Archives: Articles

By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

3 Nov 2024 – The reluctance of the international system to implement decisive actions against Israel’s mass atrocities in the Gaza Strip, especially in the northern region, exposes a stark disregard for Palestinian lives and dignity, and fuels the continuation of its crime of genocide.

Institutions like the European Union (EU), International Criminal Court (ICC), and International Court of Justice (ICJ), alongside various United Nations (UN) bodies, have deviated from their founding principles of protecting civilians and upholding justice. In over 13 months, these bodies have neglected their fundamental duty to safeguard civilian life and stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

This failure reveals a structural flaw in the global security framework meant to prevent atrocious crimes and uphold international law. As evidenced by the ongoing Israeli crimes in the occupied Palestinian territory, particularly in Gaza, this system has faltered in the face of political calculations and the influence of powerful nations complicit in the genocide, fostering a culture of impunity.

This failure reveals a structural flaw in the global security framework meant to prevent atrocious crimes and uphold international law.

Despite the gravity of the atrocities, the international community and justice mechanisms have largely turned a blind eye. At most, some entities have issued weak statements that fail to acknowledge the crimes accurately, emboldening Israel to escalate its offenses with U.S. and European support and armament.

For nearly a month, a full-scale invasion of northern Gaza has been unfolding openly, aiming to eradicate the Palestinian population and forcibly displace residents through terror. In addition to a crippling siege that blocks aid, prevents ambulance services, and shuts down hospitals, the Israeli army has conducted numerous massacres, killing over 1,300 people and injuring around 2,000 more.

On Tuesday, Israeli airstrikes killed 117 Palestinians in the Abu Nasr family home in Beit Lahia, leaving approximately 100 more trapped under the rubble. On Thursday, the Al-Ghandour family home in Jabalia was bombed, entombing about 120 residents with no rescue crews allowed to reach them. On Friday, the Shalayel family’s home was struck, killing around 50, with many others still buried under other homes.

In blatant defiance of the Geneva Conventions, which mandate the protection of medical personnel and emergency response, Israeli forces have blocked ambulance and rescue crews in northern Gaza for ten consecutive days, denying critical services to tens of thousands. Hospitals, including Kamal Adwan in Beit Lahia, have been targeted, with patients and wounded people killed, all without intervention from entities like the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has abdicated its role in this attack.

Despite official denials, Israel is executing the “Generals’ Plan” to empty northern Gaza, dropping leaflets demanding evacuations of residents in Jabalia and Beit Hanoun. Israel has continued its siege, blocking food and aid, forcing Palestinians into confined areas through terror, starvation, and massacres.

This helplessness persists despite urgent warnings that “the entire Palestinian population in northern Gaza is on the brink of death due to disease, hunger, and violence.” UN officials, including those from UNICEF and the World Food Programme, have described the situation as catastrophic, with conditions resembling apocalyptic horrors.

Under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Israel has committed genocide in Gaza since 7 October 2023, with the U.S. and Europe complicit by supplying weapons used to massacre Palestinian civilians and demolish their homes.

Civilians, who do not pose any threat to occupying forces, are protected by international humanitarian law if they remain in their homes or neighbourhoods during conflict. Euro-Med Monitor investigations show that Israel’s actions aim to eradicate the Palestinian people through forced eviction and mass killing, not for military objectives.

The ICC must step in to issue arrest warrants, prosecute those responsible, and fulfill its mandate to protect Palestinian civilians from Israel’s extensive destruction.

Immediate action from the international community and the United Nations is essential to prevent further loss of life in northern Gaza, end Israel’s ongoing genocide across the Strip, impose a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel, hold it accountable for its crimes, and take all necessary measures to protect Palestinian civilians.

18 November 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Patrick Lawrence,

What happened in one Dutch city is the world since the Zionist regime began its limitlessly barbaric assault on Gaza: Western powers blessed it, and Western media determined to hide it from view.

12 Nov 2024 – In the annals of “anti–Semitism,” if not anti–Semitism in its un-weaponized form, the events before, during, and since an ill-fated soccer match in Amsterdam last week merit a prominent entry.

We find in these chaotic days a picture in miniature of the sickness that has overtaken “the Jewish state,” the shameless apology those purporting to lead the Western post-democracies make for the straight-out barbarities of Zionist zealots, and the full-frontal disinformation spread by corporate and state-funded media as they pose as the first line of defense against disinformation.

It’s a three-fer, then, the whole banana in one place and at one time —all of this in the cause of the Zionist regime as it prosecutes its yearlong genocide in Gaza and sets about expanding its campaign of murder and destruction across West Asia.

Bad enough that planeloads of freak-show Israeli extremists arrived in Amsterdam last week for a match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax, the famous Dutch side, and instantly set about terrorizing the city in the name of Zionist chauvinism.

Worse were the authorities, starting but not ending with Amsterdam’s mayor and the Dutch foreign and prime ministers, recasting what was bound to follow as anti–Semitism, a 21st century pogrom, and so on down the list of hyperbolic absurdities.

Worst — and I indeed count this worst for its consequences — Western print and broadcast media purposefully falsified all representations of these events to turn reality upside down: Wall-to-wall, the criminals became the innocents in the news accounts, the victimizers became victims, and the victims became condemnable, anti–Semitic menaces to human decency.

See what I mean? Violence, lies, distortion, inverted reality: Two days in Amsterdam last week look now like one of those 16th century paintings the Dutch called “world landscapes,” wherein the whole of the earth is depicted in a compact panorama.

What happened in one Dutch city is the world as we have it since the Zionist regime began its limitlessly barbaric assault on the Palestinians of Gaza, the Western powers blessed it, and Western media determined to hide it from view.

Language is the instrument of my trade, and there must be words adequate to these depravities and corruptions. There must, there must. But the only one I know that matches the task at this point is “No!” Bear with me, please, as I struggle to find others.

