Archives: Articles

By Countercurrents Collective

John Pilger, world famous investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker, has died on Saturday at his home in London, his family announced on Sunday in a post on X (formerly Twitter). John Pilger was 84. John Pilger is considered a journalist for people, a journalist voicing the people.

A statement posted to his account on X said: “It is with great sadness the family of John Pilger announces he died yesterday 30 December 2023 in London.

“His journalism and documentaries were celebrated around the world, but to his family he was simply the most amazing and loved Dad, Grandad and partner. Rest In Peace.”

Pilger is survived by his partner and his two children Sam and Zoe, who are also writers.

Throughout his career, Pilger was a strong critic of western foreign policy and his native country’s treatment of Indigenous Australians.

Vietnam, Biafra, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Iraq

Pilger was known for his hard-hitting exposés on the human cost of empire, from the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, Biafra, Bangladesh, and Iraq, to Western democracies’ systematic repression of their own working classes. His documentaries include ‘Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia’, ‘Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror’, ‘The War on Democracy’, ‘Palestine is Still the Issue’, and ‘The Coming War with China’.

He covered conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Biafra, and was named journalist of the year in 1967 and 1979. Pilger had a successful career in documentary film-making, creating more than 50 films and winning a number of accolades includes honours at the Baftas.

“Every journalist, even though they may not know it, owes a debt to John Pilger,” Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi told Sunday, calling the award-winning filmmaker “one of the greatest journalists in all of history.”

Rattansi highlighted Pilger’s tireless campaigning on behalf of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, incarcerated at Britain’s Belmarsh Prison since police dragged him out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2019, as a prominent piece of his legacy. He credited the journalist for “Assange’s survival and him not being killed in the CIA plot” by the agency’s then-director Mike Pompeo.

Pilger “realized journalism was about illuminating things for the ordinary person, not for elites, it is not for awards,” Rattansi explained, praising his late friend and colleague for his “moral compass in which he looked at everything from the bottom up, from the viewpoint of the average person.”

“He was a vocal critic of fake journalism that is so on display when we look at Gaza, when we look at Ukraine, and he was banned de facto by all British media,” he said.

Pilger was long a fixture at mainstream news outlets, working for the Daily Mirror, Reuters, and ITV’s World in Action.

Frozen Out By The Establishment

Pilger was gradually frozen out by the establishment over the last decade, with The Guardian the last to end regular publication of his column in 2015, in what the journalist himself described as a “purge of those who were saying what The Guardian no longer says anymore.”

Former colleagues nevertheless flocked to social media to pay their respects. Pilger was “a great Daily Mirror journalist back in the day, one of the very best. Brave, insightful, challenging authority, and instinctively own the side of the underdog,” that outlet’s associate editor, Kevin Maguire, wrote on X.

ITV managing director Kevin Lygo called Pilger “a giant of campaigning journalism” who “eschewed comfortable consensus and instead offered a radical, alternative approach on current affairs and a platform for dissenting voices over 50 years.”

Pilger was a vocal supporter of Julian Assange and visited the WikiLeaks founder in the Ecuador embassy in London where he sought asylum after facing charges related to the publication of thousands of classified documents.

Assange’s wife, Stella, wrote on X: “Our dear dear John Pilger has left us. He was one of the greats. A consistent ally of the dispossessed, John dedicated his life to telling their stories and awoke the world to the greatest injustices.

“He showed great empathy for the weak and was unflinching with the powerful. John was one of Julian’s most vocal champions but they also became the closest of friends. He fought for Julian’s freedom until the end.”

Last Column For The Guardian

In his last column for the Guardian, in 2015, he condemned how “aboriginal people are to be driven from homelands where their communities have lived for thousands of years”.

Born in Bondi, New South Wales, Pilger relocated to the UK in the 1960s, where he went on to work for the Daily Mirror, ITV’s former investigative programme World in Action and Reuters.

In 1979, the ITV film Year Zero: The Silent Death Of Cambodia revealed the extent of the ruling Khmer Rouge’s crimes. Pilger won an Emmy award for his 1990 follow-up ITV documentary, Cambodia: The Betrayal.

Pilger also made the 1974 ITV documentary Thalidomide: The Ninety-Eight We Forgot, about the campaign for compensation for children after concerns were raised about birth defects when expectant mothers took the drug.

Kevin Lygo, the managing director of media and entertainment at ITV, said: “John was a giant of campaigning journalism. He had a clear, distinctive editorial voice which he used to great effect throughout his distinguished filmmaking career. His documentaries were engaging, challenging and always very watchable.

“He eschewed comfortable consensus and instead offered a radical, alternative approach on current affairs and a platform for dissenting voices over 50 years.

“John’s films gave viewers analysis and opinion often not seen elsewhere in the television mainstream. It was a contribution that greatly added to the rich plurality of British television.

“Our thoughts and condolences are with John’s family, friends and colleagues at this sad time.”

The former Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters, who has also supported Assange, said of Pilger: “I miss you my friend, what a great man you were. We will carry you in our hearts forever, you will always be there to give us strength. Love R.”

Pilger made a number of films about Indigenous Australians such as The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back in 1985 and Utopia in 2013, as well as writing a bestselling book, A Secret Country, which explored the politics and policies of Australia.

His last film, The Dirty War on the National Health Service, was released in 2019 and examined the threat to the NHS from privatisation and bureaucracy. It was described by the Guardian’s film critic Peter Bradshaw as “a fierce, necessary film”.

In 2003, Pilger received the Sophie prize for “30 years of uncovering the lies and propaganda of the powerful, especially as they relate to wars, conflict of interests and economic exploitation of people and natural resources”.

Pilger edited the 2005 book Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs, in which he summed up his journalistic values. “Secretive power loathes journalists who do their job, who push back screens, peer behind façades, lift rocks,” he said. “Opprobrium from on high is their badge of honour.”

