IMO, this sounds like an expression of sorrow and regret about the conflict, and about the evils it is feeding and fostering. Regardless, the institute has described that comment by Davis as antisemitic.
“‘You cannot claim to champion social cohesion while minimising or rationalising antisemitic hate,’ the institute said. ‘Social trust depends on moral consistency, especially from those in leadership. Peter Davis’s actions erode that trust.’”
For the record, Davis wasn’t rationalising or minimising antisemitic hate. His comments look far more like a legitimate observation that the longer the need for a political-diplomatic solution is violently resisted, the worse things will be for everyone — including Jewish citizens, via the stoking of antisemitism.
The basic point at issue here is that criticisms of the actions of the Israeli government do not equate to a racist hostility to the Jewish people. (Similarly, the criticisms of Donald Trump’s actions cannot be minimised or rationalised as due to anti-Americanism.)
Appalled by Netanyahu actions
Many Jewish people in fact, also feel appalled by the actions of the Netanyahu government, which repeatedly violate international law.
In the light of the extreme acts of violence being inflicted daily by the IDF on the people of Gaza, the upsurge in hateful graffiti by neo-Nazi opportunists while still being vile, is hardly surprising.
Around the world, the security of innocent Israeli citizens is being recklessly endangered by the ultra-violent actions of their own government.
If you want to protect your citizens from an existing fire, it’s best not to toss gasoline on the flames.
To repeat: the vast majority of the current criticisms of the Israeli state have nothing whatsoever to do with antisemitism. At a time when Israel is killing scores of innocent Palestinians on a nightly basis with systematic air strikes and the shelling of civilian neighbourhoods, when it is weaponising access to humanitarian aid as an apparent tool of ethnic cleansing, when it is executing medical staff and assassinating journalists, when it is killing thousands of children and starving the survivors . . . antisemitism is not the reason why most people oppose these evils. Common humanity demands it.
Ironically, the press release by the NZ Israel Institute concludes with these words: “There must be zero tolerance for hate in any form.” Too bad the institute seems to have such a limited capacity for self-reflection.
Footnote One: For the best part of 80 years, the world has felt sympathy to Jews in recognition of the Holocaust. The genocide now being committed in Gaza by the Netanyahu government cannot help but reduce public support for Israel.
It also cannot help but erode the status of the Holocaust as a unique expression of human evil.
One would have hoped the NZ Israel Institute might acknowledge the self-defeating nature of the Netanyahu government policies — if only because, on a daily basis, the state of Israel is abetting its enemies, and alienating its friends.
Footnote Two: As yet, the so-called Free Speech Union has not come out to support the free speech rights of Peter Davis, and to rebuke the NZ Israel Institute for trying to muzzle them.
This is a section of Gordon Campbell’s Scoop column published yesterday under the subheading “Pot Calls Out Kettle”; the main portion of the column about the new Pope is here. Republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
This article was initially set out to focus onThe Encampments, Kei Pritsker and Michael T Workman’s impassioned documentary that chronicles the Columbia University student movement that shook the United States and captured imaginations the world over.
But then it came to my attention that a sparring film has been released around the same time, offering a staunchly pro-Israeli counter-narrative that vehemently attempts to discredit the account offered by The Encampments.
October 8 charts the alleged rise of antisemitism in the US in the wake of the October 7 attacks on southern Israel by Hamas-led Palestinian fighters.
A balanced record though, it is not. Wendy Sachs’s solo debut feature, which has the subhead, “The Fight for the Soul of America”, is essentially an unabashed defence of the silencing of pro-Palestinian voices.
Its omissions are predictable; its moral logic is fascinatingly disturbing; its manipulative arguments are the stuff of Steven Bannon.
It’s easily the most abhorrent piece of mainstream Israeli propaganda this writer has come across .
Ignoring October 8 would be injudicious, however. Selected only by a number of Jewish film festivals in the US, the film was released in mid-March by indie distribution outfit Briarcliff Entertainment in more than 125 theatres.
The film has amassed more than $1.3 million so far at the US box office, making it the second-highest grossing documentary of the year, ironically behind the self-distributed and Oscar-winning No Other Land about Palestine at $2.4 million.
October 8 has sold more than 90,000 tickets, an impressive achievement given the fact that at least 73 percent of the 7.5 million Jewish Americans still hold a favourable view of Israel.
“It would be great if we were getting a lot of crossover, but I don’t know that we are,” Sachs admitted to the Hollywood Reporter.
Zionist films have been largely absent from most local and international film festivals — curation, after all, is an ethical occupation — while Palestinian stories, by contrast, have seen an enormous rise in popularity since October 7.
The phenomenon culminated with the Oscar win for No Other Land.
October 8 . . . “easily the most abhorrent piece of mainstream Israeli propaganda this writer has come across.” Image: Briarcliff Entertainment
But the release of October 8 and the selection of several Israeli hostage dramas in February’s Berlin Film Festival indicates that the war has officially reached the big screen.
With the aforementioned hostage dramas due to be shown stateside later this year, and no less than four major Palestinian pictures set for theatrical release over the next 12 months, this Israeli-Palestinian film feud is just getting started.
Working for change The Encampments, which raked in a highly impressive $423,000 in 50 theatres after a month of release, has been garnering more headlines, not only due to the fact that the recently detained Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil happens to be one of its protagonists, but because it is clearly the better film.
Pritsker and Workman, who were on the ground with the students for most of the six-week duration of the set-in, provide a keenly observed, intimate view of the action, capturing the inspiring highs and dispiriting lows of the passionate demonstrations and wayward negotiations with Columbia’s administrations.
The narrative is anchored from the point of views of four students: Grant Miner, a Jewish PhD student who was expelled in March for his involvement in the protests; Sueda Polat, a protest negotiator and spokesperson for the encampments; Naye Idriss, a Palestinian organiser and Columbia alumni; and the soft-spoken Khalil, the Palestinian student elected to lead the negotiations.
A desire for justice, for holding Israel accountable for its crimes in Gaza, permeated the group’s calling for divesting Columbia’s $13.6 billion endowment funds from weapons manufacturers and tech companies with business links to the Netanyahu’s administration.
Each of the four shares similar background stories, but Miner and Khalil stand out. As a Jew, Miner is an example of a young Jewish American generation that regard their Jewishness as a moral imperative for defending the Palestinian cause.
Khalil, meanwhile, carries the familiar burden of being a child of the camps: a descendant of a family that was forcibly displaced from their Tiberias home in 1948.
The personal histories provide ample opportunities for reflections around questions of identity, trauma, and the youthful desire for tangible change.
Each protester stresses that the encampment was a last and only resort after the Columbia hierarchy casually brushed aside their concerns.
These concerns transformed into demands when it became clear that only more strident action like sit-ins could push the Columbia administration to engage with them.
In an age when most people are content to sit idly behind their computers waiting for something to happen, these students took it upon themselves to actively work for change in a country where change, especially in the face of powerful lobbies, is arduous.
Only through protests, the viewers begin to realise, can these four lucidly deal with the senseless, numbing bloodshed and brutality in Gaza.
Crackdown on free speech Through skilled placement of archival footage, Pritsker and Workman aptly link the encampments with other student movements in Columbia, including the earlier occupation of Hamilton Hall in 1968 that demonstrated the university’s historic ties with bodies that supported America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
Both anti-war movements were countered by an identical measure: the university’s summoning of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to violently dismantle the protests.
Neither the Columbia administration, represented by the disgraced ex-president Minouche Shafik, nor the NYPD are portrayed in a flattering fashion.
Shafik comes off as a wishy-washy figure, too protective of her position to take a concrete stance for or against the pro-Palestinian protesters.
The NYPD were a regular fixture outside universities in New York during the encampments during 2024 Image: MEE/Azad Essa
The NYPD’s employment of violence against the peaceful protests that they declared to have “devolved into antisemitic and anti-Israel rhetoric” is an admission that violence against words can be justified, undermining the First Amendment of the US constitution, which protects free speech.
The Encampments is not without flaws. By strictly adhering to the testimonials of its subjects, Pritsker and Workman leave out several imperative details.
These include the identity of the companies behind endowment allocations, the fact that several Congress senators who most prominently criticised the encampments “received over $100,000 more on average from pro-Israel donors during their last election” according to a Guardianfinding, and the revelations that US police forces have received analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict directly from the Israeli army and Israeli think tanks.
The suggested link between the 1968 protests and the present situation is not entirely accurate either.
The endowments industry was nowhere as big as it is now, and there’s an argument to be made about the deprioritisation of education by universities vis-a-vis their endowments.
A bias towards Israel or a determination to assert the management’s authority is not the real motive behind their position — it’s the money.
Lastly, avoiding October 7 and the moral and political issues ingrained within the attack, while refraining from confronting the pro-Israel voices that accused the protesters of aggression and antisemitism, is a major blind spot that allows conservatives and pro-Israel pundits to accuse the filmmakers of bias.
One could be asking too much from a film directed by first-time filmmakers that was rushed into theatres to enhance awareness about Mahmoud Khalil’s political persecution, but The Encampments, which was co-produced by rapper Macklemore, remains an important, urgent, and honest document of an event that has been repeatedly tarnished by the media and self-serving politicians.
The politics of victimhood The imperfections of The Encampments are partially derived from lack of experience on its creators’ part.
Any accusations of malice are unfounded, especially since the directors do not waste time in arguing against Zionism or paint its subjects as victims. The same cannot be said of October 8.
Executive produced by actress Debra Messing of Will & Grace fame, who also appears in the film, October 8 adopts a shabby, scattershot structure vastly comprised of interviews with nearly every high-profile pro-Israel person in America.
The talking heads are interjected with dubious graphs and craftily edited footage culled from social media of alleged pro-Palestinian protesters in college campuses verbally attacking Jewish students and allegedly advocating the ideology of Hamas.
Needless to say, no context is given to these videos whose dates and locations are never identified.
The chief aim of October 8 is to retrieve the victimisation card by using the same language that informed the pro-Palestine discourse
Every imaginable falsification and shaky allegation regarding the righteousness of Zionism is paraded: anti-Zionism is the new form of antisemitism; pro-Palestinian protesters harassed pro-Israel Jewish students; the media is flooded with pro-Palestinian bias.
Other tropes include the claim that Hamas is conspiring to destabilise American democracy and unleash hell on the Western world.
Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a Hamas co-founder who defected to Israel in 1997, stresses that “my definition of Intifada is chaos”.
There is also the suggestion that the protests, if not contained, could spiral into Nazi era-like fascism.
Sachs goes as far as showing historical footage of the Third Reich to demonstrate her point.
The chief aim of October 8 is to retrieve Israel’s victimhood by using the same language that informs pro-Palestine discourse. “Gaza hijacked all underdog stories in the world,” one interviewee laments.
At one point, the attacks of October 7 are described as a “genocide”, while Zionism is referred to as a “civil rights movement”.
One interviewee explains that the framing of the Gaza war as David and Goliath is erroneous when considering that Hamas is backed by almighty Iran and that Israel is surrounded by numerous hostile countries, such as Lebanon and Syria.
In the most fanciful segment of the film, the interviewees claim that the Students for Justice in Palestine is affiliated and under the command of Hamas, while haphazardly linking random terrorist attacks, such as 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting to Hamas and by extension the Palestinian cause.
A simmering racist charge delineate the film’s pro-Israel discourse in its instance on pigeonholing all Palestinians as radical Muslim Hamas supporters.
There isn’t a single mention of the occupied West Bank or Palestinian religious minorities or even anti-Hamas sentiment in Gaza.
Depicting all Palestinians as a rigid monolith profoundly contrasts Pritsker and Workman’s nuanced treatment of their Jewish subjects.
The best means to counter films like October 8 is facts and good journalism
There’s a difference between subtraction and omission: the former affects logical form, while the latter affects logical content.
October 8 is built on a series of deliberate omissions and fear mongering, an unscrupulous if familiar tactic that betrays the subjects’ indignation and their weak conviction.
It is thus not surprising that there is no mention of the Nakba or the fact that the so-called “civil rights movement” is linked to a state founded on looted lands or the grand open prison Israel has turned Gaza into, or the endless humiliation of Palestinians in the West Bank.
There is also no mention of the racist and inciting statements by far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
Nor is there mention of the Palestinians who have been abducted and tortured and raped in Israeli prisons.
And definitely not of the more than 52,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza to date.
Sachs’ subjects naturally are too enveloped in their own conspiracies, in the tightly knotted narrative they concocted for themselves, to be aware of their privilege.
The problem is, these subjects want to have their cake and eat it. Throughout, they constantly complain of being silenced; that most institutions, be it the media or college hierarchies or human rights organisations, have not recognised the colossal loss of 7 October 7 and have focused instead on Palestinian suffering.
They theorise that the refusal of the authorities in taking firm and direct action against pro-Palestinian voices has fostered antisemitism.
At the same time, they have no qualms in flaunting their contribution to New York Times op-eds or the testimonies they were invited to present at the Congress.
All the while, Khalil and other Palestinian activists are arrested, deported and stripped of their residencies.
The value of good journalism October 8, which portrays the IDF as a brave, truth-seeking institution, is not merely a pro-Israel propaganda, it’s a far-right propaganda.
The subjects adopt Trump rhetoric in similarly blaming the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies for the rise of antisemitism, while dismissing intersectionality and anti-colonialism for giving legitimacy to the Palestinian cause.
As repugnant as October 8 is, it is crucial to engage with work of its ilk and confront its hyperboles.
Last month, the Hollywood Reporter set up an unanticipated discussion between Pritsker, who is in fact Jewish, and pro-Israel influencer Hen Mazzig.
The heated exchange that followed demonstrated the difficulty of communication with the pro-Israeli lobby, yet nonetheless underlines the necessity of communication, at least in film.
Mazzig spends the larger part of the discussion spewing unfounded accusations that he provides no validations for: “Mahmoud Khalil has links to Hamas,” he says at one point.
When asked about the Palestinian prisoners, he confidently attests that “the 10,000 Palestinian prisoners” — hostages, as Pritsker calls them — they have committed crimes and are held in Israeli prisons, right?
“In fact, in the latest hostage release eight Palestinian prisoners refused to go back to Gaza because they’ve enjoyed their treatment in these prisons.”
Mazzig dismisses pro-Palestinian groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and the pro-Palestinian Jewish students who participated in the encampments.
“No one would make this argument but here we are able to tokenise a minority, a fringe community, and weaponise it against us,” he says.
“It’s not because they care about Jews and want Jews to be represented. It’s that they hate us so much that they’re doing this and gaslighting us.”
At this stage, attempting for the umpteenth time to stress that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not one and the same — a reality that the far-right rejects — is frankly pointless.
Attempting, like Khalil, to continually emphasise our unequivocal rejection of antisemitism, to underscore that our Jewish colleagues and friends are partners in our struggle for equality and justice, is frankly demeaning.
For Mazzig and Messing and the October 8 subjects, every Arab, every pro-Palestinian, is automatically an antisemite until proven otherwise.
The best means to counter films like October 8 is facts and good journalism.
Emotionality has no place in this increasingly hostile landscape. The reason why The Bibi Files and Louis Theroux’s The Settlers work so well is due to their flawless journalism.
People may believe what they want to believe, but for the undecided and the uninformed, factuality and journalistic integrity — values that go over Sachs’ head — could prove to be the most potent weapon of all.
Joseph Fahim is an Egyptian film critic and programmer. He is the Arab delegate of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, a former member of Berlin Critics’ Week and the ex director of programming of the Cairo International Film Festival. This article was first published by Middle East Eye.
Leafleting for Majority, I stopped a bloke in Newcastle city centre.
Late thirties, Geordie accent, carrying a plastic bag with his shopping in, he said:
Oh, I’ll definitely be voting in the next council election.
I asked:
Who are you thinking of voting for?
“Re Form,” he pronounced, as two separate words.
You get a lot of that these days. Loads of media commentators and Westminster bubble people expound their theories why. Few of them actually go and find out for themselves.
Local elections: breaking through the Westminster bubble to find out what voters really think
I asked him if he thought Reform will fix anything after the local elections. Yes, partly as a leading question, but I was genuinely interested to hear his thoughts.
“Well, erm, aye,” then a short pause, “Farage is the man isn’t he?”
I followed up with:
What do you think needs fixing?
“Homelessness.” No hesitation this time. He continued:
Like, you see people sleeping in shop doorways. And begging, and if people give them money it goes on drugs.
I asked him his name: Ryan.
Then, I told Ryan a story.
A few years ago I visited HMP Northumberland and spoke to some of the inmates there. When I was mayor we funded courses so inmates could get skilled up and get an interview and have a job arranged all before they were released. So they came out with an income and with a life plan. I asked some of the lads what they thought would be an improvement. And they told me something I never thought I would ever hear a prisoner say.
They said:
The sentences are too short. You get lads with 3 month sentences, they serve like 5 weeks, and the drugs are barely out of their system and they’re released. But wherever they were staying has gone when they get out. And who’s nice to them? The drug dealers. So they go straight back on it.
I’m not sure longer sentences are the answer, but they were right about the problem. I explained the ‘Housing First’ policy. Giving people somewhere to live that they know can’t be taken off them. Where if they miss an appointment with a job coach they still have their home. With that foundation, they start to feel in control of their lives. They start to turn their lives around.
Working class voters have lived austerity’s devastating reality
Ryan was nodding along:
Aye, and they can get proper rehab and stuff, and they’ll turn up because they have somewhere to live. You know I struggled when I came out of prison.
I had no idea – I’d never met him before. For privacy I’ll skip over the details of Ryan’s youth he shared with me. But it struck a chord with him. The fact that I’d listened to people with his life experience. Not just listened, but heard them, and learned from them too. In return, he listened to me.
We spoke about the Newcastle Assembly where the people will develop their own manifesto. That we’ll be running in next May’s local elections for a progressive coalition to take control of Newcastle city council. Would Ryan vote for us?
Well I was just saying Re Form because there was no one else. Labour just lie.
He paused for a moment. Then, he said:
You know, if I was prime minister, I could fix this country in six months.
I was impressed. Even I’m not that confident, and I’ve ran an arm of government. I asked him what he would do. Ryan said:
You’ve got all people, like working, but they haven’t got any money, and they’re struggling to pay their bills and buy food and that. The government could support them with a bit money. And you wouldn’t have as much crime. You wouldn’t have people sleeping in doorways. And things like tourism would improve. Who’s going to come and visit here if there’s people sleeping rough?
One working-class lad with a tough history spoke more economic sense in one five minute conversation than Rachel Reeves has since she was elected, despite her Nobel Prize in economics, or whatever her CV says these days. Ryan got anti-austerity politics because he lived it. And not one word about immigration passed his lips.
Honesty and integrity: what’s missing from politics
I spoke to Alison. She also had a broad Geordie accent, and works two jobs, one as a cleaner, one as bar staff. She’s helping her daughter get through university, who’s training as a nurse.
What do you think of them getting in in Durham, then?
I asked her if she thought they’d fix anything. Alison replied:
Nah. They’re just all talk like the rest of them. They won’t fix nowt. They’re going on about people working from home now. But who can you vote for? Labour have gone back on everything they’ve said. Everything.
She told me about her daughter, and how expensive her accommodation is. My son’s at uni too, and it’s eye watering. I told her about the assembly, about having a manifesto where the people get to take part in setting policy. Would she vote for us?
I will pet, I will.
Once you get out of the social media bubble, people just want things to work. We chose the name Majority because the majority of people agree with our politics. Making sure everyone has a secure home. Public utilities run for the good of the public. A wealth tax on the very rich. Every poll shows between 70% and 80% of people want these things to happen.
It’s also about integrity. We can’t slam the Tories for VIP WhatsApp lanes and Labour for freebies unless we’re better. The most effective line in my mayoral campaign was, “In five years I claimed £0 expenses”.
Integrity means being honest. We stick firm to our values of anti-racism, anti-ableism and LGBTQ+ inclusion. Honesty gets you respect. It wasn’t Labour’s stance on immigration that lost them these local elections. It was their stance on truth.
Now, as greetings resound across the Pacific and globally, attention turns to what vision the first US pope will bring.
Change is hard to bring about in the Catholic Church. During his pontificate, Francis often gestured toward change without actually changing church doctrines. He permitted discussion of ordaining married men in remote regions where populations were greatly underserved due to a lack of priests, but he did not actually allow it.
On his own initiative, he set up a commission to study the possibility of ordaining women as deacons, but he did not follow it through.
However, he did allow priests to offer the Eucharist, the most important Catholic sacrament of the body and blood of Christ, to Catholics who had divorced and remarried without being granted an annulment.
Likewise, Francis did not change the official teaching that a sacramental marriage is between a man and a woman, but he did allow for the blessing of gay couples, in a manner that did appear to be a sanctioning of gay marriage.
To what degree will the new pope stand or not stand in continuity with Francis? As a scholar who has studied the writings and actions of the popes since the time of the Second Vatican Council, a series of meetings held to modernize the church from 1962 to 1965, I am aware that every pope comes with his own vision and his own agenda for leading the church.
Still, the popes who immediately preceded them set practical limits on what changes could be made. There were limitations on Francis as well; however, the new pope, I argue, will have more leeway because of the signals Francis sent.
The process of synodality Francis initiated a process called “synodality,” a term that combines the Greek words for “journey” and “together.” Synodality involves gathering Catholics of various ranks and points of view to share their faith and pray with each other as they address challenges faced by the church today.
One of Francis’ favourite themes was inclusion. He carried forward the teaching of the Second Vatican Council that the Holy Spirit — that is, the Spirit of God who inspired the prophets and is believed to be sent by Christ among Christians in a special way — is at work throughout the whole church; it includes not only the hierarchy but all of the church members.
This belief constituted the core principle underlying synodality.
Pope Francis with the participants of the Synod of Bishops’ 16th General Assembly in the Paul VI Hall at the Vatican in October 2023. Image: The Conversation/AP/Gregorio Borgia
Francis launched a two-year global consultation process in October 2022, culminating in a synod in Rome in October 2024. Catholics all over the world offered their insights and opinions during this process.
The synod discussed many issues, some of which were controversial, such as clerical sexual abuse, the need for oversight of bishops, the role of women in general and the ordination of women as deacons.
The final synod document did not offer conclusions concerning these topics but rather aimed more at promoting the transformation of the entire Catholic Church into a synodal church in which Catholics tackle together the many challenges of the modern world.
