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  • When Mark Zuckerberg terminated Meta’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs for hiring and training employees and procuring suppliers in January 2025, he forged “inroads with the incoming Trump administration,” abandoned Meta’s founding ethos of open innovation, and dramatically realigned how the tech giant will now do business, as critics like Bärí A. Williams, former lead counsel for Meta (then Facebook) and creator of its now-dissolved Supplier Diversity program, noted. Zuckerberg’s changes play right into the ultra-conservative presidential handbook, Project 2025, with potentially devastating consequences for the safety of numerous marginalized communities.

    The supplier diversity program was meant to accomplish multiple goals, including creating economic opportunities for marginalized communities and mitigating gentrification caused by Facebook’s expanding headquarters into East Palo Alto’s Black and brown communities. However, by incentivizing its employees with $10,000 bonuses to move into East Palo Alto, Facebook increased traffic congestion and disproportionately drove up rents in the area. As a result, many of the city’s historic, working-class population faced evictions and other forced move-outs.

    Then, in only a matter of weeks, Meta dismantled Facebook DEI programs that had taken years to build. Zuckerberg, of course, has the prerogative to change his company’s course. However, politically motivated decisions are often made during national swings of the partisan pendulum. In the inevitable event that the pendulum swings back in the opposite direction, Meta will find that its scrapped programs will be hard to recover. “The trust of users, employees, and suppliers has been destroyed,” said Williams.

    Mirroring Meta’s change in corporate policies, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced that they are ending both internal and external DEI efforts, work on immigration reform, and racial equity grantmaking, citing the “shifting regulatory and legal landscape.” In a recent survey, many leaders in corporate philanthropy indicated that they plan to reduce emphasis on racial equality (24 percent) and gender equality (22 percent) efforts in response to the trend, reflecting “a broader recalibration of corporate diversity strategies amid heightened scrutiny and pushback” that is being driven by “political polarization, legislative actions targeting diversity programs and race- or gender-specific philanthropic efforts, and intensifying stakeholder debates over the role of corporations in addressing social issues.”

    The FCC goes full MAGA

    Accusations from conservatives that their online content had been unfairly targeted for political reasons presumably factored into Zuckerberg’s decision to do away with fact-checking and other changes to Meta’s approach to content moderation. Studies have shown, however, that although posts by conservatives had, indeed, been taken down more frequently, this was not due to political beliefs. Rather, take-downs were spurred by the promotion of false claims, sharing of links to low-quality news sources, and the posting of hateful speech and imagery that violated community standards. FCC Commissioner and Trump’s chief censor, Brendan Carr, the author of Project 2025’s chapter on the FCC, would have the public believe that social media moderation practices infringe on First Amendment rights, as he asserted in a November 2024 letter to the Big Tech companies. Unless the government was explicitly involved in those takedowns, however, the decisions of private corporations have no First Amendment implications.

    Meta’s overhaul of its fact-checking, content moderation, and DEI policies appears to have been motivated by the desire to proactively align itself with Trump administration ideology. Former Facebook employees who served on Meta’s DEI and trust and safety teams say this shift was “a long time in the making.” In 2024, for example, Sheryl Sandberg stepped down from Meta’s board of directors, to be replaced by the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship organization, Dana White, “who leads the MAGA movements’ ultra-masculine sports league,” illustrating one of the steps that led to Meta’s current right turn.

    In May 2024, Meta hired Dustin Carmack, former Heritage Foundation fellow and author of Project 2025’s Intelligence Community chapter, to assist with the development of Meta’s new approach to content moderation across all of its platforms, effectively intertwining Project 2025’s governmental priorities with Meta’s corporate policies and goals. Carr’s letter to Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet (which owns Google), Tim Cook of Apple, and Satya Nandella of Microsoft (but not Musk) referred to them and their fact-checking, content moderation, and DEI practices as a “censorship cartel” that infringes on Americans’ right to free speech. In February 2025, Carr also issued a letter to Comcast, accusing the corporation of using DEI initiatives to impose discrimination (ostensibly against White people).

    Trump delivers on Project 2025

    The Global Project for Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) has warned that Meta’s new policies “align directly with Project 2025’s blueprint for dismantling” what Project 2025 identifies as “government censorship infrastructure.” Project 2025 perpetuates a manufactured moral panic around the assertion—unsupported by evidence—that “anti-white racism” is among the biggest threats to civil rights. The right-wing presidential playbook promotes White Christian Nationalism and involves plans to end the use of terms that allegedly “deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights,” including language for gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, and reproductive rights, GPAHE reported.

    Even though Trump said throughout the campaign season that he knew nothing about Project 2025, on January 20, 2025, he signed an executive gender order declaring there are only two sexes—defined biologically as male and female, following Project 2025’s plans to end the “DEI apparatus.” The executive order requires the federal government to use the term “sex” instead of “gender,” and will be reflected in all government-issued identification and other federal documents. The White House has also issued a ban on the use of pronouns in federal employees’ email signatures and on team communication platforms like Slack.

    In response to guidance issued by the Office of Personnel Management, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) ordered researchers and scientists to pause or remove the publication of research with any of the following forbidden terms, “gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female,” creating challenges to “publish research on diseases that disproportionately impact groups who can no longer be named.”

    Macho fashions for the autocrats

    Trump’s gender order coincides with Silicon Valley’s “macho makeover,” with Zuckerberg and his tech bros Musk and Bezos “dressing like titans, strongmen, and emperors.” As Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan, “A culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits,” provoking accusations of toxic masculinity.

    Typically understood to encompass how men are “culturally trained and socially pressured to behave,” toxic masculinity is typically characterized by toughness, anti-femininity, and power. Zuckerberg’s endorsement of aggression “sends an even stronger message that women aren’t welcome,” wrote Ashley Morgan, a masculinities scholar at Cardiff Metropolitan University. The same point holds for nonbinary individuals, who might well wonder where they fit into Zuckerberg’s hypermasculine worldview.

    The technogarchy “have long been aligning themselves with mythmaking, macho masculinity narratives,” and their new fashion aesthetic is not simply a trend, reported Amy Francombe, but a warning of “the consolidation of power in the tech industry” and its increased collaboration with the US government. “Zuckerberg’s style shift says something about a specific group of American billionaires who are aligning themselves with what looks to be a new political order within the United States,” Benjamin Wild of the Manchester Fashion Institute told Wired.

    In Trump’s second reign—indeed, Trump fancies himself a king—replete with displays of strong-man entitlement, wealth, and misogyny, the masculinization of Big Tech also signals a normalization of patriarchal power; that is, men’s power over and exclusion of women and gender nonconforming persons throughout sociopolitical and economic systems built by men. Wild described “parallels with medieval royal courts, where members of the aristocracy competed among themselves, often in what they wore and how they consumed, for the attention and patronage of the ruler.”

    Policies for safety obliterated

    The purpose of hate speech policies is to keep all users safe, not to “put a target on the backs of one historically marginalized group,” said Jenni Olson, Senior Director of the Social Media Safety program at GLAAD. According to 404 Media interviews with five current Meta employees, many employees are furious over the company’s content moderation changes that now allow users on its platforms to say that LGBTQ people are “abnormal” and “mentally ill.” This, explained Olson, is anti-LGBTQ dog whistle language. Meta’s extreme-right posturing mirrors the deluge of anti-trans and anti-DEI efforts emanating from the Trump White House, and the new policies and changes “send a clear message that the tech giant and its leadership may actually hold (and espouse) bigoted, homophobic, and transphobic beliefs about LGBTQ people,” Olson warned.

    Proponents of the DOGE takedown of DEI espouse a return to an allegedly merit-based society, but they ignore the fact that permitting, or even encouraging, hateful rhetoric on social media platforms can increase the likelihood of real world consequences, including threats and physical violence against members of marginalized communities. Meta may argue that the hateful rhetoric online doesn’t meet the criteria for hate speech established in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). Still, continual exposure to hateful ideas and language has been shown to result in acts of “stochastic terrorism,” the term used by scholars and law enforcement to describe how “ideologically driven hate speech increases the likelihood that people will violently and unpredictably attack the targets of vicious claims.”

    Although stochastic terrorism is statistically predictable, when such acts of violence will occur and who will carry them out are not. For example, social media accounts such as Libs of TikTok and others spread virulent messages about the LGBTQ community that have led to bomb threats against Planet Fitness, public schools, libraries, and the firebombing of a progressive church in Plano, Texas.

    Banned education, manufactured ignorance

    The United States population is widely uneducated when it comes to LGBTQ culture, history, rights, and issues, particularly with regard to the transgender community.

    Either because LGBTQ subject matter is not taught, or is banned outright, in US classrooms, the formation of opinions on the LGBTQ community is disproportionately shaped by transphobic content on social media. A void of factual information about the transgender community will likely be exacerbated by Meta’s changes, which will promote increased circulation of disinformation and misinformation on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The trajectory of hate speech on X, after it was acquired by Musk and remodeled to reflect his distorted conception of “free speech,” provides a cautionary example. As with X, Meta’s new policies will promote astounding increases in racist, homophobic, Islamaphobic, antisemitic, and misogynistic speech on Meta platforms.

