William Faulkner was right: past events continue to inform and shape our world. With powerful forces gathering to reassert US dominance over not just Venezuela but the entire Western hemisphere, the vexed issue of local elites, for example Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado and her backers, enlisting an imperial power in domestic broils, is again top of the agenda.
Back in the 1980s I studied in France. The most thrilling lecture of my university career was an outline of the significance of the Battle of Valmy, a crucial win for the young French Revolution.
The lecture was given by the distinguished historian Antoine Casanova.
One of the revolutionary generals that day in 1792 was a Venezuelan, Francisco de Miranda, who in time, returning to the Americas, would wrest power from imperial Spain and become leader of an independent Venezuela.
Miranda knew Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams and, of significance to this story, the father of the Monroe Doctrine, President James Monroe. Were he alive today he would again unsheathe his sword to fight King Donald Trump and all the forces of L’Ancien Régime.
L’Ancien Régime — the “Old Order” — refers to the system of absolute monarchy, hereditary privilege, and rigid social hierarchy where a tiny elite owned everything while the masses owned little or nothing.
In today’s world, given the concentration of power among the few in our countries, I extend the term Ancien Régime to capture the way the US, working in concert with local elites, is operating in ways that would be familiar to a Bourbon King or a British monarch.
If they had such a thing as shame, the American elites should wince that their country, born out of an epic anti-colonial struggle, now plays the role of a Prussian army seeking to impose its will on another state.
1792. La patrie en danger. The homeland is in peril. The monarchies of Europe had rallied their armies for an assault on France to destroy the Revolution that had swept from power not only King Louis XVI but the entire absolutist order of L’Ancien Régime.
After a string of victories, the invaders swung their armies towards Paris, intent on snuffing out the revolution, to ensure the contagion did not infect the rest of Europe. Desperate, the French Assembly declared “La Patrie en danger” and called on patriotic citizens to rally to the flag.
The two world orders clashed in a pivotal battle at Valmy, 200 km northeast of Paris on 20 September 1792.
At Valmy, for the first time in history, the battle cry that General Miranda and others called out — and thousands of citizen soldiers answered — was “Vive la nation!” “Long live the Nation! (not for a king, nor an emperor, nor a god).
Confronting them on the field was the superpower of the day, the best armed, best drilled war machine in history: the Prussian Army, led by Prince Field Marshall Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand. As well as his Prussians, he commanded the army of the Holy Roman Empire and, significantly, L’Armée de Condé, led by King Louis XVI’s cousin and comprised of French royalist émigrés.
To the citizen soldiers of France, this latter group were traitors to their country, men who put their privileges and their class ahead of the interests of their homeland. This is a theme relevant to discussions of Venezuela today.
Things went badly for the republican French in the opening and the lines wavered. The Venezuelan Miranda, history records, raced his charger up and down the lines, urging the troops to sing La Marseillaise, written earlier that year by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle. We know it now as the French National Anthem. It is a stirring call to arms, a passionate appeal to fight the enemies of the nation.
French First Republic
Long story short, the French prevailed that day and France’s First Republic was declared in Paris two days later. A witness to the battle was the German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who, by way of consolation — I would have thought a little rashly — told some dejected Prussian officers, “Here and today, a new epoch in the history of the world has begun, and you can boast you were present at its birth.”
Today Francisco Miranda’s name is among the 660 heroes of the Republic engraved on L’Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He has been called the “First Global Revolutionary”, having fought in the American War of Independence as well as his other exploits in Europe and Latin America.
The “first global revolutionary” . . . Miranda knew President James Monroe, father of the Monroe Doctrine. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Some of my fellow students at L’Université de Franche-Comté were South and Central Americans who had fled political persecution. Their stories were my first exposure to the concept of “death squads”.
This was a time when El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua were drenched in blood as a pitiless struggle was waged by the US and the local military and financial elites on one side, and coalitions of workers, peasants, intellectuals, teachers and various progressives on the other.
Repeated US interventions to support companies like United Fruit Company went hand in hand with brutal suppression of peasant workers. The CIA-backed coup that overthrew democratic progressive Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 led to a war — the Guatemalan Genocide or The Silent Genocide — in which 200,000 were killed and tens of thousands more “disappeared” over the succeeding three decades. Amnesty International estimated 83 percent of those killed were indigenous Maya people.
In 1980, while I was in France, Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, was gunned down mid-service by a killer working for El Salvador’s military dictatorship. A quarter of a million people braved the junta to attend his funeral.
Romero’s fate was sealed when he appealed to US President Jimmy Carter to end aid to El Salvador’s military dictatorship.
Death squads follow
Whether we look at the Iran Contra scandal, Reagan’s funding of the infamous Honduran Battalion 316 or any of dozens of such organisations, the pattern is clear: where the US wishes to assert control via elites, death squads follow. The State Department and CIA spent decades building and evolving El Salvador’s National Security Agency. They helped compile lists of leftists, intellectuals and all sorts of people who were then eliminated by the regime’s death squads.
While I was getting an education in history, literature and politics, tens of thousands were killed in Argentina by the US-backed Junta during the “Dirty War”. Similarly in Chile, from the US-promoted military takeover forward, being a social worker, teacher or trade unionist could be a fatal occupation.
Sadly, as most people my age know, one could go on and on and on about US covert activity to destroy democratic movements and foster alliances with the most vicious oligarchs on the continent. That is why I fear for Venezuela and I have zero confidence in any political leader who calls for US direct military and paramilitary (via CIA) action in her own country.
For these reasons and more, I shuddered when I heard Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace laureate Maria Corina Machado praising Donald Trump and urging him to continue his pressure campaign, saying only Trump can “save Venezuela”.
“I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause,” she wrote in a post on X.
Praising a man who is indiscriminately killing your own citizens is not, in my estimation, a good look for either a Nobel Peace laureate or a patriot. Francisco Miranda would roll in his grave.
The price of freedom from foreign powers is often counted in millions of lives and centuries of struggle; it should not be given away lightly.
The Maduro government has its fans and its detractors; both can mount solid arguments.
One thing I believe is firmly in its favour, however, is that, for its many faults, it is a national project that seeks to resist dominance from foreign interests, foremost the US. I will give the last word to Sebastián Francisco de Miranda y Rodríguez de Espinoza (28 March 1750–14 July 1816):
“I have never believed that anything solid or stable can be built in a country, if absolute independence is not first achieved.”
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region, and he contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz
Rachel Reeves, the self-styled guardian of “fiscal responsibility”, should be sitting at the dining table of her constituency home, filling out an online application form for Universal Credit around about now.
Reeves, or the fiscal Iron Lady if you prefer, confessed not in shame but in a smug little statement that she’s been illegally renting out her posh £1.3 million London family home without a selective licence for over a year.
That’s the same licence Labour forced councils to impose to “protect tenants from rogue landlords”.
The same rules that fine ordinary private landlords £30,000 for failing to provide paperwork.
The same system Reeves lobbied Leeds Council to expand in 2023, while shadow chancellor, demanding “no mercy” for non-compliant owners.
And now? Ms Thieves faces no fine, and it’s business as usual, according to PM Keith.
Reeves has lost Labour its tarnished soul to the Greens
Reeves has blatantly violated the selective licensing scheme Labour championed to “root out rogue landlords”, and Keir Starmer is too weak to do anything about it.
This isn’t a functioning government these days.
This vile parade of hypocrisy and elite arse-covering is exactly why and how Labour fluked their way into power, just sixteen months ago, following fourteen unforgivable years of Conservative corruption.
Labour’s death-by-timidity won’t take anywhere near as long.
It’s not really for me to defend private landlords, but good ones do actually exist and this is exactly the sort of two-tier justice that is seeing voters run towards the Green Party in absolute disgust at the Labour government’s hasty moral abandonment.
Reeves’ fiscal cowardice has ensured the Labour Party has lost its tarnished soul to Polanski’s Greens who are winning plaudits by peddling a remarkably simple message of housing for all, wealth taxes, climate justice and a healthy dose of good old fashioned hope.
I could probably write an essay on Polanski’s (mostly) pros and cons. He is a polished performer and communicates his ideas with infectious enthusiasm and energy, and vitally, I think he really does get our disdain for the systemic rot that has engulfed Westminster.
Cautious optimism
We can see this reflected in recent opinion polls with one such survey putting the Greens in second place, ahead of the Labour, Conservative, and Lib Dem establishment parties.
But, I am wary of political chameleons. I think a few years in the left-wing trenches has left me feeling like cynicism is a safer default option than jumping in without knowing everything that I need to know.
I couldn’t give a shit about a bit of breast-growth wizardry, and the reasons behind Mr Polanski’s name change are both sincere and understandable.
But to go from making a name for yourself as a Corbyn-heckling Lib Dem to the Green Che Guevara does warrant a bit of scrutiny before I have #BackZack tattooed on my left butt cheek.
That said, I am happy to see the Greens laying solid, progressive foundations for the future, and Polanski is undoubtedly making the right noises and performing well, despite the ruthless establishment attack dogs attempting (but failing) to pin him to the floor with the usual nastiness that we witnessed during the Corbyn years.
You really do have to give credit to Polanski for making the Green Party a welcoming home for disenchanted and demoralised Labour voters. It’s not hard for a political party to lose hundreds of thousands, if not millions of votes, but you will not gain those same votes unless you have something worth saying.
Prince Nonce
I must admit, I was delighted to hear of Prince Nonce being downgraded to Andrew the Nonce. Andrew’s “Duke of York” title wasn’t actually earned. It’s genetic loot, handed down like a blood-stained trust fund
Hang on… Am I allowed to call him a nonce, dearest editor? We can always see if they’ll let me put the damages on Klarna?
[ED: nonce is far too polite for Andrew Mountbatten].
The man admitted to staying at Epstein’s island after the conviction. He posed with a 17-year-old victim. His “I don’t sweat” defence was so laughable it deserved its very own Netflix special. He even wanted a catch-up with Epstein following his release from prison.
The British royal family is the ultimate symbol of hereditary inequality. Think of it as a multi-billion-pound benefits system for people who’ve never worked a day in their lives, funded by nurses skipping meals and children holed up in mouldy temporary accommodation.
This gilded taxpayer-funded relic where wealth and power get passed down like a family heirloom, no matter how filthy and tarnished, needs to be dismantled and abolished.
I’m pretty sure the Prime Minister used to agree with me.
Institutional rot – from Andrew to Reeves
Andrew Mountbatten Windsor’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein have always screamed of “elite impunity”.
This is a man who hobnobbed with a convicted sex trafficker, got mummy to settle a lawsuit for twelve of your millions, without actually admitting guilt, and still got to lounge around in a Windsor mansion funded by the public purse.
Yes, Andrew was publicly castrated by his own brother in a move so overdue it’s practically a fucking fossil.
But this regime survival cosplay from Charles is too little, and way too late and serves as nothing more than a PR plaster on a gaping wound of institutional rot – much like Reeves and the Labour Party.
It has been more than two weeks since world leaders gathered in Sharm el-Sheikh and declared, once again, that the path to peace in the Middle East had been found. As with previous such declarations, the Palestinians, the people who must live that peace, were left out.
Today, Israel holds the fragile ceasefire hostage while the world is fixated on the search for the remaining bodies of its dead captives.
There is no talk of the Palestinian right to search for and honour their own dead, to mourn publicly the loss.
The idea of reconstruction is dangled before the residents of Gaza. Those who call for it from abroad seem to envision just clearing rubble, pouring concrete, and rehabilitating infrastructure.
There is no talk of rebuilding people — restoring their institutions, dignity, and sense of belonging.
But this is what Palestinians need. True reconstruction must focus on the people of Gaza and it must begin not with cement but with the restoration of classrooms and learning.
It must begin with young people who have survived the unthinkable and still dare to dream. Without them — without Palestinian educators and students at the centre — no rebuilding effort can endure.
Reconstruction without exclusion The plans for governance and reconstruction of Gaza currently circulating are excluding those Palestinians most affected by the genocide. Many aspects of these plans are designed to control rather than empower — to install new overseers instead of nurturing local leadership.
They prioritise Israel’s security over Palestinian wellbeing and self-determination.
We have seen what such exclusion leads to in the Palestinian context: dependency, frustration and despair.
As scholars who have worked for years alongside Palestinian academics and students, we have also seen the central role education plays in Palestinian society.
That is why we believe that reconstruction has to start with education, including higher education. And that process has to include and be led by the Palestinians themselves. Palestinian educators, academics and students have already demonstrated they have the strength to persevere and rebuild.
Gaza’s universities, for example, have been models of resilience. Even as their campuses were razed to the ground, professors and scholars continued to teach and research in makeshift shelters, tents, and public squares — sustaining international partnerships and giving purpose to the most vital part of society: young people.
In Gaza, universities are not only places of study; they are sanctuaries of thought, compassion, solidarity and continuity — the fragile infrastructure of imagination.
Without them, who will train the doctors, nurses, teachers, architects, lawyers, and engineers that Gaza needs? Who will provide safe spaces for dialogue, reflection, and decision-making — the foundations of any functioning society?
We know that there can be no viable future for Palestinians without strong educational and cultural institutions that rebuild confidence, restore dignity and sustain hope.
Solidarity, not paternalism Over the past two years, something remarkable has happened. University campuses across the world — from the United States to South Africa, from Europe to Latin America — have become sites of moral awakening.
Students and professors have stood together against the genocide in Gaza, demanding an end to the war and calling for justice and accountability. Their sit-ins, vigils and encampments have reminded us that universities are not only places of learning but crucibles of conscience.
This global uprising within education was not merely symbolic; it was a reassertion of what scholarship is about. When students risk disciplinary action to defend life and dignity, they remind us that knowledge divorced from humanity is meaningless.
The solidarity they have demonstrated must set the tone for how institutions of higher education approach engagement with and the rebuilding of Gaza’s universities.
The world’s universities must listen, collaborate and commit for the long term. They can build partnerships with Gaza’s institutions, share expertise, support research and help reconstruct the intellectual infrastructure of a society. Fellowships, joint projects, remote teaching and open digital resources are small steps that can make a vast difference.
Initiatives like those of Friends of Palestinian Universities (formally Fobzu), the University of Glasgow and HBKU’s summits, and the Qatar Foundation’s Education Above All already show what sustained cooperation can achieve. Now that spirit of solidarity must expand — grounded in respect and dignity and guided by Palestinian leaders.
The global academic community has a moral duty to stand with Gaza, but solidarity must not slide into paternalism. Reconstruction should not be a charitable gesture; it should be an act of justice.
The Palestinian higher education sector does not need a Western blueprint or a consultant’s template. It needs partnerships that listen and respond, that build capacity on Palestinian terms.
It needs trusted relationships for the long term.
Research that saves lives Reconstruction is never just technical; it is moral. A new political ecology must grow from within Gaza itself, shaped by experience rather than imported models. The slow, generational work of education is the only path that can lead out from the endless cycles of destruction.
The challenges ahead demand scientific, medical and legal ingenuity. For example, asbestos from destroyed buildings now contaminates Gaza’s air, threatening an epidemic of lung cancer.
That danger alone requires urgent research collaboration and knowledge-sharing. It needs time to think and consider, conferences, meetings, exchanges of scholarships — the lifeblood of normal scholarly activity.
Then there is the chaos of property ownership and inheritance in a place that has been bulldozed by a genocidal army. Lawyers and social scientists will be needed to address this crisis and restore ownership, resolve disputes and document destruction for future justice.
There are also the myriad war crimes perpetrated against the Palestinian people. Forensic archaeologists, linguists, psychologists and journalists will help people process grief, preserve memory and articulate loss in their own words.
Every discipline has a role to play. Education ties them together, transforming knowledge into survival — and survival into hope.
Preserving memory As Gaza tries to move on from the genocide, it must also have space to mourn and preserve memory, for peace without truth becomes amnesia. There can be no renewal without grief, no reconciliation without naming loss.
Every ruined home, every vanished family deserves to be documented, acknowledged and remembered as part of Gaza’s history, not erased in the name of expedience. Through this difficult process, new methodologies of care will inevitably come into being. The acts of remembering are a cornerstone of justice.
Education can help here, too — through literature, art, history, and faith — by giving form to sorrow and turning it into the soil from which resilience grows. Here, the fragile and devasted landscape of Gaza, the more-than-human-world can also be healed through education, and only then we will have on the land once again, “all that makes life worth living”, to use a verse from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Rebuilding Gaza will, of course, require cranes and engineers. But more than that, it will require teachers, students and scholars who know how to learn and how to practise skilfully. The work of peace begins not with cement mixers but with curiosity, compassion and courage.
Even amid the rubble, and the ashlaa’, the strewn body parts of the staff and students we have lost to the violence, Gaza’s universities remain alive. They are the keepers of its memory and the makers of its future — the proof that learning itself is an act of resistance, and that education is and must remain the first step towards sustainable peace.
Sultan Barakat is professor in public policy at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, honorary professor at the University of York, and a member of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute ICMD Expert Reference Group. Alison Phipps is UNESCO Chair for refugee integration through education, languages and arts at the University of Glasgow. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.
Regulatory expert Stephen O’Rourke suggests that for food tech founders, the real advantage isn’t speed – it’s knowing what regulators expect before you apply.
Ask any food tech founder what keeps them up at night, and regulation is usually high on the list. It’s not that safety rules are unwelcome — it’s the uncertainty. You can spend years building your product and your team, only to discover that regulators want a completely different evidence package than the one you’ve prepared. By then, you’ve burned through capital you can’t get back.
That’s why the UK’s new Market Authorisation Innovation Research Programme (IRP) is worth paying attention to. Announced in September by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and Food Standards Scotland (FSS), it’s a one-year pilot offering a guidance hub and direct support service for companies navigating the novel foods system. The first focus? Precision fermentation.
Why precision fermentation?
Courtesy: Verley
It makes sense. Precision fermentation is one of the fastest-growing areas in food innovation. Instead of cows or chickens, engineered microbes like yeast and fungi are being used to make dairy proteins, egg alternatives, and specialty fats.
Several of these categories are already lining up for authorisation in the UK. Brewing casein or whey proteins in a fermenter, for example, raises questions regulators haven’t faced before. Is the microorganism safe? What toxicology data is needed? How should “equivalence” with conventional proteins be defined?
By choosing this as its first test case, the FSA is signalling something important: it doesn’t just want to police innovation after the fact. It wants to learn alongside the companies building it.
The EU comparison
The contrast with the EU is obvious, but it’s not black and white. The European Food Safety Authority’s (EFSA) system is slow partly because it has to be. Its mandate is to protect 450 million consumers under strict legal definitions that leave little room for flexibility. That scale and responsibility naturally add time and complexity.
