Photograph Source: Aude – CC BY-SA 3.0

Wars in the Middle East often end with a fuzzy ambiguity that allows both sides to claim victory.  “Neither victor nor vanquished” is the phrased often used to describe these wars.

– David Ignatius, oped, Washington Post, May 7, 2024.

It’s difficult to imagine an Israeli war in the Middle East that allowed any Arab country to claim victory.  The history of the Middle East over the past 75 years has been a history of war, and the Israelis have been the overwhelming victor in each and every one of them.  Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 marked an overwhelming victory for the Israelis; it created the profound antagonisms that have marked Israeli relations with the Arab states over the past 75 years.  The United States and Israel over the years have indulged in a dialogue about a “peace process,” but Arab refugees have known neither “peace” nor “process.”

The Six-Day War in 1967 was an incredibly brief and violent conflict between Israel and its three neighbors that permanently altered the landscape of the Middle East.  The Soviet Union was partially responsible for the war, falsely telling the Syrians and the Egyptians that Israelis were concentrating troops on their border.  This was dangerous disinformation, and the Soviets never played this game again, but the damage had been done.  The Egyptians believed the report, and mobilized forces in the Sinai Peninsula.  Israel used the mobilization as a pretext to attack, and overwhelmingly defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in short order.

The October 1973 War marked a major policy and intelligence failure for Israel—Israel’s Pearl Harbor—but the results were similarly one-sided and required U.S. and Soviet diplomatic cooperation and intervention to save the Egyptian forces from virtual annihilation.  Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan that, if the Israelis continued to break the cease-fire that he had negotiated with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, then the United States would find a way to get food and water to the beleaguered Egyptian III Corps, the most important Corps in the Egyptian Army.  Another one-sided Israeli victory.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 proved to be a political nightmare for Israel, but there is no question that Lebanon suffered an overwhelming military defeat.  Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization and Syrian military forces had to flee the country.  It was a dubious Israeli victory because Israeli Defense Forces remained in Lebanon for two decades.  And now Hezbollah, far more threatening than Arafat’s PLO ever was, is the major political force in Lebanon.

The official Israeli name for the operation was “Peace for Galilee,” but several Mossad intelligence analysts told me they called the campaign “Vietnamowitz” because Lebanon proved to be Israel’s “briar patch.”  The Israelis secretly informed U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig about the invasion, and he unwisely gave them a “green light,” which cost him his position at the Department of State.

Similar to the Gaza campaign, Defense Minister Ariel Sharon conducted a siege of Beirut that denied the capital city’s residents food, water, and medical supplies.  Like today’s Gazans, the residents of Beirut were trapped.  The air and artillery bombardment of Beirut was ferocious, but unlike Gaza, the Israeli cabinet instructed Sharon that he could no longer use airpower in Beirut without its consent.  Sharon was also responsible for allowing the Lebanese Phalangists to enter two Palestinian refugee camps—Sabra and Shatila—where they brutally massacred unarmed civilians.  UN and even Israeli investigative commissions condemned the actions of the Israeli military; no one should anticipate that the Israelis will do the same in the case of Gaza.

The second Lebanese War in 2006 was similarly one-sided as the Israelis targeted not only Hezbollah, but Lebanese infrastructure and such critical facilities as power plants.  The Israelis should have learned that they couldn’t destroy Hezbollah’s political influence in Lebanon with military force.  Netanyahu’s emphasis on the total destruction of Hamas points to the fact that no lessons were learned from the second war in Lebanon.  President George W. Bush, who learned nothing from his war against Iraq in 2003, was responsible for encouraging Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to continue the war.  The first Lebanese War destroyed the career of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin; the second war destroyed Olmert.  Gaza ultimately will cost Netanyahu his stewardship of Israel.

Ironically, the year 2006 was also marked by elections in Gaza that led to the political takeover by Hamas.  Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice convinced Bush that elections should be held in Gaza because they would produce a major victory for Palestinian moderates.  Impartial observers considered the election “free and fair” as Hamas won a majority of the seats in the Palestinian legislature.  American policymakers should be careful about what they wish for.

In the current war with Gaza, Ignatius believes that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “repeated insistence that he must invade Rafah is partly theatrics, to frighten Hamas into accepting a hostage release deal.”  in view of Israel’s genocidal campaign that has been marked by the total destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, schools, and libraries, it appears to be particularly obtuse to believe that Netanyahu is merely pursuing theatrics; clearly he is trying to ensure that Gaza is not habitable.

Ignatius also claims that “humanitarian assistance in Gaza has increased sharply since Israel withdrew most of its troops last month,” which will come as a shock to the Palestinians suffering from the Israeli-imposed famine in north and south Gaza.  In fact, the latest Israeli incursion in Gaza has disrupted the major entry point for humanitarian assistance in the south.  Palestinian children are already dying from malnutrition; several have arrived in the United States for medical treatment.

Unfortunately, the brokering of peace between Israel and the Arab states has never been a high priority for either side, and only the Carter administration made a real effort, largely successful, to stabilize the region.  No American soldiers were killed in the Middle East during the Carter administration.  In more recent years, American soldiers have been killed only in the Greater Middle East.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In Cairo, representatives from Hamas held indirect negotiations with Israel for a ceasefire. The sticking point for several of the rounds was the order of events. Israel wanted the hostages to be released before it would stop the bombing, while Hamas said that the bombing must stop first. Israel has called for the disarming and dismantling of Hamas, which is a maximalist demand unlikely to be met. Hamas meanwhile would like not only a ceasefire but an end to the war. Both sides blamed each other, which made the task of the Egyptian and Qatari negotiators more difficult.

The best outcome possible from the Cairo talks is an end to the current genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza. The negotiations to end the war took on an extra urgency as Israel bombed the edge of Rafah, the only city in Gaza not yet decimated by Israel. With no place to flee, the Palestinian civilians in Rafah cannot be sheltered from any attack, even if it is not as violent as conducted by the Israeli army against Gaza City and Khan Younis. Those attacks have created 37 million tons of rubble, which are filled with contaminants and an immense number of unexploded bombs (which will take 14 years to disarm). Israel believes that the last organized remnants of Hamas exist in Rafah, and that it will either bomb the millions who live there to destroy it, or it will have to agree to destroy itself through negotiations. Both are unacceptable to the Palestinians, who neither want more civilian casualties nor the break-up of one of the fiercest defenders of the right of Palestinians to self-determination.

Despite Hamas’s agreement with the ceasefire proposal, Israel launched violent attacks on Rafah and seized control of the Rafah crossing into Egypt (thereby cutting off the main access route for aid into Gaza). The talks continue but Israel is simply unwilling to take them seriously.

Palestinian Unity

Israel’s disregard for the negotiations and the level of its violence can be measured based on two political realities. It does not take negotiations with the Palestinians seriously and it feels that it can bomb with impunity. This is so because, firstly, Israel is backed fully by the Global North states (mainly the United States and Europe) and secondly, it does not regard Palestinian political views as vital because it has succeeded in breaking the political unity amongst Palestinians and it has succeeded in politically disorienting the various factions by the arrest of their main leadership. This does not entirely apply to Hamas, whose leadership was able to set up operations in Damascus and then later in Doha, Qatar. While it is impossible to imagine a rapid about-face from the Global North countries, it has become entirely clear to the Palestinian factions that absent their unity there will be no way to compel Israel to end its genocidal war, and then of course its occupation of Palestinian lands combined with its apartheid policies inside Israel.

In late April 2023, Hamas met with Fatah, the other major Palestinian political force, in China as part of a long process to create common ground between them. Relations between these two major political parties broke down in 2006-07, when Hamas won the parliamentary elections in Gaza and when Fatah—in charge of the Palestine Authority—contested these results; indeed, the two factions fought each other militarily in Gaza before Fatah retreated to the West Bank. During Israel’s genocidal war, both Fatah and Hamas sought to bridge the gap and not to permit their differences to allow both the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and the defeat of Palestinian political aims in general. High representatives of these two parties met in Moscow earlier this year, and again in China in May.

For this meeting in China, Fatah sent its senior leaders, including Azzam al-Ahmad (who is on the central committee and leads its Palestinian reconciliation team), while Hamas sent equally senior leaders, including Mousa Abu Marzouk (a member of the party’s Political Bureau and its de facto Foreign Minister). The negotiations did not result in a final agreement, but—as part of a long process—it has deepened the dialogue and the political will between the two parties to work together against the Israeli genocidal war and the occupation. Further meetings at this high level are being planned, with a joint statement to follow later regarding a call—encouraged by China’s President Xi Jinping—for an international peace conference to end the war and a joint Palestinian platform regarding the way forward.

Gaps

Fatah, the anchor of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), was founded in 1959 by three men, two of whom came from the Muslim Brotherhood (Khalil al-Wazir and Salah Khalaf) and one of whom who came from the General Union of Palestinian students and would eventually become the main leader (Yasser Arafat). The PLO established itself as the core of the Palestinian struggle against the catastrophe of 1948 that lost them their lands, made them second-class citizens inside Israel, and sent hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into decades of exile. The Muslim Brotherhood imprint did not form within the PLO, which took on a national liberation tone that was sharpened by the various left factions such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP, formed in 1967) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP, formed in1968).

The PLO became hegemonic in the Palestinian struggle, coordinating the political work in the camps of the exiles and the armed struggle of the fedayeen (fighters). The factions of the PLO faced concerted attack from Israel, which invaded Lebanon to exile the leadership and its core to Tunisia. With the fall of the USSR, the PLO began to negotiate earnestly with the Israelis and the United States, both of which imposed a form of surrender on the Palestinians called the 1993 Oslo Accords. Fatah took charge of the Palestinian Authority, which operated partially to maintain the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank.

Angered by what appeared to be a Palestinian surrender at Oslo, eight factions formed the Alliance of Palestinian Factions in 1993. Within this Alliance, the largest groups belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood tradition. They included Palestinian Islamic Jihad (formed in 1981) and Hamas (formed in 1987). The PFLP and DFLP initially joined this alliance but left in 1998 over differences with the Islamic parties. The Islamist parties won the parliamentary elections in Gaza with a slim margin (Hamas’s 44 percent against Fatah’s 41 percent), a result that angered Israel and the Global North states who then tried to undermine them.

The path to political power through the ballot box having been denied them, and then facing sustained Israeli suffocation and bombardment of Gaza, both Hamas and Islamic Jihad strengthened their armed wings and defended themselves against humiliation and attack. Every attempt at peaceful protest—including the Long March of Return in 2018 and 2019—was met with Israeli violence. There has never been a moment when the people of Gaza have experienced a year of peace since 2007. The current bombardment, however, is at a different scale than even the worst of the previous attacks by Israel in 2008 and 2014.

The main political disagreements between the factions include their different interpretation of the Oslo Accords, their respective ambition for political control, and their separate aspirations for Palestinian society. That their political leaders have been imprisoned for decades and that they have been prevented from normal, democratic political activity (such as maintaining their political structures and as canvassing the people) has prevented them from bridging their distances. However, in prison the leadership have had sustained dialogues on these issues. Right after the parliamentary elections in Gaza, the leaders of the five major factions imprisoned in Israel’s Hadarim prison wrote a National Conciliation Document of the Prisoners. Marwan Barghouti of Fatah, Abdel Raheem Malluh of the PFLP, Mustafa Badarneh of the DFLP, Abdel Khaleq al-Natsh of Hamas, and Bassam al-Saadi of Islamic Jihad.

The Document of the Prisoners, which was widely circulated and discussed, called for Palestinian unity and an end to “all forms of division that could lead to internal strife.” The text did not lay out a new Palestinian political agenda, but it called for the various factions “to formulate a Palestinian plan aimed at comprehensive political action.” The development of this plan, now almost 20 years later, is a major objective of the talks between the various Palestinian political organizations.

There is agreement that the first task is to prevent the attack on Rafah and to end the genocidal war against the Palestinians. However, soon thereafter, the sense is that the political malaise that has befallen the Palestinian people must be overcome and a new political project must be used to motivate a new political atmosphere amongst the Palestinians within Israel’s borders, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, in the refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, and in the 6 million strong Palestinian diaspora.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Portland Police on the campus of Portland State University. Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair.

Nothing agitates a campus as dramatically as the arrival of the cops. Indeed, the cops have been the only real outside agitators on campuses across the country this Spring. They have brought upheaval and disorder by breaking up peaceful protests by disciplined students with a cause and ideals. And, of course, the administrators are responsible for calling in the cops. It’s the administrators who up the ante and invite confrontations and clashes. Blaming outsiders for rebellions and revolutions is one of the oldest and nastiest ruses in the world. And one of the newest, too. But it’s not working.

New Yorkers and others aren’t buying the Columbia administration’s story that outside agitators are to blame for the protests that have taken place on the campus. As though Columbia students are too blind or too stupid to see the terrors inflicted on the people of Gaza by the Israeli military with weapons supplied by the USA. At UCLA some masked men with clubs attacked pro-Palestinian demonstrators. The cops aren’t the only culprits now much as they weren’t in ‘68.

Columbia President Shafik must take us for idiots who haven’t learned the lessons of the past and can see what’s happening in front of our own eyes. I mean the abuses of state power in Gaza and to a lesser degree on college campuses from New York to California. I know loads about the cry that outside agitators are to blame for protest movements and rebellions. I’ve heard it before. I have been called one.

I graduated from Columbia College with a B.A. in 1963 and from Columbia University with an M.A. in 1964. By 1967 I was an assistant professor at the State University at Stony Brook. Along with more than 700 or so other protesters, including Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden – who coined the slogan “Create two, three, many Columbias” – I was arrested on the Columbia campus in ‘68 and went to jail briefly. I suppose in some respects I could have rightly been called an “outside agitator.” I had graduated from Columbia College five years before students occupied and liberated buildings where classes had been held, though I mostly relinquished the agitating on campus to the Black students who kicked off the 1968 rebellion soon after MLK was shot and killed. Now, that was an incitement to riot.

In ‘68 I didn’t think of myself as an outside agitator. I still reject that label. In the world today insurgents are both insiders and outsiders, localists and internationalists who reject political boundaries and borders. Imperialism respects no national boundaries and neither do anti-imperialists. The line that supposedly divides insiders from outsiders and domestic from imported agitators is far more blurry than it might seem to the casual eye. In ‘68 I felt that I had as much right to sit in as any of the undergraduates. I paid my dues. I had been miseducated and misinformed when I was a student.

I was arrested twice in ’68. The second time I went on trial in a courtroom after I declined to apologize to the Columbia administration when I was asked to do so by a representative of the university. “You are a Columbia graduate and a scholar and gentleman and as such ought to say you’re sorry for your actions,” I was told by Professor Quentin Anderson. In the eyes of the university I would not be an outside agitator if I kissed its academic ass. That I would not do.

I still feel like a member of the extended family of Columbia insurgents. I identify with  the students who protested the invasion and occupation of Gaza this spring and who have been arrested.

As an undergraduate at Columbia in the early 1960s, when I marched against segregation and nuclear testing, my mentors and role models were off-campus radical intellectuals such as Carl Marzini and Paul Sweezy, civil rights activists like MLK and Rosa Parks and further afield Che Guevara, the continental revolutionary who was born in Argentina, joined Fidel Castro in Mexico, fought on the side of the guerrillas in Cuba and later against imperialism in the Congo and Bolivia.

When we referred to the Cuban revolutionaries by their first names as though we were brothers-in-arms, our Cold War profs  – who saw Moscow gold behind all insurrections – were shocked. Like Che, only far more modest than he, American agitators belong to the world and to the legacy of homegrown anti-slavery men and women like Harriet Tubman and John Brown. Slavers didn’t respect boundaries and neither did abolitionists. Nightstick-wielding cops on campuses are “pigs.” I haven’t used that word, which I learned from the Black Panthers, for decades. But it’s as timely now as it was in ’68.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

I just watched a child’s last breath. Lying on a gurney, bloodied and terrified. Red pools forming under his head. Eyes glazing over with the unmistakable shroud of death. This is Rafah. This is what is happening now.

And yet, I keep seeing people say they feel “unsafe” because of the mere existence of encampments on university campuses. Feeling unsafe because others are protesting a genocide. And I think about what it actually means to be unsafe. Is there anything more unsafe than being displaced, starved, endlessly bombed, shot at, or buried alive?

I think of all the universities that have been obliterated in Gaza. Of all the professors that have been slaughtered. How safe are the students who once attended them? I think of the mass graves found in hospital courtyards. Bodies with zip-tied wrists, catheters, medical gowns covered hastily with waste and mud. Bodies of children, old people, the sick and the medical teams who once assisted them. If you’ve done any work in human rights, you understand the horror that the term “mass grave” imbues. They are the absolute markers of atrocity.

Some have wasted no time reminding us that this is simply the “reality of war”. But is this really a war? I cannot recall another war where one side was able to so easily shut off the water mains, the electricity, the food and medicine shipments at will. If it is a war, I wonder where the soldiers on the other side are. Because I haven’t seen them either. I haven’t seen the other side’s tanks or drones or destroyers or aircrafts. I’ve only seen children, the elderly, the sick and the starving.

But I have seen soldiers. Soldiers from one side of this so-called “conflict”. They have been posting endless videos of themselves smashing children’s toys, defecating in kitchens, and parading around in the lingerie of women who have vanished. I’ve seen them making wedding proposals and holding podcasts on the rubble of bombed out apartment buildings. I’ve seen them hauling off jewelry, clothes and money. I’ve seen them firing on people waving white flags or who were simply crossing a road.

Much of the media, pundits and many politicians of all political persuasions have been wasting no time demonizing the student protests. They keep telling us how they make some people feel unsafe. And they continually tell us that this all started on October 7th. That this is a “retaliatory war”. And it’s true that terrible things were done on October 7th. But they never mention the 80 years prior to that day. They never mention apartheid and forced displacement and night raids and indefinite detention of children and home demolitions and settler attacks and a crippling blockade. Wouldn’t those things make anyone feel perpetually unsafe?

The assault on Rafah has begun. Millions of starving, sick and displaced civilians are in harm’s way with nowhere to go. And yet I keep hearing pundits, politicians and the media demonize students for simply demanding that their schools stop funding it. And wringing their hands over some people feeling unsafe because of those demands.

I cannot help but think of that little boy I just saw die on a gurney. I’m pretty sure he would’ve gladly traded places with any of the people who keep saying they feel unsafe because there are some nonviolent protests on some university campuses.

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Photo by Nastya Dulhiier

For those familiar with the disastrous New York Times reporting of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq, it will be no great surprise that once again the Times’ trust in sources with self-serving agendas has resulted in reporting that has tragic societal consequences—this time with respect to the treatment of depression.

Establishment psychiatry, Big Pharma, and the mainstream media have acknowledged that a single antidepressant treatment does not work for the majority of patients; but for nearly twenty years, they have told us that in the “real world,” doctors provide patients who have been failed by their initial antidepressant with another antidepressant, and if that fails, still another, and that this real-world treatment is successful for nearly 70% of patients. This nearly 70% antidepressant effectiveness claim, we’ve been told, is backed by the 2006 Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression (STAR*D) study.

On April 25, 2024, the New York Times repeated this claim in its article titled “What You Really Need to Know About Antidepressants,” in which it reported: “The largest study of multiple antidepressants—nicknamed the STAR*D trial—found that half of the participants had improved after using either the first or second medication that they tried, and nearly 70 percent of people had become symptom-free by the fourth antidepressant.”

In 2024, however, it is journalistic malpractice to not term STAR*D findings as—at the very least—controversial. Even psychiatrists within establishment psychiatry are questioning STAR*D’s validity, with some psychiatrists demanding its retraction. Other researchers have called STAR*D scientific misconduct, and one investigative journalist has termed it as fraud.

In December 2023, the editor-in-chief of Psychiatric Times, John Miller, published a commentary titled “STAR*D Dethroned?” in which he wrote, “Since 2006, STAR*D stands out as an icon guiding treatment decisions of major depressive disorder. But what if it is broken?” Then in March 2024, two psychiatrists, Nicolas Badre and Jason Compton, titled their Psychiatric Times commentary: “STAR*D: It’s Time to Atone and Retract.”

Investigative journalist Robert Whitaker (winner of both the George Polk Award for medical writing and the National Association of Science Writers’ Science in Society Journalism Award) has been following STAR*D disclosures and re-analyses since STAR*D’s 2006 publication, and in 2023, Whitaker termed STAR*D as “scientific misconduct that rises to the level of fraud.”

Why STAR*D Findings Are Viewed as Invalid

In the year-long STAR*D study of 4041 patients, there were four stages. In each stage, patients who did not remit with one antidepressant were prescribed a different one or augmented with another drug. In 2006, STAR*D investigators claimed a 67% cumulative remission rate.

When STAR*D findings were first published, the reported 67% cumulative remission rate was challenged even within establishment psychiatry as being unjustified by the data. An editorial in the same 2006 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry that the STAR*D study had been reported, psychiatrist J. Craig Nelson noted that 67 percent remission rate did not account for relapse, and he pointed out: “Among those achieving remission, relapse rates were 33.5% [in Step 1], 47.4% [in Step 2], 42.9% [in Step 3], and 50.0% [in Step 4] . . . . I found a cumulative sustained recovery rate of 43% after four treatments, using a method similar to the authors but taking relapse rates into account.”

This was only the tip of the disastrous STAR*D iceberg. Psychologist Ed Pigott and his co-researchers published an analysis in 2010 that showed of the 4041 patients who entered STAR*D, only 108 remitted, stayed well, and remained in the study to its one-year end. Thus STAR*D investigators could document a get-well/stay-well rate at the end of a year of only 3%. (This in contrast to another 2006 study that examined the remission rates of depressed patients receiving no medication, and which documented a one-year remission rate of 85% for these non-medicated patients.)

Then in 2023, Ed Pigott and his co-researchers, utilizing the Restoring Invisible and Abandoned Trials initiative, conducted a reanalysis of STAR*D, which was published in BMJ Open. Pigott reported that among the 4041 subjects, only 3110 actually had met the depression criteria, and so 931 patients who should have been excluded from the calculation of a remission rate had not been excluded, which inflated the remission rate.

While STAR*D is replete with scientific misconduct, STAR*D investigators moving a group of 931 subjects that had previously been excluded as being non-evaluable into the evaluable patients category, knowing full well that this would dramatically inflate the remission rate, “tells of a conscious act of scientific fraud,” concluded Robert Whitaker in 2023.