It has been long and well documented that the Zionist ideologues who have fashioned a national consciousness among Israelis have systematically cultivated a presumption of Jewish superiority and — the contradiction here is only apparent — a corresponding belief that the rest of humanity detests Jews and the world is in consequence a dangerous place.

This project, wherein Old Testament tales of Jewish barbarities are routinely invoked, predates World War II by many decades; since 1945, as is plain to anyone who looks honestly, the Holocaust has been fully instrumentalized in this cause.

Systematic Indoctrination 

I recall video footage shot in Jerusalem during the crisis at al–Aqsa Mosque in May 2021. It showed young Israelis, the girls in prim blue-and-white school uniforms, leaping up and down in a sort of blissed-out frenzy shouting “Kill all Arabs!” and other such obscenities.

What in hell? I wondered. Zionism is racism, yes, but how did it sink to this level of crudity?  I should have understood. I did not know then the extent to which the minds of Israelis and Zionists the world over have been mutilated.

Two films — maybe there are more — explain the systematized indoctrination that produced the outcome at al–Aqsa.

Defamation is a cleverly done documentary from 2009 that follows adolescent students as they are brainwashed, during a summer sojourn in Europe, to fear a world that hates them.

Israelism, released last year, shows how American Jews are similarly instructed in Hebrew school — and how the eyes of many of these victims are opening to the frauds and racist cruelties of Zionist ideology.

You can watch Defamation here and Israelism here. These films are brilliant and brave.

And there is a straight line from the purposefully inculcated xenophobia and paranoia they depict to the scene on Jerusalem’s streets during the crisis at al–Aqsa and now — my point here — to the repulsive mobs of Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam last week.

These are people, hundreds of them, who began their provocative aggressions as soon as they disembarked at Schiphol, Amsterdam’s airport.

The video and reported record shows them marching through the streets in what amounts to a rampage, tearing down Palestinian flags displayed on house fronts, vandalizing a taxicab with its driver (Moroccan) inside, attacking local people with pipes and clubs, chanting obscene, probably criminal slogans — “Kill the Arabs,” “Fuck you Palestine,” “There are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left,” “Let the IDF fuck the Arabs,” and on and on in this line.

The last is a reference to recent protests in Israel in defense of Israel Defense Forces soldiers found to have gang-raped Palestinian prisoners. Violent demonstrators, among them members of the Netanyahu cabinet, thought sodomizing Palestinians held in what amount to torture camps, should be made legal.

Numerous videos and news reports detail the horrific conduct of these repellent punks and the to-be-expected response from local people.

Here is one published last Friday in Middle East Eye. Here is a nine-minute video from Owen Jones, The Guardian columnist who has had a lot of things wrong over the years but has this story very right. Here is an exceptionally pithy commentary in MEE by the estimable Jonathan Cook.

Racist Israeli Football Thugs RAMPAGE In Amsterdam – And Media LIES

On Sunday The Grayzone published the excellent video reporting of a young Dutch journalist-in-the-making that records Israelis attacking a contingent of uniformed Amsterdam police officers.

We can dispense with the ridiculous thought that these are football hooligans of the common variety and do not represent ordinary Israelis. Out of the question.

Owen Jones put out a second video Sunday, this one 17 minutes, that includes within it a video of the scene when the Israelis who went to Amsterdam arrived home. It is another raving paroxysm of racist delirium.

Let us take good care to understand these people and what they signify.

Sickness of a Nation 

One, we see in them the sickness of a nation. Amsterdam showed this to the world in real-time video, reports on “X” and various other social media platforms.

I do not know when the apartheid state can be said to have succumbed to a perfectly diagnosable case of collective psychosis, but this is its condition now and it should be treated as such. Israel as now constituted, and arguably from the start, I mean to say, is not an acceptable presence in the community of nations.

See, for easy reference, the international community’s long, eventually successful ostracization of South Africa under the old apartheid regime. The time has come.

Two, it is one thing to indulge in deranged eruptions of hatred toward Palestinians and Arabs generally within the (internationally recognized) borders of an hysterical state.

Let us invoke the principle of noninterference in the affairs of others, even if these affairs amount to crazed ravings, and leave Israel’s freakish majority to itself. Gaza, and the Occupied Territories are, of course, another matter.

The Amsterdam events were something else. They were effectively an attempt to transport the extreme to which Israel has taken a premodern, even primitive ideology into a modern milieu and tell the world it must accept it.

This is what makes the mess in Amsterdam significant. And it is why it is important that it turned out to be, indeed, a mess.

Israeli terror did badly when it put its show on the road in the Netherlands last week. Ajax trounced Maccabi Tel Aviv 5 to zip. Zionism’s score was no better.

[https://twitter.com/Megatron_ron/status/1855878064414085496]

To consider this another way, listen carefully to all the racist chants. What were the Zionist deplorables who flew to Amsterdam saying?

In my read they were terrorists asserting that Israeli terror has a legitimate place in what we call Western civilization. They demanded acceptance. And why shouldn’t they try this on, given the Western powers’ unequivocal endorsement of all the state-sponsored barbarism?

The lesson here: It falls to those not of high office but of high principle to defend, in the streets or elsewhere, the remnants of the humane in the Western post-democracies.

Finally, let us not forget that in almost all cases history records, victimizers are also victims.

In this case, to praise gang rape and the slaughter of children amounts to an inverted, perverted admission that one’s psyche has been grotesquely disfigured at the hands of manipulating ideologues desperate to make a nation out of a diaspora that, as various Jews have argued over the years, ought to have remained a diaspora.

As to those who counter-demonstrated as these damaged people ripped through Amsterdam’s streets, it has been de rigueur this past week to include in one’s thoughts and observations some variation of, “There is no excuse for violence in response to the Israelis’ conduct.”

