Just International

Israel’s war in Gaza is repugnant and must end NOW

By Ranjan Solomon

On 19 July, the International Court of Justice published its advisory opinion on Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. The World Court couldn’t have been clearer. The occupation is unlawful, Israel’s presence in occupied territory must come to an end as “rapidly as possible,” Israel is guilty of “systematic” racial discrimination, Israel must immediately cease all settlement activity, and Israel owes reparation to Palestinians. That is not to mention the legal responsibilities of other states in view of this ruling, to act to end Israel’s illegal presence in occupied territory, not accept any physical or demographic changes imposed on these territories, and to end any assistance or aid that helps Israel maintain its presence in occupied territory. The Court affirmed that from a legal standpoint, that the Occupied Palestinian Territory – comprising the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip – constitutes a single territorial unit, the unity, contiguity and integrity are to be preserved and respected. It also requires the evacuation of all settlers from existing settlements and the dismantling of the parts of the wall constructed by Israel that are situated in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as well as allowing all Palestinians displaced during the occupation to return to their original place of residence.

The world saw the repugnant sight of PM Netanyahu’s address to the US Congress where he received a hero’s welcome and 57 applauds. His was a speech punctuated by lies, exaggeration, and hate. He pleaded for more funds to ‘finish off the job’. Rashida Tlaib alone chose the road less taken. She held up a banner which stated “War Criminal”. On the streets demonstrators carried placards and shouted slogans. Netanyahu simply referred to them as ‘idiots’ while they called him a war criminal. We are now left asking whether ‘idiots’ who practice cruelty are the real idiots?

No peace move can come from initiatives of the USA or any western state. The Palestinians must change tactics. China and other countries which have experienced settler colonialism know better. As much as there is a call for boycotting Israel, it is time to boycott the USA too- Israel’s biggest criminal ally. There is as much blood on the hands of American leaders as there is on the Israelis and all those countries that support the war overtly or covertly. India included. .

The suffering of Palestinians cannot continue unimpeded. The international community must isolate Israel in every single arena- political, academic, economics, armaments etc. The UN has been rendered inane. Out-of-the box solutions must be found. Arab backstabbing must end, for that alone, will scare the wits out of Israel. Regardless of what international law states, Israel must face possible suspension- until it reverses its tactics of hate, murder, death and destruction, jailing anyone who they view as a potential enemy, allow settlers to control the country, practice rape and get endorsed for it by some sections of the population.

How can the international community include within it a state that did not exist until 1948, and has abandoned all civilizational values and, instead, practices barbaric political ideas?

Way back in 2002, ‘Frontline’ one of India’s most progressive weeklies, in an article referring to the Nazification of Israel, said:”By brazenly resorting to Nazi-style rhetoric and methods of persecution in Palestine, Israel, with the consent of the majority of its own people and the unlimited support of the United States, perpetrates the kind of crimes that the Jewish state claims as the raison d’etre of its own creation in 1948”.

Ranjan Solomon is a political commentator

9 August 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

The Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples

By Aviva Chomsky

On August 9, 2001, in Colombia, riot police and private security forces from the Cerrejón coal mine — one of the largest open-pit coal mines in the world — surrounded the remote community of Tabaco. They then dragged residents out of their homes and bulldozed what remained of that town’s structures. There was, after all, coal under the town and the mine’s owner, Exxon Mobil Corporation, wanted to access it. Since that date, the displaced residents of Tabaco have been fighting for compensation and (as guaranteed by both Colombian and international law) the reconstruction of their community. So far, no such luck.

Note that August 9th was then and is now the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, as the United Nations first declared in 1994. That was, in fact, the day when the newly formed U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations had its initial meeting in 1982.

Indigenous peoples have, of course, been under siege by colonizers for hundreds of years, even if their struggles for land and sovereignty only gained true international recognition in the late twentieth century, a time when, ironically enough, they were experiencing new assaults on their lands globally. Since World War II, the unprecedented growth of both the world’s population and global consumption levels have pushed resource use far beyond any limits once imagined. And that scramble for resources only accelerated starting in the 1990s, which meant further encroachment on Indigenous territories — and, of course, an onrushing climate catastrophe.

Since then, however, the growing visibility and power of Indigenous movements have created enormous potential for fundamentally changing our world in a positive fashion. While the struggle of the inhabitants of Tabaco has in many ways been emblematic of Indigenous struggles against extractivism, the story is more complicated. First, Tabaco itself is not, in fact, an Indigenous community but one largely descended from Africans brought to the New World as slaves. A narrow emphasis on Indigeneity can make it hard to take in non-Indigenous land and environmental struggles. Moreover, not all Indigenous people are rural and the stereotype flattens the realities of such movements. Finally, popular but misguided ideas about indigeneity underlie the claim to a Jewish “Indigenous” presence in Palestine, one that divorces Indigeneity from its historical context.

A deeper dive into colonialism and Indigenous peoples can help clarify the nature of such movements today and, curiously enough, some of the debates around the Israeli-Palestinian question as well.

Defining Indigenous Peoples

Indigenous peoples today live under the jurisdiction of nation states and those countries define them in varying ways. In the United States, you are Indigenous if you belong to a federally recognized tribe. Colombia formalized legal recognition of Indigeneity in its 1991 constitution and laws that outlined the specific requirements a group must fulfill to become an official “Indigenous community.” Like other Latin American countries, it also legally recognizes Afro-descended communities like Tabaco. In the case of Israel and Palestine, there is no legal “Indigenous” status at all, though the concept has become a weapon in a political debate about who has rights to historic Palestine.

Indigenous peoples in the Americas were first identified as “Indians” by European colonizers. Those so defined had no prior sense of common identity, which only developed through the historical experience of colonization. In the United States, pan-Indian organizations initially emerged in response to the creation of residential boarding schools to forcibly “assimilate” Native American children in what were functionally educational versions of prisons. Starting in the late nineteenth century, children from widely varying homelands speaking different languages were forced into the same regimented schools.

The more radical American Indian Movement emerged in the late twentieth century among Indians from different nations thrown together, thanks in part to the 1950s Voluntary Relocation Program that brought more than 100,000 Native Americans to cities like Chicago, Denver, and Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, collective Indigenous identities in the United States drew not on long-standing language, cultural, or ethnic affinities but on the common experience of conquest and dispossession.

Only in the 1980s did international law begin to recognize a common historical experience among Indigenous peoples globally. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Affairs offered what has become a foundational definition of Indigenous peoples, even though the United Nations never formally adopted it: “Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories.” This formulation was later expanded to acknowledge the Indigenous peoples of Africa and Asia whose experience of “subjugation, marginalization, dispossession, exclusion, or discrimination” generally came from the independent nation-states that governed their territory rather than directly from European colonization.

Two important innovations in international law, the ILO Convention 169 of 1989 and the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) of 2007, reflected the growing strength of global Indigenous activism and acknowledged the growing threat of extractivist assaults on Indigenous lands. ILO 169 created a legal requirement for “prior consultation” — that is, a requirement that governments offer Indigenous communities a voice in any development projects that might affect their lands. The UNDRIP strengthened that provision by giving communities the right to veto projects they opposed by mandating that governments obtain “free, prior, and informed consent” before embarking on any project affecting Indigenous lands.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that neither the United States nor Israel ratified ILO 169 and neither supported the UNDRIP. Colombia, on the other hand, ratified ILO 169, incorporating it into its 1991 Constitution and extending such protections beyond Indigenous peoples to Afro-Colombian communities like Tabaco. Yet, in reality, as Tabaco’s experience shows, such legal rights continue to be violated.

Even as Colombia and other Latin American countries strengthened Indigenous rights, reformulating their nation-states as proudly multilingual, multicultural, and plurinational, Israel’s 2018 nation-state law further entrenched Jewish ethnonationalism there.

