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by Binoy Kampmark / December 9th, 2023
Bloodletting as form; murder as fashion. The ongoing campaign in Gaza by Israel’s Defence Forces continues without stalling and restriction. But the burgeoning number of corpses is starting to become a challenge for the propaganda outlets: How to justify it? Fortunately for Israel, the United States, its unqualified defender, is happy to provide cover for murder covered in the sheath of self-defence.
Such cover also takes the form of false fairness and forced balance. “We don’t have to choose between defending Israel and aiding Palestinian civilians,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote inanely in the Washington Post on October 31. …
by Dongsheng News / December 9th, 2023
The Age of Hypocrisy
by Greg Godels / December 9th, 2023
These are difficult, perilous, and frustrating times. Many cherished beliefs are coming unraveled. Many once-shared values are no longer shared. And distrust of unshakeable institutions is widespread.
Yet it was only a little more than three decades ago that North America and European intellectuals joined in acknowledging the triumph of the Western world’s “gift” to all: political and economic liberalism. For nearly half a century, Western liberalism had waged a “cold” war against the most serious challenge to its dominance. Apart from the fascist counter-revolution of the 1930s against political liberalism, no movement shook the Western liberal establishment and …
Enabled and Defended by Biden and Congress
by Ralph Nader / December 9th, 2023
The humiliation of the U.S. government, which is actively complicit in providing the weaponry, funding, and UN vetoes backing the Israeli government’s attack on the civilian Palestinians/Arabs in tiny Gaza, is in plain view daily. All in the name of the unasked American people and taxpayers.
Earlier this week, at a House of Representatives’ hearing, Trump toady Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) repeatedly assailed three University presidents with the question of would they discipline students calling for the genocide of Jews, without any evidence that this hateful speech is prevalent on campus.
Pursuing her …
by Vern Loomis / December 9th, 2023
It was such a bucolic setting. Even now, more than fifty years later, I can still see little Opie (Ron Howard) in his rolled-up jeans scrambling beside Andy; both carry fishing poles as they head to the lake. It introduced every episode of The Andy Griffith Show, along with that catchy whistled tune. It’s what first comes to mind when I think of fishing…but that’s just the first thing.
by Allen Forrest / December 9th, 2023
Getting the attention of those asleep.
by Binoy Kampmark / December 8th, 2023
Cunning, subtle, understated. Israeli policy in the Pacific has seen United Nations votes cast in its favour, the foreign policies of certain countries adjusted, and favours switched. While China may be considered the big, threatening beast competing alongside that large, clumsy figure called the United States, the small state of Israel is directing its expertise, and charm, in very specific ways in the Indo-Pacific.
When it came to voting for a nonbinding resolution in the United Nations General Assembly on the subject of a “humanitarian truce” regarding the conflict in Gaza in October, 14 countries were steadfastly opposed. Of those …
Right Wing and Left Wing Macro Social Psychology
by Bruce Lerro / December 8th, 2023
Orientation
Why study crowds, masses and movements?
It is tempting to imagine that as socialists we must know a great deal about crowds, masses, and in medieval thought individual meant inseparable, that is indivisible. People were defined as individuals by reference to the groups of which they were members. Group membership defined their very identity as individual units. Farr treats individualism as a product of the Renaissance and Reformation, stressing the emerging traditions of religious, political and economic liberalism. However, unlike Farr, Ivana Markova argues that it was monasticism and chivalry …
by Robert Hunziker / December 8th, 2023
COP28, the UN Conference of the Parties in oil-rich Dubai currently underway will not resolve the issue of oil and gas companies agreeing to slow down oil production. To the contrary, all signals point to an increase according to formal plans already laid out by the industry, as stated by the International Energy Agency. Reuters November 2023 headline says it all: “Global Fossil Fuel Production Plans Far Exceed Climate Targets”.
Greenhouse gas emissions will continue to rip roar, snort, huff and puff higher ever higher post COP28. It’s guaranteed. The oil companies insist upon it. And a new kid on the …
by Stuart Littlewood / December 8th, 2023
At Westminster the other day the UK Secretary of State for Defence (Grant Shapps) made a statement on military deployments to the Middle East which included questions and answers about the situation in Gaza. It was an opportunity for Shapps with help of pro-Zionist MPs to distort the facts to ‘justify’ Israel’s appalling crimes.
The following exchanges are taken from Hansard which, for those who don’t know, is the official and “substantially verbatim” report of what is said in the UK Parliament.
