Just International

Al Shifa Raid: Israel Interrogates Gaza Journalists

By Dr Marwan Asmar

The fate of 80 people including a group of journalists, including Al Jazeera reporter, hangs in the balance as they are taken for Interrogation by the Israeli army.

The life of journalists in the Gaza Strip has been a dangerous and a deadly one since Israel launched its war on the enclave after 7 October. Many were deliberately targeted, killed and injured by Israeli snipers and bombers. So far 133 Palestinian journalists were killed.

But this figure is likely to increase vastly upward with the latest Israeli onslaught on Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Israeli soldiers arrested at least 80 people, including doctors, medical staff and a group of journalists which they took away to an unknown destination.

Interrogation

On such journalist is Ismail Al Ghoul, TV satellite reporter for Al Jazeera. He was arrested together with his crew with reports that he was beaten before being taken away no doubt for interrogation. Up till then, journalists had taken Al Shifa as their place of residence mainly because of its convenience.

It was in the center of the Strip and easier to move around and cover the rapid news taken place as a result of the incessant Israeli strikes. From Al Shifa, you could travel to the north of the Gaza Strip, to the east, west, south and off course, the refugee camps sprawling in the mainly central areas of Gaza and which had taken a battering in this one-sided war.

At the time of the arrests as well, the Israeli army smashed the broadcasting equipment of the journalists stationed there. In Al Shifa, media workers could also power their broadcasting equipment in an enclave where electricity had long been cut off over the whole of Gaza by the Israelis.

At present nobody knows the whereabouts of the journalists except to say the first thing the Israeli soldiers did was to round them up and strip them of their clothes, a practice followed by the Israelis over the past six months.

This is the fourth raid on the hospital by the Israeli army in as many months with the first being taken place last November in search of the infamous “Hamas headquarter” underneath the grounds of the hospital and which was nowhere to be found.

However, Al Shifa continued to be targeted. The latest raid on the hospital ground was a result of an Israeli intelligence tip off that Hamas operatives were in the vicinity and hence it was reported that fierce fighting ensued which resulted in one soldier killed as admitted by the Israeli army.

The raid on the hospital which was made in the early hours of Monday morning resulted in fire exchange throughout the day with Israeli soldiers with tanks surrounding the hospital and calling for military backup from the air bombing different places surrounding the once-proud medical complex but now lies in tatters thanks to Israeli bombing. According to Israeli army estimates, the military operations resulted in 20 people killed.

One woman was seen crying hysterically after seeing her house in a building flattened by an Israeli missile. She had left earlier ago to look for food to feed her children. When she came back the building was gone with probably everyone inside it under the rubble.

Because of what happened to Al Shifa previously, it no longer functioned as a medical facility. It offers the bare minimum of medical care to those who come it and doesn’t have the medicines and pharmaceuticals because of the Israel siege and the grip of Zionist army.

However, according to estimates it has about 30,000 displaced persons in the hospital grounds who came to it for shelter from Israeli bombing and missiles. Anyone who moved was shot at by an Israeli sniper who was carefully placed in one of the buildings of the hospital.

In this last raid, the soldiers quickly began ordering all of the people – excluding those it took in custody – to make their way further down south, naming these places such as Al Mawasi to the west of Khan Younis, erroneously, as safe areas. But these safe areas including the far-southern city of Rafah, are frequently bombed from the air with a possible full-scale Israeli troop invasion, soon.

Today no one knows what the fate of those arrested will be. No one knows what will happen to Ismail Al Ghoul and the other journalists. But the Israeli army keeps saying this would only be a short operation and will leave the medical facility soon. But we are yet to see.

Marwan Asmar is an Amman-based journalist

19 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

Joe Biden’s Parting Gift to America Will be Christian Fascism

By Chris Hedges

The Democratic Party had one last chance to implement the kind of New Deal Reforms that could save us from another Trump presidency and Christian fascism. It failed.

Joe Biden and the Democratic Party made a Trump presidency possible once and look set to make it possible again. If Trump returns to power, it will not be due to Russian interferencevoter suppression or because the working class is filled with irredeemable bigots and racists. It will be because the Democrats are as indifferent to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza as they are to immigrants, the poor in our impoverished inner cities, those driven into bankruptcy by medical bills, credit card debt and usurious mortgages, those discarded, especially in rural America, by waves of mass layoffs and workers, trapped in the serfdom of the gig economy, with its job instability and suppressed wages.

Biden and the Democrats, along with the Republican Party, gutted antitrust enforcement and deregulated banks and corporations, allowing them to cannibalize the nation. They backed legislation in 1982 to green light the manipulation of stocks through massive buybacks and the “harvesting” of companies by private equity firms that resulted in mass layoffs. They pushed through onerous trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which crippled union organizing. They were full partners in the construction of the vast archipelagos of the U.S. prison system — the largest in the world — and the militarization of police to turn them into internal armies of occupation. They fund the endless wars.

