by Graham Peebles / October 28th, 2023
It is carnage in Gaza. Over 5,700 Palestinian civilians are currently estimated to have been murdered by the relentless Israeli assault, 2,055 are children. More than 15,000 people have been injured, including 5,364 children. In the West Bank around 100 have been killed and at least 1,650 injured.
The Israeli bombardment has so far destroyed or damaged 169,184 residential buildings, 206 educational facilities, and 29 health care centres — including the al-Ahli Arab Hospital, which, despite denials and finger pointing, evidence strongly suggests was hit by an Israeli air raid on 17 October, killing 471 people.
The population of …
by Gerald E. Scorse / October 27th, 2023
For decades, time and again, America’s tax code has been twisted and tweaked to give tax breaks to the top and crumbs (or nothing) to the tens of millions on the bottom and in the middle. Levels of wealth and inequality have become so gross that experts are clamoring for change, painting unflattering portraits of the country those laws have created.
In the latest example, Senators Manchin and Sinema joined Republicans to throw 5.1 million children into poverty. Of course, nobody knew the exact number, but they knew exactly what would happen when they blocked …
by Binoy Kampmark / October 27th, 2023
The main press stable was keen to see the scrappy benefits of the 31-hour visit to Israel by US President Joe Biden. On National Public Radio (NPR), Scott Neuman expressed the view that the “largely symbolic” visit did yield a few “concrete accomplishments” including an announcement of $100 million in Palestinian aid, convincing Israel to permit humanitarian aid into Gaza and persuade Egypt’s strongman president Abdel-Fattah El-Sissi to open up an access route via land into southern Gaza. If these were seen as achievements, one dare not look at the picture of bright success.
On an individual level, sharing the …
by Rick Sterling / October 27th, 2023
Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently said, “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” The Israeli Ambassador responded that Guterres’ comments were “shocking”, “unfathomable” and “disconnected from reality”. He called for the Secretary General’s resignation. Below are some facts about Gaza to evaluate whether Guterres was accurate or not.
Gaza is a tiny strip of land on the Mediterranean coast with the 5,000 year old Gaza City in the north. The entire strip is only 5 miles wide by 25 miles in length with …
Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon describes the struggles of the Osage people. Here’s why they are still fighting...
by Greg Palast / October 27th, 2023
This week, director Martin Scorsese releases his film Killers of the Flower Moon: the true story of the mass murder of Osage Native Americans and the plot to steal the tribe’s oil wealth. The film is a powerful telling of what came to be known as the Reign of Terror, a period that resulted in the deaths of as many as 200 Osage. But the story didn’t end there. For the past 27 years, I have been reporting on what happened afterwards.
My documentary Long Knife – produced by George DiCaprio, with his son Leonardo’s encouragement – …
by Robert Hunziker / October 27th, 2023
“Massive Permafrost Thaw Documented in Canada, Portends Huge Carbon Release”, Bob Berwyn, February 28, 2017 (Credit: Wikimedia)
New studies show the Arctic heating up 4-times the overall rate of global warming. This startling rate in one of the most sensitive environments in the world could trigger toxic disasters in up to 20,000 industrial contamination sites.
Twenty-five percent (25%) of the Northern Hemisphere is covered by permafrost that’s melting the fastest ever. The risks of toxic leaks at industrial sites are immeasurable. Nobody really knows for sure how it ends, …
by Allen Forrest / October 27th, 2023
What’s the meaning behind it all?
by Eric Zuesse / October 27th, 2023
Instead of there being the U.S.-Government-promised ‘peace dividend’ after the Soviet Union ended in 1991, there has been soaring militarism by the U.S., and also soaring profits for the American producers of war-weapons. Both the profits on this, and the escalation in America’s aggressiveness following after 1991, have been stunning. Whereas there were 53 “Instances of United States Use of Armed Forces Abroad” (U.S. invasions) during the 46 years of 1945-1991, there were 244 such instances during the 31 years of 1991-2022, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service. From a rate …
by Yves Engler / October 27th, 2023
Who is Canada’s new antisemitism envoy?
At a big apartheid lobby convention in Ottawa last week Justin Trudeau’s government announced its new Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism. Deborah Lyons will replace Irwin Cotler in a position the Liberals created three years ago.
Cotler used the platform and public funds allocated to the envoy to defend Israeli apartheid and said he sought out Lyons to replace him. Apparently, Cotler wanted an anti-Palestinian non-Jew to take over in a position designed to entrench apartheid.
