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By Liz Theoharis

It was a moment somewhat like this, 30 years ago, that turned me into a biblical scholar. In the lead-up to the passage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, political and religious leaders quoted scripture to justify shutting down food programs and kicking mothers and their babies off public assistance. Those leaders, many of them self-described Christians, chose to ignore the majority of passages in the Bible that preached “good news” to the poor and promised freedom to those captive to injustice and oppression. Instead, they put forward unethical and ahistorical (mis)interpretations and (mis)appropriations of biblical texts to prop up American imperial power and punish the poor in the name of a warped morality.

Three decades later, the Trump administration and its theological apologists are working overtime, using Jesus’s name and the Bible’s contents in even more devastating rounds of immoral biblical (mis)references. In July, there was the viral video from the Department of Homeland Security, using the “Here I am, Lord. Send me” quotation from Isaiah — commonly cited when ordaining faith leaders and including explicit references to marginalized communities impacted by displacement and oppression — to recruit new agents for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, a job that now comes with a $50,000 signing bonus, thanks to Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s former pastor went even further in marrying the Bible to anti-immigrant hatred by saying, “Is the Bible in favor of these ICE raids?… The answer is yes.” He then added: “The Bible does not require wealthy Christian nations to self-immolate for the horrible crime of having a flourishing economy and way of life, all right? The Bible does not permit the civil magistrate to steal money from its citizens to pay for foreign nationals to come destroy our culture.”

A month earlier, during a speech announcing the bombing of Iran, President Trump exhorted God to bless America’s bombs (being dropped on innocent families and children): “And in particular, God, I want to just say, we love you God, and we love our great military. Protect them. God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

And in May, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Republican congressional representatives formed a prayer circle on the floor of the House as they prepared to codify the president’s Big Beautiful Bill. Of course, that very bill threatens to cut off millions of Americans from life-saving food and healthcare. (Consider it a bizarre counterpoint to Jesus’s feeding of the 5,000 and providing free health care to lepers.)

The Antichrist

And if that weren’t enough twisting of the Bible to bless the rich and admonish the poor, enter tech mogul Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir and the man behind the curtain of so much now going on in Washington. Though many Americans may be increasingly familiar with him, his various companies, and his political impact, many of us have missed the centrality of his version of Christianity and the enigmatic “religious” beliefs that go with it.

In Vanity Fair this spring, journalist Zoe Bernard emphasized the central role Thiel has already played in the Christianization of Silicon Valley: “I guarantee you,” one Christian entrepreneur told her, “there are people that are leveraging Christianity to get closer to Peter Thiel.”

Indeed, his theological beliefs grimly complement his political ones. “When you don’t have a transcendent religious belief,” he said, “you end up just looking around at other people. And that is the problem with our atheist liberal world. It is just the madness of crowds.” Remember, this is the same Thiel who, in a 2009 essay, openly questioned the compatibility of democracy and freedom, advocating for a system where power would be concentrated among those with the expertise to drive “progress” — a new version of the survival of the fittest in the information age. Such a worldview couldn’t contrast more strongly with the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus demonstrates his preferential option for the poor and his belief in bottom-up strategies rather than top down ones.

More recently, Thiel has positioned himself “right” in the middle of the Republican Party. He served as Trump’s liaison to Silicon Valley in his first term. Since then, he has convened and supported a new cohort of conservatives (many of whom also claim a right-wing Christianity), including Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump’s Director of Policy Planning Michael Anton, AI and crypto czar billionaire David Sacks, and Elon Musk, who spent a quarter of a billion dollars getting Trump elected the second time around. Thiel is also close to Curtis Yarvin, the fellow who “jokingly” claimed that American society no longer needs poor people and believes they should instead be turned into biofuel. (A worldview that simply couldn’t be more incompatible with Christianity’s core tenets.)

Particularly relevant to recent political (and ideological) developments, especially the military occupation of Washington, D.C., Thiel is also close to Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and founder of the Cicero Institute, a right-wing think tank behind a coordinated attack on the homeless now sweeping the nation. That’s right, there’s a throughline from Peter Thiel to President Donald Trump’s demand that “the homeless have to move out immediately… FAR from the Capital.” In July, Trump produced an executive order facilitating the removal of housing encampments in Washington, a year after the Supreme Court upheld a law making it a crime, if you don’t have a home, to sleep or even breathe outside. And Thiel, Lonsdale, and the Cicero Institute aren’t just responsible for those attacks on unhoused people and “blue cities”; they also bear responsibility for faith leaders being arrested and fined for their support of unhoused communities and their opposition, on religious grounds, to the mistreatment of the poor.

On top of this troubling mix of Christianity and billionaires, however, I find myself particularly chagrined that Thiel is offering an oversold four-part lecture series on the “antichrist” through a nonprofit called ACTS 17 collective that is to start in September in San Francisco. News stories about the ACTS 17 collective tend to focus on Christians organizing in Silicon Valley and the desire to put salvation through Jesus above personal success or charity for the poor. That sounds all too ominous, especially for those of us who take seriously the biblical command to stop depriving the poor of rights, to end poverty on earth (as it is in heaven), and defend the very people the Bible prioritizes.

For instance, Trae Stephens (who worked at Palantir and is partners with Thiel in a venture capital fund) is the husband of Michelle Stephens, the founder of the ACTS 17 collective. In an interview with Emma Goldberg of the New York Times, Michelle Stephens describes how “we are always taught as Christians to serve the meek, the lowly, the marginalized… I think we’ve realized that, if anything, the rich, the wealthy, the powerful need Jesus just as much.”

In an article at the Denison Forum, she’s even more specific about her biblical and theological interpretation of poverty and the need to care for those with more rather than the poor. She writes, “Those who see Christ’s message to the poor and needy as the central pillar of the gospel make a similar mistake. While social justice movements have done a great deal to point out our society’s longstanding sins and call believers to action, it can be tempting for that message to become more prominent than our innate need for Jesus to save us.” Such a statement reminds me of the decades-long theological pushback I lived through even before the passage of welfare reform and the continued juxtaposition of Jesus and justice since.

A Battle for the Bible

Of course, such a battle for the Bible is anything but new in America. It reaches back long before the rise of a new brand of Christianity in Silicon Valley. In the 1700s and 1800s, slaveholders quoted the book of Philemon and lines from St. Paul’s epistles to claim that slavery had been ordained by God, while ripping the pages of Exodus from bibles they gave to the enslaved. During the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, churches and politicians alike preached what was called a “prosperity gospel” that extolled the virtues of industrial capitalism. Decades later, segregationists continued to use stray biblical verses to rubber-stamp Jim Crow practices, while the Moral Majority, founded in 1979 by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell, Sr., helped mainstream a new generation of Christian extremists in national politics.

Over the past decades, the use of the Bible to justify what passes for “law and order” (and the punishing of the poor) has only intensified. In Donald Trump’s first term, Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended the administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their families at the border with a passage from the Apostle Paul’s epistle to the Romans: “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order. Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.”

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders summed up the same idea soon after in this way: “It is very biblical to enforce the law.” And in his first speech as speaker of the House, Mike Johnson told his colleagues, “I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority,” an echo of the New Testament’s Epistle to the Romans, in which Paul writes that “the authorities that exist are appointed by God.”