STAR*D remission rate was also inflated through violating research protocol by switching the primary outcome measures, and by reversing the protocol on dropouts so that they were no longer viewed as treatment failures. And then results were further inflated by creating a “theoretical” remission rate based on the notion that if the drop-outs had stayed in the trial through all four stages of treatment, they would have remitted at the same rate as those who did stay in the trial to that end—this not justified by what is known from previous research about dropouts.

If STAR*D investigator’s original protocol been adhered to, Pigott concluded, “In contrast to the STAR*D-reported 67% cumulative remission rate after up to four antidepressant treatment trials, the rate was 35%.” Furthermore, that original protocol did not account for relapse.

So, what could have been the motivation for the STAR*D investigators to inflate these antidepressant remission rates? In the 2006 STAR*D report, at its end in small print, are the details of the financial relationships of the two lead STAR*D investigators (psychiatrists A. John Rush and Madhukar H. Trivedi) with multiple pharmaceutical companies, including the manufacturers of several of the antidepressants used in STAR*D, such as Forest Pharmaceuticals (Celexa), Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories (Effexor), GlaxoSmithKline (Wellbutrin), and Pfizer (Zoloft). Also detailed were the financial relationships of the several other STAR*D investigators with drug companies.

In 2023, John Miller, editor-in-chief of the Psychiatric Times, acknowledged that Pigott and his co-researchers’ reanalysis is “well-researched,” and he concluded: “For us in psychiatry, if the BMJ authors are correct, this is a huge setback, as all of the publications and policy decisions based on the STAR*D findings that became clinical dogma since 2006 will need to be reviewed, revisited, and possibly retracted.”

In March 2024, psychiatrists Nicolas Badre and Jason Compton wrote: “It is our opinion that the importance of STAR*D and its ramifications for the field of psychiatry are too serious to be dismissed. STAR*D is too cited and used too often to justify current prescribing practices. . . . Our patients, our field, and our integrity demand a better explanation of what happened in STAR*D than what has thus been provided. Short of this, the best remaining course to take is a retraction.”

What Explains the New York Times Egregious Reporting?

A simple Google search of “STAR*D” reveals the STAR*D critiques that I have linked to can be found on the first page of such a search. So, why would the New York Times omit all of this?

For one thing, the New York Times is desperate for advertising income, which drug companies provide; and drug companies would not look kindly on real investigative journalism with respect to STAR*D. The obvious purpose of drug-company advertising is to persuade consumers to buy drugs, but drug companies’ capacity to withdraw advertising dollars serves as leverage to intimidate mainstream media from exposing truths about these drugs.

Another possible explanation for the New York Times egregious reporting is that the Times and much of the rest of the mainstream media has been intimidated by a societal narrative financed by drug companies. In this narrative, to be critical of psychiatry and psychiatric drugs is to be anti-science and lacking compassion for emotionally suffering individuals. It is, of course, a false narrative, but a powerful one that has intimidated the mainstream media from true investigative journalism when it comes to psychiatry and psychiatric drugs.

As Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman detailed in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), reporters and editors in the mainstream media routinely deny that such intimidation and censorship exists, but they have been selected and socialized with internalized assumptions and self-censorship with respect to industry-created narratives, so overt coercion of them is unnecessary.

But perhaps there is a simpler explanation for the egregious reporting by the New York Times. It could just be that its reporters and editors are, in general, incompetent when it comes to journalism.

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Minuteman III, ICBM. Photo Defense Department.

John Hersey’s “Hiroshima”…was arguably the most impactful work of U.S. journalism ever.  It included stomach-turning descriptions of what one small (relative to today’s weapons) bomb did to one city’s inhabitants.

– George F. Will, May 2024.

There is much nuclear mythology connected to the development and deployment of nuclear weaponry.  The late Bernard Brodie, the first nuclear theorist, argued in the late 1940s that nuclear weapons had created a stable balance of terror, which is belied by the violence in the post-war situation.  Nuclear theorists such as Herman Kahn and Albert Wohlstetter argued in the 1950s that the balance was “precarious,” and that it was essential to measure the relevant damage one side or the other would suffer in a nuclear exchange.  Harvard’s Henry Kissinger had the most obtuse theory of all, believing that “limited” uses of nuclear weaponry would not get out of hand.  These theories were used to justify the increased development of nuclear weapons that has created the overkill situation in the arsenals of the United States and Russia.  China’s new nuclear doctrine and practice will produce additional overkill capability.

The United States has driven the nuclear race from the start.  The use of atomic bombs in Japan in 1945 was as a terror weapon; the Truman administration believed the deaths of innocent civilians would put pressure on Japanese leaders to surrender.  U.S. technology also drove the Cold War arms race, particularly the development of multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs) that could have been stopped in the 1970s if Washington’s lead negotiator, Henry Kissinger, had been willing to listen to the arms control community.

Once again, the United States is a major driver in the arms race on the basis of a 10-year $1.5 trillion modernization program that is unnecessary.  It is accompanied by Russian and Chinese modernization programs.  The U.S. program emphasizes a new strategic warhead; a new cruise missile; new plutonium cores for warheads; and new submarines, bombers, and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).  All unnecessary.

China’s developments are worrisome, particularly the expansion and rebuilding of the Lop Nor testing area in Xinjiang.  The area is the size of Virginia, and in the past five years China has added and renovated 30 buildings; these actions point to renewed testing of nuclear weapons and a more aggressive nuclear strategy.  Xi Jinping called for these developments.  He created the Chinese Rocket Forces in 2015, and he ordered the modernization of the strategic air base near Lop Nor in 2018 following Donald Trump’s emphasis on a “nuclear restart” and renewed testing.

Russia is hellbent on modernizing its nuclear program as well, but the war in Ukraine has worsened production and financial problems in addition to the management problems from the Soviet era.  There have been successes in modernizing the Strategic Rocket Forces, particularly Russia’s ICBM arsenal, but other aspects of the nuclear triad—ships and bombers—have lagged behind.  The primitive level of Russia’s robotization and automation programs have been an obstacle.  President Vladimir Putin’s withdrawal from international inspection efforts has compromised efforts to verify and monitor Russia’s programs.

In the Euro-Atlantic area, Russia is intensifying sabotage, acts of violence, cyber and electronic interference, disinformation campaigns, and other hybrid operations. East European members of NATO—particularly Poland and the Baltic states— have expressed their deep concern over Russia’s hybrid actions, which constitute a threat to Allied security.

Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump expanded nuclear missions and abrogated arms control treaties, creating the worst of all possible strategic worlds.  In 2002, Bush abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), the cornerstone of deterrence and one of the pearls of disarmament policy, paving the way for national missile defense, which costs hundreds of billions of dollars but provides no genuine security.  In 2018, Trump abrogated the Intermediate-Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), one of the most successful disarmament treaties in history, leading to a renewed arms race in Europe.  The villain in both decisions was John Bolton, the pastor child for the military-industrial complex, who was an arms control adviser to Bush and the national security adviser to Trump.

Trump’s return to the White House would be disastrous.  When former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson referred to Trump as a “fucking moron,” it was after a sensitive briefing on nuclear weapons for the new president at the Pentagon in 2017.  Since then, Trump has said that Japan would be “better off” with nuclear weapons; boasted about building new nuclear weapons (“We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before.”); and secretly discussed using a nuclear weapon against North Korea. Trump argued he could blame a U.S. strike against the communist regime on another country, according to New York Times correspondent Michael Schmidt.

As president, Trump created a Space Force, which was in violation of the Outer Space Treaty that was signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967.  Last week, Russia vetoed a UN Security Council resolution to prohibit placing nuclear weapons in space, which means the Outer Space Treaty is the latest arms control treaty from the Cold War era to fall by the wayside.  Russia’s veto reinforces the notion that Putin favors launching a nuclear weapon into space.

Prior to the 2020 election, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley took unprecedented steps to prevent Trump from misusing the country’s nuclear arsenal during the last month of his presidency.  According to the Washington Post‘s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Milley called the head of the Chinese military, and told him the “American government is stable, and “we’re not going to attack.”  Presumably, Xi Jinping has taken this call into account in terms of his own worst case thinking regarding the nuclear balance of power. Additionally, there is the threat from Putin to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

Despite the end of the “Cold War” three decades ago and the realization of the illusion of “limited” nuclear or the suicidal aspects of “mutual assured destruction,” there is still no comprehensive approach toward nuclear disarmament.  Cicero said that “endless money forms the sinews of war,” which has certainly been the case for U.S. use of force for the past three decades.  At the same time, there has been a withdrawal from the world of arms control and disarmament.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan have not even bothered to pay lip service to the idea of disarmament.  President Bill Clinton abolished the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency nearly 30 years ago, and currently there are fewer Foreign Service Officers in the Department of State than there are members of military service bands.  President Barack Obama’s vision of a nuclear-free world, expounded in Prague in 2009 marked a brave and lofty vision.  But the Trump and Biden administrations have ignored it and, as a result, the hopes for arms control and disarmament continue to fade.

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We are now seeing how holocausts happen. We are seeing how people who dare to speak out against massive state violence—in this case, college students protesting Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza—are being beaten and arrested at the behest of university leaders, who in turn are acting as agents of the Israel-allied US government.

After 35,000 Palestinians, mostly children and other civilians, have been killed, after all of Gaza’s universities have been destroyed and its hospitals bombed, and now as over a million Gazans face death by forced starvation, university administrators are having students arrested for setting up tents and asking for dialogue about how their schools might be complicit in an unfolding genocide.

This is how the paralysis that allows holocausts to happen is induced. By forcibly evicting and arresting protesters on university campuses, a clear message is sent to sympathetic others: keep quiet, accept things as they are, don’t step out of line—or you too will suffer. There’s no need to arrest everyone; just make enough arrests to set an example.

Most people, reasonably fearing arrest and its potential consequences, are then less likely to protest, less likely even to speak out. They look away from the violence, foreign and domestic, carried out by their government. They avoid asking how universities, supposedly society’s institutional stewards of humane values, might be complicit in the violence. Later, after many innocents have been murdered, they will claim ignorance about what was going on.

In the United States, suppressing dissent is complicated by laws protecting freedom of speech, assembly, and the press. Suppressing dissent on university campuses is further complicated by the widely held idea that universities are places where a clash of views is tolerated, even encouraged. Arresting students engaged in peaceful protests spoils this self-flattering image of American universities as bastions of intellectual freedom.

The contradiction between free speech and violent repression of protest requires university administrators to trot out justifications that defy both common sense and the evidence visible to anyone who has been paying attention.

At UNC–Chapel Hill, interim chancellor Lee Roberts and provost Chris Clemens claimed, in a public statement about recent arrests of student protesters, that they had to send in police because the solidarity encampment was disrupting campus operations, threatening and intimidating students, and destroying property. This was nonsense, as attested by firsthand observers and journalists. One local TV news anchor sounded incredulous as he remarked on a video feed of the arrests. We’ve been watching this protest for five days, he said, and this is the first time we’ve seen any violence. Other newscasters have made similar observations about protests elsewhere.

Many of the UNC protesters, Roberts and Clemens said, were not “members of the Carolina community.” Perhaps this was a rhetorical nod to tradition. Back in the day, when authorities sought to justify violence against civil rights protesters, they spoke of outside agitators stirring up trouble. All would be well, it was implied, if commie agitators didn’t put wild ideas about equality and justice into people’s heads. In the case of the UNC solidarity encampment, no one has yet specified who the alleged outsiders are. Students from Duke?

It is worth recalling that, not long ago, when “Silent Sam,” a Confederate statue on UNC’s campus, was the target of antiracist protest, students were told they had to accept neo-Confederates rallying on campus in defense of the statue because UNC was open to the public and obligated to respect free speech. Except, apparently, when it comes to Palestine.

In their statement, Roberts and Clemens also claimed to be alarmed by “rising accounts of antisemitic speech” linked to the protests—thereby embracing the chief propaganda tactic long used to smear critics of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. As journalists and others have documented, the claim that antisemitism is rampant on US campuses is based largely on counting criticism of Israel’s behavior as antisemitic. One can then argue that antisemitism is on the rise, thus fueling a sense of urgency about the need to rein in criticism of Israel. Occasionally, Israeli officials slip up and publicly admit that this is a trick.

The best trick, however, for reconciling the contradiction between claiming to respect free speech even while quashing it is this: devise a set of rules by which protests must be conducted and then claim that repression is justified because rules are being broken. University administrators around the country have adopted this ploy in the months since October 7, 2023. Rules never before known or applied are suddenly found to apply, peculiarly, to protests opposing Israel’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza.

The repression-by-rules tactic has the added benefit of allowing proponents of “civil discourse” at UNC and elsewhere to exempt themselves from defending the students whose rights are trampled. Those students and their agitating allies don’t deserve defense, according to the self-exculpatory logic at work here, because they broke the rules! They hollered and made people uncomfortable! That’s uncivil! Of course, once speech and protest are bureaucratized and arcane rules can be wielded arbitrarily by administrators who dislike what is being said, speech is no longer free.

Inventing rules and then sending in militarized police when student protesters violate them is another tactic that generates its own justification. Use police to turn a peaceful protest into a melee, and then claim that police are necessary to restore order. Casual observers who haven’t closely followed the sequence of events may then be misled into thinking that violence originated with protesters rather than the police.

History teaches us that holocausts happen because people follow orders and remain willfully blind to the greater evil to which they are contributing. It is this dangerous conformity that free speech and dissent can disrupt. This is what the antigenocide student protests and solidarity encampments are trying to do. To invoke picayune rules to quash the protests does worse than violate the free speech and assembly rights of a group of fellow Americans. It puts us as a nation on the path to becoming co-perpetrators of a crime against humanity, about which future historians will ask, How could this have happened again?

This essay originally appeared on Academe Blog.

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Introduction

Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a distinguished scholar with dual American and Israeli citizenship who is a resident of California, commands global recognition for her groundbreaking contributions to Palestinian feminist theory and her unwavering commitment to grassroots activism in Jerusalem.

On April 18, 2024, Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian was subjected to detention and interrogation by Israeli authorities. Despite a subsequent court order for her release, she continues to face the ongoing threat of further arrest and interrogation. It is evident that the line of questioning during these interrogations seeks to discredit her scholarly work by baselessly linking her to acts of violence.

The circumstances surrounding Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s detention are deeply troubling. She was apprehended on meritless grounds, stemming from a gross distortion of statements made in her scholarly articles and during a podcast hosted by reputable university professors in the United States. During her detention, she endured degrading and dehumanizing treatment, including a humiliating strip search, tight restraints causing physical harm, denial of essential medication, and exposure to inhumane conditions in a cold and insect-infested prison cell.

– Lama Khouri
Co-Founder, of the Palestine-Global Mental Health Network, of which Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a member.

Standing with Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Upholding Justice, Dignity and Academic Freedom

We, the Palestine-Global Mental Health Network, along with our affiliate Networks, spanning Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, South Africa, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, stand in solidarity to honor the remarkable scholarship and unwavering commitment to love, justice, and dignity for all demonstrated by our esteemed colleague and dear friend, Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian who was detained on April 18, and although she was released the next day, she was subjected to prolonged interrogation by the Israeli police, and her safety continues to be under threat.

Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s contributions to academia and activism are unparalleled. As a world-renowned scholar, her work transcends borders and disciplines, shedding light on the hopes of humanity, life and liveability. Her scholarship, based on analysis of processes of colonization, violence and racism, draws upon and enhances Palestinian feminist theory, offering profound insights into the lived experiences of marginalized communities, particularly in the city of Jerusalem where she resides. She has enriched our understanding of the workings of colonial power, including its practices of ‘bio power’ (intrusive control of all stages of human life and death) and through its shaping of discourses. She demonstrates how this contributes to a dehumanizing of Palestinians by constructing them as dangerous ‘others’, who must be subjected to surveillance, control and state violence.

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s interdisciplinary approach means that she is well placed to simultaneously analyse the ‘macro world’ of power politics and its infiltration of the ‘micro world’ of intimate human relationships and subjectivities. This has produced insights of immense value to clinicians as well as academics.

In her groundbreaking work on children, Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian expounded and developed her concept of ‘unchilding’ which she defines as the “authorised eviction of children from childhood”. This is enacted through state violence, fear, displacement, the undermining of parental function and the denial of the right to normal physical and psychological development. Her work has influenced paediatricians and child mental health clinicians around the world. ‘Unchilding’ encompasses a range of psychological wounds inflicted on the psyche of the infant, the child and the adolescent. It describes the deliberate denial of Palestinian childrens’ fragility and vulnerability and the depiction of them as either terrorists or potential terrorists. At the same time, and most importantly, Nadera’s work depicts children as active subjects in their social worlds, who scrutinize the techniques of power used upon them and assert their own moral values and desires for hope and freedom. She listens carefully to childrens’ own narratives and uses their testimonies to frame her writing. This process of amplifying childrens’ voices has had a profound effect on the practice of many of us who work with children and families.  Nadera’s passion for the well-being of children permeates her academic work, bringing together the love and anti-violence characterizing the feminist ethos in all her writing.

What also sets Nadera apart is not only her academic prowess but also her tireless dedication to grassroots activism. She is not content to merely theorize; instead, she actively engages with communities, amplifying their voices and advocating for meaningful change. Nadera’s work embodies a steadfast commitment, within the framework of international law, to challenging systemic injustices and striving towards a more equitable world for all.

Those of us who have had the privilege to hear Nadera speaking can attest to the erudition, academic rigour and eloquence which she brings to public debate. We are also aware of what a beacon she has been for her students and fellow academics and how important her voice has been for them.

 It is hard to overstate the deep concern and dismay with which we respond to the recent events surrounding Nadera’s detainment and interrogation by Israeli authorities. Despite her peaceful advocacy and scholarly endeavors, she has faced baseless charges and undue scrutiny, highlighting the oppressive tactics employed to silence dissenting voices. It is a profound insult to her sophisticated scholarship and scrupulous use of theoretical terminology that this work is now the main subject of the police interrogation. Throughout this ordeal, Nadera has remained steadfast in her principles, standing firm in defence of academic freedom and the right to dissent.

Her message remains unwavering: one of love, justice, and dignity for all. Her resilience in the face of adversity serves as a beacon of hope, inspiring countless individuals around the world to continue the fight for a more just and compassionate society.

As we continue to advocate for Nadera’s freedom and the protection of academic freedom worldwide, we celebrate her profound impact on the socio-legal field and feminist studies. Her scholarship serves as a testament to the power of knowledge and the transformative potential of academia in addressing abuses of power.

Join us in calling upon Secretary of State Blinken to protect this renowned scholar and American citizen.

Please follow this link and add your name. 

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As Israel began its genocide in Gaza, those who manage U.S. colleges and universities also commenced to issue statements of outrage at what Hamas had done. And as campus protests erupted in condemnation of the slaughter of Gazans, and especially children, and the destruction of homes and every major institution, including hospitals, these same institutions of higher learning began to disrupt these protests and bring them to an end. As a former college teacher, one who witnessed the attacks on those who protested against the War in Vietnam and who studied the repression on campuses during the McCarthy period, I became so appalled at what was being done to our brave and courageous college students that I began to write letters to the leaders of what are, in reality, academic enterprises.

University of Pittsburgh

Immediately after the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas and other Palestinian groups, on October 10, the chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, Joan Gabel, sent a message to the Pitt “community” decrying Hamas’s violence and offering University services to students traumatized by this. She wrote:

“Another wave of darkness has emerged in the violence taking place in Israel and Gaza. These heinous acts are antithetical to our values. We are compassionate. We are givers and doers. As such, we recognize the deep impact of these events across our community. Many of us are struggling with what we have seen, including members of our university family who face the unimaginable burden of grief for fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters, friends, and loved ones. For those hurting — for those grieving — we have resources available including Pitt Global, the University Counseling Center for students, and LifeSolutions for faculty and staff. We encourage all students, faculty and staff to use them. As more resources become available, we will share them.

Given her wording, she was almost certainly addressing mainly Jewish members of the “community.” In response, I sent the following email to her the same day:

Yes, the killings were terrible. But will you send another note about grieving as the Israelis bomb hospitals and kill many innocent people?”

Michael D. Yates, Pitt PhD and Pitt professor emeritus

I sent a follow-up note on December 11, when it was clear what Israel was doing:

Still waiting but not holding my breath for you to tell us (your colleagues, Pitt family, take your pick) that you are horrified, or at least a bit disturbed, by the wanton slaughter of children in Palestine, and that Pitt will help anyone traumatized by this. I suspect that you will be like every other University CEO (which is what you are) and say nothing or agree that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. International law will not be something you will refer to unless the culprit is an enemy of the US in the eyes of the US government.

Yours in peace,

Michael Yates, Professor Emeritus and Pitt PhD

ps Monthly Review Press, of which I am Director, published a book titled A Land With a People. The introduction, written by 80-year-old Rosalind Petchesky (a Jewish anti-Zionist), is worth reading. If your flack catchers, by some rare chance, let you see this, read it, and I am certain you will learn a great deal.

Again, no response was forthcoming. To date, there is a Palestinian solidarity encampment at the University, but the university has not attempted to have it dismantled.

Hobart and William Smith College (HWS)

On April 9, 2024, HWS Professor Jodi Dean wrote an essay titled, “Palestine Speaks for Everyone,” which was published on the Verso Press Blog. It is a moving piece, and it begins with this paragraph:

The images from October 7 of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating. Here were moments of freedom, that defeated Zionist expectations of submission to occupation and siege. In them, we witnessed seemingly impossible acts of bravery and defiance in the face of the certain knowledge of the devastation that would follow (that Israel practices asymmetric warfare and responds with disproportionate force is no secret). Who could not feel energized seeing oppressed people bulldozing the fences enclosing them, taking to the skies in escape, and flying freely through the air? The shattering of the collective sense of the possible made it seem as if anyone could be free, as if imperialism, occupation, and oppression can and will be overthrown. As the Palestinian militant Leila Khaled wrote of a successful hijacking in her memoir, My People Shall Live, “it seemed the more spectacular the action the better the morale of our people.” Such actions puncture expectations and create a new sense of possibility, liberating people from hopelessness and despair.

