“The violence against journalists in Sweida — including injuries, intimidation, and the ransacking of media offices — along with the attack on a media outlet in Damascus, signals a dangerous escalation in threats to Syria’s press,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Authorities must investigate these incidents and ensure accountability. Journalists should not face violence or obstruction for doing their work.”

Fighting in Sweida governorate began on July 13, 2025, after a Druze merchant was assaulted by Bedouin tribesmen. The confrontation escalated into armed clashes between Druze groups and Bedouin fighters, drawing in Syrian government forces. Israeli airstrikes on July 15 and 16 followed in Sweida and Damascus, with Israel citing the protection of Druze communities. A U.S.-brokered truce temporarily halted fighting, but conditions on the ground remained unstable.

• On July 15, Nadim al-Nabulsi, a reporter for Ahrar Horan, a local media collective, sustained minor injuries while covering events in Sweida after an Israeli drone strike. “I was reporting near the entrance of the city, following a [Syrian government] General Security Forces vehicle on my motorcycle,” al-Nabulsi told CPJ. “The vehicle was hit by drone-dropped explosives. I was around 25 meters (82 feet) behind and tried to hide, but some shrapnel hit my lower back.” He said he was wearing a “Press” vest at the time.

• Also on July 15, freelance journalist Muhannad Abu Zaid was wounded during clashes. He said he was following a General Security Forces convoy into Sweida when gunfire broke out. “I took cover and started filming, but a sniper fired and hit my hand,” he told CPJ. “I think the bullet was meant for my chest, but a car shielded me.”

• On July 16, an Israeli airstrike In Damascus, targeting the Syrian army’s general staff headquarters damaged Al-Hadath TV’s office. According to a video posted by the channel on X, no one was injured.

• On July 19, four journalists wearing “Press” vests — freelance photographer Ali Haj Suleiman, a Getty Images contributor; photographer Bakr Alkasem, who contributes to Agence France-Presse; NoonPost reporter Hamza Abbas; and NoonPost camera operator Qusay Abdulbari — were beside their car in Sweida when it was struck by bullets. “We were covering events in Sweida, entering at the Omran roundabout,” Haj Suleiman told CPJ. “Druze armed factions appeared to counterattack, and gunfire came from three directions. We took cover behind our car as snipers and RPGs fired. After 10 minutes, the shooting stopped.”

• Also on July 19, Karam Nachar, editor-in-chief of the privately owned outlet Al-Jumhuriya, posted that one of the outlet’s journalists, who asked not to be named for his own safety, was robbed and threatened in his home in Sweida by what the journalist said “appeared to be newly recruited members of the ministry of defense.” CPJ spoke with the journalist and confirmed that he is now safe in Damascus. “The four gunmen took $1,600 in cash, my phone, and a camera worth around $2,000,” he said, adding that he managed to escape the raid after another journalist intervened.

CPJ contacted Mohammad Al-Saleh, the Syrian ministry of information’s spokesperson, via messaging app. He said authorities had not blocked journalists from working but warned them that Druze snipers were active in the area, and advised them to evacuate to avoid kidnapping or crossfire. Al-Saleh said the government holds its institutions accountable for any misconduct but currently lacks the means to pursue armed groups operating outside the law — “though that time will come.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Soran Rashid.

“The violence against journalists in Sweida — including injuries, intimidation, and the ransacking of media offices — along with the attack on a media outlet in Damascus, signals a dangerous escalation in threats to Syria’s press,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Authorities must investigate these incidents and ensure accountability. Journalists should not face violence or obstruction for doing their work.”

Fighting in Sweida governorate began on July 13, 2025, after a Druze merchant was assaulted by Bedouin tribesmen. The confrontation escalated into armed clashes between Druze groups and Bedouin fighters, drawing in Syrian government forces. Israeli airstrikes on July 15 and 16 followed in Sweida and Damascus, with Israel citing the protection of Druze communities. A U.S.-brokered truce temporarily halted fighting, but conditions on the ground remained unstable.

• On July 15, Nadim al-Nabulsi, a reporter for Ahrar Horan, a local media collective, sustained minor injuries while covering events in Sweida after an Israeli drone strike. “I was reporting near the entrance of the city, following a [Syrian government] General Security Forces vehicle on my motorcycle,” al-Nabulsi told CPJ. “The vehicle was hit by drone-dropped explosives. I was around 25 meters (82 feet) behind and tried to hide, but some shrapnel hit my lower back.” He said he was wearing a “Press” vest at the time.

• Also on July 15, freelance journalist Muhannad Abu Zaid was wounded during clashes. He said he was following a General Security Forces convoy into Sweida when gunfire broke out. “I took cover and started filming, but a sniper fired and hit my hand,” he told CPJ. “I think the bullet was meant for my chest, but a car shielded me.”

• On July 16, an Israeli airstrike In Damascus, targeting the Syrian army’s general staff headquarters damaged Al-Hadath TV’s office. According to a video posted by the channel on X, no one was injured.

• On July 19, four journalists wearing “Press” vests — freelance photographer Ali Haj Suleiman, a Getty Images contributor; photographer Bakr Alkasem, who contributes to Agence France-Presse; NoonPost reporter Hamza Abbas; and NoonPost camera operator Qusay Abdulbari — were beside their car in Sweida when it was struck by bullets. “We were covering events in Sweida, entering at the Omran roundabout,” Haj Suleiman told CPJ. “Druze armed factions appeared to counterattack, and gunfire came from three directions. We took cover behind our car as snipers and RPGs fired. After 10 minutes, the shooting stopped.”