Over the past several years, Republican politicians and religious leaders have continued to use biblical references to punish the poor, quoting texts to justify cutting people off from healthcare and food assistance. A galling example came when Representative Jodey Arrington (R-TX), rebutting a Jewish activist who referenced a commandment in Leviticus to feed the hungry, quoted 2 Thessalonians to justify increasing work requirements for people qualifying for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). And that was just one of many Republican attacks on the low-income food assistance program amid myriad attempts to shred the social welfare system in the lead-up to President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the largest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in American history and a crowning achievement of Russell Vought’s Project 2025.  Arrington said: “But there’s also, you know, in the Scripture, tells us in 2 Thessalonians chapter 3:10 he says, uh, ‘For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: if a man will not work, he shall not eat.’ And then he goes on to say ‘We hear that some among you are idle’… I think it’s a reasonable expectation that we have work requirements.”

And Arrington has been anything but alone. The same passage, in fact, had already been used by Representatives Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and Stephen Lee Fincher (R-TN) to justify cutting food stamps during a debate over an earlier farm bill. And Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) used similarly religious language, categorizing people as deserving and undeserving, to argue against a healthcare plan that protects those of us with pre-existing conditions. He insisted that only “people who lead good lives” and “have done the things to keep their bodies healthy” should receive reduced costs for health care.

Such “Christian” politicians regularly misuse Biblical passages to blame the impoverished for their poverty. There is never a suggestion, of course, that the rich, who have functionally stolen people’s wages and engorged themselves by denying them healthcare, are in any way to blame.

A Theology of Liberation for a Time Like This

Such interpretations of biblical texts are damaging to everyone’s lives (except, of course, the superrich), but especially the poor. And — though you wouldn’t know it from such Republicans — they are counter to the main themes of the Bible’s texts. The whole of the Christian Bible, starting with Genesis and ending with the Book of Revelation, has an arc of justice to it. The historical equivalents of anti-poverty programs run through it all.

That arc starts in the Book of Exodus with manna (bread) that shows up day after day, so no one has too much or too little. This is a likely response to the Egyptian Pharaoh setting up a system where a few religious and political leaders amassed great wealth at the expense of the people. God’s plan, on the other hand, was for society to be organized around meeting the needs of all people, including describing how political and religious leaders are supposed to release slaves, forgive debts, pay people what they deserve, and distribute funds to the needy. The biblical arc of justice then continues through the prophets who insist that the way to love and honor God is to promote programs that uplift the poor and marginalized, while decrying those with power who cloak oppression in religious terms and heretical versions of Christian theology.

My own political and moral roots are in the welfare rights and homeless union survival movements, efforts led by poor and dispossessed people organizing a “new underground railroad” and challenging Christianity to talk the talk and walk the walk of Christ. Such a conviction was captured by Reverend Yvonne Delk at the 1992 “Up and Out of Poverty Survival Summit,” when she declared that society, including the church, must move to the position that “poor people are not sinners, but poverty is a sin against God that could and should be ended.”

Delk’s words echo others from 20 years earlier. In 1972, Beulah Sanders, a leader of the National Welfare Rights Organization, the largest organization of poor people in the 1960s and 1970s, spoke to the National Council of Churches. “I represent all of those poor people who are on welfare and many who are not,” she said, “people who believe in the Christian way of life… people whose nickels and dimes and quarters have built the Christian churches of America. Because we believe in Christianity, we have continued to support the Christian churches… We call upon you… to join with us in the National Welfare Rights Organization. We ask for your moral, personal, and financial support in this battle for bread, dignity, and justice for all of our people. If we fail in our struggle, Christianity will have failed.”

In a Trumpian world, where Christian extremism is becoming the norm, we must not let the words of Beulah Sanders be forgotten or the worst fears of countless prophets and freedom fighters come true. Rather, we must build the strength to make a theological and spiritual vision of everybody-in-nobody-out a reality and create the capacity, powered by faith, to make it so. Now is the time. May we make it so.

Liz Theoharis, a TomDispatch regular, is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. 

10 September 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By David Swanson

Restoring the original and non-Orwellian name to the U.S. Department of War ought to have a positive impact on people’s speech and understanding.

Yes, of course, Trump did it in order to celebrate the sadistic malevolence associated with the word “war.” He did it while pursuing horrific wars in Palestine and Ukraine, threatening (and beginning) wars on Venezuela and Iran, and moving massive resources from human and environmental needs into war preparations in the U.S. and its vassal NATO members. He immediately threatened to invade Chicago and show it the meaning of the newly restored name.

Yes, of course, 78 years of propaganda will not be undone quickly. All or most of the governments around the world that copied the U.S. in renaming their militaries “defense” will fervently resist switching back. Even peace activists relentlessly talk about “the Defense Department,” “the defense industry,” “defense contractors,” etc. If decades of passionate advocacy by some of us for not parroting the very propaganda we work against has had virtually no impact, it can be expected to take at least a few weeks before people flip their linguistic habits in obedience to a fascist buffoon.

But flipping those linguistic habits, for whatever reason, remains something that would benefit us all. Words shape our thinking as much as communicate it. We shouldn’t applaud Trump for dropping the pretense that wars are waged for something other than sadism, power, and profit, because he’s trying to normalize the glorification of sadism, power, and profit. But if those who oppose evil were to drop the pretense that the greatest evil in the world is “defensive” and “humanitarian,” we’d be much better off.

If Congress had to pass National War Authorization and Appropriations Acts instead of so-called Nation “Defense” Acts, it might suddenly be possible to nudge the gears in a Congressional head or three into motion. The U.S. Constitution allows Congress to raise and support armies for no longer than two years at a time. It does not envision the permanent Military Industrial Congressional “Intelligence” Media Academic Think Tank Complex. Endless massive, ever-growing War Authorization Acts could make Congress stop and notice the absence during the past 84 years of any Declaration of War, or of any moment in which the U.S. War Department was not at war, or of any war that could be said to have accomplished anything useful.

Trump believes that restoring the name “War Department” will restore an imaginary age in which the United States “won” wars — a powerful admission that for 78 years, the U.S. government has spent trillions of dollars killing millions of people, destroying societies, ripping down the rule of law, causing horrific and lasting environmental damage, fueling bigotry, restricting civil liberties, corroding culture, and depriving positive initiatives of resources that could have transformed the world for the better. But — in the words of Jeanette Rankin, who voted in the U.S. Congress against both of the “beautiful” world wars — you can no more win a war than a hurricane. The U.S. “won” imperialist and coalition wars in the days of the Department of War by committing genocidal slaughters of a sort deemed grotesquely unacceptable in the age leading up to the current livestreamed genocide in Gaza, and by allowing allies like the Soviet Union to do most of the killing and dying (rather like Ukrainians today) before producing countless Hollywood movies suggesting a different story.

Restoring the acceptability of genocides, carpet bombings, and nuclear bombings doesn’t flow inevitably from restoring the name of the institution responsible. If we choose, the unconscionable horror of such things can instead mean that admitting what the Pentagon is, and stamping that disgusting, barbarous title over its front door could allow the development of a significant anti-war contingent in the United States. Such a contingent should not be simply anti-Trump. We should not be bothered by what he calls the war machine, but by the war machine itself — even when the name change is resisted or reversed.

One way to help this along would be to conscientiously remove from our speech and our thoughts, not just “defense” but all variety of insidious war propaganda terms. We might try also giving honest names to every governmental department. We might consider alternatives to war, and the case for war abolition.