The Democrats dutifully serve their corporate masters, without whom most of them, including Biden, would not have a political career. This is why Biden and the Democrats will not turn on those who are destroying our economy and extinguishing our democracy. The slops in the trough would dry up. Advocating reforms jeopardize their fiefdoms of privilege and power. They fancy themselves as “captains of the ship,” labor journalist Hamilton Nolan writes, but they are “actually the wood-eating shipworms who are consuming the thing from inside until it sinks.”

Authoritarianism is nurtured in the fertile soil of a bankrupt liberalism. This was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in the former Yugoslavia. And it is true now. The Democrats had four years to institute New Deal reforms. They failed. Now we will pay.

A second Trump term will not be like the first. It will be about vengeance. Vengeance against the institutions that targeted Trump – the press, the courts, the intelligence agencies, disloyal Republicans, artists, intellectuals, the federal bureaucracy and the Democratic Party.

Our imperial presidency, if Donald Trump returns to power, will shift effortlessly into a dictatorship that emasculates the legislative and judicial branches.  The plan to snuff out our anemic democracy is methodically laid out in the 887-page plan amassed by the Heritage Foundation called “Mandate for Leadership.”

The Heritage Foundation spent $22 million to draw up policy proposals, hiring lists and transition plans in Project 2025 to save Trump from the rudderless chaos that plagued his first term. Trump blames “snakes,” “traitors,” and the “Deep State” for undermining his first administration.

Our industrious American fascists, clutching the Christian cross and waving the flag, will begin work on day one to purge federal agencies of “snakes” and “traitors,” promulgate “Biblical” values, cut taxes for the billionaire class, abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, stack the courts and federal agencies with ideologues and strip workers of the few rights and protections they have left. War and internal security, including the wholesale surveillance of the public, will remain the main business of the state. The other functions of the state, especially those that focus on social services, including Social Security and protection of the vulnerable, will wither away.

Unfettered and unregulated capitalism, which has no self-imposed limits, turns everything into a commodity, from human beings to the natural world, which it exploits, until exhaustion or collapse. It first creates a mafia economy, as Karl Polanyi writes, and then a mafia government. Political theorists, including Aristotle, Karl Marx and Sheldon Wolin, warn that when oligarchs seize power, the only options left are tyranny or revolution.

The Democrats know the working class has abandoned them. And they know why. Democratic Party pollster Mike Lux writes:

[C]ontrary to many pundits’ assumptions, economic issues are driving the problems of Democrats in non-metro working class counties far more than the culture war…[T]hese voters wouldn’t care all that much about cultural difference and the woke thing if they thought Democrats gave more of a damn about economic challenges they face deeply and daily…The voters we need to win in these counties are not inherently right-wing on social issues.

But the Democrats will not alienate the corporations and billionaires who keep them in office. They have opted instead for two self-defeating tactics: lies and fear.

The Democrats express a faux concern for workers who are victimized by mass layoffs while at the same time courting the corporate leaders who orchestrate these layoffs with lavish government contracts. The same hypocrisy sees them express concern for civilians being slaughtered in Gaza while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel and vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the U.N. to sustain the genocide.

Les Leopold in his book Wall Street’s War on Workers, filled with exhaustive polling and data, illustrates that economic dislocation and despair is the engine behind an enraged working class, not racism and bigotry.

He writes about the decision by Siemens to close its plant in Olean, New York with 530 decent paying union jobs. While Democrats bemoaned the closure, they refused to deny federal contracts to Siemans to protect the workers at the plant.

Biden then invited Siemens’ USA CEO Barbara Humpton to the White House signing of the 2021 infrastructure bill. The photo of the signing shows Humpton standing in the front row along with New York Senator Chuck Schumer.

Mingo County in the early 20th century was the epicenter of an armed clash between the United Mine Workers and the coal barons, with their hired gun thugs from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. The gun thugs evicted striking workers in 1912 from company housing and beat up and shot union members until the state militia occupied the coal towns and broke the strike. The federal siege was not lifted until 1933 by the Roosevelt administration. The union, which had been banned, was legalized.

“Mingo County didn’t forget, at least not for a long time,” Leopold writes. “As late as 1996, with more than 3,200 coal miners still at work, Mingo County gave Bill Clinton a whopping 69.7 percent of its vote. But every four years thereafter, support for the Democrats declined, going down and down, and down some more. By 2020, Joe Biden received only 13.9 percent of the vote in Mingo, a brutal downturn in a county that once saw the Democratic Party as its savior.”

The 3,300 Mingo County coal mining jobs by 2020 had fallen to 300, the largest loss of coal jobs in any county in the country.

