Cybercrime — the malicious hacking of computer networks, systems, and data — threatens people’s rights and livelihoods, and governments need to work together to do more to address it. But the cybercrime treaty sitting before the United Nations for adoption, presumably by August 9, could instead facilitate government repression. By expanding government surveillance to investigate crimes…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Although the current U.S. presidential campaign has focused almost entirely on domestic issues, Americans live on a planet engulfed in horrific wars, an escalating arms race, and repeated threats of nuclear annihilation. Amid this dangerous reality, shouldn’t we give some thought to how to build a more peaceful future?
Back in 1945, toward the end of the most devastating war in history, the world’s badly battered nations, many of them in smoldering ruins, agreed to create the United Nations, with a mandate to “maintain international peace and security.”
It was not only a relevant idea, but one that seemed to have a lot of potential. The new UN General Assembly would provide membership and a voice for the world’s far-flung nations, while the new UN Security Council would assume the responsibility for enforcing peace. Furthermore, the venerable International Court of Justice (better known as the World Court) would issue judgments on disputes among nations. And the International Criminal Court―created as an afterthought nearly four decades later―would try individuals for crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression. It almost seemed as if a chaotic, ungovernable, and bloodthirsty pack of feuding nations had finally evolved into the long-standing dream of “One World.”
But, as things turned out, the celebration was premature.
The good news is that, in some ways, the new arrangement for global governance actually worked. UN action did, at times, prevent or end wars, reduce international conflict, and provide a forum for discussion and action by the world community. Thanks to UN decolonization policies, nearly all colonized peoples emerged from imperial subjugation to form new nations, assisted by international aid for economic and social development. A Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, set vastly-improved human rights standards for people around the world. UN entities swung into action to address new global challenges in connection with public health, poverty, and climate change.
Even so, despite the benefits produced by the United Nations, this pioneering international organization sometimes fell short of expectations, particularly when it came to securing peace. Tragically, much international conflict persisted, bringing with it costly arms races, devastating wars, and massive destruction. To some degree, this persistent conflict reflected ancient hatreds that people proved unable to overcome and that unscrupulous demagogues worked successfully to inflame.
But there were also structural reasons for ongoing international conflict. In a world without effective enforcement of international law, large, powerful nations could continue to lord it over smaller, weaker nations. Thus, the rulers of these large, powerful nations (plus a portion of their citizenry) were often reluctant to surrender this privileged status.
Symptomatically, the five victorious great powers of 1945 (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China) insisted that their participation in the United Nations hinged upon their receiving permanent seats in the new UN Security Council, including a veto enabling them to block Security Council actions not to their liking. Over the ensuing decades, they used the veto hundreds of times to stymie UN efforts to maintain international peace and security.
Similarly, the nine nuclear nations (including these five great powers) refused to sign the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which has been endorsed by the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations. Behind their resistance to creating a nuclear weapons-free world lies a belief that there is much to lose by giving up the status and power that nuclear weapons afford them.
Of course, from the standpoint of building a peaceful world, this is a very short-sighted position, and the reckless behavior and nuclear arrogance of the powerful have led, at times, to massive opposition by peace and nuclear disarmament movements, as well as by many smaller, more peacefully-inclined nations.
Thanks to this resistance and to a widespread desire for peace, possibilities do exist for overcoming UN paralysis on numerous matters of international security. Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to abolish the Security Council veto outright, given the fact that, under the UN Charter, the five permanent members have the power to veto that action, as well. But Article 27(3) of the Charter does provide that nations party to a dispute before the Council must abstain from voting on that issue―a provision that provides a means to circumvent the veto. In addition, 124 UN nations have endorsed a proposal to scrap the veto in connection with genocide, crimes against humanity, and mass atrocities, while the UN General Assembly has previously used “Uniting for Peace” resolutions to act on peace and security issues when the Security Council has evaded its responsibility to do so.
Global governance could also be improved through other measures. They include increasing the number of nations accepting the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and securing wider ratification of the founding statute of the International Criminal Court (which has yet to be ratified by Russia, the United States, China, India, and other self-appointed guardians of the world’s future).
It won’t be easy, of course, to replace the law of force with the force of law. Only this May, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court took a bold step toward strengthening international norms by announcing that he was seeking arrest warrants for top Israeli officials and Hamas commanders for crimes in and around Gaza. In response, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act,” legislation requiring the U.S. executive to impose sanctions on individuals connected with the ICC.
Despite the nationalist backlash, however, the time has arrived to consider bolstering international institutions that can build a more peaceful world. And the current U.S. presidential campaign provides an appropriate place for raising this issue. After all, Americans, like the people of other lands, have a personal stake in ensuring human survival.
The post Let’s Think About How to Build a More Peaceful World first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Image:: wikimediacommons
We have today issued to Secretary of State Blinken, the Government and State Department, a communication regarding the recently passed Resolve Tibet legislation. We have a number of serious questions about issues it poses. This document has been presented, in part, to serve as a public record and to hold to account those who are duty bound to apply the provisions of this law.
The correspondence can be read and/or downloaded here: https://tibettruth.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/resolvetibetcommunication.pdf
This post was originally published on Digital Activism In Support Of Tibetan Independence.
Among the subjects of instruction in schools are the local language, spoken and written; the techniques of computation, arithmetic and algebra or geometry; the principles of the physical world, chemistry and physics; and the story of the country in which the school is located—unless it is a colony in which case the story of the country that rules it. That story and its episodes is what is commonly known as history. Sometimes it is taught generally. At some point a distinction may be made between local or national history and the greater odyssey know as world history. In the Anglo-American educational tradition established by Matthew Arnold and John Dewey, the aim of school instruction is to instill in the pupil or student a sense of virtue and national pride capable of sustaining citizenship and duty to the State (euphemistically described as democracy in the US).
History is first and foremost a moral subject, as opposed to a scientific investigation, something like catechism or homilies at mass. The graduate should have imbibed enough of the national theodicy to continue to judge the affairs of which he learns in a manner consistent with the national ideals. The pupil is carefully shielded from that contentious atmosphere otherwise known as historical scholarship, lest it interfere with indoctrination. If history is written by the victors, the first place they celebrate is in the history books used in formal education.
When in the wake of 1989, many scholars claimed the “end of history” had arrived, they also meant the end to any necessity of contemplating other ways to explain the events constituting the American Empire. However, in 1865, the victors in the civil war aka as the war between the States and among the vanquished the “war of Northern aggression”, the history books were written to explain and justify the defeat of the southern states, the destruction of their economy, and the military occupation of their territory. In the campaign to expand US power into the western peninsula of Eurasia in 1917, the history books had to be re-written to make all the immigrants from belligerent countries into sanitized Americans who could then be recruited to invade the lands of their forefathers bearing moral superiority. After 1945, the history of the hostilities formally declared on 7 December 1941 was revised to obscure the support for fascism and highlight the perennial battle against communism. When the US continued its efforts to control the Asian mainland after the defeat of Japan, the government found itself compelled to end Jim Crow. The reaction to this intrusion into the social order established to reconcile North and South was the introduction of “sub-national history” in the former Confederacy, reviving the rebuttals of abolitionism and industrial expansionism that had been the formal motives for the attacks on Southern sovereignty. Even after the so-called Civil Rights Era had ended, a South Carolinian was taught quasi-national history more intensively than national or world history combined. Memory of a war that had ended more than a century ago constituted the essence of South Carolinian identity for those who attended school.
Bruce Cumings, in his works recounting and analysing the war whose beginning in Korea is dated in 1951, has written that “civil wars do not start, they come.” His definitive two-volume study The Origins of the Korean War establishes that the core of the conflict was a civil war in the Korean nation. As such the enduring conflict whose greatest violence exploded between 1951 and 1953, arose in Korean society and with the defeat of Imperial Japan exploded in the vacuum created by that brief cessation of foreign domination. That is the Korean War which continues to this day, the war unknown in the US because US national history does not recognize the sovereignty of other nations, especially those populated by brown, yellow or red peoples. Professor Cumings also wrote that the Korean War has been erroneously called the “forgotten war” when it should be called the “unknown war”.
Of course the thousands of US soldiers, sailors and airmen who participated in the wholesale slaughter of Koreans and the wanton destruction of at least half of the peninsula did not forget the war, even if they reluctantly discussed it. Nor have the Koreans who survived the heaviest saturation bombing campaign ever conducted (until Vietnam) forget the war.
Already during the active combat operations, journalist I.F. Stone was able to establish the US government’s policy of concealing the war from the public at large. In his Hidden History of the Korean War (review), Stone relied solely on official pronouncements and the reporting by the mainstream media to show how what was known about the war was consistently kept as unknown as possible. Needless to say once the Chinese Peoples’ Volunteer Army had forced the US war machine, operating behind a UN fig leaf, to accept a stalemate, the hiding continued.
Not only was the civil war character of the Korean conflict denied—and hence the Korean authority to resolve the internal domestic disputes—the actual role of the US as a party to war against all of Korea was hidden by the claim that US Forces were merely commanding UN troops. Hence the active imperial objectives of the US government (and the interests it represents) were never officially recognized and or negotiated. Neither the Korean state constituted by the US nor that constituted by Koreans in the north were able to dispute the legitimacy of the US as an invader of their country.
So the Korean War is unknown in two senses. The essentially Korean nature of the civil war is denied and, therefore, untaught. The US invasion of Korea in 1945, as part of its manifest destiny to control China through Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines, is completely obscured or distorted by an utterly false implied analogy with the occupation of Germany.
In recent years there have been some attempts to at least show the extent of US barbarism in Korea. In fact everything Americans had come to hear about their war against the Vietnamese had been practiced full throttle in Korea. The virtue of telling a history of the Korean War might be to demonstrate the patterns in US warfare against target countries. It might show that the myths of US wars for freedom have always been just that. That knowledge might lead to a more critical view and consideration of contemporary lies and concealment by government, armed or civilian. Recounting US atrocities can be instructive. However, without adequate context, pupils are left with shock and awe but little to ripen their understanding. Since the task of history instruction remains unchanged, exposures such as the massacres perpetrated by US troops remain anecdotes, even if very brutal ones. In contrast, an examination of the origins of civil war in other countries, like Korea, not only acknowledges that other countries have histories independent of the United States. It also permits consideration of such questions as “what would have happened had the British successfully intervened on the side of the Confederacy in the US Civil War?” That could lead to recognition why Britain was actually considered an enemy of the US until 1917?
While it may often be impossible to identify the beginning of something, it is therefore crucial to examine the end of it. The Korean War has not ended, either for Koreans still deprived of their 1000-year-old sovereignty, which Americans helped Japan end in the beginning of the last century. It has also not ended for the US which pretends it is not a formal belligerent whose intervention in the peninsula was driven by grand strategic goals in East Asia, goals the pursuit of which it has yet to abandon. In the nearly century of endless wars waged by the US throughout the world, the refusal to acknowledge either starts or finishes is part of the policy of deniability. No one attacked by the US or NATO or some American force wearing “UN Blue” can ever openly claim its rights to self-determination or self-defence under the UN Charter because those attacks are extra-legal, extra-territorial, and extra-vicious. If history instruction is to contain more than national apologetics and catechism, then it might start with viewing the nation among the community of nations. The gaps that need to be filled are those which comprise international law, aka the law of nations, and the international humanitarian law adopted with the UN Charter, as a ratified treaty binding elements of US law. Then one could begin to ask pupils and students to reflect on the conduct of their government in accordance with international standards rather than parochial rules fabricated in foreign policy think tanks or departmental committee rooms. Then the massacres and carpet bombing of Korea would not be mere shock and awe anecdotes but the point of departure for investigating the content of a truly moral and responsible role for the US in the world.
The post Does the End Matter? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A revelation — in order to liberate Palestinians from a century of oppression and prevent their genocide, Jews must liberate themselves from centuries of conditioning that trained them to pose as perpetual victims while victimizing others. This is happening and too slowly; progressive Jews are wrestling with reacting to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people without crippling the Jewish community. Almost entirely anti-Zionist in the 19th century, Zionist advances have enticed the Jewish community to split between Zionists and anti-Zionists. The former have gained control of a community that never had a higher hierarchy. Jew is preceded by an adjective ─ Zionist or non-Zionist. Those with the former adjective have witnessed pockets of hatred against their deliberate deceptions and corrosive actions. Concurrent with Jewish genocide of the Palestinians, hatred of Jews has swelled universally, appearing in Africa and Asia, where relatively few Jewish communities now exist.
The Jews during Zionism’s formation did not believe in or trust Zionism.
Reform Judaism’s Declaration of Principles: 1885 Pittsburgh Conference stated,
We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.
Between 1881 and 1914, 2.5 million Jews migrated from Russia ─ 1.7 million to America, 500,000 to Western Europe, almost 300,000 to other nations, and only 30,000 – 50,000 to Palestine. Of the latter, 15,000 returned to Russia. Jews rejected Zionism from its outset.
Despite rejection, Zionist supporters managed to skew Western governments’ policies to favor their mission. A worldwide propaganda machine obscures Identification of Israel as a criminal state that willfully murders Palestinians, steals their lands, has ethnically cleansed them, buried their villages under rubble, and destroyed their history and heritage. Quick to use the expression ‘Holocaust denial” on anyone who questions aspects of the Holocaust, the Zionists impressed upon the Jews the use of “denial” for anything that smacks of Jewish malfeasance, and includes the greatest malfeasance, the act of genocide. Charges of malfeasance by Jews are converted into anti-Semitism, truth becomes denied, anger of Jews against a manufactured hostile world is internalized, and bitterness against hostile Jews is intensified. The Zionists have used debts as collateral, turning valid charges against them into sympathy for their cause.
Start with the beginning of Zionism.
Although antipathy toward Jews and Judaism remained strong in Christian Europe, physical attacks on western European Jews, after a brief episode of the 1819-1826 Hep-Hep riots in Germany, were relatively few.
Often mentioned is the Dreyfus case, where a Jewish military officer in the 1896 French army was twice sentenced and later pardoned for giving military secrets to the Germans. Highlighted as an example of anti-Semitism in a French military, “rife with anti-Semitism,” and psychologically extended to the French populace, the Dreyfus case circulated for a century in American media, whose audience had no relation to the French incident (why?), giving the Dreyfus case a life of its own, and making it seem that there was not one Dreyfus but thousands. The Zionists needed a Dreyfus to substantiate their mission for all time, refusing to recognize that the Dreyfus case contradicted the Zionist mission; being an isolated case, it proved Jews could integrate into European institutions and receive equal justice.
Was the French military rife with anti-Semitism? According to Piers Paul, The Dreyfus Affair. p. 83, “The French army of the period was relatively open to entry and advancement by talent, with an estimated 300 Jewish officers, of whom ten were generals.” Only five African-American officers in the much larger US army in WWII. Why not emphasize the opposite of what the Zionists proffered; French Jews received equal and eventual justice. After the French Revolution, physical attacks on Jews rarely occurred in France.
Imperial Russia was another European community that the Zionists accused of serious anti-Semitism, exaggerating the damage done to Jewish communities in a multi-ethnic nation ravaged with ethnic disturbances. They used a special term, “pogroms,” to characterize attacks on Jews. Note that prejudice to other ethnicities does not qualify for a special term, such as “anti-Semitism,” nor does violence against any of them.
A lack of communications in Russia during the 19th century, a tendency to create sensational news, and a willingness to accept rumors make it difficult to ascertain the extent of attacks on Russia’s Jewish community. The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, a reference work on the history and culture of Eastern Europe Jewry, prepared by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and published by Yale University Press in 2008, is a more objective and authoritative source. Excerpts from their work can be found here.
Anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire before 1881 was a rare event, confined largely to the rapidly expanding Black Sea entrepot of Odessa. In Odessa, Greeks and Jews, two rival ethnic and economic communities, lived side by side. The first Odessa pogrom, in 1821, was linked to the outbreak of the Greek War for Independence, during which the Jews were accused of sympathizing with the Ottoman authorities. Although the pogrom of 1871 was occasioned in part by a rumor that Jews had vandalized the Greek community’s church, many non-Greeks participated, as they had done during earlier disorders in 1859.
