What’s Next for Battlefield America? Israel’s High-Tech Military Tactics Point the Way
“I did not know Israel was capturing or recording my face. [But Israel has] been watching us for years from the sky with their drones. They have been watching us gardening and going to schools and kissing our wives. I feel like I have been watched for so long.”—Mosab Abu Toha, Palestinian poet
If you want a glimpse of the next stage of America’s transformation into a police state, look no further than how Israel—a long-time recipient of hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid from the U.S.—uses its high-tech military tactics, surveillance and weaponry to advance its authoritarian agenda.
Military checkpoints. Wall-to-wall mass surveillance. Predictive policing. Aerial surveillance that tracks your movements wherever you go and whatever you do. AI-powered facial recognition and biometric programs carried out with the knowledge or consent of those targeted by it. Cyber-intelligence. Detention centers. Brutal interrogation tactics. Weaponized drones. Combat robots.
We’ve already seen many of these military tactics and technologies deployed on American soil and used against the populace, especially along the border regions, a testament to the heavy influence Israel’s military-industrial complex has had on U.S. policing.
Indeed, Israel has become one of the largest developers and exporters of military weapons and technologies of oppression worldwide.
Journalist Antony Loewenstein has warned that Pegasus, one of Israel’s most invasive pieces of spyware, which allows any government or military intelligence or police department to spy on someone’s phone and get all the information from that phone, has become a favorite tool of oppressive regimes around the world. The FBI and NYPD have also been recipients of the surveillance technology which promises to turn any “target’s smartphone into an intelligence gold mine.”
Yet it’s not just military weapons that Israel is exporting. They’re also helping to transform local police agencies into extensions of the military.
According to The Intercept, thousands of American law enforcement officers frequently travel for training to Israel, “one of the few countries where policing and militarism are even more deeply intertwined than they are here,” as part of an ongoing exchange program that largely flies under the radar of public scrutiny.
A 2018 investigative report concluded that imported military techniques by way of these exchange programs that allow police to study in Israel have changed American policing for the worse. “Upon their return, U.S. law enforcement delegates implement practices learned from Israel’s use of invasive surveillance, blatant racial profiling, and repressive force against dissent,” the report states. “Rather than promoting security for all, these programs facilitate an exchange of methods in state violence and control that endanger us all.”
“At the very least,” notes journalist Matthew Petti, “visits to Israel have helped American police justify more snooping on citizens and stricter secrecy. Critics also assert that Israeli training encourages excessive force.”
Petti documents how the NYPD set up a permanent liaison office in Israel in the wake of 9/11, eventually implementing “one of the first post-9/11 counterterrorism programs that explicitly followed the Israeli model. In 2002, the NYPD tasked a secret ‘Demographics Unit’ with spying on Muslim-American communities. Dedicated ‘mosque crawlers’ infiltrated local Muslim congregations and attempted to bait worshippers with talk of violent revolution.”
That was merely the start of American police forces being trained in martial law by foreign nations under the guise of national security theater. It has all been downhill from there.
As Alex Vitale, a sociology professor who has studied the rise of global policing, explains, “The focus of this training is on riot suppression, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism—all of which are essentially irrelevant or should be irrelevant to the vast majority of police departments. They shouldn’t be suppressing protest, they shouldn’t be engaging in counterinsurgency, and almost none of them face any real threat from terrorism.”
This ongoing transformation of the American homeland into a techno-battlefield tracks unnervingly with the dystopian cinematic visions of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium, both of which are set 30 years from now, in the year 2054.
In Minority Report, police agencies harvest intelligence from widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs in order to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage.
While Blomkamp’s Elysium acts as a vehicle to raise concerns about immigration, access to healthcare, worker’s rights, and socioeconomic stratification, what was most striking was its eerie depiction of how the government will employ technologies such as drones, tasers and biometric scanners to track, target and control the populace, especially dissidents.
With Israel in the driver’s seat and Minority Report and Elysium on the horizon, it’s not so far-fetched to imagine how the American police state will use these emerging technologies to lock down the populace, root out dissidents, and ostensibly establish an “open-air prison” with disconcerting similarities to Israel’s technological occupation of present-day Palestine.
For those who insist that such things are celluloid fantasies with no connection to the present, we offer the following as a warning of the totalitarian future at our doorsteps.
Facial Recognition
Fiction: One of the most jarring scenes in Elysium occurs towards the beginning of the film, when the protagonist Max Da Costa waits to board a bus on his way to work. While standing in line, Max is approached by two large robotic police officers, who quickly scan Max’s biometrics, cross-check his data against government files, and identify him as a former convict in need of close inspection. They demand to search his bag, a request which Max resists, insisting that there is nothing for them to see. The robotic cops respond by manhandling Max, throwing him to the ground, and breaking his arm with a police baton. After determining that Max poses no threat, they leave him on the ground and continue their patrol. Likewise, in Minority Report, police use holographic data screens, city-wide surveillance cameras, dimensional maps and database feeds to monitor the movements of its citizens and preemptively target suspects for interrogation and containment.
Fact: We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed, corralled and controlled by technologies that answer to government and corporate rulers. This is exactly how Palestinian poet and New Yorker contributor Mosab Abu Toha found himself, within minutes of passing through an Israeli military checkpoint in Gaza with his wife and children in tow, asked to step out line, only to be blindfolded, handcuffed, interrogated, then imprisoned in an Israeli detention center for two days, beaten and further interrogated. Toha was finally released in what Israeli soldiers chalked up to a “mistake,” yet there was no mistaking the AI-powered facial recognition technology that was used to pull him out of line, identify him, and label him (erroneously) as a person of interest.
Drones
Fiction: In another Elysium scene, Max is hunted by four drones while attempting to elude the authorities. The drones, equipped with x-ray cameras, biometric readers, scanners and weapons, are able to scan whole neighborhoods, identify individuals from a distance—even through buildings, report their findings back to police handlers, pursue a suspect, and target them with tasers and an array of lethal weapons.
Fact: Drones, some deceptively small and yet powerful enough to capture the facial expressions of people hundreds of feet below them, have ushered in a new age of surveillance. Not even those indoors, in the privacy of their homes, will be safe from these aerial spies, which can be equipped with technology capable of peering through walls. In addition to their surveillance capabilities, drones can also be equipped with automatic weapons, grenade launchers, tear gas, and tasers.
Biometric scanners and national IDs
Fiction: Throughout Elysium, citizens are identified, sorted and dealt with by way of various scanning devices that read their biometrics—irises, DNA, etc.—as well as their national ID numbers, imprinted by a laser into their skin. In this way, citizens are tracked, counted, and classified. Likewise, in Minority Report, tiny sensory-guided spider robots converge on a suspected would-be criminal, scan his biometric data and feed it into a central government database. The end result is that there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide to escape the government’s all-seeing eyes.
Fact: Given the vast troves of data that various world governments, including Israel and the U.S., is collecting on its citizens and non-citizens alike, we are not far from a future where there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. In fact, between the facial recognition technology being handed out to law enforcement, license plate readers being installed on police cruisers, local police creating DNA databases by extracting DNA from non-criminals, including the victims of crimes, and police collecting more and more biometric data such as iris scans, we are approaching the end of anonymity. It won’t be long before police officers will be able to pull up a full biography on any given person instantaneously, including their family and medical history, bank accounts, and personal peccadilloes. It’s already moving in that direction in more authoritarian regimes.
Predictive Policing
Fiction: In Minority Report, John Anderton, Chief of the Department of Pre-Crime, finds himself identified as the next would-be criminal and targeted for preemptive measures by the very technology that he relies on for his predictive policing. Consequently, Anderton finds himself not only attempting to prove his innocence but forced to take drastic measures in order to avoid capture in a surveillance state that uses biometric data and sophisticated computer networks to track its citizens.
Fact: Precrime, which aims to prevent crimes before they happen, has justified the use of widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and snitch programs. As political science professor Anwar Mhajne documents, Israel has used all of these tools in its military engagements with Palestine: deploying AI surveillance and predictive policing systems in Palestinian territories; utilizing facial recognition technology to monitor and regulate the movement of Palestinians; subjecting Palestinians to facial recognition scans at checkpoints, with a color-coded mechanism to dictate who should be allowed to proceed, subjected to further questioning, or detained.
Making the Leap from Fiction to Reality
When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, he was convinced that there was “still plenty of time” before his dystopian vision became a nightmare reality. It wasn’t long, however, before he realized that his prophecies were coming true far sooner than he had imagined.
Israel’s military influence on the United States, its advances in technological weaponry, and its rigid demand for compliance are pushing us towards a world in chains.
Through its oppressive use of surveillance technology, Israel has erected the world’s first open-air prison, and in the process, has made itself a model for the United States.
What we cannot afford to overlook, however, is the extent to which the American Police State is taking its cues from Israel.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we may not be an occupied territory, but that does not make the electronic concentration camp being erected around us any less of a prison.
Journalist, critic of U.S. Ukraine policy, pulled off plane, U.S. seizes his passport
Judge Napolitano of Judging Freedom was also escorted off the plane according to some reports.
https://www.rt.com/news/598711-us-seizes-scott-ritters-passport/, 3June 24
The RT contributor was stopped from visiting Russia
The US State Department has seized the passport of former Marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, he told RT on Monday.
Ritter was on his way to Russia for the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) when he was pulled off the plane and had his documents confiscated.
“I was boarding the flight. Three [police] officers pulled me aside. They took my passport. When asked why, they said ‘orders of the State Department’. They had no further information for me,” Ritter told RT. “They pulled my bags off the plane, then escorted me out of the airport. They kept my passport.”
“Was this done in accordance with the First Amendment, or the Fourth,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, commenting on the news. The first amendment to the US constitution protects freedom of speech, press and assembly, while the fourth bars the government from “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, who later served as the US and UN weapons inspector in Iraq. He is also a RT contributor, writing about international security, military affairs, Russia, and the Middle East, as well as arms control and nonproliferation.