The president of Dean’s college, Mark D. Gearan, took great offense to her article. Here is the opening paragraph of his letter to the HWS “community,” sent on April 13, 2024:

Earlier this week, Professor of Politics Jodi Dean wrote a piece for Verso on the war in Israel and Gaza. She spoke about feeling exhilarated and energized by the paragliders on October 7, an event that has led to so much brutality against civilians in Israel and Gaza. Not only am I in complete disagreement with Professor Dean, I find her comments repugnant, condemn them unequivocally, and want to make clear that these are her personal views and not those of our institution.

He then suspended Dean from her teaching duties. His letter and actions offended me, and I sent him this message:

Dear President Gearan,

I read your letter about Professor Jodi Dean’s essay, “Palestine Speaks for Everyone,” which was posted at versobooks.com. I found your letter to be an excellent example of a false commitment to academic freedom and free speech. Taking Professor Dean out of her classroom is outrageous. Her essay speaks to a truth that cowards like you will never face. Israel is an occupying colonial power, with no right under any international law to do what it has done since the Nakba in 1948. It has violated  untold UN resolutions, and it has murdered untold numbers of people with abandon. What it has done since Oct. 7 has shocked most of the world, but apparently not you. Hamas and the other Palestinian resistance groups have every right under international law to resist Israel’s brutal and illegal occupation with violence, and Israel has no right to defend its colonial regime in Palestine. This is all not to mention that Israel’s current leadership, following it the footsteps of some of its founding fathers, are open fascists. What your letter does is whitewash this past and assert a sickening superior morality under the pretense that you are opposed to all violence. Please, spare us your tears. And your self-righteousness. Your students might be afraid and troubled!! Of what, pray tell. It is the people in Gaza who are afraid, because they are being killed by the tens of thousands. And if you have been following the news outside of the cowardly mainstream US Press, you would now know that most of the most outrageous acts Israel claimed Hamas and the other groups perpetrated on Oct. 7 have been shown not to have happened. The Nazis would have been proud of Netanyahu and company for their skill in lying and their willingness to murder women and children. Just as the US would not even take orphaned Jewish children into the United States during the late 1930s, because they might someday become Bolsheviks, so too the Israelis can’t have Palestinian kids grow up t be “terrorists.” or mothers giving birth to them.

You must put Professor Dean back in the classroom. I doubt you will, perhaps in fear that you will be called before Congress and declared an antisemite. Or more likely because you are simply not a very good human being.

Yours,

Michael D. Yates, Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown

Illinois State University

Since just after October 7, Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s popular “Morning Joe” program, has been railing against the campus protests. He typically refers to students (presumably privileged) at elite (as in Ivy League) colleges. However, the campus encampments that have been growing in number by the day, have been set up in many colleges and universities that are certainly not elite. One such college is Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. I have had correspondence with a teacher there, one whose students are by no means elite. When the president of the university, Aondover Tarhule, began threatening the protesters with punitive actions, the organizers asked people to write to him. I wrote this letter on April 30, 2024:

Dear President Tarhule,

Students around the United States are courageously protesting the open genocide being committed by the Israeli government in Gaza. That it is a genocide is widely known, and members of the Israeli state openly admit it, even declaring themselves to be fascists. Now, your students are protesting. And what does your administration do? Like many other institutions of higher learning, you threaten them with suspensions and police violence. Your duty is to protect your students. Colleges claim to be in favor of critical thinking and socially responsible actions. Yet, as soon as they take you at your word, they see that it is all a mirage.

I was a college professor for 45 years. I saw the protests against the war in Vietnam and the way that college administrators dealt with them. I know about how your predecessors condemned and blacklisted professors during the McCarthy period. Today, the world is watching. Your students are watching. What lessons will they take from your actions? The answer is up to you. Do the right thing. Do not allow police on your campus. Protect the right of your students to protest.

Sincerely yours,

Michael D. Yates, Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh

Princeton University

The more students have protested, the stronger and more violent the response by university administrators. The stormtroopers we erroneously call police were invited to put down the protests, and this they did, with fascist-like zeal. This was combined with a propaganda campaign, with full media participation from CNN and the New York Times, “reporting” that not only were the student voices rife with antisemitism, but there were nefarious outside agitators invading the campuses making trouble. Order had to be restored. At UCLA, anti-protestors did enter the college grounds by force, assaulting those who were condemning genocide. Campus security and LA police stood by while this was happening. Ultimately, the encampment was dismantled. It would hardly be surprising if these true outside agitators, like those at other universities, had close ties to the Israeli state’s multiple operation inside the United States.

Journalist Chris Hedges wrote an essay about what has happened at Princeton (The Chris Hedges Report, “Revolt in the Universities.”) After reading it, I wrote to  Rochelle Calhoun, Vice President of Campus Life:

Dear Rochelle Calhoun,

Like most of the nation’s universities, Princeton is showing its true colors as an active agent of the suppression of free speech and academic freedom. Your treatment of students protesting the genocide Israel is perpetrating in Gaza is appalling and makes a mockery of your supposed values of critical learning. As Vice President of Campus Life (note the corporate titles now ubiquitous in academe), you bear responsibility for the reprehensible treatment of student protestors, who have been arrested, handcuffed with zip ties, treated as trespassers in the place they in fact live, and unceremoniously booted off campus, unable even to take all of their possessions with them. I hope you are proud of yourself.

By doing what you are doing, you are drawing attention away from the heart of the matter, namely the callous and intentional slaughter of Gazans, including thousands of children. As Chris Hedges reports, “Not one university president has denounced Israel’s destruction of every university in Gaza. Not one university president has called for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. Not one university president has used the words “apartheid” or “genocide.” Not one university president has called for sanctions and divestment from Israel.”

As  happened during the McCarthy period and the protests against the War in Vietnam, our universities now show us how deeply they are embedded in the oppressive nature of our economic system and the national security state. As Thorstein Veblen noted more than 100 years ago, universities operate as businesses and their commitment to academic freedom and civil rights is a ruse. And as your behavior shows, as soon as a person becomes part of the corporate university, they begin to behave in ways that keep the enterprise going, no matter how liberal they think they are. Just doing their jobs, like the good Germans who gave aid and comfort, in one way or another, to National Socialism. You, like those who do the same work in other colleges and like your and their superiors, are, in truth, giving aid and comfort to genocide. It’s that simple. History will not look kindly upon you.

I was a college professor for 45 years. Not much surprises me anymore. But this does, because the Israeli genocide is perpetrated openly and some members of the Netanyahu government have declared themselves fascists. Perhaps you should take some time to grasp this and think about what you are doing.

Sincerely yours,

Michael D. Yates, Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh—Johnstown.

It would be foolish to imagine that my letters will have any effect on what the officers of these colleges and universities will do. Yet, it is necessary for each of us to do what we can to raise our voices against any and all complicity in genocide. No matter how small. If many speak out, the students will gain more confidence and courage. It is what they are doing that is important and has a chance of bringing about real change.

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The post-World War II situation is replete with bipartisan examples of failed national security decisions:  John F. Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961; Lyndon B. Johnson’s Americanization of the Vietnam War; Richard Nixon’s secret invasion of Cambodia in 1970; Ronald Regan’s stationing of Marines in Lebanon and Iran-Contra; George W. Bush’s abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Global War on Terror, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq; Barack Obama’s regime change policy in Libya; Donald Trump’s abrogation of the Iran nuclear accord and the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty; Joe Biden’s complicity in Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza.  Currently, Biden’s pursuit of dual containment of Russia and China is doomed to fail, and the United States will be dealing with the detritus of that policy.

Many of these failures were brought about by so-called “thinking in time” as decision-makers drew on past experience of their own or others to justify the use of force or coercive diplomacy.    Dwight D. Eisenhower’s successes in regime change in Iran and Guatemala led to Kennedy’s decision to invade Cuba.  One of the worst examples of “thinking in time” is the notion that the policy of “containment” worked against the Soviet Union, that it led to the collapse of the regime and the nation itself, and that it therefore will work against China.  The deputy national security adviser and senior Sinologist in the Trump administration, Matt Pottinger, wrote in this month’s Foreign Affairs that an “effective” containment policy against China will lead to “regime change.” This is an absurd notion.

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and the decade of the 1980s saw an extremely weak and virtually irrelevant regime in Moscow that played no international role in terms of economics, politics, and diplomacy.  Conversely, China is a global leader in manufacturing, trade, and renewable energy, and its budget for science and technology increases annually as the U.S. S&T budget declines.  China outpaces the entire global community in transportation, the production of electric vehicles, and clean energy technology.  China is a leader in STEM education, graduating 3.5 million STEM students annually.  Last year, the United States graduated 820,000 STEM students.

Like Donald Trump, President Biden pursues a Cold War strategy vis-a-vis China, but the nations of Asia—with the exception of Japan—do not want to be part of a Cold War between Washington and Beijing.  Both administrations have made life difficult for Chinese scientists and engineers in the United States; as a result of this “Red Scare,” many Chinese technicians are returning to China.  The Trump administration walked away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership; as a result the United States left Asian markets to China, particularly in the construction field.

On his trip to China last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that “If China doesn’t address this issue [supply of military aid to Russia for its war against Ukraine}, we will.”  It isn’t clear what Blinken is threatening, but his aggressive comments point to increased aid to Ukraine in order to strike Russia itself or increased tariffs and sanctions against China for its aid deliveries.  Instead of emphasizing those key areas that demand greater Sino-American communication such as talks on AI; greater military-to-military dialogue, environmental issues, and greater cultural exchanges, Biden has chosen to threaten China over “cheap imports;” greater military cooperation with Japan and the Philippines; and “massive” tariff increases. Biden and Blinken appear to agree with Pottinger that it isn’t enough to “manage” relations with China; we need victory in our relations with China.

The Biden administration is engaged in wishful thinking in regard to relations with Russia as well.  It appears to believe that the Soviet system could not survive the death of Josef Stalin, and that the Russian system will not survive the loss of Vladimir Putin.  There is no sign thatPresident Vladimir Putin is about to be toppled, but Biden can’t stop swinging at him as in his State of the Union address.  Biden argues that all of Europe “is at risk” from Russia, but it’s the possible return of Trump to the White House that has Europe discombobulated, not only Vladimir Putin.

On their domestic front, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping occupy secure positions while democracy in America is being threatened.  More than 75 percent of Russians turned out for the presidential election in March, and more than 85 percent of them, who had little choice, voted for Putin to remain in office. Meanwhile, bitter partisanship hampers policymaking in the United States, and the Republican Party is compromised by a “cult of personality” in the name of Donald Trump.  The direction and composition of the Supreme Court is particularly worrisome.   As a result of the domestic and international turmoil, Biden’s chances of remaining in office after the November election have worsened.

The greatest uncertainty in the near term is the worsening nuclear uncertainty.  U.S. relations with both Russia and China have worsened, and the nuclear competition has worsened as well.  The Bush and Trump administrations have abrogated nearly all of the key arms control treaties, and the Biden administration has demonstrated no interest in reviving any of them.  The size and quality of the nuclear arsenals in Washington, Beijing, and Moscow are growing without limitations: the United States is engaged in a $1.5 trillion makeover of its nuclear arsenal; China may triple its nuclear warheads by the end of the decade; and Russia has resorted to nuclear threats to deter greater Western involvement in Ukraine.

Cold Warriors in the United States, such as Pottinger, are already lobbying for the doubling of our nuclear forces to compensate for worsened U.S. relations with both Beijing and Moscow.  Last year, Russia withdrew from the inspection regime of the only remaining disarmament treaty, the START agreement.  The expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal coincided with the emergence of Xi Jinping’s leadership in 2012. The thought of Donald Trump inheriting this scenario and becoming the sole legal authority to order the use of nuclear weapons after January 25, 2025 couldn’t be more frightening.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Sometimes a wildfire breaks out and sweeps the landscape. A tipping point is reached. A phase shift turns solid ice into a raging torrent. That’s what’s happening today.

In the brief two weeks since Columbia University students set up the first Gaza solidarity encampment at the New York campus April 17, student protests have swept dozens of campuses in the U.S. and other countries. Today buildings are being occupied on campuses from coast to coast, the latest being Hamilton Hall at Columbia, renamed Hind’s Hall in honor of a 5-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in January. It was renamed Nat Turner Hall when students protesting the Vietnam War occupied the building in 1968 during a campus protest wave being compared to what’s happening today.

Over 1,000 students have been arrested in brutal police crackdowns. Scenes of cops marching onto campuses clad in riot gear are filling social media, beginning with the NYPD clearing the first encampment at Columbia April 18. Texas, California, Ohio, Georgia, other places, are witnessing students and faculty being zip tied and dragged off to jail. It is just as clear that not only is the repression failing to stop the protests; It is feeding their momentum. The contrast between the genocidal actions the students are protesting and the excuses university administrators are hatching to justify the crackdowns is just too glaring.

In fact, nothing could be more telling than the virulence of the accusations being hurled at the students and the violence with which their protests are being met. We have seen months of protests since the Gaza war broke out October 7 with nothing like this reaction. Netanyahu likens the protests to Nazi actions on German campuses in the 1930s. Biden says, “I condemn the antisemitic protests,” giving carte blanche to the police repression. Opposition to genocide is being described as “hate speech.”

The Orwellian doublespeak in calling demonstrations in which Jewish students are taking a major part antisemitic is particularly astounding. Reportedly around 15 of the 100 or so in the original Columbia arrests were Jews.

“We chose to be arrested in the movement for Palestinian liberation because we are inspired by our Jewish ancestors who fought for freedom 4,000 years ago,” several of them wrote. “When the police entered our encampment, we locked arms and sang civil rights era songs that many of our more recent ancestors recited in the 1960s. We belong to the legacy of progressive Jewish activism that has worked across race, class and religious lines to transform our communities.”

Pro-Israel forces have been terrified at the loss of support among youth. Some months ago, a leaked recording of Anti-Defamation League Director Jonathan Greenblatt was released in which he said, “ . . . we have a major, major, major generational problem . . . all the polling I’ve seen . . . suggests this is not a left or right gap folks. The issue of United States support for Israel is not left or right. It is young and old . . . and so we really have a TikTok problem, a Gen-Z problem.”

The recent passage by Congress of legislation threatening to ban TikTok if it is not sold by its Chinese owners should come as no surprise. Many observers are pointing to the Israel lobby as a driving force.

Losing young people, especially at top-flight universities where future members of the elite are being groomed, is bad enough for Israel supporters. This is in the nation where continued support is vital to sustain Israel’s actions. The participation of so many Jews in the protests pushes it over the line.  I believe this is a key reason for the intensity and falsity of the accusations and the violent police response. Jewish involvement has to be cancelled, denied, vilified.

Students of all persuasions are being told, toe the line if you expect to maintain your career prospects. Suspensions are being threatened and carried out. In a society more stratified than it was during the 1960s protest wave, when rising through the ranks depends more than ever on a university education and tuitions are significantly higher, it has required significant moral courage for students to stage encampments and risk arrest. Their determined resistance demonstrates the depth of their moral outrage at what they are seeing in Gaza, and testifies to their character. For all the dissing on younger generations I hear from olders, this provides hope for the future.

Another reason for the backlash from university administrators is that students are hitting them where they live, the money. Universities have become financialized machines with large endowments invested in the stock market. Student demands for divestment from Israel hit a nerve. Threats of losing contributions from major, pro-Israel donors, and of losing federal contracts made by Pro-Israel politicians, twitch the reptilian brains of administrators whose compensation now ranks with their peers in the corporate sector. It’s just too much for them to bear.

Whether the student protests seem to have any immediate impact, it is important to remember a lesson from the late 1960s movement. It would not be until 1975 that the Vietnam War was finally concluded. But protests in 1968 and 1969 may have averted a horror scenario. Daniel Ellsberg in his last book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,recounts how the Pentagon was proposing use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam. The protests convinced Richard Nixon that this would cause chaos so he shelved the plans. Doug Dowd, one the 1960s New Leftists who visited North Vietnam during the war, tells of how the Vietnamese credited the U.S. peace movement with stopping the use of nuclear weapons in his book,  Blues for America: A Critique, A Lament, and Some Memories. They thanked the peace movement, saying that was the one thing that could have defeated them.

The campus occupations of 1968 led to the absolutely mass protests of 1969, notably the autumn moratoriums in D.C. that Ellsberg wrote were the key events that persuaded Nixon. Certainly today’s protests are putting intense heat on the Biden Administration, recalling how the 1968 protests led to Democratic defeat in that year’s presidential election. Could today’s protests stop or reduce what would be an absolutely devastating attack on Rafah, the last population concentration in Gaza? Could they lead to a ceasefire? It is hard to know, but the over-the-top response to the protests shouts out the depth of their impact.

Students, Jewish and others, are practicing the essential lesson of all the world’s wisdom paths, compassion for the other. Even though most are not being directly affected by what is going on in Gaza, they are being impacted on a deep moral level, and cannot remain silent. We must all take a lesson from what they are doing, and follow them into the streets.

This first appeared in The Raven.

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Photograph Source: The US Army – Public Domain

Since the U.S. military brought its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system to South Korea in 2017, it has met with sustained local resistance. THAAD is the centerpiece of the numerous actions the United States has undertaken to enmesh South Korea in its hostile anti-China campaign, a course that Korean peace activists are fighting to reverse.

In a unanimous decision at the end of March, South Korea’s Constitutional Court dismissed two challenges lodged by residents of Seongju County against the deployment of THAAD. [1] Since its arrival, the THAAD system has met with recurring demonstrations in the nearby village of Soseong-ri. The hope in the Yoon and Biden administrations is that the court’s decision will dishearten opponents of THAAD. In this expectation, they are already disappointed, as anti-THAAD activists responded to the court’s decision by vowing to “fight to the end.” [2]

Although protestors have regularly held rallies on the road leading to the THAAD site, swarms of Korean police cleared them away to allow free passage for U.S. military supply trucks. Opposition to THAAD has angered U.S. officials, leading the Biden administration to dispatch Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Seoul to deliver the message that it deemed the situation “unacceptable” and progress on establishing the base needed to accelerate. Austin also raised objections to protests by residents in Pohang over noise from U.S. Apache attack helicopters conducting live-fire exercises. [3] Predictably, the Yoon administration responded by prioritizing U.S. demands over the welfare of the Korean people and promised “close cooperation for normalizing routine and unfettered access to the THAAD site” and “improvement of the combined training conditions.” [4]

THAAD is billed as an anti-missile defense system consisting of an interceptor missile battery, a fire control and communications unit, and an AN/TPY-2 X-band radar. The ostensible purpose of THAAD in Seongju is to counter incoming North Korean missiles, but serious doubts exist about its efficacy in that role. In terms of coverage, THAAD’s position in Seongju puts it in range to cover the main U.S. military base in South Korea, Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek, but out of range to protect Seoul, which at any rate is indefensible due to its proximity to the border. Even so, it is questionable how much utility the system offers even for Pyeongtaek. THAAD’s missiles are designed to intercept incoming ballistic missiles at an altitude of 40 to 150 kilometers. The THAAD battery would have less than three and a half minutes to detect and counter-launch against a high-altitude ballistic missile fired from the farthestpoint in North Korea. By then, the incoming missile would have fallen below the lower-end altitude range of 40 kilometers, leaving it invulnerable to interception. [5] That would be the best-case scenario, as in the event of a war, the North Koreans are not likely to be so accommodating as to launch ballistic missiles from as far away as possible.

Furthermore, the THAAD battery in Seongju is equipped with six launchers and 48 interceptor missiles. With a thirty-minute THAAD battery launcher reload time, incoming missiles would not take long to deplete THAAD’s ability to respond, even under the most accommodating circumstances.

An upgrade was recently made to integrate THAAD with Patriot PAC-3 defense to intercept ballistic missiles at a lower altitude. This enhancement is of doubtful utility, as the radar’s response would still be constrained by the short flight time of an incoming missile. For all the hype about the successful interception of Iranian missiles fired at Israel, the Patriot’s showing in a more suitable scenario was less than stellar. It had an advantage there, as Iranian and Yemeni launch sites were situated much farther away from their target than in the Korean case. Yet, out of 120 Iranian ballistic missiles, the Patriot system shot down only one. The others were intercepted primarily by U.S. warplanes. [6]

North Korea’s development of a solid-fuel hypersonic intermediate-range missile has added another unmeetable challenge for THAAD. Because of its proximity, it is doubtful that North Korea would target US forces with high-altitude ballistic missiles in case of war. Instead, it would likely rely on its long-range artillery, cruise missiles, and short-range ballistic missiles, flying well below the lower limit of THAAD’s altitude coverage.

Despite its doubtful defensive effectiveness on the Korean Peninsula, the United States attaches enormous importance to THAAD’s deployment in South Korea, which suggests an unstated motivation. A clue is provided by the stationing in Japan of two stand-alone AN/TPY-2 radars without an accompanying THAAD system. [7] In other words, it is the radar that matters to the U.S. military, and the linkage to THAAD interceptors is primarily a pretense made necessary by popular feeling in Korea.  What makes the AN/TPY-2 special is its ability to operate in two modes. In terminal mode, it feeds tracking data to the THAAD missile battery, allowing it to target an incoming ballistic missile as it descends toward its target. In forward-based mode, the THAAD missile battery is not involved, and the role of the radar is to detect a ballistic missile as it ascends from its launching pad, even from deep into China. In this mode, the radar is integrated into the U.S. missile defense system and sends tracking data to interceptor missiles stationed on U.S. territory and Pacific bases. [8] As a U.S. Army publication points out, when in forward-based mode, a field commander may use the radar system “to concurrently support both regional and strategic missile defense operations.” [9]

There are hints that preparations may already be underway to establish the conditions necessary for THAAD to operate in forward-based mode. Last year, South Korea and Japan agreed to link their radars to the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii. [10] The ostensible purpose is to enhance the tracking accuracy of missiles fired from North Korea, but the concept applies equally well to Chinese missiles. It is not a stretch to imagine that if South Korean and Japanese radars have been linked to the United States, the same may be true with the THAAD’s AN/TPY-2. Certainly, if the U.S. Army switches the mode, it will not be informing South Korean authorities, so sure are the Americans that they can freely treat Korean sovereignty with contempt. Switching an AN/TPY-2 radar from one mode to the other takes only eight hours, a quick process that is opaque to outsiders. [11]

An anti-ballistic missile system can easily be overwhelmed by a full-scale enemy attack. The system’s primary purpose is to support a first-strike capability, in which the United States takes out as many of the enemy’s missiles as possible, leaving the anti-ballistic missile system to counter the few surviving missiles. In essence, that makes the radar in the THAAD system a first-strike weapon. The closer the radar is stationed to an adversary’s ballistic missile launch, the more precise the tracking provided to the U.S.-based anti-missile system. South Korea is ideally located for the AN/TPY-2, where its radar can cover much of eastern China. [12] The effect is to enlist South Korea, willingly or not, in U.S. war plans against China. When residents in Seongju argue that THAAD makes them a target, they are not mistaken.