Francis refrained from issuing his own document in response, in order that the synod’s statement could stand on its own.
The process of synodality in one sense places limits on bishops and the pope by emphasising their need to listen closely to all church members before making decisions. In another sense, though, in the long run the process opens up the possibility for needed developments to take place when and if lay Catholics overwhelmingly testify that they believe the church should move in a certain direction.
Change is hard in the church A pope, however, cannot simply reverse official positions that his immediate predecessors had been emphasising. Practically speaking, there needs to be a papacy, or two, during which a pope will either remain silent on matters that call for change or at least limit himself to hints and signals on such issues.
In 1864, Pius IX condemned the proposition that “the Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.”
It wasn’t until 1965 – some 100 years later – that the Second Vatican Council, in The Declaration on Religious Freedom, would affirm that “a wrong is done when government imposes upon its people, by force or fear or other means, the profession or repudiation of any religion. …”
A second major reason why popes may refrain from making top-down changes is that they may not want to operate like a dictator issuing executive orders in an authoritarian manner.
Francis was accused by his critics of acting in this way with his positions on Eucharist for those remarried without a prior annulment and on blessings for gay couples. The major thrust of his papacy, however, with his emphasis on synodality, was actually in the opposite direction.
Notably, when the Amazon Synod — held in Rome in October 2019 — voted 128-41 to allow for married priests in the Brazilian Amazon region, Francis rejected it as not being the appropriate time for such a significant change.
Archbishop Timothy Broglio, President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, expresses joy and gratitude following the election of Pope Leo XIV.https://t.co/r2GClc7hyM
Past doctrines The belief that the pope should express the faith of the people and not simply his own personal opinions is not a new insight from Francis.
The doctrine of papal infallibility, declared at the First Vatican Council in 1870, held that the pope, under certain conditions, could express the faith of the church without error.
be speaking not personally but in his official capacity as the head of the church;
he must not be in heresy;
he must be free of coercion and of sound mind;
he must be addressing a matter of faith and morals; and
he must consult relevant documents and other Catholics so that what he teaches represents not simply his own opinions but the faith of the church.
The Marian doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption offer examples of the importance of consultation. The Immaculate Conception, proclaimed by Pope Pius IX in 1854, is the teaching that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was herself preserved from original sin, a stain inherited from Adam that Catholics believe all other human beings are born with, from the moment of her conception.
The documents in which these doctrines were proclaimed stressed that the bishops of the church had been consulted and that the faith of the lay people was being affirmed.
Unity, above all One of the main duties of the pope is to protect the unity of the Catholic Church. On one hand, making many changes quickly can lead to schism, an actual split in the community.
The Catholic Church faces similar challenges but so far has been able to avoid schisms by limiting the actual changes being made.
On the other hand, not making reasonable changes that acknowledge positive developments in the culture regarding issues such as the full inclusion of women or the dignity of gays and lesbians can result in the large-scale exit of members.
Pope Leo XIV, I argue, needs to be a spiritual leader, a person of vision, who can build upon the legacy of his immediate predecessors in such a way as to meet the challenges of the present moment.
He already stated that he wants a synodal church that is “close to the people who suffer,” signaling a great deal about the direction he will take.
If the new pope is able to update church teachings on some hot-button issues, it will be precisely because Francis set the stage for him.
Less than one year ago, the people of County Durham returned six out of six MPs for Labour. Northumberland voted Labour in four out of four. On Thursday, Northumberland Labour dropped from 21 seats in 2021, to just eight. In Durham, from 53 seats to just four. Four. Yes, there are fewer seats with the boundary changes, but this is beyond defeat. It is obliteration. And Reform has taken control.
Labour’s vote collapsed because people are rightly angry
How can a party collapse so quickly?
Well, it didn’t. Durham voted Brexit. People at bus stops weren’t discussing the intricacies of the European Central Bank. They were bemoaning the price of buses. Boarded up shops. No school places nearby. Youths on noisy motorbikes intimidating pedestrians.
One resident of a former pit village told me:
We haven’t even got a supermarket here.
The Brexit vote was a howl of pain.
In 2019, the land of the Durham Miners’ Gala returned three Tory MPs. This year, just one of 24 Tory councillors survives from the 2021 local elections. The people gave them a chance. They failed to deliver. So the people voted them out.
In July last year, the people gave Labour a chance. Boy, were they betrayed quickly. Winter fuel allowance. Impoverishing disabled people. Still no buses. Still the shops are boarded up while the prices keep going up.
Reform has 65 of 98 seats on Durham County Council. Its vote is a coalition of two angry groups. Those who are angry at life. At immigrants. Trans people. Vaccines. Tofu. Recycling. Green energy. To them I say, haters gonna hate.
And a much larger group who are angry with supermarket prices. At working long hours and still slipping into debt. At paying in all your life, then having your Winter Fuel Allowance taken away.
To them I say, you’re right to be angry. But Nigel Farage is not on your side. He’s part of the same snake-oil selling establishment who has been selling you out for a long, long time. Helping the rich get richer, while delivering a reality of ill health and insecure work.
Reform has taken back control, so what now?
What happens now that Reform has taken back control? Will they fix Durham? Or just blame someone else? Voters don’t like that. They expect you to fix something. They know you can’t fix everything everywhere, all at once. But if your park is still covered in glass after four years, they will hold you to account.
What Brexit broke was not the tradition of voting Labour. It broke the tradition of voting by tradition. Will Reform even hold together? Its four MPs have managed to start suing each other. Will they be falling out before the leaves fall off the trees?
Newcastle has all-out council elections in 2026. Labour has already lost overall control through resignations. It has a £40m debt liability for the Crowne Plaza hotel. It has cost us £7m through the failed profit-making parks trust, implemented by now North East Mayor Kim McGuinness. Child poverty is up. The new Metros are not in service. No one seems to be in charge, or capable of delivering anything. The Gateshead flyover is still closed. And no one takes responsibility.
Instead, all we get are slavish repetition of national talking points:
Everything is fine, and it’s all the Tories’ fault.
We need people who will stand up for our region. Who are not terrified of telling the truth for fear of being politically executed by party apparatchiks. We need a credible alternative.
Exactly one year ago, I polled 25,000 votes in Newcastle compared to Labour’s 26,000 votes. There is a desire for better politics and higher standards. I want to see a coalition that will actually represent the people, not the parties. I want independents involved, and Greens if they are up for it. For the people leaving Labour – and there are many – to be part of it. To use citizens’ assemblies to set policy priorities.
We need politicians who will put local people first, and who are not beholden to party HQs or toeing the party line. Our first assembly is on Sunday 18 May in the Discovery Museum. You can book on the Majority website. Get yourself along.
Robert Dupree, general partner at VC firm Alwyn Capital, argues that future foods and alternative proteins are key to winning the AI race.
If artificial intelligence (AI) is going to be the new determining factor for global hegemony, then energy dominance, food security, and water resilience must combine into a single integrated national security priority.
Securing a stable food supply is integral to defending national interests. A disrupted food system not only endangers public well-being but also undermines military readiness and economic stability, two pillars of national power. Alternative proteins can help build redundancy into our food system and will help to reduce vulnerability.
The US faces a growing array of security threats from China. As food, water, and energy become critical choke points, alternative protein R&D acts as a strategic hedge, ensuring US soldiers and citizens remain fed without requiring a massive resource footprint while maintaining traditional US farms and agriculture.
Alternative proteins are food ingredients created to replace or complement conventional animal-derived proteins. They include cell-based meat, precision fermentation, plant-based proteins, and molecular farming. Each is leveraging different technologies to produce sustainable, scalable, and functionally equivalent protein sources.
The climate problem plaguing AI and data centres
Courtesy: AI-Generated Image via Canva
AI is the ultimate force multiplier, but it requires stable power and water. Both the US and China are scrambling to shore up these resources, and whoever integrates them first wins the AI race. As Chris Wright stated during his confirmation hearings: “The security of our nation begins with energy.”
What he was referring to is the energy needed to win the AI race against China. To run high-fidelity models, AI needs data centres, and data centres need lots of power. The power required for data centres alone will need to double by 2030, and President Trump is pushing to accelerate that timeline.
China has prioritised energy creation and brought its cost to below $0.08/kilowatt-hour, half that of the US, and they are masters of doing more with less. Deepseek has demonstrated that China is surpassing us by developing its model at a lower cost and without relying on high-performance chips.
China has prioritised building energy infrastructure, while the US energy industry has lagged. Building energy sources with speed and efficiency will be critical for the next several years in the US.
Small Modular Reactors take two to three years to construct, while larger nuclear reactors need five to seven years to build. The new Alaskan LNG pipeline won’t be delivered until 2031.
While China restricts exports of antimony and other rare earth materials, the scale of renewables like solar will be limited. Those timelines don’t work for doubling power within five years.
In contrast, a new shale gas well (the main energy source for the US) can be drilled and brought online in as little as a few weeks. That means we will be looking at doubling shale capacity to double our current power output and meet the demands of data centres. To do this, we need roughly 140,000 shale gas wells by 2030. As President Trump promises, the US will “drill, baby drill”.
During this period of power and data centre expansion, access to water resources will be essential. A new vertical shale gas well requires around two to four million gallons of water, and one data centre uses over three million gallons of water a day. This surge in demand will intensify pressure on all other water-intensive industries.
The amount of water the US uses for animal feed is astronomical. Corn is the leading feed grain in the US, representing more than 95% of the total feed grain production. In 2024, US corn production was estimated at 14.9 billion bushels. One bushel of corn requires 2,500 gallons of water to produce, and producing 14.9 billion bushels requires 37.25 trillion gallons.
In 2016, the total water consumption by the US livestock sector was 72.65 trillion gallons. In 2021, Google’s data centres consumed over three billion gallons of water, by 2023, that usage had doubled to six billion gallons.
Our water resources are heavily strained and in short supply. Arkansas aquifers are being depleted at an alarming rate, as is the largest US aquifer, the Ogallala Aquifer. As previously mentioned, our short-term energy supply will likely come from shale gas that will require two to four million gallons of water per new well.
US aquifers are already experiencing strain from data centres and agriculture, and the increased demand will see the US water supply further stressed. Cattle require immense amounts of water, water that is needed for AI innovation. Thus, it will be crucial for the US to promote domestic protein production that requires less water.
On top of being resource-intensive, cattle are slow to replace. The cattle cycle typically spans about 10 years from low point to low point. As of January, the US cattle inventory stands at 86.7 million heads, marking its lowest level since 1951. Given this stage in the cycle and the current low inventory levels, investing in alternative proteins will serve as a prudent strategy to mitigate potential supply disruptions and market volatility.
In addition to beef, the egg market volatility has been affecting the US consumer for the last three years. Egg prices are at a record high due to Avian Flu outbreaks, which have decimated the US chicken population – nearly 170 million birds have been lost over the last two years.
If the chicken and cattle industries were depleted, it would take 1.5 and two to three years, respectively, under optimal conditions, to get flocks and herds back to current levels. Alternative proteins allow for faster production and shorter lead times – many alternative proteins can be produced in a matter of days or weeks.
Dealing with disruptions
Consumer price index for
beef | Courtesy: Bureau of Labor Statistics
In 2023, the US suffered crop losses totalling $21B due to storms. A major storm, combined with a failing power infrastructure, limited resources for farms and factories, and storm-related delays, could cripple the economy of a country facing an isolationist policy.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins expects significant challenges for farmers and has committed to providing financial support to help them navigate the impact. This underscores the administration’s recognition that our food supply will face increasing disruptions.
The USDA predicts beef imports will continue at record prices for the next couple of years. As the US cattle herd has declined, beef imports, mainly from Canada and Mexico, have surged, doubling since 2013 and exposing vulnerabilities in our supply chain.
We are already seeing delays in cocoa and coffee production due to weather, leading to shortages and record-high prices. As more commodities fall victim to changing climate patterns, we will experience additional shortages and major disruptions in the US food system.
Since JBS, the world’s largest beef producer, and Smithfield, the largest pork producer in the US, are both foreign-owned, relying on overseas control of such critical industries could further complicate the supply chain.
Alternative proteins will alleviate the burden of securing reliable protein and reinforce our national security in an increasingly uncertain world. Establishing alternative proteins as a backstop, especially if the current trade war with China enters an extended period, will help to secure a stable US food supply.
Global dominance now hinges on AI, which in turn relies on both water and energy, resources that are increasingly scarce, making water a critical strategic asset. Feedstock for animal agriculture is one of the largest consumers of our water supply. Clinging to outdated systems vulnerable to supply chain disruptions, trade conflicts, and resource competition puts the US at a strategic disadvantage.
Alternative proteins, by contrast, require less water, are produced more quickly, and can be non-GMO, minimally processed, and free from vaccines or antibiotics.
To secure global hegemony, the US must embrace alternative proteins as a strategic hedge.
Some artworks respond to the urgency of moment. Others make a pitch to long memory. Amidst rising suppression of the arts in the US, Mask for Pleasure – full title: A future that could include (and is not affiliated with) Eric Bogosian by the transdisciplinary arts collectiveHoly Erotic Propaganda Arson (HEPA) is attempting to do both, as an in-development performance and transnational ecosystem, including archival memory and diasporic support networks.
In the United States, the arts sector is experiencing significant upheaval due to recent federal policy changes. The Trump administration has proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), leading to the abrupt rescission of grants and encouragement for staff resignations. Simultaneously, the Kennedy Center has undergone a leadership overhaul, with president Trump appointing himself as chairman and installing Richard Grenell as president. These changes have led to the cancellation of events with LGBTQIA2S+ and progressive themes, staff layoffs, and a significant decline in ticket sales and donations.
Mask for Pleasure: a historical precedent in the Nazification of German film
What began in 1933 as political consolidation quickly became a total capture of Germany’s cultural sector, through what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung (coordination). Germany’s most prestigious film studio, Universum Film AG (UFA), had been internationally respected for its artistic innovation during the Weimar period. That ended swiftly. By 1934, all film workers, including directors, actors, screenwriters, and composers, were required to register with the Reichsfilmkammer, a branch of the newly formed Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture), overseen by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Membership was mandatory.
Studio heads complied early. UFA terminated its Jewish staff preemptively in 1933. By 1937, its majority shares were quietly transferred to Cautio Treuhand GmbH, a Nazi-controlled trust. In 1942, UFA was forcibly merged with Bavaria Film, Tobis, and Terra Film to create UFI (UFA-Film GmbH), a total monopoly under Goebbels’ control. Cinemas could now show only state-sanctioned films. Non-German films were banned or severely censored. By 1936, even film criticism was outlawed and replaced with Filmbetrachtung, state-controlled “film observation,” where critics could only describe films, never interpret them.
Silencing, arrest, and execution of creatives
Creative workers experienced silencing, arrest, and execution. Conrad Veidt, one of Germany’s most famous actors and an outspoken critic of the Nazi regime, was abducted and tortured by the SA, later fleeing to Britain. His portrayal of queer and Jewish-coded roles had made him a target. Grete Berger, a renowned silent film actress, was deported to Auschwitz and murdered in 1944. Dora Gerson, an actress and cabaret performer, was killed in Auschwitz in 1943. Robert Dorsay, a satirist and singer, was hanged in 1943 for allegedly making jokes about Hitler.
Even those who complied were ultimately expendable. Emil Jannings, the first-ever Oscar winner in the best actor category, and a vocal Nazi supporter, returned from working in Paris to publicly align himself with the regime. He made several propaganda films for Goebbels. After the war, his career was over. No redemption. No legacy rehabilitation. Just disappearance. Those who tried to remain “neutral” were surveilled, manipulated, or blackmailed. Many fled. Many disappeared.
A play in a speculative future not unlike post-war Germany
A HEPA collaborator said:
No one can predict the future, but we know the regime is plagiarising the National Socialist playbook. In that case, we’re attempting to overtake their timeline, setting Mask for Pleasure in a future where the regime’s hubris has already been reduced to rubble, where the trauma is contained in safety whose aesthetic is slate-gray conformity, and yet, like the dawn of the culture wars, embodied memory reconfigured as a new eros is emerging through the cracks.
The play is set in a speculative future that feels strangely like post-war Germany in the 1950s – starched, humming with reconstruction, and sanitised to the point of grief – with the philosophical backbone of the Frankfurt School of Philosophy that had developed in the salons of Los Angeles in the German exilic community. It follows a survivor, an older Covid-marked gardener of the rubble who insists on a wild burial. Opposite her is a repressed entry-level death administrator, whose job is to shepherd her toward a “clean death”, complete with paperwork, starched linens, and a performance of consent. What unfolds is less a drama than a ritual negotiation between Thanatos – the death drive – and Eros, the wild, unruly energy of erotic being.
Eros and Thanatos: coexistent impulses
Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, described these two forces not as opposing binaries but as coexistent, interwoven impulses. He wrote that:
The aim of all life is death.
Yet, in the same breath he insisted on the erotic as the force that binds, builds, reproduces, remembers. Thanatos pulls us toward dissolution, Eros insists on continuation. Every agent of power, suppression, and desire contains both.
This line of thought – of memory, embodiment, and erotic resistance – is indebted to the ways in which Eros was metabolised and newly reasserted through American queer Black feminist praxis, especially Audre Lorde, whose Berlin years shaped both Afro-German feminist politics and Germany’s ongoing reckoning with anti-Black racism. Lorde understood Eros not simply as sex or pleasure (though it can encompass both), but as epistemology. She wrote that:
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings
It is power made form. Knowledge made blood.
Germany remembers through philosophy; America forgets through industry.
As part of the play’s launch, its materials, ephemera, and internal logic are being deposited across the German national archive system, beginning in the Social Science Open Access Repository, operated by GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.
The archive acts as a companion to the play that houses not just its media and documentation, but its underlying thesis: the archive is fragmented, multiplicitous, and produced in the interplay between Eros and Thanatos, living that springs from dying, memory that springs from erasure, and vice-versa.
The archive springs from growing efforts to preserve art -and artists’ lives – in the face of increasing suppression.
The Covid-competent arts community across borders has begun doing what states have refused to: remembering through performance.
In New York, on 24 April, two performances happened, uncoordinated, but somehow in communion. Air Change Per Hour by Anna R.G. centred HEPA air filtration units as its lead performers and included audio recordings from performers living with Long Covid, reflecting on their exclusion from their professions.
The second play was Wake Up and Smell the C*VID: An Evening Without Eric Bogosian by Holy Erotic Propaganda Arson (HEPA), featuring monologues about the impact of the ongoing pandemic on the performing arts community.
Disrupting the stasis
In the weeks following its announcement, search engine visibility of reporting around the latter play appeared to fluctuate across platforms. Without any public explanation, published articles from the Canary and Broadway World in the play’s discursive field, which had previously been trending, seemed to be no longer searchable in Google news results.
The Canary articles appeared to resurface, but as of writing one article seems to continue to fluctuate in visibility. This article, which references the play in its body, centres the Mask for Pleasurewalk, where New York Covid-impacted artists handed out masks and leaflets in the Broadway theatre district during the opening weekend of George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, raising awareness of SARS-CoV-2’s impact on personal, interpersonal, and aesthetic pleasure.
At this point, all of this remains speculative, but the question lingers: if other articles from the same discursive network have reappeared, why is this one still apparently experiencing fluctuations? Why does it seem that a documented real-world event, captured and published in a mainstream US outlet, has remained structurally less visible than independent artistic manifestos?
This is entirely speculative, but if the invisibility originated at least in part from third parties, what might have caused any possible reactivity? The subject matter (long Covid, protest, pandemic memory) is unfortunately a nuclear topic even as Covid continues to devastate the arts, but this was a key topic across reporting. At the same time, if the article gestures to something more primally felt, then perhaps the response isn’t wholly and indivisibly logical, but also symbolic. Perhaps it’s not the language, but the drive behind it. By invoking pleasure, maybe the article doesn’t just report – it potentially disrupts stasis by reactivating affect.
The ‘threat’ of pleasure for a system trapped in death drive
Freud wrote that Eros and Thanatos, the life drives and death drives, are not enemies. They are twins: complementary, co-arising. Eros binds, constructs, repeats. Thanatos unbinds, dissolves, returns the psyche to stillness. In healthy systems, they circulate. But in moments of acute collapse, like war, pandemic, or political upheaval, systems fall into defensive postures, into Thanatos-locked stasis. Under such conditions, even the presence of one’s own life drives can feel invasive.
This may help explain why pleasure, joy, even tenderness, are now so often met with cynicism, sarcasm, or silence. Compounding this reactivity, as SARS-CoV-2 continues to damage nervous systems, dull reward centres, and erode libido and sensory coherence, the erotic may no longer feel restorative. It can feel like a demand. A disruption. A threat from the outside, when in fact, it is what the body already contains, asking to be remembered. Integrated.
Neuroscience is beginning to catch up. Studies on Long Covid show persistent inflammation in areas of the brain associated with pleasure, attention, and social reward. The loss of affect is not just a result of one’s thought world, it can be hard-wired on a neurological level. And when pleasure becomes unfamiliar, bodies may no longer recognise themselves.
This is perhaps where memory, performance, and archive meet. Because Mask for Pleasure, by invoking pleasure on a pre-cognitive level, does not simply remind us of what we’ve lost. It risks reactivating it. It opens a window through which Eros might re-enter. And for a system temporarily frozen in a protective stasis – which may be the death drive’s compulsion to self-anesthetise through control, suppression, and inertia – that could feel like violence.
Eros doesn’t live in the logic dominance and submission, but in mutually-generative exchange. The play generates. The archive generates. There are no heroes and villains, just a dialectic of energies.
AMC: network archive of transnational exchange in US film
This is all speculation, but AMC may find itself in the position defending a painstakingly-constructed image of a tentpole TV series in a political environment that is becoming increasingly hostile to queer, BIPOC-centred media. That’s understandable. And AMC itself is the preeminent network archive of generative transnational exchange undergirding US film and TV, past and present.
The network has quietly become a vital repository of diasporic film legacies, and where you are most likely to encounter the oeuvres of exiled European filmmakers. In the mid-20th century, US cinema was fundamentally shaped by émigré artists fleeing fascism in Europe.
