Just International

BMA cancelled me , and sparked off a smear campaign. Please sign and circulate CAMPAIGN letter below

Dear Friends

Some of you might know that the BMA cancelled me as opening keynote speaker for the BMA Medical Student Leaders annual meeting on 4 April 2025. This cancellation was accompanied by a smear campaign against me, in which they justified their actions by rehashing my accidentally watching an antisemitic video more  than 10 years ago.  This has now spilled over to the Telegraph publishing a toxic article last week defaming Medical Aid for Palestinians by innuendo.

Of course, the real elephant in the room is my over four decades of wholehearted support for the Palestinians, and I am not going to stop, come what may.

Please read the letter written on my behalf by CAMPAIGN (the Campaign against Misrepresentation in Public Affairs, Information and the News), that spells out clearly what this is all about.

Please open the link below and sign the letter to show your support against silencing me and so many other people who speak up against the historic and ongoing injustice and cruelty against the Palestinians. The genocide and impending ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the apartheid in the West Bank and the exile of 7 million Palestinian refugees for 77 years can only happen by silencing voices who speak up for them and humanise them. The first step to genocide is dehumanisation. Those accusing me of antisemitism and linking me with the Ku Klux Clan know full well I am neither!

Link for reading and signing the CAMPAIGN letter:

https://www.campain.org/open-letter-to-the-bma

Please circulate the letter far and wide.

Every signature sends a message to the Palestinians that we are with them on their painful journey and our support is unwavering. Every signature also sends a message to the silencing machinery that we defy them and will speak up against injustice and misrepresentation.

Thank you and with very best wishes

Swee Ang, Honorary Patron and Co-Founder of Medical Aid for Palestinians

12 April 2025

French Contradictions: Macron’s Palestine Play – Too Little, Too Late?

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vehement opposition to a Palestinian state aligns perfectly with a long-standing Zionist ideology that has consistently viewed the establishment of a Palestinian state as a direct threat to Israel’s very foundation as a settler colonial project.

Thus, the mere existence of a Palestinian state with clearly defined geographical boundaries would inevitably render the state of Israel, which pointedly remains without internationally recognized borders, a state confined to a fixed physical space.

At a time when Israel continues to occupy significant swathes of Syrian and Lebanese territory and relentlessly pursues its colonial expansion to seize even more land, the notion of Israel genuinely accepting a sovereign Palestinian state is utterly inconceivable.

This reality is not a recent development; it has always been the underlying truth. This, in essence, reveals that the decades-long charade of the “two-state solution” was consistently a mirage, meticulously crafted to peddle illusions to both Palestinians and the broader international community, fostering the false impression that Israel was finally serious about achieving peace.

Therefore, it came as no surprise that Netanyahu reacted with considerable fury to French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent announcement of France’s intention to recognize the state of Palestine next June.

In a phone call with Macron on Tuesday, April 15, Netanyahu predictably resorted to his familiar nonsensical rhetoric, outrageously equating the establishment of a Palestinian state with rewarding “terrorism.”

And, with equal predictability, he trotted out the well-worn and unsubstantiated claims about an Iranian connection. “A Palestinian state established a few minutes away from Israeli cities would become an Iranian stronghold of terrorism,” Netanyahu’s office declared in a statement.

Meanwhile, Macron, with a familiar balancing act, reiterated his commitment to Israeli “security,” while tepidly emphasizing that the suffering in Gaza must come to an end. Of course, in a more just and reasonable world, Macron should have unequivocally stressed that it is Palestinian security, indeed their very existence, that is acutely at stake, and that Israel, through its relentless violence and occupation, constitutes the gravest threat to Palestinian existence and, arguably, to global peace.

Sadly, such a world remains stubbornly out of reach.

Considering Macron’s and France’s unwavering and often obsequious support for Israel throughout the years, particularly since the onset of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, some might cautiously welcome Macron’s statement as a potentially positive shift in policy.

However, it is imperative to caution against any exaggerated optimism, especially at a time when entire Palestinian families in Gaza are being annihilated in the ongoing Israeli genocide as these very words are read. It is an undeniable truth that France, like many other Western governments, has played a significant role in empowering, arming, and justifying Israel’s heinous crimes in Gaza.

For France to genuinely reverse its long-standing position, if indeed that is the current trajectory, it will require far more than symbolic and ultimately empty gestures.

Palestinians are, understandably, weary and disillusioned with symbolic victories, hollow rhetoric, and insincere gestures.

The recent recognitions of the state of Palestine by Ireland, Norway, and Spain in May 2024 did offer a fleeting spark of hope among Palestinians, suggesting a potential, albeit limited, shift in Western sentiment that might exert some pressure on Israel to cease its devastating actions in Gaza.

Unfortunately, this initial and fragile optimism has largely failed to translate into broader and more meaningful European action.