He most recently visited Russia in January, spending time in Chechnya, Moscow and St. Petersburg, among other places.
The most recent post on Ritter’s Telegram channel put the Clooney Foundation for Justice on notice for its alleged crusade against “Russian propagandists.”
“Here I am. In your face. If telling the truth about Russia makes me a propagandist in your book, then I accept the title,” he wrote. “Bring it on. I’ll school you on the First Amendment.”
“You have zero concept of what free speech is. Try and arrest me and you’ll find out. In spades. It’s war,” he added.
38 Years After Chernobyl Disaster, 12% of Belarus’s Territory Is Still Contaminated
Belarus is not communicating anything about Chernobyl to other countries.
May 26, 2024 by Global Voices, By Daria Dergacheva, https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/38-years-after-chernobyl-disaster-12-of-belaruss-territory-is-still-contaminated/
On April 26, 1986, a catastrophic accident occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. A planned shutdown of the reactor, lasting 20 seconds, seemed like a routine check of electrical equipment. However, a few seconds later, a chemical explosion released about 520 types of dangerous radionuclides into the atmosphere. Thirty-eight years later, Belarusian officials say 12 percent of the country’s territory is still contaminated.
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was located near the city of Pripyat in northern Ukraine, then part of the Ukrainian SSR, close to the border with the Byelorussian SSR. Pripyat has been abandoned since the year of the accident, and an exclusion zone was created with a radius of 30 km around the plant. Over 100,000 people were evacuated from the zone
To the north of the Ukrainian part of the Exclusion Zone is the Polesie State Radiation-Ecological Reserve, which belongs to the territory of the Republic of Belarus. There are 96 abandoned settlements in the area, where more than 22,000 residents lived before the accident and evacuation in 1986.
According to Belarus state media, in the end of April 2024, the first deputy head of the State Atomic Inspectorate in Belarus Leonid Dedul said during a press-conference:
As a result of explosions and fires, about 200 types of radionuclides with half-lives ranging from a few hours to hundreds of thousands of years were released into the atmosphere, with Belarus taking the main blow. For example, if we consider the radionuclide cesium-137, 35 percent of the total amount that fell down landed in our country. This radionuclide accounts for about 90 percent of the radiation dose load on the population. Since the post-accident period, the area of contaminated territory in Belarus by cesium-137 has decreased by almost half and now amounts to about 25.5 thousand square kilometers, or 12 percent of the country’s total area.
Today, more than 2,000 populated areas are located in radioactive contamination zones, with approximately 930,000 people (185,000 of whom are children) living in them.
Although the state media reports on the success of Belarusian state-sponsored Chernobyl program that deals with economic, social and environmental consequences of the disaster, those outside the country are skeptical about it.
Alyaksandr Lukashenka, who has been the leader of Belarus for 30 years now, said that the program worked so well that it has “beaten Chernobyl in the face.”
However, Belarusian historian Alexander Fridman thinks that Lukashenka’s regime, through propaganda, is manipulating public memory and opinion around the tragedy. Economic goals, he says, and the ability to use contaminated territories for them, were the driver of Lukashenka’s Chernobyl program. In his opinion piece for DW, he says the people were overlooked, and research that showed grave consequences of using the land even after years have passed was repressed.
One of the researchers was Yury Bandazhevsky, former director of the Medical Institute in Gomel, a scientist working on the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster. He was sentenced to eight years imprisonment in Belarus in 2001. According to many human rights groups Dr. Bandazhevsky was a prisoner of conscience. His arrest came soon after he published reports critical of the official research being conducted into the Chernobyl incident.
He was released on parole in 2005, and is now working in Ukraine. Bandazhevsky said in one of his interviews to the DW 30 years after the disaster:
I believe that even three decades after the Chernobyl disaster, the situation hasn’t changed enough to allow for safe living and agricultural activities in these territories. Yes, the radiation levels of cesium-137 and strontium-90, which have a half-life of about 30 years, have indeed decreased. However, cesium’s half-life product is barium, which hardly exits cells.
Radionuclides have migrated into the soil, entering biological chains into plants, animals, and humans, affecting the cells of vital organs. This is ignored by those [officials] who speak of safe living in areas affected by the nuclear power plant accident.
We began to study the changes occurring in the human body under the influence of radioactive elements in the fifth year after the explosion. At that time, we recorded serious pathologies of internal organs — brain, heart, and endocrine system — that could be assessed as a result of direct radiotoxic exposure. But [Belarusian] officials didn’t want to connect cause and effect. Meanwhile, in the Vetka district of Belarus, many of the children we observed in 1993–1995 have died.
We must consider that victims can also include those who live far from the Chernobyl area but consume products from there. In Belarus, after the Chernobyl accident, some “smart” individuals came up with the idea to mix “clean” products with “dirty” ones. In the Gomel region, contaminated lands were initially secretly, then openly, used to produce agricultural products, with livestock being fed grain from there. Products from the region continue to be distributed throughout the republic. Now, the situation has reached the point where these territories are reclassified as “clean,” saving on social payments.
In October 2023, as the media reported, an NGO, Children of Chernobyl, which had helped thousands of kids from contaminated areas to visit European countries in order to receive health and psychological support, was shut down by a Belarusian court as part of ongoing crack down on Belarusian civil society. In addition, for over two years since the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine started (supported by Lukashenka), Belarus is not communicating any research or other issues about Chernobyl to other countries, apart from rare meetings of IAEA, Belarusian state media reports. Thus, it is impossible to conduct an independent evaluation of what is going on in contaminated areas of Belarus. It is safe to suggest that, until Lukashenka’s regime fails, the public within and outside the country will not know the real cost of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster for Belarus.
The Slow-Motion Execution of Julian Assange Continues .
Free speech is a key issue. If Julian is granted First Amendment rights in a U.S. court it will be very difficult for the U.S. to build a criminal case against him, since other news organizations, including The New York Times and The Guardian, published the material he released.
The ruling by the High Court in London permitting Julian Assange to appeal his extradition order leaves him languishing in precarious health in a high-security prison. That is the point.
CHRIS HEDGES, MAY 24, 2024, https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-slow-motion-execution-of-julian-986?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=778851&post_id=144930141&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
The decision by the High Court in London to grant Julian Assange the right to appeal the order to extradite him to the United States may prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. It does not mean Julian will elude extradition. It does not mean the court has ruled, as it should, that he is a journalist whose only “crime” was providing evidence of war crimes and lies by the U.S. government to the public. It does not mean he will be released from the high-security HMS Belmarsh prison where, as Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, after visiting Julian there, said he was undergoing a “slow-motion execution.”
It does not mean that journalism is any less imperiled. Editors and publishers of five international media outlets —– The New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and DER SPIEGEL —– which published stories based on documents released by WikiLeaks, have urged that the U.S. charges be dropped and Julian be released. None of these media executives were charged with espionage. It does not dismiss the ludicrous ploy by the U.S. government to extradite an Australian citizen whose publication is not based in the U.S. and charge him under the Espionage Act. It continues the long Dickensian farce that mocks the most basic concepts of due process.
This ruling is based on the grounds that the U.S. government did not offer sufficient assurances that Julian would be granted the same First Amendment protections afforded to a U.S. citizen, should he stand trial. The appeal process is one more legal hurdle in the persecution of a journalist who should not only be free, but feted and honored as the most courageous of our generation.
Yes. He can file an appeal. But this means another year, perhaps longer, in harsh prison conditions as his physical and psychological health deteriorates. He has spent over five years in HMS Belmarsh without being charged. He spent seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy because the U.K. and Swedish governments refused to guarantee that he wouldn’t be extradited to the U.S., even though he agreed to return to Sweden to aid a preliminary investigation that was eventually dropped.
The judicial lynching of Julian was never about justice. The plethora of legal irregularities, including the recording of his meetings with attorneys by the Spanish security firm UC Global at the embassy on behalf of the CIA, alone should have seen the case thrown out of court as it eviscerates attorney-client privilege.
The U.S. has charged Julian with 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count of computer misuse, for an alleged conspiracy to take possession of and then publish national defense information. If found guilty on all of these charges he faces 175 years in a U.S. prison.
The extradition request is based on the 2010 release by WikiLeaks of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs — hundreds of thousands of classified documents, leaked to the site by Chelsea Manning, then an Army intelligence analyst, which exposed numerous U.S. war crimes including video images of the gunning down of two Reuters journalists and 10 other unarmed civilians in the Collateral Murder video, the routine torture of Iraqi prisoners, the covering up of thousands of civilian deaths and the killing of nearly 700 civilians that had approached too closely to U.S. checkpoints.
In February, lawyers for Julian submitted nine separate grounds for a possible appeal.
A two-day hearing in March, which I attended, was Julian’s last chance to request an appeal of the extradition decision made in 2022 by the then British home secretary, Priti Patel, and of many of the rulings of District Judge Baraitser in 2021.
The two High Court judges, Dame Victoria Sharp and Justice Jeremy Johnson, in March rejected most of Julian’s grounds of appeal. These included his lawyers’ contention that the UK-US extradition treaty bars extradition for political offenses; that the extradition request was made for the purpose of prosecuting him for his political opinions; that extradition would amount to retroactive application of the law — because it was not foreseeable that a century-old espionage law would be used against a foreign publisher; and that he would not receive a fair trial in the Eastern District of Virginia. The judges also refused to hear new evidence that the CIA plotted to kidnap and assassinate Julian, concluding — both perversely and incorrectly — that the CIA only considered these options because they believed Julian was planning to flee to Russia.
But the two judges determined Monday that it is “arguable” that a U.S. court might not grant Julian protection under the First Amendment, violating his rights to free speech as enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.