1 January 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Akhtar Ali Syed

In 2015, Leicester hosted a conference on the psychological effects of war on the people living in active war zones. An Iraqi psychiatrist presented his research on the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder in various parts of Iraq, estimating that 50 to 70 percent of the general population suffered from the disorder.

Following him, a British specialist called his estimations ludicrous and inappropriate. The Iraqi and the British specialists were both right. The Iraqi psychiatrist reported on the clinical presentation of Iraqis who had been victims of the worst atrocities committed after the invasion. The British expert sitting thousands of miles away was speaking solely from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (popularly known as DSM).

The clinical picture of traumatised Iraqis did not fulfill the diagnostic criteria of PTSD described in the manual. This argument was made while post-invasion terrorism in Iraq was still active, with more than 1.4 million citizens dead in terrorist attacks by the time. However, the same criterion was proven to be relevant to the New Yorkers in 2007.

The PTSD was shown to be four times as prevalent among the New Yorkers. Similarly, 30 percent of the American army war veterans could be diagnosed based on the criteria. The vast majority of them returned after witnessing the sufferings of mostly their victims.

When 77 percent of clinically diagnosable Palestinian children with PTSD were discovered, only about 20 percent met the diagnostic criteria, the gap between clinical presentation and the diagnostic system became more conspicuous.

Two things stick out in this particular instance. To begin with, why are diagnostic systems failing to account for the human condition, which regularly occurs around the world? People are in pain in war zones, but there is no word for it in the mental health bible.

Individuals are not responsible for suffering in such a way that their suffering qualifies for inclusion in the diagnostic system. It is the responsibility of mental health science to investigate the changing human conditions, establish scientific processes and invent new vocabulary as an old one loses utility.

Second, why does the same standard apply to certain people but not others? Is there a hidden message here? Several years after 9/11, New Yorkers, as well as American soldiers returning from their murderous sprees, suffer from the PTSD, yet Afghans, Palestinians and Iraqis do not. Are the people not affected by the ongoing violence less human? Does the world not need to be concerned about their condition because they do not suffer the same way?

The phrase post-trauma implies that the traumatic incident – for example, seeing a road accident, a robbery or a murder – has come to an end. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a condition that occurs after an event has occurred. One of the symptoms of this disorder is a fear of a recurrence of the same incident. Because of the fear that the trauma will return, the affected person remains hyper-vigilant.

But what if the worry of recurrence becomes more than a feeling? What if it becomes a terrible daylight reality? What if what happened today will almost certainly happen again tomorrow, and it will almost certainly happen over the coming days, weeks, months, years and decades? Does one still call it post-trauma or perpetual trauma?

What will be the likely state of mind of those who have inherited trauma from their forefathers? Does this human situation have a formal label? None. Is a study being done to quantify the psychological distress of persons who have been the victims of continuous wars? None, to the best of my knowledge.

Complex PTSD, a criterion in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD 11), may be mentioned here. However, a thorough examination of the ICD 11 criteria reveals only the addition of three new symptoms to PTSD. Also, the CPTSD is suggested for use in cases of chronic and ongoing trauma, such as domestic violence. Can you imagine comparing the plight of victims of the 75-year-old Israel-Palestine conflict to the victims of domestic abuse?

Western researchers, however, are capable of doing so because this is the worst incidence of trauma they can imagine. I’d like to point out that all active war zones, at the moment, are located far from the United States and United Kingdom. This is why the victims cannot find a space in the mental disorder diagnostic systems. Also, who is to be held accountable for inflicting the pain and insult on those who are affected if the correct diagnostic criteria are devised and they are appropriately diagnosed? The Palestinians will be able to document their suffering. They will then have an identified disorder to show the world, potentially gaining sympathy against the oppressors.

A misconception concerning the PTSD is that it is associated solely with fear, nightmares and helplessness. As we all know, when fear reaches a certain level, it ceases to be constraining. The individual then no longer fears the consequences and enters the combat mode. According to a Persian proverb, a cat will turn into a lion if trauma is protracted, continuous and emotionally damaging. When one’s life, integrity, modalities of survival and emotional attachments (close family, religion and hometown) are endangered, strong rage and innate aggressiveness emerge and may extend beyond the issue of life and death.

What has been happening to Palestinians for decades and what they have done in reaction is completely understandable from the standpoint of psychopathology. What they are going through will naturally influence how they react. They’ve seen how other options have been turned down and exhausted. Oppressors always have more options than the oppressed. Whether they choose dialogue or dispute, the oppressed have learnt the value of their lives.

Dr Akhtar Ali Syed is a clinical psychologist. He lives and works in Ireland.

30 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Chris Hedges

Israel’s lebensraum master plan for Gaza, borrowed from the Nazi’s depopulation of Jewish ghettos, is clear. Destroy infrastrutrue, medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water. Block shipments of food and fuel. Unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to kill and wound hundreds a day. Let starvation — the U.N. estimates that more than half a million people are already starving — and epidemics of infectious diseases, along with the daily massacres and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes, turn Gaza into a mortuary. The Palestinians are being forced to choose between death from bombs, disease, exposure or starvation or being driven from their homeland.

There will soon reach a point where death will be so ubiquitous that deportation – for those who want to live – will be the only option.

Danny Danon, Israel’s former Ambassador to the U.N. and a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel’s Kan Bet radio that he has been contacted by “countries in Latin America and Africa that are willing to absorb refugees from the Gaza Strip.” “We have to make it easier for Gazans to leave for other countries,” he said. “I’m talking about voluntary migration by Palestinians who want to leave.”

The problem for now “is countries that are willing to absorb them, and we’re working on this,” Netanyahu told Likud Knesset members.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, the Germans handed out three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to anyone who “voluntarily” registered for deportation. “There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several hours to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman, one of the commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, writes in “The Ghetto Fights.” “The number of people anxious to obtain three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.”

