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Category: United States

  • Deadly Heat in a Political Jungle

    World heat is worse than ever. The entire planet is sweating.

    Every summer is hot but never like this. In America, it’s a national election year in the face of global record heat. What are candidates’ positions on CO2-infused heat?

    Graph by Brian Brettschneider, PhD, Climatologist

    It’s extremely significant that global heat is just as bad in the world’s oceans, which have absorbed 85-90% of planetary heat, serving as a heat reservoir for decades. But now, the oceans are starting to strut their hot stuff. According to Copernicus, April was the 13th month in a row that global sea surface temperatures between 60 degrees latitude south and 60 degrees latitude north have been the warmest on record for the month. Astoundingly, nearly 30% of the world’s oceans were above 28C (82.4°F) too hot for a bath, in April 2024, setting a record. Both the Mediterranean and Black Seas also had sharp upward trends for the month. Has civilization lost its ocean heat cushion?

    Consequently, heat deaths are on the rise and look to escalate, by a lot, and soon. This is a worldwide crisis like none other. It requires world leadership to do something, soon, like the day before yesterday. But, how soon and will it be enough and who’s willing?

    According to World Weather Attribution d/d May 14, 2024: Consistent sweltering temperatures well above 40C (104F) are creating havoc from Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria in the West to Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines in the East, and even though  heat-related death tolls are typically underreported, hundreds of heat-related deaths have been reported, schools have been closed, and citizens warned to stay indoors.

    Moreover, two studies by World Weather Attribution (WWA) “found that human-induced climate change influenced the events, making them around 30 times more likely and much hotter.”

    Heat knows no borders. According to WLRN South Florida d/d May 23, 2024: “Heat Dome Leads to Sweltering Temperatures in Mexico, Central America, and US South”: “This extreme heat is occurring in a world that is quickly warming due to greenhouse gases, which come from the burning of fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal.” For example, Miami International Airport is running 10°F hotter than normal at 96°F.

    Mexico City is nearly a war zone scenario with record high temperatures which, combined with pollution, leads to multiple city-wide protests, including by police: “A group of police agents blocked six lanes of traffic Wednesday on a main Mexico City avenue, saying their barracks lacked water for a week and the bathrooms were unusable. ” (Ibid.) Water has been trucked for hospitals and to firefighting teams. Numerous birds and animals in the wild of Mexico have dropped dead on the spot.

    All Central America is exposed to the same horrendous moist heat. And people wonder why they migrate North.

    Yale Climate Connections d/d April 29, 2024 listed some global warming samplers (1) corals are bleaching in every corner of the ocean, threatening its web of life (2) extreme drought in southern Africa leaves millions hungry (3) West African heat wave: high humidity made 40°C feel like 50°C, which is a killer (4) discomfort may increase: Asia’s heat wave scorches hundreds of millions (5) record heat in Europe, Asia closes another extremely warm month for the planet (6) Europe unprepared for rapidly growing climate risks, report finds (7) China breaks heat records as sweltering weather baked cities from north to south.

    “The era of global boiling has arrived,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres has warned. “Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning.” (Source: Climate Action, World Economic Forum, August 4, 2023.)

    António Guterres “nailed it” nine months ago. Meanwhile, at some point in time soon, the major nations of the world will hit panic buttons and go all-in supplanting fossil fuels with renewables as quickly as possible. They’ll be forced to do this. After all, when police protest in the streets, as in Mexico City, who’s left to patrol?

    It’s a national election year in America, and climate change should be a major political issue as the heat is on for the whole world to see like never before, and it will get worse, as stated by the UN secretary-general. What’s the political landscape in America? According to the mainstream publication Yahoo! Finance d/d Feb. 15, 2024: “MAGA Republicans Have a 920-Page Plan to Make Climate Change Worse.” Isn’t that just great!

    Here’s the opening paragraph of Yahoo! Finance’s write-up: “When former President Donald Trump exited the Oval Office in January 2021, he left behind a record of environmental rollbacks unrivaled in US history. Over his 1,461 days as commander-in-chief, Trump replaced, eliminated, or otherwise dismantled more than 100 environmental rules – at least — from repealing the Clean Air Act to allowing coal plants to dump toxic wastewater into lakes and rivers to declaring open season on endangered gray wolves.” Several of the hatcheted rules were from Richard Nixon’s administration.

    Subsequently, the Biden administration rolled back a lot of Trump’s hatchet job.

    “Had all Trump’s policies gone into effect, the nonpartisan Rhodium Group estimated at the end of 2020, they would have added an additional 1.8 gigatons of CO2-equivalent to the atmosphere by 2035 – more than the annual energy emissions of Germany, Britain, and Canada combined. But even though we never felt the full brunt of them, the medical journal The Lancet estimated that the policies undertaken during his presidency were responsible for 22,000 deaths in 2019 alone due to sharp increases in things like asthma, heart disease, and lung cancer.” (Ibid.)

    Project 2025 is the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for MAGA Republicans going forward: “The plan’s proposals include eviscerating existing climate programs and increasing reliance on fossil fuels. It emphatically repudiates efforts to decarbonize the economy and is a wholesale reversal of the progress made on climate policy over recent years.” (Source: “Project 2025 Tells us What a Second Trump Term Could Mean for Climate Policy. It Isn’t Pretty“, WBUR nonprofit news org, March 27, 2024.)

    Well, that’s great to know, but here’s the real issue: “Much of the voting public is disturbingly unaware of both Biden’s climate record and the assault that Project 2025 would marshal against it.” (Ibid.)

    Make America Great Again. Really?

    The post Deadly Heat in a Political Jungle first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World


    Iri and Toshi Maruki, XV Nagasaki, 1982, from The Hiroshima Panels.

    For Prabir, who is now out of jail.

    On the evening of 14 May, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken climbed onstage at Barman Dictat in Kyiv, Ukraine, to pick up an electric guitar and join the Ukrainian punk band 19.99. Ukrainians, he said, are ‘fighting not just for a free Ukraine, but for a free world’. Blinken and 19.99 then played the chorus of Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’, entirely ignoring the implications of its lyrics – much like Donald Trump, who, to Young’s irritation, used the chorus in his 2015–2016 presidential campaign.

    In February 1989, the day after Young received the news that his band’s tour in the USSR fell through, he penned the song’s lyrics, resting on his criticisms of the Reagan years and the first month of George H. W. Bush’s presidency. While it sounds patriotic on the surface, that song – like Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ (1984) – is deeply critical of the hierarchies and humiliations of capitalist society.

    The three verses of ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ paint a picture of despair (‘people shufflin’ their feet/ people sleepin’ in their shoes’) defined by the drug epidemic plaguing the poor (a woman ‘puts the kid away/ and she’s gone to get a hit’), the collapse of educational opportunities (‘there’s one more kid/ that will never go to school’), and a growing population that lives on the street (‘we got a thousand points of light/ for the homeless man’). Springsteen’s song, written in the shadow of the US war on Vietnam (‘so they put a rifle in my hand/ sent me off to a foreign land/ to go and kill the yellow man’), also captured the strangulation of the working class in the US, many of whom were unable to get a job after returning from a war they did not want (‘down in the shadow of the penitentiary/ out by the gas fires of the refinery/ I’m ten years burning down the road/ nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go’).

    These are songs of anguish, not anthems of war. To chant ‘born in the USA’ or ‘keep on rockin’ in the free world’ does not evoke a sense of pride in the Global North but a fierce criticism of its ruthless wars. ‘Keep on rockin’ in the free world’ is pickled in irony. Blinken did not get it, nor did Trump. They want the allure of rock and roll, but not the acidity of its lyrics. They do not understand that Neil Young’s 1989 song is the soundtrack of the resistance to the US wars that followed against Panama (1989–1999), Iraq (1990–1991), Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2001–2021), Iraq (2003–2011), and many more.


    Iri and Toshi Maruki, XIII Death of the American Prisoners of War, 1971, from The Hiroshima Panels.

    Blinken went to Kiev to celebrate the passing of three bills in the US House of Representatives that appropriate $95.3 billion for the militaries of Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine, and the United States. This is in addition to the more than $1.5 trillion that the US spends on its military every year. It is obscene that the US continues to supply Israel with deadly munitions for its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, including the $26.4 billion it promised to Israel in the new bills while feigning concern for the starvation and slaughter of Palestinians. It is ghastly that the US continues to prevent peace talks between Ukraine and Russia while funding the former’s demoralised military (including $60.8 billion for weapons in the new bills alone) as the US seeks to use the conflict to ‘see Russia weakened’.

    At the other end of Eurasia, the US has, similarly, used the issue of Taiwan in its efforts to see China ‘weakened’. That is why this supplemental appropriation allots $8.1 billion for ‘Indo-Pacific security’, including $3.9 billion in armaments for Taiwan and $3.3 billion for submarine construction in the US. Taiwan is not alone as a potential frontline state in this pressure campaign against China: the newly formed Squad, made up of Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the US, uses solvable conflicts between the Philippines and China as opportunities to weaponise dangerous manoeuvres with the hope of provoking a reaction from China that would give the US an excuse to attack it.


    Iri and Toshi Maruki, XIV Crows, 1972, from The Hiroshima Panels.

    Our new dossier, The New Cold War is Sending Tremors Through Northeast Asia, published in collaboration with the International Strategy Centre (Seoul, South Korea) and No Cold War, argues that ‘the US-led New Cold War against China is destabilising Northeast Asia along the region’s historic fault lines as part of a broader militarisation campaign that extends from Japan and South Korea, through the Taiwan Strait and the Philippines, all the way to Australia and the Pacific Islands’. The bogeyman for this build-up in what the US calls the ‘Indo-Pacific’ (a term developed to draw India into the alliance to encircle China) is North Korea, whose nuclear and missile programmes are used to justify asymmetrical mobilisation along the Pacific edge of Asia. That South Korea’s military budget in 2023 ($47.9 billion) was more than twice North Korea’s GDP ($20.6 billion) in the same year is just one example that highlights this imbalance. This use of North Korea, the dossier argues, ‘has always been a fig leaf for US containment strategies – first against the Soviet Union and today against China’. (You can read the dossier in Korean here).


    Iri and Toshi Maruki, XII Floating Lanterns, 1968, from The Hiroshima Panels.

    In the early years of the US development of the ‘Indo-Pacific strategy’, Chinese scholars such as Hu Bo, Chen Jimin, and Feng Zhennan argued that the term was merely conceptual, limited by the contradictions between the countries involved in the development of the Chinese containment strategy. Over the past few years, however, a new view has developed that these shifts in the Pacific pose a serious threat to China and that the Chinese must respond with bluntness to prevent any provocation. It is this situation, characterised by the US’s creation of alliances that are designed to threaten China (the Quad, AUKUS, JAKUS, and the Squad) alongside China’s refusal to bend before the hyper-imperialism of the Global North, that creates a serious threat in Asia.

    The last section of the dossier, ‘A Path to Peace in Northeast Asia’, offers a window into the hopes of the people’s movements in Okinawa (Japan), the Korean peninsula, and China to find a pathway to peace. Five simple principles anchor this path: end the dangerous alliances, US-led war games in the region, and US intervention into the region, and support unity across struggles in the region as well as frontline struggles to end militarisation in Asia. The latter point is being fought on several fronts by those living near Okinawa’s Kadena Air Base and Henoko Bay as well as South Korea’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defence installation and Jeju Naval Base, to name a few.


    Iri and Toshi Maruki, X Petition, 1955, from The Hiroshima Panels.

    Several years ago, I visited the Maruki Gallery outside Higashi-Matsuyama city in Saitama, where I saw the remarkable murals made by Ira Maruki (1901–1995) and Toshi Maruki (1912–2000) to remember the terrible violence of the nuclear bombs that the US government dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These murals, in the traditional Japanese ink wash style sumi-e, depict the immense human toll of the ugliness of modern warfare. Thanks to the chief curator Yukinori Okamura and the international coordinator Yumi Iwasaki, we were able to include some of these murals in our dossier and in this newsletter.

    In 1980, the South Korean military dictatorship arrested Kim Nam-ju (1945–1994) and thirty-five other leftists on the grounds that they were involved in the National Liberation Front Preparation Committee. Kim was a poet and a translator who brought Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Ho Chi Minh’s writings into Korean. While in Gwangju Prison for eight years, Kim wrote a range of powerful poetry, which he was able to smuggle out for publication. One of those poems, ‘Things Have Really Changed’, is about the suffocation of the ambitions of the Korean people over their own peninsula.

    Under Japanese imperialism, if Joseon people
    shouted ‘Long Live Independence!’,
    Japanese policemen came and took them away,
    Japanese prosecutors interrogated them,
    Japanese judges put them on trial.

    Japan withdrew and the US stepped in.
    Now if Koreans
    say ‘Yankee Go Home’,
    Korean police come and take them away,
    Korean prosecutors interrogate them,
    Korean judges put them on trial.

    Things have really changed after liberation.
    Because I shouted ‘Drive out the foreign invaders!’,
    people from my own country
    arrested me, interrogated me, and put me on trial.

    The post Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Australia’s Anti-ICC Lobby

    Throwing caution to the wind, grasping the nettle, and every little smidgen of opportunity, Australia’s opposition leader, Peter Dutton, was thrilled to make a point in the gurgling tumult of the Israel-Hamas war.  Israel’s leaders, he surmised, had been hard done by the International Criminal Court’s meddlesome ways.  Best for Australia, he suggested, to cut ties to the body to show its solidarity for Israel.

    Dutton had taken strong issue with the announcement on May 20 by ICC prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan that requests for five arrest warrants had been sought in the context of the Israel-Hamas War. They included Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, the commander-in-chief of the Al-Qassam Brigades Mohammed Al-Masri, Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas Political Bureau, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant.

    The measure was roundly condemned by Israel’s closest ally, the United States.  US President Joe Biden’s statement called the inclusion of Israeli leaders “outrageous”.  There was “no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas.”  US lawmakers are debating steps to sanction ICC officials, while the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has promised to cooperate with the measure.

    The United Kingdom also struck the same note,  “There is no moral equivalence between a democratically elected government exercising its lawful right to self-defence and the actions of a terrorist group,” declared UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak during a Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQ) session in the House of Commons.  When asked if he would, in the event of the warrants being issued, comply with the ICC and arrest the named individuals, a cold reply followed.  “When it comes to the ICC, this is a deeply unhelpful development … which of course is still subject to final decision.”

    Australia, despite being a close ally of Israel, has adopted a somewhat confused official response, one more of tepid caution rather than profound conviction.  Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese thought it unwise to even take a formal stance.  “I don’t comment on court processes in Australia, let alone court processes globally, that which Australia is not a party,” he told journalists.

    In light of what seemed like a fudge, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade thought it appropriate to issue a clarifying statement that “there is no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.”  Treasurer Jim Chalmers followed suit.  “There is no equivalence between Hamas the terrorist organisation and Israel, we have it really clear in condemning the actions of Hamas on October 7, we have made it clear we want to see hostages released, and we want to see the Israeli response comply completely with international humanitarian law.”

    Albanese’s opposite number preferred a punchier formula, coming out firmly on the side of Israel and donning gloves against the ICC and its “anti-Semitic stance”.  The PM had “squibbed it”, while his response had tarnished and damaged Australia’s “international relationships with like-minded nations”.  “The ICC,” Dutton insisted on May 23, “should reverse their decision and the prime minister should come out today to call for that instead of continuing to remain in hiding or continuing to dig a deeper hole for himself.”

    Opposition Liberal MP and former Australian ambassador to Israel, Dave Sharma, is also of the view that Australia examine “our options and our future co-operation with the court” if the arrest warrants were issued.  Swallowing whole the conventional argument that Israel was waging a principled war, he told Sky News that everything he had seen “indicates to me Israel is doing its utmost to comply with the principles of international humanitarian law”.

    The ears of Israeli officials duly pricked up.  Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister and Observer of its War Cabinet, Ron Dermer, was delighted to hear about Dutton’s views.  “I didn’t know the head of your opposition had said that,” Dermer told 7.30, “I applaud him for doing it.”

    In a sense, Dutton and his conservative colleague are expressing, with an unintended, brute honesty, Australia’s at times troubled relationship with international law and human rights.  Despite being an enthusiastic signatory and ratifier of conventions, Canberra has tended to blot its copybook over the years in various key respects.  Take for instance, the brazen contempt shown for protections guaranteed by the UN Refugee Convention, one evidenced by its savage “Turn Back the Boats” policy, the creation of concentration camps of violence and torture in sweltering Pacific outposts and breaching the principle of non-refoulement.

    On the subject of genocide, Australian governments had no appetite to domestically criminalise it till 2002, despite ratifying the UN Genocide Convention in 1949.  And as for the ICC itself, wariness was expressed by the Howard government about what the body would actually mean for Australian sovereignty.  Despite eventually ratifying the Rome Statute establishing the court, the sceptics proved a querulous bunch.  As then Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister Kevin Rudd noted, “John Howard is neither Arthur nor Martha on ratification of the International Criminal Court.”

    While serving as Home Affairs minister, Dutton preferred to treat his department as an annex of selective law and order indifferent to the rights and liberties of the human subject. For him, bodies like the ICC exist like a troublesome reminder that human rights do exist and should be the subject of protection, even at the international level.

    The post Australia’s Anti-ICC Lobby first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Misplaced Purity: Democracies and Crimes Against International Law

    The application for arrest warrants by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim A.A. Khan in the Israel-Hamas War gives us a chance to revisit a recurring theme in the commission of crimes in international humanitarian law.  Certain states, so this logic goes, either commit no crimes, or, if they do, have good reasons for doing so, be they self-defence against a monstrous enemy, or as part of a broader civilisational mission.

    In this context, the application for warrants regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, merits particular interest.  Those regarding the Hamas trio of its leader Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Al-Masri, the commander-in-chief of Al-Qassam Brigades, and the organisation’s political bureau head Ismail Haniyeh, would have left most Western governments untroubled.

    From Khan’s perspective, the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant will focus on policies of starvation, the intentional causing of “great suffering, or serious injury to body or health”, including cruel treatment, wilful killing or murder, intentional attacks on the Palestinian population, including extermination, persecution and other inhumane acts falling within the Rome Statute “as crimes against humanity”.

    The ICC prosecutor’s assessment follows the now increasingly common claim that Israel’s military effort, prosecuted in the cause of self-defence in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks by Hamas, is not what it claims to be.  Far from being paragons of proportionate warfare and humanitarian grace in war, Israel’s army and security forces are part of a program that has seen needless killing and suffering.  The crimes against humanity alleged “were committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population pursuant to State policy.”

    The reaction from the Israeli side was always expected.  Netanyahu accused the prosecutor of “creating a false symmetry between the democratically elected leaders of Israel and the terrorist chieftains”.  He rejected “with disgust the comparison of the prosecutor in The Hague between democratic Israel and the mass murderers of Hamas”.

    Israeli President Isaac Herzog also found “any attempt to draw parallels between these atrocious terrorists and a democratically elected government of Israel – working to fulfil its duty to defend and protect its citizens in adherence to the principles of international law […] outrageous and cannot be accepted by anyone.”

    Israel’s staunchest ally, sponsor and likewise self-declared democracy (it is, in fact, a republic created by those suspicious of that system of government), was also there to hold the fort against such legal efforts.  US President Joe Biden’s statement on the matter was short and brusque: “The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous.  And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas.”

    The democracy-as-purity theme, one used as a seeming exculpation of all conduct in war, surfaced in the May 21 exchange between Senator James Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.  Was the secretary, inquired Risch, amenable to supporting legislation to combat the ICC “sticking its nose in the business of countries that have an independent, legitimate, democratic judicial system”?  (No consideration was given to the sustained efforts by the Netanyahu government to erode judicial independence in passing legislation to curb the discretion of courts to strike down government decisions.)