Consequently, Macron’s recent announcement of France’s intention to recognize the state of Palestine in June has been met with a far more subdued and skeptical reaction from Palestinians.

While other European Union countries that have already recognized Palestine often maintain considerably stronger stances against the Israeli occupation, France’s record in this regard is notably weaker.

Furthermore, the very sincerity of France’s stated position is deeply questionable, given its ongoing and concerning suppression of French activists who dare to protest the Israeli actions and advocate for Palestinian rights within France itself.

These attacks, arrests, and the broader crackdown on dissenting political views within France hardly paint the picture of a nation genuinely prepared to completely alter its course on aiding and abetting Israeli crimes.

Moreover, there is a stark and undeniable contrast between the principled positions adopted by Spain, Norway, and Ireland and France’s steadfast backing of Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza from its very inception, a support underscored by Macron’s early and highly symbolic visit to Tel Aviv.

Macron was among the first world leaders to arrive in Tel Aviv following the war, while Palestinians in Gaza were already being subjected to the most unspeakable forms of violence imaginable.

During that visit, on October 24, 2023, he unequivocally reiterated, “France stands shoulder to shoulder with Israel. We share your pain, and we reaffirm our unwavering commitment to Israel’s security and its right to defend itself against terrorism.”

This raises a fundamental and critical question: how can France’s belated recognition of a Palestinian state be interpreted as genuine solidarity while it simultaneously remains a significant global supporter of the very entity perpetrating violence against Palestinians?

While any European recognition of Palestine is a welcome, if overdue, step, its true significance is considerably diminished by the near-universal recognition of Palestine within the global majority, particularly across the Global South, originating in the Middle East and steadily expanding worldwide.

The fact that France would be among the last group of countries in the world to formally recognize Palestine (currently, 147 out of 193 United Nations member states have recognized the State of Palestine), speaks volumes about France’s apparent attempt to belatedly align itself with the prevailing global consensus and, perhaps, to whitewash its long history of complicity in Israeli Zionist crimes, as Israel finds itself increasingly isolated and condemned on the international stage.

One can state with considerable confidence that Palestinians, particularly those enduring the unimaginable horrors of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, prioritize an immediate cessation of that genocide and genuine accountability for Israel’s actions far above symbolic acts of recognition that appear primarily aimed at bolstering France’s relevance as a global power player and a long-standing supporter of Israeli war crimes.

Finally, Macron, while reassuring Israel that its security remains paramount for the French government, must be reminded that his continued engagement with Benjamin Netanyahu is, in itself, a potential violation of international law. The Israeli leader is a wanted accused criminal by the International Criminal Court, and it is France’s responsibility, like that of the over 120 signatories to the ICC, to apprehend, not to appease, Netanyahu.

This analysis is not intended to diminish the potential significance of the recognition of Palestine as a reflection of growing global solidarity with the Palestinian people. However, for such recognition to be truly meaningful and impactful, it must emanate from a place of genuine respect and profound concern for the Palestinian people themselves, not from a calculated desire to safeguard the “security” of their tormentors.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

21 April 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

Pope Francis Dies After Final Appeal for Gaza Cease-Fire

By Countercurrents Collective

The Vatican announced Monday that Pope Francis has died at the age of 88, hours after he appeared at an Easter mass and appealed for an end to Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip.

The pope’s Easter address, read aloud by Archbishop Diego Ravelli, decried the “terrible conflict” in Gaza that “continues to cause death and destruction and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation.”

“I appeal to the warring parties: call a cease-fire, release the hostages, and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace!” said the message from the pope, an outspoken opponent of military conflict and war profiteersclimate destruction, and runaway economic inequality.

“In the face of the cruelty of conflicts that involve defenceless civilians and attack schools, hospitals, and humanitarian workers, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that it is not targets that are struck, but persons, each possessed of a soul and human dignity,” the pope’s address continued.

News of Pope Francis’ death came after a bout with double pneumonia left him hospitalized for more than a month. The Vatican did not specify a cause of death in its announcement.

Pope Francis was a true Christian who traversed the path of Jesus in its truest spirit. The whole world will miss his spiritual guidance

Xavier Abu Eid, a political scientist and former adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization, said Palestinians have lost a dear friend with the death of Francis, whom he described as a staunch defender of their right to self-determination.

“From a diplomatic perspective, he tried to have influence in the region as he did several visits to Arab countries,” Abu Eid told Al Jazeera, adding that the most famous picture of the pontiff was him standing by the Israeli wall that separates Jerusalem from Bethlehem.

“This was an incredible moment for so many people. I was there, and it was not part of the programme. It was his decision to stop by the wall. He just walked peacefully, and all looked how he stood by and prayed in a place that then became a pilgrimage site in Bethlehem,” he said.

“He kept the same position that [Pope] John Paul II had when the wall started to be built, where he said the Holy Land needed bridges and not walls. That was repeated by Pope Francis, who stood heavily for the right of the Palestinian people for self-determination,” he added.