The judges in March asked the U.S. to provide written assurances that Julian would be protected under the First Amendment and that he would be exempt from a death penalty verdict. The U.S. assured the court that Julian would not be subjected to the death penalty, which Julian’s lawyers ultimately accepted. But the Department of Justice was unable to provide an assurance that Julian could mount a First Amendment defense in a U.S. court. Such a decision is made in a U.S. federal court, their lawyers explained.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg, who is prosecuting Julian, has argued that only U.S. citizens are guaranteed First Amendment rights in U.S. courts. Kromberg has stated that what Julian published was “not in the public interest” and that the U.S. was not seeking his extradition on political grounds.
Free speech is a key issue. If Julian is granted First Amendment rights in a U.S. court it will be very difficult for the U.S. to build a criminal case against him, since other news organizations, including The New York Times and The Guardian, published the material he released.
The extradition request is based on the contention that Julian is not a journalist and not protected under the First Amendment.
Julian’s attorneys and those representing the U.S. government have until May 24 to submit a draft order, which will determine when the appeal will be heard.
Julian committed the empire’s greatest sin — he exposed it as a criminal enterprise. He documented its lies, routine violation of human rights, wanton killing of innocent civilians, rampant corruption and war crimes. Republican or Democrat, Conservative or Labour, Trump or Biden — it does not matter. Those who manage the empire use the same dirty playbook.
The publication of classified documents is not a crime in the United States, but if Julian is extradited and convicted, it will become one.
Julian is in precarious physical and psychological health. His physical and psychological deterioration has resulted in a minor stroke, hallucinations and depression. He takes antidepressant medication and the antipsychotic quetiapine. He has been observed pacing his cell until he collapses, punching himself in the face and banging his head against the wall. He has spent weeks in the medical wing of Belmarsh, nicknamed “hell wing.” Prison authorities found “half of a razor blade” hidden under his socks. He has repeatedly called the suicide hotline run by the Samaritans because he thought about killing himself “hundreds of times a day.”
These slow-motion executioners have not yet completed their work. Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the Haitian independence movement, the only successful slave revolt in human history, was physically destroyed in the same manner. He was locked by the French in an unheated and cramped prison cell and left to die of exhaustion, malnutrition, apoplexy, pneumonia and probably tuberculosis.
Prolonged imprisonment, which the granting of this appeal perpetuates, is the point. The 12 years Julian has been detained — seven in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and over five in high-security Belmarsh Prison — have been accompanied by a lack of sunlight and exercise, as well as unrelenting threats, pressure, prolonged isolation, anxiety and constant stress. The goal is to destroy him.
We must free Julian. We must keep him out of the hands of the U.S. government. Given all he did for us, we owe him an unrelenting fight.
If there is no freedom of speech for Julian, there will be no freedom of speech for us.
Follow the Money: How Israel-Linked Billionaires Silenced US Campus Protests
Scheerpost, By Alan MacLeod / MintPress News, May 23, 2024
Thousands of students face severe consequences for protesting Gaza violence. Alan Macleod investigates the powerful financial and ideological ties to Israel driving the harsh responses from America’s top universities.
America’s universities are on fire. A protest movement against the violence in Gaza and U.S. colleges’ complicity in them has swept the nation, with encampments on college campuses in 45 of America’s 50 states. The crackdown has been swift; thousands of students have been arrested, charged, fined, lost their degrees, or even deported. Amid corporate media demanding a “Kent State 2.0”, riot police, armored vehicles and snipers have been deployed across the country to terrify those campaigning for justice into silence.
Why have overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations against a foreign power’s actions been met with such a heavy-handed response? A MintPress News investigation finds that those same elite institutions have deep financial and ideological ties to the state of Israel, are funded by pro-Israel billionaires who have demanded they take action to crush the student movement, are partially funded by the Israeli government, and exist in a climate where Washington has made it clear that the protests should not be tolerated.
ISRAEL’S BILLIONAIRE BACKERS
The movement began on April 17 at Columbia University, where a modest Gaza solidarity encampment was established. Protestors hardly expected to be welcomed by university authorities but were shocked as university president Minouche Shafik immediately called in the NYPD – the first time the university had allowed police to suppress dissent on campus since the famous 1968 demonstrations against the Vietnam War.
Shafik’s decision was no doubt influenced by the enormous pressure put on her by the university’s top donors – many of whom have deep connections to the Israeli state and its military
The turning point, Kraft said, was watching a publicity stunt by Shai Davidai, an Israeli-American academic at Columbia, who claimed his access to campus was revoked. Davidai had previously called the student protestors “Nazis” and “terrorists” and called for the National Guard to be set upon the encampment, obliquely referencing the Kent State University Massacre while doing so.
Kraft is one of Columbia’s most important donors, giving the institution millions of dollars, including $3 million to fund the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life.
He also has deep connections to Israel, having visited the country over 100 times, including to have private lunch with his friend, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said, “Israel does not have a more loyal friend than Robert Kraft.”
Netanyahu is correct. Kraft is one of the Israel lobby’s primary benefactors, donating millions to groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), The Israel Project and StandWithUs. He pledged a gigantic $100 million to his own Foundation to Combat Antisemitism – a group that presents critics of Israeli policy with the charge of anti-Jewish racism. He has also funded a host of pro-Israel politicians in races against progressive, anti-war challengers. A recent MintPress News investigation took a closer look at how Kraft is a key actor in trying to launder Israel’s image in America.
LEON COOPERMAN
Another billionaire benefactor pulling his Columbia funding is Leon Cooperman………………………………………
LEN BLAVATNIK
A third billionaire backer using his financial clout to pressure Columbia is Soviet-born oligarch Len Blavatnik, who demanded that the university protestors be “held to account.” Leaked messages reveal that for Blavatnik, this meant using the full weight of the law against protestors………………………………………….
IDAN OFER
From Columbia, the protests quickly spread across America, including to many of the country’s most prestigious institutions, including Harvard.
LESLIE WEXNER
Another billionaire apparently “stunned and sickened” by Harvard’s pro-Hamas positions is former Victoria’s Secret CEO Leslie Wexner. Apart from Wexner’s exceptionally close and well-publicized connections to child sex traffickers and Israeli intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein, Wexner is a major donor to Israeli causes……………………………………………
MARC ROWAN
Nowhere, however, has the elite backlash to student protests been as bitter as at the University of Pennsylvania. Leading the charge to suppress pro-Palestine sentiment on campus there has been Marc Rowan. The billionaire investor demanded that his side must “exact a price” on students who express solidarity with Palestine. ……………………………………………………………………
ACADEMIC COLLABORATION
In addition to pressure from donors, elite U.S. universities have close academic and business ties to Israel………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
PAID FOR BY ISRAEL
However, more controversial than the academic collaboration is the Israeli government’s direct funding of American educational institutions. MIT, for example, is awash in Israeli cash. Scientists Against Genocide, a group at MIT, report that, since 2015, the university has received over $11 million in authorized research funding from the Israeli Ministry of Defense. This cash has reached various departments, including Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Biological Engineering, Physics, Aeronautics and Astronautics, Materials Science and Engineering, and Civil and Environmental Engineering…………………………………………………………………….
TIES TO THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
It could be argued that MIT could reasonably be accused of directly abetting a genocide in Gaza. However, MIT and other elite institutions are under enormous governmental pressure from the other side. Its president, Sally Kornbluth, as well as Harvard president Claudine Gay and Pennsylvania’s Magill, were brought before Congress and grilled on their universities’ alleged support for Hamas and indifference to antisemitism. The case made national news and focused waves of pressure on universities nationwide………………………………………………….
While corporate media has demonized the students as out-of-touch supporters of terrorism, they enjoy widespread support among their peers. Students approved a resolution calling on MIT to cut all research and financial ties to the Israeli military, with 63.7% of undergraduates and 70.5% of graduates voting in favor of it. American adults aged between 18 and 44 support the nationwide protests by a ratio of 4:3.
THE CRACKDOWN
Authorities, however, have been in little mood to negotiate, and images of black-clad riot police beating up and dragging away students and faculty members have gone viral across the globe………………………………………………………………………………………..
SHREDDING THE FIRST AMENDMENT…………………………………………………………
Despite the campus demonstrations being overwhelmingly peaceful, authorities have chosen to crack down harshly upon them, shredding the First Amendment in the process. Why have both universities and the government shown virtually zero tolerance towards those protesting against genocide? Firstly, because so many big-money university benefactors are themselves committed Zionists and have deep ties to the Israeli state………………………………………… https://scheerpost.com/2024/05/23/follow-the-money-how-israel-linked-billionaires-silenced-us-campus-protests/—
‘Bring Julian home’: the Australian campaign to free Assange
Assange’s supporters say what Wikileaks revealed about power and access to information is as relevant today as ever.
Aljazeera, By Lyndal Rowlands 19 May 2024
Melbourne, Australia – At home in Australia, Julian Assange’s family and friends are preparing for his possible extradition to the United States, ahead of what could be his final hearing in the United Kingdom on Monday.
Assange’s half-brother Gabriel Shipton, who spoke to Al Jazeera from Melbourne before flying to London, said he had already booked a flight to the US.
A filmmaker who worked on blockbusters like Mad Max before producing a documentary on his brother, Shipton has travelled the world advocating for Assange’s release, from Mexico City to London and Washington, DC.
Earlier this year, he was a guest of cross-bench supporters of Assange at US President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.
The invitation reflected interest in his brother’s case both in Washington, DC and back home in Australia. Biden told journalists last month he was “considering” a request from Australia to drop the US prosecution.
Assange rose to prominence with the launch of Wikileaks in 2006, creating an online whistleblower platform for people to submit classified material such as documents and videos anonymously. Footage of a US Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad, which killed a dozen people, including two journalists, raised the platform’s profile, while the 2010 release of thousands of classified US documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a trove of diplomatic cables, cemented its reputation.