    The response from Blinken was agreeable to such an aim.  There was “no question we have to look at the appropriate steps to take to deal with, again, what is a profoundly wrong-headed decision.”  As things stand, a bill is already warming the lawmaking benches with a clear target.  Sponsored by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act would obligate the President to block the entry of ICC officials to the US, revoke any current US visas such officials hold, and prohibit any property transactions taking place in the US.  To avoid such measures, the court must cease all cases against “protected persons of the United States and its allies”.

    The Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer similarly saw the prosecutor’s efforts as a pairing of incongruous parties. “The fact however that the leader of the terrorist organisation Hamas whose declared goal is the extinction of the State of Israel is being mentioned at the same time as the democratically elected representatives of that very State is non-comprehensible.”

    From the outset, such statements do two things.  The first is to conjure up a false distinction – that of equivalence – something absent in the prosecutor’s application.  The acts alleged are relevant to each specified party and are specific to them.  The second is a corollary: that democracies do not break international law and certainly not when it comes to war crimes and crimes against humanity, most notably when committed against a certain type of foe.  The more savage the enemy, the greater the latitude in excusing vengeful violence.  That remains, essentially, the cornerstone of Israel’s defence argument at the International Court of Justice.

    Such arguments echo an old trope.  The two administrations of George W. Bush spilled much ink in justifying the torture, enforced disappearance and renditions of terror suspects to third countries during its declared Global War on Terror.  Lawyers in both the White House and Justice Department gave their professional blessing, adopting an expansive definition of executive power in defiance of international laws and protections.  Such sacred documents as the Geneva Conventions could be defied when facing Islamist terrorism.

    Lurking beneath such justifications is the snobbery of exceptionalism, the conceit of power.  Civilised liberal democracies, when battling the forces of a named barbarism, are to be treated as special cases in the world of international humanitarian law.  The ICC prosecutor begs to differ.

    The post A Misplaced Purity: Democracies and Crimes Against International Law first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Rages of Equivalence: The ICC Prosecutor, Israel and Hamas

    The legal world was abuzz.  The diplomatic channels of various countries raged and fizzed.  It had been rumoured that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with his cabinet colleagues, had been bracing themselves for a stinging intervention from the International Criminal Court, a body they give no credence or respect to.

    Then came the words from the Prosecutor of the ICC, Karim A.A. Khan on May 20, announcing that arrest warrants were being sought in the context of the Israel-Hamas War, benignly described as the “Situation in Palestine”, under the Rome Statute.  “On the basis of evidence collected and examined by my Office, I have reasonable grounds to believe that Benjamin NETANYAHU, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Yoav GALLANT, the Minister of Defence of Israel, bear criminal responsibility for […] war crimes and crimes against humanity on the territory of the State of Palestine (in the Gaza strip) from at least 8 October 2023”.

    Hamas figures responsible for the attacks of October 7 against Israel also feature.  They include the essential triumvirate: Hamas chief, Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Al-Masri, the commander-in-chief of Al-Qassam Brigades, and Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas Political Bureau.  All “bear responsibility for […] war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on the territory of Israel and the State of Palestine (on the Gaza Strip) from at least 7 October 2023”.

    On Israel’s part, Khan’s office points the accusing finger at such alleged war crimes as starvation, the wilful causing of “great suffering, or serious injury to body or health”, including cruel treatment, wilful killing or murder, the intentional direction of attacks against a civilian population, extermination, persecution and other inhumane acts falling within the Rome Statute “as crimes against humanity”.

    The ICC prosecutor’s assessment follows the now increasingly common claim that Israel’s military effort, prosecuted in the cause of self-defence, is not what it claims to be.  Far from being paragons of proportionate warfare and humanitarian grace in war, Israel’s army and security forces are part of a program that has seen needless killing and suffering.  The crimes against humanity alleged “were committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population pursuant to State policy.”

    Khan acknowledges Israel’s innate right and marrow to self-defence.  He does not consider it estranged from the objects of international humanitarian law.  To divorce them would merely enliven barbarism.  The means Israel chose to achieve its military aims in Gaza, “namely, intentionally causing death, starvation, great suffering, and serious body or health of the civilian population – are criminal.”

    On the part of Hamas, the prosecutor cites extermination, murder, the taking of hostages, the use of rape and sexual violence, the resort to torture, cruel treatment and “[o]utrages upon personal dignity” as crimes worthy of investigation.  Khan finds that the accused individuals “planned and instigated the commission of crimes” on October 7 and had “through their own actions, including visits to hostages shortly after their kidnapping, acknowledged their responsibility for their crimes.”

    When law intrudes into the violence of war and conflict, the participants and instigators are rarely satisfied.  The matter becomes even more testy when international tribunals feature.  Concerns about power, bias, and an inappropriate coupling (or decoupling) of potential culprits abound.

    No doubt anticipating the fulminating response, Khan convened a panel of experts in international law to advise him whether his applications for arrest warrants met the threshold requirements of Article 58 of the Rome Statute.  It would be hard to dismiss the weighty credentials of a group made up of such figures as Lord Justice Fulford, Judge Theodor Meron and Baroness Helena Kennedy.

    None of this mattered in the catatonic rage arising from pairing the warring parties in the same effort.  The response reads like a decrypting key to hate and exceptionalism.  All wage war justly; all wage war righteously.  According to Netanyahu, Israel had suffered a “hit job”, with Khan “creating a false symmetry between the democratically elected leaders of Israel and the terrorist chieftains”.  The subtext is clear: democracies, at least those declaring themselves as such, are beyond reproach when fighting designated savages.

    On the side of the Middle East’s only nuclear power (officially undeclared) came the erroneous argument that lumping Hamas officials with Israeli cabinet members was tantamount to equivalence.  “The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous,” declared US President Joe Biden.  “And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas.”  Ditto the Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer, who thought the pairing “non-comprehensible”.

    The prosecutor implied no such thing, focusing on the profile of each of the individuals.  The allegations regarding Netanyahu and Gallant, for instance, keenly focus on starvation as a means of waging war, including broader applications of collective punishment against Gaza’s civilian population.  For the leaders of Hamas, the interest is on allegations of murder, sexual violence, extermination, torture, hostage taking and incidents of captivity.

    The trope of faultless democracy at war against terrorism is a common one.  The George W. Bush administration made incessant use of it in justifying illegal renditions and torture during the scandalously named Global War on Terror.  Memoranda from the White House and the US Justice Department gave nodding approval to such measures, arguing that “illegal combatants” deserved no human rights protections, notably under the Geneva Conventions.

    Unfortunately, many a just cause sprouts from crime, and the protagonists can always claim to be on the right side of history when the world takes notice of a plight.  Only at the conclusion of the peace accords can stock be taken, the egregiousness of it all accounted for.  Along the way, the law looks increasingly shabby, suffering in sulky silence.  These applications for arrest warrants are merely a modest measure to, pardon the pun, arrest that tendency.  It is now up to the pre-trial chamber of the ICC to take the next step.

    The post The Rages of Equivalence: The ICC Prosecutor, Israel and Hamas first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Indeed, there is no comparison: Israel’s crimes are far worse than Hamas’

    There is one thing we should all be able to agree with Benjamin Netanyahu on: Any comparison between Israel’s war crimes and those of Hamas is, as the Israeli prime minister put it, “absurd and false” and a “distortion of reality”.Here’s why:

    * Israeli war crimes have been ongoing for more than seven decades, long predating Hamas’ creation.

    * Israel has kept the Palestinians of Gaza caged into a concentration camp for the past 17 years, denying them connection to the outside world and the essentials of life. Hamas managed to besiege a small part of Israel for one day, on October 7.

    * For every Israeli killed by Hamas on October 7, Israel has slaughtered at least 35 times that number of Palestinians. Similar kill-ratios grossly skewed in Israel’s favour have been true for decades.

    * Israel has killed more than 15,000 Palestinian children since October – and many tens of thousands more Palestinian children are missing under rubble, maimed or orphaned. By early April, Israel had killed a further 114 children in the West Bank and injured 725 more. Hamas killed a total of 33 Israeli children on October 7.

    * Israel has laid waste to Gaza’s entire health sector. It has bombed its hospitals, and killed, beaten and kidnapped many hundreds of medical personnel. Hamas has not attacked one Israeli hospital.

    * Israel has killed more than 100 journalists in Gaza and more than 250 aid workers. It has also kidnapped a further 40 journalists. Most are presumed to have been taken to a secret detention facility where torture is rife. Hamas is reported to have killed one Israeli journalist on October 7, and no known aid workers.

    * Israel is actively starving Gaza’s population by denying it food, water and aid. That is a power – a genocidal one – Hamas could only ever dream of.

    * Israel has been forcibly removing Palestinians from their lands for more than 76 years to build illegal Jewish settlements in their place. Hamas has not been able to ethnically cleanse a single Israeli, nor build a single Palestinian settlement on Israeli land.

    * Some 750,000 Palestinians are reported to have been taken hostage and jailed by Israel since 1967 – an unwelcome rite of passage for Palestinian men and boys and one in which torture is routine and military trials ensure a near-100% conviction rate. Until October 7, Hamas had only ever managed to take hostage a handful of the Israeli soldiers whose job is to oppress Palestinians.

    * And, while Hamas is designated a terrorist organisation by western states, those same western states laud Israel, fund and arm it, and provide it with diplomatic cover, even as the World Court rules that a plausible case has been made it is committing a genocide in Gaza.

    Yes, Netanyahu is right. There is no comparison at all.

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  • The Assange Case: A Flicker of Hope in the UK High Court

    It was faint, but there was more than just a flicker of hope.  In the tormented (and tormenting) journey the WikiLeaks founder and publisher, Julian Assange, has endured, May 20, 2024 provided another pitstop.  As with many such stops over the years, it involved lawyers.  Many of them.

    The occasion was whether the UK High Court of Justice would grant Assange leave to appeal his extradition to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 hewn from the monstrous quarry that is the Espionage Act of 1917.  He is wanted for receiving and publishing classified US government materials comprising diplomatic cables, the files of those detained in Guantanamo Bay, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Any computed sentence, glacially calculated at 175 years, would effectively spell his end.

    News on the legal front has often been discomforting for Assange and his supporters.  The US has been favoured, repeatedly, in various appeals, chalking up the lion’s share of victories since successfully overturning the decision by Judge Vanessa Baraitser to bar extradition in January 2021 on mental health grounds.  But Justice Johnson and Dame Victoria Sharp of the High Court of Justice in London promised to keep matters interesting.

    A key sticking point in the proceedings has been whether the First Amendment would protect Assange’s publishing activity in the course of any trial in the US.  The attitude from the central US prosecutor in the extradition proceedings, Gordon Kromberg, and former Secretary of State and ex-CIA director Mike Pompeo, has been one of hearty disapproval that it should.

    Pompeo’s remarks in an infamous April 2017 address as CIA director to the Center for Strategic and International Studies openly branded WikiLeaks “a hostile intelligence service” that proselytised in the cause of transparency and aided such powers as Russia.  Assange “and his kind” were “not in the slightest bit interested in improving civil liberties or enhancing personal freedom.  They have pretended that America’s First Amendment freedom shield them from justice.”  They were “wrong” to have thought so.

    On January 17, 2020, Kromberg submitted an affidavit to the UK district court that was eye opening on the subject.  The following remains salient: “Concerning any First Amendment challenge, the United States could argue that foreign nationals are not entitled to protections under the First Amendment, at least as it concerns national defense information, and even were they so entitled, that Assange’s conduct is unprotected because of his complicity in illegal acts and in publishing the names of innocent sources to their grave and imminent risk of harm.”

    In March 2024, the High Court curtly dismissed six of the nine arguments submitted by Assange in part of his effort to seek a review of the entire case.  The judges, anchoring themselves in the initial reasoning of the district court judge, refused to accept that he was being charged with a political offence, something barred by the US-UK Extradition Treaty, or that the CIA had breached lawyer-client privilege in having spied on him in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, not to mention the serious thought given to abduction and assassination.

    The judges gave the prosecution a heavy olive branch, implying that the case for extradition would be stronger if a number of assurances could be made by the US prosecution.  These were, in turn, that Assange be offered First Amendment protections, despite him not being deemed a journalist; that he not be prejudiced, both during the trial and in sentence, on account of his nationality, and that he not be subject to the death penalty. The insistence on such undertakings had a slightly unreal, woolly-headed air to them.

    On April 16, the US State Department filed the fangless assurances in a diplomatic note to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).  “Assange will not be prejudiced by reason of nationality with respect to which defenses he may seek to raise at trial and at sentencing.”  If extradited, he could still “raise and seek to rely upon at trial (which includes any sentencing hearing) the rights and protections given under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.  A decision as to the applicability of the First Amendment is exclusively within the purview of the US Courts.”

    The US authorities further undertook to avoid seeking or imposing the death sentence. “The United States is able to provide such assurance as Assange is not charged with a death-penalty eligible offense, and the United States assures that he will not be tried for a death-eligible offense.”  This can only be taken as conjecture, given the latitude the prosecution has in laying further charges that carry the death penalty should Assange find himself in US captivity.

    In court, Edward Fitzgerald KC, representing Assange, explained with cold sobriety that such an assurance made no guarantee that Assange could rely on the First Amendment at trial. “It does not commit the prosecution to take the point, which gave rise to this court’s concerns, i.e. the point that as a foreign citizen he is not entitled to rely on the First Amendment, at least in relation to a national security matter.”  In any case, US courts were hardly bound by it, a point emphasised in the statement given by defence witness and former US district judge, Professor Paul Grimm.  It followed that the assurance was “blatantly inadequate” and “would cause the applicant prejudice on the basis of his nationality.”

    Written submissions to the court from Assange’s legal team also argued that discrimination “on grounds that a person is a foreigner, whether on the basis that they are a foreign national or a foreign citizen, is plainly within the scope of the prohibition [against extradition under the UK Extradition Act 2003].  ‘Prejudice at trial’ must include exclusion on grounds of citizenship from fundamental substantive rights that can be asserted at trial.  On the US argument, trial procedures could discriminate on grounds of citizenship.”

    In response, the US submitted arguments of a headshaking quality.  Through James Lewis KC, it was submitted that the High Court had erred in its March judgment in equating “prejudice on grounds of foreign nationality with discrimination on grounds of foreign citizenship”.  The UK Extradition Act mentions “nationality” in preference to “citizenship”.  These terms were not “synonymous”.

    According to Lewis, Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) protecting journalists and whistleblowers was qualified by conduct “within the tenets of reasonable and responsible journalism”. One factor in this context “whether it is reasonable and responsible is where the publication took place – inside a member state’s territory or outside a member state’s territory.”

    The prosecution’s written submissions summarise the points.  The First Amendment’s applicability to Assange’s case depended on “the components of (1) conduct on foreign (outside the United States of America) soil; (2) non-US citizenship; and (3) national defense information”. Assange, Lewis elaborated, “will be able to rely on it but that does not mean the scope will cover the conduct he is accused of.”

    The prosecution suggested that former US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, a vital source for WikiLeaks, had been unable to rely on the First Amendment, limiting the possibility that its protections could extend to covering Assange.

    Mark Summers KC, also representing Assange, was bemused. “The fact that Chelsea Manning was found in the end to have no substantial First Amendment claims tells you nothing at all.  She was a government employee, not a publisher.”

    He also made the point that “You can be a national without being a citizen [but] you cannot be a citizen without nationality.”  It followed that discrimination arising out of citizenship would result in discrimination based on nationality, and nothing adduced by the prosecution in terms of case law suggested otherwise.

    Unconvinced by the prosecution’s contorted reasoning, Dame Victoria Sharp agreed to grant leave to Assange to appeal on the grounds he is at risk of discrimination by virtue of his nationality, in so far as it affects his right to assert protections afforded by Article 10 of the ECHR and the First Amendment.

    It remains to be seen whether this legal victory for the ailing Australian will yield a sweet harvest rather than the bitter fruit it has.  He remains Britain’s most prominent political prisoner, held in unpardonable conditions, refused bail and subject to jailing conditions vicariously approved by those in Washington.  In the meantime, the public campaign to drop the indictment and seek his liberation continues to ripen.

    The post The Assange Case: A Flicker of Hope in the UK High Court first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • “Extremely Harrowing”: British Surgeon’s Gaza Testimony Buried By The “MSM”

    Propaganda by omission is a dominant feature of the ‘mainstream’ news media. Indeed, it is a requirement. Rather than serving the public interest by fully exposing the brutal machinations of power, state-corporate media shield Western governments and their allies from scrutiny and focus the public’s attention on the crimes of Official Enemies.

    Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza is but the latest example. Consider the dearth of media coverage given to the compelling and shocking testimony provided by leading British surgeon, Professor Nick Maynard, who works as a consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University Hospital.

    Maynard left Gaza just before Israel took control of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt on 7 May. He had been operating on Palestinian patients for two weeks and he gave a very disturbing account of what he had observed.

    The first topic he highlighted was ‘the direct targeting of healthcare workers’ by the Israeli military, describing how ‘hundreds have been killed’ and ‘hundreds have been abducted’. Maynard had personally worked with one young doctor and one young nurse who had been abducted and held in captivity for 45 days and 60 days, respectively. They both gave him ‘very graphic and stark descriptions of their daily torture at the hands of the Israeli defence force’. He described the experience of hearing their stories as ‘extremely harrowing’.

    Maynard had also been to Gaza over Christmas and New Year where he worked at Al-Aqsa hospital. He “spent the whole two weeks operating all the time on major explosive injuries to the abdomen and to the chest. And it was really nonstop.”

    His visit was unexpectedly cut short in early January when the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) ordered the medical staff, along with the hospital’s 600 patients, to evacuate the hospital. A few British newspaper reports that included accounts by Maynard and colleagues were published at the time on the “nightmare” of working in “one of ‘Gaza’s last functioning hospitals” (Daily Mirror, 18 January, 2024), “The single worst thing I’ve seen” (Daily Telegraph, 12 January, 2024), and “British surgeon haunted by Gaza horrors pledges to go back” (The Times, 4 February, 2024).

    In March, the Guardian reported that a delegation of American and British doctors had arrived in Washington DC to tell the Biden administration that the Israeli military was systematically destroying Gaza’s health infrastructure in order to drive Palestinians out of their homes. Maynard was quoted, accusing the IDF of committing “appalling atrocities”, although the article did not address these in depth.

    He said:

    “The IDF are systematically targeting healthcare facilities, healthcare personnel and really dismantling the whole healthcare system.”

    He continued:

    “It’s not just about targeting the buildings, it’s about systematically destroying the infrastructure of the hospitals. Destroying the oxygen tanks at the al-Shifa hospital, deliberately destroying the CT scanners and making it much more difficult to rebuild that infrastructure. If it was just targeting Hamas militants, why are they deliberately destroying the infrastructure of these institutions?”

    According to Maynard, Israel’s strategy of targeting hospitals and healthcare facilities is intended to drive the Palestinians from their homes:

    “It persuades the local population to leave. If a hospital has been dismantled, if the locals see there is no medical care available and see the disrupted infrastructure, it’s yet another factor that drives them south.” [At that time, Israel had designated the south of Gaza a “safe zone” for Palestinians to seek refuge.]

    In an interview with Nick Ferrari of London-based LBC radio on 2 April, Maynard made further shocking revelations. The timing of the interview was linked to the IDF having just destroyed another hospital, Al-Shifa, where Maynard had also previously worked. Around 400 Palestinians had reportedly been killed in a brutal two-week attack by Israeli forces.

    Maynard told Ferrari:

    “Every single part of the hospital has been destroyed. The whole infrastructure of the hospital has been destroyed. When I spoke to Marwan [a Palestinian colleague] yesterday, he told me there were 107 patients, 60 medical staff. God only knows what has happened to them. I think we’ve seen some of the pictures. Surgeons I know have been executed in the last 48 hours there. Bodies have been discovered in the last 12-24 hours who had been handcuffed, with their hands behind their back. [Our added emphasis].”

    He added:

    “And so, there is no doubt at all, that multiple healthcare workers have been executed there in the last few days.”