The Nazis shipped their victims to death camps. The Israelis will ship their victims to squalid refugee camps in countries outside of Israel. Israeli leaders are also cynically advertising the proposed ethnic cleansing as voluntary and a humanitarian gesture to solve the catastrophe they created.

This is the plan. No one, especially the Biden administration, intends to stop it.

The most disturbing lesson I learned while covering armed conflicts for two decades is that we all have the capacity, with little prodding, to become willing executioners. The line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin. The dark lusts of racial and ethnic supremacy, of vengeance and hate, of the eradication of those we condemn as embodying evil, are poisons that are not circumscribed by race, nationality, ethnicity or religion. We can all become Nazis. It takes very little. And if we do not stand in eternal vigilance over evil — our evil — we become, like those carrying out the mass killing in Gaza, monsters.

The cries of those expiring under the rubble in Gaza are the cries of the boys and men executed by the Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica, the over 1.5 million Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge, the thousands of Tutsi families burned alive in churches and the tens of thousands of Jews executed by the Einsatzgruppen at Babi Yar in Ukraine. The Holocaust is not an historical relic. It lives, lurking in the shadows, waiting to ignite its vicious contagion.

We were warned. Raul Hilberg. Primo Levi. Bruno Bettelheim. Hannah Arendt. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. They understood the dark recesses of the human spirit. But this truth is bitter and hard to confront. We prefer the myth. We prefer to see in our own kind, our own race, our own ethnicity, our own nation, our own religion, superior virtues. We prefer to sanctify our hatred. Some of those who bore witness to this awful truth, including Levi, Bettelheim, Jean Améry, the author of “At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities,” and Tadeusz Borowski, who wrote “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” committed suicide. The German playwright and revolutionary Ernst Toller, unable to rouse an indifferent world to assist victims and refugees from the Spanish Civil War, hanged himself in 1939 in a room at the Mayflower Hotel in New York City. On his hotel desk were photos of dead Spanish children.

“Most people have no imagination,” Toller writes. “If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother? Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.”

Primo Levi railed against the false, morally uplifting narrative of the Holocaust that culminates in the creation of the state of Israel — a narrative embraced by the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. The contemporary history of the Third Reich, he writes, could be “reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality.” He wonders if “we who have returned” have “been able to understand and make others understand our experience.”

Levi saw us reflected in Chaim Rumkowski, the Nazi collaborator and tyrannical leader of the Łódź Ghetto. Rumkowski sold out his fellow Jews for privilege and power, although he was sent to Auschwitz on the final transport where Jewish Sonderkommando —  prisoners forced to help herd victims into the gas chambers and dispose of their bodies  — in an act of vengeance reportedly beat him to death outside a crematorium.

“We are all mirrored in Rumkowski,” Levi reminds us. “His ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit. His fever is ours, the fever of Western civilization, that ‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums,’ and its miserable adornments are the distorting image of our symbols of social prestige.” We, like Rumkowski, “are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility. Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.”

Levi insists that the camps “could not be reduced to the two blocks of victims and persecutors.” He argues, “It is naive, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims; on the contrary; it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.” He chronicles what he called the “gray zone” between corruption and collaboration. The world, he writes, is not black and white, “but a vast zone of gray consciences that stands between the great men of evil and the pure victims.” We all inhabit this gray zone. We all can be induced to become part of the apparatus of death for trivial reasons and paltry rewards. This is the terrifying truth of the Holocaust.

It is hard not to be cynical about the plethora of university courses about the Holocaust given the censorship and banning of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace, imposed by university administrations. What is the point of studying the Holocaust if not to understand its fundamental lesson — when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable? It is hard not to be cynical about the “humanitarian interventionists” — Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Samantha Power  — who talk in sanctimonious rhymes about the “Responsibility to Protect” but are silent about war crimes when speaking out would threaten their status and careers. None of the “humanitarian interventions” they championed, from Bosnia to Libya, come close to replicating the suffering and slaughter in Gaza. But there is a cost to defending Palestinians, a cost they do not intend to pay. There is nothing moral about denouncing slavery, the Holocaust or dictatorial regimes that oppose the United States. All it means is you champion the dominant narrative.

The moral universe has been turned upside down. Those who oppose genocide are accused of advocating it. Those who carry out genocide are said to have the right to “defend” themselves. Vetoing ceasefires and providing 2,000-pound bombs to Israel that throw out metal fragments for thousands of feet is the road to peace. Refusing to negotiate with Hamas will free the hostages. Bombing hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, ambulances and refugee camps, along with killing three former Israeli hostages, stripped to the waist, waving an improvised white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew, are routine acts of war. Killing over 21,300 people, including more than 7,700 children, injuring over 55,000 and rendering nearly all of the 2.3 million people in Gaza homeless, is a way to “deradicalize” Palestinians. None of this makes sense, as protesters around the world realize.

A new world is being born. It is a world where the old rules, more often honored in the breach than the observance, no longer matter. It is a world where vast bureaucratic structures and technologically advanced systems carry out in public view vast killing projects. The industrialized nations, weakened, fearful of global chaos, are sending an ominous message to the Global South and anyone who might think of revolt —  we will kill you without restraint.

One day, we will all be Palestinians.

“I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms,” Christopher R. Browning writes in Ordinary Men, about a German reserve police battalion in World War Two that was ultimately responsible for the murder of 83,000 Jews. “In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce ‘ordinary men’ to become their ‘willing executioners.’”

