Israel’s siege of Gaza has rendered the region “uninhabitable” for its 2.2 million residents, the UN’s humanitarian chief has warned, citing Israel’s bombing of the majority of residences, its blockade on basic supplies like food and water, and its near-total destruction of Gaza’s health system. The UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This post was originally published on Human Rights Centre Blog.
Peace activists across the country have embarked on a campaign to mobilize global support for South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The campaign, spearheaded by CODEPINK, World Beyond War, and RootsAction, aims to rally nations to submit a “Declaration of Intervention” supporting South Africa’s case at the ICJ. The focus is on holding Israel accountable for alleged genocide in Gaza and putting an end to the tragic suffering of an imprisoned population. Delegations from major cities engaged with U.N. missions, embassies, and consulates worldwide, urging countries to invoke the Genocide Convention at the United Nations’ judicial arm.
The campaign started two weeks ago with an open call for people to join in a petition and letter-writing campaign urging countries to invoke the genocide convention and charge Israel with genocide in the International Court of Justice. Since then, over 30,000 people signed the petition, accompanied by an impressive 118,290 letters sent to various countries urging support of the cause.
The nationwide delegations of “grassroots diplomats” took on this campaign because officially appointed U.S. diplomats continue to insist on supporting Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, rejecting the sentiments of a majority of people in the U.S. and around the world who want a ceasefire and an end to the slaughter.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby calls South Africa’s 84-page suit accusing Israel of genocide “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.” Notably, the United States supported Ukraine invoking the Genocide Convention last year in the International Court of Justice with far less evidence.
In the first week of January, delegations of grassroots diplomats embarked on a petition and letter delivery campaign across the United States, urging missions, consulates, and embassies to support South Africa’s legal action against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) under the U.N. Convention on Genocide. While the visits and deliveries varied from city to city, the overall reception by staff and representatives in each U.N. Mission, Embassy, and Consulate was encouraging and supportive, with some delegations able to meet directly with country representatives.
The NYC delegation visited around 30 U.N. missions, engaging in significant diplomatic efforts. They had a positive meeting with Colombia’s U.N. Ambassador, Arlene Tickner, exploring the potential for a Declaration of Intervention to support South Africa’s legal action. Another meeting took place with the Deputy Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the U.N. At the Bolivia Mission, the delegation received a warm reception, providing a letter and petition. A productive meeting occurred with the Bangladesh U.N. Consul, who expressed interest in connecting with legal experts. The NYC team met African Union diplomats who offered support and suggested additional efforts for South Africa. A meeting at the South Africa Mission involved discussions with the counselor and Deputy Permanent Representative. The delegation expressed their gratitude and support to the South African government. The South African representative acknowledged and appreciated the delegation’s work in their peace work.
The D.C. team engaged in diplomatic efforts, meeting with the Deputy Minister at the Colombian Embassy to encourage the Colombian government’s continued stance against Israeli actions and to join South Africa’s case. They visited and submitted their petition to the Ghanaian, Chilean, and Ethiopian Embassies, urging support for South Africa’s case against Israel. The team also had discussions with the Bolivian Embassy. Currently, they are arranging a meeting with the Turkish ambassador to further their diplomatic initiatives.
Three delegations from Miami divided their efforts to visit ten consulates, including those of Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, France, Honduras, Ireland, Spain, and Turkey. The delegations had the opportunity to meet with consular generals from Bolivia, Honduras, and Turkey, all notably welcoming and receptive. In addition, the Miami team reached out to the Turkish ambassador in Washington, D.C., further extending their diplomatic efforts. The Türkiye Consulate in Miami emphasized the visit on their social media platform, underscoring the significance of the engagement.
The Tampa team focused on a single visit to the Greek Consulate, accompanied by a representative from CAIR Florida, based in Tampa. CAIR is a nationwide federation of legally independent chapters dedicated to safeguarding the civil liberties of Americans. The Greek Consulate warmly received the delegation, expressing appreciation for a gift of olive oil. Furthermore, they assured the team they would forward the petition and letter to the Embassy of Greece in Washington, D.C., indicating a positive reception and willingness to address the delegation’s concerns.
Orlando engaged with five consulates representing Mexico, Italy, Brazil, Haiti, and Colombia. The meeting at the Haitian Consulate was mainly positive, with a productive discussion with an Assistant Consul urging support for South Africa’s case against Israel. Similarly, the delegation met with the Vice Consular of Colombia, delivered a petition, and urged their support for South Africa’s case against Israel, indicating a proactive approach in advancing their diplomatic efforts.
In Houston, the delegation reported successful engagements during their visits. They met with the Consulate of Belize staff and spoke with Consulate General Francisco Leal of Chile. The Honduran consulate staff extended kindness during their visit. The delegations also visited the Pakistan consulate as part of their diplomatic efforts.
The San Francisco delegation visited three consulates – Chile, Brazil, and Colombia. They engaged with the staff at the Chilean and Brazilian consulates, delivering the petition and letter at the Colombian Consulate, situated in the same building as the Israeli Consulate. Security at the building instructed the delegation to wait outside for a representative. However, the doors were subsequently locked, preventing entry. In response, the delegation affixed the petition and letter to the building’s door to convey their message.
The delegation in Los Angeles visited nine foreign consulates in the city, including Belize, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Turkey, Chile, Colombia, and Kuwait. The delegation expressed gratitude to the staff at the South African Consulate for South Africa’s filing in the ICJ that charges Israel with genocide. As a goodwill gesture, the activists brought flowers, a simple yet well-received token of peace and unity. They also had an encouraging meeting with Bolivian Consulate Gabriella Silva, who supported the delegation’s effort.
Delegations from Detroit, Chicago, Boston, and San Antonio also made visits to their local Consulates. Prior to deliveries, Turkey, Malaysia, and Slovakia publicly came out in support of South Africa’s filing. Since then, Jordan announced that they will file a “Declaration of Intervention” supporting South Africa’s case.
This grassroots diplomatic effort represents a unified plea for justice, demanding global solidarity against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The tireless advocacy seeks to bridge nations in support of South Africa’s pursuit of justice in the International Court of Justice.
Deliveries will continue into the first of next week with the hopes of engaging with as many missions, consulates, and embassies as possible before the start of the ICJ hearing on Jan. 11.
The oral argument of South Africa will take place on Thursday 11th January 2024 and Israel’s oral argument on Friday 12th January 2024. The hearings will be streamed live and on demand on the ICJ’s Website and on the UN Web TV.
The oral argument of South Africa will take place on Thursday 11th January 2024 and Israel’s oral argument on Friday 12th January 2024. The hearings will be streamed live and on demand on the ICJ’s Website and on the UN Web TV.
The post Coalition of “Grassroots Diplomats” Take the Lead on International Solidarity with South Africa in the Absence of Diplomacy and Accountability from U.S. Officials first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The COP 28 UN climate conference concluded with countries agreeing to a plan to transition away from fossil fuels, using language that fell short of calling for an explicit phaseout. In the debates over whether countries need to phase fossil fuels “out” or merely “down,” carbon capture and storage (CCS), a form of so-called fossil fuel “abatement,” played a central role.
Rather than exposing CCS as the greenwashing ploy it essentially is, some reporting placed disproportionate significance on the technology, adding to the confusion and misunderstandings about climate change that fossil fuel companies have been funding for decades.
“Don’t be fooled,” writes Jonathan Foley in Scientific American (12/4/23): Carbon capture is “mostly a distraction from what we really need to do right now: phase out fossil fuels and deploy more effective climate solutions.”
Before COP 28 even began, climate activists were not hopeful. The conference, held in Dubai, capital of the oil-dependent United Arab Emirates, reeked of almost comedic irony. The conference’s president, Sultan Al Jaber, is the head of the petrostate’s national oil company.
During a November livestream event, Al Jaber falsely claimed there was “no science” indicating a phaseout of fossil fuels was necessary to keep warming levels below the 1.5°C threshold set by the Paris Agreement. He added that phasing out fossil fuels would “take the world back to the caves” (Guardian, 12/3/23).
CCS technology—which involves capturing carbon from sources like power plants and steel mills, and storing it underground—has become a key part of the fossil fuel industry’s arguments against the elimination of its environmentally devastating product. Instead of rapidly ending the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, the claim goes, we can simply “abate” the emissions with CCS.
The reality is that even optimistic estimates see CCS (also known as carbon capture and sequestration) as playing only a limited role in mitigating emissions from difficult-to-decarbonize sectors. But polluters aggrandize its potential contributions in order to keep expanding fossil fuel extraction while at the same time claiming to take action on climate (Scientific American, 12/4/23). In fact, most successful CCS projects are actually used to force more oil out from underground, in a process called “enhanced oil recovery” (Washington Post, 10/25/23).
Given the chokehold the fossil fuel industry had on this COP and subsequent conversations about climate change mitigation, journalists must be clear and realistic in their reporting about the capabilities of carbon capture, and its role in both climate crisis solutions and fossil fuel industry greenwashing.
To back up the idea that carbon capture is a “valuable tool,” the New York Times (12/6/23) links to a study whose headline calls it “Too Little, Too Late, Too Slow.”
The New York Times’ headline, “Can Carbon Capture Live Up to the Hype?” (12/6/23), could have been most easily and accurately answered by a short “no.” Instead, the subheading misled about CCS’s plausibility as a climate change solution, claiming that “experts say it could play a valuable role.”
But what’s the evidence on offer? The article mostly described the failures of expensive carbon capture projects to even get off the ground. The only reference to that supposedly “valuable role” linked to three studies or reports. The titles of two were “[Carbon Capture]—Too Little, Too Late, Too Slow—It’s No Panacea” (S&P Global, 10/18/23) and “Heavy Dependence on Carbon Capture and Storage ‘Highly Economically Damaging,’ Says Oxford Report” (SSEE, 12/4/23).