21 April 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

Night in Gaza: A Living Nightmare

By Quds News Network

For the vast majority of civilians in Gaza, nighttime brings not rest, but horror—a relentless cycle of fear, pain, and uncertainty.

Nowhere feels safe. Not the remains of their homes, not the makeshift tents, not even the overcrowded displacement camps. As dusk falls over Gaza, people brace for what many describe as the most terrifying hours of the day.

“From 5 p.m. onwards, tank shelling intensifies,” local residents say. By 6 a.m., those who make it through the night wake to the deafening blasts of artillery, often unsure of where the missiles have landed—or who has survived.

Electricity has been cut for more than 18 months, leaving families into total darkness. There is no power, no light—only the sounds of drones, quadcopters, and bombardment.

“Night is like a nightmare,” says Ahmed Abu Saleh, a resident of Al-Maghazi camp. “It’s like we’re living inside a horror movie. Death is everywhere. Attacks, explosions, screams. People being burned alive. We hear it all.”

Before sleeping, Abu Saleh and his wife close the windows—not for privacy, but in fear. “We’re afraid a quadcopter might fly into our home,” he says. “We’ve seen them enter houses here in the camp, terrifying people even more, spying on us.”

His children, he adds, are haunted by the sound of drones. “They sleep next to me and their mother. They’re terrified. Night means bombs. Night means fear.”

Rania Abu Msameh shares a similar dread. “At night, we sleep not knowing whether we’ll wake up alive,” she says. “We all sleep in the same room. That way, we can hold each other, feel the same fear, and try to offer some comfort.”

“We wait for the morning,” she adds. “Because at least in the light, we can see where the strikes are happening. At night, we’re blind. We just hear the bombs, the Apache helicopters, the artillery shelling. The fire grows louder and closer.”

Daily life has narrowed to daylight hours. “We can’t move or do anything at night,” she says. “There’s no power, no safety. So we do everything while it’s still light. When the sun sets, we wait in the dark, helpless.”

For Gaza’s families, the night no longer offers rest—it only deepens the wounds of war.

20 April 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

Israel Uses Suicide Drones Against Gatherings of Displaced Families

By Quds News Network

In the early hours of April 17, four children were killed in a drone strike in central Gaza. Their burned and shredded bodies arrived at Shuhada’a Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah. According to eyewitnesses, they had been playing near tents set up for displaced families when an Israeli drone hovered overhead. Moments later, it exploded.

These aren’t ordinary drones. They’re designed to kill, not scout or surveil, but to identify human gatherings and detonate mid-air. These are suicide drones, or what Israel calls “loitering munitions.” Their use in Gaza marks a chilling evolution in the occupation’s warfare: impersonal, cost-effective, and lethal with minimal accountability.

Rotem L: A Weapon Built for Urban Mass Killings

In 2018, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) tested its “Rotem L” suicide drone in southern occupied Palestine. Built for dense urban environments like Gaza, this drone was developed specifically to target gatherings of people. It is small, fast, and deadly—designed to be operated by a single soldier. The entire system can be deployed in under a minute.

Carrying a warhead of 6.5 kilograms, the Rotem L drone flies silently for up to 45 minutes, seeking its target. Once locked, it crashes directly into human beings. It’s a flying bomb with AI-powered guidance and minimal oversight. It can be “recalled” or “re-routed,” giving Israeli operators plausible deniability when children are killed, yet often, it is not.

IAI didn’t stop with Rotem L. It also developed Harop—a kamikaze drone that blends the precision of a missile with the stealth of a drone—and the Green Dragon, a tactical loitering munition meant for small infantry units. These systems boast silent motors, long flight times, and precise targeting capabilities. But in Gaza, “precision” often translates into “plausible deniability” for war crimes.

A Drone for Every Soldier, A Death for Every Tent

What makes suicide drones especially dangerous is their convenience. They remove the need for pilots. Any soldier, with a few hours of training, can launch, steer, and kill. No chain of command, no delay, no cockpit hesitation. In Gaza, that translates to spontaneous attacks on gatherings, including refugee camps, aid queues, and family tents.

Israel claims its drones can distinguish faces. If that were true, then the decision to strike gatherings of displaced civilians becomes even more sinister. These drones are not “mistaken.” They are deliberate. Their victims are not “collateral damage.” They are targeted.

Since October 2023, suicide drones have increasingly buzzed over Gaza’s skies. Sometimes they watch, sometimes they kill. Their constant presence creates psychological terror. Fighters and civilians alike know they can turn deadly in an instant. No warning. No escape.

A War Crime Disguised as Innovation

International humanitarian law prohibits attacks that fail to distinguish between civilians and combatants. Suicide drones, by their very design, challenge this legal principle. They rely on sensors and algorithms to decide when to strike. But no sensor can measure innocence. No AI can differentiate between a child and a fighter when both are huddled under plastic sheets.