Perhaps the most celebrated film in US history is Casablanca (1942). Casablanca was, in essence, a film of exiles, with Hungarian director Michael Curtiz, anti-fascist Victor Laszlo played Paul Henreid, an Austrian-Jewish actor, and Conrad Veidt ironically playing a Nazi, though, in real life, he had assisted Henreid’s emigration. Casablanca transformed displacement into a shared ethic of cooperation, resistance, and layered intimacy. Its production reflected, and its narrative modeled, networks of cultural survival.
Interview with the Vampire, it could be gently suggested, belongs to that same lineage. As a show that crosses national, embodied, and historical borders with fluency, it could be said to participate in a diasporic cinematic logic, one in which identity is mobile, power is always being negotiated, and continuity is maintained through shared memory (and shared intimacy, and shared memory of intimacy), not national allegiance. In this way, AMC’s creative platform is already sustaining the kinds of transnational content and real-life networks that earlier generations of displaced artists depended on. That continuity is structural. And it deserves to be recognised as such.
Mask For Pleasure: artist-led transnational mutual aid
The archive is part of the early scaffolding of a growing transnational network to support at-risk artists in the US, particularly LGBTQIA2S+, disabled and chronically ill, and BIPOC communities. The model draws its lineage from the European Film Fund, established in 1938 by exiled German and Austrian artists fleeing the Nazi regime. Figures like Salka Viertel and Bruno Frank helped establish informal yet deeply effective support networks in Los Angeles, organising housing, work, and sponsorship for refugee artists.
These exile networks did more than provide survival, they replanted the emotional and visual infrastructure of European modernism into US cinema. Expressionist lighting, fatalism, and fractured identity became mainstream American idioms. Simultaneously, the psychoanalytic frameworks that shaped those émigré artists were later metabolised through American Black feminist theory, figures like Audre Lorde, who integrated Freudian and Jungian interiority with embodied, erotic knowledge.
It is from this combined legacy, of diasporic mutual aid and insurgent epistemology, that this present-day network emerges. Once again, we are witnessing a diasporic memory structure rematerialise, led by at-risk artists, and open to anyone at any career stage. Perhaps it is possible to decentre the Gleichschaltung playbook, integrating the wisdom from elders and ancestors who have not only navigated similar crises in the past, but in the process shaped the art we heretofore have been told was bound to a specific national identity, but was always the product of exchange.
Mask For Pleasure: disclaimer
This article is a work of cultural commentary, artistic reflection, and speculative analysis. References to public figures, including Eric Bogosian, Rolin Jones, and the organisations AMC and Interview with the Vampire, are made solely for the purposes of critique, contextual analysis, and public interest. No factual allegations of misconduct, illegality, or defamatory intent are expressed or implied.
All information included is based on publicly available sources, artistic works, and interviews already in the public domain. Interpretations are framed within the bounds of fair comment, academic inquiry, and protected expressive speech.
This article is protected under applicable freedom of expression and public interest provisions, including:
• United States: First Amendment protections covering opinion, satire, and fair use
• United Kingdom: Defenses of honest opinion, fair comment, and publication on matters of public interest under the Defamation Act 2013
• European Union: Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, covering freedom of expression, scholarly interpretation, and artistic critique
No statements herein should be interpreted as claims about the private beliefs, intentions, or actions of any individual or institution. Any perceived resemblance to real persons or corporate positions is part of protected critical analysis.
After 19 months of conflict that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and drawn accusations of war crimes against Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu is once more preparing to escalate Israel’s offensive in Gaza.
The latest plan puts Israel on course for full occupation of the Palestinian territory and would drive Gazans into ever-narrowing pockets of the shattered strip.
It would lead to more intensive bombing and Israeli forces clearing and holding territory, while destroying what few structures remain in Gaza.
This would be a disaster for 2.2 million Gazans who have already endured unfathomable suffering.
Each new offensive makes it harder not to suspect that the ultimate goal of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition is to ensure Gaza is uninhabitable and drive Palestinians from their land. For two months, Israel has blocked delivery of all aid into the strip.
Child malnutrition rates are rising, the few functioning hospitals are running out of medicine, and warnings of starvation and disease are growing louder. Yet the US and European countries that tout Israel as an ally that shares their values have issued barely a word of condemnation.
They should be ashamed of their silence, and stop enabling Netanyahu to act with impunity.
In brief remarks on Sunday, US President Donald Trump acknowledged Gazans were “starving”, and suggested Washington would help get food into the strip.
But, so far, the US president has only emboldened Netanyahu. Trump returned to the White House promising to end the war in Gaza after his team helped broker a January ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
Under the deal, Hamas agreed to free hostages in phases, while Israel was to withdraw from Gaza and the foes were to reach a permanent ceasefire.
But within weeks of the truce taking hold, Trump announced an outlandish plan for Gaza to be emptied of Palestinians and taken over by the US.
In March, Israel collapsed the ceasefire as it sought to change the terms of the deal, with Washington’s backing. Senior Israeli officials have since said they are implementing Trump’s plan to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza.
On Monday, far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said: “We are finally going to occupy the Gaza Strip.”
Netanyahu insists an expanded offensive is necessary to destroy Hamas and free the 59 remaining hostages. The reality is that the prime minister has never articulated a clear plan since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack killed 1200 people and triggered the war.
Instead, he repeats his maximalist mantra of “total victory” while seeking to placate his extremist allies to ensure the survival of his governing coalition.
But Israel is also paying a price for his actions. The expanded offensive would imperil the lives of the hostages, further undermine Israel’s tarnished standing and deepen domestic divisions.
Israel has briefed that the expanded operation would not begin until after Trump’s visit to the Gulf next week, saying there is a “window” for Hamas to release hostages in return for a temporary truce.
Arab leaders are infuriated by Netanyahu’s relentless pursuit of conflict in Gaza yet they will fete Trump at lavish ceremonies with promises of multibillion-dollar investments and arms deals.
Trump will put the onus on Hamas when speaking to his Gulf hosts. The group’s murderous October 7 attack is what triggered the Israeli offensive.
Gulf states agree that its continued stranglehold on Gaza is a factor prolonging the war. But they must stand up to Trump and convince him to pressure Netanyahu to end the killing, lift the siege and return to talks.
The global tumult triggered by Trump has already distracted attention from the catastrophe in Gaza. Yet the longer it goes on, the more those who remain silent or cowed from speaking out will be complicit.
I’m a lifelong Harry Potter fan. As a teenager, I even queued up outside WH Smiths at midnight to secure a copy of The Deathly Hallows, which I then read in one sitting. There wasn’t much of a queue and I was out late anyway, but it’s a cherished series for millions of us. Nonetheless, do I believe JK Rowling deserves to hold a ‘cool’ £820 million that increases by tens of millions every year through her stakes in Potter assets? No, I do not.
JK Rowling: divide and rule
JK Rowling, however, clearly does. She had a meltdown when it became clear that Jeremy Corbyn would be re-elected leader of Labour following the coup in 2016, even though he was only proposing a moderate rebalancing of wealth and resources from the richest and the reestablishing of public utilities in public hands. Policies that polling shows are simply common sense. She tweeted, upon news that Corbyn was increasing his mandate:
One day in the far distant future we’ll look back and we WONT LAUGH, LABOUR, BECAUSE THIS ISN’T BLOODY FUNNY.
Rowling would rather use the culture war to divide progressives and working class people. The author herself has the pen name Robert Galbraith for another series, suggesting she knows men and women both hold masculine and feminine qualities to differing degrees. She seems eager to dumb down the situation, when in fact the mind is more significant than identity politics.
Polanski and Green leadership
While the culture war rages on – fuelled by the likes of JK Rowling – deputy leader of the Greens Zack Polanski has announced a leadership bid. In doing so, he called for a 1% wealth tax on the richest 1%, rebalancing the economy by £75 billion per year. Rowling might not be too happy about that.
Polanski is arguing for ‘green populism’ to counter the rise of Nigel Farage, with Reform taking 31% of contested seats in the local elections to Labour’s 14%. He said:
People are done with the two old parties and we’re in this dangerous moment where Nigel Farage is absolutely ready to fill that vacuum. We should never turn into Nigel Farage. But there are things we can learn in terms of being really clear in speaking to people.
There’s an empty space in politics, where we’re not being as bold as we can be. Being sensible and professional are good qualities. But I don’t think they should be the central qualities.
It is this kind of approach to society we need – not the bigotry and division sewn by Reform, and the likes of JK Rowling.
In a major blow to the Paris ’15 climate agreement, last year witnessed one more nail in the coffin of the celebrated agreement to slow down CO2 emissions by 2030, as CO2, for the first time in modern history, enters the scientifically established danger zone. This agreement was/is meant to curtail global warming and hopefully save major ecosystems from collapse. But now, with too much noncompliance by countries and rapidly ascending CO2 emissions, Paris ’15 is at rest in a coffin awaiting an un-ceremonial burial. Nobody wants to attend.
CO2 emissions went bonkers in 2024, up 3.75 ppm, a new all-time-record, smashing all prior years and looking very ominous with trouble likely ahead as global warming kicks into higher gear, raising the question of whether property/casualty insurance companies will survive the onslaught: (1) raging wildfires (2) atmospheric river cloudbursts (3) widespread flooding (4) skies blackened by tornados (5) scorching droughts (6) category 5+ hurricanes, all of which follow in the footsteps of excessive greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
It should be noted that the property/casualty insurance industry was already on the ropes with CO2 emissions lower. They’ve publicly admitted it! The following is a must-read article written by a key player in the worldwide insurance industry; frankly, a must-read for anybody concerned about the future: “Climate, Risk, Insurance: The Future of Capitalism,” March 25, 2025.
Within only a couple weeks of that standalone earth-shattering article that lays out the climate change-global warming disaster scenario from a senior member of the property/casualty insurance industry, Arctic News published a startling notice on April 14, 2025, “Record High Increase in Carbon Dioxide,” CO2, the primary target of the now-infamous Paris 2015 climate agreement. Oops! All Paris ’15 bets are off, as CO2 increased by a thundering record-shattering 3.75 ppm, a rocket ship blastoff by historic standards, and the future likely higher yet:
1960 +0.96 ppm
1970 +1.13 ppm
2000 +1.24 ppm
2024 +3.75 ppm
And that’s before the Trump administration turned the oil and gas spigot wide open along with a big push for coal as well as an ultra-ultra-massive rollback of environmental regulations, meaning the fossil fuel and chemical industries are deeply indebted to the administration for removing costly regulations that forced them to adhere to a clean environment!
Additionally, according to a recent article inScience: “Trump Administration Fires Staff for Flagship U.S. Climate Assessment” (subtitle: Move Could Open Door to Using High-Profile Report to Attack Science), April 9, 2025. This is obviously devious to an extreme, possibly altering climate reports. But unfortunately the truth remains, as the insurance industry continues to raise rates and/or drop coverage because the reality of harmful climate change takes precedence over doctored reports.
The 430 ppm CO2 Danger Zone
Reality is inescapable: Of all the greenhouse gases, CO2 alone is responsible for 2/3rds of the warming effect by greenhouse gases. This is 100% a proven fact that was discovered by Exxon’s scientists years ago (“Exxon Scientists Predicted Global Warming with ‘Shocking Skill’,” Harvard Gazette, Jan. 12, 2023).
Effective January 2025, CO2 registered 426.03 ppm versus 422.25 ppm in 2024. By way of comparison, in 1960 CO2 in the atmosphere was 316.00 ppm. And until advent of the industrial revolution mid 18th century, CO2 levels were below 300 ppm for ages.
According to an IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report: “In 2016, a worldwide body of climate scientists said that a CO2 level of 430 ppm would push the world past its target for avoiding dangerous climate change.” (MIT Climate Portal)
Acceleration of CO2 is getting to be downright spooky +200%-t0-300% since the start of the new century. It’s never increased at such a rapid pace throughout recorded history. According to current readings by Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, CO2 exceeded 430 ppm for six days in a row in April 2025 and hit 430.51 on April 21. And the new year is still young. Clearly, CO2 emissions are out of control running roughshod over any pretense of climate change mitigation efforts by parties to the Paris ‘15 climate agreement (RIP?).
Moreover, the U.S., one of the world’s major influencers of economic behavior and climate change, is pushing in the wrong direction, encouraging more CO2 emissions via increased production of oil and gas and coal while falsely claiming “climate change is a hoax.” This is an extreme position, bold-faced lie, not supported by facts, making Emperor Nero look like a lightweight. It’s the whole planet, stupid, not just Rome!
Meanwhile, a casual Google search of four words: “climate change and insurance” reveals the startling truth, bringing up page after page after page filled with titles such as: “Climate Change is Driving an Insurance Crisis.” Business gets it: “Property Values to Crater up to 60% Due to Climate Change,” Business Insider, August 9, 2024. Yes, the word “crisis” fills the pages. It’s a crisis! Crises end badly, but we’ve only just begun.
According to the Arctic News’ article, it’s about to get much, much worse. But what’s worse than a crisis? A worsening crisis seems to be on the docket. As clearly stated, “Not only are concentrations of CO2 very high, but additionally, there has been an increase in total solar irradiance.” This is therefore the ole one-two punch to the gut as increased solar irradiance means more solar energy reaches the surface absorbed, ipso facto, increasing global temperatures as excessive levels of CO2 blanket and trap heat. This is a fatal formula for life on Earth, just ask sister planet Venus, 95% CO2 atmosphere, surface temperature 870°F, which melts lead.
It should be noted that Arctic News has a reputation for taking the more extreme view of where climate change is headed, but it should also be noted that it” footnotes a lot of peer-reviewed climate science,” albeit taken to an extreme conclusion, which happens to be the prospect of an oncoming “extinction event” with climate change a wild stallion that can’t be tamed.
It’s difficult to ignore heightened concern of the property/casualty insurance industry alongside Arctic News both publicly exposing a rapidly descending climate system that’s literally changing the landscape of property ownership, starting with coastal properties and working inland, as homeowners find insurance premiums, if available where they reside, squeezing throats, stated as such in the following quote from the insurance industry article included herein: “The insurance industry has historically managed these risks. But we are fast approaching temperature levels 1.5°C, 2°C, 3°C where insurers will no longer be able to offer coverage for many of these risks. The math breaks down: the premiums required exceed what people or companies can pay. This is already happening. Entire regions are becoming uninsurable. (See: “State Farm and Allstate exiting California’s home insurance market due to wildfire risk,” 2023).
Already, the climate crisis that started on the West Coast is spreading fast: “The Home Insurance Crisis Hits the US Heartland,” Business Insider, April 6, 2025.
It was only a couple of months ago when James Hansen (Columbia – Earth Institute) said 2C is dead: “Climate Change Target of 2C is ‘Dead’ says Renowned Climate Scientist,” Guardian, Feb. 4, 2025. If medals are ever awarded for correct calls, James Hansen, Ph.D. gets the gold medal for the following: “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate,” New York Times, June 24, 1988. He nailed it!
The insurance article insinuation of “entire regions becoming uninsurable,” standing alone, should be enough motivation to turn the screws of climate change mitigation efforts to whatever level necessary at whatever costs! Who cares how much a Worldwide Marshall Plan to ‘hopefully’ control radical climate change costs? The alternative is unspeakable, and there’s little time to waste.
Now that the insurance industry is feeling the wrath of numerous climate change warnings issued by Arctic News over many years, it may be a good idea to at least consider what the extreme publication has to say.
Here’s the Arctic News’ summation of climate change:
Climate Emergency Declaration
The situation is dire and the precautionary principle calls for rapid, comprehensive and effective action to reduce the damage and to improve the situation, as described in this 2022 post, where needed in combination with a Climate Emergency Declaration, as discussed at this group.
Climate Emergency in bold red letters is how Arctic News sees the current situation.
As for the property/casualty insurance industry: “There is only one path forward: Prevent any further increase in atmospheric energy levels. That means keeping emissions out of the atmosphere.” So far, this solution is not even close to working as CO2 emissions are currently cranking up faster than ever before, knocking on the door of the 430 ppm danger zone, which is starting to look like a cake walk.
So, Donald Trump’s heralded intervention to bring resolution to the Ukraine conflict has fallen flat. Rejected by Russia, by the EU states, by Kiev. An unprecedented trifecta of failed foreign policy. His contrived scheme designed to skirt the core issues and interests at stake was a ‘non-starter’ from Day One. That should have been obvious. There was no serious thinking in the White House that might produce a coherent diplomatic strategy. There manifestly was no understanding of Moscow’s position rooted in post-Cold history and events since the U.S. sponsored Maiden coup in 2014 – nor of the intransigence among the ultra-nationalists who pull Zelensky’s strings. Instead, what we got was vintage Trump. An impulsive reaching for a quick triumph to punctuate his brilliance as a statesman. The fixing of an objective without a thought-out plan how to achieve it. A reliance on bullying, intimidation and underhanded dealing – the hallmark of his entire career. Its apparent successes are rooted in corruption, cronyism, and criminality – facilitated by the deference of other parties who lacked his ruthless cold-bloodedness. It is also a record of failures as testified by six bankruptcies – contriving to stiff his partners and creditors in each instance. Against this background, his ability to cast himself as a winner owes more to the perversity of contemporary American society that invites chicanery than to any genius on his part.
On Ukraine-Russia, Trump was grandstanding. There is an element of self-promotion in everything that he does publicly. The idea of being celebrated as a great peacemaker captured his imagination – not because he had any concern about the destruction and human cost or Europe’s long-term stability. Admittedly, he also seemed to have been sold on the fashionable notion that the U.S. should mute its confrontation with Russia so as to be in a position to concentrate all our resources for the titanic struggle with China. The role of warrior-in-chief potentially could be just as appealing as that of peacemaker. In fact, he had it both ways for a while: a Noble Prize candidate for mediating in Ukraine; laurels from Israel’s American legions for reinforcing Washington’s complicity in the Palestinian genocide. What counts for Trump is the limelight and the exaltation. So, he fixates on the one step that could stop the Ukraine fighting quickly – a ceasefire. None of the necessary and suitable preconditions exist; it amounts to calling a timeout of indeterminate length in a war that the other side is winning. Yet, for 3 months that is the centerpiece around which everything pivots – futile proposals hatched by Trump’s virally anti-Russian advisers that only a fantasist images could lead to a settlement of the conflict. The package presented to the Kremlin on a take-it-or-leave-it basis included such zany ideas as the U.S. taking over the critical Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station now under Russian control. This from a government that relentlessly for the past decade has pulled out all stops in its campaign to isolate and undermine the Russian state.
So, the great tariff offensive is mired in its contradictions. Donald Trump’s hairbrained scheme to make the American economy great again by forcing everybody else to pay extravagantly for the privilege of sending trillions in goods to the United States in return for nothing more than electronic banknotes printed by the Federal Reserve in the form of debt securities – securities they found it expedient to place in American financial institutions. The magical circle that has allowed Washington to run huge budget deficits and balance-of-trade deficits for decades without fear of a monetary comeuppance. It was the dollar’s supremacy in the global economy, American control of multilateral institutions like the IMF, and its leveraging of security protections that made this convenient arrangement possible. However, that world no longer exists – a cardinal fact of contemporary international life beyond the comprehension of the hucksters who convinced Trump that this snake oil was the elixir that could cure the national economy of all that ails it – arresting the fading of American economic dominance and, indeed, ensuring its Providential hegemony forever and anon.
An essential truth that we have been willfully overlooking is that Trump is an ignoramus – literally. His pool of knowledge about issues, places or persons is so shallow that you couldn’t drown a gnat in it. He doesn’t read. He thinks in slogans, as well as speaks in slogans. The wide gaps between his declarations and the truth are at once the result of mental laxness and a characteristic of a clinical narcissist whose exalted sense of self can only survive by erasing the line between actuality and what he finds is comfortable and self-serving. Thus, for Trump the truth has no claim on precedence. We have had nine years of the Trump phenomenon to observe how that approach to the world expresses itself. If further evidence were needed, scrutinize his behavior of the past 100+ days. His understanding of the Russian leadership’s state of mind (and that of an overwhelming majority of citizens) is close to zero – despite repeated, candid statements by Putin and Lavrov explaining with exceptional clarity what their views are. The only notions he held were simplistic and mistaken: Putin is a strong leader and a hardnosed wheeler-dealer of the type I’ve known all my life, someone with whom I can strike a deal; Russia is struggling to keep up the war effort; a few territorial concessions are all that is needed to resolve the dispute. Similarly, his understanding of how the global economy works is equally impoverished. Macro-economics is not his thing; after all, he imagines that he became a (nominal) billionaire by being a master of micro finance. Does he even comprehend that supply chains are the connective issue of today’s international economy?
There is another feature of the malignant narcissist that is noteworthy: a powerful drive toward controlling what filters into his mind/feelings. Empathetic understanding of other parties, or detailed knowledge of complicated matters, is perceived as a potential threat to the uninhibited assertion of will. For it is constraining to recognize boundaries, the likely responses of interlocutors, second order effects, or intricate intersections. The imperative is to safeguard the privilege of saying or doing whatever that avaricious, demanding psyche may impulsively want to do at any given moment. Sudden reversals are the inevitable outcome. One day we are told that the U.S. will abandon Ukraine to its fate unless it obeys Washington; the next is announcement with great fanfare of an historic joint resource venture that will entail a massive American presence and stake in Ukraine’s future – such as it might be, an incidental oversight by Trumpian strategists.
For the same reason, the formal obligation to observe institutional rules (e.g. NATO, IMF), treaty stipulations, or alliance commitments is anathema.
Is this an overstatement of Trump’s ignorance? Let us recall that this is the President who advised Americans that they may protect themselves against the COVID-19 virus by injecting themselves with bleach. Too, a President who appoints as Secretary of Health and Human Services a whacko who seems skeptical of the germ theory of medicine.