David Swanson, Author, Activist, Journalist, Radio Host.

10 September 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Camila Villard Duran

ANGERS – In a letter to Brazil’s largest banks, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has demanded to know what steps they were taking to comply with the sanctions recently imposed on Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act. President Donald Trump’s administration was delivering an unmistakable message: America calls the shots, and others must fall in line.

The decision to add Moraes to the US list of “Specially Designated Nationals” is unprecedented, given that he is neither an oligarch accused of corruption nor a human-rights abuser. Instead, Moraes has been targeted for overseeing criminal cases related to the January 8, 2023, insurrection in Brasilia, when supporters of then-President Jair Bolsonaro stormed the National Congress, the Supreme Court, and the presidential palace in a bid to overturn his election defeat.

While this may look like a technical compliance issue, Trump’s actions are an assault on the independence of Brazil’s judiciary. Sanctioning Moraes does more than restrict his personal finances; it indirectly pressures the institutions he represents. It also forces Brazilian banks to choose between upholding domestic court rulings – thereby incurring severe US penalties – and preserving access to global markets. Either choice risks undermining their legitimacy at home and abroad.

The OFAC letter also underscores the fragility of economic sovereignty. While the Magnitsky Act is formally a US statute, the dollar’s role as the world’s leading reserve currency extends its reach far beyond America’s borders.

Brazilian banks, like their counterparts around the world, rely on US banks to clear dollar transactions, and many maintain subsidiaries in New York and other major financial centers. Whether you want to export soybeans to Asia or issue bonds on Wall Street, the financial infrastructure you depend on is American. And this dependency means that disregarding OFAC is not an act of defiance but a step toward financial exile, if not outright ruin.

This is the paradox of sovereignty. Legally, Brazil’s courts can rule that US sanctions do not apply domestically, since under both constitutional and international law, foreign measures must be formally enacted to take effect. But economically, compliance is unavoidable, given that its trade and financial systems depend on dollar-based infrastructure beyond its control. In practice, monetary sovereignty ends at the edge of the dollar system.

The irony is striking. The United States once wielded the Magnitsky Act to confront authoritarian abuses abroad, most notably by sanctioning Russian officials implicated in the 2009 murder of tax adviser and whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky. Today, it is using the same law to intimidate a judge seeking to defend Brazil’s democratic order. By weaponizing foreign-policy tools to influence domestic legal processes, the Trump administration has effectively reduced Brazil’s sovereignty to a test of obedience.

Brazilian policymakers are in a difficult position. Routing Moraes’s personal financial transactions through domestic cooperatives is, at best, a temporary fix that does nothing to resolve the underlying issue. And longer-term alternatives, such as global payment systems built on blockchain technology, remain far from viable.

With Brazil still caught in the dollar’s gravitational pull, the current crisis underscores the urgency of investing in alternatives to the dollar-based system. As I argued in a recent policy paper, new technologies and platforms – from blockchain-based networks to instant cross-border payments – could make settlements more efficient and potentially challenge the dollar’s dominance.

For now, though, these initiatives are no more than fragmented pilot projects confined to “coalitions of the willing,” often excluding the developing economies that are most dependent on the dollar. Moreover, even the most advanced multi-currency platforms still revert to the dollar or the euro when local currencies lack sufficient liquidity, reproducing the very hierarchy they claim to challenge.

That said, these monetary innovations offer a glimpse of a future in which multilateral infrastructures are no longer controlled by a single government or private organizations operating under one country’s jurisdiction. But realizing such a future will require extraordinary diplomatic and technical cooperation, along with new governance frameworks. Until then, the dollar’s extraterritorial power will remain unmatched.

In that sense, the OFAC letter is more than a message to Brazilian banks; it is a reminder to all countries of the extraordinary power the US exerts through its control of the world’s financial infrastructure. To counter it, they must work together to develop credible alternatives, such as central bank digital currencies, interoperable instant-payment networks, and broader multilateral arrangements. Otherwise, their monetary sovereignty and political autonomy will be left at the mercy of American policymakers.

Camila Villard Duran is Associate Professor of Law at ESSCA School of Management.

9 September 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark

Destroying cultures and eradicating the legacies of a people is a game the parochial and the dim-witted delight in. While this should be shunned and punished in international law, a general discomfort of purpose seems to trouble the friends of Israel as the state goes about its business of ruining what vestiges of living might exist in the Gaza Strip. As Israel’s warriors of vengeful virtue go about demolishing one of the last parts of Gaza that has any infrastructure worth mentioning, the usual ceremony of impotent effusion and concern is registered across the networks of the world.

By the end of October 2024, Corey Scher and Jamon Van Den Hoek noted that the Gaza Strip had been subjected to “one of the most intense bombing campaigns of the 21st century, driving widespread urban damage.” With a focus on northern Gaza, the authors noted that 191,263 (three-fifths) of all buildings were either damaged or destroyed. In such outlets of sober discernment as Lawfare, we find the authors aghast that the operations in Gaza eclipse those of more recent operations of levelling mayhem, be it the destruction of Mariupol in Ukraine, where 32 percent of the buildings were destroyed or damaged, or the Syrian town of Aleppo, an ancient city victim to a war that saw damage to 40 percent of its buildings during three years of remorseless conflict.

In language so corrupted it conveys the opposite of what is intended, Israel has again used the term “humanitarian zone” in areas it repeatedly bombs, whose residents are being consistently killed. Leaflets dropped over Gaza City on September 7 made the bold and mendacious claim:

“From this moment it is announced that the al-Mawasi area is a humanitarian zone and steps will be taken to provide better humanitarian services there”. (They were evidently not up to scratch before.) 

The Gaza Ministry of Interior could only capitalise on this in a statement.

“We call on citizens in Gaza City to beware of the occupation’s deceitful claims about the existence of a humanitarian zone in the south of the Strip.”

Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud reports that the IDF is “using remotely controlled explosive robots, and detonating them in residential streets, destroying neighbourhoods.” He goes on to say that homes, public facilities, schools and a mosque were also hit in Sheikh Radwan. The head of the Palestinian NGOs network, Amjad Shawa, also observed that Israeli forces were “aiming to force Palestinians to the southern areas using these explosions, but everyone knows that there is no safe place in the south or any humanitarian zone.”

Demolitions are now taking place at will, with the high-rise buildings in Gaza City falling to attacks. BBC Verify notes that the IDF is replicating its pattern of demolishing structures in southern Gaza.

“Thousands of buildings in areas including Rafah and Khan Younis have been demolished by controlled explosions and demolition contractors in the area”.

Along the way, tents have disappeared in such areas as Zeitoun. Palestinians, treated like much incidental livestock in war, have again been forced to move on under callous direction. Israeli military spokesperson, the gruesome Avichay Adraee, growled his bit of advice that residents leave the city to move to a designated coastal area of Khan Younis risibly called a “humanitarian zone”. On social media, Adraee assures his own conscience – and those of his colleagues: residents are told to leave such specific buildings as the Al-Ruya complex because of alleged Hamas “terrorist infrastructure” in it.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu adds a vicious flourish, treating the systematic destruction of Gaza City’s infrastructure as entailing the necessary removal of “terror towers” and “nests of terror” (50, to date, having been destroyed).