I go back to that important word mentioned above, “No!” The violence of those protesting the Israeli racists as they exported their nation’s terror to Europe, and the extent of this violence cannot be measured and so not known, is perfectly understandable in my view.

We are talking about a city — one with a large Muslim population, as the Israelis surely knew — that was confronted with a manifestation of evil that is nearly as pure as it gets. And those subjected to this viciously aggressive display are to be criticized because they did not respond as angelic pacifists?

I am simply not on for this. It has long seemed to me that we in the West, to dilate the lens briefly, have a very peculiar attitude toward violence given we live under regimes whose policies at home as well as abroad begin and end with violence or the threat of it. But I will leave this topic for another time.

For now, this: However many Muslims were among those countering the Israelis in Amsterdam’s streets, and we cannot know this either, they are absolutely correct to read the small-time terrorists who arrived last week as manifestations of a global system that, in its centuries of racist ideology, has violently made of them its victims.

Israeli officials ran all the miles their legs could carry them as they cast the Amsterdam events as another demonstration of a rampant wave of anti–Semitism sweeping across the globe. “It was a pogrom!” “It was another Kristallnacht!”

And among my favorites in this line for its faux desolation, this from Issac Herzog, the Israeli president: “I had hoped we would never again see these things.”

This kind of stuff is altogether predictable. Zionist officials long ago lost the privilege of being taken seriously.

Dishonesty Exposed

It is the responses of Dutch officials, and soon enough others in Europe, Britain and the U.S., I take seriously indeed. Their dishonesty — pervasive, distant from reality — has consequences running to free speech, all manner of other democratic rights, and popular opposition to terrorist Israel’s gross offenses to our shared humanity.

As is now well-reported in many independent media, in the early aftermath of last week’s chaos Dutch officials and others — among them the egregious Ursula von der Leyen, president of the E.U. Commission — assiduously erased the provocations of the Israeli mobs, turning them into the innocent victims of Jew-hating urban marauders.

[https://twitter.com/AsaWinstanley/status/1855243480928260514]

This narrative is now more or less in ruins. But there is no indication that officials at any level are prepared to self-correct in light of now-established facts.

“What happened over the past few days is a toxic cocktail of antisemitism, hooligan behavior and anger over the war in Palestine and Israel and other countries in the Middle East.” That is Femke Halsema, Amsterdam’s mayor, diagnosing last week’s events as quoted in The New York Times’ Tuesday editions.

Once again, “No!” There is no equivalence among the three items on Halsema’s list.

The “war in Palestine and Israel” — what does this mean, while I am at it? — is by a long way the main event. Thuggery and anti–Semitism, and I will get to the latter shortly, are of passing importance in any honest evaluation of last week’s chaos.

Dick Schoof, the Dutch premier, asserted that many or most of those so far arrested — 60-odd at this point, and who knows how true this is — were of “a migration background.” He added, “We have an integration problem. This is an expression of that.”

We are now dismissing last week’s events as unimportant, symptoms of the Netherlands’ social problems, nothing more than the resentments of brown people? “No!” once more. This is not an integration problem. It is a Zionism problem.

It was inevitable that the riot of Zionist excess the Netanyahu government set in motion a year ago last month would spill well beyond Gaza and the rest of West Asia, given the Western powers’ enthusiasm for it.

Amsterdam can be reasonably interpreted as merely a chicken come home to roost.

Dick Schoof will not get anywhere near addressing this reality. Dick Schoof is what I mean when I suggest that leadership in the Western post-democracies, artful dodgers all, is hopeless. As we must all face, there is no getting any sense or decency out of them.

It is likely — once again, we have no confirmation of this — that there were declared anti–Semites among those who countered the Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam’s streets.

One cannot condone this, of course, but neither can one take these people, however many their number, as defining of the last week’s events, and neither can we neglect to put their presence in context.

Israel is Judaism and Judaism is Israel:  This has long been the Zionist state’s refrain — and the Netanyahu regime’s incessant refrain since it began its assault on Gaza on Oct. 8, 2023.

The identification is, of course, key to the Israelis’ way of protecting themselves against criticism. Attack Israel and you attack the Jewish faith: You are an anti–Semite.

One of the responsibilities of those who oppose Israeli barbarism now is to reject this false congruence as a trap set by Zionist propagandists. This is not so easy for many people.

However many anti–Semites were on Amsterdam’s streets last week, it is likely some did not think this question through sufficiently to refuse the bait. To succumb to anti–Semitic sentiments at this point is to serve, in upside-down fashion, the Israeli cause.

It is years since various government departments, universities, and other entities operating in the public sphere have endorsed the equivalence of opposition to Israel and anti–Semitism.

This is well-enough known. Since the Gaza crisis and the demonstrations across the Western post-democracies, this project has accelerated markedly.

Official responses to the Amsterdam events seem to me disturbing in that they suggest the erasure of this vital distinction now appears to be more or less complete. This is a war not only of words but also of individual and democratic rights in the post-democracies.

Let us not, let us never allow this preposterous conflation to pass without vigorous objection. Voices raised in opposition to Zionist terrorism — at this point to the Zionist state, indeed — are too important to let the charge of anti–Semitism silence them.

Mainstream media across the Western world, as has now been well-exposed, have made an ungodly mess of their coverage of the Amsterdam events — and so of themselves.

By all appearance they complacently assumed they could control the narrative, chiefly by obscuring the chronology of events, and maintain their simply disgusting defense of Israel’s genocide and the freakery abroad among its citizens.

Stories with bold-faced lies, lies of omission, accurate broadcast news segments published and pulled as “not up to our standards”: You had all of this as events unfolded. Those videos Owen Jones put out, linked above, give a good inventory of these derelictions.