Fossil Colonialism

Fossil fuel use creates massive levels of toxic waste, including (but not limited to) the greenhouse gas emissions now overheating our planet. Increasing fossil fuel use — the industrial revolution in each of its phases — also accelerated the use of other resources. Industry can keep producing more and better stuff, but only by extracting more resources and producing ever more waste. As a result, geographical expansion — whether labeled Manifest Destiny, colonialism, or globalization — has been inseparable from the increasing use of energy, while both were also intimately tied to a 500-year assault on Indigenous lands and ways of life that continues today.

Remarkably enough, despite centuries of colonial expansion, Indigenous peoples still control about a quarter of the planet’s land — mostly (you won’t be surprised to learn) areas ignored by industrial colonizers because they were too cold, too hot, too wet, too dry, too high, too low, or too apparently resource-poor to be deemed useful. However, this century’s relentless push for coal, oil, and natural gas, as well as the growing demand for “clean” energy resources like biofuels, copper, lithium, and rare earth elements, dams for hydropower, and land for solar and wind farms, has pushed the geographic reach of extractivism into new Indigenous territories. And the toxic waste from extraction and production, including greenhouse gas emissions, is at the heart of the present environmental catastrophes that affect us all, but disproportionately Indigenous, poor, and marginalized communities.

Tabaco’s history reflects the experiences and fates of so many self-liberated Afro-descended peoples who established their own communities, some in still-autonomous Indigenous territories, throughout Latin America over the past centuries. Like Indigenous communities, they were rural-, land-, and subsistence-based. And like Indigenous communities, their communities predated the nation-states that later engulfed them. Today, like Tabaco, they find themselves under threat from a modern fossil-fuelized version of colonialism.

Are Indigenous People Natural Environmentalists?

The resistance of Indigenous peoples to extractivism has made them crucial protagonists in today’s environmental and climate movements. But that’s only part of the story.

Colonial ideologies long romanticized Indigenous peoples as living in harmony with the land and nature — the “noble savage” who inhabited an idealized past. This view had a dark side, too: Europeans also labeled them lazy, indolent, standing in the way of progress, and in desperate and eternal need of European tutelage.

Such colonial constructions offered useful rationalizations for destroying even imperial, technologically advanced Indigenous polities like the Aztec and Inca empires that controlled and transformed nature every bit as profoundly as did contemporaneous European societies. Conquest of what they called “the new world” turned European fantasies into reality, as Indigenous hierarchies were flattened and Indigenous peoples dispossessed, enslaved, marginalized, or ruralized. What began in 1492 would only continue with the Indian removal of the 1830s in the United States, Argentina’s “conquest of the desert” in the late nineteenth century, and what some Indigenous scholars have termed the fourth (or fifth) conquest occurring today with neo-extractivism.

Fossil colonialism created a world in which socioeconomic and ethnic categories came to overlap — but not completely. Ramachandra Guha identified “ecosystems peoples,” whose economies and cultures were based on long-term symbiotic relationships with their lands (and they were not all Indigenous). Then, of course, there were the industrializing “omnivores” whose technological and geographical reach knew (and knows) no bounds. Whether European or not, such voracious omnivores were also colonizers and industrializers. Rural, land-based ecosystem peoples, whether Indigenous, Afro-descended, or neither, tend to possess environmental values that look quite different from what passes for environmentalism among so many industrialized omnivores. Theirs is about changing the global economic system, not giving corporations in the global north yet more incentives to extract more from the global south.

Today, Indigenous people are indeed frequently “land-based,” but they remain Indigenous even if they have been displaced, whether voluntarily or not, from their rural communities (or in the United States, their reservations). Most Indigenous people in the Americas now do not live in peasant or rural communities but in urban areas. Some Native American tribal governments and members have even embraced extractive industries like oil and coal on their reservations and they are still Indigenous, even if they don’t match the colonial stereotype.

It’s the historical continuity with people who inhabited a territory prior to those who founded today’s nation-states that makes people Indigenous. In Latin America, Afro-descended peoples share this “priority” not by their ancestors’ presence prior to 1492 but because of their marginalization by the nation-states founded in the 1800s.

Israel and Palestine: Who Is Indigenous?

When I first became involved with Palestinian rights activism during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the term “Indigenous” never arose. There were hints, however. Zionists argued that biblical history connected Jews to the land, and French historian Maxime Rodinson situated European Zionism in its historical context of European colonialism and colonial thought, presaging what later became settler colonial theory.

Today, the question of who is “Indigenous” comes up regularly as Palestinians emphasize their family and ancestral ties to the land from which they were displaced, while mainstream Jewish and Zionist organizations claim that Jews are “native and indigenous” to Palestine. They also insist that Israeli Jews cannot be considered colonizers because, unlike other European ones, they “came to a homeland” and there was and is “no ‘motherland’” to which they can return. Israeli historian Benny Morris typically relied on the narrowest definition of colonialism (as “the policy and practice of an imperial power acquiring political control over another country”) to insist that European Zionists couldn’t be colonizers since they were not agents of a state exercising imperial power.

Such arguments fundamentally distort the scholarship of Indigeneity and settler colonialism. Indigenous people are those whose presence predates the nation-state formed on their territory: in this case, the Palestinians. The Israelis, while cherry-picking from the scholarship on Indigeneity, ignore the basic fact that the state is theirs.

European colonialism has had many faces. Scholars have distinguished “franchise” colonialism (as with much of the British imperial project in India and Africa), in which a small number of colonial bureaucrats cycle in and out of a colony to enforce systems of governance and extraction, from settler colonialism. A classic example of the latter is British North America, where the goal was to eliminate, rather than rule over, native populations, and replace them with a flood of European immigrants.

Of course, such categories are “ideal” types (however less than ideal they proved to be in reality). Most European colonial projects had both settler and franchise characteristics. In fact, one thing the “Jewish-Indigenous” argument about Israel omits is the British Mandate’s (1920-1948) role in fostering the Zionist project in Palestine. It also ignores the fact that most settler colonies were populated not by direct representatives of the colonial power but by unwanted populations of prisoners, religious or ethnic minorities, enslaved people (mostly Africans), indentured or contract laborers, or, in the case of Palestine, European and later Arab and other Jews.

Settler colonialism in North America began in the 1600s but continued long after the United States became an independent country. After that, it wasn’t an outside ruler but a national government that promoted the mass immigration of often impoverished and excluded Europeans to its shores.

Latin America’s history also offers overlapping examples of different types of colonial enterprises. In addition to the Spanish religious and royal officials sent to establish foreign rule, adventurers and non-Castilians made their way to the Americas in both official and unofficial capacities. The colonial governments mistrusted American-born “Creoles” of European origin as promoters of their own interests rather than that of the ruling imperial powers, even if they were also natural allies in controlling recalcitrant indigenous, African, and Afro-descended populations.

Creole elites played a major role in Latin America’s eventual split with Spain and in establishing independent countries there in the nineteenth century. Latin America’s new countries, like the newly independent United States, did not, of course, offer much independence for Indigenous and Afro-descended peoples. And like the United States, they promoted European immigration to whiten their populations, while continuing the project of conquering, missionizing, and otherwise eliminating Indigenous peoples and identities.

Today, amid the brutality in Gaza, it’s worth remembering that the creation of Israel in Palestine, its ongoing genocide in Gaza, and its current settlement and immigration policies, share many parallels with those earlier settler colonial projects. Israel’s extractivist projects (especially of water on the West Bank and gas off the coast of Gaza) also place it firmly among today’s fossil colonizers.