So, Donald Trump is repositioning his foreign policy people. Waltz is exiled to the United Nations, Marco Rubio becomes interim National Security Adviser – warming the seat until Steven Witkoff has completed his failed missions in Moscow and the Middle East and available to take over. In a normal government, led by a normal person, such a move so early in an administration would be seen as having considerable practical significance. It might reflect the outcome of a dispute fueled by serious policy differences. It might impend important changes in the structure and process of decision-making. Neither is likely in this instance. There is no organized process for setting foreign policy objectives, for choosing among strategies, for formulating the appropriate diplomacy. Structured, orderly deliberation is absent and alien. Decisions are made by Trump on an ad hoc basis. He listens at random to advice from the principal officeholders, from his White house entourage, from golf pals, from FOX TV personalities. From whomever. The appointment of the hapless numbskull Pete Hegseth to head the Pentagon happened because Trump relished the crude inanities that he uttered at FOX. (During Trump’s first term, he habitually chatted late in the night with Sean Hannity about what the latter had broadcast in that evening’s segment). Whatever impresses him he adopts – even if the ideas are contradictory or ephemeral. Hence, the changeability of what he tweets or says from day-to-day – re Zelensky, Putin, Ukraine in or out of NATO, grabbing Greenland/Panama/Canada, trade negotiations with China vs new sanctions, negotiations with Iran vs Trump fatwa forbidding anyone in the world from buying its oil. All of this is transparent and repetitious. Yet, elided by the media and most commentators.
Frankly, there is a case to be made that the psychology of Trump’s unhinged behavior is less of an analytical challenge than is the behavior of all those analysts who insist on normalizing it by ascribing to Trump’s words and actions design and coherent strategy that simply do not exist.
And I certainly did not expect Peter Dutton — amid an election campaign, one with citizens heading to the polls on World Press Freedom Day — to come out swinging at the ABC and Guardian Australia, telling his followers to ignore “the hate media”.
I’m not saying Labor is likely to be the great saviour of the free press either.
The ALP has been slow to act on a range of important press freedom issues, including continuing to charge journalism students upwards of $50,000 for the privilege of learning at university how to be a decent watchdog for society.
Labor has increased, slightly, funding for the ABC, and has tried to continue with the Coalition’s plans to force the big tech platforms to pay for news. But that is not enough.
The World Press Freedom Index has been telling us for some time that Australia’s press is in a perilous state. Last year, Australia dropped to 39th out of 190 countries because of what Reporters Without Borders said was a “hyperconcentration of the media combined with growing pressure from the authorities”.
We should know on election day if we’ve fallen even further.
What is happening in America is having a profound impact on journalism (and by extension journalism education) in Australia.
‘Friendly’ influencers
We’ve seen both parties subtly start to sideline the mainstream media by going to “friendly” influencers and podcasters, and avoid the harder questions that come from journalists whose job it is to read and understand the policies being presented.
What Australia really needs — on top of stable and guaranteed funding for independent and reliable public interest journalism, including the ABC and SBS — is a Media Freedom Act.
My colleague Professor Peter Greste has spent years working on the details of such an act, one that would give media in Australia the protection lacking from not having a Bill of Rights safeguarding media and free speech. So far, neither side of government has signed up to publicly support it.
Australia also needs an accompanying Journalism Australia organisation, where ethical and trained journalists committed to the job of watchdog journalism can distinguish themselves from individuals on YouTube and TikTok who may be pushing their own agendas and who aren’t held to the same journalistic code of ethics and standards.
I’m not going to argue that all parts of the Australian news media are working impartially in the best interests of ordinary people. But the good journalists who are need help.
The continuing underfunding of our national broadcasters needs to be resolved. University fees for journalism degrees need to be cut, in recognition of the value of the profession to the fabric of Australian society. We need regulations to force news organisations to disclose when they are using AI to do the job of journalists and broadcasters without human oversight.
And we need more funding for critical news literacy education, not just for school kids but also for adults.
Critical need for public interest journalism
There has never been a more critical need to support public interest journalism. We have all watched in horror as Donald Trump has denied wire services access for minor issues, such as failing to comply with an ungazetted decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
And mere days ago, 60 Minutes chief Bill Owens resigned citing encroachments on his journalistic independence due to pressure from the president.
The Committee to Protect Journalists is so concerned about what’s occurring in America that it has issued a travel advisory for journalists travelling to the US, citing risks under Trump administration policies.
Those of us who cover politically sensitive issues that the US administration may view as critical or hostile may be stopped and questioned by border agents. That can extend to cardigan-wearing academics attending conferences.
While we don’t have the latest Australian figures from the annual Reuters survey, a new Pew Research Centre study shows a growing gap between how much Americans say they value press freedom and how free they think the press actually is. Two-thirds of Americans believe press freedom is critical. But only a third believe the media is truly free to do its job.
If the press isn’t free in the US (where it is guaranteed in their constitution), how are we in Australia expected to be able to keep the powerful honest?
Every single day, journalists put their lives on the line for journalism. It’s not always as dramatic as those who are covering the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, but those in the media in Australia still front up and do the job across a range of news organisations in some fairly poor conditions.
If you care about democracy at all this election, then please consider wisely who you vote for, and perhaps ask their views on supporting press freedom — which is your right to know.
Alexandra Wake is an associate professor in journalism at RMIT University. She came to the academy after a long career as a journalist and broadcaster. She has worked in Australia, Ireland, the Middle East and across the Asia Pacific. Her research, teaching and practice sits at the nexus of journalism practice, journalism education, equality, diversity and mental health.
Palestinians do not have the luxury to allow Western moral panic to have its say or impact. Not caving in to this panic is one small, but important, step in building a global Palestine network that is urgently needed, writes Dr Ilan Pappé
ANALYSIS:By Ilan Pappé
Responses in the Western world to the genocide in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank raise a troubling question: why is the official West, and official Western Europe in particular, so indifferent to Palestinian suffering?
Why is the Democratic Party in the US complicit, directly and indirectly, in sustaining the daily inhumanity in Palestine — a complicity so visible that it probably was one reason they lost the election, as the Arab American and progressive vote in key states could, and justifiably so, not forgive the Biden administration for its part in the genocide in the Gaza Strip?
This is a pertinent question, given that we are dealing with a televised genocide that has now been renewed on the ground. It is different from previous periods in which Western indifference and complicity were displayed, either during the Nakba or the long years of occupation since 1967.
During the Nakba and up to 1967, it was not easy to get hold of information, and the oppression after 1967 was mostly incremental, and, as such, was ignored by the Western media and politics, which refused to acknowledge its cumulative effect on the Palestinians.
But these last 18 months are very different. Ignoring the genocide in the Gaza Strip and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank can only be described as intentional and not due to ignorance.
Both the Israelis’ actions and the discourse that accompanies them are too visible to be ignored, unless politicians, academics, and journalists choose to do so.
This kind of ignorance is, first and foremost, the result of successful Israeli lobbying that thrived on the fertile ground of an European guilt complex, racism and Islamophobia. In the case of the US, it is also the outcome of many years of an effective and ruthless lobbying machine that very few in academia, media, and, in particular, politics, dare to disobey.
The moral panic phenomenon
This phenomenon is known in recent scholarship as moral panic, very characteristic of the more conscientious sections of Western societies: intellectuals, journalists, and artists.
Moral panic is a situation in which a person is afraid of adhering to his or her own moral convictions because this would demand some courage that might have consequences. We are not always tested in situations that require courage, or at least integrity. When it does happen, it is in situations where morality is not an abstract idea, but a call for action.
This is why so many Germans were silent when Jews were sent to extermination camps, and this is why white Americans stood by when African Americans were lynched or, earlier on, enslaved and abused.
What is the price that leading Western journalists, veteran politicians, tenured professors, or chief executives of well-known companies would have to pay if they were to blame Israel for committing a genocide in the Gaza Strip?
It seems they are worried about two possible outcomes. The first is being condemned as antisemites or Holocaust deniers. Secondly, they fear an honest response would trigger a discussion that would include the complicity of their country, or Europe, or the West in general, in enabling the genocide and all the criminal policies against the Palestinians that preceded it.
This moral panic leads to some astonishing phenomena. In general, it transforms educated, highly articulate and knowledgeable people into total imbeciles when they talk about Palestine.
It disallows the more perceptive and thoughtful members of the security services from examining Israeli demands to include all Palestinian resistance on a terrorist list, and it dehumanises Palestinian victims in the mainstream media.
On ‘Moral Panic’ and the Courage to Speak – Professor Ilan Pappé examines how fear of professional consequences silences Western voices in the face of genocide in Gaza — and what this reveals about power, complicity, and moral responsibility.
— The Palestine Chronicle (@PalestineChron) April 18, 2025
Lack of compassion
The lack of compassion and basic solidarity with the victims of genocide was exposed by the double standards shown by mainstream media in the West, and, in particular, by the more established newspapers in the US, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post.
When the editor of The Palestine Chronicle, Dr Ramzy Baroud, lost 56 members of his family — killed by the Israeli genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip — not one of his colleagues in American journalism bothered to talk to him or show any interest in hearing about this atrocity.
On the other hand, a fabricated Israeli allegation of a connection between the Chronicle and a family, in whose block of flats hostages were held, triggered huge interest by these outlets.
This imbalance in humanity and solidarity is just one example of the distortions that accompanies moral panic. I have little doubt that the actions against Palestinian or pro-Palestinian students in the US, or against known activists in Britain and France, as well as the arrest of the editor of the Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah, in Switzerland, are all manifestations of this distorted moral behaviour.
A similar case unfolded just recently in Australia. Mary Kostakidis, a famous Australian journalist and former prime-time weeknight SBS World News Australia presenter, has been taken to the federal court over her — one should say quite tame — reporting on the situation in the Gaza Strip.
The very fact that the court has not dismissed this allegation upon its arrival shows you how deeply rooted moral panic is in the Global North.
But there is another side to it. Thankfully, there is a much larger group of people who are not afraid of taking the risks involved in clearly stating their support for the Palestinians, and who do show this solidarity while knowing it may lead to suspension, deportation, or even jail time. They are not easily found among the mainstream academia, media, or politics, but they are the authentic voice of their societies in many parts of the Western world.
The Palestinians do not have the luxury of allowing Western moral panic to have its say or impact. Not caving in to this panic is one small but important step in building a global Palestine network that is urgently needed — firstly, to stop the destruction of Palestine and its people, and second, to create the conditions for a decolonised and liberated Palestine in the future.
Dr Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian, political scientist, and former politician. He is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies. This article is republished from The Palestine Chronicle, 19 April 2025.
Although the statement that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun” was made by Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong, it’s an idea that, in one form or another, has motivated a great many people, from the members of teenage street gangs to the statesmen of major nations.
The rising spiral of world military spending provides a striking example of how highly national governments value armed forces. In 2024, the nations of the world spent a record $2.72 trillion on expanding their vast military strength, an increase of 9.4 percent from the previous year. It was the tenth year of consecutive spending increases and the steepest annual rise in military expenditures since the end of the Cold War.
This enormous investment in military might is hardly a new phenomenon. Over the broad sweep of human history, nations have armed themselves―often at great cost―in preparation for war. And an endless stream of wars has followed, resulting in the deaths of perhaps a billion people, most of them civilians. During the 20th century alone, war’s human death toll numbered 231 million.
Even larger numbers of people have been injured in these wars, including many who have been crippled, blinded, hideously burned, or driven mad. In fact, the number of people who have been wounded in war is at least twice the number killed and has sometimes soared to 13 times that number.
War has produced other calamities, as well. The Russian military invasion of Ukraine, for example, has led to the displacement of a third of that nation’s population. In addition, war has caused immense material damage. Entire cities and, sometimes, nations have been reduced to rubble, while even victorious countries sometimes found themselves bankrupted by war’s immense financial costs. Often, wars have brought long-lasting environmental damage, leading to birth defects and other severe health consequences, as the people of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, and the Middle East can attest.
Even when national military forces were not engaged in waging foreign wars, they often produced very undesirable results. The annals of history are filled with incidents of military officers who have used their armies to stage coups and establish brutal dictatorships in their own countries. Furthermore, the possession of military might has often emboldened national leaders to intimidate weaker nations or to embark upon imperial conquest. It’s no accident that nations with the most powerful military forces (“the great powers”) are particularly prone to war-making.
Moreover, prioritizing the military has deprived other sectors of society of substantial resources. Money that could have gone into programs for education, healthcare, food stamps, and other social programs has been channeled instead into unprecedented levels of spending to enhance military might.
It’s a sorry record for what passes as world civilization―one that will surely grow far worse, or perhaps terminate human existence, with the onset of a nuclear war.
Of course, advocates of military power argue that, in a dangerous world, there is a necessity for deterring a military attack upon their nations. And that is surely a valid concern.
But does military might really meet the need for national security? In addition to the problems spawned by massive military forces, it’s not clear that these forces are doing a good job of deterring foreign attack. After all, every year government officials say that their countries are facing greater danger than ever before. And they are right about this. The world is becoming a more dangerous place. A major reason is that the military might sought by one nation for its national security is regarded by other nations as endangering their national security. The result is an arms race and, frequently, war.
Fortunately, though, there are alternatives to the endless process of military buildups and wars.
The most promising among them is the establishment of international security. This could be accomplished through the development of international treaties and the strengthening of international institutions.
Treaties, of course, can establish rules for international behavior by nations while, at the same time, resolving key problems among them (for example, the location of national boundaries) and setting policies that are of benefit to all (for example, reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere). Through arms control and disarmament agreements they can also address military dangers. For example, in place of the arms race, they could sponsor a peace race, in which each nation would reduce its military spending by 10 per cent per year. Or nations could sign and ratify (as many have already done) the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which would end the menace of nuclear annihilation.
International institutions can also play a significant role in reducing international conflict and, thus, the resort to military action. The United Nations, established in 1945, is tasked with maintaining international peace and security, while the International Court of Justice was established to settle legal disputes among nations and the International Criminal Court to investigate and, where justified, try individuals for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression.
Unfortunately, these international organizations are not fully able to accomplish their important tasks―largely because many nations prefer to rely upon their own military might and because some nations (particularly the United States, Russia, and Israel) are enraged that these organizations have criticized their conduct in world affairs. Even so, international organizations have enormous potential and, if strengthened, could play a vital role in creating a less violent world.
Rather than continuing to pour the wealth of nations into the failing system of national military power, how about bolstering these global instruments for attaining international security and peace?
30 April 1975. Saigon Fell, Vietnam Rose. The story of Vietnam after the US fled the country is not a fairy tale, it is not a one-dimensional parable of resurrection, of liberation from oppression, of joy for all — but there is a great deal to celebrate.
After over a century of brutal colonial oppression by the French, the Japanese, and the Americans and their various minions, the people of Vietnam won victory in one of the great liberation struggles of history.
It became a source of inspiration and of hope for millions of people oppressed by imperial powers in Central & South America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
Civil war – a war among several
The civil war in Vietnam, coterminous with the war against the Western powers, pitted communists and anti-communists in a long and pitiless struggle.
Within that were various strands — North versus South, southern communists and nationalists against pro-Western forces, and so on. As various political economists have pointed out, all wars are in some way class wars too — pitting the elites against ordinary people.
As has happened repeatedly throughout history, once one or more great power becomes involved in a civil war it is subsumed within that colonial war. The South’s President Ngô Đình Diệm, for example, was assassinated on orders of the Americans.
By 1969, US aid accounted for 80 percent of South Vietnam’s government budget; they effectively owned the South and literally called the shots.
Donald Trump declared April 2 “Liberation Day” and imposed some of the heaviest tariffs on Vietnam because they didn’t buy enough U.S. goods! Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
US punishes its victims
This month, 50 years after the Vietnamese achieved independence from their colonial overlords, US President Donald Trump declared April 2 “Liberation Day” and imposed some of the heaviest tariffs on Vietnam because they didn’t buy enough US goods!
As economist Joseph Stiglitz pointed out, they don’t yet have enough aggregate demand for the kind of goods the US produces. That might have something to do with the decades it has taken to rebuild their lives and economy from the Armageddon inflicted on them by the US, Australia, New Zealand and other unindicted war criminals.
Straight after they fled, the US declared themselves the victims of the Vietnamese and imposed punitive sanctions on liberated Vietnam for decades — punishing their victims.
Under Gerald Ford (1974–1977), Jimmy Carter (1977–1981), Ronald Reagan (1981–1989), George H.W. Bush (1989–1993) right up to Bill Clinton (1993–2001), the US enforced the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA) of 1917.
The US froze the assets of Vietnam at the very time it was trying to recover from the wholesale devastation of the country.
Tens of millions of much-needed dollars were captured in US banks, enforced by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The US also took advantage of its muscle to veto IMF and World Bank loans to Vietnam.
Countries like Australia and New Zealand, to their eternal shame, took part in both the war, the war crimes, and imposing sanctions and other punitive measures subsequently.
The ‘Boat People’ refugee crisis While millions celebrated the victory in 1975, millions of others were fearful. The period of national unification and economic recovery was painful, typically repressive — when one militarised regime replaces another.
This triggered flight: firstly among urban elites — military officers, government workers, and professionals who were most closely-linked to the US-run regime.
You can blame the Commies for the ensuing refugee crisis but by strangling the Vietnamese economy, refusing to return Vietnamese assets held in the US, imposing an effective blockade on the economy via sanctions, the US deepened the crisis, which saw over two million flee the country between 1975 and the 1980s.
More than 250,000 desperate people died at sea.
Đổi Mới: the move to a socialist-market economy In 1986, to energise the economy, the government moved away from a command economy and launched the đổi mới reforms which created a hybrid socialist-market economy.
They had taken a leaf out of the Chinese playbook, which under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping (1978 –1989), had moved towards a market economy through its “Reform and Opening Up” policies. Vietnam saw the “economic miracle” of its near neighbour and its leaders sought something similar.
Vietnam’s economy boomed and GDP grew from $18.1 billion in 1984 to $469 billion by 2024, with a per capita GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP) of $15,470 (up from about $300 per capita in the 1970s).
After a sluggish start, literacy rates soared to 96.1 percent by 2023, and life expectancy reached 73.7 years, only a few short of the USA. GDP growth is around 7 percent, according to the OECD.
An unequal society Persistent inequality suggests the socialist vision has partially faded. A rural-urban divide and a rich-poor divide underlines ongoing injustices around quality of life and access to services but Vietnam’s Gini coefficient — a measure of income inequality — puts it only slightly more “unequal” as a society than New Zealand or Germany.
Corruption is also an issue in the country.
Press controls and political repression As in China, political power resides with the Party. Freedom of expression — highlighted by press repression — is severely limited in Vietnam and nothing to celebrate.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) rates Vietnam as 174th out of 180 countries for press freedom and regularly excoriates its strongmen as press “predators”. In its country profile, RSF says of Vietnam: “Independent reporters and bloggers are often jailed, making Vietnam the world’s third largest jailer of journalists”.
Vietnam is forging its own destiny What is well worth celebrating, however, is that Vietnam successfully got the imperial powers off its back and out of its country. It is well-placed to play an increasingly prosperous and positive role in the emerging multipolar world.
It is part of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and the ASEAN network, and borders China, giving Vietnam the opportunity to weather any storms coming from the continent of America.
Vietnam today is united and free and millions of ordinary people have achieved security, health, education and prosperity vastly better than their parents and grandparents’ generations were able to.
In the end the honour and glory go to the Vietnamese people.
Ho Chi Minh, the great leader of the Vietnamese people who reached out to the United States, and sought alliance not conflict. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
I’ll give the last word to Ho Chi Minh, the great leader of the Vietnamese people who reached out to the United States, and sought alliance not conflict. He was rebuffed by the super-power which had a different agenda.
On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh square:
“‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’
“This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.
“… A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eight years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years, such a people must be free and independent.
“For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, solemnly declare to the world that Vietnam has the right to be a free and independent country — and in fact is so already. The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilise all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.”
And, my god, they did.
To conclude, a short poem attributed to Ho Chi Minh:
“After the rain, good weather.
“In the wink of an eye,
the universe throws off its muddy clothes.”
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
As the fight against the government’s proposed Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) disability benefits cuts rages on, something is emerging that’s making me very uncomfortable. Whilst the government and media are focusing on the part of the plans that involves making DWP PIP harder to claim and conflating it with being out of work, disabled people are eager to prove them wrong – but I think they’re going the wrong way about it.
Instead of Instagram posts, tweets, and TikTok videos highlighting on the fact that the government want to make it harder for disabled people who can’t work, many disabled people (especially those with influence) are solely focusing on the fact that disabled people DO work.
Some of us DO work actually. Well, good for you…?
While I don’t doubt that these people have got good motivations, by solely focusing in the fact that many disabled people do actually work, we’re playing right into the government and media’s hands by separating the good and worthy disabled from those who are bad, lazy, and not worthy of support.
The government and media have for a long time been working hard to paint disabled people as either those who desperately want to work but just don’t have the motivation or those who are happy to languish on benefits. They want a return to the strivers vs skivers narrative, the inspirational disableds vs the lazy scroungers who should be left to die.
By constantly asserting that many – and especially YOU – work, you’re only playing into their hands. You’re unconsciously saying, “I’m not one of those faker scroungers rinsing the taxpayer, look at me, I work!”
The government know DWP PIP isn’t an unemployment benefit
At the end of the day, as much as the government claim they want to support people into work, their actions speak for themselves. There’s been no commitment to make Access to Work the wait shorter and there’s no onus on employers to make work accessible for disabled people. This isn’t about helping us to actually strive. It’s about forcing us into work or letting us die.
And although the constant social media posts of “many disabled people work, DWP PIP isn’t an out-of-work benefit!” are done with good intentions, they all feed into the narrative that disabled people are only worthy if they contribute to the capitalist society that doesn’t care if we live or die.
Make no mistake, the constant conflation that all disability benefits are unemployment benefits is a bad thing, but it’s also very deliberate.
The ministers in charge of running our country and MPs constant touted out in front of the media circus definitely know that DWP PIP isn’t an out of work benefit, but they also know that the media’s constant coverage of them saying otherwise is what has helped turn the public against disabled people who need and deserve support.
The government couldn’t give a fuck if disabled people work or not
Of course, the government stooges aren’t going to tell the public that many disabled people rely on DWP PIP to help them get to work, or to pay for equipment when they’ve been failed by Access to Work. They don’t care that many of us, like me, rely on PIP to top up our income so that we can afford to only work the hours that best suit our bodies. They don’t fucking care how many disabled people need PIP to survive when they are so unfairly discriminated at work.
The fact is that they don’t actually give a fuck how many disabled people do work. They just want us all off benefits one way or another. The problem is they can’t just tell the public they want to kill us. So instead, they want to appear to be supporting us with the likes of DWP PIP – whilst knowing full well that many can’t work and that they will die. Because dead disabled people mean less people they have to pretend to care about and support.