A third, seemingly more optimistic, report came from the International Energy Agency (11/27/23). But that agency’s latest report actually offered the opposite message, its executive director explained (Toronto Star, 11/23/23): Oil companies’ plan to achieve “net zero”—removing as much carbon from the atmosphere as they emit—by capturing emissions while increasing production is an “illusion” based on “implausibly large amounts of carbon capture.” Lucky for those companies, New York Times headline writers are here to keep up that illusion.
The Times article itself even noted that “total fossil fuel use will have to fall sharply no matter what to keep global warming at relatively low levels,” and that carbon capture is “no silver bullet.” It cited the IEA’s roadmap to lowering carbon emissions to net zero by mid-century, noting that even in this ideal plan, CCS would account for just 8% of the world’s total emissions cuts, and that “the vast majority of reductions would come from countries shifting away from fossil fuels entirely.”
While CCS could play a part in mitigating emissions from industries like cement, steel and fertilizers, the benefit can only be realized if the technology’s logistical and financial limitations are addressed, explained Jonathan Foley in a piece for Scientific American (12/4/23). Food and Water Watch (7/20/21) characterizes CCS as an “expensive failure” that’s energy intensive and actually increases emissions.
Even while outlining CCS’s “limitations,” the Times managed to both-sides the issue:
One big dispute is over how big a role this technology, known as carbon capture and storage, should play in the fight against global warming. Some oil and gas producers say it should be central in planning for the future. Others, including many activists and world leaders, dismiss carbon capture as too unproven and too risky.
In a “dispute” about how to cut carbon emissions, oil and gas producers’ arguments should certainly not be taken at face value. And, while “activists and world leaders” are among those who “dismiss carbon capture,”crucially, so are scientists.
The Times piece played down the many economic and logistical failures of CCS as “limitations.” While removing carbon will likely play a necessary—albeit small—role in meeting climate goals, CCS’s success hinges on our abilities to phase out fossil fuels. The tone of the piece’s headline is overly optimistic, offering a false sense of hope—and “hype”—for a technology that’s used more as a fossil fuel fig leaf than a climate change solution.
Bloomberg (12/6/23) notes without rebuttal that “CCS has been discussed as a way to limit the damage caused by fossil fuels without having to abandon them.”
An explanatory Bloomberg piece (12/6/23) about carbon capture, headlined, “Why Carbon Capture Is Seen as Vital in Climate Fight but Falling Short,” used similarly weak language.
In addition to CCS, the piece highlighted direct air capture (DAC), another carbon capture technology that removes carbon that is already in the atmosphere, rather than at the site of emission, and also performs at a tiny fraction of the scale that would be necessary for it to be an actual solution. According to the article, the largest DAC hub in the world, found in Iceland, only removes the equivalent of the annual emissions of 250 average US citizens.
For more context, the Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs that Biden’s Department of Energy is supporting are anticipated to suck only about 1 million metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually. In 2022, global emissions of CO2 were 40.5 billion metric tons (Scientific American, 12/4/23)–adding more than 40,000 times as much carbon as the hubs are supposed to take out.
To say these technologies are “falling short” is quite the understatement.
To say they’re “vital” requires context. The Bloomberg piece explained:
Even if solar and wind energy largely supplant fossil fuels, holding temperatures down will require capturing large amounts of emissions produced by activities that are hard to decarbonize, such as making cement.
That much is true. However, it leaves out the most important part: Carbon capture can only make a difference in a world that drastically cuts emissions. Without that priority being met, its impacts are marginal at best—and, at worst, a distraction that permits fossil fuel companies to increase emissions and worsen the crisis.
In a press briefing with Covering Climate Now (11/9/23) regarding CCS and carbon dioxide removal, David King, former chief science adviser to the British government, emphasized that reducing greenhouse gas emissions was still the No. 1 priority, as human activity continues to emit the equivalent of about 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.
Washington Post (12/11/23) attributes the idea that carbon capture is a “false climate solution” to “some environmentalists.”
A Washington Post report (12/11/23), leading with the tearful remarks of Mona Ainuu, a climate activist from Niue, a small island nation, described the ultimate, disappointing outcome of the COP: The draft agreement to come out of the conference called not for the phaseout of fossil fuels, but for the mealy-mouthed “reducing both consumption and production of fossil fuels, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.”
The agreement also called for the rapid phase-down of “unabated coal.” The Post explained carbon capture and sequestration:
Some environmentalists view CCS as a false climate solution, saying it could prolong the life of polluting facilities for decades to come. They note that the International Energy Agency has warned that humanity cannot build any new fossil fuel infrastructure if it hopes to limit warming to 1.5°C.
Like the Times report, the Post framing failed to give readers the unvarnished truth they need, that CCS is only seen as a key climate solution by industries whose profitability depends upon the further burning of fossil fuels. No further information on the IEA report was given, or any information about the other litany of scientific studies, reports and information on the failures of CCS, allowing the specific concerns of “some environmentalists” to go unmentioned.
All of these pieces fail to mention why the fossil fuel industry is so gung ho about this dubious technology: While oil companies’ greenwashed PR campaigns tout CCS, corporations and governments continue to ramp up extraction.
Carbon capture and removal will likely play a small role in avoiding the most devastating effects of climate change, but it’s spitting in the ocean without a fossil fuel phaseout. It is journalists’ job to explain this accurately, while reminding audiences to not forget the No. 1 priority: eliminating fossil fuels.
The post Corporate Media Fed COP 28 Carbon Capture Confusion appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
Illustration: Charlotte Giang Beuret for ISHR.
On 4 January 2024 ISHR published a massive, complete compilation of all recommendations issued by UN human rights bodies – including the UN Special Rapporteurs and Working Groups, the UN Treaty Bodies, and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights – on the human rights situation in China since 2018. Recommendations are sorted by topic and community affected.
This repository compiles all recommendations issued by UN human rights bodies to the Government of the People’s Republic of China since 2018, the year of its third Universal Periodic Review (UPR).
This includes recommendations in: Concluding Observations issued by UN Treaty Bodies following reviews of China in 2022 (Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)) and 2023 (Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)), as well as in Decision 1 (108) on the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) by the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) under its Early Warning and Urgent Action Procedure; communications and press releases by UN Special Procedures (Special Rapporteurs and Working Groups), including Opinions by the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention; press releases by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) as well as the OHCHR’s assessment of human rights in the XUAR.
These UN bodies are composed of independent, impartial experts, from all geographic regions.
The recommendations are categorised by key topic or community affected. Yet, this repository does not cover all topics, nor does it include all recommendations issued by the above-mentioned UN bodies.
This repository maintains the original language of the recommendation issued by a given UN body, with minor formatting changes. For the appropriate links please go to the original document.
This repository does not include recommendations to the Governments of Hong Kong and of Macao. Please click here for the repository of recommendations on Hong Kong, and here for the repository of recommendations on Macao.
The topics include very useful ones such as:
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
The U.S. State Department on Tuesday condemned a pair of high-ranking Israeli officials for suggesting that Gaza’s Palestinian population should be permanently evicted from their territory — a sentiment that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly expressed in private. But critics said the State Department’s outraged reaction to recent comments by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Starting in the mid-20th century, companies began distorting and manpulating science to favor specific commercial interests.
Big tobacco is both the developer and the poster child of this strategy. When strong evidence that smoking caused lung cancer emerged in the 1950s, the tobacco industry began a campaign to obscure this fact.
The Unmaking of Science
The tobacco industry scientific disinformation campaign sought to disrupt and delay further studies, as well as to cast scientific doubt on the link between cigarette smoking and harms. This campaign lasted for almost 50 years, and was extremely successful… until it wasn’t. This tobacco industry’s strategic brilliance lay in the use of a marketing and advertising campaign (otherwise known as propaganda) to create scientific uncertainty and sow doubts in the minds of the general public. This, combined with legislative “lobbying” and strategic campaign “donations” undermined public health efforts and regulatory interventions to inform the public about the harms of smoking and the regulation of tobacco products.
Disrupting normative science has become a de rigueur component of the pharmaceutical industry business model. A new pharmaceutical product is not based on need, it is based on market size and profitability. When new data threatens the market of a pharmaceutical product, then that pharma company will try to sprout the seeds of scientific uncertainty and lack of proof. For instance, clinical trials can be easily coopted to meet specified end-points positive for the drug products. Other ways to manipulate a clinical trial include manipulating the dosing schedule and amounts. As these practices have been exposed, people no longer trust the science. Fast forward to the present, and the entire industry of evidence-based (and academic) medicine is now suspect due to the malfeasance of certain pharma players. In the case of COVID-19, Pharma propaganda and cooptation practices have now compromised the regulatory bodies controlling the pharma product licensing and deeply damaged global public confidence in those agencies.
We all know what climate change is. The truth is that the UN, most globalists and a wide range of world leaders” blame human activities for climate change. Whether or not climate change is real or that human activities are enhancing climate change is not important to this discussion. That is a subject for another day.
Most climate change scientists receive funding from the government. So they must comply with the government edict and policy position that human activity-caused climate change is an existential threat to both humankind and global ecosystems. When these “scientists” publish studies supporting the thesis that human activities cause climate change, they are more likely to receive more grant monies and therefore more publications- and therefore to be academically promoted (or at least to survive in the dog-eat-dog world of modern academe). Those who produce a counter narrative from the government approved one soon find themselves without funding, tenure, without jobs, unable to publish and unable to procure additional grants and contracts. It is a dead-end career wise. The system has been rigged.