After Alexander II became Tsar in 1855, he lessened anti-Jewish edicts, rescinded forced conscription, allowed Jews to attend universities, and permitted Jewish emigration from the Pale. His assassination in 1881 prompted Tsar Alexander III to reverse his father’s actions. Because some Jews were involved in Russia’s revolutionary party, Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), which organized the assassination, the assassination acted as a catalyst for a wave of attacks on Jews during 1881-83.
Typically, the pogroms of this period originated in large cities, and then spread to surrounding villages, traveling along means of communication such as rivers and railroads. Violence was largely directed against the property of Jews rather than their persons. In the course of more than 250 individual events, millions of rubles worth of Jewish property was destroyed. The total number of fatalities is disputed but may have been as few as 50, half of them pogromshchiki who were killed when troops opened fire on rioting mobs.
Note that this was one large “pogrom,” which emanated from one incident that touched the Russian nerve, was directed mainly against Jewish property, did not have government support, and faded out. “Michael Aronson has sought to refute the long-standing belief that the regime of Alexander III actively conspired to lead the Russian masses into savage riots against the Jews. In Aronson’s view the pogroms were spontaneous, by which he means not that they happened without cause, but that they happened largely without prior planning or organization.”
Missing from references to the attacks on the Jewish population is that the Tsars inherited Jewish and other populations after the 1791-1795 partitions of Poland and sought means to integrate the new ethnicities into a Russian way of life. Nevertheless, in Tsarist Russia, the principal population to which Zionism should have had appeal, there is no evidence that a massive number of Jews accepted Zionism.
Unwaveringly secularist in its beliefs, the Russian Bund discarded the idea of a Holy Land and a sacred tongue. Its language was Yiddish, spoken by millions of Jews throughout the Pale. This was also the source of the organization’s four principles: socialism, secularism, Yiddish, and doyikayt or localness. The latter concept was encapsulated in the Bund slogan: “There, where we live, that is our country.” The Bund disapproved greatly of Zionism and considered the idea of emigrating to Palestine to be political escapism.
Imperial Russia contained several minorities that economically contested and attacked one another. Economic rivalry was the leading cause of attacks on Jews. From Middleman Minorities and Ethnic Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Russian Empire, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 87, Issue 1, January 2020.
Using detailed panel data from the Pale of Settlement area between 1800 and 1927, we document that anti-Jewish pogroms—mob violence against the Jewish minority—broke out when economic shocks coincided with political turmoil. When this happened, pogroms primarily occurred in places where Jews dominated middleman occupations, i.e., moneylending and grain trading. This evidence is inconsistent with the scapegoating hypothesis, according to which Jews were blamed for all misfortunes of the majority. Instead, the evidence is consistent with the politico-economic mechanism, in which Jewish middlemen served as providers of insurance against economic shocks to peasants and urban grain buyers in a relationship based on repeated interactions.
Violation of any human life can not be underestimated or ignored; Jews suffered in the 19th century Russian Empire, and so did almost everyone else, including native Russians. Placed in context — location, time, comparison of the fate and life of Jews to other minorities, and internal and external factors that favored the Jews — the reasons for Zionists to behave as the rescuer of their co-religionists is dubious.
For others, also not of the Russian Orthodox faith, persecution was magnitudes worse. From Balfour Project:
The Moscow Patriarchate presided over the state religion and other believers were generally disadvantaged, often persecuted, or sometimes driven from Russian lands. The non-Orthodox were despised as unbelievers and thousands of Catholics were deported to Siberia in the mid-19th century. At the same time, around half a million Muslims were driven from the Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire, Iran or further afield. At the south-eastern border of the Pale of Settlement began the lands of the Circassians, a mostly Muslim group who had lived since the 14th century along the northern Black Sea coast from Sochi and eastwards into the Caucasus mountains. A long war of attrition ended in the genocide of 1865. According to official Russian statistics, the population was reduced by 97 per cent. At least 200,000, and possibly several hundred thousand people died through ethnic cleansing, hunger, epidemics and bitterly cold weather.
Compared to other ethnicities ─ Native American, slaved Africans, Chinese, Irish, and Catholic in the U.S., and Chinese, Indian, and African during the age of Imperialism, the persecution and distress of European Jews was insignificant. Yet, the Zionists made it appear that Jews were the most suffering people in the world and the world believed it.
Despite the overwhelming verbal and physical rejection of Zionism by worldwide Jewry, a small group of conspirators managed to convince the British government to issue the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which is not an official or legal instrument. It is not even a Declaration. It is a letter from Lord Balfour to Lord Rothschild, which has a phrase, “declaration of sympathy,” from which it was given the more lofty description of declaration. Who are these two guys?
Arthur James Balfour, known as Lord Balfour, served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1902 to 1905 and as foreign secretary from 1916 to 1919,
Lionel Walter Rothschild was a British zoologist from the wealthy Rothschild banking family, who served as a Conservative member of Parliament from 1899 to 1910. He was sympathetic to the Zionist cause and had an eminent position in the Anglo-Jewish community.
The letter:
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Why was the letter issued, what did it exactly mean, and why did it have impact? Acceptable answers have not been supplied. One clue is from Minutes of British War Cabinet Meetings
Meeting No. 245, Minute No. 18, 4 October 1917: 4 October 1917: “… [Balfour] stated that the German Government were making great efforts to capture the sympathy of the Zionist Movement.”
Meeting No. 261, Minute No. 12, 31 October 1917
With reference to War Cabinet 245, Minute 18, the War Cabinet had before them a note by the Secretary, and also a memorandum by Lord Curzon on the subject of the Zionist movement. The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs stated that he gathered that everyone was now agreed that, from a purely diplomatic and political point of view, it was desirable that some declaration favourable to the aspirations of the Jewish nationalists should now be made.
World leaders failed to recognize the ominous outcomes of their San Remo Peace Conference and the newly formed League of Nations, which created a new international order that sliced the Middle East for the major European powers. Both approved establishment of a Jewish presence in the British Mandate in accord with the Balfour Letter. Despite these achievements, progress for obtaining a central headquarters for Zionism went slowly until US immigration laws and persecution of German Jews renewed Zionist life.
The year 1924 was fortuitous for the Zionists. The US Immigration Act closed the doors to mass Jewish immigration from East European nations and the Act steered Jews to migrate to Palestine. By 1931, Palestine housed 175,000 Jews. The economic depression slowed the migration. The rise of Nazi Germany reinvigorated it.
After the Nazis began their rule, they slowly froze Jewish assets. Although not proven, a principal reason for Germany slowly freezing Jewish assets and engaging in its own boycott of Jewish enterprises was the boycott of German goods, which was organized by Jewish groups in the United States as a response to the confined and sporadic violence and harassment by Nazi Party members against Jews in early 1933. Zionists saw the frozen assets as a means to bring Jews to the British Mandate.
By the Ha’avara Transfer Agreement with Nazi Germany, the Zionists used German Jewish assets, including bank deposits to purchase German products that were exported to the Jewish-owned Ha’avara Company in Tel-Aviv. A portion of the money from the sales of the goods went to the emigrants, who could leave Germany and regain assets after arrival in Palestine and in an amount corresponding to their deposits in German banks. The Zionists enabled the Nazi regime to circumvent the international boycott campaign that its policies had provoked. The Zionist movement, which had become the only authorized Jewish organization in Nazi Germany, was able to transfer about 53,000 Jews to Palestine. Again, the Zionists turned catastrophe to the Jews into an opportunity for themselves.
Zionist luck, if that is the proper word for gaining from calamities to others, continued. Revelations of the Holocaust and the plight of Jewish refugees after World War II gained worldwide sympathy for the Zionist cause. About 136,000 displaced Jews came to Palestine, mostly out of desperation and without intention to remain. The Cold War provided the most decisive benefit for Zionism ─ Soviet Union support for an Israeli state drove the United States to compete for Zionist attention. Votes from both nations, bribes, and arm twisting provided a narrow victory for United Nations Declaration 181 and the Zionists established their state.
Because neither state had official names at that time, designations as Arab and Jewish states were used to map out contours of land where the major portions of the ethnicities would live. President Truman recognized the Jewish state, which became Israel just before he approved recognition. The U.S. president failed to observe that, although the state was bi-national, a small Zionist group took control of all apparatus of the new state and did that without consulting Palestinian leadership.
The UN did not create two states; it divided one Palestinian state into two states ─ a Palestinian state composed of almost 100 percent Palestinians, and another mostly Palestinian state composed of about 70 percent who were native to the area (400,000 Palestinians), a small contingent of foreign Jews that had come as Zionists to live permanently in Palestine (200,000), and another larger contingent of foreign Jews (300,000) that arrived for expediency and not with original intentions of remaining in the British Mandate. The Mandate was only a way station for Jews caught in the tragedies during the 1930s and World War II. If neither cataclysm occurred, would these Jews have gone to the Mandate? Without them, how many Jews would have been there in 1947?
David Ben-Gurion and a small clique of opportunists took advantage of an ill-advised UN, an ill-led and ill- equipped Palestinian community, and a confused world to declare their state, and, with seasoned militia forces — Haganah, Irgun, Lehi, and Palmach — cleansed the area of Palestinians and established Israel.
The Zionists turned lying, cheating, and deceiving into an accepted ethnic cleansing. During the next years, they continued the lies, cheats, and deceptions to steal more land and oppress Palestinians. Taking advantage of the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas, the Zionist Jews have embarked on a genocide of the Palestinian people, masking it as a defense of their land against a force that has no offensive power to conquer anything.
The Zionists made the struggle (which they engineered) a zero-sum game of “us” or “them.” The “us” is those who steal the land and the patrimony and the lives of “them.” They forced the Jews into a choice, reasoning that the powers in control will favor “us.” This poses a difficulty for Jews who will not support genocide and, therefore, cannot support “us,” and fear that for the Palestinians to survive the Jews in Israel will not survive. A different look — if the Jews liberate themselves from the conditioned grip that Zionism has on them and differentiate between a liberated Jew and a Zionist Jew, the liberated Jews will lose their paranoid fear and the Zionist Jews will lose their power, which is based upon creating paranoia and fear in fellow Jews.
Unfortunately, the liberation of the Jews is not foreseen and the decimation of innocents will occur — a replay of the story of Purim, “when having obtained royal permission to strike their enemies, including women and children, the Jews kill over seventy-five thousand people! Esther then further seeks permission for another day of massacre.”
Unleashed from subjugation and drowned with power, they seek another day of massacre. Is Joshua, who slew the inhabitants of Jericho, eradicated the Canaanites, and is a hero in Jewish mythology, a clue to the mentality of leaders of the Jewish people? Do the horrors visited upon the Gazans, purposeful and wanton killings and massacres beyond credulity, carry Joshua to modern times and tell a cautious story of the Zionist Jews?
The post The Liberation of the Jews first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The international court of justice, the UN’s top court, has ruled that Israel’s settlement policies and use of natural resources in the occupied Palestinian territories violate international law. The ICJ said: ‘The transfer by Israel of settlers to the West Bank and Jerusalem, as well as Israel’s maintenance of their presence, is contrary to article 49 of the fourth Geneva convention’
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
The PANG media team at this month’s Pacific International Media Conference in Fiji caught up with independent journalist, author and educator Dr David Robie and questioned him on his views about decolonisation in the Pacific.
Dr Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report and deputy chair of Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN), a co-organiser of the conference, shared his experience on reporting on Kanaky New Caledonia and West Papua’s fight for freedom.
He speaks from his 40 years of journalism in the Pacific saying the United Nations and the Pacific Islands Forum need to step up pressure on France and Indonesia to decolonise.
This interview was conducted at the end of the conference, on July 6, and a week before the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) leaders called for France to allow a joint United Nations-MSG mission to New Caledonia to assess the political situation and propose solutions for the ongoing crisis.
The leaders of the subregional bloc — from Fiji, FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front of New Caledonia), Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu — met in Tokyo on the sidelines of the 10th Pacific Islands Leaders Meeting (PALM10), to specifically talk about New Caledonia.
They included Fiji’s Sitiveni Rabuka, PNG’s James Marape, Solomon Islands’ Jeremiah Manele, and Vanuatu’s Charlot Salwai.
In his interview with PANG (Pacific Network on Globalisation), Dr Robie also draws parallels with the liberation struggle in Palestine, which he says has become a global symbol for justice and freedom everywhere.
“I should mention Palestine as well because essentially it’s settler colonisation.
“What we’ve seen in the massive protests over the last nine months and so on there has been a huge realisation in many countries around the world that colonisation is still here after thinking, or assuming, that had gone some years ago.
“So you’ll see in a lot of protests — we have protests across Aotearoa New Zealand every week — that the flags of Kanaky, West Papua and Palestine fly together.
“The people see these as symbolic of the repression and injustice all over the world.”
PANG Media talk to Dr David Robie on decolonisation. Video: PANG Media
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This month on 11th July 2024, the UN commemorated the Srebrenica Genocide of 1995 with official statements and speeches by dignitaries, memorial services, moments of silence and designating a day for remembering what has been called the greatest atrocity in modern Europe.
What is ironic, however, is the fact that the world comes together to remember Srebrenica in the midst of another harrowing genocide — one that is live-streamed straight into every waking moment, all over the world. Ten months into the nightmarish bloodbath in Gaza that has cost nearly 40,000 lives, world leaders are still haranguing over the events of October 7, still unsure and half-hearted towards the urgent and pressing need to enforce a cease-fire to end an unimaginably horrific war, most victims of which have been children.
Alija Izetbegovich, the iconic Muslim leader of Bosnia during the Bosnian war and Srebrenica massacre, had once said, “Do not forget this genocide. If you forget it, another will happen…” The words bear premonition as they echo the age-old cliche that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
Here we stand, remembering a genocide while having unleashed another one thirty years on, with the bloody tide showing no signs of abating — as if human lives were like the flies that the wanton boys kill for sport.
To learn the right lessons from Srebrenica, one must revisit in 1992, the Muslim majority republic of Bosnia immediately after it seceded from Communist Yugoslavia as a result of a popular referendum. Bosnia’s Orthodox Christian Serb minority, however, refused to accept this and began a rebellion. Given how well-armed Serbia was as an ally of powerful erstwhile Communist Russia, what started as ethno-religious strife quickly flared up into a war against which Bosnia was nearly defenceless. Several appeals for help by Alija Izetbegovic resulted in no more than humanitarian assistance from the Arab-Muslim world. Izetbegovic feared a genocide, given the violence displayed by the Serb forces under Ratko Mladic, known as the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’. Mladic, as the commander of the army of Republika Sprska (the self declared Serb autonomous zone inside Bosnia), had earlier threatened: “You Muslims cannot defend yourselves if a civil war breaks out.”
Bosnia’s countless appeals ultimately led to the arrival of UN peacekeeping forces in the area. Not surprisingly, the UN forces proved utterly ineffectual as the Serb army carried on its atrocities with over 100,000 Muslim Bosniaks killed.
Serb violence against the Bosniaks was neither isolated from context nor sudden. It climaxed after centuries of endemic structural violence built on nationalist Islamophobic narratives rife in the region. When Mladic began the genocidal operation in Srebrenica, he said on camera while addressing his troops, “This is the time to take revenge on the Turkish rabble and return Srebrenica to the Serbs…” The reference to Bosniaks as “Turks” reeks of ethnocentric hate deeply embedded in a prejudicial understanding of history. Serbia had been under Ottoman rule for three centuries, and the reference to ethnic Bosniak Muslims as “Turks” aims to build on the Islamophobic nationalist narrative of victimhood by Turkish-Muslim rulers centuries ago.
As the Bosnian war raged on from 1992 to 1995 with terrible atrocities including the blockade of Sarajevo which prevented fuel, food and water to the area, rapes and mass murders, UN peacekeepers from Netherlands were unable to halt the violence. They were outgunned and outnumbered, and could neither expect the scale of the violence nor were they equipped or even really willing to take decisive action against it. As late as in 2022, twenty-seven years after the Srebrenica genocide, the Dutch government acknowledged partial complicity of its peacekeepers in Bosnia and offered “apology for not taking effective action to stop the “Srebrenica genocide” — too little, too late.
