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By Dr. Binoy Kampmark

The EU elections over June 6 to June 9 have presented a chaotically merry picture, certainly for those on the right of politics.  Not that the right in question is reliably homogeneous in any sense, nor hoping for a single theme of triumph.  A closer look at the gains made by the conservative side of politics, along with its saltier reactionary wings, suggests difficulty and disagreement.

In any case, papers such as The Economist were hopelessly pessimistic about the post-Eden fall, which may suggest that democracy, in all its unpredictable nastiness, is working.  The lingering nature of the Ukraine War, the obstinate, enduring presences of such nationalists as Marine Le Pen in France and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, all pointing to “a period of political rudderlessness”.  In truth, the rudders are being replaced.

In France, Le Pen has managed to point the gun of discontent at the centre of bureaucratic control and (hideous word) governance.  The two prominent targets: President Emmanuel Macron and Paris.  She has been aided by the fact that Macron has been inclined to pack key positions in government with loyal, reliable Parisians.  Last February, François Bayrou, an early Macron enthusiast and Justice Minister, found it hard to accept that 11 of the 15 important ministers in the government were from the Paris area.  This revealed a “growing lack of understanding between those in power and the French people at the grassroots level”.

On June 9, Le Pen proved had every reason to gloat, with the gains made by her party sufficiently terrifying French President Emmanuel Macron to dissolve parliament and call an election.  Parties of the far-right came first in Austria, tied for top billing in the Netherlands and came in as runners-up in Germany (where Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats were savaged) and Romania.

The party of Italian Prime Minister, Georgia Meloni, also did well, winning 28.9% of the country’s vote in the elections.  Predicted to get 24 seats in the European Parliament, the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) have done a shedding act on neo-fascism in favour of a smoother image, while still insisting that Europe’s identity had to be defended “from every cultural subjugation that sees Europe renounce its history to adopt that of others.”  Such messaging has come with slick shallowness on social media, including such posts as those featuring “L’Italia cambia l’Europa” (“Italy changes Europe”), or the voter instruction to “scrivi Giorgia” (“write Giorgia”) on their ballot.

Meloni’s march was so significant as to compel EU Commission chief, Ursula von der Leyen, to become a salivating groupie for the right – of sorts.  Her sharp policies on migration have drawn the approval of Meloni.  Speaking at April’s Maastricht Debate, organised by POLITICO and Studio Europa Maastricht, von der Leyen openly expressed her interest in linking arms with Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR).

The Italian PM has found herself to be an object of much political interest, indispensable to the chess pieces of Europe’s political manoeuvrings.  Italy’s reactionary flame has become, for instance, a matter of much interest to Le Pen. To the Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, Le Pen emphasised her insistence that a hard-right bloc of parties in the European Parliament could be formed, overcoming the current division between her Identity and Democracy (ID) group and that of Meloni’s ECR.

That said, any union of faux liberal types such as von der Leyen with those of the hard right of Europe is unlikely to be a fragrant one.  Von der Leyen has taken heavy shots at Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally), excoriating its pro-Russian position along with those of Germany’s AfD and Poland’s Konfederacja.  “They are Putin’s puppets and proxies and they are trampling on our values.”  The promise to Meloni: if you want my dour, camouflaged conservatism, forget the other reactionaries.

What was telling was that the young, having voted in 2019 for parties of the left such as the Greens, had had a change of heart.  In May an Ipsos poll revealed that 34% of French voters under the age of 30 were keen to vote for the 28-year old leader of the National Rally in the European Parliamentary elections.  In Germany, the 22% of Germans between 14-29 were keen to plump for Alternative for Germany (AfD), just under double from what was registered in 2023.

For Albena Azmanova of the University of Kent, this presents a curious predicament for those on the progressive side of politics (is there such a thing anymore?).  Dissatisfaction that would normally be mined by progressives for political advantage is being left over to the opposite wing of politics.  “The left is failing to harness that discontent, although its trademark issues – poverty and unemployment – are now more salient for voters than the far right’s flagship of ‘immigration’.”

An unanticipated phenomenon has manifested: younger voters in France, Portugal, Belgium, Germany and Finland folding at the ballot box for parties of the right and far right. The pendulum has well and truly swung.  Europe’s right, bulked by the young, is on the march.

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

12 June 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

Caption: Frame captured from a De-Colonizer 1948 video titled “Une conversation en hébreu sur le génocide”

By Rima Najjar

Even before Israel exposed its heart of darkness to the world in the aftermath of Oct 7, the term “the ugly Israeli” was already a thing. According to many reports, Israelis traveling internationally have developed a reputation for unruliness, rudeness, and assertiveness; observed instances of Israelis arguing, yelling, and disregarding rules have led to negative perceptions by airline staff and other travelers abroad, and even to a Ynet news report that wonders, “Are Israel’s tourists the worst in the world?” But such characterizations of a national stereotype are just the tip of the iceberg.

The “heart, mind and soul” of the Israeli public in general is twisted, maybe even beyond redemption. Israel is often described by analysts in the Arab media as an army that has a state rather than a state that has an army. Support for military measures designed to entrench and expand Zionist political and territorial control of historic Palestine has been a characteristic of the Israeli public since the entity’s violent establishment on 78 percent of Palestine in 1948. This mass public support of violence is the natural human condition of a “State of Terror,” one that came into being through massacres very much like those taking place in Gaza daily now, and through robbery and deceit (very much like that being exercised now by Netanyahu and his partner in crime, Joe Biden) on the backs of the mostly agrarian Palestinian people at the time. (See State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel by Thomas Suarez, “The first comprehensive and structured analysis of the violence and terror employed by the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel against the people of Palestine”, according to Ilan Pappé.)

The aftermath of October 7th has disrupted Israel’s success in directly influencing the perceptions of the publics of other nations and garnering tolerance for the Israeli government’s strategic objectives. But the Israeli public is still firmly in the government’s public policy grip.