Legal scholars warn of growing accountability gaps: suicide drone strikes often occur without public oversight, clear chain of command, or external review. Civilian deaths are brushed off as “technical errors.” Investigations are rare, and when they do occur, they are internal and classified.

Israel’s deployment of suicide drones over displacement camps highlights how technology is being weaponized to obscure war crimes. With no cockpit footage to leak, no pilot testimony, and no accountability trail, drone warfare offers Israel a way to kill anonymously—and repeatedly.

Cheap, Lethal, and Exportable

Another reason for Israel’s increasing use of suicide drones is economic. Unlike jets and missiles that require imported components, drones like Rotem L are made in-house. They’re cheap to produce and can be launched in large numbers. Some drones can even be carried in a backpack, allowing entire infantry squads to field their own airstrikes.

International arms watchdogs have already criticized Israel’s drone exports. Several countries have canceled or reconsidered arms deals after seeing how these drones are used in Gaza. But instead of curbing production, Israel has doubled down, framing the use of suicide drones as “precision warfare.”

The results, however, speak for themselves: mass death, destroyed families, and a generation of Gazan children growing up in the shadow of buzzing machines that rain death without warning.

Drones Don’t “Miss”—They Are Directed to Kill

Israel’s propaganda machine insists that its drone strikes are surgical. But the images from Gaza contradict this. Charred children. Shredded tents. Burned family members who were simply seeking shelter.

The claim of “precision” is a smokescreen. In reality, suicide drones are part of a broader strategy to erode Gaza’s social fabric—to make even moments of rest or play a potential death sentence. By normalizing this new method of warfare, Israel is writing a new chapter in the playbook of modern war crimes.

20 April 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

From the desk of Helena Cobban

Hi there–

I hope you’re well? Another tumultuous week– and yet another totally horrendous week for the people of Gaza. They have now passed seven weeks since the Israeli military slapped a total, wall-to-wall ban on the entry of any goods, even basic necessities, into the Gaza Strip.

That blockade– and the repeated, extremely deadly assaults from air, land, and sea the Israelis have undertaken against Gaza over the past month– have been complete violations of the agreement the Israeli government and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) signed on January 15, which stipulated an 18-week period of ceasefire with each successive 6-week period seeing additional relief for Gaza’s hard-pressed population along with the release of additional numbers of captives by each side.

Israel has also, meanwhile, pushed the survivors among Gaza’s once- 2.3. million people into ever smaller zones within Gaza. On the UN-OCHA map here (click on it to see it better, or download the whole PDF here), Gaza’s Palestinians are now forbidden from entering all the zones shaded purple or red.

Where is international law, you may ask?

Where are the Geneva Conventions?

Where are international institutions like the United Nations, a body that was born from the defeat of the largest-scale perpetrator of genocide ever seen in the 20th century?

The United State, under most of its presidents in recent times including former Pres. Biden, has frequently used Washington’s privileged position within the U.N. to openly flout international law and to give “ironclad” support to Israel as it has also done the same.

Pres. Trump is now taking that scofflawery to totally unprecedented new levels. In international affairs as in domestic affairs he has taken a wrecking ball to institutions and norms that, while never perfect, have nonetheless proved their value over time and were previously capable of improvement.

Here within the U.S., the long-established norms of constitutional government seem to mean nothing to trump. The NYT columnist Ezra Klein– never a firebrand– phrased it well in this hard-hitting column today about the fate of deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia:

To the Trump administration, Abrego Garcia is not a mistake. He is a liability, and he is a test. A test of their power to do this to anyone. A test of whether the loophole they believe they have found — that if they can get you on a plane, they can hustle you beyond our laws and leave you in the grips of the kind of gulags they wish they had here.

They are not ashamed of this. They are not denying their desire to do it to more people.
This is how dictatorships work. Trump has always been clear about who he is and the kind of power he wants. Now he is using that power.

And everyone around him — including Marco Rubio, Pam Bondi, Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem — is defending his right to wield that power.

There is a clear, open gleefulness in the way Trump (and his foot-soldier Salvador’s President Bukele) talk about what they have done to Abrego Garcia– and to untold scores of other immigrants herded off to Bukele’s mega-prisons. This gleefulness is shocking and deeply unsettling. It is also deeply familiar to anyone who has followed the way Israeli military commanders, Defense Ministers, and foot-soldiers all openly brag about the atrocities they have already committed in Gaza, and the future ones they’re planning.

The cruelty and the open and sadistic displays of it are the point. It is a clear attempt to terrorize the rest of the public into submission.

Four years ago, I spent some months on a project to track the earliest years of the attempts that a number of White, West-European polities pursued to build sprawling empires that for the first time in human history were transoceanic and thus reliant on excellent command of shipbuilding, navigation– and naval gunnery. The first polity to launch such a project was not Spain, but Portugal. In 2021 I summarized my understanding of that effort in this piece, published free on Medium.