The Yoon administration is taking integration with the U.S. missile defense system one step further in planning to spend an estimated $584 million to procure American SM-3 interceptor missiles, suitable for protecting the United States and its bases in the Pacific.[13] The SM-3 interceptors are to be deployed on South Korean Aegis destroyers, which will need to be upgraded at additional cost to handle them. [14]

Residents in Seongju are also concerned about potential health risks associated with living adjacent to the THAAD installation. Radars transmit pulses of high-frequency electromagnetic fields, and the AN/TPY-2 radar generates radio frequencies of 8.55 to 10 GHz. [15] According to the World Health Organization, radio frequency waves below 10 GHz “penetrate exposed tissues and produce heating due to energy absorption.” [16] One study observes that radars generate pulsed microwaves “in very high values of peak power compared to mean power emitted.” To evaluate risk, one must also take peak values into account. In that case study, exposure levels for 49 workers were assessed, where it was noted that “peak values are about 200 – 4000 times higher than corresponding mean values.” Although recorded mean values fell below exposure limits that could have caused thermal effects, the peak values suggested potential non-thermal impacts, and “peak power density frequently exceeded the reference level and were correlated with nervous system effects.” [17]

The AN/TPY-2 relies on a phased array antenna. The U.S. Army publication on Ground-based Midcourse Defense Operations warns, “Dangerous radio frequency power levels exist on and near antennas and phased-array radars during operations. Radio frequency electromagnetic radiation may cause serious burns and internal injury. All personnel must observe radio frequency danger indications and stay outside designated keep out zones.” It adds that the keep out zone can vary according to power output “but may extend out from a radar face in excess of 10 kilometers and sweep more than 70 degrees on each side from the system bore sight.” [18] In other words, the extent of risk depends heavily on the radar’s power output and disposition.

Where the radar is aimed matters; the extent of human exposure is sharply reduced outside of the direct path of the primary beam. The U.S. Army’s AN/TPY-2 forward-based operations field manual specifies three search plans for the radar while in that mode. The “standard operations mode,” named Autonomous Search Plans, “normally provides multiple search sectors,” and in general, the larger the ballistic missile named area of interest, “the larger the search volume of the radar sector.” [19] Since China constitutes a vast area of interest, the THAAD radar in forward-based mode potentially exposes a wide range of the local population to radiation.

Shortly after THAAD was brought to South Korea, the Daegu Regional Environmental Office attempted to ascertain the environmental impact through periodic measurements; results registered at safe levels at a point in time when the THAAD system was not yet fully implemented. However, the Environmental Office noted that the radar’s power output level and vertical and horizontal angles were unknown “due to military secrecy.” [20] While the low measurements were suggestive, they were essentially meaningless without knowing what radar settings were being measured.

Since the arrival of THAAD in 2017, the local population’s concerns about possible health impacts from electromagnetic radiation had gone unanswered until June 21 last year, when the Ministry of Defense issued a press release announcing the result of its THAAD environmental impact assessment. The Ministry of Environment judged the impact as “insignificant.” [21] The press release reported that the highest measurement registered was 0.018870 watts per square meter (W/㎡), far below the limit for human exposure.

An earlier series of tests in Gimcheon City, at four locations northwest of the radar, produced a slightly higher but comparable measurement to the Seongju test, definitely within a safe limit. The tests were conducted over one year, ending in May 2023. The highest and maximum readings were registered at the farthest location, 10.2 kilometers from the radar. [22] However, as in the earlier Daegu test, nothing about how the radar operated was known.

At first glance, the Seongju test result would appear to allay concerns over the radar’s health impact. But has it? The most striking aspect of the press release is its lack of transparency. No information is provided other than a single result. The Ministry of Defense withheld information because it would be “likely to significantly harm the vital interests of the state if disclosed.” [23] It is unclear how revealing details about the test conditions, such as the radar’s angle, would pose a security risk. More likely, United States Forces Korea preferred to hide the details from public view so that the test could be conducted in a way sure to produce safe readings.

Unlike the earlier Gimcheon report, which identified the populated areas where measurements had been taken, the Seongju environmental impact assessment “was done for the entire base, including the site negotiated by the Daegu Regional Environmental Office.” [24] The phrasing suggests that no measurements were taken outside of the THAAD base, an odd choice given the concerns of nearby residents. Even within that limitation, less than thirty percent of the base was included in the assessment. [25]

Several factors can produce dramatically different results when measuring radiation. The public’s only knowledge of the Seongu test is that radiation poses no risk in an unknown set of conditions. Risk remains a mystery in other scenarios. We do not know which mode(s) the test included. It is probable that only the terminal mode was involved, aligning with the fiction that the radar’s purpose is purely defensive. Estimated ranges for the AN/TPY-2 vary but are consistently far higher when set to forward-based mode. Therefore, a test in forward mode could be expected to produce a higher electromagnetic radiation reading, as the longer the range, the higher the average power the radar has to generate. [26]

There are also the factors of angle and direction. The press release was silent on these matters, as well. In none of the measurements was it known in which direction the radar was pointed. In terminal mode, the radar would presumably point north. The forward-based mode should have the radar directed toward China in a different and much broader range of directions. Furthermore, the AN/TPY-2 can be set at any angle ranging from ten to 60 degrees. [27]Presumably, the angle would be positioned much lower in forward-based mode than in terminal mode, resulting in a more direct environmental impact on the ground.

The highest radiofrequency radiation is in the path of the radar’s main beam. Outside of that, there is a sharp drop-off, typically at levels thousands of times lower. [28] If measurements are taken outside the line of the beam, then results would be misleadingly low. Also unknown are the positions of the radar in various planned operation scenarios. What populated areas would be situated directly in line of the beam? Without that information, let alone corresponding measurements, potential risk remains unknown.

The U.S. Army conducted the Seongju test, and the South Korean Air Force, partnering with the Korea Radio Promotion Association, measured the radiation. [29] There was no outside involvement in planning or conducting the test. Lacking independent outside oversight, the U.S. military chose the test conditions based on the motivation to produce a reassuring finding. In coordination with selected third parties, the Ministry of Environment’s sole role was to review the measurements handed to them by the South Korean military.

In its recent decision, the Constitutional Court dismissed every point in the two appeals that challenged the deployment of THAAD. The petition filed by Won Buddhists charged that THAAD violated their freedom of religion by requiring them to obtain permission from the military to conduct religious activities and meetings and by restricting pilgrimages. Similarly, the petition by residents argued that security restrictions imposed on farmers required them to seek permission from the police to work their fields. To both complaints, the court ruled that restricted access to a religious site and farmland does not apply to the constitution, as a joint U.S.-Korean commission had decided to deploy THAAD in accordance with the Mutual Defense Treaty. The court summarized its point by asserting, “If the exercise of public authority has no effect on the legal status of the applicants, there is no possible violation of their fundamental rights in the first place.” It was a curious framing for the court to adopt in that it ignored the impact on residents who could no longer conduct their activities in a normal manner. In dismissing the challenges relating to health concerns and noise pollution, the court cited the Ministry of Defense’s environmental test press release in evidence. Finally, in rejecting the challenge that THAAD would make Seongju a target in times of war, the court made the specious claim that since the system is defensive, it cannot be said that it “is likely to threaten the peaceful existence of the people by subjecting them to a war of aggression.” [30] Chinese complaints about the nature of THAAD are well known in South Korea; the judges could hardly have been unaware of how deployment has been perceived in the People’s Republic of China.

Following close on the heels of the publicized environmental test result, the court’s decision surely had Washington in a jubilant mood. South Korea’s military promised to “work closely with the U.S. side to faithfully reflect the opinions of the U.S. side so that the project can proceed.” [31] They plan to expedite the steps needed to “normalize” the base and ensure its permanent emplacement.

THAAD can be considered a microcosm representing everything unsettling about the U.S.-South Korea military alliance. It is a relationship serving American geostrategic objectives in which Koreans play a subservient role, often acting against their interests. As East Asian specialist Seungsook Moon explains, “While there have been variations and changes in the U.S. relationships with host countries over time, the military relationship between the USA and South Korea has been persistently neocolonial.” Moon adds that, in “maintaining the boundary between us and them,” the South Korean state “imposes the unequal burden of hosting the missile defense system on lower-class and rural citizens” and “exacerbates class inequality by diminishing these citizens’ quality of life and human security.” [32] The costs of U.S. militarism are also offloaded onto Koreans in other ways, as well, including communities impacted by toxic pollution from active and abandoned American bases. Those living near live-fire practice exercises must endure unbearable noise levels, while crimes committed by American soldiers victimize residents near bases.

As for South Korea as a whole, the presence of U.S. bases in the context of American hyper-militarized confrontation with China and North Korea poses an ongoing danger of dragging the nation into war. Indeed, the United States is quite explicit about the role it assigns to South Korea. Shortly after taking office, in a revealing statement, President Biden declared, “When we strengthen our alliances, we amplify our power.” [33] That leaves no doubt about whose interests allied nations are expected to serve. In South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, the United States has found an ideal lackey, a true believer who eagerly prioritizes American demands over the welfare of his people. It has long been a U.S. goal for its alliance to expand beyond the Korean Peninsula. With Yoon in power, the United States had been progressing toward moving the alliance in that direction. Austin and South Korean Defense Minister Shin Won-sik recently announced that the alliance is committed to “operate across the region with greater bilateral and multilateral political-military alignment to realize this vision of a true global comprehensive strategic Alliance…” [34]

The U.S. objective is total economic, diplomatic, and military domination of the Asia-Pacific. When Yoon met with Biden last year, he signaled his support for that policy, including the usual anti-China euphemisms. [35] Biden and Yoon have also been ramping up regional tensions with a nearly nonstop series of aggressive full-scale military exercises intended to intimidate and threaten North Korea and China. [36]

Yoon and Biden have underestimated the determination of the Korean progressive movement, which is unswayed by recent developments. If anything, the setbacks have energized them. On April 27, the seventh anniversary of the introduction of THAAD in Soseong-ri, activists held a demonstration at the site to proclaim their undying opposition, shouting, “We will be with you until the day THAAD is dismantled!” [37]

One of the speakers, student Lee Ki-eun, pointed out that THAAD’s radar is intended to defend the United States and Japan. “It is completely for foreign powers.” She added, “What is Korea? At the forefront of the confrontation with North Korea and China, the lives of our people are sacrificed for foreign powers.” Lee urged her audience: “With greater determination, with an even greater life force like a bursting prairie fire, let’s continue the anti-THAAD struggle!” [38]

The anti-THAAD battle is part of a broader movement by Korean progressives against the deepening military alliance with the United States and Yoon’s colonial mindset that sacrifices Korean sovereignty and the welfare of the Korean people on the altar of U.S. imperialism. As Ham Jae-gyu of the Unification Committee declared at the rally, “The Japanese colonial period merely passed the baton to U.S. imperialism, and subjugation by imperialism is accelerating. The United States is trampling every corner of Korea.” [39]

Notes.

[1] https://www.lawtimes.co.kr/news/197154

[2] Kwan Sik Yoon, “Anti-THAAD Group: ‘The Constitution Does Not Protect Basic Rights…We Will Fight to the End,” Yonhap, March 29, 2024.

[3] Oh Seok-min, “S. Korea, U.S. Working Closely on How to Improve THAAD Base Conditions: Seoul Ministry,” Yonhap, March 29, 2021.

[4] Press Release, “54^th Security Consultative Meeting Joint Communique,” U.S. Department of Defense, November 3, 2022.

[5] Yoon Min-sik, “THAAD, Capacity and Limitations,” Korea Herald, July 21, 2016

[6] Lauren Frias, “US Fighter Jets, Destroyers, and Patriot Missiles Shot Down Loads of Iranian Weapons to Shield Israel From an Unprecedented Attack,” Business Insider, April 15, 2024.

Vera Bergengruen, “How the U.S. Rallied to Defend Israel From Iran’s Massive Attack,” Time, April 15, 2024.

[7] “U.S. Defense Infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific: Background and Issues for Congress,” p. 39, Congressional Research Service, June 6, 2023.

[8] https://sldinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Mobile-Radar.pdf

[9] ATP 3-27.3, “Ground-based Midcourse Defense Operations,” U.S. Army, October 30, 2019.

[10] Jesse Johnson, “Japan, South Korea, U.S. Begin Sharing Real-time Data on North Korean Missiles,” The Japan Times, December 19, 2023.

[11] Park Hyun, “Pentagon Document Confirms THAAD’s Eight-hour Conversion Ability,” Hankyoreh, June 3, 2015.

[12] https://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/an-tpy-2.htm

[13] Eunhyuk Cha, “South Korea Approves Procurement of SM-3 for Ballistic Missile Defense,” Naval News, April 26, 2024.

[14] Younghak Lee, “South Korea to Upgrade KDX-III Batch-I Ships to Operate SM-3 and SM-6,” Naval News, November 19, 2023.

[15] “AN/TPY-2 Transportable Radar Surveillance Forward Based X-Band Transportable [FBX-T],” GlobalSecurity.org.

[16] “Electromagnetic Fields and Public Health: Radars and Human Health,” Fact Sheet N 226, World Health Organization.

[17] Christian Goiceanu, Răzvan Dănulescu1, Eugenia Dănulescu, Florin Mihai Tufescu, and Dorina Emilia Creangă, “Exposure to Microwaves Generated by Radar Equipment: Case Study and Protection Issues,” Environmental Engineering and Management Journal, April 2011, Vol. 10, No. 4, p 491-498.

[18] ATP 3-27.3, “Ground-based Midcourse Defense Operations,” U.S. Army, October 30, 2019.

[19] ATP 3-27.5: “AN/TYP-2 Forward Based Mode (FBM) Radar Operations,” U.S. Army, April 16, 2012.

[20] Press Release, “성주 사드기지 소규모 환경영향평가 협의 완료,” Daegu Regional Environment Agency Environmental Assessment Division, September 4, 2017.

[21] Song Sang-ho, “S. Korea Completes Environmental Assessment of U.S. THAAD Missile Defense Base,” Yonhap, June 21, 2023.

[22] “사드기지 소규모 환경영향평가 후속조치 기술지원 결과,” Republic of Korea Ministry of Environment, undated report.

[23] https://www.peoplepower21.org/peace/1927732

[24] Press Release, “전 정부서 미룬 사드 환경영향평가 완료, 윤정부 ‘성주 사드기지 정상화’에 속도,” Republic of Korea Ministry of Defense, June 21, 2023.

[25] https://www.peoplepower21.org/peace/1927732

[26] “Radar Navigation and Maneuvering Board Manual,” National Imagery and Mapping Agency, 2001, p. 24

https://www.furuno.com/en/technology/radar/basic/

[27] “Shielded from Oversight: The Disastrous US Approach to Strategic Missile Defense – Appendix 10: Sensors, Union of Concerned Scientists, p. 9.

[28] J. Kusters, “X-band Wave Radar Radiation Hazards to Personnel,” General Dynamics Applied Physical Sciences, November 26, 2019.

https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/radiation-radar

[29] “Science Prevails Over Wild Rumors,” JoongAng Ilbo, June 21, 2024.

[30] “2017헌마372: 고고도미사일방어체계 배치 승인 위헌확인고고도미사일방어체계 배치,” Constitutional Court of Korea, March 28, 2024.

[31] Press Release, “전 정부서 미룬 사드 환경영향평가 완료, 윤정부 ‘성주 사드기지 정상화’에 속도,” Republic of Korea Ministry of Defense, June 21, 2023.

[32] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09670106211022884

[33] “Remarks by President Biden on America’s Place in the World,” The White House, February 4, 2021.

[34] Press Release, “Defense Vision of the U.S.-ROK Alliance,” U.S. Department of Defense, November 13, 2023.

[35] “Leaders’ Joint Statement in Commemoration of the 70^th Anniversary of the Alliance Between the United States of America and the Republic of Korea,” The White House, April 26, 2023.

[36] Simone Chun, “Unprecedented US War Drills and Naval Deployment Raise Fear of War in Korea,” Truthout, April 7, 2024.

[37] https://spark946.org/party/kor_en?tpf=board/view&board_code=3&code=27545

[38] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMb3eLbBve0

[39] https://worknworld.kctu.org/news/articleView.html?idxno=504477

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Cops on the campus of Northeastern University, Boston.

When I strolled into Harvard Yard around 6:00 pm on Friday, a Shabbat service was taking place in the student encampment for Palestine. Dozens of young people were seated in a large circle on the lawn, many wearing keffiyehs, a few wearing kippahs, and at least one wearing both. A guitar player strummed and led the circle in a Yiddish song while campers nearby talked in small groups, or stared at laptops, perhaps preparing for finals. Three police SUVs were parked in sight of the camp on the centuries-old Yard, and a keffiyeh was tied around the sculpted head of the university’s namesake, John Harvard.

The encampment—or “the Liberated Zone,” as a big banner proclaimed it—now consisted of more than 40 tents. It had grown since Wednesday, when it was assembled by surprise during a noon rally on the last day of classes. Video of the moment shows students suddenly dashing onto the grass with backpacks, tarps, and bags to begin erecting tents while supporters cheer.

I had come to observe the camp and speak with Lea Kayali, a campus organizer and Palestinian American in her third year at Harvard Law School. Her family is from Jaffa and the West Bank, and the bombardment of Gaza has hit her hard. “I wake up and read the names of the dead,” she said, “the places that have been destroyed. Each headline is more gutting than the last.” Even Kayali’s cousins in the West Bank, whom she said don’t leave their houses for fear of being attacked by settlers or arrested, always remind her: “Keep eyes on Gaza.”

Though the devastation of Gaza can feel distant in the US, according to Kayali it is not. This is the point being made by student protesters at Harvard, Columbia University (where an encampment, and its police suppression, first made headlines), and other campuses across the country. Student demands include disclosure of investments in Israeli companies and others profiting from the attack on and occupation of Palestine, and divestment from those companies.

Kayali has been heartened by the enthusiasm of students new to the movement. “It’s been activating for many on campus,” she said, emphasizing the collective labor the camp requires. Students coordinate food and organize political programming, like a teach-in on the history of student activism. The camp, she said, “is an exemplar of community care, mutual aid.”

The moment the tents popped up, Kayali said, “the only sound you could hear was cheering. And this was from students who were just walking through the Yard!” Arabic students began to dance the dabke, a Palestinian folk dance, in a huge circle after the tents were raised. “Seeing a revolutionary joy that has really been absent the last seven months gave me more assurance that we can build the world we want,” she added. (When I left her, Kayali got up to help a couple of Black students practicing the steps to the dabke.)

Another inspiring moment for Kayali came Thursday during a visit to the encampment at Northeastern University, across the Charles River in Boston. There, the camp was encircled by a large ring of Boston police in riot gear, with helmets and zip tie handcuffs. But the activists stood in a smaller circle around the tents, linking arms and standing their ground. For about 20 minutes, she said, there was an intense stand-off. And then the police backed off.

Kayali’s visit to Northeastern typifies the supportive relationship among area encampments, as many student activists communicate across campuses. For instance, a speaker at a pro-Palestinian rally this week at Berklee College of Music mentioned spending time at the Emerson College encampment before it was violently broken up by police and over 100 arrests were made. That Berklee rally ended with a march to join the Northeastern encampment.

Though the police pressure on Northeastern dissipated Thursday without mass arrests, early Saturday morning the school administration followed through on their threats to break up the camp. This time, Northeastern police, the Boston police, and Massachusetts state troopers detained over 100 students, arresting those who could not or would not produce Northeastern IDs. The tents and other camp equipment were thrown into moving trucks.

I saw one of these moving trucks leaving as I entered the Northeastern campus Saturday morning around 10am. Where the camp had been was an unbroken green expanse, empty of tents and students, surrounded by metal barricades. Nearby, a group of students faced some police officers and chanted “Israel bombs, NEU pays! How many kids did you kill today?”

A Northeastern student on the scene, senior Sarah Barber, told me that Northeastern’s ties to the defense industry, particularly Raytheon, had long been a subject of debate on campus. Even when she was a freshman, there were posters in common spaces that said “Pull out of Raytheon.” In fact, in 2023 the Student Government Association voted to call on school administration to end contracts with private military companies.

Barber said she was sympathetic to the camp, but also worried that if she joined, the university might withhold her diploma. She saw many on campus who were supportive of the encampment and the Palestinian cause, but others were hostile, and tempers sometimes ran high. Barber said, “I once walked by a girl in a hijab being screamed at by people. I asked if she was okay, and she said, ‘They just started screaming at me about Gaza.’”

The administration’s excuse for breaking up the camp was that it included “professional protesters” from outside, and that antisemitic chants had been heard, including “Kill the Jews.” But as another pro-Palestinian student on the scene, Alina Caudle, pointed out, that phrase was actually yelled by a counter-protester Friday night at the camp. In video of the incident, a young man draped in an Israeli flag shouted, “Kill the Jews! Anybody on board? That’s what you chanted for!” Pro-Palestinian students can then be heard shouting him down.

I stopped by the MIT encampment on Sunday, a warm spring day. Students talked, snacked, worked on laptops, or spoke to visitors. While I was there, a couple of mothers from Lexington came to ask how they could help, and a high school student took some pictures. Seated on a lawn chair in the sun, I spoke for over an hour to Zeno (who uses just his last name), a graduate student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management—Netanyahu’s alma mater.

Zeno, a former captain in the Air Force, had been active in the Black Graduate Students Association (BGSA) before October 7. He explained, “We were doing a lot of group studies on different liberation movements. My family’s Black American and my mother’s Puerto Rican—through that side there’s indigenous Taino—so being Black and indigenous, I know oppressed populations when I see them.”

Groups that Zeno organized with demonstrated for a ceasefire and held a teach-in about Black and Palestinian solidarity. MIT Graduates for Palestine began researching and publishing about MIT’s ties to the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Student groups also created referenda calling for an immediate ceasefire and an end to MIT’s “special relationship” with the Israeli ministry; a vote by MIT undergraduates resulted in 63% support for such a resolution, and MIT graduate students voted 70% in favor.