The Zionist Jewish entity controls not only the content and limits of Jewish identity, but also the content and limits of Palestinian lives. My concern here with the Israelis and their grandiose and self-absorbed national character is to expose and condemn their “distance from humanity,” their “millennia-old disdain for non-Jews” (i.e., their racism), which have shaped the horrendous and unjust world in which Palestinians have lived for more than 76 years and made the Israeli public complicit in genocide.

The censorship and repression of the Palestinian, international, and Israeli media hide some of the horrors of Israel’s war on Gaza’s children. But is it really possible that the Israeli public is unaware of the story the whole world is watching with horror, a story of “famished Palestinians killed outside aid trucks on Al-Rashid Street in February; of tent-dwellers in Rafah burned alive in Israeli air strikes; of women and children subsisting on 245 calories a day?” Do they honestly believe instead what Benjamin Netanyahu describes as “the victory of Judaeo-Christian civilisation against barbarism?”

In an attempt to search the Israeli public’s heart of darkness, Eitan Bronstein Aparicio (De-Colonizer) recently published a video of himself having conversations with random Israelis in May 2024 about what Israel is doing in Gaza and the possibility that its actions will ultimately be recognized as genocide.

Aparicio asks these individuals for their opinion on the lawsuit against Israel brought by South Africa before the International Court of Justice in The Hague (On February 16, the ICJ called on Israel to avoid actions that could lead to genocide and to facilitate humanitarian access for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.) Unsurprisingly, their responses show a uniform obliviousness to their government’s willful causing of great suffering to Palestinian civilians, including the “mowing” of Palestinian children. They deny it’s happening, even as the UN has put Israel on its “blacklist” for the killing, maiming, recruitment of minors, bombings of schools and hospitals, and attacks on humanitarian aid workers as well as Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war. Aparicio says: “All the people I interviewed reject it [the idea that Israel is conducting a genocide on Palestinians] and even react to it with anger.”

At the very least, the scale and nature of Israeli military operations in Gaza, combined with policies that result in severe Palestinian suffering, suggest an intent to weaken or destroy the Palestinian population in Gaza. But Israelis are in self-absorbed denial.

Like the Nazi regime in Germany, the Zionist regime has been highly effective in its use of propaganda (hasbara), including exploitation of the Holocaust to shape public opinion, especially the Jewish-Zionist entity’s own public. It uses the Holocaust to justify military actions, occupation policies, and settlement expansion in the Palestinian territories, invoking historical suffering to justify contemporary political objectives.

Zionist leaders cooperated with Nazi Germany (the Haavara Agreement of 1933 — i.e., before the Holocaust) to allow Jewish emigration and the transfer of Jewish assets from Germany to then “British Mandatory Palestine,” thus helping to undermine the anti-Nazi boycott, which was supported by many European and American Jews and posed a potential threat to the German economy.

Under the Agreement, Jews emigrating from Germany could use their assets to purchase German-manufactured goods for export to Palestine. This created a substantial export market for German factories in British-ruled Palestine, which was beneficial for the German economy during a time of economic hardship. The largely agrarian Palestinian population was locked out, then as now, of the economic benefits of the influx of Jewish capital and labor to Palestine.

To me, the De-Colonizer interviews with Israelis are as chilling as the following excerpt from the cross-examination of Otto Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppe D, during the Nuremberg trials, which United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca P. Albanese shared on Facebook:

Q. Will you explain to the Tribunal what conceivable threat to the security of the Wehrmacht a child constituted in your judgment?
A. I believe I cannot add anything to your previous question. I did not have to determine the danger but the order contained that all Jews including the children were considered to constitute a danger for the security of this area.
Q. Will you agree that there was absolutely no rational basis for killing children except genocide and the killing of races?
A. I believe that it is very simple to explain if one starts from the fact that this order did not only try to achieve security, but also permanent security because the children would grow up and surely, being the children of parents who had been killed, they would constitute a danger no smaller than that of the parents.

When I came across the De-Colonizer video, I was curious to hear how the Israeli respondents would handle Aparicio’s question on the Gaza genocide, especially because Israeli PR has long invoked the term “ethnic cleansing” (in reference to Israeli Jews) as a tactic to create a negative association with the Palestinian right of return, framing it as something that could lead to the displacement of Israeli Jews. (See Frank Luntz’s report, which was commissioned by The Israel Project and came to light in 2009. It suggests several fact-denying strategies for Israel’s public policy communication.) The loaded term “ethnic cleansing” resonates negatively with Western audiences, says the report, but as it turns out, the concept of genocide, especially when it is not merely rhetorical and is happening before our eyes, also does.

The Israeli respondents in the video recycle all the most familiar tropes of Zionist propaganda, making use of several strategies of PR communication in Luntz’s report, such as denial, deflection, and accusations of antisemitism. They pretend that the war on Gaza with its wholesale obliteration of neighborhoods and families, schools, hospitals and markets, is an equal struggle between an Israeli state that has the fourth most powerful army in the world (F16s, nuclear weapons, the unconditional logistical, political and diplomatic support of the most powerful state on earth: the USA, and massive trading privileges from the EU) … and Hamas. They pretend that it all started on Oct 7, 2023 and do not acknowledge that Palestinians have lived for so long, not just with the blockade of Gaza, but also with the daily threat of Israeli incursions, the kidnapping of their children by brutal Israeli soldiers, the demolition of their homes, the humiliation of men, women and children at countless checkpoints, and the daily interference with normal life at every imaginable level.

Comparing Israel and the Palestinian resistance is like comparing the rapist and the rapist’s victim. And yet, without exception, the De-Colonizer respondents do just that, with one of them saying (appallingly, since the issue being discussed is genocide) at minute 4:44— “and I say, ‘I wish they didn’t exist.’”