Still, for startups, the result is painful: approvals that take years, dossiers that get stuck in lengthy back-and-forths, and scarce feedback along the way.
The UK is trying a different playbook. By offering early guidance and a sandbox approach, it hopes to become a first-choice launch market. No one is pretending this replaces EU access, but for a founder, it could mean proving your concept in one market before facing EFSA’s longer process.
What founders actually gain
Courtesy: Better Dairy
Here’s the crux: the real win here isn’t faster approvals. Science and safety checks take the time they take.
The real win is clarity.
I see this again and again working with startups: the hardest part is not knowing what regulators will call “enough”. One team spends a year on human trials, only to be told that animal data would have sufficed. Another invests in a costly toxicology package that turns out to be unnecessary.
These aren’t just academic choices; they decide whether you still have money in the bank by the time the decision comes. If programmes like the IRP can give companies a read-out earlier – here’s what we’ll expect, here’s what you don’t need – it can save startups years and millions.
Of course, no one-year pilot will fix the structural bottlenecks in global food regulation. Unless initiatives like this turn into permanent services, there’s a risk they become a one-off experiment.
But that doesn’t diminish its importance. For once, regulators are signalling that they see themselves as part of the ecosystem, not just the final hurdle. That shift in mindset matters.
Why it matters
For investors, this could reshape the map. A VC deciding where to back a Series A food tech team may well see the UK as a de-risked entry point, with clearer timelines and lower regulatory uncertainty. That makes capital more likely to flow — and companies more likely to survive.
And for founders, the lesson is simple: don’t just think about speed. Think about certainty. Knowing what’s expected, and knowing it early, is often the difference between scaling your company and running out of road.
It’s a pattern I see often in my work with startups: clarity early on makes the difference between a company that thrives and one that burns out. Programmes like the IRP won’t remove every barrier, but they do something equally important: they show that regulation doesn’t have to be a wall.
Done badly, regulation is a wall. Done well, it’s scaffolding – not stopping you, but helping you reach the next stage.
Sainsbury’s has started using facial recognition in two of its stores, apparently to “crack down on shoplifting.” But let’s call the new machines that have been installed in one store apiece in Bath and London exactly what they are: the eye of Big Brother. A Live Facial Recognition (LFR) camera bolted to the ceiling, staring down at some of the poorest people in London, waiting for me, or the ghost of who I was, to fuck up.
I spent two and a half brutal years of my life homeless and stuck, struggling with trauma I didn’t know I had. My late teens and early twenties are a blur of addiction, self-destruction, and being totally and utterly lost. I was a thief, yes, I will admit it. But I only stole to survive and only from corporate giants. The disgusting irony of Sainsbury’s rolling out this dystopian surveillance technology to “combat crime” is a total slap in the face, given that they boasted a £1.6 billion profit last year.
Turning to surveillance cameras to address people stealing food criminalises a symptom and ignores a much larger problem: why are people going hungry in the first place? And, for that matter, what kind of absurd cruelty is it to then punish those people for needing to steal to eat?
Manufactured desperation from Sainsbury’s
Retail bosses often talk about a ‘spiralling crime epidemic.’ They throw out stats, reducing those struggling to nothing but a number, and use them to justify a dystopian surveillance state.
These numbers are screamed as an existential threat to retail, shocking figures thrown out to scare the public, and leave them cheering for these cameras. But where is the outrage? This massive explosion of theft is a result of our crumbling society; surely people can see that? Why are people so content to give away their freedoms so easily? This explosion of theft mirrors the destruction of the social safety net, driven by well over a decade of brutal austerity and the cost-of-living crisis.
Economic violence
In the years I was forced to steal from these corporate giants, I stole to eat and drown my sorrows. One grim-looking security firm claims that, based on their experience, packaged meat, baby formula, and alcohol are the most popular items shoplifted. It’s hardly the work of master criminals. Back then, I wasn’t a criminal; I was a desperately lost girl whose basic human needs had been made illegal.
If a society strips away services, cuts benefits, and artificially inflates the price of food, you cannot act surprised when the most vulnerable turn to desperate measures to survive. If the establishment legislates poverty, this is not governance. Actually, it is economic violence used to justify technological suppression. The state itself admits that 70% of retail thefts are carried out by frequent hard drug users, proving that addiction is a disease, homelessness is a desperate crisis, and shoplifting is a direct result of this.
This isn’t a crime wave. This is a wave of hunger and trauma, crashing against the doors of the wealthy elite.
The war on families
The CEO of Sainsbury’s, Simon Roberts, says trialling the LFR is essential because colleagues are concerned about “rising abuse” and must “put safety first.”
But who are the real victims here?
Last year, Sainsbury’s Retail Underlying Operating Profit was over £1 billion, up a massive 7.2% on the previous year, and what was CEO Simon Roberts’ compensation for this? A ridiculous £5.19 million.
If Sainsbury’s has the money to pay one man over £5 million, don’t they have the capability to help poor people? They are spending a wild amount of money on facial recognition technology, as good capitalist bastions of the surveillance state. Simultaneously, that same state is starving social services, housing support, and addiction centres… the things that would actually solve the problem.
They’re choosing to build walls, not bridges.
This manufactured crime wave is worsened by policies that specifically target families. We all know about the two-child benefit cap, a cruel political choice that means struggling families miss out on about £3,455 per year. This disproportionately affects single-parent households, with approximately 71% of benefit-capped families being lone parents, half of whom have a child under five.
Coupled with horrifically stagnating wages, inflation consistently outstripping pay growth, Sainsbury’s is effectively installing biometric software tools not to catch “organised gangs” but to catch struggling single mothers who need to feed their babies.
Corporate bias and the police state
Corporate integration of LFR into retail isn’t a minor security upgrade. It is an unethical and terrifying sprint towards a corporate police state.
By entering that Sainsbury’s store, every single shopper is now subject to a real-time biometric check. This is the privatisation of social control. This technology violates our fundamental right to privacy by turning a simple top-up shop into a mandatory, uncensored biometric scan.
LFR is far more insidious than regular CCTV. It will remember your face and scan your every move. Its very presence can have a chilling effect on everyday life, creating a cloud of fear in which people are scared to exist in their own communities.
The increased danger comes with this technology’s flaws. The facial recognition algorithms are prone to racial and gender bias. LRF performs a lot worse when identifying people of colour and women, and that should scare all of you. This means that the people who are most affected by austerity, such as the working poor, single mothers, those suffering with addiction, and minoritised communities, are the most likely to be misidentified, flagged, and excluded by untrained security staff.
The unaccountable police state
It weaponises technology to further existing institutional discrimination. Back in the day, if that LFR camera had caught me, the consequences would have been so damaging. It would have been a short prison sentence, ripping away the tenuous grip I had on recovery. For those of us who have walked the dark and lonely path of addiction and homelessness, this would do nothing but continue the spiral into despair. The only thing that would work is empathy, secure housing, and accessible treatment.
When Sainsbury’s, our own police, and the government align on initiatives like this, they are creating a private surveillance infrastructure that can be quickly integrated into public policing.
This isn’t a sudden, military takeover; this is a slow, maddening descent into a surveillance police state that will affect all aspects of our daily lives.
By allowing LFR, these supermarkets are acting as an unaccountable, pre-emptive policing arm of the establishment. This will enable corporations, driven by profit, to dole out their own form of exclusion. And this is entirely without the democratic safeguards of our court system.
Sainsbury’s: corporate leeches
Sainsbury’s and the other corporate leeches have chosen to criminalise our most vulnerable. They have chosen not to invest in life, but to invest in a police state. This slow descent into a Big Brother state is accelerating rapidly, and we should be terrified of it.
Facial recognition is not a solution to crime; it is a politicised statement which draws a final, unforgiving line in the sand drawn by unregulated capitalist dogs, and it screams:
We know you’re poor, we deliberately made you this way, and now we are going to watch your every move to make sure you never take back anything we stole from you.
We need to stand up to this.
We need to stand up for every mother who needs to feed her newborn child milk.
For every homeless teenager who hasn’t eaten in days and wants nothing but to find a safe place to sleep.
For the lost addict, drowning their sorrows in narcotics when all they need is stability and someone to help them.
The rift between US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is real. However, to understand it, one must see it for what it is — not a clash of principles, but of priorities.
Trump and the US establishment seek to expand the Abraham Accords, especially to bring Saudi Arabia on board. Tel Aviv, meanwhile, is fixated on accelerating its settlement project, beginning with annexations across large swathes of land in the West Bank.
Beneath this lies another tension. Israel wants to erase any talk of a Palestinian state, while the US, though never serious about Palestinian sovereignty, insists on keeping the illusion alive.
For Washington, that illusion is useful leverage with Arab capitals; for Israel, it is an obstacle.
Trump’s plan even hinted at this illusion in its nineteenth clause: after certain “conditions,” a state might someday emerge. Yet annexation would shatter even that mirage.
Trump, a man known for lying, is sincere in one thing: his promise to Arab states to restrain Israel from annexing land in the West Bank. But his sincerity is tactical, not moral.
The restraint he offers is temporary, a pause meant to preserve the path toward expanding the Abraham Accords. It is not a strategic position, only a calculation.
Natural next step
Netanyahu, meanwhile, wants to force the world to accept that the West Bank is part of Israel, beyond the reach of UN resolutions or international law. For him, annexation is not a bargaining chip but the natural next step in completing the Zionist project.
Both men seek Arab submission to Israeli hegemony. Yet Washington has learned that Arab leaders, while complicit, remain wary. They fear that deepening normalisation, meant to evolve from official policy to popular acceptance, could backfire after Gaza’s devastation, Israel’s ongoing assaults, the seizure of Syrian and Lebanese land, and the aggression against Qatar.
Annexing the West Bank now, they worry, could blow up the illusion of peace that underpins normalisation itself.
For the US, that illusion is vital. The Abraham Accords are not just about recognition but about institutionalising a regional order, a military and security alliance led by Israel, with Arab acquiescence to its sovereignty over all of historic Palestine.
Netanyahu, however, sees no need for Arab consent. He believes force, not diplomacy, will impose Israel’s supremacy. His political survival depends on it: projecting strength, showing no retreat, proving that Arabs, defeated and divided, will ultimately rush to make deals with him.
And so far, he has reason to believe he’s right. The war on Gaza has not halted normalisation; no Arab state has suspended trade or energy ties.
On the contrary, cooperation, especially with the UAE, has expanded. Israeli analysts track this closely, confident that annexation may delay the process, but it will not derail it.
No Arab threats
Israel has concluded that no Arab state that normalised relations has threatened to suspend them, not even after the war of annihilation in Gaza, the incursions into Syria and Lebanon, or the demolition and settlement campaigns across the West Bank.
Still, Zionist and pro-Israel circles in Washington continue to warn the Trump administration that Netanyahu’s recklessness could destroy everything. They know Arab leaders find it difficult to deepen normalisation while Israel endangers regional stability and shows open contempt for their security concerns.
These leaders do not trust that their agreements can restrain Netanyahu’s excesses and take seriously his threats of expansion into Syria, Lebanon, and even Jordan, threats that have already begun to materialise.
Arab governments have managed, for now, to contain public sympathy for Palestinians and suppress popular opposition to ties with Israel. Yet they remain aware of the anger simmering beneath the surface, which could erupt if Israel’s aggressions continue.
It was this fear that drove pro-Israel circles in Washington to pressure the Trump administration to block, or rather, postpone, Israel’s annexation of West Bank land.
Trump was ultimately persuaded. Arab leaders had delivered the message to him directly: annexation would make normalisation politically impossible. He therefore pledged to prevent it, at least temporarily.
This exchange, Arab opposition to annexation and Trump’s tactical response, reveal that the Arab position can still influence Washington.
US needs cooperation
The United States cannot simply threaten every Arab government or sever all aid. It needs their cooperation to secure its regional goals, and that cooperation depends on a degree of stability.
If chaos benefits Washington, popular anger can be tolerated, but if stability is the goal, unchecked Israeli aggression becomes a liability even for the United States.
Trump’s response to the concerns of Arab leaders, especially those of Qatar, Jordan, and Egypt, revealed that they could have done more but chose not to. That, however, is another story.
What matters here is that Trump understood two key conditions for sustaining the Abraham Accords: maintaining a ceasefire and preventing Israel from annexing West Bank land.
The normalisation project aims to integrate Israel into the region and present it as an “indigenous” state, not a colonial one that expands by uprooting the land’s original population.
This has long been Israel’s dream, but Netanyahu no longer seems concerned with appearances. He imagines himself on the verge of a sweeping historic victory.
That fantasy is not his alone; Trump shares it as well.
Trump’s ego greater
Yet Trump’s own ego is greater. He now sees Netanyahu as an obstacle to his ambitions, a man jeopardising what Trump believes he has built and protected. Many within Zionist and pro-Israel circles agree: they want Trump to save Israel from Netanyahu.
Trump’s anger is therefore genuine. He and his aides, backed by influential figures from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, one of the central bastions of Zionist influence in Washington, are determined not to let Netanyahu endanger both US and Israeli interests.
This rift should be used by Arab states wisely, without illusion: it will not alter Washington’s strategic bond with Israel. However, I am under no illusion that they will do anything.
Still, Arab states, however weak-willed, can take a minimum position, to publicly reject Israeli annexation of West Bank land and any territory from Gaza, and to reaffirm their refusal to recognise Israeli sovereignty over occupied Palestinian land.
They can at least reclaim the language of rights as a peaceful weapon: legal, diplomatic, and moral.
That weapon gains power if Arab states act by filing a case against Israel and its settlements as violations of international law. Not to defend Palestine alone, but to defend themselves.
For if they fail to act, the threat will not spare their regimes, nor the region they claim to protect.
Lamis Andoni is a Palestinian journalist, writer and academic who launched The New Arab as its editor-in-chief.
For many of us who have lived through the 70s in Britain, the rise of fascism today brings back many disturbing memories, whilst making us aware of the important differences between the National Front of the 70s and the fascists of today.
Not only is massive corporate power and money backing today’s fascists, they are a global movement that target Muslims, people of colour across the board, asylum seekers, and that small and extremely vulnerable minority, trans people.
Fascists and the feminist movement: trans people’s rights in the crosshairs
The vicious attacks on trans people, particularly trans women, have become commonplace. A Supreme Court judgement in April this year has partly fuelled this. It ruled that under the Equality Act 2010, the protected category of women refers to biological sex only. This ruling implies that trans women cannot legally use women’s spaces such as toilets, male police officers can strip-search them, and in case of miscarriages of justice, the state can hold them in male-only prisons. Notorious transphobe, billionaire author J.K Rowling, reportedly partly-funded the legal case. She sinisterly named it “TERF VE Day”.
The effect on trans women’s lives is catastrophic. Shortly after the ruling, one anonymous trans woman outlined plans to leave the UK:
I’m a senior health professional with a career I love. I’m a married woman with a husband I love. I’m a daughter, sister and friend. But all this has just been shattered.
The ruling is clearly a victory for an increasingly far-right establishment. But the response to the judgement from older cis feminists of colour I spoke to has been varied. It has ranged from eager acceptance “the law will protect real women”, to confused dismissal “possibly being trans is just a young people fad which will go away”, to anger that masculine-presenting women will now face more humiliating questions in women’s toilets than ever before; to an encouraging total rejection – in the words of one Muslim lesbian, “I stand against hate. All kinds of hate!”.
Feminist movement has never been a monolith: a long history of racism
But this is to be expected. The feminist movement of which I regard myself a part has never been monolithic. In the 70s and 80s, it was the issue of racism which divided us.
When Asian women from Awaz, the first South Asian feminist organisation in Britain, spoke at meetings of the racism we faced, and how for us race and gender were inextricably linked, white women often cried or felt personally attacked – just as JK Rowling and her fellow transphobes today claim to feel attacked by trans people online.
At times it seemed that we were being told that being accused of racism was somehow far worse than facing racism. The question of what are ‘women’s issues’ was frequently raised. Was it right to speak at feminist meetings about the physical and psychological violence of immigration laws, for example, or should we stick only to the violence we faced in our families and communities?
However, there were also divides among Black and Asian feminists. In 1989, at a time of rising Islamophobia preceding Bush’s Gulf War, Southall Black Sisters (SBS) joined others to set up an organisation called ‘Women against Fundamentalism’. Many of us from other feminist organisations felt that the raison d’etre, and even the name, of the group was hugely problematic, since ‘fundamentalism’ had already become a byword for religious Muslims in public discourse.
This stigmatised many feminists who were practising Muslims and reinforced the idea that Islam was the exclusive source of patriarchy. The differences became increasingly stark as the oppression of Muslim women became a way of legitimising the invasion of Afghanistan, and the war on terror in Britain brought narratives on the excesses of ‘Muslim’ patriarchy often shaped by neoconservative groups like the Henry Jackson Society.
Filia conference: where white feminism and transphobia collide
Today while some of these differences over racism and Islamophobia still linger, battles over transphobia and overt Zionism have joined them. Southall Black Sisters have publicly supported the trans exclusionary A Woman’s Place UK for instance. These new fault lines led, earlier this month, to the spectacular implosion of a 2,500 strong conference in Brighton. Openly transphobic organisation, Filia had organised the event.
Filia holds annual conferences which it describes as the largest annual grassroots feminist conferences in Europe. These gatherings are clearly well-funded and seem very far from any grassroots organising. One of Filia’s most beloved supporters, mentioned with great excitement in their publicity material, is Rowling. Alongside her transphobia, Rowling has also recently publicly revealed her support for Israel. As Lowkey has noted:
JK Rowling’s agent, head of her company and chair of her charity, Neil Blair, fronts an organisation which is funded by the Israeli government and claims to “advance synergy between Israeli bodies & respective agencies & institutions in the UK.
Among other core members of Filia is Julie Bindel, another longstanding transphobe and Zionist.
Filia’s choice of Brighton, which has a strong trans rights movement, was, in the words of Green Party MP Sian Berry, “clearly provocative”. The night before the conference started, trans rights activists allegedly targeted the venue, a council building. They spray painted it with the words “Feminism is the refusal to define women” and smashed a window. Trans rights activists continued protesting outside the venue for most of the conference.
Indoors, it all kicked off right from the first plenary with a speech by Rahila Gupta from SBS – also the author of an official Filia book – a supporter of Palestine who maintains an explicitly anti-Hamas position. Her carefully calibrated speech, calling in effect for a two-state solution, was met with loud shouts of “What about the hostages!”
Transphobes supporting genocidal Israel
Maryam Aldossari, academic and SBS trustee who also spoke at the conference, told me:
when Rahila asked women to stand up for a free Palestine only about a hundred out of 2500 did so, I was shocked!
On Saturday, a group of women supporting Palestine held a vigil outside the venue. The vigil was met with aggression, Maryam told me:
They were shouting “You are Hamas! You are not feminists”. Later we held a separate meeting at a community centre elsewhere in Brighton.