“Now all of this is just an introduction, just a prelude, to the main intense operation – a ground manoeuvre of our forces, who are organising and gathering in Gaza City.”

Paying lip service to humanitarian considerations, he also wished it to be on record that those in Gaza “take advantage of this opportunity and listen” with care to his words:

“You have been warned. Get out of there.”

The time given for leaving such structures is a question of debate.  Aida Abu Kas, resident of the now demolished Sousi Tower, claims that a mere 20 minutes was given by the IDF to take what belongings they could and leave the building before its razing. A better perspective of Israeli intentions is offered by defence minister Israel Katz. In posting a video on social media featuring the destruction of Sousi Tower, he ecstatically claimed (war crime prosecutors, take keen note) that,

“The gates of hell are being unlocked in Gaza City.”

In another post of ample blood lust on the X platform, Katz “a last warning to the murderers and rapists of Hamas in Gaza, and in luxury hotels abroad: Release the hostages, and put down your weapons – or Gaza will be destroyed and you will be obliterated.” In such exercises, distinguishing between civilians and combatants no longer takes place. Targets, and culpability, are conflated, as they have been from the outset. The next hellish stage is being set.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University.

9 September 2025

Source: globalresearch.ca

By Peter Koenig

“No mountain or ocean can distance people who have shared aspirations,” China’s President Xi Jinping said in July 2024, addressing leaders from fellow Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member states and a few other nations in Astana, Kazakhstan.

It is not reaching too far, saying that this year’s 25^th SCO Summit (SCO) in Tianjin, China, from 31 August to 1 September 2025, fulfilled – and more – President Xi’s vision of 2024. The summit caused a tectonic shift in the conventional world order.

China’s Assistant Foreign Minister Liu Bin told a news conference in Beijing, shortly before the SCO summit, that the 2025 SCO event be

“One of China’s most important head-of-state and home-court diplomatic events this year”.

As the Economist says, “A New Reality is Taking hold.” The “new reality” is not anti-US or anti-West; it is just separating the western unipolar aspirations from the newly created multi-polar, or perhaps better, multi-block, world, where countries aim at a peaceful cooperation towards a joint future with shared benefits.

The SCO was established in 2001 by China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Today the SCO consists of ten member-states with headquarters in Beijing. In addition to the founding members, SCO members have increased by India, Iran, Belarus, and Pakistan. SCO members account for 23% of the world’s GDP and for 43% of the world’s population.

Further attendance included high-level government officials from Myanmar, Egypt, Cambodia, Nepal, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Maldives, Turkey, as well as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Secretary-General Kao Kim Hourn, and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

This year’s summit made clearly the SCO the guiding light for the Global South which includes the 11 BRICS countries, plus the 10 BRICS partners, added at the 16^th BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia, in October 2024.

While even the UNSG, Mr. Guterres, was invited – while the UN was or still is (?) considered by the US and the West in general as the World Organization in the western camp – President Trump felt snubbed by China, “left out” from the world shifting SCO event in Tianjin.

So, Trump invented a last-minute opportunity to leave his mark on the meeting by requesting President Xi literally on the eve of the SCO summit for “military talks,” a phone call between the two defense ministers (in the US now called War Minister, as the Ministry of Defense has been re-christened by Trump as War Ministry).

The Chinese Foreign Ministry said that Beijing rejected the proposal, reasoning “a lack of mutual understanding between the two countries”, asking a pertinent question:

“Is there any sincerity in and significance of any communication like this?”

Of course not. Trump just wanted to interfere in the SCO summit, showing his self-styled emperor head. But to no avail. The West was absent – the “naked emperor” as well as his European puppets, the (almost) defunct European Union, and especially the non-elected and every time more rejected European Commission (EC).

Imagine just a few weeks earlier, a delegation of the EC including Kaja Kallas, the Commission’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, the Commission’s top-diplomat so to speak, visited Beijing to discuss tariffs, but on the side they were insinuating that China should distance herself from Russia.

So much aggression, let alone undiplomatic thinking and acting – like at home spending taxpayers’ money destined for social programs, instead for a monster armament to go to war against Russia – aggression and a war philosophy that can only lead to a EU downfall which is accelerating by the day.

To add insult to injury, the symbolic leader of the EU, Germany, her Chancellor Friedrich Merz said recently:

 “Putin is a war criminal. He is perhaps the most serious war criminal of our time that we have seen on a large scale. We must be clear about how to deal with war criminals: There is no room for leniency.”

It is time for the Real World, the Global South, to distance themselves from the western warmongers and war-makers. This is just happening with the 25^th SCO Summit – a new awakening for peace, cooperation, and togetherness in the spirit of working towards a future of shared benefits.

A future with shared benefits is not possible by western economic standards and principles, that followed since 1989 the so-called Washington Consensus, an un-stated agreement between the three most powerful western financial institutions, the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank – to “subdue” the “emerging and developing world” with debt, so as to get a hold of their natural resources.

This disequilibrium already started with the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference during which the World Bank and IMF were created, two institutions which were and still are veto-dominated by Washington. Real economic equality and development had and up to now has no chance under these circumstances. Instead, it is abusive exploitation and neocolonialism.

The SCO decision at their Summit to create an SCO Development Bank bodes well with a new future of togetherness and cooperation. It fits right in with the Chinese Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB). It is a vivid sign of pulling free from the neoliberal western financial institutions making their living by exploiting “socioeconomic development”, instead of enhancing it.

Together and perhaps with a newly furbished BRICS New Development Bank, they will allow the Global South to evolve and grow according to their sovereign and independent terms, using instead of an isolating “protective” tariff system – Trump-style – their comparative advantages to deal and trade with each other – tariff-free. No conflicts but cooperation.

See also this.

This SCO Summit was not a western-style aggression event of “The Willing”, but a China-initiated reorientation of the world order, in which long-term objectives were envisioned by real leaders who had seen and lived enough of western-dictated aggressions, wars and destruction, but instead opted for Peace and Cooperation – and it very much looks like they may succeed.

In his opening speech, President Xi made this point clear: 

“Humanity is again faced with a choice of peace or war, dialogue or confrontation, and win-win outcomes; or zero-sum games.”

This clearly creates a growing chasm between East and West. The former seeking peaceful constructive development, while the latter are still clinging to their destructive economic model, wars and killing for a growing military complex and a tech-world that goes hand in hand with the agenda of transhumanization and destruction of humanity.

The highly successful SCO Summit in Tianjin was deliberately staged just before China’s Grand Military Parade on Tiananmen Square, marking 80 years since the end of World War II. It was the culmination of a new “World Order”, one of Peace – demonstrating the West, silently but visibly, that a new epoch is about to begin.

The image of presenting the heads of China’s Xi Jinping; Russia’s Vladimir Putin; India’s Narendra Modi; Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian; and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, side by side speaks volumes. They embody a new power base – power for Peace and for a new world order of a common future with shared benefits.

Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst, regular author for Global Research, and a former Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world.

9 September 2025

Source: globalresearch.ca

By Roger D Harris and Joe Emersberger

President Donald Trump euphorically concluded his White House press conference on September 2 with breaking news: the US military had just blown up a small motor vessel in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. He alleged that the skiff came from Venezuela and was loaded with illicit drugs headed to the US.