There are many reasons for Washington’s fervent support for Israel, but what Secretary of State Henry Kissinger described as the U.S. need for Israel as a reliable “cop on the beat” or, as Secretary of State Alexander Haig once put it, an unsinkable American “aircraft carrier” in the oil-rich Middle East, certainly plays a major role. So does the colonial view that Israel represents technological and ideological modernity in a retrograde Arab world.

On August 9th, we honor the world’s Indigenous peoples. Let’s move beyond stereotypes and recognize the ideas, movements, and rights of all peoples formerly and still subject to the violence of fossil colonialism.  That includes those displaced from the Colombian town of Tabaco and those in the besieged territory of Gaza.

Aviva Chomsky, a TomDispatch regular, is professor of history and coordinator of Latin American studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts.

9 August 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

Will U.S.A. Continue To Help Israel Kill Palestinians and Steal Their Land Right Up to November?

By Jay Janson

With coverage of the Paris Olympics and the novelty of a black/Indian woman presidential candidate, and her ever provocative rival former President Trump vying for public attention, it will be some time before much CIA-overseen main stream media attention, if any, will revert to modest coverage of the colossal loss of Palestinian life in Gaza and the West Bank.

Will Any Powerful Global South Media Source Arise in the Meantime to bring public attention… 

– to the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians with U.S. weapons and ammo? – to the Israeli seizure of Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem? – to the generations long  illegal Israeli military occupation of Palestine? – to Israeli ‘right’ to imprison all of Gaza’s population? – to Israeli denial of Palestinian freedom as a nation.

BBC, Jun 7, 2024 — The UN has added the Israeli military to a list of offenders failing to protect children.

UN adds Israel to global list of offenders that harm children

CNN, June 7, 2024

Will Global South Will See the Murderous Nature of the U.S. Gov. in the Many Thousands of Murdered and Maimed Dear Palestinian Children

Quoting from “Gaza genocide enters month 11 as Israel provokes regional war in Palestine” by Maureen Clare Murphy, 08/08/2024, Counter Currents, Kerala, India

The government media office in Gaza says that since the beginning of Israel’s offensive in early October, more than 39,650 fatalities had been received at hospitals, including 16,365 children and more than 11,000 women, indicating that the vast majority of Palestinians killed were civilians. An additional 10,000 people remain missing under the rubble or their bodies not yet recovered from the streets or inaccessible areas.

The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor estimates that at least an additional 51,000 Palestinians have died as a result of Israel’s siege on Gaza and its deliberate collapse of the medical sector in the territory, as well as the widespread destruction of infrastructure and mass displacement of civilians, leading to the spread of disease.

Nearly three dozen hospitals and 68 health centers in Gaza have been knocked out of service due to Israel’s assault. Israel’s military offensive has inflicted $33 billion in “direct initial losses” overall, the government media office added.

After more than 300 days of genocide, the media office said, more than 91,500 people in Gaza had been injured, at least 36 people had starved to death, while nearly 900 medical workers and nearly 80 civil defense members were killed.

That the Israeli military had dropped 82,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, according to the office, destroying homes, universities, schools, mosques, churches, government buildings, sports and recreation facilities, water and hygiene infrastructure, and archaeological and heritage sites.

Meanwhile, Gaza has gone 300 days without electricity, the government media office said on Friday after Israel cut off the supply of power on 7 October and the only power plant in the territory was forced to shut down four days later after running out of fuel.

In what is widely cited as proof of Israel’s genocidal intent, Ghassan Alian, the head of the military body that deals with the civil administration of the occupation, said back in early October that “Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, no electricity, no water, just damage.”

The absence of electricity has prevented the normal operation of vital infrastructure and services for Gaza’s population, which before the war stood at 2.3 million Palestinians. This includes health, water and sanitation facilities, schools, flour mills and bakeries. The resulting environmental catastrophe has allowed for the spread of diseases and the emergence of the highly infectious polio virus and meningitis.

The devilish commander of this living hell, Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, was recently given standing ovations by most of the senators and representatives of a joint session of the U.S. Congress,

About 90 percent of children in Gaza lack nutrition and face “severe” threats to their “survival, growth and development”, according to the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF.

The petty suppositions and calumny floated from all angles on mainstream media during the usual U.S. TV exaggerated extravaganza of a presidential election will not make the world at large forget the continuing genocidal inhumanity of the governments of U.S.A. and Israel.

Western media presenting U.S.A. election as of paramount importance will not diminish the ever growing outrage over the ghastly extirpation of the children of Gaza as this genocide gains more and more world wide shocking attention shaming the self-centred preoccupation of Americans and Israelis.

Bombing Famine Malnutrition Disease Deaths Could Reach Near Million Proportion by November.

By November Will Not Most All Jewish American Voters Will Feel Shame For the Monstrous Israeli/U.S. Palestinian Genocide

On the Other Hand

Will Anti-Semitism Play a Role in Trump Voter Turnout?

As he continues to super champion Israel, might Trump not come to realise that he could awake considerably long-standing traditional anti-Jewish fervour inherent within his far right constituency and thus might lessen voter turnout for Trump in November?

Your writer as a 93 year old is able to remember painfully and calculate approximately how many tens of millions of dear children in poor countries have been put to death by the military forces of his American government during his lifetime, always of course excused as not having been accomplished intentionally, but as “collateral damage” even if it is done day after day, year after year for decades past and/or an indeterminate time in the future in Gaza.

Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist,  musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India, in Germany & Sweden Einartysken,and in the US by Greanville Post, Dissident Voice; Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents; Minority Perspective, UK,and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989.

10 August 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

Gaza: Israel targets shelter schools in systematic forced evacuation of the displaced people of Gaza

By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Palestinian Territory – The Israeli army is increasingly targeting schools that provide shelter for the displaced population in Gaza City, killing and wounding hundreds of them in the process. It has also issued orders for the illegal forced evacuation of Gaza from the north to the south, in a systematic effort fueled by revenge to drive residents from their homes and places of displacement and rob them of any stability.

In just eight days, Israeli aircraft attacked nine schools in Gaza City that served as shelters for thousands of displaced people. They destroyed the schools above the heads of the occupants, killing 79 Palestinians and injuring 143 more—mostly women and children—in addition to several other victims who were buried beneath the rubble and could not be retrieved due to the lack of the necessary tools.

The latest of these attacks occurred on Thursday, 8 August, at 3:00 p.m. when Israeli aircraft bombed the Al-Zahraa and Abdul Fattah Hamouda schools in the Al-Tuffah neighbourhood east of Gaza City, where thousands of displaced people are housed. The attack resulted in the deaths of 17 civilians and the injuries of dozens more, many of whom were women and children.  Sixteen more were reportedly missing under the rubble

Last Sunday, on 4 August, Israeli aircraft bombed the Al-Nasr and Hassan Salama schools in Gaza City, killing 30 Palestinians and wounding 19 others. The day before, Israeli planes attacked four schools in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood of eastern Gaza that were being used as shelter centres; 17 Palestinians were killed and 60 others were injured in the attack. Earlier this month, Israeli aircraft bombed the Dalal Al-Maghribi school in the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood of eastern Gaza, leaving 15 dead and 29 injured.

Although the Israeli army repeatedly attempts to justify the bombings by claiming that they target military or political figures, without providing evidence to support these claims, the bombing and destruction of schools above the heads of displaced people inside them has no valid justification and serves no military purposes.

Initial investigations by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor’s field team indicate that the Israeli army deliberately destroyed the remaining shelter centres to deny Palestinians the few remaining places to seek refuge after the systematic destruction of homes and shelters, including schools and public facilities, over the past ten months.

By continuing to bomb the entire Gaza Strip and concentrating on shelters, such as those housed in UNRWA schools, the Israeli bombing strategy clearly indicates a policy intended to deprive Palestinians of security and stability, if only temporarily.