Another respondent says, “It’s a war that’s sad for both sides. We on the Israeli side didn’t start it. It opened, exploded, on October 7, but there is a war, and it is sad for both Israelis and Palestinians. A war, but it’s a kind of contact between the Palestinian population, Hamas, and Israel.”

To the Israeli public, the unfolding horror in Gaza is a “kind of contact” the nature of which appears to be a mystery. It’s genocide, folks. The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories has found “reasonable grounds” to believe that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The report presented at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, entitled ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’, outlines specific acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

Aparicio concludes: “The probability that in a few years’ time it will be proven that Israel has committed a genocide must also be taken into account by the Israelis themselves. This is a potential future that will shock all those who have not lost their humanity and who have not been swept away by the prevailing racism.”

It must be exhausting, this denial and rationalization on the part of Israelis. But then, so is facing the facts. A Jewish-American friend posted on Facebook about her exhaustion as she grapples with these gruesome facts: “I am so exhausted that ‘exhausted’ doesn’t even fully cover how I feel from having my secondary trauma as a second gen Shoah survivor triggered constantly since Israel started its genocide in Gaza. The flip-flopping from the grief, shame, empathetic pain & sheer rage toward the perpetrators & the “Good Germans” who are enabling it is pushing the limits of my sanity. I hold onto stories of courage, resistance & selfless compassion as my life rafts in this sea of hate & sheer evil.”

I wrote this blog post with this question in my mind about Israelis: Have they “lost their humanity” for good? Do they need to wait “a few years’ time” for Israel’s crimes against humanity to be “proven” before being “shocked.” One of them says, “Alas, if it comes to that!” Well, it has come to that … and more.

Through control of the media, the spread of Zionist ideology, and the hasbara portrayal of the settler-colonial Jewish Zionist state as a victim figure with “a right to exist” forcibly on someone else’s land, Israel manipulates public perception and promotes the public’s complicity with the destruction of the Palestinian population in Gaza. The Israeli Jews who dissent must first go through a wrenching “identity crisis” and then, like the historian Ilan Pappé, be hounded out of Israel. Pappé moved out in 2008 after appearing in an Israeli newspaper at the center of a target and receiving several death threats.

Note: First published on Medium here.

Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.

11 June 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

Details have begun to emerge of Israel’s massacre at the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza Saturday, in which 274 people were killed and hundreds more were injured.

The Washington Post confirmed Sunday that Israeli forces used civilian vehicles in the military operation and that the operation was staged near the “humanitarian” port built by the US military. Gaza’s Government Media Office reported that Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers pretended to be refugees before opening fire on the camp.

The massacre was carried out under the pretext of a “hostage rescue,” although nearly as many hostages (three) were killed during the massacre as were rescued (four).

According to US media accounts, the massacre, which killed or injured nearly 1,000 and destroyed nearly 100 buildings, aimed to simply destroy everything in the path of the Israeli commando team. “The air force started shooting to give them a corridor, a wall of fire,” retired IDF Maj. Gen. David Tsur told the Washington Post.

The IDF boasts of close US collaboration in the massacre. It reported that “the US hostage cell played a decisive role in freeing the hostages” and that it used “high-precision American technology that had not been used before in the process of freeing the hostages.”

The Pentagon denied direct US military participation in the attack. “The pier facility, including its equipment, personnel and assets, were not used in the [Israeli military’s] operation to rescue hostages in Gaza,” said Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder.

He admitted, however, “there was some type of helicopter activity” by the IDF near the pier, but claimed this was “not associated” with the US military.

The Euro-Med Monitor reported that “massive, indiscriminate air and artillery attacks were launched by the Israeli army during the operation in order to conceal the withdrawal of Israeli forces.”

The massacre sent a flood of wounded people into Gaza’s overloaded hospital system. “We placed the injured along the internal corridors and in between beds. There is no room at all inside this hospital. We had them sleep in external tents,” Dr. Khalil al-Dakran of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital told Al Jazeera, noting that there are four times more wounded people at the hospital than beds.

“It’s a nightmare at Al-Aqsa,” said Samuel Johann, a Doctors Without Borders coordinator in Gaza. “There have been back-to-back mass casualties as densely populated areas are bombed. It’s way beyond what anyone could deal with in a functional hospital, let alone with the scarce resources we have here. How many more men, women and children have to be killed before world leaders decide to put an end to this massacre?”

“Israel committed a massacre in Nuseirat,” said Khalil al-Degran, spokesman for Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital on Saturday. “In this terrible state … the hospital cannot absorb the number of dead and injured. The hospital has been at full capacity for weeks.”

Karin Huster of Doctors Without Borders told the Associated Press in an interview, “We had the gamut of war wounds, trauma wounds, from amputations to eviscerations to trauma, to TBIs (traumatic brain injuries), fractures and, obviously, big burns… Kids completely gray or white from the shock, burnt, screaming for their parents. Many of them are not screaming because they are in shock.”

Some 274 Palestinians were killed during the massacre and another 700 were wounded. The dead included 64 children and 57 women. “The streets are filled with dead bodies,” one witness told the Associated Press. Eighty-nine homes or residential buildings had been bombed during the massacre.

In an interview given to The Intercept, witness Abu Nasser declared, “The area turned to ashes… I couldn’t find my wife and started calling out to those around me to ensure they were still alive.”

Paraphrasing Nasser, The Intercept wrote, “The streets were filled by a swarm of quadcopter drones equipped with small arms. Tank tracks could be heard nearby. U.S.-made Apache attack helicopters hovered. Nearby homes were hit with missiles.”

Nasser continued, “We heard people crying for help in the bombed houses… They had martyrs and injuries, but we couldn’t help them… The street was filled with civilian body parts … and many injuries bleeding out without ambulances being able to reach them.”

