by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / October 2nd, 2024
Photo credit: CODEPINK
On October 1, Iran fired about 180 missiles at Israel in response to Israel’s recent assassinations of leaders of its Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), Hezbollah, and Hamas. There are conflicting reports about how many of the missiles struck their targets and if there were any deaths. But Israel is now considering a counterattack that could propel it into an all-out war with Iran, with the U.S. in tow.
For years, Iran has been trying to avoid such a war. That is why it signed the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement with the United States, …
Talk delivered for the event “Changes Not Seen in a Century: 75th Anniversary of the Founding of PRC.”
Friends, Colleagues, Comrades,
It’s a great honor for me to join you in this extraordinary, historical moment of celebration and reflection on the 75th anniversary of the founding of the PRC.
As has been said, we are seeing changes unseen in a century. Changes both great and terrible.
We are currently seeing the unravelling of Empire–and its last desperate, violent, hideous death rattle. We are seeing the unmasking of 500 years of western “civilization”, and the laying bare of its …
As Israel begins another invasion of Lebanon, Australian officials from both sides of the imaginary partisan divide have been falling all over themselves to get Australians punished for speech crimes about the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah.
The Australian political-media class have been in an uproar ever since footage surfaced of people waving Hezbollah flags at a protest in Melbourne over the weekend and displaying pictures of the group’s deceased leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was assassinated by Israel in a massive airstrike on Friday.
Next month will see the commemoration in Israel of the tragic events of October 7, 2023. For Israelis, that day has taken on a degree of sanctity. It is seen as an event that was unprecedented, unforeseen and unconnected to all that came before. To look for causes, beyond antisemitism and military and political culpability or incompetence, is to question the sacred. To link it to one hundred years of war against Palestine is to provide succor to the barbarians at the gate.
Israeli media platforms – the webpages, the rolling news channels – provide a constantly updated count of …
It was good to hear that voice again. A voice of provoking interest that pitter patters, feline across a parquet, followed by the usual devastating conclusion. Julian Assange’s last public address was made in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. There, he was a guest vulnerable to the capricious wishes of changing governments. At Belmarsh Prison in London, he was rendered silent, his views conveyed through visitors, legal emissaries and his family.
The hearing in Strasbourg on October 1, organised by the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the …
Is it acceptable for Israel to wipe Palestine and Palestinians off the map? On 5 November 2024, Americans have an opportunity to signal whether genocide is anathema for the majority of its citizens.
So, how can Americans signal their abhorrence for genocide?
Americans have been locked in a pattern of voting for the political duopoly: either wing of the business party. It is widely held that on most major matters there is little to separate the Democrats and Republicans. And this has led to many Americans voting based on whichever party is perceived to be the lesser evil.
Left-liberals plea every four years that this really is the most important election ever and time to hold our noses and send a Democrat to the White House. The manifest destiny of US world leadership, we are told, is at stake, as is our precious democracy which we have so generously been exporting abroad.
Let’s leave aside the existential threats of climate change or nuclear war. However important, these issues are not on the November 5 ballot. Nor are they addressed in even minimally meaningful ways by the platforms of …
When I was about seven years old I used to play a “let’s pretend” baseball game in our backyard. I laid out 4 rags I’d gotten from the garage and placed them in a diamond form which represented the bases. The bases were about 20 feet apart. Then I looked at our house and took my batting stance and let my imagination take over. The imaginary scene is no doubt familiar to many of you. It is the last of the 9th inning, we are losing by three runs. …
There is little substantive difference between the Republicans and Democrats; they are both corporate dominated and controlled parties. As futile as lesser evilism is, it is also futile to talk about there being a lesser evilism between the two utterly dominant political parties in the United States.
Anura Kumara Dissanayake, known with convenient laziness as AKD, became Sri Lanka’s latest president after a runoff count focusing on preferential votes. The very fact that it went to a second count with a voter turnout of 77% after a failure of any candidate to secure a majority was itself historic, the first since Sri Lankan independence in 1948.