Canada’s Ambassador to Israel from 2016 to 2020, Lyons has an anti-Palestinian track record. In January 2020 Lyons …
by Global Times / October 27th, 2023
Illustration: Chen Xia/GT
The US doesn’t seem to be hesitant for a second to sacrifice its allies so as to contain China. The tightening chip export restrictions show that it is willing to do whatever it takes to hinder China’s technological development. But that doesn’t mean its allies will unconditionally follow such an extreme approach toward China, especially when their own interests will be at greater risk.
The fact that the subject of the new US export restrictions involving ASML is under heated debate in the …
by Visualizing Palestine / October 26th, 2023
October 7-24, 2023 in Gaza.
by Binoy Kampmark / October 26th, 2023
The relevance given to a UN Secretary-General is often judged by the degree of controversy caused. In history, the most relevant are usually targeted. Dag Hammarskjöld, refusing to remain a mere bauble of international office, was almost certainly murdered over his intervention in the Congo civil war in 1961. The least relevant (who was that sweet little fella, Ban Ki-Moon?) have barely registered a note of dissent. The big powers like to know they can render such figures impotent, if not insignificant.
It was, for that reason, refreshing to see the current occupant of that post make the less than …
The Forty-Third Newsletter (2023)
by Vijay Prashad / October 26th, 2023
From 9 to 15 October, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank held their annual joint meeting in Marrakech (Morocco). The last time that these two Bretton Woods institutions met on African soil was in 1973, when the IMF-World Bank meeting was held in Nairobi (Kenya). Kenya’s then President Jomo Kenyatta (1897–1978) urged those gathered to find ‘an early cure to the monetary sickness of inflation and instability that has afflicted the world’. Kenyatta, who became Kenya’s first president in 1964, noted …
by Roger D. Harris / October 26th, 2023
When I told my grandmother that I was going to visit Europe for the first time, she exploded, “Oy vey!” Raising her voice, she exclaimed: “There’s nothing there! NOTHING! Just poverty and filth.” Collecting herself, she added: “You like foreign food? There’s better in New York.”
For her generation of Jews, there was little nostalgia for the old country…and for good reason. She had been an involuntary participant in pogroms, violent riots massacring Jews. Fast forward to the present, the perpetrators are being rehabilitated. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, disregarding his religious heritage, honors the murderous Stepan Bandera as one of his “…
by Allen Forrest / October 26th, 2023
About what causes a zombie apocalypse.
by Dan Lieberman / October 25th, 2023
Israel’s dilemma has been how to construct a racially pure state and extinguish the Palestinian presence in the country without the world noticing the genocide. It has found the solution and the world takes no notice. The world can entertain another solution and the world takes no notice.
Want to rid the world of Hamas, rid the world of apartheid Israel. If apartheid Israel goes away assuredly Hamas will go away; after all, Israel says that Hamas’s only reason for existence is to eradicate apartheid Israel.
Want to stop the oppression and save the Palestinians from genocide, get rid of apartheid Israel; …
by Allen Forrest / October 25th, 2023
Are you worrying about a world government?
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / October 25th, 2023
But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Enough already.
Enough with the distractions. Enough with the partisan jousting.
Enough with the sniping and name-calling and mud-slinging that do nothing to make this country safer or freer or more just.
We have let the government’s evil-doing, its abuses, power grabs, brutality, meanness, inhumanity, …
by Yanis Iqbal / October 24th, 2023
On June 7, 2023, the Gujarat High Court cited the casteist and gender-biased Hindu text Manusmriti during a case involving a minor rape victim who was seven months pregnant. The court argued that historically, it was considered normal for girls to marry early and have children by the age of 17, while also asserting that girls tend to mature earlier than boys. This reference was made while considering a plea from the victim’s father to medically terminate her pregnancy.
What the above case demonstrates is the patriarchal logic of Hindutva, which uses the militarized vocabulary of religious nationalism to convert …
by Jay Janson / October 24th, 2023
Excerpt of a Letter to the New York Times, December 4, 1948, from Albert Einstein and other prominent Jews.
Attack on Arab Village
A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants —— 240 men, women, and …
by Allen Forrest / October 24th, 2023
What would Hippocrates think?
by Ted Glick / October 24th, 2023
I’ve been arrested three times so far this year for nonviolent direct actions (nvda) on the climate crisis. I don’t think I’ve ever been arrested more than once in a single year before this year; since my first arrest in 1970 I’ve been arrested about 30 times.