Martin Griffiths, UN under-secretary-general for Humanitarian Affairs, declared that the Nuseirat camp is the “epicenter of the seismic trauma that civilians in Gaza continue to suffer.” He added, “The images of death and devastation following Israel’s military operation there prove that each day this war continues, it only grows more horrific. Seeing shrouded bodies on the ground, we are reminded that nowhere is safe in Gaza. Seeing bloodied patients being treated on hospital floors, we are reminded that healthcare in Gaza is hanging by a thread.”

Since the start of the genocide, at least 37,124 Palestinians have been killed and 84,712 injured in Gaza, with countless more missing and presumed dead.

In a statement Sunday, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) called for an independent international inquiry into Israeli massacres at Palestinian hospitals, where hundreds of mass graves have been discovered.

“Israel has attacked nearly every hospital in Gaza. Hundreds of health workers and patients have been killed and detained. The discovery of mass graves in two hospitals further demonstrates that the protected status of healthcare in Gaza under international law has totally failed, with harrowing results,” said MAP’s director of advocacy Rohan Talbot.

“The families of the dead deserve to know the truth of what happened to their loved ones, and to have justice wherever serious violations of international law have occurred. This can only be achieved through thorough, prompt and impartial investigations,” he said. “The international community must therefore demand access to Gaza for independent investigators and forensic experts, so that evidence can be preserved and accountability pursued,” Talbot added.

Non-stop Israeli bombardment across the devastated Palestinian territory has continued in the aftermath of the raid. “Israeli bombardment from the air, land, and sea continues to be reported across much of the Gaza Strip, resulting in further civilian casualties, displacement, and destruction of houses and other civilian infrastructure,” the United Nations reported Monday.

11 June 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By UN International Organization for Migration

6 Jun 2024 – The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is warning that the number of people displaced by conflict inside Sudan could top 10 million in the coming days. The world’s worst internal displacement crisis continues to escalate, with looming famine and disease adding to the havoc wrought by conflict.

IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix, which issues weekly statistics, recorded 9.9 million people internally displaced across all 18 states in Sudan this week – 2.8 million prior to the April 2023 war, and 7.1 million since. More than half of all internally displaced persons (IDPs) are women, and over a quarter are children under the age of five.

“Imagine a city the size of London being displaced. That’s what it’s like, but it’s happening with the constant threat of crossfire, with famine, disease and brutal ethnic and gender-based violence,” said IOM Director General Amy Pope. “Humanitarian needs in Sudan are massive, acute and immediate, and yet only 19 per cent of the funds we have asked for have been delivered. Unified international efforts are required to avoid a looming famine.”

In total, some 12 million have been forced to flee their homes in Sudan, with more than 2 million crossing borders into neighbouring countries, principally to Chad, South Sudan, and Egypt.

After years of protracted crisis, full-scale civil war erupted in mid-April 2023 when fierce fighting between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) broke out in the capital Khartoum, and quickly expanded across the huge country, home to nearly 50 million people.

The brutality and intensity of the war are relentless, with reports of grave violations of human rights including ethnic violence, rape and gang rape as tools of war. Seventy per cent of the people forced to move in Sudan are now trying to survive in places that are at risk of famine. Humanitarian access is patchy or non-existent. The upcoming rainy season will complicate this and may lead to climate-related disasters and the spread of disease.

Last week, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), the highest-level humanitarian coordination forum of the United Nations system, issued a stark warning that the situation in Sudan had reached catastrophic levels.

In Al Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, the intensifying conflict has left more than 800,000 civilians trapped in what the IASC called “a merciless onslaught of fighting and aerial bombardments.” Essential infrastructure, including health care, has collapsed. Prices of food, water and fuel have skyrocketed, making these basic essentials unaffordable.

“Crucial roads out of Al Fasher are blocked, preventing civilians from reaching safer areas, while at the same time limiting the amount of food and other humanitarian aid coming into the city,” added Othman Belbeisi, IOM’s Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa. “We join the United Nations in calling for an immediate end to the fighting and the guarantee of safe, unimpeded and sustained humanitarian access across the borders and across frontlines. Millions of lives depend on it.”

Notes to Editors  

The number of IDPs displaced post 15 April 2023 (7.1 million IDPs) includes the estimated 974,905 IDPs who were initially displaced prior to 15 April 2023 and experienced secondary displacement since 15 April 2023.

***

For more information, please contact:

Port Sudan: Lisa George, lgeorge@iom.int
Cairo: Tamim Elyan,  telyan@iom.int
Geneva: Kennedy Okoth, kokoth@iom.int

10 June 2024

Source: transcend.org

By The Kucinich Report

4 Jun 2024 – Scott Ritter was pulled off a NY-to-Istanbul flight yesterday by US officials and his passport confiscated in a startling new development in the government’s open drive to censor and silence critics of the Administration’s foreign policies at a time when the United States is supplying billions of dollars in arms to foment wider war in Russia, accelerate the attacks on Gazans and set the stage for war with China over Taiwan.

A Marine veteran and true American patriot, Mr. Ritter is also a noted former Chief UN weapons inspector, author and journalist.  He was enroute to Russia to attend an international conference in St. Petersburg.

Mr. Ritter first came to my attention when he testified at a Capitol hearing I sponsored to inquire into the Bush Administration’s plans to attack Iraq. Ritter warned in August of 2002 that a case had not been made for attacking Iraq.

Had Congress listened to Mr. Ritter, the US would have been spared the loss of thousands of our soldiers and the waste of trillions of tax dollars. Over one million Iraqis died as a result of the US attack on their country. America’s financial and moral debt will never be able to be repaid, but would not exist if we had simply looked at the evidence he presented.

Mr. Ritter’s  passport was confiscated yesterday by U.S. authorities without explanation.