In a later piece I summarized the new features that building a transoceanic empire– as opposed to the kind of land-based empire that many polities have built throughout history– now allowed. Key among them was its “hit and run” capability: The people who ran these new kinds of empire no longer had to establish mechanisms that would allow their own people live alongside the peoples they had conquered. They could– and did– genocide the Indigenes wholesale, force them into slavery, and if too many of them objected the European rulers could simply round them up in large numbers and trans-ship them to a distant corner of the empire to provide unpaid slave labor there…

Sounds familiar, huh.

… Anyway, this morning I decided to reconnect with that work I did back in 2021, drawing a straight-ish line back from the cruelty that we see Trump and Netanyahu deploying against Brown people today to the cruelty the Portuguese deployed against Indigenous communities on the shores of the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, in the early 1500s.

I think it’s important to recognize that the deployment (and open celebration) of cruelty against non-White people is a clear feature of all the White empires that have dominated the global balance for the past 500 years. It is not a bug.

Anyway, here’s the piece I wrote on my Globalities platform about this, today. (The Bab El Mandeb Straits were a key location back in 1506 CE, for what it’s worth, just as they are today.)

I hope this essay might energize all of us to work harder to end the stranglehold that the tiny, less than 12 percent of humanity who are of West European origin have exercised over world affairs for far too long…

Maybe, just maybe, with Trump’s latest, deranged economic war against the rest of the world, we might hope to see that stranglehold being broken soon?

But Gaza is still the fulcrum. The suffering there is unbearable. And it is all being fueled and actively supported by my government, using my tax dollars to destroy the lives of my friends.

20 April 2025

US Concentration Camps

By Chris Hedges

“Once a regime starts to send people to concentration camps — including those in El Salvador — it creates a system of detention that eschews due process and disappears citizens into black holes.

16 Apr 2025 – Our offshore concentration camps, for now, are in El Salvador and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But don’t expect them to remain there. Once they are normalized, not only for U.S.-deported immigrants and residents, but U.S. citizens, they will migrate to the homeland. It is a very short leap from our prisons, already rife with abuse and mistreatment, to concentration camps, where those held are cut off from the outside world — “disappeared” — denied legal representation and crammed into fetid, overcrowded cells.

Prisoners in the camps in El Salvador are forced to sleep on the floor or in solitary confinement in the dark. Many suffer from tuberculosis, fungal infections, scabies, severe malnutrition and chronic digestive illnesses. The inmates, including over 3,000 children, are fed rancid food. They endure beatings. They are tortured, including by water-boarding or being forced naked into barrels of ice-cold water, according to Human Rights Watch. In 2023, the State Department described imprisonment as “life-threatening,” and that was before the Salvadoran government declared a “state of exception” in March 2022. The situation has been greatly “exacerbated,” the State Department notes, by the “addition of 72,000 detainees under the state of exception.” Some 375 people have died in the camps since the state of exception was established, part of El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s “war on gangs,” according to the local human rights group Socorro Jurídico Humanitario.

These camps — the “Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo” (Center for Terrorism Confinement) known as CECOT, to which U.S. deportees are being sent, holds some 40,000 people — are the model, the harbinger of what awaits us.

Metal worker and union member Kilmar Ábrego García, who was abducted in front of his five-year-old son on March 12, 2025, was accused of being a gang member and sent to El Salvador. The Supreme Court agreed with District Judge Paula Xinis who found that García’s deportation was an “illegal act.” Trump officials blamed their deportation of García on an “administrative error.” Xinis ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” his return. But that does not mean he is coming back.

“I hope you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States,” Bukele told the press at a White House meeting with Trump. “How can I smuggle — how can I return him to the United States? Like, I smuggle him into the United States? Well, of course I’m not going to do it…the question is preposterous.”

This is the future. Once a segment of the population is demonized — including U.S. citizens Trump labels “homegrown criminals” — once they are stripped of their humanity, once they embody evil and are seen as an existential threat, the end result is that these human “contaminants” are removed from society. Guilt or innocence, at least under the law, is irrelevant. Citizenship offers no protection.

“The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man,” writes Hannah Arendt in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “This was done, on the one hand, by putting certain categories of people outside the protection of the law and forcing at the same time, through the instrument of denationalization, the nontotalitarian world into recognition of lawlessness; it was done, on the other, by placing the concentration camp outside the normal penal system, and by selecting inmates outside the normal judicial procedure in which a definite crime entails a predictable penalty.”