Meanwhile, Israel supporters led by Julie Bindel held their own external meeting too. But this was not all. At the Filia disco party, a woman with a Palestinian flag joined others on the stage and Sathi Patel from the anti-imperialist feminist organisation Total Women Victory (TWV) also stood with her in solidarity. Filia organisers called the event’s burly male security guards, and Sathi was according to a TWV statement:
grabbed by her hip and thigh and lifted offstage her feet dragging on the ground and left with bruises.
On the last day Maryam wandered into a room in the venue where a meeting was in progress. There was an Israeli flag in the background. Maryam said that a Filia volunteer was running it. Filia meanwhile emailed attendees that “men’s wars” should not be allowed to divide women. Clearly the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian women Israel has killed in the genocide didn’t count as women. Moreover, nor did the many female IOF soldiers who were perpetrators of the genocide.
Filia has most recently issued a statement invoking the Charity Commission and suggesting, in what could be interpreted as a veiled threat against SBS, that all those who support Palestine are pro-Hamas. This, said Maryam:
is exactly what imperial feminists do to deflect from the genocide.
Trans people at the heart of the feminist movement
If Filia’s party descended into a display of anti-Palestinian aggression, there was another ‘celebration’ which went according to plan. This was a session celebrating the Supreme Court judgement on trans people which Filia had supported wholeheartedly. It involved a discussion between those who had campaigned for the law: ex-SNP MP and Filia Trustee Joanna Cherry, and Kate Barker-Mawjee, CEO of the LGB Alliance.
must be treated like any other children with psychological problems.
She has called for Scotland’s only gender identity clinic to be closed. LGB Alliance is a rightwing organisation allegedly close to Boris Johnson.
The overt message of the panel and of Filia as a whole was that trans women were merely recent encroachers in the feminist movement. As veteran of the Gay Liberation Front Frankie Green has written:
There were trans people there from the beginning, of course, just as there have always been trans people and there always will be…Why should even a fraction of the fury that should rightly be directed at perpetrators of the epidemic of male violence against women and femicide and the institutions that enable them, the governments who cut funding to refuges or don’t punish rapists, and systems that subjugate women globally, be targeted at trans women?
Palestine: a ‘defining issue for feminism’
In contrast to Filia’s transphobic perspective, feminist organising must centre trans women, as US-based trans journalist Meredith Talusan urged in an impassioned 2018 essay:
A successful feminist movement must include us not merely as token individuals but with our full selves and the revolutionary perspectives we represent.
Will Filia’s implosion mean anything for the future of the feminist movement in Britain? For me, Filia is a turning point which allows us, cis and trans, young and old, to reaffirm our feminist principles. Specifically, the importance of self-determination, or as the spraypainters outside the conference had proclaimed, that “Feminism refuses to define women”, and the centrality of anti-colonial struggle, today epitomised by Palestine.
As Palestinian feminist Afaf Jabiri reminds us, in the context of the ongoing Nakba:
the losses that we mourn are not only those who were martyred, but those who were never lucky enough to be born… Given that settler colonialism threatens both potential and future, and that feminism must confront the pressing issues of our time in order to shape a better future, Palestine becomes not only a feminist issue but a defining issue for feminism.
You can wake up one morning in Fiji and feel like you’re living in a totally different country.
Overnight we have lost two of our three Deputy Prime Ministers — by many accounts these were the two who were perhaps among the most influential and pivotal in the running of this government.|
For days news of Biman’s impending arrest was being posted about in advance — clearly leaked by people inside Fiji Independent Commission Against Corruption (FICAC). So it did not come as a total surprise.
But reading the reactions on social media — what has surprised, unnerved and confused many — especially government supporters, is how and why does a government charge their own when many in the previous government they wanted to be held accountable continue to walk free?
Why did charges against the two DPM’s take priority?
Is that a sign of how divided they are — or how upright and full of integrity they are?
Charges seem small
The charges brought against the two DPM’s seem small when compared to the significant impact of their removal from cabinet. PM Sitiveni Rabuka, when he was SODELPA leader in 2018, was charged with more or less the similar offence DPM Biman is being charged with — inaccurate declaration of assets and liabilities under the Political Parties Act.
Rabuka was acquitted on the eve of the 2018 election.
Many thought then the whole charge was nothing more than the former Bainimarama government trying to take out its main competitor ahead of the 2018 elections. There was a strong anti-FICAC sentiment then by those now in power.
The main gripe of the coalition parties coming in was that FICAC was being used by those in power for their political agenda — and needed to be disbanded and come under the Police Force.
Rabuka said as much to me in a 2022 interview.
Inevitably, many are now openly wondering if the same thing FijiFirst was accused of doing is happening here, and if this is a machiavellian political strategy for power. To take out a potential internal challenger and clear out a coalition partner so PAP can fight the next elections on its own and focus on winning it outright.
With the support of some former FijiFirst MP’s — PAP has more than enough numbers — and not as reliant on NFP and SODELPA any more.
Coalition has been great
The coalition has been great — but it has been a headache keeping everyone together and managing everyone’s competing interests.
However, the PM has grounds to argue that he is just following the process and maintaining the integrity of FICAC’s fight against corruption — that was severely compromised with the appointment of Barbara Malimali as per the Commission of Inquiry report.
That all he is practising are the principles of transparency, accountability and good governance. Nothing more, nothing less.
That matter is being heard in court with the ruling to be delivered by 23 January 2026 — three months away.
Rabuka has stated that “no one is above the law” and seems confident of weathering any political storm.
But the dark political clouds are forming. Expect more thunder and lightning strikes as more influential people in key positions are expected to be arrested, putting the political and judicial landscape in turmoil.
Forecast is uncertain.
Many storms before
Rabuka has been through many storms like this before. He says he continues to have the support of everyone on his side, including the two DPM’s recently charged.
For now he remains firmly in charge.
But what was once just whispers of internal dissent and division that many of us once dismissed as rumours is starting to grow, as politicians weigh their options.
Whether it turns into a split or full on rebellion, or everyone realise they have no choice but to fall in line, we shall wait and see.
Could we see a repeat of 1994 when Rabuka’s government was brought down from within but he managed to win enough in the elections and form a coalition with the GVP to remain in power?
As of now many in politics are trying to work out which way the wind will blow.
Stanley Simpson is director of Mai TV, general secretary of the Fiji Media Association (FMA) and a media commentator. This is an independent commentary first published on his Facebook page and republished with permission.
On October 17, I received a brief email from a former Association of Salaried Medical Specialists (ASMS) vice-president: “Can’t wait for your blog covering the reception of Simeon Brown at conference yesterday!!”
The context was the aggressive address of Minister of Health Simeon Brown to the ASMS annual conference.
As reported by Radio New Zealand’s Ruth Hill (October 16), Brown accused senior doctors of crossing an “ethical line” by taking strike action involving non-acute care.
Health Minister Simeon Brown . . . his ‘unethical’ accusation against doctors. Image: RNZ screenshot APR
His accusation was made in the lead up to the “mega strike” of around 100,000 senior doctors, nurses, teachers and public servants on October 23.
It included misleadingly Brown claiming that patients were paying the price for the strike action and that ASMS had walked “away from negotiations”.
Further, he added, “Patients should never be collateral damage in disputes between management and unions.” He urged ASMS to call off the strike action and return to negotiations (conveniently ignoring that it never left them).
Clicking my heels – but how? As the ASMS executive director until 31 December 2019, what could I do but click my heels and obey the former vice-president. But this left me with a problem of what to focus on in a short blog.
The Health Minister had raised several options.
Attack dog Judith Collins published a strident and inaccurate open letter. Image: otaihangasecondopinion.wordpress.com
One was the fact that his address, reinforced by Public Services Minister Judith Collins’ stridently inaccurate “attack dog open letter” attack on the health and education unions (October 19) is the most aggressive and hardline government approach towards health unions, at least, since I first became involved with the newly formed ASMS in 1989.
Another was the deliberate use of misleading claims such as Brown accusing ASMS of not being prepared to negotiate while, at the same time, Health New Zealand was refusing to meet ASMS to discuss negotiations. Also deliberately misleading was his false claim about senior doctors’ average salaries.
Eventually I landed on the accusation that triggered much of the media interest and most of the criticisms from ASMS conference delegates — Brown’s claim that senior doctors were crossing an ethical line.
Understanding medical ethics As Ruth Hill reported there were “audible cries of disbelief” from the delegates. Also see Stuff journalist Bridie Witton’s coverage (October 16).
Let’s get back to basics. Ethics is the branch of knowledge that deals with moral principles that govern a person’s behaviour or the conducting of an activity.
Following on, medical ethics is the disciplined study of morality in medicine and concerns the obligations of doctors and healthcare organisations to patients as well as the obligations of patients.
Hippocrates developed the oath that formed the original basis of medical ethics. Image: otaihangasecondopinion
Medical ethics starts with the Hippocratic Oath beginning with its first principle of ‘first do no harm’.
As part of an earlier post on the ancient Oath and this principle (5 February 2022) I argued that not only were they still relevant today, but that they should be applied to the whole of our health system, including its leadership.
Who really crossed the ethical line?
Dr Elizabeth Fenton is a lecturer in bioethics at Otago University. On October 22 she had an article published in The Conversation that shone a penetrating analytical light on Simeon Brown’s ethical line crossing claim.
Her observations included:
Bioethics lecturer Dr Elizabeth Fenton gets to the core of whether striking senior doctors are crossing an ethical line. Image: otaihangasecondopinion
“Striking is an option of last resort. In healthcare, it causes disruption and inconvenience for patients, whānau and the health system – but it is ethically justified.
“Arguably, it is ethically required when poor working conditions associated with staff shortages, inadequate infrastructure and underfunding threaten the wellbeing of patients and the long-term sustainability of public health services.
” . . . The real ethical issue is successive governments’ failure to address these conditions and their impact on patient care.”
In response to the health minister’s implication that striking doctors are failing to meet their ethical obligations to provide healthcare, she noted that:
“These are the same doctors who, alongside nurses, carers and allied health professionals, kept New Zealand’s health system functioning during the COVID pandemic in the face of heightened personal risk, often inadequate protections and substantial additional burdens.
“While the duty of care is of primary ethical importance, codes of ethics also recognise doctors’ duties to all patients, and responsibilities to advocate for adequate resourcing in the health system. These duties may justify compromising care to individual patients under the circumstances in which industrial action is considered.”
Further, doctors:
“. . . are striking because their ability to meet these obligations [to provide high quality care] is routinely compromised by working conditions that contribute to burnout and moral injury – the impact of having to work under circumstances that violate core moral values.
“A key goal of the industrial action is to demand better conditions for clinical care, such as safe staffing levels, that will benefit patients and staff and improve the health system for everyone.”
The penultimate final word In the context of Dr Fenton’s incisive analysis, as reported by Ruth Hill in her above-mentioned RNZ item it is appropriate to leave the penultimate final word to the response of senior doctors at the ASMS annual conference to Simeon Brown’s ethical line crossing accusation. These comments were made in among their boos and groans.
Dr Katie Ben . . . operating lists routinely being cancelled. Image: The Press
ASMS president and Nelson Hospital anaesthetist Dr Katie Ben said:
“We have now taken to putting the number of times the patient has been cancelled on the operating list to ensure the patient doesn’t get cancelled for the fourth, fifth or sixth time. Non-clinical managers were cancelling planned care because they could not fill rosters.”
Waikato Hospital rheumatologist Dr Alan Doube said many people (with crippling chronic conditions) did not even get a first specialist appointment (FSA).
“In Waikato, we decline regularly 50 percent of our FSA so we can provide some kind of sensible ongoing care.”
Emergency medicine specialist Dr Tom Morton at Nelson Hospital added:
“Our ED waiting time have blown out with more than doubling of patients leaving without being seen, which I think is a significant marker of unmet need that’s not being recorded or reported on officially.”
The ultimate final word: nailing who crossed an ethical line In a subsequent RNZ item (October 17), the Health Minister threatened a law change to remove senior doctors’ right to strike: Right to strike threatened.
Patient advocate Malcolm Mulholland . . . nailing who crossed an ethical line. Image: otaihangasecondopinion
The reported response of leading patient advocate Malcolm Mulholland nailed who was crossing the ethical line. Describing Simeon Brown’s threat as “pathetic”, he added:
“I think the reason why our doctors and our nurses are striking is because there’s just simply not enough staff. I don’t know how many times they have to tell him until they are blue in the face.
“You know, all this talk about crossing an ethical line, I would say, ‘take a look in the mirror, minister’.”
Indeed Health Minister — look in the mirror! It is the striking doctors who are acting in accordance with the Hippocratic Oath and adhering to the principle of “first do no harm”. It is the Health Minister who is not.
Ian Powell is a progressive health, labour market and political “no-frills” forensic commentator in New Zealand. A former senior doctors union leader for more than 30 years, he blogs at Second Opinion and Political Bytes, where this article was first published. Republished with the author’s permission.
A fresh survey this week suggested Labour has plummeted to fourth place in voter intentions, behind not just the Conservatives and Reform UK, but potentially even the Greens.
Starmer: turbocharging Labour’s demise
Keir Starmer isn’t just floundering, he is actively accelerating the death of the Labour Party, turning what was once a party of workers and social justice into a pale imitation of the Tories with a hint of Reform, all while watching his poll numbers crater and his own MPs eye the exit doors.
For Starmer, falling behind the Greens isn’t just bad, it’s utterly humiliating for a party that won a massive landslide victory a little over a year ago.
This calamitous collapse is a direct result of Starmer’s refusal to fight for bold socialist policies. Instead of tackling rising inequality head-on with targeted wealth taxes, genuine public ownership, or real wage protections, the bought-and-paid-for asset of the terrorist pariah state doubled down on austerity-lite measures that savagely punch down on the working class while unashamedly cosying up to big business.
It’s a classic Blairite triangulation. Shamelessly go searching for the votes of the centre-right, rather than advocate the policies of the left. Completely alienate your traditional voter base. Sit back and watch helplessly while the Greens siphon off progressive voters who are justifiably furious about Labour’s shift to the right.
But this time, there are two huge differences to the Greens of two decades ago.
Meet the new Greens
One, Zack Polanski. He is the most polished, believable Green Party politician in my lifetime. He gets it.
If you’re left-wing and fed up, Polanski — greener, meaner (to the establishment), and a dab hand at brilliantly dismantling the system — is a serious upgrade on the beleaguered anti-socialist prime minister.
Starmer is the emperor, foolishly pretending he is dressed for revolution. Polanski is the comedian, roasting the emperor’s new clothes with very little effort.
Is Polanski perfect? No.
Are you?
We on the left have been absolutely drubbing Starmer since his 2024 landslide win turned into a masterclass in disappointment, with policies that feel like Thatcherism in a red tie, such as keeping the two-child benefit cap and welcoming donors over workers.
Zack Polanski is the right person, in the right place, at the right time, to take this fight to the establishment.
Perhaps it’s just me, but I’m beginning to think Zack Polanski’s new Green Party is looking a whole lot like I would expect the Labour Party to look.
And secondly, a fractured left has pushed thousands of socialists towards the Greens because they really cannot be arsed with these factional divisions that keep us further away from power than ever before.
If I, once laughably described by Buzzfeed as “the woman that leads Corbyn’s Twitter army” can see it, so can anyone else that is looking for a hope train to hop on board during these dark days of poor-hating, refugee-baiting and *checks notes*… roundabout painting.
The left has been screaming out for a figurehead for five years. You can hardly blame them for getting behind a fantastic communicator with a clear vision, such as Mr Polanski.
Meanwhile, in Wales…
Caerphilly — M4 Junction 32, and the cradle of socialist icons like Aneurin Bevan and birthplace of the NHS — has been a Labour stronghold for over 100 years.
The Caerphilly Senedd by-election wasn’t just a win for Plaid Cymru, it was a thunderous repudiation of the stale, out-of-touch status quo that is dogmatically peddled by both Labour and Reform UK.
Farage had already strutted into Caerphilly like some sort of conquering hero. Pass me the fucking sick bucket. The loathsome, wretched skid mark threw everything at a seat where they had scraped just 495 votes in 2021.
Hilariously, Reform limped to second place with just over a third over the vote. This slap-down reveals their apparent insurgent momentum as little more than brittle protest fluff that can be easily dismantled by a grounded progressive campaign that addresses the concerns of the many, and not the few.
Reform boasted of toppling “100 years of Labour rule” and got their arses handed to them on left-wing plate by a 72-year-old local stalwart who has contested THIRTEEN elections since 1983.
Reform’s 2025 gains could well be anti-Labour spasms, not durable ideology, and we have seen how they can be defeated by alliances that emphasise hope over hate and a local ground campaign that gets out the vote.
Labour got a seismic warning in Wales
I’ve no doubt Mr Farage makes fantastic meme material, but governing the UK? Don’t bet on it just yet, because Plaid Cymru and the people of Caerphilly have shown us that nothing in politics is inevitable.
For Labour, Caerphilly wasn’t just a minor blip, it is a seismic warning that Starmer’s austerity-lite, Westminster first Labour is in a whole world of shit, across the entire country.
Just for one moment, imagine being a Labour politician. Yikes.
Now try telling an ordinary person in Caerphilly about the need for fiscal restraint and difficult decisions after fourteen dreadful years of Tory austerity while not-so-subtly sending billions of their pounds to a country with a rampant neo-Nazi problem.
It’s okay. You can stop imagining now, pick yourself up off the floor, pinch the bridge of your nose to stem the flow of blood, and join a genuinely progressive force for good.
Well done to the people of Caerphilly for coming together to stop Reform ringmaster Farage and his Tory-reject clowns — in the words of another famous son of Caerphilly, Tommy Cooper — “just like that”.
The central hall in the Dolphin in Darlington wasn’t just a venue on Friday evening, it was an anomaly.
In this tiny, post-industrial town in the north, the population has been lost for a long time, reeling from the fall of the ‘Red Wall,’ and desperate for change. Years of lack of funding, being ignored by the vast majority of political parties, has meant that the populist far-right have found a home in the crumbling streets of the town, where Reform UK are expected to surge in the polls.
Yet it was here, in the last bastion of community in Darlington, that the Green Party hosted a sold-out public meeting. Three hundred and fifty people packed into the hall, a huge number for a town of this size, every eye shimmering with excitement and hope as they jostled for seats.
Zack Polanski, the new Green Partyleader, took to the stage, and fucking hell, he did not mince his words.