In the course of their ten-month military attack on the Gaza Strip, Israeli forces continue to bomb civilian targets, kill large numbers of civilians, target refugee centres—the majority of which are housed in UN facilities—and carry out mass murders there, all of which are considered crimes against humanity and full-fledged war crimes.

The last four days have seen new forced evacuation orders for tens of thousands of residents in Khan Yunis, the central governorate, and northern Gaza. These events coincide with the policy of bombing shelter centres in Gaza City, suggesting that Israel is purposefully stepping up the evacuation orders to force Palestinians to leave their destroyed homes without even the option to resettle in nearby tents.

In its crime of genocide, ongoing since 7 October, Israel has adopted a systematic policy of targeting the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, in blatant disregard of the civilian protections mandated by international humanitarian law. This includes Israel’s targeting of areas designated as humanitarian zones, as well as its increased bombing of shelters and relocation centres over the heads of the displaced in an effort to impose forced relocation and destroy all essentials of life.

A series of displacement orders targeting large residential communities in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, have been issued by the Israeli army in recent days. The most recent of these orders was issued on Thursday evening, 8 August, and it included all of the eastern towns of Khan Yunis as well as the city centre’s neighbourhoods, Sheikh Nasser, Al-Satar, and Al-Mahta, which are communities with over 200,000 residents. These orders coincided with aerial and artillery bombardment and the beginning of a ground incursion into the eastern outskirts of the city.

Concurrently, the Israeli army distributed incitement leaflets against leaders of the Palestinian factions. This suggests that the purpose of these directives and military actions is not military necessity but rather acts of incitement and retaliation against the locals and displaced people, whom Israel targets to exact political pressure and retaliation

Last Wednesday the Israeli army issued new evacuation orders for tens of thousands of residents in Beit Hanoun town and the Al-Manshiya and Sheikh Zayed neighbourhoods in northern Gaza, ordering them to head to the west of Gaza City, which was also bombed. The following day, the evacuation order was modified to direct residents to relocate to the central Gaza Strip, to Al-Zawayda and Deir al-Balah. These areas were heavily targeted by Israeli raids and bombings, including one that destroyed tents housing displaced people inside the Shuhada al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, resulting in the deaths of three Palestinians and the injuries of eighteen more.

Civilians in the Gaza Strip are paying the price for Israeli military attacks that violate with impunity the rules of international humanitarian law, especially the principles of distinction, proportionality, and military necessity.

Accordingly, all countries must fulfil their international obligations by enacting effective sanctions against Israel and ceasing all forms of military, political, and financial assistance. This includes immediately cutting off arms exports to Israel; otherwise, these nations must be found to be complicit in crimes that have been committed in the Gaza Strip, including genocide.

As genocide is one of the international crimes that the International Criminal Court is mandated to investigate, it is imperative that the Court move forward with its investigation of all crimes committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip, broaden its investigation into all individuals responsible for these crimes, and issue arrest warrants against them.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is a Geneva-based independent organization with regional offices across the MENA region and Europe

10 August 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

An Urgent Question for ICC Judges: When Will You Act on Israel’s War Crimes?

By Yanis Varoufakis

Dear International Criminal Court judges,

It is now beyond dispute: Israel has set out systematically to eliminate every aspect of Palestinian life in Gaza. It is not just the 186,000 lives that the Lancet estimates to have been lost. It is more than that.

You have already witnessed:

1. The most intensive bombing of any densely populated urban area in living memory

2. The most deliberately targeted starvation of a population in post-WW2 history

3. The greatest number of journalists killed in any war worldwide

4. The largest number of UN staff killed in 10 months.

And that’s not all: Israel attacks schools, universities, libraries, archives, cultural centres, heritage sites, mosques and churches. It assassinates professors and slaughters teachers, along with their students—often their entire families too. When will you act?

[https://twitter.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1822214344081305645]

If you don’t act now, what is the point of having the ICC?

If you don’t act now, is there a smidgeon of an iota of a possibility that anyone will take the ICC seriously in the future?

Yanis Varoufakis is a Greek economist and politician. A former academic, he served as the Greek Minister of Finance from January to July 2015 under Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. He has been Secretary-General of MeRA25, the political party he founded in 2018.

10 August 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

Israel Kills 100 People Performing The Dawn Prayers

By Dr Marwan Asmar

More than 100 Palestinians were killed and dozens injured, Saturday morning, after Israeli occupation forces bombed the “Al-Tabi’een” school, which houses displaced people in the Al-Daraj neighbourhood east of Gaza City.

[https://twitter.com/QGhifari50771/status/1822175445585965114]

Local sources reported that the occupation warplanes bombed the school while Palestinians were performing the dawn prayer, and they were specifically targeted after the Takbeer of the dawn prayer.

Eyewitness reports say limbs – arms, hands, feet and heads of those performing prayers were scattered around the school’s prayer hall in what is described as one of the worst massacres committed by the Israeli army yet.

[https://twitter.com/bloeddadels/status/1822168832674263528]

The Civil Defense said that the bodies of citizens caught fire as a result of the Israeli bombing of the school, noting that the crews are trying to control the fire to retrieve the bodies of the martyrs and rescue the wounded but it’s a difficult and painful exercise.

Reports say the four-storey school was hit by three missiles each weighing 2000 pounds according to Al Jazeera. The prayer hall which was at the bottom of the building was itself hit by a devastating missile.

Director of Ambulance and Emergency in the Gaza Strip described the massacre as a heinous crime, while the spokesman for the Civil Defense in the Gaza Strip confirmed that the Israeli bombing of the school led to the martyrdom of 90% of the displaced people there.

[https://twitter.com/Juliette_ue/status/1822172408553296243]

In the first response from the Israeli occupation army, the Air Force confirmed it targeted the school because it was used by the resistance as a headquarters, which is the excuse that the occupation uses every time it commits a massacre with reporters on the scene saying this is an absolute lie.

[https://twitter.com/FranceskAlbs/status/1822184214860534271]

About 350 families were sheltering at the school, amounting to around 1000 people. It recently received dozens of displaced persons from the northern town of Beit Hanoun, after they were forced by the occupation to leave their homes in search of a so-called safe area where non exist in Gaza.

According to the Civil Defense, Israeli warplanes used American-made missiles that reach high temperatures of up to 7,000 degrees Celsius, causing bodies to melt and fires to rage.

All the martyrs are scattered remains, and the majority of injuries are to the upper body (head and chest), with burns of the first and second degrees, in addition to limb amputations, according to the administration of the Baptist Hospital.

This is not the only school targeted; the occupation targeted five schools in northern Gaza last week, according to the Civil Defense.

It is worth noting that the Baptist Hospital is the only one dealing with injury cases in Gaza City after the occupation destroyed Al-Shifa Hospital and rendered 25 hospitals and medical centers out of service, according to the Ministry of Health.

The Israeli occupation forces continue their aggression on the Gaza Strip, by land, air and sea, since October 7, 2023, which resulted in the martyrdom of 39,699 Palestinians, the majority of whom are children and women, and the injury of 91,722 others, in an incomplete toll, as thousands of victims are still under the rubble and on the roads, and ambulance and rescue crews cannot reach them.

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

10 August 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

Torture, Abuse and Humiliation: Palestinians on Israeli Prison ‘Hell’

By Emma Graham-Harrison, Sufian Taha, Bethan McKernan, and Quique Kierszenbaum

Palestinian prisoners ‘tortured in Israeli prison’ speak out: ‘We couldn’t sleep from the screams’

Ex-prisoners report sexual assault and starvation in ‘torture camp’ jails presided over by Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Palestinian Prisoners Describe Systemic Abuse in Israel’s Jails

5 Aug 2024 – Ashraf al-Muhtaseb is a musician who described leaving Israel’s jails with no hearing in his left ear, four fractured ribs and a broken hand, so ill and weak from hunger he could no longer walk.