• Also on July 19, Karam Nachar, editor-in-chief of the privately owned outlet Al-Jumhuriya, posted that one of the outlet’s journalists, who asked not to be named for his own safety, was robbed and threatened in his home in Sweida by what the journalist said “appeared to be newly recruited members of the ministry of defense.” CPJ spoke with the journalist and confirmed that he is now safe in Damascus. “The four gunmen took $1,600 in cash, my phone, and a camera worth around $2,000,” he said, adding that he managed to escape the raid after another journalist intervened.

CPJ contacted Mohammad Al-Saleh, the Syrian ministry of information’s spokesperson, via messaging app. He said authorities had not blocked journalists from working but warned them that Druze snipers were active in the area, and advised them to evacuate to avoid kidnapping or crossfire. Al-Saleh said the government holds its institutions accountable for any misconduct but currently lacks the means to pursue armed groups operating outside the law — “though that time will come.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Soran Rashid.

Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, held talks with France, Germany, and the United Kingdom yesterday in Geneva as Israel’s attacks on Iran entered a second week.

A US-based Iranian human rights group reports the Israeli attacks have killed at least 639 people. Israeli war planes have repeatedly pummeled Tehran and other parts of Iran. Iran is responded by continuing to launch missile strikes into Israel.

Hundreds of thousands of Iranians have protested in Iran against Israel. Meanwhile, President Trump continues to give mixed messages on whether the US will join Israel’s attack on Iran.

On Wednesday, Trump told reporters, “I may do it, I may not do it”. On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt delivered a new statement from the President.

KAROLINE LEAVITT: “Regarding the ongoing situation in Iran, I know there has been a lot of speculation among all of you in the media regarding the president’s decision-making and whether or not the United States will be directly involved.

“In light of that news, I have a message directly from the president. And I quote, ‘Based on the fact that there’s a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks.’”

AMY GOODMAN, The War and Peace Report: President Trump has repeatedly used that term, “two weeks,” when being questioned about decisions in this term and his first term as president. Leavitt delivered the message shortly after President Trump met with his former adviser, Steve Bannon, who has publicly warned against war with Iran.

Bannon recently said, “We can’t do this again. We’ll tear the country apart. We can’t have another Iraq,” Bannon said.

This comes as Trump’s reportedly sidelined National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard from key discussions on Iran. In March, Gabbard told lawmakers the intelligence community, “Continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.”

But on Tuesday, Trump dismissed her statement, saying, “I don’t care what she said.”

Earlier Thursday, an Iranian missile hit the main hospital in Southern Israel in Beersheba. After the strike, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened to assassinate Ayatollah Khamenei, saying Iran’s supreme leader, “Cannot continue to exist.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the hospital and likened Iran’s attack to the London Blitz. Netanyahu stunned many in Israel by saying, “Each of us bears a personal cost. My family has not been exempt. This is the second time my son Avner has cancelled a wedding due to missile threats.”

We’re joined now by William Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new article for The National Interest is headlined, “Don’t Get Dragged Into a War with Iran.”

Can you talk about what’s going on right now, Bill, the whole question of whether the U.S. is going to use a bunker-buster bomb that has to be delivered by a B-2 bomber, which only the US has?

Another Iraq: Military expert warns US has no real plan    Video: Democracy Now!

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yeah. This is a case of undue trust in technology. The US is always getting in trouble when they think there’s this miracle solution. A lot of experts aren’t sure this would even work, or if it did, it would take multiple bombings.

And of course, Iran’s not going to sit on its hands. They’ll respond possibly by killing US troops in the region, then we’ll have escalation from there. It’s reminiscent of the beginning of the Iraq War, when they said, “It’s going to be a cakewalk. It’s not going to cost anything.”

Couple of trillion dollars, hundreds of thousands of casualties, many US veterans coming home with PTSD, a regime that was sectarian that paved the way for ISIS, it couldn’t have gone worse.

And so, this is a different beginning, but the end is uncertain, and I don’t think we want to go there.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about the GBU-57, the bunker-buster bomb, and how is it that this discussion going on within the White House about the use of the bomb — and of course, the US has gone back and forth — I should say President Trump has gone back and forth whether he’s fully involved with this war.

At first he was saying they knew about it, but Israel was doing it, then saying, “We have total control of the skies over Tehran,” saying we, not Israel, and what exactly it would mean if the US dropped this bomb and the fleet that the US is moving in?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yes, well, the notion is, it’s heavy steel, it’s more explosive power than any conventional bomb. But it only goes so deep, and they don’t actually know how deep this facility is buried. And if it’s going in a straight line, and it’s to one side, it’s just not clear that it’s going to work.

And of course, if it does, Iran is going to rebuild, they’re going to go straight for a nuclear weapon. They’re not going to trust negotiations anymore.

So, apparently, the two weeks is partly because Trump’s getting conflicting reports from his own people about this. Now, if he had actual independent military folks, like Mark Milley in the first term, I think we’d be less likely to go in.

But they made sure to have loyalists. Pete Hegseth is not a profile in courage. He’s not going to stand up to Trump on this. He might not even know the consequences. So, a lot of the press coverage is about this bomb, not about the consequences of an active war.

AMY GOODMAN: Right, about using it. In your recent piece, you wrote, “Israeli officials suggested their attacks may result in regime change in Iran, despite the devastating destabilising impact such efforts in the region would have.”

Can you talk about the significance of Israel putting forward and then Trump going back and forth on whether or not Ali Khamenei will be targeted?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yeah, I think my colleague Trita Parsi put it well. There’s been no example of regime change in the region that has come out with a better result. They don’t know what kind of regime would come in.

Could be to the right of the current one. Could just be chaos that would fuel terrorism, who knows what else.