And by the way, this is nothing new. Back in the day, during the “war on drugs, if a researcher who had funding by the NIH’s NIDA (National Institute of Drug Addiction) published an article or wrote an annual NIH grant report showing benefits to using recreational drugs, that would be a career ending move, as funding would not be renewed and new funding would never materialize. Remember, the NIH peer review system only triages grants, it does not actually chose who receives grant money. The administrative state at NIH does that! And anything that went against the war on drugs was considered a war on the government. Funding denied. This little truthbomb was conveyed to me – word of mouth- many years ago by a researcher and Professor who specialized in drug addiction research. Nothing printed, all heresy. Because that is how the system works. A whisper campaign. A whiff of a message on the wind.
The ends justify the means.
The new wrinkle in what has now happened with corrupted climate change activism/propaganda/”science” is that the manipulation of research is crossing disciplines. No longer satisfied with oppressing climate change scientists, climate change narrative enforcers have moved into the nutritional sciences. This trend of crossing disciplines portends death for the overall independence of any scientific endeavors. A creeping corruption into adjacent disciplines. Because climate change activists, world leaders, research institutions, universities and governments are distorting another branch of science outside of climate science. They are using the bio-sciences, specifically nutrition science, to support the climate change agenda. It is another whole-of-government response to the crisis, just like with COVID-19.
Just like with the tobacco industry’s scientific disinformation campaign, they are distorting health research to make the case that eating meat is dangerous to humans. Normal standards for publication have been set aside. The propaganda is thick and easily spotted.
As the NIH is now funding researchers to find associations between climate change and health, it is pretty clear that those whose research is set-up to find such associations will be funded. Hence, once again, the system is rigged to support the climate change narrative.
The standard approach for nutritional research is based on a food-frequency and portion questionnaire – usually kept as a diary. The nutrient intake from this observational data set is then associated with disease incidence. Randomized interventional clinical trials are not done due to expense and bioethical considerations.
The problem is that the confounding variables in such studies are hard to control. Do obese people eat more, so would their intake of meat be more or less in proportion to dietary calories? What do they eat in combination? What about culture norms, combined with genetic drivers of disease? Age? Geo-considerations? The list of confounding variables is almost never ending. Garbage in, garbage out.
We have all witnessed how these studies get used to promulgate one point of view or another.
It’s not just within the context of red meat. The same thing happens over and over. We get dietary recommendations put together by expert committees and the data are reviewed. But when subsequent, so-called systematic reviews of specific recommendations take place, the data don’t meet reliability standards…
Yes, available information is mostly based on studies of association rather than causation, using methods that fall short of proving chronic disease effects, especially in view of the crucial dietary measurement issues. The whole gestalt produces reports that seem very uncertain in terms of the standards that are applied elsewhere in the scientific community for reliable evidence. (Dr. Ross Prentice, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center)
Some recent “peer reviewed” academic publications on climate change and diet:
Enter climate change regulations, laws and goals – such as those found in UN Agenda 2030. Enter globalists determined to buy up farm-land to control prices, agriculture and eating trends. Enter politics into our food supplies and even the science of nutrition What a mess.
Below are some of the more outlandish claims being made in the name of climate science and nutrition. The United Nations’s World Food Program writes:
The climate crisis is one of the leading causes of the steep rise in global hunger. Climate shocks destroy lives, crops and livelihoods, and undermine people’s ability to feed themselves. Hunger will spiral out of control if the world fails to take immediate climate action.
Note that “Climate shocks” have always existed and will always exist. The existence of readily observed (and easily propagandized) human tragedies associated with hurricanes, fires and droughts are embedded throughout the entire archaeological record of human existence. This is nothing new in either written human history or prehistory. This does not equate to a pressing existential human crisis.
In fact, reviewing the evidence of calories and protein available reveals a very different trend. Over time, per capita caloric and protein supplies have increased almost across the board.
The prevalence of undernourishment is the leading indicator of food availability. The chart below shows that the world still has a significant issue with poverty and food stability, but it is not increasing. If anything, people are better nourished in countries with extreme poverty than they were 20 years ago.
*Note the COVIDcrisis has most likely exacerbated extreme poverty and undernourishment, but those results for the 2021-2023 years are not (yet?) available.
Despite clear and compelling evidence that climate change is not impacting on food availability or undernutrition, websites, news stories and research literature all make tenuous assertions about how the climate change “crisis” is causing starvation.
These are from the front search page on google for “climate change starvation”:
But the actual data documents something different.
This is not to say that that the poorest nations in the world don’t have issues with famine, they do. It is an issue, but not a climate change issue. It is a gross distortion of available data and any objective scientific analysis of those data to assert otherwise.
The best way to stop famine is to ensure that countries have adequate energy and resources to grow their own food supply, and have a domestic manufacturing base. That means independent energy sources.
If the United Nations and the wealthy globalists at the WEF truly want to help nations with high poverty and famine rates <and reduce our immigration pressure>, they would help them secure stable energy sources. They would help them develop their natural gas and other hydrocarbon projects. Then they could truly feed themselves. They could attain independence.
Famine is not a climate change issue, it is an energy issue. Apples and oranges. This is not “scientific”. Rather, it is yet more weaponized fearporn being used as a Trojan horse to advance hidden political and economic objectives and agendas of political movements, large corporations and non-governmental organizations.
Facts matter.
The post The Distortion of Science first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Cabinet papers from 2003 show the government pursued talks without consulting peak Indigenous body – which it then abolished
The Howard government fought strongly against recognising the right of Indigenous peoples to “self-determination” and worked secretly with Canada to try to change a draft UN declaration, newly released cabinet papers show.
The cabinet papers from 2003, released by the National Archives on Monday, show that some Australian government departments held concerns about potential impacts of the UN declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples, but Australia’s talks with Canada on amendments were being pursued with “no Indigenous consultation about the process or its product” as such input would be “premature”.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
“No one knows apartheid like those who fought it before,” said one Palestinian rights advocate on Friday in response to the news that South Africa has taken a “historic” new step to hold Israel accountable for its relentless bombardment and violent yearslong occupation of Gaza — calling on the International Court of Justice to declare that Israel has breached its obligations under the Genocide…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Han Youngsoo (Republic of Korea), Seoul, Korea 1956–1963.
In October 2023, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) published its annual Trade and Development Report. Nothing in the report came as a major surprise. The growth of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) continues to decline with no sign of a rebound. Following a modest post-pandemic recovery of 6.1% in 2021, economic growth in 2023 fell to 2.4%, below pre-pandemic levels, and is projected to remain at 2.5% in 2024. The global economy, UNCTAD says, is ‘flying at “stall speed”’, with all conventional indicators showing that most of the world is experiencing a recession.
The latest notebook from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The World in Depression: A Marxist Analysis of Crisis, questions the use of the term ‘recession’ to describe the current situation, arguing that it acts as ‘a smokescreen meant to hide the true nature of the crisis’. Rather, the notebook explains that ‘the prolonged and profound crisis that we are experiencing today is… a great depression’. Most governments in the world have used conventional tools to try and grow their way out of the great depression, but these approaches have placed an enormous cost on household budgets, which are already hit hard by high inflation, and have curbed the investments needed to improve employment prospects. As UNCTAD notes, central banks ‘prioritise short-term monetary stability over long-term financial sustainability. This trend, together with inadequate regulation in commodity markets and continuous neglect for rising inequality, are fracturing the world economy’. Our team in Brazil explores these matters further in the recently launched Financeirização do capital e a luta de classes (‘Financialisation of Capital and the Class Struggle’), the fourth issue of our Portuguese-language journal Revista Estudos do Sul Global (‘Journal of Global South Studies’).
There are some exceptions to this rule, however. UNCTAD projects that five of the G20 countries will experience better growth rates in 2024: Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, and Russia. There are different reasons why these countries are exceptions: in Brazil, for instance, ‘booming commodity exports and bumper harvests are driving an uptick in growth’, as UNCTAD writes, while Mexico has benefited from ‘less aggressive monetary tightening and an inflow of new investment to establish new manufacturing capacity, triggered by the bottlenecks that emerged in East Asia in 2021 and 2022’. What seems to unite these countries is that they have not tightened monetary policy and have used various forms of state intervention to ensure that necessary investments are made in manufacturing and infrastructure.
Farhan Siki (Indonesia), Market Review on School of Athens, 2018.
The OECD’s Economic Outlook, published in November 2023, is consistent with UNCTAD’s assessment, suggesting that ‘global growth remains highly dependent on fast-growing Asian economies’. Over the next two years, the OECD estimates that this economic growth will be concentrated in India, China, and Indonesia, which collectively account for nearly 40% of the world population. In a recent International Monetary Fund assessment entitled ‘China Stumbles But Is Unlikely to Fall’, Eswar Prasad writes that ‘China’s economic performance has been stellar over the past three decades’. Prasad, the former head of the IMF’s China desk, attributes this performance to the large volume of state investment in the economy and, in recent years, to the growth of household consumption (which is related to the eradication of extreme poverty). Like others in the IMF and OECD, Prasad marvels at how China has been able to grow so fast ‘without many attributes that economists have identified as being crucial for growth – such as a well-functioning financial system, a strong institutional framework, a market-oriented economy, and a democratic and open system of government’. Prasad’s description of these four factors is ideologically driven and misleading. For instance, it is hard to think of the US financial system as ‘well-functioning’ in the wake of the housing crisis that triggered a banking crisis across the Atlantic world, or given that roughly $36 trillion – or a fifth of global liquidity – is sitting in illicit tax havens with no oversight or regulation.