As the days went by, it was very fine to see independent media force the corporate press and state-funded broadcasters such as the BBC to run for cover. This has to go down among the most revelatory, embarrassing occasions in the long decline of the mainstream.

I salute all those independent practitioners who got this work done.

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the big Swiss daily, published a piece in its Tuesday editions to this effect:

“The reconstruction of events in Amsterdam reveals a differentiated picture: The scenes surrounding the Champions League match between Ajax Amsterdam and Maccabi Tel Aviv went around the world, with top politicians outdoing each other in condemning the anti–Semitic incidents. However, amateur videos show a differentiated picture of the escalation. Maccabi fans were also violent before the anti–Israeli hunts.”

Plenty of blur remains but here you see how the major media in the West are trying to climb out of the hole they dug for themselves without being seen to be climbing. This is likely to prove as far they will go in the direction of honesty.

My favorite in this line involves one of those amateurs the NZZ mentions. In its first-day story from Amsterdam, the Times included a brief, indistinct video showing, it said without equivocation, a gang of Dutch people running down a Maccabi Tel Aviv fan along an Amsterdam street.

“Verified by The New York Times” it assured readers with all that faux authority to which the once-but-no-longer newspaper of record no longer has any claim.

The video made the rounds among mainstream media. And in days following, its maker protested that all those reproducing it had turned it on its head: It was Israeli crazies chasing down a Dutch person. Her name turned out to be Annet de Graaf, and Annet de Graaf went public to demand retractions and apologies.

So far as I know she has had one, from Tagesschau, Evening News, in Germany.

And then this, from a piece in The New York Times Sunday. At this point our friends on Eighth Avenue appear a touch desperate to obscure all the false reporting published in previous days:

“A video taken after midnight by a teenage Dutch YouTube personality and verified by The Times shows a group of men, many wearing Maccabi fan colors, picking up pipes and boards from a construction site, then chasing and beating a man. The incident was also captured in a video shot by a photographer, Annet de Graaf.”

Punks. Joe Kahn, the Times’ executive editor, is a punk to let his foreign desk pull this stunt. This is the same video it published several days earlier with the roles of victim and victimizers reversed.

Zionist Israel lost, lost big in Amsterdam. The horror it has made of itself is now plain for the world to see. The apologist pols, already hanging on for dear life in the post-democracies, lost. Mainstream media lost.

Annnet de Graaf, all the Annnet de Graafs — they won. They spoke the word and spoke for many. They said, “No!”

______________________________________________

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer.

18 November 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Common Dreams Staff

‘The Israeli fans instigated the violence after arriving in the city and attacking Palestinian supporters before the match.’

9 Nov 2024 – Thursday night [7 Nov], Israeli soccer fans clashed with Amsterdam residents before and after a Europa League soccer match between their team Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax in Amsterdam.

By Juan Cole

15 Nov 2024 – Solar panels are great sources of energy. We have them on our roof and they have saved us a lot of money, especially in spring-summer-fall. Some observers complain about their bulk compared to the energy they put out, though. I’ve had engineers argue to me that there just isn’t space for all the solar panels that would be needed to green the US energy grid.

Since I study the Middle East, I’ve had to learn about energy markets and security. One time about a decade ago I was doing some energy consulting with the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). Japan had had to deal with the closure of many of its nuclear plants after the Fukushima disaster by importing Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) from the Middle East. They were nervous about the security of the region, though. I told my Japanese colleagues that they would be better off going in for wind and solar. One replied that Japan had very little land available for solar farms. I don’t know how sincere this reply was. I think those bureaucrats were just wedded to nuclear power. In fact, Japan now has over 87 gigawatts of solar power. It has been adding about 6 gigs of solar a year recently.

One solution to this problem that is increasingly being tried out is agrovoltaics, putting solar panels on farms but in such a way that they help crops grow. So far in the US, most agrovoltaic set-ups are for sheep raising, since grass can grow under the panels. In fact, the panels help the grass thrive in hot, sunny environments by providing shade and allowing retention of moisture, which is also good for “tomatoes, turnips, carrots, squash, beets, lettuce, kale, chard, and peppers.”

Solar panels are rapidly becoming more efficient, which will allow this form of energy to produce electricity while taking up less space.

In the meantime, another possible solution is to put the solar panels on floating platforms. Japan has put them on lakes, for instance.

The panel arrays can also be placed offshore. Fish and other marine life like structures such as the steel truss platform piling used for China’s offshore solar farms. It gives them places to hide from predators, e.g.

China is the most advanced solar society in the world with over 600 gigawatts of installed solar capacity, which saves the country billions of dollars a year over paying for imported fossil gas. The US is in comparison backward, only having about 130 GW of solar.

It is therefore no surprise that Beijing has, as Aman Tripathi reports, just connected to high capacity transmission wires the world’s large offshore solar plant off the coast of Shandong Province, a 1-gigawatt facility. The facility also does fish farming.

The nearly 3,000 photovoltaic platforms are attached to fixed pilings in the sea floor and are spread over an area of some 4 square miles. It will generate enough power to provide electricity to 2.6 million people.

And this installation is only the beginning. China is aiming to have 60 gigawatts of offshore solar in only 3 years from now — an incredible build-out if it happens.

China also already has 61 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity.

Wind, water, solar and battery are clearly the way forward on meeting the world’s power needs while avoiding massive carbon pollution. Solar plus battery in my view has the greatest potential over the medium to long term. The issue of where to put the PV panels is not in my view a very serious problem. If there is a will to use them to cut carbon dioxide production, as there is in China, then places will be found to put them — as China is demonstrating.

And by the way, if the US government under the incoming Trump administration puts roadblocks in the way of solar power, it will just accelerate US decline and help propel China further toward great power status. The future is solar panels and electric vehicles, and China is already eating our lunch on those two. If that goes on for a while, we’ll be poor, breathing dirty air, and paying trillions for climate catastrophes, while China replaces us as the world’s leading superpower.