When the government and media have sown so much hatred of disabled people on benefits into the working class public, we’re not going to change any minds with “BUT SOME OF US DO WORK ACTUALLY!!”
All you’re going to do is play right into their hands and cause a bigger divide between those who can and can’t work, who’s worthy and who isn’t.
They’re coming for all disabled people – not just working DWP PIP claimants
They’re coming for us all at the end of the day, but they’re going to start with those already deemed less worthy, because it’s easier. And they know they can do it whilst so much of the fight is being focused on proving that we’re valuable.
Whilst we’re all trying to prove we’re good little disableds worthy of support, they’ll be stripping our siblings who can’t work of their benefits (including DWP PIP), forcing them to dance to prove they can’t work then go “oh but you can do the dance you can work”.
And then they’ll come for us too. DWP PIP is already going to be harder to qualify for and for years there have been rumoured attempts to make it means-tested. Once they’ve cut benefits as much as they can the next media churn will be “Why do these people need benefits when they work? Why are they taking our taxpayers money and get all these perks when non disabled people are working hard too?”
With the current hatred over Motability cars, the next step from government is surely going to be to heavily lean on disabled people being given free cars to make it so that only those under a certain income can claim DWP PIP, meaning millions of us will be forced to work ourselves to death or just starve to death.
So what should we be focusing on?
Whilst we shouldn’t be jumping to immediately defend ourselves, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be pointing out how many disabled people rely on DWP PIP so that they can work, but also so that they can live.
More than anything though, instead of having to defend that you do actually work, those with a platform should be highlighting just how many who can’t work will be affected and that many disabled people will never be able to work – but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be supported.
We should be using the platforms we’ve been afforded to highlight just how cruel this government is and how many disabled people will die if these DWP PIP and other benefit cuts are allowed to happen. Because there’s nothing about us without all of us – and it’s the job of those with a voice to speak for those who can’t.
Most of the political conversation this week has revolved around what person should use what public toilet. Yet we find ourselves locked in the dunny with a wet piece of (used) toilet roll of a prime minister that changes his own idea of what a woman should be off the back of a court ruling. Would you trust Keir Starmer, Liz Kendall, Wes Streeting, or even Rachel from Accounts to run a public toilet?
One of them would see what use Israel could make of it, another would use it for PIP assessments, and that’s assuming another one hasn’t already privatised it, or in Rachel’s case, ordered ice cubes instead of pineapple cubes for the urinal thingies.
Does anyone reading this now seriously believe that Starmer changed his mind because of a court ruling?
Starmer: once a transphobe, always a transphobe
Starmer is a politician, a shit one, granted, but a politician nonetheless. Starmer goes wherever he thinks he can find votes, and if that means adding poison to a debate that has already been made toxic by his corporate media pals, just to win over a few more right-wing dipshits, he will do so without a single fuck given for the trans community.
I know the type of people that Starmer wants to appeal to. They’re the ones that preach about “each to their own” but practice an entirely different approach.
My opinion is merely a tiny drop of water in a vast and bottomless ocean, and I absolutely hear every side of the argument, but I refuse to be brainwashed into thinking a trans woman is a danger to my wellbeing, because it is a load of old nonsense.
The Gender Recognition Act does not allow trans people to self-identify their gender and forces them to undergo invasive medical tests. For me, this is wrong, and I believe a transgender woman that has self-identified as a woman, is a woman.
Proper wrong’uns
In the year 2025, where a fucking idiot like Donald Trump can identify as the most powerful man on earth, I’m absolutely comfortable with people self-identifying their own gender.
It’s strange isn’t it? The left obsess over housing, health and community while the right obsess over transgender women, refugees and child abuse. What does that say about us as people?
My nan would call these people “proper wrong’uns”. She didn’t do left and right, just right and wrong. She also had a mouth like a fucking sewer, a trait that wasn’t passed down to me, thank fucking fuck.
I’m not usually one for praising celebrities. I find the entire celebrity culture utterly nauseating, particularly the types that are famous for absolutely nothing whatsoever, and even more so when they’re multimillionaire ex-footballers that have earned a chunk of their fortune through the wholly immoral TV licence fee.
But if Keir Starmer can change his mind, so can I.
Well done, Gary Lineker
Bloody well done, Gary Lineker. It’s not the first time I’ve praised the former Match of The Day host, and I suspect it won’t be the last.
Once upon a time, poor Gary was told off by Tracy Ann Doberman and Frances Barber for retweeting one of my tweets.
Gary of all the many many people who led a Corbyn troll army to hate on me and [Rachel Riley] it was Swindon. She posted and RT some of the most vile abuse and whipped hate and racist lies. It caused pain. To see a hero like you legitimise her is difficult.
Oddly enough, I never retweeted any “vile abuse” towards either her or Riley, as tempting as it might seem. I never “whipped hate and racist lies”, and Mr Lineker didn’t legitimise me by retweeting a tweet highlighting the heroism of a 100-year-old British Muslim man that was walking laps of his garden to raise money for charity.
Fellow minor thesp, Frances Barber, managed to put down the bottle for long enough to tell the former England footballing legend:
Never RT Rachel Swindler Gary please.
LOL. I’ve never heard that one before.
So it is quite clear that Lineker is one of a few celebrities with a huge following that isn’t afraid to stick his own neck on the line to speak up for what is right.
Lineker quite rightly said the October Hamas-led attacks on Israel were “truly awful”, but the big truth bomb was still to follow:
But that’s not the full context because the full context starts way before October 7, doesn’t it.
This wasn’t a question, but a statement of fact.
BBC: never-ending bias
Lineker — who rightly compared the Tories’ anti-foreigner incitement in 2023 to the fascist propaganda of the 1930s — went on to openly accuse the BBC of “capitulating” to lobbyists, and he is right, because the BBC is anything but independent when it comes to coverage of Israel and Palestine.
The BBC’s editorial decisions have a long history of being influenced by pro-Israel lobbyists.
A fairly recent report from Owen Jones, based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former BBC journalists, revealed how senior figures from the BBC used to skew coverage in Israel’s favour, systematically devalue Palestinian lives, downplay Israeli war crimes, and as Mr Lineker rightly pointed out, erased historical context.
I’m the very first to grumble if a multimillionaire celebrity fails to use their privileged platform to raise awareness of the suffering of the Palestinian people, but in Mr Lineker’s case I think we should thank the bloke for having the balls to stand up to the Zionist propaganda machine.
The prime minister — said to be a former leading human rights lawyer — could learn a lot from people like Gary Lineker. Compassion, empathy and a basic grasp of reality are not traits to be ashamed of, and as you can see from a quick glance across the political spectrum, they are traits that are in desperately short supply.
Starmer: shifty U-turns continue apace
Shifty Starmer’s U-turn on how *he* defines a woman is just the latest populist attempt to grab a few more right-wing votes before the forthcoming local elections.
We’ve seen it all before.
Ask the People’s Vote campaigners. Ask WASPI women. Ask the people that he promised ‘Corbynism without Corbyn’. Ask the Labour members that he promised he would make “the moral case for socialism”. Ask millions and millions of disabled people. Honestly, this could go on for hours.
It wasn’t that long ago that Keir Starmer was standing on a boycott Israel platform, and calling for the abolition of the monarchy.
And now, Starmer would happily have you locked up if you call for a boycott of Israel and he would be even happier to give the sausage-fingered monarch a hand job under the Buckingham Palace dining table if it secured an X in the box from Camilla on polling day.
I think I’ll leave you with that disturbing thought…
When the US Embassy knocked on my door in late 2024, I was both pleased and more than a little suspicious.
I’d worked with them before, but the organisation where I did that work, Tohatoha, had closed its doors. My new project, Dark Times Academy, was specifically an attempt to pull myself out of the grant cycle, to explore ways of funding the work of counter-disinformation education without dependence on unreliable governments and philanthropic funders more concerned with their own objectives than the work I believed then — and still believe — is crucial to the future of human freedom.
But despite my efforts to turn them away, they kept knocking, and Dark Times Academy certainly needed the money. I’m warning you all now: There is a sense in which everything I have to say about counter-disinformation comes down to conversations about how to fund the work.
There is nothing I would like more than to talk about literally anything other than funding this work. I don’t love money, but I do like eating, having a home, and being able to give my kids cash.
I have also repeatedly found myself in roles where other people look to me for their livelihoods; a responsibility that I carry heavily and with more than a little clumsiness and reluctance.
But if we are to talk about President Donald Trump and disinformation, we have to talk about money. As it is said, the love of money is the root of all evil. And the lack of it is the manifestation of that evil.
Trump and his attack on all of us — on truth, on peace, on human freedom and dignity — is, at its core, an attack that uses money as a weapon. It is an attack rooted in greed and in avarice.
In his world, money is power
But in that greed lies his weakness. In his world, money is power. He and those who serve him and his fascist agenda cannot see beyond the world that money built. Their power comes in the form of control over that world and the people forced to live in it.
Of course, money is just paper. It is digital bits in a database sitting on a server in a data centre relying on electricity and water taken from our earth. The ephemeral nature of their money speaks volumes about their lack of strength and their vulnerability to more powerful forces.
They know this. Trump and all men like him know their weaknesses — and that’s why they use their money to gather power and control. When you have more money than you and your whānau can spend in several generations, you suddenly have a different kind of relationship to money.
It’s one where money itself — and the structures that allow money to be used for control of people and the material world — becomes your biggest vulnerability. If your power and identity are built entirely on the power of money, your commitment to preserving the power of money in the world becomes an all-consuming drive.
Capitalism rests on many “logics” — commodification, individualism, eternal growth, the alienation of labour. Marx and others have tried this ground well already.
In a sense, we are past the time when more analysis is useful to us. Rather, we have reached a point where action is becoming a practical necessity. After all, Trump isn’t going to stop with the media or with counter-disinformation organisations. He is ultimately coming for us all.
What form that action must take is a complicated matter. But, first we must think about money and about how money works, because only through lessening the power of money can we hope to lessen the power of those who wield it as their primary weapon.
Beliefs about poor people
If you have been so unfortunate to be subject to engagement with anti-poverty programmes during the neoliberal era either as a client or a worker, you will know that one of the motivations used for denying direct cash aid to those in need of money is a belief on the part of government and policy experts that poor people will use their money in unwise ways, be it drugs or alcohol, or status purchases like sneakers or manicures.
But over and over again, there’s another concern raised: cash benefits will be spent on others in the community, but outside of those targeted with the cash aid.
You see this less now that ideas like a universal basic income (UBI) and direct cash transfers have taken hold of the policy and donor classes, but it is one of those rightwing concerns that turned out to be empirically accurate.
Poor people are more generous with their money and all of their other resources as well. The stereotype of the stingy Scrooge is one based on a pretty solid mountain of evidence.
The poor turn out to understand far better than the rich how to defeat the power that money gives those who hoard it — and that is community. The logic of money and capital can most effectively be defeated through the creation and strengthening of our community ties.
Donald Trump and those who follow him revel in creating a world of atomised individuals focused on themselves; the kind of world where, rather than relying on each other, people depend on the market and the dollar to meet their material needs — dollars. of course, being the source of control and power for their class.
Our ability to fund our work, feed our families, and keep a roof over our heads has not always been subject to the whims of capitalists and those with money to pay us. Around the world, the grand multicentury project known as colonialism has impoverished us all and created our dependency.
Colonial projects and ‘enclosures’
I cannot speak as a direct victim of the colonial project. Those are not my stories to tell. There are so many of you in this room who can speak to that with far more eloquence and direct experience than I. But the colonial project wasn’t only an overseas project for my ancestors.
Enclosure is one of the core colonial logics. Enclosure takes resources (land in particular) that were held in common and managed collectively using traditional customs and hands them over to private control to be used for private rather than communal benefit. This process, repeated over and over around the globe, created the world we live in today — the world built on money.
As we lose control over our access to what we need to live as the land that holds our communities together, that binds us to one another, is co-opted or stolen from us, we lose our power of self-determination. Self-governance, freedom, liberty — these are what colonisation and enclosure take from us when they steal our livelihoods.
As part of my work, I keep a close eye on the approaches to counter-disinformation that those whose relationship to power is smoother than my own take. Also, in this the year of our Lord 2025, it is mandatory to devote at least some portion of each public talk to AI.
I am also profoundly sorry to have to report that as far as I can tell, the only work on counter-disinformation still getting funding is work that claims to be able to use AI to detect and counter disinformation. It will not surprise you that I am extremely dubious about these claims.
AI has been created through what has been called “data colonialism”, in that it relies on stolen data, just as traditional forms of colonialism rely on stolen land.
Risks and dangers of AI
AI itself — and I am speaking here specifically of generative AI — is being used as a tool of oppression. Other forms of AI have their own risks and dangers, but in this context, generative AI is quite simply a tool of power consolidation, of hollowing out of human skill and care, and of profanity, in the sense of being the opposite of sacred.
Words, art, conversation, companionship — these are fiercely human things. For a machine to mimic these things is to transgress against all of our communities — all the more so when the machine is being wielded by people who speak openly of genocide and white supremacy.
However, just as capitalism can be fought through community, colonialism can and has been fought through our own commitment to living our lives in freedom. It is fought by refusing their demands and denying their power, whether through the traditional tools of street protest and nonviolent resistance, or through simply walking away from the structures of violence and control that they have implemented.
In the current moment, that particularly includes the technological tools that are being used to destroy our communities and create the data being used to enact their oppression. Each of us is free to deny them access to our lives, our hopes, and dreams.
This version of colonisation has a unique weakness, in that the cyber dystopia they have created can be unplugged and turned off. And yet, we can still retain the parts of it that serve us well by building our own technological infrastructure and helping people use that instead of the kind owned and controlled by oligarchs.
By living our lives with the freedom we all possess as human beings, we can deny these systems the symbolic power they rely on to continue.
That said, this has limitations. This process of theft that underlies both traditional colonialism and contemporary data colonialism, rather than that of land or data, destroys our material base of support — ie. places to grow food, the education of our children, control over our intellectual property.
Power consolidated upwards
The outcome is to create ever more dependence on systems outside of our control that serve to consolidate power upwards and create classes of disposable people through the logic of dehumanisation.
Disposable people have been a feature across many human societies. We see it in slaves, in cultures that use banishment and exile, and in places where imprisonment is used to enforce laws.
Right now we see it in the United States being directed at scale towards those from Central and Latin America and around the world. The men being sent to the El Salvadorian gulag, the toddlers sent to immigration court without a lawyer, the federal workers tossed from their jobs — these are disposable people to Trump.
The logic of colonialism relies on the process of dehumanisation; of denying the moral relevance of people’s identity and position within their communities and families. When they take a father from his family, they are dehumanising him and his family. They are denying the moral relevance of his role as a father and of his children and wife.
When they require a child to appear alone before an immigration judge, they are dehumanising her by denying her the right to be recognised as a child with moral claims on the adults around her. When they say they want to transition federal workers from unproductive government jobs to the private sector, they are denying those workers their life’s work and identity as labourers whose work supports the common good.
There was a time when I would point out that we all know where this leads, but we are there now. It has led there, although given the US incarceration rate for Black men, it isn’t unreasonable to argue that in fact for some people, the US has always been there. Fascism is not an aberration, it is a continuation. But the quickening is here. The expansion of dehumanisation and hate have escalated under Trump.
Dehumanisaton always starts with words and language. And Trump is genuinely — and terribly — gifted with language. His speeches are compelling, glittering, and persuasive to his audiences. With his words and gestures, he creates an alternate reality. When Trump says, “They’re eating the cats! They’re eating the dogs!”, he is using language to dehumanise Haitian immigrants.
An alternate reality for migrants
When he calls immigrants “aliens” he is creating an alternate reality where migrants are no longer human, no longer part of our communities, but rather outside of them, not fully human.
When he tells lies and spews bullshit into our shared information system, those lies are virtually always aimed at creating a permission structure to deny some group of people their full humanity. Outrageous lie after outrageous lie told over and over again crumbles society in ways that we have seen over and over again throughout history.
In Europe, the claims that women were consorting with the devil led to the witch trials and the burning of thousands of women across central and northern Europe. In Myanmar, claims that Rohinga Muslims were commiting rape, led to mass slaughter.
Just as we fight the logics of capitalism with community and colonialism with a fierce commitment to our freedom, the power to resist dehumanisation is also ours. Through empathy and care — which is simply the material manifestation of empathy — we can defeat attempts to dehumanise.
Empathy and care are inherent to all functioning societies — and they are tools we all have available to us. By refusing to be drawn into their hateful premises, by putting morality and compassion first, we can draw attention to the ridiculousness of their ideas and help support those targeted.
Disinformation is the tool used to dehumanise. It always has been. During the COVID-19 pandemic when disinformation as a concept gained popularity over the rather older concept of propaganda, there was a real moment where there was a drive to focus on misinformation, or people who were genuinely wrong about usually public health facts. This is a way to talk about misinformation that elides the truth about it.
There is an empirical reality underlying the tsunami of COVID disinformation and it is that the information was spread intentionally by bad actors with the goal of destroying the social bonds that hold us all together. State actors, including the United States under the first Trump administration, spread lies about COVID intentionally for their own benefit and at the cost of thousands if not millions of lives.
Lies and disinformation at scale
This tactic was not new then. Those seeking political power or to destroy communities for their own financial gain have always used lies and disinformation. But what is different this time, what has created unique risks, is the scale.
Networked disinformation — the power to spread bullshit and lies across the globe within seconds and within a context where traditional media and sources of both moral and factual authority have been systematically weakened over decades of neoliberal attack — has created a situation where disinformation has more power and those who wield it can do so with precision.
But just as we have the means to fight capitalism, colonialism, and dehumanisation, so too do we — you and I — have the tools to fight disinformation: truth, and accurate and timely reporting from trustworthy sources of information shared with the communities impacted in their own language and from their own people.
If words and images are the chosen tools of dehumanisation and disinformation, then we are lucky because they are fighting with swords that we forged and that we know how to wield. You, the media, are the front lines right now. Trump will take all of our money and all of our resources, but our work must continue.
Times like this call for fearlessness and courage. But more than that, they call on us to use all of the tools in our toolboxes — community, self-determination, care, and truth. Fighting disinformation isn’t something we can do in a vacuum. It isn’t something that we can depersonalise and mechanise. It requires us to work together to build a very human movement.
I can’t deny that Trump’s attacks have exhausted me and left me depressed. I’m a librarian by training. I love sharing stories with people, not telling them myself. I love building communities of learning and of sharing, not taking to the streets in protest.
More than anything else, I just want a nice cup of tea and a novel. But we are here in what I’ve seen others call “a coyote moment”. Like Wile E. Coyote, we are over the cliff with our legs spinning in the air.
We can use this time to focus on what really matters and figure out how we will keep going and keep working. We can look at the blue sky above us and revel in what beauty and joy we can.
Building community, exercising our self-determination, caring for each other, and telling the truth fearlessly and as though our very lives depend on it will leave us all the stronger and ready to fight Trump and his tidal wave of disinformation.
Mandy Henk, co-founder of Dark Times Academy, has been teaching and learning on the margins of the academy for her whole career. As an academic librarian, she has worked closely with academics, students, and university administrations for decades. She taught her own courses, led her own research work, and fought for a vision of the liberal arts that supports learning and teaching as the things that actually matter. This article was originally presented as an invited address at the annual general meeting of the Asia Pacific Media Network on 24 April 2025.
When the US Embassy knocked on my door in late 2024, I was both pleased and more than a little suspicious.
I’d worked with them before, but the organisation where I did that work, Tohatoha, had closed its doors. My new project, Dark Times Academy, was specifically an attempt to pull myself out of the grant cycle, to explore ways of funding the work of counter-disinformation education without dependence on unreliable governments and philanthropic funders more concerned with their own objectives than the work I believed then — and still believe — is crucial to the future of human freedom.
But despite my efforts to turn them away, they kept knocking, and Dark Times Academy certainly needed the money. I’m warning you all now: There is a sense in which everything I have to say about counter-disinformation comes down to conversations about how to fund the work.
There is nothing I would like more than to talk about literally anything other than funding this work. I don’t love money, but I do like eating, having a home, and being able to give my kids cash.
I have also repeatedly found myself in roles where other people look to me for their livelihoods; a responsibility that I carry heavily and with more than a little clumsiness and reluctance.
But if we are to talk about President Donald Trump and disinformation, we have to talk about money. As it is said, the love of money is the root of all evil. And the lack of it is the manifestation of that evil.
Trump and his attack on all of us — on truth, on peace, on human freedom and dignity — is, at its core, an attack that uses money as a weapon. It is an attack rooted in greed and in avarice.
In his world, money is power
But in that greed lies his weakness. In his world, money is power. He and those who serve him and his fascist agenda cannot see beyond the world that money built. Their power comes in the form of control over that world and the people forced to live in it.
Of course, money is just paper. It is digital bits in a database sitting on a server in a data centre relying on electricity and water taken from our earth. The ephemeral nature of their money speaks volumes about their lack of strength and their vulnerability to more powerful forces.
They know this. Trump and all men like him know their weaknesses — and that’s why they use their money to gather power and control. When you have more money than you and your whānau can spend in several generations, you suddenly have a different kind of relationship to money.
It’s one where money itself — and the structures that allow money to be used for control of people and the material world — becomes your biggest vulnerability. If your power and identity are built entirely on the power of money, your commitment to preserving the power of money in the world becomes an all-consuming drive.
Capitalism rests on many “logics” — commodification, individualism, eternal growth, the alienation of labour. Marx and others have tried this ground well already.
In a sense, we are past the time when more analysis is useful to us. Rather, we have reached a point where action is becoming a practical necessity. After all, Trump isn’t going to stop with the media or with counter-disinformation organisations. He is ultimately coming for us all.
What form that action must take is a complicated matter. But, first we must think about money and about how money works, because only through lessening the power of money can we hope to lessen the power of those who wield it as their primary weapon.
Beliefs about poor people
If you have been so unfortunate to be subject to engagement with anti-poverty programmes during the neoliberal era either as a client or a worker, you will know that one of the motivations used for denying direct cash aid to those in need of money is a belief on the part of government and policy experts that poor people will use their money in unwise ways, be it drugs or alcohol, or status purchases like sneakers or manicures.
But over and over again, there’s another concern raised: cash benefits will be spent on others in the community, but outside of those targeted with the cash aid.