During the war, Srebrenica in Eastern Bosnia had been designated as a “safe zone” where hundreds of thousands were sheltering. However, when the international community warned of action against Republika Srpska and Serbia, driven by a misdirected vengeance, the Serb leadership decided to violate the safe zone and besieged Srebrenica. As the Dutch peacekeepers looked on, Bosniak men and women were segregated, and all men including minor boys, were herded together and shot fatally, their bodies huddled together and thrown into mass graves.
The horrific reality of the war crimes later surfaced, and it was established after investigations that in July 1995, a massacre of 8,372 Muslim men and boys by Serb forces over just three days had been systematically committed — known now in the annals of history as the “Srebrenica Genocide”.
Some months later, as the world came to know of the horrors that had been unleashed, there was an attempt by the Serb leadership to cover up the evidence. The mass graves of 8,372 Muslims were bulldozed and whatever remained of the bodies was scattered in unmarked areas all over the region. To this day, search for human remains continues in Srebrenica. Some 1,200 of those who went missing in July 1995 have still not been identified or given the dignity of a proper funeral and burial.
While the Dayton Accords of 1996 enforced a ceasefire after what the Bosniaks had endured, peace in the region is still tenuous. Tensions are rife as the Serb Autonomous Zone inside Bosnia continues with its ultraconservative nationalism and ethnic prejudice, refusing to acknowledge what was done to the Bosniaks from 1992-1995 as a genocide. The current UN Peace Representative for Bosnia — Hans Christian Schmidt– has warned earlier this year that ethnic tensions between Bosnia and the autonomous Serb community remain dangerously high still, and the possibility of internecine violence once again cannot be ruled out.
There are some clear parallels between the Bosnian genocide three decades ago and the Israeli military onslaught on Gaza in 2023-24. Like the Serbs, Israelis justify their actions on the narrative of historical victimhood. They present their victim as the perpetrator, stereotyping through Islamophobic propaganda that makes you believe Muslim Palestinian children are fair targets as potential “Islamist terrorists” and “jihadists” in the making. Like in the case of Bosnia, the world was never moved to decisive action to end the bloodbath until too late. Not surprisingly, the victims in both cases happen to be Muslims. While Serbia had been armed to the teeth by its mentor Soviet Russia, Israel has been heavily armed by the US, Germany, UK and other Western allies that continue to send military supplies to the Zionist state. In both cases, the population against whom these lethal weapons are unleashed is extremely vulnerable, unarmed and defenceless. In both Bosnia and now in Palestine, the UN proved a complete failure. And perhaps most poignantly, in both cases the Muslim world failed to stand up and act together, other than sending some humanitarian supplies for the victims.
Yet there are aspects in which the Gaza genocide emerges as a unique and unprecedented case in point. Gaza’s suffering has been long and historic, since the Nakba of 1948, and the world has continued to ignore its plight. Gaza has for years been under severe blockade, with many observers describing it as an “open air prison.” Israel, on the other hand, seen as the Middle East’s only beacon of democracy with Western liberal values and culture is considered as the West’s only reliable ally in the volatile region — the ‘blue-eyed boy’ of the Western world. It enjoys tremendous influence and solid support from its Western benefactors, even after having committed gross defiant violations of human rights and international law. The ongoing siege and death toll in Gaza is more protracted, and the scale of devastation far greater, surpassing anything we may have witnessed in modern history.
Bosnia found some solace with the trial of Serb war criminals at The Hague, as a result of which 21 perpetrators of the genocide were pronounced guilty- including Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, Republika Sprska leader Radovan Karadzic and Serb army commander Ratko Mladic. The case for Palestine, on the other hand, given the global power and influence of the Zionist lobby, has found no echo in the corridors of power, and any wholesale transparent accountability for the genocidal far right Israeli regime seems to be a remote possibility.
This is precisely why the global commemoration of the Bosnian genocide seems meaningless when the UN and the international community have proven so utterly spineless in the case of Gaza. Remembering and honouring Srebrenica means learning its lessons and promising “Never Again”. With humanity abysmally failing to show any resolve to end Israel’s relentless and brutal assault on Palestine, carefully crafted words for Srebrenica from high podiums ring hollow indeed.
The post Remembering a Genocide in the Midst of Another first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Mexico City, July 18, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists supports the urgent appeal filed to UN officials by an international legal team on behalf of Guatemalan investigative journalist José Rubén Zamora, who the appeal says has been wrongfully imprisoned since 2022 and held in conditions “that amount to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
The appeal, sent to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, says Zamora, age 67, has been deprived of light, water, and sleep, subjected to “sadistic humiliation ceremonies,” unnecessary restraints, and “has been detained in unsanitary conditions that pose a danger to his physical health and well-being.”
“Jose Rubén Zamora’s treatment in prison and pre-trial detention is appalling and constitutes a grave violation of international human rights standards,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, CPJ’s Program Director. “The international community must act urgently to ensure his immediate release.”
The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention recently declared Zamora’s imprisonment arbitrary and in violation of international law. Likewise, a February report from TrialWatch gave a failing grade to Zamora’s legal proceedings, citing numerous breaches of fair-trial standards.
The UN working group asked Guatemalan authorities to report within six months on Zamora’s release status, any compensation or reparations, the results of the investigation into his rights violations, and whether Guatemala enacted legislative amendments or practical changes to align with international obligations.
Zamora, president of elPeriódico newspaper, was sentenced to six years in prison in June 2023 on money laundering charges, but an appeals court overturned his conviction in October 2023 and ordered a retrial. However, numerous delays have prolonged the new trial in 2024.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Beatriz González (Colombia), Señor presidente, qué honor estar con usted en este momento histórico (‘Mr President, What an Honour to Be with You in This Historic Moment’), 1987.
There are times in life when you want to set aside complexity and return to the essence of things. Last week, I was on a boat in the Caribbean Sea, travelling from Isla Grande to the mainland of Colombia, when it began to rain heavily. Though our boat was modest, we were in minimal danger with Ever de la Rosa Morales, a leader of the Afro-Colombian community on the twenty-seven Rosario Islands (located off the coast of Cartagena), at the helm. During the downpour, a range of human emotions swept through me, from fear to exhilaration. The rain was linked to Hurricane Beryl, a storm that struck Jamaica at a Category Four level (the highest the country has experienced) and then moved toward Mexico with a more muted ferocity.
The Haitian poet Frankétienne sings of the ‘dialect of lunatic hurricanes’, the ‘folly of colliding winds’, and the ‘hysteria of the roaring sea’. These are fitting phrases to describe the way we experience the power of nature, a power that has redoubled as a result of the damage inflicted upon it by capitalism. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report suggests that the North Atlantic has almost certainly experienced stronger and more frequent hurricanes since the 1970s. Scientists say that long-term greenhouse gas emissions have led to warmer ocean waters, which pick up more moisture and energy and lead to both stronger winds and more rainfall.
On Isla Grande, where pirates used to stash their loot and where Africans escaping enslavement fled over five hundred years ago, residents held an assembly in early July to discuss the need for an electricity plant that would benefit the islanders. The assembly is part of a long struggle that ultimately allowed them to remain on these islands, despite the Colombian oligarchy’s attempt to evict them in 1984, and succeeded in removing the rich owner of the best land on Isla Grande, upon which they built the town of Orika through a process called minga (community solidarity). Their Community Action Board (Junta de Acción Comunal), which led the struggle to defend their land, is now called the Community Council of the Rosario Islands (Consejo Comunitario de las Islas del Rosario). Part of that council held the assembly, an example of the permanent minga.
The island is knit together by this spirit of minga and by the mangroves, which preserve the habitat from the rising waters. The assembled residents know that they must expand their electricity capacity, not only to promote eco-tourism, but also for their own use. But how can they generate electricity on these small islands?
On the day of the rains, Colombian President Gustavo Petro visited the town of Sabanalarga (Atlántico) to inaugurate the Colombia Solar Forest, a complex of five solar parks with a capacity of 100 megawatts. This park is set to benefit 400,000 Colombians and cut annual CO2 emissions by 110,212 tonnes, which is equivalent to 4.3 million car trips from Barranquilla to Cartagena. At this event, Petro called on mayors in the Colombian Caribbean to build ten-megawatt solar farms for each municipality, reduce electricity rates, decarbonise the economy, and promote sustainable development. This is perhaps the most concrete solution for the islands to date, whose coastlines are being eroded by the rising waters.
Marisa Darasavath (Lao People’s Democratic Republic), Oil Painting #7, 2013.
As Petro spoke in Sabanalarga, I thought about his speech to the United Nations last year, where he pleaded for world leaders to honour the ‘crisis of life’ and fix our problems together rather than ‘waste time killing one another’. In that speech, Petro lyrically described the situation in 2070, forty-six years from now. In that year, he said, Colombia’s lush forests will become deserts and ‘people will go north, no longer attracted by the sequins of wealth, but by something simpler and more vital: water’. ‘Billions’, he said, ‘will defy armies and change the Earth’ as they travel to find the remaining sources of water.
Such a dystopia must be prevented. To do so, Petro said, at the very minimum sufficient funding must be provided for the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), established by a treaty in 2015. While the entire process of developing these SDGs was fraught with problems, including how they disarticulate issues that are inextricably connected (poverty and water, for instance), their existence and acceptance by world governments provides an opportunity to insist that they be taken seriously. On 8 July, the United Nations Economic and Social Council opened the 2024 High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, which will last for ten days. The gap between the funds pledged to meet the SDGs and the actual amount provided to implement the programme in developing countries is now $4 trillion per year (up from $2.5 trillion in 2019). Without sufficient funding, it is unlikely that this forum will have any meaningful outcome.
Abdelaziz Gorgi (Tunisia), Les Joueuses de Cartes (‘Card Players’), 1973.
In anticipation of the forum, the UN released the Sustainable Development Goals Report 2024, which shows that only ‘minimal or moderate’ progress has been made toward nearly half of the seventeen targets, and more than a third have either stalled or regressed. While the first sustainable development goal is to eradicate poverty, for instance, the report notes that ‘the global extreme poverty rate increased in 2020 for the first time in decades’, and that by 2030, at least 590 million people will be in extreme poverty and fewer than one in three countries will halve national poverty. Similarly, while the second goal is to end hunger, in 2022 one in ten people faced hunger, 2.4 billion people were moderately or severely food insecure, and 148 million children under the age of five suffered from stunting. These two goals, ending poverty and ending hunger, are perhaps the ones with the highest global consensus. And yet, we are nowhere near meeting even a modest interpretation of these goals. Ending poverty and hunger would also assist in the fifth SDG, gender equality, since it would reduce the increased burden of care work placed mostly on women, who largely bear the weight of austerity policies.
There is, as President Petro said, a ‘crisis of life’. We seem to favour death over life. Each year, we spend more and more on the global military. As of 2022, this number was $2.87 trillion – nearly the amount needed to finance all seventeen SDGs for one year. It is strange how the advocates of a planet at war claim that they are realistic, while those who want a planet of peace are seen as idealists; yet, in fact, those who want a planet of war are exterminators, while those of us who advocate for a planet of peace are the only possible realists. Reality demands peace over war, spending our precious resources to solve our common problems – such as climate change, poverty, hunger, and illiteracy – above all else.
In September 2023, a month before the current genocidal assault against Gaza began, Petro called for the UN to sponsor two peace conferences, one for Ukraine and one for Palestine. If there can be peace in these two hotspots, Petro said, ‘they would teach us to make peace in all regions of the planet’. This perfectly reasonable suggestion was ignored then and is ignored now. Nonetheless, this did not stop Petro from organising a massive Latin American concert for peace in Palestine in early July.
Rosângela Rennó (Brasil), from the series Rio-Montevideo, 2016.
There is madness in our choices. The revenues of the top five arms dealers in 2022 alone (all domiciled in the United States) were around $276 billion, a number that should be a standing rebuke to humanity. Israel has dropped roughly 13,050 MK-84 ‘dumb bombs’ on Gaza, which have an explosive capacity of 2,000 pounds (around 900 kgs) per bomb. Each of these bombs costs $16,000, meaning that the bombs already dropped have cost over $200 million in total. It is strange that the very governments that supply Israel with these bombs and that give it political cover (including the US) then turn around and fund the UN to dismantle unexploded dumb bombs from Gaza during the pause between bombings. Meanwhile, aid for relief and development in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (which includes Gaza) has not exceeded hundreds of millions – in a good year. More spent on weapons, less spent on life – the ugliness of our humanity needs to be transformed.
Mohamed Sulaiman (Western Sahara), Red Liberty, 2014.
The young artist Mohamed Sulaiman grew up in Algeria, at the Smara Refugee Camp of the displaced peoples of Western Sahara. After studying at Algeria’s University of Batna, Sulaiman returned to the camp to make art based on calligraphy traditions that use the oral histories of the Saharawi people as well as poems of contemporary Arab writers. In 2016, Sulaiman founded the Motif Art Studio, built from recycled materials to resemble traditional desert homes. In his studio, which opened in 2017, Sulaiman hangs Red Liberty, which carries a line from the Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi (1868–1932): ‘Red freedom has a door, knocked on by every bloodstained hand’. The line comes from ‘The Plight of Damascus’, a poem that reflects on the French destruction of Damascus in 1916 as revenge for the Arab revolt. The poem encapsulates not only the ugliness of the war, but also the promise of a future:
Homelands have a hand that has alreadylent a favour
and to which all free people owe a debt.
The bloodstained hand is the hand of those before us who struggled to build a better world, many of whom perished in that struggle. To them, and future generations, we owe a debt. We must turn this ‘crisis of life’ into an opportunity to ‘live far from the apocalypse and times of extinction,’ as Petro said last year; ‘A beautiful horizon [is coming] amidst the storm and darkness of today, a horizon that tastes like hope’.
The post Building a Planet of Peace Is the Only Realistic Thing to Do first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Crown prince criticised ‘bad laws’ for Mohammed al-Ghamdi’s death sentence months before second conviction
Fresh questions have been raised about the suppression of free speech in Saudi Arabia after the brother of a man facing the death penalty for tweeting to 10 followers was handed a 20-year sentence for largely innocuous tweets.
The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had said Mohammed al-Ghamdi was a victim of “bad laws” after being sentenced to death, yet the crown prince permitted the same laws to be used to sentence Ghamdi’s younger brother, Asaad al-Ghamdi.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Crown prince criticised ‘bad laws’ for Mohammed al-Ghamdi’s death sentence months before second conviction
Fresh questions have been raised about the suppression of free speech in Saudi Arabia after the brother of a man facing the death penalty for tweeting to 10 followers was handed a 20-year sentence for largely innocuous tweets.
The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had said Mohammed al-Ghamdi was a victim of “bad laws” after being sentenced to death, yet the crown prince permitted the same laws to be used to sentence Ghamdi’s younger brother, Asaad al-Ghamdi.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Mexico City, July 2, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention’s Monday declaration that the continued imprisonment of Guatemalan investigative journalist José Rubén Zamora is arbitrary and in violation of international law. CPJ echoes the group’s call for Zamora’s immediate release.
“The U.N. Working Group’s acknowledgment of José Rubén Zamora’s arbitrary detention highlights that he has been consistently denied a fair trial, and there is no justification for his ongoing imprisonment,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America program coordinator, from São Paulo. “Zamora’s prosecution was a retaliatory measure for his investigative reporting on government corruption, and he has faced an abusive judicial process driven by individuals also accused of corruption. His imprisonment has been unjust from the start.”
Zamora, the president of elPeriódico newspaper, was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment in June 2023 on money laundering charges widely condemned as retaliation for his journalism. An appeals court overturned Zamora’s conviction in October 2023 and ordered a retrial, but numerous delays have been imposed. He has been in detention since his July 2022 arrest.
A February report by the global monitoring group TrialWatch assigned a failing grade to Zamora’s legal proceedings, citing numerous breaches of international and regional fair-trial standards.
Monday’s opinion, endorsed by four international experts from the working group, examined the judicial process and the broader context of Zamora’s case, including prosecutors’ public statements, and recommended that Guatemalan authorities immediately release Zamora and compensate him.