Shipton told Al Jazeera the recent attention from Washington, DC had been notable, even as his brother’s options to fight extradition in the UK appeared close to running out.
“To get attention there on a case of a single person is very significant, particularly after Julian’s been fighting this extradition for five years,” Shipton told Al Jazeera, adding that he hoped the Australian prime minister was following up with Biden.
We’re always trying to encourage the Australian government to do more.”
A test for US democracy
Assange’s possible extradition to the US could see freedom of expression thrown into the spotlight during an election year that has already seen mass arrests at student antiwar protests.
Shipton told Al Jazeera the pro-Palestinian protests had helped bring “freedom of speech, freedom to assembly, particularly in the United States, front of mind again”, issues he notes have parallels with his brother’s story.
While Wikileaks published material about many countries, it was the administration of former US President Donald Trump that charged Assange in 2019 with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act.
US lawyers argue Assange is guilty of conspiring with Chelsea Manning, a former army intelligence analyst, who spent seven years in prison for leaking material to WikiLeaks before former US President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.
“It’s an invaluable resource that remains utterly essential to understand how power works, not just US power, but global power,” Antony Loewenstein, an independent Australian journalist and author, said of the Wikileaks archive.
“I always quote and detail [Wikileaks’s] work on a range of issues from the drug war, to Israel/Palestine, to the US war on terror, to Afghanistan,” Loewenstein said, noting that Wikileaks also published materials on Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
“It’s just an incredible historical resource,” he said.
Loewenstein’s most recent book, the Palestine Laboratory, explores Israel’s role in spreading mass surveillance around the world, another issue Loewenstein notes, that Assange often spoke about.
“One thing that Julian has often said, and he’s correct, is that the internet is on the one hand an incredibly powerful information tool… but it’s also the biggest mass surveillance tool ever designed in history,” said Loewenstein……………………………………………. more https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/5/19/bring-julian-home-the-australian-campaign-to-free-assange
Mini-Nukes, Big Bucks: The Interests Behind the Small Modular Reactor Push
Scandal-ridden SNC-Lavalin is playing a major role in the push for SMRs.
Then there’s Terrestrial Energy
the Breakthrough Energy Coalition (BEC) no longer makes its membership public, the original coalition included such familiar names as Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Marc Benioff (Salesforce), Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Jack Ma (Alibaba), David Rubenstein (Carlyle Group), Tom Steyer, George Soros, and Mark Zuckerberg. Many of those names (and others) can now be found on the “Board and Investors” page of Breakthrough Energy’s website.
Why Canada is now poised to pour billions of tax dollars into developing Small Modular Reactors as a “clean energy” climate solution
by Joyce Nelson, January 14, 2021
https://watershedsentinel.ca/articles/mini-nukes-big-bucks-the-money-behind-small-modular-reactors/—
Back in 2018, the Watershed Sentinel ran an article warning that “unless Canadians speak out,” a huge amount of taxpayer dollars would be spent on small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), which author D. S. Geary called “risky, retro, uncompetitive, expensive, and completely unnecessary.” Now here we are in 2021 with the Trudeau government and four provinces (Saskatchewan, Ontario, New Brunswick, and Alberta) poised to pour billions of dollars into SMRs as a supposed “clean energy” solution to climate change.
It’s remarkable that only five years ago, the National Energy Board predicted: “No new nuclear units are anticipated to be built in any province” by 2040.
So what happened?
The answer involves looking at some of the key influencers at work behind the scenes, lobbying for government funding for SMRs.
The Carney factor
When the first three provinces jumped on the SMR bandwagon in 2019 at an estimated price tag of $27 billion, the Green Party called the plan “absurd” – especially noting that SMRs don’t even exist yet as viable technologies but only as designs on paper.
According to the BBC (March 9, 2020), some of the biggest names in the nuclear industry gave up on SMRs for various reasons: Babcock & Wilcox in 2017, Transatomic Power in 2018, and Westinghouse (after a decade of work on its project) in 2014.
But in 2018, the private equity arm of Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management Inc. announced that it was buying Westinghouse’s global nuclear business (Westinghouse Electric Co.) for $4.6 billion.
Two years later, in August 2020, Brookfield announced that Mark Carney, former Bank of England and Bank of Canada governor, would be joining the company as its vice-chair and head of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) and impact fund investing, while remaining as UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance.
“We are not going to solve climate change without the private sector,” Carney told the press, calling the climate crisis “one of the greatest commercial opportunities of our time.” He considers Canada “an energy superpower,” with nuclear a key asset.
Carney is an informal advisor to PM Trudeau and to British PM Boris Johnson. In November, Johnson announced £525 million (CAD$909.6 million) for “large and small-scale nuclear plants.”
SNC-Lavalin
Scandal-ridden SNC-Lavalin is playing a major role in the push for SMRs. In her mid-December 2020 newsletter, Elizabeth May, the Parliamentary Leader of the Green Party, focused on SNC-Lavalin, reminding readers that in 2015, then-PM Stephen Harper sold the commercial reactor division of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL) “to SNC-Lavalin for the sweetheart deal price of $15 million
May explained, “SNC-Lavalin formed a consortium called the Canadian National Energy Alliance (CNEA) to run some of the broken-apart bits of AECL. CNEA has been the big booster of what sounds like some sort of warm and cuddly version of nuclear energy – Small Modular Reactors. Do not be fooled. Not only do we not need new nuclear, not only does it have the same risks as previous nuclear reactors and creates long-lived nuclear wastes, it is more tied to the U.S. military-industrial complex than ever before. That’s because SNC-Lavalin’s partners in the CNEA are US companies Fluor and Jacobs,” who both have contracts with US Department of Energy nuclear-weapons facilities.”
But, states May, “Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan has been sucked into the latest nuclear propaganda – that ‘there is no pathway to Net Zero [carbon emissions] without nuclear’.”
Terrestrial Energy
Then there’s Terrestrial Energy, which in mid-October 2020 received a $20 million grant for SMR development from NRCan’s O’Regan and Navdeep Bains (Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry). The announcement prompted more than 30 Canadian NGOs to call SMRs “dirty, dangerous, and distracting” from real, available solutions to climate change.
The Connecticut-based company has a subsidiary in Oakville, Ontario. Its advisory board includes Stephen Harper; Michael Binder, the former president and CEO of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission; and (as of October) Dr. Ian Duncan, the former UK Minister of Climate Change in the Dept. of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
Perhaps more important, Terrestrial Energy’s advisory board includes Dr. Ernest Moniz, the former US Secretary of the Dept. of Energy (2013-2017) who provided more than $12 billion in loan guarantees to the nuclear industry. Moniz has been a key advisor to the Biden-Harris transition team, which has come out in favour of SMRs, calling them “game-changing technologies” at “half the construction cost of today’s reactors.”
In 2015, while the COP 21 Paris Climate Agreement was being finalized, Moniz told reporters that SMRs could lead to “better financing terms” than traditional nuclear plants because they would change the scale of capital at risk. For years, banks and financial institutions have been reluctant to invest in money-losing nuclear projects, so now the goal is to get governments to invest, especially in SMRs.
That has been the agenda of a powerful lobby group that has been working closely with NRCan for several years.
The “billionaires’ nuclear club”
The 2015 Paris climate talks featured what cleantechnica.com called a “splashy press conference” by Bill Gates to announce the launch of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition (BEC) – a group of (originally) 28 high net-worth investors, aiming “to provide early-stage capital for technologies that offer promise in bringing affordable clean energy to billions.”
Though BEC no longer makes its membership public, the original coalition included such familiar names as Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Marc Benioff (Salesforce), Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Jack Ma (Alibaba), David Rubenstein (Carlyle Group), Tom Steyer, George Soros, and Mark Zuckerberg. Many of those names (and others) can now be found on the “Board and Investors” page of Breakthrough Energy’s website.
Writing in Counterpunch (Dec. 4, 2015) shortly after BEC’s launch, Linda Pentz Gunter noted that many of those 28 BEC billionaires (collectively worth some $350 billion at the time) are pro-nuclear and Gates himself “is already squandering part of his wealth on Terra Power LLC, a nuclear design and engineering company seeking an elusive, expensive and futile so-called Generation IV traveling wave reactor” for SMRs. (In 2016, Terra Power, based in Bellevue, Washington, received a $40 million grant from Ernest Moniz’s Department of Energy.)
According to cleantechnica.com, the Breakthrough Energy Coalition “does have a particular focus on nuclear energy.” Think of BEC as the billionaires’ nuclear club.
By 2017, BEC was launching Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), a $1 billion fund to provide start-up capital to clean-tech companies in several countries.
Going after the public purse
Bill Gates was apparently very busy during the 2015 Paris climate talks. He also went on stage during the talks to announce a collaboration among 24 countries and the EU on something called Mission Innovation – an attempt to “accelerate global clean energy innovation” and “increase government support” for the technologies. Mission Innovation’s key private sector partners include the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, the World Economic Forum, the International Energy Agency, and the World Bank.
An employee at Natural Resources Canada, Amanda Wilson, was appointed as one of the 12 international members of the Mission Innovation Steering Committee.
In December 2017, Bill Gates announced that the Breakthrough Energy Coalition was partnering with Mission Innovation members Canada, UK, France, Mexico, and the European Commission in a “public-private collaboration” to “double public investment in clean energy innovation.”
Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources at the time, Jim Carr, said the partnership with BEC “will greatly benefit the environment and the economy. Working side by side with innovators like Bill Gates can only serve to enhance our purpose and inspire others.”
Dr. M.V. Ramana, an expert on nuclear energy and a professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at UBC, told me by email: “As long as Bill Gates is wasting his own money or that of other billionaires, it is not so much of an issue. The problem is that he is lobbying hard for government investment.”