The lies of Democratic politicians did far more damage to working men and women than any of the lies spewed by Trump.

There have been at least 30 million mass layoffs since 1996 when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking them, according to the Labor Institute. The reigning oligarchs, not content with mass layoffs and reducing the unionized workforce in the private sector to a paltry 6 percent, have filed legal papers to shut down the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that enforces labor rights. Elon Musk’s SpaceX as well as Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s targeted the NLRB – already stripped of most of its power to levy fines and force corporate compliance – after it accused Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s of breaking the law by blocking union organizing. The NLRB accused SpaceX of illegally firing eight workers for criticizing Musk. SpaceX, Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joes are seeking to get the federal courts to overturn the 89-year-old National Labor Relations Act to prevent judges from hearing cases brought against corporations for violating labor laws.

Fear — fear of the return of Trump and Christian fascism — is the only card the Democrats have left to play. This will work in urban, liberal enclaves where college educated technocrats, part of the globalized knowledge economy, are busy scolding and demonizing the working class for their ingratitude.

The Democrats have foolishly written off these “deplorables” as a lost political cause. This precariat, the mantra goes, is victimized not by a predatory system built to enrich the billionaire class, but by their ignorance and individual failures. Dismissing the disenfranchised absolves the Democrats from advocating the legislation to protect and create decent-paying jobs.

Fear has no hold in deindustrialized urban landscapes and the neglected wastelands of rural America, where families struggle without sustainable work, an opioid crisis, food deserts, personal bankruptcies, evictions, crippling debt and profound despair.

They want what Trump wants. Vengeance. Who can blame them?

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 for the paper.

18 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

Netanyahu doubles down on planned assault on Rafah

By Andre Damon

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel would proceed with its plans to assault Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, where over 1.5 million refugees are sheltering.

“No international pressure will stop Israel,” Netanyahu said during a meeting of Israel’s cabinet, adding, “If we stop the war now before achieving all of its goals, the meaning is that Israel had lost the war, and we will not allow this.

“We will operate in Rafah,” Netanyahu said. “This will take several weeks, and it will happen.”

On Friday, the Israeli military approved a plan for an offensive in Rafah, combined with the displacement of refugees sheltering there to camps to the north, which Israeli officials called “humanitarian islands.”

Netanyahu reiterated his plans to attack Rafah following a speech Thursday by US Democratic Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, who called Netanyahu an “obstacle” to “peace” and said the prime minister had “lost his way.” US President Joe Biden effectively endorsed Schumer’s remarks, saying it was a “good speech.”

But Netanyahu’s statements Saturday demonstrated that these verbal criticisms by US officials have no effect on the conduct of the genocide. Israel continues to kill over 100 people every single day, while the entire population of Gaza is on the verge of starvation.

Amid all this, US funding and weapons to Israel continue to flow uninterrupted, and the White House has made it clear it has no “red lines” for what crimes Israel is allowed to commit before the US stops providing it with arms and funding.

The United States has already offered a pre-emptive endorsement of the assault on Rafah by making the only qualification the existence of a “plan” to relocate the civilian population.

On Sunday, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported that 13,000 children have been killed in Gaza to date, adding that many children affected by malnutrition in Gaza “don’t even have the energy to cry.”

“What’s happening now is more than 13,000 children already have been killed, which is an astronomical, horrifying number,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell in an interview on CBS News Sunday.

She added, “Thousands more have been injured or we can’t even determine where they are. They may be stuck under rubble. Thousands more have lost one or both parents. Some of these children, you’ve seen them on the news, they’re just by themselves managing their younger siblings. I mean, it’s a horrifying situation.”

Russell said that one in three children under the age of two is suffering from acute malnutrition.

She continued, “I’ve been in wards of children who are suffering from severe anemia and malnutrition, and the whole ward is absolutely quiet because the children, the babies, don’t even have the energy to cry.”

In a report published Sunday, the UK-based charity Oxfam said Israel continues to “systematically and deliberately block and undermine any meaningful international humanitarian response.”

Oxfam reported that the deliberate starvation of the population of Gaza has only worsened since the ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) calling on Israel to stop killing Palestinians and to allow food into Gaza.

“The ICJ order should have shocked Israeli leaders to change course, but since then conditions in Gaza have actually worsened,” Oxfam Middle East and North Africa Director Sally Abi Khalil said Sunday. “Israeli authorities are not only failing to facilitate the international aid effort, but are actively hindering it. We believe that Israel is failing to take all measures within its power to prevent genocide.”

To date, Israel has killed over 32,000 people in Gaza since October 7, with tens of thousands more missing. Between March 14 and 15, Israeli forces killed 149 Palestinians in Gaza and injured 300 more.

On Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced that the military is once again launching a raid on Al-Shifa Hospital, raising the prospect that doctors and patients will be killed by IDF troops.

“The IDF is conducting a high-precision operation in limited areas of Shifa Hospital following concrete evidence that demanded immediate action,” the IDF said in a statement.

18 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

Gaza Kids Pick Shrubs For Their Iftar Meal

By Dr Marwan Asmar

Al Jazeera correspondent Anas Al Sharif reports on the starvation experienced by people in north Gaza and what they are doing to overcome their hunger. He talks to three young boys about picking shrubs near the Jabalia Camp.

This report was made slightly before aid started to trickle to north Gaza, a 13-truck convey of flour that entered the region from the south, the first in months.

This is a drop in the ocean but many hope, it will be the first of other trucks that will be allowed by the Israelis to enter this area of the Strip.

People in northern Gaza are in starvation mode. The 700,000 people here, are acutely worse than those in the south and international agencies speak of a looming famine if aid trucks are not allowed in.

The clip is in a question/answer form:

Salamu Alaikum. hi, how are you, what are you doing?

“We are picking shrubs so we can cook and eat for dinner tonight.

What, near the beach, here?

“We have come here to wait for aid (planes, now-a-days, drop bundles of aid from the sky). I heard they are going to drop aid today and we have been waiting for them since 7 o’clock this morning.

(Another small boy muttered in agreement). Today the Gaza is frequently filled with black parachutes that open in the skies while carrying the airdrops.

And

“We are still waiting. We don’t want to go home empty-handed, so we thought we’d pick shrubs and to take home to cook.

(The reporter addresses the third boy): “What are you gathering?

“Same…some wood and shrubs.” The wood is for fire as many Gazan families today have no gas and cook on fire.

Are you going to eat this?

All replied “yes. We want to feed the children back home, so they wouldn’t starve to death.”

“We are all dying from hunger here,” added Al Sharif.

“They are for the kids which we want to feed. There is supposed be a ceasefire and allow the entry of aid so that the children won’t die.”

“Kids are dying every day in the Kamal Al Adwan and nobody pays any attention to them,” the bigger boy emphasized.

“This is the prevailing scene” the reporter interjects. “The children came to wait for the planes that drop the aid but they haven’t arrived till now so the boys started picking what sparse shrubs they can from this place so they can provide for the Iftar meal of the day in the Muslim month of Ramadan.

Maybe, these shrubs are not fit for eating but many families today in this part of the world are forced to do that.”

Marwan Asmar is a journalist from Amman Jordan writing on Middle East affairs

18 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

BJP rule and threats to Indian Democracy and Constitution

By Dr Ram Puniyani

The leaders of BJP, the ruling dispensation have been claiming to be winning more that 400 (370BJP +30 Allies) seats in the forthcoming parliamentary elections (Char sau paar) of 2024.  This is not based on any psephological analysis but purely propagated for political reasons.

Justifying this ‘char sau par’ the Karnataka BJP MP of long standing Anantkumar Hegde explained the need for such a figure. As per him BJP intends to change the Constitution for which 2/3rd majority is needed. In a public meeting he stated, that the party needs 400 seats to change the Constitution, “If the Constitution has to be amended — the Congress fundamentally distorted the Constitution by forcefully filling unnecessary things in it (added, secularism, socialism), especially by bringing in laws that were aimed at suppressing the Hindu society — if all of this has to be changed, it is not possible with this (current) majority,”

BJP distanced itself from this statement of the sitting MP, as if they do not really approve of such a statement. There are some news items saying that due to this statement he may be denied the ticket. Whether he is denied a ticket on this ground or not; one thing is sure that BJP has no aversion to such statements. This MP had said the same thing in 2017, when he was a Central minister in the BJP government. He was duly given the ticket from this party in 2019 General elections by BJP.

Rahul Gandhi, Congress MP, and many others feel that what Hegde is saying is precisely what explains the figure of 400. “The statement of the BJP MP that he needs 400 seats to change the Constitution is a public declaration of the hidden agenda of Narendra Modi and his ‘Sangh Parivar’. The ultimate goal of Narendra Modi and the BJP is to destroy Baba Saheb’s Constitution. They hate justice, equality, civil rights and democracy,” Rahul Gandhi wrote in Hindi on X (formally Twitter).

The former Congress president also alleged that “by dividing society, guarding the freedom of expression and crippling independent institutions, they want to turn India’s great democracy into a narrow dictatorship by conspiring to eliminate the opposition”.

The BJP has a twin track strategy to undermine the democratic values, the values of equality of our Constitution. Its parent organization RSS opposed the constitution right from the beginning. After the Indian Constitution came into being RSS unofficial mouthpiece Organiser wrote, “…In Our Constitution, There Is No Mention of That Unique Constitutional Development in Ancient Bharat. To This Day His Laws As Enunciated In The Manusmriti Excite The Admiration Of The World And Elicit Spontaneous Obedience And Conformity. But To Our Constitutional Pundits That Means Nothing.”