***************

News.Com.Au : “China’s Massive 1-gigawatt Offshore Solar Cell Platform Now Connected To The Grid”

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment.

18 November 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Scheer Intelligence

1 Nov 2024

The bigger picture of what the United States is and how it operates often gets lost on people. Many think that choosing one or another candidate will better represent their values, but in reality there is only one group of people that matter: those who Dr. Peter Phillips, professor emeritus at Sonoma State University, calls the “titans of capital.” Phillips studied the economic trends following the COVID-19 pandemic and how the wealth concentration in the world took a dramatic turn towards the already ultra-wealthy. He joins host Robert Scheer to further analyze these trends and how dire inequality is becoming.

These 10 companies run our ‘democracy’

18 November 2024

Source: transcend.org

By René Wadlow

14 Nov 2024 – The Climate Conference (COP 29) organized from 11 to 22 November 2024 in Baku, Azerbaijan is held at a time of armed conflicts in the Middle East and Russia-Ukraine.

There is the shadow of the consequences of the 2020 -2023 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh area which led to the flight in 2023 of the majority of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh.  There is some hope that the Climate Conference may help the Azerbaijan President Aliev lessen the continuing tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia.  There is also the additional shadow that the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President may lead to a U.S. withdrawal from the climate goals set out in the Paris session of the Climate Conference in 2015. Then President Trump had withdrawn the U.S. in 2017.

Finance for the transition to ecologically-sound development is at the core of this session – as it has been of other sessions –  a flow of largely public finance from the industrialized North toward the “Global South” with China somewhat between.  This flow is structured by the “New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG)” which will be the heart of the negotiations. The negotiations are difficult as all agreements must be by consensus. States have different national priorities, and compromises are not easy to find.

Efforts for ecologically-sound development – what is often called a Green New Deal – concerns both the industrialized North and the Global South – all of whom are impacted by current climate change.  These efforts will be expensive, at a time when many government budgets are colored by debt and other national priorities.

In addition to the many governments present at the Climate Conference who will be negotiating on financial questions, there are also the representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who have made proposals on a wider range of issues.  Thus, the Association of World Citizens is a co-author of a text “Protecting Our Common Climate System: Earth Governance for a Sustainable Future”.  The text makes the proposal of having a U.N. Declaration of Planetary Emergency to stress the dangers of the current situation at the local, national and regional levels.  A central proposal is for negotiations for a Fossil Fuel Treaty that would end subsidies for fossil fuels and phase out fossil fuel extraction.

All these issues will continue beyond the Baku meeting and should be a focus of our continuing attention and action.

______________________________________

René Wadlow is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment.

18 November 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Leandro Melito

Palestinian lawyer Rula Shadeed, who filed the complaint against Israel at the Tribunal, spoke about the need to increase international pressure against the Zionist state.

16 Nov 2024 – Israel was convicted of genocide against the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip yesterday. The ruling was made by the People’s Tribunal, which brought together jurists, lawyers, and activists at the Fundição Progresso in Rio de Janeiro (RJ) to judge the crimes of capitalism.

“In the case of the genocide of peoples, the evidence in the case file reveals that the people of Palestine, particularly in Gaza, have been subjected to colonialism for 76 years and have been suffering genocide for 409 days, openly practiced by the State of Israel with the complicity of the United States, Germany and other European and Western countries,” says the sentence read out by judge Simone Dalila Nacif, from the Brazilian Association of Jurists for Democracy (ABJD), who presided over the session.

“The inhumanity we are seeing in Gaza has exceeded our imagination. Turning hospitals into torture chambers, bombing and burning shelters where people should seek safety, UN facilities, schools, is unbelievable,” Rula Shadeed, a Palestinian lawyer who presented the case for genocide at the G20 Social People’s Court, told Brasil de Fato.

The director of the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD), a Palestinian civil society organization based in Ramallah, considers this condemnation a “very important symbolic action” in the efforts to stop Israel’s military offensive in the region.

“There are prominent people from all over the world. It’s a way of showing how there are different systems and, despite the fact that the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court have already taken action, we are still seeing genocide against my people in Gaza and the West Bank, and also against people in Lebanon, people in the Syrian region and elsewhere.”

A special committee of the United Nations (UN) declared on Thursday, November 14 that the methods of warfare used by Israel in the Gaza Strip “correspond to the characteristics of genocide” and that the Israeli authorities “have publicly supported policies that deprive Palestinians of the most basic vital needs”, including food, water and fuel. Despite the increasingly forceful stances taken by international organizations, Shadeed believes that the genocide in Gaza reveals the need for changes in the entire human rights system.

“There are no more human rights, we can’t say that the legal framework of human rights is really working. Therefore, tribunals like this and many others that are being prepared around the world are necessary, because we need other paths and we need to see some kind of accountability, which can lead to de facto formalization in the bureaucratic courts, in order to take a step forward.”

Israel’s military offensive in the region, she points out, is maintained mainly due to the financial and military support the country receives from its main allies, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, countries with veto power in the UN Security Council that prevent more incisive decisions against its ally in West Asia or even the establishment of a ceasefire in the region.

“The time has come to move away from the regular bureaucratic, patriarchal and authoritarian system that is based on the veto. You have five states in the world that are betraying any decision that could lead to some kind of responsibility, security or stability. I don’t even understand how we can let this system continue for so long.”

The fact that Israel’s aggressions go unpunished by the international legal system creates a precedent for its military might to turn against other peoples, Shadeed points out.