What the data shows us is that a set of Asian countries is growing very quickly, with India and China in the lead and with the latter having the longest sustained period of rapid economic growth over at least the past thirty years. This is uncontested. What is contested is the explanation for why China, in particular, has experienced such high rates of economic growth, how it has been able to eradicate extreme poverty, and, in recent decades, why it has struggled to overcome the perils of social inequality. The IMF and the OECD are unable to formulate a proper assessment of China because they reject – ab initio – that China is pioneering a new kind of socialist path. This fits within the West’s failure to comprehend the reasons for development and underdevelopment in the Global South more broadly.
Over the past year, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has engaged with Chinese scholars who have been trying to understand how their country was able to break free of the ‘development of underdevelopment’ cycle. As part of this process, we collaborate with the Chinese journal Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横) to produce an international quarterly edition that collects the work of Chinese scholars who are experts on the respective topics and brings voices from Africa, Asia, and Latin America into dialogue with China. The first three issues have looked at the shifting geopolitical alignments in the world (‘On the Threshold of a New International Order’, March 2023), China’s decades-long pursuit of socialist modernisation (‘China’s Path from Extreme Poverty to Socialist Modernisation’, June 2023), and the relationship between China and Africa (‘China-Africa Relations in the Belt and Road Era’, October 2023).
The latest issue, ‘Chinese Perspectives on Twenty-First Century Socialism’ (December 2023), traces the evolution of the global socialist movement and tries to identify its future direction. In this issue, Yang Ping, the editor of the Chinese-language version of Wenhua Zongheng, and Pan Shiwei, the honorary president of the Institute of Cultural Marxism, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, contend that a new period in socialist history is currently emerging. For Yang and Pan, this new ‘wave’ or ‘form’ of socialism, following the birth of Marxism in nineteenth-century Europe and the rise of many socialist states and socialist-inspired national liberation movements in the twentieth century, began to emerge with China’s period of reform and opening up in the 1970s. They argue that, through a gradual process of reform and experimentation, China has developed a distinct socialist market economy. The authors both assess how China can strengthen its socialist system to overcome various domestic and international challenges as well as the global implications of China’s rise – that is, whether or not it can promote a new wave of socialist development in the world.
Denilson Baniwa (Brazil), The Call of the Wild//Yawareté Tapuia, 2023.
In the introduction to this issue, Marco Fernandes, a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, writes that China’s growth has been sharply distinct from that of the West since it has not relied upon colonial plunder or the predatory exploitation of natural resources in the Global South. Instead, Fernandes argues that China has formulated its own socialist path, which has included public control over finance, state planning of the economy, heavy investments in key areas that generate not only growth but also social progress, and promoting a culture of science and technology. Public finance, investment, and planning allowed China to industrialise through advancements in science and technology and through improving human capital and human life.
China has shared many of its lessons with the world, such as the need to control finance, harness science and technology, and industrialise. The Belt and Road Initiative, now ten years old, is one avenue for such cooperation between China and the Global South. However, while China’s rise has provided developing countries with more choices and has improved their prospects for development, Fernandes is cautious about the possibility of a new ‘socialist wave’, warning that the obstinate facts facing the Global South, such as hunger and unemployment, cannot be overcome unless there is industrial development. He writes:
this will not be attainable merely through relations with China (or Russia). It is necessary to strengthen national popular projects with broad participation from progressive social sectors, especially the working classes, otherwise the fruits of any development are unlikely to be reaped by those who need them the most. Given that few countries in the Global South are currently experiencing an upsurge in mass movements, the prospects for a global ‘third socialist wave’ remain very challenging; rather, a new wave of development with the potential to take on a progressive character, seems more feasible.
This is precisely what we indicated in our July dossier, The World Needs a New Socialist Development Theory. A future that centres the well-being of humankind and the planet will not materialise on its own; it will only emerge from organised social struggles.
Philip Fagbeyiro (Nigeria), Streets of Insignificance, 2019.
The post The World’s Economic Centre of Gravity Is Returning to Asia first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A United Nations report released Thursday warned that conditions in the occupied West Bank have worsened rapidly since October, with Israeli settlers and soldiers ramping up violent attacks on the Palestinian population and subjecting people across the territory to frequent abuse, movement restrictions, arbitrary detention, and “unlawful killings.” The report by the Office of the U.N.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In the words of the UN Chief Antonio Guterres, the US-Israel assault has created “a graveyard for children” in Gaza, a tiny sliver of land that is home to several generations of impoverished refugees, half of whom are children. Gazans arguably make up one of the most vulnerable populations globally. They live in the “largest open-air prison” or the “largest concentration camp” in the world. Since 2007, Gazans have been subjected to a cruel siege by Israel, with cooperation from Egypt, and support from the US, which has led to unbearable conditions of life. As early as 2012, the UN warned that Gaza would become “uninhabitable” by the year 2020 with 60% of its households already “either food insecure or vulnerable to food insecurity” in 2012 “even when taking into account the UN food distributions to almost 1.1 million people.” The UN said Gaza was “kept alive through external funding and the illegal tunnel economy.” Since the siege began, Israel has militarily assaulted Gaza at least six times killing thousands, injuring many thousands more, and destroying homes and critical infrastructure in what it cynically calls “mowing the lawn.”
As bad as the conditions had been pre-October 7, they are now unimaginably worse. Between 7 October and 23 December, the US-Israeli assault killed 28,091 Palestinians (11,023 of whom are infants and children, 5,683 women, and 25,741 civilians) and injured 54,311. The dead include 95 journalists and 226 healthcare staff. By now 1.9 million Gazans of a total population of 2.2 million have been displaced.
Human Rights Watch has accused Israel of using the starvation of civilians as a weapon of war. The Israeli forces, it said, are “depriving the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival.” Israel bombed “Gaza’s last operational wheat mill on November 15” ensuring that “locally produced flour will be unavailable in Gaza for the foreseeable future.” The “decimation of road networks,” the destruction of “Bakeries and grain mills … agriculture, water and sanitation facilities,” and the “sustained bombardment, coupled with fuel and water shortages, alongside the displacement of more than 1.6 million people to southern Gaza, has made farming nearly impossible.” The report states that “agricultural land, including orchards, greenhouses, and farmland in northern Gaza, has been razed,” and that “livestock in the north are facing starvation due to the shortage of fodder and water, and that crops are increasingly abandoned and damaged due to lack of fuel to pump irrigation water.” Another report by 23 UN and NGOs has found that the entire population of Gaza faces an imminent risk of famine if present genocidal policies continue, with 576,600 persons at catastrophic or starvation levels. “It is a situation where pretty much everybody in Gaza is hungry,” said the World Food Program economist.
At least 369,000 Gazans are suffering from infectious diseases under rapidly declining health conditions. “We are all sick,” the Times quoted Samah al-Farra “a 46-year-old mother of 10 struggling to care for her family in a camp housing displaced Palestinians in Rafah, in southern Gaza. ‘All of my kids have a high fever and a stomach virus.’” At the time of the gravest healthcare need, according to the World Health Organization, just 9 out of 36 health facilities in Gaza are operating, and only partially. At the same time, there are “no functional hospitals left in the north.”
The deliberate destruction of Gaza’s health system amounts to a slow and more painful death sentence for the tens of thousands of injured whose minimal urgent care needs cannot be met.
The US-Israel genocidal assault on Gaza reveals much about the US political system and the ‘rules-based international order” as well. For example, a poll in mid-December showed that 68% of North Americans, three-quarters of Democrats, and half of Republicans support a ceasefire. Contrast those numbers with not only the refusal of the Biden administration to support a truce but the fact that as of 21 December only 62 members of Congress (11.6%) had joined a call for a ceasefire. The persistence of a wide split between the political elites and the public is a clear indication of political dysfunctionality in the US despite ongoing protests including the largest pro-Palestine demonstration in US history on November 4. There remains a slight window of opportunity to influence policy as the 2024 elections approach and polls indicate that the Biden administration is losing public support on this issue. Reportedly “there was some concern in the administration about an unintended consequence of the pause: that it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel” and against the Biden administration. A growing public opposition may be all we have in constraining Washington from pursuing a wider regional war on behalf of Israel.
It is important to note that the US as the chief enabler of Israel can stop this genocide. Instead, it continues to give full military, diplomatic, ideological, technological, and economic support to Israel. For example, The Times of Israel reports that “244 US transport planes and 20 ships have delivered more than 10,000 tons of armaments and military equipment to Israel since the start of the war.”
Furthermore, investigations by several mainstream US news establishments like the New York Times and CNN show that in the first month of its assault on Gaza Israel used mostly US-manufactured 2000-pound bunker-buster bombs. These heavy munitions “can cause high casualty events and can have a lethal fragmentation radius – an area of exposure to injury or death around the target – of up to 365 meters (about 1,198 feet), or the equivalent of 58 soccer fields in area.” According to CNN’s analysis: “Satellite imagery from those early days of the war reveals more than 500 impact craters over 12 meters (40 feet) in diameter, consistent with those left behind by 2,000-pound bombs. Those are four times heavier than the largest bombs the United States dropped on ISIS in Mosul, Iraq, during the war against the extremist group there.” CNN quotes John Chappell, “advocacy and legal fellow at CIVIC, a DC-based group focused on minimizing civilian harm in conflict” stating that “The use of 2,000-pound bombs in an area as densely populated as Gaza means it will take decades for communities to recover.”
Crucially, the US also shields Israel from global initiatives at the UN Security Council that aim at halting its consistent and gross violations of international humanitarian laws and the UNSC resolutions, including those calling for an immediate ceasefire.