The opinion highlighted the “widespread concern within the international community about the criminalization and prosecution of judges, prosecutors, journalists (including Mr. Zamora’s case), and human rights defenders in the context of the fight against corruption in Guatemala.” This included a pattern of investigating and criminalizing Zamora’s lawyers, the opinion said.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Economic growth allows the few to grow ever-wealthier. Ending poverty and environmental catastrophe demands fresh thinking
Economic growth will bring prosperity to all. This is the mantra that guides the decision-making of the vast majority of politicians, economists and even human rights bodies.
Yet the reality – as detailed in a report to the United Nations Human Rights Council this month – shows that while poverty eradication has historically been promised through the “trickling down” or “redistribution” of wealth, economic growth largely “gushes up” to a privileged few.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
This event, organized on the occasion of the 56th session of the Human Rights Council and of the 28th Working Group of the Parties to the Aarhus Convention, as part of the Geneva Roadmap 40/11 series, provides a platform for experience sharing around with different protection mechanisms.
Today, some specific instruments, such as the Aarhus Convention, regional processes and mechanisms are playing a growing and rapidly transforming role for environmental defenders in terms of new standards, collaborative efforts and plans. Yet, how effective are these instruments, processes and mechanisms in supporting and protecting environmental defenders in different parts of the world? What are the lessons in terms of the relevance and effectiveness of regional human rights and environmental protection mechanisms? How can ongoing experiences by civil society organizations and defenders help shape new and strengthened regional approaches? There is wide recognition of the different situations across regions as well as relevant lessons from ongoing initiatives.
On the occasion of both the 56th Session of the UN Human Rights Council and of the 28th Working Group of the Parties to the Aarhus Convention, on access to information, public participation and access to justice in environmental matters, this event will aim to gather views from various stakeholders on the question: “How are environmental defenders protected in the regions?”
Five years ago, on 21 March 2019, the Human Rights Council adopted Resolution 40/11 – Recognizing the contribution of environmental human rights defenders to the enjoyment of human rights, environmental protection and sustainable development – without a vote.
Following the adoption of the resolution, platforms, coalitions and networks of defenders met in February 2020 to launch the Geneva Roadmap 40/11 to foster the implementation of this Resolution.
Building on previous Geneva Roadmap 40/11 efforts in relation to global human rights mechanisms, this year’s events organized by the University of Geneva, Earthjustice, the International Service for Human Rights, with the support of the Geneva Environment Network, will focus on the protection mechanisms provided at the regional level for environmental defenders.
To attend on-line, register with: https://ungeneva.webex.com/webappng/sites/ungeneva/meeting/register/3e557712421b4e8ead22641b4d3bab74?ticket=4832534b000000078514d3e000931fd016c9cc18835becb6ccd518f1a5e9a6bf63a5563f32a1a932×tamp=1719521373667&RGID=r18b54211d7fc07219656ed6fdab82df1
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
By Stefan Armbruster, Victor Mambor and BenarNews staff
An unheralded visit to Indonesia’s Papuan provinces by a leading Pacific diplomat has drawn criticism for undermining a push for a United Nations human rights mission to the region where pro-independence fighters have fought Indonesian rule for decades.
The Melanesian Spearhead Group’s Director-General, Leonard Louma, has not responded to BenarNews’ questions about the brief visit. It occurred just days after the most recent clash between Indonesian forces and the Papuan resistance, which resulted in four deaths and hundreds of civilians fleeing their homes in Paniai regency in Central Papua province.
Indonesia has capitalised on the visit earlier this month to portray its governance of the contested Melanesian territory, generally referred to as West Papua in the Pacific, in a positive light.
State news agency Antara said Louma had declared Papua to be in a “stable and conducive” condition.
A highly critical UN Human Right Committee report on Indonesia released in May highlighted “systematic reports about the use of torture” and “extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances of Indigenous Papuan people.”
The Indonesian government’s sponsorship of the visit is “another attempt to downplay a global call, including from the MSG, to allow the UN Human Rights Commission to visit and assess human rights conditions in Papua,” said Hipo Wangge, an Indonesian foreign policy researcher at Australian National University.
“It’s also another attempt to neutralise regional concern over deep-seated discrimination against Papuans,” he told BenarNews.
UN human rights rebuff
For several years, Indonesia has rebuffed a request from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to carry out an independent fact-finding mission in Papua.
The Pacific Islands Forum, a regional organisation of 18 nations, has called on Indonesia since 2019 to allow the mission to go ahead.
The Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) — whose members are Fiji, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and New Caledonia’s Kanak independence movement FLNKS — has made similar appeals.
It is unclear whether the comments attributed to Louma by Antara and an Indonesian government statement are his own words. The Antara article, published last week on June 19, in English and Indonesian, is more or less identical to a statement released by Indonesia’s Ministry of Information and Communications.
An insurgency has simmered in Papua since the early 1960s when Indonesian forces invaded the region, which had remained under a separate Dutch administration following Indonesia’s 1945 declaration of independence from the Netherlands.
Indonesia argues its incorporation of the mineral rich territory was rightful under international law because it was part of the Dutch East Indies empire that is the basis for Indonesia’s modern borders.
Papuans, culturally and ethnically distinct from the rest of Indonesia, say they were denied the right to decide their own future and are now marginalised in their own land. Indonesian control was formalised in 1969 with a UN-supervised referendum restricted to little more than 1000 Papuan voters.
Arrived from PNG
The Indonesian statement said Louma, his executive adviser Christopher Nisbert and members of their entourage arrived on June 17 at the Skouw-Wutung border crossing after traveling overland from Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea.
They were met by an Indonesian diplomat and then traveled to Jayapura accompanied by Indonesian officials.
On June 19 they took part in a conference organised by Indonesia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that was purportedly to address security concerns in Melanesia.
Yones Douw, a Papuan human rights activist based in Paniai, said a properly conducted visit by the Melanesian Spearhead Group should have had wide public notice and involved meetings with churches, customary leaders, journalists and civil society organisations, including the independence movement.
“This visit is just like a thief — in secret. I suspect that the comments submitted to the mass media were the language of the Indonesian government, not on behalf of the MSG,” he told BenarNews.
“This way can damage the togetherness or unity of the Melanesian people,” he said.
The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), an independence movement umbrella organisation, said it should have been notified of the visit because it has observer status at the MSG. Indonesia is an associate member.
‘A surreptitious visit’
“We were not notified by the MSG Secretariat. This is a surreptitious visit initiated by the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” said Markus Haluk, the ULMWP’s executive secretary.
“We will file a protest,” he told the MSG’s chair, Vanuatu Prime Minister Charlot Salwai.
Indonesia, over several years, has stepped up its efforts to neutralise Pacific support for the West Papuan independence movement, particularly among Melanesian nations that have ethnic and cultural links to Papuans living under Indonesian rule.
It has had success in ending direct criticism from Pacific island governments — many of which had used the UN General Assembly as a forum to air their concerns about human rights abuses — but grassroots support for Papuan self-determination remains strong.
Wangge, the ANU researcher, said the Indonesian government had been particularly active with Melanesian nations since Louma became director-general of the MSG’s secretariat in 2022.
At the same time it had avoided addressing ongoing reports of abuses in the Papuan provinces, he said, and militarisation of the region.
Indonesia’s military offered a rare apology to Papuans in March after video emerged of soldiers repeatedly slashing an indigenous man with a bayonet while he was forced to stand in a water-filled drum.
Regional security meetings
Among the initiatives, Indonesian police have facilitated regional security meetings, the Indonesian foreign ministry established an Indonesia-Pacific Development Forum, fisheries training has been provided, and the foreign ministry is providing diplomacy training for young diplomats from Melanesian countries and the MSG’s secretariat.
There was nothing to show, Wangge said, from the MSG’s appointment last year of Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka and Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape as special envoys to Indonesia on West Papua.
The two leaders met Indonesian President Joko Widodo, whose second five-year term finishes in October, at a global summit in San Francisco in November.
Following the meeting, there was no agenda to facilitate a dialogue over West Papua, he said.
Marape is due in Indonesia mid-July for an official state visit.
“One thing is clear: the Indonesian government will buy more time by initiating more made-up efforts to cover pressing problems in West Papua,” Wangge said.
Copyright ©2015-2024, BenarNews. Republished with the permission of BenarNews.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Special rapporteurs working for UN warn famine is imminent and over 25 million people need urgent help
Human rights experts working for the United Nations have accused Sudan’s warring parties of using starvation as a war weapon, amid mounting warnings of imminent famine in the African country.
Sudan plunged into chaos in April last year when simmering tensions between the country’s military and a notorious paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), exploded into open fighting in the capital, Khartoum, and elsewhere in the country.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
19 June 2024: in a ground-breaking initiative, civil society organisations worldwide have united to produce an authoritative articulation of the international legal framework for the protection of human rights defenders.
Following a year-long project involving consultations with human rights defenders, a coalition of 18 international (full list below) and regional human rights organisations released the Declaration +25, a landmark document systematising relevant developments in regional and international human rights law and standards of the last 25 years.
The principles contained in the two documents together represent a baseline for the protection and promotion of human rights defenders while addressing their enduring and evolving needs.
https://ishr.ch/25-years-un-declaration-on-human-rights-defenders/
To download: https://ishr.ch/defenders-toolbox/resources/declaration-25
‘The 1998 Declaration was a turning point in human rights history,’ the coalition of 18 international and regional human rights groups said today, ‘it recognised the importance and legitimacy of human rights defenders, and the need to protect the right to defend human rights.’
However, the Declaration has never been fully implemented or enforced, and human rights defenders have had to adapt their work to rising issues such as the climate crisis, racism, discrimination, the backlash against sexual and reproductive rights, but also to new threats – including digital surveillance, and different forms of stigmatisation, and criminalisation.
‘With grassroots and frontline activists’ lived experiences and concerns at its heart, the Declaration + 25 will help tackle the current challenges faced by human rights defenders. It will also be a major step towards fulfilling the promise of the 1998 Declaration: enshrining in law the protection of human rights defenders around the world.’
The project commenced in 2023 with the coalition conducting online and in person consultations with defenders to identify the key issues they face in the defence of human rights that were not fully addressed by the 1998 Declaration, and analyse developments in international and regional contexts and jurisprudence.
Over 700 human rights defenders from all regions of the world took part in these consultations, which, along with inputs from legal and human rights experts and civil society organisations, fed into the Declaration + 25. The document was adopted unanimously at a two-day experts’ meeting in Bangkok, Thailand in April 2024. The result is a call to action to governments, multilateral organisations, businesses, and civil society to protect human rights defenders and their activities.
‘People everywhere have the right to defend human rights and unite to achieve justice for all, and States have an obligation under international law to protect those exercising that right, and ensure they can work freely and safely,’ the 18 rights groups emphasised.
‘The Declaration +25 is a powerful new tool and reminder of the existing standards and principles that States, corporations and society at large must implement to protect and enable human rights defenders across the world for the years to come.’
The Declaration+25 was formally launched on Wednesday 19 June at a side event in Geneva, on the margins of the 56th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council. [https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2024/06/08/launch-of-the-hrd-declaration25/]
List of participating organisations:
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
The unique post-World War II economic and military power of the United States prevented military and foreign policy errors from becoming overpowering disasters. Military adventures in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq upended America’s political system and wounded its psyche. Other than the 2001 attacks on American soil, physical destruction was foreign, appearing as images on television screens. Oil price rises, inflation, increasing debt to finance military costs, and social upheavals temporarily perturbed the US socioeconomic system. A powerful America overcame the impediments and continually extended its power until the Asian Tigers, a rejuvenated China, and progressive Latin leaders appeared on the global stage. America’s hegemony declined and the decline became confirmed by the Russian/Ukraine conflagration, Israel’s invasion of Gaza, and a subsequent attack on protesting students at the UCLA campus. No nation with unique power and in control of that power would have permitted these horrific happenings.
The US is sliding into a mediocre existence. Heard that before? Hear it again. Four words describe those who have brought the United States to a sorrowful state ─ treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitor ─ harsh words that will be met with smiles, sneers, and derisions. They are correct words and backed by a long list of treacherous, treasonous, tyrannical, and traitorous actors in the American public. The description of the “tyranny in America” is not a repetitious overkill; it is a necessary refrain that punctuates the alarm ─ America is led by pseudo patriots who have betrayed its ideals and Americans must regain its inspiring freedom, liberty-loving, and peaceful aspirations.
Domestic treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors
Running for president of the USA are two traitors ─ Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Donald Trump is accused of provoking and aiding the Jan 6, 2021 attack on the US capitol and pursuing an insurrection against the US government. Treason.
Donald Trump is accused of keeping US government top secrets in his home in locations where they could be revealed to others. He is guilty of violating US espionage laws. Treason.
Donald Trump solicits Evangelical vote and financial assistance by supporting Israel, a foreign nation, in its genocide of the Palestinian people. Treachery.
Joe Biden said, “Because even where we have some differences, my commitment to Israel, as you know, is ironclad. I think without Israel, there’s not a Jew in the world who’s secure. I think Israel is essential.” Besides the nonsensical statement that condemns Biden for not knowing that Israel is the only country in the world where Jews have continually suffered from fatal attacks, claim insecurity that seeks security, and exhibit excessive prejudice toward one another — Ashkenazi against Mizrahi, both against Yemeni and Falasha, and secular against ultra-orthodox — Biden admits he has failed to protect the most well-off Americans ─ Jewish citizens (from what??). Treachery.
By having said, “My commitment to Israel, as you know, is ironclad,” Joe Biden betrayed US interests, which should have a flexible foreign policy. He has allied the US people with genocide. Traitor.
Hunter Biden had financial dealings with adversaries of the US government. Joe Biden should have known his son’s arrangements and prevented accusations of influence peddling. Joe Biden is guilty of violating his oath of office. Treachery.
Biden, similar to Trump, brought classified documents to his home and left them scattered in places open to revelation. Despite the Justice Department not pressing charges, Biden is guilty of violating US espionage laws. Treason.
The US Justice Department (DOJ) indicted several Russians and Chinese who infiltrated America, gathered information, and lobbied for a foreign nation. The US Justice Department has not indicted one of tens of thousands of Israelis (could be one of hundreds of thousands), who have performed similar duties for Israel. Lobbying is only a small part of the damage to Americans done by these miscreant infiltrators, sent by Israel to foreign shores to do their mischief. From the almost one million Israelis living in the United States, hundreds of thousands may have become citizens, voted, and changed a highly contested election. In a coming election in Westchester, New York, Westchester Unites urged Jewish voters in the district (not non-Jewish voters??) to request ballots so they could vote before the June 25 Democratic primary battle between New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who criticizes Israel, and challenger, Westchester County Executive George Latimer, an avid supporter of apartheid Israel’s genocide. Campaign organizers say they will spend up to $1 million to boost voter turnout.
I’m not privy to the manipulations of the American public performed by the mass of Israeli infiltrators. One example is the declarations by Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi of Manhattan’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. His contrived Amplify Israel Initiative “aims to breathe new life into the principles we’ve been committed to for decades, with an array of programs aimed at bolstering support for Israel and aligning Zionism with liberal ideology.” In clearer words, “influence every man, woman, and child that nationalist, militarist, oppressive, and apartheid Israel is a benevolent country.”
Who is Rabbi Hirsch? Ammiel Hirsch went to high school in Israel, served as a tank commander in the IDF, and was formerly the director of the Association of Reform Zionists of America, the Israeli arm of the North American Reform movement. In a response to a letter, in which 93 rabbinical and cantorial students harshly criticized Israeli actions in the hostilities between Israel and Hamas, Rabbi Hirsch wrote:
For the record, the Reform movement is a Zionist movement. Every single branch of our movement — the synagogue arm (Union for Reform Judaism), the rabbinic union (Central Conference of American Rabbis), and our seminary (HUC-JIR) — every organization separately, and all together, are Zionist and committed ideologically and theologically to Israel.
Why did Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, after receiving training in Israel, come to the United States to guide the Reform movement, which, in previous decades, had been against Zionism, and define it in Israel’s image? By not investigating the actions of multitudes of Israelis residing, the US Justice Department betrays the US people.