    Pushback and boycotts

    Although the number of companies abandoning DEI policies is growing, according to Fortune reporter Alena Botros, some prominent corporations, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Costco, Salesforce, Apple, and Microsoft, are maintaining their diversity policies. Even the NFL has doubled-down on its commitment to DEI. And some employees at Meta are subtly pushing back “against their billionaire Big Tech boss,” Botros reported, by undertaking actions such as bringing tampons into the men’s restrooms at Meta.

    Similarly, a movement is forming that encourages Tesla owners to get rid of their vehicles in protest of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and “the wholesale incursions into government systems” by its de facto leader, Elon Musk. For example, singer Sheryl Crow got rid of her Tesla and donated the money to NPR, the public radio outlet that, Crow posted on X, is under threat by the Trump Administration. As per Project 2025’s promises and Trump’s executive order, PBS has shuttered its DEI office; and although NPR has a dedicated DEI office too, it has not yet announced its plans. PBS and NPR haven’t escaped Carr’s lettersthe one to them claims that the public media outlets were in violation of their noncommercial status by publicizing their sponsors.

    On February 19, 2025, Pew Research published findings from a survey of Americans’ opinions of Musk and Zuckerberg. The gist is that more Republicans view Musk favorably than Democrats; and views of Zuckerberg are mostly unfavorable among both parties. Polls from the first months of 2025 show that Trump’s approval ratings are slipping, mainly owing to his overreach of executive power. With consumer confidence plunging, some Trump supporters may be regretting their choice.

    These findings may align with Bärí Williams’s advice “not to reward Meta with our engagement, our data, or their ability to earn ad revenue from us.” Invoking the history of the Civil Rights Movement, in which DEI has its roots, Williams described how boycotts were used to create safe spaces and entrepreneurial opportunities for marginalized communities. In her view, disengagement from Meta is the only way that Meta will feel the full consequences of the decision to abandon diversity. Author Caroline Sumlin wrote that, thanks to the earlier generation of civil rights activists who pressed on in the face of adversity, we should do the same now—not only for the present day but for future generations.

    The dismantling of DEI practices, fact-checking, and loosening of content moderation around hateful speech is in direct conflict with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Having pledged support for these principles, Meta continues to be responsible for respecting and protecting fundamental human rights even if doing so is not required by national law. Meta’s policy changes infringe on the human rights of others by actively encouraging discrimination across their platforms, refusing to address human rights linked to misinformation, and using “free speech” as rationale for human rights abuses.

    When a handful of major tech companies have a monopoly on the information space, they can effectively control the content we consume, make top-down determinations about what is deemed morally acceptable or historically accurate, and decide what information and viewpoints to preserve, omit, or alter. This can lead to a version of reality that reflects and promotes narrow corporate interests at the expense of the public good.

    To counter the twin threats of online hate speech and historical revisionism, users of these services should: develop an understanding of how information can be curated online through the use of algorithms that favor certain viewpoints over others; actively seek out information from a range of sources such as independent news, local media, and international outlets; and push for stronger regulations to ensure transparency and accountability in the digital space.

    1. First published at Project Censored.
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    In the fall of 2022, the New York Police Department began posting videos online to promote one of its latest initiatives: the Community Response Team, an elite unit formed under the city’s new mayor, Eric Adams.

    Punctuated by dramatic music and quick cuts, the first video, dubbed “True Blue NYPD Finest,” looked like the TV show “Cops.” Officers run and shout as they chase people joyriding on motorbikes and ATVs.

    One points a Taser at a motorcyclist and his passenger. Others tackle a rider, pinning him to the ground. Still others chase a motorbike onto the sidewalk, endangering nearby pedestrians.

    Within the NYPD, department officials were disturbed by what they saw. “I threw red flags,” said Matthew Pontillo, a former chief who noted what he called “constitutional concerns” in the footage. But Pontillo and two former department executives say that when they raised the videos and the officers’ conduct with one of the unit’s leaders, he pushed back and complained to an unlikely party: the mayor himself.

    If Adams was troubled by the unit’s actions, he hasn’t shown it. Instead, for more than two years, the mayor has repeatedly championed the CRT and his allies who run it, even as NYPD officials have warned its policing has been too aggressive.

    In 2023, for example, Pontillo wrote a scathing internal audit after finding that some CRT officers were wrongfully stopping New Yorkers and failing to document the incidents. Weeks later, the mayor took to Instagram to boost the unit. “Turning out with the team,” he wrote, showing a photo of him wearing a wide smile and khaki pants, CRT’s official uniform.

    The mayor has been so closely connected to the unit, former senior officials said, that at one point he had special access to a livestream of the team’s body-worn cameras.

    “The unit effectively reported directly to City Hall,” recalled a former top NYPD official with direct knowledge of the interactions, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisal. “If you raised concerns, they would go directly to the mayor. All the time. It was insanity.”

    In 2023, Mayor Eric Adams posted a photo of himself with the Community Response Team, in which he wore the unit’s uniform, khaki pants. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

    In a few instances, after getting a call from one of the unit’s leaders, the mayor questioned department lawyers who objected to officers’ actions, another former official recalled. In one case, the mayor demanded to know the name of the lawyer and asked whether they were stating the law or just their opinions. The CRT leader, Kaz Daughtry, then ignored the lawyer’s objections, the official said. (Daughtry said he always cooperated with department lawyers.)

    The dynamic underscores a central irony around policing during the Adams administration: As a former police captain, Adams railed against the injustices of gung-ho policing; but as the mayor, he has embraced a unit that perpetuates it.

    Within the department, Adams’ views are clear. “Our mayor has given us the mandate to start playing offense out here,” one of CRT’s other leaders, John Chell, told a local TV station in 2023, months after the promotional videos.

    The CRT has played a central role in carrying out Adams’ public safety priorities, from breaking up college campus protests to cracking down on illegal motorcycles and shuttering unlicensed cannabis shops.

    The fallout for New Yorkers has been significant.

    An officer chasing unlicensed motorcyclists killed a rider after swerving into him, body-camera footage shows. A commander punched a driver and kicked him in the head, according to cellphone video posted to social media. Officers stopped a young man without apparent cause, according to the audit, and, when he complained, a supervisor slammed him into a car window.

    Body-Camera Footage Shows CRT Officer Shoving Man Into a Car Window (Body-camera video obtained by ProPublica)

    Watch video ➜

    The questionable conduct has sometimes extended into the bizarre. In November, a CRT officer repeatedly grabbed and squeezed a man’s genitals without searching him elsewhere, according to an investigation by the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board that was obtained by ProPublica. Police then cited the man for littering.

    “When you put your thumb on the scale, it tips the culture,” Pontillo said. “And that starts with the mayor.”

    Adams declined to be interviewed for this story. A mayoral spokesperson provided a statement that said, in part, “While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to public safety and we are always working to improve operations, CRT has been an important addition to the NYPD’s mission to ensure community members are both safe and feel safe.” She added that the mayor has always instructed the team to follow the guidance of department lawyers.

    ProPublica interviewed more than a dozen former and current members of the NYPD, reviewed internal department records and watched video footage of several police encounters.

    As Adams faces calls to resign over federal corruption charges, our reporting provides a new window into how the mayor has wielded power — and whom he’s entrusted to carry out his vision for public safety.

    Among them are Daughtry and Chell, longtime leaders of the CRT. The two are allies of the mayor and were photographed with him at a group lunch in Washington in January around President Donald Trump’s inauguration. An NYPD spokesperson said they were part of a department contingent that was there “to assist with security efforts.”

    Within law enforcement circles, Chell and Daughtry have long stirred controversy.

    Chell shot a young man in the back in 2008, killing him. He was not criminally charged and has denied any wrongdoing. Chell said he fired by accident, but a jury in a civil suit determined the shooting was intentional. He now holds the NYPD’s top uniformed position, where he oversees a wide swath of the department. (Chell did not respond to requests for comment.)

    Daughtry has been found by the Civilian Complaint Review Board to have repeatedly engaged in misconduct, including for pointing a gun and threatening to kill a motorcyclist. Adams recently chose him to be deputy mayor for public safety, a role that will likely place him at the center of the city’s response to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. (Daughtry did not respond to questions about his record. When the New York Daily News reported on it in 2023, he said, “At the end of the day, we have a job to do.”)

    Overall, more than half of the officers assigned to the CRT have been found to have engaged in misconduct at least once in their career, according to a ProPublica analysis of Civilian Complaint Review Board records. That compares with about 15% of officers across the NYPD. More than 40 have three or more cases of substantiated misconduct. The supervisor who shoved a man into the car window had 28.

    “It’s not like they’re taking the best of the best,” said a current senior officer who spoke with ProPublica on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. “They’re grabbing a bunch of cowboys and just letting them loose on the city.”

    A spokesperson for the NYPD touted the team’s record, saying it has confiscated nearly 4,000 motorbikes and ATVs, as well as hundreds of fake license plates and guns.

    But even department leaders have at times found it hard to track the team’s work.

    The 2023 audit of CRT, obtained by ProPublica, found that officers were going out on patrols even though they weren’t actually assigned to the team, making it difficult for commanders to track which officers were involved in particular actions. They were also frequently turning on their body-worn cameras too late to record full incidents, in violation of the patrol guide.