There are several Constitutional issues at stake here:

1. The taking of his passport was  an illegal seizure, prohibited by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Mr. Ritter asked for, but did not receive a receipt, for the seized passport.
2. The seizure represents a punitive attempt to censor his views, a violation of his First Amendment right to free speech and freedom of the press.
3. His Fifth Amendment rights to due process were violated. Someone in the State Department made an administrative decision to prevent his travel and to take away his passport.  Since there was no stated reason for the seizure, there was no open court hearing, no evidence to justify the confiscation of Mr. Ritter’s passport was presented publicly.  The whole process has a Kafka-like Trial feeling, where Mr. Ritter cannot find out what he is accused of.

The State Department was aware of Mr. Ritter’s travel three weeks before his planned departure, giving rise to the likelihood that the interception was designed to humiliate Mr. Ritter, in addition to the blatant disregard of his Constitutional rights.

Mr. Ritter has been critical of U.S. foreign policy, and has repeatedly stated his objections to widening war clearly and cogently in his podcasts.

While the State Department has jurisdiction over travel, it has no ability to cancel the rights accorded all Americans under the U.S. Constitution, including freedom of movement.

There needs to be an inquiry into the State Department’s actions here.  Many serious questions arise, all of Constitutional import:

Was Mr. Ritter’s passport seized based on secret evidence, and authorized under President Bush’s Executive Order 13224, which established a national emergency, (now 23 years old!) and reauthorized last year by President Biden?

Was the passport seized under the Patriot Act?  The public has a right to know the reasons why.

Were the expanded powers given the government in the recent reauthorization of Section 702 of the Patriot Act in play here?

Has Scott Ritter been under federal surveillance because of the exercise of his First Amendment rights?

Was Ritter intercepted because of his attempt to build a bridge of peace toward Russia?

This is not only about Scott Ritter.

Any American, journalist or not, who challenges the state in the current climate may find themselves subject to arbitrary procedures and even politically-inspired prosecution.  That is the real state of emergency.

Chris Hedges, a man of impeccable journalist credentials, was canceled after he and I engaged in a discussion criticizing US foreign policy, on his show The Real News.

Julian Assange’s arrest and imprisonment at the instance of the US government gave fair warning to every journalist of the price which may be paid for exposing official acts of the murder of innocent civilians in Iraq.

When the Constitutional rights of any of us are under attack, the Constitutional rights of all of us are under attack.  Who else will have their travel restricted because the government does not like what one is saying?  Who else will be surveilled?  Who else will be prosecuted?  Who else will have their Constitutional rights denied?

Of equal concern was the simultaneous publication yesterday by the Washington Post which casts as disinformation the work of journalists, including several Americans, who have challenged the State Department’s narrative with regard to Russia and Iran.

It would seem the Washington Post has taken seriously the sardonic dictum of A.J. Leibling:  “Freedom of the Press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”   The corporatization of the First Amendment, and the concentration of media into fewer and fewer hands, are major reasons why America is under constant threat of war and why our Constitutional freedoms are in trouble.

Independent authors and journalists are struggling to provide a response which protects our freedom of speech.  They also have access to the same Constitutional protection of Freedom of the Press as the Washington Post, the New York Times and other large corporate publishers.

Governments’ fear of being challenged is as old as the case of John Peter Zenger, who 1734 printed the New York Weekly Journal.  Zenger’s persistent prodding of the Crown’s provincial governor resulted in him being charged with libel.  He won the case, establishing truth as a defense.

Today the well understood truth is as deeply offensive to liars as freedom is offensive to tyrants.  “Our liberty,” wrote Thomas Jefferson ten years after The Declaration of Independence, “depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”

Dennis Kucinich is a former presidential candidate (D) who was in the US Congress for 16 years.

10 June 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Caitlin Johnstone

Our perception of the world is dominated by the movements of our attention, which means that our perception of the world can be changed by manipulating those movements.

9 Jun 2024 – “Israel Rescues 4 Hostages in Military Operation; Gazan Officials Say Scores Are Killed,” reads a New York Times headline from yesterday.

It’s a very odd-looking headline even if you don’t know anything about the propagandistic tactics being employed in it. The first half is very clear, while the second half is unintelligible and reads like some weird kind of riddle or word puzzle.

The New York Times is performing these bizarre, cryptic linguistic gymnastics to discuss the latest Israeli massacre in Gaza which as of this writing has a reported death toll of 236.

Right off the bat we can see something weird in this headline with the use of the word “scores” to describe the number of people reported killed in the massacre. The New York Times article itself says it was reported that “more than 200 people were killed in central Gaza,” so the correct quantifier for the headline would be “hundreds”, not “scores”. This would be like a headline saying “dozens” of people were killed on 9/11 instead of “thousands”; it would technically be correct since the number of people killed were mathematically speaking many many dozens, but it would give readers the wrong impression of the lethality of the incident.

[https://twitter.com/TameeOliveFern/status/1799525189828649351]

Next, notice the sudden switch mid-headline from active, certain voice to passive, doubtful voice. Four Israeli hostages were definitely rescued by Israel, while Gazan officials are alleging that scores were killed.

Scores of what? Cats? Chickens? Israelis?

Killed by what? Salmonella poisoning? Traffic accidents? Congolese militias?

There’s no way to tell from the headline.

The mass media in general and The New York Times in particular are notorious for their passive language “Palestinian child ceases breathing after encountering bullet” headlines when promoting Israeli information interests, but it really drives the point home when you see it switch from normal human language to something that sounds like a clue The Riddler would leave Batman within the very same headline.

And what’s interesting is that nothing The New York Times editors did here is technically a lie. Every word they meticulously selected for their headline is technically true, but it is shaped in such a way that it draws the reader’s attention away from the fact that Israel just massacred hundreds of human beings.

They could have just as easily written “Israel Kills Hundreds of Palestinians in Central Gaza Attack; 4 Hostages Rescued” and it would have been just as true, but then public attention would have been drawn in the opposite direction. The New York Times never, ever draws public attention in that direction; the slanting only ever goes one way.