You see this less now that ideas like a universal basic income (UBI) and direct cash transfers have taken hold of the policy and donor classes, but it is one of those rightwing concerns that turned out to be empirically accurate.
Poor people are more generous with their money and all of their other resources as well. The stereotype of the stingy Scrooge is one based on a pretty solid mountain of evidence.
The poor turn out to understand far better than the rich how to defeat the power that money gives those who hoard it — and that is community. The logic of money and capital can most effectively be defeated through the creation and strengthening of our community ties.
Donald Trump and those who follow him revel in creating a world of atomised individuals focused on themselves; the kind of world where, rather than relying on each other, people depend on the market and the dollar to meet their material needs — dollars. of course, being the source of control and power for their class.
Our ability to fund our work, feed our families, and keep a roof over our heads has not always been subject to the whims of capitalists and those with money to pay us. Around the world, the grand multicentury project known as colonialism has impoverished us all and created our dependency.
Colonial projects and ‘enclosures’
I cannot speak as a direct victim of the colonial project. Those are not my stories to tell. There are so many of you in this room who can speak to that with far more eloquence and direct experience than I. But the colonial project wasn’t only an overseas project for my ancestors.
Enclosure is one of the core colonial logics. Enclosure takes resources (land in particular) that were held in common and managed collectively using traditional customs and hands them over to private control to be used for private rather than communal benefit. This process, repeated over and over around the globe, created the world we live in today — the world built on money.
As we lose control over our access to what we need to live as the land that holds our communities together, that binds us to one another, is co-opted or stolen from us, we lose our power of self-determination. Self-governance, freedom, liberty — these are what colonisation and enclosure take from us when they steal our livelihoods.
As part of my work, I keep a close eye on the approaches to counter-disinformation that those whose relationship to power is smoother than my own take. Also, in this the year of our Lord 2025, it is mandatory to devote at least some portion of each public talk to AI.
I am also profoundly sorry to have to report that as far as I can tell, the only work on counter-disinformation still getting funding is work that claims to be able to use AI to detect and counter disinformation. It will not surprise you that I am extremely dubious about these claims.
AI has been created through what has been called “data colonialism”, in that it relies on stolen data, just as traditional forms of colonialism rely on stolen land.
Risks and dangers of AI
AI itself — and I am speaking here specifically of generative AI — is being used as a tool of oppression. Other forms of AI have their own risks and dangers, but in this context, generative AI is quite simply a tool of power consolidation, of hollowing out of human skill and care, and of profanity, in the sense of being the opposite of sacred.
Words, art, conversation, companionship — these are fiercely human things. For a machine to mimic these things is to transgress against all of our communities — all the more so when the machine is being wielded by people who speak openly of genocide and white supremacy.
However, just as capitalism can be fought through community, colonialism can and has been fought through our own commitment to living our lives in freedom. It is fought by refusing their demands and denying their power, whether through the traditional tools of street protest and nonviolent resistance, or through simply walking away from the structures of violence and control that they have implemented.
In the current moment, that particularly includes the technological tools that are being used to destroy our communities and create the data being used to enact their oppression. Each of us is free to deny them access to our lives, our hopes, and dreams.
This version of colonisation has a unique weakness, in that the cyber dystopia they have created can be unplugged and turned off. And yet, we can still retain the parts of it that serve us well by building our own technological infrastructure and helping people use that instead of the kind owned and controlled by oligarchs.
By living our lives with the freedom we all possess as human beings, we can deny these systems the symbolic power they rely on to continue.
That said, this has limitations. This process of theft that underlies both traditional colonialism and contemporary data colonialism, rather than that of land or data, destroys our material base of support — ie. places to grow food, the education of our children, control over our intellectual property.
Power consolidated upwards
The outcome is to create ever more dependence on systems outside of our control that serve to consolidate power upwards and create classes of disposable people through the logic of dehumanisation.
Disposable people have been a feature across many human societies. We see it in slaves, in cultures that use banishment and exile, and in places where imprisonment is used to enforce laws.
Right now we see it in the United States being directed at scale towards those from Central and Latin America and around the world. The men being sent to the El Salvadorian gulag, the toddlers sent to immigration court without a lawyer, the federal workers tossed from their jobs — these are disposable people to Trump.
The logic of colonialism relies on the process of dehumanisation; of denying the moral relevance of people’s identity and position within their communities and families. When they take a father from his family, they are dehumanising him and his family. They are denying the moral relevance of his role as a father and of his children and wife.
When they require a child to appear alone before an immigration judge, they are dehumanising her by denying her the right to be recognised as a child with moral claims on the adults around her. When they say they want to transition federal workers from unproductive government jobs to the private sector, they are denying those workers their life’s work and identity as labourers whose work supports the common good.
There was a time when I would point out that we all know where this leads, but we are there now. It has led there, although given the US incarceration rate for Black men, it isn’t unreasonable to argue that in fact for some people, the US has always been there. Fascism is not an aberration, it is a continuation. But the quickening is here. The expansion of dehumanisation and hate have escalated under Trump.
Dehumanisaton always starts with words and language. And Trump is genuinely — and terribly — gifted with language. His speeches are compelling, glittering, and persuasive to his audiences. With his words and gestures, he creates an alternate reality. When Trump says, “They’re eating the cats! They’re eating the dogs!”, he is using language to dehumanise Haitian immigrants.
An alternate reality for migrants
When he calls immigrants “aliens” he is creating an alternate reality where migrants are no longer human, no longer part of our communities, but rather outside of them, not fully human.
When he tells lies and spews bullshit into our shared information system, those lies are virtually always aimed at creating a permission structure to deny some group of people their full humanity. Outrageous lie after outrageous lie told over and over again crumbles society in ways that we have seen over and over again throughout history.
In Europe, the claims that women were consorting with the devil led to the witch trials and the burning of thousands of women across central and northern Europe. In Myanmar, claims that Rohinga Muslims were commiting rape, led to mass slaughter.
Just as we fight the logics of capitalism with community and colonialism with a fierce commitment to our freedom, the power to resist dehumanisation is also ours. Through empathy and care — which is simply the material manifestation of empathy — we can defeat attempts to dehumanise.
Empathy and care are inherent to all functioning societies — and they are tools we all have available to us. By refusing to be drawn into their hateful premises, by putting morality and compassion first, we can draw attention to the ridiculousness of their ideas and help support those targeted.
Disinformation is the tool used to dehumanise. It always has been. During the COVID-19 pandemic when disinformation as a concept gained popularity over the rather older concept of propaganda, there was a real moment where there was a drive to focus on misinformation, or people who were genuinely wrong about usually public health facts. This is a way to talk about misinformation that elides the truth about it.
There is an empirical reality underlying the tsunami of COVID disinformation and it is that the information was spread intentionally by bad actors with the goal of destroying the social bonds that hold us all together. State actors, including the United States under the first Trump administration, spread lies about COVID intentionally for their own benefit and at the cost of thousands if not millions of lives.
Lies and disinformation at scale
This tactic was not new then. Those seeking political power or to destroy communities for their own financial gain have always used lies and disinformation. But what is different this time, what has created unique risks, is the scale.
Networked disinformation — the power to spread bullshit and lies across the globe within seconds and within a context where traditional media and sources of both moral and factual authority have been systematically weakened over decades of neoliberal attack — has created a situation where disinformation has more power and those who wield it can do so with precision.
But just as we have the means to fight capitalism, colonialism, and dehumanisation, so too do we — you and I — have the tools to fight disinformation: truth, and accurate and timely reporting from trustworthy sources of information shared with the communities impacted in their own language and from their own people.
If words and images are the chosen tools of dehumanisation and disinformation, then we are lucky because they are fighting with swords that we forged and that we know how to wield. You, the media, are the front lines right now. Trump will take all of our money and all of our resources, but our work must continue.
Times like this call for fearlessness and courage. But more than that, they call on us to use all of the tools in our toolboxes — community, self-determination, care, and truth. Fighting disinformation isn’t something we can do in a vacuum. It isn’t something that we can depersonalise and mechanise. It requires us to work together to build a very human movement.
I can’t deny that Trump’s attacks have exhausted me and left me depressed. I’m a librarian by training. I love sharing stories with people, not telling them myself. I love building communities of learning and of sharing, not taking to the streets in protest.
More than anything else, I just want a nice cup of tea and a novel. But we are here in what I’ve seen others call “a coyote moment”. Like Wile E. Coyote, we are over the cliff with our legs spinning in the air.
We can use this time to focus on what really matters and figure out how we will keep going and keep working. We can look at the blue sky above us and revel in what beauty and joy we can.
Building community, exercising our self-determination, caring for each other, and telling the truth fearlessly and as though our very lives depend on it will leave us all the stronger and ready to fight Trump and his tidal wave of disinformation.
Mandy Henk, co-founder of Dark Times Academy, has been teaching and learning on the margins of the academy for her whole career. As an academic librarian, she has worked closely with academics, students, and university administrations for decades. She taught her own courses, led her own research work, and fought for a vision of the liberal arts that supports learning and teaching as the things that actually matter. This article was originally presented as an invited address at the annual general meeting of the Asia Pacific Media Network on 24 April 2025.
There was faint hope that efforts to achieve a ceasefire deal in Gaza would succeed. That hope is now all but gone, offering 2.1 million tormented and starved Palestinians dismal prospects for the days and weeks ahead.
Last Saturday, the Israeli Prime Minister once again affirmed he had no intention to end the war. Benjamin Netanyahu wants what he calls “absolute victory” to achieve US President Donald Trump’s so-called vision for Gaza of ethnic cleansing and annexation.
To that end, Israel is weaponising food at a scale not seen before, including immediately after the October 7 attack by Hamas. It has not allowed any wheat, medicine boxes, or other vital aid into the Gaza Strip since 2 March.
This engineered starvation has pushed experts to warn that 1.1 million Palestinians face imminent famine.
Many believe this was Israel’s “maximum pressure” plan all along: massive force, starvation, and land grabs. It’s what the Israeli Minister of Defence, Israel Katz, referred to in March when he gave Palestinians in Gaza an ultimatum — surrender or die.
A month after breaking the ceasefire, Israel has converted nearly 70 percent of the tiny territory into no-go or forced displacement zones, including all of Rafah. It has also created a new so-called security corridor, where the illegal settlement of Morag once stood.
Israel is bombing the Palestinians it is starving while actively pushing them into a tiny strip of dunes along the coast.
Israel only interested in temporary ceasefire
This mentality informed the now failed ceasefire talks. Israel was only interested in a temporary ceasefire deal that would keep its troops in Gaza and see the release of half of the living Israeli captives.
In exchange, Israel reportedly offered to allow critically needed food and aid back into Gaza, which it is obliged to do as an occupying power, irrespective of a ceasefire agreement.
Israel also refused to commit to ending the war, just as it did in the Lebanon ceasefire agreement, while also demanding that Hamas disarm and agree to the exile of its prominent members from Gaza.
Disarming is a near-impossible demand in such a context, but this is not motivated by a preserved arsenal that Hamas wants to hold on to. Materially speaking, the armaments Israel wants Hamas to give up are inconsequential, except in how they relate to the group’s continued control over Gaza and its future role in Palestinian politics.
Symbolically, accepting the demand to lay down arms is a sign of surrender few Palestinians would support in a context devoid of a political horizon, or even the prospect of one.
While Israel has declared Hamas as an enemy that must be “annihilated”, the current right-wing government in Israel doesn’t want to deal with any Palestinian party or entity.
The famous “no Hamas-stan and no Fatah-stan” is not just a slogan in Israeli political thinking — it is the policy.
Golden opportunity for mass ethnic cleansing
This government senses a golden opportunity for the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the annexation of Gaza and the West Bank — and it aims to seize it.
Hamas’s chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya recently said that the movement was done with partial deals. Hamas, he said, was willing to release all Israeli captives in exchange for ending the war and Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza, as well as the release of an agreed-on number of Palestinian prisoners.
But the truth is, Hamas is running out of options.
Netanyahu does not consider releasing the remaining Israeli captives as a central goal. Hamas has no leverage and barely any allies left standing.
Hezbollah is out of the equation, facing geographic and political isolation, demands for disarmament, and the lethal Israeli targeting of its members.
Armed Iraqi groups have signalled their willingness to hand over weapons to the government in Baghdad in order not to be in the crosshairs of Washington or Tel Aviv.
Meanwhile, the Houthis in Yemen have sustained heavy losses from hundreds of massive US airstrikes. Despite their defiant tone, they cannot change the current dynamics.
Tehran distanced from Houthis
Finally, Iran is engaged in what it describes as positive dialogue with the Trump administration to avert a confrontation. To that end, Tehran has distanced itself from the Houthis and is welcoming the idea of US investment.
The so-called Arab plan for Gaza’s reconstruction also excludes any role for Hamas. While the mediators are pushing for a political formula that would not decisively erase Hamas from Palestinian politics, some Arab states would prefer such a scenario.
As these agendas and new realities play out, Gaza has been laid to waste. There is no food, no space, no hope. Only despair and growing anger.
This chapter of the genocide shows no sign of letting up, with Israel under no international pressure to cease the bombing and forced starvation of Gaza. Hamas remains defiant but has no significant leverage to wield.
In the absence of any viable Palestinian initiative that can rally international support around a different dialogue altogether about ending the war, intervention can only come from Washington, where the favoured solution is ethnic cleansing.
This is a dead-end road that pushes Palestinians into the abyss of annihilation, whether by death and starvation or political and material erasure through mass displacement.
Nour Odeh is a political analyst, public diplomacy consultant, and an award-winning journalist. She also reports for Al Jazeera. This article was first published by The New Arab and is republished under Creative Commons.
Part Two of Solidarity’s Vietnam War series: The folly of imperial war
COMMENTARY:By Eugene Doyle
Vietnam is a lesson we should have learnt — but never did — about the immorality, folly and counter-productivity of imperial war. Gaza, Yemen and Ukraine are happening today, in part, because of this cultural amnesia that facilitates repetition.
It’s time to remember the Quiet Mutiny within the US army — and why it helped end the war by undermining military effectiveness, morale, and political support at home.
There were many reasons that the US and its allies were defeated in Vietnam. First and foremost they were beaten by an army that was superior in tactics, morale and political will.
The Quiet Mutiny that came close to a full-scale insurrection within the US army in the early 1970s was an important part of the explanation as to why America’s vast over-match in resources, firepower and aerial domination was insufficient to the task.
Beaten by an army that was superior in tactics, morale and political will. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
‘Our army is approaching collapse’ Marine Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr wrote: “By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.” — Armed Forces Journal 7 June, 1971.
A paper prepared by the Gerald R Ford Presidential Library — “Veterans, Deserters and Draft Evaders” (1974) — stated, “Hundreds of thousands of Vietnam-era veterans hold other-than-honorable discharges, many because of their anti-war activities.”
Between 1965-73, according to the Ford papers, 495,689 servicemen (and women) on active duty deserted the armed forces! Ponder that.
For good reason, the defiance, insubordination and on many occasions soldier-on-officer violence was something that the mainstream media and the Western establishment have tried hard to expunge from our collective memory.
Something that the mainstream media and the Western establishment have tried hard to expunge from our collective memory. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
‘The officer said “Keep going!” He kinda got shot.’ At 12 years old in 1972, I took out a subscription to Newsweek. Among the horrors I learnt about at that tender age was the practice of fragging — the deliberate killing of US officers by their own men, often by flicking a grenade — a fragmentation device (hence fragging) — into their tent at night, or simply shooting an officer during a combat mission.
There were hundreds of such incidents.
GI: “The officer said, ‘Keep on going’ but they were getting hit pretty bad so it didn’t happen. He kinda got shot.”
GI: “The grunts don’t always do what the Captain says. He always says “Go there”. He always stays back. We just go and sit down somewhere. We don’t want to hit “Contact”.
GI: “We’ve decided to tell the company commander we won’t go into the bush anymore; at least we’ll go to jail where it’s safe.”
Hundreds of GI antiwar organisations and underground newspapers challenged the official narratives about the war. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
US Army — refusing to fight “Soldiers in Revolt: G.I. Resistance During the Vietnam War,” by David Cortright, professor emeritus at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, himself a Vietnam veteran, documents the hundreds of GI antiwar organisations and underground newspapers that challenged the official narratives about the war.
Cortright’s research indicated that by the early 1970s the US Army was close to a full mutiny. It meant that the US, despite having hundreds of thousands of troops in the country, couldn’t confidently put an army into combat.
By the war’s end the US army was largely hunkered down in their bases. Cortright says US military operations became “effectively crippled” as the crisis manifested itself “in drug abuse, political protest, combat refusals, black militancy, and fraggings.”
Cortright cites over 900 fragging incidents between 1969–1971, including over 500 with explosive devices.
“Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units,” Colonel Heinl said in his 1971 article.
At times entire companies refused to move forward, an offence punishable by death, but never enforced. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
At times entire companies refused to move forward, an offence punishable by death, but never enforced because of the calamitous knock-on effect this would have had both at home and within the army in the field.
‘The rebellion is everywhere’ It was heroic journalists like John Pilger who refused to file the reassuring stories editors back in London, New York, Sydney and Auckland wanted. Pilger told uncomfortable truths — there was a rebellion underway. The clean-cut, spit-and-polish boys of the 1960s Green Machine (US army) had morphed into a corps whose 80,000-strong frontline was full of defiant, insubordinate Grunts (infantry) who wore love beads, grew their hair long, smoked pot, and occasionally tossed a hand grenade into an officer’s tent.
John Pilger’s first film “Vietnam: The Quiet Mutiny”, aired in 1970. “The war is ending,” Pilger said, “because the largest, wealthiest and most powerful organisation on earth, the American Army, is being challenged from within — by the most brutalised and certainly the bravest of its members.
“The war is ending because the Grunt is taking no more bullshit.”
That short piece to camera is one of the most incredible moments in documentary history yet it likely won’t be seen during the commemorations of the Fall of Saigon on April 30.
At the time, Granada Television’s chairman was apoplectic that it went to air at all and described Pilger as “a threat to Western civilisation”. So tight is the media control we live under now it is unlikely such a documentary would air at all on a major channel.
“I don’t know why I’m shooting these people” a young grunt tells Pilger about having to fight the Vietnamese in their homeland. Another asks: “I have nothing against these people. Why are we killing them?”
Shooting the messenger Huge effort goes into attacking truth-tellers like Pilger, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, but as Phillip Knightley pointed out in his book The First Casualty, Pilger’s work was among the most important revelations to emerge from Vietnam, a war in which a depressingly large percentage of journalists contented themselves with life in Saigon and chanting the official Pentagon narrative.
Thus it ever was.
Pilger was like a fragmentation device dropped into the official narrative, blasting away the euphemisms, the evasions, the endless stream of official lies. He called the end of the war long before the White House and the Pentagon finally gave up the charade; his actions helped save lives; their actions condemned hundreds of thousands to unnecessary death, millions more to misery.
African Americans were sent to the front in disproportionately large numbers – about a quarter of all frontline fighters. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Race politics, anti-racism, peace activism
Race politics was another important factor. African Americans were sent to the front in disproportionately large numbers — about a quarter of all frontline fighters. There was a strong feeling among black conscripts that “This is not our war”.
In David Loeb Weiss’ No Vietnamese ever called me Nigger we see a woman at an antiwar protest in Harlem, New York. “My boy is over there fighting for his rights,” she says, “but he’s not getting them.” Then we hear the chant: “The enemy is whitey! Not the Viet Cong!”
We should recall that at this time the civil rights movement was battling powerful white groups for a place in civil society. The US army had only ended racial segregation in the Korean War and back home in 1968, there were still 16 States that had miscegenation laws banning sexual relations between whites and blacks.
Martin Luther King was assassinated this same year. All this fed into the Quiet Mutiny.
Truth-telling and the lessons of history Vietnam became a dark arena where the most sordid aspects of American imperialism played out: racism, genocidal violence, strategic incoherence, belief in brute force over sound policy.
Sounds similar to Gaza and Yemen, doesn’t it?
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
I love coffee. I drink it every day. It’s part of my culture, my mornings, my memories. But behind each cup is a fragile system, and that system is breaking.
Coffee and cocoa are daily rituals for many of us, but behind every cup or chocolate bar lies a fragile system under increasing stress. What used to be distant projections of climate disruption are now real-time events: volatile harvests, surging prices, and shrinking yields.
In 2024, cocoa prices quadrupled. Coffee hit a 50-year high in 2025. Farmers are leaving these crops behind. Hedging no longer works. And the effects are rippling across the supply chain.
If your business depends on these ingredients, whether in chocolate bars, coffee blends, or ready-to-drink beverages, this isn’t a passing blip. It’s a structural shift.
The supply chains are broken (and it’s costing you money)
Coffee prices have reached a 50-year high | Courtesy: MacroTrends
Cocoa prices exploded from $2,500 per tonne in 2023 to over $10,000 in 2024, the highest in 46 years. Even after retreating slightly, prices remain three times higher than historical norms.
Coffee futures hit $4.24 per lb in 2025, a 50-year high, as droughts in Brazil and Vietnam (which together supply 50% of global beans) slashed yields.
Why does this matter for businesses? Input costs are rising and increasingly volatile, putting pressure on margins and making it harder to forecast. Hedging can’t keep up. But the biggest risk isn’t just price, it’s access. As supply becomes more unstable, securing reliable ingredients is becoming harder by the season.
This isn’t a temporary squeeze. The narrow equatorial zones where these crops grow are becoming unpredictable. Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, and disease (like swollen shoot virus in West African cocoa) are systemic threats.
Bottom line: If your products rely on coffee or cocoa, your margins and supply security are at risk.
Traditional solutions are too slow
The industry’s playbook – breeding hardier plants, shifting farms north, and promoting regenerative practices – is critical, but too slow. New coffee varieties take 10-15 years to develop, test, and scale. Cocoa trees require three to five years to mature, if they survive pests and drought.
Meanwhile, land availability is shrinking. World Coffee Research estimates that 50% of current coffee-growing land could become unproductive by 2050.
Courtesy: Anay Mridul/Green Queen
The overlooked solution: alternatives that work
Here’s the truth: businesses don’t need perfect replacements. They need ingredients that are functional, cost-stable, and compatible with today’s supply chains. Ours delivers on all three – and tastes great while doing so.