On social media, he further embellished his story by saying that the crew were members of the Tren de Aragua cartel, which Trump claims is controlled by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Trump alleges that this cartel is “responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence across the US.”

Evidence blown out of the water

There was no attempt to stop and search the boat in international waters, before murdering the crew. This gruesome practice arrogates to the US state the extrajudicial power to kill anyone with whom it unilaterally declares itself to be at “war.”

The eleven victims are just a drop in the imperial blood bucket compared to the US-sponsored genocide in Gaza. But the homicidal “victory” was used by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to crow about the “full power of America, the full might of the United States.”

Maduro responded that no one believes Trump’s and Rubio’s lies: “they come for Venezuelan oil and gas, they want them for free.”

The day before the incident, Maduro presciently warned that the US could create a false positive to justify the US military deployment. Claims have circulated that the incident may have been faked by AI. If true, that’s not much of a relief. It simply means Trump’s military escalation against Venezuela has begun at a lower level than he claims.

Maduro alluded to the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident and the explosion of the Maine, which precipitated the 1964 Vietnam and 1898 Spanish-American wars respectively. Maduro also mentioned the WMD hoax that was used to justify the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

Maduro might also have noted that President Bill Clinton bombed Sudan, diverting attention from his Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. Trump is now facing similar difficulties due to his close friendship with the deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein

A decapitation strike attempt on Venezuela foretold

All the elements, especially US impunity, are in place to eventually attempt a decapitation strike eliminating the South American nation’s leadership.

Trump ominously boasted at his press conference “there is more where that came from” for Venezuela. Just four days earlier, Washington’s “historic partner” Israel had assassinated the Yemeni prime minister and his civilian cabinet. Arguably, the word “partner” understates the intimate level of integration between the two. The Israelis have been perpetrating a live-streamed genocide in Gaza for over 700 days while receiving daily airlifts of military supplies under both Biden and Trump.

Decapitation of an enemy’s leadership has become a tactic for the “partners.” Aside from Yemen, the Israelis launched a devastating decapitation strike on Hezbollah in Lebanon along with a similarly brazen one of top Iranian leaders during its twelve-day war with Tehran. In 2020, Trump murdered Iranian General Qassem Soleimani with a drone.

Trump signed an executive order designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations the day he returned to the presidency. US military were deployed to the Caribbean near Venezuela under the ruse of drug interdiction. Shortly afterwards, The New York Times reported a leaked “secret order” authorizing the use of the US military to intervene in other countries against drug cartels.

Also in August, the reward on the head of Maduro was doubled to $50 million with lesser rewards for other top officials. US sanctions now extend to the heads of the state oil and transportation companies, supreme court justices, electoral councilors, national assembly politicians, various military and security heads, and so forth; in short, a leadership hit list. 

Trump doesn’t actually care about the US’s illegal drug problem

The US is indeed flooded with drugs, but Trump’s concern is insincere. Otherwise he would have mobilized against trafficking within the US and close allies like Ecuador. Instead Trump diverts public attention by scapegoating Venezuela, a country that contributes to the problem negligibly.

Illicit dsrug sales in the US are estimated at $200–$750 billion, including new synthetics. Remarkably, the only other domestic commodity that comes close in volume is legal pharmaceuticals at $600 billion, followed by oil and gas at $400 billion. Indeed, the US is the largest consumer of illegal drugs and a major supplier of weapons and drug precursor chemicals for the cartels. As the world’s leading narcotics money launderer, prominent US banks implicated include HSBC Bank USA, Wachovia, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America.

We constantly hear about Latin American drug kingpins, but who distributes the dope when it crosses the border is left unanswered. Research by Mexican journalist Jorge Esquivel demonstrates that no US administration has ever seriously investigated domestic drug trafficking networks. Venezuelan international analyst Sergio Gelfenstein asserts Washington has “no interest whatsoever in combating the drug trade”; it is just too big and profitable.

Besides, drug usage serves to pacify youth, African Americans, and other potentially dissident demographics. Journalist Gary Webb exposed how drug trafficking on the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s helped fund the CIA-backed Contras in Nicaragua. And opium production was virtually eradicated in Afghanistan before the US invasion of 2001, only to explode again under direct US military occupation. 

Fake threat of Venezuelan drug trafficking

“What the US really seeks is regime change and regional control, thinly veiled behind drug war rhetoric,” according to The Cradle.

The authoritative 2025 UN World Drug Report featured minimal mention of Venezuela, emphasizing that it plays a marginal role in global drug trafficking. The report confirms that Venezuela is a territory largely free of drug cultivation and processing, as well as any significant international cartel presence. Nor does the report mention the fictitious “Cartel of the Suns,” which the US claims Maduro heads.

Despite the Tren de Aragua’s designation by the US as a terrorist organization, the intelligence community itself refutes that it is controlled by Maduro or is even a highly functioning international narcotics cartel.

The guard rails are down for imperialist aggression

Democrats may carp about the optics of Trump’s actions, but they have been bipartisan partners in opposition to the Bolivarian Revolution’s attempt to build socialism in the 21^st century ever since Hugo Chávez was first elected Venezuela’s president in 1998. Note, every US Senator voted to confirm Marco Rubio as Trump’s Secretary of State.

The so-called “international community” and its institutions such as the United Nations have been powerless to stop the US/zionist war on Palestine let alone one in Uncle Sam’s “backyard.” Welcome to the post-Gaza genocide world.

And let’s not forget the perfidy of big “human rights” NGOs like Amnesty International, which absurdly and hysterically alleges that the Venezuelan government’s “cruelty knows no bounds,” nicely timed to justify US imperialism.   

The US aggression on Venezuela is clearly escalating from funding of opposition elements, lawfare, and sanctions, plus occasional coup attempts and sabotage. Now direct military confrontation is possible, which could involve an attempt to assassinate the entire Bolivarian leadership.

The reported 4,500 US troops recently deployed to the Caribbean could never take Venezuela even if they were multiplied manyfold. But recent history suggests that the US often avoids a full US troop-heavy occupation. In Haiti, Libya, and Syria, the US instead opted for chaos rather than permitting insubordinate states to survive.

Resistance by Venezuela has stiffened to meet the challenge. Civilian-military unity has remained strong. This video clip shows artisanal fishing boats accompanying one of the mobilized Venezuelan naval ships. Shortly before the US destroyed the alleged “drug boat,” President Maduro had declared a “republic in arms.” And millions of civilian reservists have enlisted in the Bolivarian National Militia, a branch of the Venezuelan armed forces, while regular troops had been dispatched to the Colombia border.

Many regional leaders along with the regional ALBA organization have condemned the US military buildup. Further afield, Russia, Iran, and China all stated their support of Venezuela. And international grassroots support for Venezuela’s sovereignty has been overwhelmingly positive, condemning Yankee warfare.

For humanity, Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution represents hope; for the US imperial project, which seeks to crush any alternative to its order, it is a threat. To force regime change in Caracas, Washington may attempt to eliminate the current leadership or pursue another tactic. The method matters less than the goal – either installing a compliant vassal or, failing that, leaving the country in chaos. The pressure will therefore continue, and likely intensify.

Roger D. Harris is a founding member of the Venezuela Solidarity Network and on the secretariat of the US Peace Council.

Joe Emersberger is co-author of “Extraordinary Threat: The US Empire, the Media, and Twenty Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela.”