“One of the more concerning pieces of research,” Zeno said, “involves autonomous robotic swarms. Imagine quadcopter drones being AI-driven rather than piloted, and imagine if they could swarm together. AI built by Zionists—how dangerous would that be? Sci-fi kind of stuff.”

When the police cracked down at Columbia, MIT students quickly came together on the night of Sunday, April 21, to set up tents. Zeno said it garnered a lot of support from other students and faculty.

He explained, “It’s a hearts and minds campaign—but first hearts. When you put yourself on the line, risking arrest, risking your career, that inspires people. We get more and more courage. Someone might say, ‘I was nervous about what my lab might think of me,’ but now they’re spending the night out here. So every day we’re growing the community.”

Zeno understands the risks better than many. When the Emerson College encampment was threatened late Wednesday night, he and about ten other MIT students answered a call for support and crossed the Charles River to join the Emerson activists.

Zeno said, “The state troopers pulled up with lots of cars, zip ties, face shields, very militarized.” The MIT students were chanting when confronted by a policeman, who said they wouldn’t be arrested if they left immediately. “We didn’t reply except to start chanting ‘Free Palestine,’ at which point the cops got…agitated.”

He said his face was slammed against the wall, and then he was slammed against the hood of the police car. “I told the cop, I’m a disabled veteran, I have an autoimmune disorder that makes my fascia tight, so you have to be careful how you’re cuffing me. My arms don’t move that far up my back! But he kept trying to force them farther up.” According to Zeno, his friend, a Black Muslim, had his head banged on the ground, resulting in a concussion. Despite this and other injuries to protesters, police initially claimed the only injuries were to officers.

Just as the crackdown at Columbia begot more college encampments, though, this police violence only increased students’ solidarity. Zeno described how, as he was being cuffed with his face against the hood of the car, he was looking into the eyes of another MIT student being cuffed on the other side of the car. Laughing, he said, “She was newer to the camp, I hadn’t even talked to her yet, but we trauma-bonded.”

When I ask about how solidarity with Palestine connects to other causes, Zeno warms to his topic. He talks about white supremacy, corruption in the military, the two-party system, the working class, climate change, while a student in a colorful crocheted kipah with a Star of David necklace steps closer and starts nodding. “I see vets unhoused and people walking over them! This is a full-on dystopia and this is not how society is supposed to function. And then I come here and see people helping each other, pooling their resources, and not to add to their 401k.”

He pauses. “We could be so much better. We have the imagination to build a better society, and it’s people like this administration who can’t see it.”

His words reminded me of the Shabbat service I’d heard two days before at Harvard. Someone was unfolding the passage where the prophet Moses asks to see the face of God. They said, “Moses, after fleeing persecution, dares to ask for the unimaginable. When I think of my ancestors, I think of his courage in asking this. But the difference is, what we are asking for is not unimaginable. We are imagining it here together as one. Shabbat Shalom!”

In the background, I could see Kayali still practicing the dabke. She had been joined by a couple more people who jumped and wheeled together, the circle widening as I walked away.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The murder of the four students who protested the Vietnam War at Kent State University on May 1, 1970, was a tragedy.  The suppression of student protests on campuses across the United States in the spring of 2024 is a farce. The latter points to how little college administrators and politicians have learned when it comes to students’ speech, thinking that repression is the solution for dissent and disagreement.

The student protests of the 1960s were born of political anger. Students were unable to vote. They lacked a political voice in American elections and politics, and they lacked a voice in the governance of their schools. They demanded a seat at the table, the right to be heard and some control over the institutions that literally dictated their lives. Their demands for a voice were met with force and repression much in the same way that the civil rights demonstrators who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge  were.

College administrators first ignored student demands.  Then they sought to break up the demonstrations with campus police.  Politicians such as Governor Reagan in California, and Governor Rhodes in Ohio responded even more forcefully. They, along with President Richard Nixon, sought to capitalize on the protests politically and personally. They made political careers by running against challenges to authority, campaigning  as law and order candidates, claiming to speak for the silent majority, and labeling those who dissented as un-American.

A show of force was their solution across college campuses in America.  Eventually they called out the National Guard. The tragic result culminated in Kent State. Four Dead in Ohio as sung by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

Colleges and politicians should have learned the lessons of this mistake.  The lesson should have been that student voices matter, that students have a right to express their views, and  force is not a way to stifle or to address differences of opinion.

They should have also learned that universities are supposed to be socially responsible. They are or have become political institutions, not private corporations. They are socially responsible in the sense that they have responsibility to act ethically and act consistent with their values. Their values include free and open inquiry, disagreement, and debate.  They need to be responsible to their stakeholders, including their students, and they need to live up to the democratic ideals and values that they are supposed to be fostering.

But what we learned in the 1960s was that schools were also hotbeds of hypocrisy. That was the source of much of the campus unrest and protest in the 1960s.  Instead of fixing the hypocrisy, living  up to their values, and respecting student demands, higher education turned corporate.  Over a fifty year period schools thought they had learned how to address the dissent on campus. They adopted even more of a corporate structure, seeking a top down mechanism for trying to control curriculum, faculty, and students. They adopted speech and civility codes as a way not to encourage debate but as a tool to discourage views that they do not want to hear.

The corporate university turned itself into a  private good, forcing students to borrow tens of thousands of dollars and thereby discipline their behavior by the demands of the economic marketplace.  Moreover, the corporate university  created its own problem by not being neutral when it came to a diversity of viewpoints, favoring some as opposed to others. It created not a tolerance but an intolerance of certain types of speech. Moreover, as universities have become even more corporate they have built lofty endowments whose investments are oftentimes questionable and which gives donors  outsized influence upon  what administrators and professors can do.

Much in the same way that the students of the 60s criticized universities for the defense contracts they took and how universities furthered the Vietnam War, students today criticize endowments for supporting causes and issues of which they do not support.  They have legitimate grievances against both the US government’s support for a war they do not endorse, and also against universities  whom they see as complicit. They demand a voice, call for disinvestment, or simply want to express their disagreement.

Yet again politicians such as Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson are denouncing the protests, calling for the National Guard to quell student  speech.  Yet again a sitting president seems unable or unwilling to  listen to the students.  Yet again another war will impact a presidential campaign.

This is more than a tragedy.  It is a farce.

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Caricature by Leslie Ward – Public Domain

The late 1890s were a time of acute social and economic upheaval in China. Foreign governments dramatically increased their economic penetration and influence in China during this period, and the Chinese suffered an embarrassing military defeat at the hands of Japan in a war that began in the summer 1894. Catastrophic floods of the Yellow River in the final years of the century devastated thousands of square miles and directly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. Famine and disease followed in the wake of the floods, driving massive movements of people and leaving millions of peasants in the north of the country in conditions of extreme poverty. Amidst these overlapping crises, “1898 was a good year for the Christians,” and the missionaries added “a new threat to peasant well-being.”^[1]That year also saw the political turbulence of the Hundred Days of Reform and its aftermath, in particular the coup d’état that made Empress Dowager Cixi the head of the Qing government.

It is within this context that the Boxer Uprising materializes. While the general circumstances surrounding the Uprising have become a familiar story to many in the United States, it is nonetheless poorly understood, our accounts shaped by Western chauvinism and the old, embarrassed desire to rationalize the brutality of the West’s efforts to “civilize” benighted foreigners. A popular romanization of the movement’s actual name is Yi-he quan, which has been translated as “righteous and harmonious fists.”^[2] But the group was “dismissively known by members of the Western embassies”^[3] in Beijing as the Boxers, owing to ritualistic martial arts practices to which confused westerners referred as “Chinese boxing.” As historian and China expert Joseph W. Esherick observes, the “boxing” of the Yi-he quan movement “was really a set of invulnerability rituals—to protect them from the powerful new weapons of the West.” Professor Esherick observes that even the popular name “Boxer Rebellion” is a misnomer pointing to a degree of historical misunderstanding, as the Boxers were never actively rebelling against the Qing dynasty and its Manchu ruling class.^[4] As a matter of fact, the Boxers had expressed support of the Qing and had always made it explicit that theirs was a struggle against foreign influence generally and the Christian missionary presence in particular. The Qing dynasty likewise expressed its support for the boxers in 1900 as the Eight-Nation Alliance moved toward the capital, as discussed below.

At the time of a serious economic crisis, the Boxers observed the clear connection between burgeoning Christianity, propelled by ever-bolder missionary leaders, and the growing power of Western governments in their country. Just as many of the most important and sacred temples were being repurposed as churches by the Christian missionaries, so was much of China’s wealth being expropriated by the foreign powers. Their history and culture were being destroyed before their eyes while millions of Chinese sank into lower and lower states of poverty and need. Unlike many contemporary accounts, “[t]he classic works on modern China” correctly “stressed the crucial role of Western and Japanese imperialism” in reducing China to the crisis state of social and economic breakdown the country witnessed during the first half of the twentieth century.^[5] The Boxer Uprising is among the most important events for developing an understanding of several related phenomena that continue to shape the world of today; it is one of the major immediate preludes to the decades-long conflict between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party, and it helps to explain current relations between China and the West, particularly the foreign policy of the United States as today’s dominant imperial power.

Through a combination of military pressure and economic coercion, the major powers of Europe had acquired strategically important pieces of territory and broad concessions of authority that allowed them power over tariffs and trade and supplanted local governments and laws in much of the country on important issues. Such grants of privilege to foreign governments, accomplished through a series of humiliating unequal treaties, had become a source of controversy, rightly resented by the Chinese population. The governments of the United Kingdom and France, for example, held some concessions in China for almost one-hundred years.

The Boxers were a genuinely decentralized, bottom-up, people’s uprising against a destructive, extractive economic system foisted upon Chinese people from without—a system that could not have been erected or maintained without war. The Boxers understood the connection between economic extraction and imperialistic wars better than most people do today, because they lived and observed that connection and its material consequences. Today’s war hawks and imperialists follow directly from the government elites of the major European powers of the nineteenth century and the turn of the century in pretending that there is an equivalence between high notions of free trade and gunboat diplomacy. The elites of the capitalist West believed it their clear and unquestionable prerogative to “open China,” and this they did through force, the language of “free trade” notwithstanding.

The Uprising’s crescendo was the Boxers’ siege of the international legations. Founded after China’s defeat in the Second Opium War, the Legation Quarter was an area of the capital city that was the prime real estate home to the diplomats of the foreign powers. The siege lasted almost two months during the summer of 1900, until the Boxers were overcome by the Eight Nation Alliance of Germany, Japan, Russia, Britain, France, the United States, Italy, and Austria-Hungary. The Eight Nation Alliance’s attacks on the Taku Forts in June of 1900 had led to the Qing government’s decision to support the Boxers in the fighting that took place at the legations. It is noteworthy that there was no formal declaration of war against China. Among the Eight-Nation Alliance, Japan committed far and away the largest number of troops, with over 20,000 of its soldiers descending upon the Chinese capital. Of the soldiers the British sent to the war, thousands were unwilling conscripts from India, forced at the point of a gun to a faraway war in which they held no stake. In the brutal aftermath of the Alliance’s victory at the capital city, suspected boxers were tortured and killed, often publicly decapitated. The Alliance’s looting remains legendary. An estimated 80% of Beijing’s cultural objects were either looted or destroyed. Missionaries, too, knew an opportunity to loot when they saw it, demanding indemnity payments for losses incurred during the Uprising; the payment amounts and terms reflected the power of the missionaries—they were new unequal treaties intended to punish local populations. They took whatever they could, reaping a massive windfall from the proceeds of the stolen booty. The excesses of one well-known missionary, William Scott Ament, made headlines back in the United States, particularly after Mark Twain entered the fray.

Published in the February 1901 issue of the North American Review, Twain’s satirical essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” addressed the controversy of the church engaging in the exploitative looting of China. In it, Twain skewered the ideological foundations of imperialism with characteristic trenchance, addressing the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising, and in particular the actions of Ament. A Congregationalist minister, Ament had left for China on a missionary effort shortly after his ordination in the fall of 1877. In China, Ament was the “ideal missionary,”^[6] an able preacher in Mandarin Chinese who became one of the most influential missionaries in China. Twain regarded Ament as a moral hypocrite and fraud, and his treatment of the reverend was cuttingly sarcastic:

We all hold [Ament] dear for manfully defending his fellow missionaries from exaggerated charges which were beginning to distress us, but which his testimony has so considerably modified that we can now contemplate them without noticeable pain. For now we know that, even before the siege, the missionaries were not “generally” out looting, and that, “since the siege,” they have acted quite handsomely, except when “circumstances” crowded them. I am arranging for the monument.

Mark Twain was a key figure in the foundation of the American Anti-Imperialist League, becoming one of the organization’s Vice Presidents in 1901. He was a forceful and adamant opponent of war and imperialism and became a “red-hot anti-imperialist.”^[7] In 1900, in a piece for the New York Herald, Twain had written of his conversion experience, remarking on his time as a “red-hot imperialist” who “wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific.” Twain soon came to understand that the mission of the U.S. government in the Philippines was the same old one, a mission not to free, but to subjugate—not to redeem, but to conquer. Twain’s experience reflects that of so many anti-war and anti-empire activists, who have been disabused of their jingoism by a growing awareness of history and respect for their fellow human beings.

In school, many received a boring, whitewashed version of Mark Twain—a humorist of bottomless wit certainly, and comfortably critical of American slavery and racism, but without a more comprehensive anti-authoritarian worldview. Though the ideological underpinnings of his anti-imperialism have been debated, Twain clearly understood a relationship between monopoly capitalism and imperialism.^[8] The anti-imperialism that was so important a part of his life and character has been blotted out because it is not a fit with the worldview of a decadent, out-of-touch American ruling class. It is difficult to deny the judgment reached by R. Samarin in the 1950 article “The True Mark Twain,” which argued that America’s culture-makers had presented Twain “to the reading public in a false light,” promoting him as a shallow and “easy-going humorist.” Samarin contends that Twain’s indictments of capitalism and his “attack against the dictatorship of the dollar in American life” were deliberately buried.^[9] His work for the League was incredibly important to him, and later in life, the failure of the anti-imperialist movement left Twain with an increasingly pessimistic and “despairing world view.”^[10]

The American Anti-Imperialist League was founded in 1898 as a response to the ongoing Spanish-American war. The anti-imperialists’ platform protested against “the subjugation of the weak by the strong,” anticipating today’s critics of empire in resisting a so-called rules-based order that cynically ratifies the arbitrary violence of the hegemonic power. The organization’s members, though extremely diverse in background and ideology, understood well that embarking on a project of global conquest and empire would fundamentally change the character of America’s social, cultural, and political institutions, debasing and corrupting them. History has of course borne out their worries, as an increasingly powerful arms industry and ever-expanding military-industrial complex have neutralized and neutered democratic institutions in favor of a comparatively tiny elite. American society is now bereft of democracy. We have trillions of dollars for war-making while Americans go hungry and unhoused—and, crucially, this was both predictable and predicted by the anti-imperialists of over one-hundred years ago.

Charles Ames, a prominent member of the League and a Unitarian minister, warned that the quest for empire would mean a “trampling on the principles of free government,” making the United States “one more bully among bullies,” “only add[ing] one more to the list of oppressors of mankind.”^[11] Ames represents another kind of Christian and man of the cloth, one who understood Jesus as a radical messenger for love and peace in a world racked by a sick, destructive obsession with purity and rules, the kind of ideology that divides people from one another. It is critical to understand the nuanced perspective with which the members of the American Anti-Imperialist League approached this subject: their opposition to war and empire was not only about the rights and freedoms of the people whose countries and cultures were being ravaged, though this was certainly a central aspect of their opposition. Crucially, it was also about the domestic upshots of empire, the politico-economic cementing of a permanent war machine incarnated as a standing army, a permanent military intelligence bureaucracy, and a nominally private war industry, well-connected to finance capital and political decision-makers. It was obvious to late nineteenth century American anti-imperialists that this conflux of organized and centralized incentives held the potential to foreclose the possibility of freedom and people’s government.

The connection between imperialism and racial animus was also always clear to those paying attention. It is impossible to manufacture public support for the conquest of faraway lands and peoples without cultivating the pretense of ethnic and cultural superiority, the idea that the imperial power actually helps the conquered by sharing its more advanced culture. Both President William McKinley and President Theodore Roosevelt attempted to buoy their unpopular war-making by “branding their Filipino foes as little better than ungrateful savages,”^[12] just as the American and European press had reported on the Boxers with already-established racist tropes, appealing to scare tactics associated with characterizing Asians as “the Yellow Peril.” As there is today, there was much overlap a century ago between the anti-imperialist movement and activism for equality of rights under the law between racial and ethnic groups.

Moorfield Storey is among the most important figures in the history of the League, serving as its President from 1905 until the final days of the organization in 1921. Storey is more well-known as among the founding members of the NAACP, serving as its first president from the organization’s founding in 1910 until he died in 1929. Storey was a pioneer in the use of targeted, strategic litigation to secure civil rights victories and raise awareness of important civil rights issues (later taken up by the ACLU and others), and he was instrumental in bringing an end to the exclusion of Black Americans from the American Bar Association.^[13] He believed that domestic racial violence and domination were intimately connected with a broader way of thinking in which a ruling class formulates an ideology of both economic and ethnic stratification, with a ruling class using ideology to manufacture consent among the middle classes for a profoundly violent and immoral system. In this thinking, he was of course many decades ahead of his time.

Our political and media class, even (perhaps especially) our liberals, harbors a system of belief not so very different from the one held by the turn-of-the-century imperialists against whom Twain railed. They continue to believe, against all available evidence, that we’ve arrived at a kind of end of history, that Washington should, indeed must, project America’s cultural, political, and economic paradigm around the world—as a boon to the world. As the late Palestinian-American scholar and activist Edward Said observed over 20 years ago, this is all predicated on “the theory that imperialism is a benign and necessary thing,” the ability of the oppressor to see itself as “unlike all other empires,” with a mission “not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.” Notwithstanding its proponents’ pretenses to enlightened  liberalism, this is a philosophy that proceeds in direct continuity from the one underpinning the genocide of the peoples the Spanish and English wiped out in the Americas. Today’s colonial enterprises demonstrate that we are not nearly as far from these ideologies of racial hierarchy and extreme violence as we think. Most people in the white, educated West have committed themselves to a vast complex of politics to which they don’t realize they’ve committed themselves. Imperialism and colonialism are fundamentally attempts to define and establish one’s own culture as the foundation of or condition precedent to the cultures of other peoples. Inequality is always at the center of such projects.

But across time, people everywhere have desired self-determination and organized within their communities to resist the subjugation and oppression of foreign rulers. For wanting just what we all want and expect, they have been hatefully slurred as uncivilized, as animals, terrorists, savages, rebels, criminals, and subversives. But they never sought the violent domination of conquering foreign nations looking for resources to plunder. The modern era’s imperial powers have always feigned shock that the peoples they want to steal from and sentence to permanent second-class status in their own homelands are not ready to welcome them with open arms. In the world that is emerging now, a more grounded geopolitical posture will be an absolute imperative for the United States, particularly after the massive loss of respect and legitimacy that will come from the rest of the world now.

We are entering a new moment of global discontent with the arrogance and license of an increasingly brutal imperial order.

Like those who fight for freedom today, the Boxers didn’t need to be taught revolutionary consciousness. They wanted to protect their families, their home, and their way of life. They understood something philosopher Chantelle Gray observed in a recent interview: “Revolution is not something that is this kind of event,” but is rather “something that we practice in the here and now, individually, together, all the time” as “a persistent action towards freedom—towards more freedom.” They understood and lived this intuitively. Twain famously referred to himself as a Boxer and wished the movement success, calling the Boxers patriots. We must learn to see today’s Boxers in the same light.

Notes.

^[1] Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (University of California Press 1987), page 185.

^[2] To avoid confusion, I’ve chosen to refer to the movement as the Boxers here, rather than using their actual name.

^[3] David J. Silbey, The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China: A History (Hill and Wang 2012).

^[4] Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (University of California Press 1987), page xiv.

^[5] As against the view, growing in popularity at the time of Esherick’s article in 1972, that “imperialism fostered economic development, progressive Western-style nationalism and institutional modernization.”

^[6] Larry Clinton Thompson, William Scott Ament and the Boxer Rebellion: Heroism, Hubris and the “Ideal Missionary”(McFarland & Company 2009), page 2.

^[7] Selina Lai-Henderson, Mark Twain in China (2015 Stanford University Press).

^[8] John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (Oxford University Press 2000), page 134.

^[9] James L. Machor, The Mercurial Mark Twain(s): Reception History, Audience Engagement, and Iconic Authorship (Routledge 2023).

^[10] Hunt Hawkins. “Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialism.” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910, vol. 25, no. 2, 1993, pp. 31–45. In 1906, Twain writes, “The woes of the wronged and unfortunate poison my

life and make it so undesirable that pretty often I wish I were 90 instead of 70.”

^[11] Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (Henry Holt and Company 2017).

^[12] Kenneth Osgood, Andrew K. Frank, Selling War in a Media Age: The Presidency and Public Opinion in the American Century(University Press of Florida 2010).

^[13] Paul Finkelman, ed. American Encyclopedia of Civil Liberties: Volume 3, R-Z (Routledge 2018), page 1571.

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Photograph Source: Ernest Cole – Public Domain

As I write in Durban on 27 April South Africa is commemorating the third decade since the end of apartheid. The mood is sombre. Millions remain excluded from economic opportunity. Unemployment is at over 40%. For the youth the rate is over 60%. More than a quarter of children under the age of five have stunted growth due to hunger. The country has one of the highest murder rates in the world and an extremely violent and corrupt police force.

Freedom Day is a national public holiday celebrated each year on 27 April to celebrate the anniversary of the first democratic election on 27 April 1994. It has been contested from below since 2006 when Abahlali baseMjondolo, a powerful movement of the urban, began to mourn ‘UnFreedom Day’ while the state celebrated ‘Freedom Day’. This year around 15 000 people showed up for an ‘UnFreedom Day’ rally on land occupation in Durban and the event was covered live on national TV.

