in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. Jews comprise just 2.4 per cent of the U.S. population and 0.2% of the global population and have little sway over anything, anywhere, except in Israel and Palestine. There, a faction of far-right leaders has gained political and ideological sway over a small, but militarily powerful nation now hell-bent on genocide. They are proud decedents of the terrorist Irgun and Herut parties (which evolved into Likud), denounced by Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein and others at the time as “closely akin in [their] organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” No more and apparently no less than any other community, Jews today are prey to fascist and Nazi ideation, despite their own catastrophic experience with it. That makes the heroism of Jewish protestors – students and faculty alike – at UCLA, USC, Columbia and dozens of other colleges and universities across the country all the more noteworthy and necessary. It’s also why journalists, politicians, business leaders and the rest of us have the obligation to speak up loudly against fascism, genocide, and war in Gaza and wherever else it occurs.

The post Can Jews be Nazis? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by Ales Krivec.

“Deep below the glistening surface of a frozen Arctic lake, something is bubbling—something that could cause global warming to accelerate beyond all previous projections… Now the freezer door is opening, releasing the carbon into Arctic lake bottoms. Microbes digest it, convert it to methane, and the lakes essentially burp out methane.’ Scientists estimate that permafrost holds up to 950 billion tons of carbon. As it thaws, 50 billion tons of methane could enter the atmosphere from Siberian lakes alone. That’s ten times more methane than the atmosphere holds right now,” (Katey Walter Anthony, biogeochemist, National Geographic Explorer Since 2011)

Rapid warming of Arctic permafrost has brought a significant threat to all life forms. Consequently, The Royal Society (est. 1660) felt compelled to support publication of a new video that exposes this threat: What Happens When the Permafrost Thaws? BBC in partnership with The Royal Society by Daniel Nils Roberts, British-Norwegian director, April 15, 2024.

“Thermokarst lakes (formed when permafrost melts) are projected to release approximately 40% of ancient permafrost soil carbon emissions this century.” (Source: K.M. Walter Anthony, et al, Decadal-scale Hotspot Methane Ebullition Withing Lakes Following Abrupt Permafrost Thaw, Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2021)

“The Tibetan Plateau is the largest alpine permafrost region in the world, accounting for approximately 75% of the total alpine permafrost area in the Northern Hemisphere. Similar to high-latitude permafrost regions, this region has experienced fast climate warming and extensive permafrost thaw, which has triggered the widespread expansion of thermokarst lakes and other types of abrupt permafrost thaw. The number of thermokarst lakes in this permafrost region is estimated to be 161,300.” (Source: Guibiao Yang, et al, Characteristics of Methane Emissions from Alpine Thermokarst Lakes on the Tibetan Plateau, Nature Communications 14, Article No. 3121, 2023)

Ecosystems throughout the planet are rapidly transforming because of human-generated global warming. After all, what does the formation of 161,300 thermokarst lakes in only the Alpine permafrost region alone say about the impact of global warming?

Scientists are expressing renewed concerns about monster climate events lurking beneath the frozen ground of permafrost, which is 15% of the exposed land surface of the Northern Hemisphere (MIT Climate Portal). And monsters lurk above solid grounding in Antarctic glacial formations, starting to fracture as fissures widen like ogres of the deep.

From the Arctic to Antarctica the planet is sagging, dripping, slouching, changing the face of 10,000 years of nature coexisting with humanity side-by-side until only recently as it transforms into an adversarial relationship. Permafrost ranks alongside the Arctic, Antarctica, Greenland, The Great Barrier Reef, and the world’s three largest rainforests as the most important determinates of this changing future. Within permafrost’s confines exist thousands of years of latent ingredients that have the potential to set the world on fire. Its impact could be transcendent.

“Most of Earth’s near-surface permafrost could be gone by 2100, an international team of scientists has concluded after comparing current climate trends to the planet’s climate 3 million years ago… The team found that the amount of near-surface permafrost could drop by 93% compared to the preindustrial period of 1850 to 1900. That’s under the most extreme warming scenario in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” (Source: Study: Near Surface Permafrost Will Be Nearly Gone by 2100, Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Sept. 15, 2023)

What Happens When the Permafrost Thaws (the film): “Permafrost is of huge importance to the entire planet… including one-half of Canada and two-thirds of Russia… and the Tibetan Plateau… permafrost is rock, sediment or ice that remains at or below zero degrees Celsius for two or more consecutive years… depending upon where it is found, permafrost can be millions of years old.”

Interviews in the What Happens film, living in permafrost regions, like Svalbard, Norway, when discussing noticeable climate change: “This kind of weather, it’s not supposed to be like this in October, it’s supposed to be minus 15°, clear, dry climate, and it’s not. It’s a rainstorm.”

As a result of abnormal climate behavior, especially where permafrost hangs out, the “active layer” of permafrost is getting deeper and deeper throughout the world. This is bad news. This creates more and more exposure to thousands of years of accumulation of “who knows what?” It’s happening at a fast enough rate now that it could expose 10,000,000 woolly mammoths (a very rough estimate by somebody?) as well as ancient viruses, and who knows what else?

Moreover, aside from 10,000,000 woolly mammoth skeletons with some of them kinda well-preserved skin, fur, etc., a unique study claims up to 20,000 toxic contamination sites could be exposed: “Here we identify about 4500 industrial sites where potentially hazardous substances are actively handled or stored in the permafrost-dominated regions of the Arctic. Furthermore, we estimate that between 13,000 and 20,000 contaminated sites are related to these industrial sites.”  (Source: Moritz Langer, et al, Thawing Permafrost Poses Environmental Threat to Thousands of Sites with Legacy Industrial Contamination, Nature Communications, March 28, 2023)

“But there’s something else that concerns scientists much more. The scariest thing that is happening with permafrost is what it is doing to the climate itself… permafrost acts as a storage… it locks up the carbon from dead vegetation quite effectively, and it’s accumulated over many thousands of years.” (What Happens).

Now, the freezer door is open. Nobody knows for sure what’ll come through. But the biggest concern is permafrost competing with human-driven carbon emissions like CO2. This could drive global warming to unspeakable levels.

“There’s estimated to be four times the amount of carbon in permafrost than all the human-generated CO2 emissions in modern history. The release into the atmosphere of even a fraction of this as carbon dioxide and methane will have a profound impact on the climate.” (What Happens)

“What can be done” is an open question that’s semi-addressed in the film What Happens: We can make more informed decisions and build communities that are resilient to changes, highlighted by the ways that humans are entangled with nature. In other words, adaptation is the most realistic solution, other than stopping fossil fuels, which is not happening.