6 September 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad

Let us begin with a provocation, for nothing less will do: if courage had a capital in Pakistan, it would not be in Rawalpindi’s General Headquarters. It would be on the deck of a civilian vessel headed toward Gaza, with five Pakistanis—including former Senator Mushtaq Ahmed Khan—who have dared to place their fragile, mortal bodies in the path of an Israeli war machine notorious for its appetite for blood. These men are not naïve. They know very well the grisly fate of flotillas past, gunned down in cold blood by a state that shoots aid workers with the same ease it drops American-financed bombs on refugee camps. And yet they go. Not with tanks, not with drones, but with sacks of flour and medicine. And somehow, in that terrifying imbalance, their courage outshines every medal ever pinned on a general’s chest.

It is almost comical, if it weren’t so tragic, to compare them to our own brass-buttoned overlords—the Pakistani generals. These titans of self-advertised bravery, these chronic vomiters of “ghairat” (honor) in every press briefing, are so busy polishing their boots on American rugs that they cannot spare even a bullet, even a whisper, for Gaza. Instead, they distribute medals to Washington’s most fanatical Zionists, as though the Holocaust itself were reborn not in Gaza but in Rawalpindi’s banquet halls, where the generals toast with their patrons. They even had the gall to suggest a Nobel Peace Prize for the man affectionately nicknamed “Holocaust Donald.” One wonders whether the generals’ sense of irony has been surgically removed along with their spines.

Meanwhile, five civilians—just five, from a nation of 250 million—are willing to sail into the jaws of death to say, at the very least: “Not in our name.” Their action is both pitifully small and immeasurably great. Small, because they cannot undo a genocide conducted with American weapons and Israeli enthusiasm. Great, because they expose the moral bankruptcy of an entire state apparatus whose sole definition of bravery is bulldozing its own people and arresting students with a fondness for free speech.

Consider the imagery: on one side, civilians boarding rickety ships with humanitarian aid; on the other, generals in perfectly pressed uniforms, trembling at the thought of offending their masters in Washington. On one side, risk without hope of reward; on the other, safety wrapped in cowardice and medals pinned for services to empire. If hypocrisy were an Olympic sport, Pakistan’s top brass would sweep the podium.

And the media? Ah yes, our gallant “free press.” Where is their wall-to-wall coverage of this flotilla, this act of Pakistani defiance? It is nowhere. They whisper about it in the margins, careful not to embarrass the cowards in uniform who might choke on their imported cigars if confronted with actual courage. It is safer, after all, to report on cricket scores and celebrity weddings than to admit that five ordinary Pakistanis have done more for Palestine than the entire defense establishment has done in decades.

This silence is no accident. The generals understand that the real enemy is not Israel, nor America, nor even India—it is embarrassment. To be outshone by civilians with nothing but their faith and a few supplies is intolerable to men who measure honor by the tonnage of their real estate portfolios. Better to suppress the story, to make it invisible, than to risk the public asking uncomfortable questions: “If five men can go, why not fifty thousand? If a senator can risk his life, why not an army?” These are questions that shake thrones, so better not to ask them at all.

The Americans, of course, look on with approval. Their lunatic Zionists in power—those grinning armchair genocidaires who write billion-dollar checks to Israel with the same casualness that they order frappuccinos—are delighted to see Pakistan’s army playing the role of obedient client state. They know that Rawalpindi will never dare to send real material support to Gaza. At most, a few crocodile tears at the UN, followed by a discreet military parade to reassure Washington that nothing serious is brewing. The empire sleeps well knowing that its client generals are too busy saluting to fight.

But the flotilla changes something. It is not the power of arms—Israel can sink those ships in an afternoon, and America will applaud. It is the power of shame. Those five Pakistanis have revealed a chasm between the rhetoric of honor and its practice. They have demonstrated that even in a country suffocated by cowardice at the top, there remain conscientious souls willing to stand where history demands they stand.

Let us not romanticize too much. They are not going to liberate Palestine. They will not stop the genocide. But their act carries symbolic power greater than the sum of their lives. They remind us that history does not always belong to those with the biggest guns, but sometimes to those with the clearest conscience. They remind us that Pakistan’s generals, for all their swagger, have been unmasked as little more than security guards for empire, while the real defenders of dignity are unarmed civilians sailing into danger.

There is, too, an element of humor here—dark humor, to be sure. Imagine the generals watching footage of the flotilla on their plasma screens. Imagine the panic: “How dare these civilians do what we have not done? How dare they embarrass us by acting like men while we polish medals for Zionists?” It is the kind of comedy that borders on tragedy, like watching a lion flee from a mouse.

And so we arrive at the stark contrast: five men with nothing to lose but their lives, against an entire military machine with everything to lose but its conscience. Five men who know they may be sailing to their deaths, and yet find meaning in that sacrifice. Five men whose courage has already eclipsed the cowardice of their so-called guardians of the nation.

This is why their voyage matters. It is not simply about aid to Gaza. It is about reclaiming the very idea of courage from those who have debased it. It is about reminding a nation of 250 million that true honor is not measured in parades or medals or rented alliances, but in the willingness to stand with the oppressed even when the cost is death.

At the end of the day, the flotilla may be destroyed, the volunteers may be killed, and Israel may chalk up another “victory” in its gruesome tally. But the moral ledger will remain open. And on that ledger, the names of five Pakistanis will shine brighter than the entire constellation of stars on the shoulders of our generals.

The generals may have their guns, their medals, their patronage networks, their American visas. But what they do not have—and what they cannot fake—is courage. Five men sailing into the abyss have stripped them bare. And no amount of propaganda, no quantity of medals for Zionists, no thunderous declarations of “strategic depth” can ever clothe that nakedness again.

Let the last word be this: nations are not remembered for their generals. They are remembered for their heroes. And in this moment, Pakistan’s heroes are not in Rawalpindi, not in Islamabad, not in the palatial cantonments that dot the land like parasites. They are on the open sea, carrying bread where others carry bombs, carrying hope where others carry shame. If Pakistan has any future worth the name, it is with them—not with the cowardly brass who confuse surrender for strategy.

And so the flotilla sails, into danger, into history, into the conscience of a nation that has long forgotten what courage looks like. Perhaps now, at last, it will remember.

Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan.

6 September 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Kathy Kelly

In his last minutes of freedom before Israeli Defense Forces arrested him, Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, clad in a medic’s white coat, walked alone toward two Israeli tanks. His captors awaited him amid the rubble of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital. An artist swiftly created a dramatic poster showing Dr. Safiya striding through the ruins of the hospital he directed. The artist, David Solnit, recently updated the poster’s caption. It now reads:   Free Dr. Abu Safiya   Eight months in prison Dec. 27, 2024 – August 27, 2025.

Dr. Safia had already endured agonizing losses at the Kamal Adwan hospital. In late October 2024, an Israeli drone attack killed his son, also a doctor. In a November 2024 attack on the hospital, Dr. Safiya was wounded by shrapnel, but continued working, insisting he would not close the hospital. He witnessed his colleagues being humiliated, beaten, and marched off to prison. By December 27, 2024, when Dr. Safia’s ordeal as a prisoner began, most hospitals in Gaza were non-functional.