Evil is protean. It mutates. It finds new forms and new expressions. Germany orchestrated the murder of six million Jews, as well as over six million Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, artists, journalists, Soviet prisoners of war, people with physical and intellectual disabilities and political opponents. It immediately set out after the war to expiate itself for its crimes. It deftly transferred its racism and demonization to Muslims, with racial supremacy remaining firmly rooted in the German psyche. At the same time, Germany and the U.S. rehabilitated thousands of former Nazis, especially from the intelligence services and the scientific community, and did little to prosecute those who directed Nazi war crimes. Germany today is Israel’s second largest arms supplier following the U.S.

The supposed campaign against anti-Semitism, interpreted as any statement that is critical of the State of Israel or denounces the genocide, is in fact the championing of White Power. It is why the German state, which has effectively criminalized support for the Palestinians, and the most retrograde white supremists in the United States, justify the carnage. Germany’s long relationship with Israel, including paying over $90 billion since 1945 in reparations to Holocaust survivors and their heirs, is not about atonement, as the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes, but blackmail.

“The argument for a Jewish state as compensation for the Holocaust was a powerful argument, so powerful that nobody listened to the outright rejection of the U.N. solution by the overwhelming majority of the people of Palestine,” Pappé writes. “What comes out clearly is a European wish to atone. The basic and natural rights of the Palestinians should be sidelined, dwarfed and forgotten altogether for the sake of the forgiveness that Europe was seeking from the newly formed Jewish state. It was much easier to rectify the Nazi evil vis-à -vis a Zionist movement than facing the Jews of the world in general. It was less complex and, more importantly, it did not involve facing the victims of the Holocaust themselves, but rather a state that claimed to represent them. The price for this more convenient atonement was robbing the Palestinians of every basic and natural right they had and allowing the Zionist movement to ethnically cleanse them without fear of any rebuke or condemnation.”

The Holocaust was weaponized from almost the moment Israel was founded. It was bastardized to serve the apartheid state. If we forget the lessons of the Holocaust, we forget who we are and what we are capable of becoming. We seek our moral worth in the past, rather than the present. We condemn others, including the Palestinians, to an endless cycle of slaughter. We become the evil we abhor. We consecrate the horror.

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.

30 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

On 29 December 2023, the Republic of South Africa activated Article 9 of the Genocide Convention filing an application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) requesting provisional proceedings against Israel concerning its recent atrocities against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

BADIL and the Global Palestinian Refugee and Internally Displaced Person Network (GPRN) thank South Africa for the initiative, which fulfills one of its obligations as a third-party state to hold Israel accountable for the commission of the crime of genocide in the Gaza Strip.

The South Africa initiative is the right example to pave the way to saving Palestinian lives, and bringing an end to Israel’s genocide and its colonial-apartheid regime over the Palestinian people and Palestine.

While we appreciate this commendable step, other third states must either join and support the South Africa request, or take their own initiatives to fulfill their negative and positive duties under their responsibilities for internationally wrongful acts.

Therefore, BADIL and the GPRN call on all states to activate universal jurisdiction measures, and implement arms embargoes and sanctions against Israel to hold it accountable for its war crimes and crimes against humanity, particularly genocide and forced displacement and transfer.

29 December 2023

Source: ww.badil.org

Israel, which has been accused of meting out collective punishment on Palestinians, has rejected the case at the UN court.

South Africa has filed a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing it of crimes of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza after nearly three months of relentless Israeli bombardment has killed more than 21,500 people and caused widespread destruction in the besieged enclave.

In an application to the court on Friday, South Africa described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group”.

“The acts in question include killing Palestinians in Gaza, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, and inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction,” the application said.

The ICJ, also called the World Court, is a UN civil court that adjudicates disputes between countries. It is distinct from the International Criminal Court (ICC), which prosecutes individuals for war crimes.

As members of the UN, both South Africa and Israel are bound by the court.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has compared Israel’s policies in Gaza and the occupied West Bank with his country’s past apartheid regime of racial segregation imposed by the white-minority rule that ended in 1994.

Several human rights organisations have said that Israeli policies towards Palestinians amount to apartheid.

Global condemnation

South Africa said Israel’s conduct, particularly since the war began on October 7, violates the UN’s Genocide Convention, and called for an expedited hearing. The application also requests the court to indicate provisional measures to “protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people” under the Convention.

“South Africa is gravely concerned with the plight of civilians caught in the present Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip due to the indiscriminate use of force and forcible removal of inhabitants,” a statement from South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) said, adding that the country has “repeatedly stated that it condemns all violence and attacks against all civilians, including Israelis.”

“South Africa has continuously called for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and the resumption of talks that will end the violence arising from the continued belligerent occupation of Palestine,” the statement added.

Israel has rejected global calls for a ceasefire saying the war would not stop until the Hamas group, whose October 7 attack triggered the current phase of the conflict, was destroyed. Some 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas attack in Israel. The Palestinian group has said its attack was against Israel’s 16-year-old blockade of Gaza and expansion of settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. Settlement expansions pose the biggest hurdle in the realisation of a future Palestinian state comprising Gaza, occupied West Banka and East Jerusalem.

In the latest development in Israel’s war on Gaza, tens of thousands of newly displaced Palestinians in the centre of the Palestinian enclave on Friday were forced to flee further south as Israel expanded its ground and air offensive in the centre of the enclave.

Israel has faced global condemnation for the mounting toll and destruction and is accused of meting out collective punishment on the Palestinian people.

‘A very important step’

The court application is the latest move by South Africa, a vociferous critic of Israel’s war, to ratchet up pressure after its lawmakers last month voted in favour of closing down the Israeli embassy in Pretoria and suspending all diplomatic relations until a ceasefire was agreed.

Al Jazeera’s Gabriel Elizondo, reporting from the United Nations headquarters in New York, said the move was “clearly a very important step to try to hold some accountability to Israel.”

“Now that South Africa is pushing this to the ICJ, it will be on [the UN’s] agenda to try to make a ruling on this very important question,” he added.