The most recent example of the latter occurred on 22 December. The US abstained from voting on a UNSC resolution (13-0-2) that called for aid access and temporary pauses in Israel’s bombing of Gaza. For 5 days, the US delayed the vote on an earlier draft, a tactic aimed at giving Israel more time, and vetoed an amendment calling for a complete ceasefire and the establishment of a robust UN inspection mechanism in Gaza. The hollowed-out and meaningless resolution that was passed is another triumph for the US obstructionism in support of Israeli genocide albeit in the form of an abstention; earlier the US twice vetoed resolutions calling for immediate ceasefire and the release of all hostages.
The last time the US blocked a UNSC resolution calling for a ceasefire and the release of all hostages was on 7 December. The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter (a rare Article akin to a global “panic button” to trigger a UNSC vote) and urged the UNSC to act on the war in Gaza. The UN Chief referred to the situation in Gaza as “apocalyptic” and stated that he believes Gaza’s humanitarian system and civil order are at risk of “complete collapse.” The US not only vetoed the resolution but on that same day approved the sale and immediate delivery of 14,000 tank shells to Israel without congressional approval, displaying its dedication to protecting Israeli terror.
Less mentioned in the news is the US vote on 19 December against a resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly affirming the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. The vote count was 172-4-10. The other three countries that joined the US to reject the resolution were Israel, Micronesia, and Nauru. Affirming the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination is the very heart of a just resolution of the Question of Palestine. US rejectionism ensures the continuation of Israel’s colonization, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, occupation, siege, and genocide, as well as Palestinian resistance to oppression and rightlessness.
Of course, the dominant view in the US equates Palestinian resistance with terrorism motivated by hatred of Jews. Such a view can only persist in the absence of historical context. To ensure that absence, corporate media rarely feature Palestinian voices. Propaganda often works not by spin alone; omission is a crucial part of manipulating public opinion. Omitting context has allowed the US and Israel to weaponize the October 7 Hamas attack to mobilize public support for the genocide and ethnic cleansing they are committing in Gaza, ostensibly in response to October 7. This is reminiscent of how the US hijacked the 9/11 attacks to silence dissent and push through its ruinous and criminal post-9/11 wars. Public opposition eventually emerged in the longer term to those 9/11 wars of choice.
The ongoing genocide in Gaza is no different although the shift in public opinion in the US has been much swifter this time as compared to the post-9/11 period. As mentioned above, by now most people in the US favor a ceasefire. Additionally, polls found that “more people ages 18-29 sympathized with Palestinians than with Israelis in the current conflict … 28 percent expressed more sympathy with Palestinians vs. 20 percent for Israelis.” There have been massive pro-Palestinian protests globally and huge ones in the US, including unprecedented ones by staff at the State Department and the White House. The Israeli Jews on the other hand have taken a super hawkish position on the use of force in Gaza. Polls found that just 1.8% believed Israel was using too much firepower in Gaza. That is a remarkable figure indeed and a sign of the general moral decline of Israeli society.
We might therefore say that to contextualize is to act radically because the understanding that necessarily accompanies contextualization undermines the dehumanizing and racialized language used to justify atrocities against the Palestinians: such as calling the Palestinians terrorists, human animals, and antisemitic Nazis.
What, then, is the missing context for understanding what has been taking place in Palestine? To answer, we can begin by asking “What are the Palestinians struggling against?” and “What are the Palestinians fighting for?”
The Palestinians struggle against a US-backed Zionist colonizing state of Israel itself allied with several reactionary Arab client states of the US. They fight not just against Israeli apartheid, ethnic cleansing, occupation, siege, theft of their lands, and colonization, but against US imperialism. Israel is a component of the US empire and serves its interests in this region by opposing radical Arab nationalism. The Palestinians fight for a free Palestine with equal rights for all its inhabitants, including Muslims, Christians, Jews, Druze, the non-religious, and others. Because they cannot free themselves unless they defeat the forces of imperialism and reaction arrayed against them in the region, their liberation necessarily entails the possibility of liberation for all the peoples in the region.
In the broadest sense, the struggle for a free Palestine is a struggle for the liberation of all the peoples of that region from imperialism and domination. The proper context to view this is therefore a confrontation between imperialist domination and the people’s movements for liberation. A sub-context of this confrontation is that between the Palestinians and the Zionist colonizing state of Israel. The latter is bent on completing its ethnic cleansing of historical Palestine and uses every opportunity to advance its incomplete project of settler colonialism until it achieves its final goal of conquering what it calls Greater Israel which includes the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The goal of Zionism is to take as much land of historical Palestine with as few Palestinians as possible. The Zionist colonizing state has waged a war on the Palestinians since 1948, not October 7.
October 7 provided Israel with another opportunity to further its ethnic cleansing objectives in Gaza. On the night that Israel killed 250 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured another 500 just in the 24 hours over Christmas eve, Benjamin Netanyahu, the right-wing prime minister of Israel, announced “the three prerequisites for peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors in Gaza”: “We must destroy Hamas, demilitarize Gaza and deradicalize the whole of Palestinian society.” These are impossible objectives. Hamas is a resistance group. Even if all its members are killed, its ideology remains as one form of resistance to Israeli genocide, colonization, and oppression. It’s dialectical, stupid! Repression generates resistance. Plus, the ongoing genocide will surely further radicalize the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank too, making Hamas more popular, not less, regardless of whether Israel can declare victory in Gaza. Even putting the latter point aside, the goal of deradicalizing the Palestinians essentially means turning Palestinians into Zionists. That is even more absurd than the goal of eradicating Hamas. No wonder the Israeli army Chief of Staff said on the same day that “achieving war’s goals ‘will take months.’” By the time Israel is done, there will be no structures left for any Gazans to come back to while many tens of thousands more will have died due to the spread of infectious diseases, hunger, despair, and hardships of disruptions and displacements, if not from US-made bombs.
The genocidal actions of Israel in Gaza are consistent with a leaked document produced by Israel’s intelligence ministry 6 days after the bombing of Gaza began, titled ‘Options for a policy regarding Gaza’s civilian population’ that recommended the ethnic cleansing of Gaza with its population expelled into “tent cities” in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula before constructing cities in a “resettled area” in the north of Sinai to house them. So far Egypt has refused to cooperate.
But the Egyptian intransigence may not have stopped Israel from its forced mass displacement plans. According to an Israeli daily newspaper report published in early December, Netanyahu plans in secret to “thin out” the population of Gaza. He has “instructed Ron Dermer, his minister of strategic planning and a close aide, to have a plan for the ‘day after’ in Gaza and, if necessary, one that ‘enables a mass escape [of Palestinians] to European and African countries’ by opening sea routes out of the strip.” The report said that “Netanyahu sees this as a strategic goal.”
Indeed, the UN expert warned on 22 December that Israel is working to expel the civilian population of Gaza. Paula Gaviria Betancur, Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons (IDPs), said: “As evacuation orders and military operations continue to expand and civilians are subjected to relentless attacks on a daily basis, the only logical conclusion is that Israel’s military operation in Gaza aims to deport the majority of the civilian population en masse.”
It’s worth noting that Israeli Jews are overwhelmingly supportive of ethnically cleansing Gaza. A Direct Survey poll published on December 21 in Israel included the following question: “To what degree do you support encouraging the voluntary emigration of Gaza Strip residents?” The response was as follows: “68% support it strongly,” “15% are quite supportive,” “8% don’t really support it,” and “9% don’t support it at all.” That is, 83% favor what is euphemistically called “voluntary emigration” but is ethnic cleansing and a war crime.
The deafening din of Zionist propaganda in the US has drowned two essential truisms about the Question of Palestine:
1) The Palestinians are not fighting Israel because they hate Jews. They are fighting against their dispossession, occupation, and erasure and for liberation from oppression, domination, colonization, and imperialism.
2) The source of the problem isn’t the Palestinian resistance, in whatever form, but the US imperialist domination of the region in alliance with the racist Zionist colonizing state of Israel and a coterie of reactionary Arab states.
“The historical contextualization would undermine the dominant dehumanizing Zionist narrative and open pathways for crucial solidarity work towards a free, democratic, equal, and inclusive Palestine from the river to the sea.”
The post Erasing Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Israeli military on Tuesday expanded its ground assault to refugee camps in central Gaza, forcing displaced people to flee in terror from an area that was once considered a relative safe zone as the rest of the strip came under near-constant bombardment. Over the weekend, U.S.-armed Israeli forces pummeled central Gaza with airstrikes, reducing the Maghazi refugee camp to ruins and killing…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Israel’s foreign ministry said Monday it would deny visas for multiple United Nations employees after officials and agencies within the world body — including a panel on which an Israeli expert accused the country of genocide — continued their sharp criticism of the war on Gaza. “I instructed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs not to extend the visa of one of the organization’s employees in Israel…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
As Israel continues its genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza — with the death toll now exceeding 20,000 (about 70 percent women and children) — the world seems powerless to stop the slaughter. The Biden administration, Israel’s chief enabler, defanged the resolution that was ultimately passed by the UN Security Council on December 22, rendering it merely symbolic. The final resolution calls…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
For refugees living in settlements across Africa, life got more difficult in 2023. Shortfalls in the operating budget of the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, and the World Food Program have brought increased precarity into the daily lives of millions of displaced people across the continent. Having fled violence, famine and insecurity in search of survival, many African refugees now find…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The UAE, host to the latest UN climate conference, showcases the vices that need to be vanquished if we’re going to have anything approaching a green society.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
Quentin Matsys (The Netherlands), The Tax Collectors, c. 1525–1530.