Dr. Ramana explained that because SMRs only exist on paper, “the scale of investment needed to move these paper designs to a level of detail that would satisfy any reasonable nuclear safety regulator that the design is safe” would be in the billions of dollars. “I don’t see Gates and others being willing to invest anything of that scale. Instead, they invest a relatively small amount of money (compared to what they are worth financially) and then ask for government handouts for the vast majority of the investment that is needed.”
Kevin Kamps, Radioactive Waste Specialist at Beyond Nuclear, told me by email that the companies involved in SMRs “don’t care” if the technology is actually workable, “so long as they get paid more subsidies from the unsuspecting public. It’s not a question of it working, necessarily,” he noted.
Gordon Edwards, President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, says governments “are being suckers. Because if Wall Street and the banks will not finance this, why should it be the role of the government to engage in venture capitalism of this kind?”
“Roadmap” to a NICE future
By 2018, NRCan was pouring money into a 10-month, pan-Canadian “conversation” about SMRs that brought together some 180 individuals from First Nations and northern communities, provincial and territorial governments, industry, utilities, and “stakeholders.” The resulting November 2018 report, A Call to Action: A Canadian Roadmap for Small Modular Reactors, enthusiastically noted that “Canada’s nuclear industry is poised to be a leader in an emerging global market estimated at $150 billion a year by 2040.”
At the same time, Bill Gates announced the launch of Breakthrough Energy Europe, a collaboration with the European Commission (one of BEC’s five Mission Innovation partners) in the amount of 100 million euros for clean-tech innovation.
Gates’ PR tactic is effective: provide a bit of capital to create an SMR “bandwagon,” with governments fearing their economies would be left behind unless they massively fund such innovations.
NRCan’s SMR Roadmap was just in time for Canada’s hosting of the Clean Energy Ministerial/Mission Innovation summit in Vancouver in May 2019 to “accelerate progress toward a clean energy future.” Canada invested $30 million in Breakthrough Energy Solutions Canada to fund start-up companies.
A particular focus of the CEM/MI summit was a CEM initiative called “Nuclear Innovation: Clean Energy (NICE) Future,” with all participants receiving a book highlighting SMRs. As Tanya Glafanheim and M.V. Ramana warned in thetyee.ca (May 27, 2019) in advance of the summit, “Note to Ministers from 25 countries: Prepare to be dangerously greenwashed.”
Greenwash vs public backlash
While releasing the federal SMR Action Plan on December 18, O’Regan called it “the next great opportunity for Canada.”
Bizarrely, the Action Plan states that by developing SMRs, our governments would be “supporting reconciliation with Indigenous peoples” – but a Special Chiefs Assembly of the Assembly of First Nations passed a unanimous 2018 resolution demanding that “the Government of Canada cease funding and support” of SMRs. And in June 2019, the Anishinabek Chiefs-in-Assembly (representing 40 First Nations across Ontario) unanimously opposed “any effort to situate SMRs within our territory.”
Some 70 NGOs across Canada are opposed to SMRs, which are being pushed as a replacement for diesel in remote communities, for use in off-grid mining, tar-sands development, and heavy industry, and as exportable expertise in a global market.
On December 7, the Hill Times published an open letter to the Treasury Board of Canada from more than 100 women leaders across Canada, stating: “We urge you to say ‘no’ to the nuclear industry that is asking for billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to subsidize a dangerous, highly-polluting and expensive technology that we don’t need. Instead, put more money into renewables, energy efficiency and energy conservation.”
No new money for SMRs was announced in the Action Plan, but in her Fall Economic Statement, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland touted SMRs and noted that “targeted action by the government to mobilize private capital will better position Canadian firms to bring their technologies to market.” That suggests the Canada Infrastructure Bank will use its $35 billion for such projects.
It will take a Herculean effort from the public to defeat this NICE Future, but along with the Assembly of First Nations, three political parties – the NDP, the Bloc Quebecois, and the Green Party – have now come out against SMRs.
Award-winning author Joyce Nelson’s latest book, Bypassing Dystopia, is published by Watershed Sentinel Books. She can be reached via www.joycenelson.ca.
The Heroism of David McBride
By John Kiriakou https://consortiumnews.com/2024/05/16/john-kiriakou-the-heroism-of-david-mcbride/
By 2014 McBride had compiled a dossier into profound command failings that saw examples of potential war crimes in Afghanistan overlooked and other soldiers wrongly accused. On Tuesday he was sentenced to nearly six years in jail.
Sometimes a whistleblower does everything right. He or she makes a revelation that is clearly in the public interest. The revelation is clearly a violation of the law. And then he or she is even more clearly abused by the government. It would be great if these stories always had happy endings. Unfortunately, they don’t.
In this case, the whistleblower, the hero, Australian David McBride has been sentenced to five years and eight months in prison for telling the truth. He will not be eligible for parole for 27 months.
David McBride is former British Army officer and a lawyer with the Australian Special Forces who blew the whistle on war crimes committed by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, specifically the killing of 39 unarmed Afghan prisoners, farmers, and civilians in 2012.
After failing to raise a response through official channels, McBride shared the information with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which published a series of major reports based on the material.
The ABC broadcasts in 2017 led to a major inquiry that upheld many of the allegations. Despite this, the ABC and its journalists themselves came under threat of prosecution for their work on the story.
The ABC offices in Sydney were raided by the national police, but in the end the government did not prosecute an ABC journalist because it was not in the public interest. McBride himself, however, was prosecuted for dissemination of official information.
Two Tours in Afghanistan
Let’s go back a few years. McBride at the time already was a seasoned attorney. After studying for a second law degree at Oxford University, he joined the British military and eventually moved back to Australia where he became a lawyer in the Australian Defence Forces (ADF). In that role he had two tours in Afghanistan in 2011 and 2013.
While on deployment, McBride became critical of the terms of engagement and other regulations that soldiers were working under, which he felt were endangering military personnel for the sake of political imperatives determined elsewhere.
By 2014 McBride had compiled a dossier into profound command failings that saw examples of potential war crimes in Afghanistan overlooked and other soldiers wrongly accused. His internal complaints were suppressed and ignored.
McBride’s reports also looked at other matters, including the military’s handling of sexual abuse allegations. After his use of internal channels had proven ineffective, McBride gave his report to the police. And eventually, he contacted journalists at ABC.
ABC’s Afghan Files documented several incidents of Australian soldiers killing unarmed civilians, including children, and questioned the prevalent “warrior culture” in the special forces. Subsequent to McBride’s disclosures, the behavior of other Coalition Special Forces in Afghanistan also came under sustained investigation.
In many ways, McBride’s reports went further than the issues identified by ABC. Amid prevalent rumors that Australian troops were responsible for war crimes, questionable deaths in Afghanistan had led to calls for investigations.
Report Vindicated McBride & ABC
In November 2020, the Brereton report (formally called the Inspector General of the Australian Defence Force Afghan Inquiry report) was published, utterly vindicating McBride and the ABC. Judge Paul Brereton found evidence of multiple incidents involving Australian personnel that had led to 39 deaths. Among his recommendations were the investigation of these incidents for possible future criminal charges.
There would be almost no criminal charges, however. At least, there would be only one eventual criminal charge against one single soldier in the murder of Afghan civilians. There have been no charges against the officers who covered up the war crimes.
Instead, though, there would be serious charges against McBride for “theft of government property” (the information) and for “sharing with members of the press documents classified as secret.” He faced life in prison.
McBride’s sentence illustrates the challenges that Australian whistleblowers face when reporting evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to the public health or public safety.
First, just like in the United States, there are no protections for national security whistleblowers. McBride took his career — indeed, his life — into his hands when he decided to go public with his revelations. But what else could he do?
Second, as in the United States, there is no affirmative defense. McBride, like Edward Snowden, Jeffrey Sterling, Daniel Hale and like me, was forbidden from standing up in court and saying, “Yes, I gave the information to the media because I witnessed a war crime or a crime against humanity. What I did was in the public interest.”
Those words are never permitted to be spoken in a court in the United States or Australia.
Recalling Nuremberg
Third, Australia is in dire need of some legal reforms. The judge in McBride’s case said at sentencing that McBride, “had no duty as an army officer beyond following orders.” That defense was attempted at Nuremberg and it failed. It’s time for the Australian judiciary to get into the 21st century.
There are a couple points of light in this whole fiasco. The Brereton Commission did indeed recommend that 19 members of the Australian Special Forces be prosecuted for war crimes. So far, one has been charged with a crime. He is accused of shooting and killing a civilian in a wheat field in Uruzgan Province in 2012.
Indeed, Andrew Wilkie, a former Australian government intelligence analyst-turned-whistleblower, and now member of Parliament, says that “the Australian government hates whistleblowers” and that it wanted to punish David McBride and to send a signal to other government insiders to remain silent, even in the face of witnessing horrible crimes. I would say exactly the same thing about the United States.
I’m proud to call David McBride a friend. I know exactly what he’s going through right now. But his sacrifice will not be in vain. History will smile on him. Yes, the next several years will be tough. He’ll be a prisoner. He’ll be separated from his family. And when he gets out of prison, well into his 60s, he’ll have to begin rebuilding his life. But he is right and his government is wrong. And future generations will understand and appreciate what he did for them.
John Kiriakou is a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act — a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.
And McBride will be allowed to appeal his conviction. Still any other light at the end of the tunnel is likely an oncoming train, rather than relief for the whistleblower.
But the bottom line is this. There is a war against whistleblowers in Australia just like there is in the United States.
Enforcing Silence on Genocide
The U.S. public should by now be realizing that instead of stopping genocide, U.S. institutional and media authority is actively stamping out cries to stop the mass murder being committed with U.S. complicity, writes Elizabeth Vos.
By Elizabeth Vos, Consortium News, May 4, 2024, https://consortiumnews.com/2024/05/04/enforcing-silence-on-genocide/
Developments on university campuses and in Congress this week showed that the U.S. government’s top priority is not protecting students or civilian lives in Gaza, but to protect Israel’s ability to continue its unimpeded slaughter.