In an espionage scandal involving Lawrence Franklin, a former United States Department of Defense employee, who passed classified documents to AIPAC officials, which disclosed secret United States policy towards Iran, Franklin pleaded guilty and, in January 2006, was sentenced to nearly 13 years of prison. He served ten months of house arrest. The DOJ dropped espionage charges against the AIPAC officials — Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman. Reason (which was treason) — the Department claimed court rulings had made the case unwinnable and the trial would disclose classified information (which can apply to almost every trial for treason). Despite the previous espionage charges and knowledge that un-American AIPAC is a lobby for apartheid Israel, the DOJ has not indicted AIPAC for being an unregistered lobby and has permitted its cadre of Israel firsters to wander the halls of Congress and shake palms with dollar bills. Traitors.
US representatives know that AIPAC lobbies for an apartheid Israel that is committing genocide and drags US citizens into accusations of aiding the genocide. Politicians accept contributions from individuals allied with AIPAC and vote in accordance with AIPAC’s preferences. The power of the contributions and fear that disregarding AIPAC poses a danger to remaining in office was highlighted in 1984. For voting to permit Boeing to sell AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia and for suggesting there were Palestinians and they had “rights,” AIPAC marked as undesirable the popular Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Charles Percy, who had always favored Israel. Paul Simon wrote in his autobiography that Bob Asher, an AIPAC board member, called him to run for Senator from Illinois. Simon unseated the admired and respected Charles Percy who was only 98% pure in his support for Israel. Treachery.
The US government and local governments favor laws, such as the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which can suppress free speech and free actions that contend Israel’s genocidal policies, and H.R. 3016, Anti-Boycott Act, which “bars U.S. citizens from participating in boycotts of U.S. allies if those boycotts are promoted or imposed by foreign countries.” Federal and local governments tyrannize the US people. Tyranny.
The Los Angeles (LA) Police Department stood by for hours before halting attacks on peaceful UCLA students and then arrested dozens of student protesters and not any of the vigilantes who represented a foreign power and attacked the students. The LA Police Department supported a group representing a foreign government and failed to protect American citizens. Treason.
The House of Representatives has had numerous one-sided hearings on campus anti-Semitism that feature callous remarks against Jews from relatively few of the protestors. In none of the hearings has a Committee invited the student protestors to testify; maybe, because they might say, “These students do not represent the protestors. They are angry and frustrated individuals who see Israel identify itself as a Jewish state and note that a great number of American Jews approve of Israel and its genocide of the Palestinian people. They realistically equate Jews with the genocide.” The truth of these hearings is they are more concerned with fictional Jewish feelings than factual Palestinian lives. Let’s face it, these hearings are organized by Israel’s advocates who seek to prevent the US public from gaining awareness of the genocide and shift the protest arguments to a spurious charge of anti-Semitism in America. Elected officials adhere to a foreign nation’s request to stifle American citizens from exercising their right to protest and move dialogue from the horrific victimization of Gazans to an artificially created Jewish victimhood. College presidents committed a huge error by not responding to the committees’ fabricated charges of campus anti-Semitism with a simple statement, “There is no campus anti-Semitism and you are attempting to divert the impact of these demonstrations that criticize Israel policies into a false charge that indirectly enhances Israel’s image.” By representing a foreign power and censoring American students from their right to protest, these elected officials are guilty. Treason.
Foreign policies exhibit the same treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors.
North Vietnam
President Lyndon Johnson’s reciting a dubious attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on the USS Maddox in international waters cajoled Americans into accepting an increased US military involvement in the Vietnamese civil war. Global strategists also mentioned the Domino Theory, where if one country falls to communism, then adjacent nations also become communist. A non-functioning Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty (SEATO) tied these fabrications into a call for action. Result was 58,148 uniformed Americans killed, 200,000 wounded, and 75,000 severely wounded. Ho Chi Minh’s followers won the war and none of the neighboring SEATO nations became communist. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the leading prophet of the Domino Theory, confessed, “I think we were wrong. I do not believe that Vietnam was that important to the communists. I don’t believe that its loss would have led – it didn’t lead – to Communist control of Asia.” Treachery.
Six-day war
During the 1967 war between Israel and its neighbors, Israeli torpedo boats and airplanes attacked the intelligence ship USS Liberty in international waters, killed 34, and wounded 171 American service personnel. President Johnson refused to respond to this assault, an insult to all Americans. Treason.
Yom Kippur war
In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, President Nixon’s administration supplied arms to Israel and reversed the course of the war. Arab nations responded with an oil embargo that caused huge inflation in the United States, punished the American consumer, and harmed the American economy. Treachery.
Afghanistan-1980s
President Ronald Reagan’s CIA covertly assisted Pakistan intelligence in providing financial and military assistance to Osama bin Laden during the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan. In effect, the US played an essential role in creating the al-Qaeda network. Treason.
International Terrorism and 911
After Ronald Reagan helped create and popularize Osama bin Laden, later presidents did not heed Osama bin Laden’s warnings. The arch-terrorist clarified his position in the infamous Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to the American people,” which has been conveniently sidetracked to ensure Americans do not get infected with terrorism germs. It should be titled, “How the United States made me a terrorist.” It is difficult to agree with bin Laden but his statements are not easily contended.
You have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every day. It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern.
Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.
You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.
William J. Clinton was president during the period that Bin Laden raged his fury at the United States. If Bill Clinton had considered some of bin Laden’s grievances his considerations might have prevented the later 9/11 attack on American soil. Treason.
George W. Bush and American security officials permitted 19 co-conspirators to enter the country and take preparatory flying lessons in full view of authorities. His DOJ did not pursue information that connected the Saudi royal family with the bombers. Treason.
Afghanistan-2001
Without exhausting all means to have Osama bin Laden extradited from Afghanistan and knowing that the Taliban was not directly involved in the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan in a military adventure that had no defined purpose and accomplished nothing. In a war that lasted 20 years, the United States had 2,459 military deaths and 20,769 American service members wounded in action. Twenty years of a useless war that only brought the Taliban back to power. Treachery.
Iraq
George W. Bush’s uncalled-for war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom) is the best example of sacrificing U.S. lives to advance Israel’s interests. The cited reason ─ destroying Hussein’s weapons of destruction ─ whose evidence of developments the U.S. based on spurious intelligence and was a farce that no sensible person could believe. This “made for consumption” and fabricated story detracted from the real reason for the U.S. invasion of Iraq — to prevent Iraq from becoming the central power in the Middle East and able to threaten Israel. Neocons succeeded in pressuring President George W. Bush to sacrifice American lives and, by military action, remove Saddam Hussein from power. Discarding the nonsensical assertion that Saddam Hussein, who had no nuclear material, no technology to develop a nuclear weapon, and no ICBMs to deliver a bomb, threatened the United States, and needed to be immediately stopped from turning bubble gum into a mighty weapon solicits a more acceptable reason for the U.S. attack on Iraq. The U.S. Department of Defense casualty website has the US military suffering 4,418 deaths and 31,994 wounded in action during the Iraq War. No coincidence that Iraq was a long-time adversary of Israel and it was in Israel’s interests to have Iraq become militarily impotent. Treason.
Libya
NATO declared it intervened in the 2011 Libyan Civil War “to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack.” President Barack Obama remarked, “Gaddafi declared that he would show ‘no mercy’ to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment.”
Reuters report demonstrated significant differences between Gaddafi’s remarks and President Obama’s rendition: Gaddafi Tells Rebel City, Benghazi, ‘We Will Show No Mercy,’ March 17, 2011.
Muammar Gaddafi told Libyan rebels on Thursday his armed forces were coming to their capital Benghazi tonight and would not show any mercy to fighters who resisted them. In a radio address, he told Benghazi residents that soldiers would search every house in the city and people who had no arms had no reason to fear. He also told his troops not to pursue any rebels who drop their guns and flee when government forces reach the city.
Logic tells us that few Benghazi residents could even have guns to hide, and Gadhafi’s forces were too limited to carry out any large-scale purge.
The U.S. vacillated, and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, convinced President Obama to join NATO in removing Gaddafi. NATO eliminated Gaddafi, Islamic extremists gained partial power, discarded armaments were shipped to al-Qaeda “look-alikes” throughout North Africa and soon the Jama’at Nusrat al Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) coalition, Boko Haram, and Islamic State in West Africa (ISWA) were creating havoc throughout North Africa. The US gained nothing in removing Gaddafi and created more Islamic extremist organizations with which to contend. Treachery.
UN Vetoes
As of December 18, 2023, the U.S. vetoed resolutions critical of Israel 45 times. Each time, the Secretary of State offered the excuse that the resolution would not advance the cause of peace, and each time vetoing the resolution did not advance the cause for peace. Why do Americans give deference to Israelis when Israel insults American leaders, uses Americans to die in wars that advance Israel’s interests, causes havoc that brings injury to U.S. relations with other nations, and sucks money ($3.1 billion annually) from U.S. taxpayers to support its apartheid and oppressive policies?
Some mentioned reasons, which have changed during the decades, are:
Pundits confuse support for Israel with support for this Israel. The United States, for military and geopolitical reasons, can support Israel, as it does Columbia, but there is no reason to support and assist this Israel in the destruction of the Palestinians. The Washington establishment and foreign policymakers have incorrectly calculated the tradeoffs between supporting this Israel in its denial of Palestinian rights and in satisfying the Palestinian cause.
Just for money and votes, U.S. politicians sell out their commitment to the American people, follow the dictates of a foreign nation, and make Americans party to the destruction of innocent people. TREASON!!
Conclusion
Americans have, at times echoed grievances against their government’s policies and demonstrated their despair, well, some Americans, a small minority of the US population. The rest of the population has been naïve, complacent, and manipulated. Due to America’s intrinsic wealth — natural resources, abundant farmland, temperate climate, rivers, valleys, streams, hard-working population, ocean barriers to foreign incursions — the treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors temporarily slowed but did not stop the roaring engine. The roaring engine is beginning to sputter.
America’s posture as the leading defender of democracy and human rights is hypocritical; its economic system is challenged; its united states are disunited; its pluralistic political system is an epic fantasy; its legislative bodies are divided; and its courts are agenda-seeking rather than law-abiding. Democracy recedes and polarization of citizens widens. Americans are increasingly divided in their aspirations and express increasing fears of one another. An almost self-sufficient economic system proceeds with debt financing imports, trade imbalances, and growth, an unruly situation that can continue until debt hits a financial wall and repaying the debt becomes intolerable.
Hopefully, more Americans will take cognizance of the failed leadership, meet the challenges they pose, gather the resources, form the organizations, shout much louder, push much stronger, and succeed in disposing of the treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors that have made the Statue of Liberty weep.
The words of Patrick Henry, “These are the times that try people’s souls,” are heard again in the cities and villages of a disunited United States of America.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The UN Human Rights Council will hold its 56th regular session at Palais des Nations in Geneva from 18 June and 12 July 2024. And as always the excellent Alert of the International Service for Human Rights permits me to hightlight what concerns HRDs most. To stay up-to-date you can follow @ISHRglobal and #HRC56 on X, and look out for the Human Rights Council Monitor.
Civil Society Access and Participation The UN is facing a severe liquidity crisis due to member states not paying their membership dues in full and on time. This shortfall is impacting victims and survivors of human rights violations. The crisis risks being used to impose restrictions on civil society participation, although online and hybrid modalities offer cost-effective and environmentally friendly solutions. Over 100 human rights organisations have called on all states to promptly pay their dues to address the liquidity crisis. Additionally, this session States have the opportunity to continue to build on the good practices adopted in the past years and allow for a broader, more inclusive, effective and climate-friendly human rights system, including by providing remote access to informal consultations on HRC resolutions that can greatly benefit from the analysis and lived experiences of human rights defenders.
Thematic issues Issues on the agenda At this 56th session, the Council will discuss a range of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights through dedicated debates with the mandate holders and the High Commissioner, including with the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, the Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of expression, the Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, the Special Rapporteur on promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change, the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance In addition, the Council will hold dedicated debates on the rights of specific groups including with: The Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, the Special Rapporteur on the rights of Internally Displaced Persons, the Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, the Special Rapporteur on independence of judges and lawyers
The Council will also hold debates on interrelation of human rights and thematic issues including with: The High Commissioner on new and emerging technologies.
The new incoming Independent Expert on violence and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, Graeme Reid, will present his first report focusing on freedom of expression, assembly and association.
Environment and Climate Justice The Special Rapporteur on Internally Displaced Persons will present her report on planned relocations of people in the context of the adverse effects of climate change and disasters. This report is building up on previous reports by other mandates and will also look at laws and policies at the national, regional, and international levels. The newly appointed Special Rapporteur on Climate Change will also present her first report looking at the upcoming priorities and some reflections of the progress achieved on some issues in the last 5 years. The report will also provide a snapshot of some other key topics and the impacts on some particular groups. The Special Rapporteur will also present two country visits reports: Honduras and the Philippines. There is currently a call for inputs for her upcoming General Assembly report on access to information on climate change and human rights. The Working Group on Business and Human Rights will present its report on investors, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) approaches and human rights. The report will raise awareness of the responsibilities of investors and will clarify responsibilities on how to align their ESG approaches to human rights. On Thursday 20 June, the President of the Human Rights Council is organising a high-level informal Presidential discussion on ‘The important link between climate change, food security and health security’. The discussion should address the important role of environmental human right defenders in promoting and securing the full realisation of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment; and recognition of the obligation of States to prevent, protect and promote their work in an enabling environment.
International Solidarity Civil society and international experts have continued to raise grave concern at the attacks on fundamental freedoms when advocating for the human rights of Palestinians by authorities in Western countries, including in universities. The High Commissioner deplored the ‘sharp rise in hatred globally – including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia’. In her report to the Council, the Independent Expert on International Solidarity called on States to ‘eliminate the criminalization of international solidarity expressions and symbols and calls for accountability for violations of public international law norms, such as calls for peace, self-determination or decolonization and the ending of apartheid or genocide […] stressing that States ‘should not conflate them with ‘manifest support of terrorism’ or antisemitism in relevant legislation or regulations’. The Special Rapporteur on racism also raised concern at ‘accusations of antisemitism on the basis of legitimate criticism of treatment of Palestinians by Israel’ in her report following her visit to the United States.
The Special Rapporteur on Education, following her visit to the United States, stressed that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism is being used to crackdown against pro-Palestinian protesters, including individuals who ‘self-identify as belonging to the Jewish community or represent Jewish student associations’. The Rapporteur addressed violations against students following the organisation of ‘mass encampments at nearly 40 universities in more than 25 states across the country’, including the detention of more than 2000 individuals, raids by fully armed police on university campuses requested by educational institutions to ‘disperse demonstrators and dismantle encampments’. During the session, and especially in the ID with the experts on International Solidarity, Education, Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Assembly and Association, we urge States to call for an end to the repression and criminalisation of groups and individuals advocating for the human rights of the Palestinian people, including through the instrumentalization of anti-Semitism (IHRA definition) and anti-terrorism policies, including in universities, and especially in the West (including in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, United States, United Kingdom).
Reprisals
HRC56 is a key opportunity for States to raise concerns about specific cases of reprisals and demand that governments provide an update on any investigation or action taken toward accountability. This month ISHR launched a new campaign regarding cases. ISHR urges States to raise these cases in their statements:
Cao Shunli was a prominent Chinese human rights defender, who sought to share information on the human rights situation in China with the United Nations in Geneva. Cao was arbitrarily detained and died in prison 10 years ago. [for more saee: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/cao-shunli/]
Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja is a Bahraini-Danish advocate known for his unwavering commitment to freedom and democracy. In April 2011 during the Bahrain chapter of what is known as the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings, while he was leading peaceful demonstrations, Abdulhadi was violently arrested. He went missing for two months and, in June 2011, after a military trial, he was condemned to life-imprisonment on terrorism-related charges, despite grave concerns from the international community about unfair trials. [s`eae also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/11/29/mea-laureate-abdulhadi-al-khawaja-facing-new-charges-for-protesting-injustice-in-jau-prison/ and https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/4d45e316-c636-4d02-852d-7bfc2b08b78d]
Pham Doan Trang is an author, blogger, journalist and pro-democracy activist from Viet Nam. Trang was prosecuted for her articles and reports on the human rights situation in Viet Nam, including an analysis of a 2016 report on the Formosa Ha Tinh Steel Plant environmental disaster that was shared with the United Nations. See also: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/fe8bf320-1d78-11e8-aacf-35c4dd34b7ba and https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/pham-doan-trang/].