    Ferrari then asked:

    “You believe executed by whom, doctor?”

    Maynard:

    “By the Israeli Defence Force.

    Ferrari:

    “Why would they seek to execute surgeons and medical professionals?”

    Maynard:

    “Well, they’ve been doing it since October the 7th. Over 450 healthcare workers have been killed. Friends of mine that I’ve worked with over the years. Many have been abducted as well, and nothing has been heard of them since. So, there is no doubt in my mind that – I can bear witness to this from my time at Al-Aqsa hospital and from talking to people that there has been direct targeting of the healthcare system in Gaza, direct targeting of hospitals and multiple killings of healthcare workers.”

    Maynard also made clear that neither he, nor any of his colleagues, ever saw evidence of Hamas using hospitals or healthcare facilities as bases for their operations, despite numerous Israeli claims to the contrary.

    BBC Silence

    “Mainstream” media showed minimal interest in this highly credible testimony from a British surgeon on Israel’s deliberate targeting of healthcare workers, including actual execution of surgeons. As far as we can see, there is nothing about Maynard’s testimony exposing these executions on the BBC News website.

    An article on the Guardian website on 7 April did cover Maynard’s testimony about targeting of healthcare workers and infrastructure, but made no mention of his statement that Palestinian surgeons had been executed by Israeli soldiers. Nor was it mentioned anywhere else in the entirety of the British national press.

    The Telegraph carried an interview with Maynard on 12 January in which he said:

    “here can be certainly no doubt in my mind from what I’ve recently witnessed that [Israel] are directly targeting healthcare structures with a view to completely disabling the healthcare system in Gaza.”

    The Telegraph appears not to have reported Maynard’s subsequent claim that he personally knew surgeons who have since been executed by Israeli soldiers.

    On 13 May, International Nurses Day, the Gaza Health Ministry announced that at least 500 medical personnel had been killed by Israel since 7 October. Dr Omar Abdel-Mannan, a paediatric neurologist and co-founder of Healthcare Workers for Palestine, said that the only way Israel could ‘justify’ these killings would be if they see these healthcare workers not as humans, but as “human animals”. As readers may recall, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant infamously described his Palestinian enemies as “human animals”.

    Of his most recent trip, Maynard said that:

    “the very strong narrative of the patients I was treating over the last two weeks were those with terrible infective complications as a direct result of malnutrition, and this was very stark indeed.”

    He gave a graphic insight into the hellish conditions:

    “And I operated on many patients in the last two weeks who had awful complications from their abdominal surgery related to inadequate nutrition, and particularly those with [the] abdominal wall breaking down. So, literally their intestines end up hanging outside. And the intestinal repairs that have been carried out to deal with the damage to the bowels leaking, so their bowel contents leaking out from different parts of the abdomen, covering their bodies, covering their beds.”

    He drew particular attention to:

    “The lack of resources to deal with these inadequate numbers of colostomy bags, wound management devices and nutritional support.”

    Maynard explained the consequences for patients:

    “They get this vicious cycle of malnutrition, infection, wounds breaking down, more infection, more malnutrition. So, it’s devastating and we will see far more of that over the coming months.”

    He gave examples of two young female patients he had treated: Tala who was 16 and Lama who was 18, both of whom had survivable injuries. Tragically, they both died “as a direct result of malnutrition”.

    This was yet more shocking and credible testimony from an experienced British consultant surgeon. It should have been headline news across the British press and broadcasting outlets. But searches of the Lexis-Nexis database of newspapers, together with Google searches, reveal minimal “mainstream” coverage: one article in the Independent.

    If this had been evidence against “Putin’s Russia” or “Assad’s Syria”, it would have generated huge headlines, in-depth reporting and anguished commentary across all major news media. Once again, we see the insidiously corrupt phenomenon of propaganda by omission.

    It is noteworthy that, last November, the BBC News website did feature Maynard, “who’s been travelling to the Gaza Strip and West Bank for more than a decade.” Six months ago, he was once again on “standby to go and work in operating theatres with the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians”. With remarkable courage, he told the BBC:

    “I think there is fear, apprehension, not knowing what one would find, but I think the other motives for doing so… are so powerful that they outweigh everything else. I consider it a huge privilege to be in a position to help these people who need help more than most of us can possibly understand.”

    Now that Maynard has returned from Gaza with horrific accounts, not least of the murder of healthcare workers by the Israeli military, the BBC appears not in the least interested. When we pointed this out via X (formerly Twitter), directly challenging John Neal, editor of BBC News at One, Six and Ten, and Paul Royall, executive editor of the BBC News Channel, the public response was huge. Our social media outreach is routinely suppressed by the deliberately obscure algorithms of Facebook and X. But this particular tweet spread widely by our standards, being shared 740 times at the time of writing. Shamefully, there has been no response from the BBC.

    When Genocide Is Merely “War”

    In the meantime, BBC News persists in labelling the Gaza genocide as the ‘Israel-Gaza war’. The day after it was reported that almost half a million Palestinians had fled Rafah in the south of Gaza, despite having previously been designated a “safe zone” by Israel, as discussed above, the BBC failed to follow up on the story.

    One was presumably supposed to imagine that this huge number of people was no longer in danger: at risk of being bombed or dying under Israeli-imposed hunger, malnutrition and disease.

    That same week, the BBC News website had as many as four ‘Live’ feeds running simultaneously. Not one of them focused on the Israeli-inflicted horrors in Gaza. This is truly remarkable. Has there been a BBC directive from senior management not to give too much attention to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians? Where are the BBC whistleblowers who can let the public know what’s going on inside the corporation?

    A vanishingly rare exception appeared on 24 October 2023, when BBC correspondent Rami Ruhayem – a former journalist for the Associated Press, who has worked as a journalist and producer for BBC Arabic and the BBC World Service since 2005 – sent a letter to the BBC’s Director-General, Tim Davie:

    “Dear Tim,

    I am writing to raise the gravest possible concerns about the coverage of the BBC, especially on English outlets, of the current fighting between Israel and Palestinian factions.

    “It appears to me that information that is highly significant and relevant is either entirely missing or not being given due prominence in coverage.”

    The emphasis now is emphatically on “missing”. It seems the global student and other protests have prompted the BBC to attempt to limit public dissent.

    By contrast, BBC journalists can be quick to respond when they feel they have been subjected to unjust criticism. On 13 May, we retweeted a clip from Saul Staniforth, a media activist with a large following on X, about Israel banning Al Jazeera. Staniforth had included a quote from Sebastian Usher, a BBC News Middle East analyst:

    “Al Jazeera – I think many people, if they DO watch it, WOULD see it as some kind of propaganda.”

    We asked:

    “And how do you think many people see BBC News?”

    Clearly piqued, Usher contacted us the following day to say that his quote had been taken out of context. He said it was a direct response during a live interview to a question on the likely reaction by Israelis to the closing of Al Jazeera. He considered Staniforth’s tweet and our follow-up seriously misleading and the exact opposite of the tenor of his reporting on the issue.

    We asked him which words he had used to express solidarity with Al Jazeera, or to speak out for press freedom and free speech. He declined to provide such a statement, saying that as a BBC journalist he was unable to do so in a public forum. Usher added that in his reporting he stressed that Al Jazeera sees its mission as righting what it believes is imbalance on Gaza reporting in international media by giving more space to Palestinian voices and voices on the ground.

    We were happy to include the points he had made, which we did via Facebook and X. Usher responded to our very reasonable response with a grudging “Ok”.

    It is worth noting that Usher strongly objected to being “quoted out of context” while working for a media organisation clearly trying to suppress public outrage at an ongoing genocide by reducing coverage.

    Moreover, the essential observation we made stands: many people at home and abroad regard BBC News as an outlet of western propaganda. Its abject performance during the Gaza genocide – “the Israel-Gaza war”, as the state-mandated broadcaster puts it – is ample proof.

    The post “Extremely Harrowing”: British Surgeon’s Gaza Testimony Buried By The “MSM” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The Biggest Obstacle to Free and Fair Elections in Venezuela is the US

    For all the hullabaloo about “free and fair elections” in Venezuela by the US government, its sycophantic corporate press deliberately ignores the elephant in the room – namely, the so-called sanctions designed to make life so miserable that the people will acquiesce to Washington’s plan for regime change.

    As Foreign Policy puts it, “Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro values his political survival above his country’s economic well-being.” Translated from Washington-speak, the US government is blackmailing the Venezuelan electorate with, in the words of Foreign Policy, “the looming threat,” of continuing unilateral coercive measures unless they vote against the incumbent in the presidential election on July 28.

    The New York Times reports that a Maduro win will “intensify poverty,” conveniently omitting the cause will be tightening of US sanctions. Typical of such coverage, the article blames Maduro for the “dire” economic situation, but not until the 25th paragraph is there even a passing reference to US sanctions.

    Such outside electoral meddling by the use of sanctions is orders of magnitude greater than the supposed “Russiagate” interference in the 2016 US presidential contest. Washington brazenly leaves no ambiguity about its intent to punish the Venezuelan people for choosing a government not to its liking. With no sense of shame or irony, the State Department imperiously calls this bullying “democracy promotion.”

    US hybrid war on Venezuela

    As documented by Venezuelanalysis, US sanctions against Venezuela are “a war without bombs.” These actions, more correctly called coercive economic measures by the United Nations, are killing Venezuelans. Never mentioned in the corporate press is that these unilateral measures are a form of collective punishment, considered illegal under international law.

    The over 930 US sanctions are designed to crash the Venezuelan economy and, above all, to prevent any recovery. Initially they succeeded in the former objective and, equally importantly, failed in the latter.

    The bipartisan offensive was initiated in 2015 by President Obama, who incredulously declared “a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security” posed by Venezuela. (Note, none of the corporate press subjected this extraordinary claim to any kind of scrutiny.) Coercive measures were intensified by President Trump, targeting the vital Venezuelan oil industry. Seamlessly, President Biden continued the “maximum pressure” campaign with minor adjustments, mainly designed to benefit US and select foreign business interests.

    As a result, Venezuela experienced the largest peacetime economic contraction in recent world history. The free-falling economy suffered triple-digit inflation, again, the highest in the world. Some seven million economic refugees fled the country.

    The US continued other “hybrid warfare” measures including recognizing Juan Guaidó as the self-proclaimed “interim president” of Venezuela in 2019. The then 35-year-old far-right US security asset had never run for national office and was at the time unknown to over 80% of the population. Nevertheless, some fifty US allies initially recognized his government.

    Further, US-backed coups have continued since the 2002 one that lasted only 47 hours. Recent capers included the “bay of piglets” operation in 2020. Biden recently repatriated two of the US mercenaries, who had been captured in that failed coup, in a prisoner exchange that resulted in freeing Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab.

    Coup attempts are ongoing according to the Venezuelan government. US official policy on such extra-legal measures is “plausible deniability.”

    Venezuela successfully resists

    Contrary to all odds and most predictions, President Maduro has turned the Venezuelan ship of state around against such unfavorable winds. By the end of 2023, Venezuela had recorded 11 quarters of consecutive growth after years of economic contraction. GDP growth during the first four months of 2024 exceeded forecasts of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and are projected to be 4% for the year, compared to IMF figures for the US at 2.7% and China at 4.6%.

    Today, on the diplomatic front, only the US, Israel, and a handful of other Washington vassals still fail to recognize the democratically elected government of Venezuela. Even the US-backed opposition has itself renounced the Guaidó presidency.

    Until recently, Colombia (then a hostile US client state) served as a launching pad for paramilitary incursions onto Venezuela’s western border. In 2022, President Gustavo Petro, the first leftist in the entire history of Colombia, replaced the right-wing Iván Duque. The next year, the friendly Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva replaced the hostile government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil on Venezuela’s southern border.

    Meanwhile, progressive regional governments such as Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Mexico have continued to support Venezuela. Most significantly and indicative of a shifting world order toward multipolarity, Venezuela has strengthened ties with China, Russia, and Iran. This, in turn, has only intensified hostility by the US.

    Lessons from the 1990 electoral defeat of the Sandinista’s in Nicaragua

    Conditions in Venezuela today, in the run-up to the July presidential election, bear some parallels to a similar situation in Nicaragua in 1990. In 1979, the Sandinistas overthrew the US-backed Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. By the 1990 presidential election, polls looked favorable for the reelection of their FSLN party’s Daniel Ortega.

    Everyone, including the US president, who was bent on overthrowing the Nicaraguan Revolution, anticipated a Sandinista victory, according to Dan Kovalik’s book on Nicaragua. But the vote was unfavorable, issuing in seventeen years of neoliberal regression.

    Both the State Department and the US ambassador to Managua had made it abundantly clear that the Nicaraguans had best vote the “right way” or the US-sponsored contra war would continue. The contras were mercenaries recruited largely from Somoza’s former army who were waging an armed terror campaign against the population.

    In addition, the country was under US economic sanctions and suffering from hyperinflation. Brian Willson, who lost his legs in civil disobedience protesting the US contra war in Nicaragua, reported that the US funded opposition parties and NGOs in the 1990 election. The CIA alone poured in $28-30 million. Willson concluded that the US “purchased the 1990 Nicaragua elections.”

    Prospects for the Venezuelan presidential election

    While Venezuela is not under siege by US-paid mercenaries as was Nicaragua, it is nonetheless subject to Washington’s hybrid war of coercive economic measures, funding of opposition forces, international diplomatic belligerence, and covert actions.

    An assessment in February by the US intelligence community found Maduro “is unlikely to lose the 2024 presidential election.” A May 3 Encuesta Nacional Ideadatos opinion poll reported a 52.7% preference for Maduro. Other polls give the lead to opposition candidate Edmundo González with the Unitary Platform who allegedly worked with the CIA.

    Within the Chavista core – those who support the Bolivarian Revolution of Hugo Chávez and its current standard bearer Nicolás Maduro – it is only to be expected that there is a certain level of weariness. Venezuelan political commentator Clodovaldo Hernández cites ongoing issues of inadequate healthcare delivery, salaries and pensions that have not kept pace with inflation, erratic electric power, incompletely addressed corruption, and dysfunctional police and judicial services, all of which disproportionately impact the Chavista base of poor and working people. How this will translate come July 28 is uncertain.

    The propaganda campaign by the US state and its stenographers in the press to delegitimize the Venezuela election process is ramping up. For example, the US “newspaper of record” reports that “the last competitive election was held in 2013.” Not “fit to print” is the news that the presidential term is six years, or that the US literally ordered the opposition not to run in 2018. The leading opposition candidate at the time, Henri Falcón, was threatened with sanctions when he chose to ignore Washington’s demand.

    The very fact that any of the US-backed opposition is contesting in the upcoming election rather than boycotting indicates that they are no longer relying on an extra-parliamentary overthrow of the government. This itself represents a significant victory for the Chavistas.

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  • South China Sea Drama Unfolds

    A Filipino civilian convoy called “Atin Ito” claims to have breached China’s blockade around the Huangyan Dao, also known as Scarborough Shoal, in the South China Sea. The convoy reportedly aimed to resupply Filipino fishermen but stopped 50 nautical miles from the shoal. The Philippine Coast Guard and Navy monitored the mission. What are the real goals behind it? Are the fishermen being exploited, and are there other forces at play? Join us as we uncover the real story behind this high-stakes maritime drama.

    The post South China Sea Drama Unfolds first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Promising the Impossible: Blinken’s Out of Tune Performance in Kyiv

    Things are looking dire for the Ukrainian war effort.  Promises of victory are becoming even hollower than they were last summer, when US President Joe Biden could state with breathtaking obliviousness that Russia had “already lost the war”.   The worst offender in this regard remains the United States, which has been the most vocal proponent of fanciful victory over Russia, a message which reads increasingly as one of fighting to the last Ukrainian.

    Such a victory is nigh fantasy, almost impossible to envisage.  For one thing, domestic considerations about continued support for Kyiv have played a stalling part.  In the US Congress, a large military aid package was stalled for six months.  Among some Republicans, in particular, Ukraine was not a freedom loving despoiled figure needing props and crutches.  “From our perspective,” opines Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul, “Ukraine should not and cannot be our problem to solve.  It is not our place to defend them in a struggle with their longtime adversary, Russia.”  The assessment, in this regard, was a matter of some clarity for Paul.  “There is no national security interest for the United States.”

    Despite this, the Washington foreign policy and military elite continue to make siren calls of seduction in Kyiv’s direction.  On April 23, the Senate finally approved a $US95.3 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, with the lion’s share – some US$61 billion – intended for Ukraine’s war effort.

    On April 24, a press release from US Secretary State Antony Blinken announced a further US$1 billion package packed with “urgently needed capabilities including air defense missiles, munitions for HIMARS, artillery rounds, armored vehicles, precision aerial munitions, anti-armor weapons, and small arms, equipment, and spare parts to help Ukraine defend its territory and protect its people.”

    On May 14, in his address to the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, Blinken described what could only be reasoned as a vast mirage.  “Today, I’m here in Kyiv to speak about Ukraine’s strategic success.  And to set out how, with our support, the Ukrainian people can and will achieve their vision for the near future: a free, prosperous, secure democracy – fully integrated into the Euro-Atlantic community – and fully in control of its own destiny.”  This astonishingly irresponsible statement makes Washington’s security agenda clear and Kyiv’s fate bleak: Ukraine is to become a pro-US, anti-Russian bastion, with an open cheque book at the ready.

    Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has made the prevention of that vision an article of faith.  While Russian forces, in men and material, have suffered horrendous losses, the attritive nature of the conflict is starting to tell. While Blinken was gulling his audience, the military realities show significant Russian advances, including a threatening push towards Kharkiv, reversing Ukrainian gains made in 2022.

    There are also wounding advances being made in other areas of the conflict.  US and NATO artillery and drones supplied to Ukraine’s military forces have been countered by Russian electronic warfare methods.  GPS receivers, for instance, have been sufficiently deceived to misdirect missiles shot from HIMARS launchers.  In a number of cases, the Russian forces have also identified and destroyed the launchers.

    Russian air power has been brought to bear on critical infrastructure.  Radar defying glide bombs have been used with considerable effect.  On the production and deployment front, Colonel Ivan Pavlenko, chief of EW and cyber warfare at Ukraine’s general staff, lamented in February that Russia’s use of drones was also “becoming a huge threat”.  Depleted stocks of weaponry are being replenished, and more soldiers are being called to the front.

    Despite concerns, one need not scour far to find pundits who insist that such advances and gains can be neutralised.  Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace admits to current Russian “material advantage” and holding “the strategic initiative,” though goes on to speculate that this “may not prove decisive”.

    The gong of deceit and delusion must, however, go to Blinken.  Americans, he claimed, understood “that our support for Ukraine strengthens the security of the United States and our allies.”  Were Putin to win – and here, that old nag of appeasement makes an undesirable appearance – “he won’t stop with Ukraine; he’ll keep going.  For when in history has an autocrat been satisfied with carving off just part, or even all, of a single country?”

    Towards that end, “we do have a plan,” he coyly insisted.  This entailed ensuring Ukraine had “the military that it needs to succeed on the battlefield”.  Biden was encouraged by Ukrainian mobilisation efforts, skipping around the logistical delays that had marred it.  Washington’s “joint task” was to “secure Ukraine’s sustained and permanent strategic advantage”, enabling it to win the current battles and “defend against future attacks.  As President Biden said, we want Ukraine to win – and we’re committed to helping you do it.”

    Even by the standards of US Secretaries of States, Blinken’s conduct in Kyiv proved brazen and shameless.  A perfect illustration of this came with his musical effort alongside local band, 19.99, involving a rendition of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

    Local indignation was quick to follow.  “Six months of waiting for the decision of the American Congress” had, fumed Bohdan Yaremenko, legislator and former diplomat with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s party, “taken the lives of very, very many defenders of the free world”.  What the US was performing “for the free world is not rock ’n’ roll, but some other music similar to Russian chanson.”