On November 16, a group of 36 UN experts called on the international community to “prevent genocide against the Palestinian people”, calling Israel’s actions since October 7 a “genocide in the making”.

“We are deeply disturbed by the failure of governments to heed our call and to achieve an immediate ceasefire. We are also profoundly concerned about the support of certain governments for Israel’s strategy of warfare against the besieged population of Gaza, and the failure of the international system to mobilise to prevent genocide,” the experts said in a statement.

Israel rejects South Africa’s accusations

Israel has rejected South Africa’s move as “baseless”, calling it “blood libel.”

“South Africa’s claim lacks both a factual and a legal basis, and constitutes despicable and contemptuous exploitation of the Court,” Israel’s minister of foreign affairs, Lior Haiat, said in a statement posted on X.

“Israel has made it clear that the residents of the Gaza Strip are not the enemy, and is making every effort to limit harm to the non-involved and to allow humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip,” the statement added.

“It does rally public opinion to the reality of what’s going on in Palestine, not just in Gaza but also in the West Bank,” said Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara.

According to Article 2 of the Genocide Convention, genocide involves acts committed with the “intent to destroy, either in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.”

“Where the disagreement lies is whether there is intent or no intent,” Bishara said.

“The three leading Israeli officials have declared the intent, starting with Israeli President Herzog when he said there are ‘no innocents’ in Gaza, the defence minister who said Israel will impose collective punishment on the people of Gaza because they are ‘human animals’,” Bishara said, adding that prime minister Netanyahu also used a biblical analogy in a statement widely interpreted as a genocidal call.

The Palestinian ministry of foreign affairs welcomed South Africa’s move, and called on the ICJ to take immediate action to “prevent further harm to the Palestinian people”.

“Israel’s stated policy, acts and omissions are genocidal in character are  committed with the requisite specific intent to the destruction of the Palestinian people under its colonial occupation and apartheid regime in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention,” a statement by the ministry said.

“The State of Palestine appeals to the international community and the Contracting Parties to the Convention to uphold their obligations and support the Court in the proceedings.”

29 December 2023

Source: aljazeera.com

By Countercurrents Collective

The world’s richest people got even richer over the past year, Bloomberg’s top-500 billionaire list, published on Wednesday, shows. Some 77% of the billionaires who made it on the list saw their fortunes grow even larger, while others experienced certain losses.

Elon Musk remains at the top, with an estimated net worth of $235 billion. The South African-born billionaire first dislodged Amazon owner Jeff Bezos from the pedestal in mid-2021, retaining first place ever since.

This year, Musk saw his fortune grow by nearly $98 billion, according to Bloomberg. While his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, has been in turmoil, locked into back-and-forth with advertisers and battered by various scandals, Musk’s flagship asset, Tesla, has enjoyed steady growth, further solidifying his position.

Bezos himself is currently in third place with $178 billion, narrowly outmatched by Bernard Arnault, the CEO of the LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton), whose wealth grew to some $179 billion this year.

Musk’s arch-rival and Meta owner, Mark Zuckerberg, enjoyed the second-largest absolute growth in wealth this year, with his net worth surging by nearly $83 billion. The two have long engaged in an open public rivalry and even planned to stage a fighting match, but the idea was ultimately scrapped. The growth, enabled by surging shares of his social media empire after the 2022 collapse, put Zuckerberg in sixth place with $128 billion.

Among the top-15, in fact, only a single billionaire saw his fortune shrink. Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, the chairman of the Adani Group, saw his net worth decrease by a massive $36.3 billion to some $84.3 billion, with the development putting him out of the top-10 list.

The massive loss – which actually became the largest one in absolute terms this year – was prompted by a large scandal around Andani’s empire, which erupted early this year. Namely, the businessman was accused of “pulling the largest con in corporate history” and “brazen stock manipulation.” The company, however, has firmly denied all the allegations.

Mark Zuckerberg Building Doomsday Bunker

Another media report said:

Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly started work on a $100 million family compound in Hawaii that will include a 5,000-square-foot underground bunker featuring an escape hatch and a tunnel leading to two connecting mansions.

The project is located on the Hawaiian island of Kauai and is so secretive that carpenters, electricians and other contractors are muzzled by nondisclosure agreements, according to a report this week by U.S. media outlet Wired. “It is fight club, we do not talk about fight club,” one former employee told Wired. “Anything posted from here, they get wind of it right away.”

The compound stretches across about 1,400 acres, on land that Zuckerberg began buying in August 2014. A spokeswoman for the billionaire told Wired that he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, spent $170 million to purchase the property, which they view as their family home.

Known as Koolau Ranch, the compound reportedly produces its own energy and water supplies, and onsite ranching and farming can provide the food. The property will include more than a dozen buildings with at least 30 bedrooms and 30 bathrooms combined, said Wired, citing property records and interviews with unidentified contractors.

Two mansions at the center of the compound will total about 57,000 square feet of living space, and 11 disk-shaped treehouses will be connected by rope bridges. The property will be dotted with guest houses and will include a large building with a gym, pools, sauna, hot tub and tennis court.

The bunker will have living space, a mechanical room and a metal door filled with concrete. Many of the compound’s doors will be soundproofed and operated by keypads. Some of the passages, such as a “blind” door in the library, will be designed to resemble walls. Dozens of cameras will be stationed around the property. Just one small operations building will have more than 20 cameras.

Wired based its $100 million cost estimate on building permits, saying the actual figure will likely be higher. “The cost rivals that of the largest private, personal construction projects in human history,” the outlet said.

A six-foot wall reportedly blocks views of the property, as well as the ocean, from a road fronting the compound. Security guards are stationed at the entrance gate and patrol the nearby beaches on all-terrain vehicles.