[https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1798799983447048303]

We saw something similar the other day from The New York Times when they reported that Israel has been torturing Palestinian prisoners by sodomizing them with hot metal rods — sometimes to death — but buried this information at the very bottom of the article, without mentioning a word of it in the headline or sub-headline.

Here again, nobody can technically accuse The New York Times of lying; they didn’t report anything that wasn’t true or fail to report anything that was true. They just drastically underemphasized the real story in their report to direct their readers’ attention away from Israeli criminality.

A lot of people who grow skeptical of the mass media correctly assume that these outlets are propaganda services for the US empire, but incorrectly assume that this means they must be lying all the time. In truth the imperial propaganda machine is much more sophisticated than this, and much more effective.

Rather than making up whole-cloth lies and losing all credibility in the mainstream public, the mass media will generally rely on distortions like the above which skew public perception without actually technically lying. They’ll place emphasis in areas which benefit the empire, they’ll omit inconvenient facts, they’ll use tricky phrasing, they’ll uncritically report on the claims of favored government officials while saying the claims of unfavored government officials are made without evidence, they’ll mention convenient news stories over and over again, and they’ll report inconvenient stories only once before leaving them to get lost in the daily news churn.

I actually cite the mass media quite a bit in my own work, because a lot of useful and truthful information about the criminality of the western empire comes out through outlets like The New York Times. It’s just that that information is deemphasized and quickly shuffled out of public attention by the propagandists who run those outlets, allowing them to technically tell the truth while still manipulating the overarching narrative about what’s going on in the world.

[https://twitter.com/AssalRad/status/1798757428764561889]

The propagandists who edit outlets like The New York Times are able to skew public perception in favor of the empire because they understand that human experience is dominated by the movements of attention, so if they can manipulate those movements of attention, they can manipulate how people perceive the world.

I once met someone who described attention as “the uncrowned king of consciousness,” and I recall those words often because of their accuracy. Attention is the uncrowned king of consciousness because its movements dictate how we will experience our world: what we will think about, notice, see, hear, or otherwise perceive, but we don’t tend to place much importance on it or recognize the extent to which our life is ruled by it.

In reality there is little that is more crucial to our experience of life than the movements of our attention. It’s something so fundamental that two people walking across the exact same meadow at the exact same time will never have the same experience of it. One might experience a meadow with a pleasant breeze, a chirping bird in a tree, a grasshopper zipping across their path, and a sky of phenomenal beauty, while the other might experience the meadow as a distant and barely-noticed backdrop to their mental concerns for their future, their grievances about the past, their imaginary arguments with a family member, and a catchy song they’ve got stuck in their head.

After someone dies people often talk about the things they did in life — their accomplishments, their legacy, how many children they raised, what they did for work — but really the kind of life someone lived has less to do with the things they did than the way their attention moved. The movements of their attention throughout their life really was their life, because it determined what their experience of their time on this world actually was. How present they were for it. How much beauty they experienced. How much mental energy they wasted on imaginary bullshit. What they noticed. What they missed.

[https://twitter.com/TheOnion/status/1721644886619836479]

Our perception of the world is dominated by the movements of our attention, which means that our perception of the world can be changed by manipulating those movements. Propagandists understand this, so they spend their time doing things like telling us over and over again what a bad bad baddie Vladimir Putin is while just occasionally giving a single highly mitigated mention to an individual instance of Israeli criminality, or talking about October 7 over and over again while greatly deemphasizing the massacres Israel has been perpetrating on the Palestinians in Gaza every day since.

This causes public attention to move in directions that benefit the information interests of the empire and away from directions that would harm those information interests, all without having to tell actual lies. People’s perception of the world is shaped by these skillful propagandists without their even being aware that it is happening.

That’s what makes the propaganda of the western empire so much more effective than any other propaganda that has ever existed anywhere else: the inhabitants of the western empire have no idea they’re being propagandized.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper.

10 June 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Ramzy Baroud

5 Jun 2024 – If one were to argue that a top Spanish government official would someday declare that “from the river to the sea, Palestine would be free”, the suggestion itself would have seemed ludicrous.

But this is precisely how Yolanda Diaz, Spain’s Deputy Prime Minister, concluded a statement on May 23, a few days before Spain officially recognized Palestine as a state.

The Spanish recognition of Palestine, along with the Norwegian and Irish recognition, is most important.

Western Europe is finally catching up with the rest of the world regarding the significance of a strong international position in support of the Palestinian people and in rejection of Israel’s genocidal practices in occupied Palestine.

But equally important is the changing political discourse regarding both Palestine and Israel in Europe and all over the world.

Almost immediately after the start of the Israeli war on Gaza, some European countries imposed restrictions on pro-Palestinian protests, some even banning the Palestinian flag, which was perceived, through some twisted logic, as an antisemitic symbol.

With time, the unprecedented solidarity with Israel at the start of the war, however, turned into an outright political, legal and moral liability to the pro-Israel western governments.

Thus, a slow shift began, leading to a near-complete transformation in the position of some governments, and a partial though clear shift of the political discourse among others.

The early ban on pro-Palestinian protests was impossible to maintain in the face of millions of angry European citizens who called on their governments to end their blind support for Tel Aviv.

On May 30, the mere fact that French private broadcaster TF1 hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu led to large, though spontaneous, protests by French citizens, who called on their media to deny accused war criminals the chance to address the public.

Failing to push back against the pro-Palestine narrative, the French government has, on May 31, decided to disinvite Israeli military firms from participating in one of the world’s largest military expos, Eurosatory, scheduled for June 17-21.

Even countries like Canada and Germany, which supported the Israeli genocide against Palestinians until later stages of the mass killings, began changing their language as well.