Khurram Parvez and Irfan Mehraj are two Kashmiri human rights defenders. They have conducted ground-breaking and extensive human rights documentation in the Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, including through their work within the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS). In 2016, Indian authorities arrested Khurram a day after he was barred from traveling to Geneva to attend the 33rd session of the Human Rights Council. See also: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/81468931-79AA-24FF-58F7-10351638AFE3 and https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/khurram-parvez/. Meanwhile, on 20 March 2023, Irfan was summoned for questioning and arbitrarily detained by the NIA in Srinagar also under provisions of the UAPA and other laws. The NIA targeted Irfan for being ‘a close associate of Khurram Parvez.’ Both Khurram and Irfan are presently in pre-trial detention in the maximum-security Rohini prison in New Delhi, India.
Country-specific issues on the agenda
The Council will consider updates, reports on and is expected to consider resolutions addressing a range of country situations, in some instances involving the renewal of the relevant expert mandates. These include: Interactive Dialogues with the High Commissioner and the Special Rapporteur on Myanmar Enhanced Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan Interactive Dialogue with the Independent international fact-finding mission for the Sudan Interactive Dialogue with the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on Eritrea Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on Belarus Interactive Dialogue with the Commission of Inquiry on Syria Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on Burundi Interactive Dialogue with the High Commissioner on Venezuela Interactive Dialogue with the High Commissioner on Libya Interactive Dialogue with the Independent Expert on Central African Republic Interactive Dialogue with the High Commissioner on Ukraine and interim report of SG on Crimea Interactive Dialogue with the High Commissioner on Colombia
Afghanistan On 18 June, Richard Bennett, Special Rapporteur on Afghanistan will present his most recent report on the ‘phenomenon of an institutionalized system of discrimination, segregation, disrespect for human dignity and exclusion of women and girls’ (HRC res. 54/1). The report provides a multidimensional understanding of the design, commission and impact of the harms resulting from the Taliban’s institutionalized system of gender-based oppression. We welcome the Special Rapporteur’s view expressed in the report that the framing of gender apartheid most fully encapsulates the institutionalized and ideological nature of the abuses in the country. We note that the report of the Working Group on Discrimination Against Women to be presented at this session also noted the pattern of large-scale systematic violations of women’s and girls’ fundamental rights in Afghanistan ‘constitutes an institutionalized framework of apartheid based on gender and merits an unequivocal response.’ ISHR considers that the pursuit of justice for Afghan women and girls demands a multifaceted approach harnessing the strengths of various accountability mechanisms, including the establishment of an accountability mechanism for crimes against humanity; with strategic coordination exerting heightened pressure on the Taliban.
Sudan On 18 June, the Fact-Finding Mission on Sudan will provide its first oral update to the HRC. Since the conflict erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on 15 April 2023, more than 30 thousand people have been killed while 10 million and a half have been displaced, a majority of which are women and children. Half of the population is now on the verge of famine, and 2.5 million could die of starvation by September. The continued fighting in El Fashir portends a repeated massacre and ethnic cleansing of the Masalit in El Geneina last year. In Aljazeera at least one hundred people were killed by RSF on 5 June, the area is facing grave human rights violations since last December. Meanwhile, the attacks on women’s rights groups and local response initiatives continue unabated.bHumanitarian responders get arbitrarily arrested, and smeared as traitors by the warring parties, some sentenced for up to 2 years and even killed. States should call for an immediate ceasefire, protection of civilians and adherence to international law by all parties in the conflict.
Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel On 19 June, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel will present its report addressing the 7 October attacks by Palestinian armed groups and the commencement of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Venezuela The High Commissioner will present his report on 3 July with his Office staff still operating from Panama. The Maduro government has still not permitted the return of the Office on the terms of its original mandate. With Presidential elections to be held on 28 July, concerns increase about the safety of human rights defenders and opposition figures. Uncertainty has recently been increased by the re-introduction (and then rapid postponement of adoption) of the NGO Law. HRDs Javier Tarazona and Rocío San Miguel remain wholly unjustifiably detained. States must engage actively in the dialogue with the High Commissioner to make clear their support of the essential work of human rights defenders and of the UN’s essential, multifaceted regime scrutinising the human rights situation in the country. Situations of concern that are not on the Council’s agenda
Algeria The sustained repression against the pro-democracy movement and human rights defenders in Algeria was addressed in the end-of-session statements of the Special Rapporteur on freedom of association and assembly as well as the Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders who conducted official visits to Algeria in 2023. These were the first visits since 2016 by UN mandate holders to the country. The Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Assembly and Association addressed the ‘criminalisation of civil society work‘, and the ‘suspension or dissolution of political parties and associations, including prominent human rights advocacy organisations’ (including RAJ and LADDH), as well as ‘overly restrictive laws and regulations’ hindering their work.
Bahrain Thirty-three civil society organisations reiterated that thirteen years since Bahrain’s popular uprising, systemic injustice has intensified and political repression targeting dissidents, human rights defenders, clerics and independent civil society has effectively shut any space for the peaceful exercise of the right to freedom of expression or peaceful activism in the country. Despite the recent royal pardon issued on 8 April 2024, which included the release of more than 650 political prisoners, marking a change in State policy from previous royal pardons, the pardon excluded many individuals who played significant roles in the 2011 pro-democracy uprising, with an estimated 550 political prisoners remaining behind bars. HRC56 provides an important opportunity to address these developments in States’ national and joint statements, including during the Interactive Dialogues with the Special Rapporteurs and Independent Expert on Health, Freedom of Expression, Peaceful Assembly and Association, Independence of Judges and Lawyers and International Solidarity. We urge States to call for the release of all those arbitrarily, including human rights defenders and opposition activists Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, Abduljalil Al-Singace, Hassan Mushaima and Sheikh Ali Salman as well as death row inmates Mohammed Ramadhan and Husain Moosa, who have now spent over a decade unlawfully detained following torture and unfair trials and remain at immanent risk of execution.
China The adoption on 4 July of the outcome of China’s fourth UPR review, which exposed strong international condemnation over grave abuses in January, is a key opportunity for States to urge China to fully implement recommendations emanating from existing findings by UN bodies. Any rejection by the Chinese government of UPR recommendations referring to UN expert mechanisms or to constructive cooperation with the UN system should be promptly condemned. Ahead of the second anniversary of the publication of the damning OHCHR Xinjiang report, and its authoritative findings of possible crimes against humanity in the Uyghur region, States should request updates on the implementation of the report’s recommendations. To uphold the integrity of its mandate and put an end to China’s exceptionalism, the HRC must also establish a monitoring and reporting mechanism on the country, as repeatedly called for by over 40 UN experts and hundreds of human rights groups globally. States should further urge the UN High Commissioner to strengthen follow-up action on his Office’s Xinjiang report, including through public calls for implementation, through translation of the report, and through an assessment of its implementation. States should raise serious concerns at the repression of peaceful protests by over 100 Tibetans who opposed a hydropower project in Derge County, affecting villages and monasteries. States should unequivocally call out the adoption of yet-another national security law further criminalising dissent and human rights promotion in Hong Kong, considered a ‘regressive step’ by High Commissioner Türk. States should echo the latter’s call to ‘release immediately and unconditionally all those arbitrarily arrested and detained under these laws.’ States should further ask for the prompt release of human rights defenders arbitrarily detained or disappeared, including feminist activist Huang Xueqin, human rights lawyers Ding Jiaxi, Yu Wensheng and his wife Xu Yan, legal scholar Xu Zhiyong, Uyghur doctor Gulshan Abbas, Hong Kong lawyer Chow Hang-tung, and Tibetan climate activist A-nya Sengdra.
Occupied Western Sahara ISHR is concerned over the situation of Saharawi human rights defenders, including lawyer M`hamed Hali, who has been arbitrarily deprived of his right to practice in the Moroccan judicial system due to opinions expressed in support of the right to self-determination for the people of Western Sahara. His hearing is scheduled on 27 June in front of Morocco´s highest court. We urge States to address the crackdown on Sahrawi civil society including: during the Interactive Dialogues with the Special Rapporteurs on Freedom of Expression, Peaceful Assembly and Association, to call on Morocco to immediately put an end to ‘the systematic and relentless targeting of human rights defenders in retaliation for exercising their rights to freedom of association and expression to promote human rights in Western Sahara’; during the Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers to call on Morocco to reinstate M’hamed Hali’s right to practice as a lawyer, stressing that this case sets a dangerous precedent for the independence of lawyers; and during the Interactive Dialogue with the Independent Expert on International Solidarity to reiterate the recommendation of the expert that ‘States should eliminate the criminalization of international solidarity expressions and symbols and calls for accountability for violations of public international law norms, such as calls for peace, self-determination or decolonization […]’ in the case of Western Sahara.
Saudi Arabia On 4 July, the Council will consider Saudi Arabia’s fourth UPR outcome, as the authorities announce whether they have accepted or rejected recommendations issued by States in January. The recommendations address widespread and systematic rights violations in the Kingdom, and have the potential to bring about significant change. They include, but are not limited to: calls for the release of prisoners of conscience, many of whom are serving decades-long prison sentences for peacefully exercising their basic rights, and the repealing of travel bans imposed on human rights defenders following their release; the abolition of the death penalty for child defendants, with several young men at imminent risk of execution for alleged crimes committed as minors; and a raft of legislative measures, including ratifying key international human rights treaties and revising repressive laws. States should use this key opportunity to urge Saudi Arabia to accept them in good faith, and crucially implement them.
Tunisia In May 2024, Tunisian authorities waged an unprecedented crackdown against Black migrants and refugees, and civil society organisations defending their rights. On 6 May, in the opening address to a National Security Council meeting, Tunisian President Kais Saied reiterated discriminatory and hateful remarks against Sub-Saharan migrants and refugees while inciting against civil society organisations, describing them as ‘traitors and [foreign] agents’ and ‘rabid trumpets driven by foreign wages’, because of their receipt of foreign funding and their ‘insulting’ of the state. The president questioned the sheltering of asylum seekers and refugees by the Tunisian Council for Refugees (CTR) – a nongovernmental organization, partner of the UNHCR, which supports the registration of asylum claims – and described asylum seekers and refugees residing in Tunisia as illegal. President Saied suggested that CSOs should only work with the state and under its instructions. Since 3 May, Tunisian authorities have arrested and opened investigations against the heads or members of at least six organisations working on migrant and refugee rights and against racial discrimination, including the CTR. Five people, including WHRD Saadia Mosbah, President of Mnemty, have remained in pre-trial detention, under unfounded accusations of financial crimes. On 14 May, the Prime Minister announced that a new association law is being finalized, which would replace Decree-Law 88, an internationally lauded legislation that that safeguards Tunisia’s right to the freedom of association. During the interactive dialogues with the Special Rapporteurs on Freedom of Assembly and Association, and Freedom of Expression, we urge States to call on Tunisia to put an end to the crackdown on civil society, immediately release all those arbitrarily detained, including individuals providing support or advocating for the rights of migrants and refugees, and to firmly condemn the escalating smear campaign and stigmatisation of human rights and humanitarian organisations receiving foreign funding and working with migrants and refugees, supported by the president’s speeches, often making use of discriminatory and racist language against Black migrants and Black people.
Adoption of Universal Periodic Review (UPR) reports During this session, the Council will adopt the UPR working group reports on Belize, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Congo, Jordan, Malaysia, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Monaco, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Senegal. ISHR supports human rights defenders in their interaction with the UPR. This session of the Council will provide an opportunity for Chad, China, Congo, Mauritius, Nigeria to accept recommendations made in relation to human rights defenders, as proposed in ISHR’s briefing papers.
Side events
19 June at 13:00 (room XXV): ISHR will hold a side event to launch the Declaration +25: A supplement to the UN Declaration on human rights defenders. See https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2024/06/08/launch-of-the-hrd-declaration25/.
Open Society Institute will hold a side event on human rights in Afghanistan 19 June at 15:00:
American Civil Liberties Union will hold a side event on human rights in the United States of America
On 25 June at 16:00: Center for Justice and International Law will hold a side event on human rights in Guatemala
26 June at 14:00: Amnesty International will hold a side event on the protection of freedom of expression and assembly
On 27 June at 14:00: International Bar Association will hold a side event on gender apartheid: Case studies
On 3 July at 12:00: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung will hold a side event on climate change and human mobility
On 3 July at 17:00: Third World Network will hold a side event on business accountability in the context of armed conflict
On 4 July at 15:00: Earthjustice will hold a side event on Protection of Environmental Human Rights Defenders #HRC55:
Alert to the Human Rights Council’s 56th session
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
State reportedly arrested at least 25 journalists and activists in last year as it prepares for September climate summit
Azerbaijan’s government has been accused of cracking down on media and civil society activism before the country’s hosting of crucial UN climate talks later this year.
Human Rights Watch has found at least 25 instances of the arrest or sentencing of journalists and activists in the past year, almost all of whom remain in custody.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
The Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC) has called on France to drop the “limbo” proposed law on electoral changes in Kanaky New Caledonia opposed by the indigenous pro-independence movement and restore the path to peace and self-determination.
General secretary Reverend James Bhagwan made the call at the UN Committee of 24 meeting in New York as the future of the draft law, which has already been passed decisively by the Senate and National Assembly but not ratified by the combined Council, looked doubtful as a result of French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call a snap election.
Incomplete legislation is reportedly deemed as suspended once a general election is called.
Reverend Bhagwan referred to his role as a petitioner at C24 in June 2022 when he spoke on behalf of Pacific faith and civil society organisations against the moive by the French givernment to “fast track” legislative changes that would dilute the vote of the indigenous Kanaks, already a minority 41 percent of the 270,000 New Caledonian population.
Criticising France for having turned a “deaf ear” to the “untiring and peaceful calls of the indigenous people for a new political process following the 1998 Nouméa Accord, Reverend Bhagwan said Paris had not upheld “one of the most fundamental principles of the United Nations Charter — the fundamental right of all peoples to be free, free from colonial rule”.
in his group statement on the “Question of New Caledonia” to the “Special Committee on the Situation with regard to the implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence of Colonial Countries and Peoples” at the UN, he said:
The chair, members of this august committee, petitioners and observers.
Greetings from the Pasifika Household of God. May the grace and peace of God be upon you all.
In June, 2022, I was here as a petitioner on behalf of faith and civil society organisations of our Pacific region, home to the French colonised territories of Kanaky New Caledonia and Mā’ohi Nui French Polynesia, to raise our concerns on the failure of the referendum process.
In Kanaky, under the Nouméa Accord, through the actions of the French government to fast track the third referendum, despite local, regional and global pleas.
In the two years since, France has taken further actions that contradict its responsibilities as an administrating power, to uphold one of the most fundamental principles of the United Nations Charter — the fundamental right of all peoples to be free, free from colonial rule.
France has turned a deaf ear to untiring and peaceful calls of the indigenous people of Kanaky-New Caledonia and other pro-independence supporters for a new political process, founded on justice, peaceful dialogue and consensus and has demonstrated a continued inability and unwillingness to remain a neutral and trustworthy party under the Nouméa Accord.
Today, on behalf of Pacific Churches and Civil Society we reiterate our collective concerns that we have made in a number of statements on the current situation in Kanaky.
Recalling these statements and on behalf of the Église Protestante de Kanaky Nouvelle-Calédonie, and the Pacific Regional Non-Governmental Organisation Alliance, the Pacific Conference of Churches calls:
The very fact that Kanaky New Caledonia is an agenda item in this meeting and that of the 24th Committee is a reminder that their decolonisation is a matter of ‘WHEN’, not ‘if’ — and a ‘when’ that needs to be sooner rather than later.
May God’s blessings of justice, love and liberation be with all the people of Kanaky as they seek their own equality, liberty and fraternity.
Oleti Atrqatr (Thank you in the Kanak Drehu dialect).
Presented by
Reverend James Shri Bhagwan
General Secretary
Pacific Conference of Churches
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Since day one of their entrance, the Zionists seized opportunities to enhance their strength and further their agenda, extending a single settlement in Ottoman Palestine to complete control of Palestine. Ten pioneers from Russia acquired 835 acres of land southeast of present day Tel Aviv and established Rishon Le-Zion (“First in Zion”). Founded in 1882, the settlement has grown to a city of approximately 260,000.