    As for the performance itself, the crowd at Barman Dictat witnessed yet another misreading – naturally by a US politician – of an anthem intended to excoriate American failings, from homelessness to “a kinder, gentler machine gun hand”.  Appropriately, the guitar, much like the performer, was out of tune.

    The post Promising the Impossible: Blinken’s Out of Tune Performance in Kyiv first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Is the U.S. blackmailing India over assassination allegations to be more hostile toward China and Russia?

    The United States and its Western allies have stepped up a media campaign to accuse India of running an assassination policy targeting expatriate dissidents.

    The government of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, has furiously denied the allegations, saying there is no such policy.

    Nevertheless, the American Biden administration as well as Canada, Britain and Australia continue to demand accountability over claims that  New Delhi is engaging in “transnational repression” of spying, harassing and killing Indian opponents living in Western states.

    The accusations have severely stained political relations. The most fractious example is Canada. After Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly accused Indian state agents of involvement in the murder of an Indian-born Canadian citizen last year, New Delhi expelled dozens of Canadian diplomats.

    Relations became further strained this month when The Washington Post published a long article purporting to substantiate claims that Indian security services were organizing assassinations of U.S. and Canadian citizens. The Post named high-level Indian intelligence chiefs in the inner circle of Prime Minister Modi. The implication is a policy of political killings is sanctioned at the very top of the Indian government.

    The targets of the alleged murder program are members of the Sikh diaspora. There are large expatriate populations of Sikhs in the U.S., Canada and Britain. In recent years, there has been a renewed campaign among Sikhs for the secession of their homeland of Punjab from India. The New Delhi government views the separatist calls for a new state called Khalistan as a threat to Indian territorial integrity. The Modi government has labeled Sikh separatists as terrorists.

    The Indian authorities have carried out repression of Sikhs for decades including political assassination in the Punjab territory of northern India. Many Sikhs fled to the United States and other Western states for safety and to continue their agitation for a separate nation. The Modi government has accused Western states of coddling “Sikh terrorists” and undermining Indian sovereignty.

    Last June, a prominent Sikh leader was gunned down in a suburb of Vancouver in what appeared to be a professional hit-style execution. Hardeep Singh Nijjar was murdered by three assailants outside a religious temple. Indian state media described him as a terrorist, but Nijjar’s family denied he had any involvement in terrorism. They claim that he was targeted simply because he promoted Punjabi separatism.

    At the same time, according to The Post report, the U.S. authorities thwarted a murder plot against a well-known American-Sikh citizen who was a colleague of the Canadian victim. Both men were coordinating efforts to hold an unofficial referendum among the Sikh diaspora in North America calling for the establishment of a new independent state of Khalistan in the Punjab region of northern India.

    The Post article names Vikram Yadav, an officer in India’s state spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), as orchestrating the murder plots against the Sikh leaders. The Post claims that interviews with US and former Indian intelligence officials attest that the killings could not have been carried out without the sanction of Modi’s inner circle.

    A seemingly curious coincidence is that within days of the murder of the Canadian Sikh leader and the attempted killing of the American colleague, President Biden was hosting Narendra Modi at the White House in a lavish state reception.

    Since the summer of last year, the Biden administration has repeatedly pressured the Modi government to investigate the allegations. President Biden has personally contacted Modi about the alleged assassination policy as have his senior officials, including White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CIA director William Burns. Despite New Delhi’s denial of such a policy, the Modi government has acceded to American requests to hold an internal investigation, suggesting a tacit admission of its agents having some involvement.

    But here is where an anomaly indicates an ulterior agenda. Even U.S. media have remarked on how lenient the Biden administration has been towards India over what are grave allegations. It is inconceivable that Washington would tolerate the presence of Russian or Chinese agents and diplomats on its territory if Moscow and Beijing were implicated in killing dissidents on American soil.

    As The Washington Post report noted: “Last July, White House officials began holding high-level meetings to discuss ways to respond without risking a wider rupture with India, officials said. CIA Director William J. Burns and others have been deployed to confront officials in the Modi government and demand accountability. But the United States has so far imposed no expulsions, sanctions or other penalties.”

    What appears to be going on is a calculated form of coercion by the United States and its Western allies. The allegations of contract killings and “transnational repression” against Sikhs in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia and Germany are aimed at intimidating the Indian government with further embarrassing media disclosures and Western sanctions. The U.S. State Department and the Congress have both recently highlighted claims of human rights violations by the Modi government and calls for political sanctions.

    The objective, it can averred, is for Washington and its Western allies to pressure India into toeing a geopolitical line of hostility towards China and Russia.

    During the Biden administration, the United States has assiduously courted India as a partner in the Asia-Pacific to confront China. India has been welcomed as a member of the U.S.-led Quad of powers, including Japan and Australia. The Quad overlaps with the U.S. security interests of the AUKUS military partnership with Britain and Australia.

    Another major geopolitical prize for Washington and its allies is to drive a wedge between India and Russia.

    Since the NATO proxy war blew up in Ukraine in February 2022, the United States has been continually cajoling India to condemn Russia and to abide by Western sanctions against Moscow. Despite the relentless pressure, the Modi government has spurned Western attempts to isolate Russia. Indeed, India has increased its purchase of Russian crude oil and is importing record more quantities than ever before the Ukraine conflict.

    Furthermore, India is a key member of the BRICS forum and a proponent of an emerging multipolar world order that undermines U.S.-led Western hegemony.

    From the viewpoint of the United States and its Western allies, India represents a tantalizing strategic prospect. With a foot in both geopolitical camps, New Delhi is sought by the West to weaken the China-Russia-BRICS axis.

    This is the geopolitical context for understanding the interest of Western powers in making an issue out of allegations of political assassination by the Modi government. Washington and its Western allies want to use the allegations as a form of leverage – or blackmail – on India to comply with geopolitical objectives to confront China and Russia.

    It can be anticipated that the Western powers will amplify the media campaign against India in line with exerting more hostility toward China and Russia.

    • First published in Strategic Culture Foundation

    The post Is the U.S. blackmailing India over assassination allegations to be more hostile toward China and Russia? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Gaza Genocide 2.0

    The most widely reported figure currently used for Palestinian casualties in Gaza since October 7, 2023, is more than 35,000 killed and 78,000 wounded. These are only the civilian casualties, reported by the Ministry of Health. More than two-thirds are women and children. Combatant casualties are not included. The Ministry of Health maintains a list of the casualties, by name, gender and age classification (e.g. “infant”). This usually means that a medical professional has tended to the individual, usually at a hospital. The list is conservative in the extreme: it reports only the casualties that it can identify and confirm.

    The inevitable consequence of this sort of tally is that while it provides hard data, it vastly undercounts the actual total, since most of the hospitals have been destroyed, and many of the medical personnel either killed or taken captive. The uncounted casualties are therefore necessarily at least 200 or 300% greater than those reported, as Ralph Nader has pointed out, and as I discussed in “Not all of the genocide is being live-streamed” more than three months ago.

    How many have died without ever being reported to the Ministry of Health? How many on the list of wounded die later for lack of treatment, but are never reported as dead from weapons of war? How many are nameless and unidentified bodies? How many are corpses that have not even been found? How many are newborn infants that died without ever having a registered name?

    But there is another category, potentially even greater, that is becoming the new focus of Israel’s genocide: deaths by starvation, disease, exposure, and dehydration. These are not currently included in the Ministry of Health statistics, and they are largely anonymous deaths.

    Israel loves anonymous deaths. It interprets condemnation of its genocide project as mainly an image problem, generating pressure to stop the elimination of the population in Gaza. Israel therefore loves deaths that do not appear on Al-Jazeera or even in social media. The media are only interested in death from the skies, demolition of neighborhoods, massacres of civilians, masses of refugees fleeing on foot with their few remaining possessions. Deaths due to “natural causes” are not this dramatic.

    This is why Israel has modified its plans for the invasion of Rafah: fewer bombs, more starvation and deprivation. The first step was to capture and occupy the Rafah border crossing, in violation of Israel’s treaty with Egypt. This has enabled Israel to entirely stop relief supplies to the people of Gaza, whose limited farms and food production had already been destroyed along with their homes. Then they destroyed the hospitals and the sanitation and health services. In addition, they forced the population – many of them already living in makeshift tents – to flee once again, this time to more desolate locations with even fewer (zero) amenities, such as the barren al-Mawasi sand dunes, and thus more conducive to death by “natural causes”.

    This quieter form of genocide suits Israel’s US accomplices in the Biden administration, as well. President Biden and Secretary Blinken have been under public pressure and criticism that they and their allies in the Israel lobby have been unable to quell by control of the news media, censorship of social media, or repression of freedom of speech and assembly, notably in the student movement. They are reluctant to withhold the tools of genocide from Israel, but welcome any change that might reduce the public outrage (and improve their chances in the November presidential elections).

    Israel seems to think that removing and preventing the means to sustain life in Gaza, as an alternative to bullets, bombs and explosives, may achieve that objective. They seem to be taking a page from the Armenian genocide, which herded large numbers of the unwanted population into the Syrian desert and abandoned them there, or the native American genocide, where the food supply was destroyed.

    If the list of casualties grows more slowly while a vastly larger number of Palestinians die uncounted, this will further the goal of killing and/or expelling the population of Gaza, and advances the day when an empty Gaza can be annexed to Israel, for developers to build beach condos for Zionist settlers, with subsidies and low-cost loans from the US and Germany.

    POST SCRIPT: As this article heads for publication, the completion of the US floating pier on the shore of central Gaza was announced. Its ostensible purpose is to provide humanitarian aid to Palestinians. We are permitted to be skeptical. Why create such a cumbersome procedure to deliver aid, when mountains of supplies are waiting at the Egyptian border?

    Why indeed? Some possibilities:

    • To put the US and Israel in total control of Gaza and shut out the UN
    • To export the Palestinians from Gaza
    • To create a “Guantanamo East” US naval base
    • To garner votes of the faithful for Biden before the election and then let Israel toss the Palestinians into the sea

    I don’t have answers or even good speculations at this point, but stay tuned for Gaza Genocide 3.0

    The post Gaza Genocide 2.0 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Gaza is our moment of truth

    A protest by students at George Washington University. Probal Rashid SIPA USA)

    Powerful student movements in the 1960s and 1970s shook the world’s conscience to end America’s slaughter in Vietnam and Cambodia. The moral force of Black people rising together in their pain and rage against legislated racism changed the social fabric of America, ending formal segregation and ushering a new era in the struggle against institutional racialism.

    Power did what power does, deploying brute force, murder, intimidation, silencing, marginalizing, surveillance and all manner of corrupt policing.

    We see the outcome and we think we know it.

    Labels like “victory” and “advancement” are applied. “Civil rights” is a term spoken as an absolute, a singular point of history with a terrible before and liberated after.

    It’s the “happy ending” reframing of what is indeed a boundless thread of struggle for Black liberation stretching in both directions through time.

    The resilience of elite capitalist rule relies heavily on such narrative construction that manipulates public imagination with platitudes and reversible concessions, followed by a rebranding of oppression.

    Enslavement becomes mass incarceration and purposeful drug addiction. Segregation is sacrificed to be replaced with conscription of Black faces around the same table of power ethos.

    Rebooted with greater cruelty

    Power adapted since the 1960s, creating new stops, levers, gates and gatekeepers. They lulled us back into their system, rebooted it with greater cruelty and corruption, and retooled it with distractions and celebrity worship while they consolidated and concentrated power in the hands of a tiny minority.

    They bought politicians, who in turn work to safeguard and increase the wealth and influence of this elite minority, turning millionaires into billionaires and soon trillionaires, a staggering wealth gap built on the misery of the masses. They created laws to exonerate their criminality and criminalize dissent.

    They busted up the unions, subjugated workers and pitted them against each other. Instead of confronting the bosses, workers were manipulated into demanding iron borders and separation of families at those borders.

    They gutted regulations and bought up the airwaves to now dictate the content of 95 percent of everything we see, hear and read in the way of journalism, entertainment, education and cultural productions.

    This is the reason terrorist characters dominate Arab depictions in Hollywood. It’s the reason for the unusually high number of casual mentions of Israeli benevolence or genius in so many television series and films; the reason why Palestinian humanity is ignored or at best obscured in both print and broadcast news media no matter how many atrocities we face at Israel’s hands.

    It’s why Black media outlets, owned and run by Zionists of all stripes, take out hit pieces on the likes of Amanda Seales for her righteous stand on Palestine.

    Instead of paying taxes, these billionaires “donate” to universities sufficient sums to impose their vision not only for higher education, but for the acceptable expression of constitutional rights like the First Amendment.

    For example, outraged by a Palestinian literature festival – a beautiful celebration of Palestinian excellence and indigenous heritage – the billionaires Marc Rowan, Dick Wolf and the Lauder family conspired to remove the president of the University of Pennsylvania for her insufficient deference to their interpretation of academic freedom.

    Enlisting their hired goons in Congress, they and others of their ilk, like Bill Ackman, denigrated and/or removed more university presidents for the same reason.

    They even managed to bring the internet – which gave the 1990s generation hope for real democracy – under their nefarious control through algorithms and various forms of surveillance and censorship.

    Hiding the horrors

    Americans tried to stop the march of US corporate and Zionist warmongers toward war in the early 2000s, but they marched on, trampling our will and the bodies of millions of Iraqis. And the world watched as the US pulverized Iraq, a once glorious, high functioning ancient society.

    An “embedded” media hid the bloody horrors and kept the secrets of US corporate looting of Iraq’s treasures and laundering of US tax dollars through rebuilding schemes.

    Desensitized, Americans didn’t bother protesting when the US did the same in Libya, spurring a staggering de-development of one of Africa’s most advanced nations into a veritable human slave market.

    The enslavement and mutilation of Congolese children and whole families in mineral mines to benefit American tech billionaires (as well as Israel’s blood diamond trade) barely elicit a blip in Western media, a shockingly cruel reality they continue to obscure.

    There are hundreds more examples of American and Israeli militarism killing and destroying others in the service of this ruling corporate class.

    Mass surveillance of the populace followed the gutting and looting of public education in the United States. The rich got richer and the poor became destitute.

    In the name of technology and efficiency, capitalists degraded our food and water – poisoned them even – benefitting pharmaceutical billionaires who keep the masses teetering on the edge of health.

    Popular gurus pushed philosophies of individualism, contempt for family, and various forms of alienation that shattered community and social or familial bonds, leaving vast swaths of the people unable to cope with life without drug varieties, both legal and illegal.

    They have weighed us down with the fake dreams they scripted for us – insurmountable debt as a stand-in for family and education, blood diamonds as a stand-in for love and carnage abroad as a stand-in for greatness. They sold us a glorious pile of shit and made us think it was a normal – even inevitable – way of life.

    They glorified obsessive consumerism and obscenely ostentatious lifestyles. And we let them, believing it was our choice.

    But we had none.

    An American illusion

    Choice, like democracy and free press, is an American illusion, a fairytale they peddle in school, newspapers and songs.

    Look how quickly they disbanded, silenced and erased memory of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. Look how we are taught to believe that change can only come through the ballot box, where we’re told to “choose” between two war criminals one election after another.

    This moment of livestreamed genocide is the culmination of decades of global capitalist criminality and genocidal Western and Zionist imperialism. We watch in horror as whole Palestinian families are buried alive in their homes, crushed beneath the weight of rubble, their bodies torn and shredded.

    Then they gaslight us.

    Politicians, spokespeople, pundits, journalists and broadcasters take to the airways to convince us that we hadn’t just seen brains, tongues and eyeballs spilling from the crushed skulls of children and babies. Or worse, that they somehow deserved it.

    “Fog of war.”

    “Collateral damage.”

    “Hamas. Hamas. Hamas.”

    “The only democracy.”

    “Self-defense.”

    Over and over they use their wicked justifications and obfuscations. They speak to us as if we’re stupid because they’re accustomed to our silence and acquiescence.

    And they go on, prancing into the Met Gala in obscene finery, the vulgarity of which is made all the more apparent in juxtaposition to the burned and dismembered small bodies on the same day, pouring into Gaza’s few remaining hospitals, screaming, bewildered, in shock and in pain.

    But thank God for the students.

    Thank God for every Palestinian journalist and every Palestinian healthcare worker risking their lives day in and out to serve their people.

    For every fighter choosing martyrdom over indignity.

    For the local organizations and activists you never hear about, but whose work has been keeping thousands alive. I dare not say their names, lest they become targets.

    For Naledi Pandor in South Africa, Francesca Albanese at the United Nations and Clare Daly in the European Parliament.

    For the masses rising up in #Blockout2024. For artists and musicians from Roger Waters and Talib Kweli, to Macklemore and Black Thought, Questlove and more.

    For Yemen, South Africa and Colombia. For every person who refuses to remain silent.

    All dots connected

    This time is different from the uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s. There is a new sense of global interconnection, an emerging class consciousness and foundational political analyses predicated on post-colonial studies and intersectionality.

    Back then the white students protesting the war wouldn’t unite with the Black Panthers because they couldn’t connect the dots. All dots are connecting now.

    Gaza is no longer the enclave sealed and besieged by Israel and Abdulfattah al-Sisi’s Egypt into a concentration camp. Gaza is no longer the densely-populated strip of Israeli-occupied land.

    Rather, Gaza is now all the world.

    Gaza is our collective moment of truth, the meaning in our lives. It is the clarity we need and seek.

    It is the definitive divide between us and the ruling class that tramples us.

    It is us or them. There is no middle place now.

    All the borders fade, leaving us united to confront this greedy genocidal minority everywhere.

    Gaza is the most anguished place on earth at this hour, dimmed by unimaginable Zionist cruelty, which their military and society conduct with perverted glee that they set to music for TikTok.

    And from this tortured place of rubble, death and misery there springs the greatest light we have ever known to guide us out of the darkness in which we’ve been forced to live. The light of our ancestors – from Palestine and Alkebulan to Turtle Island and Aotearoa.

    Gaza may well be our last chance to save humanity.

    If we allow the wheels of this genocidal Zionist engine to keep turning, there will be no more limits to fascism. There will be no shame or red lines before which they will halt.

    This struggle can no more be just about a ceasefire. It must demand liberation and accountability across our burning planet.

    Already they are using the tactics of brute force, violent intimidation, suspension and marginalization. They will attempt the same dismantlement, silencing and erasure they did with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

    They will offer half-baked promises with no teeth, enough to quiet matters long enough to adopt new strategies and enact new laws.

    If we stop they will adapt, and they will do so with artificial intelligence, against which we may well have no defenses, not for a long time to come. So beware of their concessions.

    Beware of victory that pulls us back into the lanes they made.

    We cannot allow Israeli genocide against a defenseless and captive indigenous population to become a whitewashed, declawed historic moment of before and after.

    We cannot leave the lawns and streets and courts and battlefields until Zionism is dismantled and Palestine is free.

    This moment belongs to the people. We can dream our own dreams and create a new world in every personal act of refusal to participate in this horrible system predicated on genocide and unending exploitation.

    Together we are powerful beyond our wildest imaginations. Compassion and defiance are our superpowers, and this is just our origin story.

    The youth are leading and showing us that the future is ours, if we dare to claim it.

    • First published in The Electronic Intifada

    The post Gaza is our moment of truth first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Arsenal of Genocide: the U.S. Weapons That Are Destroying Gaza

    Protesters block the entrance to the BAE factory in Kent, UK. (Photo credit: Reuters)

    On May 8, 2024, as Israel escalated its brutal assault on Rafah, President Biden announced that he had “paused” a delivery of 1,700 500-pound and 1,800 2,000-pound bombs, and threatened to withhold more shipments if Israel went ahead with its full-scale invasion of Rafah.

    The move elicited an outcry from Israeli officials (National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir tweeted “Hamas loves Biden”), as well as Republicans, staunch anti-Palestinian Democrats and pro-Israel donors. Republicans immediately prepared a bill entitled the Israel Security Assistance Support Act to prohibit the administration from withholding military aid to Israel.