When BJP came to power as NDA in 1998 one of the first things it did was to appoint a commission to review the Constitution. This Commission’s, (Venkatchaliah Commission), report could not be undertaken for implementation as there was a severe opposition to any tampering with our Constitution. From 2014, when BJP has been in power; times and over again it has used the preamble of our Constitution by deleting the words Secular and Socialist.

Prior to this when K.Sudarshan became the Chief of RSS in 2000, he frankly stated that the Indian Constitution is based on Western values so should be replaced by one based on Indian holy books. “Sudarshan said the constitution was of no use for the people of the country as it was based on the Government of India Act of 1935, …We need not fight shy of altering the constitution completely,…”

Not too long ago, Chief of PM’s economic advisory council, Dr. Vivek Debroy had also called for a change of constitution in a lead article in Livemint on August 15, 2023. So voices of major stature from within the BJP organization and state officials do keep raising such voices while officially the BJP or BJP led Government makes the show of distancing itself from such utterances.

On another track; since BJP has been in power for the last one decade, what has it done to the core value of the Indian Constitution: Democracy and equality? As far as democracy is concerned, all the pillars of democratic state, Constitutional institutions ED, CBI, IT, EC all are being controlled by the executive and the executive itself is restricted to one person. The Judiciary at various levels has been weakened by various mechanisms. There are numerous examples of this; one such being the detention of Umar Khaild and refusal to hear his bail plea from the last three years.

Freedom of expression is down in the dumps. With the mainstream media under the belt of pro Government Corporate, it is the Voice of Ruling Government which is broadcast through major TV channels and newspapers. The independent voices have limited space available to articulate their opinions. Freedom of Expression; the major pillar of a democratic society has gone for a toss.

Freedom of Religion has been declining with many International indices. ‘India as a country of particular concern,’ is the label for India as per US freedom of religion watchdog. As per V-Dem India ranked 104 on democracy Index, between Niger and Ivory Coast! This is what has happened during the last ten years, to practically denigrate the democratic freedoms through executive actions leading to such a drastic fall in democratic index.

Not long ago it was Lal Krishna Advani, who had said that India is living through an undeclared emergency. All the components of freedom have been stifled through the foot soldiers of Hindu nationalists apart from state officials, while the ruling Governments merrily looks the other way around, a clear signal to these elements that this regime grants full impunity to violations of democratic rights of minorities and weaker sections of society.

As such if we look around every ‘religious nationalist’ outfit is averse to democratic freedoms. They do resort to tuning their constitutions in such a direction, also their ground level workers resort to the actions promoting divisive and oppressive politics. India is joining this club of ‘Democracy suppressors’ like Pakistan or Sri Lanka. BJP is resorting to twin track politics, aiming for changing the Constitution on one hand and practically undermining it, on the other!

17 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

‘What happened to us is beyond imagination’

By Dr Marwan Asmar

A woman narrates how she escaped alive while her house was being bulldozed

“What happened to us is beyond imagination,” said a displaced person in Gaza.

“It was like anybody who moved outside the home was shot and left outside for the cats,” the woman who moved from the north of the Gaza Strip continued.

It happened so fast

“A youth was sent by our neighbors to see if we were alright and it happened all so fast. He was talking to me just as I opened the door and he was shot dead right there, in front of me,” she added.

“He was left outside the house we were living for nine days,” she told Al Jazeera TV channel.

But this was only the beginning of a chain of events that eventually landed her in the Abu Yousef Al Najar Hospital in Rafah in the south of Gaza where 1.4 million internally displaced refugees are now located thanks to the Israeli army.

“The Israeli army started bulldozing right on top of our heads but miraculously, me and mother, were able to leave the house alive. At the time, the bodies of other martyrs were scattered outside,” she continued.

Burying inside homes

The situation was scary and chaotic.  “Our neighbors were forced to bury their martyrs inside their houses and this applied to many people, for there was no way anyone could bury their dead outside of their homes because of the intensity of the bombardment.”

In the case of her neighbor’s house, she narrated the story of the family that had been living there before it was bombed. “A doctor was living there, he had worked in the Indonesian Hospital in the north then Kamal Al Adwan Hospital then moved to a clinic in Jabalia before making it down here, she narrated.

The fateful day happened when “the Israeli army knocked on their door, shot the doctor point blank and then immediately fired a tank missile on the house killing him and his children instantly.”

This account was edited from Al Jazeera Mubasher with the handle of @ajmubasher by Dr Marwan Asmar, an Amman-based journalist who writes on Middle East affairs.