So, they’re just talking — they’re winging it. They have no idea what they’re getting into. And I think Trump, he doesn’t want to seem like Netanyahu’s pulling him by the nose, so when he gets out in front of Trump, Trump says, “Oh, that was my idea.”

But it’s almost as if Benjamin Netanyahu is running US foreign policy, and Trump is kind of following along.

AMY GOODMAN: You have Netanyahu back in 2002 saying, “Iran is imminently going to have a nuclear bomb.” That was more than two decades ago.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Exactly. That’s just a cover for wanting to take out the regime. And he spoke to the US Congress, he’s made presentations all over the world, and his intelligence has been proven wrong over, and over, and over.

And when we had the Iran deal, he had European allies, he had China, he had Russia. There hadn’t been a deal like that where all these countries were on the same page in living memory, and it was working.

And Trump trashed it and now has to start over.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about the War Powers Act. The Virginia Senator Kaine has said that — has just put forward a bill around saying it must be — Congress that must vote on this. Where is [Senator] Chuck Schumer [Senate minority leader]? Where is [Hakeem] Jeffries [Congress minoroity leader] on this, the Democratic House and Senate leaders?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, a lot of the so-called leaders are not leading. When is the moment that you should step forward if we’re possibly going to get into another disastrous war? But I think they’re concerned about being viewed as critical of Israel.

They don’t want to go out on a limb. So, you’ve got a progressive group that’s saying, “This has to be authorised by Congress.” You’ve got Republicans who are doubtful, but they don’t want to stand up to Trump because they don’t want to lose their jobs.

“Risk your job. This is a huge thing. Don’t just sort of be a time-server.

AMY GOODMAN: So, according to a report from IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, released in May, Iran has accumulated roughly 120 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent, which is 30 percent away from weapons-grade level of 90 percent. You have Rafael Grossi, the head of the IAEA, saying this week that they do not have evidence that Iran has the system for a nuclear bomb.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yes, well, a lot of the discussion points out — they don’t talk about, when you’ve got the uranium, you have to build the weapon, you have to make it work on a missile.

It’s not you get the uranium, you have a weapon overnight, so there’s time to deal with that should they go forward through negotiations. And we had a deal that was working, which Trump threw aside in his first term.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the foreign minister of Iran, Araghchi, in Geneva now speaking with his counterparts from Britain, France, the EU.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, I don’t think US allies in Europe want to go along with this, and I think he’s looking for some leverage over Trump. And of course, Trump is very hard to read, but even his own base, the majority of Trump supporters, don’t want to go to war.

You’ve got people like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon saying it would be a disaster. But ultimately, it comes down to Trump. He’s unpredictable, he’s transactional, he’ll calculate what he thinks it’ll mean for him.

AMY GOODMAN: And what impact does protests have around the country, as we wrap up?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, I think taking the stand is infectious. So many institutions were caving in to Trump. And the more people stand up, 2000 demonstrations around the country, the more the folks sitting on the fence, the millions of people who, they’re against Trump, but they don’t know what to do, the more of us that get involved, the better chance we have of turning this thing around.

So, we should not let them discourage us. We need to build power to push back against all these horrible things.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, if the US were to bomb the nuclear site that it would require the bunker-buster bomb to hit below ground, underground. Are we talking about nuclear fallout here?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: I think there would certainly be radiation that would of course affect the Iranian people. They’ve already had many civilian deaths. It’s not this kind of precise thing that’s only hitting military targets.

And that, too, has to affect Iran’s view of this. They were shortly away from another negotiation, and now their country’s being devastated, so can they trust us?

AMY GOODMAN: Bill Hartung is senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new piece for The National Interest is headlined, “Don’t Get Dragged Into a War with Iran.”

Republished from Democracy Now! under Creative Commons.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The book explores her personal journey from her pro-democracy activism as a student in China in the 1980s, to her move to the United States in 1989, and her efforts to draw attention to the plight of Uyghurs in the face of mass internments and other grave abuses that the U.S. government says constitute genocide.

(Mariam Zuhaib/AP)

Among those she’s spoken up for are her sister, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, who was imprisoned by China in 2018. Her father, Abbas Borhan, a prominent Uyghur scholar, was forced out of his job as chairman of the Science and Technology Council of Xinjiang because of his daughter’s activism.

Rushan Abbas currently serves as executive director of a human rights group, the U.S.-based Campaign for Uyghurs. She says her book, published by Optimum Publishing International, is intended both as a personal testimony and a political call to action for governments and citizens worldwide. She spoke to RFA Uyghur journalist Shahrezad Ghayrat. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

(Courtesy of Rushan Abbas)

RFA: Your book is titled ‘Unbroken.’ What does unbroken personally mean to you after all you’ve experienced and witnessed?

Rushan Abbas: The unbroken means that despite everything that my people and my family have been through — the separation, the suffering, the oppression, and the mass detention — our spirit and our dignity and our hope have not been broken. It’s a testament to resilience and to the idea that even under the most difficult conditions, Uyghur people will not be defeated, we will fight. We will fight onward with an unbroken will and courage.

RFA: You share parts of your late father’s unpublished memoir. How has his story influenced your fight for Uyghur freedom today?

Rushan Abbas My father’s story, what he has been through during the Great Cultural Revolution, is at the heart of my own fight for Uyghur freedom. And his memoir was written in the brief period of time that he was in the United States. So he lived through unimaginable oppression, and he and my mother and my grandparents and my grandpa, during the Cultural Revolution but held on to hope for future generations. He always had hope for the future generations and paved the way for the next generation to advocate for human rights. So I’m here today because of him. I am the way I am from a very young age. I have put my people and my dedication to the cause because of him. So this is not just a political story that I wrote with this book, and it’s not just my own story or not only my family’s story, but it is a story for all Uyghur people back home.