Anti-genocide student protestors at Columbia University, demanding Columbia divest from Israel, occupied the campus’s Hamilton Hall on Tuesday and renamed it Hind’s Hall after Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza earlier this year. The Columbia protest has inspired more than 40 other anti-genocide university encampments across the country and in other nations.
On the morning the students occupied Hamilton Hall, MSNBC’s Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski compared the student protests to Jan. 6, calling for authorities to “just start arresting people.” Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti Defamation League, echoed the comparison in the same MSNBC segment. Other supporters of Israel also made the same Jan. 6 anaolgy on social media early Tuesday morning.
Former CNN anchor Don Lemon wrote on X that the Columbia protest “feels January 6th ish to me” because the protesters had occupied a building. Not a federal government building, but a university hall. Has Lemon not heard of a sit-in?
Missing was the most apt and obvious comparison: the occupation of the same Columbia hall took place 56 years to the day since it was the site of a police crackdown on an historic student occupation against the Vietnam War.
Columbia University itself commemorates the anti-Vietnam War occupation of the same building by student protesters in 1968 on their own website. Nonetheless, the NYPD descended on the Hall on Tuesday night at the direct request of Columbia University President Minouche Shafik.
[See: The Israeli Connection to the Raid on Columbia University]
All the comparisons to Jan. 6 came less than 24 hours before the brutal crackdown at Columbia University and the City College of New York by the NYPD Tuesday night, in which almost 300 people were arrested.
Following the New York City arrests, CNN’s Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash argued on air that the protests were “harkening back to the 1930’s in Europe,” claiming some Jewish people in the U.S. “feel unsafe,” words that completely echoed those of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
How unsafe did students at the University of Pennsylvania feel when a Zionist counter protester sprayed their belongings with an unknown substance?
How unsafe did students feel at multiple universities when police violently arrested professors trying to shield them? In one case in St. Louis, police broke the ribs of a 65-year-old Southern Illinois professor.
How safe did UCLA students feel when they were attacked with fireworks and bats by counter protesters?
In addition to the repulsive comparison with Nazis, Bash’s claim omits the context of previous legitimate antiwar protests that acted virtually identically to the current-era largely peaceful student actions.
These portrayals also excuse the police brutality that followed hours later and has continued since. Police reportedly allowed Zionist counter protesters to violently attack the UCLA encampment for hours without intervention on Tuesday night, only to clear the encampment the next evening using extreme force that included shooting students at close range with rubber bullets.
Bash and the rest of the talking heads focused on the feelings of Zionists in the U.S., deflecting from the horror taking place in Gaza, further dehumanizing civilians there.
The horror on the ground in Gaza is beyond imagination. We can’t say how many Palestinians have been killed, as the Gaza health authorities were forced to stop counting months ago when the healthcare system there collapsed under Israel’s assault. We’ve been using the ‘15,000 children have died’ number for months, there’s no telling how many have been killed, maimed, or orphaned to date.
The experience of witnessing this ceaseless genocide in the same moment that protests against it are violently put down was summed up by one social media user:
“I am watching a toddler die on a table in a field hospital in Rafah with half her face blown apart while listening to college students fight tears reporting on a police assault on their campus for protesting that, and I feel like I am losing my fucking mind.”
Also unmentioned by Morning Joe and Dana Bash is the fact that Israel’s prime minister is being actively shielded by the U.S. from being charged by the International Criminal Court.
It doesn’t stop there: corporate media and police are not the only parts of the establishment trying to silence students and wider criticism of Israel.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill on Wednesday that, if made law, will codify a definition of anti-Semitism created by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) into Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a federal anti-discrimination law.
This would change the current definition of anti-Semitism to include criticism of Israel as hate speech. The IHRA sets out 11 examples of anti-Semitism.
Critics argue that the bill’s language is vague and would reportedly allow the federal Department of Education to restrict funding and other resources to campuses perceived as tolerating so-called “anti-Semitism,” not to mention the disbarring of discourse on social media platforms by citing “hate speech.” Multiple human rights groups have decried the bill.
The latest House bill is an addition to the anti-BDS laws already in place across 38 states, many of which impact speech on university campuses. One example can be found in Arkansas, where a 2017 anti-BDS law forces speakers at the University of Arkansas to sign an anti-BDS pledge, or they will not be paid.
This resulted in legal action, but the Supreme Court ultimately refused to hear the case, allowing the law to stand in deference to the interests of a foreign nation.
Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn went further, calling for: “Any student who has promoted terrorism or engaged in terrorists acts on behalf of Hamas should be immediately be added to the terrorist watch list and placed on the TSA No Fly List.”
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar denounced Blackburn’s sentiments as “insanely dangerous.” But Blackburn wasn’t alone. House Speaker Mike Johnson also called on the F.B.I. to investigate protesters and suggested the National Guard should be deployed.
We’ve collectively realized that no one, no protective force nor institution of power is going to stop Israel’s violence.
The U.S. public should by now be realizing that instead of stopping genocide, U.S. institutional and media authority is actively stamping out cries to stop the mass murder being committed with U.S. complicity.
Covering for Israel is evidently more important to U.S. leaders than international law, than the lives of civilians or students, than freedom of speech, and even, it seems, their own re-election as they resist polls showing a majority of Americans want an end to the killing in Gaza.
Elizabeth Vos is a freelance reporter, co-host of CN Live! and regular contributor to Consortium News.
New US Antisemitism Law Turns Critics Against Israeli Genocide Into Criminals
By Joachim Hagopian, Global Research, May 03, 2024
On Wednesday May 1st, the House overwhelmingly passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act by a 320-91 vote, with only 21 Republicans joined by 70 Democrats against it. Expanding the scope of what is legally considered antisemitism, this is another bipartisan uniparty trap to ensnare the thousands of protesters exercising their free speech against the apartheid Israel’s extermination of Palestinians, in effect criminalizing those that are critical of the genocide. This is piece of legislation is a betrayal of our First Amendment rights and a betrayal of the American people, and a testimonial how AIPAC Israel through bribery and blackmail have turned our constitutional republic into a totalitarian technocratic police state.
Foreign national influence is outlawed in the United States except with one exception, the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) that allows Zionist Israel money and bribery control to essentially own the treasonous US Congress.
Through intelligence agencies Mossad, CIA and MI6 in addition to AIPAC, US politicians are systemically coerced, bribed and blackmailed into unconditional support for Israel.
As Tucker Carlson admitted recently to Joe Rogan, politicians are afraid to not vote in line with these intimidation tactics imposed by foreign agent operatives, that threaten kiddie porn on their computers or truth exposing pedo-blackmail activity, to ensure that Zionist Israel always gets what it wants with total impunity. With this kind of captured control over politicians, and now with this latest antisemitism law, dare criticize Israel or Zionism or Jewish power, it can now get us locked up under antisemitic hate speech. Zionist bloodline moneychangers like the Rothschilds and Rockefellers would not want it any other way.
A Thursday May 2nd Truthout article states:
House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to approve legislation directing the U.S. Department of Education to consider a dubious definition of antisemitism, despite warnings from Jewish-led groups that the measure speciously conflates legitimate criticism of the Israeli government with bigotry against Jewish people.
Uniparty Republicans and Democrats passing this new antisemitism bill destroying US Constitution’s First Amendment that guarantees our citizens’ free speech rights, confirms that US Congress panders and grovels in submission to their master Zionist Jewish State and its bloodline master founding owner, the Rothschild banking cartel. America’s uniparty is owned and operated by foreign agent AIPAC Israel.
Again, look at what inexhaustible lengths our Congress goes to, to protect the rights, security and safety of Jews, while Palestinian Arabs are brutally massacred daily and American citizens’ disappearing constitutional rights, our safety and national security are blatantly trampled upon.
Only the apparent “chosen ones” receive preferential legal protection under bipartisan US law, while all the rest of us members of the human race, to Israel and US Congress, are all Palestinians in the genocidal crosshairs of our common Zionist Darkside enemy.
My article on Global Research last week is titled “In Defense of Genocide and War on ‘Antisemitism’, There Go Our Constitutional Liberties.” I cite the increasing number anti-hate speech laws grossly conflating criticism of Israeli genocide with antisemitism conveniently misused to falsely justify criminalizing and silencing our fundamental First Amendment rights of free speech, including the right to assemble for peaceful protest.
On Saturday April 27th, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) called out his colleagues over this very same issue:
Some of my colleagues are introducing legislation to create federally sanctioned ‘antisemitism monitors’ at colleges. I’ll vote No. Policing speech, religion, and assembly is not the role of the federal government. In fact, it’s expressly prohibited by the U.S. Constitution.
In a related news story illustrating how the will of Zionist Israel controlling America through AIPAC bribery and Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as Israel’s thuggish enforcer, the bought and sold US Congress completely abandoned the will of the American people demanding that the recently passed FISA law be stopped or amended. The ADL/Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations actively lobbied Congress emphasizing the FISA renewal was necessary to keep Israel, Jews in the US and all Americans safe from terrorism.
The need for spying without warrant on anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian protesters was used to sell the FISA law’s passage as the biggest domestic surveillance legislation since the subversive Patriot Act. The alleged “rise of antisemitism” events in America hyped artificially by the mainstream media also helped pass the law during the current wave of college campus pro-Palestine protests.
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt is attempting to create a legal framework whereby pro-Palestine protesters are charged with providing material support to the designated foreign terrorist organization Hamas. This move along with inciting antisemitic hate speech are the legal angles currently in process to violate and eliminate our First Amendment free speech rights that includes the right to protest. The mass arrests of hundreds of peaceful student protesters across US campuses is part of this unconstitutional dystopian agenda.