17 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

‘You Are Doing It Now’: If The Palestinians Are Forgotten, So Is The Holocaust

By Arjun Banerjee

“What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide? The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.” – Aaron Bushnell, martyred on Feb 26, 2024.

The basic kernel of truth about the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany is that whatever happened was wrong, and offensive to humanity on a level that all people across the world can relate to. The acceptance that the atrocities of the Holocaust were just that: atrocities. There could be no situational justification or no rationalization of why this evil was necessary. It is a momentous event that should shock us out of the bloodlust of war and make us pause and consider the humanity that had been destroyed in the process. The Zionist actions in Palestine are striking at the roots of what makes the Holocaust stand out in its inhumanity and absolute evil. If the position that it is acceptable to allow Zionism to do what it is doing because of ‘terrorism’, then the essential spirit behind remembrance of that great human catastrophe stands rejected.

All human beings can inherently understand the repugnance of murder and imagine the pain of physical injury and torture. A sense of absolute hopelessness and dread is created in us when we witness the history of those events through records and works of culture (art, films, books, etc.). We can instinctively understand that there can be no justification for treating fellow human beings like this. The ability to feel wronged on another’s behalf, and to be able to place oneself in those who were persecuted, ripped from their families, and denied their humanity: this is what makes the vast majority of the world acknowledge and mourn the Holocaust. By not doing the same for the Palestinian people, the world does a great disservice to the memory of the Holocaust by allowing it to be weaponized by the Zionist agenda.

Nowhere is safe in Gaza

Among the hundreds of disturbing visuals from Palestine, there is one that shows the Star of David cut into the back of a Palestinian man kidnapped and tortured by Israeli soldiers. Susan Abulhawa tells their story, along with those of others, here. It is but one of the many windows into the hell that Israel has created in Gaza. The branding and marking of a tortured body with a symbol of a whole people and religion is a gross disrespect compounded by a terrible crime. It is one of the ways in which Zionism turns Judaism and Jewish identity into a weapon. This recalls the Zionist regime’s ambassador to the U.N. brandishing the Star on his chest, in an attempt at referencing the Nazi segregation of Jews from 1939 onwards in December 2023.

Zionism violently marks the Palestinian body (in a gendered and sexual manner) with visible markers of Jewish supremacy and exceptionalism. It declares that the Jews are exempt and immune to the censure of all humanity and have propped themselves up as a self-righteous exemption to ‘Never Again’.

The many horrendous calamities being deliberately visited upon the Palestinian people have blown any semblance of the ‘post-colonial’ or ‘post War’ world to shreds. What do these terms even mean now, other than being mere academic brackets around random dates? There have been at least four similar incidents after the Rafah flour massacre on March 1. People are being baited with food dropped from the air, made to run around only to be shot at or even to be killed by the dropped ‘aid’ items themselves. Military-grade weapons and equipment mounted on ships, warplanes, and tanks are being used to mow down starving human beings. This reality is infinitely more shocking than the shameless, fake propaganda about Hamas killing babies and raping women by the dozens. Hemmed in without food, water, electricity, medicine, and communication, the Zionist regime stamps its bloody fist all over the land and people of Palestine with impunity. Its actions have discredited the moral and political unanimity that stood behind the condemnation of the Holocaust because of its insistence that the same crimes committed in the name of protecting Judaism do not count. The universality of the human values that were offended by the Holocaust is being openly denied and refuted. Nothing could be a greater representation of the disrespect and failure of the efforts of so many people to preserve the solemnity of the Holocaust and all its lessons for future generations. It has taken six decades of absolute terror by Israel in Palestine for it all to unravel into the ghastly scenes we are witnessing today.

Relentless bombings and massacres of the hungry

Rafah, the last refuge of 1.7 million besieged people, is being bombed relentlessly. Nothing can hide the shame of the fact that Israel is targeting all Palestinians in a bid to completely remove them from their lands. Raids, abductions, airstrikes, children recounting horror after horror, starving people being shot at as they rush at food or try and collect water: the human dignity and spirit of an entire people is under attack as we watch them scrounge for the bare minimum while their cultural achievements, arts, and education is completely obliterated. Nowhere is safe now. The Western-backed Zionist forces have marked Palestine out for complete annihilation. Zionism makes sure that all Israelis share in this great sin. The people of this highly militarized, apartheid ethnonationalist regime bring their children to blockades of aid trucks, declaring openly that they mean to starve everyone trapped behind their high-tech walls. Their children are being conditioned to enjoy the suffering that they will soon be called on to perpetrate with their own hands. By that time, however, they will have completely submitted to the depravity that prompts them to revel in the miseries of others and broadcast their crimes with pride on their social media profiles.