RFA: You describe Unbroken as both a personal story and a political call to action. Who do you hope hears this call the loudest: the policymakers, the public, or both?

Rushan Abbas: Both actually - the policymakers and the public. I want the public to understand the human cost of what’s happening and to stand with us. And I want policymakers to feel the urgency to act. And understand the cost of what will happen to the world if we don’t hold the authoritarian Chinese government accountable. And governments must act by applying pressure and holding the Chinese government accountable because we are talking about the future of the free world, not just what’s happening to the Uyghurs or what China is doing within their borders.

RFA: His Holiness the Dalai Lama, (prominent scholar on persecution of Uyghurs) Dr. Adrian Zenz, and others have endorsed your book. How important is international solidarity, including voices from different communities, in countering China’s repression?

Rushan Abbas: International solidarity is essential. It’s very important. China’s repression is a global human rights issue and it affects the future world ... (It’s) not just a Uyghur issue. So we are not talking about something is that is just happening to Uyghurs, but (about) how China is going to impact the world if we don’t speak out, if we don’t hold China accountable. Because our future generations will (face) the consequences of an illiberal world if we don’t stop the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) right now. So when voices from different communities like Tibetans, Hong Kongers, Chinese democracy activists, Muslim communities, scholars, and the lawmakers come together, it shows the world that injustice anywhere demands action everywhere.

RFA: Your book covers painful topics like detention camps, forced sterilization, and surveillance. What was the most difficult chapter for you to write and why?

Rushan Abbas: As you mentioned, all these atrocities, detention camps, forced sterilizations, forced marriages, surveillance, child abduction - all these are very difficult to reflect (on). But the last chapter was especially difficult to write. The last chapter is titled “Light of Hope” and it reflects some of the achievements we made over the past few years as an organization or as an activist. Writing about accomplishment was particularly challenging and difficult knowing that even today the reality on the ground for the Uyghur people remains unchanged. The genocide is still ongoing. I continued to speak with Uyghurs in (the) diaspora daily about the horrific experience that our people are experiencing back home. So it was difficult to write about the accomplishment achievements and to try to give hope for people while the situation is so, you know, it’s so horrible still.

RFA: You’ve been a fierce advocate on the global stage. How do you see the role of diaspora communities - not just the Uyghurs, but others in defending human rights worldwide?

Rushan Abbas: The diaspora communities have a crucial role. We carry the stories that oppressive regimes try to silence by speaking out, organizing, and building alliances. We help keep the human rights abuses on the global stage, in the global conversation, and push for accountability and freedom for all people under the brutal rule of CCP. So it’s extremely important.

RFA: With the publication of Unbroken, what specific action do you hope the international community, especially governments, will take next?

Rushan Abbas: I hope governments will move beyond just the empty words and the statements. I hope that they will start to take action by imposing sanctions on the companies who are making a profit from forced labor, and that they impose sanctions on Chinese officials responsible for these atrocities, banning products made with Uyghur slave labor; and prioritizing human rights in their foreign policy with China, whenever there’s a conversation with trade or with any kind of diplomatic engagements with China the Uyghur issue should be in the front and the center. The Uyghur people deserve to live in freedom and with full respect for their human dignity.

(Shahrezad Ghayrat/RFA Uyghur)

RFA: Transnational repression is a major theme you highlight. How have you personally experienced China’s attempts to silence you beyond its borders?

Rushan Abbas: I have faced constant harassment, attacks, death threats, and libel through online threats ... attempts to intimidate me. But the most devastating example of transnational repression is my sister’s case. Dr. Gulshan Abbas, a retired medical doctor. And she is unjustly imprisoned by the Chinese government in retaliation for my advocacy as an American citizen and exercising my freedom of speech in the United States, even though, you know, I have been living outside of China for 36 years. They still continue ... to target my sister to try to silence me by keeping her in jail. So that is the hardest example of transnational repression that I’m experiencing under China’s attempt to silence me. But they are making such a huge mistake, continuously holding my sister as a hostage, not only giving me the full strength to fight harder, but also it has been the reason for international stages, forums, and the summits and all these platforms inviting me to speak because I am a sister of the direct victim who’s in jail with fabricated false charges. So, that attempt of the Chinese government is backfiring on them. It’s not working, but it’s actually giving me more opportunities to speak.

RFA: Looking back on your decades of advocacy, what gives you the most hope today for the future of the Uyghur people?

Rushan Abbas: What gives me the most hope is the resilience of the Uyghur people and the growing global awareness and understanding that CCP is a threat to all humanity, freedom and democracy. Despite everything, our culture, our identity and our spirit endure today, and more people around the world are standing with us as more people began to recognize and understand the Chinese Communist Party’s intent to export its oppressive and authoritarian model globally.

RFA: If you could deliver one message directly to young Uyghurs who feel scared or silenced, what would it be?

Rushan Abbas: You are not alone, your voice matters. Our history, our identity, and our future lives through you. And no matter how hard the CCP tries, they cannot erase who we are. Let’s fight together with an unbroken inner strength and the spirit against the totalitarian system with all we have. Justice will prevail. We need to speak out. Unless if we speak today, then the only words left will be one of regret.

Edited by Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Shahrezad Ghayrat for RFA Uyghur.

The book explores her personal journey from her pro-democracy activism as a student in China in the 1980s, to her move to the United States in 1989, and her efforts to draw attention to the plight of Uyghurs in the face of mass internments and other grave abuses that the U.S. government says constitute genocide.

(Mariam Zuhaib/AP)

Among those she’s spoken up for are her sister, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, who was imprisoned by China in 2018. Her father, Abbas Borhan, a prominent Uyghur scholar, was forced out of his job as chairman of the Science and Technology Council of Xinjiang because of his daughter’s activism.