28 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jim Miles

The tree lights shine, the decorations sparkle, the delicious smells of baked goods and roasting food fills the room.  The evening of Christmas Day, the presents are all unwrapped and momentarily coveted, the family has now gone home.  Outside all is calm, bright with the coloured lights of Christmas.   But I feel no joy, perhaps the satisfaction of seeing my family safe and far from the agonies that are destroying other parts of the world, but no joy, nothing festive.

I turn on the computer and review the geopolitical news of the day, and not even for one day is there peace in the land that is holy to three of the world’s major religions.  My stomach knots, my nerves tighten as I read and see the massacres of the people of Gaza, the women and children struck down by the maniacal violence of Israel, the United States, indeed the ‘western’ world.  They have no warm homes, no solid meals, nothing but piles of rubble, the immediate grief of lost family members, and the never ending threat of destruction falling from the skies.

As part of this world I am ashamed…but no, ashamed is not the right word, more of a cold anger against the perpetrators of such violence, the politicians, manufacturers, and financiers who support mass destruction, genocide, death, and ethnic cleansing for their own profit and power.  It goes beyond words yet words at the moment are all I have.

I usually try to abstract myself from the situation I am writing about, to be factual, observant, and while I advocate, I try to do so using the reasoning of history and international laws.  That is beyond me at the moment, partly because there are – fortunately – many others reporting on the unfolding disasters against humanity in the Middle East, not just Gaza, but throughout the West Bank, up into Lebanon, and out onto the Mediterranean Sea and Red Sea and beyond.   It is beyond me, mainly because what is happening is so stunning against my core beliefs about the common sensibilities of people wanting to live essentially simple lives in peace and harmony with their families, friends, and community.

History does not bode well for thoughts of peace:  the Versailles Peace of 1919 was a disaster setting the stage by way of the Balfour Letter and the British Palestine Mandate for today’s problems;  the end of World War II, the last battle of World War I,  did not bring global peace but a falsely constructed military struggle against a falsely perceived enemy creating wars around the world; and the settlement of the Jewish people because of Europe’s – mostly Britain’s – history of neocolonialism set the stage for today’s genocidal massacres.  Peace under these conditions has only come about from the slaughter of hundreds of millions of people.

Amazingly, the Israelis do not seem to care that their slaughter is taking place under the global scrutiny of modern media.  They defy the world blatantly and openly, daring the world to do something, knowing that the political powers that be are either too weak – vis a vis their own people’s anger at them – or are very much on their side while exposing the double standards and hypocrisy of nations claiming morality but demonstrating only criminality and violence against humanity.

I watch, I listen, I wait – hoping that somewhere, somehow, someone in power with enough humane sanity left, stands up and says enough…yet knowing there are only a few people in the world with that power, and they appear to be applying the throttle to the momentum of war.   The lies, the manipulations, the self-satisfied morality of a chosen people, of an indispensable nation, both carrying nuclear weapons as backups to the madness of their militarily saturated egos and desires makes it difficult to feel other than an underlying anger at the society that engenders them.

I sit, not comforted by my own ease, but very ill at ease with the daily recurrence of the genocide that I know is in part perpetuated by my own government.   I can speak out for peace – wondering at the same time if my speaking is having any effect – perhaps as it joins in with hundreds, thousands, of other voices.  A peace not just the cessation of hostilities for a momentary prisoner exchange, nor a truce allowing both sides time to re-arm and re-equip themselves, but a peace that will allow all the people of the Middle East – and the world beyond – to live together in harmony, sharing their cultures and creating a full community beyond the narrow confines of militaristic power authorized by some strange false narrative of supremacy.

Jim Miles is a Canadian educator

28 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Phil Pasquini

To commemorate the deaths of 100 journalists and media workers along with over 20,000 Gazans who have been murdered by the Israeli military with weapons supplied by the US, an action calling attention to the ongoing genocide along with the targeted killings of journalists took place in San Francisco. Outside of the Chronicle newspaper building journalists, media workers and supporters of journalism gathered to demand a permanent ceasefire now and an end to all US aid to Israel.

The commemoration was organized by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) Palestine Solidarity Campaign saying “the Israeli government has, since the beginning of the war in Gaza, continued its organized attack and murder of journalists as part of the efforts of the Israeli forces to stop the documentation and recording of their war crimes and the genocidal slaughter.” The union “strongly condemns the killing of journalists in Gaza, Israel and from Lebanon and calls on all parties to ensure the safety of journalists in the region to work without threat or interference.”

Comments made by Benny Gantz, a minister in the Israeli government and former defense minister, who compared journalists to “terrorists” was condemned by the union by noting “Journalism is not terrorism, and covering violence is not the same thing as condoning it. Journalists document tragedy as it unfolds and shine a light on a dark world. Our job is to seek truth and report it, especially during a war.”

The members of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign have called on their Executive Council to stand with Palestine demanding, “Our union must stand on the right side of history. Our union must pressure the U.S. government to stop funding and supporting Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians. The billions spent on weapons and war should instead be put towards life-affirming systems such as healthcare, education, and infrastructure that benefits the working class.”

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign is also calling upon the union to honor the foundational commitment outlined in its constitution: “To raise the standards of journalism and ethics of the industry; to foster friendly cooperation with all workers. Living up to those words requires nothing less than demanding a ceasefire and an end to our government’s aid to Israel.”

Speaking to those gathered, union activist Steve Zeltzer spoke to the subject by saying “Not only have the journalists been killed, but their families have been killed by Israeli forces as they have actually bombed their homes in Gaza.” After posing the question of why so many journalists are being killed in Gaza, Zeltzer answered “The reason is that Israel does not want what they are doing in Gaza to get out. We believe that the labor movement and CWA International need to take a strong stand along with that of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the American Postal workers Union who have already taken a strong stand against US support for Israeli’s war. The bombs, the bullets that are killing Palestinian journalists are coming from US weapons which our tax dollars pay for. That is a war crime and why are we paying for war crimes?’