    Many people have been asking the U.S. to halt weapons to Israel for seven months, and, of course, Biden’s move comes too late for 35,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza, mainly by American weapons.

    Lest one think the administration is truly changing its position, two days after announcing the pause, the State Department released a convoluted report saying that, although it is reasonable to “assess” that U.S. weapons have been used by Israeli forces in Gaza in ways that are “inconsistent” with international humanitarian law, and although Israel has indeed delayed or had a negative effect on the delivery of aid to Gaza (which is illegal under U.S. law), Israel’s assurances regarding humanitarian aid and compliance with international humanitarian law are “credible and reliable.”

    By this absurd conclusion, the Biden administration has given itself a green light to keep sending weapons and Israel a flashing one to keep committing war crimes with them.

    In any event, as Colonel Joe Bicino, a retired U.S. artillery officer, told the BBC, Israel can “level” Rafah with the weapons it already has. The paused shipment is “somewhat inconsequential,” Bicino said, “a little bit of a political play for people in the United States who are… concerned about this.” A U.S. official confirmed to the Washington Post that Israel has enough weapons already supplied by the U.S. and other allies to go ahead with the Rafah operation if it chooses to ignore U.S. qualms.

    The paused shipment really has to be seen in the context of the arsenal with which the U.S. has equipped its Middle Eastern proxy over many decades.

    A Deluge of American Bombs

    During the Second World War, the United States proudly called itself the “Arsenal of Democracy,” as its munitions factories and shipyards produced an endless supply of weapons to fight the genocidal government of Germany. Today, the United States is instead, shamefully, the Arsenal of Genocide, providing 70% of the imported weapons Israel is using to obliterate Gaza and massacre its people.

    As Israel assaults Rafah, home to 1.4 million displaced people, including at least 600,000 children, most of the warplanes dropping bombs on them are F-16s, originally designed and manufactured by General Dynamics, but now produced by Lockheed Martin in Greenville, South Carolina. Israel’s 224 F-16s have long been its weapon of choice for bombing militants and civilians in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.

    Israel also has 86 Boeing F-15s, which can drop heavier bombs, and 39 of the latest, most wastefully expensive fighter-bombers ever, Lockheed Martin’s nuclear-capable F-35s, with another 36 on order. The F-35 is built in Fort Worth, Texas, but components are manufactured all over the U.S. and in allied countries, including Israel. Israel was the first country to attack other countries with F-35s, in violation of U.S. arms export control laws, reportedly using them to bomb Syria, Egypt and Sudan.

    As these fleets of U.S.-made warplanes began bombing Gaza in October 2023, their fifth major assault since 2008, the U.S. began rushing in new weapons. By December 1, 2023, it had delivered 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells.

    The U.S. supplies Israel with all sizes and types of bombs, including 285-pound GBU-39 small diameter glide bombs, 500-pound Mk 82s, 2,000-pound Mk 84s and BLU-109 “bunker busters,” and even massive 5,000-pound GBU-28 bunker-busters, which Israel reportedly used in Gaza in 2009.

    General Dynamics is the largest U.S. bomb manufacturer, making all these models of bombs. Most of them can be used as “precision” guided bombs by attaching Raytheon and Lockheed Martin’s Paveway laser guidance system or Boeing’s JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munitions) GPS-based targeting system.

    Little more than half of the bombs Israel has dropped on Gaza have been “precision” ones, because, as targeting officers explained to +972 magazine, their Lavender AI system generates thousands of targets who are just suspected rank-and-file militants, not senior commanders. Israel does not consider it worth “wasting” expensive precision munitions to kill these people, so it uses only “dumb” bombs to kill them in their homes—obliterating their families and neighbors in the process.

    In order to threaten and bomb its more distant neighbors, such as Iran, Israel depends on its seven Lockheed Martin KC-130H and seven Boeing 707 in-air refueling tankers, with four new, state-of-the-art Boeing KC46A tankers to be delivered in late 2025 for over $220 million each.

    Ground force weapons

    Another weapon of choice for killing Palestinians are Israel’s 48 Boeing Apache AH64 attack helicopters, armed with Lockheed Martin’s infamous Hellfire missiles, General Dynamics’ Hydra 70 rockets and Northrop Grumman’s 30 mm machine guns. Israel also used its Apaches to kill and incinerate a still unknown number of Israelis on October 7, 2023—a tragic day that Israel and the U.S. continue to exploit as a false pretext for their own violations of international humanitarian law and of the Genocide Convention.

    Israel’s main artillery weapons are its 600 Paladin M109A5 155 mm self-propelled howitzers, which are manufactured by BAE Systems in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. To the layman, a self-propelled howitzer looks like a tank, but it has a bigger, 155 mm gun to fire at longer range.

    Israel assembles its 155 mm artillery shells from U.S.-made components. One of the first two U.S. arms shipments that the administration notified Congress about after October 7 was to resupply Israel with artillery shell components valued at $147.5 million.

    Israel also has 48 M270 multiple rocket launchers. They are a tracked version of the HIMARS rocket launchers the U.S. has sent to Ukraine, and they fire the same rockets, made by Lockheed Martin. U.S. Marines used the same rockets in coordination with U.S. airstrikes to devastate Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, in 2017. M270 launchers are no longer in production, but BEA Systems still has the facilities to produce them.

    Israel makes its own Merkava tanks, which fire U.S.-made tank shells, and the State Department announced on December 9, 2023, that it had notified Congress of an “emergency” shipment of 14,000 120 mm tank shells worth $106 million to Israel.

    U.S. shipments of artillery and tank shells, and dozens of smaller shipments that it did not report to Congress (because each shipment was carefully calibrated to fall below the statutory reporting limit of $100 million), were paid for out of the $3.8 billion in military aid that the United States gives Israel each year.

    In April, Congress passed a new war-funding bill that includes about $14 billion for additional weapons. Israel could afford to pay for these weapons itself, but then it could shop around for them, which might erode the U.S. monopoly on supplying so much of its war machine. That lucrative monopoly for U.S. merchants of death is clearly more important to Members of Congress than fully funding Head Start or other domestic anti-poverty programs, which they routinely underfund to pay for weapons and wars.

    Israel has 500 FMC-built M113 armored personnel carriers and over 2,000 Humvees, manufactured by AM General in Mishawaka, Indiana. Its ground forces are armed with several different types of U.S. grenade launchers, Browning machine-guns, AR-15 assault rifles, and SR-25 and M24 SWS sniper rifles, all made in the USA, as is the ammunition for them.

    For many years, Israel’s three Sa’ar 5 corvettes were its largest warships, about the size of frigates. They were built in the 1990s by Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi, but Israel has recently taken delivery of four larger, more heavily-armed, German-built Sa’ar 6 corvettes, with 76 mm main guns and new surface-to-surface missiles.

    Gaza Encampments Take On the Merchants of Death

    The United States has a long and horrific record of providing weapons to repressive regimes that use them to kill their own people or attack their neighbors. Martin Luther King called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” and that has not changed since he said it in 1967, a year to the day before his assassination.

    Many of the huge U.S. factories that produce all these weapons are the largest employers in their regions or even their states. As President Eisenhower warned the public in his farewell address in 1960, “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” has led to “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

    So, in addition to demanding a ceasefire, an end to U.S. military aid and weapons sales to Israel, and a restoration of humanitarian aid to Gaza, the students occupying college campuses across our country are right to call on their institutions to divest from these merchants of death, as well as from Israeli companies.

    The corporate media has adopted the line that divestment would be too complicated and costly for the universities to do. But when students set up an encampment at Trinity College in Dublin, in Ireland, and called on it to divest from Israeli companies, the college quickly agreed to their demands. Problem solved, without police violence or trying to muzzle free speech. Students have also won commitments to consider divestment from U.S. institutions, including Brown, Northwestern, Evergreen State, Rutgers and the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin.

    While decades of even deadlier U.S. war-making in the greater Middle East failed to provoke a sustained mass protest movement, the genocide in Gaza has opened the eyes of many thousands of young people to the need to rise up against the U.S. war machine.

    The gradual expulsion and emigration of Palestinians from their homeland has created a huge diaspora of young Palestinians who have played a leading role in organizing solidarity campaigns on college campuses through groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Their close links with extended families in Palestine have given them a visceral grasp of the U.S. role in this genocide and an authentic voice that is persuasive and inspiring to other young Americans.

    Now it is up to Americans of all ages to follow our young leaders and demand not just an end to the genocide in Palestine, but also a path out of our country’s military madness and the clutches of its deeply entrenched MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media- academia-think-tank) complex, which has inflicted so much death, pain and desolation on so many of our neighbors for so long, from Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan to Vietnam and Latin America.

    The post The Arsenal of Genocide: the U.S. Weapons That Are Destroying Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The Kindness of Strangers?

    I was channel surfing the other evening and watched the Supreme Court’s new case concerning homeless encampments, etc. What got me was how the government’s lawyer kept explaining how the homeless situation was being handled. HIs retort was that Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have been unsuccessful in giving the necessary helping hand to this burgeoning crisis throughout our nation, especially in most cities. Is it me or isn’t it the responsibility of Uncle Sam to use our tax dollars to help address the needs of our homeless? The justices all acknowledged that many of our nation’s homeless are mentally ill individuals, discounting to some extent the millions of others who just cannot afford to pay for shelter. Well, think about this: How many of us who do not own a home can actually afford the outrageous rents the “land lord” charges? I say “land lord” because the term comes from feudalism when the “lord of the manor” owned the rental property for his serfs. Go and get the fine Claude Berri 1993 French film Germinal and see how this feudal arrangement played out. Disgusting!

    The case at issue for this Supreme Court is The City of Grants Pass vs. Johnson. Via the internet this is a thumbnail of the case:

    The legal issue is whether they can fine or arrest people for sleeping outside if there’s no shelter available. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has deemed this cruel and unusual punishment, and this case is a pivotal challenge to that ruling.

    The high court declined to take up a similar case in 2019. But since then, homelessness rates have climbed relentlessly. Street encampments have grown larger and have expanded to new places, igniting intense backlash from residents and businesses. Homelessness and the lack of affordable housing that’s helping to drive it have become key issues for many voters.

    So, even the monopoly media is realizing how terrible the homeless situation is. Who gets hurt, in addition to someone who becomes homeless, but the local community? No one wishes to see so many poor souls out in the open, or hidden within the brush, to fend for themselves. Funny how the court does all it can to dance around the solution.

    For all those good religious folks who attend their places of worship and echo that we are all our brother’s keeper: do something about it! Start telling your wonderful (yeah, right) elected officials to start increasing the taxing of the Super Rich, AKA Mega Millionaires and Billionaires. When JFK took office the top federal income tax rate was 90%. Over the years it dropped down to 78%, 71%, 50% all the way down to 39% and now at 37%. Do you think perhaps that our Super Rich fellow Americans have it damn good now? You bet your $1,000,000 and up home or shall I call it estate? My plan, the Farruggio Millionaire Flat Surtax Plan, would generate many of the funds needed to not only build affordable housing, but help treat the millions of mentally ill fellow citizens who cannot get the care needed to exist properly. My plan is to have a flat surtax of 50% on any income over 1 million dollars, with NO deductions… period! The first $one million would be taxed at the present rate, with any and all deductions allowed now. The other money would go directly to Uncle Sam to subsidize the homeless and mentally ill… or both. Do you think it is unreasonable for someone now earning $5 or $10 million (or a few $billion) a year to keep HALF that money TAX FREE?

    On top of that teepee we need to stop the 50% of our discretionary spending that goes for our War Industries. How about spending 25% and use the remainder of the hundreds of billions of dollars saved to be directed for other social net needs? President Eisenhower, in his farewell address, called it what it was then and still is, a Military Industrial Complex. And the way it has always worked is simple, just follow the money. The House of Representatives just passed another bill for $95 billion in aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Some estimates are that about half of that money is going into the pockets of US weapons manufacturers and other assorted War related businesses. During the Vietnam debacle whenever a Huey helicopter was destroyed the manufacturer.

    Bell Helicopter, sold another one to Uncle Sam for $1 million. In the kill zone of Iraq in 2003, a US Apache Helicopter cost Uncle Sam around $30 million. Today, these vehicles can run from $60 million to over $130 million… of your tax dollars for more of our phony wars and aggressions. How many homeless and or mentally ill Americans can an Apache subsidize?

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  • Dodging the Issue: The Biden Administration Report on Israel’s Use of US Weapons

    It truly is pushing the envelope of lunacy to assume that this latest revelation was revelatory.  US weapons, the wonks in Washington find, are being used by the Israeli Defense Forces to kill their opponents, many of them Palestinians, and most of them civilians.  These are detailed in a report ordered by the White House pursuant to National Security Memorandum 20, also known as “National Security Memorandum on Safeguards and Accountability With Respect to Transferred Defense Articles and Defense Services”.

    NSM-20 requires the Secretary of State to obtain credible and reliable assurances within 45 days from any country engaged in armed conflict in which US defence articles are used.  The NSM-20 report, in addition to Israel, considers Colombia, Iraq, Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia and Ukraine.  But Israel, by far, is the most significant, given that it is the most prominent recipient of US weapons.  As John Ramming Chappell notes for Just Security, these include reported transfers of “bombs, artillery shells, precision guidance kits (which are attached to bombs for targeting purposes), tank ammunition, guided missiles, firearms, drones, various types of ammunition, and other weapons”.

    The Israeli entry starts off with various qualifying conditions about the horror of the Gaza conflict.  Hamas is blamed for embedding “itself deliberately within and underneath the civilian population to use civilians as human shields.”  The scene is set.

    In a pitiful dodge, the report claims it is “difficult to determine facts on the ground in an active war zone”, a state of mind that is bound to lend itself to justifications.  “The nature of the conflict in Gaza and the compressed review period in this initial report amplify those challenges.”

    The report acknowledges various “reported incidents to raise serious concerns” that US weaponry is being used in a manner not in conformity with international law.  While it was “difficult to assess or reach conclusive findings on individual incidents,” it was “reasonable to assess that defense articles covered under NSM-20 have been used by Israeli security forces since October 7 in instances inconsistent with IHL [International Humanitarian Law] obligations or with established best practices for mitigating civilian harm”.

    The discussion is filled with softening qualifiers.  Israel had “the knowledge, experience, and tools to implement best practices for mitigating civilian harm in its military operations” but “results on the ground, including high levels of civilian casualties, raise substantial questions as to whether the IDF is using them effectively in all cases.”

    Despite concerns about IHL violations, the report accepts that in Israel, there are “a number of ongoing, active criminal investigations pending and there are hundreds of cases under administrative review.”  Surely this would be a troubling, rather than assuring fact.

    The report goes on to reveal the view of the US Intelligence Community (IC) that, while Israel had “inflicted harm on civilians in military and security operations, potentially using US-provided equipment”, it had “no direct indication of Israel intentionally targeting civilians.”  It could, however, “do more to avoid civilian harm.”  How high a body count does one need before the intention to kill is evinced?

    Mindful of the image of an ally, the report is seemingly less concerned by the staggering civilian death toll than “the impact of Israel’s military operations on humanitarian actors.”  Despite the intervention of the US government and engagement between humanitarian organisations with Israeli officials regarding deconfliction and coordination procedures, “the IDF has struck humanitarian workers and facilities.”

    Inexplicably, Israel gets a clean bill of health in terms of section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act, which bars military aid to a state that “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United states humanitarian assistance.”  This, despite the acceptance that Israeli actions had “delayed or had a negative impact in the delivery of aid to Gaza”. Current levels of aid reaching Palestinian civilians “while improved” remained “insufficient”.

    The assessment of Israel’s use of US weapons, all in all, is paltry.  It glaringly omits making any specific adverse findings regarding breaches of international law.  This proved to be a satisfactory state of affairs for Senator Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who agreed with the “assessment that Israel has not violated International Humanitarian Law and that military assistance to support Israel’s security remains in the US interest and should continue.”

    Maryland Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen begged to differ, noting the report’s failure “to do the hard work of making an assessment and ducks the ultimate questions that the report was designed to determine.”

    In a fuller statement, Van Hollen identifies the “continuation of a disturbing pattern where the expertise and analyses of those working most closely on these issues at the State Department and at USAID have been swept aside to facilitate a predetermined policy outcome based on political convenience.”

    While the Biden administration recently paused the transfer of a weapons shipment to Israel comprising 1,800 2000-pound bombs, and 1,700 500-pound bombs, Congressional sentiment is seemingly in favour of the status quo.  Despite the grumbling of some lawmakers, the general view is that the business of supplying the IDF is a sound one.  The killing of Palestinian civilians can, in all its ghoulishness and cruelty, continue.

    The post Dodging the Issue: The Biden Administration Report on Israel’s Use of US Weapons first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Unfurling Love from the Window

    On April 30, when Columbia University student protesters took over Hamilton Hall, they renamed it “Hind’s Hall,” dropping a large banner out the windows above the building’s entrance. This was a hall famously occupied by students in the 1968 protests against the Vietnam War and against Jim Crow racism in the United States. The students are risking suspension and expulsion, and a very real blacklist has already been generated against them, with Congress joining in to define criticism of genocide as a form of antisemitism that state universities and state-linked employers will not be allowed to tolerate.

    I believe their love for Hind Rajab guides the movement so desperately needed to resist militarism. Hind was six years old when Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons to kill her.

    If our civilization survives a looming ecological collapse that is helping to drive catastrophic nuclear brinkmanship, I hope future generations of students will study the “Hind’s Hall” occupation in the way that students of the civil rights movement have studied the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the story of Emmett Till. Hind’s story is tragically emblematic. Her cruel murder has befallen many thousands of children throughout the decades of Israel’s fight to maintain apartheid. Just in our young century, from September 2000 to September 2023, Israel’s B’tselem organization reports that 2,309 Palestinian minors were killed by Israelis and some 145 Israeli minors were killed by Palestinians, with these numbers excluding Palestinian children dead from deliberate immiseration via blockade or traumatized as hostages in prisons. We hear reports that thirty-eight Israeli children and some 14,000 Palestinian children have been murdered since October 7, deaths which can all be laid on the doorstep of the ethnostate project so lethally determined to keep one ethnicity in undemocratic governance.

    No six-year-old poses any threat to anyone. Like the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children starved to death during the U.S. imposition of economic sanctions against Iraq, none of these children could be held accountable for the actions of their government or military.

    Hind Rajab committed no crime, but she was made to watch her family die and wait for death surrounded by their corpses. When the ambulance crew asked safe passage to come rescue her, she was used as bait to kill them as well. Her story must be remembered and told over and over.

    As Jeffrey St. Clair writes, Hind was a little girl who liked to dress up as a princess. She lived in the neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa, an area south of Gaza City.

    “Hind Rajab was in her own city when the invaders in tanks came,” St. Clair notes. “What was left of it . . . Hind’s own kindergarten, from which she’d recently graduated, had been blown up, as had so many other schools, places of learning, places of shelter and places of safety in Gaza City.”

    On January 29, when the Israelis ordered people to evacuate, her mother, Wissam Hamada, and an older sibling set off on foot. Hind joined her uncle, aunt, and three cousins who traveled in a black Kia automobile.

    The uncle placed a call to a relative in Germany which initiated the family’s contact with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS). After the initial connection with the PRCS switchboard, the car was targeted and hit, killing Hind’s uncle, her aunt, and two of her cousins.

    Hind and her fifteen-year-old cousin, Layan, were the only survivors.

    Switchboard operators handling the phone contact with Layan had immediately notified ambulance workers that the little girls needed to be rescued.

    But it would have been suicidal for a rescue crew to enter the area without first working out coordinates with the Israeli military.

    Similar to the World Central Kitchen workers killed on Monday, April 1, they waited hours for the coordinated rescue plan.

    On the audio tape shared by the PRCS workers, Layan’s petrified voice can be heard. The tank is coming closer. She is so scared. A blast is heard and Layan no longer speaks. PRCS workers call back and Hind answers.

    She pleads, “Please come and get me. I’m so scared.”