    A recent report by a city watchdog slammed the unit for its secrecy. Citing a “lack of public transparency,” the report noted CRT has no required training or policies on officers’ conduct. “The absence of clear rules,” the report concluded, “limits NYPD’s ability to effectively oversee CRT.”

    The NYPD spokesperson said Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who took office in November, is making changes. Among them, Tisch ordered hundreds of officers to return to their assigned units. “She will continue to review the department, including CRT, and make any changes necessary to ensure accountability and strengthen our ability to fight crime,” the spokesperson said.

    A Unit “Acting Recklessly”

    CRT Officer Drove Into Motorcyclist Samuel Williams (Body-camera video obtained and edited by ProPublica)

    Watch video ➜

    Samuel Williams died in 2023 after an encounter with the CRT that lasted about a second.

    It was Memorial Day weekend, and the Bronx man had gone riding on his motorbike after feeding his 6-year-old daughter breakfast and kissing her goodbye. He was crossing the University Heights bridge when CRT officers driving in the opposite direction spotted him.

    Unlicensed motorcyclists joyriding in the city have long been a nuisance to New Yorkers and of particular concern to Adams. “We need to hold these drivers accountable,” Adams said when first running for mayor.

    That day on the bridge, CRT officer Raymond Perez decided to take drastic action. Body-camera footage shows that he swerved his unmarked police car across the yellow line and into oncoming traffic, hitting Williams head-on and sending him flying through the air.

    Officers found Williams splayed across the hood of a nearby car, suffering horrific injuries. His right leg was bent unnaturally — the tibia so badly broken it pierced his jeans, according to a report from civilian investigators.

    In the body-camera footage, Williams can be heard screaming in pain. “Why would you all hit me?” he asks between moans. “For a fucking dirt bike, are you serious?” Williams begged the officers for help. Instead, they pushed him against the car hood and handcuffed him.

    Williams, seen here with his daughter, died after CRT officer Raymond Perez hit the motorcycle he was riding head-on. (Courtesy of the Williams Family)

    Perez did not respond to requests for comment, but the NYPD previously said the officer was trying to pull Williams over.

    Williams’ mother, Joyce Fogg, soon got a call that there had been an accident and her son was in the hospital. When Fogg arrived, she found police guarding Williams’ door and refusing to let anyone in. “They didn’t want nobody talking to him,” Fogg said.

    By the time Williams’ sister, Sha-Sha Prince, was allowed into the room, she recalled, “he was covered in a sheet.”

    After an autopsy, the New York medical examiner listed Williams’ cause of death as “complications following blunt injuries.”

    His family never heard from anyone at the NYPD. They did, however, get a bill from the city demanding $3,429.23 for the damage Williams caused to the police car when officers ran into him. (The bill was rescinded after the news organization The City reported it.)

    The family is now suing the city and the police. “It was CRT doing what they do, acting recklessly, and Sammy is not with us today as a result,” said their lawyer, Jaime Santana. (In a response to the suit, the city said Williams’ “culpable conduct caused or contributed, in whole or in part,” to his injuries.)

    The NYPD said Perez, as punishment, had forfeited 13 days of vacation. The department’s website shows the officer is still with the CRT.

    “We Will Avoid Mistakes of the Past”

    Adams has not always embraced aggressive police units. About 25 years ago, he launched a campaign to shutter one after its officers fired 41 shots at an unarmed man named Amadou Diallo. The killing was just the latest in a long trail of violence and abuse by the so-called Street Crimes Unit. Its motto was “We Own The Night.”

    At the time, Adams was a 38-year-old NYPD lieutenant and leader of a group of Black officers that spoke out against police brutality.

    To bring attention to the abuses, Adams orchestrated City Council testimony by a disguised officer who had been in the unit.

    He sat next to the officer as she laid out a pattern of rampant racism. The NYPD fired the officer an hour after her testimony. But Adams kept up his campaign, and the unit was eventually closed.

    Adams, right, at a City Council hearing in New York in 1999 when he was a 38-year-old NYPD lieutenant. He orchestrated the testimony of a disguised officer, center, from the Street Crimes Unit who spoke about racism within the unit. (Librado Romero/The New York Times/Redux)

    In the years that followed, Adams continued to push for change. He gave key testimony in a historic lawsuit that challenged the NYPD’s use of a tactic known as stop-and-frisk, where officers were stopping, questioning and frisking residents without reasonable suspicion. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Adams spoke powerfully about how police leadership needs to step up. “We have to create a culture of zero tolerance,” Adams said. “That accountability really starts at the top.”

    But Adams had a different focus when he ran for mayor a year later. Amid concern over rising crime, Adams positioned himself as a former officer who would keep New Yorkers safe. One of his main proposals was to take guns off the streets by bringing back a refashioned Street Crimes Unit. “We should not throw out the baby with the bathwater,” Adams said. “We can do it right.”

    After he took office, Adams announced the creation of new roving anti-crime units. “We will avoid mistakes of the past,” Adams said at a press conference. “These officers will be identifiable as NYPD, they will have body cameras and they will have enhanced training and oversight.”

    The units were dubbed Neighborhood Safety Teams, and officers in them did get more oversight.

    But a few months later, Daughtry, Chell and another Adams ally created the CRT. The unit was essentially off the books — it had never gone through the NYPD’s process for creating teams, there was no announcement at its debut and many of its members weren’t formally assigned to the group.

    “It was one of those teams where everyone is a ghost,” said Pontillo, the former chief.

    Even top NYPD officials were kept in the dark. When they eventually learned of the CRT’s existence, they were befuddled, noting the launch of the similar much-publicized effort at nearly the same time. “What’s the difference between NSTs and CRTs?” said one of the former NYPD officials. “If you can answer that, lemme know.”

    CRT Commander Punched Unarmed Driver and Kicked Him in the Head (Cellphone video obtained by ProPublica)

    Watch video ➜

    Operating in the Shadows

    The CRT began to make waves after the department started posting videos in the fall of 2022. In one 38-minute spot, Chell described how the team was created to address so-called quality-of-life issues, such as unlicensed motorbikes and ATVs.

    “We attacked quality of life,” Chell says. “Our Community Response Team was all over the city of New York. And I’ll tell you this, it’s been highly, highly successful.” As he speaks, the video shows roughly a dozen CRT members, with Adams standing in the middle.

    A still from a CRT promotional video showing Adams standing among members of the team. (NYPD)

    By the spring of 2023, it was not only NYPD officials who were asking questions. Pontillo, a top department oversight official at the time, said the federal monitor’s office charged with overseeing the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk called him to ask about the CRT. Pontillo told ProPublica that he went to Chell, who told him, wrongly, the team was only a short-lived experiment.

    “There was an effort to conceal the reality and conduct of CRT,” Pontillo recalled.

    Neither Chell nor the NYPD responded to questions about the exchange.

    Another instance of secrecy involved body-worn cameras. Early in 2023, the team had purchased new models that allowed users to send live feeds to select individuals — including the mayor — but unit leaders had not informed others at the NYPD, according to an official’s notes from the time.

    For weeks, videos from the new cameras were not stored in the NYPD’s main database for footage, rendering it invisible to the department lawyers responsible for sharing evidence in criminal and civil cases. “Footage wasn’t being produced for discovery,” recalled one former department executive. “We lost our minds.”

    Jerome Greco, head of digital forensics at Legal Aid Society, said failing to turn over the footage “could get cases dismissed. It could have significant consequences, and frankly it should.”

    It was after the body-camera issue that Pontillo wrote his audit of CRT, which flagged the team’s aggressive policing. Adams’ first police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, ordered commanders to gather and discuss it. But the conversation didn’t go far.

    After meeting with the mayor that same day, Sewell resigned with no explanation. She did not respond to requests for comment for this story. But a former official close to her said she had grown tired of being undermined by Adams and his deputies.

    “I don’t think Sewell resigned because of CRTs,” the former official said. “But it was another thing on the list.”

    As for Pontillo, he said he was offered a choice: be demoted five ranks or retire. He chose the latter. The NYPD has not commented. The department previously told the news organization The City that leadership changes are common when a new commissioner arrives, as happened here.

    CRT members, in their trademark khakis, breached Hamilton Hall at Columbia University on April 30, 2024. (Caitlin Ochs/Reuters) Mayoral Priorities

    Over the past year, the CRT’s actions have often reflected the mayor’s priorities.

    Last spring, for example, Adams became the public face of opposition to demonstrations at Columbia University over the war in Gaza. Blaming “professional outside agitators,” he said, “This must end now.” That night, khaki-wearing CRT officers led the way in breaching a building that had been barricaded by protesters. The NYPD made a video of the operation, set to dramatic music.

    Days later, the mayor announced a new initiative to close down unlicensed cannabis shops. The CRT was again at the forefront of the operation.

    Surveillance footage from one store shows officers jumping over the counter to grab and arrest the shopkeeper after he had asked to see a court order. “When a cop tells you to do something, you fucking do it,” one officer said.

    It is difficult to tally the number of civilians who have had these types of encounters with the CRT. The NYPD does not disclose data about the team, as it does for most other units.

    But over the past two years, New Yorkers have filed at least 200 complaints of improper use of force by CRT members, according to Civilian Complaint Review Board records obtained by ProPublica. Among them was the incident with Williams, the motorcyclist who died. The similarly sized Neighborhood Safety Teams had about half as many complaints.