The change of language is also happening in Israel itself and among pro-Israeli intellectuals and journalists in mainstream media. In a widely read column, New York Times writer Thomas Friedman attacked Netanyahu late last March, accusing him of being the “worst leader in Jewish history, not just in Israeli history”.

Unpacking Friedman’s statement requires another column, for such language continues to feed on the persisting illusion, at least in the mind of Friedman, that Israel serves as a representation, not of its own citizens, but of Jewish people, past and present.

As for the language in Israel, it is coalescing into two major and competing discourses: one irrationally ruthless, represented by far-right Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, in fact, by Netanyahu himself; and another, though equally militant and anti-Palestinian, which is more pragmatic.

While the first group would like to see Palestinians slaughtered in large numbers or wiped out through a nuclear bomb, the other realizes that a military option, at least for now, is no longer viable.

“The Israeli army does not have the ability to win this war against Hamas, and certainly not against Hezbollah,” Israeli Army Reserve Major General Yitzhak Brik said in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Maariv on May 30.

Brik, one of Israel’s most respected military men, is but one of many such individuals who are now essentially repeating the same wisdom.

Strangely, when Israel’s Minister of Heritage Amihai Eliyahu suggested the “option” of dropping a nuclear bomb on the Strip, his words reeked of desperation, not confidence.

Prior to the war, the Israeli political discourse regarding Gaza revolved around a specific set of terminology: ‘deterrence’, represented in the occasional one-sided war, often referred to as ‘mowing the lawn’ and ‘security’, among others.

Billions of dollars have been generated throughout the years by war profiteers in Israel, the US and other European countries, all in the name of keeping Gaza besieged and subdued.

Now, this language has been relegated in favor of a grand discourse concerned with existential wars, the future of the Jewish people, and the possible end of Israel if not Zionism itself.

While it is true that Netanyahu fears an end to the war will be a terrible conclusion to his supposedly triumphant legacy as the ‘protector’ of Israel, there is more to the story.

If the war ends without Israel restoring its so-called deterrence and security, it will be forced to contend with the fact that the Palestinian people cannot be relegated and that their rights cannot be overlooked. For Israel, such a realization would be an end to its settler-colonial project, which began nearly a hundred years ago.

Additionally, the perception and language pertaining to Palestine and Israel are changing among ordinary people across the world. The misconception of the Palestinian ‘terrorist’ is being quickly replaced by the true depiction of the Israeli war criminal, a categorization that is now consistent with the views of the world’s largest international legal institutions.

Israel now stands in near-complete isolation, due, in part, to its genocide in Gaza but also to the courage and steadfastness of the Palestinian people, and to the global solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

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

10 June 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Seraj Assi

On Sunday night, May 26 2024, 1-year-old Ahmad became the symbol of the unspeakable horror of genocide in Gaza after Israel bombed his family tent in north Rafah.

6 Jun 2024 – Ahmad Al-Najjar was a happy one-year old child from Gaza. He loved trampolines, balls, and cats. Born as the youngest of his four siblings, his father liked to call him “bobba” or “baby.”

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

The world economy is experiencing a deep process of economic convergence, according to which regions that once lagged the West in industrialization are now making up for lost time.

6 Jun 2024 – The World Bank’s release on May 30 of its latest estimates of national output (up to the year 2022) offers an occasion to reflect on the new geopolitics. The new data underscore the shift from a U.S.-led world economy to a multipolar world economy, a reality that U.S. strategists have so far failed to recognize, accept, or admit.

The World Bank figures make clear that the economic dominance of the West is over. In 1994, the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, U.K., U.S.) constituted 45.3% of world output, compared with 18.9% of world output in the BRICS countries (Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Russia, South Africa, United Arab Emirates). The tables have turned. The BRICS now produce 35.2% of world output, while the G7 countries produce 29.3%.

As of 2022, the largest five economies in descending order are China, the U.S., India, Russia, and Japan. China’s GDP is around 25% larger than the U.S.’ (roughly 30% of the U.S. GDP per person but with 4.2 times the population). Three of the top five countries are in the BRICS, while two are in the G7. In 1994, the largest five were the U.S., Japan, China, Germany, and India, with three in the G7 and two in the BRICS.

As the shares of world output change, so too does global power. The core U.S.-led alliance, which includes the U.S., Canada, U.K., European Union, Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, was 56% of world output in 1994, but now is only 39.5%. As a result, the U.S. global influence is waning. As a recent vivid example, when the U.S.-led group introduced economic sanctions on Russia in 2022, very few countries outside the core alliance joined. As a result, Russia had little trouble shifting its trade to countries outside the U.S.-led alliance.

The world economy is experiencing a deep process of economic convergence, according to which regions that once lagged the West in industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries are now making up for lost time. Economic convergence actually began in the 1950s as European imperial rule in Africa and Asia came to an end. It has proceeded in waves, starting first in East Asia, then roughly 20 years later India, and for the coming 20-40 years in Africa.

These and some other regions are growing much faster than the Western economies since they have more “headroom” to boost GDP by rapidly raising education levels, boosting workers’ skills, and installing modern infrastructure, including universal access to electrification and digital platforms. The emerging economies are often able to leapfrog the richer countries with state-of-the-art infrastructure (e.g., fast intercity rail, 5G, modern airports and seaports) while the richer countries remain stuck with aging infrastructure and expensive retrofits. The IMF’s World Economic Outlook projects that the emerging and developing economies will average growth of around 4% per year in the coming five years, while the high-income countries will average less than 2% per year.

It’s not only in skills and infrastructure that convergence is occurring. Many of the emerging economies, including China, Russia, Iran, and others, are advancing rapidly in technological innovations as well, in both civilian and military technologies.