At Compound Foods, we’re building beanless coffee and cocoa ingredients designed to:
Reduce exposure to price spikes (no dependency on fragile origins)
Slot into existing manufacturing (no reformulation headaches)
Meet sustainability targets (up to 70% lower carbon footprint vs conventional coffee)
How we do it
Our journey began with a simple but powerful question: what makes coffee and cocoa what they are?
We mapped over 800 compounds that create coffee’s flavour and aroma. Then we asked: can we replicate those experiences using what we already have? We explored byproducts from other food processes, seeds, cereals, and fibres, and applied food science, fermentation, and formulation design to transform them.
Our first hypothesis was to use precision fermentation to recreate specific key compounds. But we quickly learned that no single compound could replicate the complex sensory experience of coffee. Even chlorogenic acid, a major coffee molecule, didn’t move the needle alone.
So we took inspiration from nature, from how coffee farmers use fermentation to influence flavour. We built a base using whole foods that mimicked the coffee cherry. We identified ingredients with molecular overlap, tested them in the lab, and developed a fermentation process using microbial strains sourced from global coffee cherries.
Over time, and with input from baristas, Q graders, and sensory scientists (including blind testing with Purdue University), we created a formulation that could rival the complexity and acidity of high-quality coffee. In one study with 120 tasters, 60% preferred our coffee over Blue Bottle and Stumptown.
We also explored cell culture, partnering with a lab in Costa Rica to grow coffee plant cells. The result? It still required roasting and fermentation, and sensory performance fell short. After years of testing and iteration, our current method delivered the best outcomes across flavour, cost, and scalability.
The current market dynamics are creating an opening. Brands are open to alternatives. Especially in cocoa, where consistency and cost have become pain points, ingredient diversification is no longer niche: it’s a strategy.
Coffee has more emotional complexity. We get it. I love specialty coffee. It’s the only coffee I personally drink. The industry’s commitment to quality, soil health, and fair practices is unmatched. But specialty coffee accounts for just 10-15% of the market. The rest is commodity-driven, and that’s where the greatest risk lies.
Let’s be clear: we are not trying to replace specialty coffee. If all coffee could be produced with the same care and ethics, we’d be in a very different place. But for the vast majority of brands and manufacturers, cost and consistency are non-negotiables.
That’s why we’re offering a solution:
for small brands looking to reduce formulation costs;
for CPG companies protecting margins;
for distributors needing a backup supply.
The path forward
This isn’t about replacing coffee or cocoa. It’s about making them more resilient and closing the future gap between supply and demand.
Blending: Stretch expensive commodities by combining with alternatives.
Hedging: Secure secondary supply, insulated from climate shocks.
Innovating: Partner with food scientists to build future-proof products.
If cocoa stays above $8,000 per tonne, alternatives save millions. If coffee yields drop another 20%, blends protect revenue.
Courtesy: Compound Foods
Securing the future of coffee and cocoa through partnerships
The coffee and cocoa industries won’t disappear, but business models built on low-cost, resilient, abundant supply will.
Companies that thrive will be those that:
Diversify ingredients now
Invest in supply-chain resilience (not just sustainability optics)
Partner with innovators to bridge the gap
At Compound Foods, we’re giving businesses the tools to act today. Because in a climate-disrupted world, the biggest risk isn’t change, it’s waiting too long to adapt.
I want to drink coffee every morning. I want to indulge in cocoa treats forever. But the future of these crops won’t be built on nostalgia. It will be built by those willing to evolve. And the time to do so is now.
Regardless of the activism disabled and chronically ill people have been doing now for over ten years, including warning the general public of what potentially lies ahead, it seems that we have now reached the point many feared regarding Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) benefit cuts. After 15 years of austerity and now a “Labour” government determined to outdo the Tories, many are extremely concerned and unsure what will happen to their entitlements and support, specifically DWP Personal Independence Payment (PIP).
DWP PIP cuts are coming
With the recent discovery of a survey (DO NOT FILL IT OUT, IT’S NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS) asking claimants what they spend their money on – along with similar ones by charities and organisations like There for ME and Scope – many chronically ill and disabled people are terrified as to what will happen to their DWP PIP support and whether they will still be entitled to it.
DWP PIP is a payment that chronically ill and disabled people receive regardless of whether they are in work or not. It is to support with the additional costs of being disabled.
But as of Labour’s Spring Statement and Green Paper, it has become clear that this entitlement is going to be reduced or removed for up to 1.3 million people. Along with many who currently receive this entitlement suddenly being left without it, there are also plans to push these chronically ill and disabled people back into work if they also get Universal Credit.
Are they taking the (DWP) PIP…?
Although I work as a writer and activist at the Canary and I am very lucky to have a partner that works and supports me, I am also incredibly lucky to have an amazing bunch of understanding work colleagues, who all live with chronic illnesses.
Being a chronically ill and disabled person who, due to Universal Credit and living with a partner that earns over the threshold to get it, I have already lost my full health element of my entitlements. This includes my National Insurance contributions. As it stands, I already have to work around nine hours a week to cover these payments, or pay this out of my PIP entitlement.
So, if my PIP was stopped this would be the reality for me.
Although I look “absolutely fine” to most, I am in fact chronically ill and disabled, not workshy, and not a scrounger for getting DWP PIP either.
Labour PIP takers
I live with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), atlantoaxial instability (AAI), craniocervical instability (CCI), postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS), gastroparesis, and epilepsy, to name a few of my conditions – not unlike thousands of others in the UK. And, along with the appointments and recovery times that come with these chronic illnesses and disabilities I live with, the following reflects an average four-month period in my life.
So far this year I have had four gastroparesis flares where I vomit continuously for around 24 hours – then needing around a week to recover.
I have had dumping syndrome twice (where I have uncontrollable diarrhoea), both times lasting around 48 hours, needing around two days to recover.
I have had severe vasomotor rhinitis causing post nasal drip that has been repeatedly getting worse, resulting in no sleep unless upright for around two weeks each time. This needed a doctors appointment and sleeping tablets along with an urgent private ENT appointment to finally get the correct treatment.
I have also had a deterioration in my POTS symptoms, lasting around 24 hours each time. This has resulted in me having to elevate my legs for long periods, whilst still awaiting a private appointment with my POTS specialist.
Therefore, if I was working or forced to work fulltime this year, I would have already missed nearly seven weeks out of the 15 working ones. I have only physically managed to attend four protests and write six articles from home for the Canary.
This is just one example of a chronically ill and disabled persons life who may now lose the support of DWP PIP.
Really taking the (DWP) PIP now…!
There are at least 2.9 million people who live with either EDS, POTS, ME, long Covid, epilepsy, or a combination of them. These being just some of the conditions that currently allow an entitlement of PIP. With there currently being around 3.7 million people receiving DWP PIP, even if by some stroke of luck or a miracle taking their support away suddenly makes people better or cured, where are the jobs, then…?
As Canary journalist Rachel Charlton-Dailey recently said there are seven (yes, SEVEN) jobs that are actually available for people with chronic illnesses and disabilities that would allow them to work from home part time. And seriously, who would actually employ someone who doesn’t know from one day to the next whether their going to be well enough or able to work, even if they really wanted to? Let alone the fact that taking peoples entitlements and financial support away doesn’t suddenly make them better, quite the opposite in fact.
The impact this will have on already isolated and vulnerable people will be devastating. In my opinion, this isn’t just an attack on chronically ill and disabled people, specifically people living with invisible disabilities who will be affected the most.
This is an attack on the once-proud mindset that allowed the foundations of the NHS, social security, and social housing to be built. We are being taken further away from welfare and closer to warfare purely to create wealth for rich people at the detriment of poor people.
I also honestly despair at the millions of people whose blatant ignorance is allowing this to continue to happen. Propaganda might make you discriminate, but trust me, disability does not.
Disclaimer:
On writing this article I had a fourth gastroparesis flare that lasted over a week. Not only was I unable to move out of my bed I lost two pounds in the process. Apart from my partner Steve I was completely isolated.
I honestly don’t think I would still be here if it wasn’t for his support over the last decade, and as many will know, all of my conditions were originally dismissed as mental health issues prior to him attending appointments with me. This included my epilepsy that was dismissed as psychiatric and a ‘childhood trauma’, and therefore left untreated for over 10 years, including my tonic clonic seizures.
This is not uncommon in the chronic illness community, with many, specifically women taking years to get a diagnosis. It seems having a dick to swing makes all the difference.
The point being, Steve has had to finish this article for me. Just another reason why taking away DWP PIP from people like me is just plain wrong.
Pope Francis has died on Easter Monday, aged 88, the Vatican announced. The head of the Catholic Church had recently survived being hospitalised with double pneumonia.
“Dear brothers and sisters, with deep sorrow I must announce the death of our Holy Father Francis. At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the house of the Father.”
There were many unusual aspects of Pope Francis’ papacy. He was the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas (and the southern hemisphere), the first to choose the name “Francis” and the first to give a TED talk.
He was also the first pope in more than 600 years to be elected following the resignation, rather than death, of his predecessor.
From the very start of his papacy, Francis seemed determined to do things differently and present the papacy in a new light. Even in thinking about his burial, he chose the unexpected: to be placed to rest not in the Vatican, but in the Basilica of St Mary Major in Rome – the first pope to be buried there in hundreds of years.
Vatican News reported the late Pope Francis had requested his funeral rites be simplified.
“The renewed rite,” said Archbishop Diego Ravelli, “seeks to emphasise even more that the funeral of the Roman Pontiff is that of a pastor and disciple of Christ and not of a powerful person of this world.”
Straddling a line between “progressive” and “conservative”, Francis experienced tension with both sides. In doing so, his papacy shone a spotlight on what it means to be Catholic today.
The Pope’s Easter Blessing Video: AP
The day before his death, Pope Francis made a brief appearance on Easter Sunday to bless the crowds at St Peter’s Square.
Between a rock and a hard place Francis was deemed not progressive enough by some, yet far too progressive by others.
His apostolic exhortation (an official papal teaching on a particular issue or action) Amoris Laetitia, ignited great controversy for seemingly being (more) open to the question of whether people who have divorced and remarried may receive Eucharist.
He also disappointed progressive Catholics, many of whom hoped he would make stronger changes on issues such as the roles of women, married clergy, and the broader inclusion of LGBTQIA+ Catholics.
The reception of his exhortation Querida Amazonia was one such example. In this document, Francis did not endorse marriage for priests, despite bishops’ requests for this. He also did not allow the possibility of women being ordained as deacons to address a shortage of ordained ministers. His discerning spirit saw there was too much division and no clear consensus for change.
Francis was also openly critical of Germany’s controversial “Synodal Way” – a series of conferences with bishops and lay people — that advocated for positions contrary to Church teachings. Francis expressed concern on multiple occasions that this project was a threat to the unity of the Church.
At the same time, Francis was no stranger to controversy from the conservative side of the Church, receiving “dubia” or “theological doubts” over his teaching from some of his Cardinals. In 2023, he took the unusual step of responding to some of these doubts.
Impact on the Catholic Church In many ways, the most striking thing about Francis was not his words or theology, but his style. He was a modest man, even foregoing the Apostolic Palace’s grand papal apartments to live in the Vatican’s simpler guest house.
He may well be remembered most for his simplicity of dress and habits, his welcoming and pastoral style and his wise spirit of discernment.
He is recognised as giving a clear witness to the life, love and joy of Jesus in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council – a point of major reform in modern Church history. This witness has translated into two major developments in Church teachings and life.
Pope Francis on respecting and protecting the environment. Image: Tandag Diocese
Love for our common home The first of these relates to environmental teachings. In 2015, Francis released his ground-breaking encyclical, Laudato si’: On Care for Our Common Home. It expanded Catholic social teaching by giving a comprehensive account of how the environment reflects our God-given “common home”.
Consistent with recent popes such as Benedict XVI and John Paul II, Francis acknowledged climate change and its destructive impacts and causes. He summarised key scientific research to forcefully argue for an evidence-based approach to addressing humans’ impact on the environment.
He also made a pivotal and innovative contribution to the climate change debate by identifying the ethical and spiritual causes of environmental destruction.
Francis argued combating climate change relied on the “ecological conversion” of the human heart, so that people may recognise the God-given nature of our planet and the fundamental call to care for it. Without this conversion, pragmatic and political measures wouldn’t be able to counter the forces of consumerism, exploitation and selfishness.
Francis argued a new ethic and spirituality was needed. Specifically, he said Jesus’ way of love – for other people and all creation – is the transformative force that could bring sustainable change for the environment and cultivate fraternity among people (and especially with the poor).
Synodality: moving towards a Church that listens Francis’s second major contribution, and one of the most significant aspects of his papacy, was his commitment to “synodality”. While there’s still confusion over what synodality actually means, and its potential for political distortion, it is above all a way of listening and discerning through openness to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
It involves hierarchy and lay people transparently and honestly discerning together, in service of the mission of the church. Synodality is as much about the process as the goal. This makes sense as Pope Francis was a Jesuit, an order focused on spreading Catholicism through spiritual formation and discernment.
Drawing on his rich Jesuit spirituality, Francis introduced a way of conversation centred on listening to the Holy Spirit and others, while seeking to cultivate friendship and wisdom.
With the conclusion of the second session of the Synod on Synodality in October 2024, it is too soon to assess its results. However, those who have been involved in synodal processes have reported back on their transformative potential.
Archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge, explained how participating in the 2015 Synod “was an extraordinary experience [and] in some ways an awakening”.
Cardinals use a centuries-old voting process to elect a new pope, complete with smoke signals to indicate the outcome. And the next papal conclave will be the most diverse in Catholic history.
— The Conversation U.S. (@ConversationUS) April 21, 2025
Catholicism in the modern age Francis’ papacy inspired both great joy and aspirations, as well as boiling anger and rejection. He laid bare the agonising fault lines within the Catholic community and struck at key issues of Catholic identity, triggering debate over what it means to be Catholic in the world today.
He leaves behind a Church that seems more divided than ever, with arguments, uncertainty and many questions rolling in his wake. But he has also provided a way for the Church to become more converted to Jesus’ way of love, through synodality and dialogue.
Francis showed us that holding labels such as “progressive” or “conservative” won’t enable the Church to live out Jesus’ mission of love – a mission he emphasised from the very beginning of his papacy.
Part one of a two-part series: On the courage to remember
COMMENTARY:By Eugene Doyle
The first demonstration I ever went on was at the age of 12, against the Vietnam War.
The first formal history lesson I received was a few months later when I commenced high school. That day the old history master, Mr Griffiths, chalked what I later learnt was a quote from Hegel:
“The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn the lessons of history.” It’s about time we changed that.
Painful though it is, let’s have the courage to remember what they desperately try to make us forget.
Cultural amnesia and learning the lessons of history Memorialising events is a popular pastime with politicians, journalists and old soldiers.
Nothing wrong with that. Honouring sacrifice, preserving collective memory and encouraging reconciliation are all valid. Recalling the liberation of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) on 30 April 1975 is important.
What is criminal, however, is that we failed to learn the vital lessons that the US defeat in Vietnam should have taught us all. Sadly much was forgotten and the succeeding half century has witnessed a carnival of slaughter perpetrated by the Western world on hapless South Americans, Africans, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, and many more.
Honouring sacrifice, preserving collective memory and encouraging reconciliation are all valid. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
It’s time to remember.
Memory shapes national identity As scholars say: Memory shapes national identity. If your cultural products — books, movies, songs, curricula and the like — fail to embed an appreciation of the war crimes, racism, and imperial culpability for events like the Vietnam War, then, as we have proven, it can all be done again. How many recognise today that Vietnam was an American imperial war in Asia, that “fighting communism” was a pretext that lost all credibility, partly thanks to television and especially thanks to heroic journalists like John Pilger and Seymour Hersh?
Just as in Gaza today, the truth and the crimes could not be hidden anymore.
How many recognise today that Vietnam was an American imperial war in Asia? Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
If a culture doesn’t face up to its past crimes — say the treatment of the Aborigines by settler Australia, of Māori by settler New Zealand, of Palestinians by the Zionist state since 1948, or the various genocides perpetrated by the US government on the indigenous peoples of what became the 50 states, then it leads ultimately to moral decay and repetition.
Lest we forget. Forget what? Is there a collective memory in the West that the Americans and their allies raped thousands of Vietnamese women, killed hundreds of thousands of children, were involved in countless large scale war crimes, summary executions and other depravities in order to impose their will on a people in their own country?
Why has there been no collective responsibility for the death of over two million Vietnamese? Why no reparations for America’s vast use of chemical weapons on Vietnam, some provided by New Zealand?
Vietnam Veterans Against War released a report “50 years of struggle” in 2017 which included this commendable statement: “To VVAW and its supporters, the veterans had a continuing duty to report what they had witnessed”. This included the frequency of “beatings, rapes, cutting body parts, violent torture during interrogations and cutting off heads”.
The US spends billions projecting itself as morally superior but people who followed events at the time, including brilliant journalists like Pilger, knew something beyond sordid was happening within the US military.
The importance of remembering the My Lai Massacre While cultural memes like “Me Love You Long Time” played to an exoticised and sexualised image of Vietnamese women — popular in American-centric movies like Full Metal Jacket,Green Beret, Rambo, Apocalypse Now, as was the image of the Vietnamese as sadistic torturers, there has been a long-term attempt to expunge from memory the true story of American depravity.
The most infamous such incident of the Vietnam War was the My Lai Massacre of 16 March 1968. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
All, or virtually all, armies rape their victims. The US Army is no exception — despite rhetorically jockeying with the Israelis for the title of “the world’s most moral army”. The most famous such incident of the Vietnam War was the My Lai Massacre of 16 March 1968 in which about 500 civilians were subjected to hours of rapes, mutilation and eventual murder by soldiers of the US 20th Infantry Regiment.
Rape victims ranged from girls of 10 years through to old women. The US soldiers even took a lunch break before recommencing their crimes.
The official commission of inquiry, culminating in the Peers Report found that an extensive network of officers had taken part in a cover-up of what were large-scale war crimes. Only one soldier, Lieutenant Calley, was ever sentenced to jail but within days he was, on the orders of the US President, transferred to a casually-enforced three and half years of house arrest. By this act, the United States of America continued a pattern of providing impunity for grave war crimes. That pattern continues to this day.
The failure of the US Army to fully pursue the criminals will be an eternal stain on the US Army whose soldiers went on to commit countless rapes, hundreds of thousands of murders and other crimes across the globe in the succeeding five decades. If you resile from these facts, you simply haven’t read enough official information.
Thank goodness for journalists, particularly Seymour Hersh, who broke rank and exposed the truth of what happened at My Lai.
Senator John McCain’s “sacrifice” and the crimes that went unpunished Thousands of Viet Cong died in US custody, many from torture, many by summary execution but the Western cultural image of Vietnam focuses on the cruelty of the North Vietnamese toward “victims” like terror-bomber John McCain.
The future US presidential candidate was on his 23rd bombing mission, part of a campaign of “War by Tantrum” in the words of a New York Times writer, when he was shot down over Hanoi.
The CIA’s Phoenix Programme was eventually shut down after public outrage and hearings by the US Congress into its misdeeds. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Also emblematic of this state-inflicted terrorism was the CIA’s Phoenix Programme, eventually shut down after public outrage and hearings by the US Congress into its misdeeds. According to US journalist Douglas Valentine, author of several books on the CIA, including The Phoenix Program:
“Central to Phoenix is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers”.
Common practices, Valentine says, quoting US witnesses and official papers, included:
“Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electrical shock (“the Bell Telephone Hour”) rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; “the water treatment”; “the airplane,” in which a prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair.”
No US serviceman, CIA agent or other official was held to account for these crimes.
Tiger Force — part of the US 327th Infantry — gained a grisly reputation for indiscriminately mowing down civilians, mutilations (cutting off of ears which were retained as souvenirs was common practice, according to sworn statements by participants). All this was supposed to be kept secret but was leaked in 2003.
“Their crimes were uncountable, their madness beyond imagination — so much so that for almost four decades, the story of Tiger Force was covered up under orders that stretched all the way to the White House,” journalists Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss reported.
Their crimes, secretly documented by the US military, included beheading a baby to intimidate villagers into providing information — interesting given how much mileage the US and Israel made of fake stories about beheaded babies on 7 October 2023. The US went to great lengths to hide these ugly truths — and no one ever faced real consequences.
The US went to great lengths to hide these ugly truths. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Helicopter gunships and soldiers at checkpoints gunned down thousands of Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, much as US forces did at checkpoints in Iraq, according to leaked US documents following the illegal invasion of that country.
The worst cowards and criminals were not the rapists and murderers themselves but the high-ranking politicians and military leaders who tried desperately to cover up these and hundreds of other incidents. As Lieutenant Calley himself said of My Lai: “It’s not an isolated incident.”
Here we are 50 years later in the midst of the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, with the US fuelling war and bombing people across the globe. Isn’t it time we stopped supporting this madness?
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
Next article: The fall of Saigon 1975: Part two: Quiet mutiny: the US army falls apart.
I am a whistleblower with a master’s of public policy from Central European University (kicked out of Hungary by Orban’s regime), and I have spent the last several years feverishly trying to blow the whistle about authoritarianism and rising fascism in the U.S. On Christmas Eve in 2023, I wrote a prescient and illustrative letter to civil society abroad as I begged for help on behalf of a marginalized, targeted U.S. activist. When the international civil society employee had a call with me, she explained what human rights are to me, assuming I did not know, and she seemed to think Americans have said rights to such an extent that we could not possibly urgently need the support her organization provides.
“We don’t help with democratic backsliding,” she said.
“How bad does it have to get?” I replied.
I am not angry at the Trump voters who ”chose” Trump when they did not have a choice, as the U.S. has not had enough election integrity for it to matter for years. At best, billionaires gave ordinary voters the illusion of choice, asking them to pick between two right-wing candidates on the menu the oligarchy provided. It is like children being told, “You must wear pants, so do you want the red ones or the blue ones? We bought them both.” I am angry at the careerist civil servants and civil society members who served themselves at society’s expense, leading us to this point instead of preventing it. Almost every time I tried to explain the Orwellian details of U.S. case studies, and the playbook of corruption paving the way for fascism, to supposed experts and members of civil society, I was dismissed or laughed out of “the room where it happens.” Far from helping us, civil society betrayed us.