    Others have also been hurt by the team’s high-risk tactics. About a month after police ran into Williams, Daughtry and other officers pursued an alleged car thief into New Jersey, according to an internal report. Daughtry turned his car on the road in an attempt to block the driver, who slammed into it. The man was seriously injured after he fled the scene and jumped over the side of the highway.

    The report noted that Daughtry did not have his camera on during the chase.

    Kaz Daughtry was just tapped to be Adams’ deputy mayor for public safety. (Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times/Redux)

    Chuck Wexler, who has studied chases as head of the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum, said Daughtry and the others shouldn’t have even started a pursuit. Given that there hadn’t been a violent crime, Wexler said, “why would you engage in a high risk chase that puts officers and civilians in danger?”

    Neither Daughtry nor the NYPD responded to questions about the incident.

    Tisch, the new commissioner, ordered officers in January to curtail chases. Meanwhile, Daughtry has not been punished, according to disciplinary records.

    Instead, he was promoted in July 2023, about two weeks after the chase, for what his official bio described as his “significant contributions as a leader and trailblazer.”

    “Let me tell you,” Adams said at a press conference last November, “Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry, you don’t realize how much this young man has really changed the game of policing in this city.”

    In January, asked by an interviewer on YouTube about Daughtry, the mayor said: “Love Kaz, man.”

    Daughtry, just named as a deputy mayor, regularly boasts on social media about the CRT. One Instagram post from last summer showed dozens of officers posing in Central Park. “Your Community Response Teams own the night,” Daughtry wrote. It was an echo of the motto of the street crime unit that Adams had once fought to shutter.

    Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

    Do you have information about the NYPD or policing that we should know? Contact Eric Umansky at eric.umansky@propublica.org or securely on Signal at EricUmansky.04.


    This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Eric Umansky.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.


  • This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Committee to Protect Journalists denounces Monday’s court ruling to revoke the house arrest of Guatemalan journalist José Rubén Zamora and send him back to prison.

    “The decision to return journalist José Rubén Zamora to prison is a blatant act of judicial persecution. This case represents a dangerous escalation in the repression of independent journalism,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator, in São Paulo. “We call on authorities to release him immediately, stop using the justice system to silence critical journalism, and to respect press freedom and due process.”

    Zamora’s return to jail on money laundering charges that have been widely condemned as politically motivated was ordered by Judge Erick García, who had initially granted Zamora house arrest on Oct. 18, 2024. García said during Monday’s hearing that he and his staff had been threatened and intimidated by unknown individuals, according to a report by Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre.

    Zamora, 67, was first arrested on July 29, 2022, and spent more than 800 days in pretrial detention before being placed under house arrest. A pioneering investigative journalist, Zamora has faced decades of harassment and persecution for his work, which CPJ has extensively documented. He received CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award in 1995 for his commitment to independent journalism. His newspaper, elPeriódico, was forced to shut down in 2023.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

    The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – March 10, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.


    This content originally appeared on KPFA – The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.


  • This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Woman at rally supporting peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Berlin, Germany.  (Photo: Reuters)

    When European Union leaders met in Brussels on February 6 to discuss the war in Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron called this time “a turning point in history.” Western leaders agree that this is an historic moment when decisive action is needed, but what kind of action depends on their interpretation of the nature of this moment.

    Is this the beginning of a new Cold War between the U.S., NATO and Russia or the end of one? Will Russia and the West remain implacable enemies for the foreseeable future, with a new iron curtain between them through what was once the heart of Ukraine? Or can the United States and Russia resolve the disputes and hostility that led to this war in the first place, so as to leave Ukraine with a stable and lasting peace?

    Some European leaders see this moment as the beginning of a long struggle with Russia, akin to the beginning of the Cold War in 1946, when Winston Churchill warned that “an iron curtain has descended” across Europe.

    On March 2, echoing Churchill, European Council President Ursula von der Leyen declared that Europe must turn Ukraine into a “steel porcupine.” President Zelenskyy has said he wants up to 200,000 European troops on the eventual ceasefire line between Russia and Ukraine to “guarantee” any peace agreement, and insists that the United States must provide a “backstop,” meaning a commitment to send U.S. forces to fight in Ukraine if war breaks out again.

    Russia has repeatedly said it won’t agree to NATO forces being based in Ukraine under any guise. “We explained today that the appearance of armed forces from the same NATO countries, but under a false flag, under the flag of the European Union or under national flags, does not change anything in this regard,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on February 18. “Of course this is unacceptable to us.”

    But the U.K. is persisting in a campaign to recruit a “coalition of the willing,” the same term the U.S. and U.K. coined for the list of countries they persuaded to support the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. In that case, only Australia, Denmark and Poland took small parts in the invasion, Costa Rica publicly insisted on being removed from the list, and the term was widely lampooned as the “coalition of the billing” because the U.S. recruited so many countries to join it by promising them lucrative foreign aid deals.

    Far from the start of a new Cold War, President Trump and other leaders see this moment as more akin to the end of the original Cold War, when U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met in Reykjavik in Iceland in 1986 and began to bridge the divisions caused by 40 years of Cold War hostility.

    Like Trump and Putin today, Reagan and Gorbachev were unlikely peacemakers. Gorbachev had risen through the ranks of the Soviet Communist Party to become its General Secretary and Soviet Premier in March 1985, in the midst of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and he didn’t begin to withdraw Soviet forces from Afghanistan until 1988. Reagan oversaw an unprecedented Cold War arms build-up, a U.S.-backed genocide in Guatemala and covert and proxy wars throughout Central America. And yet Gorbachev and Reagan are now widely remembered as peacemakers.

    While Democrats deride Trump as a Putin stooge, in his first term in office Trump was actually responsible for escalating the Cold War with Russia. After the Pentagon had milked its absurd, self-fulfilling “War on Terror” for trillions of dollars, it was Trump and his psychopathic Defense Secretary, General “Mad Dog” Mattis, who declared the shift back to strategic competition with Russia and China as the Pentagon’s new gravy train in their 2018 National Defense Strategy. It was also Trump who lifted President Obama’s restrictions on sending offensive weapons to Ukraine.

    Trump’s head-spinning about-turn in U.S. policy has left its European allies with whiplash and reversed the roles they each have played for generations. France and Germany have traditionally been the diplomats and peacemakers in the Western alliance, while the U.S. and U.K. have been infected with a chronic case of war fever that has proven resistant to a long string of military defeats and catastrophic impacts on every country that has fallen prey to their warmongering.

    In 2003, France’s Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin led the opposition to the invasion of Iraq in the UN Security Council. France, Germany and Russia issued a joint statement to say that they would “not let a proposed resolution pass that would authorize the use of force. Russia and France, as permanent members of the Security Council, will assume all their responsibilities on this point.”

    At a press conference in Paris with German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, French President Jacques Chirac said, “Everything must be done to avoid war… As far as we’re concerned, war always means failure.”

    As recently as 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, it was once again the U.S. and U.K. that rejected and blocked peace negotiations in favor of a long war, while FranceGermany and Italy continued to call for new negotiations, even as they gradually fell in line with the U.S. long war policy.

    Former German Chancellor Schröder took part in the peace negotiations in Turkey in March and April 2022, and flew to Moscow at Ukraine’s request to meet with Putin. In an interview with Berliner Zeitung in 2023, Schröder confirmed that the peace talks only failed “because everything was decided in Washington.”

    With Biden still blocking new negotiations in 2023, one of the interviewers asked Schröder “Do you think you can resume your peace plan?”

    Schröder replied, “Yes, and the only ones who can initiate this are France and Germany… Macron and Scholz are the only ones who can talk to Putin. Chirac and I did the same in the Iraq war. Why can’t support for Ukraine be combined with an offer of talks to Russia? The arms deliveries are not a solution for eternity. But no one wants to talk. Everyone sits in trenches. How many more people have to die?”

    Since 2022, President Macron and a Thatcherite team of iron ladies – European Council President von der Leyen; former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock; and Estonia’s former prime minister Kaja Kallas, now the EU’s foreign policy chief – have promoted a new militarization of Europe, egged on from behind the scenes by European and U.S. arms manufacturers.

    Has the passage of time, the passing of the World War II generation and the distortion of history washed away the historical memory of two world wars from a continent that was destroyed by war only 80 years ago? Where is the next generation of French and German diplomats in the tradition of de Villepin and Schröder today? How can sending German tanks to fight in Ukraine, and now in Russia itself, fail to remind Russians of previous German invasions and solidify support for the war? And won’t the call for Europe to confront Russia by moving from a “welfare state to a warfare state” only feed the rise of the European hard right?

    So are the new European militarists reading the historical moment correctly? Or are they jumping on the bandwagon of a disastrous Cold War that could, as Biden and Trump have warned, lead to World War III?

    When Trump’s foreign policy team met with their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia on February 18, ending the war in Ukraine was the second part of the three-part plan they agreed on. The first was to restore full diplomatic relations between the United States and Russia, and the third was to work on a series of other problems in U.S.-Russian relations.

    The order of these three stages is interesting, because, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted, it means that the negotiations over Ukraine will be the first test of restored relations between the U.S. and Russia.

    If the negotiations for peace in Ukraine are successful, they can lead to further negotiations over restoring arms control treaties, nuclear disarmament and cooperation on other global problems that have been impossible to resolve in a world stuck in a zombie-like Cold War that powerful interests would not allow to die.