Rushan Abbas currently serves as executive director of a human rights group, the U.S.-based Campaign for Uyghurs. She says her book, published by Optimum Publishing International, is intended both as a personal testimony and a political call to action for governments and citizens worldwide. She spoke to RFA Uyghur journalist Shahrezad Ghayrat. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

(Courtesy of Rushan Abbas)

RFA: Your book is titled ‘Unbroken.’ What does unbroken personally mean to you after all you’ve experienced and witnessed?

Rushan Abbas: The unbroken means that despite everything that my people and my family have been through — the separation, the suffering, the oppression, and the mass detention — our spirit and our dignity and our hope have not been broken. It’s a testament to resilience and to the idea that even under the most difficult conditions, Uyghur people will not be defeated, we will fight. We will fight onward with an unbroken will and courage.

RFA: You share parts of your late father’s unpublished memoir. How has his story influenced your fight for Uyghur freedom today?

Rushan Abbas My father’s story, what he has been through during the Great Cultural Revolution, is at the heart of my own fight for Uyghur freedom. And his memoir was written in the brief period of time that he was in the United States. So he lived through unimaginable oppression, and he and my mother and my grandparents and my grandpa, during the Cultural Revolution but held on to hope for future generations. He always had hope for the future generations and paved the way for the next generation to advocate for human rights. So I’m here today because of him. I am the way I am from a very young age. I have put my people and my dedication to the cause because of him. So this is not just a political story that I wrote with this book, and it’s not just my own story or not only my family’s story, but it is a story for all Uyghur people back home.

RFA: You describe Unbroken as both a personal story and a political call to action. Who do you hope hears this call the loudest: the policymakers, the public, or both?

Rushan Abbas: Both actually - the policymakers and the public. I want the public to understand the human cost of what’s happening and to stand with us. And I want policymakers to feel the urgency to act. And understand the cost of what will happen to the world if we don’t hold the authoritarian Chinese government accountable. And governments must act by applying pressure and holding the Chinese government accountable because we are talking about the future of the free world, not just what’s happening to the Uyghurs or what China is doing within their borders.

RFA: His Holiness the Dalai Lama, (prominent scholar on persecution of Uyghurs) Dr. Adrian Zenz, and others have endorsed your book. How important is international solidarity, including voices from different communities, in countering China’s repression?

Rushan Abbas: International solidarity is essential. It’s very important. China’s repression is a global human rights issue and it affects the future world ... (It’s) not just a Uyghur issue. So we are not talking about something is that is just happening to Uyghurs, but (about) how China is going to impact the world if we don’t speak out, if we don’t hold China accountable. Because our future generations will (face) the consequences of an illiberal world if we don’t stop the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) right now. So when voices from different communities like Tibetans, Hong Kongers, Chinese democracy activists, Muslim communities, scholars, and the lawmakers come together, it shows the world that injustice anywhere demands action everywhere.

RFA: Your book covers painful topics like detention camps, forced sterilization, and surveillance. What was the most difficult chapter for you to write and why?

Rushan Abbas: As you mentioned, all these atrocities, detention camps, forced sterilizations, forced marriages, surveillance, child abduction - all these are very difficult to reflect (on). But the last chapter was especially difficult to write. The last chapter is titled “Light of Hope” and it reflects some of the achievements we made over the past few years as an organization or as an activist. Writing about accomplishment was particularly challenging and difficult knowing that even today the reality on the ground for the Uyghur people remains unchanged. The genocide is still ongoing. I continued to speak with Uyghurs in (the) diaspora daily about the horrific experience that our people are experiencing back home. So it was difficult to write about the accomplishment achievements and to try to give hope for people while the situation is so, you know, it’s so horrible still.

RFA: You’ve been a fierce advocate on the global stage. How do you see the role of diaspora communities - not just the Uyghurs, but others in defending human rights worldwide?

Rushan Abbas: The diaspora communities have a crucial role. We carry the stories that oppressive regimes try to silence by speaking out, organizing, and building alliances. We help keep the human rights abuses on the global stage, in the global conversation, and push for accountability and freedom for all people under the brutal rule of CCP. So it’s extremely important.

RFA: With the publication of Unbroken, what specific action do you hope the international community, especially governments, will take next?

Rushan Abbas: I hope governments will move beyond just the empty words and the statements. I hope that they will start to take action by imposing sanctions on the companies who are making a profit from forced labor, and that they impose sanctions on Chinese officials responsible for these atrocities, banning products made with Uyghur slave labor; and prioritizing human rights in their foreign policy with China, whenever there’s a conversation with trade or with any kind of diplomatic engagements with China the Uyghur issue should be in the front and the center. The Uyghur people deserve to live in freedom and with full respect for their human dignity.

(Shahrezad Ghayrat/RFA Uyghur)

RFA: Transnational repression is a major theme you highlight. How have you personally experienced China’s attempts to silence you beyond its borders?

Rushan Abbas: I have faced constant harassment, attacks, death threats, and libel through online threats ... attempts to intimidate me. But the most devastating example of transnational repression is my sister’s case. Dr. Gulshan Abbas, a retired medical doctor. And she is unjustly imprisoned by the Chinese government in retaliation for my advocacy as an American citizen and exercising my freedom of speech in the United States, even though, you know, I have been living outside of China for 36 years. They still continue ... to target my sister to try to silence me by keeping her in jail. So that is the hardest example of transnational repression that I’m experiencing under China’s attempt to silence me. But they are making such a huge mistake, continuously holding my sister as a hostage, not only giving me the full strength to fight harder, but also it has been the reason for international stages, forums, and the summits and all these platforms inviting me to speak because I am a sister of the direct victim who’s in jail with fabricated false charges. So, that attempt of the Chinese government is backfiring on them. It’s not working, but it’s actually giving me more opportunities to speak.