ASL’s Greenblatt showed up at the Columbia University campus calling for the NYPD and/or National Guard to arrest and expel “student agitators” in order to assure the public safety and civil rights of Jewish students since Columbia administration’s response was deemed too lax. And as my article alluded to, hundreds of protesters exercising their legal constitutional rights were illegally incarcerated across multiple campuses nationwide. Again, we are rapidly in tyrannical freefall descent towards the Soviet Gulag era.
It seems what Israel, AIPAC and ADL Zionists want, Israel, AIPAC and ADL Zionists get……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Moreover, it’s an overtly dangerous indication that the US federal government is aggressively silencing and outlawing Americans’ right to dissent, protest and exercise free speech, while condoning and protecting Israeli genocide and war crime atrocities in favor of unconstitutional censorship, suppression and unlawful criminalization. All Americans should be joining the college students in mass protests against our own government’s all too obvious treasonous betrayal in addition to the genocide. We the People need to hold both the Israeli government as well as the US government to account for their appallingly egregious, thus far unprosecuted crimes.
The US and Israel should not be above the law, but if no court, agency or organization with the legal, political and economic will, clout and teeth is in place to hold them accountable, then they can and still will get away with murder and genocide. With the geopolitical and economic power dynamics shifting currently from unipolar kingpin America led Western bloc to the multipolar Global South nation majority led by Eastern powers Russia and China, gradually the international community is in a position to effectively hold them and in fact, any nation that flagrantly violates international law accountable…………………………………………………………….more https://www.globalresearch.ca/antisemitism-law-critics-israeli-genocide/5856331
US State Department says Israeli units committed ‘gross violations of human rights’ prior to Oct. 7,
Comment: But don’t expect anything to be done about it.
By Ryan King, New York Times. April 29, 2024
Five Israel Defense Force units committed “gross violations of human rights” outside of the Gaza Strip prior to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack that killed hundreds, the State Department announced Monday.
Four of the IDF units have been “remediated” by Israel, a spokesman said, adding an unidentified fifth unit is still subject to review about whether the US should impose penalties — including cutting off military training, equipment and other aid.
“We continue to be in consultations and engagements with the Government of Israel. They have submitted additional information as it pertains to that unit,” State Department principal deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters.
Under the Leahy Laws, the US is bared from assisting military units accused of violating human rights law.
On April 19, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he had made “determinations” on accusations of human rights violations in the West Bank, triggering speculation that sanctions were imminent.
However, in a letter last week to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Blinken revealed that the department had received new information about the fifth unit, widely reported to be the Netzah Yehuda battalion — made up primary of ultra-Orthodox nationalist Jews.
“The government of Israel has submitted additional information. We are currently reviewing it,” he said. “We’re engaging with them in a process and we’ll make a decision from there when that process is complete.”
Patel was coy about the timeline of events and when a final decision on sanctions would be made.
“The standard of remediation is that these respective countries take effective steps to hold the accountable party to justice. And that is different on a country-by-country basis,” he said.
Patel also underscored that the incident “does not have a bearing on the broader security relationship” between the US and Israel.
Reporters grilled Patel about whether the State Department was itself in compliance with the Leahy Laws by giving Israel an opportunity to remediate the situation, forcing the spokesman to deny that the Jewish state was receiving “special treatment” from Washington.
The Netzah Yehuda battalion was accused of wrongdoing in the death of 78-year-old Palestinian American Omar Assad, who died of a heart attack in January 2022 following his arrest at an Israeli military checkpoint……………………………………………………………………………….
The State Department announcement came down after reports emerged that the International Criminal Court is considering levying war crimes charges against Israeli leaders over the conduct of the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip
“On this investigation, our position is clear,” Patel said. “We continue to believe that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over the Palestinian situation.”
The Israeli Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. https://www.sott.net/article/491118-US-State-Department-says-Israeli-units-committed-gross-violations-of-human-rights-PRIOR-to-Oct-7
As Peace Protests Are Violently Suppressed, CNN Paints Them as Hate Rallies
JULIE HOLLAR, 3 May 24, https://fair.org/home/as-peace-protests-are-violently-suppressed-cnn-paints-them-as-hate-rallies/
As peace activists occupied common spaces on campuses across the country, some in corporate media very clearly took sides, portraying student protesters as violent, hateful and/or stupid. CNN offered some of the most striking of these characterizations.
Dana Bash (Inside Politics, 5/1/24) stared gravely into the camera and launched into a segment on “destruction, violence and hate on college campuses across the country.” Her voice dripping with hostility toward the protests, she reported:
Many of these protests started peacefully with legitimate questions about the war, but in many cases, they lost the plot. They’re calling for a ceasefire. Well, there was a ceasefire on October 6, the day before Hamas terrorists brutally murdered more than a thousand people inside Israel and took hundreds more as hostages. This hour, I’ll speak to an American Israeli family whose son is still held captive by Hamas since that horrifying day, that brought us to this moment. You don’t hear the pro-Palestinian protesters talking about that. We will.
By Bash’s logic, once a ceasefire is broken, no one can ever call for it to be reinstated—even as the death toll in Gaza nears 35,000. But her claim that there was a ceasefire until Hamas broke it on October 7 is little more than Israeli propaganda: Hundreds of Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the year preceding October 7 (FAIR.org, 7/6/23).
‘Hearkening back to 1930s Europe’
Bash continued:
Now protesting the way the Israeli government, the Israeli prime minister, is prosecuting the retaliatory war against Hamas is one thing. Making Jewish students feel unsafe at their own schools is unacceptable, and it is happening way too much right now.
As evidence of this lack of safety, Bash pointed to UCLA student Eli Tsives, who posted a video of himself confronting motionless antiwar protesters physically standing in his way on campus. “This is our school, and they’re not letting me walk in,” he claims in the clip. Bash ominously described this as “hearkening back to the 1930s in Europe.”
Bash was presumably referring to the rise of the Nazis and their increasing restrictions on Jews prior to World War II. But while Tsives’ clip suggests protesters are keeping him off UCLA campus, they’re in fact blocking him from their encampment—where many Jewish students were present. (Jewish Voice for Peace is one of its lead groups.)
So it’s clearly not Tsives’ Jewishness that the protesters object to. But Tsives was not just any Jewish student; a UCLA drama student and former intern at the pro-Israel group Stand With Us, he had been a visible face of the counter-protests, repeatedly posting videos of himself confronting peaceful antiwar protesters. He has shown up to the encampment wearing a holster of pepper spray.
One earlier video he made showing himself being denied entry to the encampment included text on screen claiming misleadingly that protestors objected to his Jewishness: “They prevented us, Jewish students, from entering public land!” (“You can kiss your jobs goodbye, this is going to go viral on social media,” he tells the protesters.) He also proudly posted his multiple interviews on Fox News, which was as eager as Bash to help him promote his false narrative of antisemitism.
‘Attacking each other’
UCLA protesters had good reason to keep counter-protesters out of their encampment, as those counter-protesters had become increasingly hostile (Forward, 5/1/24; New York Times, 4/30/24). This aggression culminated in a violent attack on the encampment on April 30 (Daily Bruin, 5/1/24).
Late that night, a pro-Israel mob of at least 200 tried to storm the student encampment, punching, kicking, throwing bricks and other objects, spraying pepper spray and mace, trying to tear down plywood barricades and launching fireworks into the crowd. As many as 25 injuries have been reported, including four student journalists for the university newspaper who were assaulted by goons as they attempted to leave the scene (Forward, 5/2/24; Democracy Now!, 5/2/24).
Campus security stood by as the attacks went on; when the university finally called in police support, the officers who arrived waited over an hour to intervene (LA Times, 5/1/24).
(The police were less reticent in clearing out the encampment a day later at UCLA’s request. Reporters on the scene described police in riot gear firing rubber bullets at close range and “several instances of protesters being injured”—LA Times, 5/3/24.)
The mob attacks at UCLA, along with police use of force at that campus and elsewhere, clearly represent the most “destruction, violence and hate” at the encampments, which have been overwhelmingly peaceful. But Bash’s description of the UCLA violence rewrote the narrative to fit her own agenda: “Pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups were attacking each other, hurling all kinds of objects, a wood pallet, fireworks, parking cones, even a scooter.”
When CNN correspondent Stephanie Elam reported, later in the same segment, that the UCLA violence came from counter-protesters, Bash’s response was not to correct her own earlier misrepresentation, but to disparage antiwar protesters: Bash commended the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles for saying the violence does not represent the Jewish community, and snidely commented: “Be nice to see that on all sides of this.”
‘Violence erupted’
Bash wasn’t the only one at CNN framing antiwar protesters as the violent ones, against all evidence. Correspondent Camila Bernal (5/2/24) reported on the UCLA encampment:
The mostly peaceful encampment was set up a week ago, but violence erupted during counter protest on Sunday, and even more tense moments overnight Tuesday, leaving at least 15 injured. Last night, protesters attempted to stand their ground, linking arms, using flashlights on officers’ faces, shouting and even throwing items at officers. But despite what CHP described as a dangerous operation, an almost one-to-one ratio officers to protesters gave authorities the upper hand.
Who was injured? Who was violent? Bernal left that to viewers’ imagination. She did mention that officers used “what appeared to be rubber bullets,” but the only participant given camera time was a police officer accusing antiwar students of throwing things at police.
Earlier CNN reporting (5/1/24) from UCLA referred to “dueling protests between pro-Palestinian demonstrators and those supporting Jewish students.” It’s a false dichotomy, as many of the antiwar protesters are themselves Jewish, and eyewitness reports suggested that many in the mob were not students and not representative of the Jewish community (Times of Israel, 5/2/24).