We have seen a repeat of every defining image of the Holocaust over these six months— children emaciated from extreme starvation and dehydration, people put through famine and thirst, families separated and kidnapped for beatings and torture, human bodies crushed by bulldozers and maimed in every way imaginable, surgeries conducted without anaesthesia, and so much more. Is this not the utter and complete failure to honour the memory of that calamity? Can it be said that the Holocaust was never ‘over’ in the first place, but merely shifted to other lands far away?

Some voices roar in a morally dead world

It takes great sacrifices to make the world beat back the information fatigue and culture of apathy and take a good hard look at what is being allowed to happen in Gaza. The brave actions of two American citizens: an unnamed woman in Atlanta, and USAF serviceman Aaron Bushnell were acts of extreme protest that confronted those of us in our fragile bubbles of comfort with the brutality of what “the ruling classes have decided will be normal” (Bushnell’s final message). The masses in the Arab world have expressed their support and respect for Bushnell for paying the ultimate price in such a heroic manner.  What Bushnell achieved with his self-immolation was to make us sit up and take notice and to inspire a renewed faith in moral convictions in a world where things are quickly forgotten and caring for others is scorned. None of this makes up for the loss of his brilliant life or the physical anguish he endured in his final moments. It is up to all of us to ensure that his sacrifice did not go in vain.

Arjun Banerjee is a writer and political commentator. He is a postgraduate in English literature from the University of Delhi.

17 March 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

Trump Son-in-Law Jared Kushner Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza to ‘Finish the Job’

By Jake Johnson

Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former president and presumptive 2024 Republican nominee Donald Trump, said in a recent interview that if he were in charge of Israeli policy, he would push Gaza civilians into Egypt or Israel’s Negev desert—a proposal that critics denounced as ethnic cleansing.

“You want to get as many civilians out of Rafah as possible,” Kushner told the faculty chair of Harvard University’s Middle East Initiative, Tarek Masoud, in a March 8 interview that was first reported widely on Tuesday. “I think that you want to try to clear that out. I know that with diplomacy maybe you get them into Egypt.”

“I know that that’s been refused, but [with] the right diplomacy I think it would be possible,” Kushner added. “But in addition to that, the thing that I would try to do if I was Israel right now is I would just bulldoze something in the Negev, I would try to move people in there. I know that won’t be the popular thing to do, but I think that that’s a better option to do so you can go in and finish the job.”

Israel should ‘finish the job’ by moving Palestinians to Negev, says Kushner

Kushner played a central role in crafting Trump’s Middle East policy during his first four years in the White House, and the former president’s son-in-law’s remarks provided a potential glimpse of how the U.S. would approach Gaza if Trump wins another term in November.

Earlier this month, Trump said he wants Israel to “finish the problem” in Gaza—a remark that Kushner echoed just three days later in his March 8 interview.

In addition to advocating the removal of civilians from Rafah—which is currently packed with more than 1.5 million people, including hundreds of thousands of children—Kushner said Gaza’s “waterfront property could be very valuable.”

“It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up,” Kushner said.

Kushner responded flippantly to concerns that if Gazans were forced out of their territory, the Israeli government wouldn’t let them return—something that top Israeli officials have publicly advocated.

“Maybe,” he said, “but I’m not sure there’s much left of Gaza at this point.”

Kushner also claimed that Israel has gone “way more out of its way” than other countries would to protect civilians—despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary.

Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

19 March 2024

Source: commondreams.org

New UK MP George Galloway on the Next Era of Politics

By Glenn Greenwald

8 Mar 2024

Upending the “West’s Dictatorship” – System Update

Upending the “West’s Dictatorship.” New MP George Galloway on the Next Era of Politics

George Galloway has been a member of the British Parliament for nearly 30 years. He presents TV and radio shows and is a film-maker, writer and a renowned orator and activist.

18 March 2024

Source: transcend.org

Seeing the Divinity in Everyone

By Stephen Knapp

Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of the Aikido method of martial arts said: “Above all, one must unite one’s heart with that of the gods. The essence of God is love, an all-pervading love that reaches every corner of the universe. If one is not united to God, the universe cannot be harmonized. Martial artists who are not in harmony with the universe are merely executing combat techniques, not Aiki (Ai–uniting harmony and love with ki–the universal energy).”

This understanding is very important even in ordinary, everyday life. If we are not working in harmony with love and universal energy, we are simply going through daily routines that are ineffectual and empty. We need to practice the methods which also awaken the connection we have with God, the universe, and each other. This is the way we can fully grow and develop. Then our life will have meaning and purpose. We will be guided by our own upliftment and will be able to assist in the upliftment of others. We will be able to recognize the all-pervasiveness of the Supreme Being.