Those who build concentration camps build societies of fear. They issue relentless warnings of mortal danger, whether from immigrants, Muslims, traitors, criminals or terrorists. Fear spreads slowly, like a sulfurous gas, until it infects all social interactions and induces paralysis. It takes time. In the first years of the Third Reich, the Nazis operated ten camps with about 10,000 inmates. But once they managed to crush all competing centers of power — labor unions, political parties, an independent press, universities and the Catholic and Protestant churches — the concentration camp system exploded. By 1939, when World War II broke out, the Nazis were running over 100 concentration camps with some one million inmates. Death camps followed.

Those that create these camps give them wide publicity. They are designed to intimidate. Their brutality is their selling point. Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, was not, as Richard Evans writes in “The Coming of The Third Reich” “an improvised solution to an unexpected problem of overcrowding in the goals, but a long-planned measure that the Nazis had envisioned virtually from the very beginning. It was widely publicized and reported in the local, regional and national press, and served as a stark warning to anyone contemplating offering resistance to the Nazi regime.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, wearing plainclothes and circling neighborhoods in unmarked cars, kidnap legal residents such as Mahmoud Khalil. These abductions replicate those I witnessed on streets of Santiago, Chile under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, or in San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital, during the military dictatorship.

ICE is swiftly evolving into our homegrown version of the Gestapo or The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). It oversees 200 detention facilities. It is a formidable domestic surveillance agency that has amassed data on most Americans, according to a report compiled by The Center of Privacy & Technology at Georgetown.

“By reaching into the digital records of state and local governments and buying databases with billions of data points from private companies, ICE has created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time,” the report reads. “In its efforts to arrest and deport, ICE has — without any judicial, legislative or public oversight — reached into datasets containing personal information about the vast majority of people living in the U.S., whose records can end up in the hands of immigration enforcement simply because they apply for driver’s licenses; drive on the roads; or sign up with their local utilities to get access to heat, water and electricity.”

Those abducted, including the Turkish national and PhD student at Tufts University, Rümeysa Öztürk, are accused of amorphous behaviour such as “engaging in activities in support of Hamas.” But this is a subterfuge, accusations no more real than the invented crimes under Stalinism where people were accused of belonging to the old order — Kulaks or members of the petit bourgeoisie — or were convicted for plotting to overthrow the regime as Trotskyites, Titoites, agents of capitalism or saboteurs, known as “wreckers.” Once a category of people is targeted, the crimes they are charged with, if they are charged at all, are almost always fabrications.

Concentration camp inmates are severed from the outside world. They are disappeared. Erased. They are treated as if they never existed. Nearly all efforts to obtain information about them are met with silence. Even their death, should they die in custody, becomes anonymous, as if they were never born.

Those who run concentration camps, as Hannah Arendt writes, are people without the curiosity or the mental capacity to form opinions. They don’t, she notes, “even know any more what it means to be convinced.” They simply obey, conditioned to act as “perverted animals.” They are intoxicated by the God-like power they have to turn human beings into quivering flocks of sheep.

The goal of any concentration camp system is to destroy all individual traits, to mold people into fearful, docile, obedient masses. The first camps are training grounds for prison guards and ICE agents. They master the brutal techniques designed to infantilize inmates, an infantilization that soon warps the wider society.

The 250 purported Venezuelan gang members shipped to El Salvador in defiance of a federal court were denied due process. They were summarily herded onto planes, which ignored the judge’s order to turn back, and once they arrived, were stripped, beaten and had their heads shaved. Shaved heads are a feature of all concentration camps. The excuse is lice. But of course it is about depersonalization and why they are in uniforms and identified by numbers.

The autocrat openly revels in the cruelty. “I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!”

Those that build concentration camps are proud of them. They show them off to the press, or at least the sycophants posing as the press. Secretary for Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who posted a video of herself visiting the El Salvadoran prison, used the shirtless and head shaved inmates as a stage prop for her threats against immigrants. If fascism does one thing well, it is spectacle.

First they come for the immigrants. Then they come for the activists on foreign student visas on college campuses. Then they come for green card holders. Next are the U.S. citizens who fight Israeli genocide or the creeping fascism. Then they come for you. Not because you broke the law. But because the monstrous machine of terror needs a constant supply of victims to sustain itself.

Totalitarian regimes survive by eternally battling mortal, existential threats. Once one threat is eradicated, they invent another. They mock the rule of law. Judges, until they are purged, may decry this lawlessness, but they have no mechanism to enforce their rulings. The Department of Justice, turned over to the Trump sycophant Pam Bondi, is, as in all autocracies, designed to block enforcement, not facilitate it. There are no legal impediments left to protect us. We know where this is going. We have seen it before. And it is not good.

______________________________________________

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief.

21 April 2025

Source: transcend.org

“They’re Kissing My Ass”: Trump Says Tariffs Are Going Great, Promises Duty on Pharmaceuticals

By Alex Galbraith

Trump has a rosy take on the early days of his ‘war on the world.’ “I’m telling you these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They’re dying to make a deal.”