    It was a welcome change to hear Secretary Rubio say that the post-Cold War unipolar world was an anomaly and that now we have to adjust to the reality of a multipolar world. But if Trump and his hawkish advisers are just trying to restore U.S. relations with Russia as part of a “reverse Kissinger” scheme to isolate China, as some analysts have suggested, that would perpetuate America’s debilitating geopolitical crisis instead of solving it.

    The United States and our friends in Europe have a new chance to make a clean break from the three-way geopolitical power struggle between the United States, Russia and China that has hamstrung the world since the 1970s, and to find new roles and priorities for our countries in the emerging multipolar world of the 21st Century.

    We hope that Trump and European leaders can recognize the crossroads at which they are standing, and the chance history is giving them to choose the path of peace. France and Germany in particular should remember the wisdom of Dominique de Villepin, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder in the face of U.S. and British plans for aggression against Iraq in 2003.

    This could be the beginning of the end of the permanent state of war and Cold War that has held the world in its grip for more than a century. Ending it would allow us to finally prioritize the progress and cooperation we so desperately need to solve the other critical problems the whole world is facing in the 21st Century. As General Milley said back in November 2022 when he called for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, we must “seize the moment.”

    The post Is This the Beginning or the End of a New Cold War? first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • There has been a prolonged furore over the BBC’s craven decision to ban a documentary on life in Gaza under Israel’s bombs after it incensed Israel and its lobbyists by, uniquely, humanising the enclave’s children.

    The English-speaking child narrator, 13-year-old Abdullah, who became the all-too-visible pretext for pulling the film Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone because his father is a technocrat in the enclave’s Hamas government, hit back last week.

    He warned that the BBC had betrayed him and Gaza’s other children, and that the state broadcaster would be responsible were anything to happen to him

    His fears are well-founded, given that Israel has a long track record of executing those with the most tenuous of connections to Hamas – as well as the enclave’s children, often with small, armed drones that swarm through its airspace.

    The noisy clamour over How to Survive a Warzone has dominated headlines, overshadowing another new BBC documentary on Gaza – this one a three-part, blockbuster series on the history of Israel and Palestine – that has received none of the controversy.

    And for good reason.

    Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October, whose final episode airs this Monday, is such a travesty, so discredited by the very historical events it promises to explain, that it earns a glowing, five-star review from the Guardian.

    It “speaks to everyone that matters”, the liberal daily gushes. And that’s precisely the problem.

    What we get, as a result, is the very worst in BBC establishment TV: talking heads reading from the same implausibly simplistic script, edited and curated to present western officials and their allies in the most sympathetic light possible.

    Which is no mean feat, given the subject matter: nearly eight decades of Israel’s ethnic cleansing, dispossession, military occupation and siege of the Palestinian people, supported by the United States.

    But this documentary series on the region’s history should be far more controversial than the film about Gaza’s children. Because this one breathes life back into a racist western narrative – one that made the genocide in Gaza possible, and justifies Israel’s return this month to using mass starvation as a weapon of war against the Palestinian people.

    ‘Honest broker’ fiction

    The Road to 7th October presents an all-too-familiar story.

    The Palestinians are divided geographically and ideologically – how or why is never properly grappled with – between the incompetent, corrupt leadership of Fatah under Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, and the militant, terrorist leadership of Hamas in Gaza.

    Israel tries various peace initiatives under leaders Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. These failures propel the more hardline Benjamin Netanyahu to power.

    The United States is the star of the show, of course. Its officials tell a story of Washington desperately trying to bring together the two parties, Israel and Fatah (the third party, Hamas, is intentionally sidelined), but finds itself constantly hamstrung by bad luck and the intransigence of those involved.

    Yes, you read that right. This documentary really does resurrect the Washington as “honest broker” fiction – a myth that was supposed to have been laid to rest a quarter of a century ago, after the Oslo accords collapsed.

    The film-makers are so lost to the reality in Israel and Palestine that they imagine they can credibly keep Washington perched on a pedestal even after we have all spent the past 16 months watching, first, President Biden arm Israel’s “plausible” genocide in Gaza, killing many tens of thousands of Palestinians, and then President Trump formulate an illegal plan to ethnically cleanse the enclave of its surviving Palestinian population to develop it as a luxury “waterfront property”.

    A viewing of a short, Trump-endorsed, AI-generated promo video for a glitzy, Palestinian-free “Trump Gaza”, built on the crushed bodies of the enclave’s children, should be enough to dispel any remaining illusions about Washington’s neutrality on the matter.

    Enduring mystery

    This documentary, like its BBC predecessors – most notably on Russia and Ukraine, and the implosion of Yugoslavia – excels at offering a detailed examination of tree bark without ever stepping back far enough to see the shape of the forest.

    The words “apartheid”, “siege” and “colonialism” – the main lenses through which one can explain what has been happening to the Palestinian people for a century or more – do not figure at all.

    There is a single allusion to the events of 1948, when a self-declared Jewish state was violently founded as a colonial project on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.

    Or as the documentary delicately puts it: “Millions of their people [the Palestinians] had been made refugees by decades of conflict.”

    As ever, when the plight of the Palestinians is discussed, the passive voice is put to sterling use. Millions of Palestinians were accidentally ethnically cleansed, it seems. Who was responsible is a mystery.

    In fact, most of Gaza’s population are descended from Palestinian families expelled by the newly declared state of Israel from their homes in 1948. They were penned up in a tiny piece of land by European colonisers in the same manner as earlier generations of European colonisers confined the Native Americans to reservations.

    Even when the term “occupation” appears, as it does on the odd occasion, it is presented as some vague, unexamined, security-related problem the US, Israel and the Fatah leadership are engaged in trying to fix.

    The settlements are mentioned too, but only as the backdrop to land-for-peace calculations that never come to fruition as the basis for an elusive “peace”.

    In other words, this is the reheating of a phoney tale that Israel and the US have been trying to sell to western publics for many decades.

    It was holed well below the water line last year by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest court in the world. It ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem was illegal, that Israeli rule over the Palestinians was a form of apartheid, and that its illegal settlements needed to be dismantled immediately.

    That is the forest all the documentary’s furious bark-studying is designed to avoid.

    Path to genocide

    The makers of Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October choose to begin their time line on an obscure date: 19 August 2003, when a Palestinian suicide bomber blows up a bus in Jerusalem, killing 23 Israelis.

    Why then?

    The programme, despite its title, is not really about the “Palestinians”. Note that the BBC dares not refer to “Palestine”.

    The true focus is on Hamas and its rise to power in Gaza, as viewed chiefly by the other parties: the US, Israel and Fatah.

    Starting the story in 2003 with a bus bombing, the programme can navigate “The Road to 7thOctober” in ways that assist the self-serving narratives those other parties wish to tell.

    On the Palestinian side, the story opens with a terror attack. On Israel’s side, it opens with Sharon deciding, in response, to dismantle the illegal settlements in Gaza and withdraw Israeli troops from the enclave.

    This entirely arbitrary date allows the programme makers to create an entirely misleading narrative arc: of Israel supposedly ending the occupation and trying to make peace, while being met with ever greater terrorism from Hamas, culminating in the 7 October attack.

    In short, it perpetuates the long-standing colonial narrative – contrary to all evidence – of Israel as the good guys, and the Palestinians as the bad guys.

    In an alternate universe, the BBC might have offered us a far more informative, relevant documentary called Israel and Palestine: The Path to Genocide.

    Don’t hold your breath waiting for that one to air.

    Dystopian movie

    In fact, Sharon’s so-called Disengagement Plan of 2005 had nothing to do with ending the occupation or peace-making. It was a trap laid for the Palestinians.

    The disengagement did not end the occupation of Gaza, as the ICJ noted in its ruling last year. It simply reformulated it.

    Israeli soldiers pulled back to the perimeter of the enclave – what Israeli and US officials like to falsely term its “borders” – where Israel had previously established a highly fortified wall with armed watchtowers.

    Stationed along this perimeter, the Israeli army instituted an oppressive Medieval-style siege, blockading access to Gaza by land, sea and air. The enclave was monitored 24/7 with drones patrolling the skies.

    Even before Hamas won legislative elections in 2006 and came to power in Gaza, the tiny coastal strip of land looked like it was the backdrop for a dystopian Hollywood movie.

    But after Hamas’ victory, as the talking heads cheerily explain, the gloves really came off. What that meant in practice is not spelled out – and for good reason.

    The Israeli army put Gaza on “rations”, carefully counting the calories entering the enclave to create widespread hunger and malnutrition, especially among Gaza’s children.

    The Israeli official behind the scheme explained the reasoning at the time: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

    That official – Dov Weisglass, Olmert’s main adviser – is one of the central talking heads in episode one. And yet strangely, he is never asked about Gaza’s “diet”.

    ‘Die more quietly’

    Stephen Hadley, George W Bush’s deputy national security adviser, claims – unchallenged – that Sharon’s disengagement was “a downpayment on a Palestinian state. … They [the Palestinians] would have an opportunity to build and show the world that they were ready to live side by side in peace with Israel”.

    Israel’s real goal, all too evident then and impossible to ignore now, was something else entirely.