Benefiting from the system and becoming one with it—seeking status, fancy titles, and nice salaries, as well as a seat at the politician’s table—precludes the due diligence of protecting the public from the system and the excesses of those politicians. Chris Hedges likes to refer to this gutted and gutless “Liberal Class” as “careerists” and “courtiers” in his books such as Death of the Liberal Class. Many of these “experts” who got interviewed on mainstream media over the past few years still thought “everything is fine” like the dog drinking coffee in the house on fire meme out of excessive privilege, fragile egos, and self-delusion. Other “experts” and members of civil society knew things were bad, but did not want to sound the alarm with accurate urgency because they wanted to keep their rapport with the powers that be such as the morally bankrupt Democratic party (as Chris Hedges calls it). There were powerful people who admitted privately to me that they knew our supposed rights and the constitution do not function in practice, but who feebly justified being two-faced when it was time to face the music. They are, in the worst cases, members of marginalized groups themselves who helped corrupt cronies by misleading people like them into traps set by state-sponsored perpetrators.
Funding was doled out by billionaires and corporations, and accepted by supposedly independent academia with strings attached, leading partially to the crackdown on speech against the genocide in Palestine. I believe civil society groups and researchers partnered with Big Tech to whitewash AI’s impacts and image, especially when it comes to harms related to journalism. Some civil society groups even operate on behalf of the enemy, redefining victims as perpetrators and perpetrators as victims. As a whistleblower, I found no help for people like me, but I did find organizations helping people who are part of the problem. I attended one Florida-based “whistleblower” organization’s vicariously embarrassing online event two years ago, and concluded they were supporting people who had been justly punished for racism, sexism, and homophobia, not the victims of said people.
In other situations, I recall civil society members allowing pure egotism and petulance to prevent their receptivity to the truth and willingness to find real solutions. A program coordinator at a legal aid organization got angry when I said they were bringing their programs to the U.S. late and explained how access to justice would not solve the problem of a corrupted and commandeered judiciary. She practically pouted like a child as though the truth was a personal attack, and I received no replies to my follow-up emails even after her boss tried to direct me back to her through LinkedIN. Instead of spending their money and advocacy training on me, perhaps they trained some of the other people in the info-session: A Native American conspiracy theorist supporting anti-trans parents against Child Protective Services intervention for their kids, and an open pedophile trying to conflate being a pedophile with being gay and a victim of unfair state persecution.
It is telling to me that I am so relieved when someone like Ellie Mystal so much as states the obvious and asks,
To turn it around back on the people who were telling me for months that the courts would save us, what do you all got now? What’s your plan now? Now that the courts have issued their order and Trump has ignored their orders, what’s plan B because plan A was the courts going to save us, and that was never going to work?
A few days ago, after trying for seven months to reach one of the most powerful and important people I have ever managed to contact to ask for help fighting fascism, I was dismissed with the worst, most tone-deaf and delusional advice I have ever received in my life which was essentially:
“Come back to the U.S. and get any job you can find regardless of how houseless it leaves you. Convince people not to believe Trump’s lies, and work your way up into politics.”
Nevermind that dissidents, LGBTQ+, disabled people, houseless people, etc. are being targeted and will certainly be put into prison camps such as those called for in Project 2025 domestically (not just in El Salvador). Nevermind that I tried everything to organize, and collaborate, and resist, over the last few years, and have worked in advocacy and awareness-raising pro-bono since 2021. Nevermind that there is no such thing as working your way up into politics from the working class under autocratic dictatorships. I should thank this rich, white, boomer member of the establishment for the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and return to stand in front of the firing squad pitch. I know he did not mean it to be arrogant, condescending, negligent, and reprehensible, but it is.
We are now witnessing the social media and televised version of developing genocide, and while false information and free press concerns make the truth harder for people to discern, the regime is allowing photo journalists in and creating a public spectacle as it gloats about its crimes. I wish everyone in the world could see that photo of bound detainees having their heads shaved and read about how innocent Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist deported to Trump’s torture gulag, called for his mother as he wept with his hair falling all around him. I wish everyone would read ProPublica’s article detailing the experiences of the helpless and morally-conflicted flight attendants on the unmistakable modern version of the trains to the concentration camps.
I cannot share my 2023 letter here, but I wish I could submit it as a primary source if there is a future museum or archive where people go to see evidence painting a picture of a dark chapter in history they promise to never repeat. It is worth noting that, in 2023, the Holocaust Museum in Mexico even had an exhibit on Trump, playing his dehumanizing quotations about immigrants and vulnerable people on repeat. This time, we won’t be able to say we did not know. People like me who had little power knew, and people who had the most power and authority did not listen, would not help, and did not protect anyone but themselves. Psuedo-experts whose careers rested on fealty knowingly or unknowingly participated in a collective gaslighting of the victims of the broken system and sick society in a cover-up for the increasingly authoritarian and oligarchic state. They dragged us kicking and screaming into autocracy, or threw us under the bus, and I will never forgive them for it.
Secretary of Marco Rubio said today (Friday) that “If it’s not possible to end the war in Ukraine , we need to move on.” Rubio told reporters that the Trump could decide this “in a matter of days…” (NYTimes, 4/18/2025)
The context: Russia has made its conditions very clear. (1) Ukraine must not join NATO. (2) Ukraine must give up the four oblasts and Crimea. 3) Ukraine must be demilitarized and not pose a military threat to Russia.
Although to this point Trump been unwilling or unable to do so, he must accept these nonnegotiable conditions and do it against the opposition of European leaders. Or conceivably, he could simply walk away.
British political analyst Alexander Mercouris reports that European leaders are meeting in Paris to, in their words, achieve a “fair and lasting peace in Ukraine” and for them, this means a “Ukrainian victory.” Even as they voice this objective, reliable reports indicate that Russian recruitment is running at 1,000 per day, which is more than enough to replace lost soldiers. Ukrainian forces are steadily getting smaller and for the first time, external military analysts can foresee the fall of Kiev as a real possibility. Russian forces are making significant gains and Ukrainians are retreating in several areas. Finally, there is no question that Europe lacks the resources to achieve anything in Ukraine.
Presumably, the US will explain to the Europeans that they’re engaged in a dangerous fantasy and that peace will occur only by accepting the Russian demands (see above). However, the British, French and Danish are considering sending troops to Ukraine via Romania. This will be absolutely unacceptable to Russians but will come as no surprise to them. The few thousand (probably French) soldiers entering Odessa will be annihilated. Here one wonders how long French citizens would tolerate the war if coffins began returning home. (Note: Some of you may recall my earlier post about European and US intervention in the Russian Civil War and how they were expelled. Russian citizens will be reminded once again of Western intentions).
Given the above, one is forced to wonder why European leaders are doing everything possible to undermine and sabotage any meaningful peace talks? Why are they pursing a doomed policy that’s bankrupting their economies? Why alienate the US and Trump? I don’t have a definitive answer but I suspect that Mercouris is close to one when he speculates that European leaders hate Russia and have come to loathe Donald Trump. They cannot accept that they’ve lost the war and Trump was actually correct. I’ll leave for another day to speculate about what this means for the Democrats and unprincipled “progressives” (think AOC and Bernie Sanders) who gave left cover to US imperialism in its proxy was in Ukraine. In my opinion, they have much to answer for.
This week Cambodia marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh to the murderous Khmer Rouge, and Vietnam celebrates the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces in April 1975.
They are being commemorated very differently; after all, there’s nothing to celebrate in Cambodia. Its capital Phnom Penh was emptied, and its people had to then endure the “killing fields” and the darkest years of its modern existence under Khmer Rouge rule.
Over the border in Vietnam, however, there will be modest celebrations for their victory against US (and Australian) forces at the end of this month.
Yet, this week’s news of Indonesia considering a Russian request to base aircraft at the Biak airbase in West Papua throws in stark relief a troubling question I have long asked — did Australia back the wrong war 63 years ago? These different areas — and histories — of Southeast Asia may seem disconnected, but allow me to draw some links.
Through the 1950s until the early 1960s, it was official Australian policy under the Menzies government to support The Netherlands as it prepared West Papua for independence, knowing its people were ethnically and religiously different from the rest of Indonesia.
They are a Christian Melanesian people who look east to Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the Pacific, not west to Muslim Asia. Australia at the time was administering and beginning to prepare PNG for self-rule.
The Second World War had shown the importance of West Papua (then part of Dutch New Guinea) to Australian security, as it had been a base for Japanese air raids over northern Australia.
Japanese beeline to Sorong
Early in the war, Japanese forces made a beeline to Sorong on the Bird’s Head Peninsula of West Papua for its abundance of high-quality oil. Former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam served in a RAAF unit briefly stationed in Merauke in West Papua.
By 1962, the US wanted Indonesia to annex West Papua as a way of splitting Chinese and Russian influence in the region, as well as getting at the biggest gold deposit on earth at the Grasberg mine, something which US company Freeport continues to mine, controversially, today.
Following the so-called Bunker Agreement signed in New York in 1962, The Netherlands reluctantly agreed to relinquish West Papua to Indonesia under US pressure. Australia, too, folded in line with US interests.
That would also be the year when Australia sent its first group of 30 military advisers to Vietnam. Instead of backing West Papuan nationhood, Australia joined the US in suppressing Vietnam’s.
As a result of US arm-twisting, Australia ceded its own strategic interests in allowing Indonesia to expand eastwards into Pacific territories by swallowing West Papua. Instead, Australians trooped off to fight the unwinnable wars of Indochina.
To me, it remains one of the great what-ifs of Australian strategic history — if Australia had held the line with the Dutch against US moves, then West Papua today would be free, the East Timor invasion of 1975 was unlikely to have ever happened and Australia might not have been dragged into the Vietnam War.
Instead, as Cambodia and Vietnam mark their anniversaries this month, Australia continues to be reminded of the potential threat Indonesian-controlled West Papua has posed to Australia and the Pacific since it gave way to US interests in 1962.
Russian space agency plans
Nor is this the first time Russia has deployed assets to West Papua. Last year, Russian media reported plans under way for the Russian space agency Roscosmos to help Indonesia build a space base on Biak island.
In 2017, RAAF Tindal was scrambled just before Christmas to monitor Russian Tu95 nuclear “Bear” bombers doing their first-ever sorties in the South Pacific, flying between Australia and Papua New Guinea. I wrote not long afterwards how Australia was becoming “caught in a pincer” between Indonesian and Russian interests on Indonesia’s side and Chinese moves coming through the Pacific on the other.
All because we have abandoned the West Papuans to endure their own “slow-motion genocide” under Indonesian rule. Church groups and NGOs estimate up to 500,000 Papuans have perished under 60 years of Indonesian military rule, while Jakarta refuses to allow international media and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to visit.
Alex Sobel, an MP in the UK Parliament, last week called on Indonesia to allow the UN High Commissioner to visit but it is exceedingly rare to hear any Australian MPs ask questions about our neighbour West Papua in the Australian Parliament.
Canberra continues to enhance security relations with Indonesia in a naive belief that the nation is our ally against an assertive China. This ignores Jakarta’s deepening relations with both Russia and China, and avoids any mention of ongoing atrocities in West Papua or the fact that jihadi groups are operating close to Australia’s border.
Indonesia’s militarisation of West Papua, jihadi infiltration and now the potential for Russia to use airbases or space bases on Biak should all be “red lines” for Australia, yet successive governments remain desperate not to criticise Indonesia.
Ignoring actual ‘hot war’
Australia’s national security establishment remains focused on grand global strategy and acquiring over-priced gear, while ignoring the only actual “hot war” in our region.
Our geography has not changed; the most important line of defence for Australia remains the islands of Melanesia to our north and the co-operation and friendship of its peoples.
Strong independence movements in West Papua, Bougainville and New Caledonia all materially affect Australian security but Canberra can always be relied on to defer to Indonesian, American and French interests in these places, rather than what is ultimately in Australian — and Pacific Islander — interests.
Australia needs to develop a defence policy centred on a “Melanesia First” strategy from Timor to Fiji, radiating outwards. Yet Australia keeps deferring to external interests, to our cost, as history continues to remind us.
Ben Bohane is a Vanuatu-based photojournalist and policy analyst who has reported across Asia and the Pacific for the past 36 years. His website is benbohane.com This article was first published by The Sydney Morning Herald and is republished with the author’s permission.
When I was a Uyghur child living in communist China in the 1970s, we had no way of knowing what was happening around the world, within China, or even to our own Uyghur people in our homeland of East Turkistan (also known as Xinjiang, China). For colonized people like us, living under a total information blackout and bombarded by communist propaganda 24/7, discovering the truth was not a luxury – it was a yearning, something we sometimes risked our lives for.
I remember those days vividly. My father would gather us in the dead of night and begin tuning our old radio, searching for foreign broadcasts to find out what was happening in our homeland, where we lived. Due to the Chinese Communist Party’s strict media control and harsh punishment for those who sought outside information, this was an act of defiance.
At the time, the only source of information for the Uyghur people was propaganda in the state-run media. Yet, despite the risks, we longed to hear the truth. In our home in the capital, Urumqi, we had a microwave-sized radio with glowing tubes inside. My father would carefully fine-tune it by hand each night. Sometimes the signal was clear; other times it was full of static. But it was the only source of free news from the outside world.
He always told us to stay quiet and warned us never to mention to anyone that we listened to foreign broadcasts. “If the Chinese communists find out,” he said, “we will be severely punished.”
We thought we were alone in this. But by the late 1980s, we learned that many Uyghur families were secretly doing the same – tuning in to foreign voices in the dark.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, communist China not only survived but thrived, largely due to the failure of America and its Western allies to grasp the colossal threat this regime posed. Today, China has become a global superpower, and perhaps the most serious national security threat to the United States and the democratic world.
Like all totalitarian regimes, communist China rules through brute force and carefully curated propaganda designed to suppress the truth. From the Tiananmen Square Massacre to the COVID-19 pandemic, China manipulates public perception and rewrites history. For the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, information is both a weapon and a shield. Its total control over media ensures its rule remains unchallenged. But there is one thing the regime fears most: the truth.
The CCP does not just use propaganda to brainwash its people. It weaponizes it against perceived enemies, foreign and domestic. The success of its rule over 1.4 billion people for more than 75 years lies in its ability to craft and control the narrative.
Radio Free Asia (RFA) headquarters in Washington, March 18, 2025.(Gemunu Amarasinghe/RFA)
That is why the establishment of the Uyghur Service at Radio Free Asia (RFA) in November 1998 was such a historic moment. At last, the long-suffering Uyghur people had a voice – one that could tell the world about the atrocities they had endured under communist Chinese rule since 1949. Uyghurs in the homeland rejoiced, seeing in America – the leader of the free world – a beacon of hope and justice. Unsurprisingly, China condemned this move, with its Foreign Ministry denouncing the creation of the first independent international Uyghur broadcasting service.
Under China’s brutal rule, the Uyghur people have never been allowed an independent voice. Anyone who dared to speak out against the communist regime was quickly silenced – labeled a “separatist,” “extremist,” or “terrorist,” and disappeared.
This has been especially true since 2017, when China began detaining an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs in concentration camps and forcibly separating children from their parents to be sent to Chinese-run boarding schools. This systematic targeting of an entire ethnic group was eventually labeled as genocide and crimes against humanity by the first Trump administration. The European Parliament echoed this condemnation, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights published a report stating that China’s actions may constitute crimes against humanity.
Much of this international recognition was made possible by the groundbreaking reporting of the RFA Uyghur Service. Despite the threat of retaliation against their families in China, Uyghur journalists at RFA fearlessly investigated and exposed the Orwellian surveillance state Beijing had imposed on their people.
The United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) has recognized the tremendous contributions made by the brave RFA Uyghur journalists. USAGM states on its website:
“Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service was the first to report on the implementation of a vast, high-tech security state in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) and the mass arbitrary detentions there sweeping up the mostly Muslim Uyghur population and other ethnic groups in the region in early 2017, when much of the world was unaware of the situation. Since then, RFA Uyghur has diligently and tirelessly continued to break key stories that bring to light major events, aspects, and developments of a massive humanitarian crisis. This crisis has undoubtedly achieved global notice and notoriety, in large part because of RFA’s Uyghur Service’s courageous journalism, despite risks and threats. RFA’s Uyghur Service has risen above and beyond and continues to stay on top of one of the most difficult, complex, and important stories of our lifetimes.”
The closure of the RFA Uyghur Service would be a tragedy. For a people still suffering under an ongoing genocide, it would extinguish a vital light of hope. China would seize the moment to tell Uyghurs: “You are forgotten. No country, not even America, cares anymore.” This would be a powerful psychological blow, not just to the Uyghurs, but to millions across China who have looked to the United States as a symbol of justice, democracy, and freedom.
If America lets the RFA Uyghur Service disappear, it risks abandoning an entire people and ceding the information war to a regime that thrives on lies.
The RFA Uyghur Service is worth saving – and worth every penny America has spent since its creation. Preserving it allows the U.S. to stand on moral high ground and push back against China’s disinformation campaigns. It ensures the truth can still be told about the genocide, the repression, and the resilience of a people who refuse to be erased.
Dr. Rishat Abbas is a pharmaceutical scientist based in the United States and president of Uyghur Academy International. The academy is a a global network of Uyghur intellectuals who raise awareness about the Uyghur genocide, and seek to counter CCP influence abroad, and preserve Uyghur language, culture and identity. The views expressed in this commentary are Dr. Abbas’ own.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by commentator Rishat Abbas.
In the absence of any measures taken by the New Zealand government to respond to the genocide being committed by Israel in Gaza, Green Party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick is doing the principled thing by trying to apply countervailing pressure on Israel to stop its brutal actions in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
New Zealand is a state party to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948).
As a contracting party New Zealand has a clear obligation to respond to a genocide when it is indicated and which it must “undertake to prevent and to punish”.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in January 2024, deemed that a “plausible genocide” is occurring in Gaza. That was a year ago. Thousands of Palestinians have died since the ICJ’s determination.
The New Zealand government has failed its responsibilities under the Genocide Convention by applying no pressure to influence Israel’s military actions in Gaza. There are a number of interventions New Zealand could have chosen to take.
For example, a United Nations resolution which New Zealand co-sponsored (UNSC 2334) when it was a non-permanent member of the Security Council in 2015-16 required states to distinguish in their trading arrangements between Israeli settlements in the Occupied West Bank and the rest of Israel.
New Zealand could have extended this to all trading arrangements with Israel.
Diplomatic pressure needed
Diplomatic pressure could have been put on Israel by expelling the Israeli ambassador to New Zealand. Finally, New Zealand could have shown well-needed solidarity with Palestine by conferring statehood recognition.
In contrast, Swarbrick is looking to bring her member’s Bill to Parliament to apply sanctions against Israel for its ongoing illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza).
The context is the UN General Assembly’s support for the ICJ’s recent report which requires that Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem comes to an end.
New Zealand, along with 123 other general assembly members, supported the ICJ decision. It is now up to UN states to live up to what they voted for.
Swarbrick’s Bill, the Unlawful Occupation of Palestine Sanctions Bill, responds to this request, in the absence of any intervention by the New Zealand government. The Bill is based on the Russian Sanctions Act (2022), brought forward by then Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta, to apply pressure on Russia to cease its military invasion of Ukraine.
While Swarbrick’s Bill has the full support of the opposition MPs from Labour and Te Pāti Māori she needs six government MPs to support the Bill going forward for its first reading.
Andrea Vance, in a recent article in the Sunday Star-Times, called Swarbrick’s Bill “grandstanding”. Vance argues that the Greens’ Bill adopts “simplistic moral assumptions about the righteousness of the oppressed [but] ignores the complexity of the conflict.”
‘Confict complexity’ not complicated
The “complexity of the conflict” is a recurring theme which dresses up a brutal and illegal occupation by Israel over the Palestinians, as complicated.
It is hardly complicated. The history tells us so. In 1947, the UN supported the partition of Palestine, against the will of the indigenous Palestinian people, who comprised 70 perent of the population and owned 94 percent of the land.
Palestine’s historical land shrinking from Zionist colonisation . . . From 1947 until 2025. Map: Geodesic/Mura Assoud 2021
In 1948, Jewish paramilitary groups drove more than 700,000 Palestinian people out of their homeland into bordering countries (Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, the UAE) and beyond, where they remain as refugees.
Finally, the 1967 illegal occupation by Israel of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. This occupation, which multiple UN resolutions has termed illegal, is now over 58 years old.
This is not “complicated”. One nation state, Israel, exercises total power over a people who have been dispossessed from their land and who simply have no power.
It is the unwillingness of countries like New Zealand and its Anglosphere/Five-Eyes allies (United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia) and the inability of the UN to enforce its resolutions on Israel, which makes it “complicated”.
Historian on Gaza genocide
One of Israel’s most distinguished historians, Emeritus Professor Avi Shlaim at Oxford University, in his recently published book Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine, now chooses to call the situation in Gaza “genocide”.
In arriving at this position, he points to the language and narratives being adopted by Israeli politicians:
“Israeli President Isaac Herzog proclaimed that there are no innocents in Gaza. No innocents among the 50,000 people who were killed and nearly 20,000 children.
“There are quotes from [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] that are genocidal, as well as from his former Minister of Defence, Yoav Gallant, who said we are up against ‘human animals’.
“I hesitated to call things genocide before October 2023, but what tipped the balance for me was when Israel stopped all humanitarian aid into Gaza. They are using starvation as a weapon of war. That’s genocide.”
There is growing concern among commentators about the ability of international rules-based order to function and hold individuals and states to account.
Institutions such as the UN, the ICJ and the ICC are simply unable to enforce their decisions. This should not come as a surprise, however, as the structure of the UN system, established at the end of the Second World War was designed to be weak by the victors, with regard to its enforcement ability.
Time NZ supports determinations
It is time that New Zealand supported these same institutions by honouring and looking to enforce their determinations.
Accordingly, New Zealand needs to play its part in holding Israel to account for the atrocities it is inflicting on the Palestinian people and stand behind and support the Palestinian right to self-determination.
Swarbrick is absolutely right to introduce her Bill.
At the very least it says that New Zealand does care about the plight of the Palestinian people and is willing to stand behind them. It is the morally correct thing to do and incumbent on the government to provide support to Swarbrick’s Bill — and not just six of its members.
John Hobbs is a doctoral candidate at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (NCPACS) at the University of Otago. This article was first published by the Otago Daily Times and is republished with the author’s permission.