Martin Docherty-Hughes …
by Venezuelanalysis / December 8th, 2023
The unsolved border dispute between Venezuela and Guyana sparked renewed tensions in recent weeks. The two governments have engaged in a war of words, military presence has increased, as well as fears of US intervention.
The following infographic recaps the main chapters of the longstanding controversy over the resource-rich Essequibo Strip.
by Allen Forrest / December 8th, 2023
Is Chicken Little a Deep State operative?
by Steve Macek / December 8th, 2023
During the past three years, the country has seen a dramatic increase in book bans at public and K-12 school libraries and in rightwing pro-censorship activism, usually targeting books that address race, gender identity, or sexuality.
In Texas, Suzette Baker was fired from her job as director of a rural public library for refusing to withdraw books about racial justice and the lives of LGBTQ people from circulation. A mob of neo-fascist Proud Boys descended on a Downers Grove, Illinois, school board meeting to demand that school libraries under the district’s control remove …
by Survival International / December 8th, 2023
The Shompen live in the rainforests of Great Nicobar. If their forest and rivers are destroyed, they will be too. © ASI
Authorities in India have vowed to press ahead with a controversial mega-development project, despite experts’ warnings that it will destroy a unique uncontacted tribe.
The $5bn mega-port planned for the Indian Ocean island of Great Nicobar, plus associated ‘development’ such as a new city, defense base, industrial zones, airport and power station, will utterly destroy the Shompen people. They are one of India’s two tribes who shun contact …
by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East / December 8th, 2023
After months of research and analysis, CJPME published a landmark study highlighting the widespread problem of anti-Palestinian racism (APR) in Canada. Entitled, “Anti-Palestinian Racism in Canada: CJPME’s 2022 Report,” the report constitutes the first-ever, non-exhaustive study of APR in Canada, and exposes more than 500 examples of this form of racism in online written content from 2022.
Although the study focused exclusively on examples from 2022, the report acknowledges the huge uptick in incidents of anti-Palestinian racism in 2023. …
by Visualizing Palestine / December 7th, 2023
Israel’s repeated military assaults on Gaza have devastating consequences for children. Israel is not only killing Palestinian children at astonishing rates, but also killing the childhood of those who survive.
by Media Lens / December 7th, 2023
Left-progressive websites don’t always get it right. Take Media Lens, for example. In October, we discussed the corporate media invention of so-called ‘disinformation experts’. We lampooned the claim that although journalists are ‘working within profit-maximising, billionaire-owned, advertiser-dependent, government-subsidised media, they are nevertheless exposing “disinformation” without the slightest trace of bias’.
Last May, the BBC unveiled just such an initiative:
BBC Verify is transparency in action – fact-checking, verifying video, countering disinformation, analysing data and explaining complex stories in the pursuit of truth.
We took it for …
The Many Faces of the Lebanese Shiite Organization
by Dan Lieberman / December 7th, 2023
As part of a fact-finding mission to the Middle East in late 2007, one year after Hezbollah concluded a war with Israel, we spent a few days with Hezbollah. I knew that Hezbollah carried heavy baggage, could be threatening, and operated as a state within a state, but it never seemed, as bludgeoning reports insisted, an international terrorist organization. All of the few horrific actions involving Hezbollah have been tit-for-tat revenge attacks for Israeli murder of its cadres, such as the February 16, 1992, Israeli Apache AH64 helicopter missile attack on an automobile that killed Sheikh Abbas Musawi, the then …
Organisation or personality
by T.P. Wilkinson / December 7th, 2023
by T.P. WilkinsonThere have been recent elections in numerous principalities. The constellations by which governments — the outward and visible signs of obscured and conspiratorial power — have been formed since 2020 are not in themselves unique but have occurred with an intensity — I like here the German term Verdichtung, i.e. thickening or coagulation — perhaps unlike anything since the financial coup d‘etat that inaugurated the Great Depression (as it was called in the US).
In fact, one could date this phenomenon to …
by Vijay Prashad / December 7th, 2023
Malak Mattar (Palestine), A Life Stolen Before It Had Begun, 2023.
The indecency of the phrase ‘humanitarian pause’ is obvious. There is nothing humanitarian about a brief interlude between bouts of horrendous violence. There is no true ‘pause’, merely the calm before the storm continues. We are witnessing the bureaucratisation of immorality, the use of old words with great meaning (‘humanitarian’) and their reduction to new, empty phrases that betray their original meanings. Before the debris …
by Allen Forrest / December 7th, 2023
by Binoy Kampmark / December 6th, 2023
In most instances, the justice system of a liberal democracy presumes absence of arbitrary and cruel treatment by the State. Punishment, when levelled, is finite. It might see out the term of a convict’s natural life, but that would only be for the most extreme cases. Even then, the whiff of parole, while far off, might still be possible.