    St. Clair writes, “The [PRCS] dispatched an ambulance crewed by two paramedics: Ahmed al-Madhoon and Youssef Zeino. As Ahmed and Youssef approached the Tel al-Hawa area, they reported to the Red Crescent dispatchers that the IDF was targeting them, and that snipers had pointed lasers at the ambulance. Then there was the sound of gunfire and an explosion. The line went silent.”

    The tank-fired M830A1 missile remnant found nearby had been manufactured in the United States by a subsidiary of the Day and Zimmermann Corporation. Day and Zimmermann prides itself on having once received the U.S. National “Family Business of the Year” award—an Internet search for the award chiefly produces references to this company. The company states that it believes in civic and community service, with core values of safety and integrity; emphasizing their success as a team that hits its targets. But since last October, their business has been killing families like Hind’s.

    Although Israel predictably insists that Layan and Hind, and the additional slain paramedics, were all lying with their final breaths and that no IDF tanks were present to attack them, Al Jazeera’s analysis of satellite images taken at midday on January 29 corroborates the victims’ accounts and puts at least three Israeli tanks just 270 meters (886 feet) from the family’s car, with their guns pointed at it.

    When rescuers were finally allowed to approach the remains of Hind and her family on February 10, the car was riddled with bullet holes likely coming from more than one direction.

    Hind’s mother couldn’t go to the site until February 12.

    On May 5, Israel raided the offices of Al Jazeera at the Ambassador Hotel in Jerusalem and moved to shut down the television network’s operations in Israel.

    To remember Hind’s story is an act of resistance. Commemorating her short life builds resolve to confront profiteers who benefit from developing, manufacturing, storing, and selling the weapons that prolong wars—robbing children of their precious right to live.

    Universities should, in theory, be places to learn things of importance, and we can learn from the students of Hind Hall to throw comfort and ambition out the window while keeping hold of love, as the students clung to that banner and to the name of Hind Rajab. We can learn to keep hold of our humanity. We learn by doing, as these students are learning to do, drawing wisdom from people like Phil Berrigan who famously said, “Don’t get tired!”

    The list of Gaza solidarity encampments grows each day. Conscious of increasing famine in Gaza, students at Princeton University launched a water-only fast on May 4 as they continue to call for their University to divest from corporations selling weapons to Israel. The United Nations warns of a potential collapse of aid delivery to Palestinians with Israel’s May 7 closure of the two main crossings into Gaza. These crossings are critical entry points for food, medicine, and other supplies for Gaza’s 2.3 million people. The disruptions come at a time when officials say northern Gaza is experiencing a “full-blown famine.”

    With thousands of innocent lives in the balance, promoters of peace should take advantage of this crucial opportunity to follow the young people, learning alongside the students whose hunger for humanity reveals stunning courage.

     Hind Rajab (Image provided, family photo)

    Palestinian Red Crescent Society ambulance crew (Photo Credit: PCRS)

    • This article first appeared in The Progressive Magazine

    The post Unfurling Love from the Window first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Western Media Ignites War on China in Sports

    Western accusations of doping by Chinese swimmers threaten to exacerbate China-US tensions, undermine the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) and seriously harm the upcoming Paris Olympics.

    The controversy was ignited by investigation reports at the New York Times and  German TV broadcaster ARD.  These media outlets suggest there has been a cover-up of a mass doping incident among Chinese top swimmers with connivance of  the Chinese Anti Doping Agency (CHINADA) and complicity from the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA).  This story served as red meat to the hyper aggressive leader of the US Anti Doping Agency (USADA), Travis Tygart.  It has prompted western swimming competitors to loudly complain. For example, the NY Times reports that US team swimmer Paige Madden thinks medals from the Tokyo Olympics should be reallocated. “I feel that Team USA was cheated.”  British swimmer James Guy says, “Ban them all and never compete again.” What might be considered whining and poor sportsmanship is effectively being encouraged by western media.

    The NY Times and ARD are the same two media that precipitated the accusations of “state sponsored doping” in Russia. It did enormous damage to thousands of Russian athletes and resulted in different levels of banning starting with the Rio Olympics in 2016.  Although widely accepted as “truth” in the West, the claims of widespread Russian doping were weak when evidence was required.  Most Russian athletes who challenged their banning were exonerated. The major accusers, the Stepanovs and Grigory Rodchenkov, were themselves guilty of doping and profiting from doping. Despite this, the banning has continued and escalated after the Russian intervention in Ukraine.  The accusations and banning were useful in propelling the “new cold war” and “new McCarthyism”.

    NYT and ARD, and their anonymous informants, may be seeking to do something similar to China.  USADA has issued a response in which they say China may be engaging in “systematic doping” under a  “coordinated doping regime”. On May 6 USADA’s Tygart escalated his attacks. He implies the Paris Olympics will be a “train wreck” because of WADA complicity in China’s “cheating”. He hopes the US government will “step in and help lead and fix this.”  Surely a recipe for success.

    What happened

    On Jan 1  – 3 in 2021, the Chinese swim team was having a domestic swim meet. It was in the midst of covid lockdown.  As usual, the team was drug tested but this time a strange thing happened: many swimmers tested positive for a trace amount of the banned medication trimetazadine (TMZ).

    The China Anti Doping Agency (CHINADA) investigated and reported the facts to the World Anti Doping Agency as required.  They found:

    * 23 swimmers tested positive for a very small amount of trimetazadine (TMZ)

    * the swimmers were from different regions of China with different coaches and trainers

    * all 23 were staying at the same hotel eating in the same dining room

    * none of the swimmers staying at a different hotel tested positive

    * some of the swimmers tested positive one day, negative the next

    * tests in the hotel kitchen showed the presence of  TMZ on the air vent and counters

    CHINADA concluded the positive TMZ tests were from hotel food and the athletes were not at fault.

    They reported the incident and investigation to the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) and the international swimming federation now known as World Aquatics (formerly FINA). Both organizations examined the facts and agreed with the findings.

    Because the athletes were deemed to have no fault, the incident and names of the athletes were not publicized. WADA regulations indicate that there should be no publicity or naming of athletes deemed innocent and without an “Anti Doping Rule Violation” (ADRV).

    How it has been reported

     Approximately a year later, in 2022,  anonymous sources reported this incident to the NY Times and ARD.  Since then, the two media outlets have done further investigation but kept the story secret until two weeks ago.

    They suggest something shady happened back in early 2021. They suggest WADA may be complicit in covering up anti doping violations. They almost encourage western athletes to challenge the Chinese swimming accomplishments and be “angry”. On April 20 the story was “Top Chinese Swimmers Tested Positive for Banned Drug, Then Won Olympic Gold“. On April 21 the story was “‘Team USA Was Cheated’: Chinese Doping Case Exposes Rift in Swimming“. On April 22 the story was “Top Biden Official Calls for Inquiry Into Chinese Doping Case.”

    These reports ignited a flood of other sensational and accusatory reports and editorials. The Guardian report is titled “Poison in the pool: why the latest Chinese doping row is proving so toxic.” Sports Yahoo says, “Extremely concerned Olympians will not let the Chinese doping allegations die.” The PBS News Hour had a video report titled, “Chinese doping ‘swept under the carpet’: US anti-doping chief says.” Sports Illustrated said the news may alter the distribution of medals from the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.

    The US Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into the situation.

    The NY Times and ARD say they have been investigating this story for two years. The release appears timed to have maximum impact and possible damage, just months before the Paris Olympics.   

    USADA accuses WADA  

    The US Anti Doping Agency (USADA) is led by the hyper-aggressive Travis Tyler. He has used the reports to claim that WADA is complicit in a Chinese “cover-up”.  In a TV interview before a large national audience Tygart said, “China didn’t follow the rules. They effectively swept this under the carpet because they didn’t find a violation. They didn’t announce a violation. They didn’t disqualify the athletes from the event at which they tested positive. And this is absolutely mandatory under the world anti-doping code that all nations are required to follow.”

    WADA has responded that Tygart’s comments seem “politically motivated”.  They say CHINADA followed the rules, investigated and reported as required.  They say China did NOT have to announce it to the world, or name the individual athletes for the very good reason that false accusations of doping can destroy a career. WADA regulations say the names of athletes should NOT be publicized until or unless it is confirmed they have an Anti Doping Rule Violation. 

    WADA appoints independent investigator

    WADA is the international organization charged with supervising global anti-doping in sports. With its headquarters in Canada and most of its leaders from NATO countries, it is a largely western organization.

    They are highly sensitive to criticism from the West. It has pushed back against some of the most extreme criticism, for example from the USADA head. They have also appointed an independent investigator to review what happened in China and whether WADA was correct to accept the Chinese investigation and report.

    WADA appointed Eric Cottier, the prosecutor general of a Swiss region. WADA headquarters are in Canada but the organization is registered in Switzerland. USADA has criticized the appointment suggesting that Cottier is not sufficiently “independent”.

    Thoms Bach, head of the International Olympic Committee, has voiced support for WADA.

    WADA has defended their actions in a press conference and fact sheet about the case.

    The controversy may quiet down. But a lot of poison has been spread around. Encouraged by the NY Times and other media,  numerous western athletes now claim they feel “cheated” out of medals at the Tokyo Olympics since 5 medals were won by Chinese swimmers involved in the  TMZ “doping scandal”.

    It is also possible the controversy will continue. Will the “Sports Czar” of the Biden Administration get involved? Will the FBI be designated to investigate?  These are now possible in the wake of the Rodchenkov Anti Doping Act which passed Congress in 2020.

    Reader comments following articles indicate there is a wellspring of anti-China hostility encouraged by the accusations. The most popular comment on this article says, “When will democracies learn that authoritarian regimes play dirty, and should be viewed as suspect not deserving of good faith.”  Another says,”No one knows doping like China knows doping, China knows doping best.”  Another one says, “China cheats. Russia cheats. Just like the East Germans did before them. Their governments will meet the same fate as they did.”

    Pushback  

    There has been some pushback to the sensational anti-China accusations. For example, Denis Cotterell is a world class coach who has trained both  Australian and Chinese Olympic swimmers. He has spoken out strongly in support of the Chinese swimmers. He says, “I can see what they (the swimmers) go through. I see the measures… The suggestion that it’s systemic is so far from anything I have seen here the whole time. They are so adamant on having clean sport.”

    An insightful article from an Australian academic sports authority and popular sports commentator suggests there are political forces at work: “WADA – like the United Nations and other organizations – finds itself in the cross hairs of the great power struggle of our time: a rising China and its challenge to US dominance.” 

    Geopolitical Consequences

    According to the “2024 Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community”, China is “challenging longstanding rules of the international system as well as U.S. primacy within it.” China’s positive “international image” is a challenge to U.S. leadership. By this logic, it is in the US interests to damage China’s international reputation and standing.

    This raises the question: How did the TMZ get into the hotel kitchen and into the food being served to these Chinese athletes?

    In February 2022, accusations of intentional doping were heaped on the Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva. A trace amount of trimetazadine (TMZ) was detected in a drug test taken seven weeks before the Beijing Olympics.  There are similarities to the Chinese case: same drug, same trace amount detected, same mystery as to how it was ingested.

    Because she could not explain how it got there, Valieva was condemned in the West and ultimately had her international career destroyed. The Russian figure skating sweep was prevented and the Russian team lost their gold medals.  The controversy distracted and partially ruined the Beijing Olympics. The “intelligence community” undoubtedly considers this a success.

    How did the TMZ get in the hotel kitchen in China?  Who are the “whistle blowers” who informed the New York Times and ARD and supplied the names of the athletes who tested positive for the trace amount of TMZ?

    The anti doping crusade is being manipulated  by powerful forces with ignoble intentions.

    The post Western Media Ignites War on China in Sports first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Rick Sterling.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Forces of Impunity: The US Threatens the International Criminal Court

    The International Criminal Court is a dusty jewel, a creation of heat, tension and manufacture in the international community.  Various elements have gone into its creation.  As with any international institution which draws its legitimacy from nation states and the like, its detractors are many, the invective against it frequent.  Some 124 countries have signed the Rome Charter of 1998 that gives the body its authority and jurisdictional force, but no one is foolish enough to think that its reach can ever be anything but tempered by political consideration and self-interest.

    Be it issuing a problematic arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, attempting to investigate alleged US war crimes in Afghanistan, or busying itself with some nasty examples of African despotism, the scope of the body is potentially extensive.  At present, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan is sniffing out the prospect of issuing arrest warrants against senior Israeli officials in the context of the war in Gaza.  The sniff, however, has come with a rebuking blast from Israel, joined by various politicians in the United States champing at the bit to take a swipe at the body.

    Such attacks have only been emboldened by the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, an instrument from 2002 that prohibits federal, state and local governments from furnishing the ICC with assistance in any way while authorising the US president “to use all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release” of any “US person” or “allied persons” detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request,” of the ICC.

    In what is expedient and legally anomalous, Washington has chosen not only to avoid signing the Rome Statute but reject ICC jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories.  The ICC begs to differ, noting the acceptance of the court’s jurisdiction on the part of “the Government of Palestine” and its accession to the Rome Statute in January 2015.

    In late October 2023, Israel announced that it would not be permitting Khan to enter Israel, signalling its intention to frustrate, as far as possible, his investigative functions.  In April this year, Axios revealed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had requested US President Joe Biden to prevent the ICC from issuing arrest warrants against senior Israeli officials.  A broader lobbying effort of the US Congress by the Netanyahu government is also taking place.

    On May 1, a bipartisan group of US senators held a virtual meeting with members of seniority from the ICC, worried about the prospect that arrest warrants for top Israel might issue from the prosecutorial pipeline.  In a threatening letter to Khan from a dozen Republican senators led by Tom Cotton, the promise for retaliation was unequivocal: “Target Israel, and we will target you.”  Issuing such warrants would be “illegitimate and lack legal basis, and, if carried out, will result in severe actions against you and your institution.”  They would “not only be a threat to Israel’s sovereignty but to the sovereignty of the United States.”

    This was hardly novel and was unlikely to have phased Khan or his staff.  In June 2020, President Donald Trump implemented an executive order directed at the ICC.  The order authorised the blocking of assets and imposed family entry bans into the US in response to the court’s efforts to investigate the alleged commission of war crimes in Afghanistan by US personnel.  In September that year, pursuant to the executive order, targeted sanctions were imposed on then ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and senior prosecution official Phakiso Mochochoko.

    Since 2021, the ICC has been vested in examining alleged war crimes committed by both the Israeli Defense Forces and Palestinian militants stretching back to the 2014 Israel-Hamas war.  “Upon the commencement of my mandate in June 2021,” Khan states, “I put in place for the first time a dedicated team to advance the investigation in relation to the Situation in the State of Palestine.”  Its mission is to collect, preserve and analyse “information and communications from key stakeholders in relation to relevant incidents.”

    In November 2023, the office of the prosecutor received a referral from South Africa, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Comoros and Djibouti to investigate “the Situation in the State of Palestine.”  The referral requests the prosecutor “to vigorously investigate crimes under the jurisdiction of the Court allegedly committed” on various grounds, including, among others, the unlawful appropriation and destruction of private and public properties, the forcible transfer of Palestinians, the unlawful transfer of Israel’s population into Occupied Palestinian Territory and a discriminatory system amounting to apartheid.

    The spectacularly brutal Israeli campaign in Gaza following the October 7 attacks by Hamas also enlivened interest in using the ICC’s jurisdiction to investigate allegations of genocide, crimes against humanity and relevant war crimes.  But the notable catch, and bound to be threatening to its intended targets, was the request that culprits be found, and perpetrators be outed and held accountable.  South Africa, more specifically, requested that the prosecutor “investigate the Situation for the purpose of determining whether one or more specific persons should be charged with the commission of such crimes.”

    On May 3, officials from the ICC openly reproached efforts to tamper and modify any opinions on the part of the body regarding its activities.  The ICC welcomed, according to Khan, “open communication” with government officials and non-governmental entities, and would only engage in discussions so long as they were “consistent with its mandate under the Rome Statute to act independently and impartially”.

    As he continued to explain in his statement, Khan argued “That independence and impartiality are undermined … when individuals threaten to retaliate … should the office, in fulfilment of its mandate, make decisions about investigations or cases falling within its jurisdiction”.  He demanded that “all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence its officials cease immediately.”

    Netanyahu had previously promised that, under his leadership, “Israel will never accept any attempt by the ICC to undermine its inherent right of self-defense.”  He regarded any “threat to seize the soldiers and officials of the Middle East’s only democracy and the world’s only Jewish state” as “outrageous.”  Going heavy on the forces of light battling those of darkness – a favourite theme of his – the Israeli PM went on to claim that such actions “would set a dangerous precedent that threatens the soldiers and officials of all democracies fighting savage terrorism and wanton aggression”.

    Far from threatening democracies of whatever flavour, the actions of the ICC can serve the opposite purpose, holding individuals in high office accountable for egregious crimes in international law.  In doing so, it can contribute, in no small part, to efforts in defeating impunity and rebutting brutal and often callous assertions of self-defence.

    The post Forces of Impunity: The US Threatens the International Criminal Court first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Why the media have failed Gaza

    [This is a transcript of my full speech for the Bristol Palestine Alliance’s March Against Media Bias at College Green, Bristol, on Saturday May 4.]

    Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day, and it is fitting we mark it by highlighting two things.

    First, we should honour the brave journalists of Gaza who have paid a horrifying price for making the Palestinian experience of genocide visible to western audiences over the past seven months.

    Israel has killed a tenth of their number – some 100 journalists – as it tries to prevent the truth of its atrocities from getting out. Israel’s has been most deadly eruption of violence against journalists ever recorded.

    Second, we must shame the western media – not least the BBC – who have so utterly betrayed their Palestinian colleagues by failing to properly report the destruction of Gaza, or name it as a genocide.

    The BBC aired only the briefest coverage of South Africa’s devastating case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in January – a case so powerful the court has put Israel on trial for genocide. A fact you would barely know from the BBC’s reporting.

    By contrast, the corporation cleared the schedules to present in full Israel’s hollow legal response.

    The BBC’s double standards are all the more glaring if we recall how it reported Ukraine, also invaded by a hostile army – Russia’s.

    Only two years ago the BBC dedicated its main news headlines to Kyiv’s citizens mass-producing molotov cocktails with which to greet Russian soldiers closing in on their city.

    BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen felt emboldened to post – apparently approvingly – a diagram showing weak points where the improvised explosives would do most damage to Russian tanks, and the soldiers inside.

    Two years later, in its coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the same BBC has performed a 180-degree turn.

    It is quite impossible to imagine Bowen or any other British journalist posting instructions on how Palestinians might burn alive Israeli soldiers in their tanks – even though those soldiers, unlike Russia’s, have been occupying and stealing Palestinian lands for decades, not two years.

    Israeli soldiers, unlike Russian soldiers, are now actively enforcing a genocidal policy of starvation.

    But the double standards of establishment media like the BBC aren’t directed only towards the people of Gaza. They are directed at us, the public, too.

    The same media that celebrated families taking in Ukrainian refugees has willingly conspired in the smearing of those whose only crime is that they wish to stop the slaughter of 15,000-plus Palestinian children in Gaza.

    There is apparently nothing heroic about opposing Israel’s genocide, even if opposing Russia’s invasion is still treated as a badge of honour.

    The media give politicians a free pass to vilify as an antisemite anyone outraged that UK weapons are being used to help kill, maim and orphan many, many tens of thousands of Palestinian children. That accusation assumes that every Jew supports this slaughter, and erases all those Jews standing alongside us today at this protest.

    In the US, police forces are beating and arresting students who have peacefully called on their universities to stop investing in the arming of Israel’s genocide. When the police pulled back at UCLA, it was only to allow pro-Israel thugs to assault the students – again many of them Jews.

    A clear war is being waged against the right to protest against a genocide. And in tandem, the media has declared a war on the English language.

    The roles of aggressor and victim have been reversed. The BBC accused the students, encamped on university grounds, of “clashing” with pro-Israel groups that invaded the campus to violently attack them.