The “First in Zion” symbolizes the Zionist thrust — pretend innocence, harden hearts, brutalize innocent inhabitants, and turn oppression of others into security needs for yourself. After the Zionists gained overwhelming power, they used power for severe oppression, to steal more lands, manufacture huge bombs to overcome fists and rocks, and to terrorize a population. Those who contended the oppression were called terrorists. The smiles on Zionists’ faces come from convincing a complacent, unknowing, and confused world to accept ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide as daily happenings that only Zionists are permitted to perpetrate.
The questions often asked and never answered are, “How did the Zionist Jews get away with this open air and available for all to see genocide, and why has there been no valid response to stop it? Millions of valiant people struggle each day to change the situation and bring peace and justice to the Middle East, and these efforts have not succeeded in halting the onslaught, not even reducing it by one Band-Aid.
Shocking is the cowardice of prominent and respected persons, such as Barack Obama, who do not speak out forcibly about the genocide in Gaza. Puzzling is that the United States entered World War II to defeat a state claiming ethnic superiority, exhibiting ultra-nationalism, engaging in irredentism, practicing militarism, and perpetrating genocide. For decades the United States has supported another state that claims ethnic superiority, exhibits ultra-nationalism, engages in irredentism, practices militarism, and perpetrates genocide. The US has seen its World War II battle that defeated Nazi Germany give rise to an extremist Zionism, with innocent European Jews and now innocent Palestinians the victims of the battle. Defeat of a despised international opponent has resurrected a lookalike and despised international opponent.
Building an effective strategy against an opponent requires understanding the opponent’s strategy. The Zionist Jews have major strategies — never compromise, continually pursue the agenda, pay no attention to those who cannot or will not militarily intercede (how many armed divisions does the Vatican have?), turn arguments against them into arguments against the accuser (using debts as collateral), and use to advantage the conditioning of minds that the Holocaust and false charges of anti-Semitism have provided. These strategies are apparent in the war on the Gazans and the reactions to the genocide.
PM Netanyahu stated that Israel did not start this war and did not want this war. Although the genocide of the Palestinians started in 1948, when Zionist militias were already cleansing the land and telling the world they were being attacked, Netanyahu made it seem that a past did not exist and a new war had started. PM Netanyahu tells us that a relatively small contingent of lightly armed Hamas militias want to kill all Jews, conquer all Israel, and expel all Jewish inhabitants. This invisible army is prepared to overcome a heavily armed and formidable army that, without much resistance, does to the Palestinians what Netanyahu claims little Hamas wants to do to the Jews — daily massacres, seizing lands, ethnic cleansing, and constant oppression. Israel took advantage of the October 7 attack to hasten the genocide of the Palestinians and disguise the massacre as a legitimate defense.
The Zionist strategy demonstrated its effectiveness when the international Zionist organization persuaded the US Congress to inform the world that the campus protests against US assistance to the genocide of the Palestinians were anti-Semitic conspiracies. Periodic television ads that attempt to validate the anti-Semitic conspiracy and plead not to make Jews victims of the protests followed the diabolical plot. The TV ads indirectly tell us not to give overwhelming importance to the genocide of the Palestinians; more important is that the protests make Jews feel uncomfortable because a few protestors accuse Jews, who support a state that calls itself the “Jewish state,” of complicity in genocide that a “Jewish state” they support is committing. The Zionist strategy works well in a dumbed American republic ─ converts action to stop the genocide into sympathy for those approving the genocide
Focus on the genocide seems a sufficient exercise but lack of success in halting it indicates other severe problems must be addressed. Witnessing the genocide, which is as apparent as the sun rising every 24 hours, having leading and recognized authorities on human rights vigorously exclaim, “This is a genocide,” noting the number of nations voicing their horror and taking action to stop the genocide, regarding the worldwide protests against the genocide, and observing government officials leaving government in protest to the US government’s bizarre assistance in hastening the genocide, and then hearing President Joe Biden say, “What’s happening is not genocide, we reject that,” raises doubts of the sanity of US government officials and operation of a pluralistic democracy where the public’s loud voice is not heard. These genocide deniers can start learning by consulting the Law for Palestine Releases Database, especially the legislative database.
Rhetoric has not clarified that the moral corruption in allowing Zionist Jews to commit genocide has turned religion, democracy, justice, truth, and human rights into meaningless words. Life has lost reality and values have no substance. The mainstream public remains unaware of the seriousness of the damaging relationship the US has with Israel and the genocide and that these affect all aspects of their lives —political, moral, social, cultural, and economic. A strategic objective is to let them know.
Throw it at them.
Huge protests in front of the embassies and media headquarters that support Israel.
Huge protests that align the main roads and city streets and bring the protests into neighborhoods.
Full-page ads in the New York Times and Washington Post calling out the genocide.
Turning anti-Semitism into a vile expression so that its use is uncomfortable. Signs that say “The truth becomes a shit charge of anti-Semitism, and “If truth is anti-Semitism, we are we are all anti-Semites now.”
Assist Jewish organizations that have joined the battle
Jewish organizations, such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and If not Now (IFN) have courageously championed Palestinian rights. They deserve praise for their efforts and funding to expand their efforts. These efforts serve a dual purpose — liberate the Palestinians from Israeli oppression and liberate the Jewish people from Zionist oppression.
The biblical “Exodus” story did not free the Jews. Just the opposite, it has been used to keep Jews in perpetual bondage to a spurious history and to promote constant victimhood, while distracting them from roles they may play in the injustices done to others. JVP and IFN are awakening other Jews to the destructive impulses generated from Israel that prevent worldwide Jewry from recognizing the roots of modern Judaism and revert them to atavistic and reactionary relics of an ancient Hebrew and fictitious past.
Israel is not a true democracy, and evidence certifies it is a militarist, nationalist, racist, nation that practices apartheid, engages in severe human rights violations, and spies on its citizens. By blindly accepting Zionist behavior, the Jewish people lost the initiative to change Israel’s policies, misdirected the path to a peaceful solution to the Middle East crisis, exacerbated the crisis, and harmed the security of Jews throughout the world. The exemplary work by JVP and IFN members is the best rescue plan for a subdued Jewish community. The best Hanukah gift is a check to both these organizations.
Lawsuits
Pernicious lawsuits that had no legal value and demonstrated bias of US courts in favor of the Zionists have pulverized the Palestine Authority and organizations supporting Palestinian liberation. Time to have the lawsuits work the other way.
Lawsuits against false charges of anti-Semitism by the ADL and other organizations can be made. The ADL has lost several cases against its illegal expressions.
Lawsuits by Jewish groups against those who signify Israel as a Jewish state, a slander to Jewish people that unfairly binds them to the genocide of the Palestinian people..
Lawsuit to finally have AIPAC declared a lobby for a foreign state. New evidence and a new approach will be needed.
Lawsuits to close Holocaust Memorial museums as improper use of the deaths of the Holocaust victims. The US government and people are guilty of genocide of the Native Americans, enslaving Blacks from Africa, and extreme violence against peoples throughout the world — Latin America, the Caribbean, Vietnam, the Philippines, Iraq, Libya, and others. The Holocaust occurred in a foreign nation and neither the US government nor its people had responsibility for the tragedy. The Holocaust Memorial museums indicate otherwise, are unfair to the American people, have not halted other genocides, have been divisive, and have been accused of promoting hatred. These museums distract Americans from their responsibility for the violence they have committed against other cultures. The Native Americans and African Americans did not use the destruction of their peoples to create museums in which they play victim; they took a positive approach and used them to encourage respect for their cultures. Their inviting museums ridicule the lugubrious Holocaust museums and reveal the latter museums as an insult to the European Jews who died in the Holocaust. Included in the lawsuit can be those who suffered during the Holocaust or had close relatives who died during the Holocaust. Having had aunts, uncles, and cousins from Paris, France, and Warsaw, Poland, some who died in the Holocaust and others who struggled for survival during World War II, I identify with the latter. When writing my book on the struggles for survival of my European family during the 2nd World War, Not Until They Were Gone, I made sure it was not written as a Holocaust story and appeared as a book of heroism and survival.
Illegal activities by Israelis residing in the United States
A previous article detailed how Israel sends its citizens to other nations, has them integrate, and steer the country to favor Israel. Exposing, combatting, and bringing law to halt this maneuver and manipulation of American hospitality is a high priority.
Defeating pro-Israel legislators
Highest priority is to do in reverse what AIPAC does. Defeating two or three congress politicos who have had marginal victories is possible. If pro-Israelis suffer more defeats, other politicians will rapidly question their allegiances. An organization for accomplishing this vital task requires the highest skill — demographers who know voting patterns, public relations who understand the constituency and how to approach it, statisticians who can translate voting patterns into probability of victory, fundraisers who can target donors, psychologists who interpret behavior, sociologists who recognize social patterns, political consultants who recognize strengths and faults of candidates, and luck.
Defeat media co-opting
This includes responding to social media. Failure to change media co-opting by the Zionists makes other tasks more difficult. Establishing an alternative media has been tried and never permanently succeeded. Why? One insulting obvious reason is that the American public prefers simplicity, excitement, and trash, regardless of the truth. Insulting, but true. It is difficult for moral, dedicated, and honest people to operate at the low level of the Fox network and use the Zionist duplicity that infiltrates and inserts fallacies into conventional media networks. Even if the Fox News types are defeated, their audience will find another Fox News type. Intense brainstorming by smart people who do smart things and understand the devious mind can devise a strategy that limits Zionist influence. Subtlety, invisible conditioning, and making people feel cheated by subscribing to cheaters are my recommendations to the brainstorming operation.
Getting Things Straight
It’s troublesome to hear those who struggle to prevent the genocide exhibit lapses in knowledge that affect the solution. As an example, I have heard many people refer to UN Proclamation 188, the Partition Plan, as the UN awarding the Jews a state. Two corrections: (1) The UN General Assembly cannot award. It can only recommend; it is not an enforcing agency. The Palestinians had every right to refuse the plan. (2) I have written several times that the partition plan did not create two states; it divided one Palestinian state into two states ─ a Palestinian state composed of almost 100 percent Palestinians, and a Palestinian state called Jewish for differentiation. In the document that recognized the ‘new state,’ President Truman crossed out the words ‘Jewish state’ and inserted the words ‘state of Israel.’ This state was composed of about 67 percent Palestinians who were native to the area (400,000 Palestinians), a smaller contingent of 200,000 foreign Jews that had been born or came as Zionists to live permanently in Palestine, and another larger contingent of 400,000 foreign Jews who arrived for expediency and not with original intentions of remaining in the British Mandate. They should not have been counted in the census. From that perspective, David Ben-Gurion and a small clique of opportunists took advantage of an ill-advised UN, an ill-led and ill-equipped Palestinian community, and a confused world to declare their state, and, with seasoned militia forces — Haganah, Irgun, Lehi, and Palmach — cleanse the area of Palestinians and establish Israel. Disconcerting that significant information is not properly distributed, which leads to the recommendation that an organization be formed to provide accurate material, answer questions, and correct inaccuracies.
Conclusion
Requests for obtaining viable recommendations that will prevent the genocide of the Palestinians have not been forthcoming. Demonstrations have highlighted the massacres and brought those who recognize the genocide to work together, but have not succeeded in changing government policy. Gathering signatures for petitions to congressional representatives has slightly moved some Democratic politicos to change their pro-Israel position but has not prevented committees from assisting Israel and has not prevented legislation that favors Israel.
Masses of dedicated and well-meaning people are involved in the push to prevent genocide; unfortunately, the present efforts do not appear they will achieve the wanted results. Much more is needed and the lack of inquiries, recommendations, discussions, and feedback to suggestions indicate that the urgent message has fallen on deaf ears.
When the hurricane swirled and spread its deluge of dark evil
onto the good green land ‘they’ gloated.
The western skies
reverberated with joyous accounts:
“The Tree has fallen !
The great trunk is smashed! The hurricane leaves no life in the Tree!”
Had the Tree really fallen?
Never! Not with our red streams flowing forever, not while the wine of our thorn limbs fed the thirsty roots,
Arab roots alive, tunneling deep, deep, into the land!
When the Tree rises up, the branches
shall flourish green and fresh in the sun
the laughter of the Tree shall leaf
beneath the sun
and birds shall return
Undoubtedly, the birds shall return.
The birds shall return.
Fadwa Touqan, “The Deluge and the Tree”
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Israel’s illegal control over the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza has for decades prevented the Palestinian people from exercising their right of self-determination and full and effective self-governance. UN Resolution 3246 calls for all States to recognise that that right applies to all peoples subjected to colonial and foreign domination, including the Palestinians.
The warning signs of genocide in Gaza had been there for all to see. But the lack of will on the part of UN members to implement 3246 not only let it happen but then failed to stop it even when its ferocity passed all comprehension.
When October 7 erupted the West attempted to airbrush the pre-existing conditions Israel had imposed on Gaza and pretended Hamas started the ‘war’. But 1,000 lawyers, scholars, and practitioners immediately sounded the alarm about “the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip” and issued an open letter as early as 15 October.
For a start they reminded everyone that in 1982 the UN General Assembly condemned the massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps as “an act of genocide”.
Pre-existing conditions in the Gaza Strip had prompted discussion on genocide before, with warnings given over the years that the siege of Gaza (from 2006 onwards) might amount to a “prelude to genocide” or a “slow-motion genocide”.
And since 2007, shortly after Hamas won the Palestinian elections, Israel had defined the Gaza Strip as an “enemy entity”.
Earlier in 2023 Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich called Palestinians “repugnant”, and “disgusting” and proposed “wiping out” the entire Palestinian village of Huwwara in the West Bank.
Here’s a timely reminder of what else the open letter said.
• In the short space of time between 7 October and 15 October (when the open letter was written), 2,329 Palestinians were killed and 9,042 Palestinians injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza, including over 724 children, huge swathes of neighborhoods, and entire families across Gaza were obliterated.
• Israel’s Defence Minister ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip prohibiting the supply of fuel, electricity, water, and other necessities. This intensifies an already illegal and potentially genocidal siege turning it into an outright destructive assault.
• The ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) stated that orders to evacuate, coupled with the complete siege, are incompatible with international humanitarian law. Almost half a million Palestinians have already been displaced and Israeli forces have bombed the only possible exit route that Israel does not control (the Rafah crossing to Egypt) multiple times.
• The World Health Organisation published a warning that “forcing more than 2000 patients to relocate to southern Gaza, where health facilities are already running at maximum capacity and unable to absorb a dramatic rise in the number of patients, could be tantamount to a death sentence”.
• In the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, since 7 October, Israeli settlers backed by the IDF and police, have attacked and shot Palestinian civilians at point-blank range (as documented in the villages of a-Tuwani and Qusra), invaded their homes, and assaulted residents. Several Palestinian communities have already been forced to abandon their homes, after which settlers arrived and destroyed their property.
• Between 7 and 15 October, Al-Haq documented the killing by the Israeli military and settlers of 55 Palestinians in the West Bank with 1,200 injured there.
• Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared on 9 October: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly”, and afterward announced that Israel was moving to “a full-scale response” and he had “removed every restriction” on Israeli forces, also stating: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.”
• On 10 October, the head of the Israeli Army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, addressed a message directly to Gaza residents: “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell”.
• Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari acknowledged the wanton and intentionally destructive nature of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza: “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
• On 7 October, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Gazans would pay an “immense price” for the actions of Hamas fighters and asserted that Israel will wage a prolonged offensive that will turn parts of Gaza’s densely populated urban centers “into rubble”.
• Israel’s President emphasized that the Israeli authorities view the entire Palestinian population of Gaza as responsible for the actions of militant groups, and subject accordingly to collective punishment and unrestricted use of force: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”
• Israeli Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Israel Katz added: “All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”
• On 12 October UN Special Rapporteurs condemned “Israel’s indiscriminate military attacks against the already exhausted Palestinian people of Gaza, comprising over 2.3 million people, nearly half of whom are children. They have lived under unlawful blockade for 16 years, and already gone through five major brutal wars, which remain unaccounted for”.