RFA: Looking back on your decades of advocacy, what gives you the most hope today for the future of the Uyghur people?

Rushan Abbas: What gives me the most hope is the resilience of the Uyghur people and the growing global awareness and understanding that CCP is a threat to all humanity, freedom and democracy. Despite everything, our culture, our identity and our spirit endure today, and more people around the world are standing with us as more people began to recognize and understand the Chinese Communist Party’s intent to export its oppressive and authoritarian model globally.

RFA: If you could deliver one message directly to young Uyghurs who feel scared or silenced, what would it be?

Rushan Abbas: You are not alone, your voice matters. Our history, our identity, and our future lives through you. And no matter how hard the CCP tries, they cannot erase who we are. Let’s fight together with an unbroken inner strength and the spirit against the totalitarian system with all we have. Justice will prevail. We need to speak out. Unless if we speak today, then the only words left will be one of regret.

Edited by Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Shahrezad Ghayrat for RFA Uyghur.

Less than three weeks from the election, Kamala Harris is campaigning in Michigan. Will she lose votes over the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza and expanding war on Lebanon? Meanwhile, Republican candidate Donald Trump has opened a new campaign office in the swing state. “It feels like Vice President Harris is not doing what it takes to be both humane and compassionate and sensitive to the political realities in Michigan that are necessary to engage with in order to beat Donald Trump,” says Abbas Alawieh, co-founder of the “uncommitted” movement to change U.S. policy toward Israel and Gaza. “What are we even talking about as Democrats if we speak so much to the value of human life, of the dignity of workers, when our party’s official policy is to send more and more weapons to a fascist government that is on a killing spree?”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

On October 1, Iran fired about 180 missiles at Israel in response to Israel’s recent assassinations of leaders of its Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), Hezbollah, and Hamas. There are conflicting reports about how many of the missiles struck their targets and if there were any deaths. But Israel is now considering a counterattack that could propel it into an all-out war with Iran, with the U.S. in tow.

For years, Iran has been trying to avoid such a war. That is why it signed the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement with the United States, the U.K., France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union. Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and despite Joe Biden’s much-touted differences with Trump, he failed to restore U.S. compliance. Instead, he tried to use Trump’s violation of the treaty as leverage to demand further concessions from Iran. This only served to further aggravate the schism between the United States and Iran, which have had no diplomatic relations since 1980.

Now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees his long-awaited chance to draw the United States into war with Iran. By killing Iranian military leaders and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil, as well as attacking Iran’s allies in Lebanon and Yemen, Netanyahu provoked a military response from Iran that has given him an excuse to widen the conflict even further. Tragically, there are warmongering U.S. officials who would welcome a war on Iran, and many more who would blindly go along with it.

Iran’s newly elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, campaigned on a platform of reconciling with the West. When he came to New York to speak at the UN General Assembly on September 25, he was accompanied by three members of Iran’s JCPOA negotiating team: former foreign minister Javad Zarif; current foreign minister Abbas Araghchi; and deputy foreign minister Majid Ravanchi.

President Pezeshkian’s message in New York was conciliatory. With Zarif and Araghchi at his side at a press conference on September 23, he talked of peace, and of reviving the dormant nuclear agreement. “Vis-a-vis the JCPOA, we said 100 times we are willing to live up to our agreements,” he said. “We do hope we can sit at the table and hold discussions.”

On the crisis in the Middle East, Pezeshkian said that Iran wanted peace and had exercised restraint in the face of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its assassinations of resistance leaders and Iranian officials, and its war on its neighbors.

“Let’s create a situation where we can co-exist,” said Pezeshkian. “Let’s try to resolve tensions through dialogue…We are willing to put all of our weapons aside so long as Israel will do the same.” He added that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while Israel is not, and that Israel’s nuclear arsenal is a serious threat to Iran.

Pezeshkian reiterated Iran’s desire for peace in his speech at the UN General Assembly.

“I am the president of a country that has endured threats, war, occupation, and sanctions throughout its modern history,” he said. “Others have neither come to our assistance nor respected our declared neutrality. Global powers have even sided with aggressors. We have learned that we can only rely on our own people and our own indigenous capabilities. The Islamic Republic of Iran seeks to safeguard its own security, not to create insecurity for others. We want peace for all and seek no war or quarrel with anyone.”

The U.S. response to Iran’s restraint throughout this crisis has been to keep sending destructive weapons to Israel, with which it has devastated Gaza, killed tens of thousands of women and children, bombed neighboring capitals, and beefed up the forces it would need to attack Iran.

That includes a new order for 50 F-15EX long-range bombers, with 750 gallon fuel tanks for the long journey to Iran. That arms deal still has to pass the Senate, where Senator Bernie Sanders is leading the opposition.

On the diplomatic front, the U.S. vetoed successive cease-fire resolutions in the UN Security Council and hijacked Qatar and Egypt’s cease-fire negotiations to provide diplomatic cover for unrestricted genocide.

Military leaders in the United States and Israel appear to be arguing against war on Iran, as they have in the past. Even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney balked at launching another catastrophic war based on lies against Iran, after the CIA publicly admitted in its 2006 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons.

When Trump threatened to attack Iran, Tulsi Gabbard warned him that a U.S. war on Iran would be so catastrophic that it would finally, retroactively, make the war on Iraq look like the “cakewalk” the neocons had promised it would be.