    Yes, withdrawing from Gaza allowed Israel to falsely claim the occupation in Gaza had ended and focus instead on the colonisation of the West Bank, as the documentary briefly grants.

    Yes, it split geographically the main territories forming the basis of a future Palestinian state and encouraged irreconciliable leaderships in each – divide and rule on steroids.

    But even more importantly, by making Gaza effectively a giant concentration camp, blockaded on all sides, Israel ensured that the accommodationists of Fatah would lose credibility in the enclave and militant resistance movements led by Hamas would gain ascendancy.

    That was the trap.

    Hamas, and the people of Gaza, were denied any legitimacy so long as they insisted on a right – enshrined in international law – to resist their occupation and besiegement by Israel.

    It was a message – a warning – directed at Fatah and the West Bank too. Resistance is futile. Keep your heads down or you’ll be next.

    Which is exactly the lesson Abbas learnt, soon characterising his security forces’ collusion with the Israeli occupation as “sacred”.

    For Gaza, the US notion of living in “peace alongside Israel” meant surviving just barely and quietly, inside their cage, accepting the diet Olmert and Weisglass had put them on.

    Making any noise – such as by firing rockets out of the concentration camp, or massing at the heavily armed walls of their cage in protest – was terrorism. Die more quietly, Israel and the international community demanded.

    Perversely, much of episiode one is dedicated to US officals spinning their conspiracy to foil the results of the 2006 Palestinian election, won by Hamas, as democracy promotion.

    They demanded Hamas give up armed resistance or the 2 million people of Gaza, half of them children, would face a continuing blockade and starvation diet – that is, illegal collective punishment.

    Or as Robert Danin, a US State Department official, puts it, the plan was “either Hamas would reform and become a legitimate political party or it would remain isolated”. Not just Hamas isolated, but all of Gaza. Die more quietly.

    The hope, he adds, was that by immiserating the population “Gazans would throw off the yoke of Hamas” – that is, accept their fate to live as little more than “human animals” in an Israeli-run zoo.

    ‘Mowing the lawn’

    Hamas, both its proto-army and its proto-government, learnt ways to adapt.

    It built tunnels under the enclave’s one, short border with Egypt to resist Israel’s siege by trading with the neighbouring population in Sinai and keeping the local economy just barely afloat.

    It fired primitive rockets, which rarely killed anyone in Israel, but achieved other goals.

    The rocket fire created a sense of fear in Israeli communities near Gaza, which Hamas occasionally managed to leverage for minor concessions from Israel, such as an easing of the blockade – but only when Israel didn’t prefer, as it usually did, to respond with more violence.

    The rockets also prevented Gaza and its suffering from disappearing completely from international news coverage – the “Die more quietly” agenda pursued by Israel – even if the price was that the western media could denounce Hamas even more noisily as terrorists.

    And the rockets offered a strategic alternative – armed resistance, its nature shaped by Hamas’ confinement in the Gaza concentration camp – to Fatah’s quietist, behind-the-scenes diplomacy seeking negotiations that were never forthcoming.

    Finally, confronted with the permanent illegitimacy trap set for it by Israel and the US, Hamas approved in 2018 mass, civil disobedience protests at the perimeter fence of the concentration camp it was supposedly “ruling”.

    Israel, backed by the US, responded with increased structural violence to all these forms of resistance.

    In the last two programmes, Israeli and US officials set out the challenges and technical solutions they came up with to prevent their victims from breaking out of their “isolation” – the concentration camp that Gaza had been turned into.

    Underground barriers were installed to make tunnelling more difficult.

    Rocket fire was met with bouts of “mowing the lawn” – that is, carpet-bombing Gaza, indifferent to the Palestinian death toll.

    And thousands of the ordinary Palestinians who massed for months on end at the perimeter fence in protest were either executed or shot in the knee by Israeli snipers.

    Or as the documentary’s narrator characterises it: “At the border with Israel, protesters clashed with Israeli forces, and dozens of Palestinians were killed.”

    Blink, and you might miss it.

    Nothing learnt

    Only by looking beneath the surface of this facile documentary can be found a meaningful answer to the question of what led to the attack on 7 October.

    Israel’s strategy of “isolation” – the blockade and diet – compounded by intermittent episodes of “mowing the lawn” was always doomed to failure. Predictably, the Palestinians’ desire to end their imprisonment in a concentration camp could not be so easily subdued.

    The human impulse for freedom and for the right to live with dignity kept surfacing.

    Ultimately, it would culminate in the 7 October attack. Like most breakouts from barbaric systems of oppression, including slave revolts in the pre-civil rights US, Hamas’ operation ended up mirroring many of the crimes and atrocities inflicted by the oppressor.

    Israel and the US, of course, learnt nothing. They have responded since with intensified, even more obscene levels of violence – so grave that the world’s highest court has put Israel on trial for genocide.

    Obscured by The Road to 7th October is the reality that Israel has always viewed the Palestinians as “human animals”. It just needed the right moment to sell that script to western publics, so that genocide could be recast as self-defence.

    The 7th October attack offered the cover story Israel needed. And the western media, most especially the BBC, played a vital part in amplifying that genocide-justifying narrative through its dehumanisation of the Palestinian people.

    Its one break with that policy – its humanising portrait of Gaza’s children in How to Survive a Warzone – caused an uproar that has echoed for weeks and seen the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, dragged before a parliamentary committee.

    But in truth, we ought to be appalled that this is the only attempt the BBC has made, after 17 months of genocide, to present an intimate view of life for the people of Gaza, especially its children, under Israel’s bombs. The state broadcaster only dared doing so after stripping away the politics of Gaza’s story, reducing decades of the Palestinian people’s oppression by Israel to a largely author-less “humanitarian crisis”.

    Not only is the programme never likely to see the light of day again on the BBC but, after all this commotion, the corporation is unlikely ever again to commission a similarly humanising programme about the Palestinian people.

    There is a good reason why there has been no comparable clamour for the BBC to pull Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October.

    The historical and political context offered by the documentary does nothing to challenge a decades-old, bogus narrative on Israel and Palestine – one that has long helped conceal Israel’s turning of Gaza into a concentration camp, one that made something like the 7 October breakout almost inevitable, and one that legitimised months of genocide.

    The Road to 7th October seeks to rehabilitate a narrative that should be entirely discredited by now.

    In doing so, the BBC is assisting Israel in reviving a political climate in which the genocide in Gaza can resume, with Netanyahu re-instituting mass starvation as a weapon of war and spreading Israel’s ethnic cleansing operations to the West Bank.

    We don’t need more official narratives about the most misrepresented “conflict” in history. We need journalistic courage and integrity. Don’t look to the BBC for either.

    The post New BBC Documentary “The Road to 7th October” is an Utter Travesty first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • This motivating discussion was supposed to run earlier, but then the third year anniversary of Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine was marked by Trump viciously reminding the world he works for Russia by kicking Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the White House, after he, Vance, and MTG’s boyfriend tried to ambush the war hero. 

     

    In our recorded first ever Gaslit Nation book club, we discussed Albert Camus’ The Stranger (Matthew Ward translation) and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, to see what wisdom they hold for us today, and how these two works “talk to each other.” 

     

    For March, we’re reading Gene Sharp’s revolutionary handbook From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, which informed revolts in Ukraine, the Arab Spring, Hong Kong, and beyond. Our March 31st salon at 4pm will open with a book club discussion of Dictatorship to Democracy. For April, we’re reading (if you haven’t already!) Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, and May’s book club pick is Total Resistance: Swiss Army Guide to Guerrilla Warefare And Underground Operations. Get ready to make some good trouble! 

     

    To hear the full discussion, be sure to join our community on Patreon. Thank you to everyone who supports Gaslit Nation–we could not make this show without you! 

     

    Want to enjoy Gaslit Nation ad-free? Join our community of listeners for bonus shows, ad-free episodes, exclusive Q&A sessions, our group chat, invites to live events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit!

    EVENTS AT GASLIT NATION:

     


    This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.

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  • This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.

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  • Why is Phnom Penh now willing to give the United States what it has been demanding for years?

    At a meeting on Feb. 24 with Ronald Clark, commanding general of the the U.S. Army Pacific, Cambodia’s military chief Vong Pisen made the most explicit call to date for restarting the bilateral “Angkor Sentinel” military drills that Phnom Penh had suspended in 2017.

    Washington has been encouraging the resumption of the exercises since at least 2020, yet Phnom Penh had strung the U.S. along with offers of counterterrorism cooperation, a much lower-level form of engagement.

    Cambodia suspended Angkor Sentinel in early 2017 on the premise that its troops were needed to guard that year’s local elections.

    Gen. Ronald P. Clark, left, commander of the US Army Pacific, meets with Gen. Vong Pisen, commander-in-chief of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces, on Feb. 24, 2025.
    Gen. Ronald P. Clark, left, commander of the US Army Pacific, meets with Gen. Vong Pisen, commander-in-chief of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces, on Feb. 24, 2025.
    (Royal Cambodian Armed Forces)

    A few months later, however, Cambodia’s military started its first joint “Golden Dragon” drills with China. A few months after that, Cambodia’s ruling party dissolved its only political opponent on charges of plotting a U.S.-backed coup.

    The same year, Phnom Penh banned several U.S. Congress-funded organizations, sparking a deterioration in U.S.-Cambodia relations.