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has characterized the war in Gaza on journalists and media workers, killed, injured, or missing “as the deadliest for journalists since they began gathering data in 1992.” Journalism is a dangerous profession and those who are willing to put their lives on the line to report from war zones are heroes in every sense of the word. All journalists deserve respect and support as they report on issues and conditions so the public in turn can be informed with relevant factual information and news about their communities and the world, to better understand for themselves the circumstances affecting their lives. Only demagogs and dictators fear the public being thus informed and are afraid to allow for the free exchange of information and ideas between journalists and the public, knowing full well that knowledge and Information is power.

Zeltzer went on to note that it’s not just journalists in Gaza who are being attacked but that here in the US journalists and media workers who support a ceasefire have been singled out, sanctioned and retaliated against to which the Palestine Solidarity Campaign has declared that “We defend their democratic rights and the rights of all journalists here and abroad.”

He went on to explain how several journalists at the LA Times “…who signed a statement for a ceasefire as a result of which the LA Times said they could no longer cover wars in the Middle East.” He pointed out how management at the paper has taken a position on a ceasefire in a November 16^th editorial titled “Cease-fire now. The killing in Gaza must stop” in part saying that “It is time for a cease-fire. It is time for the Biden administration to assert strong and sustained pressure on the government of Benjamin Netanyahu to stop attacks that have reportedly already killed more than 11,000 Gazans. The world cannot stand by to witness more slaughter of civilians.” Evidently, as Zeltzer pointed out, while “Management can take a position on a ceasefire, workers at the newspaper cannot take a position.”

“We believe that journalists in the newspaper industry have a right to take sides, to take a position.” He noted, too, while standing under the watchful eye of the building’s security cameras and by the private security officers observing the protest, that the San Francisco Chronicle has banned journalists from marching on May Day and on Women’s Day” so this type of suppression on free speech is industry wide. He closed by declaring that “Journalists have a right to have their own voices.”

Phil Pasquini is a freelance journalist and photographer. His reports and photographs appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Pakistan Link and Nuze.ink.

28 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

On Wednesday, Gaza’s Government Media Office reported that the number of Gazans killed has hit 28,110, including 21,110 bodies identified at hospitals and approximately 7,000 additional people missing, most buried under the rubble.

In a separate report, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported, “The majority of those killed in the Israeli air and artillery attacks on the Gaza Strip were civilians, including 11,422 children, and 5,822 women.”

The organization asserted, “Israel has deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure in order to cause as many casualties, material losses, and destruction as possible … as a form of retaliation and collective punishment.”

The organization concluded, “This is against international humanitarian law and the 1949 Geneva Convention, and amounts to war crimes according to the Rome Statute, which governs the International Criminal Court.” It added, “Israel has flagrantly broken the terms of international humanitarian law, which forbids property damage as a ‘preventive means’ and property destruction as a means of deterrence, even for military purposes.”

In its own report, the Gaza Government Media Office asserted that 310 medical personnel and 97 journalists have been killed. It reported that 65,000 residential units have been completely destroyed, with another 290,000 damaged. The government media office reported that Israel has “targeted more than 23 hospitals, 53 health centres, 140 health facilities, and 102 ambulances.”

In a separate report, Gaza’s education ministry said that over 4,037 students and 209 educational staff have been killed since the start of Israel’s attack on Gaza. It added that more than 7,259 students and 619 teachers were injured since October 7.

On Wednesday, more than 30 people were killed after Israel bombed a building near the al-Amal Hospital. In its daily report on the genocide, the United Nations asserted, “On 27 December, heavy Israeli bombardment from air, land, and sea, continued across most of the Gaza Strip. In the north, Gaza City and Jabalya were most affected; in the Middle Area, hostilities continued in the four refugee camps—Al Bureij, An Nuseirat, Deir Al Balah and Al Maghazi. Simultaneously, Israeli forces struck multiple targets in the southern cities of Khan Yunis and Rafah.”

As the death toll soars, Israeli politicians are openly advocating the ethnic cleansing of Gaza through the forcible displacement of the entire Palestinian population.

On Wednesday, Avigdor Liberman, a member of Israel’s parliament who previously served as defense minister, became the latest Israeli politician to openly advocate the ethnic cleansing of Gaza through the displacement of the population into the Sinai Desert. Liberman called on the Israeli military to “tear down the fences” between Gaza and Egypt. He continued, “As soon as there is no obstacle there, I estimate one-and-a-half million Gazans will leave for Sinai and we will not disturb anyone.”

This echoed a statement in parliament Monday by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu , who declared, “Regarding voluntary immigration … we are working on it. This is the direction we are going in.”

Earlier this month, Liberman published an op-ed in the Times of Israel entitled “Innocents in Gaza? Don’t be naïve,” in which he called for collective punishment against the entire civilian population of Gaza.

As the ferocity of the genocide increases, Israel is making preparations to massively expand the war throughout the Middle East.

Earlier this week, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant claimed that Israel is at “war” with multiple countries. “We are in a multi-front war. We are being attacked from seven fronts—Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), Iraq, Yemen and Iran,” he said. “We have already responded and acted on six of those fronts,” in a clear threat to Iran.

On Wednesday, Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz threatened Lebanon at a press conference, declaring, “The situation on Israel’s northern border demands change. The stopwatch for a diplomatic solution is running out. If the world and Lebanese government don’t act in order to prevent the firing on Israel’s northern residents, and to distance Hezbollah from the border, the [Israeli military] will do it.” He concluded, “the war will continue and expand.”

The United States, which is funding and arming the genocide, is coordinating its own military escalation in the Middle East with that of Israel. On Christmas Day, the US military carried out attacks on three locations in Iraq, targeting what it called Iranian proxy forces.