“There have been previous warnings in other situations and struggles, such as in Sudan, Somalia and elsewhere. When the oppressors realize that there is no accountability, the next attack or aggression will be even greater, because there is nothing to stop them. We’ve seen the war in Iraq since the US invasion. We saw the attack on Afghanistan. No accountability. So this is very regrettable and has a huge cost for our people.”

“I hope Brazil surprises me”

The massacre committed by Israel against the Palestinian population represents the main challenge for Brazil’s conduct of the G20 presidency, which is taking place on Monday, November 18 and Tuesday, November 19 in Rio de Janeiro (RJ). The condemnation of this crime by the People’s Court increases the pressure on the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to take concrete positions against Netanyahu’s government.

“I hope Brazil surprises us, but I’m not sure it will. So we call on the unions, the workers and the Black movement, the Indigenous movements, and others who are also facing oppression which, by the way, is very much fueled by Israeli brutality. Israeli colonial forces export violence to many countries around the world and this is exactly what is being used, also in Brazil, against various underprivileged people and groups,” says the Palestinian lawyer.

Despite having already classified the military offensive led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as genocide, the Brazilian government can be considered an accomplice to this crime, says Shadeed.

In August, a survey commissioned by the non-profit organization Oil Change International revealed that Brazil is responsible for 9% of the total crude oil supplied to Israel and points out that an oil embargo would help promote a ceasefire in the region.

On Wednesday, November 13, a coalition led by Palestinian organizations presented at COP29 – the UN Climate Conference – a request to Brazil, South Africa and Turkey to stop supplying gas and energy to Israel, as the Colombian government has done.

“I really hope that the Brazilian people, through the movements, the unions and the people, will push for a change that benefits the Palestinian people from this terrible genocide, and that also benefits their own people. In the last five weeks, we have seen the siege, the unbelievable situation and the end of any humanitarian aid to the northern part of Gaza, and this is because countries like Brazil and Turkey, which are very clear about the genocide, have not taken action.”

_____________________________

This article was first published in Portuguese by Brasil de Fato.

18 November 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Maung Zarni

7 Nov 2024 – Empires do NOT reform. Resilience is the term associated with the Oppressed, not the Oppressor.  (Try imagine being enslaved or colonized for 300 years).  With elite delusions and a popular sense of “being special/exceptional/unique/superior),  Empires get toxic at home and abroad, decay, get overpowered/crushed or simply collapse.  USA is no exception, except it has the capacity to bring humanity at large with it, to Hell.  I do not hate Americans as a people – just another population of fellow humans, who deserve life, not more or less than any other population.

But, with every cell in my body, I absolutely loath Empires and Imperialisms, whatever their names.  Some of the mightiest  imperial entities – Asoka’s India and what it left behind, the Maureans of N. India with its crowning intellectual edifice of Nalanda University – (if you think everything rational and intellectual was rooted in or developed out of the European Enlightenment,  you have not seen even ruins of Nalanda and what it gifted humanity), the Moguls of the latter day Indian subcontinent, the China of the Great Wall,  the Angkor, the Ottoman, the Mayans, and many others.    We know some of them lasted for 500 years. History has, in due course, humbled them all.

But there is this signature historical ignorance of the imperalist elite – which my dear friend Gayatri  Spivak termed “sanctioned ignorance”.  They are typically drunk with their own cool-aid.     My street in this English countryside is littered with Oxbridge types.  I can only talk to them about the weather, dogs and gardens: their very elite education did not include a single lesson on the crimes against humanity serially perpetrated by Britain during its relatively short reign vis-a-vis other empires that came, and went before the British Empire.

Historical time is not human biological life span.    Whatever is unfolding before our eyes, I for one do NOT despair.  I ask myself were a young African on a slaveship passing through the Middle Passage,  what would I have done?    Certainly, i would not have known that the Evil of Europe would go on to be institutionalized for another 400 years, but the question really is would I have jumped off the ship that was carrying me to the living Hell of Plantations far away, or would I have resisted the attempts to shackle me and my loved ones to eternity.  Of course, this is all academic.  For I was not there.

But I am here, living in the most wretched and horrid era of the United States taking off its mass-murderous gloves, and giving the rest of humanity the middle finger.   Teddy Roosevelt was at least wiser in that he advised his power elite, to carry a big stick but speaks softly.

But the American elites have been talking crude and crass while running 750 military bases around the world and openly threatening any institution or individuals that seek to uphold international law and norms (ICC, UN, ICJ).

I have long adopted the long historical perspective – that Braudel called “long durations”.     I left the United States for good – against my own interests 20 years ago, because i could no longer bear the deep pain of cognitive dissonance – benefiting from being in the belly of the beast while knowing how sick the whole place is.   Yesterday, my 25-years old daughter texted me, “it’s not just Trump, Dad.  All across the board.   Awful country.”   I knew this when she was barely 5.

I keep the faith.   This Evil Empire too has its own expiry date.   Take the long view, if you feel dejected by the Second Coming of Trump.    Genocide Joe and thick-headed and unprincipled Kamala Harris, who also went to the same elementary school as my daughter, are also not good for humanity.   Ask the Palestinians.

Have a great day!

A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia.

18 November 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Shakeel Mohammed P A

There is a prevalent view that Islam considers all other religions as fake, their scriptures as fabricated, and their holy men as charlatans. Is there any truth to this?

It will only be prudent to start with the faith of Islam itself. The simplest definition of Islam is “submission to the will of God.” This is what the Qur’an says,

“Say: Surely the guidance of Allah, that is the (true) guidance, and we are commanded that we should submit to the Lord of the worlds.” – Holy Quran 6:71

The first question that comes to one’s mind on hearing this will be “to which God?”. Is Allah a unique God exclusive to Muslims? The word “Allah” is a combination of Arabic words “Al” and “Illah,” which translate into “the” and “God.” In other words, Allah simply means “the God.” The Arabic Bible uses the word Allah to denote God. Allah is not a God exclusive to a community but the one true God, the Lord of the worlds, Who is mentioned in all monoesthic belief systems.