Ten years ago the black middle classes, of which I am part, were still in the mood to celebrate Freedom Day. For many of us our lives are fundamentally different to those of our parents and we enjoy opportunities and lifestyles of which they could only dream. But today even the black middle classes are disillusioned. The collapse of public services and infrastructure means that education, health care, security, electricity and now even water are increasingly privately sourced by those with the means placing even well-paid professionals under severe financial stress. The middle class is awash in debt and fearful of the frightening levels of crime.

The left had cogent critiques of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) from the beginning of its time in government, and radical intellectuals like Neville Alexander, Martin Legassick and David Hemson developed important critiques of the ANC in the 1980s. I embraced all those critiques but do acknowledge that it is a material fact that things were getting better for many people during the presidencies of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, and that Mbeki made great strides in deracialising and professionalising the civil service. This have got so bad that many of us now look back to the Mandela and Mbeki presidencies with more than a little nostalgia. Aside from his tragic misstep on AIDS, Mbeki was the most effective president since the end of apartheid. But that progress came to a screeching halt when Jacob Zuma, a ruthless kleptocrat, became President in 2009.

Zuma mixed neoliberal economic policies, including damaging austerity, with massive corruption, corruption at a staggering scale, to the mix. He also sharply escalated state repression, most infamously with the massacre of 34 mineworkers during a wildcat strike on the platinum mines in 2012. Grassroots groups such as the Amadiba Crisis Committee and Abahlali baseMjondolo were also hit with assassinations and a number of honest civil servants were assassinated.

In my many years as a trade union educator I saw the depths of the cynicism that set in among the organised working class during the Zuma years. That disillusionment was even more profound among Abahlali baseMjondolo, which has lost more than twenty of its members, including many leaders, mostly to political assassinations and police killings. If the industrial working class was deeply unhappy the poor were simply desperate.

The widespread euphoria when Zuma was finally removed from office in 2018 fizzled out as the ANC struggled to recover its integrity in the wake of the disastrous nine years under Zuma. It’s one shining achievement was taking Israel to the International Court of Justice. This brave act was welcomed by the left around the world and strongly supported by the ANC’s sternest left critics at home, including Abahlali baseMjondolo and the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (NUMSA), the largest trade union in the country.

Aside from some religious fundamentalists there is overwhelming support for Palestine among black South Africans and this was a moment in which the ANC could have recovered its moral centre. It was not able to expand this new sense of moral credibility into its domestic policies and practices though. It is true that its position on Palestine has won back some support for the party, perhaps particularly among Muslims, but the latest polls in advance of the election on 29 May show that the ANC is heading for a serious collapse in support.

The latest poll, released the day before Freedom Day, shows that the ANC is on track to win around 40% of the national vote. This will be the first time in thirty years that it has been unable to win an outright election victory. It will now be forced into a coalition government. At national level there are four other parties with other enough support to be real contenders for inclusion in the coming collation government.

The Democratic Alliance, which is polling second with around 22% of the vote, is a liberal party that remains white dominated even though most of its votes come from black voters. It has always supported neoliberal economic policies and has recently been sucked into the general capture of white liberal opinion by the hysterical pro-West (and therefore pro-Israel) politics driven by a set of reactionary white managed NGOs such as the Institute for Race Relations and the Brenthurst Foundation. The former has Chester Crocker as an ‘honorary life member’ and the latter, which openly operates in the orbit of the National Endowment for Democracy, has a former NATO advisor as its head and Richard Meyer, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the US, on its board.

The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) are polling third at around 11%. Some on the left have argued that it has fascist characteristics while others see it as a form of authoritarian nationalism. Everyone agrees that is crudely opportunistic, bald-facedly corrupt and highly intolerant of critique. It has sometimes engaged in xenophobic and anti-Indian politics. The EFF is aggressively opposed to white privilege though, and as a result has attracted the support of some alienated young people, often unemployed graduates, who see it as a wrecking ball swinging against enduring systems of exclusion. No credible left intellectual considers the party to be left though. It’s leader, Julius Malema, is more like a wannabe Vladimir Putin than a wannabe Lula da Silva.

Jacob Zuma’s new party, the MK Party, is polling fourth with around 8% of the vote. Zuma represents a viciously kleptocratic political class determined to regain access to state budgets. It masks this with a hard right wing nationalism that is violent, grossly xenophobic, and so far to the right on gender that it has proposed to send unmarried pregnant young women to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned. The party also wants to do away with constitutional democracy and place aristocratic authority over the authority of elected members of parliament.

The MK Party also has an alarming ethnic element to its politics. This means that it will never be a real national force, but some polls suggest that it could win the majority of the vote in Zuma’s home province of KwaZulu-Natal. This is frankly terrifying and could only mean the organised looting of the state and ever more violent repression. Political gangsterism and ethnic mobilisation are an extremely worrying pairing.

The only other party with any meaningful national support is the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) which is currently polling at just over 4%. It is a right-wing Zulu nationalist party that, like Zuma’s party, is only really a player in KwaZulu-Natal where it seems that it may come second to Zuma’s party on the provincial ballot.

There is no left party in the running. This is quite astounding for a country that has such a rich radical tradition and which is often described as the most unequal in the world. One reason for this is that the Communists and public sector workers remain affiliated to the ANC. The left outside of the ANC does have two mass organisations, NUMSA and Abahlali baseMjondolo. They are very different. NUMSA’s leaders were trained by the Communist Party before the union was expelled from the ANC alliance in 2013 . The union remains firmly Marxist-Leninist while Abahlali baseMjondolo advocates for a bottom up form of bottom up socialism driven from democratically organised land occupations. Neither organisation has been able to formulate a coherent electoral strategy.

Abahlali baseMjondolo started calling for its members to vote against the ANC from the 2014 election after its leaders started to be assassinated in 2013. It has repeated this call to vote against the ANC in every subsequent election but, in an indication of its growing desperation as more of its leaders have been assassinated, it has now called for tactical votes for three different parties in three elections. But while calling for a tactical vote against the ANC to protest repression is understandable, and was effective in the 2014 election, this is not a positive electoral program. It is a desperate rear guard defensive action.

NUMSA ran a quickly thrown together Leninist party in the 2019 election but, although the party’s inaugural conference was impressive, it was launched far too close to the election, failed miserably and then withered away during the stringent Covid lockdowns.

There is also a small but vibrant left in universities and various civil society organisations. It has developed many important critiques on economic questions but is notoriously sectarian and wages brutal intra-left wars and witch hunts with far more effectiveness than its attempts to organise. There are severe and possibly irreconcilable tensions between it and the mass based organisations of the left outside of the ANC. At the moment there are scant hopes that a left revival could come from this quarter but all left projects need intellectuals and one can only hope that it can overcome its damaging sectarianism and repair its relationship with the mass organisations.

There are no signs that the Communist Party and the mostly public sector unions that remain aligned to the ANC will break with the party. NUMSA does not appear to be trying to rebuild its failed party. Abahlali baseMjondolo has said that its members have demanded that “the movement should, working with like-minded membership based organisations, begin a process of considering how to build a political instrument for the people, a political instrument that aims to put the people in power rather than a new set of individuals”.

It does have influence beyond its 120 000 paid up members and gives leadership to an array of much smaller grassroots groups representing street traders, migrants, sex workers, residents of old migrant worker hostels, and the like. But unless the organisations of the poor, the trade unions and the middle class left can find a way to come together it seems unlikely that there will be real progress in building a party that will have a real chance to effectively contest the 2029 election. At the moment this looks to be a highly unlikely prospect. If the South African left is to have any chance of mounting an electoral challenge in the 2029 election extraordinary political vision and maturity will be required from all its different players.

The post A Sombre Mood in South Africa Thirty Years After Apartheid appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Photograph Source: Shaunak Modi – CC BY 4.0

There are several exercises in extremes playing out in India right now. Nearly a billion people are voting in elections that will last into early June, braving record-high temperatures to cast ballots. Against this backdrop, Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is throwing what will likely be the world’s most expensive wedding for his youngest son.

Although they appear unrelated, these phenomena are intimately linked.

With 1.4 billion people, India now has the largest population of any nation in the world, surpassing China in 2023. It is also the world’s largest democracy, a title it has held since the end of British colonial rule in 1947. India’s secular democracy has eroded, particularly since 2014 when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s leadership ushered in a dawn of Hindu supremacy in a nation that is home to many different faiths.

Much like the Christian right in the United States blended religious fervor with capitalist fundamentalism, the BJP has cloaked its pro-business position in saffron robes. And, just as American billionaires embrace the white supremacist Donald Trump, India’s wealthy seem unperturbed by incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s hate-filled speeches.

Indian corporate interests are counting on incumbent Modi winning another five years in office, “hoping for further easing of stifling investment restraints,” as per the Financial Times. This dismantling of regulations, which began a few decades before the BJP gained power, ushered in an erosion of India’s socialist infrastructure. Economists Subhashree Banerjee and Yash Tayal explained in the Deccan Herald, that India’s 1991 reforms ended up “liberalizing the Indian economy to an unprecedented extent. These reforms facilitated an environment for the wealthy to profit from the less-affluent without repercussions.”

The BJP accelerated this trend so that India, which housed nine billionaires in 2000, was home to 101 by 2017. According to Oxfam, “The top 10 percent of the Indian population holds 77 percent of the total national wealth,” and “73 percent of the wealth generated in 2017 went to the richest 1 percent, while 670 million Indians who comprise the poorest half of the population saw only a 1 percent increase in their wealth.” It’s clear that deregulation helped catapult the rich into greater riches while keeping India’s poor relatively impoverished.

Sitting atop this inglorious dung heap of billionaires is Mukesh Ambani, who is not only India’s richest man, but the wealthiest person in all of Asia—the world’s largest continent. He is also the world’s 11th richest man. And he appears to feel no shame in having spent $152 million for a three-day extravaganza in early March celebrating the coming nuptials of his youngest son.

Yes, that’s correct. Twenty-nine-year-old Anant Ambani’s “pre-wedding” festivities, which took place in Gujarat over three days (several months before the actual wedding), cost the equivalent of feeding nearly 50 million of India’s poorest citizens for a day. The groom-to-be’s mother sported a $60 million necklace to the party, while American pop icon Rihanna flew in to perform for guests for one-tenth of the cost of the jewels.

This brazen display of excess is oddly refreshing. Unlike many American billionaires who prefer hiding the perverse extent of their wealth, the Ambanis are delightfully honest in flexing their economic power for the world to see. The pre-wedding has generated countless headlines in India and in the world for its mind boggling lavishness—1,200 guests, including the world’s top CEOs and Bollywood’s most popular stars! More than 2,500 unique dishes including 70 breakfast options and 85 varieties of midnight snacks! Bespoke designer gowns dripping with pearls!

Forget Britain’s royal family, whose weddings appear humble in comparison—Harry and Meghan’s wedding cost a mere $43 million, cheaper than Mrs. Ambani’s necklace—India’s royalty is newly minted and unwilling to bow down at the altar of modesty.

The Ambanis’ conspicuous consumption has also generated endless derision from ordinary Indians who are having a field day lambasting the family’s apparent need for such profligacy on social media. One popular YouTube channel spent more than 13 minutes gleefully delving into every over-the-top detail, ridiculing the ridiculous.

There seemed to be at least some semblance of an attempt by the wealthy family to thwart the inevitable public criticism. Forbes reported that the festivities were held against the backdrop of a wildlife sanctuary called Vantara, which apparently is “the manifestation of Anant’s vision for a brighter future for the animal kingdom, from spreading awareness on the mistreatment of animals to working to breed near-extinct species.”

A friend of the happy couple told Forbes that, “The events brought incredible exposure and shone a spotlight on the good work that’s been done, and also spread the message on the state of animals in the world and the challenges to overcome in improving their welfare.”

Was it charity, shame, or public relations that prompted such a ludicrous juxtaposition as justification? We may never know.

Meanwhile, the defenders of corporate profiteering in India’s business-friendly atmosphere have enjoyed a public relations coup with the release of a long-overdue report by the BJP government earlier this year claiming that poverty in India now afflicts only 5% of the population. The report spawned such wild conclusions by publications like the Brookings Institute as “[d]ata now confirms that India has eliminated extreme poverty,” promoting the wild idea that predatory capitalism is good for Indian democracy.

But critics point out that the report’s numbers have been massaged to align with the BJP’s reelection efforts so as to paint the government as having achieved the near-impossible. According to Princeton economist Ashoka Mody, “While the publication of India’s first consumption figures in over a decade has generated much excitement, the official data appear to have been chosen to align with the government’s preferred narrative.”

Mody eloquently surmised, “[W]hile such misuse of statistics will amplify the India hype in elite echo chambers, poverty remains deeply entrenched in India, and broader deprivation appears to have increased as inflation erodes incomes of the poor.”

The “elite echo chambers” he references are very real. One Indian billionaire, NR Narayana Murthy, argued for a 70-hour work week in India (even as Americans are now debating working for less than half that time). A tech mogul and co-founder of Infosys, Murthy happens to be the father-in-law of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. He complained on a podcast that “India’s work productivity is one of the lowest in the world,” and that the nation’s youth ought to be saying, “This is my country. I’d like to work 70 hours a week.’”

India’s political and financial elites are painting a gold-plated vision of a modern Gilded Age: Because billionaires are saving wildlife from extinction it’s okay for them to obscenely flaunt their wealth, and meanwhile everyone’s fortunes are rising through hard work!

But the strongest evidence that this vision is a lie is for Indians to see their own lives against the Ambanis’. Nearly a billion Indians will finish casting ballots about a month before their “royal family” jet sets off to London for the youngest heir’s actual nuptials, to be held at the exclusive Stoke Park estate. If there’s anything voters can be grateful for, it is that their nation’s wealthy elites are busy reminding them of how little they have in comparison and how morally bankrupt a system is that allows such inequality.

The post India’s Billionaire Wealth is on Display as Nation Votes appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: SWinxy – CC BY-SA 4.0

We live in an age of increased disasters and encroaching fascism. This is a historical moment marked by a systemic attempt by an emerging authoritarianism to disable language and dissent of any substantive meaning, remove actions from the grammar of moral witnessing, and disassociate power from institutional justice. As all levels of society are hollowed out, notions of democratic community, the social contract, and compassion give way to a politics in which all matters of responsibility are individualized, privatized, and removed from broader systemic considerations. The habits of oligarchy are animated by fear and reproduced through relentless attacks on human possibilities, while “the disorder of real history is replaced by the orderliness of pseudo-history.”[1] In a time of widespread suffering and unrest, higher education is feared for its critical functions and students are expected to be silent, unresponsive to wider social issues, and ignore the relationship between the dynamics of power, marginality, and knowledge.  Amid the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the carceral state, faculty and students are expected to look away or inward, unresponsive to the language of imagined futures.

This process of depoliticization is intensified by a frontal attack on dissent, free speech, academic freedom, and institutions that support and nurture these crucial democratic rights and practices. Increasingly, higher education, in particular, under the influence of right-wing billionaires, authoritarian politicians, and cravenly boards of trustees is attacked for its critical functions, reduced to morally dead zones of the imagination and a mind-numbing conformity. Disdained as a public good whose purpose should be to educate young people to be informed and critical citizens, higher education is under pressure by far-right members of the GOP to renounce its responsibility to teach students to question, challenge, and think against the grain. One model for this regressive form of education is on display in Florida where Gov. Ron DeSantis has transformed New College, a once progressive college, into a citadel for anti-woke ideology and pedagogy–cleansed of classes where faculty and students can think critically, test their opinions, and realize themselves as engaged citizens.

No longer considered a public good where ideas and important social issues are nurtured, debated. and interrogated, institutions of higher education are being transformed into indoctrination centers where critical ideas and empowering pedagogies are held in contempt, transformed into apparatuses of censorship and hopelessness. Derided as a haven for critically informed social criticism, the far-right wants to reduce teaching and learning to what might be called cloning pedagogies, designed to clone culture, knowledge, ideas, and extremist world views.

Even worse. Higher education is increasingly being attacked by the far-right for its liberal claim of equality and a common good. As an institution that aligns with a notion of “citizenship… equated with human dignity [and] equality on multiple fronts,” it has garnered the wrath of fascists for whom hostility to universal citizenship is a central element of its mobilizing passions.[2] This hatred of equality reinforced by the selective definition of who counts as an American now feeds both the attack on higher education and an increasingly vicious racist politics. As Eddie S. Claude notes, the fantasy of a “lily-white America” and the call to banish Black and brown people “from the nation’s moral conscience” create landscapes of illusion, enable white supremacy, while furthering racist violence and the logic of exclusion and annihilation.[3] The far-right views thinking as dangerous as is the notion that education is central to politics and must be defined through it claims on democracy and its role in a time of tyranny.

Moral restrictions seem obsolete as another colonial war rages in Gaza, during which thousands of Palestinians are killed, while attempts to criticize what various international organizations label as war crimes are summarily dismissed as antisemitism. This refusal to acknowledge the violence being waged against Palestinians has morphed into a war against critical journalists, cultural workers, and increasingly higher education, now viewed by the far-right as a citadel of pernicious socialist thought. Under such circumstances, those who react to the suffering of others are subject to the dehumanizing and morally cannibalistic, verbal orgies of hatred, and increasingly, state violence. They are also at risk of a society in which civic death leads state violence, domestic terrorism, and a politics of disposability.[4]

In this historical moment, attacks on higher education make clear that struggling for freedom, equality, and justice comes with great risks. Such attacks give credence to an emerging fascist politics both in the U.S. and abroad that mark students who question settler colonial dispossession and state violence as objects of disparagement and potential violence by a racist-criminogenic state. Displays of civic courage now qualify students as objects of critique, exclusion, and in some cases arrests. In the current repressive climate, this points to not only the egregious act of censorship, but also to the death of the university as a public good and civic institution, regardless of its flawed notions of equality and civic knowledge.

For Trump and his Vichy-like enablers, higher education is portrayed as a laboratory of left-wing ideologies whose ultimate purpose is “to destroy family, community, and national unity.”[5] These repressive policies represent the return of what Ellen Schrecker has called “the new McCarthyism,” which uses the smear of communism to attack critical education, teacher autonomy, and “real-world issues of race, gender, and social inequality.”[6] She writes:

The current [McCarthyite] campaign to limit what can be taught in high school and college classrooms is clearly designed to divert angry voters from the deeper structural problems that cloud their own personal futures. Yet it is also a new chapter in the decades-long campaign to roll back the changes that have brought the real world into those classrooms. In one state after another, reactionary and opportunistic politicians are joining that broader campaign to overturn the 1960s’ democratization of American life. By attacking the CRT bogeyman and demonizing contemporary academic culture and the critical perspectives that it can produce, the current limitations on what can be taught endanger teachers at every level, while the know-nothingism these measures encourage endangers us all.[7]

The right’s attack on universities as citadels of leftist ideology dates back further than the purge of academics by the rabid anti-communists under Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. Authoritarian governments in the 1930s performed a similar task in order to control universities. As Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes:

From the fascist years in Europe…right-wing leaders have accused universities of being incubators of left-wing ideologies and sought to mold them in the image of their own propaganda, policy, and policing aims. … Given the virulence the Nazis showed in silencing their critics in and out of the academy after Hitler took power in 1933, it is remarkable that this talking-point has retained traction for the right. It has done so thanks, largely, to the military juntas of the cold war era, which gave new life to fascism’s battles against the left.[8]

More recently, McCarthyite tactics became rampant during George W. Bush’s presidency. This was particularly evident when Vice President Cheney claimed that critics of the administration’s Iraq policy “abetted terrorists.”[9]Simultaneously, the Bush-era witnessed the emergence of McCarthyite institutions like Campus Watch, the David Project, Students for Academic Freedom, and other groups designed to police Middle East Studies and the liberal arts in general for any vestige of dissent against US domestic and foreign policies. Discoverthenetwork.org and other extremist organizations listed the names of professors considered un-American, similar to how ACTA listed the names of alleged unpatriotic professors after the 9/11 attacks.[10]

In an age dominated by feral social media platforms, a malignant form of censorship has emerged in even more virulent forms. For example, this is evident in the work of organizations such as StopAntisemitism, which engages in online vigilantism by doxing critics of Israel’s war on Gaza by “posting personal information online to encourage harassment — thereby chilling debate.”[11] Not only are such critics named, shamed, and harassed, but many of them are expelled from college and often terminated from their jobs.