Opening with a winning smile, he greeted the crowd in a way that I haven’t seen in years. His openness, humour, and caring demeanor seemed to saturate his every word, showing that the purpose of the meeting was not to dwell on the fact that “the county’s future is on the edge,” but to light a fire of hope. The night was a beautiful demonstration that a politics of hope is the answer to the creeping national despair:
The engine of hope, powered by local people
Zack Polanski’s approach, a brilliant mixture of charisma and enthusiasm, immediately set the tone, one that contrasted sharply with the caution of the mainstream. Emphasising that, under his leadership, the massive increase in membership was not a cult of personality, but a genuine grassroots phenomenon.
With open arms, he declared:
Hope is not about a charismatic leader on a stage, hope is about a movement.
At that point, I felt a prickle of hope in the pit of my stomach.
The powerful message seemed to ripple through the audience, reminding us all that we are not passive consumers of politics, but the engine that we powered to facilitate change. Not since Jeremy Corbyn had I felt this prickle, with Polanski’s leadership style embracing the messiness of real democracy. He seems unafraid to acknowledge the rifts that haunt the left, recognising that a healthy party needs a broad church of members.
Our unified struggle and reframing the blame
The commitment to internal democracy in the Green Party shone through in the words “parties should have disagreements,” and assured people that it would be the members who would be deciding the future of the party.
The most compelling part of the evening was how Zack Polanski dismantled the divide-and-rule tactics of the establishment. For the leader of the Greens, although he openly stated the environment remains a primary issue, he highlighted how social and racist injustices are not a separate issue. You cannot tackle one without tackling them all.
This philosophy led him to confront the politics of hate and division. Polanski himself is proudly gay and Jewish, clearly showing that the Green Party would stand for all minoritised people, and he highlighted this by talking about the plight of the trans community and the relentless attacks they are facing as the media tries to mask the real issues society faces.
Polanski did not shy away from calling the rise of far-right figures exactly what it is: fascism, which he proudly and loudly called Nigel Farage, to the smiling approval of the crowd:
The real politics of hope from Zack Polanski and the Greens
Yet Zack Polanski immediately pivoted, drowning the politics of fear with his own politics of hope.
His strategy to win hearts in tiny towns like Darlington was powerful and made me pause and think.
Stating that the people running into the open arms of far-right organisations are “not racist, they are scared,” and face exactly the same fears as we do. They cannot afford their homes, their bills, and cannot feed their kids. We are one and the same, but these lost people just need to realise that, rather than punching downwards and attacking the vulnerable, they need to turn their eyes upwards towards the true enemy.
The Green Party’s role, he argued, is that our struggles are the same and the only enemy we share is the system of orchestrated inequality.
That prickle of hope became a little flame, as I realised what he said was true, and it dawned on me I had to change my ways as well and open myself up to speaking to these people, not just shout at them. It is time to open those dialogues and embrace those who suffer like we do, but have not quite realised the real reasons why.
“We don’t have to stop the small boats, we have to stop the yachts”
That little flame of hope flickering in my stomach suddenly became a furnace with what Zack Polanski then went on to say. He unapologetically laid out the economic blueprint for hope, emphasising that wealth redistribution was the key to going forward and that the means of production should be squarely in the control of the workers.
Honestly, I could have cried.
Who was this man standing before us, smiling at the crowd and speaking the most sense I’d heard since the Corbyn years?
Going on to announce a wealth tax, a policy supported by 75% of the population, was met with ear-shattering applause, as he unapologetically and confidently smashed an issue that every single other leader didn’t have the balls to address. With that winning smile, he promised the revenue it would raise would balance the country’s battered books and would fund the essential services austerity had destroyed.
A £15 minimum wage was also met with rippling excitement from the crowd, a momentum I didn’t think could be beaten until the mention of a MAXIMUM WAGE left Polanski’s lips. Ensuring the crowd that bosses would “no longer be able to take the piss,” the people in the room met this with cacophonous cheers, the promise to shatter the current status quo giving us all the hope we have been missing for so long.
Pledge after pledge from Zack Polanski
Our crumbling NHS, he stated, would no longer incorporate private healthcare, declaring it was run by nothing but leeches. Connecting the health crisis directly to immigration, he highlighted the over 150,000 vacancies within our healthcare system, with the anti-immigration rhetoric of the right pushing away essential workers that we need to keep the nation healthy.
Oh, and social housing? Don’t worry, Zack Polanski has it covered. With over 1.2 million people on the waiting list, he pledged to build social housing, safe from the predatory ownership of career landlords.
Putting the nail in the coffin for the Reform UK party, Polanski smashed the key issue that the entire crowd’s beliefs echoed: The migration issue isn’t one of scarcity, but of greed. The Greens were going after those who truly drained our wrecked country’s resources.
The Rich.
And I almost lost my shit when he said:
We don’t have to stop the small boats, we have to stop the yachts.
A final, hope-filled pledge
The Green Party’s strategy has already been bearing fruit in Darlington, where six Green councillors have been championing local people’s issues. They have tirelessly worked for their community, fighting incredibly hard against the Skerningham Development and working with local Fix-It Cafes.
Zack Polanski promised to turn the current momentum of the party into a force capable of winning 30 to 40 seats in the next government.
He drew a very rare line in the sand as well, which shocked me. I have seen Polanski speak with Zarah Sultana previously, and all he ever did was offer his hand and ways to work together. But this red line was spot on. He refused to ever consider a coalition with Labour, citing the original pledges Starmer had pissed on to get into power, Polanski saying that he “could not be trusted.”
The meeting ended not with a policy debate, but with a massively overwhelming feeling of hope.
A hope none of us have felt for years.
A hope that we, as the trodden-down working class, need to bring to those who are lost and scared:
The Green Party has another new member – thanks to Zack Polanski
The entire evening was a testament to the fact that, even in a little run-down town like Darlington, which is deemed ‘jaded,’ people are hungry for the politics of change. They need a politics that speaks to their needs and offers a genuine alternative to community, that will fight the rising tide of fascism and bring the real power of politics to the people. We need a politics run by us, not politicians in the hands of their corporate masters and shareholders.
For me, sitting in that crowd and feeling the shared conviction in Zack Polanski’s voice and the cheers of those around me, the furnace of hope burning in my chest, I came to a realisation.
It was time I stopped watching from the sideline and actually became part of the change.
That night, I decided to join the Greens.
Featured image and additional images via the Canary
King Charles may already be longing for the good old days of merely dealing with the alleged crimes of his creepy sweatless brother, as he has now attracted the ire of an even more unscrupulous pack of ne’er-do-wells – grumpy Orangemen. The monarch’s crime is to try and put an end to 500 years of sectarian strife in Europe by becoming the first leader of the Church of England to pray with the Pope.
You’d think it might be a positive thing to step away from a period that has brought us such highlights as The Thirty Years’ War (1618 – 1648, 8 million dead, including half of Germany); the French Wars of Religion (1562 – 1598, 4 million dead); and several hundred years of conflict in Ireland (including Britain’s genocidal starvation policies that left over 1 million dead), but the Independent Loyal Orange Institution (ILOI) has a different take. The offshoot of the Orange Order apparently want to keep this excellent run going for a few more centuries, and have used the trendy medium of obscure theological rhetoric to do so.
Gonna party like it’s 1517
Ever with the times, the sash-sporting sectarians have come up with a series of anti-papist gibberish likely to confuse even their own members, King Charles, the Pope, the person that wrote it, and probably God himself. Leo is a fairly conventionally bigoted leader of the Catholic church, but the wild diatribe – which sounds like an unused excerpt from the street preachers scene in Life of Brian – makes him sound closer to the antichrist:
The Pope falsely claims to be the Vicar of Christ on earth and the Church over which he presides clearly preaches a false Gospel which is not in keeping with the Inerrant Word of God.
When examined in the light of Scripture, the erroneous and dangerous doctrines and practices of the Church of Rome are found to be unscriptural and completely without biblical warrant.
The Ballymoney lads go on to prove they’re down with the kids by letting us know that the:
Romish doctrine of Purgatory is repugnant to the Word of God along with the worshipping of images and relics’. Furthermore, the same Articles of Faith over which the King governs reaffirm that ‘the Church of Rome hath erred on matters of Faith and that the false doctrine of Transubstantiation cannot be proved in scripture for the Mass is a blasphemous fable and a dangerous deceit which have given occasion to superstition.
The Canary tried running the above through Google Translate to see what this shit means but the Deranged Orange Sectarian Lunacy feature is still in beta so we’ll put it down as “something not very nice about the Pope” for now.
Full-fat Orangeism, carbonara and Holy War
The ILOI pledge on their website (a form of witchcraft btw) to “look forward to the future [and]…learn from the past”, which is an interesting take given they likely believe the world is 6,000 years old, fixate on stuff 2,000 years old, pledge their allegiance to a creed 500 years old, and revel constantly in the ‘glory’ of a battle that’s 300 years old.
The solemnity of their letter clearly indicates they’re still stuck in a past where Britain’s benefit-scrounger-in-chief (i.e. King), enjoyed real power rather than just slightly too much power for an unelected figurehead. Naughty Charlie is told off for failing to uphold his Coronation Oath in which someone who actually listens to this stuff noticed that he pledged to be a “faithful Protestant”. Apparently that means “there can be No Peace with Rome, until Rome makes Peace with God” so with any luck hopefully while in Italy Charles can say something disparaging about a carbonara and kick off a world-shattering Holy War before he gets the 19:15 flight home to London Stansted.
In these fast-changing times, where some unionists seem to be moving towards your more fashionable forms of bigotry, such as hatred of immigrants and trans people, it’s almost nostalgic to see the old hands keeping the proud tradition of anti-Catholic animosity going.
Returning to Aotearoa after half a year in the occupied West Bank, Cole Martin says a peace deal that fails to address the root causes — and ignores the brutal reality of life for Palestinians — is no peace deal at all.
COMMENTARY:By Cole Martin
A ceasefire in Gaza last week brought scenes reminiscent of January’s brief pause — tears, relief, exhaustion and devastation as families reunited after months, years and even decades in captivity.
Others were exiled or discovered their entire family had been killed; thousands returned to their homes in northern Gaza, others to rubble – but just like last time, it didn’t last.
An Israeli checkpoint near Al-Khalil, Hebron . . . Palestinians stand in a crowded, fenced corridor with metal bars, waiting to pass through a turnstile gate. Image: Cole Martin
The prevention of food, water, aid and critical infrastructure continues; the borders remain closed; and across the rest of Palestine, Israel’s brutal system of domination, apartheid and displacement continues.
It’s impossible to ignore two critical elements that this deal omitted: a failure to address the root causes and a jarring lack of international accountability.
I returned to Aotearoa this week after six months documenting and reporting from the occupied West Bank, where Israel continues its campaign of violent displacement and colonial expansion. Almost everyone I know has tasted the terror of Israeli domination.
Broke into bedroom
My Arabic tutor described how soldiers broke into her bedroom at night to interrogate her family about a man they didn’t even know. My climbing partner warned you can be shot for climbing in the wrong place, with most of their crags now inaccessible.
I visited Jerusalem with a friend who scored a one-day permit. He lives in Bethlehem, just a half-hour away, but they’re barred from visiting and must return by midnight; a process involving biometric scanners and intrusive searches.
And I was based in Aida refugee camp, one of dozens across the land where thousands of families have lived since their violent displacement in 1948 — the ethnic cleansing which saw 750,000 expelled, 15,000 killed and 530 villages destroyed.
Refused the right to return, their homes are now dormant ruins in “nature reserves” or inhabited by Israeli families. Israel was built on the land, farms, businesses and stolen wealth of these families — and countless more who remain as “present absentees” within the state of Israel.
Left: Palestinian climbers enjoy one of their last accessible crags, the others too dangerous to access because of settler violence. Right: Yacoub Odeh, 84, walks the ruins of his childhood village Lifta, denied his right to return to live, despite living just 10 minutes away. Images: Cole Martin
I visited the Ofer military courts and witnessed a corrupt system designed to funnel Palestinians to prison based on extortion, plea bargains and “secret evidence” which the detainee and lawyer aren’t allowed to see. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers receive full legal rights in Israeli civil courts; two vastly different legal systems based on race — if the settler is arrested at all.
Almost everyone I met has experienced detention firsthand or through a close family member — involving beatings, humiliation, starvation and threats. A nurse my age humorously asked why I wasn’t married yet; when I asked the same, he explained he’d only recently left years of Israeli captivity.
His killer was free within five days, back harassing the family, and has established an illegal settlement in the middle of their village — destroying homes, olive groves, water and electrical infrastructure with no repercussions.
Tariq Hathaleen stares at the bloodstained courtyard where his cousin and best friend Awdah was shot. Tariq was detained for several days following Awdah’s death. Image: Cole Martin
I visited countless communities across the West Bank who face daily harassment, violence and incursions from Israeli settlers, police and military. Settlements continue to expand, preventing Palestinians from reaching their land.
All of this continues, none of it is halted by the “ceasefire”; and most of it will escalate as soldiers leave Gaza and look to exert their dominance elsewhere.
I’m truly fearful for my friends in the West Bank, particularly as Israel openly threatens annexation. A peace deal that ignores these realities is no peace deal.
Resilience and courage
But I also witnessed resilience and courageous persistence. Palestinian civil society and individuals have spent decades committed to creative non-violence in the face of these atrocities — from court battles to academia, education, art, demonstrations, general strikes, hīkoi (marches), sit-ins, civil disobedience.
These are the overlooked stories that don’t make catchy headlines, but their success depends on the international community to provide accountability. Without global support, Palestinians have been refused their right to self-defence, resistance and self-determination.
If we really care about peace, we need to support justice. To talk about peace without liberation is to suggest submission to a system of displacement, imprisonment, violence and erasure.
This is not the time to turn away, this is the time to ensure that international law is upheld, that Palestinians are given their dignity, self-determination, right to return and reparations for the horror they’ve faced.
Cole Martin is an independent New Zealand photojournalist who has been based in the occupied West Bank for six months and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by the The Spinoff and is republished with the author’s permission.
Jeremy Corbyn has written to Lisa Nandy to condemn her outrageous – and frankly antisemitic – comments. Namely, Nandy claimed that Corbyn and the left don’t care about the safety of Jewish people because they object to allowing a bunch of racist Maccabi Tel Aviv thugs masquerading as football fans to rampage through the streets of Birmingham chanting about rape and murder and looking for Muslims to beat up.
Conflating all Jewish people with a hate mob is antisemitic – yet that’s what Nandy did when she answered Corbyn’s parliamentary question by telling him that, as Corbyn notes in his letter:
the people he now associates with … do not share the view that everybody must be safe to walk the streets of this country.
Of course, Corbyn being Corbyn – and an MP – has used more moderate language. But, his disgust at Nandy and her boss Keir Starmer’s determination to conflate Jewish people and violent thugs is perfectly clear nonetheless. The letter is reproduced below and the text is provided after it for those using screen readers:
I have written to Lisa Nandy, following her grossly misleading comments over the Maccabi Tel Aviv ban.
This is about a group of fans with a history of racism and violence. It is not about banning Jewish people – and any attempt to conflate the two is shameful. pic.twitter.com/B2MsaaZBGq
I am writing to express my deep disappointment in your response to my question during
yesterday’s Urgent Question; on the decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv F.C. fans from the fixture
against Aston Villa.
As I said in the chamber, this decision was about the risk to public safety, not about “banning
Jewish people from going to the match or going to Birmingham.”
I requested that we must avoid the dangerous conflation of the behaviour of a group of football
fans from “the wider question of how everybody-whether Jewish, Muslim or anything else must
be safe to walk the streets of this country.”
In your response, you stated that “the people he now associates with … ” do not share the view
that everybody must be safe to walk the streets of this country. Your comment is a shameful
misrepresentation of my colleagues’ views. As you will know, the Safety Advisory Group’s
decision to prohibit away supporters from attending the match was taken to “help mitigate risks
to public safety” after West Midlands Police classified the fixture as “high-risk”. Making this
assessment through the lens of public safety is what most people would hope and expect – and
explains why this decision has public support.
Contrary to your claim that “it is unprecedented in recent times that an entire group of away
supporters have been entirely banned from a game”, Legia Warsaw fans were banned from a
game against Aston Villa in 2023. West Midlands Police took this decision due to “safety fears.”
This is about a group of football fans with a history of racism and violence. This is not about
banning Jewish people -and you know full well that none of us would support such a ban. Any
attempt to conflate these two issues is not just grossly misleading; it is irresponsible and
represents a shameful attempt to exploit the fears and anxieties of Jewish people.
Please can you return to the House of Commons to retract your comments. My independent
colleagues in parliament -Ayoub, Zarah, Iqbal, Shockat and Adnan -work diligently to serve
people of all faiths and others in their communities. We will continue to speak up in parliament
for all of them in the name of equality, justice and peace.
Israel-funded Zionist Nandy is even less likely to do that than she is to be seen at the front of the next march for Palestine, which her boss and his minions want to ban, when the UK Israel lobby has mounted a mass campaign to overturn the safety-driven Maccabi ban, even inventing a ‘Jewish supporters’ organisation to shore up its propaganda.
Israel and the West pretend they want a real peace in Israel-Palestine yet the Israelis have beaten unconscious the man most likely to help realise a sustainable end to the conflict: Marwan Barghouti.
The ethnocentrism of Western culture is such that 20 Israeli hostages received vastly more coverage than thousands of Palestinian hostages, nearly 2000 of whom were released as part of the recent exchange.
These prisoners, physically emaciated, most emotionally shattered, many children, most having never been charged, some held for decades, emerged from the Dantesque Inferno of the Israeli prison system. Most had some kind of disease, commonly scabies, due to the infested and infected conditions of the gulag.
Five Palestinian detainees released and exiled to Egypt brought with them terrible news: the great Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti — the person most likely to lead a free Palestine — had recently been beaten unconscious by his captors.
According to the Times of Israel, Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir who oversees the Israeli Prison System says he is “proud that Barghouti’s conditions have changed drastically”.
What Nelson Mandela would say about the beating of Marwan Marwan Barghouti — Palestine’s most loved and revered leader, a living symbol of the resistance — was beaten unconscious by 8 Israeli guards, according to the testimony of fellow prisoners on arrival in Cairo. The attack left the 66-year-old with broken ribs and head injuries.
When called on to demand his protection, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other Western leaders yawned and looked the other way. That response defined the depths that the Western world has reached in its permissiveness of violence towards Palestinian prisoners.
Marwan Barghouti is commonly referred to as the Palestinian Mandela, a man who has the attributes to not only unite the many Palestinian factions but also negotiate a lasting peace, if given the opportunity.
Mandela couldn’t have been “Mandela” without him surviving and being released — which is a tribute to the ANC and other fighters for freedom, as well as to the global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns that finally convinced the regime to negotiate.