“Say, ˹O Prophet,˺ “He is Allah—One ˹and Indivisible˺;

Allah—the Sustainer ˹needed by all˺.

He has never had offspring, nor was He born.

And there is none comparable to Him.” “- Holy Qur’an Chapter 12

“God is the Creator and Guardian of all things” – Holy Qur’an 39:62

In the 12th chapter holy Qur’an describes Allah as one and only God who has no partners. Everyone and everything is dependent on Him, but He is dependent on none. The Holy Book also states that God was not born to anyone, nor did He father anyone. The chapter ends by declaring that God is not comparable to anyone or anything; He is unique. He is unique because He created everything; the universe and everything in it are His creations. Obviously, the Creator cannot be compared to any of His creations. This in a nutshell is the concept of God in Islam.

The next question obviously will be, How do people know what God’s will is? Islam’s answer to that question is Prophets of God. Prophets are the chosen people of God who receive divine revelations that they communicate to ordinary humans. These revelations are guidance from the Almighty that enable people to submit themselves to God.

“To every nation We sent a Messenger who told its people, “Worship God and stay away from satan.” Some of them were guided by God and others were doomed to go astray. Travel through the land and see how terrible was the end for those who rejected the truth! “- Holy Qur’an 16:36

This verse makes it clear that prophets have been sent to every nation of this world. That is, men of God have come to every country on this earth. All those teachers, revered religious figures invariably found in every nation’s history , may have been prophets of God.

“The messenger believes in what has been revealed to him from his Lord, and (so do) the believers; they all believe in Allah and His angels and His books and His messengers; We make no difference between any of His messengers; and they say: We hear and obey, our Lord! Thy forgiveness (do we crave), and to Thee is the eventual course.”- Holy Qur’an 2:285

In this verse, God explains that believers don’t get to pick and choose which prophet to believe in and which prophet not to believe in. A Muslim has to believe that every prophet sent to every country of this world carried God’s message and hence has to be accepted without any reservation.

“All the Messengers that We sent spoke the language of their people so that they could explain (their message to them). God guides or causes to go astray whomever He wants. He is Majestic and All-wise. “- Holy Qur’an 14:4

Prophets are not sent to just deliver the message. They have the responsibility to explain the message to the masses and also represent the message by living as per the revealed message. The Holy Quran says,

“The Messenger of God is certainly a good example for those of you who have hope in God and in the Day of Judgment and who remember God very often.” – Holy Qur’an 33:21

Prophets have to deliver the divine message, explain the same to the people by rightly interpreting it, and live according to the message received. Here God says that for people to understand His message, He has sent it down in the languages of the people addressed. Each prophet was given the divine guidance in his and his people’s mother tongue. In other words, divine revelations have come to this world in the languages of every nation.

The belief that Islam started with Mohammed (PBUH) is a misconception. In fact, he is the last prophet; the long line of prophets starting with Adam ended with Prophet Mohammed (PBUH). The Holy Qur’an describes him as the seal of the prophets, meaning there is not going to be another prophet after him.

“Muhammad is not the father of any one of your men, but the Messenger of God, and the Seal of the Prophets; God has knowledge of everything.” – Holy Quran 33:40

What this implies is that all the tens of thousands of prophets who received divine guidance over the years in different parts of the world were prophets of Islam, and what they preached was submission to the will of Almighty God.

The Holy Qur’an is the revelation Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) received from God. But the Qur’an is not the only divine guidance that mankind has received. In the beginning of the second chapter of the Qur’an, God specifies who benefits from the Holy Qur’an. One of the qualities that God specifies as belonging to people who benefit from the Holy Qur’an and thus are successful is their firm belief in all His revelations.

“And who believe in that which has been revealed to you and that which was revealed before you and they are sure of the hereafter.” – Holy Qur’an 2:4

From this verse, it’s amply clear that it’s incumbent on every Muslim to believe in every revelation of God, not just the Qur’an. In short, Islam calls on it’s followers to accept all the prophets assigned to different nations of the world and believe in every scripture that God has sent down in the various languages of the world.

In fact some of the prophets mentioned in the holy books of Jews and Christians are mentioned by name in Qur’an.

“(Muslims), say, “We believe in God and what He has revealed to us and to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, and their descendants, and what was revealed to Moses, Jesus, and the Prophets from their Lord. We make no distinction among them and to God we have submitted ourselves.”” – Holy Qur’an 2:136

Another popularly held view is that Islam encourages its followers to convert non-Muslims by any means possible. How true is this?

“If it had been thy Lord’s will, they would all have believed,- all who are on earth! wilt thou then compel mankind, against their will, to believe!”- Holy Quran 10:99

This verse is enough to dispel this misconception. Here God is asking the prophet, Why would he compel people to accept faith when God could have made them believers if He so desired? The point is that acceptance of Islam should be by choice.

Surely God does ask Muslims to spread his word, but they shouldn’t compel anyone to accept His message.

“Messenger, preach what is revealed to you from your Lord. If you will not preach, it would be as though you have not conveyed My message. God protects you from men. He does not guide the unbelieving people.”- Holy Qur’an 5:67

“Invite (all) to the Way of thy Lord with wisdom and beautiful preaching; and argue with them in ways that are best and most gracious: for thy Lord knoweth best, who have strayed from His Path, and who receive guidance.”- Holy Qur’an 16:125

“There is no compulsion in religion. Certainly, right has become clearly distinct from wrong. Whoever rejects the devil and believes in God has firmly taken hold of a strong handle that never breaks. God is All-hearing and knowing.”- Holy Qur’an 2:256

These verses irrefutably state that spreading God’s word is the responsibility of believers, but they cannot force anyone to accept their faith; if ever someone accepts Islam, it has to be a voluntary decision. The responsibility of Muslims is to convey the message intelligently and graciously and not to force anyone to convert to their faith.