I risked arrest with about 100 others a week ago in southwest Virginia, fighting the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP). Five of us—not me–were arrested, four on purpose after locking down to four pipeline construction vehicles at two different construction sites. Both sites were pretty much shut down for the whole day, the main objective …
by Binoy Kampmark / October 23rd, 2023
Erroneous doctrines are current in the world, which declare a man culpable and responsible merely because he is a member or part of a determined country, without taking the trouble to seek or examine whether on his part there has been any personal sin of deed or omission.
— Pope Pius XII, New York Times, February 21, 1946.
For anyone concerned about the moderating restraint international law is meant to offer, especially when it comes to the use of force by states, Israel’s approach against the imprisoned populace of Gaza is bound to cause profound despair and lingering disgust.
Since the brutal, and …
by Stuart Littlewood / October 23rd, 2023
I never thought I’d live to see a British prime minister warmly embracing a war criminal and genocidal thug like Netanyahu, go swanning around a hotel (the King David) which was used as the Jerusalem headquarters of the British Mandate aúthority and blown up by Jewish terrorists in 1946, killing 91 and wounding 45, then tell Netanyahu: “We want you to win.”
Win what, exactly? And who’s “we”? Certainly not the man-in-the-street in Britain. No, it’ll be that band of brainwashed …
Distortions, omissions, outright lies, false equivalencies, victim-blaming, dehumanization!
by Charles Pierce / October 23rd, 2023
“Hamas terrorists”, “hostages”, “anti-Semitism”, Israeli “right of self-defense”, standing with Israel, upholding the “laws of war”, peace thru “negotiations”, “2-state solution”, end game? What are the relevant facts? How should recent events be evaluated?
Double standard
Western imperial states (US, Britain, France, Germany, et cetera) and their mainstream media report the conflict with a pro-Israel anti-Arab bias.
+ Palestinian violence is categorized as “terrorism”, while Israeli violence never is. Statistics: Israeli violence (2008-2023 June) killed 6,407 Palestinians, while Palestinian violence killed 307 Israelis.[1]
+ Israelis taken captive by Palestinian fighters are categorized as “kidnapped” and “hostages”, while the 4,500 Palestinians (including 147 minors as …
The case builds that Israel may have invoked its infamous ‘Hannibal directive’, which requires that the army kill Israelis rather than let them be taken hostage
by Jonathan Cook / October 23rd, 2023
So much space continues to be dedicated to the Hamas attack more than two weeks on. But this article from Mondoweiss is a rare attempt to try to piece together the events of October 7 without relying simply on Israel’s official, increasingly strained narrative.
The author explains the response of the Israeli army to Hamas’ incursion into Israel and capture of Israeli communities near Gaza in terms of Israel’s infamous “Hannibal directive”. That military directive compels the Israeli army to kill Israelis rather than let them be taken hostage. It …
by Colin Todhunter / October 23rd, 2023
The BJP-led government in India is seeking to extract revenge for the humiliating defeat it suffered at the hands of farmers whose one-year agitation led to the repeal of three farm laws in late 2021.
This claim was made during a recent press conference in Delhi held by the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) (United Farmers Front).
The SKM was formed in November 2020 as a coalition of more than 40 Indian farmers’ unions to coordinate non-violent resistance against three farm acts initiated two months before.
Asserting that the laws violated the constitution and were anti-farmer and pro big business, the SKM announced renewed …
by Allen Forrest / October 23rd, 2023
Racism, in whatever form, is just so despicable.
by Binoy Kampmark / October 22nd, 2023
Commemorative occasions are often draped in fatty platitudes. Within such platitudes lie excuses and apologies. People are celebrated after the fact, not for their faults but for their virtues. It’s just the polite thing to do. At the time of their achievement, they were ridiculed, condemned, and flayed. Buildings are also remembered, not for the blemishes they caused or the arguments they ignited, but the fact that they were (the pun is irresistible) foundational. After the fact, they stand as glorious fragments of culture.
Much of this can be seen in the horrendously treacle-covered slurry about the Sydney Opera House, which …
by Eric Zuesse / October 22nd, 2023
The Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives secretly voted on Friday October 20 to prevent Donald Trump’s choice to become the leader of Republicans in the House, Rep. Jim Jordan, from leading Republicans in the House. The vote to block Trump’s choice was 122 to 86 against Jordan. The voting was held in secret so that the 122 against Jordan will not be known by their own electorate to have voted now so as to increase Biden’s chances to win in 2024. Here is why this …