Meanwhile, the backup position to frustration over ongoing CO2 emissions that are continuing to ratchet up, now at all-time highs, scientists are increasingly calling for “adaptation to climate change” instead of pounding the table for a halt to emissions. For example, a recent report by the prestigious Columbia Climate School makes the case: “Experts are warning that policymakers should consider adaptation to sea-level rise a primary concern.” But, how to adapt to permafrost thaw is an altogether different matter… the most challenging of all.

In truth, climate change is far ahead of schedule, as scientific models of yesteryear look like distant history. It’s likely that history will designate the 21^st century “The Age of Adaptation” by default as countries react, after the fact, to collapsing ecosystems, which guarantees a future full of surprises beyond wildest imagination.

There are scientists who believe permafrost thawing will accelerate global warming beyond the comfort zone of life in several regions of the planet, in fact, it’s already very close to a large scale event in Pakistan, India’s Indus River Valley, eastern China, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Still, regardless of circumstances, finding a way forward to the future is in the lifeblood of humanity. In that regard, there is some good news (kinda good): According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) renewables will meet 35% of “global power generation” by 2025, thus a significant rise in CO2 emissions from global power activity is unlikely over the next few years. However global power generation is not the full enchilada of world energy: Along those lines, coal consumption is expected to drop 13.5% by 2030 but natural gas and oil will both rise as renewables, alongside fossil fuels, experience strong growth to meet increasing levels of demand. According to the IEA, fossil fuels will still account for 70% of world energy, down from today’s 82%, by 2030. This is progress but is it too slow, not enough soon enough? Moreover, and as endorsed by several oil CEOs, the IEA expects oil supply to remain robust into 2050. Hmm -global warming is all about excessive levels of fossil fuel CO2 emissions. Those emissions are not going away anytime soon, which will please the permafrost thawing gods.

As for US influence to lessen the impact of permafrost thawing, although not expressly stated as such in the legislative bill, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provides $370 billion in clean energy investments. But can Biden’s IRA survive political wars? Is IRA bulletproof? More importantly, is it enough soon enough?

According to Barron’s d/d April 1, 2024: Trump Is Taking Aim at Biden’s Climate Law: He calls it a waste of money, and instead, has promised oil and gas CEOs favorable treatment, including scrapping Biden’s IRA, if elected, assuming they pony-up $1 billion for his campaign. Is this a bribe? It’s MAGA’s BMGW “Buy More Global Warming” to subsidize thawing of permafrost.

The post Permafrost Showdown appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Fiber plant, Halsey, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

We’ve spent 40 years putting together an apparatus to protect public health and environment from a lot of different pollutants.  [Former EPA administrator Scott} Pruitt is pulling the whole apparatus down. 

– William Ruckelshaus, the EPA’s first administrator, regarding former president Trump’s first EPA administrator Scott Pruitt.

One of President Joe Biden’s greatest accomplishments over the past three and a half years has been the rebuilding of the Environmental Protection Agency, and endorsing  ambitious EPA rules that will slash air pollution, water pollution, and planet-warming emissions from U.S. power plants.  President Barack Obama tried  to force power plants to stop burning coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, but his successor—Donald Trump—reversed Obama’s plans.  Biden is trying to end carbon emissions from coal plants, and Trump has already promised to reverse these plans if he returns to the White House in 2025.

As the poster child for “science denialism,” Trump had no science adviser for the first two years of his presidency; he finally named a meteorologist to be the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology.  Trump closed scientific laboratories throughout the country; compromised scientific conferences that depended on federal participation; and interrupted the planning and flow of resources needed by the scientific community.  Government scientists were furloughed  at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the National Weather Service; the EPA; and NASA.  Government agencies that provided research grants, such as the National Science Foundation, had to cancel review panels and put plans for future spending on hold.

Trump’s war on science, particularly climate change, included the naming of climate deniers to his cabinet: Rex Tillerson to the State Department; Pruitt to the EPA; Ryan Zinke to the Department of the Interior; and Rick Perry to the Department of Energy.  Tillerson was fired; Pruitt and Zinke stepped down due to ethics and management scandals; and Perry stepped down after demonstrating world-class incompetence.  Only five cabinet officials have left the Biden administration after three and a half years; the turmoil in Trump’s cabinet included the departures of more than 20 cabinet officers in addition to 17 other acting officials who stepped in temporarily.

Trump is already promising chaos if he gets back to the White House.  His speeches over the past several months have threatened to “cancel” Biden’s plans for cutting pollution from fossil-fuel burning power plants; terminate programs to encourage electric vehicles; and  “develop the liquid gold that is right under our feet,” meaning oil and gas.  In his first term, Trump reversed more than 100 EPA protections signed by the Obama administration.  Trump has promised to “unleash domestic energy production like never before,” meaning oil, gas, and coal, and to end Biden’s limits on pollution from automobile tailpipes.  Trump also wants to gut Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which marks the nation’s largest investment to fight climate change.

As president, Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris agreement, which committed nations to reduce their greenhouse gases to keep global warming within relatively safe limits.  Several days after the November election, the United Nations will convene the annual global climate summit in Azerbaijan, which Trump would presumably ignore as part of his effort to make the United States an environmental “pariah state” in the fight against climate change.   

Trump’s attacks on science and fact-finding were unprecedented in a country that has prided itself on innovation and development.  The United States is a global leader in Nobel prizes for science and math, and no country has registered more patents for research and the application of theoretical ideas.  US. educational and research institutions are some of the finest in the world, and regularly attract foreign scientists to their classrooms and laboratories. 

Unlike Trump, Biden has called climate change an existential threat, and has moved to reduce pollution; limit toxic chemicals in our water; and to ban “white asbestos,” which has been linked to mesothelioma and other cancers.  EPA regulations will cut pollution from power plants, and will require coal plants to reduce 90 percent of their greenhouse pollution by 2039.  According to the New York Times, Biden has ordered federal agencies to reinstate or strengthen more than 100 environmental regulations that former president Trump had weakened or removed.  The Biden administration has also made it more expensive for fossil fuel companies to drill for oil, gas, and coal on public lands.  Conversely, Trump is campaigning on the basis of a “drill, baby, drill” agenda. 

The post Donald Trump’s War on Science and the Environment appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

UCLA protest, photo by Ed Rampell.

On May Day I went to embattled UCLA to cover the ongoing student revolt there. At the barricades I met with a young woman who called herself “Mona,” the press spokesperson for UCLA’s Palestine Solidarity Encampment. Mona gave me a copy of the student occupiers’ demands:

“Divest: Withdraw all UC-wide and UCLA Foundation funds from companies and institutions that are complicit in the Israeli occupation, apartheid, and Genocide of the Palestinian people.” The demands went on to call for UCLA to: “Disclose… full-transparency to all UC-wide and UCLA Foundation assets including investments, donations, and grants.” “Abolish Policing: End the targeted repression of pro-Palestinian advocacy… and sever all ties with LAPD” and “Boycott” ties to Israeli universities. The antiwar students also demanded that UCLA “call[s] for “ceasefire and end to the occupation and Genocide in Palestine.”