Within the United Nations, there is a little-known debate about the status of global tax regulation. In August 2023, UN Secretary-General António Guterres released a draft document called ‘Promotion of Inclusive and Effective International Tax Cooperation at the United Nations’. This document comes out of a long debate led by the Global South about the unregulated behaviour of transnational corporations (especially the ways in which they avoid taxation) and about the fact that discussions regarding regulations have been dominated by Global North countries (notably those in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, an intergovernmental platform largely made up of the richest countries in the world). In October of last year, the government of Nigeria spearheaded a resolution in the UN General Assembly (UNGA) that advocated for an international tax cooperation treaty and proposed that the UN take over jurisdiction of the debate about tax regulation. In December 2022, the UNGA passed the resolution, which asked Guterres to move forward with a report on the topic and develop a new international tax agenda.
Guterres’s August 2023 report affirmed the need for an ‘inclusive and effective’ tax treaty, arguing that the two-pillar solution laid out in the OECD and G20’s Inclusive Framework on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting is insufficient. The second pillar in this solution discusses the development of a global minimum effective tax on ‘excess profits’. However, this tax would be levied on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis, which would open the entire process to chaos. Furthermore, even though the OECD-G20 policy has been developed by a minority of countries, it is intended to become the global norm for all countries. Even when the OECD and G20 ask for inputs from other countries, Guterres writes, ‘many of those countries find that there are significant barriers to meaningful engagement in agenda-setting and decision making’. This, Guterres said, is unjust. The UN should be the site where a new international taxation treaty is created – not a site for arbitrary bodies such as the OECD and the G20 to impose their agendas.
Arturo Rivera (Mexico), El Encuentro (‘The Meeting’), 2016.
To be fair, the OECD has developed a number of important proposals, including a global tax deal in 2021 that was agreed upon by 136 countries. However, due to pressure from transnational corporations (and the United States government), the implementation of this agreement was delayed until 2026. Nonetheless, leaks from illicit tax havens (such as the Paradise Papers, beginning in 2017, and the Luxembourg Leaks, beginning in 2014) brought the issue of regulating of financial flows to the fore, pressuring the OECD and the G20 to act on its promises. An outcome statement from the OECD in July 2023 put the issue back on the table, with the two-pillar tax regime coming into effect in 2024. This regime institutes a global tax of at least 15% on transnational corporations’ profits that exceed €750 million in each jurisdiction. Even here, the regulations offer transnational corporations a safe harbour until June 2028 through practices such as a simplified effective tax rate, a routine profits test, and a de minimis test – all instruments that require some accounting training to properly understand. In other words, the system designed to regulate transnational corporations merely creates business opportunities for global accounting firms that help these companies continue to shield their profits. In 2022, the main four accounting firms earned between $34 and $60 billion each in revenues, and Deloitte alone earned $64.9 billion in 2023 (a 9.3% increase since last year).
The Tax Justice Network’s annual report, published in July 2023, noted that the entire debate over taxes ‘boils down to one number: $4.8 trillion. That is how much tax we estimate wealthy corporations and individuals will avoid and evade over the next decade under the current direction of OECD tax leadership’. The data shows that ‘higher income countries lose the greatest amounts of revenue in absolute terms and also that they are responsible for the greatest share of the problem, globally’. The top ten contributors to global tax theft are, in descending order, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the Cayman Islands, Saudi Arabia, Luxembourg, Bermuda, the United States, Singapore, Ireland, and Hong Kong (it is worth noting that both the Cayman Islands and Bermuda are British territories). Lower income countries, however, ‘incur the most intense losses, losing by far the greatest share of their current tax revenues or public spending needs’. For instance, as the OECD report Tax Transparency in Africa 2023 shows, the continent loses up to $88 billion each year due to illicit financial flows. In its report, the Tax Justice Network issued a clarion call:
Countries have a choice to make: forfeit the money now, and with it our future, to the wealthiest handful of people in the world, or claim it, and with it a future where the power of the wealthiest corporations and billionaires, like the kings and barons before them, is reined in by the march of democracy. A future where tax is our most powerful tool for addressing the challenges our societies face and for building a fairer, greener, and more inclusive world.
Wifredo Lam (Cuba), El Tercer Mundo, 1965–1966.
In 1975, the United Nations established the Information and Research Centre on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC). Two interconnected events led to its inception: first, the UNGA’s passage of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) in 1974, and second, the coup against the Popular Unity government of Chilean President Salvador Allende in September 1973. By 1972, Allende had taken leadership of the process to create the NIEO to allow countries such as Chile sovereignty over their raw materials. Allende spoke forcefully on these issues at the UNCTAD III meeting in Santiago in April 1972 and at the UNGA in December 1972 (which we discuss in more depth in our dossier The Coup Against the Third World: Chile, 1973). The coup against Allende strengthened the will in the Third World to oversee and regulate transnational corporations such as the former telecommunications giant International Telegraph and Telephone Company (ITT) and copper firm Anaconda, both of which played a decisive role in the coup in Chile. The UNCTC was, therefore, the child of both the NIEO and the coup.
The UNCTC’s mission was straightforward: build an information system about the activities of transnational corporations, create technical assistance programmes that help Third World governments negotiate with these firms, and establish a code of conduct that these firms would need to abide by with respect to their international activities. The UNCTC, with thirty-three employees, did not begin its work until 1977. From the start, it found itself under pressure levied by the International Chamber of Commerce as well as various US-based think tanks, which lobbied the US government to prevent it from functioning.
Nonetheless, in its fifteen years of existence, UNCTC staff produced 265 documents that covered areas such as bilateral investment treaties and the social impact of transnational corporations. The UNCTC’s work was slowly inching toward creating a code of conduct for transnational firms, which would have hampered the ability of these firms to create a system of financial plunder through illicit financial flows (including transfer pricing and remittance of profits). In 1987, the UNGA urged the UNCTC to finalise the code of conduct and hold a special session to discuss the code.
That same year, the Heritage Foundation, based in the US, argued that the UNCTC had a ‘deliberate anti-West and anti-free enterprise motive’. In March 1991, the US State Department sent a démarche to its embassies to lobby against the code of conduct, which it saw as a ‘relic of another era, when foreign direct investment was looked upon with considerable concern’. The session to finalise the code of conduct never took place. The US pushed the incoming UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to abolish the UNCTC, which he did as part of a broader UN reform agenda. This was the sunset of tax regulation. When the OECD picked up the mantle, it did so almost to ensure that a patina of liberalism would remain in place while transnational corporations operated in a largely lawless global environment.
In 1976, the radical Peruvian poet Magda Portal (1900–1989) wrote ‘A Poem for Ernesto Cardenal’ (a Nicaraguan poet). The poem acknowledged that inequality and misery had been in our towns for centuries, but that what the ‘transnational corporations and their henchmen’ are doing is worse. As she wrote:
On this side of America, you can feel the nauseating and toxic breath of those who only want our mines, our oil, our gold, and our food.
…
Never was more torment spread over the sleepless earth.
It was not more execrable to continue living without shouting at the top of
our lungs in a howl, the protest, the rejection, the demand for
justice. To whom?
How can we continue living like this on a daily basis,
ruminating on food, loving and enjoying life when
hundreds of thousands of condemned people on
Earth are drowning in their own blood? And in Black Africa, with its apartheid
and its Sowetos, and in Namibia and Rhodesia, and in Asia,
in Lebanon and in Northern Ireland, on the rack
of the executed? Can we continue living like this
when a single scream of horror runs through
the vertebrae of the world?
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Report also calls for spit hoods to be banned and strip searches to be limited after UN visit last year
The United Nations’ anti-torture watchdog has urged Australia to curb the extraordinary number of people awaiting trial or sentencing in jails and ban the use of spit hoods.
A report, released by the UN subcommittee on the prevention of torture (SPT) this week, also called for the limiting of routine strip-searches. It comes after the body visited Australia in October last year but terminated the visit after it was prevented from entering detention facilities in New South Wales and Queensland.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
The UK’s leaders are tying themselves in knots in their desperate attempt to defend the indefensible.
In a debate on Israel and Palestine in Parliament last week, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Affairs Leo Docherty got up and said:
There is no scenario in which Hamas can be allowed to control Gaza again. That is why we are not calling for a general ceasefire, which would allow Hamas to regroup and entrench their position. I am pleased to say that the government’s position is shared by the Opposition Front Bench. Instead, we are focused on urging respect for international law…
What a fatuous statement. If the UK government had any concern for international law Israel would not have been allowed to breach it continuous and with impunity for the last 75 years and the horrendous slaughter we’ve all been watching would never have happened.
As a foreign office minister, Docherty should be aware that Hamas is the legitimate government in Gaza, having won the last election fair and square. Israel, the US and UK might not like the result but that’s beside the point. What Docherty and his colleagues are contemplating is coercive regime change, which is hardly in line with international law or Palestinians’ right to self-determination.
Meanwhile, David Cameron, hurriedly parachuted in from outside Parliament as our new Foreign Secretary and breaching all democratic niceties, was telling everyone that there can be no resolution to the conflict in the Middle East if Hamas is still “armed to the teeth” and capable of attacking Israel. And he defended the UK’s decision to abstain on the UN vote for a Gaza ceasefire on the grounds that the UN was calling for an immediate armistice plus a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine, and “those two things don’t go together… If you have an immediate ceasefire but Hamas [is] still armed to the teeth, launching rockets into Israel, wanting to repeat 7 October, you’ll never have a two-state solution.
“Long-term security I think requires there to be a state for Palestine as well,” he said, sounding wonderfully generous, adding that he did not agree with “disappointing” comments made by Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, on Wednesday 13 December that Tel Aviv would not back a two-state solution.
Had he been paying attention Cameron would know that the apartheid regime, from its very inception in 1948, has refused to contemplate the existence of a Palestinian state. That would thwart Israel’s ambition to establish sovereignty over the entire territory “from the river to the sea”, which is the express aim of Hotovely’s (and Netanyahu’s) vile party, Likud.