The same was true of the Good Friday Agreement for Northern Ireland which saw the release of prisoners that one side considered terrorists. The British also came to accept that negotiation with leaders like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of the IRA was essential precisely because they had the street credibility to deliver peace.
It is worth pointing out that Mandela said he was not personally beaten during his 27 years of captivity by the racist South African apartheid regime.
Barghouti, who has spent the last 23 years in prisons has had at least four beatings by the Israelis in the past three years alone. The Israelis have shown nothing but contempt for the Geneva Conventions, the laws of war, Red Cross requests, or any benchmark of human decency.
They are our “friends and allies” with whom we share values.
‘He has been in a struggle for 50 years’. Video: TRT News
Rules on prisoner treatment
After leaving Robben Island to eventually become South Africa’s first black President, the convicted terrorist and revolutionary Prisoner 46664 helped author the Nelson Mandela Rules on prisoner treatment, adopted by the United Nations in 2015. He had seen the mistreatment of many of his comrades by racist white South Africa, a close ally of most of our governments.
The scale of what is being done by Israel in its mass torture centres would be beyond anything Mandela could have imagined. Unlike morally repellent leaders like New Zealand’s Luxon, UK’s Starmer, France’s Macron or Germany’s Merz, he would never have failed to act.
A central tenet of the Mandela Rules is that people behind bars are not beyond human rights. Countries — and, yes, that includes Israel — must adhere to minimum standards such as, “No prisoner shall be subjected to, and all prisoners shall be protected from, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, for which no circumstances whatsoever may be invoked as a justification.”
Recently released Palestinians, most in shocking physical condition, talked of having to drink toilet water, beatings, being denied medical treatment, constant humiliations, including sexual violence, committed by the Israelis.
This kind of behaviour has long been documented by international human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — and largely ignored by the mainstream media.
The Israelis, never forget, are our close friends, with whom we share “values”.
I have written a number of articles about Marwan and, to avoid repetition, I recommend those unfamiliar with his astonishing story to read them. My last article, Saving Marwan Barghouti is our duty, in August, was part of a global push to prevent Marwan facing further mistreatment. I was shocked at the time to see the video that Israeli Minister Ben-Gvir posted to show the power he personally had over Marwan whose physical condition had obviously deteriorated to a terrible extent. Now he has been beaten, for the fourth time.
“It is a clear declaration that they are threatening my father’s life,” his son Arab Barghouti said this week.
Prisons are ‘Israeli sadism in a nutshell’ One person who watched the release of the prisoners last week was veteran Israeli journalist Amira Hass, correspondent on the Occupied Palestinian Territories for Israel’s leading newspaper Haaretz.
“It was a kind of parade of skeletons,” Hass said. “These last two years, it’s like the Israeli prisons have become Israeli sadism in a nutshell,” she told Democracy Now!.
“The way that prisoners were treated during these two years is unprecedented in Israel. They didn’t only come out emaciated; they came out ill, sick. Some of them have lost limbs. It’s indescribable.”
Hass’s own parents were Holocaust survivors, her mother surviving nine months in the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Now, along with all of us, she is witness to genocide.
She makes the fine observation that people aren’t born cruel; they become so. I would add: we in the West helped the Israelis become so depraved by ignoring their abuses for so long. Former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer is a case in point.
“Can I ask the Prime Minister what recent representation his government has made in the last few days to secure the immediate release of Mr Barghouti, given his widespread popularity as a unifying voice for Palestinian rights, dignity and freedom, and therefore his potential crucial role in securing a meaningful and lasting peace in the region?”
Starmer is an avatar for the West: complicit in genocide and disturbingly detached from the suffering of the Palestinian people.
Starmer is an avatar for the West . . . complicit in genocide and disturbingly detached from the suffering of the Palestinian people. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Starmer, who has less human decency in his entire being than Nelson Mandela had in one nostril hair, refused to even mention Barghouti by name. His lawyerly reply:
“Thank you for raising the individual case. We offer to provide such further information as we can, as soon as we can, in relation to that particular case.”
Western leaders, including in my own country, have refused to even reply to requests that petitions/insistences be made to the Israelis to save the great Palestinian leader. They have shown more empathy for the remains of deceased Israeli hostages crushed under the rubble of buildings bombed by the Israelis, hypocritically blaming Hamas for not releasing the remains fast enough!
Such is the moral calibre of our leaders.
None of them, it should be pointed out, had anything to say when footage appeared of Israeli soldiers committing gang rape at Sde Temein Prison last year. Not only were the men not punished but by week’s end they had been blessed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s spiritual mentor Rabbi Meir Mazuz who assured one of the rapists that he had done “no wrong” and “In another country they would have given him an award”.
Never forget, the Israelis are our close friends and allies with whom, our leaders tell us, we share values.
‘Israel doesn’t want peace – they want ethnic cleansing’ Such is Marwan Barghouti’s standing that he is respected by all Palestinian factions and acknowledged as a unifying figure, a peacemaker and someone who should be leading Palestine not getting his head punched by Israeli thugs.
“That’s why they see him as a danger,” says his son, Arab Barghouti. “Because he wants to bring stability, he wants to end the cycle of violence.
“He wants a unifying Palestinian vision that is accepted by everyone, and the international community as well. But they’re [Israelis] not interested in any political settlement; they’re only interested in ethnically cleansing the Palestinian people.”
True words, those — and they demolish the fake narrative peddled by Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders that there was “no partner for peace” on the Palestinian side.
The Israelis have killed so many Palestinian negotiators, so many Palestinians leaders that the opposite is now clear: the Israelis and the West are the true enemies of peace.
I’ll give the last word to another Palestinian. I dedicate it to Keir Starmer, Christopher Luxon, Anthony Albanese and all those other leaders who stand deaf, dumb and blind to Marwan Barghouti and the thousands of Palestinian souls still suffering in Israeli captivity:
“Then He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.’
– Matthew 25, King James Bible
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region, and he contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz.
The irrelevance of Keir Starmer was highlighted in the most brutally awkward fashion, this past week in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, where world leaders gathered for a hastily organised signing ceremony endorsing Donald Trump’s Gaza ‘peace plan’.
After a couple of weeks of painfully dragging myself through party conference speeches, a running nose and aching bones, this ultimate cringe of 2025 was exactly what the doctor ordered.
The ‘historic’ signing event was supposed to project global unity, but it quickly devolved into a viral moment of delicious diplomatic discomfort that humiliated a beleaguered flop of a British prime minister.
Even more glorious was the fact Keir Starmer had hyped himself up into the big leagues, and in the blink of an eye he realised he was no more than the intern fetching a coffee for his boss.
Starmer shuffled up to the lectern like he was about to unveil the cure for the common cold and left moments later looking like a lightweight boxer in a heavyweight bout.
After watching the slow motion car crash of egos clip for a fourth, possibly fifth time, was I the only person thinking to myself, “Please god, don’t let me be British any longer”?
As if the dentally-challenged far-rights painted roundabouts and upside down Temu flags didn’t already leave you wanting to denounce your Britishness every time you popped to Asda, then along comes wooden Keir, with a grin like cracked porcelain to finish the job off.
So what happened to the ironclad “special relationship”?
Starmer: where’s the special relationship?
There was Trump, name-dropping and praising his allies like Italy’s Meloni, while Starmer got the equivalent of a LinkedIn “thanks for your interest” email. There was no “Keir, my man” bromance, no shared spotlight, just a pat on the head and a dismissal that screamed of utter irrelevance.
Of course, the snub wasn’t random. Starmer was named last because of the simmering tensions over Britain’s role in the peace process. Trump, seeking revenge for Starmer’s half-hearted recognition of a Palestinian state, gave a brutal demonstration of our diminished clout on the global stage.
Starmer, desperately trying to play the serious statesman with his lawyerly gravitas and zero stage presence, made an absolute fool of himself on the greatest stage of them all, and I, for one, absolutely loved it.
Starmer’s post-snub spin? “It helped get the ceasefire”. This is delusional nonsense from a man who peaked as a human upright Dyson.
In reality, it wasn’t just a snub. It was a vivisection of Starmer’s fragile ego, exposing the hollow core of a damaged prime minister who thought groveling at Donald Trump’s flakey feet would earn him a seat at the grown-ups’ table.
I absolutely detest Keir Starmer at the best of times, be in absolutely no doubt of that, but I am absolutely convinced that the tangerine tantrum hates the toolmaker’s son, even more than me.
Trump views Starmer as a woke liability with Obama-esque policies. It’s easy for us to laugh at the “woke” accusation, but when you’re Donald Trump even Genghis Khan comes across as a tofu-eating tree hugger.
Meanwhile…
I dared to delve into the world of football thuggery this past week, inspired by the decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from travelling to Birmingham to watch their football team face Aston Villa.
Keir Starmer, desperate to please his disappointed Zionist backers, immediately denounced the safety advisory group’s decision (because he obviously knows better), and went straight in with the antisemitism smear.
I can’t pretend to know the ins and outs of the Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters’ well-documented football-related violence, and I thought the Football Lads Alliance was some sort of boyband that was thrown together on the X Factor. But to pretend a group of football hooligans are being singled out for being Jewish is entirely disingenuous and utterly deplorable.
The last I heard, the Labour government were working “at pace” to get the sensible decision overturned. Perhaps they should keep their fucking noses out, unless Starmer, Streeting, Reeves, and the rest of the Israel fanatics want to put on a hi-viz jacket and steward the match themselves.
Who knows? By the time you read this it wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility for Benjamin Netanyahu to be given a VIP seat at Aston Villa for the big match, with free tea and biscuits at half time.
Bald bait
I must admit, I did put a little bit of bald bait on my X timeline to see what fishy fash I could reel in, and my goodness they did not disappoint:
Stick to cooking. U obviously know nothing about football
You’ve not seen my cooking, Simon Bunchanumbers.
You know fuck all about football you nazi cunt
@lads_alliance we have another one here to visit
Ive got her address
Thank you Jason the patriot. Could you ask them to cut my front bush, please?
Shut up you lefty cunt
Cheers Arnie, my love. I hope your next shit is a hedgehog.
I say to you lovers of ‘the beautiful game’, there is nothing beautiful about repeatedly turning European football into a battleground for violent extremism. Not that Starmer seems to have noticed that.
While millions waited in hopes that the Global Sumud Flotilla would win this year’s Nobel peace prize for its epic solidarity with Palestine, the Norwegian committee charged with granting the award gave it to Maria Corina Machado instead, veteran CIA coup plotter in Venezuela. As the late Gore Vidal aptly advised, “Never underestimate the Scandinavian sense of humor.”
A day later in Gaza, the Israeli army destroyed the children’s hospital Al Rantisi with dynamite charges exponentially more powerful than those conceived by their inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), creator of the prize that carries his name. With the victims’ bodies barely cold in the rubble where the hospital previously stood, Machado praised the Holy State as a “genuine ally of liberty” while sending compliments to the “long-suffering Venezuelan people” as well as President Trump: “I accept this award in your honor, because you really deserve it.”
Congratulations poured in, among them, from Barack Obama, who won the peace prize in 2009 on his way to authorizing seven wars in Muslim countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria). Also from Guatemalan president Bernardo Arevalo, who called Machado a “world class Venezuelan,” an appraisal that would have shamed his father (Juan Jose Arevalo), the first democratically elected president of the Central American republic and author of The Shark and the Sardines, a strong anti-imperialist essay whose title alone captures the historic power dynamic between Washington and Latin America.
Machado, a pseudo-Venezuelan “sardine” eager to sell-out her country to the “shark” in Washington, was received in the White House in 2005 by George W. Bush in recognition of the quality of her aspirations, and twenty years later she is still at it, imploring Trump to invade Venezuela in the name of liberty, democracy, and the struggle against narco-terrorism. Of course this has nothing to do with Venezuelan’s proven oil reserves of 303.8 billion barrels, the most of any country in the world. Perish the thought.
Dr. Nobel, an arms manufacturer who got the idea for awarding a peace prize from his secretary Bertha Felicie Sophie, who was a pacifist and feminist, as well as the author of Lay Down Your Arms (1889). In his will, Nobel stated that the profits from his considerable fortune were to reward “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
Since its creation (1901) the prize has been accompanied by pious Eurocentrism and conditioned by Great Power geopolitics that have more to do with tweaking the conditions of permanent war than they do with establishing peace. This was never more evident than in the case of Woodrow Wilson, who won the prize in 1919.
Elected on a peace platform, Wilson immediately plunged the U.S. into the bloodiest war in world history (at the time) — World War I — transforming an expensive battlefield stalemate into a lopsided victory for the Allies, who promptly imposed a bitter and humiliating “peace” on starving Germany, which began to take growing note of the German-supremacist denunciations of an obscure Austrian corporal. Forgotten was Wilson’s Fourteen Points declaration he had boomed across the Atlantic on the pretext it contained the secret to human happiness and permanent world peace. Once his complete lack of strategic sense was revealed at Versailles, Europe’s veteran imperialists ignored his pious nostrum about establishing a “machinery of friendship” in favor of perpetuating European colonialism, leaving Wilson unable to convince even his own country to join his crowning glory — the League of Nations.
Other “great” Americans who won a Nobel peace prize include Nordic-supremacist Teddy Roosevelt, for whom war was a greater thrill than life itself, and whose popular book series, The Winning of the West, was worthy of Himmler. He estimated that “nine out of every ten” Indians were better dead than alive, deemed “coloreds” degenerate by nature, and looked on Latin peoples (“damned dagoes”) as little more than children. He applauded U.S. civilian massacres in the Philippines, which killed hundreds of thousands.
However, the most genocidal U.S. winner of the peace prize would have to be the late Henry Kissinger, who befriended apartheid South Africa, ushered General Pinochet into power in Chile, gave the green light to Indonesia’s mass extermination of East Timor’s mountain people, and killed millions of Indochinese with saturation bombings. His comment about the Cambodian phase of the latter attacks, which paved the way for Pol Pot’s rise to power, make an ideal epitaph for the career of the clueless foreign policy expert: “I may have a lack of imagination, but I fail to see a moral issue involved.”
With the Scandinavian sense of humor continuing to enrich our political folklore, there’s no reason for Donald Trump to lose hope.
Content warning: discussions of suicidal thinking and ideation
Every year as ADHD Awareness Month rolls around, we see the same tired social media posts from politicians, corporations, and charities talking about how we should be supported, and everyone should be more aware.
The issue is, most of them are plenty aware of ADHD, and are using their power to oppress ADHDers further instead. This October, one of the forms this takes is Wes Streeting announcing a new review into ‘overdiagnosis’ of mental health and neurodivergence – something we know is a complete and utter fallacy, used to deny benefits and strip our healthcare.
Just one example of ADHD care from the wrong angle
I was diagnosed with ADHD in 2021, after I learnt about it myself. It was six years after I received my autism diagnosis in a psychiatric unit, and it should have been obvious that they came as a pair when I talked constantly about having six thoughts and two songs rattling around my head at once. This, and my constant inattentiveness, were put down to ‘autism-associated anxiety’.
As grateful as I was – and am, to this day – to have received any diagnosis at all, the years spent with one diagnosis and not the other meant my understanding and the ways I tried to support myself were completely misaligned with my reality.
This included, more seriously, the fact that I couldn’t get a hold on my suicidal thoughts. I experience passive suicidality most of the time: this refers to suicidal thinking that has no plan in place, rather is made up of more feeling. But often, it would suddenly flare and become dangerous in a way that didn’t make sense to anyone around me. Therapy didn’t seem to change it coming up, nor my medication.
In reality, these sudden flares were emotional dysregulation, experienced as part of my ADHD and causing extremely intense feelings, impulsivity, and what others may term ‘mood swings’. When my brain sees no other way out, or thinks it would be easier not to exist, that’s where it goes — normally in relation to criticism, rejection, or something that is just entirely too overwhelming. The former elements can be attributed to Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria, an intense feeling felt in ADHDers.
Maybe it isn’t overdiagnosis, maybe it’s not understanding our root needs
When I finally learnt that these suicidal thoughts were not depression, I started to handle them differently. We worked on strategies that would calm me down and get me through those patches, and planned for them with those around me.
When I thought it was depression causing this, I couldn’t manage it. I felt entirely confused about the timing and the on-off again nature. I felt like a failure for the fact that medication and therapy couldn’t seem to even begin to change it.
Perhaps, when we look at neurodivergent people, we shouldn’t think about it as overdiagnosis, but instead, understand our traits in the right light, and professionals not wasting time being unable to help us because our care is coming from the wrong angle?
Suicidality in autism & ADHD has to be taken seriously
My story is not to say that autistic and ADHD people cannot have depression that causes suicidal thinking – that isn’t the case at all. In fact, we are more likely to experience depression and suicidal thinking than our peers.
However, I do think it is critical to understand that suicidality can have different roots in brains that are not built for this world. Health professionals and those assessing or caring for us need to have a basic understanding of different manifestations of these needs. They need to understand how to support us with them, from how simply we talk about it to how we make support plans and stop seeing it as something that needs fixing.
The overdiagnosis review is wasting time and resources
It’s clear that the overdiagnosis review is only to back up the benefit cuts. Last week, when the review was announced, Keir Starmer told Radio 4:
would we not be better putting our money in the resources and support that is needed for mental health than simply saying, it’s to be provided in benefits?
If this is genuinely the case, where are all these resources? Where is the care and the clearing of the waiting lists? He’s right – benefits should not be the only answer. But they cannot be taken and replaced with nothing.
The review is to be vice-chaired by controversial doctor, Sir Simon Wessely. He is the same man who said Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) had a psychological root, and the chances are high that it will lean into the rhetoric that neurodivergence and mental health conditions are over diagnosed.
There are endless reasons why autism, ADHD and others are being diagnosed more, including higher awareness and changes in diagnostic understanding. To spend time, money and energy on trying to prove otherwise rather than funding broken systems, the government is doing the exact opposite of what Keir Starmer is arguing.
The issue is not overdiagnosis. It’s every other problem we can see: earlier misdiagnosis, lack of understanding, lack of resources — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
President Trump’s hostility toward Venezuela has grown more explicit and reckless in recent days, making indifference on this issue from top Democrats and center-left media all the more conspicuous.
The New York Times reports that Trump has instructed the CIA to “take action” in Venezuela as the White House pushes for regime change that would, according to the Times, involve a “broad campaign that would escalate military pressure to try to force out” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The Trump White House claims to have blown up six boats from Venezuela in the Caribbean, killing 27 people thus far with no legal or moral authority to do so (leading to the abrupt resignation Thursday of the military commander overseeing the Pentagon’s boat attacks, Adm. Alvin Holsey). The CIA authorization, according to the Miami Herald, “coincides with a broader US military buildup in the region. The Pentagon has deployed more than 4,500 troops, most of them based in Puerto Rico, along with a contingent of Marines aboard amphibious assault ships. The U.S. Navy has positioned eight warships and a submarine in the Caribbean as part of the expanded presence.”