China clearly has a large lead in the manufacturing of cutting-edge technologies needed for the global energy transition, including batteries, electric vehicles, 5G, photovoltaics, wind turbines, fourth generation nuclear power, and others. China’s rapid advances in space technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and other technologies is similarly impressive. In response, the U.S. has made the absurd claim that China has an “overcapacity” in these cutting-edge technologies, while the obvious truth is that the U.S. has a significant under-capacity in many sectors. China’s capacity for innovation and low-cost production is underpinned by enormous R&D spending and its vast and growing labor force of scientists and engineers.

Despite the new global economic realities, the U.S. security state still pursues a grand strategy of “primacy,” that is, the aspiration of the U.S. to be the dominant economic, financial, technological, and military power in every region of the world. The U.S. is still trying to maintain primacy in Europe by surrounding Russia in the Black Sea region with NATO forces, yet Russia has resisted this militarily in both Georgia and Ukraine. The U.S. is still trying to maintain primacy in Asia by surrounding China in the South China Sea, a folly that can lead the U.S. into a disastrous war over Taiwan. The U.S. is also losing its standing in the Middle East by resisting the united call of the Arab world for recognition of Palestine as the 194th United Nations member state.

Yet primacy is certainly not possible today, and was hubristic even 30 years ago when U.S. relative power was much greater. Today, the U.S. share of world output stands at 14.8%, compared with 18.5% for China, and the U.S. share of world population is a mere 4.1%, compared with 17.8% for China.

The trend toward broad global economic convergence means that U.S. hegemony will not be replaced by Chinese hegemony. Indeed, China’s share of world output is likely to peak at around 20% during the coming decade and thereafter to decline as China’s population declines. Other parts of the world, notably including India and Africa, are likely to show a large rise in their respective shares of global output, and with that, in their geopolitical weight as well.

We are therefore entering a post-hegemonic, multipolar world. It too is fraught with challenges. It could usher in a new “tragedy of great power politics,” in which several nuclear powers compete—in vain—for hegemony. It could lead to a breakdown of fragile global rules, such as open trade under the World Trade Organization. Or, it could lead to a world in which the great powers exercise mutual tolerance, restraint, and even cooperation, in accord with the U.N. Charter, because they recognize that only such statecraft will keep the world safe in the nuclear age.

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

10 June 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

It’s a criminal act under the eyes of the world. Israel’s Nusseirat massacre with the active cooperation of American help is grotesque by any standard for the 250 Israeli strikes made on the camp during this flagrant military operation.

The number of innocent Palestinians killed kept climbing up on the day of the massacre, Saturday, with the final death toll reaching 274 martyrs. These included 64 children, 57 women and 37 elderly people. Shameful is the fact, the massacre was carried out by Israeli soldiers, Shabak agents and members of the police who had been planning this for weeks.

The number of injuries was equally horrific as 698 people were injured during this killing spree that was backed from the air, sea and with ground tanks helping the infiltrators who went into the camp camouflaged in an aid truck and a car with Israeli tanks behind. Among the injured were 153 children, 161 women 54 elderly people according to the Gaza Government Media Office.

The shooting begun after the disguised aid lorry and a vehicle stopped in the middle of the housing area just outside the central market and begun the bloody mayhem. The lorry was at first thought to carry displaced people with their belongings but soon got out their machine guns and started shooting.  According to the Media Office soldiers were disguised in civilian clothing in ambulances with medical and health signals.

Hostages

The massacre was all made to rescue four Israeli hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October when they pushed through the barrier fence that blocked Gaza from the so-called Israeli territories. The four hostages, three men and a woman, were part of the 250 Israelis and foreigners that were taken back to Gaza by members of the Islamic organization on the fateful month and day.

Their rescue was seen as a major victory by Israel after 245 days of war destroying the Gaza Strip and killing its civilian population, earmarked at over 36,000 dead. The Israeli media was jubilant, ignoring the fact the operation was nearly botched with a major fight in getting to the four captives resulting in at least one Israeli soldier and at least three other captives getting killed, one of them an American citizen, though massive Israeli gunfire.

[https://twitter.com/Gaza_Psych/status/1799386305371201937]

This fact is not yet receiving much attention in the media because it is given by a credible source from Hamas but it has become known the Nusseirat “rescue” operation was a heinous, diabolical affair for the Israeli occupation army bombed 89 houses and residential buildings inhabited by residents in the early hours of committing this massacre.

Eye witness reports say many of the houses were bombed over the heads of their residents without prior warning. Residents were shocked at the sudden bombs and missiles stuck from the air. These were made simultaneously to distract civilians from the underground operation to get to the four hostages reportedly held in different building and flats.

[https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1799682414803141106]

Women, children, men and old people, passerby were all in the line of fire for this was a busy area in between houses and the central market in West Nusseirat.

It is being described as another area genocide with a great impact on central Gaza and executed with dozens of warplanes, quadcopters, helicopters and drones with espionage and intelligence purposes, and tanks in more than four axes and directions, the Gaza Media office stated.

At the time of writing the Government Media office said it is yet to confirm which soldiers from different countries were used in the mass attacks on the camp but there is already confirmation that thousands of American soldiers have been stationed in Israel shortly after 7 October and are providing technical and logistical advice to the Israeli army.

[https://twitter.com/BeckettUnite/status/1799366129028387094]

Disturbing however, and as reported is the fact that the aid truck that was used to enter the Nusseirat camp was from the recently constructed American pier where US officials previously said they made this construct to make it easier to bring food to the starving Gazans imposed by Israel.

Social media commentators couldn’t but help make the comparison of the treatment between the Israeli hostages and those “limp” Palestinians coming out of Israeli prisons, spotlighting Noa Argamani with her father in a happy state.

One blogger commented on how Noa was treate and how Israelis treat Palestinians in their  prisons. The latter are old and haggard because they are denied basic things, are beaten, tortured and denied food.

Dr Marwan Asmar is a writer based in Amman covering Middle East affairs

10 June 2024

Source: countercurrents.org