Britain, on the other hand, promised a Palestinian state back in 1915 but repeatedly reneged on it – in 1917, in 1923, in 1948 – and continues to sidestep the issue while forever prattling on about a two-state solution.
Cameron is also saying that Israel “must take stronger action to stop settler violence and hold the perpetrators accountable”. But his lordship should be telling Israel to do much more than that. To comply with international law Israel must remove its settlers and its thuggish military from the West Bank altogether, remembering that the West Bank includes East Jerusalem (and the Old City) and Gaza.
What needs eliminating is the threat posed by Israel
As I write, Cameron is changing tack slightly and now calling for a “sustainable” ceasefire because it has dawned on him that “too many civilians have been killed” by Israel. A joint article in the Sunday Times by him and German Foreign Affairs Minister Annalena Baerbock comes amid growing pressure on Israel over its methods in the war on Gaza. It states: “We do not believe that calling right now for a general and immediate ceasefire, hoping it somehow becomes permanent, is the way forward. It ignores why Israel is forced to defend itself: Hamas barbarically attacked Israel and still fires rockets to kill Israeli citizens every day.”
The usual misinformation. They ignore why the Palestinians are compelled to defend themselves, i.e. the brutal and murderous decades-long illegal occupation by Israel using military force.
“Hamas must lay down its arms,” say Cameron and Baerbock. And in a tepid warning to Israel, the two foreign ministers say: “Israel has the right to defend itself but, in doing so, it must abide by international humanitarian law. Israel will not win this war if its operations destroy the prospect of peaceful coexistence with Palestinians. They have a right to eliminate the threat posed by Hamas.”
But do they really? Where in international law does it say that an illegal occupier (such as Israel) can claim self-defence against a threat that emanates from the territory it illegally occupies?
Under UN Resolution 37/43, however, the Palestinians, as victims of illegal military occupation, have an unquestionable right to eliminate the threat posed by Israel in their struggle for “liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle”.
Resolution 37/43 also condemns “the constant and deliberate violations of the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people, as well as the expansionist activities of Israel in the Middle East, which constitute an obstacle to the achievement of self-determination and independence by the Palestinian people and a threat to peace and stability in the region”.
The Palestinians’ right to armed struggle in self-defence is also confirmed in UN Resolution 3246, which calls for all States to recognise the right to self-determination and independence for all peoples subject to colonial and foreign domination and alien subjugation and to offer them moral, material and other forms of assistance in their struggle to exercise fully their inalienable right to self-determination and independence.
Resolution 3246 reaffirms the legitimacy of the peoples’ struggle for liberation from colonial and foreign domination and alien subjugation by all available means, including armed struggle, and demands full respect for the basic human rights of all individuals detained or imprisoned as a result of their struggle for self-determination and independence, and strict respect for article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights under which no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
There’s no sign that Cameron and the rest of the UK government understand any of this.
And what right does the UK have to prevent Palestinians choosing their own government? None. The correct way to “eliminate the threat posed by Hamas” is to require Israel to end its occupation.
International law trampled to suit Israeli plans for domination
It is ludicrous to keep repeating that Israel must abide by international humanitarian law. Israel has no intention of doing so, and everyone knows it. Israel wants to dominate the Holy Land and has made that abundantly clear. Western governments and Western Christendom seem paralysed. The presumption must be that Biden and Cameron (both self-proclaimed Zionists, as were most of their predecessors) are overly sympathetic towards Israel and happy to trample international law to ensure the success of the apartheid regime’s criminal enterprise.
Many in the UK question why our parliamentarians are so concerned about the 1,200 Israeli dead following Hamas’s breakout attack and the 200-odd hostages when they couldn’t care less about the 10,651 Palestinians (including 656 women and 2,270 children) slaughtered by Israel in the 23 years before 7 October. Or the 7,200 Palestinian hostages held in Israeli jails, including 88 women and 250 children. Over 1,200 are held under “administrative detention” without charge or trial and denied due process.
An authority on international law, Dr Ralph Wilde, has produced a legal opinion on the Israeli occupation which might be helpful in putting an end to Cameron’s & co’s claptrap.
He points out that:
Advice to Messrs Sunak, Cameron and Docherty is surely to first get on the right side of international law – and human decency – and recognise Palestinian statehood without any more foot-dragging. Furthermore, to join with other states and tell Israel, firmly, that all cooperation, collaboration and favoured nation privileges are cancelled until the apartheid regime ends its illegal occupation, removes its squatters, lifts its siege, ceases interference with free movement and fulfils its obligations under the UN Charter and resolutions. And completes a probationary period demonstrating good behaviour before being welcomed back into the community of nations.
Otherwise, what is international law worth? Our political leaders must realise that the British public don’t want a so-called ally that’s bent on genocide and the wholesale destruction of another people’s homeland and heritage, and is as hateful, racist and disrespectful of human rights and norms as Israel has been for as long as most of us can remember.
The post Palestinians’ Superior Right to Self-defence is Ignored, as Usual first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Indigenous campaigners, human rights defenders and climate activists say they are being silenced by fear of reprisals
Incidents of harassment, surveillance, threats and intimidation are creating a climate of fear at UN events including the recent Cop28 climate conference in Dubai, experts have said.
Indigenous campaigners, human rights defenders and environmental activists say they are increasingly afraid to speak out on urgent issues because of concerns about reprisals from governments or fossil fuel industries.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
The United Nations Security Council on Monday delayed an expected vote on a new Gaza cease-fire resolution as the U.S. worked to weaken the measure’s language, objecting to the proposed call for an “urgent and sustainable cessation of hostilities.” Unnamed diplomats told The Associated Press that the wording will likely be changed to call for a “suspension” of hostilities or some other watered…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
As our hopes for an extended ceasefire are dashed and Israel’s war on Gaza is now in its third month, the dire conditions that Palestinians are living under — hunger, lack of drinking water, infectious diseases, displacement, and fear of dying from the nonstop bombardment — continue to worsen as the U.S. supports Israel’s relentless assault on the besieged, occupied and now largely houseless…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
US representative to the UN Robert Wood raises his hand to veto a security council resolution calling for Gaza ceasefire. Photo credit: Charly Triballeau/AFP
On Friday, December 8, the UN Security Council met under Article 99 for only the fourth time in the UN’s history. Article 99 is an emergency provision that allows the Secretary General to summon the Council to respond to a crisis that “threatens the maintenance of international peace and security.” The previous occasions were the Belgian invasion of the Congo in 1960, the hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1979 and Lebanon’s Civil War in 1989.
Secretary General Antonio Guterres told the Security Council that he invoked Article 99 to demand an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza because “we are at a breaking point,” with a “high risk of the total collapse of the humanitarian support system in Gaza.” The United Arab Emirates drafted a ceasefire resolution that quickly garnered 97 cosponsors.
The World Food Program has reported that Gaza is on the brink of mass starvation, with 9 out of 10 people spending entire days with no food. In the two days before Guterres invoked Article 99, Rafah was the only one of Gaza’s five districts to which the UN could deliver any aid at all.
The Secretary General stressed that “The brutality perpetrated by Hamas can never justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people… International humanitarian law cannot be applied selectively. It is binding on all parties equally at all times, and the obligation to observe it does not depend on reciprocity.”
Mr. Guterres concluded, “The people of Gaza are looking into the abyss… The eyes of the world – and the eyes of history – are watching. It’s time to act.”
UN members delivered eloquent, persuasive pleas for the immediate humanitarian ceasefire that the resolution called for, and the Council voted thirteen to one, with the U.K. abstaining, to approve the resolution. But the one vote against by the United States, one of the five veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council, killed the resolution, leaving the Council impotent to act as the Secretary General warned that it must.
This was the sixteenth U.S. Security Council veto since 2000 – and fourteen of those vetoes have been to shield Israel and/or U.S. policy on Israel and Palestine from international action or accountability. While Russia and China have vetoed resolutions on a variety of issues around the world, from Myanmar to Venezuela, there is no parallel for the U.S.’s extraordinary use of its veto primarily to provide exceptional impunity under international law for one other country.
The consequences of this veto could hardly be more serious. As Brazil’s UN Ambassador Sérgio França Danese told the Council, if the U.S. hadn’t vetoed a previous resolution that Brazil drafted on October 18, “thousands of lives would have been saved.” And as the Indonesian representative asked, “How many more must die before this relentless assault is halted? 20,000? 50,000? 100,000?”
Following the previous U.S. veto of a ceasefire at the Security Council, the UN General Assembly took up the global call for a ceasefire, and the resolution, sponsored by Jordan, passed by 120 votes to 14, with 45 abstentions. The 12 small countries who voted with the United States and Israel represented less than 1% of the world’s population.
The isolated diplomatic position in which the United States found itself should have been a wake-up call, especially coming a week after a Data For Progress poll found that 66% of Americans supported a ceasefire, while a Mariiv poll found that only 29% of Israelis supported an imminent ground invasion of Gaza.
After the United States again slammed the Security Council door in Palestine’s face on December 8, the desperate need to end the massacre in Gaza returned to the UN General Assembly on December 12. An identical resolution to the one the U.S. vetoed in the Security Council was approved by a vote of 153 to 10, with 33 more yes votes than the one in October. While General Assembly resolutions are not binding, they do carry political weight, and this one sends a clear message that the international community is disgusted by the carnage in Gaza.
Another powerful instrument the world can use to try to compel an end to this massacre is the Genocide Convention, which both Israel and the United States have ratified. It only takes one country to bring a case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) under the Convention, and, while cases can drag on for years, the ICJ can take preliminary measures to protect the victims in the meantime.