Dropped at an Israeli checkpoint on his own, he says he began crawling towards his home in the occupied West Bank town of Hebron, until a passerby picked him up.

Muhtaseb was held for six months

Muhtaseb’s wife fainted when she saw him, and his son asked: “Who are you, and where is my dad?” Picked up on 8 October 2023, he was not charged before his release on 7 April this year.

In those six months, the 53-year-old said, he passed through three Israeli prisons, enduring a marathon of torture, abuse and humiliation detailed in an interview, backed up by medical records and photos that show the impact of multiple beatings and of losing 30kg (66lbs) of body weight.

He said his hearing was destroyed during an attack in his cell in Ketziot prison in November. “I was beaten and kicked in my back, my chest and my head. I had one side of my head against the wall and was getting blows on the other,” he told the Guardian. “The next day I couldn’t hear.”

The abuse, starvation and humiliation he said endured was part of a pattern described repeatedly in eight other interviews carried out by the Guardian, and dozens more done by the human rights group B’Tselem. They described abuse so widespread and systemic that it must now be considered state policy, said the group’s executive director, Yuli Novak. Israeli jails had become “torture camps” in which at least 60 Palestinian prisoners have died in detention since 7 October 2023, she added.

Prisoners said they were subjected to regular severe, arbitrary violence, including sexual assault. None of the prisoners interviewed by the Guardian left detention without experiencing or witnessing some form of attack. Other abuse and humiliation was constant, from starvation rations to denial of access to basic hygiene supplies including sanitary pads for women, soap, towels, clothes and clean water for drinking and showers.

B’Tselem’s descriptions of systemic abuse echo those raised in private by an unlikely ally: the domestic intelligence service. In June the Shin Bet head, Ronen Bar, warned prison officials of a “crisis” that threatened national security. In a leaked letter he says Israel is vulnerable in international courts to “well-founded” claims of committing the war crime of inhumane treatment and violating the convention against torture.

The Israel Prison Service (IPS) said it operated according to law and under democratic scrutiny. “We are not aware of the claims you described and as far as we know, no such events have occurred under IPS responsibility,” it said in a statement.

The Israeli military said it “rejects outright allegations concerning systematic abuse of detainees”, and that it acted “in accordance with Israeli law and international law”. Abuse of detainees during detention or interrogation was strictly prohibited and allegations were thoroughly examined, a statement said.

No group of Palestinians appear to be exempt; women and Palestinian citizens of Israel have been caught up in the dragnet of abuse. Maryam Salhab, a 23-year-old student from Hebron, said she still had back problems from the hours she said she spent face down in mud after her arrest on 26 October, with her hands and legs cuffed, kicked and attacked for hours by Israeli soldiers.

At one point, she said, two of them stood on her back. “I was suffocated, I couldn’t breathe, I saw death with both eyes,” she said, estimating that the men stayed there, weighed down by all their gear, for two or three minutes. “They chatted to each other as if nothing was happening, as if they were standing on solid ground.”

She said she was then moved to a cell smeared with the vomit of a previous inmate who had an infectious disease. Water in the taps had been turned off so the women could not even try to clean it.

Lama al-Fakhuri, 48, a writer who joined her there, got her period soon after her arrest. Refused a pad, she bled through her clothes. Both women said they were threatened with rape and verbally abused. Neither faced charges or trial before their release five weeks later, several kilos lighter, as part of a deal to free hostages in Gaza.

‘Livestreaming for Ben-Gvir’

The far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has presided, with vocal pride, over the grim transformation of Israel’s prison system. “In Ketziot [prison] they say that I am crazy and I am proud of that. I am proud that we have changed all of the conditions,” he recently told the Knesset.

Ben-Gvir also confirmed in a recent letter to the supreme court that food deprivation was ordered from the top. “There is no starvation, but my policy does call for reducing conditions, including food and calories.”

He appears to be so closely linked to abuse that far-right social networks share pictures of emaciated detainees with captions joking about a Ben-Gvir weight-loss plan.

Musa ‘Aasi, a 58-year-old painter-decorator and father of four, said he heard guards beat 38-year-old Tha’er Abu ‘Asab to death in a neighbouring cell at Ketziot in November. One guard told 50-year-old Firas Hassan, from Bethlehem: “We are livestreaming this for Ben-Gvir”.

Ben Gvir’s spokesperson said the minister was “proud” of his prison policy, and that it was in line with international law. “The conditions of the terrorists imprisoned in Israeli prisons have been tightened to the minimum required by law. In accordance with the minister’s policy, the terrorists do not receive the improved conditions they received in the past,” they said.

What guards wanted the security chief to see, they tried to hide from the rest of the world. Ahmed Khalefe, 42, a human rights lawyer from northern Israel detained at an anti-war protest, told a court hearing about violence he witnessed in jail. On his way back to his cell, he was beaten and threatened. “They told me if I spoke again [about abuse] they would kill me,” said Khalefe, who is still under house arrest.

He described pools of blood on the floor and watching jailers jump on the back and legs of an 80-year-old man. “He just cried,” Khalefe said. “We ended up taking care of the tortured people, even though they had no medicine.”

For some prisoners, denial of medical care was in effect a death sentence. Atef Awawda, 54, shared a cell with Muhammad al-Sabbar, a 21-year-old with special needs and Hirschsprung’s disease.

Sabbar required a special diet and medication to prevent blockages in his intestine but when the war started, those provisions stopped. His abdomen began swelling dangerously and Awawda said they begged a nurse: “He is going to die, please help.” “The nurse replied: ‘Go bang your head against the wall,’” Awawda said.

Another medic eventually gave Sabbar an injection and Awawda helped him back towards health by managing their meagre rations, but the two were then separated. Months later Sabbar died from an intestinal blockage. “This is medical negligence in the true sense of the word,” Awawda said.

He said he also briefly shared a dirty, overcrowded cell with a paraplegic prisoner, Khalid Shamish, who had developed an infected pressure sore. “I saw maggots coming out of his back,” Awawda told the Guardian. A month later Shamish had died.

In Ketziot, jailers hung a sign with “welcome to hell” written in Arabic and Hebrew outside one wing. Another comparison occurred to Sari Huriye when he was ordered to strip by prison guards as he entered the jail. “They made me get completely naked and that’s when I realised I was entering Abu Ghraib,” he said, referring to the US jail in Iraq that became a byword for abuse two decades ago.

He is an Israeli citizen from Haifa and a property lawyer, and was arrested over Facebook posts about the war, he believes to set an example. “I ticked all the boxes – middle class, Christian, political,” he said. “Everyone told me they stopped posting on Facebook after that. That was the point.”

He spent 10 days in prison, enough to hear Abdul Rahman al-Maari die in agony in the neighbouring cell after a beating. “I feel so guilty that I couldn’t help him,” he said, breaking into tears. “Maari didn’t stop screaming the whole time. He kept saying: ‘I’m dying, I need a doctor.’

“Then he went quiet. In the morning the guards went in and kicked him, said: ‘Wake up, get up.’ After an hour they brought the medic and they put him in a bag, like trash, and took him away.”

______________________________________________

Emma Graham-Harrison and Sufian Taha in Hebron; Bethan McKernan and Quique Kierszenbaum in Haifa

12 August 2024

Source: transcend.org

Venezuela: An Attempted Coup by Any Other Name

By María Páez Victor

“We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”
Elon Musk, 25 July 2020, Twitter

4 Aug 2024 – Once again, as in 2002, Venezuela has been the victim of a combined media and diplomatic coup attempt, but this time with the added element of organized crime and a cyber-attack.

Millions of eligible voters cast their electronic ballots before the presence of more than 635 international witnesses including electoral experts of the United Nations, the African Union, and electoral staff of 65 countries. How many international witnesses are allowed for the USA or Canadian elections? None.