Mona and I have stayed in contact and I interviewed her via phone May 11 about the ongoing campus resistance.

How do you want to be identified?

Mona: Just my first name, Mona, would be preferred. Media Liaison for the UCLA Palestine Solidarity Encampment.

Tell us what you’re comfortable saying about your personal background?

I’m an undergraduate student here at UCLA. I’m a political science major. I’m originally from California. Religiously I am Muslim…

I don’t use my full name for a variety of reasons, including the fact that I’d like to maintain my privacy as an individual… My safety and prevention from retaliation is a part of that.

What is the latest situation as of May 11 regarding UCLA and the student protesters?

So, right now, we’re going to continue to push to get our demands met. One way we’re doing that is we created an email template for students and other concerned members of the community to email to [UCLA Chancellor] Gene Block to continue to reiterate our demands. Because, at the end of the day, in whatever way we can, we’re going to continue to work to get those demands met. [The email template is here and can be emailed to: chancellor@conet.ucla.edu.]

…The student senate is preparing to go into a [censure and/or no confidence] vote regarding Gene Block – however, the vote got pushed back. [By May 8, UCLA’s Undergraduate Students Association Council, the governing body of the Undergraduate Students Association, demanded Block’s resignation.

President Biden has said that the student protests rocking US college campuses hasn’t changed his policy vis-à-vis Israel’s war in Gaza. But around May 8, Pres. Biden paused the shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, stating he didn’t want these munitions used by the IDF on Rafah. Do you feel that Biden’s suspension of shipment of some weaponry to Israel is a result of the pressure student and other protests have brought to bear on the White House?

At the end of the day, when it comes to protests, particularly student-led ones, there’s been a long tradition of these protests having an impact on these things. While our demands are addressed specifically at the university, our goal is to stand in solidarity with Palestine.

But do you feel Biden is actually hearing the protests that have rocked scores of college campuses and that he’s feeling the heat of the student uprising?

We’re definitely doing our best to really pressure the university administration and the ones who are connected to UCLA.

What threats are UCLA student protesters facing from the administration and security forces?

Yeah, for sure. Just last week we did see how the university responded to the Encampment and the movement and we saw that when the police breeched the Encampment and how an ex-IOF soldier was present that day and collaborating with the police forces there and in the way that the police forces held back and didn’t separate agitators from the Encampment on Tuesday, April 30, which went into the [early] hours of May 1. So, we kind of see that the University has been using these police forces in ways to try to prevent the movement from continuing. And these tactics are very similar, if not completely the same, as the tactics of the IOF.

Please clarify what you mean by “IOF” [instead of IDF – the Israel Defense Forces]?

The Israel Occupation Forces.

Are protesters also being threatened with expulsion, suspension, eviction from dorms?

As of right now, these threats haven’t been carried out against students, as far as we’re aware. However, disciplinary measures were threatened previously, before April 30.

Given that UCLA students have so much to lose by engaging in campus protest and – unless they’re on scholarships – pay so much to attend UCLA, what motivates them to take action that places them in harm’s way?

The primary motivation for this movement, especially as students, is because we feel the genocide that’s happening in Gaza right now. And we want to stand in solidarity with Palestine. Within the past 24 hours we’ve started to hear reports of detainment camps that have such horrific conditions. Not only that, but we’re continuing to hear about mass graves being discovered in Gaza behind hospitals…

All of these accounts and testimony that what’s happening in Gaza, in Palestine right now is on top of the over 35,000 people who have been murdered in Gaza. And almost 76 years of occupation. So, for us, it’s really about standing in solidarity with Palestine and continuing to do what we can as students to really push to make the world a better place and to prevent this from continuing.

What percentage of the Encampment’s participants would you guesstimate were of Palestinian origin, Arab, Muslim?

I think that’s a really great question. When it comes to the Encampment and its demographics, honestly there was a very diverse set of backgrounds present. Whether they were Muslim; whether they were Jewish; whether they were Arab; whether they were specifically Palestinian – the range was so wide and diverse and that did continually shift throughout the week as more people were able to show up. So, we didn’t keep track of specific demographics, but considering the diversity of the students who were present, there were lots of students from all types of backgrounds.

To play devil’s advocate: If I’m a UCLA student but I don’t have any Palestinian, Arab and Muslim background, why should I care about what’s happening in Gaza, to the point where I’m going to put my well-being on the line?

For sure. When it comes to that question, we’ve seen lots of students over the past couple of weeks – those who haven’t had a lot of ties, faced that question themselves. A lot of them have seen the atrocities that are happening, the violence being carried out against the people in Gaza right now, and as a human, seeing other people going through that, seeing these violent attacks, seeing them being killed, really is that sense of compassion, and that sense of empathy, that for a lot of students who I’ve gotten to know over the past couple of weeks who have become more conscious of what’s happening and more willing to stand up to, to stand up in solidarity with Palestine. A lot of it is what’s been happening.

Describe the UCLA Palestine Solidarity Encampment itself?

For sure. When it comes to the Encampment the primary reason why we were gathered there was to be in solidarity with Palestine. A lot of times the Encampment would work to engage with the people inside of it. Whether that was through teach-ins hosted by faculty who came in to talk about the connection of the struggle all across the world, and how standing in solidarity is so important. Watching films that are related to this; or creating artwork to express solidarity and the sentiment of the Encampment. Engaging in conversations and dialogue to continue to further our own education on how we can stand up in solidarity with Palestine.

Throughout the Encampment, while it was up, there were Muslim services, as well as Jewish services for the students within the Encampment who did practice those faiths and wanted to continue to engage with their communities. There was that sense of solidarity and full commitment and willing to continue to work together within these types of events that were all centered around solidarity as a whole.

…[Physically] the Encampment was primarily set up of tents, blankets, as well as a couple of canopies to cover over tents that had been set up for medical care, as well as for food, which was primarily based on community donations. When it comes to the [wooden] barrier of the encampment, that was set up to protect students from the outside agitators who started to show up almost immediately after the Encampment was set up, and continually harassed students within it. The university administration set up metal barricades to fence off the section from others… they were not set up by the Encampment.

You just used the term “outside agitators.” Do you mean they weren’t UCLA students?

Yes. Primarily a lot of the individuals who were harassing students at the Encampment were not part of the UCLA community and had shown up specifically to harass and threaten violence against the students within the Encampment.