    What explains these glaring inconsistencies, this gigantic failure by a media that’s supposed to act as a watchdog on the abuse of power.

    Part of the answer is old-school racism. Ukrainains look like us, as some reporters let slip, and therefore deserve our solidarity. Palestinians, it seems, do not.

    But there is another, more important answer. The establishment media isn’t really a watchdog on the abuse of power. It never was. It is a narrative factory, there to create stories that make those abuses of power possible.

    State and billionaire-owned media achieve this goal through various sleights of hand.

    First, they omit stories that might disrupt the core narrative.

    The media’s script is a simple one:

    What the West and its allies do is always well-meant, however horrific the outcomes.

    And what the West does, however provocative or foolhardy, can never be cited as an explanation for what our “enemies” do.

    No cause and no effect. They, whoever we select, are simply savage. They are evil. Theyare out to destroy civilisation. They must be stopped.

    Nightly for weeks, I have watched the BBC news. If it were all I relied on, I would barely know that Israel is daily bombing the refugee camps of Rafah that are supposedly a “safe zone”.

    Or that Israel continues to engineer a famine by blocking aid, and that Palestinians continue to die of hunger.

    Or that the UK has actively assisted the creation of that famine by denying UNRWA funding.

    Or that the protests to end the Gaza genocide – painted as terror-supporting and antisemitic – are backed by many, many Jews, some of them here today.

    And of course, I would have little idea that Israel’s imprisonment and slaughter of Palestinians did not begin on October 7 with Hamas’ attack.

    That’s because the BBC continues to ignore the siege of Gaza as the context for October 7 – just as it and the rest of the media largely ignored the 17-year siege throughout the years Israel was enforcing it.

    If I relied on the BBC, I would not understand that what Israel is doing can be neither “retaliation”, nor a “war”. You can’t go to war, or retaliate, against a people whose territory you have been belligerently occupying and stealing for decades.

    And when the media can no longer omit, it distracts – through strategies of deflection, misdirection and minimisation.

    So when Gaza makes the news, as it rarely does now, it is invariably filtered through other lenses.

    The focus is on interminable negotiations, on Israel’s plans for the “day after”, on the agonies of the hostages’ families, on the fears evoked by protest chants, on where to draw the line on free speech.

    Anything to avoid addressing a genocide that’s been carried out in broad daylight for seven months.

    In their defence, establishment journalists tell us that they have a duty to be impartial. Their critics, they say, do not understand how news operations work.

    As a journalist who spent years working in major newsrooms, I can assure you this is a self-serving lie.

    Just this week, an interview went viral of the Norway Broadcasting Corporation interviewing Israeli government spokesman David Mencer. Unlike on the BBC, Mencer’s lies did not pass unchallenged.

    The Norwegian journalist spent 25 minutes unpicking his falsehoods and deceptions, one by one. It was revelatory to see an Israeli spokesperson’s claims stripped away, layer by layer, until he stood there naked, his lies exposed.

    It can be done – if there is a will to do it.

    Journalists at the BBC and the rest of the establishment media understand, however implicitly, that their job is to fail. It is to fail to investigate the genocide in Gaza. It is to fail to give voice to the powerless. It is to fail to provide context and aid understanding. It is to fail to show solidarity with their colleagues in Gaza being killed for their journalism.

    Rather, the BBC’s role is to protect the political establishment from ever being held to account for their complicity in genocide.

    The establishment media’s job is to create the impression of uncertainty, of doubt, of confusion – even when what is happening is crystal clear.

    When one day, the World Court finally gets round to issuing a ruling on Israel’s genocide, our politicians and media will claim they could not have known, that they were misled, that they could not see clearly because events were shrouded by the “fog of war”.

    Our job is to explode that lie, to deny them an alibi. It is to keep pointing out that the information was there from the start. They knew, if only because we told them.

    And one day, if there is any justice, they will stand in the dock – at the Hague – their excuses stripped away.

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  • How Hamas Changed the World

    In a June, 2023 article, The Fall of the West, I named 2023 as the end date of a half millennium of Western domination of world power. Although neither the start nor the end of the era can be entirely discrete, the key indicator for that year was the failure of the combined might of the US and all of NATO to prevail over Russia, a relatively modest economic power, in the Ukraine war. Subsequent developments on the Ukrainian battlefields, as well as the astonishing resilience of the Russian economy, only support that conclusion.

    But 2023 had another momentous event in store for us, which also marked a great change in the world power structure, bolstering the claim for marking 2023 as the end of an era. That event was the October 7th, 2023 revolt by Hamas and its allies against Israel’s increasingly repressive occupation of Palestine, and especially the repercussions of that revolt, changing the landscape of power worldwide in profound ways.

    Although the Hamas revolt was puny by comparison with Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, its consequences were equally far reaching, due largely to Israel’s disproportionate response, directed against the Palestinian civil population and institutions rather than against the resistance fighters themselves, whose military capabilities were largely unaffected. This response is described by an Israeli military policy known as the Dahiyeh Doctrine, an extreme form of the war crime known as collective punishment, which deliberately inflicts massive and disproportionate destruction and casualties upon the civilian population and infrastructure as a deterrent against resistance. It is reminiscent of similar tactics in other wars and occupations, such as the Boer war in South Africa, the US exterminations in the Philippines, the Nazi repression in Greece and other territories, and in Russia, where it was given the name pogrom (“devastation”), when used by the tsars against internal populations. Israel has acknowledged using such war crimes as a means of dominating both its occupied Palestinian population and its neighbors.

    In the case of Gaza, Israel has applied the doctrine multiple times, especially since sealing the enclave with walls and towers, largely completed in 2007. In the pogroms of 2008, 2012 and 2014, the ratio of deaths of mostly civilian Palestinians to mostly military Israelis has been as high as 100:1, in keeping with the Dahiyeh Doctrine.

    This changed dramatically with the Hamas led revolt of October 7th, although only for a single day. On that day, the casualty rates were decidedly in favor of the resistance fighters, despite the fact that many of the Israeli casualties, including civilians, were inflicted by Israeli troops themselves as indiscriminate “friendly fire”. Israel counted 1,163 Israeli deaths, including hundreds by Israeli forces, firing upon other Israeli soldiers and civilians. The number of Palestinians killed that day is unreported, as far as I can tell, but surely much smaller, and all or nearly all combatants.

    The repercussions of the event, however, were due more to Israel’s response than to the initial actions of Hamas and its allies. True to form, Israel responded massively with indiscriminate bombing against the Palestinian civilian population, killing tens of thousands of mostly women and children, and destroying most of the buildings and infrastructure throughout the Strip. By early 2024, most of the remaining population had lost their homes and livelihood, and had been driven on foot to the town of Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, quintupling its population. In addition, Israel destroyed Gaza’s water, sewage, electric and medical services, and severed or severely restricted its access to food, fuel and medicine, causing deliberate starvation and disease. Starving mothers delivered stillborn babies, or ones who died soon after birth, due to the inability of the mothers’ bodies to produce milk.

    Israel’s intention was and is clearly to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing. So clear, in fact, that it has been articulated explicitly by the Israeli leadership and military, to the extent of calling for redevelopment of an empty Gaza Strip by Zionist Jewish settlers upon conclusion of the genocide. There is even suspicion, in some quarters, that Israel permitted and enabled the Hamas attack as a pretext for the genocide, to absolve Israel of its premeditated crime. The notion is not far-fetched. The population in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories is probably less than half Jewish, an intolerable situation for the Zionist leadership desiring to annex those territories, which it calls “greater Israel”. In addition, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is desperate to remain in power, if only to avoid legal prosecution on corruption charges. That, plus the legacy of “enlarging” Israel, would also be a motive for letting Hamas provide the pretext for genocide.

    None of this has been lost on the rest of the world. Few nations are willing to be associated with such monstrous acts, especially when their populations fill the streets with demonstrations after seeing daily footage from Gaza. Countries around the world have ceased or reduced their military sales. Commercial, diplomatic and even academic ties are shunned. The International Court of Justice has issued an injunction against Israel, and has recorded public denunciation pronouncements from 52 nations made by their representatives before the ICJ bench. Israel has lost many of the links that it spent decades developing with the rest of the world. It has become isolated except for its ties with the US and a dwindling number of US allies. The vaunted “Abraham accords” have become an embarrassment to the few Arab states that agreed to them. In the space of a few months, Israel has become a pariah among nations.

    The US can, of course, supply all of Israel’s needs, including vast quantities of weapons for genocide, and apparently intends to do so, regardless of Israel’s extermination of Palestinians, or the opinion of the rest of the world or even the American people. But most of the rest of the world is washing its hands of Israel. This constitutes a global realignment similar to that of the Ukraine war and its reverberations. Even many Israelis have fled the country – estimates run between 0.5 to 1.0 million – leaving it a smaller redoubt of mostly fanatical and violent Zionists that an increasing number of Jews now oppose, many of them quite actively.

    Furthermore, Israel will not achieve its goal of emptying Gaza and defeating Hamas. Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian resistance have not merely demonstrated that they cannot be defeated, but neither can its allies in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Iraq (al-Hashd al-Shaebi), Iran, Yemen (Ansar Allah) and other forces in the region. Hamas and its allies can make Gaza just as unlivable for Israelis as Israel is trying to make it for Palestinians.

    The defeat of the US and Israel in Gaza comes on the heels of the US/NATO defeat in Ukraine, and with similar effect, sapping the global dominance of the US and the West, and bringing an end to Western hegemony.

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  • Veterans to Biden: US Law Says No Weapons to Nations with A-Bombs if They’ve Not Signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That Means Israel

    In a letter 18 April to President Biden and top members of his administration, Veterans For Peace cited existing federal law that gives the President “…no discretion whatsoever to allow any military assistance of any form to be delivered to Israel,” based on that country’s “serial violations of the Symington-Glenn Amendments, codified at 22 U.S.C. § 2799aa.”

    The letter cites a lengthy list of credible reports that Israel has possessed nuclear weapons for decades. Because Israel has not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), the Symington-Glenn Amendments to the International Security Assistance and Arms Export Control Act of 1976, which allow no presidential discretion, goes into effect, including:

    • termination of assistance under the Foreign Assistance Act, except for humanitarian assistance or food or other agricultural commodities;
    • termination of defense sales and licensing of Munitions List exports;
    • termination of foreign military financing;
    • denial of U.S. government credit, credit guarantees, or other financial assistance (except for medical and humanitarian assistance and agricultural exports from the United States);
    • U.S. government opposition to any loan or financial or technical assistance from international financial institutions (IFIs);
    • prohibition of any loan or credit from U.S. banks to the foreign government (except for the purchase of food or other agricultural commodities); and
    • prohibition under the Export Administration Act of exports to that state of specific goods and technology licensed by the Commerce Department (except for food and other agricultural commodities).

    The letter states, “The President may not waive the cutoff of the above aid and exports under the Glenn Amendment where there has been a nuclear weapons detonation, or the offending state has received a nuclear explosive device. Congress would have to enact new legislation authorizing the President to waive some or all of these sanctions.”

    VFP National Director, Mike Ferner, said, “Israel’s possession of The Bomb and the U.S.’ refusal to take appropriate action is yet another example of how the Madmen Arsonists – the Raytheons, Boeings, General Dynamics – actually govern our country and determine policy. The law is quite simple – Does Israel have an unregulated nuclear weapons arsenal? Yes, it does.  Is Israel a signatory to the NPT? No, it isn’t. So, the question to Biden is, ‘will you obey the law or the Madmen?’”

    Ferner added, “This election year our members will ask their Congressional representatives, ‘Will you hold hearings to enforce existing law, or let the Madmen Arsonists continue to run our country?’”

    Highlights of the letter:

    • Senator John Glenn was prompted to seek a change in the law because of a reported theft of 100 kg of highly enriched uranium from an NRC vendor in 1968, later traced to the Dimona reactor complex in Israel. (pg. 3)
    • Repeated CIA assessments and remarks of Colin Powell in 2016 that the U.S. knew Israel had at least 200 warheads at that time. (pgs. 4-9)
    • Israel prosecuted and jailed Mordecai Vanunu for his courageous whistleblowing disclosure in the 1980’s that Israel has The Bomb. (pg. 7)
    • Benjamin Netanyahu was identified by the FBI as being directly involved in an Israeli smuggling operation in the 1980’s that successfully stole 800 krytrons, a prized device used for triggers in nuclear weapons. (pg. 7)
    • The Symington-Glenn amendment has been implemented by previous administrations. (pg. 4)
    • What the President must do (pg. 10)
    • Contrary to other instances where the Biden administration is allowed to ignore aid limitations, this one may be litigable in court. (pg. 10)

    Veterans For Peace members across the U.S. are telling their members of Congress to vote NO on any more weapons for Israel and hold hearings to hold the Biden administration accountable  They have participated in numerous protests and acts of civil disobedience to highlight Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine.

    The post Veterans to Biden: US Law Says No Weapons to Nations with A-Bombs if They’ve Not Signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That Means Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Presidential Candidate Jill Stein Attacked in St. Louis

    Green Party member Jill Stein center.

    After attacking Dr. Jill Stein, St. Louis police charged her with assaulting them. Stein is the presumptive Presidential candidate of the Green Party. On April 27 she spoke at a program of the Green Party of St. Louis and then went to support student protesters at Washington University. There, she was arrested along with Green Party campaign managers Jason Call and Kelly Merrill with about 100 others.

    As students peacefully gathered in tents and on the lawn, they were soon confronted by police from four departments: University City, Richmond Heights, St. Louis City and St. Louis County. When Stein arrived at the campus, students asked her to help defuse an already tense situation.

    She identified herself to onlooking university administrators as a Green Party Presidential candidate. Stein, along with St. Louis Aldermanic President Megan Green and Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier, attempted to persuade university administrators to let students stay. Police moved to block the conversation. A reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who attempted a discussion with university vice-chancellor Julie Hail Flory was ordered to leave the campus.

    Merrill and Stein looked for a restroom and found all doors locked, but a student was able to unlock one door. Hearing yelling that the police were about to attack, they quickly went outside. They walked into the space between students and police, pleading for calm. But the police stormed in.

    Merrill reported that “This was the first time I understood why so many police are on bicycles. They picked them up and used them as weapons to push people down.” When police began assailing protesters, they targeted Stein first and did not bother the two Democratic Party officials. They threw Stein on her head, threw Merrill to the ground, jumped on Call, and dozens became their victims.

    Students were charged with trespassing and disruptive behavior. Those who were arrested have been prohibited from re-entering campus even if they will miss final examinations and not graduate. The administration-police reaction followed a pattern at universities across the US as if it had been scripted in Joe Biden’s office.

    Being assaulted, arrested and jailed was only the beginning of Stein’s ordeal. Not being told what would happen to her, Stein sat alone in a cell for hours before being released. Exhausted, she did not make it to our house to sleep until 3:00 in the morning.

    On Monday morning, April 29 Stein took a break from her mid-states tour to get checked out at University Hospital in Columbia MO. They found that, though very bruised, her rib was not broken; and she continued to Kansas City.

    Bob Suberi is a Jewish member of the St. Louis Green Party who has made several solidarity visits to the West Bank. He brings back stories of the Israeli Defense Forces’ deliberately provoking Palestinians in order to have an excuse for over-reacting, sometimes with a massive raid. Similarly, Washington University students committed the trivial infraction of occupying space regularly used for events such as carnivals and this became the excuse for a police invasion.

    The similarities between practices in Palestine and on US campuses is unmistakable. This is true not only for intolerance of dissent and brutality. It is also the case with the way Israelis destroy sanitary facilities in Gaza, leaving people with nowhere to relieve themselves except on sidewalks. This serves both to humiliate Palestinians and create a health crisis.

    The mounting opposition to Israel’s war is reflected by the wide variety of speakers at the St. Louis Green Party event: Andrew de las Alas (Asians Demanding Justice), Saish Satyal (College Democrats), Lila Steinbach (Jewish Students for Palestine), Bahar Bastani MD (Dar al-Zahra Mosque and Education Center), Shahab Mushtaq (Green Party of St. Louis), Bob Suberi (Veterans For Peace), Chibu Asonye (Green Party of Illinois), Zaki Baruti (Universal African Peoples Organization) and Omali Yeshitela (African People’s Socialist Party).

    Jewish herself, Stein insists that “The students are not the villains in this struggle against Israeli violence. They are in fact the heroes, defending the right of free speech and to peacefully protest. Many already see the villains being the Washington University administration, those who conspired with them to destroy free speech, and the Biden gang whose fingerprints are all over efforts to shut down peace initiatives. Out of one side of his mouth Biden claims he is working to end the killing and maiming of Palestinians. From the other side of his mouth comes the push for billions of war dollars that are causing the genocide.”

    Dr. Stein joined tens of thousands of students in campuses across the US who are demanding university divestment from Boeing and other companies that manufacture weapons used by Israel. Students presented Washington University with five demands:

  • Cut ties with Boeing.
  • Boycott Israeli educational institutions.
  • Drop charges and suspensions against protesters and defund university police.
  • Stop buying land in surrounding communities and make payments in lieu of taxes to University City and St. Louis.
  • Release a statement condemning Palestinian genocide and calling for an immediate ceasefire.

    • University officials told the press that they felt that they had to take action because the demonstrators “had the potential to get out of control and become dangerous.” Apparently skilled at ignoring the obvious, these officials have never noticed that the corporate behavior of their partner, Boeing, has vastly exceeded the “potential” to become dangerous.

    One of the great ironies of the episode is that above the April 28 Post-Dispatch story which described events at Washington University was another front page story reporting that Boeing was abandoning efforts to outsource much of its work. It approvingly announced that this would save 550 St. Louis jobs.

    Of course, the Post-Dispatch has not published stories regarding the creation of peace-related jobs for Boeing employees if the war-manufacturer were to be downsized. Also worthy of note is the fact that no Boeing executive or government official working with them has been arrested for crimes against humanity, complicity with genocide or any other charge. Maybe they would have to peacefully sit in a tent on the Washington University campus to get busted.

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  • The Little Flotilla that Almost Could

    The flotilla cargo ship in Istanbul (Photo credit: Medea Benjamin)

    Two gutsy activists from the Twin Cities flew to Istanbul, Turkey April 17 to join over three-hundred others from about 40 countries on an eleven-hundred mile voyage across the Mediterranean Sea to raise awareness and bring lifesaving aid to Gaza.

    Vietnam Vet and member of Veterans For Peace (VFP) Barry Riesch was nervous about signing on with the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), but felt he should try to do something for the vast majority of Gazans lacking medical care and being deliberately starved. Apart from the mission’s goal of delivering over five-thousand tons of urgently needed food, water and medical supplies (including five ambulances, and an abundance of baby formula), Reisch said he wanted to do this for his grandkids in hopes “they won’t have to grow up in a world that would ignore such a tragedy.”

    Riesch has good reasons to be nervous. Since the Free Gaza Movement began in 2006, only a handful of small ships have been allowed to bring humanitarian aid to Gazans. Retired U.S. Army Colonel and former diplomat Ann Wright is a member of the 2024 FFC Steering Committee. She was a participant (resistor) on five previous flotillas that never reached Gaza. In 2010 she watched Israeli troops rappelling from helicopters onto the deck of the Mavi Marmara from a nearby boat. Ten resistors were killed and 50 more wounded after some of them allegedly tried to fight back in international waters against the Israeli invaders who were using pressurized water hoses on them. In a video, Wright gave other accounts of Israeli troops harassing and beating resistors before confiscating their belongs and taking them against their will to Israeli jails until they could be deported.

    Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu contends that Israel has been unfairly targeted by resistors trying to break his country’s illegal navel blockade and bring humanitarian aid into Gaza. During a 2015 speech in Tel Aviv he told the Jewisih Agency Assembly “They send flotillas to Gaza, they don’t send flotillas to Syria. It’s amazing, this travesty of justice, this violation of the truth, the rape of truth.”