On being released, the usual assumptions apply. Time served is time done. Past punishment will not be revisited upon you; the State will not send its hounds and officers of the thin blue line after you. This would only happen in …
by Sayed Hasan / December 6th, 2023
As the genocide in Gaza resumes, it becomes ever more clear that the Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood”, launched by the Palestinian Resistance on October 7, and the events that followed, have not only destroyed the prestige of the Israeli army: they completely unmasked the hypocrisy of the West, who is not only silent but accomplice of the unprecedented massacres perpetrated against a defenseless and trapped civilian population, as well as the duplicity of most of the so-called Western “friends” of Palestine, be they political forces, media, Unions or associations.
by Allen Forrest / December 6th, 2023
Safe & Effective? – NOT ACCORDING TO THE PFIZER CONTRACT
South Africa – Pfizer contract
“…considering the relevant risks, uncertainties, limitations and challenges of the development, manufacture, commercialization and distribution of a novel COVID19 vaccine product, taking into account the following factors: actual and potential issues of safety and efficacy,…” (p 3)
“Purchaser acknowledges and agrees that (i) Pfizer’s efforts to develop and manufacture the Product are aspirational in nature and subject to significant risks and uncertainties,…” (p 8)
Albania Contract – (use “purchaser” as a …
by Binoy Kampmark / December 5th, 2023
The sequence of COP meetings, ostensibly a United Nations forum to discuss dramatic climate change measures in the face of galloping emissions, has now been shown for what it is: a luxurious, pampered bazaar for the very industries that fear a dip in their profits and ultimate obsolescence. Call it a drugs summit for narcotics distributors promoting clean-living; a convention for casino moguls promising to aid problem gamblers. The list of wicked analogies is endless.
Reading the material from the gathering that is known in its longer form as the United Nations Climate Change Conference, one could be forgiven for falling …
World Health Organization now says disease could be even deadlier than airstrikes in Gaza
by Kathy Kelly / December 5th, 2023
Speaking from a hospital ward about 50 meters from where a bomb had just exploded, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder raised his voice over sounds of children screaming. In a video posted on Twitter/X he emphasized that Gaza’s health care system is overwhelmed. Pointing at children packed into the ward of a hospital he said was operating at 200 per cent capacity, Elder insisted the hospital “cannot take more children with the wounds of war…with the burns, with the shrapnel littering their bodies, with the broken bones.”
Calling it a war on children, Elder warned that “inaction by those …
by Shawgi Tell / December 5th, 2023
Although they have been around for more than 30 years, and although they are frequently touted as being superior to public schools, the U.S Department of Education reports that between 2010-11 and 2021-22, an 11-year period, 2,315 charter schools failed and closed in the U.S.
That is a huge number of school closures in a short time frame. By any measure, it is hard to call such a phenomenon “successful.”
And this figure probably does not capture the real number of charter schools that have failed and closed over the years, leaving thousands of parents, students, teachers, education support staff, and …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / December 5th, 2023
This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.
— Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
What a year.
It feels as if government Grinches and corporate Scrooges have been working overtime to drain every last drop of joy, kindness and liberty from the world.
After endless months of being mired in political gloom and doom, we could all use a little Christmas cheer right now.
Unfortunately, …
by William T. Hathaway / December 5th, 2023
Now is the season when priests proclaim, “Peace on earth, goodwill towards men” and mainstream media soothe us with stories and images of kindness.
But why do peace and goodwill remain just dreams? Why is kindness so rare in the world today? Why is it limited to the personal sphere? Why is the wider world so cruel?
The root cause of this is capitalism, an intrinsically violent and harsh social-economic system that shapes us. By forcing people to compete for the essentials of life, it generates selfish, aggressive personalities. Individual accumulation is the priority rather than cooperative sharing.
But capitalism is not as …
by Rosalie Steward / December 5th, 2023
They didn’t have a choice, those infant twins abandoned into the river Tiber. We can only imagine what their Mother went through. What feelings would have washed the womb of the infants, when the Royal Mother knew that her babies would be murdered at birth by her uncle? The Palace servants were ordered to drown the newborns in the Tiber, but the river was in flood that day, so the basket was left to be washed away.
It scars the infant brain – the terror of abandonment, the terror of starvation. Before the conscious mind can make sense of pain, the …