On April 30 when counter-demonstrators attacked the UCLA Palestine Solidarity Encampment, who were the counter-protesters? And what happened?

That goes again to some being outside Zionist agitators who were present, there specifically with the intent of harming people inside of the Encampment… That night, these agitators rushed the Encampment barriers at a little before 11:00 [p.m., April 30] and started to tear away pieces of the Encampment. Also use them to attack the students, as well as throw fireworks into and above the Encampment, three of which exploded both within and right on top of students. As well as spraying them with bear spray, pepper spray and Mace, and throwing other things like metal projectiles.

This continued on until approximately 2:00 a.m. Which is how long it took for any police force to show up, as campus-hired security stood by and watched and did not help the engaged or separate these agitators from the Encampment. Even when cops did show up a little before 2:00 a.m., it took them almost an hour to actually move in and try to separate the agitators from the Encampment. In the police response – and in the attack itself – we can kind of see the consistency of the ideology and the tactics being used to try to suppress the Encampment. Because we can kind of see how police forces are tied to the IOF, both in their tactics and in the way that they collaborated.

On May Day there was a dispersal order to the Encampment to leave by 6:00 p.m. Do you believe that the massive outpouring of solidarity and formation of hundreds of students with locked arms on the steps leading up to the Encampment delayed police from raiding it around 6:00 p.m.?

When it comes to the student and community support that the Encampment saw on May 1, it was definitely motivating and supportive for the Encampment to see that presence and for that presence to help kind of hold the line and prevent police forces from starting to reach the Encampment. The police tactics that we did see that night were very reminiscent, if not exactly the same, as IOF techniques that they used to harm individuals.

We can kind of see that because we know that least one ex-IOF special operations soldier who was present that night, Aaron Cohen [According to Wikipedia: “ In the mid-1990s, he became a member of the undercover Duvdevan Unit… of the IDF Commando Brigade, performing counter-terror operations targeting suspects among the Palestinian Arab population in the West Bank.”], who posted on social media about his time at UCLA on Wednesday night and his support of the police forces who were there.

So having that student engagement and support there was very motivational for the Encampment to continue to hold the Encampment present and to continue to push for divestment and the other demands of the movement.

Is Aaron Coehn an enrolled UCLA student or faculty?

No.

What happened when the security forces raided the Encampment?

When it came to the early morning hours when they did move in [on May 2], police were using flashbang grenades… which obscures vision and went off so loudly that student hearing was damaged, as well… [There were] other tactics to kind of dismantle the barricades and the human chain that was trying to protect the Encampment. That included shooting students with rubber bullets, at least five of which hit students in the head and we know of at least 15-plus people needing emergency services as a result of the police’s actions that night. So, the Encampment saw police beating protesters with metal batons and being violent towards students and the people of the Encampment.

Over 200 people were arrested.

What has happened on campus since the Palestine Solidarity Encampment was dispersed?

The movement is going to continue in whatever shape that it is. Since May 2 there have been efforts to mobilize the student body in ways to pressure the administration, as well as faculty and other members of the UCLA community… [such as the aforementioned] email template to send to Gene Block’s office.

[Early May 6, 40-ish protesters were arrested by LAPD and LASD in a UCLA parking garage. After LAPD confronted other demonstrators staging a sit-in at Moore Hall, a march was held through the campus to Dodd Hall and beyond. L.A. Times reported: “While campus was supposed to resume normal operations Monday, a Bruin Alert issued just before 9 a.m. Monday said ‘classes and work in Moore Hall will be remote today due to ongoing disruptions.’” For the rest of the quarter, all UCLA classes are being held online. (The Encampment’s full statement.)

…When it comes to graduation, many other colleges were supposed to have their ceremonies close to now. But UCLA is on the quarter system for its undergraduates, so their graduation isn’t until June. There’s not a lot that we can touch on in regards to how UCLA is responding to graduation yet.

Democracy Now reported [during the week of May 6] more than 2,500 students in the U.S. have been arrested for opposing the war in Gaza. What outreach is there to and coordination by the UCLA protesters with USC and other college student protesters across the country?

When it comes to the connections between student movements across universities, we are going from a very strong tradition of student organizing. Whether that’s from UCLA or across college campuses across the United States, so we know that we’re not the first Encampment to have popped up and even this movement isn’t the first time that we’ve seen students organize and push for universities and administrations to divest. This is a student-wide movement, so lots of times students do have friends who are from out of state, or have friends at other universities; in that case, communications are open. The work that we’re doing here as a whole is a student-led movement that isn’t limited in any organizational way.

For us it goes back to the fact that all of the universities in Gaza have been destroyed. And we know that college students there have lost that space to be able to voice their thoughts and to use that space to organize. So, it’s very important for us, no matter which campus… is that solidarity with Palestine in however way we can.

Has there been contact with non-student, pro-Palestinian, peace groups here and abroad?

…When it comes to community support, whether from organizations or individuals, we did see a lot of that in ways they supported the Encampment with food. And outside community organizations continue to stand in solidarity with Palestine.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon wrote about Spontaneity: Its Strength and Weakness. During the ’60s groups such as SDS and the MOBE organized antiwar resistance. Are there moves to create a national organization to coordinate ongoing antiwar causes and opposition?

Yeah. When it comes to the national level of organizing, we know there are already organizations set up and we know those efforts will continue. How that plays out on the national level remains to be seen.

What do you think of the way MSM has framed the narrative and the antiwar protesters?

When it comes to the media focus on protesters, our primary focus has always been Palestine and solidarity with Palestine. It’s never just about us as individuals or about college campus movements, our focus has been on Palestine. Our specific focus now is on Rafah and the attacks on Rafah in Gaza.

There has been commentary and reports alleging that the student protesters are pro-Hamas?

At the end of the day, our focus is Palestine, the people of Palestine. Our focus is ending the violence that is ongoing. Our focus is ending the UCLA administration’s complicity and profit in the genocide in Gaza.

There has been commentary and reports alleging that the student protesters are anti-Semitic?

…As mentioned earlier, the Encampment itself has had religious services for both Muslim students and Jewish students. Our focus has been about solidarity – never about exclusion.

What is the UCLA Palestine Solidarity Encampment’s position re: the hostages being held by Hamas?

At the end of the day, the Encampment and the movement as a whole is more focused on the origin of violence and preventing that from continuing and preventing the genocide that we see playing out from continuing.

By “origin” are you referring to decades of occupation and the siege of Gaza?

Yes. We are referring to the violence that’s being enacted

Speaking of “violence,” what is the UCLA Palestine Solidarity Encampment’s position re: the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack? The killing and abducting of civilians, children, women?

So, again, our focus is on Palestine and on preventing this genocide from continuing.