AKD’s presidential victory tickles and excites the election watchers for various reasons. He does not hail from any of the dynastic families that have treated rule and the presidential office as electoral real …
For sure since its 2023 invasion Russia has been taking a horrific amount of Ukrainian lives and causing a vast amount of injuries as most all wars do, however the constant and much longer ongoing killing and injuring during the Ukrainian civil war since the overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014, has been entirely and utterly unmentioned in the hegemonic media of the West (as witnessed by this writer, who has been following this absence daily in both internet and television).
For example, although the present Ukrainian Government has been shelling Donbas since 2014, killing civilians including children. …
The paper's disinformation is making waves only now, after it printed claims based on forged Hamas documents. But the JC has been peddling falsehoods for years.
by Jonathan Cook / September 30th, 2024
Britain’s best-known Jewish newspaper has found itself thrust into the centre of an embarrassing and long-overdue storm over its involvement with the shadowy manoeuvrings of the pro-Israel lobby.
It raises questions about the degree to which parts of the British media are – inadvertently or otherwise – colluding in Israeli disinformation.
The 180-year-old Jewish Chronicle, or JC as it is now known, lost four of its big-name columnists on Sunday, after it was revealed that the paper had published a story based on a forged document concerning Israel’s war on Gaza. Jonathan Freedland, …
by Black Alliance for Peace / September 30th, 2024
The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) urges the leaders of the nations of the Americas to oppose the upcoming United Nations’ decision to renew the Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS) in Haiti for another 12 months. Additionally, we call on these regional leaders to challenge the United States’ proposal to convert this MSS into a full-fledged UN Peacekeeping mission by 2025.
On October 16, 2022, the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) sent a letter urging the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation to “respect Haitian sovereignty …
As another October approaches, the beautiful season of colors begins here in New England. Call it October’s Surprise Party. The turning leaves with all their colors come to announce the earth’s glory, the possibility of peace and happiness for all.
Yet as the month transpires and November nears, I think we might expect what for many will be the unexpected, as Bob Dylan reminds us with “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Listen: “I heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a warnin’/I heard the roar of a wave that could drown …
Justin Trudeau justified the brutal killing of the leader of a Lebanese political party on the grounds Canada lists his organization as “terrorist”.
On Friday Israel leveled six large apartment buildings in the Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut with some 80 bombs weighing 2,000 to 4,000 pounds each. Dropped by US-made F-15 fighter jets, the US-made BLU-109 “bunker-busters” incinerated an unknown number.
In response to this act of state terror Trudeau posted, “Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has been killed. He was the leader of a …
The 2020 election saw more than $1 billion in ‘dark money’ pending at the federal level, a massive sum driven by an explosion of secret donations boosting Democrats in a historically expensive cycle. That’s according to an estimate from OpenSecrets. The billion-dollar sum includes a whopping $660 million in donations from opaque political nonprofits and shell companies to outside groups.
In many prior years, most of the dark money had been going to Republicans, but now this has apparently …
In 2017, Macron was marketed by the media as a new product. He was elected without a program, solely on the argument that he represented the “new world,” breaking away from the old political class. Seven years later, Macron is resurrecting the worst aspects of the old world, amidst increasing fascization and overt authoritarianism, having shattered the last illusions of representative democracy.
Michel Barnier: A Political Dinosaur
After a prolonged indecision over several candidates for Prime Minister, Macron ultimately chose Michel Barnier, thereby sidelining Bernard Cazeneuve and Xavier Bertrand, other contenders for the role. Michel …
Father, husband, son, brother, uncle, nephew, grandson, refugee, changling, between Viet Nam and America, writer, a voice, silenced, how many faces does it take?
by Paul Haeder / September 30th, 2024
Serendipity, picking Viet Thanh Nyugen’s memoir, A Man with Two Faces as the main book for the memoir writing class I am teaching. Last time it was Liar’s Club and Wild and other things to haunt the student with other writers’ haunting memoirs.