CNN likewise highlighted the law and order perspective after Columbia’s president called in the NYPD to respond to the student takeover of Hamilton Hall. CNN Newsroom (5/1/24) brought on a retired FBI agent to analyze the police operation. His praise was unsurprising:
It was impressive. It was surprisingly smooth…. The beauty of America is that we can say things, we can protest, we can do this publicly, even when it’s offensive language. But you can’t trespass and keep people from being able to go to class and going to their graduations. We draw a line between that and, you know, civil control.
CNN host Jake Tapper (4/29/24) criticized the Columbia president’s approach to the protests—for being too lenient: “I mean, a college president’s not a diplomat. A college president’s an authoritarian, really.” (More than a week earlier, president Minouche Shafik had had more than a hundred students arrested for camping overnight on a lawn—FAIR.org, 4/19/24.)
‘Taking room from my show’
Tapper did little to hide his utter contempt for the protesters. He complained:
This is taking room from my show that I would normally be spending covering what is going on in Gaza, or what is going on with the International Criminal Court, talking about maybe bringing charges. We were talking about the ceasefire deal. I mean, this—so I don’t know that the protesters, just from a media perspective, are accomplishing what they want to accomplish, because I’m actually covering the issue and the pain of the Palestinians and the pain of the Israelis—not that they’re protesting for that—less because of this.
It’s Tapper and CNN, of course, who decide what stories are most important and deserve coverage—not campus protesters. Some might say that that a break from CNN‘s regular coverage the Israel’s assault on Gaza would not altogether be a bad thing, as CNN staffers have complained of “regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and the censoring of Palestinian perspectives in the network’s coverage of the war in Gaza” (Guardian, 2/4/24)
The next day, Tapper’s framing of the protests made clear whose grievances he thought were the most worthy (4/30/24): “CNN continues to following the breaking news on college campuses where anti-Israel protests have disrupted academic life and learning across the United States.”
Gaza Journalists Killed by Israel Honored on World Press Freedom Day
“To claim these deaths are accidental is not only incredulous, it is insulting to the memory of professionals who lived their lives in service of truth and accuracy,” said one expert.
Common dreams JESSICA CORBETT, May 03, 2024
As the international community marked World Press Freedom Day on Friday, journalists and advocates across the globe mourned and celebrated those killed in Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip.
The U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has publicly identified at least 97 media workers killed since Israel launched its retaliatory war on October 7: 92 Palestinian, three Lebanese, and two Israeli reporters.
Since the Israel-Gaza war began, journalists have been paying the highest price—their lives—to defend our right to the truth. Each time a journalist dies or is injured, we lose a fragment of that truth,” said CPJ program director Carlos Martínez de la Serna in a Friday statement. “Journalists are civilians who are protected by international humanitarian law in times of conflict. Those responsible for their deaths face dual trials: one under international law and another before history’s unforgiving gaze.”
Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF)—or Reporters Without Borders—puts the journalist death toll in Gaza above 100. Middle East Monitorreports at least 144 members of the press are among the 34,622 Palestinians that Israeli forces have killed in less than seven months in what the International Court of Justice has called a plausibly genocidal campaign.
RSF on Friday released its annual Press Freedom Index. In its section on the Middle East, the group states:
Palestine (157th), the most dangerous country for reporters, is paying a high price. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have so far killed more than 100 journalists in Gaza, including at least 22 in the course of their work. Since the start of the war, Israel (101st) has been trying to suppress the reporting coming out of the besieged enclave while disinformation infiltrates its own media ecosystem……………………………………………………..
The Paris-based group nominated Palestinian journalists covering Gaza for an annual award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)—an honor they received during a ceremony on Thursday.
“Each year, the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano Prize pays tribute to the courage of journalists facing difficult and dangerous circumstances,” said Audrey Azoulay, the U.N. organization’s director-general. “Once again this year, the prize reminds us of the importance of collective action to ensure that journalists around the world can continue to carry out their essential work to inform and investigate.”…………………………………….
While Israel has repeatedly claimed—as it did to CNN on Friday—that “the IDF has never, and will never, deliberately target journalists,” members of the press and others have cast doubt on such comments.
“For far too long Israel has been able to operate with impunity in the occupied Palestinian territory, and this has included occasionally killing reporters, like the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, in 2022,” Simon Adams, president of the Center for Victims of Torture, told the Inter Press Service.
Given the number of journalists killed in Gaza since October, he said, “to claim these deaths are accidental is not only incredulous, it is insulting to the memory of professionals who lived their lives in service of truth and accuracy.”…………………………… more https://www.commondreams.org/news/gaza-journalists
US House votes to officially label Israel critics ‘antisemites’
“it would likely chill free speech of students on college campuses by incorrectly equating criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism.”
Rights groups have warned that the definition could be used to target pro-Palestine protesters on university campuses
News Desk, MAY 2, 2024 https://thecradle.co/articles-id/24681
The US House of Representatives passed a bill on 1 May to expand the federal definition of antisemitism, coming in the wake of widespread pro-Palestine protests on university campuses across the country.
The bill passed in a 320 to 91 vote, and will now go to the Senate for consideration.
If successful, the bill would codify a definition of antisemitism established by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). IHRA defines antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
The IHRA definition of antisemitism also includes the “targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.”
The definition says any comparison between “contemporary Israeli policy” and “that of the nazis” is antisemitic, as well as referring to Israel as “racist.”
This bill could potentially be used to bar funding of any institution perceived as advocating antisemitism, as many university campuses have been recently due to widespread support for the Palestinian cause.
Some have warned that it could specifically be used to confront pro-Palestine protests at US university campuses, which many have accused of being anti-Jewish.
Certain rights groups have criticized the bill for this reason. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called on members of the House to vote against it, clarifying that US federal legislation against antisemitism already exists.
The bill is “not needed to protect against antisemitic discrimination,” ACLU said, adding that, “Instead, it would likely chill free speech of students on college campuses by incorrectly equating criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism.”
Campus protests have continued to rage in universities across the US, with violent police crackdowns taking place over the past few days. Dozens of protesters at New York’s Columbia University were aggressively detained by police on Tuesday night when the NYPD raided a building in which the students had barricaded themselves in.
Similar violent arrests involving the use of pepper spray took place at other universities.
Pro-Israel counter-protesters attacked the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at UCLA on 30 April, facing little to no backlash from campus authorities and police. The incident has spurred major outrage and criticism.
On Wednesday evening, riot police surrounded the pro-Palestine encampment at UCLA and are planning to move on the protesters and clear them out.
Academic arrested for “statements against Zionism” as Israel intensifies anti-genocide crackdown
Jean Shaoul, WSWS, 1 May 24
This month, Israeli police arrested and detained for questioning Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a leading Palestinian legal academic, over comments made on a podcast weeks earlier. Shalhoub-Kevorkian holds a chair in law at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and another at Queen Mary University of London.
The police said, “The detainee is suspected of making serious incitement against the State of Israel and for having said statements against Zionism and even claims that Israel is currently committing genocide in the Gaza Strip.” They added that they had found posters and pictures in her home depicting Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers as an occupying army.
Freedom of political expression in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always been restricted and there have been widespread detentions of Palestinian citizens of Israel who have publicly criticised the war in Gaza. But this is the first time an academic has been targeted over opposition to Zionism, possession of posters against the occupation and claims of Israeli genocide in Gaza—statements that pose no “security threat,” let alone any “incitement” to violence, terror and racism. Since the attorney general’s office must approve all prosecutions relating to freedom of speech, Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s detention was greenlighted not just by the police but at the very heart of government.
Her detention is part of a broader crackdown on dissent and the targeting of Israel’s critics by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fascistic regime, aimed at intimidating and silencing Israel’s Palestinian citizens who make up 20 percent of the population. Netanyahu’s strategic goal of annexing Palestinian territory illegally occupied since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and establishing an ethno-religious regime between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea means the “only democracy in the Middle East” eliminating even the tattered, democratic façade of the Israeli state.
The police confiscated books and posters from Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s home and questioned her extensively about her academic work, including articles published years ago, even though academic writing is afforded special legal protections in Israel. In her 60s, she was strip-searched, handcuffed so tightly it caused pain, denied access to food, water and medication for several hours, and held overnight in a cold cell without adequate clothing or blankets, conditions her lawyers described as “terrible” and designed to humiliate. While she was released on bail the next day, after a magistrate and a district court judge both ruled she posed no threat, days later she was summoned for further questioning.
Her lawyer, the director of the human rights organisation Adalah, Hassan Jabareen, said, “This case is unique. This is not only about one professor; it could be a [precedent] for any academic who goes against the consensus in wartime.” As he explained, “They could have asked her to come to the police station for two or three hours to discuss, investigate. To carry out the arrest like that, as if she was a dangerous person, shows the main purpose was to humiliate her. It was illegal, that’s why the magistrates court accepted my argument that she should be released and the district court confirmed it.”
Her arrest follows months of political attacks orchestrated by the Hebrew University, which likes to present itself as a model of liberalism and inclusion, in the run-up to her detention. The rector had called on her to resign in late 2023 after she signed a letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and describing Israel’s campaign as genocide, and she was briefly suspended over a podcast in which she discussed the tragic events of October 7 and the subsequent destruction, death, and starvation in Gaza. He had objected to her calling for Zionism to be abolished and casting doubt about some aspects of the October 7 attack, particularly reports of sexual assaults.
More than 100 academics at the Hebrew University published an open letter backing Shalhoub-Kevorkian, criticising the university for not supporting her. They wrote, “Regardless of the content of Nadera’s words, their interpretation and the opinions she expressed, it is clear to everyone that this is a political arrest, the whole purpose of which is to gag mouths and limit freedom of expression. Today it is Nadera who stands on the bench, and tomorrow it is each and every one of us.”…………………………………………………………………….. more https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/04/30/dxoj-a30.html
1 This Month
of the week – Shut Down Drone Warfare!
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
Petition to revoke the licensing of the Near Surface Nuclear Disposal Facility (NSDF) at Chalk River. https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-7247
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