The post The Battle of UCLA: Inside the Class Struggle appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Manufacturers of the new weight-loss drugs that have taken the nation by storm are salivating at the prospect of how best to extract profits from people. What Americans eat, how they diet and exercise, what nutritional supplements they take, the sugar content of their sodas, the high fructose corn syrup in their processed foods, and the price of their diabetes medication have long been objects of endless gambling on Wall Street. Now, with drugs like Mounjaro, Wegovy, and Ozempic in the mix, new vistas of corporate exploitation have opened up. Companies are eager to figure out how best to milk people who might be losing their taste for the plentiful calories that food producers got them hooked on in the first place.

It’s not a conspiracy theory that food addiction is a tool of corporate profiteering. Consider that tobacco companies, upon being regulated out of the business of addictive smoking, turned their sights onto addictive eating. The Washington Post’s health columnist, Anahad O’Connor wrote, “In America, the steepest increase in the prevalence of hyper-palatable foods occurred between 1988 and 2001—the era when Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds owned the world’s leading food companies.” Further, “the foods that they sold were far more likely to be hyper-palatable than similar foods not owned by tobacco companies.”

Many of these ultra-processed foods are specially marketed to children, which in turn can change their brain chemistry to desire those foods for life. According to a paper published in Science Daily, “The current obesity epidemic is due, in part, to hormonal responses to changes in food quality: in particular, high-glycemic load foods, which fundamentally change metabolism.” Today we would be appalled at the idea of marketing tobacco to children, but the same companies pushed addictive foods onto kids, and even though Big Tobacco is no longer in the business of food, its practices remain widespread.

The harmful impacts of unhealthy foods also fall disproportionately along racial lines, with aggressive marketing aimed at communities of color. Black children, in particular, are subjected to significantly greater advertising of high-calorie addictive foods than their white peers.

As obesity rates have risen in the U.S., there is an all-too-familiar blame game that individualizes the harm being caused by a capitalist system that thrives off of addiction. Doctors warn people struggling to manage their weight that they must simply restrict their intake of calories while expending more calories through rigorous exercise. High-profile reality shows such as The Biggest Loser have cemented the narrative that obesity is the result of individuals not being able to manage their urges to eat. And American pop culture’s obsession with increasingly unattainable thinness generates shame spirals among individuals and further fuels the idea that people are fat simply because they are too weak to control themselves. Meanwhile, there are few, if any, government regulations on unhealthy foods in the U.S.

There’s a similar analogy to be found in personal finance. American culture is steeped in the myth of a meritocracy where people struggling to make ends meet are blamed for simply not being good managers of money and where well-meaning budgeting guides are offered without the broader context of rising inequality, suppressed wages, bloated student debt, and inflation.

The causes of both, obesity and wealth inequality, are systemic, while the solutions being offered are individualized, often spawning lucrative industries of their own.

Alongside the aggressive marketing of hyper-palatable foods is a massively profitable weight-loss industry that preys upon individual shame to the tune of more than $60 billion a year. In fact, some of the same companies pushing high-calorie foods are in the business of weight loss.

With the advent of the new revolutionary weight-loss drugs, watching the industry reconfigure itself is fascinating. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Since drugs such as Mounjaro, Wegovy, and Ozempic became sensations last year, Wall Street has rushed to work out just how disruptive the drugs, called GLP-1s, might be.” By “disruptive,” the journal is referring to a discouraging trend in food industry profits. If weight-loss drugs curb appetite, who will buy enough Krispy Kreme donuts to keep the sugar-peddling company in business? That’s a big worry for corporate CEOs and shareholders.

Another story in the Journal lamented the impact of these drugs on the weight-loss industry “which long pushed calorie-counting and willpower,” and are now “grappling with the surging popularity of new drugs.” If weight-loss drugs curb appetite without expensive gym memberships, supplements, and programs like WeightWatchers, will the traditional weight-loss industry go out of business?

Today, the manufacturers of weight-loss drugs are clear winners in the changing landscape of food consumption and weight, charging tens of thousands of dollars for a year’s supply, and ensuring that only the wealthy have access to the thinness that our culture celebrates. Not only do the high price tags keep these drugs out of the hands of low-income people struggling to manage their weight, but also out of the hands of diabetics whom the drugs were originally meant for.

The capitalist maxim of higher demand fueling higher prices is very much at work here. Ozempic for example, could have a price tag of only $57 a year its manufacturer Novo Nordisk would still reap a profit. Instead, it is being sold in the U.S. for a whopping $11,600 a year simply because the company can charge an arm and a leg, ensuring that the drugs remain in the hands of the wealthy while tidying up a nice profit for Novo Nordisk’s shareholders.

Eventually, however, the prices will come down once the elite market for the drugs saturates. And drug manufacturers are already busy ensuring their future market share by pushing doctors to prescribe the drugs widely. One obesity expert named Dr. Lee Kaplan, who received $1.4 million from Novo Nordisk, told his fellow physicians, “We are going to have to use these medications…for as long as the body wants to have obesity.” What he didn’t say out loud was that there will be obesity for as long as food manufacturers market and sell junk foods.

Ultimately, our individual appetites and waistlines are pawns in the highly lucrative game of profit extraction that private companies and industries play. It is in the interest of drug manufacturers that Americans remain hooked on hyper-palatable high-calorie foods so that a market exists for their weight-loss drugs. The ultra-processed food industry is becoming symbiotic with the weight-loss drug industry. The former ensures we eat poorly and the latter is there to feed off our shame.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The post Weight Loss Drugs Go Hand-in-Hand With Junk Food Industry appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: badlyricpolice – CC BY 2.0

Our world does not lack for international agreements. The United Nations, the official depository for global pacts, currently has over 560 on file.

Some of these agreements have already made an appreciable — and positive — difference. Others may turn out to have some meaningful potential. This past November, for instance, saw the adoption of a “Convention on the Contract for International Carriage of Goods by Rail,” a climate-friendly move that promises to help cargo move cheaper and quicker.

On still other fronts, unfortunately, the world’s nations have made precious little progress. The front with the least progress of all? That may well be taxes. We have no international pact in place that promotes fair and effective taxation. We have instead a global incoherence that royally benefits the rich — and the lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists so eager to do their bidding.

Some political jurisdictions have benefited royally as well. These jurisdictions — our top global “tax havens” — have become places where the world’s most fortunate can park their fortunes and escape the tax rates of the nations they call home.

How have the nations the rich call home responded? They’ve typically been doing whatever they can to keep their rich at home and happy at tax time. They’ve lowered tax rates and littered their tax codes with loopholes that have significantly slashed how much in taxes their richest need pay.