At present, a more dangerous form of McCarthyism has returned with a vengeance. This authoritarian turn in higher education has been accelerated by the increasing suppression of dissent by critics of Israel’s war in Gaza. Against Israel’s historically based claim of ontological innocence and perpetual victimhood, a new generation of critics argue, as Pankaj Mishra makes clear, that “oppression does not improve moral character.”[12] Israel can no longer absolve its crimes by drawing upon its own tortured unfathomable history of repression and genocide.   Federic Lordon goes further and argues that Israel’s brutal war of revenge on Gaza and its call to prevent a Palestinian state represent a form of “moral suicide.” He adds: “Never before has there been such a colossal squandering of symbolic capital that was thought to be unassailable, which had been built up in the wake of the Holocaust.”[13]

Netanyahu’s war on Gaza has intensified protests on university campuses against Israel’s brutal violence against Palestinians. In response, the mainstream media and a number of pundits, with the blessing of pro-Israeli interests, has weaponized antisemitism, a label which has been reduced to any critique of Israel’s military conduct in Gaza or the West Bank. As William I. Robinson observes, one consequence of this pernicious criticism by the far-right is that “academic freedom and free speech are under an all-out attack on university campuses in the United States, not just from college administrations and pro-Israeli groups, but also from the highest levels of the Israeli state.”[14]

Student activists who criticize Israel are facing harassment, monitoring, expulsion, public shaming, and, in some cases, mass arrest for disruptions, evidenced by recent events at Columbia and Yale University, and increasingly several other universities.[15] The protester’s call for colleges and universities to divest from corporations that profit from Israel’s war on Gaza along with their demand  for “a complete ceasefire in Gaza” are buried in the blanket charge of antisemitism and the force of police violence.[16]  These arrests serve as another indication of the collaboration between certain Ivy League colleges and the far-right in the assault on student voices.[17] Ari Paul observes that mainstream news has generally delighted in the crackdown, making clear “that campus safe spaces where speech is banned to protect the feelings of listeners are good, depending on the issue.” [18] This is not to suggest that attacks on Jewish and students supporting Palestinian rights should be overlooked, but the real objective of the war being waged on elite universities poses a far greater threat than generalized and undebated charges of antisemitism.   The inquisition at work in the house committee hearings investigating campus antisemitism is heavily inundated with political theater displayed by Elise Stefanik and her GOP colleagues. What is obvious in this show trial, as David Bell notes, is that they “do not have any real interest in solving campus problems. Their goal is to expose liberal elites as corrupt, dangerous, and anti-American.”[19] The real objective of these hearings is to weaponize protests against the war in Gaza as components of a larger strategy aimed at exercising a defining role in the control of higher education. Robert Kuttner rightly notes in The American Prospect that this McCarthyite assault is part of a broader effort “to suppress fundamental freedoms of expression.”[20]

While the issue of campus antisemitism warrants discussion and debate, it is not within the purview of congresswomen, Elise Stefanik. Nor is any serious discussion of widespread Islamophobia and the squelching of dissent by various campus groups supporting Palestinian rights. By leading the charge in Congressional hearings on antisemitism on college campuses, Stefanik adopts a flame-throwing confrontational approach aimed at dictating “the academic mission of a university,” prescribing disciplinary measures against professors, and formulating guidelines “for acceptable campus speech.”[21]  The irony and hypocrisy here are hard to overlook given Stefanik’s “Puritan superego,” belligerent stance, and self-assured role as an opponent of campus antisemitism.[22] This is especially noteworthy in light of her denial of elections results, characterization of individuals who attacked the Capitol as “January 6 hostages,” and her impassioned and staunch defense of Trump, who associates with prominent antisemites such as Kanye West and Nick Fuentes.[23]

The hypocrisy at work in criticism by far-right politicians is not limited to Stefanik. Senator Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and other MAGA supporters of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6 have called for President Biden, whose election they refused to accept, to use the National Guard to arrest students on college campuses. For the MAGA group,  violence waged by insurrections is legitimate, but students protesting against the massacre of Palestinians represent a threat to the state. On full display here is the irony of warmongers calling for violence against students who are calling for “the American government to stop sending military aid to Israel” and “for universities to stop investing in weapons manufacturers…who profit from Israel’s invasion of Gaza.”[24] Hypocrisy in the service of violence is perfectly aligned with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s characterization of student protesters on American university campuses as “”antisemitic mobs” that must be stopped.[25]  Senator Bernie Sanders aptly criticized Netanyahu’s derogatory remarks as a ploy to use antisemitism “to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies of your extremist and racist government.”[26]  He further adds:

  No, Mr. Netanyahu. It is not antisemitic or pro-Hamas to point out that in a little over six months, your extremist government has killed 34,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 77,000—70% of whom are women and children. It is not antisemitic to point out that your bombing has completely destroyed more than 221,000 housing units in Gaza, leaving more than one million people homeless—almost half the population.[27]

Of course, hypocrisy is important to point out but what really is at issue here is a political party and its far-right media apparatchiks who believe in using  state force and the exercise of violence against their  own people in order to shut down free speech.  Yes, this is a form of domestic terrorism and it is a fundamental element of fascist regimes.   Campus protests are not merely seen as unwelcome disruptions but are criminalized by far-right university administrators and politicians.

Compounding these crude attacks on students protesting against the war on Gaza and the corporations that provide them with military weapons is the aggressive involvement of pro-Israel groups, some with the backing of the Israel state, in a broad campaign to shame and publicly disclose information about pro-Palestinian protesters, including students and faculty. Commenting on the repressive nature of this intervention by the Israeli state, Robinson states that the Israeli government has initiated what appears to be a wide-ranging covert campaign and action plan “to harass and intimidate students, faculty, and administrators into silence.”[28] He elaborates on some of the chilling specifics of the plan:

The plan aims at ‘inflicting economic and employment consequences on antisemitic [read: pro-Palestinian/anti-genocide] students and compelling universities to distance them from their campuses.” The plan specifies that actions taken “should not have the signature of the State of Israel on it.’… It calls for ‘personal, economic and employment repercussions for the distributors of antisemitism.’ According to the plan, the inter-ministerial task force will carry out ‘naming and shaming’ by ‘publicizing the names of those generating antisemitism on campuses — both students and faculty and impacting the employment of those identified as the perpetrators of antisemitism.’ Those targeted ‘will struggle to find employment in the U.S. and will pay a significant economic price for their conduct.’[29]

Within this frigid climate of censorship, doxing, and punishment, faculty are being fired and students are being intimidated, harassed, and silenced. One egregious example took place when the University of Southern California’s campus canceled a valedictory commencement address by Asna Tabassum, a Muslim student—more than likely because of her expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people.[30] In another instance, which has become all too familiar, some “New York University students were hauled in for disciplinary hearings after staging a reading of poetry by the Palestinian author Refaat Alareer,” who was killed in an Israeli airstrike.[31]  After students erected tents on the campus of Columbia University in protesting the slaughter of Palestinians taking place in Gaza, the university president, Nemat Shafik, called in the city’s Police Department to remove them. Over a hundred students were arrested, all of them were suspended, their student IDs were deactivated, and they were evicted from their dorms.[32] Such actions are reminiscent of the protests and arrests of over one thousand students that took place at Columbia University in 1968. It is worth noting, as Judd Legum states, “In 2018, on the 50th anniversary of the 1968 arrests, then-Columbia President — and noted First Amendment scholar — Lee Bollinger said the decision to call in the NYPD in 1968 was ‘a serious breach of the ethos of the university’.”[33] Clearly, this is a lesson that President Shafik has chosen to ignore and in doing so  is complicit in supporting this new wave of McCarthyism and its intensifying attacks on free speech taking place on more and more college campuses.

Her moral vacuity in calling the police to arrest students–who should be celebrated for their courage not punished–is astonishing given her comment that she has initiated “this extraordinary step because these are extraordinary circumstances.”[34] What is extraordinary is that students are protesting the fact that over 34,000 Palestinians are dead, including more than 14,000 children, and that 80 percent of the population in Gaza are homeless, many of whom are starving in the midst of an intentionally imposed famine.

What is extraordinary is that students are opposing Columbia University’s investment and ties with corporations that profit from Israel’s war on Gaza. What is extraordinary is that students are calling for an end to obscene and morally reprehensible acts of violence, such as Israel‘s  bombing of Rafah—”where more than half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million has sought refuge from fighting elsewhere.”[35] Such attacks have resulted in the indiscriminate killing of women and children who have no place to escape.

What is extraordinary is that students are trying to stop an Israeli military attack Gaza in which war crimes are being committed in violation of international law, as evidenced by the fact that over  300 bodies have been discovered in “a series of mass graves near Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza….The dead include men, women and children….Some were discovered handcuffed, indicating that victims were killed in mass summary executions.”[36]       What Shafik willfully fails to acknowledge is that the real crime is not students demonstrating against the war–asserting their sense of moral agency—but the scale of human suffering in Gaza to which they are opposed. As an educator, Shafik is shamefully blind to the fact that Israel has not only destroyed or damaged all 12universities in Gaza but has engaged in a “wholesale destruction” of Gaza’s educational system, committing what UN experts have labeled as scholasticide.[37]  In all of these matters, Shafik displays an astonishing degree of moral weightlessness, rooted in an appalling mix of ignorance and political irresponsibility.

While genuine antisemitism exists, it is now being used and maligned by the far-right—known for its own embrace of antisemitism–to engage in targeted harassment and shut down all criticism of the violence waged in Gaza against the Palestinian people, especially women and children. In this context, all criticism of Israel is being branded as antisemitic. This reflects more than a blind commitment to the Israeli state under a far-right leadership; it covers up an institutional machinery of state repression while reproducing a central tenet of authoritarianism, which is to silence those minds that dare to criticize its totalitarian ideology, policies, and anti-democratic tendencies. It is worth repeating that this far-right call for an “ecstasy of obedience” increasingly uses the charge of antisemitism on university campuses as a wedge issue to attack colleges and universities, which they claim are too liberal. It is worth noting that while the Biden white house condemned antisemitic incidents taking place at Columbia University, student journalists at the school stated that many of the incidents took place “on the fringe of campus, not involving students.”[38]

What is often forgotten by critics of the new McCarthyism is that this upgraded attack on higher education is worse than anything that took place in the 1950s. Ellen Schrecker, one of the great historians of McCarthyism, has written that the current assaults on higher education are “worse than McCarthyism.” She is worth quoting at length:

 It’s worse than McCarthyism. The red scare of the 1950s marginalized dissent and chilled the nation’s campuses, but it did not interfere with such matters as curriculum or classroom teaching. Its goal was to eliminate communism (however loosely defined) and all the individuals, organizations, and ideas associated with it from any position of influence within American society. The witch hunters achieved that goal by firing people who had once been in or near the small, unpopular Communist party and/or refused to inform on their ex-comrades. They also relied on blacklists, loyalty oaths, speaker bans, and interference from the FBI and other anti-communist investigators. … the classroom was not targeted.[39]

History matters and it is crucial to remember that higher education since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 has been under severe attack by the forces of neoliberalism intent on turning education at all levels into nothing less than adjuncts of the workplace and laboratories for ideological repression. As I have stated in another article:

Across the globe, a new historical conjuncture is emerging in which attacks on higher education as a democratic institution and on dissident public voices in general – whether journalists, whistleblowers, or academics – are intensifying with alarming consequences for both higher education and the formative public spheres that make democracy possible. Hyper-capitalism … has put higher education in its crosshairs and the result has been the ongoing transformation of higher education into an adjunct of the very rich and powerful corporate interests… In fact, the right-wing defense of the neoliberal dismantling of the university as a site of critical inquiry is more brazen and arrogant than anything we have seen in the past. [40]

Since 2016, with the election of Trump as president, the attack on higher education has increased in scope and intensity and resembles forms of education similar to what took place in Nazi Germany.[41] The attempts by conservatives “to deplore knowledge, deride academic inquiry for its own sake, and discourage intellectual curiosity in our children and the American public” has a long and sordid history.[42]

What is different today is that an emerging fascist politics driven by a range of far-right billionaires and groups have education in their crosshairs. For instance, as Judd Legum recently noted, college administrators are facing “substantial political pressure from the right,” and some like Columbia President Minouche Shafik are too willing to buckle under such intimidation.[43] As Irene Mulvey, the President of the American Association of University Professors observed, we are experiencing a “new era of McCarthyism where a House Committee is using college presidents and professors for political theater.”[44] The recent attacks by the far-right on higher education are designed to reach deep into the classroom in order to erase dangerous moments of history, eliminate criticism of systemic racism, banish subjects dealing with sexual orientation, shut down any discussions of social problems, and weaken any control teachers or faculty have over their classrooms. This is more than an airbrushing of what the far-fight considers unpalatable and dangerous.

This is an education that produces moral blindness, ignorance, and reveals contempt for empowering ideas, critical thinking and civil liberties. It is a war against history, memory, solidarity, and the dissolution of the social ties that bind us together in a set of shared values.[45] As Donald Howard argues, educators and others cannot risk failing to speak and act against the current right-wing assaults, especially at a time when a range of democratic educations are under assault and “the very fabric of our democracy is frayed, if not unraveling. We cannot risk silence.”[46]  Silence in the face of an emerging fascist politics offers a warning of the danger to come and the lessons to be addressed.

Such attacks function as a massive disimagination machine and a tool of subjugation by enacting a pedagogy of obedience and repression. This type of education is about more than turning schools into indoctrination centers; it is about creating an educational system that normalizes fascist ideologies and denies critical modes of agency.[47] This is nothing less than a resurgence of a poisonous neo-McCarthyism that threatens not only free speech and academic freedom, but also the central principles of democracy itself.

The acts of civil disobedience currently taking place on campuses are imbibed with spirit of the 1960s Berkely Free Speech Movement. Then, as now, students are fighting for the right to be heard, overturn acts of social injustice, and to bring to an end what Mario Savio, one of the leaders of the movement, called “the operation of the machine [that has become] so odious  [that] you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels … upon the levers, upon …the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”[48]  What the students protesters at Columbia, Yale, New York University and other campuses throughout the U.S. are making clear is that power must be held accountable and that the plague of silence over the war on Palestinians has to be broken so as to inject the struggle for human rights back into the language of a politics built upon the values of equality, social justice, liberty, and human dignity. What young people are teaching the world today, heeding the words of the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, is that freedom is an empty abstraction if people fail to act, and that “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.”[49] What they are fighting for is not just a call to end the war against the Palestinian people, a war that is a moral litmus test of our time, but what it means to imagine and fight for a more just and better world.

Damn right!

Notes.  

[1] Vaclav Havel, Living in Truth, ed (Boston: faber and Faber, 1986), p. 26.

[2] G. M. Tamas, “On Post-Fascism,” Boston Review (June 1, 2000). Online: https://bostonreview.net/articles/g-m-tamas-post-fascism/

[3] Eddie S. Glaude Jr., “The Fantasy of a Lily-White America.” Time [April 15, 2024]. Online: https://time.com/6966768/fantasy-white-america-eddie-glaude/

[4] Judith Butler’s various writings and books are brilliant on this issue. See, for instance, Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence (New York: Verso, 2024).  Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence,  (London: Verso Press, 2004).

[5] Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “The Right’s War on Universities,” The New York Review of Books (October 15, 2020). Online: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2020/10/15/the-rights-war-on-universities; see also her larger work on authoritarianism, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020).

[6] Ellen Schrecker, “Yes, These Bills Are the New McCarthyism,” Academe Blog (September 12, 2021). Online: https://academeblog.org/2021/09/12/yes-these-bills-are-the-new-mccarthyism/

[7] Ibid., Ellen Schrecker, “Yes, These Bills Are the New McCarthyism.”  

[8] Ibid., Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “The Right’s War on Universities,” The New York Review of Books.

[9] Michael Abramowitz, “War’s Critics Abetting Terrorists, Cheney Says,” The Washington Post (September 10, 2006). Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2006/09/11/wars-critics-abetting-terrorists-cheney-says-span-classbankheadhe-cites-allies-doubts-about-us-willspan/9bf45f56-45a5-4309-9dd2-fa6fe5a30fb1/

[10] I have taken up this issue in detail in Henry A. Girox “Democracy, Freedom, and Justice after September 11th: Rethinking the Role of Educators and the Politics of Schooling,” Teachers College Record 104:6 (September 2002), pp. 1138-1162. Also on-line at www. TCRecord.Org  (January 21, 2002), pp. 1-33.

[11] Pranshu Verma, “They criticized Israel. This Twitter account upended their lives, The Washington Post (April 16, 2024). Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/16/stop-antisemitism-twitter-zionism-israel/

[12]Pankaj Mishra, “The Shoah after Gaza,” London Review of Books (March 21, 2024). Online: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n06/pankaj-mishra/the-shoah-after-gaza

[13] Frederic Lordon, “End of Innocence” New Left Review [April 12, 2024]. Online: https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/end-of-innocence

[14] William I. Robinson, “Israel Has Formed a Task Force to Carry Out Covert Campaigns at US Universities,” Truthout (March 23, 2024). Online: https://truthout.org/articles/israel-has-formed-a-task-force-to-carry-out-covert-campaigns-at-us-universities/

[15] Melissa Chan and Phil Helsel, “108 arrested at pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University,” NBC News (April 18, 2024). Online: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/rep-ilhan-omars-daughter-students-suspended-barnard-college-refusing-l-rcna148445

[16] Al Jazeera Staff, “Columbia, NYU, Yale on the boil over Israel’s war on Gaza: What’s going on?,” Al Jazeera ( April 22, 2024). Online: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/22/columbia-university-on-edge-over-gaza-whats-going-on

[17] Moira Donegan, “Columbia University is colluding with the far-right in its attack on students,” The Guardian(April 19, 2023). Online: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/19/far-right-columbia-university-student-arrests

[18] Ari Paul, “The McCarthyist Attack on Gaza Protests Threatens Free Thought for All,” Fair (April 19, 2024). Online; https://fair.org/home/the-mccarthyist-attack-on-gaza-protests-threatens-free-thought-for-all/

[19] David Bell, “Elise Stefanik, Dean of the Faculty,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (April 22, 2024).  Online: https://www.chronicle.com/article/elise-stefanik-dean-of-faculty

[20] Robert Kuttner, “Self-Destructive College Presidents,” The American Prospect (April 22, 2024). Online: https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-04-22-self-destructive-college-presidents-antisemitism/

[21] Ibid. Bell.

[22] I have taken the term “Puritan superego” from Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p.295.

[23] Martin Pengelly, “Stefanik criticized for support of Trump after push against campus antisemitism,” The Guardian(December 11, 2023). Online: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/11/elise-stefanik-antisemitism-congress-trump-upenn-resignation

[24] Mattthew Mpoke Bigg, “Netanyahu Calls U.S. Student Protests Antisemitic and Says They Must Be Quelled,” New York Times (April 24, 2024). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/us/netanyahu-israel-us-college-protests.html#:~:text=Prime%20Minister%20Benjamin%20Netanyahu%20of,and%20portray%20them%20as%20antisemitic.

[25] Ibid. Mattthew Mpoke Bigg.

[26] Gov. Press Release, “ Sanders Responds to Netanyahu’s Claim that Criticism of the Israeli Government’s Policies is Antisemitic,” Bernie Sanders U.S. Senator for Vermont (April 25, 2024). Online: https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-responds-to-netanyahus-claim-that-criticism-of-the-israeli-governments-policies-is-antisemitic/

[27] Ibid. Gov. Press Release.

[28] Ibid. Robinson.

[29] Ibid. Robinson.

[30] Arwa Mahdawi, “Will the ‘cancel culture’ crowd speak up about the silencing of Asna Tabassum? Don’t hold your breath,” The Guardian (April 17, 2024). Online: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/17/usc-valedictorian-speech-canceled-palestine

[31]  Will Bunch, “Fear and loathing on America’s college campuses as free speech is disappearing,” The Philadelphia Inquirer. Online: https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/college-free-speech-palestine-israel-20240418.html#:~:text=Opinion-,Fear%20and%20loathing%20on%20America’s%20college%20campuses%20as%20free%20speech,a%20new%20brand%20of%20McCarthyism.

[32] Troy Closson and Anna Betts. “Columbia Students Arrested Over Campus Rally May Face Other Consequences,” New York Times (April 20, 2024). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/20/nyregion/arrested-columbia-students-suspended.html

[33] Judd Legum, “Columbia University protests and the lessons of ‘Gym Crow’,” Popular Information (April 22, 2024). Online: https://popular.info/p/columbia-university-protests-and

[34] Troy Closson and Anna Betts, “Columbia Students Arrested Over Campus Rally May Face Other Consequences,” New York Times (April 23, 2024). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/20/nyregion/arrested-columbia-students-suspended.html

[35] Mohammad Jahjouh and Samy Magdy, “Israeli strikes on southern Gaza city of Rafah kill 22, mostly children, as US advances aid package.” Associated Press (April 21, 2024). Online: https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-04-21-2024-8c027f2587c2c433d0fde41b63a0e0c3

[36] Andre Damon, “Hundreds of bodies discovered in mass graves at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital,”  Countercurrents (April 23, 2024). Online: https://countercurrents.org/2024/04/hundreds-of-bodies-discovered-in-mass-graves-at-gazas-nasser-hospital/

[37] Press Release, “ UN experts deeply concerned over ‘scholasticide’ in Gaza,” United Nations Human Rights (April 18, 2024). Online: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/04/un-experts-deeply-concerned-over-scholasticide-gaza  The full comment is worth quoting: “After six months of military assault, more than 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors have been killed in Gaza, and over 7,819 students and 756 teachers have been injured – with numbers growing each day. At least 60 per cent of educational facilities, including 13 public libraries, have been damaged or destroyed and at least 625,000 students have no access to education. Another 195 heritage sites, 227 mosques and three churches have also been damaged or destroyed, including the Central Archives of Gaza, containing 150 years of history. Israa University, the last remaining university in Gaza was demolished by the Israeli military on 17 January 2024.”

[38] Will Bunch, “With the truth up for grabs, Columbia’s young journalists are getting the story,” The Philadelphia Inquirer (April 23, 2024). Online: https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/attytood/columbia-student-journalists-wkcr-spectator-free-speech-rfk-jr-20240423.html

[39] Ellen Schrecker, “Yes, These Bills Are the New McCarthyism.” Academe Blog [September 21, 2021]. Online: https://academeblog.org/2021/09/12/yes-these-bills-are-the-new-mccarthyism/

[40] Henry A. Giroux, “Neoliberal Savagery and the Assault on Higher Education as a Democratic Public Sphere,” Café Dissensus (September 15, 2016). Online: https://cafedissensus.com/2016/09/15/neoliberal-savagery-and-the-assault-on-higher-education-as-a-democratic-public-sphere/#:~:text=By%20Henry%20A.,Giroux&text=Hyper%2Dcapitalism%20or%20market%20fundamentalism,rich%20and%20powerful%20corporate%20interests.

[41] Henry A. Giroux and Anthony R. DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy(London: Bloomsbury, 2024).

[42] Eden McLean, “Fascism’s History Offers Lessons about Today’s Attacks on Education,” Scientific American (April 7, 2024). Online: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fascisms-history-offers-lessons-about-todays-attacks-on-education/. See also Henry A. Giroux and Anthony R. DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (London: Bloomsbury, 2024).

[43] Judd Legum, “Columbia University protests and the lessons of ‘Gym Crow,” Popular Information (April 22, 2024).  Online: https://popular.info/p/columbia-university-protests-and?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1664&post_id=143820814&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=f0dw&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

[44] Cited in Judd Legum, “Columbia University protests and the lessons of ‘Gym Crow,” Popular Information (April 22, 2024).  Online: https://popular.info/p/columbia-university-protests-and?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1664&post_id=143820814&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=f0dw&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

[45] Alexander J. Means, Yuko Ida and Matthew Myers, “Teaching Beyond dread.” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies. Online [February 8, 2024]. Online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10714413.2024.2306079

[46] Donald W. Harward, “Risking Silence,” Inside Higher Ed, [August 28, 2018]. Online: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/08/28/higher-education-has-responsibility-speak-out-against-current-administrations-false

[47] Henry A. Giroux and Anthony R. DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy(London: Bloomsbury, 2024).

[48] Mario Savio, “Sit-In Address on the Steps of Sprout Hall,” delivered December 2, 1964, at the University of California. American Rhetoric:  Top 100 Speeches. Online: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mariosaviosproulhallsitin.htm

[49] Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation, speech delivered at Canandaigua, New York, August 4, 1857, in Philip S. Foner, Ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 2 (New York: International, 1950), p. 437.