But neither U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin nor Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant can control their countries’ war policies, which are in the hands of political leaders with political agendas. Netanyahu has spent many years trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, and has kept escalating the Gaza crisis for a year, at the cost of tens of thousands of innocent lives, with that goal clearly in mind.

Biden has been out of his depth throughout this crisis, relying on political instincts from an era when acting tough and blindly supporting Israel were politically safe positions for American politicians. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rose to power through the National Security Council and as a Senate staffer, not as a diplomat, riding Biden’s coat-tails into a senior position where he is as out of his depth as his boss.

Meanwhile, pro-Iran militia groups in Iraq warn that, if the U.S. joins in strikes on Iran, they will target U.S. bases in Iraq and the region.

So we are careening toward a catastrophic war with Iran, with no U.S. diplomatic leadership and only Trump and Harris waiting in the wings. As Trita Parsi wrote in Responsible Statecraft, “If U.S. service members find themselves in the line of fire in an expanding Iran-Israel conflict, it will be a direct result of this administration’s failure to use U.S. leverage to pursue America’s most core security interest here — avoiding war.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

Image by Planet Volumes.

In April 2021, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree postponing parliamentary and presidential elections, which were scheduled to take place in May and July respectively.

The then-85-year-old Palestinian leader justified his unwarranted decision as a result of a ‘dispute’ with Israel over the vote of Palestinians living in the occupied Palestinian city of East Jerusalem.

But that was just a pretense. Though contrary to international law, Israel considers Palestinian East Jerusalem as part of its “eternal and undivided capital’, the cancellation of the elections stemmed from a purely internal Palestinian matter: fears that the outcome of the elections could sideline Abbas and his unelected political apparatus.

Marwan Barghouti, though a member of Abbas’ Fatah party, had decided to throw his hat in the ring, entering the elections under a separate list, the Freedom List. Opinion polls showed that, if Barghouti entered the fray, he could have decisively beaten Abbas. Those numbers are, in fact, consistent with most Palestinian public opinion polls conducted in recent years.

However, Barghouti, the most popular Palestinian figure in the West Bank, is a prisoner in Israel. He has spent 22 years in Israeli prisons due to his leadership of the Second Palestinian Intifada, the uprising of 2000.

Neither Israel nor Abbas wanted Barghouti, known as the Mandela of Palestine, to acquire any more validation while in prison, thus putting pressure on Israel to release him.

One can only speculate regarding the possible outcomes of the canceled May and July 2021 elections should they have taken place as scheduled. A democratically elected government would have certainly addressed, to some extent, the question of legitimacy, or lack thereof, among all Palestinian factions.

It would have also allowed the incorporation of all major Palestinian groups into a new political structure that would be purely Palestinian – not a mere platform for the whims and interests of specific political groups, business classes or hand-picked ruling elites.

That is all moot now, but the question of legitimacy remains a primary one, as the Palestinian people, more than ever before, require a unified, truly representative leadership that is capable of steering the just cause of Palestine during these horrifically difficult and crucial times.

This new leadership could have also understood the changing global dynamics regarding Palestine and would be compelled, per the will of the Palestinian people, to refrain from utilizing growing international support and sympathies with Gaza for financial perks and limited factional interests.

True, elections under military occupation would never meet the requirements of true democracy. However, if a minimal degree of representation was acquired in the now-canceled elections, the outcome could have served as a starting point towards widening the circle of representation to include the PLO and all Palestinians, in occupied Palestine and in the shatat as well.

Palestinians in the shatat, the diaspora, have also confronted the question of legitimacy and representation. However well-intentioned, many of these attempts  faced, and continue to face, many obstacles, including the impossible geography, increasing political restrictions and limited funding, among other problems.

As the vacuum of truly representative leadership in Palestine remains in place, Washington and its western allies are left to contend with the question themselves: who shall rule the Palestinians? Who shall govern Gaza after the war? Who are the ‘moderate’ Palestinians to be included in future US-led western schemes and the ‘extremists’ to be shunned and relegated?

The irony is that such thinking, of picking and choosing Palestinian representation, has led, in large part, to the current crisis in Palestine. Segmenting Palestinians according to ideological, geographic and political lines has proved disastrous, not just to the Palestinians themselves but to any entity that is interested in achieving a just peace in Palestine.

The question of representation should be resolved by the Palestinian people and no one else. And, until that task is achieved, we must invest in centering Palestinian voices in every political, legal and social platform that is relevant to Palestine, to the struggle of the Palestinians and to their legitimate aspirations.

Centering Palestinian voices does not mean that any Palestinian is a legitimate representative of the collective Palestinian experience. Indeed, not any Palestinian, regardless of his political views, class orientation, background, and so on can be a worthy ambassador for the Palestinian cause.

Even without organized general elections, we already know so much about what Palestinians want. They want an end to the Israeli occupation, the dismantlement of the illegal settlements, the honoring of the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees, social equality, end to corruption and democratic representation, among other shared values.

These are not my own conclusions, but the views of the majority of Palestinians as indicated in various opinion public polls. Similar sentiments have been expressed and repeated year after year. It follows that any true representative of the Palestinian cause should adhere to these ideals; otherwise, he or she either represents the narrow interests of a faction, a self-serving class or merely reflects his own personal views.

Only those who truly reflect the wider collective Palestinian experience and aspiration deserved to be centered, listened to or engaged with. Doing so would help protect the Palestinian cause of the self-seeking few, who use the Palestinian struggle as an opportunity for personal or factional gains.

The post Abbas ‘Postponed’ Democracy – So, Who Speaks on Behalf of the Palestinian People?   appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

“CPJ is deeply concerned by the attacks on the Zoom News TV crew in Sulaymaniyah and the Alsumaria TV crew in Baghdad,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna in New York. “We call on Iraqi authorities to thoroughly investigate these incidents and ensure their security forces are properly trained to interact with journalists.”