    In 2018, Washington started alleging that Phnom Penh had agreed to a secret deal to allow China exclusive use of its Ream Naval Base. U.S. policymakers came to see Cambodia as a “lost” Chinese client state.

    Some observers suggest that Phnom Penh’s offer to restart the Angkor Sentinel drills is a result of Cambodia’s leadership succession in 2023.

    That year, long-ruling prime minister Hun Sen, who typically has taken a dim view of the U.S., handed over power to his eldest son Hun Manet, a West Point-educated general considered by some to be reformist and Western-looking.

    This is almost certainly not the reason.

    China dependency

    Hun Manet might be the prime minister, but Hun Sen still calls the shots, especially over foreign policy. Hun Sen’s trusted ally, Prak Sokhonn, was brought back as foreign minister last November to further solidify his control over foreign relations.

    Another claim is that Phnom Penh is trying to appease U.S. President Donald Trump to avoid tariffs and wants to win over Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who as senator had long called for U.S. sanctions on Cambodia over its democratic backsliding and human rights violations.

    In fact, it was the Biden administration that began a slow, gradual process of reengaging Cambodia, and talks about Angkor Sentinel began at least in October.

    The foundations were probably laid long before that, possibly when then-CIA Director Bill Burns visited Phnom Penh last June to meet with Hun Sen. It was the Biden administration that arranged for an U.S. warship to make a port call in Cambodia in December, the first to do so since 2016.

    The actual motivation for Phnom Penh to reopen the war games is that it has now accepted that it must reduce its dependency on China.

    This explains why Cambodia has spent considerable energy in improving relations with Japan, Canada, Australia and Saudi Arabia in recent months — while also trying to silence exiled dissidents in those countries.

    The Chinese military ship Qijiguang prepares to dock at the Sihanoukville port, Cambodia, May 19, 2024.
    The Chinese military ship Qijiguang prepares to dock at the Sihanoukville port, Cambodia, May 19, 2024.
    (AFP)

    Cambodia’s economy grew by around 5 percent last year, but it’s far from healthy.

    Aside from domestic factors like private debt and bad loans, a lack of Chinese investment since the COVID-19 pandemic has weakened the construction and real estate sectors, while tourism is still reeling from the lack of Chinese visitors.

    The U.S., by contrast, has steadily accounted for around two-fifths of all Cambodia’s exports for almost a decade.

    More importantly, Beijing will no longer throw armfuls of cash at every infrastructure project Phnom Penh thinks it needs.

    This became clear last year when Beijing refused to put up substantial funds for the Funan Techo Canal, a vanity megaproject for the Hun family. Last year, China did not approve any new loans to Cambodia.

    Scam center crackdown

    As well as being more picky, the Chinese government has demanded that Southeast Asian governments tackle their vast cyber scam industries, which are defrauding ordinary Chinese out of tens of billions of dollars each year

    The scam centers have put a strain on China’s already weakened economy and the heavy role of Chinese crime groups in the sector is increasingly a source of national embarrassment for the Chinese Communist Party.

    Beijing launched a massive public information campaign about its scam-busting efforts in December, before public anger rose in January over news that Chinese actor Wang Xing had been kidnapped in Thailand and forced to work in a scam compound in Myanmar.

    He was rescued, but the Chinese public is demanding their government take more action to rescue their relatives.

    Talk among Cambodia watchers is that Beijing is irate about Phnom Penh’s lackluster efforts at cracking down on the scam sector.

    A casino in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, Feb. 2020.
    A casino in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, Feb. 2020.
    (Reuters)

    China has found a willing partner in Thailand—which launched major raids on scam compounds on its border with Myanmar last month. Beijing has also cooperated with Laos’ communist government and some parties in Myanmar’s raging civil war.

    Cambodia, though, is allegedly dragging its feet, much to everyone’s frustration, not just China’s.

    Some analysts reckon that “pig-butchering” scammers are finding a safe haven in Cambodia as compounds are shut down elsewhere in the region.

    Bangkok has just revealed that it is debating whether to build a wall along parts of its border with Cambodia.

    Pressing Phnom Penh

    If the United States Institute for Peace (USIP) is correct, Cambodia’s scam industry is worth $12.5 billion annually, the equivalent of a third of the formal economy.

    According to some experts, Cambodia is also somewhat unique in that a large percentage of the proceeds are laundered through the local economy.

    If the authorities were to launch a major crackdown, most Cambodian oligarchs and senior ruling party politicians would allegedly lose access to billions of dollars in tithes and dodgy contracts.

    “The level of co-option of state actors in countries like Cambodia exceeds what we saw in narco-states of the 1990s in Latin America,” Jacob Sims, an expert on organized crime in Southeast Asia, recently told The Economist.

    Worse, it might destabilize the economy. Who knows how much money from the scammers is propping up construction or property or any other sector?

    We now have the ironic situation in which the U.S. and China are aligned over what they want from the Cambodian government: a substantial and meaningful crackdown on the scammers.

    Indeed, Washington, like Beijing, is also increasingly concerned that Cambodia-based scammers are defrauding its nationals.

    Last September, the U.S. embassy in Phnom Penh estimated that Americans had lost at least $100 million to scams originating in Cambodia.

    The same month, Ly Yong Phat, a Cambodian senator and the oligarch arguably closest to the Hun family, was hit by U.S. sanctions because of his association with the illegal industry.

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    Beijing’s growing frustration with Phnom Penh might soon come to a head.

    There is talk that Chinese President Xi Jinping is set to visit Phnom Penh, possibly next month. It’s unlikely that he would arrive — or depart — without a major concession from the Hun family on the scam industry.

    Phnom Penh possibly wants to use the resumption of the Angkor Sentinel drills with the U.S. as a way of signaling to Beijing that it is not as beholden as it once was to Chinese pressure.

    Whether China would go “soft” so as not to lose influence to the U.S. is another matter.

    According to informed sources in Phnom Penh and Washington, most U.S. policymakers don’t view the resumption of Angkor Sentinel as a major sea change after eight years of fraught U.S.-Cambodia relations.

    While welcoming an important step towards healthier relations, Washington will be looking for Cambodia to make a more drastic break from Beijing, they say.

    David Hutt is a research fellow at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies (CEIAS) and the Southeast Asia Columnist at the Diplomat. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of RFA.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by commentator David Hutt.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

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  • The global celebration of International Women’s Day is a call to action to support and amplify the efforts of the extraordinary girls and women around the world who are tirelessly working within their communities to defend their rights and to empower future generations.

    Last month, we saw the Argentinian federal court issue arrest warrants against 25 Myanmar officials, including the seniormost military leaders, for genocide and crimes against humanity committed against the Rohingya community between 2012 and 2018. Our thoughts immediately went to the brave Rohingya women who helped make this significant legal action possible.

    For years, the Shanti Mohila (Peace Women), a group of over 400 Rohingya women living in the refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh, have defied societal expectations and conservative gender norms.

    They are leaders in their community fighting for recognition and justice for the harms endured at the hands of the Myanmar military. They play a vital role as leaders, educators, and advocates for justice.

    RELATED STORIES

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    The 2017 “clearance operations” by the Myanmar military against the historically persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority living in the Rakhine state were a series of widespread and systematic attacks involving mass killings, torture, and destruction of houses that led to the largest forced displacement of the Rohingya community from Myanmar into neighboring Bangladesh.

    Sexual violence was a hallmark of these “clearance operations,” with young women and girls disproportionately affected by brutal and inhuman acts of sexual and gender-based violence. Yet, despite efforts to destroy them through long-term serious physical and mental harm, Rohingya women fought back.

    Shanti Mohila members participate in a series of art facilitation sessions conducted by Legal Action Worldwide in collaboration with Artolution Inc. in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, in 2024.
    Shanti Mohila members participate in a series of art facilitation sessions conducted by Legal Action Worldwide in collaboration with Artolution Inc. in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, in 2024.
    (Ayesha Nawshin/Legal Action Worldwide)

    Shanti Mohila members have mobilized to raise awareness of the large-scale sexual and gender-based violence endured by Rohingya women between 2016 and 2017. They have spoken about their experiences before international justice proceedings and catalyzed change by breaking down the stigma associated with victimhood and inspiring next generations of Rohingya women through action.

    In 2023, their remarkable achievements were recognized as they were honored as Raphael Lemkin Champions of Prevention by the U.N. Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide.

    Contributing evidence to justice mechanisms

    The testimonies Shanti Mohila members have provided and encouraged other survivors to step forward to provide over the past years have given the opportunity to investigative mechanisms, NGOs, and lawyers to present evidence before all ongoing international justice proceedings.

    Specifically, Shanti Mohila members are among the survivors who provided key witness statements in The Gambia v. Myanmar case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

    In 2019, two representatives were in The Hague as part of The Gambia delegation to observe provisional measures hearings at the ICJ.

    In 2023, they were among the group of seven witnesses in Buenos Aires to testify in the investigative hearings under the universal jurisdiction principle before the federal criminal court – leading to the recent court order of the first-ever arrest warrants for crimes of genocide against key state officials and members of the Myanmar military.

    “I could not believe I could tell an international court about my sufferings. I could not believe it until I stepped into the courtroom,” said “Salma” (not her real name), a Rohingya female witness who requested anonymity for privacy and safety concerns.