For our Earth’s wealthiest, all this has ended up working out quite wonderfully. Worldwide, grand fortunes have never been grander.

Meanwhile, lower down on the income ladder, average people have been taking it on the chin. Their governments insist they simply don’t have the budget capacity to do what average people know needs to be done. So schools go underfunded, decent housing and health care grow grotesquely more expensive, and our climate becomes ever more menacing.

The post Could the UN Actually Lead a Charge to Tax the World’s Rich? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Anyone who detected the slight look of relief on Benjamin Netanyahu’s face during his address on the evening of October 7th knew two things were about to happen: a great many innocent Palestinians were going to die, and both the Congress of the United States and American news organizations would do all within their power to justify the carnage.

For those who knew those things, the most essential act we could perform right now would be to engage in a genuine conversation about Gaza and antisemitism and the chaos on college campuses. A conversation in the style of the Founders, filled with reason and analysis and rumination. A Jeffersonian argument (much more on Jefferson later) that honestly looks at the foundational aspects of every view.

All of which is utterly impossible. For America is a scandalously lazy and uninformed land which prefers a sense of decorum to a sense of history.

The elected imbeciles strolling the halls of government. The platitudes with which they perfume their genocidal hypocrisy regarding bombed children. The Congressional committees which conduct themselves as a grotesque amalgam of the Sanhedrin and the Council Of Trent. All are a direct result of a citizenry with a limitless inability to fathom.

As for me, while I know what antisemitism is I readily admit that I don’t know what it isn’t. Unfortunately, no leading Jewish organization seems to know either. Their current definitions conflate religion, ethnicity, and nationhood into an amorphous trinity apparently intended to stigmatize any act or utterance which hinders arms shipments.

But I do know that saying God gave this to us can not continue to be proffered as a valid argument for treating Palestinians as human-adjacent. I do know that if Israel is “a light unto the nations” the primary glow is coming from incendiary fires caused by American 2000 pound bombs. I do know that certain members of Congress would need to exhibit even a passing interest in the international status of the United States before they could be credibly accused of dual loyalty.

And I know one thing more. America is NOT a Judeo-Christian nation and it was never intended to be.  So it would be useful if the American people bestirred themselves to know a few essential facts regarding the faiths they claim to espouse.

The fact that Jesus spent his life as a reforming Rabbi and all his apostles died considering themselves Jews. The fact that Christianity was invented by Paul Of Tarsus, who never met Jesus, and whose tenuous qualification for inventing a religion was that he persecuted Jesus’ followers. The fact that Christianity was consolidated by the Emperor Constantine in 325 A.D. in order to unify the Roman Empire, after which he called together the First Council of Nicaea to literally decide, by majority vote, what was or wasn’t the word of god.

And as useful conversations go, oh how I wish manic Elice Stefanik and those question hurling Congressional antisemitism experts would be able to call on that noted college administrator Thomas Jefferson.

Because while Jefferson, as I hope a majority of graduating high school seniors know, wrote The Declaration Of Independence, he was prouder of having founded the University Of Virginia. And while neither his racism nor his sexism would be a problem for any modern Republican, there was one issue where his views would’ve provoked theatrically bipartisan outrage and earned UVA an F- on Jonathan Grenblatt’s campus report card: Thomas Jefferson considered Judaism to be depraved.

That is not something I feel he felt. Depraved is his actual word. And therein lies the problem. Jefferson held an Enlightenment view of Judaism as a barbaric religion which valued rules over humanity, or as his frequent pen pal John Adams put it, “the principle of the Hebrew is fear.” In today’s hyper-sensitive climate, tenure would not be in his future.

And if the expression of that Enlightenment thought causes your pillars of Judeo-Christian certitude to go all atremble it may be best not to inquire as to our third President’s view of Jesus.

As surprising as it may sound, the Jefferson Bible was not on sale in the lobby at Monticello. It did not include a gold leaf reprint of The Articles Of Confederation and the lyrics to “Proud To Own An African” by a progenitor of Lee Greenwood.

With scissors and paste, Jefferson assembled versions of The Bible in Greek, Latin, French and English that contained only the words of Jesus the man. No mention of the Hebrew Bible. No Adam & Eve. No original sin. No virgin birth. No miracles. No transubstantiation. And no resurrection.

One can only imagine the spit-take of vintage wine which would’ve ensued when asked if he was familiar with Yahweh’s pact with the Israelites and if he wanted his University to be cursed by God.

Fortunately, less loquacious gentiles than Tom and me find it easy not to express an honest opinion about such matters for the simple reason that most Jews seldom solicit one. When it comes to a discussion of Israel, Zionism, and the Middle East, if two Jews three opinions is the norm, one gentile no opinion germane has been the decades-long codicil.

Throughout my adult lifetime, where the “self-hating” Jew had a range of options regarding how to talk about Israel, the self-censoring gentile, fearing allegations of antisemitism, permitted himself only two: Love it or fund it.

Which is what makes our current moment of greater conversational freedom both wondrous and treacherous.
Treacherous because ours is an age which refuses to see irony. An age where wars between faiths and certainties rage in bottomless valleys of death while sanity, not wishing to offend, meekly gestures at its TV screen.

Above all, an age which actively seeks to ban books while the three most destructive ever written by man are used to justify everything from murdering to starvation to flying planes into buildings to legislating that life begins at erection.

Joe Biden’s position on Israel’s merciless butchering of Gaza has always been clear. He intends to wait until there is no one left for Netanyahu to destroy. One look into his milky eyes should confirm that ossified certainty which has spanned his political career.

And it is fitting that Biden self-identifies as a Zionist. Zionists are Libertarians with a predilection for violence. Smug adherents of a movement incapable of surviving the first practical followup question. I often try imagining their acceptable parameters of debate if Theodore Herzl had settled for Kenya (it’s a misnomer that the British offered Uganda) as the location for a homeland. How many indigenous residents of downtown Nairobi would need to be re-classified terrorists? How many UN resolutions opposing illegal settlements around Lake Victoria would need to be vetoed by the American ambassador?

For non-Zionists who believe, as I do, that Israel has an absolute right to exist with defined borders and a constitution, the fact that a “Greater Israel” lasted no more than 80 years and ended around 920 B.C. is a relevant thing.

It is also relevant that the Diaspora is not some Dantean level of hell. It is a flawed yet accepting place where the unjust horrors inflicted on Alfred Dreyfus did not preclude Lloyd Blankfein from flourishing. Furthermore, in this fetid time of Trump and Biden, for anyone lacking wealth and power the Diaspora embraces Jew and gentile alike in an ever tightening caress of hopelessness.