On January 23, 2020, the Court did exactly that in a case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar, alleging genocide against its Rohingya minority. In a brutal military campaign in late 2017, Myanmar massacred tens of thousands of Rohingya and burnt down dozens of villages. 740,000 Rohingyas fled into Bangladesh, and a UN-backed fact-finding mission found that the 600,000 who remained in Myanmar “may face a greater threat of genocide than ever.”
China vetoed a referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Security Council, so The Gambia, itself recovering from 20 years of repression under a brutal dictatorship, submitted a case to the ICJ under the Genocide Convention.
That opened the door for a unanimous ruling by 17 judges at the ICJ that Myanmar must prevent genocide against the Rohingya, as the Genocide Convention required. The ICJ issued that ruling as a preventive measure, the equivalent of a preliminary injunction in a domestic court, even though its final ruling on the merits of the case might be many years away. It also ordered Myanmar to file a report with the Court every six months to detail how it is protecting the Rohingya, signaling serious ongoing scrutiny of Myanmar’s conduct.
So which country will step up to bring an ICJ case against Israel under the Genocide Convention? Activists are already discussing that with a number of countries. Roots Action and World Beyond War have created an action alert that you can use to send messages to 10 of the most likely candidates (South Africa, Chile, Colombia, Jordan, Ireland, Belize, Turkïye, Bolivia, Honduras and Brazil).
There has also been increasing pressure on the International Criminal Court to take up the case against Israel. The ICC has been quick to investigate Hamas for war crimes, but has been dragging its feet on investigating Israel. After a recent visit to the region, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan was not allowed by Israel to enter Gaza, and he was criticized by Palestinians for visiting areas attacked by Hamas on October 7, but not visiting the hundreds of illegal Israeli settlements, checkpoints and refugee camps in the occupied West Bank.
However, as long as the world is faced with the United States’ tragic and debilitating abuse of institutions the rest of the world depends on to enforce international law, the economic and diplomatic actions of individual countries may have more impact than their speeches in New York.
While historically there have been about two dozen countries that have not recognized Israel, in the past two months, Belize and Bolivia have severed ties with Israel, while others–Bahrain, Chad, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Jordan and Turkey–have withdrawn their ambassadors.
Other countries are trying to have it both ways–condemning Israel publicly but maintaining their economic interests. At the UN Security Council, Egypt explicitly accused Israel of genocide and the U.S. of obstructing a ceasefire.
And yet Egypt’s long-standing partnership with Israel in the blockade of Gaza and its continuing role, even today, in restricting the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza through its own border crossings, make it complicit in the genocide it condemns. If it means what it says, it must open its border crossings to all the humanitarian aid that is needed, end its cooperation with the Israeli blockade and reevaluate its obsequious and compromised relationships with Israel and the United States.
Qatar, which has worked hard to negotiate an Israeli ceasefire in Gaza, was eloquent in its denunciation of Israeli genocide in the Security Council. But Qatar was speaking on behalf of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Under the so-called Abraham accords, the sheikhs of Bahrain and the UAE have turned their backs on Palestine to sign on to a toxic brew of self-serving commercial relations and hundred million dollar arms deals with Israel.
In New York, the UAE sponsored the latest failed Security Council resolution, and its representative declared, “The international system is teetering on the brink. For this war signals that might makes right, that compliance with international humanitarian law depends on the identity of the victim and the perpetrator.”
And yet neither the UAE nor Bahrain has renounced their Abraham deals with Israel, nor their roles in U.S. “might makes right” policies that have wreaked havoc in the Middle East for decades. Over a thousand US Air Force personnel and dozens of U.S. warplanes are still based at the Al-Dhafra Airbase in Abu Dhabi, while Manama in Bahrain, which the U.S. Navy has used as a base since 1941, remains the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet.
Many experts compare apartheid Israel to apartheid South Africa. Speeches at the UN may have helped to bring down South Africa’s apartheid regime, but change didn’t come until countries around the world embraced a global campaign to economically and politically isolate it.
The reason Israel’s die-hard supporters in the United States have tried to ban, or even criminalize, the campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is not that it is illegitimate or anti-semitic. It is precisely because boycotting, sanctioning and divesting from Israel may be an effective strategy to help bring down its genocidal, expansionist and unaccountable regime.
U.S. Alternate Representative to the U.N. Robert Wood told the Security Council that there is a “fundamental disconnect between the discussions that we have been having in this chamber and the realities on the ground” in Gaza, implying that only Israeli and U.S. views of the conflict deserve to be taken seriously.
But the real disconnect at the root of this crisis is the one between the isolated looking-glass world of U.S. and Israeli politics and the real world that is crying out for a ceasefire and justice for Palestinians.
While Israel, with U.S. bombs and howitzer shells, is killing and maiming thousands of innocent people, the rest of the world is appalled by these crimes against humanity. The grassroots clamor to end the massacre keeps building, but global leaders must move beyond non-binding votes and investigations to boycotting Israeli products, putting an embargo on weapons sales, breaking diplomatic relations and other measures that will make Israel a pariah state on the world stage.
The post Getting Serious About Halting Israeli Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
In a heated session at the United Nations Security Council, diplomats engaged in a vigorous debate over the provision of arms to Ukraine amid the protracted war with Russia. The eleventh meeting on this pressing issue since Russia invaded in February of 2022 drew sharp criticisms from multiple speakers, who accused Moscow of deflecting attention from its own aggression.
While various briefers and delegates presented conflicting perspectives, CODEPINK member Ann Wright, a retired United States Army colonel and former diplomat, took a different stance. As a civil society representative, she introduced herself as a concerned citizen and taxpayer who resigned from the U.S. Government in 2003 in protest against the Iraq War.
Wright emphasized her opposition to the continued supply of weapons, asserting that it only serves to prolong conflicts. The United States and its European allies have provided tens of billions of dollars in aid to support Ukraine over the past two years. With the war at an indefinite stalemate with the death toll rising, Wright argued that fueling conflicts with substantial amounts of weapons ultimately profits corporations and politicians, but not the innocent civilians caught in the crossfire. A position that antiwar groups like CODEPINK has held since the beginning of this deadly war.
Highlighting the lengthy process of conflict resolution, Wright drew parallels with historical conflicts, such as the Korean War, which required 575 meetings before reaching a ceasefire agreement. She underscored the devastating toll on human lives during U.S. funded wars, referencing the significant casualties in the Korean War.
Drawing attention to not only the lack of diplomacy but also an attempt to stop any form of negotiations from happening, she expressed concern along with the historical fact that the supply of weapons prevents the possibility of peace. Wright referred to the reports that informed Washington, D.C., and London had pressured the Ukrainian Government to avoid peace negotiations with Russia, emphasizing the importance of preserving diplomatic efforts.
In a powerful conclusion, Mary Ann Wright shared a poem depicting a plea in Gaza for children’s names to be written on their legs as a means of identification in the event of death due to Israeli bombings. While specifically referencing Gaza, she asserted that the sentiment applies universally to children in conflict zones, including Ukraine, Russia, Palestinel, or Yemen.
As the Security Council debates the “complexities’ ‘ of arms transfers and their impact on international peace and security, Wright’s testimony emphasizes the importance of addressing the root causes of conflicts and fostering meaningful resolutions. She makes the case that this is not, in fact, a complex issue nor should it be a debate. It is quite simple, more weapons only create more war and prohibit lasting peace.
You can watch her full testimony here.
The post Ret. Col. Ann Wright Unmasks the Truth in Arms Transfer Debate first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Rev Dr Noel Anthony Davies says Rishi Sunak’s government seems all too willing to breach the principles of the UN’s human rights declaration. Plus letters from Clive Stafford Smith, Jim King and Michael McLoughlin
As a retired Christian minister, I very much welcome the powerful and challenging article by Prof Philippe Sands (From Gaza to Ukraine, what would the pioneers of human rights think of our world today?, 13 December). In the service that I led in our uniting church in Swansea last Sunday – international Human Rights Day – I shared some of the key articles of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights with the congregation. A number commented afterwards on how powerful and challenging its affirmations are.
We were therefore shocked to see that the UK government is prepared to turn its back on the declaration that has been the foundation of our common humanity and our shared sense of justice and freedom for all over the last 75 years merely to serve party political ends, and to implement an immigration policy that is clearly in contravention of the declaration. It is also a denial of what we, as Christians, would regard as a universal recognition, founded in the teaching of Jesus, of the dignity, freedom and equality of all people, irrespective of race, religion, sexuality, national identity or political conviction.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
A cache of international documents published late November by the nonprofit Center for Climate Reporting revealed how Emirates officials plotted to use the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s 28th Conference of Parties (COP28), hosted in Dubai, as an opportunity to expand their oil contracts with other countries. The revelations were published days before COP28 began…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Human rights campaigners say ‘responsibility to protect’ principle and ambition to prevent genocides have diminished
Human rights activists say that the international community has given up on intervention efforts to stop mass atrocities, leading to fears that such occurrences may become the norm around the world.
The warnings come on the 75th anniversaries this weekend of the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both signed in the aftermath of the Holocaust in the hope that the world would act in concert to prevent a repeat of such mass slaughter.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
This figure was given by the Gaza Ministry of Health on December 7. However, due to breakdowns in communication networks within the Gaza Strip (particularly in northern Gaza) and the high number of people trapped under rubble, the Gaza Ministry of Health has been unable to regularly and accurately update its tolls since mid-November. Some rights groups put the death toll number closer to or above…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
While King Charles was being wined and dined during his recent state visit to the country, Kenyan authorities were brutally evicting up to 700 Ogiek Indigenous people from their ancestral homes in the Mau Forest. This is just one in a long string of violent evictions that the Ogiek have had to endure, usually leading to the theft of their land by the government and the subsequent logging of the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