The essence of this perception has been related in the ancient Vedic texts, as we find in the Svetasvatara Upanishad (6.11) which states, “He is the one God hidden in all beings, all pervading, the self within all beings, watching over all worlds, dwelling in all beings, the witness, the perceiver.” If one can truly understand this and become enlightened in this way, he will see that he is a part of the Supreme Reality and realize his union with all beings. Within that enlightenment one can reach Divine Love. This love is based on the spiritual oneness and harmony between all beings, which is sublime. It is a source of spiritual bliss. It is a love based not on bodily relations or mutual attraction, but it is based on being one in spirit, beyond the temporary nature of the body. This is the love for which everyone searches, from which springs forth peace, harmony, and unity, of which all other kinds of love are mere reflections. This state of being is reached only through spirituality. Therefore, a life without spirituality is a life incomplete. All have the need to fill their souls with spirituality, the presence of God, in order to feel fullness, peace, contentment, and unity.

As the Supreme says in the ancient Vedic text of Bhagavad-gita (6.30): “To him who sees Me in everything and everything in Me, I am never lost, and he is not lost to Me.”

To begin seeing how things really are, and to recognize the Divinity in each of us, we have to start adjusting our consciousness. This takes place by being trained in spiritual knowledge and by the practice of yoga which purifies the mind. When the mind becomes purified and the false ego no longer influences our vision, we become sensible people. As the Bhagavad-gita (13.31-32) says, when a sensible man ceases to see different identities due to different material bodies, he attains the spiritual conception. Those with the vision of eternity see that the soul is transcendental, eternal, and beyond the modes of nature. Despite being within the material body, the soul is above material contact.

As the son is a part and parcel of the father, similarly, we are all individual parts of the supreme spiritual Father. In fact, the whole creation displays different energies which are expansions of the Supreme Energetic. Thus, there is diversity within the variegated material energy which expands from the Supreme Being. These expansions manifest in millions of species of life, as explained in the Vedic literature. Therefore, although we are in different material bodies, we are all expansions of the same spiritual energy. This is oneness and unity in diversity. On the spiritual platform, which is absolute, we are all the same. We are all spiritual beings, servants of the Supreme Being, undergoing life in the material creation. That is real unity. This perception is the perfection of the spiritually conscious person. He sees all living entities as reflections of the One, the Supreme Being. Thus, in a broad sense, there is one interest. Spiritually there is no clash.

We are all but small reflections of the Supreme Consciousness. When we put the greater whole above ourselves, and realize that we all contribute to the condition of this planet, then uniting with a common cause and with that Supreme Consciousness will be easy.

This planet does not allow us to be isolated. We all must work together and interface with others on some level. One lesson that this school of existence on this planet forces us to learn is that when we come together willingly to communicate, with a positive purpose, or to pray together, and to unite for the good of the whole, then harmony and peace can exist. That peace forms and manifests when we focus on our spiritual nature, which brings between us our unity in the Supreme. Making this the center of our existence will easily bring peace, unity, and harmony in this world because it brings in the spiritual vibration that emanates from the Supreme. That vibration is one of spiritual love. It is all that is eternal. All else is temporary. Therefore, focusing on and using our energy on temporary emotions such as envy, jealousy, and anger, will only keep us far away from the Supreme, and from reaching any peace or unity between us.

We have to recognize how similar we are in order to expand our heart toward others we may have previously rejected. This is how love and understanding can dissolve the boundaries that keep us stifled as a society and individuals, and keep us from entering higher dimensions of consciousness. There is no other way to grow spiritually. A lack of love for each other is a reflection of a lack of love for God.

When we think in spiritual consciousness, we do not recognize others by their differences. We see our similarities. This is easy when we think in terms of being sons and daughters of the same Supreme Father. We all belong to the One. Only in this way can there be universal love among all living entities. Only in this way can we begin to think that we are all related to each other. Once we establish our relationship with the Supreme, then we can establish our true relationship with everyone else. Our spiritual nature is eternal, and our spiritual relation with the Supreme is eternal. Therefore, our spiritual relationship with each other is also eternal. It is not subject to time and circumstances. This central point has to be established in order for there to be universal peace, brotherhood, equality, and unity in the world.

In essence, we are all consciousness in material forms. Consciousness cannot be destroyed. It is the essence of God in each of us. We are all spiritual beings, reflections of the Divine. We are not our beliefs, our cultures, or our minds and bodies. We are all divine souls on a wondrous journey through Truth. We have all manifested from God, the Supreme Truth, and we are all evolving back to God. As the Manu-samhita (12.125) relates, “Thus, he who by means of Self sees the self in all created things, after attaining equality with all, enters into Brahman [spiritual consciousness], the highest place.” That is the ultimate goal.

Stephen Knapp (Sri Nandanandana dasa) has dedicated himself to spreading the deepest and most practical levels of spiritual knowledge about the soul–our real identity.

18 March 2024

Source: transcend.org