In the end, perhaps a Jeffersonian conversation on antisemitism will prove impossible. For it cannot begin until the Holocaust is seen for what it was: a rancid and unspeakably obscene chapter in a 20th-century book of depravity that includes Armenians, Cambodians, Rwandans and Kulaks – and not an Accountability E-ZPass for defenders of Israel to view its policies as somehow beyond criticism.

Regardless, every Jew and gentile in the United States is answerable for what Israel is doing with our tax money. Every Jew and gentile in the United States is answerable for the militaristic terrorism by which our government attempts to govern the world.

And if we are incapable of agreeing on even those facts, let us agree that tribalism on a finite planet is madness.

You don’t need to be Thomas Jefferson to hold that truth self-evident.

The post A Jeffersonian Conversation on Antisemitism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: Leonidas Drosis – CC BY-SA 4.0

As the student movement in solidarity with the Palestinians and denunciation of their genocide by Israel intensifies in the United States and now spreads across the planet, there are growing indications that it is succeeding in influencing the central balance of forces while it is being recognized as a major factor in international developments of decisive importance! Thus, Washington’s “sudden” distancing of itself from the Netanyahu government, which followed (or perhaps…preceded) Hamas’ acceptance of the Qatar-Egypt peace plan, is mainly attributed to the asphyxiating pressure exerted on President Biden and the world superpower establishment by the American student movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people.r

It’s no coincidence, then, that Marwan Bishara himself, the chief commentator on Al Jazeera (which Netanyahu has just banned in Israel), attributes the sudden acceleration of political developments in the Middle East and the United States to the student movement spreading through American universities. A movement that he eloquently describes as a “major factor” in the sequence of events that led the Israeli newspaper Haaretz to headline on its front page that “Hamas has trapped Netanyahu”…

Admittedly, this movement, which has spread to more than 120 American colleges and universities, has support for the Palestinian people as its top priority. However, it is already widely recognized as a major factor in the cataclysmic developments that will follow the presidential elections in November, whoever wins. More concretely, the emergence of the mass youth movement as an independent, combative and radical third force against the two major traditional US parties is reshaping the political and social map of the United States, strengthening the left, labor unions, social movements and other existing forces in their looming civil conflict with fascist Trumpism and its militias. A civil conflict at the very heart of global capitalism, the outcome of which will largely determine the future and even the fate of the rest of humanity…

In the meantime, the proliferation of this American youth movement in at least 40 countries (at the time of writing), constitutes an event of historic proportions which clearly worries and even terrifies the owners and their chancelleries. The proof is that almost everywhere, from the USA, Germany and France to Morocco and Nigeria, and from South Korea and India to the Netherlands and Kenya, the repression of this movement not only exceeds in brutality all that has gone before (eg, the repression in May 68) and cynically tramples on the most elementary democratic rights, but it is also combined with a hysterical media campaign of denigration, aimed at accustoming citizens to the fact that their democratic freedoms are a distant memory…

Countries where the student movement in support of the Palestinians has spread:

United States, Great Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Switzerland, India, Australia, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand, Finland, Mexico, Costa Rica, Jordan, Lebanon, Spain, Iraq, Turkey, Tunisia, Canada, Argentina, Ireland, Netherlands, Austria, Brazil, South Korea, Thailand, Portugal, Sweden, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Nigeria, Kenya, Bosnia, Serbia…

However, the list of countries where this youth movement has already proliferated doesn’t just fill us only with optimism. It also fills us with sadness, because one country is missing, Greece the Greek student movement! And it’s not just that this Greek absence constitutes an infamy, a great shame that will mark the Greek left for years to come. It’s also that the student movement and the Greek left are today missing a unique opportunity to denounce in action the very guilty relations maintained by Greek universities with Israel and its institutions. That they are also missing a golden opportunity to finally (!) denounce the scandalous support offered by Mitsotakis’ Greece to Netanyahu’s Israel, which makes Greece Israel’s staunchest ally in the Eastern Mediterranean and perhaps in the whole of Europe. And that they are finally missing out on a historic opportunity to join and fight together with the best there is today on our planet, in an attempt to change not only our Greek reality but the whole world! Really, what is the Greek student movement waiting for to emerge from its apathy and respond to the expectations that are now being expressed daily by those bombarded and starving Palestinians of the martyred Gaza Strip, when they declare that their only real hope now is those they call “our brothers”, the students in America and around the world who express their solidarity and support through deeds and not just words?

But there’s not just a problem with the Greek student movement and the Greek left. There’s also a problem with those on the left around the world, who hide behind the most incredible “arguments” such as “yes, but we mustn’t forget the crimes of Hamas” or “the crimes of the Ayatollahs”, “yes, but the slogan ‘from the river to the sea’ is anti-Semitic”, “yes, but what am I going to tell my uncle in Tel Aviv”, “yes, but Israel has its rights too”, etc., to justify their (prolonged) silence or absence from demonstrations against what is a real crime against humanity perpetrated in Gaza, the very definition of genocide! The problem with all these people is not only their monstrous insensitivity to the unprecedented suffering inflicted by the Israeli army and Israeli settlers on hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians, especially women and children. Another problem, at least as important, is that they are turning their backs on a planetary youth movement that is currently the only tangible force available to humanity to confront, with any hope of success, the major crises that directly threaten it: climate catastrophe, the risk of widespread intra-imperialist war and the fascist tide.

But precisely because this youth movement represents humanity’s only hope, there can be no doubt that it will be suppressed with the utmost ferocity by its class enemies. However, in the terrible confrontation already looming on the horizon, this global movement will not stand alone. Already in the United States, it is drawing around it both the great anti-racist, climate, feminist and other social movements that have sprung up especially in the last decade, and the revitalized trade union movement that is winning victory after victory after decades of crisis and setback. And it’s no coincidence that, proportionately speaking, we’re beginning to see the same thing taking shape even in Europe, where the far right is going from strength to strength. For example, in Belgium (Ghent), where the movement in support of the Palestinians and the movement against climate catastrophe are joining forces. Or in France, where the student mobilization (Sorbonne) against the genocide of the Palestinians is being actively joined by the Youth for Climate movement (founded by Greta Thunberg) and young people from disadvantaged suburbs, while at the same time the mobilization is beginning to extend to high schools across the country.

Finally, who would dare, in this month of May 2024, to claim that the younger generation is not resisting and fighting tooth and nail against the barbarism of our neoliberal times? Everywhere on earth, East and West, North and South. Everywhere, here and now…

The post What are Greek Students Waiting For? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

A discussion of the origins of urbanization may provide some insight into the character of modern social problems by highlighting the long historical dynamic at work. It may not be out of place here to point out that anti‑states are well known in the modern world, above all in what the U.S. Federal Reserve Board classifies as eleven offshore banking centers. Five such enclaves are in the Caribbean: Panama, the Netherlands Antilles (Curacao), Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the British West Indies (Cayman Islands). Three enclaves—Hong Kong, Macao, and Singapore—were founded to conduct the China trade. The remaining three are Liberia, Lebanon, and Bahrain at the mouth of the Persian Gulf—the island which Bronze Age Sumerians called Dilmun when they used it to trade with the Indus valley and the Iranian shore.