    “It was difficult for me to speak about the death of my family and their names, but I did it for justice, for my grandchildren, for a future where we can return home with dignity,” she said. “They [perpetrators] targeted women first to break our community, our morale.”

    “Who would have thought that we, the Rohingya women, would one day be taking the Myanmar military to the court?”

    It is worth highlighting here why exactly the evidence from survivors of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is so critical to successfully prosecute and hold the Myanmar military accountable, particularly for genocide.

    The “intent to destroy a group in whole or in part” is a necessary element to prove the crime of genocide, which can be notoriously difficult to evidence.

    In the Rohingya context, the scale and brutality of SGBV during the 2017 “clearance operations” was identified by the U.N. Independent Fact-Finding Mission as one of the key factors that “inferred” the Myanmar military’s genocidal intent to destroy the Rohingya people.

    Rohingya refugee women hold placards as they take part in a protest at the Kutupalong refugee camp to mark the first year of their exodus in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, Aug. 25, 2018.
    Rohingya refugee women hold placards as they take part in a protest at the Kutupalong refugee camp to mark the first year of their exodus in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, Aug. 25, 2018.
    (Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters)

    Sexual violence against Rohingya women and young mothers in front of their families, and the accompanying sexual mutilations and forced pregnancies, are some of the most significant reflections of the perpetrators’ desire to inflict severe social and reproductive harm on the community.

    The SGBV was not only a part of the campaign of mass killings, torture and destruction of property in 2017 but also committed in the context of decades-long propagated narrative that uncontrolled Rohingya birth rate is a threat to the survival of the nation, and state policies that placed significant legal restraint on Rohingya reproductive rights.

    In a 2023 study on long-term impact of sexual and gender-based violence against the Rohingya men, women, and hijra conducted by the Legal Action Worldwide (LAW), clinical analysis by psychologists and medical doctors revealed that the SGBV against Rohingya had resulted in: permanent damage to survivors’ genitalia impacting their ability to procreate; severe psychological injuries that have left them in a state of extreme emotional distress; damaged the survivors’ family relations including with their spouse and children; severe ostracization of the women and children born of rape; and forced reorganization of the Rohingya households.

    The evidence of SGBV is critical in that its commission and its enduring and foreseeable impact on survivors clearly shows that the Myanmar military inflicted serious mental and bodily harm and imposed measures intending to prevent births within the community. It also reflects a deliberate incremental step in causing the biological or physical destruction of the group while inflicting acute suffering on its members in the process.

    Leaders within the Shanti Mohila network have been instrumental in supporting the conceptualization and implementation of studies such as the 2023 report – making them truly the grassroots advocates for the community.

    Towards holistic justice and healing

    Alongside these important contributions, the Shanti Mohila members continuously work within the camps in Cox’s Bazar to ensure awareness of the ongoing justice processes and provide peer support to one another and the wider community.

    Last year, LAW and Shanti Mohila engaged with Rohingya activists around the globe through LAW’s Rohingya Diaspora Dialogue initiative to foster wider recognition and advocacy for the significant work being done by the Rohingya women in Cox’s Bazar on gender equality and to hold the perpetrators of serious crimes responsible.

    These actions embody Shanti Mohila’s commitment and openness to learning.

    They are dedicated to remaining bold and effective advocates for their community and being against the illegitimate military regime that continues to commit atrocities against civilians across Myanmar.

    Shanti Mohila members stand in an embrace in a gesture of support and solidarity, in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, in 2022.
    Shanti Mohila members stand in an embrace in a gesture of support and solidarity, in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, in 2022.
    (Ayesha Nawshin/Legal Action Worldwide)

    The challenges remain plenty since the renewed conflict between Arakan Army and Myanmar military in late 2023 has led to upward of 60,000 Rohingya arriving in Cox’s Bazar in a new wave of forced displacement, joining over 1 million Rohingya refugees already living in the camps.

    The evolving conflict dynamics in the Rakhine state and its impact on the Rohingya there add to the tensions in the camps. The risk of another surge in the forced recruitment of the Rohingya in the camps by organized groups pressuring youths to join the civil war in Myanmar persists.

    Amid this, the work and growth of Shanti Mohila can prove to be a stabilizing force, beyond their contributions to women empowerment and the justice process. They can provide an avenue to offset the negative impacts of the deteriorating regional security situation through promoting efforts toward reconciliation and encouraging people to keep the rule of law and justice at the center of their struggle.

    On this International Women’s Day, we celebrate the groundbreaking work of Shanti Mohila and the power and legacy they are creating for generations of Rohingya women, their community as a whole, and women across fragile and conflict-affected contexts worldwide.

    Ishita Kumar, based in Cox’s Bazar, is the legal and program adviser on the Rohingya crisis for Legal Action Worldwide (LAW), an independent, non-profit organization of human rights lawyers and jurists working in fragile and conflict-affected areas. LAW has been supporting Shanti Mohila leaders and representing over 300 Rohingya in the ongoing international justice processes about their treatment in Myanmar, including at the International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court and supporting universal jurisdiction cases in foreign domestic courts such as in Argentina. The views expressed here are hers, not those of Radio Free Asia.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by guest commentator Ishita Kumar.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • BANGKOK — Air force aerobatic and demonstration teams from China, India and the United States streaked through Bangkok’s overcast skies Friday in a rare joint-showcase marking the 88th anniversary of the Royal Thai Air Force.

    China’s August 1st Aerobatic Team of People’s Liberation Army Air Force, the U.S. Air Force’s F-35A Lightning II Demonstration Team and India’s Air Force Surya Kiran Aerobatic Team each performed separately, entertaining crowds at Bangkok’s Don Mueang air base.

    Also present was Thailand’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn, a former F-5 fighter jet pilot.

    “We did not have special conditions to have both the U.S. and Chinese aircraft to join. Politics is set aside and mutual respect is there,” Thailand’s air force chief Air Marshal Punpakdee Pattanakul told reporters.

    Vortices are visible on its wings as a U.S. Air Force F-35A demonstration team fifth generation jet performs over Don Mueang air base in Bangkok, March 7, 2025.
    Vortices are visible on its wings as a U.S. Air Force F-35A demonstration team fifth generation jet performs over Don Mueang air base in Bangkok, March 7, 2025.
    (Pimuk Rakkanam/RFA)
    India’s Air Force Surya Kiran Aerobatic Team fly Hawk Mk-132 jets as they perform over Don Mueang air base in Bangkok, March 7, 2025.
    India’s Air Force Surya Kiran Aerobatic Team fly Hawk Mk-132 jets as they perform over Don Mueang air base in Bangkok, March 7, 2025.
    (Pimuk Rakkanam/RFA)
    Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force Chengdu J-10 jets perform over Don Mueang air base in Bangkok, March 7, 2025.
    Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force Chengdu J-10 jets perform over Don Mueang air base in Bangkok, March 7, 2025.
    (Pimuk Rakkanam/RFA)
    A U.S. Air Force F-35A demonstration team fifth generation jet opens its weapons bay as it performs over Don Mueang air base in Bangkok, March 7, 2025.
    A U.S. Air Force F-35A demonstration team fifth generation jet opens its weapons bay as it performs over Don Mueang air base in Bangkok, March 7, 2025.
    (Pimuk Rakkanam/RFA)
    Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force Chengdu J-10 jets perform over Don Mueang air base in Bangkok, March 7, 2025.
    Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force Chengdu J-10 jets perform over Don Mueang air base in Bangkok, March 7, 2025.
    (Pimuk Rakkanam/RFA)
    India’s Air Force Surya Kiran Aerobatic Team fly Hawk Mk-132 jets as they perform over Don Mueang air base in Bangkok, March 7, 2025.
    India’s Air Force Surya Kiran Aerobatic Team fly Hawk Mk-132 jets as they perform over Don Mueang air base in Bangkok, March 7, 2025.
    (Pimuk Rakkanam/RFA)
    Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force pilots greet spectators as they taxi at Don Mueang air base in Bangkok, March 7, 2025.
    Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force pilots greet spectators as they taxi at Don Mueang air base in Bangkok, March 7, 2025.
    (Pimuk Rakkanam/RFA)
    A Royal Thai Air Force JAS 39 Gripen fighter jet  takes off from Bangkok’s Don Mueang air base, Mar. 7, 2025.
    A Royal Thai Air Force JAS 39 Gripen fighter jet takes off from Bangkok’s Don Mueang air base, Mar. 7, 2025.
    (Pimuk Rakkanam/RFA)
    A U.S. Air Force demonstration team pilot waves to spectators before taking off Don Mueang air base in Bangkok, March 7, 2025.
    A U.S. Air Force demonstration team pilot waves to spectators before taking off Don Mueang air base in Bangkok, March 7, 2025.
    (Pimuk Rakkanam/RFA)
    Spectators arrive at Don Mueang air base for the international air show commemorating the 88th anniversary of the Royal Thai Air Force, Mar. 7, 2025, in Bangkok.
    Spectators arrive at Don Mueang air base for the international air show commemorating the 88th anniversary of the Royal Thai Air Force, Mar. 7, 2025, in Bangkok.
    (Pimuk Rakkanam/RFA)


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Pimuk Rakkanam for RFA.

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