On August 28, 2025, Dr. Safiya’s lawyer, Ghaid Ghanem Qassem, visited him in the Ofer Prison. She reports he has lost one third of his body weight. While imprisoned in in the Sde Teiman military Detention Center, located in an Israeli military base in the Negev desert, he showed signs of torture. Subjected to beating with electric shocks and batons, he sustained blows which may also cause him to lose his right eye. Yet his message remains intact:  

“I entered in the name of humanity, and I will leave in the name of humanity… We will remain on our land and continue to provide healthcare services to the people, God willing, even from a tent.”

Regimes conducting a genocide have more than one reason to eliminate brave professionals attempting, life by precious life, to undo their inhuman work: doctors not only seek to slow down the dying, but they, like the journalists the Israeli regime so frantically targets, are specially positioned and specially qualified to accurately report on the intensity and nature of Israel’s extermination campaign. Silencing the citizens most capable of reporting on genocidal savagery is a key objective of genocide.

In one of the most egregious efforts to eliminate a key eye witness, Israeli naval forces, on May 9, 2025, killed twelve-year-old Mohammed Saeed al-Bardawil, who, as a passerby alongside his father, had witnessed Israel’s March 23^rd pre-dawn execution of 15 unarmed emergency rescue workers. The murdered paramedics had driven their clearly marked ambulances to a spot where they intended to retrieve victims of an earlier attack. The bullets that killed them were fired over six minutes as Israeli soldiers advanced to shoot directly into the survivors’ heads and torsos, afterwards using earth-moving equipment to bury their corpses and vehicles. On that day, Mohammed and his father were detained and made to lie face down near a burning ambulance. He is listed as a source in a well-documented NYT video on the massacre, dated May 2^nd. Eleven days later, an Israeli gunboat fired on his father’s fishing boat, killing Muhammed in his father’s presence off the coast of Gaza’s southern Rafah governate.

It was less than two weeks ago, on August 25^th, that Israel killed Reuters camera operator Hussam Al Masri and nineteen others, four of them also journalists, in a series of double-tap precision guided aerial attacks on buildings and a stairway of the Al Nasser Hospital. Al Masri was easily targetable as he broadcast a live video feed from a Reuters outpost on a top hospital floor. Describing the second wave of the attack,  Jonathan Cook writes:  “And when Israel struck 10 minutes later with two coordinated missiles, it knew that the main victims would be the emergency workers who went to rescue survivors from the first strike and journalists — al-Masri’s friends — who were nearby and rushed to the scene … Nothing was a “mishap.” It was planned down to the minutest detail.”

Snipers and weaponized drone operators routinely kill Palestinians who courageously continue to don bullet proof press jackets, set up cameras, and report on Israel’s atrocities. Israel refuses entry to foreign journalists and when brave, grieving, impassioned young Palestinians insist on carefully documenting their people’s agony for Western news outlets, Israel carefully targets them using the traceable phone and broadcasting equipment necessary to their work, before posthumously branding them Hamas operatives. Craven Western officials watch from within Israel’s patron states, discounting brown lives on whatever flimsy pretexts white authorities offer them. Almost daily, new faces appear in an assemblage of photos showing hundreds of journalists Israel has killed.

Health care workers and journalists who are still alive do their work amid struggles to prevent their families, their colleagues, their neighbors, and of course themselves, from deaths not just by direct massacre but by militarily imposed starvation and its handmaiden, epidemic disease. Surgeons speak of being too weak to stand throughout an operation. Reporters document their own starvation.

Palestinians long for protection, but even the prospect of UN mandated protective forces carries terrifying possibilities. What if “peacekeepers” assigned to monitor Palestinians collect data the Israelis will use to control them? Weaponized “stabilizing forces,” equipped with U.S. surveillance technology, could be used to target, imprison, assassinate, and starve even more Palestinians.

In the summer of 1942, in Munich, Germany, five students and one professor summoned astonishing courage to defy a genocidal regime to which we, reluctantly, have to look if we want to find a racist cruelty comparable to that currently seizing not just Israel’s leadership but, in poll after poll, strong majorities of its non-native population. The students’ collective, called The White Rose, distributed leaflets denouncing Nazi atrocities. “We will not be silent” was the final line of each leaflet. Hans Scholl, age 24, and his sister, Sophie Scholl, age 21, hand-delivered the leaflets to their university campus in February of 1943. The Gestapo arrested them after a janitor spotted them disseminating the leaflets. Four days later, Hans and Sophie, as well as their colleague Christopher Probst, were executed by guillotine.

With Israel’s nuclear arsenal capable of out-killing the Nazi regime over the course of a few minutes, and in the process inciting humanity’s final war; and with its leadership and populace radicalized through decades of fascist impunity to the point of endorsing not just a genocide but multiple, preemptive military strikes upon most of its neighbors at once, we may well be arriving at the moment when, as a result of our having let Israel assassinate, with impunity, the reporters of its crimes, there will be no-one in the outside world left to receive reports. 

The silence we allow ourselves today may soon be involuntary and absolute. Let us summon up a fraction of Dr. Safia’s, of young Mohammad’s, of Sophie Scholl’s and Hussam al-Masri’s courage and speak while we can.

Kathy Kelly (kathy.vcnv@gmail.com) is board president of World BEYOND War.

6 September 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

The Israeli genocide starting on 27 October, 2023 through mass bombs and missiles dropped on the Gaza Strip is being discribed as hell-on-earth. After 700 days of slaughter in which the enclave was reduced to ruin, debris and mass killings, Gazans speak of the “hell” they are going through between multiple and countless displacements, starvation and waiting in limbo for what is going to happen next. Their lives have been turned upside down and live in limbo of fog.

All the above interviews were conducted by Al Jazeera satellite channel on the 700 days of horrors the Israeli army has subjected the Palestinian civilians of Gaza to.

“700 days and the killings are still going on with the war taking everything from us,” said one man. “The blood of martyrs is still hemorrhaging,” he continued.

“I now envy the people who have died in this slaughter,” said another. “In this past 700 days, journalists were killed, civil defense men gone, hospitals bombed, children murdered and many other things disappeared…”

After 700 days there is nothing left, there is no children left, no food,  no drink, starvation everywhere, life has become extremely difficult. I have started to say to myself I wish I was long dead and have left this sorry place,” said another woman.

What about the handicapped

‘“I have three teenager sons who are handicapped and the process of displacement with them is very difficult…we were forced to move by the Israeli army more than 15 times – I walked them, I sometimes carried them would you believe, there is no transport and walked under bombs and missiles, sometimes they’d fall very near us, the danger of being killed is real,” the father of the three said.

“There is no food, no drink, there is no place to live, the sewerage is bad, we can’t do anything.”

He added on this 700 day of living like this, the Israeli army has just called on us to keep moving. “They want to displace us yet again from the north to the south, what is next we don’t know. 

We don’t have food, we don’t have water, we don’t have tents, we don’t have anything. On the 700 day, the world is just sitting and looking at us while we move from one place to another.

Another 30-year-old who lost her husband and five children and just stares into the void: “Now they are gone I feel life is empty and meaningless. I force myself to work just to forget but its like living in a distant memory and suddenly wake up to this nightmare. 

Another man with five small children moving around him said: “I have a handicapped son – a grown up, as you can see and I have to carry him across my shoulder blades whenever we are ordered to keep moving.