Nicolás Maduro was re-elected with 51.2% of votes (5,150,092 votes), and the far-right candidate Edmundo González lost with 44.2% of votes (4,445,978 votes). The other 8 opposition leaders received 4.6% of the total votes cast. This is the statistically irreversible results given out by the constitutional Electoral Authority (CNE) on election day, 28 July 2024, having examined and audited 80% of the votes. These results were audited 16 times.

However, the rest of the 20% votes have not yet (at the writing of this article) been released because of a massive cyber-attack. The elements of the electronic system that transmit the results to the central point was hacked over a hundred times in a most sophisticated manner that was traced to North Macedonia.

The Attorney General, Tarek William Saab, named as responsible for this cyber-attack: Lester Toledo, Leopoldo López, and M. Corina Machado. Furthermore, President Maduro implicated Elon Musk, considering him a far-right fanatic who has the technology to pull an attack like this and has many times denigrated Venezuela. It is alleged that Musk supported the supposed “humanitarian” invasion of Venezuela through Colombia in 2019. He famously said “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” Musk must desire Venezuela’s lithium, apart its oil and gold.

Ironically, in the USA there is no constitutional or other law that demands that election results be declared on Election Day. In fact, in that supposed beacon of democracy, for much of the 19th Century it took days if not weeks to the winner to be declared.”[1] And much more recently:

* In 2000, Bush won the presidency over Al Gore with only 537 votes; there was a delay of 37 days before the results were released and was ultimately decided by the US Supreme Court.

* In 2021, Biden won over Trump with 51.3% of votes, (almost exactly as Maduro has won now), Trump obtaining 46.8%. There was a delay of 4 days before the final results were given out and only certified by the Electoral College after 33 days. Trump launched 63 lawsuits contesting the results[2] and still insists they were bogus.

Yet today, like a pack of vicious hyenas, the fascist far right – and not so far right – nations and NGOs are howling for Venezuela to release the detailed results immediately. The implication being that there is some sort of fraud or hidden trick. They DEMAND that the Electoral Authority (CNE) release the remaining votes, which the world should know are not little pieces of paper in a cardboard box. In Venezuela the vote is done electronically, the paper trail is only an added security measure to show that someone has duly voted.

President Maduro has formally asked the Venezuelan Supreme Court to settle any discrepancy about the vote, just as George Bush asked of the US Supreme Court in 2020.

Many of us who analyze the Venezuelan situation predicted it earlier: the far right, fascist group led by M. Corina Machado and her puppet candidate in Edmundo Gonzalez, had no electoral intention. Clue: unlike other candidates from the opposition, they refused to sign the agreement among candidates to respect the results and reject any violence after the results came in. Because that is exactly what they planned. Even before the results were in Machado was telling her formidable social media networks that Gonzalez had overwhelmingly won the election.

We wondered why Machado insisted on travelling the country to campaign. Now the Attorney General has found out why: under the cover of campaigning, she was paying off bands of real criminals she grouped in what she called “comanditos’ (little commands). These were common criminals trained in Colombia, with the help of the Colombian narco ex-presidents of Alvaro Uribe and Duque, and gangs of organized crime, who were paid up to $150 a day to burst on to the scene the day after the elections. There was a clear plan with strategic targets laid out for every “comandito”. It was also discovered that a great number of them were trained terrorists who arrived in Venezuela under the cover of Venezuelans migrants who were returned by plane from the USA.

Images have been flashed these past few days around the world of individuals setting fires and burning tires who are portrayed invariably as “the people” rejecting the fraud of the elections. In fact, “the people”, whether Chavistas or opposers, peaceful people in the great majority, were snug in their homes, having nothing to do with this terrorism. What did these supposed freedom fighters do? They looted, burned and destroyed, stores, schools, clinic, food warehouses, plazas, electricity plants, PSUV headquarters, police stations, water plants, and destroyed statues.

They injured 77 members of the police and armed forces, killing one officer by a bullet to his neck, not to mention the many social leaders dragged out of their homes and assaulted. In each area they had lists of the social community leaders identified with Bolivarianism, attacked and set fire to their houses and physically beat them up, women included, threatening to kill them and anyone in the town that supported the government. The government has set a special fund to help these victims.

These criminals had a specific plan. They were trained, armed, and received part of their pay in drugs. The blood tests done on every one of those caught show the presence of drugs. In certain areas they combined with organized bands of narco-paramilitary. The overall plan was to knock out the electricity supply to 10 states, create chaos, attack and march to Miraflores (the main government house) and capture or kill the president and prepare the way for foreign intervention.

How do we know all this? Firstly, because the terrorists are being rounded up, alive, without killing any one of them and they are talking. The terrorists aren’t fighting for any ideology or democracy, they are craven cowards that assault defenseless people, but when caught, fall on their knees crying and telling everything they know to the authorities. And because today:

  • There are security cameras everywhere, and it seems everybody has a phone camera to catch their horrible deeds.
  • There is a real Attorney General, not a vile traitor as before.
  • There are now anti-terrorist laws that were previously missing to enable such violence to be dealt with through the courts.

There is a great difference today from the street violence of 2015 y 2017, “guarimbas” images of which were flashed around the world to convey that Venezuela was in chaos and should be “intervened”. At that time, Venezuelans watched disgusted and astounded as the violent criminals were never arrested for assaults, arson and deaths. The then Attorney General, Luisa Ortega, who spent years destroying the institution, gave strict orders that these street criminals were not to be arrested because they were “exercising their democratic right”. It turned out she was a mercenary traitor piling up millions of dollars the CIA gave her and is now living in great luxury in the USA where she fled when her crimes were discovered.

Following these events the National Assembly passed modern anti-terrorist laws that now include these heinous crimes against the peace, which the Constitution did not have when it was first written in 1999. Now there will be no impunity; so far there are 1,062 arrested who will go to trial. They are confessing readily with practically no promptings. It is to the great credit of the Venezuelan police and military that they have not caught these terrorists by shooting them – as it might happen in other countries which will remain nameless. No bodies, no dead terrorists: all captured alive up to now.

What would the governments of the USA, Canada or Europe do if bands of armed people set fires, assaulted and shot officials and members of the public, and terrorised their towns and cities? For sure they would be caught in a heartbeat and could very well end up being shot on sight.

President Maduro has said: we have seen this film before. The Bolivarian government under Chávez and Maduro has had since 1999, had 31 elections, and always the extreme right opposition has yelled fraud. That is, they recognize the elections when they have gained places in the National Assembly, state governments and mayoralties. Very convenient: if they win, the elections are legitimate, if they lose, they are a fraud. This has happened over and over again but the international media never seem to pick up on this or do not want to.

We are in the presence of an attempt of the international fascist far right and the CIA to overthrow the government of Venezuela with a massive disinformation and denigration campaign to justify illegal sanctions and foreign intervention in the country.

The checkered past and crimes of Machado, poster girl of the far right, is never mentioned, her involvement in coups, her promotion of street violence in the past, her asking the USA for sanctions and military invasion against Venezuela, and right now, her collaboration with criminal gangs and narco-paramilitary groups are never mentioned. Her puppet, Edmundo González, was involved in the logistics and financing of the death squads in El Salvador’s civil war. Their hands are tainted with blood.

But this is another universe from the one in 2015 and 2017. Venezuela is strong and prepared. Its economy has diversified and grown, despite the sanctions. It no longer depends exclusively on the US oil market – the whole world wants its oil. Even the USA needs Venezuelan oil for its refineries in Louisiana and Texas to keep the price of gasoline down in a crucial presidential election year.