Mary Karr and Cheryl Strayed, and the students learned about all sorts of ins and outs tied to those two women’s memoirs. There is countless ink on Mary and Cheryl and endless YouTube uploads of them talking, being interviewed and giving memoir writing tips to selected and wide audiences.
The ongoing Israeli operation against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia group so dominant in Lebanon, is following a standard pattern. Ignore base causes. Ignore context. Target leaders, and target personnel. See matters in conventional terms of civilisational warrior against barbarian despot. Israel, the valiant and bold, fighting the forces of darkness.
The entire blood woven tapestry of the Middle East offers uncomfortable explanations. The region has seen false political boundaries sketched and pronounced by foreign powers, fictional countries proclaimed, and entities brought into being on the pure interests of powers in Europe. These empires produced shoddy cartography in the name of the …
Israel is genociding the Palestinians one neighborhood at the time, one hospital at the time, one school at the time, one refugee camp at the time, one ‘safe zone’ at the time – Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt, 10 August 2024
One would expect that human rights organisations would spring into action during an impending or unfolding genocide – the ultimate violation of human rights. Maybe human rights NGOs actions should be proportional to the level of the crimes they are concerned with. Thus, the more killing, torture, arbitrary imprisonment, bombing…, etc., that is plainly evident, the more action one would …
by Dissident Voice Communications / September 28th, 2024
Seems Germany is doing whatever it can to descend into increasing irrelevance as a state. A video was circulated on social media showing German police chasing a boy, said to be 10-years-old, carrying a Palestinian flag during a pro-Palestinian protest in Berlin. Activists stated that the child had been detained. The child’s fate or whether he has been released is, at present, unconfirmed.
It was a shock to some of us progressives when Liz Cheney—once a rising, strong Republican star in the U.S. House—recently declared she was endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president, and would campaign and spend millions on it in battleground states.
As Cheney put it after a speech at Duke University: “Those of us who believe in the defense of our democracy and the defense of our Constitution and the survival of our Republic have a duty in this election cycle to come together and to put those things above politics.”
But even more mind-blowing to us (and Democratic …
Joint Statement from Veterans For Peace and Move to Amend
by Veterans for Peace / September 28th, 2024
Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has produced increasing calls for an immediate ceasefire, while a pro-Israel, U.S.-based group has waged an increasing war on democracy with little public scrutiny and no end in sight.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is one of the most politically and electorally influential groups in this country. They have bombarded our “democratic” system spending over $100 million just in 2024 to punish opponents of Israeli policies, including the military assault on Gaza that’s claimed over 40,000 deaths and displaced 2.3 million people.
Our democracy has always been incomplete at best, but peoples’ movements have won …
In recent days, Donald Trump and his Republican running mate, JD Vance, have doubled down on their false and defamatory claims about legally-admitted Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, thus churning up widespread fears, bomb threats, and school evacuations. Claiming that these migrants were destroying the American “way of life,” Trump promised that, if elected, he would order massive deportations. This statement echoed his astonishing promise, made during the 2024 campaign and previously, to seize and deport between 15 and 20 million immigrants.
Nativist agitation has a long, sordid history in the United States. In the 1850s, large numbers …
The Prince of Eternia Promised Transformation ... With a Dash of Body Dysmorphia
by Justin Kolber / September 28th, 2024
Sure, Mattel already had Barbie, but after the colossal success of the Star Wars action figure lines, they demanded to reverse engineer a boy’s toy. As the Masters of the Focus Group, my catchphrase was meticulously crafted. The most commonly argued-over word of little boys? Power. “No, I have the power!” “No, it’s my power.” My cartoon show …
Adivasi (Indigenous) people have organized mass protests across India to denounce forced evictions from their forests to make way for tiger reserves.
Thousands of people facing eviction from their villages, and some already evicted, joined the protests last week and this week at several of the country’s most famous tiger reserves – including Nagarhole, Udanti-Sitanadi, Kaziranga, Rajaji, and Indravati. Many more protests are planned.