Nothing would seem more modern than these offshore banking and tax-avoidance centers. They are the brainchildren of lawyers and accountants in the 1960s seeking to weave loopholes into the social fabric—to provide curtains of secrecy (“privacy”) to avoid or evade taxes, and to serve as havens for ill‑gotten earnings as well as to facilitate legitimate commerce.

Whereas modern nation‑states enact laws and impose taxes, these enclaves help individuals evade such regulations. And whereas nation‑states have armies, these centers are the furthest thing from being military powers. They are antibodies to nationhood, yet more may be learned about Ice Age, Neolithic, and even Bronze Age gathering and meeting sites by looking at these modern enclaves than by examining classical city‑states such as Athens and Rome.

Timeless Features of Entrepots

1. They Lack Political Autonomy

Instead of being politically independent, the modern offshore banking centers and free trade zones are small former colonies, e.g., the Caribbean islands as well as the Chinese entrepots. The Grand Cayman Island was a Jamaican dependency until 1959, when it chose to revert to its former status as a British crown colony so as to benefit from what remained of imperial commercial preferences. Liberia and Panama are U.S. dependencies lacking even their own currency system (both use the U.S. dollar). Hong Kong did not gain title to its own land until Britain’s leases expired in 1997. Panama did not gain control of its canal until 1999.

In sum, whereas political theorists define the first characteristic of modern states (and implicitly their capital cities) as being their ability to enact and enforce laws, offshore banking centers are of no political significance. In the sense of being sanctuaries from national taxes and law authorities, such enclaves are in some ways akin to the biblical cities of refuge. If they are not sanctuaries for lawbreakers in person, they at least provide havens for their bank accounts and corporate shells.

2. They Occupy Convenient Points of Commercial Interface Between Regions

Typically, entrepots are on islands or key transport navels such as the Panamanian isthmus. They are separated as free ports politically, if not physically, from their surrounding political entities. They often are centers of travel and tourism (“business meetings”) and for gambling. In antiquity they typically were centers for sacred festivals or games such as were held at Delphi, Nemia, the Corinthian Isthmus, or Olympia (whence our modern Olympic games originated in a sacred context).

3. They Enjoy Sacred (or Legal) Protection Against Attack

Although Delphi and Olympus were landlocked (as was Çatal Hüyük), they were centrally located for their local regions. They served as religious and cultural centers, whose festivals and games could be conveniently attended by the Hellenic population at large. Even visitors who were citizens of mutually belligerent city‑states enjoyed sanctuary. Of course, today’s enclaves no longer claim sacred status, except for the Vatican and its Institute for Religious Works promoting money-laundering functions¹. Their commercial focus has become divorced from the religious setting associated with international commerce down through medieval Europe with its great fairs. And indeed, their attraction is especially to wealthy individuals avoiding the tax laws and criminal codes of their own homeland.

4. They Are Militarily Safe

Although today’s enclaves rarely have armies of their own, they are militarily safe. Thanks to their unique apolitical status, and indeed to their ultimate dependence on larger powers, their neighbors have little motive to attack them and every reason to use them as business channels and even for government transactions such as arms dealing, money laundering, and related activities not deemed proper behavior at home. The resulting commerce thrives free of regulations and taxes, conducted in militarily safe environments without the cost of having to support standing armies, and hence less need to levy taxes for this purpose, or to monetize national war debts.

5. They Are Politically Neutral Sites

To create such enclaves has been an objective of mercantile capital through the ages. It patronizes the world’s politically weakest areas as long as they do not do what real governments do: regulate their economies. The search for “neutral territory” expressed itself already in the chalcolithic epoch, many millennia before private enterprise developed as we know it. The result of this impetus is that neolithic towns such as Çatal Hüyük, Mesopotamian temple cities such as Nippur, island entrepots such as Dilmun, the Egyptian Delta area, Ischia/Pithekoussai, and the biblical cities of refuge share the following important common denominator with today’s offshore banking centers: Instead of being centers of local governing, legal, and military power, they were politically neutral sites established outside the jurisdictions of local governments.

6. They Create Forums for Rituals of Social Cohesion

Whether the status of these urban sites was that of sanctified commercial entrepots or amphictyonic centers, they provided a forum for rituals of social cohesion to bolster their commerce. These rituals included the exchange of goods and women (intermarriage)—commerce and intercourse in their archaic sexual meaning as well as in the more modern sense of commodity exchange.

I have cited above the archaic practice of conducting trade via island entrepots. The sacred island of Dilmun/Bahrain in the Persian Gulf represents history’s longest lasting example of such an enclave. It served as an entrepôt linking Sumer and Babylonia (whose records refer prominently to the “merchants of Dilmun”) to the Indus civilization and the intervening Iranian shore. Its status as a sacred as well as commercial center may have been promoted by the fact that its waters were a source of pearls, prized as sacred symbols of the moon (being round, pale, and associated with deep water). It also seems to have served as a high‑status burial ground for prosperous individuals, or at least for parts of their bodies. Lamberg‑Karlovsky² reports that there are more fingers and other limbs than full skeletons, as the Sumerians partook piecemeal in the island’s sanctity (although some commentators believe that this may be simply the result of grave robberies through the centuries³). In any event, these social and commercial virtues helped make Dilmun one of the most expensive pieces of Bronze Age real estate, not unlike modern Bahrain.

7. They Facilitate Commercial Development

The sacred status of such entrepots facilitated commercial development in ways that did not abuse Bronze Age sensibilities, much like the sacred status of temples did when they became the major economic and textile production centers. While creating the economic conditions and organization of large‑scale enterprise within traditional social values and order, Bronze Age institutions provided leeway so as not to stifle commercial development with overcentralized control. This may be part of the reason why trade was conducted outside the city gates. The philosophy was to create “mixed economies” in which institutional and private sectors each had their proper role.

Notes.

1. David A. Yallop, In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I, 1984, pp. 92-94.

2. C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky “Dilmun: Gateway to Immortality,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Jan 1982, 41(1), pp. 45-50.

3. P.R.S. Moorey, “Where did they bury the Kings of the IIIrd Dynasty of Ur?” Iraq, 46, 1984, pp. 1‑18.

This article was produced by Human Bridges.

The post The Parallels Between Archaic Entrepots and Modern Offshore Banking Centers appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.