It’s been a fast and unprecedented escalation, putting the US on the brink of a disastrous, illegal, and immoral invasion of the sovereign country with the world’s 50th largest military. All of which makes the lackluster, largely indifferent response from the liberal establishment all the more troubling.
Let us begin by looking at the two top Democrats in the country, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—the people most in charge of leading the resistance to Trump. Neither Jeffries nor Schumer have issued any formal statement whatsoever on Trump’s potential attack on Venezuela, or even commented, much less condemned, Trump’s illegal murder of Venezuelan citizens in the Caribbean. The closest either have come to chiming in was when they were asked directly about it at a presser Thursday, to which Schumer responded by leveling a vague process criticism about Trump “going it alone,” then quickly pivoting to healthcare. In the past year, neither Schumer nor Jeffries have mentioned Venezuela once in any of their social media posts or press releases.
The New York Times editorial board hasn’t mentioned Trump’s escalation toward Venezuela either (though it did support his previous attempts at a regime change in 2019). The Washington Post editorial board, while handwringing about the potential for Trump’s threats to “spiral into war,” lent Trump’s regime change efforts support with a wink and a nod. After praising pro-Trump Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado (who openly supports a military invasion of Venezuela and Trump’s extrajudicial killings at sea), the Post tells its readers that Machado’s “economic vision” “could triple the country’s gross domestic product over 15 years by tapping its vast resources” and would “better serve” “U.S. economic interests” than the current Maduro government. The Jeff Bezos-owned paper then ended its editorial hoping Machado “someday got to lead the country she is so courageously fighting to save.” Through what mechanism it’s unclear but, given the current context and ramp up to a direct US attack, one is left to fill in the blanks.
Once again, like with Gaza protesters, it seems elements within party leadership are playing with fire, sitting back and letting Trump take out their mutual enemies.
To be clear, there has been some pushback, but it is sporadic, anonymous, or from Democrats lower down the food chain. The Democrats’ House Foreign Affairs Committee, led by Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), posted on social media Oct. 7, “Trump and Rubio are pushing for regime change in Venezuela. The American people don’t want another war—and Congress can’t let any president start one illegally or unilaterally. That’s not how the Constitution works.” But the statement wasn’t attributed to anyone in particular and has been their sole comment on the potential military attack. Senators Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Tim Kaine (D-VA) are seeking a congressional resolution to prevent Trump from using military force against Venezuela, but it has gone nowhere and, in typical Kainian form, is expressed as a process criticism, outraged entirely over jurisdiction not the substance of the invasion.
Just as weak, liberal cable outlets like MSNBC have mostly limitedtheir criticism of Trump on Venezuela to the illegality of the boat strikes. Better than nothing of course, but they’re missing the much bigger issue—which is the strikes are about provoking a pretense for a direct invasion and regime change war. It’s mostly been a nonissue in liberal circles.
In fairness, Trump’s firehose of attacks on Medicare, immigrant communities, the administrative state, environmental regulations, the Voting Rights Act, civil rights, Palestine solidarity protestors, and our entire education system make focusing on any one topic very difficult, and much of the silence around Venezuela no doubt comes from bandwidth issues. But it’s also something more deliberate: Journalist Aída Chávez reported on Sept. 29 that, according to a congressional source, “a senior Dem staffer is discouraging Democrats from coming out against regime change in Venezuela.” Once again, like with Gaza protesters, it seems elements within party leadership are playing with fire, sitting back and letting Trump take out their mutual enemies—in this case a government that has been under siege from both U.S. parties since it came to power in 1999, surviving a previous US-backed coup in 2002 that was only overturned after masses of Venezuela’s poor took to the streets the streets demanding the return of Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez. Despite the fact that the 2002 coup was completely externally manufactured and undemocratic by any objective metric, it was supported at the time by the editorial boards of the New York Times and Washington Post. Both outlets did so by lying about Chavez loyalists firing on protesters, a claim later debunked by the Times itself.
One can debate the democratic integrity of Venezuela’s latest election but it’s a non sequitur given it has nothing to do with why Trump is gearing up for an attack. “We would have taken [Venezuela] over; we would have gotten to all that oil,” Trump said in 2023, lamenting his previous failed coup. It’s clear Trump—who is gutting democracy in the US and showers praise on dictators throughout the world—could not possibly care less about these concerns, and would just as likely replace Maduro with a pro-Trump dictator, whomever it may be. Likely aware of this, the White House is using the pretense of taking out “narcoterrorists” as the moral basis for their escalatory attacks, insisting that every boat they blow up “saves 25,000 American lives,” somehow managing to find the only pretense less credible than Trump wanting to “restore democracy” in South America.
Meanwhile, Democratic leadership, either because they support it or don’t really care either way, continue to sleepwalk as Trump explicitly targets yet another Latin American country for US intervention. By directly attacking their citizens, Trump has already declared war on Venezuela, without any legal or ethical basis to do so. At some point, leadership of the nominal opposition party ought to take notice and at least register a formal opinion on whether Trump’s brazen illegality and dangerous escalation is something they support or not, rather than ignoring it out of cowardice or, worse yet, hoping Trump, once again, does their dirty work.
Being a baby boomer who protested against the Vietnam debacle, what the Trump regime is now doing is disgusting. All this week we see Republican Congressional minions and members of the Trump gang standing in front of cameras calling those who peacefully protest as Terrorists. Webster’s dictionary defines a terrorist as ” A person who uses unlawful violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” The sad irony is that it was the mob on January 6th, 2021 at the Capitol building who acted like terrorists, especially when they invaded the legislative chambers using their violence and intimidation against the Congress people (civilians). That day alone added up to the need for the Department of Justice to indict Trump once he was no longer president. A more recent irony is how many of the ICE agents, hiding their faces, have used terrorist acts against civilians? I ask any decent and law abiding American ‘ How can they make these types of people into ICE agents?’ Storm trooper would be a better term for them.
So, this Saturday there are plans nationwide, and even worldwide, for peaceful protests encompassing millions upon millions, once again declaring ‘ No Kings’. Imagine the utter audacity of this president, led by his inner circle, to consider using the Insurrection Act of 1807. The few times in our recent past that it was used was when Presidents Eisenhower and JFK used it to enforce desegregation laws in certain Southern states when violent mobs of whites were threatening black citizens. It was used after Hurricane Hugo in 1989 when looting was excessively prevalent, and in Los Angeles in 1992 during the violent riots after the Rodney King case set free the LAPD cops who savaged him, after being caught on video.
When the group I had organized in 2004 to protest the illegal ( and immoral) invasion and occupation of Iraq, we stood peacefully on the same street corner each Tuesday at rush hour. One week, we had visits from more than one police officer as we found our spots on that corner. First they informed us incorrectly that we ‘ Had to keep moving our picket line’. They went away when told that this was not a strike, rather a demonstration. Then a supervisor drove up and told us that ‘ We got a call that you folks are going out into the road and hassling the motorists.’ A lie and he then disappeared. I immediately called our city’s mayor ( a diehard libertarian) and complained to him. He said ‘ Phil, you folks have been out there peacefully for weeks. You have every right to protest and I’m going to call the police chief and smash this nonsense.’ And he did.
Perhaps it’s time for all those so called Republican libertarians and civil liberty backers to get off their asses and let Trump and company know how they feel, before this goes way too far.
Many millions on the streets this Saturday all over the country loudly proclaiming: No Kings! Yes to Democracy!–followed on November 4th by victories for Mamdani in NYC, Sherrill in NJ, Spanberger in Virginia, redistricting in California, and more–could this be truly “world changing?”
On one level, no. This is not a Presidential election year or a Congressional election year. It’s an off-year electorally.
But it’s not an off-year politically. The battle is fully joined between the forces of democracy and the forces of authoritarianism, between the resistance and blind Trumpism. And because of this, what happens over the next three weeks could be a decisive turning point, victories for the significant majority of US Americans who are saddened and outraged by the lying, divisive, destructive and dangerous Trump federal government and its billionaire co-conspirators.
Think about it: potentially the biggest mass demonstration ever in the USA, in every single state and literally thousands of localities, organized by a broadly-based progressive/liberal/independent coalition of hundreds of organizations that is not going away. That alone is a huge thing at this challenging time for the US and the world.
A Zohran Mamdani victory in itself will be a huge deal, a non-sectarian, democratic socialist becoming the Mayor of the country’s largest city, the financial capitol, a melting pot of diverse peoples and nationalities and which often leads the country as far as political shifts.
Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger winning the Governor races in their states will not be the same thing. Neither are consistently progressive, definitely not socialists, but there’s no question that many people to their left support them over the Trump-supporting Republican opponents. Combined with October 18 and a Mamdani victory and continued progressive organizing at the grassroots, that will make a difference in how they govern.
If California comes through and neutralizes Texas’ brazen, Trump-pushed, Congressional redistricting plan to try to gain 5 more Republican House seats from Texas next November, that will be important both practically and politically.
There’s something else, less visible and obvious but critical, that must be said about why we are at this point, why the popular resistance movement for democracy, justice and our threatened ecosystems is at this historic moment: we have learned how to unite.
It’s not unity based on following one great individual, usually a man. It’s not unity concerned very little with the internal culture, the health, of the organizations that make it up–just the opposite, in general. A critical mass of us of all ages, nationalities, genders and classes have internalized positive values and ways of working together which are making a huge difference in how we have responded, and will keep responding, to the efforts to impose a form of 21st century fascism in the USA.
The Trumpists are in trouble, and they know it. That’s why, one week before No Kings! Day, House leader Mike Johnson and others began publicly attacking it, lying about who we are and what we are about, trying to scare people away from coming out that day.
It’s not going to happen! There ain’t no power like the power of the people, united and organized, and when we are, nothing and no one can defeat us. Si, se puede!
United States President Donald Trump had the time of his life on Monday at the Israeli Knesset, where he was welcomed as “the president of peace”. His captive audience showered him with applause, laughs and too many standing ovations to count.
Two protesting lawmakers undertook a brief outburst in support of “Palestinian sovereignty” but were swiftly bundled out, earning the president more laughs and applause for his remark: “That was very efficient.”
It was a typical stream-of-consciousness Trump speech although he mercifully refrained from rambling about escalators and teleprompters this time.
I had initially hoped the fact that the US head of state was promptly due at a Gaza summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, might have kept the tangents to a minimum. Such hopes were dashed, but Trump did manage to devote a good bit of time to speculating about whether his summit counterparts might have already departed Egypt by the time he arrived.
Trump’s Knesset appearance was occasioned by the ostensible end — for the moment — to the US-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, which has over the past two years officially killed more than 67,000 Palestinians. Some scholars have suggested that the real death toll may be in the vicinity of 680,000.
Obviously, the Palestinian genocide victims were of scant concern at the Knesset spectacle, which was essentially an exercise of mutual flattery between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a celebration of Israel’s excellence in mass slaughter.
To that end, Trump informed Israel that “you’ve won” and congratulated Netanyahu on a “great job”.
‘Best weapons’
As if that weren’t an obscene enough tribute to genocide, enforced starvation and terror in Gaza, Trump boasted that “we make the best weapons in the world, and we’ve given a lot to Israel, … and you used them well.”
There were also various references to what he has previously called on social media the “3,000 YEAR CATASTROPHE”, which he fancies himself as having now resolved. This on top of the “seven wars” he claims to have ended in seven months, another figure that seems to have materialised out of thin air.
But, hey, when you’re a “great president”, you don’t have to explain yourself.
In addition to self-adulation, Trump had plenty of praise for other members of his entourage, including US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff — who merited a lengthy digression on the subject of Russian President Vladimir Putin — and Trump’s “genius” son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was also in attendance despite having no official role in the current administration.
During Trump’s first term as president, Kushner served as a senior White House adviser and a key player in the Abraham Accords, the normalisation deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, which essentially sidelined the Palestinian issue in the Arab political arena.
Trump’s Knesset performance included numerous sales pitches for the Abraham Accords, which he noted he preferred to pronounce “Avraham” because it was “so much sort of nicer”. Emphasising how good the normalisation deals have been for business, Trump declared that the four existing signatories have already “made a lot of money being members”.
To be sure, any expansion of the Abraham Accords in the present context would function to legitimise genocide and accelerate Palestinian dispossession. As it stands, the surviving inhabitants of Gaza have been condemned to a colonial overlordship, euphemised as a “Board of Peace” — which Trump has hailed as a “beautiful name” and which will be presided over by the US President himself.
‘Path of terror’
This, apparently, is what the Palestinians need to “turn from the path of terror and violence”, as Trump put it — and never mind that the Palestinians aren’t the ones who have been waging a genocide for the past two years.
Preceding Trump at the podium was Netanyahu, adding another level of psychological torture for anyone who was forced to watch the two leaders back to back. Thanking the US president for his “pivotal leadership” in supposedly ending a war that, mind you, Netanyahu didn’t even want to end, the Israeli prime minister pronounced him the “greatest friend that the State of Israel has ever had in the White House”.
Netanyahu furthermore put up Trump as the first non-Israeli nominee for the Israel Prize and assured him he’d get his Nobel, too, soon enough.
I didn’t time Trump’s own speech although I’d calculate that it was several aneurysms long. At one point in the middle of his discussion of some topic entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand, I wondered if my anguished cries at having to listen to him speak might elicit the concern of my neighbours.
When Trump at long last decided to wrap things up, his final lines included the proclamation: “I love Israel. I’m with you all the way.”
And while US affection for a genocidal state should come as no surprise to anyone, it’s also a good indication that “peace” is not really what’s happening at all.
Belén Fernández is the author of The Darién Gap: A Reporter’s Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas (Rutgers UP, 2025), Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up in Mexico’s Largest Immigration Detention Center (OR Books, 2022), Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019), and other books and has written widely for global news media. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.
United States President Donald Trump had the time of his life on Monday at the Israeli Knesset, where he was welcomed as “the president of peace”. His captive audience showered him with applause, laughs and too many standing ovations to count.
Two protesting lawmakers undertook a brief outburst in support of “Palestinian sovereignty” but were swiftly bundled out, earning the president more laughs and applause for his remark: “That was very efficient.”
It was a typical stream-of-consciousness Trump speech although he mercifully refrained from rambling about escalators and teleprompters this time.
I had initially hoped the fact that the US head of state was promptly due at a Gaza summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, might have kept the tangents to a minimum. Such hopes were dashed, but Trump did manage to devote a good bit of time to speculating about whether his summit counterparts might have already departed Egypt by the time he arrived.
Trump’s Knesset appearance was occasioned by the ostensible end — for the moment — to the US-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, which has over the past two years officially killed more than 67,000 Palestinians. Some scholars have suggested that the real death toll may be in the vicinity of 680,000.
Obviously, the Palestinian genocide victims were of scant concern at the Knesset spectacle, which was essentially an exercise of mutual flattery between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a celebration of Israel’s excellence in mass slaughter.
To that end, Trump informed Israel that “you’ve won” and congratulated Netanyahu on a “great job”.
‘Best weapons’
As if that weren’t an obscene enough tribute to genocide, enforced starvation and terror in Gaza, Trump boasted that “we make the best weapons in the world, and we’ve given a lot to Israel, … and you used them well.”
There were also various references to what he has previously called on social media the “3,000 YEAR CATASTROPHE”, which he fancies himself as having now resolved. This on top of the “seven wars” he claims to have ended in seven months, another figure that seems to have materialised out of thin air.
But, hey, when you’re a “great president”, you don’t have to explain yourself.
In addition to self-adulation, Trump had plenty of praise for other members of his entourage, including US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff — who merited a lengthy digression on the subject of Russian President Vladimir Putin — and Trump’s “genius” son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was also in attendance despite having no official role in the current administration.
During Trump’s first term as president, Kushner served as a senior White House adviser and a key player in the Abraham Accords, the normalisation deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, which essentially sidelined the Palestinian issue in the Arab political arena.
Trump’s Knesset performance included numerous sales pitches for the Abraham Accords, which he noted he preferred to pronounce “Avraham” because it was “so much sort of nicer”. Emphasising how good the normalisation deals have been for business, Trump declared that the four existing signatories have already “made a lot of money being members”.
To be sure, any expansion of the Abraham Accords in the present context would function to legitimise genocide and accelerate Palestinian dispossession. As it stands, the surviving inhabitants of Gaza have been condemned to a colonial overlordship, euphemised as a “Board of Peace” — which Trump has hailed as a “beautiful name” and which will be presided over by the US President himself.
‘Path of terror’
This, apparently, is what the Palestinians need to “turn from the path of terror and violence”, as Trump put it — and never mind that the Palestinians aren’t the ones who have been waging a genocide for the past two years.
Preceding Trump at the podium was Netanyahu, adding another level of psychological torture for anyone who was forced to watch the two leaders back to back. Thanking the US president for his “pivotal leadership” in supposedly ending a war that, mind you, Netanyahu didn’t even want to end, the Israeli prime minister pronounced him the “greatest friend that the State of Israel has ever had in the White House”.
Netanyahu furthermore put up Trump as the first non-Israeli nominee for the Israel Prize and assured him he’d get his Nobel, too, soon enough.
I didn’t time Trump’s own speech although I’d calculate that it was several aneurysms long. At one point in the middle of his discussion of some topic entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand, I wondered if my anguished cries at having to listen to him speak might elicit the concern of my neighbours.
When Trump at long last decided to wrap things up, his final lines included the proclamation: “I love Israel. I’m with you all the way.”
And while US affection for a genocidal state should come as no surprise to anyone, it’s also a good indication that “peace” is not really what’s happening at all.
Belén Fernández is the author of The Darién Gap: A Reporter’s Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas (Rutgers UP, 2025), Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up in Mexico’s Largest Immigration Detention Center (OR Books, 2022), Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019), and other books and has written widely for global news media. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.
For two full years, Israel waged one of the fiercest wars in modern history, a war described as a ‘slow-burn genocide.’ It used all kinds of prohibited weapons and relied on international intelligence agencies, yet failed to achieve its primary goal: recovering its prisoners from Gaza.
Since October 7, 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framed his war on Gaza as a battle for “existence and security,” using the liberation of the prisoners as a pretext. However, after 735 days of continuous bombardment, Israel dropped more than 200,000 tons of explosives—the equivalent of approximately 13 Hiroshima bombs—over an area no larger than 365 square kilometres, turning Gaza into a scorched, lifeless wasteland.
The result, as revealed by the facts, was horrific: more than 67,000 martyrs and missing, 170,000 wounded, and the near-total collapse of civilian infrastructure.