8 Apr 2025 – Donald Trump‘s tariff scheme has upended the stock market and cast the United States’ diplomatic ties into doubt, but you wouldn’t know it if you listened to the president.

Neither hide nor hair of the roiling economy made it into Trump’s speech before the National Republican Congressional Committee on Tuesday night. The president donned a tux to tell the GOP bigwigs his reciprocal tariff plan was going swimmingly.After briefly calling the tit-for-tat over import duties a “war on the world,” Trump repeatedly assured his party that everything was peachy. On the subject of peaches, he said that U.S. trade partners were waiting in line to pucker up.”I’m telling you these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass,” he said. “They’re dying to make a deal.”In his winding speech, the president called Adam Schiff a pencil-necked geek with a “watermelon head,” repeatedly insinuated that the 2020 election was stolen and told the assembled small gov crowd that states were merely agents of the federal government. But few of Trump’s discursive asides carried as much weight as the announcement that he planned to levy further tariffs on imported pharmaceuticals.”We’re gonna tariff our pharmaceuticals and once we do that they’re going to come rushing back,” he said. “The advantage we have over everybody is that we’re the big market. We’re going to be announcing very shortly a major tariff on pharmaceuticals.”Trump also touted his 104% tariff on imported Chinese goods, refusing the framing that tariffs are taxes. (A tariff is, by definition, a tax.) He stuck to his talking point that America was being “ripped off” by countries that imported less from the U.S. than they exported to the U.S.

“They’ve ripped us off left and right, but now it’s our turn to do the ripping,” he shared, before saying that China would pay a “big number” to the Treasury. “Don’t let them keep telling you that this is a tax on our people. I hate that.

‘They are kissing my ass’: Trump says countries are pleading to negotiate tariffs

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Alex Galbraith is Salon’s nights & weekends editor.

21 April 2025

Source: transcend.org

Hailing Francesca Albanese’s Second Three-Year Term

By Prof. Richard Falk

16 Apr 2025 – Over time, the role of the Special Rapporteur as established by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate and report upon Israel violations of human rights in Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967, has gradually assumed increasing importance as a source of reliable information and enlightening analysis. The position of SR is both unpaid and demanding, and is aggravated recently by often harmful and always hurtful defamatory attacks from pro-Israeli NGOs, most notably UN Watch based in Geneva and NGO Monitor with headquarters in New York City. It is a fact that the SR influence has grown over time as have the intensity of these attacks on the SR truth-bearing messengers. The mean spirited attacks seem to have as their main purpose a diversion of attention away from the messageMs. Albanese’s experience was preceded by that of the SR signatories of the support letter below. Our milder although similar experience of defamation is set forth in the course of a book entitled Protecting Human Rights in Occupied Palestine: Working through the United Nations, Clarity Press, 2022,  with a foreword by Ms. Albanese.

This double dynamic has reached its climax during the first three-year term of Francesca Albanese tenure as SR that happened to coincide with Israel’s genocidal response to the October 7 Hamas-led attack, which instead of opposition elicited the active complicity of North American and leading European governments and the passive complicity of Arab and many other governments around the world, with a few notable exceptions, including South Africa, Colombia, and Chile. In this period, the excellence of Ms. Albanese’s SR reports made a major impact on civil society awareness. They added professional competence as to why allegations of Israeli genocide were well-grounded in law and fact. Her energetic and courageous high visibility talks in all parts of the world at the invitation of a great variety of organizations made her a prime target of vicious smears by Zionist support groups, especially in the West, characterizing her without a shred of evidence as ‘a notorious antisemite.’ As with Israeli bombing of Gaza, Israel’s acknowledged intention is not to be accurate but to inflict maximum damage. In this case, the battlefields are symbolic yet the blood of victims spills.

This pattern of increased reliance on SR reports also reflects an awareness of Israel’s formidable, sophisticated, and well-funded efforts to shape the public discourse on Israel/Palestine, and the acceptance by the most influential Western media platforms of a one-sided approach that gives consistent priority to Israel’s spin on developments in Gaza and the West Bank. The separate reports of the SR to the Human Rights Council and General Assembly each year have become the go-to source trustworthy relevant information and analysis for anyone seeking objective assessments of the ongoing  Palestinian ordeal, now reaching a peak with the connivance of the Trump presidency and a totally subservient Congress.

We welcome this opportunity to congratulate Francesco Albanese on the renewal of her second three-year term, and take note of the shameful effort of Israel, US, Germany, and a few other UN members to end the Mandate concerned with Occupied Palestine altogether. Given the personal abuse to which she was subjected, it is a tribute to Ms. Albanese commitment and courage that she is willing to endure further abuse for another three years.