    Former FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley is a member of VFP and Women Against Military Madness (WAMM) couldn’t disagree with Netanyahu more. She hopes that he and his cronies will be called to answer for their criminal behavior sooner than later. Rowley has been speaking at academic and other professional venues with an emphasis on ethical decision-making for twenty years. Before flying to Istanbul she talked over the phone with me about the “berserk Israelis” who have “shredded the law” — not only breaking the rules of the high seas for murder and kidnapping, but with their ongoing violations of international humanitarian law and war crimes on land. In a recent television interview she said “ I told people I can’t help seeing the faces of my own grandchildren (I have five grandchildren now) in the faces of these poor Gazan children who are being orphaned, starved and murdered.”

    Riesch and Rowley attended intensive nonviolence training shortly after arriving in Istanbul. “The most frightening part of the training was a simulation replete with deafening booms of gunfire and exploding percussion grenades and masked soldiers screaming at us, hitting us with simulated rifles, dragging us across the floor, and arresting us” author/activist Medea Benjamin wrote in a Counterpunch article. During an April 19 Zoom meeting in Istanbul, resistors discussed their fears about the trip. One recalled a mock situation where three doctors from New Zealand laid on the floor during a seminar and instructed resistors on what to do if their heads are stepped on in the dark. Lawyers provided legal advice about separating “false authority” from “legitimate authority” along with tips for walking away from precarious situations. Despite their fears, resistors believe what they are doing not only has to be done, it is morally and legally justifiable, citing a recent ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that it is “plausible” Israel has committed acts of genocide: The court further maintains, that it is now incumbent upon citizens and governments of the world to do what they can to stop the genocide.

    The location of the launch was kept secret due to Israel’s history of sabotaging boats in port and the departure dates were pushed back repeatedly because of outside pressures — mostly from the Israeli and U.S. governments. Last week the Israelis made an announcement about intercepting the flotilla that prompted Huwaida Arraf, U.S. human rights attorney and FFC Steering Committee member to say “Governments must refuse to collaborate in maintaining Israel’s illegal siege on Gaza by obstructing the flotilla in any way. We call on the governments of the 40 countries represented on the Freedom Flotilla to uphold their obligations under international law and demand that Israel guarantee the flotilla safe passage to Gaza.” Soon after, UN experts reaffirmed Arraf’s demand  “As the Freedom Flotilla approaches Palestinian territorial waters off Gaza, Israel must adhere to international law, including recent orders from the International Court of Justice to insure unimpeded access for humanitarian aid.”

    But on April 26, the doubts crept home. During a morning call, Riesch talked about his dwindling hopes that the flotilla would make it to Gaza “Now there’s a problem with ship flags” — this is the fourth delay.” According to Reuters, Guinea-Bissau made a decision to remove its flag from flotilla boats. Istanbul activists answered with this:  “The Guinea-Bissau International Ships Registry (GBISR), in a blatantly political move, informed the Freedom Flotilla Coalition that it had withdrawn the Guinea Bissau flag from two of the Freedom Flotilla’s ships, one of which is our cargo ship.”

    Riesch mentioned that frustrated resistors were already drifting away and during last night’s FFC meeting, he found out numerous other boats loaded with activists were preparing to join the flotilla in a show of solidarity, even though Israelis planned to stop them with a blockade. So, it was decided the flotilla would meet up with the blockade and wait a few days before turning around. The earliest departure time he said would be Sunday April 28 — if they could clear customs. Later that evening he sent a text saying the trip was canceled.

    During a follow-up Q&A TikTok post, Wright told Benjamin that Israel always uses delay tactics before flotilla launches and the State Department invariably issues travel warnings and cautions Americans about challenging the Israeli government — especially now since the U.S. has been so openly complicit with the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Gaza. While support for the flotilla remains high from Turkish nationals, Wright strongly believes the U.S. is using economic pressures including military aid, ito derail the project in Turkey.

    If nothing else, those who traveled to Istanbul succeeded in bringing much-needed attention to the plight of captive and undernourished Palestinians waiting in refugee camps for the next bombing campaign. About 45% of the people living in Gaza are children under the age of 15. So far, well over one hundred fifteen thousand Palestinians have been killed or wounded — most were women and children. It may take decades to rebuild the parts of Gaza already destroyed but for now, resistors are packing their bags — some hope to return this summer.

    First row — Coleen Rowley far left and Barry Riesch third from left

    Ann Wright second from left, and Medea Benjamin second from back in Istanbul 

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  • The Israel-US game plan for Gaza is staring us in the face

    One does not need to be a fortune-teller to understand that the Israel-US game plan for Gaza runs something like this:

    1. In public, Biden appears “tough” on Netanyahu, urging him not to “invade” Rafah and pressuring him to allow more “humanitarian aid” into Gaza.

    2. But already the White House is preparing the ground to subvert its own messaging. It insists that Israel has offered an “extraordinarily generous” deal to Hamas – one that, Washington suggests, amounts to a ceasefire. It doesn’t. According to reports, the best Israel has offered is an undefined “period of sustained calm”. Even that promise can’t be trusted.’

    3. If Hamas accepts the “deal” and agrees to return some of the hostages, the bombing eases for a short while but the famine intensifies, justified by Israel’s determination for “total victory” against Hamas – something that is impossible to achieve. This will simply delay, for a matter of days or weeks, Israel’s move to step 5 below.

    4. If, as seems more likely, Hamas rejects the “deal”, it will be painted as the intransigent party and blamed for seeking to continue the “war”. (Note: This was never a war. Only the West pretends either that you can be at war with a territory you’ve been occupying for decades, or that Hamas “started the war” with its October 7 attack when Israel has been blockading the enclave, creating despair and incremental malnutrition there, for 17 years.)Last night US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken moved this script on by stating Hamas was “the only thing standing between the people of Gaza and a ceasefire… They have to decide and they have to decide quickly”.

    5. The US will announce that Israel has devised a humanitarian plan that satisfies the conditions Biden laid down for an attack on Rafah to begin.

    6. This will give the US, Europe and the region the pretext to stand back as Israel launches the long-awaited assault – an attack Biden has previously asserted would be a “red line”, leading to mass civilian casualties. All that will be forgotten.

    7. As Middle East Eye reports, Israel is building a ring of checkpoints around Rafah. Netanyahu will suggest, falsely, that these guarantee its attack meets the conditions laid down in international humanitarian law. Women and children will be allowed out – if they can reach a checkpoint before Israel’s carpet bombing kills them along the way.

    8. All men in Rafah, and any women and children who remain, will be treated as armed combatants. If they are not killed by the bombing or falling rubble, they will be either summarily executed or dragged off to Israel’s torture chambers. No one will mention that any Hamas fighters who were in Rafah were able to leave through the tunnels.

    9. Rafah will be destroyed, leaving the entire strip in ruins, and the Israeli-induced famine will worsen. The West will throw up its hands, say Hamas brought this on Gaza, agonise over what to do, and press third countries – especially Arab countries – for a “humanitarian plan” that relocates the survivors out of Gaza.

    10. The western media will continue describing Israel’s genocide in Gaza in purely humanitarian terms, as though this “disaster” was an act of God.

    11. Under US pressure, the International Court of Justice, or World Court, will be in no hurry to issue a definitive ruling on whether South Africa’s case that Israel is committing a genocide – which it has already found “plausible” – is proved.

    12. Whatever the World Court eventually decides, and it is almost impossible to imagine it won’t determine that Israel carried out a genocide, it will be too late. The western political and media class will have moved on, leaving it to the historians to decide what it all meant.

    13. Meanwhile, Israel is already using the precedents it has created in Gaza, and its erosion of the long-established principles of international law, as the blueprint for the West Bank. Saying Hamas has not been completely routed in Gaza but is using this other Palestinian enclave as its base, Israel will gradually intensify the pressures on the West Bank with another blockade. Rinse and repeat.

    That’s the likely plan. Our job is to do everything in our power to stop them making it a reality.

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  • Unbecoming American: The Fourth Dimension


    Stories, Histories, Fantasies and Desire

    Essentially there are three standard scripts for the history of the United States of America. They partly overlap, exposing or concealing contradictions. They are taught or staged in schools, in homes, at work, on the playground and in the workplace. They are taught all over the world, too.

    The USA originates as part of British North America, especially after the French were all but driven out of the continent with British ascendency and the capture of Quebec. A UDI followed by an insurgency, aided by the vindictive French, leaves 13 colonies to themselves while Upper and Lower Canada remain British. Some of the departed French are replaced by loyalist who flee the victorious settler-colonialists south of the St. Lawrence. These colonies become America about the same time the taunting French allies are busy overthrowing the Bourbon monarchy. France‘s new regime eventually cedes its claim to a third of the North American continental massif central- Louisiana and the Mississippi valley. America doubles in size. The Anglo-Americans fail to absorb or conquer Canada but reach the Pacific Ocean by colonizing Nueuva España/ Mexico and in turn seizing the northern provinces from its southern rulers. America becomes the dominion from “sea to shining sea“.

    Of course that story would be incomplete without the script that tells of all the heroism and adventure as the coastal merchants and latifundistas pushed their servants West to occupy lands inhabited and exploited by “Injuns”. America became bountiful as its settlers collected bounties for removal of “useless eaters”. Subsequently, albeit barely mentioned, was the Asian bonded labor (aka known as “contract labor”) abused to connect the coastal regimes in San Francisco and New York. They were barred from becoming American until after the lands of their birth and descent had been ravaged in the Second World War.

    Then there is the script known and best loved. This is the story of all those “huddled masses yearning to be free”. In the fine print, freedom included to be free of history, language, love and loyalty as part of “becoming American”. Traditionally “becoming American” has been a process analogous to accepting all the Latin sacraments, from infant baptism to extreme unction. There could be no greater blessing on Earth. Even vicarious consumption could bring the willing to conversion. Becoming American was possible with clothes, food, cinema, music, and political-cultural habits. The world could and should become American even if the iron and razor wire gates to that North American heaven were opened only very selectively. Any indifference or independence of life was simply unbecoming.

    While a private soldier, seaman or airman from the other ranks is punished like a criminal for misconduct and possibly less than honorably discharged from the service, the commissioned ranks are treated differently. Article 133 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice – UCMJ provides for serious violations of military discipline by those holding a warrant or commission to be punished by dismissal “for conduct unbecoming an officer (and a gentleman) ”. Ordinary crime is expected among the enlisted. The commissioned class is subject to different standards, even if the UCMJ applies to all members of the US Forces. An officer expelled from his class is also disgraced.

    There is a fourth script that is rarely if ever staged and in many ways remains unfinished. Individuals have been punished and disgraced for charges of disloyalty to the US. In fact even entire populations have been subjected to the terrible swift sword wielded by the Grand Republic. Conduct unbecoming an American is easily a capital offense. However in a world in which America, i.e. the United States of America, is one out of many rather than “the one from many” (e pluribus unum) only Americans should owe loyalty to Columbia. It should be natural that those citizens of other nations live and love in their own homes and not those portrayed in Hollywood films and TV series. But to do so, without betrayal, it must be possible to unbecome American, to escape the abusive parentalism of those who churn on the great Wurlitzer or the other machines of Oz.

    By turning most of the world into cultural captives (also huddled masses) the US has advertised itself with propaganda, both unarmed and armed, as the only source of freedom, the one true church outside of which salvation is impossible. Unfortunately the Protestant Reformation did not end papal and clerical power. It forced its reorganization. The ostensible decline of Rome on the Potomac will not end the power of its corporate clerical caste. More fundamental change is necessary. We must dare unbecoming in conduct and faith. Give to god what is god’s and give to caesar what is caesar’s. Give America to the Americans and keep one’s own country for oneself.

    Unbecoming American: A War Memoir is a compilation of articles, many of which were first published in Global Research, Dissident Voice, The Greanville Post, and in some cases were presented as papers at scholarly conferences. The essays are the product of some forty years reflection on what makes the US Empire so irresistable even as it demonstrates its incapacity to win on the battlefield or in the marketplace. The author, who emigrated from the US more than 40 years ago also renouncing his citizenship, has dedicated years of observation during travels to South America, Africa, East Asia and throughout the western peninsula of Eurasia trying to understand why nearly everyone he met was becoming American – and no one could understand that he had surrendered his locker room keys. As a witness to interruptions in Brazil (1986), Germany (1989), South Africa (1991) and numerous less visible caesures at the fin de siecle, the discrepancy between the apparent opportunities and the vivid realities could not be ignored. These essays are the product of those experiences and reflection on them.

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  • URGENT: Don’t Punish Nicaragua for Defending Gaza

    Dear Friend

    We need your help to push out this petition (see below), urging the US Senate to Vote No on S1881 – a bill that will place additional unilateral coercive measures/sanctions on Nicaragua.  This Bill moved in the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee after Nicaragua argued at the International Court of Justice to defend the Palestinian people from genocide.  We have also just found out that it will no longer pass through the Senate’s Banking Committee, where we would have had an opportunity to slow it down, but go directly to the full Senate for a vote.  This could happen very quickly.  We need to gather at least 1,000 signers to this petition in the next few days so that it can be delivered to Senators mid week.  Please share widely through your networks  and social media. Signers do not have to be from the United States – please share internationally.

    It is tweetedbhere: https://twitter.com/SolidarityNica/status/1784295271662252276

    Thank you for taking urgent action!

    John

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  • Intervention in Gaza

    Is there a point at which the genocide in Gaza becomes egregious enough to provoke other countries to directly intervene in the Gaza Strip to prevent further genocide? Can Israel exterminate the entire population without anyone stopping them?

    This is not a rhetorical question. Intervention is not merely judgments by the International Court of Justice or resolutions introduced at the United Nations. It is not even shiploads of supplies sent to queue up for delivery into Gaza, pending permission from the Israeli occupying authorities. Rather, intervention means forcing one’s way into Gaza, whether the occupying authorities like it or not, and being prepared for confrontation.

    If there is such a point for some countries, what is that point? Half a million deaths, by massacre, starvation, dehydration, hypothermia, hyperthermia, exposure and disease? A million? And what are the countries that are willing to take action? Or can Israel exterminate the entire population without any countries intervening to stop the genocide?

    The question is essential and not rhetorical, because it is now clear that there is no level of atrocity that Israel is not willing to commit, nor that the United States is not willing to support with all armaments necessary to commit the deed, as well as all aid necessary to sustain the Israeli economy. Israel will not be deterred by economic or diplomatic isolation. It is willing to be boycotted by the entire world other than the US. It cares nothing for legal judgments against it. Whether delusional or not, it sees genocide as its only means of survival, and will pursue it until it is deprived of the means to do so.

    It therefore behooves us to ask the question whether there are any countries willing to intervene to stop the genocide, and at what point they will be willing to do so. If there are such countries, they will need to define the tripwire for their intervention and the means that they are willing to use to enforce it. They will need to form a consortium that is prepared to act in concert. The consortium will have to act outside the United Nations, because the US veto will prevent any UN action, other than symbolic.

    The intervention need not be belligerent, but it must not accept to be impeded, nor to be attacked by the forces of the Israeli government. It must be prepared to defend itself if necessary. A suggested model for such an intervention may be found at https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/03/gaza-airdrops/, but the participating countries will make their own plans according to their own means and priorities.

    The demonstrations, sit-ins, speeches, letters, phone calls, emails, boycotts, flotillas, legal judgments and other actions to apply pressure to stop the genocide are successful in raising awareness, changing opinions, and perhaps even partially forestalling the inevitable. But they have not in the least affected Israeli actions or US government support for them. Direct intervention is the only way that Israel can be made to stop.

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  • Anzac and the Pageantry of Deception

    On April 25, along Melbourne’s arterial Swanston Street, the military parade can be witnessed with its bannered, medalled upholstery, crowds lost in metals, ribbons and commemorative decor.  Many, up on their feet since the dawn service, keen to show the decorations that say: “I turned up”.  Service personnel, marked by a sprig of rosemary.

    The greater the pageantry, the greater the coloured, crimson deception.  In the giddy disruptions caused by war, this tendency can be all too readily found.  The dead are remembered on the appointed day, but the deskbound planners responsible for sending them to their fate, including the bunglers and the zealous, are rarely called out.  The memorial statements crow with amnesiac sweetness, and all the time, those same planners will be happy to add to the numbers of the fallen.

    The events of April 25, known in Australia as Anzac Day, are saccharine and tinged about sacrifice, a way of explicating the unmentionable and the barely forgivable.  But make no mistake about it: this was the occasion when Australians, with their counterparts from New Zealand as part of the Australian New Zealand Corps, foolishly bled on Turkish soil in a doomed campaign.  Modern Australia, a country rarely threatened historically, has found itself in wars aplenty since the 19th century.

    The Dardanelles campaign was conceived by the then First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, and, like many of his military ventures, ended in calamitous failure.  The Australian officers and politicians extolling the virtues of the Anzac soldiers tend to ignore that fact – alongside the inconvenient truth that Australians were responsible for a pre-emptive attack on the Ottoman Empire to supposedly shorten a war that lasted in murderous goriness till November 1918.  To this day, the Turks have been cunning enough to treat the defeated invaders with reverence, tending to the graves of the fallen Anzacs and raking in tourist cash every April.

    For the Australian public, it was far better to focus on such words as those of British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett written on the occasion of the Gallipoli landings: “There has been no finer feat in this war than this sudden landing in the dark and the storming of the heights.”  Ashmead-Bartlett went on to note the views of General William Birdwood, British commander of the Anzac forces at Gallipoli: “he couldn’t sufficiently praise the courage, endurance and the soldierly qualities of the Colonials”.  They “where happy because they had tried for the first time and not found wanting.”

    In March 2003, these same “colonials” would again participate in the invasion of a sovereign state, claiming, spuriously, that they were ridding the world of a terrorist threat in the form of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, whose weapons of mass destruction were never found, and whose subsequent overthrow led to the fracturing of the Middle East.  Far from being an act of bravery, the measure, in alliance with the United States and the United Kingdom, was a thuggish measure of gang violence against a country weakened by years of sanctions.

    When options to pursue peace or diplomacy were there, Australian governments have been slavish and supine before the dictates and wishes of other powers keen on war.  War, in this context, is affirmation, assertion, cleansing.  War is also an admission to a certain chronic lack of imagination, and an admission to inferiority.

    The occasion of Anzac Day in 2024 is one acrid with future conflict.  Australia has become, and is becoming increasingly, an armed camp for US interests for a war that will be waged by dunderheads over such island entities as Taiwan, or over patches of land that will signify which big power remains primary and ascendant in the Indo- and Asia-Pacific.  It is a view promoted with sickly enthusiasm by press outlets and thinktank enclaves across the country, funded by the Pentagon and military contractors who keep lining their pockets and bulking their accounts.

    Central to this is the AUKUS security pact between Australia, the UK and the United States, which features a focus on nuclear powered submarines and technology exchange that further subordinates Australia, and its tax paying citizens, to the steering wishes of Washington.  Kurt Campbell, US Deputy Secretary of State, cast light on the role of the pact and what it is intended for in early April.  Such “additional capacity” was intended to play a deterrent role, always code for the capacity to wage war.  Having such “submarines from a number of countries operating in close coordination that could deliver conventional ordinance from long distances [would have] enormous implications in a variety of scenarios, including in cross-strait circumstances”.  That’s Taiwan sorted.

    Ultimately, the Australian role in aiding and abetting empires has been impressive, long and dismal.  If it was not throwing in one’s lot with the British empire in its efforts to subjugate the Boer republics in South Africa, where many fought farmers not unlike their own, then it was in the paddy fields and jungles of Vietnam, doing much the same for the United States in its global quest to beat off atheistic communism.  Australians fought in countries they barely knew, in battles they barely understood, in countries they could barely name.

    This occasion is often seen as one to commemorate the loss of life and the integrity of often needless sacrifice, when it should be one to understand that a country with choices in war and peace decided to neglect them.  The pattern risks repeating itself.

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