In a letter to Congress on Wednesday, US President Joe Biden wrote, “On the night of December 25, 2023, at my direction, United States forces conducted discrete strikes against three facilities in Iraq used by Iran-affiliated groups for training, logistics support, and other purposes… The strikes were intended to degrade and disrupt the ongoing series of attacks against the United States and our partners, and to deter Iran and Iran-backed militia groups from conducting or supporting further attacks on United States personnel and facilities.”

Biden threatened, “The United States stands ready to take further action, as necessary and appropriate, to address further threats or attacks.”

With every passing day, it is becoming clear that the Israeli-US genocide and ethnic cleansing of the population of Gaza is a critical component of a major new military offensive being carried out by the imperialist powers in the Middle East. With the new year just days away, the imperialist powers are seeking to make 2024 another year of endless war and military barbarism.

Originally published in WSWS.ORG

28 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

Citing U.S. and Saudi officials the New York Times reported:

Saudi Arabia has no interest in taking part in the new U.S.-led coalition to safeguard commercial traffic in the Red Sea from Houthi attacks, prioritizing domestic security and economic development instead,.

The kingdom views the prospect of peace on its southern border “a more appealing goal” compared to joining any naval action after eight years of war with the rebel movement that drained Saudi coffers and helped drive Yemen into one of the world’s most acute humanitarian crises, the newspaper reported on Monday.

Yemen has been engulfed in an armed conflict between the government forces and the Houthi rebels since 2014. The situation exacerbated in March 2015, when the Saudi-led coalition, working in cooperation with the internationally-recognized Yemeni government, began conducting air, land and sea operations against the Houthis. The latter have retaliated by attacking Saudi forces and firing missiles into Saudi Arabia.

After the armed conflict between Israel and Palestinian movement Hamas escalated in October, the Houthis have intensified their attacks on cargo ships linked to Israel in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, vowing to continue them until Israel ends its military actions in the Gaza Strip.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the establishment of a multinational operation to secure the Red Sea amid the surge in Houthis’ attacks on cargo ships, saying that the UK, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, the Seychelles, and Spain would take part in the mission. The Houthis, for their part, vowed to attack any ships that join the US-led maritime coalition.

U.S.-led Red Sea Coalition

The U.S. has initiated Operation Prosperity Guardian, a multinational naval coalition to protect Red Sea commercial traffic from Houthi attacks. As of now, over 20 countries are on board.
The nascent U.S.-led coalition has already run into difficulties, with some allies committing just handfuls of ship-less seamen, and others deciding to sit out the U.S. military adventure altogether, preferring any naval assets they have in the region to go it alone.

The U.S.-led coalition comprises 20+ countries, including the UK, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles, Spain, Greece, and Australia.

Britain’s HMS Diamond is on board, operating as part of the U.S.-led Combined Maritime Forces.
Some participating countries, including at least eight, prefer not to be publicly named.

France supports navigation security, but will keep its ships under French command.

Italy is sending the frigate Virginio Fasan, but insists it is part of existing operations, not Prosperity Guardian.

Spain is opting for NATO-led or EU-coordinated missions, declining unilateral participation in Red Sea operations.

In the wake of the Israel-Hamas conflict that erupted on October 7, the Houthis, an armed group representing Yemen’s Shia Muslim minority, the Zaidis, have initiated a series of attacks in the Red Sea targeting ships heading towards Israel. Controlling a significant portion of Yemen, the Houthis declared solidarity with Hamas and announced their intention to target any ship heading towards Israel.

U.S. ‘Trapped’ In Red Sea, Should Prepare For Gibraltar Strait’s ‘Closure’, Says IRGC

The U.S. and its allies are “trapped” in the Red Sea and should prepare for the closure of waterways stretching all the way to the western gates of the Mediterranean Sea, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Chief of Staff Mohammad Reza Naqdi has warned.

“With the continuation of the crimes [in Gaza], the United States and its allies should await the birth of new powers of resistance and the closure of the rest of the waterways and roads to them,” Naqdi said at a ceremony commemorating Hasan Irlu, a late IRGC commander and former Iranian ambassador to Yemen.

“The Zionist regime and the United States have gone mad due to the severity of the crimes and brutality they have committed, and they cannot even recognize their own interests,” Naqdi suggested, saying the two powers seem incapable of “learning from past events.”

Naqdi did not elaborate on what kinds of operations specifically may be taken to close regional waterways to US forces and their allies. However, U.S. media and news agencies immediately interpreted the commander’s words as an explicitly Iranian “threat” to “close the Mediterranean.”

The Biden administration Friday accused Iran of being “deeply involved in planning the operations against commercial vessels in the Red Sea” as part of a “long-term material support and encouragement of the Houthis’ destabilizing actions in the region.”

Iran has been open about its political and moral sympathies for and support for the Houthis, but has consistently denied many years of claims by US officials of the provision of material or military support to the Yemeni militia since its rise to power over much of the country in late 2014.

The Houthis are often mentioned by Iranian leaders and commentators as members of the Axis of Resistance, a loose, informal and unofficial political and military coalition opposed to Israel and American imperialism in the Middle East. Syria, Hezbollah, and Palestinian militias in Gaza are also typically listed as members of the informal grouping.

Naqdi’s remarks come against the background of growing tensions in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden as the US works to assemble a multinational coalition consisting mostly of NATO nations to try to secure the waterways after a month of Houthi hijackings and missile attacks against Israeli-owned commercial ships, as well as vessels thought to be heading to or from the Jewish State. The attacks have had a severe impact on Israel’s southern ports, and have prompted a handful of powerful international shipping concerns to stop the transit of any commercial cargoes through the Red Sea.

27 December 2023

Source: countercurrents.org