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Photograph Source: S.Sgt. Albert R. Simpson, Department of Defense – Public Domain

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

– George Santayana, 1905.

In the summer of 1968, I was assigned to the Central Intelligence Agency’s task force on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.  The task force met around the clock in the CIA operations center, which was outfitted with myriad television screens.  Most of these screens were showing the Soviet invasion.  But several screens were devoted to the violence and mayhem on the streets of Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley’s police force was pummeling young people holding a protest rally against the Vietnam War.  The chaos and the violence, which a federal commission labeled a “police riot,” played a key role in Richard Nixon’s narrow defeat of Hubert Humphrey in the election several months later.

Once again, we are looking toward a Democratic Convention in Chicago in August as well as an election in November that will be close.  It could well be decided by the national reaction to the chaos that is taking place on college campuses around the country and that will presumably be followed by demonstrations in Chicago.  Does the Biden White House understand this?

In 1968, the Vietnam War was the decisive moral issue of the time.  In 2024, Israel’s genocidal warfare in Gaza is the decisive moral issue.  The likelihood of an ugly Israeli military campaign in southern Gaza will lead to additional Palestinian deaths and to increased fury at home and abroad.

Hubert Humphrey lost support in 1968 because he was terribly late in speaking out against the immoral war in Vietnam being pursued by President Lyndon B. Johnson.  Joe Biden is losing support on a daily basis because he is unwilling to stop underwriting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s immoral military campaign in Gaza.

In 1968, the Prague Spring and the Tet Offensive contributed to violent activism and protest activity in the United States.  The assassinations of two key anti-war leaders, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in April and June, respectively, meant the absence of two key anti-war protagonists at the Democratic Convention.  When the peace plank was defeated at the convention, additional college students and an assortment of activists and progressives rallied against the U.S. role in Vietnam.  Prior to the convention, there were walk-outs at high schools around the country, which contributed to the anti-war fervor that was building before the convention.

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley contributed to the tension by orchestrating a news blackout in an attempt to keep the public from learning about the protest activity in the city.  The Chicago police beat protestors at will with clubs and fists.  At the convention, Senator Abraham Ribicoff blasted Mayor Daley for what he called the “Gestapo” tactics of the Chicago police.  Daley called Ribicoff a “kike” from the floor of the convention. These events garnered more attention than the nominations of Humphrey and Senator Edmund Muskie.

Just as the violence and madness in 1968 pushed conservatives and independents to rally on behalf of Richard Nixon, the potential for violence in Chicago in August could hurt Biden’s chances for reelection in November.  Nixon won in 1968 by a narrow margin—less than one point—in a nation divided by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement.  He prevailed in most states outside of the Northeast, and won the electoral vote easily.

Joe Biden is facing similarly beleaguered international and domestic situations.  The international situation is particularly ominous, as Biden tries to maneuver on behalf of Ukraine in Central Europe and Israel in the Middle East.  Ukraine is losing ground; Israel is losing credibility.  Biden is citing the “rule of law” to challenge Russia, but is ignoring the “rule of law” by underwriting Israel’s war in Gaza.  Two additional nations complicate Biden’s situation—Iran and North Korea—but the United States does not officially recognize either Tehran or Pyongyang.

The Republicans are doing their best to exploit this situation.  Aid to Ukraine was help up for several months by Republican demagogues and obscurantists, and Republican leaders are pandering to supporters of Israel.  This week, House Speaker Mike Johnson traveled to Columbia University to encourage the dismantling of pro-Palestinian encampments and the resignation of President Minouche Shafik.

Shafik has been targeted by Republican members of the House of Representatives who are pummeling college presidents (particularly female presidents) at so-called elite universities. The resignations of the presidents at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University have already taken place.  Johnson’s demagoguery could result in the resignation of Shafik as key Republicans in the House pursue their “anti-woke” agenda, which is in fact part of a right-wing campaign against the diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at key institutions.

George Santayana argued in “The Life of Reason” that if our world is ever going to make progress, it needs to remember what it’s learned from the past.  Sadly, President Biden has learned little about both the deceit of Benjamin Netanyahu and the danger of supporting an immoral war.

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Photograph Source: Chenspec – CC BY-SA 4.0

In striking at the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1 Bibi Netanyahu has made himself an April Fool. Israel has been bombing Syria for years with no provocation or retaliation by Syria. For years it has bombed its airports which disrupted humanitarian aid to Syria’s civilian population who were suffering in its long civil war. Iran responded to the Israeli strike on its Damascus consulate by asking its allies, the Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas in Gaza, to refrain from their retaliatory strikes on Israel and let Iran make a military retaliation by itself. This was to ensure that Israel got the message. In the future, Iran will not rely on its proxies but will itself attack Israel. Israel and the US intercepted all but a few of the Iranian drones, and Israel trumpeted this as a victory for it and a defeat for Iran. But in fact the Iranian response was a political and strategic victory.

Netanyahu has been spoiling for a war with Iran for a long time, and since October 7 he has seeking ways to drag the US into another war in the Middle East.  While Biden said the US would fully back Israel in its confrontation with Iran, he also cautioned Netanyahu. A CNN story said this:

Biden sought to frame Israel’s successful interception of the Iranian onslaught as a major victory:  — with the suggestion that further Israeli response was unnecessary…Biden told Netanyahu to consider Saturday a win because the US assessed Iran’s attacks had been largely unsuccessful and demonstrated Israel’s superior military capability, Biden made clear that the US will not participate in any offensive operations against Iran in response, a senior administration official told CNN.

In the meantime, US Senator Tim Kaine who was Hillary Clinton’s vice-presidential candidate has spoken up about the US relationship with Netanyahu and his rightwing government. Kaine is a close ally and is a member of the Senate foreign relations and armed services committees. Kaine said, “Joe Biden now understands that Benjamin Netanyahu ‘played’ him during the early months of the war in Gaza but ‘that ain’t going to happen anymore.’[i] Netanyahu’s strategic blunders in the Gaza war and now the strike in Damascus have got him in quite a pickle. His major concern is to stay in office to avoid looming criminal prosecution. His quandary is not unlike that of his friend Trump. If they are friends—if either really has any friends. Each in psychiatric terminology is mentally ill with what is diagnosed as ‘malignant narcissism.’ Each is willing to sacrifice anything to save himself. Kaine said as much of Netanyahu in his interview:

“He’s going to end up being one of the most successful politicians and most destructive public servants to be on the world stage in the last quarter century, because he’s successful if you measure it by maintaining his own position but, in terms of what he has done … has made Israel less safe and less secure.”[ii]

Benny Gantz, the ‘moderate’ Israeli politician who joined the war cabinet after October 7 has spoken of how the reaction to Iran’s attack showed the unity of Israel and its western allies. He said, “Israel against Iran, the world against Iran. This is the result. That is a strategic achievement which we must leverage for Israel’s security.” Whether he actually believes this I do not know. But if he does he is deluding himself. The key event was not Iran’s retaliation but the Israel’s strike on the Iranian consulate. That event only reinforced the view of its western ‘allies’ and almost all the other nations of Israel as a rogue state, whose now increasingly reckless actions in Gaza and Syria threaten to bring a wider war to the Middle East—which no one wants, except it seems Netanyahu and his neo-fascist cabinet.

That means that if Israel goes to war against Iran it will go alone. If it continues to provoke the Hezbollah in south Lebanon, it will find itself fighting on two fronts which it doesn’t have the military capacity to do. The last time Israel confronted Hezbollah in 2006, it lost. Since then Hezbollah has acquired more advanced weaponry and, what is more, its soldiers are battle-hardened veterans from their combat in alliance with the Syrian army in the decade of civil war. The reservists Israel called up for the attack on Gaza would be no match for Hezbollah fighters. Netanyahu has painted himself into a corner with the Damascus strike. For a long time the EU—especially France—has tired of Israel’s aggressions in the Middle East. Now its last ally the US has apparently had enough too.

Israel was designed by its Zionist founders to be an aggressive state, a new Jewish ghetto really But an aggressive one. They saw it as a necessity. Israel needed to be at war lest the Jewish settlers be assimilated into the Arab people all around them.

The slogan ‘from the river to the sea’ now denounced by some people in the US as ‘anti-Semitic’ was actually also a part of the Likud Party’s original charter which Netanyahu helped write. It is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media that Israel helped start Hamas. It is well-documented that when Netanyahu became prime minister, he and others in Likud channeled money to it through Qatar in order to weaken Fatah with a fundamentalist party that wanted to obliterate Israel thus giving Netanyahu and his backers a way to claim that there was no one to negotiate with. This was simply a cynical delaying tactic while the Israeli settlements metastasized throughout the West Bank. But on October 7 the folly of Netanyahu’s connivance in the creation Hamas was apparent. How clever he was—until he wasn’t.

The foundation of Israel in 1948 was in a way the big bang of the post-war Middle East. The humiliating defeat of the states created out of colonial designs of Britain and France led to revolutions in the Arab world.

The two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a non-starter for some years. Israel has stolen too much land in the West Bank for a viable Palestinian state. It is still touted by the US and most of the EU. It does serve one purpose, however. It makes apparent that the real obstacle to a peaceful settlement of the conflict is solely Israel. The only possible solution is a single secular state of Palestine where Arabs and Jews are equal citizens. Hamas and the radical Jewish fundamentalists in Netanyahu’s administration will have to deal with it from the sidelines—the majority of Israelis and Palestinians are not religious fundamentalists. The Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan met with Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Qatar. Fidan said according to Turkish news media. “In our political talks with Hamas for years, they have accepted a Palestinian state to be established within the 1967 borders.”[iii]

While Netanyahu is the driver behind Israel’s latest gambles in Gaza and elsewhere, he’s simply explicitly mouthing Israeli aims—expansion and ethnic cleansing.  He has espoused and worked purposefully against the two-state option. He has tolerated and even collaborated with Hamas. He is the most arrogant and duplicitous politician in the world. Biden should never call him again. He should call for his arrest and imprisonment not only for fraud breach of trust and bribery—the charges pending in Israel—but for crimes against humanity.

That said, the miserable theocratic imams of Iran have done the world a favor. They have put the US between a rock and a hard place, and forced Biden to say, Enough, we won’t support any further action of Israel against Iran. Which will also increase greater anxiety in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and will expose them for the shits they are.[iv]

The strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus was to distract the world press from the genocidal assault on Gaza. Israel responded with a missile attack on Iran itself. Iran’s retaliation to that attack that showed that Iran—is more cautious. It seems now not likely to retaliate to the Israeli strike.

On the other hand, Netanyahu has already drawn blunt criticism for the Israeli strike on Iran. Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir—who was convicted by an Israeli court of supporting terrorism—said the Israeli attack on Iran was “lame.” after Tehran thwarted a small IDF drone strike early on Friday. Netanyahu is under attack even by members of his own cabinet. As they say down South, he’s up to his waist in alligators. Netanyahu is caught now in a vise of his own making between the assault on Gaza and the strike on Damascus. It was bound to happen ever since 1948. He is simply the catalyst who finally brought it on. With the US finally drawing a line, Israel’s last ally is saying enough is enough. AIPAC is now challenged by another Jewish lobby, J Street, and American politicians are taking note of AIPAC’s diminishing power. It’s power politics and Bibi is losing.

The American decision not to veto a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza was another shock to Netanyahu—it was a first for a US administration. Netanyahu’s response was to cancel a planned Israeli meeting with the Biden administration in Washington. Israel is now more isolated more isolated than ever in the international world. Hamas is outfoxing Israel at every step. Israel is learning the hard way that an empire will sacrifice the interests of a small piece of it to the greater interests of the empire.

Yair Lapid, who is the leader of the opposition Yesh Atid party, said the resolution was “dangerous, unfair, and Israel will not accept it.” Minister Hili Tropper, a close ally of Netanyahu’s rival Benny Gantz — who polls say would win handily if an election were held today —said, “The war must not stop.” These comments did not differ greatly from the angry reactions by extreme-right leaders such as Bezalel Smotrich or Itamar Ben Gvir.

More people in the Israeli security establishment are saying that eliminating Hamas is not an achievable goal. Former IDF spokesman Ronen Manelis was quoted recently saying. “To say that one day there will be a complete victory in Gaza — this is a complete lie. Israel cannot completely eliminate Hamas in an operation that lasts only a few months.”

The near-unanimous rejection of a ceasefire shows the cross-party support for an invasion of the Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. But Netanyahu is holding off after the US allowed the resolution. Also figuring in his calculations is the call by thirty members of Congress including Nancy Pelosi for a suspension of military aid to Israel.

Likewise in the UK, opposition parties and parliamentarians from the governing Conservative Party, and hundreds of lawyers and judges have called on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to stop the sale of weaponry to Israel.

At the same time the families of the Israeli hostages are becoming more critical of Netanyahu’s failure to cut a deal with Hamas to free the hostages. The futility of continuing the war has become clear—the goals of eliminating Hamas and freeing the hostages are conflicting. Hamas has politically won the war.

Before October 6, most Israelis thought that a resolution of the Palestinian issue could be put off indefinitely. October 6 shattered that illusion.

There are only two responses to the collapse of the status quo after October 6. One is to recognize the presence of Palestinians and their right to a state. The other is a genocidal war. Israel had chosen the latter. Its slaughter of over thirty-four thousand people, almost all of them innocent civilians (the IDF counts all adult males in Gaza as members of Hamas) its denial of food, water and medicine—all these acts have increased the anger and disgust with it all around the world. The recent murderous assault on the World Kitchen Central—the WKC—is the latest outrage. Israeli’s claim that it was an accident is not believable. It was intentional. The death of an American aid worker simply brought it to the attention of the mass media in America. Israel has been killing aid workers of such organizations as the International Rescue Committee and Médecins Sans Frontières since the beginning of its assault on Gaza—in the case of the WKC it didn’t reckon on one of the victims being an American. If all of these actions are not genocidal then the term has no meaning.

“WCK [aka WFK] is not just any relief organization,” wrote Jack Mirkinson in The Nation magazine. He said of José Andrés, “Andrés is a global celebrity with ties to the international political establishment. WCK had been working closely with the Israeli government both in Gaza and in Israel proper. It would be difficult to think of a more mainstream, well-connected group.” It was as if Israel were showing off, Mirkinson added, “flaunting its ability to cross every known line of international humanitarian law and get away with it.”[v]

Were more evidence needed to support Mirkinson’s description of Israel’s actions, a recent story in the Washington Post confirms it.

The story describes how on January 29 a six-year-old girl, Hind Rajab, was calling for help on her cell phone—when she was intermittently conscious—from the backseat of a car near a Gaza City gas station. She told the emergency dispatchers that ID tanks were getting closer. Her cousin Layan took the phone and told a cousin that Israeli soldiers and were firing at it.  Everyone in the car was dead except her and Rajab. They told her that paramedics were on their way. Hind Rajab and all the paramedics were killed. The paramedics notified an IDF agency COGAT that they were going to rescue wounded children and COGAT told them the safest route to take. The paramedics never made it to Hind Rajab. Their ambulance was destroyed Israeli tank fire—they probably would have been safer if they had not notified COGAT. It was twelve days later that family members could make their way to the scene. The car was riddled with bullets as were the bodies of Hind Rajab and her family members. Again despite the statement of the IDF that they would ‘look into it,’ the story in the Washington Post makes it clear with a mass of forensic evidence that the IDF murdered the paramedics and Hind Rajab and her family in cold blood.[vi]

A video posted recently on various news sites showed an endless line Palestinians walking on al-Rashid Road next to the sea, returning to the north of Gaza defying the Israeli warning that they should remain near Rafa. Their home are mostly rubble now but one Palestinian woman said, “If I have to die I want to die in my home.”

As I write Monday April 22, The US has imposed sanctions on the IDF’s Netzah Yehuda battalion, which has been accused of serious human rights violations against Palestinians in the West Bank. It’s now deployed in Gaza. What’s more, The Israeli paper Haaretz has reported that the US was also considering similar moves against other police and military units. What took so long?

When people mention Israel to me—“the Zionist Entity” as its Arab foes call it—I think of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem founded by the Crusaders in 1099. It lasted until 129I when Saladin took Jerusalem. I want to say to them, ‘Where is the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem?’ The Palestinians will win simply by staying in Palestine while Israel atrophies as the apartheid state of South Africa did. It won’t take two centuries as Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem did.

October 7 was a war crime but a relatively minor one when set in the context of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006 and the US invasion of Iraq—which caused the deaths of somewhere between half a million to a million Iraqis. But now Bibi’s blundering response to the Hamas assault has resulted in another Big Bang. Global condemnation of Israel.

Notes.

[i] “Tim Kaine: “Biden knows Netanyahu ‘played’ him in early months of Gaza war.” The Guardian, April 10, 2024.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] https://www.newarab.com/news/hamas-willing-disarm-under-two-state-solution-turkey-fm

[iv] See this article about Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states: https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/19/slavery-now-migrant-labor-in-the-persian-gulf-and-saudi-arabia/

[v] Ellen Cantorow: “Dead on Arrival.” AntiWar.com, April 17 2024. The Jack Mirkinson article, “The Ghoulish Ostentatiousness of Israel’s Latest War Crimes, cited by Ellen Cantorow appeared in The Nation on April 4, 2024.

[vi] Meg Kelly, Hajar Harb, Louise Loveluck, Miriam Berger and Cate Brown. “Palestinian paramedics said Israel gave them safe passage to save a 6-year-old girl in Gaza. They were all killed.” Washington Post, April 16, 2024.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Israeli bombs continue to fall on Gaza, killing Palestinian civilians with abandon. Al Jazeera published a story about the destruction of 24 hospitals in Gaza, each of them bombed mercilessly by the Israeli military. Half of the 35,000 Palestinians killed by Israel were children, their bodies littering the overwhelmed morgues and mosques of Gaza. The former United Nations assistant secretary-general for human rights Andrew Gilmour told BBC Newsnight that the Palestinians are experiencing “collective punishment” and that what we are seeing in Gaza is “probably the highest kill rate of any military, killing anybody, since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.” Meanwhile, in the West Bank section of Palestine, Human Rights Watch shows that the Israeli military has participated in the displacement of Palestinians from 20 communities and has uprooted at least seven communities since October 2023. These are established facts.

Yet, these facts—according to a leaked memorandum—cannot be spoken about in the “newspaper of record” in the United States, the New York Times. Journalists at the paper were asked to avoid the terms “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “occupied territory.” Indeed, over the past six months, newspapers and television shows in the United States have generally written about the genocidal violence using passive voice: bombs fell, people died. Even on social media, where the terrain is often less controlled, the ax fell on key phrases; for instance, despite his professions of commitment to free speech, Elon Musk said that terms such as “decolonization” and phrases such as “from the river to the sea” would be banned on X.

Silence on the College Campuses

At the University of Southern California (USC), Asna Tabassum, a South Asian American, was to deliver an address on campus to 65,000 people as the valedictorian of the class of 2024. Involved in the conversation around the Israeli war against the Palestinians, Tabassum was targeted by pro-Israeli activists who claimed to feel threatened. On the basis of this feeling of endangerment, whose source the university refused to disclose, USC decided to cancel her speech. In a thoughtful response, Tabassum—who majored in biomedical engineering and history (with a minor in resistance to genocide)—implored her classmates “to think outside the box—to work towards a world where cries of equality and human dignity are not manipulated to be expressions of hatred. I challenge us to respond to ideological discomfort with dialogue and learning, not bigotry and censorship.” Tabassum is 21 years old. The USC provost who canceled her speech, Andrew Guzman, is 56 years old. His reasons for shutting her down are less mature than her plea for dialogue.

College students across the United States have been trying desperately to raise awareness about what is happening in Gaza and have sought to get their campuses to divest from companies with investments in Israel and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Early protests were tolerated, but then U.S. politicians got involved with congressional hearings and rash commentsabout these students being funded by the Chinese and Russians. College administrators, afraid of their donors and of political pressure, buckled and began to censor the students from one end of the country (Columbia University) to the other (Pomona College). College presidents invited local police departments onto their campuses, allowed them to arrest the students, and suspended them from their colleges. But the mood is undeniable. Student unions across the country—from Rutgers to Davis—voted to force their administrations to divest from Israel.

What’s Repugnant?

On April 12, 2024, the Berlin police closed a Palestine conference that brought together people from across Germany to listen to a range of speakers, including from other parts of Europe and from Palestine. At the airport, the police detained and then deported the British-Palestinian doctor, Ghassan Abu Sitta, who had volunteered in Gaza and had witnessed the genocidal war firsthand. The former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis was to give an online speech at the conference. He was not only prevented from giving that speech, but also was issued a betätigungsverbot—or a ban from any political activity in Germany (ban from entry into Germany and a ban from doing an online event). This, Varoufakis said, is essentially the “death knell of the prospects of democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany.”

A few days before the conference in Berlin, Professor Jodi Dean published an essay on the Verso Blog called “Palestine Speaks for Everyone.” The essay is rooted in the simple, and unobjectionable, idea that oppressed people have the right to fight for their emancipation. This is the basis of the International Declaration of Human Rights, also cited frequently by Varoufakis. The day after the Palestine conference was shut down in Berlin, Jodi Dean’s employer, President Mark Gearan of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in the United States, published a statement announcing that Professor Dean cannot teach the rest of her classes this term. Gearan wrote that not only was he in “complete disagreement” with Dean, but he also found her comments to be “repugnant.” It is interesting that since October, Gearan has only released a public statement condemning Hamas, but nothing about the horrendous genocidal violence against the Palestinians.

What did Jodi Dean write that was so “repugnant”? Gearan focused on the word “exhilarating,” which Dean used to describe her reaction to paragliders that went beyond the Israeli occupation fence around Gaza. She did not actually celebrate the attacks of October 7, but merely used the paragliders as a metaphor to consider the politics of hope and liberation from a Palestinian standpoint (citing the last poem of Refaat Alareer, killed by Israel on December 6, 2023, with its meditation on kites to highlight the idea of soaring above oppression). Gearan did not want a dialogue about the occupation or about the genocide. Like the editors and publishers of the New York Times, like the German government, and like other U.S. college presidents, Gearan wanted to curtail conversation. Tabassum’s plea for “dialogue and learning” was muzzled; too scared to actually talk about Palestine, people like Gearan prefer “bigotry and censorship.”

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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