Israel’s genocide
The Israeli failure here is multifaceted. First, it was a military failure in converting firepower into tangible political results. Second, it was an intelligence failure in locating the prisoners or securing routes leading to their recovery. Third, it was a moral and political failure, as this process produced bloodshed and destruction, perpetrated by a government that relied on war as the only solution to internal and political pressure.
On the other hand, what happened reflects the resistance’s tactical and organisational superiority: its ability to withstand a besieged structure, its ability to manage a sensitive issue such as the prisoners, and its ability to intelligently use information as a tool of pressure and dignity. The issue here is not just that the prisoners survived; rather, the resistance was able, in a single hour, to transform years of bombardment into a spectacle announcing the enemy’s failure to achieve its central goal.
In a moment that seemed to sum up the futility of two years of genocide, the Qassam Brigades announced the handover of living prisoners during the first phase of the ceasefire agreement—a move that effectively ended the war that force had failed to end.
Israel’s twisted actions
While Israel needed two years of bombing to fail to free a single prisoner, the resistance was able to hand over the living prisoners within just one hour, in a scene that observers considered:
a symbolic end to a futile war waged by Netanyahu in the name of electoral deception and political survival.
This was not merely a symbolic event; it was a stark reflection of the shifting balance of power. The resistance, besieged and cut off from electricity, water, and medicine, maintained its organisational, military, and intelligence capabilities until the very last moment.
Israeli military analyst Yaron Avraham bitterly remarked on Channel 12:
They had maps of Israeli army bases, so what’s so strange about them having the family numbers of soldiers?
This statement reads like an implicit admission of the failure of the Israeli military and intelligence establishment, which had spent two years searching in the dark. While Israel utilised satellites, aircraft, and artificial intelligence, the resistance was able to hide prisoners in a small, besieged territory completely exposed to the world.
How did Israel have the backing of the world and still fail?
As the tanks withdrew from the rubble, the most important question within Israel returned: How could a state with its entire military and technological arsenal fail, while the besieged resistance succeeded in preserving its prisoners and managing their situation intelligently and professionally?
Thus, the short communication from Gaza became something of a final statement of the war. Israel did not win with weapons, but was defeated by sound—a sound coming from under the rubble, carrying messages that did not require missiles to hit their targets.
Israel wanted to recover its prisoners to prove its strength, but its war ended to prove the opposite: that force does not provide security, that annihilation does not produce victory, and that Gaza, despite the ashes, is still capable of redefining the meaning of survival.
The conclusion is harsh: bombs do not restore spirit or build confidence. Massive firepower may destroy cities, but it does not guarantee political or intelligence results. More importantly, it does not deter a people built from its ashes with the capacity to endure and manage critical issues. Thus, after two years of annihilation, which Israel intended as a final resolution, the war did not empty its adversary; rather, it revealed that victory in the age of media and intelligence is not measured by destruction, but by the ability to protect people, narrate their stories, and capture them—a capacity the resistance succeeded in preserving when the state machinery failed.
I have noticed supposed left organizations considering the Epstein files their secret weapon and naively pouring energy into advocating release. It is a doomed strategy.
Is it insightful that Trump has not already released the Epstein Files? Of course it is, partially because it indicates the state is probably hiding something, but more so because it means the state can get away with hiding things regardless of the obvious public interest. Does this mean the answer is to demand release of the files and focus on that as a way to discredit Trump? No, that will get you nowhere because the state is extremely experienced in hiding records even when they hand some to the public, and the Epstein files would not stop Trump even if they did prove he is a sexual predator (which everyone who lives in reality already knows). Believing the Epstein files are Trump’s Achilles heel or some silver bullet to stop him is a delusional fantasy and the mother of all distractions.
I filed probably well over a hundred public records requests to state entities between 2022 and 2024. The state routinely used a myriad of evasion strategies, some of which were impressively dirty, such that I can hardly remember any responses that appeared to be legally compliant. Moreover, there was nothing I could do about it unless I was willing to sue the state at personal expense as I explain here, and that promised me no proportional benefits. Violating public records laws was the rule, not the exception, which was already undermining transparency, legal cases, and journalists’ jobs, helping ensure that the public was vastly under-informed about the widespread corruption that I believe is an essential prerequisite for fascism. Poynter, a journalism and media literacy nonprofit, covers the problem of the normalization of lack of transparency. The Press Freedom Tracker, Propublica, Nieman Reports and surely many others talk about records suppression too.
Journalistic outlets all over the country, unable to cover the actual scandals anymore, developed public records denial reporting over the last several years. So, civil society and journalists, as in all authoritarian countries, carefully and indirectly imply a scandal by the lack of transparency rather than reporting the details of the scandal with the documents they could not obtain from the state. This is the kind of hard for the general public to interpret, desperate last vestige of public accountability you see in authoritarian regimes where journalists have to creatively report misconduct. It reflects the normalization of transparency law violations by the state and impunity for the state such that it cannot be compelled to follow the law and chooses not to regularly. Body cameras are a great example of a supposed accountability solution that never lived up to promises and is now not even pretending to, meanwhile there are attempts brewing to criminalize videotaping ICE.
In spite of the state’s long-standing record of transparency law violations and playbook for accomplishing them, organizations like Indivisible waste their efforts and resources calling for release of the Epstein files. This is a gift to Trump because it will tell us nothing we do not already know, sway no one who is not already on our side, and keep everyone focused on a symbolic demand the state can easily undermine the value of while it consolidates power in far more dangerous ways. Do they really think the state is above fraud, fabrication, “losing” and disappearing evidence, and editing documents? Look at examples like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, as I explain here, to see what the state can do when it comes to documents and evidence.
All people are doing by demanding the Epstein files is setting themselves up for disappointment, either in the form of getting nothing or getting a performative false release the state will spin as proof of its innocence and transparency. Look, here is conservative propaganda casting the release of Epstein files that are no doubt harmless to Trump as proof of transparency exactly as I anticipated. You know that quote, “Shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you’ll land amongst the stars”? Well, idiots shoot for the moon by demanding the Epstein files to somehow magically get Trump, and their “landing amongst the stars” is successfully incriminating other Epstein associates like the Clintons instead. Careful what you wish for. Any files released that included Trump would only amount to implying association not demonstrating guilt, which we do not need because everyone knows who Epstein’s friends were without the files. The survivor testimony is far better than any guest list, and those survivors are saying the files have been redacted to protect Trump. We know what we need to know, and there is still nothing we can do about it.
People who are still relying on U.S. democratic institutions (which are essentially destroyed, and now exist as a facade, a conclusion I came to two years ago and Ted Starmer echoes in this video at minute 4:00), are using obsolete institutional or legal mechanisms and getting rewarded with meaningless breadcrumbs. Examples: Canceling Kimmel before reinstating him to make people feel like they won, the passport provision removed from H.R. 5300 when the state does not need it to accomplish the same thing, stopping alligator Alcatraz only to have it approved again with even more funding, etc. Corrupt actors manipulate the public on purpose, and I have seen it many times. They make people feel good by giving out cheap tokens and image candy, while still doing the same dirty things in a more covert way, or they simply wait until public attention shifts to do something much, much worse.
Focusing naively on the Epstein files while the U.S. government transforms into a dictatorship is about as ridiculous as focusing gleefully on Trump’s escalator trouble while Trump prepares to dismantle the United Nations. While the mainstream media is celebrating and exaggerating fake victories, entertaining us with a distracting p.r. campaign wrestling match with Gavin Newsom, stoking wishful thinking about divisions and infighting, and pumping out propaganda falsely casting Trump as being in a weak position or quaking in his boots, Trump is taking over the military. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism maintains an excellent Project 2025 tracker, and Project 2025 is being implemented even faster than expected.
The lack of Epstein file transparency did not stand in Trump’s way before, and there is nothing suggesting it will now. Everything Trump is getting away with should tell you that evidence of sexual crimes would do nothing to him. As he said in 2016, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Blatant acts of authoritarian oppression such as we now see daily, including official narratives fully representative of that, are not evidence of fear but the total lack thereof. I will probably get accused of being a “doomer” for denouncing the delusional belief in Epstein file kryptonite, but there is no silver bullet for American fascism and people need to stop looking for one. Believing in fake silver bullets only ensures real monsters advance unperturbed, and we are doomed if we are left defenseless when they arrive.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
As we’ve reported, the Gaza ceasefire deal is in effect. Phase one of the US.-backed 20-point plan is underway. Hamas has released all 20 living captives. Israel has released almost 2000 Palestinians in Ramallah and now in Khan Younis in Gaza.
Yesterday, President Trump addressed the Israeli Knesset and then co-chaired a so-called peace summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not among the 20 or more world leaders who attend. He was invited but said he was not going.
For more, we’re joined by the Israeli historian, author and professor Ilan Pappé, professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter and the chair of the Nakba Memorial Foundation. Among his books, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, almost 20 years ago, and Gaza in Crisis, which he co-wrote with Noam Chomsky. His new book, Israel on the Brink: And the Eight Revolutions That Could Lead to Decolonization and Coexistence.
We thank you so much for being with us. Professor Pappé, if you could start off by responding to what has happened? We’re watching, in Khan Younis, prisoners being released, Palestinian prisoners, up to 2000, and in the occupied West Bank, though there families were told if they dare celebrate the release of their loved ones, they might be arrested.
And we saw the release of the 20 Israeli hostages as they returned to Israel. Hamas says they’re returning the dead hostages, the remains, over the next few days. Israel has not said they will return the dead prisoners, of which it’s believed there are nearly 200 in Israeli prisons.
Your response overall, and now to the summit in Egypt?
ILAN PAPPÉ: Yes. First of all, there is some joy in knowing that the bombing of the people in Gaza has stopped for a while. And there is joy knowing that Palestinian political prisoners have been reunited with their families, and, similarly, that Israeli hostages were reunited with their families.
But except from that, I don’t think we are in such an historical moment as President Trump claimed in his speech in the Knesset and beforehand. We are not at the end of the terrible chapter that we have been in for the last two years.
And that chapter is an Israeli attempt by a particularly fanatic, extremely rightwing Israeli government to try and use ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and genocide in Gaza to downsize the number of Palestinians in Palestine and impose Israel’s will in a way that they hope would be at least endorsed by some Arab governments and the world.
So far, they have an alliance of Trump and some extreme rightwing parties in Europe.
And now I hope that the world will not be misled that Israel is now ready to open a different kind of page in its relationship with the Palestinians. And what you told us about the way that the celebrations were dealt with in the West Bank and the incineration of the sanitation center shows you that nothing has changed in the dehumanisation and the attitude of this particular Israeli government and its belief that it has the power to wipe out Palestine as a nation, as a people and as a country.
I hope the world will not stand by, because up to now it did stand by when the genocide occurred in Palestine.
AMY GOODMAN: We have just heard President Trump’s address to the Israeli Knesset. He followed the Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu. I’m not sure, but in listening to Netanyahu, I don’t think he used the word “Palestinian.” President Trump has just called on the Israeli president to pardon Netanyahu.
Your thoughts on this, and also the possibility of why Netanyahu has not joined this summit that President Trump is co-chairing? Many are speculating for different reasons — didn’t want to anger the right, that’s further right than him. Others are saying the possibility of his arrest, not on corruption charges, but on crimes against humanity, the whole case before the International Criminal Court.
ILAN PAPPÉ: It could be a mixture of all of it, but I think at the center of it is the nature of the Israeli government that was elected in November 2022, this alliance between a very opportunistic politician, who’s only interested in surviving and keeping his position as a prime minister, alongside messianic, neo-Zionist politicians who really believe that God has given them the opportunity to create the Greater Israel, maybe even beyond the borders of Palestine, and, in the process, eliminate Palestinians.
I think that his consideration should all — are always about his chances of survival. So, whatever went in his mind, he came to the conclusion that going to Cairo is not going to help his chances of being reelected.
My great worry is not that he didn’t go to Cairo. My greatest worry is that he does believe that his only chance of being reelected is still to have a war going on, either in Gaza or in the West Bank or against Iran or in the north with Lebanon.
We are dealing here with a reckless, irresponsible politician, who is even willing to drown his own state in the process of saving his skin and his neck. And the victims will always be, from this adventurous policy, the Palestinians.
I hope the world understands that, really, the urgent need of — and I’m talking about world leaders rather than societies. You already discussed what is the level of solidarity among civil societies. But I do hope that political elites will understand — especially in the West — their role now is not to mediate between Israelis and Palestinians.
Their role now is to protect the Palestinians from destruction, elimination, genocide and ethnic cleansing. And nothing of that duty, especially of Europe, that is complicit with what happened, and the United States, that are complicit with what happened in the last two years — nothing that we heard in the speeches so far in the — in preparation for the summit in Egypt, and I have a feeling that we won’t hear anything about it also later on.
There is a different way in which our civil societies refer to Palestine as a place that has to be saved and protected, and still this irrelevant conversation among our political elites about a peace deal, a two-state solution, all of that, that has nothing to do with what we are experiencing in the way that the Israeli government thinks it has an historical moment to totally de-Arabise Palestine and eliminate and expunge the Palestinians from history and the area.
AMY GOODMAN: Ilan Pappé, I want to thank you for being with us, Israeli historian, professor of history, director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter, chair of the Nakba Memorial Foundation. His new book, Israel on the Brink: And the Eight Revolutions That Could Lead to Decolonization and Coexistence.
AMY GOODMAN:Israel’s government has approved the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal, that includes a pause in Israeli attacks and the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons — 20 living hostages were freed today coinciding with President Trump’s visit to Israel and Egypt.
According to the deal, 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences and another 1700 people from Gaza detained in the last two years — and described as “forcibly disappeared” by the UN — would be released.
Hamas has demanded the release of prominent Palestinian political prisoner Marwan Barghouti, but his name was reportedly secretly removed from the prisoner exchange list by Israel.
Meanwhile, the US is sending about 200 troops to Israel to monitor the ceasefire deal.
The Israeli military on Friday confirmed the ceasefire had come into effect as soldiers retreated from parts of Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians, including families that had been forced to the south, began their trek back to northern Gaza after news that Israeli forces were withdrawing.
Returning Gaza City residents made their way through mounds of rubble and destroyed neighborhoods, searching for any sign of their homes and belongings. Among them, Fidaa Haraz.
FIDAA HARAZ: [translated] I came since the morning, when they said there was a withdrawal, to find my home. I’m walking in the street, but I do not know where to go, due to the extent of the destruction.
I swear I don’t know where the crossroads is or where my home is. I know that my home was leveled, but where is it? Where is it? I cannot find it.
What is this? What do we do with our lives? Where should we live? Where should we stay? A house of multiple floors, but nothing was left?
AMY GOODMAN: Al Jazeera reports Israel’s army said it would allow 600 humanitarian aid trucks carrying food, medical supplies, fuel and other necessities daily into Gaza, through coordination with the United Nations and other international groups.
On Thursday, the exiled Hamas Gaza chief Khalil al-Hayya declared an end to the war.
KHALIL AL-HAYYA: [translated] Today, we announced that we have reached an agreement to end the war and aggression against our people and to begin implementing a permanent ceasefire, the withdrawal of the occupation forces, the entry of aid, the opening of the Rafah crossing in both directions and the exchange of prisoners.
AMY GOODMAN: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke today in Israel.
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] Today, we mark one of the greatest achievements in the war of revival: the return of all of our hostages, the living and the dead as one. …
This way, we grapple Hamas. We grapple it all around, ahead of the next stages of the plan, in which Hamas is disarmed and Gaza is demilitarised.
If this can be achieved the easy way, very well. If not, it will be achieved the hard way.
AMY GOODMAN: In the United States, President Trump hailed his administration’s ceasefire plan during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday as concerns mount regarding potential US and foreign intervention in the rebuilding of Gaza.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Gaza is going to be slowly redone. You have tremendous wealth in that part of the world by certain countries, and just a small part of that, what they — what they make, will do wonders for — for Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by two guests. Diana Buttu, Palestinian human rights attorney and a former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). She has just recently written a piece for The Guardian. It is headlined “A ‘magic pill’ made Israeli violence invisible. We need to stop swallowing it.” And Amjad Iraqi is a senior Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group, joining us from London.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Diana Buttu, let’s begin with you. First, your response to the ceasefire-hostage deal that’s just been approved by the Israeli government and Hamas?
DIANA BUTTU: Well, first, Amy, it’s really quite repulsive that Palestinians have had to negotiate an end to their genocide. It should have been that the world put sanctions on Israel to stop the genocide, rather than forcing Palestinians to negotiate an end to it. At the same time, we’re also negotiating an end to the famine, a famine that Israel, again, created.
Who are we negotiating with? The very people who created that famine. And so, it’s really repugnant that this is the position that Palestinians have been forced to be in.
And so, while people here are elated, happy that the bombs have stopped, we’re also at the same time worried, because we’ve seen that the international community, time and again, has abandoned us.
Everybody is happy that the Israelis are going home, but nobody’s talking about the more than 11,000 Palestinians who are currently languishing in Israeli prisons, being starved, being tortured, being raped. Many of them are hostages picked up after October 2023, being held without charge, without trial, and nobody at all is talking about them.
So, while people are happy that the bombs have stopped, we know that Israel’s control has not at all stopped. And Israel has made it clear that it’s going to continue to control every morsel of food that comes into Gaza. It’s going to control every single construction item that comes into Gaza.
And it’s going to continue to maintain a military occupation over Gaza.
This is not a peace agreement. This is not an end to the occupation. And I think it’s so important for us that we keep our eyes on Gaza and start demanding that Israel be held to account, not only for the genocide, but for all of these decades of occupation that led to this in the first place.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the exchange of hostages, Israeli hostages, dead and alive, and Palestinian prisoners? According to the Hamas Gaza chief, I believe they’re saying all women and children, Palestinian women and children, picked up over these last two years — or is it beyond? — are going to be released. And then, of course, there are the well over 1000 prisoners who are going to be released.
DIANA BUTTU: No, not quite. So, there are 250 who are political prisoners who are going to be released, and that list just came out about a little over an hour ago.
But there are also 1700 Palestinians, solely from Gaza, who are going to be released. And these were people — these are doctors, these are nurses, these are journalists and so on, who were — who Israel picked up after 7 October, 2023, and has been holding as hostages.
These are the people that are going to be released. There are still thousands more, Amy, that are from the West Bank, that we do not know what is going to happen to them.
And so, while the focus is just on the people in Gaza — and again, there is no path for freeing all of those thousands of Palestinians who are languishing in Israeli prisons, being starved, being tortured, being raped.
What’s going to happen to them? Who’s going to be focusing on them? I don’t think that it’s going to be this US administration.
AMY GOODMAN:I want to talk about the West Bank in a minute. More than a thousand Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank just over the last two years. But I first want to get Amjad Iraqi’s response to this deal that has now been signed off on.