We are at the end of our tethers after 700 days of devastation, we see death in front of our eyes, there is no let up, the kids keep screaming at all hours of the day and night. We don’t know what is going to happen to us and now we are called upon to keep moving.”

The same is true of another lady. Her plight is the same as many others. “We are being displaced from one place to another. After 700 days we are not able to settle down to establish a tent we can live in, being displaced is like losing one’s soul and I don’t know when this will end or how.

We are living in devastation, death, slow death. Today I envy the people who have died and become martyrs.” 

Another man in crutches said: “Our savings have now ended, we are on aid to say alive, my son used to go to Zakim to get some stuff but they shot at him and now sit by me unable to move.

Blood on the streets

“The past 700 days were the deadliest, killings, bombing, starvation, you see blood seething on the streets, laying bodies of martyrs, people with no legs or arms”.

It has been an extremely difficult 700 days for a woman with the responsibility of looking after three children. “How do I cope, how do I make ends meet. My husband went before my eyes, in front of his kids, I saw, my kids saw an incredible sight of their father spluttering on the wall and now that image never leaves me nor them.

In this 700 days you lost a brother, a relative, a friend as you were forced to move from one place to another in between charities, water queues, cutting wood and all the rest of it. I just can’t describe it,” said one young man.

Sullen future

“For me, my future has perished, gone up in flames, I could have been working by now, having just finished university, but I live in a 4 by 6 tent with nothing to look forward, searching for morsels of food and hewing water, carrying buckets of water not just today but everyday, said a young lady.

Nothing is for certain. The people of Gaza, as of yet, have nothing to look forward to but more slaughter. There is a nagging fleeing, frequently made by Israeli ministers, that the aim is to push these people dubbed at around two million to other countries.

But the Gazans, still after two years of slaughter and going to the third, say they are not leaving Gaza except as dead bodies.

Marwan Asmar is the Editor of crossfirearabia.com

6 September 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Kevin Reed

As Israel prepares a massive assault on Gaza City, the Palestinians who remain in the area have been subjected to a new round of destructive air strikes that are wiping out entire residential blocks and sending new waves of panic and desperation throughout the population.

On Friday, Israeli forces struck the Mushtaha Tower, one of the tallest buildings in Gaza City, with at least three projectiles, reducing the 12-story high-rise to rubble. Verified footage and reports from ABC News show the tower collapsing in a cloud of dust, with the shockwaves from the strike shaking tent encampments surrounding it, where hundreds of displaced Palestinians had been sheltering.

According to eyewitnesses, the military issued an evacuation order just 15 minutes before the first strike, leaving many families camped around the building with nowhere to go. The force of the explosion overturned tents and caused panic as people fled. Doctors at Al-Shifa Hospital described being overwhelmed by the number of dead and injured.

Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Gaza City, said:

The destruction is the systematic erasure of homes, memories, and their community. The city is being leveled and with it their future is torn down one tower at a time.

Hospital personnel reported that it was impossible for the residents and displaced people in the tower and its vicinity to escape in the short time given. The building’s management said the building was filled with civilians.

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1963924601710182800]

Israeli projectiles have also struck other residential high-rises, and further attacks are expected as military officials advance the offensive against Gaza City. The measures being taken now by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) can only be described as bloody terror.

Fear and desperation among the population are being deliberately brought to new levels in the barbaric genocide that has been unleashed on Palestinians since October 2023. Israel is wiping out the skyline of the largest city in Gaza in preparation for a massive ground invasion.

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1964002174838399463]

Israeli officials have justified these attacks on residential buildings on the grounds that they are used by Hamas for “military operations.” Defense Minister Israel Katz, in statements made on social media and reported by numerous media outlets, declared:

Now the bolt is being removed from the gates of hell in Gaza. When the door opens, it will not close and IDF activity will increase—until the Hamas murderers and rapists accept Israel’s conditions for ending the war, primarily the release of all hostages and disarmament—or they will be destroyed.

Katz has issued multiple warnings that Gaza City will meet the same fate as Rafah and Beit Hanoun, which have been essentially turned into rubble by prior offensives. Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir confirmed Friday that IDF activity in Gaza is being “expanded.”

It is undeniable that the Zionist war criminals—with the backing of US and European imperialism—have no intention to end the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza under any circumstances. The fascists Katz and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have made it clear that no matter what happens, the aim is to completely seize the Gaza Strip and that there will be nothing left of Palestine.

In the past several days, Israeli airstrikes and fire have killed dozens of civilians in and around the Gaza City, including at least 18 people, seven of them children, in overnight attacks on Friday.

Reports from the Palestinian Health Ministry and hospitals on the ground confirmed that many of the dead were women and children, their bodies recovered from tents and makeshift shelters destroyed in the strikes. Several more were killed in missile attacks on other high-rise buildings and in the sprawling Muwasi zone, where many Palestinians have sought safety.

In just the last two nights alone, over 50 people have been killed across the Gaza Strip. According to an Associated Press report and statements from local health authorities, many of those killed in recent strikes, shootings, and stampedes were attempting to access desperately needed aid at food distribution points or airdropped supplies.

Since May, several hundred Palestinians have died from Israeli gunfire while approaching aid convoys or distribution centers, often after being forced from their homes repeatedly by military operations. The UN and humanitarian agencies have documented how Israel has made the safe delivery of humanitarian aid nearly impossible through blockades and by directly attacking aid-seeking crowds and that this is part of a strategic plan cooked up in the cooperation with the White House of Donald Trump.

The deliberate policy of starvation continues as a weapon in what international human rights groups have characterized as genocide. A global hunger monitor officially declared that famine conditions now exist in northern Gaza, a revelation Israel has denied despite overwhelming evidence.

According to the UN, over 20,000 children have been treated for acute malnutrition. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have denounced the Israeli government for its use of starvation as a weapon of war and for imposing conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the Palestinian people.

Amnesty’s recent report stated:

Israel has continued to use starvation of civilians as a weapon of war against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip and to deliberately impose conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as part of its ongoing genocide.

The criminality of these measures is multiplied by ongoing restrictions on water, fuel, food and medicine, the destruction of infrastructure, and the refusal to permit adequate humanitarian access to a desperate and exhausted population.

Human Rights Watch condemned the Israeli attacks on residential towers, declaring:

The destruction of civilian infrastructure forced displacement of residents and collective punishment of Gaza’s people constitute war crimes.

Amnesty International issued a statement that said:

Starving civilian populations, razing their homes, and attacking aid distribution points are crimes under international law.

Behind the death and devastation in Gaza stands a detailed “post-war” plan developed in close collaboration between the Israeli government and the Trump administration, with critical roles played by Israeli businessmen, the Boston Consulting Group, the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Fund, and the Tony Blair Institute.

This scheme, as reported by investigative journalists, aims to sweep Gaza clear of its Palestinian population and turn the Strip into a “seaside resort” for Western and Israeli business interests. The plan entails massive new privatization of land and resources, the introduction of special economic zones controlled by foreign investors, and the permanent exclusion of the native population, with the blessing and logistical support of the US and Israeli militaries.

While publicly couched as “humanitarian reconstruction,” the real intent is obvious: ethnic cleansing, economic exploitation, and the utter erasure of Palestinian national rights, engineered by figures like the war criminal Tony Blair and implemented at the direction of the financial and corporate elites behind US and Israeli policy.

6 September 2025

Source: countercurrents.org