• UN experts warned against “the withholding of essential supplies such as food, water, electricity and medicines. Such actions will precipitate a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where its population is now at an inescapable risk of starvation. Intentional starvation is a crime against humanity”.
• On 14 October the UN Special Rapporteur, on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, warned against “a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale” as Israel is carrying out “mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under the fog of war”.
• The Palestinian population of Gaza appears to be presently subjected by the Israeli forces and authorities to widespread killing, bodily and mental harm, and unviable conditions of life – against a backdrop of Israeli statements that evidence signs of intent to physically destroy the population.
• Article II of the Genocide Convention provides that “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as # Killing members of the group; # Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; # Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; # Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; # Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
• The Convention provides that individuals who attempt genocide or who incite genocide “shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals”.
• The International Court of Justice has clarified that “a State’s obligation to prevent, and the corresponding duty to act, arise at the instant that the State learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed. From that moment onwards, if the State has available means likely to have a deterrent effect on those suspected of preparing genocide, or reasonably suspected of harboring specific intent (dolus specialist), it is under a duty to make such use of these means as the circumstances permit”. (The many means available to the British Government include sanctions – readily applied to other delinquent nations – and withdrawal of favored-nation privileges, trade deals, and scientific collaboration).
• Competent elements of the United Nations, particularly the UN General Assembly, are required to take urgent action under the Charter of the United Nations appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide. Emphasis is on the General Assembly given that the Security Council is compromised by the US and UK (both permanent veto-holding members) sending military forces to the eastern Mediterranean in support of Israel.
• All relevant UN bodies, including the Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, as well as the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, are called on to immediately intervene, carry out necessary investigations, and invoke the necessary warning procedures to protect the Palestinian population from genocide.
Chock-full of hate
All this was quickly followed by the UK Lawyers’ Open Letter Concerning Gaza of 26 October 2023, which contained important warnings regarding international law — for example:
⦁ The UK is duty-bound to “respect and ensure respect” for international humanitarian law as set out in the Four Geneva Conventions in all circumstances (1949 Geneva Conventions, Common Art 1). That means the UK must not itself assist violations by others.
⦁ The UK Government must immediately halt the export of weapons from the UK to Israel, given the clear risk that they might be used in serious violations of international humanitarian law and in breach of the UK’s domestic Strategic Export Licensing Criteria, including its obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty.
So, within 3 weeks it was clear to everyone paying attention that the Israeli leadership, chock-full of hate, were set on a course of vicious and brutal genocide. Yet the following month John Kirby, the White House National Security Communications Advisor, dismissed claims that Israel was committing genocide and told everybody that “Israel is not trying to wipe the Palestinian people off the map. Israel is not trying to wipe Gaza off the map. Israel is trying to defend itself against a genocidal terrorist threat. So if we’re going to start using that word, fine. Let’s use it appropriately.”
Yes, and let’s use the term “right of self-defence” appropriately. In Gaza and the West Bank it only applies to the Palestinian resistance, not the belligerent illegal occupier.
Incredibly, we’re now entering the 9th month of the genocide in Gaza and it has gone from bad to much, much worse. And there is still no let-up. People worldwide have been watching day after day mainstream and alternative media reports, seeing for themselves the horrors endured even by children, and aghast at the wholesale and wanton destruction of the Palestinians’ homeland. They cannot believe how depraved, immoral and spineless the international community has become, and how paralysed the UN in allowing the slaughter to continue. They are especially sickened by the conduct of the so-called ‘major powers’ and by the lunatic Netanyahu whom their own politicians call ‘friend and ally’ who thinks he can still dictate what happens in Gaza after he eventually condescends to end the butchery.
If he thinks Israel can now grab Gaza by conquest he may be disappointed. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter expressly prohibits aggressive war and Article 5(3) of General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) of 1975 (which includes the definition of Acts of Aggression) nullifies any legal title acquired in this way. And 5(3) says “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations“.
In carrying through its genocidal assault on Gaza’s civilians and their homes, infrastructure and livelihoods Israel cannot possibly claim to abide by international law or honour their obligations under the Charter. And by encouraging Israel — and supplying the weaponry — neither can the US and UK.
And now we have Biden, Israel’s loony protector, setting ‘red lines’ which Israel must not cross while merrily carrying on with their genocide. But they are so elastic that, with US permission, the hateful maniacs can almost do as they please to satisfy their genocidal lust. Biden arrogantly overrules the red lines on war crimes and crimes against humanity that are already set out by international law.
The post The Shameful Journey from “Prelude to Genocide” to “Slow-motion Genocide” to “Rampant Genocide” first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
International law―the recognized rules of behavior among nations based on customary practices and treaties, among them the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights―has been agreed upon by large and small nations alike. To implement this law, the nations of the world have established a UN Security Council (to maintain international peace and security) and a variety of international courts, including the UN’s International Court of Justice (which adjudicates disputes between nations and gives advisory opinions on international legal issues) and the International Criminal Court (which prosecutes individuals for crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression).
Yet nations continue to defy international law.
In the ongoing Gaza crisis, the Israeli government has failed to uphold international law by rebuffing the calls of international organizations to end its massive slaughter of Palestinian civilians. The U.S. government has facilitated this behavior by vetoing three UN Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire, while the Israeli government has ignored an International Court of Justice ruling that it should head off genocide in Gaza by ensuring sufficient humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian population. The Israeli government has also refused to honor an order by the International Court of Justice to halt its offensive in Rafah and denounced the International Criminal Court’s request for arrest warrants for its top officials.
Russia’s military assault upon Ukraine provides another example of flouting international law. Given the UN Charter’s prohibition of the “use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” when Russian military forces seized and annexed Crimea and commenced military operations to gobble up eastern Ukraine in early 2014, the issue came before the UN Security Council, where condemnation of Russia’s action was promptly vetoed by Russia. Similarly, in February 2022, when the Russian government commenced a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia again vetoed Security Council action. That March, the International Court of Justice, by an overwhelming vote, ordered Russia to halt its invasion of Ukraine—but, as usual, to no avail.
Unfortunately, these violations of international law are not unusual for, over many decades, numerous nations have ignored the recognized rules of international conduct.
What is lacking is not international law but, rather, its consistent and universal enforcement. For decades, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France) have repeatedly used their veto power in that entity to block UN action to maintain international peace and security. Furthermore, nearly two-thirds of the world’s nations do not accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, while more than a third of the world’s nations (including some of the largest, such as Russia, the United States, China, and India) have resisted becoming parties to the International Criminal Court.
Despite such obstacles, these organizations have sometimes played very useful roles in resolving international disputes. The UN Security Council has dispatched numerous peacekeeping missions around the world―including 60 alone in the years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union―that have helped defuse crises in conflict-ridden regions.
For its part, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) paved the way for the Central American Peace Accords during the 1980s through its ruling in Nicaragua v United States, while its ruling in the Nuclear Tests case helped bring an end to nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific. In addition, the ICJ’s ruling in Chad v Libya resolved a territorial dispute between these two nations and ended their military conflict.
Although the International Criminal Court has only been in operation since 2002, it has thus far convicted ten individuals of heinous crimes, issued or requested warrants for the arrest of prominent figures charged with war crimes (including Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the leaders of Hamas), and conducted or begun investigations of yet other notorious individuals.
But, of course, as demonstrated by the persistence of wars of aggression and massive violations of human rights, enforcing international law remains a major problem in the contemporary world.
Therefore, if the world is to move beyond national impunity―if it is finally to scrap the long and disgraceful tradition among nations of might makes right―it is necessary to empower the world’s major international organizations to enforce the international law that nations have agreed to respect.
This strengthening of global governance is certainly possible.
Although provisions in the UN Charter make outright abolition of the UN Security Council veto very difficult, other means are available for reducing the veto’s baneful effects. In many cases ―including those of the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts―simply invoking Article 27(3) of the UN Charter would be sufficient, for it states that a party to a dispute before the Security Council shall abstain from voting in connection with that dispute. Furthermore, 124 UN nations have already endorsed a proposal for renunciation of the veto when taking action against genocide, crimes against humanity, and mass atrocities. Moreover, the UN General Assembly has occasionally employed “Uniting for Peace” resolutions to take action when the Security Council has failed to do so.
Improving the effectiveness of the international judicial system has also generated attention in recent years. The LAW Not War campaign, championed by organizations dedicated to improving global governance, advocates strengthening the International Court of Justice, principally by increasing the number of nations accepting the compulsory jurisdiction of the Court. Similarly, the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, representing numerous organizations, calls on all nations to ratify the Court’s founding statute and, thereby, “expand the Court’s reach and reduce the impunity gap.”
National impunity is not inevitable, at least if people and governments of the world are willing to take the necessary actions. Are they? Or will they continue talking of a “rules-based international order” while they avoid enforcing the rules?
The post Israel, Russia, and International Law first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A new analysis released by human rights and anti-corruption group Global Witness on Wednesday left no room for doubt, said one campaigner, that the host country of last year’s United Nations climate summit, the United Arab Emirates, prioritized fossil fuel interests over the planet. “Make no mistake, COP28 was hijacked by the interests of the fossil fuel industry,” said Patrick Galey…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Harrowing new satellite imagery provided by the United Nations (U.N.) showcases the extent to which Israeli forces have targeted and destroyed vital civilian infrastructure in Gaza throughout their genocidal war on Palestinians. While there is no greater cost of genocide than the number of lives lost, the analysis of infrastructure damage provides yet another indicator of Israel’s drive to destroy…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A two-state solution (that is, having two independent separate nations) in Palestine-Israel would definitely be an improvement. However, it would not challenge and threaten the forces of imperialism because Zionist Israel and Hamas would still be allowed to exist if there are two separate nations. Furthermore, land disputes between the two nations would continue. The forces of imperialism include the imperial nations such as the United States, the military-industrial complex, and NATO.
Jerusalem in Palestine-Israel is a holy city for Christians, Muslims, and Jews. If we can solve the problems in this region of the world, everything else will be a piece of cake. What happens in Palestine-Israel has repercussions throughout the world, which is why it is so important to learn more about Zionism, imperialism, and the Middle East crisis, especially now considering the catastrophic situation in Rafah, Gaza.
According to Kuna.net, 36,224 Palestinians have been killed, and 81,777 have been injured in Gaza as of May 30, 2024, since October 7, 2023 when the Israel-Hamas War began. The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 killed 1,139 Israeli citizens (revised from 1,400).
The United Nations Partition Plan was adopted on November 29, 1947. Part I of the plan stipulated that the British Mandate (that lasted from 1922 to 1948) would be terminated as soon as possible. The Arab Palestinians considered the UN partition plan to be pro-Zionist with 56% of the land allocated to the Jewish state, while the Arab Palestinian population was twice the Jewish population at that time. “In 1920 the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian population was Arab, mostly Sunni Muslim,” according to British Palestine Police.org.UK.
The British mandate ended on May 15, 1948. The day before in the afternoon of May 14, 1948, the Zionist State of Israel was declared in Tel-Aviv.
After the United Nations adopted its partition plan on November 29, 1947 for Palestine, it caused the 1947-1948 civil war between Arabs and Jews. Then after the British Mandate ended and the State of Israel was declared, the very next day the surrounding Arab nations declared war on Israel, and that war is referred to as the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The Arab-Israeli War resulted in the Nakba, which was the catastrophe in which 80% of the population (more than 700,000 Palestinians) were expelled or fled from their homes.
Middle East Eye.net : The Nakba: All you need to know explained in five maps and charts–May 15, 2024
Even the fairest two-state partition plan will not eliminate the bitterness and hatred between Arabs and Jews that developed increasingly when Jewish Zionists started immigrating into the Arab land of Palestine. When Jews started immigrating into Palestine, they did not just integrate with the Arab Palestinians. Instead, the Jewish immigrants remained separate. Zionism is anchored in the belief that Jews, through their nationality and religion, deserve and have a right to reclaim their ancestral homeland, Israel. Eventually the Zionist Jews developed a plan (Plan Dalet, or Plan D for short) for the systematic removal of Palestinians, also referred to as the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
The rivalry between Jews and Arabs has its roots in the ancient biblical account of Isaac and Ishmael. However, Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Palestine had gotten along just fine under the Ottoman Empire, which was dissolved at the end of World War I.
The imperial forces and nations can tolerate a two-state solution because Zionist Israel would still be allowed to exist as one of the two states. But the imperial forces will absolutely not tolerate having one democratic nation for all Palestinians, Jews, and Christians. That would threaten to end the conflict between Zionists and Hamas advocates, which the imperialists need. Zionist Israel gives the imperial nations a base and an ally to keep the Middle-East under its control.
Currently the Zionist Israeli Jews have much control over the Palestinian territories, which is exactly how they and the imperialists want it to be. Creating two independent nations would definitely be an improvement, but it has some serious shortcomings. With even the best partition plan for Israel and Palestine as two separate nations, Zionism in Israel would still be allowed to exist, and the land disputes between Israel and Palestine would continue. So a two-state solution would be tolerable (but not preferable) to the imperialists. However, if all the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian residents of Palestine-Israel could have an equal vote in a national government, this would be totally unacceptable to the imperialists because they need Zionist Israel as a base and ally for their operations.
The war profiteers need the regional instability created by the Zionist State of Israel to increase their profits and increase their control of the region. As conflicts increase, more weapons of war must be produced, and this is profitable for those who are invested in the weapons industry. Zionists and imperialists need each other.
If Zionism is democratically removed from the State of Israel, and Hamas is democratically removed from Gaza, peace and harmony in the Middle East could actually become a reality. But creating peace would be an enormous threat to the military-industrial complex that makes money from endless wars, that makes money from conflicts that are deliberately created. In 2009 Ron Paul explained in this 1-minute video that Israel encouraged and helped start Hamas!
The imperial nations do not want peace in Palestine-Israel unless it is on their terms. They don’t want to give Muslims and Christians the same rights and privileges as the Zionist Israeli Jews have. To maintain the status quo and accomplish their long-term objectives, the imperial nations create division and discord in the Middle East. They use a strategy of divide and conquer.
Imperialists want to keep controlling the world as they have since ancient times, but they do not yet have total control, which is what they want. Imperialists love to infiltrate, destabilize, and even create the collapse of a nation because then they can create changes in that nation that allow them to further their interests and achieve their long-term goals. The imperial forces are sinister and evil, if not satanic.
The integration of Jews, Muslims, and Christians into a secular one-state nation would be a win-win situation for everyone except the war profiteers of the military-industrial complex.
Having two independent nations (the two-state solution) would help the Palestinians the most because Israel currently has much control over the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza. But a two-state solution is not the best solution. Integrating Jews, Muslims, and Christians into a secular one-state nation would be the best solution and the highest achievement. Considering the current tensions and hostilities between Arab Palestinians and Jewish Israelis, a secular one-state solution could create a safe homeland for Jews, Muslims, and Christians.
If all the Jews, Muslims, and Christians have equal rights in a national government, the beliefs and practices of Zionism and Hamas will not be implemented by popular vote. Ideally the citizens of Palestine-Israel could have a unicameral legislature and equally-empower the 7 largest political parties and give those political parties proportionate control of the mainstream media. Maximizing democracy could be a model for other nations as well.
How can we create healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews?
We must work to promote a secular national government for all Jews, Muslims, and Christians that live in Palestine-Israel. This would remove the imperialist base in Zionist Israel, and it would ideally eliminate the influences of Zionism and of Hamas.
In an article entitled “Christians, Muslims, and Jews for a Secular One-State Solution in Palestine-Israel,” I discuss other dimensions of this subject.
The imperial nations deeply invested in the Middle East crisis dearly love the current situation in which Zionist Israel has much control over the Palestinian territories. For Muslims, Jews, and Christians living in Palestine-Israel, a two-state solution would be better, but a one-state solution would be best.
The post The Imperialists Will Tolerate a Two-State But Not a One-State Solution in Palestine-Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The United Nations (U.N.) delegation from Algeria has submitted a draft resolution to the Security Council, demanding that Israel end its brutal assault on Palestinians in the south Gaza city of Rafah. “Israel, the occupying Power, shall immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action” in the city, the resolution states. The resolution recognizes that “the catastrophic situation in…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.