I mean, watching the images of tens of thousands, this sea of humanity, of Palestinians going south to north, to see what they can find of their homes in places like Gaza City, not to mention who’s trapped in the rubble. We say something — well over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, but we don’t know the real number. It could be hundreds of thousands?
AMJAD IRAQI: Indeed, Amy. And to kind of continue off of Diana’s points, this is a deal that really should have been made long, long time ago. We’ve known that the parameters of this truce have been on the table for well over a year, if not since the very beginning of the war, what they used to define as an all-for-all deal, the idea that Hamas would release all hostages in exchange for a permanent ceasefire.
And the reasons for the constant foiling of it are quite evident. And it’s important to recognise this not for the sake of just lamenting the lives, the many lives, that have been lost and the massive destruction that could have been averted, but it needs to really inform the next steps going forward.
The biggest takeaway of what’s happening right now is that in order for a ceasefire to be sustained, in order for Gaza to be saved from further military assault, you need massive political pressure.
And we’ve seen this really build up in the past weeks and months. You saw this, for example, from European governments, which, even through the symbolic recognition of Palestinian statehood, was very much venting their frustration with the Israeli conduct in the war, the fact that the EU was actually starting to contemplate more punitive measures against Israel, such as partial trade suspensions, potential sanctions against Israel.
We saw this building up over the past few weeks. Arab states have started to use much of their leverage, especially after Israel’s strike on Doha or on Hamas’s offices in Doha. We started seeing Gulf and other Arab and Muslim states come forward to President Trump at the UN saying that Israel aggression cannot continue like this.
And most crucially is, of course, President Trump himself and Washington finally saying that it needs to put its foot down to stop this war, which we’ve heard repeatedly from Trump himself.
But this is really the first time since the January ceasefire agreement where Trump has really insisted that this come to an end.
Now, this — now there’s much to be sort of debated about the Trump plan itself, but this aspect of the truce cannot continue, and certainly cannot save Palestinian lives, unless that pressure is maintained.
The concern now is that that pressure will recede or alleviate, because there’s now a deal that’s signed. But, actually, in order to enforce it, that pressure really needs to be maintained.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think was the turning point, Amjad? The bombing of Qatar?
Now, I mean, The New York Times had an exposé that Trump knew before, not just in the midst of the bombing, that Israel was bombing their ally to try to kill the Hamas leadership. But do you think that was the turning point?
AMJAD IRAQI: It certainly might have expedited, I think, a lot of factors that were already building up. As I said, pressure had been mounting against Israel for quite a while.
There was really outrage, not just at the continuance of the military assaults, but the policy of starvation, which was very evident on the ground, and Israel’s complete refusal to let in aid, its failed project with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
So, this had all been building, but I do think the strike on Doha really pushed Arab states to say that enough is enough. To see them really meet all together with President Trump and create a bit more of a united position to insist that this really couldn’t go on, I think, has really signalled that Israel really crossed a certain line geopolitically.
Now, of course, that line should have been recognised as being crossed well before because of the facts on the ground in Gaza, but I do think that this has helped to kind of push things over the edge a bit more assertively.
There are also speculations about Trump, of course, trying to have his name in for the Nobel Peace Prize, and potentially other factors. But I do think that the timing of this, again, regardless of what ended up pushing it over the line, it is unfortunate that it has really taken this long.
And it’s really up to global powers and foreign governments to recognise that in order to make sure that this stays, that they really need to keep that pressure up.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Amjad Iraqi, the core demand of the ceasefire is that Hamas disarm and end its rule. What security guarantees is Hamas seeking for its own members to lay down their arms and not face a wave of arrests or assassinations?
How is this going to work? And talk about who you see running Gaza.
AMJAD IRAQI: So, these things are still a bit unclear. So, throughout the ceasefire talks, Hamas has kept insisting about the idea of US guarantees that Israel will not end the war.
But there’s never really any clear, concrete way to prove this. And as we’ve seen before, like in the January ceasefire deal and in much of the ceasefire talks, even if President Trump expresses his desire to see an end to the war, oftentimes he would still hand the steering wheel to Prime Minister Netanyahu.
And if Netanyahu decided that he wanted to thwart the ceasefire talks, if he wanted to relaunch military assaults, and the Israeli military and the government would back it, then Trump and Washington would fall into line and amplify those calls, and even President Trump himself would sort of cheer on the military assaults.
And so, this factor has certainly weighed a lot on Hamas, but I do think there’s a culmination of pressure, the fact that Arab states have insisted on Hamas to try to show, at least signal, certain flexibility, even though many of its demands have been quite consistent throughout the war.
But the fact that I think Hamas is now feeling that there’s also a bit more pressure on Israel to actually ensure that they at least try to take the gamble that they will not return to war.
And in regards to decommissioning and disarmament, publicly Hamas has placed a red line around this right to bear arms. But historically, and even recently, they do say that they are willing to have conversations about decommissioning, as long as it’s tied to a political framework, especially one that’s tied to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Now, one can really debate how much this process is actually quite feasible, and obviously the Israeli government and much of the Israeli public is quite adamant in its opposition against Palestinian statehood, but Hamas may at least offer some space for those conversations to be had.
There are discussions about it potentially giving up what it might describe as its larger or more offensive weaponry, like rockets or anti-tank missiles. And there’s bigger questions around firearms.
But I think it’s important to put this question not as a black-and-white issue, as something that has to come first in the political process, as Israel is demanding, but one that requires trust building and confidence building in the rubric of a process of Palestinian self-determination.
This is important not just in the case of Palestine, but across many conflicts around the world where the question of decommissioning, about establishing one rule, one gun, one government for a society, requires that kind of process. So, it shouldn’t just be a policy of destroying and military assaults and so on. You do need to engage in these questions in good faith.
AMY GOODMAN: There are so many questions, Diana Buttu, in this first stage of the ceasefire-hostage deal, is really the only one that Netanyahu addressed in his speech.
You’re usually in Ramallah. You spend a lot of time in the West Bank. Where does this leave the Palestinian Authority? I don’t think the West Bank is talked about in this deal.
And what about the fact that we’re looking at pictures of Netanyahu surrounded by Steve Witkoff on one side and Jared Kushner, who has talked about — as we know — famously referred to Gaza as “very valuable” waterfront property?
DIANA BUTTU: Well, I think that this plan was really an Israeli plan, and it was repackaged and branded as a Trump plan. And you can see just in the text of it and the way that all of the guarantees were given to the Israelis, and none given to the Palestinians, it’s really an Israeli plan.
But beyond that, it’s important to keep in mind that when Trump was going around and talking about this plan, that he consulted with everybody but Palestinians. He didn’t talk to Mahmoud Abbas. He didn’t even let Mahmoud Abbas go to the UN to deliver his speech before the UN.
I’m pretty certain he didn’t speak to the UN representative, Palestine’s representative to the UN. And so, this is — once again, we’ve got a plan in which people are talking about Palestinians, but never talking to Palestinians. So, again, this is very much an Israeli plan repackaged as a Trump plan and branded as a Trump plan.
In terms of them looking at Gaza as being prime real estate, this is not at all different from the way that they’ve done it in the past, and this is not at all the way that Israel has looked at Palestine.
And this is because this is the way that colonisers look at land that isn’t theirs. They ignore the history of the place.
Gaza has an old history. It has some of the oldest churches, I think the second-oldest church in the world. It has some of the oldest mosques. It has an old civilization.
We want Gaza to be Gaza. We don’t want it to be Dubai or any other place. We want it to be Gaza. And so, the idea of somehow turning it into prime real estate, this is the mentality of somebody who’s coming from outside.
This is the way that colonisers think. This isn’t the way that the Indigenous think. And so, you can see in this plan that it’s not only the idea of the outside coming in, but they certainly didn’t consult Palestinians at all.
As for what’s going to happen to the Palestinian Authority, it’s clear that they don’t want the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip, and it’s clear that they do want to have a foreign authority in the Gaza Strip.
But once again, Amy, when is it that Palestinians get to decide our own future? Are we really going back to the era of colonialism, when other people get to decide our future? And that’s what this plan is really all about.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to be continuing to cover this story. President Trump is going to be there for the signing of the ceasefire in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt on Monday, and the hostages and prisoners are expected to be released on Monday or Tuesday.
Diana Buttu, I want to thank you for being with us, Palestinian human rights attorney, former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and Amjad Iraqi, Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group.
Within hours of being named the Nobel Peace laureate for 2025, María Corina Machado called on President Trump to step up his military and economic campaign against her own country — Venezuela.
The curriculum vitae of the opposition leader hardly lines up with what one would typically associate with a Peace Maker. Nor would those who nominated her, including US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and recent US national security advisor Mike Waltz, both drivers of violent policies towards Venezuela.
“The Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 goes to a brave and committed champion of peace, to a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amidst a growing darkness,” said the Nobel Committee statement.
Let’s see if María Corina Machado passes that litmus test and is worthy to stand alongside last year’s winners, Nihon Hidankyo, representing the Japanese hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “honoured for their decades-long commitment to nuclear disarmament and their tireless witness against the horrors of nuclear war”.
Machado supports Israel, would move embassy Machado is a passionate Zionist and supporter of both the State of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu personally. She has not been silent on the genocide; indeed she has actively called for Israel to press ahead, saying Hamas “must be defeated at all costs, whatever form it takes”.
>If Machado achieves power in Venezuela, among her first long-promised acts will be the ending of Venezuela’s support for Palestine and the transfer of the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
The smiling face of Washington regime change The Council on American-Islamic Relations, US’s largest Muslim civil rights organisation, called Machado a supporter of anti-Muslim fascism and decried the award as “insulting and unacceptable”.
2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado . . . “It is really a disaster. It’s laying the groundwork and justifying greater military escalation,” warns a history professor. Image: Cristian Hernandez/ Anadolu Agency
Venezuelan activist Michelle Ellner wrote in the US progressive outlet Code Pink:
“She’s the smiling face of Washington’s regime-change machine, the polished spokesperson for sanctions, privatisation, and foreign intervention dressed up as democracy.
“Machado’s politics are steeped in violence. She has called for foreign intervention, even appealing directly to Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of Gaza’s annihilation, to help ‘liberate’ Venezuela with bombs under the banner of ‘freedom.’
She has demanded sanctions, that silent form of warfare whose effects – as studies in The Lancet and other journals have shown – have killed more people than war, cutting off medicine, food, and energy to entire populations.”
Legitimising US escalation against Venezuela Ellner said she almost laughed at the absurdity of the choice, which I must admit was my own reaction. Yale professor of history Greg Grandin was similarly shocked.
“It is really a disaster. It’s laying the groundwork and justifying greater military escalation.”
What Grandin is referring to is the prize being used by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Trump administration to legitimise escalating violence against Venezuela — an odd outcome for a peace prize.
Grandin, author of America, América: A New History of the New World says Machado “has consistently represented a more hardline in terms of economics, in terms of US relations. That intransigence has led her to rely on outside powers, notably the United States.
“They didn’t give it to Donald Trump, but they have given it to the next best thing as far as Marco Rubio is concerned — if he needs justification to escalate military operations against Venezuela.”
The Iron Lady wins a peace prize? Rubio has repeatedly referred to Machado as the “Venezuelan Iron Lady” — fair enough, as she bears greater resemblance to Margaret Thatcher than she does to Mother Teresa.
This illogicality brought back graffiti I read on a wall in the 1970s: “Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity”. Yet someone at the Nobel Committee had a brain explosion (fitting as Alfred Nobel invented dynamite) when they settled on Machado as the embodiment of Alfred Nobel’s ideal recipient — “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
Machado, a recipient of generous US State Department funding and grants, including from the National Endowment for Democracy (the US’s prime soft power instrument of regime change) is praised for her courage in opposing the Maduro government, and in calling out a slide towards authoritarianism.
Conservatives could run a sound argument in terms of Machado as an anti-regime figure but it is ludicrous to suggest her hard-ball politics and close alliances with Trump would in any way qualify her for the peace prize. Others see her as an agent of the CIA, an agent of the Monroe Doctrine, and as a mouthpiece for a corrupt elite that wants to drive a violent antidemocratic regime change.
She has promised the US that she would privatise the country’s oil industry and open the door to US business.
“We’re grateful for what Trump is doing for peace,” the Nobel winner told the BBC. Trump’s recent actions include bombing boatloads of Venezuelans and Colombians — a violation of international law — as part of a pressure campaign on the Maduro government.
Machado says she told Trump “how grateful the Venezuelan people are for what he’s doing, not only in the Americas, but around the world for peace, for freedom, for democracy”. The dead and starving of Gaza bear witness to a counter narrative.
Rigged elections or rigged narratives? Peacemakers aren’t normally associated with coup d’etats but Machado most certainly was in 2002 when democratically elected President Hugo Chavez was briefly overthrown. Machado was banned from running for President in 2024 because of her calls for US intervention in overthrowing the government.
Central to both Machado’s prize and the US government’s regime change operation is the argument that the Maduro government won a “rigged election” in 2024 and is running a narco-trafficking government; charges accepted as virtually gospel in the mainstream media and dismissed as rubbish by some scholars and experts on the country.
Alfred de Zayas, a law professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy who served as a UN Independent Expert on International Order, cautions against the standard Western narrative that the Venezuelan elections “were rigged”.
The reality is that the Maduro government, like the Chavez government before it, enjoys popularity with the poor majority of the country. Delegitimising any elected government opposed to Washington is standard operating procedure by the great power.
Professor Zayas led a UN mission to Venezuela in 2017 and has visited the country a number of times since. He has spoken with NGOs, such as Fundalatin, Grupo Sures, Red Nacional de Derechos Humanos, as well as people from all walks of life, including professors, church leaders and election officials.
“I gradually understood that the media mood in the West was only aiming for regime change and was deliberately distorting the situation in the country,” he said in an article in 2024.
I provide those thoughts not as proof definitive of the legitimacy of the elections but as stimulant to look beyond our tightly curated mainstream media. María Machado is Washington’s “guy” and that alone should set off alarm bells.
Michelle Ellner: “Anyone who knows what she stands for knows there’s nothing remotely peaceful about her politics.”
“Beati pacifici quoniam filii Dei vocabuntur. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God”. Matthew 5:9.
Amen to that.
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific, and hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz
A few, instantly forgettable days in the city of Manchester has confirmed the Conservative Party is unable to provide a credible opposition to a widely discredited, scandal-ridden Labour government.
I am in absolutely no doubt whatsoever; the Conservative Party is dead.
The 2024 general election didn’t just eject them from power — it was a massacre that would make a Hammer Horror movie blush.
Reduced to 121 MPs, their lowest tally since the 1830s, they lost seats to everyone from independent socialists calling out their Gaza genocide complicity to Farage’s grifting circus, Reform UK.
Just over a year later, under the leadership of Kemi Badenoch, the Tories find themselves trailing in the polls to the worst Labour government in living memory.
Even their own members are jumping ship. Half of them say Badenoch’s unfit to lead them into the next election, and Robert Jenrick — who believes the UK should have the Star of David at every entry point into the country — keeps popping up as the consolation prize that nobody asked for,
Admittedly, a number of the Tories want Jenrick, a man so bland he makes fence panels look rebellious, but the rest of the Brexit nostalgists are ready to sell their darkened souls to Farage’s fascist fan club to make themselves feel a little bit better.
The Tories aren’t just dead, they’re decomposing into the compost heap of history.
The Conservative Party is dead
Years of gutting the NHS, cheering on the body count of austerity, and shilling for fossil fuel barons and shady foreign donors have left them with nothing but culture war dogwhistles and the memory of an iceberg lettuce outliving Liz Truss’ credibility.
The Tories spent fourteen years building a Britain where NHS nurses queue at food banks and sleep in cars while their hedge fund associates dodge taxes in their mansions. That is the Tory brand, and it is more toxic than a skunk’s armpit at a garlic-eating contest.
Badenoch’s speech was a desperate, reheated casserole of right-wing buzzwords. The promise to “restore a strong economy, secure our borders, and rebuild Britain’s strength” is pure delusion.
It was supposed to be a rallying cry for the restless Tory masses but it felt so much more like a requiem for a party that is out of touch and out of ideas.
It will be a miracle if Badenoch is still the leader of the Conservative Party at the next general election because that speech was like a resignation letter in policy form.
The big reveal, which absolutely nobody was waiting for, was to announce the abolition of stamp duty under the next Conservative government.
Because what Britain really needs is another tax loophole for oligarchs and Airbnb millionaires, while millennials live in their parents’ basements, right?
There will not be a next Conservative government.
And what if there was? The Tories torched social housing, jacked up rents to dystopian levels and turned rough sleeping into a national sport. This is a legacy that cannot be undone.
Zack Polanski: inspiring hope
One political leader that inspires genuine hope is Zack Polanski. I must admit, he is growing on me quicker than a pair of hypnotised breasts.
While Jezza and Zarah’s ‘Your Party’ spent the summer months squabbling and threatening legal action, Polanski went about his business quietly and effectively, putting in place the foundations of a genuine socialist movement.
Some people on the left are quick to say Polanski is simply putting a green slant on Corbynite policies as if it’s a bad thing.
Eco socialism is a solution to the crises of today, not the problem.
Other critics (particularly on the right) are keen to point out that Mr Polanski was born with a different name, as if it is some sort of “gotcha” hypocrisy moment.
Polanski changed his name at the age of 18 to reclaim his family’s original Jewish surname, which had been anglicised to Paulden generations earlier as a shield against rampant antisemitism in early 20th-century Britain.
Polanski’s name change was transparent, legally documented, and tied to his heritage.
The same critics are fine with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon calling himself Tommy Robinson, which is a pseudonym layered over convictions for fraud and contempt, but they get particularly angry about a Jewish lad honouring his roots?
Remind me again, why did the Polanski family feel it necessary to change their surname, some generations earlier?
Fixating on birth certificates distracts from substance. If Polanski’s policies land or flop, it’ll have absolutely nothing to do with what his mum called him at birth.
There is space for two left parties
Don’t get me wrong here folks, Your Party has every chance of being a huge success, even more so if they can effectively live stream a rally…
It is entirely possible for Your Party and the Greens to work together, both now and in the future.
The Independent Alliance (Your Party’s precursor) has informally coordinated with Greens in Parliament since 2024.
They’ve jointly tabled amendments to the King’s Speech, voted together on issues like Gaza and social justice, and shared resources for campaigns.
And at this week’s Your Party big rally in Liverpool, Corbyn and Sultana discussed an “optimistic socialist alternative” alongside “working with Polanski’s Greens.”
There is plenty of space on the left for two political parties. Millions of disillusioned Labour voters are politically homeless. Your Party and Polanski’s Greens must now point the way to a better, fairer Britain for all.