“Surely you cannot guide whom you love, but Allah guides whom He pleases, and He knows best the followers of the right way.”- Holy Qur’an 28:56

God here reveals another fact: nobody will accept God’s guidance unless God wills so. Even though the acceptance of faith is a choice, even that choice is subject to Almighty’s consent. As far as believers are concerned, their duty is to convey the message and leave the rest to God Almighty.

Another point to be noted is that it is the duty of every Muslim to proclaim his faith by properly representing the same, that’s by living like a true Muslim. They are also expected to use public platforms to convey their message, but a believer is personally bound to convey God’s message only to people who are receptive to the message or are at least interested in such matters.

“Therefore give admonition in case the admonition profits (the hearer).”- Holy Qur’an 87:9

One is not expected to go from door to door and pester people with provocative proselytisation activities.

This article cannot be complete without mentioning the verse of the Holy Quran that asks Muslims to not insult the dieties others consider as God or Gods.

“And do not insult those they invoke other than Allah , lest they insult Allah in enmity without knowledge. Thus We have made pleasing to every community their deeds. Then to their Lord is their return, and He will inform them about what they used to do. “- Holy Qur’an 6:108

To sum up, Islam is not a religion that began with the prophethood of Prophet Mohammed (PBUH). While the Qur’an is the last revelation of God, Muslims are told to respect all the revelations of God and accept all prophets of God. Islam accepts the fact that men of God have come to every nation and God’s message has been revealed to these nations in that particular nation’s mother tongue. Further believers are not to compel anyone to accept Islam, as acceptance of faith should be of free will. God also tells His followers in no uncertain terms that they are not to insult or abuse the dieties others pray to.

Shakeel Mohammed P A is a social activist based in Kochi. Email : shakeelmpa@gmail.com

18 November 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

Francesca Albanese did not mince her words. In a strongly worded speech at the United Nations General Assembly Third Committee on October 29, the UN Special Rapporteur deviated from the typical line of other UN officials. She directed her statements to those in attendance.

“Is it possible that after 42,000 people killed, you cannot empathize with the Palestinians?” Albanese said in her statement about the need to “recognize (Israel’s war on Gaza) as a genocide”. “Those of you who have not uttered a word about what is happening in Gaza demonstrate that empathy has evaporated from this room,” she added.

Was Albanese too idealistic when she chose to appeal to empathy, which, in her words, represents “the glue that makes us stand united as humanity”?

The answer largely depends on how we wish to define the role being played by the UN and its various institutions; whether its global platform was established as a guarantor of peace, or as a political club for those with military might and political power to impose their agendas on the rest of the world?

Albanese is not the first person to express deep frustration with the institutional, let alone the moral collapse of the UN, or the inability of the institution to affect any kind of tangible change, especially during times of great crises.

The UN’s own Secretary-General Antonio Guterres himself had accused the executive branch of the UN, the Security Council, of being “outdated”, “unfair” and an “ineffective system”.

“The truth is that the Security Council has systematically failed in relation to the capacity to put an end to the most dramatic conflicts that we face today,” he said, referring to “Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine”. Also, although noting that “The UN is not the Security Council”, Guterres acknowledged that all UN bodies “suffer from the fact that the people look at them and think, ‘Well, but the Security Council has failed us.’”

Some UN officials, however, are mainly concerned about how the UN’s failure is compromising the standing of the international system, thus whatever remains of their own credibility. But some, like Albanese, are indeed driven by an overriding sense of humanity.

On October 28, 2023, mere weeks after the start of the war, the director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights left his post because he could no longer find any room to reconcile between the failure to stop the war in Gaza and the credibility of the institution.

“This will be my last communication to you,” Craig Mokhiber wrote to the UN high commissioner in Geneva, Volker Turk. “Once again we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes and the organization we serve appears powerless to stop it,” Mokhiber added.

The phrase “once again” may explain why the UN official made his decision to leave shortly after the start of the war. He felt that history was repeating itself, in all its gory details, while the international community remained divided between powerlessness and apathy.

The problem is multilayered, complicated by the fact that UN officials and employees do not have the power to alter the very skewed structure of the world’s largest political institution. That power lies in the hands of those who wield political, military, financial and veto power.

Within that context, countries like Israel can do whatever they want, including outlawing the very UN organizations that have been commissioned to uphold international law, as the Israeli Knesset did on October 28 when it passed a law banning UNRWA from conducting “any activity” or providing services in Israel and the occupied territories.

But is there a way out?

Many, especially in the global south, believe that the UN has outlived its usefulness or needs serious reforms.

These assessments are valid, based on this simple maxim: The UN was established in 1945 with the main objectives of the “maintenance of international peace and security, the promotion of the well-being of the peoples of the world, and international cooperation to these ends.”

Very little of the above commitment has been achieved. In fact, not only has the UN failed at that primary mission, but it has become a manifestation of the unequaled distribution of power among its members.

Though the UN was formed following the atrocities of WWII, now it stands largely useless in its inability to stop similar atrocities in Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan and elsewhere.

In her speech, Albanese pointed out that if the UN’s failures continue, its mandate will become even “more and more irrelevant to the rest of the world”, especially during these times of turmoil.

Albanese is right, of course, but considering the irreversible damage that has already taken place, one can hardly find a moral, let alone rational justification of why the UN, at least in its current form, should continue to exist.

Now that the Global South is finally rising with its own political, economic and legal initiatives, it is time for these new bodies to either offer a complete alternative to the UN or push for serious and irreversible reforms in the organization.

Either that or the international system will continue to be defined by nothing but apathy and self-interest.

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

18 November 2024

Source: countercurrents.org