The spectre that arises for the for the West is that their chickens have come home to roost: after decades of denigrating and harming Venezuela with a vicious hybrid war, Venezuela has turned to the East for its friends and allies. Russia and China have stood by Venezuela and its electoral process; Turkey, Iran, India, OPEC, and soon the Non-Aligned nations will also rally to its side as it is made clear that the purpose of the far right was not to win an election but to provoke a coup. And the “piéce de resistance” is that the BRIC, considering Venezuela a strategic partner, is poised to welcome it as a full member. This will open many more opportunities for Venezuelan development than Europe, the USA and Canada have done and who have treated Venezuela so badly for so long.

Let us rejoice in the triumph of the Venezuelan people and may they live in peace, secure in their own sovereignty.

NOTES:

1. CNN, “Why the delayed election results prove the system is adequately working”, 4 Nov. 2020 
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election 

______________________________________________

María Páez Victor, Ph.D. is a Venezuelan sociologist living in Canada.

12 August 2024

Source: transcend.org

Interrogating the Venezuelan Victory of Nicolás Maduro

By Murat Sofuoglu | Richard Falk

Venezuelan Election Sparks Geopolitical Feud Between US, China and Russia

6 Aug 2024 – Whether incumbent President Nicolás Maduro holds on to power could very well depend on his allies, and the result could have global ramifications.

One week after Venezuela held its presidential election on July 28, the United States and its rivals China and Russia are taking sides in the debate over who actually won power in the South American state, which has had an anti-Western socialist leadership under President Nicolas Maduro.

The US contests the official results declared by the National Electoral Council (CNE), the country’s election oversight authority, which said that Maduro won 51 percent against opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia’s 44 percent.

Meanwhile China and Russia are standing by the incumbent president.

According to the US-backed opposition, Gonzalez won the presidency with a large margin. He has called for protests against Maduro, and anti-government demonstrations have been raging across Venezuela since the CNE’s declaration of election results. Maduro described the unrest as a far-right conspiracy against his government.

Venezuela’s election has also divided Latin America, where pro-Western governments from Argentina to Peru, Panama and several other states rejected the official result. Countries like Cuba, which have socialist leaderships, have backed Maduro’s reelection.

“At present, Maduro’s victory has received congratulatory messages from left governments in the region including Cuba, Nicaragua, and Bolivia and critical reactions from the US and European countries,” said Richard Falk, a leading international relations expert.

Meanwhile, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, the three critical Latin American countries with leftist or left-leaning governments, have distanced themselves from the US position. These nations have important interactions with both Russia and China, and oppose external interference to address the Venezuelan impasse.

But the three states also called on Caracas to release details of election results, urging an internal “institutional solution”. Caracas says that a hacking attack prevents the electoral oversight body from releasing detailed outcomes as its website continues to be down. 

History of tensions

Venezuela has seen at least two failed coup attempts against anti-Western governments since the Bolivarian Revolution in 1999, which was launched by Venezuelan socialist leader Hugo Chavez, who passed away in 2013 which brought his protege Maduro to power.

APA mural of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez with a message that reads in Spanish: “Chavez, the heart of our towns”, in Caracas, Venezuela, July 24, 2024.
Photo/Fernando Vergara

The Bolivarian revolution refers to Simon Bolivar, a 19th-century Venezuelan leader who was instrumental in achieving the independence of some South American states from Spanish rule. Like Bolivar in the past, Chavez and later Maduro along with their allies have aimed to form an anti-Western socialist bloc across the region.

“The natural stance of the opposition and of countries (Western powers) is to oppose Madurismo-Chavismo,” said Juan Martin Gonzalez Cabañas, a researcher at Moscow State Linguistic University (MSLU) and a Eurasia specialist at the Argentine-based Center of Studies “Soberanía”.

Madurismo-Chavismo refers to the ongoing leftist governance in Venezuela since the Bolivarian revolution. So far, at least two failed coup attempts were launched against the Venezuelan socialist leadership.

In 2002, US-linked forces ousted Chavez for a brief time from power, but in a dramatic reversal, much of the military loyal to Chavez restored him to power after a tense 47 hours. In 2020, there was another failed coup attempt against Maduro’s government. This one was orchestrated by Jordan Goudreau, a US Green Beret, who was recently arrested by the US in New York for arms smuggling.

“More or less impartial commentators believe that the political outcome will depend on whether the Venezuelan armed forces continue to back Maduro and whether the opposition is militant and organised enough to threaten the survival of the Maduro government,” Falk told TRT World. 

Cabanas assesses that Western powers’ antagonist relationship with Maduro and their approach to his reelection bid are clearly related to their political interests. “A [Venezuelan] government opposed to Chavismo would be more functional to their objectives,” he told TRT World.

Russia and China weigh in

On the other hand, the Kremlin is on the side of Maduro, “firmly” backing him and the outcomes of elections that recognised him and his government as winner of elections, according to Cabanas.

Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro, right, meets with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, at Miraflores Presidential Palace in Caracas, Venezuela, April 18, 2023.
AP ARCHIVE

China, which has already congratulated Maduro on a third term following the release of election results, also reiterated its support for the socialist leader.

“China will, as always, firmly support Venezuela’s efforts to safeguard national sovereignty, national dignity and social stability, and firmly support Venezuela’s just cause of opposing external interference,” President Xi Jinping said last week.

Both Chavez and Maduro have been long aligned with the anti-Western camp, ranging from Russia to China and regional leftist states like Cuba to counter US influence in Venezuela.

But Caracas faces a serious economic recession under US-led sanctions, which has led more than 7.7 million Venezuelans to migrate to other countries, particularly the US, since 2014.

It’s difficult to present a fair assessment of the elections because “they are being undertaken in a country that operates in a state of economic siege and hostile relations with the United States,” said Alexander Moldovan, a researcher on social movements and security in Latin America at York University.

“Democracy and national security are difficult to balance,” Moldovan told TRT World, referring to the Venezuelan political dilemma. He sees that the country’s post-election process will be difficult as both pro-government and opposition forces have been entrenched into their firm positions.

Prior to the election, Maduro has shown his flexibility and held talks with Washington to address the two countries’ differences, aiming to reach an agreement to ease sanctions.

“Although Maduro’s victory is a win for the counter-hegemonic powers that counterweights the West, this fact should be measured in its proper context: Venezuela is facing an economic recovery after very hard years, and Chavismo is no longer an ideological ‘export brand’ as it used to be, at least in its region (South America/Latin America),” Cabanas added.

Madurism and regional socialist trends

Falk said he believes that Madurism’s future might depend on how “governments with progressive credentials, such as Colombia, Brazil and Mexico, will influence” its perceptions outside Venezuela if the socialist leader’s reelection is “sustained in a future period that is bound to be turbulent.”

Bolivia’s President Luis Arce, from left, Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva assemble for a group photo during the South American Summit at Itamaraty palace in Brasilia, Brazil, May 30, 2023.
Photo/Andre Penner AP

The three countries are part of BRICS, a non-Western alliance, and have not sided with the Western stance, as Brazil’s leftist President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva said he found “nothing abnormal” in the election process.

“If Maduro manages to hold on, and especially if he gains support from Brazil and other moderate governments, it will be interpreted as a setback for ideologically motivated US coercive diplomacy, including an effort to exert political influence by imposing sanctions unilaterally,” Falk said.

But if the opposite political scenario becomes a reality, then Maduro’s exit and opposition success could be perceived “as allied with the right and the beneficiary of US intervention,” according to Falk. This perception would essentially empower leftist tendencies in Latin America, “not so much for the sake of socialism or electoral integrity, but to assure sovereign rights and resistance to foreign intervention, especially on behalf of capitalist vested interests.”

The professor also drew attention to the media’s use of political language when it comes to internal settings and processes of anti-Western states like Venezuela.