We celebrate her achievements, and join with those who feel that a Nobel Peace Prize would be a highly deserved recognition of her contributions to peace and justice to so recognize her achievements. Some are even suggesting that her credentials of service to the UN while under fire make her an ideal candidate to become the first female Secretary General of the Organization. The UN needs a person that can take the heat of abusive criticism at a time when the UN’s most powerful member is an undisguised opponent of internationalism and even cooperative problem-solving on a global scale. Given these realities it is almost inconceivable that such an inspirational choice will be made at the UN any time soon. Among other hurdles, it would only become technically possible in the highly unlikely event that the five permanent members of the Security Council gave their approval.

Should I ever be asked, Francesca would certainly receive my vote based on her extraordinary performance but also as an expression of my hopes for a stronger, more relevant UN in the future when called upon with a sense of urgency to stop genocide and uphold global security in the manner set forth in the UN Charter.

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SR Letter to Jürg Lauber

3 April 2025

To your excellency, Jürg Lauber, President of the Human Rights Council

We write as former Special Rapporteurs of the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967 with reference to the reappointment of Francesca Albanese to this position. We are conversant with her work since becoming Special Rapporteur, which we commend, and for Jürg Laubers the basis for this message of enthusiastic support for her reappointment, which we understand is scheduled to be voted on 4 April 2025.

We have learned that a small number of governmental members of the HRC have indicated their intention to vote against Ms. Albanese. We find this show of opposition to be irresponsible and harmful to the United Nations, which stands for excellence of performance combined with accuracy and objectivity of analysis. Ms. Albanese has been confronted with extreme behavior on the part of Israel, including flagrant instances of disregard of basic provisions of international humanitarian law, international human rights law, and the Genocide and Apartheid Conventions, as well as those obligations incumbent on an Occupying Power to extend protection to the civilian population of the Occupied society in all circumstances. With insight and careful research Albanese has called world attention to these patterns of wrongdoing as is her duty as Special Rapporteur.

Against this background of Israel’s lawlessness, Ms. Albanese, by her reports and public appearances has brought these patterns of Israeli violation of international law to the attention of millions all over the planet. She is trusted by the many of the most influential media platforms and is a frequent participant in webinars, academic conferences, and media events. Under the most difficult of circumstances, she is doing exactly what she is supposed to do as a UN SR. Having ourselves been attacked unfairly and inaccurately when similarly acting on behalf of the UN we feel great sympathy for our friend Francesca who has been mercilessly smeared and misrepresented in this unseemly effort by Israel and its partisans to shift attention from her message to her alleged lack of credibility as a messenger due to the diversionary slur of being a ‘virulent antisemite.’

As suggested, we not only ardently support reappointment, but believe the work of Ms Albanese should be formally acknowledged and praised by the top echelons of UN officials. In our judgment, she has received in the past insufficient support in carrying out difficult missions on behalf of the UN in her unpaid role as SR operating in a particularly dangerous atmosphere. She has the right to expect to be insulated from such irresponsible and false invective. We hope that you will be able to congratulate Francesca Albanese after she is reappointed tomorrow.

Respectfully yours,

John Dugard, Richard Falk and Michael Lynk

Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute.

21 April 2025

Source: transcend.org

Spain’s Prime Minister Leads the EU’s Rapprochement with China Despite Pressure from Washington

By Ahmed Adel

15 Apr 2025 –Xi recalled that China and the EU are “firm defenders” of free trade and that “there are no winners in a tariff war.”

Brussels is seeking to diversify relations with other powers due to the threat of economic recession. For this reason, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is leading the European Union’s rapprochement with China in an effort to expand markets and reduce the trade deficit. While Sánchez says the rapprochement “isn’t against anyone” and Beijing says it places bilateral ties “at the forefront,” Washington criticizes it.

“Spain is a deeply pro-European country that sees China as a partner of the European Union,” Sánchez assured Chinese President Xi Jinping during their meeting, where he emphasized that Spanish foreign policy “is not against anyone.”

Following the Spanish prime minister’s third official visit to China in just two years, the signing of two export protocols (on pork products and cherries) and various agreements on scientific, technological, educational, and film matters was announced. Previously, Sánchez met with representatives of major Chinese companies in the automotive, battery, and green energy sectors that he hoped would invest in Spain.

On the eve of Xi’s meeting with Sánchez, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian stated that bilateral relations with Spain are “at the forefront” of its ties with EU member states.

Under the current geopolitical conditions, political dialogue can be cultivated to strengthen the relationship between China and the EU.

The US-provoked tariff war and the reciprocal responses from China led to a global stock market collapse and investor panic, leading to US President Donald Trump announcing a temporary (90-day) suspension of tariffs on those countries (around 75) that requested negotiations with Washington. Faced with this new scenario, the EU, which on April 9 had approved the imposition of a series of 25% tariffs on nearly 1,700 US products, suspended its application for the same period and announced its willingness to enter negotiations.

“If negotiations are not satisfactory, our countermeasures will kick in,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen clarified.

21 April 2025

Source: transcend.org