While pro-Maduro forces describe María Corina Machado Parisca, a leading opposition leader, and Gonzales, as the leaders of “right-wing” or “far-right” groups, “the liberal media never uses this language, painting the struggle as between “autocratic” and “democratic” tendencies,” he said.

On the other hand, “Maduro describes his movement as one on behalf of the people, especially the poor and marginalised, rarely speaking of ‘socialism’ as the inspiration or goal,” he added.

__________________________________________________

Source: TRT World

Submitted byTRANSCEND Member Richard Falk

12 August 2024

Source: transcend.org

US Elites Fail to Sink Chinese Swimmers

By Rick Sterling

9 Aug 2024 – US political and media elites tried but failed to sink the Chinese swimming team at the Paris Olympics.  The Chinese swimmers performed well despite the increased stress caused by media-induced rumors of “Chinese doping”. And now, the tables are being turned as the US anti-doping regime is coming under increasing scrutiny and criticism.

The Media Manufactured Cloud of Suspicion

Just a few months ago the NY Times and German ARD media ignited  the controversy with an “investigation” regarding an incident from December 2021. At that time, 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for a trace amount of the heart medication Trimetazadine (TMZ) during a swim meet for top swimmers from across the country.  The Chinese Anti Doping Agency investigated and learned that all the positively tested swimmers were staying at the same hotel and eating in the same dining room. The amount of TMZ detected was so low that in some cases it was detected one day, and not the next. Testing in the kitchen revealed that TMZ was on the counters and in the vent hood.

The Chinese Anti Doping Agency (CHINADA) concluded that the athletes had been contaminated through food served in the dining room. They reported the facts to the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) and the international swimming federation (World Aquatics, formerly known as FINA) . Both organizations concurred with the conclusion that the athletes were innocent and should not be charged with an anti-doping rule violation.

But the NY Times and ARD suggested something shady had occurred and the athletes may not have been innocent. They further suggested that  CHINADA and WADA may be in collusion and covering up mass doping.  .

This story ignited a storm of accusations with the head of the US Anti Doping Agency (USADA), Travis Tygart, leading the pack.  Some prominent international swimmers have joined the fray with suggestions that the Chinese swimming accomplishments at the 2022 Tokyo Olympics were tainted, “not clean,” or based on cheating. The insinuations and suspicions continued into swimming competitions at the Paris Olympics. Many TV commentators at the Olympics referred to the insinuation one way or another. Media kept the suspicion alive by highlighting when a prominent international swimmer said anything about it. American champion swimmer Katie Ledecky said it was difficult to accept coming second behind a Chinese swimmer who might have doped. Legendary US swimmer Michael Phelps said any athlete guilty of doping should be banned forever – “one and done”.

The US Congress got involved with Congressional representatives  to suspend or cancel US contributions to WADA. With the 2019 Rodchenkov Act, the US Congress has granted itself the power to arrest and penalize anyone in the world involved in “doping”.

Paris 2024 Olympics

Swimming at the 2024 Paris  Olympics is now over. The swimming powerhouses US  and Australia won the most medals with 28  and 18 respectively. But China did well, coming third with 12 swimming medals.  China’s Pan Zhanle was one of the superstars of the event, setting a new world record in the 100 m freestyle. He also anchored the Chinese relay team to their victory in the 4 x 100 meter medley relay, an event the US has dominated for 64 years.

Chinese swimmers spoke about feeling additional stress and discomfort because of the accusations and rumors about doping. They were tested much more than any other team, with some 600 doping tests conducted leading into and during the games. There were zero violations.

The superstar Pan Zhanle was not one of the swimmers who tested positive in 2021.

So it was left to some critics to say his performance was not “humanly possible”.

Tables Are Turned

Chinese and other media are now pushing back and exposing the hypocrisy and double standards of the US anti-doping regime. Even the mainstream Newsweek magazine headlines “China turns the table on US doping accusations.”

More significantly, on August 7 the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) publicly denounced USADA for having “allowed athletes who had doped, to compete  for years, in at least one case without ever publishing or sanctioning their anti-doping rule violations, in direct contravention of the World Anti-Doping Code and USADA’s own rules. The USADA scheme threatened the integrity of sporting competition, which the Code seeks to protect.”

Other international organizations are also reacting negatively to the US efforts to be the global judge and jury. The International Olympic Committee has said that the US may lose hosting of future Olympic Games if the US undermines the global anti doping establishment.

NY Times Misleading Information

The NY Times and Germany’s ARD launched and spurred this controversy with misleading reporting. A recent NYT article titled “A Doping Scandal” claims there is “a troubling pattern of positive doping tests in the Chinese swimming program.” Twelve members of the Chinese Olympic team tested positive in recent years for powerful performance-enhancing drugs but were cleared to keep competing.”  They insinuated malfeasance on the part of the Chinese swimmers, China Anti Doping Agency and World Anti Doping Agency.  By implication, the world swimming federation (World Aquatics) was also guilty.

The NY Times claim that Trimetazidine is a “powerful performance-enhancing drug” is false. The medication is helpful for elderly individuals with weak hearts but does nothing for young athletes with healthy hearts.  As noted at SwimSwam magazine, “Dr. Benjamin Levine, a renowned sports cardiologist at UT Southwestern Medical School, says he doesn’t think it provides any benefit.”  If Western athletes doubt this or want to test it, Dr. Levine says they can imbibe RANOLAZINE which is very similar to TMZ and NOT PROHIBITED.

The insinuation that dozens of Chinese swimmers from diverse parts of the country with different coaches were collectively imbibing a prohibited medication risking their careers and reputations does not pass the sniff test. Simple logic would indicate an accidental contamination of the food they were all eating, confirmed by the presence of the chemical in the dining room kitchen. That is what CHINADA, WADA and World Aquatics all determined. The commitment of Chinese swimmers to anti-doping and clean sport is confirmed by the renowned Australian swim coach Denis Cotterell.

The Need for Thresholds

This incident points to the need for there to be appropriate thresholds for determining a doping rule violation. Currently this is inconsistent. There are minimum levels for some chemicals and none for others. Modern test instruments can detect extremely small amounts – molecules – of a chemical. As a scientist at an official doping test laboratory said, “It is very dangerous to not have a minimum threshold because all sorts of chemicals are in the environment.”

How Did the TMZ Get in the Kitchen?

A very important question remains unanswered: How did TMZ get into the hotel kitchen and the food that was being prepared for consumption by the Chinese athletes?

There is a curious coincidence. During the same month, December 2021, the Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva – widely recognized as the best in the world – tested positive for a trace amount of TMZ when she was competing in the Russian Nationals in St. Peteresburg.  However  this was not reported by the Swedish laboratory until February,  just in time to disrupt the Beijing Winter Olympics.  Unlike the Chinese swimmers, Valieva was alone and unable to identify where the contamination seven weeks earlier came from. This one positive test for a trace amount of TMZ resulted in huge turmoil in Beijing, assumption of guilt contrary to common sense, and ultimately the destruction of Valieva’s international competitive career. Her suggestion there may have been sabotage was ignored. The NY Times thinks this case is “how it’s supposed to work.”

Summary

In Paris unlike Beijing in 2022, the accusations were a distraction but not totally disruptive. The fans in the swimming arena were respectful and appreciative of the Chinese athletes. Some international swimmers also  ignored the controversy and did the right thing. They congratulated the Chinese swimmers when they were victorious. Australian Kyle Chalmers congratulated Pan Zhanle.  American Caleb Dressel acknowledged the Chinese swimmers were the best that day they won the 4 x 100m medley.

The attempt to torpedo the Chinese swimmers and undermine China’s international image did not succeed.

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Rick Sterling is a member of the TRANSCEND Network and an investigative journalist who lives in the SF Bay Area, California.

12 August 2024

Source: transcend.org