On August 18, in Halabja, Sulaymaniyah province, Iraqi Kurdistan Asayish security forces attacked Zoom News TV reporter Avin Atta and cameraman Zhyar Kamli while they were reporting on a demonstration against the killing of a porter, known as a kolbar, by Iraqi border forces in the Hawraman area.

Atta told CPJ that an Asayish official twisted her arm behind her back, dislocating her shoulder and wrist, after she refused to hand over their camera and microphone. The security forces released Atta and Kamli after reviewing their footage for more than an hour. 

CPJ did not receive a response to its request for comment sent via messaging app to Salam Abdulkhaliq, spokesperson for the Kurdistan Region Security Agency.

Zoom News TV supports the newly formed People’s Front, a political party participating in Kurdistan’s October 20 parliamentary elections.  

Separately, Iraqi SWAT forces assaulted Alsumaria TV reporter Amir Al-Khafaji and cameraman Omar Abbas while they were covering an August 19 Baghdad protest by medical school graduates demanding jobs.

Al-Khafaji told CPJ by phone that four SWAT officers beat him and confiscated their equipment and phones after he tried to stop them from attacking Abbas.

After taking the journalists to a police station in Baghdad’s Al-Rusafa district, the officers accused them of assaulting security forces and refused to release them until they signed a pledge not to attack security forces again. “We were shocked and denied the allegations,” said Al-Khafaji.

CPJ received no response to its call for comment from Iraqi Interior Ministry spokesperson Brigadier General Miqdad Miri.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Galehban, the publisher and the editor-in-chief of Urmiye24 Kurdish News, was arrested by the Iran’s Cyber Police Unit in the city of Urmia, in West Azerbaijan province, on April 8, according to news reports.

According to CPJ research, the Urmiye24 website was suspended as soon as Galehban was arrested. According to news reports, Galehban was arrested after the office of Urmia’s Prosecutor General filed a lawsuit against him. CPJ was unable to determine where Galehban was being held or whether he had been formally charged.

Iranian cartoonist Atena Faraghdani was arrested violently again on April 14, according to a post by her lawyer, Mohammad Moghimi, on X, formerly known as Twitter.

According to a separate post by Moghimi, security forces arrested Faraghdani when she was trying to exhibit some of her critical cartoons publicly in the street. She was beaten in the head multiple times at the time of arrest, resulting in a nose bleed. She fainted, and later found herself in detention.

According to the report, Faraghdani is banned from publishing her cartoons or holding any exhibitions. According to her lawyer, the cartoonist was charged with “spreading propaganda against the system” and “blasphemy.”

“Iranian authorities are desperate to silence the truthful voices and now imprisoned journalist Rasoul Galehban and cartoonist Atena Faraghdani,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martínez de la Serna in New York  “Authorities must realize that jailing journalists and critical voices won’t help them in hiding Iran’s difficult realities, and they must immediately release Galehban, Faraghdani, and all jailed journalists.”

On April 15, the office of Tehran’s Prosecutor General filed multiple lawsuits against several newspapers, including the economic daily Jahane Sanat, the moderate state-run Etemad, and journalists Abbas Abdi, the head of the Tehran Journalists Association, and Hossein Dehbashi, a media worker, charging them with “disturbing public opinion,” according to news reports.

Dina Ghalibaf was also arrested on April 15 after reporting on social media about the sexual abuse and violent treatment of herself and other women by morality police agents, amid increased presence of compulsory hijab police forces to enforce Islamic hijab in big cities such as the capital, Tehran.

Ghalibaf, a freelance journalist who has previously worked with the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA), was scheduled to be temporarily released on bail from Evin prison on Monday. But authorities announced to her family that a new case has opened against her questioning her claims of sexual assault.

CPJ emailed Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York requesting comment on the above-mentioned cases but did not receive any response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

On Tuesday, security forces arrested Abbasi, a freelance investigative reporter, in a public location in the southern port city of Bandar Abbas in Hormozgan Province, according to news reports. CPJ was unable to determine where Abbasi was being held or whether he had been formally charged.

“Iranian authorities must immediately disclose the location of investigative journalist Hasan Abbasi, who has not been seen or heard from since he was arrested, free him, and drop any charges,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour. “Authorities must realize that repeatedly arresting and detaining journalists like Abbasi won’t stop them from reporting on vital issues in their communities.”

Abbasi was previously arrested on April 30, 2023, detained for one week, and charged with disturbing the public order and spreading false news on social media after the governor of Hormozgan Province filed a lawsuit against him over his critical reporting, according to the exile-run Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA).

In recent weeks, six journalists— Maryam Shokrani, Sara Massoumi, Milad Alavi, Matin Ghaffarian, Omid Tosheh, and Zeinab Rahimi—who reported on the death and funeral of 16-year-old Armita Geravand in October have been charged with “false news” or “spreading propaganda against the system,” according to news reports.

Geravand died after falling into a coma while in the Tehran Metro. Her head was uncovered, in violation of the mandatory Islamic dress code. Iran has denied that she was injured in a confrontation with the morality police.

Massoumi was sentenced on December 20 to six months in prison and a two-year ban from journalism for publishing false information after she posted one tweet about Geravand.

Alavi was among about 80 journalists who were arrested in early 2023, after mass protests swept Iran following the death in morality-police custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.

Separately, on December 19, 2023, journalist Hadi Kasaeizadeh was arrested after responding to a summons to appear at the Qodousi Courthouse in Tehran, where he was charged with “false news,” “defamation,” and “disturbing public order,” HRANA reported. On December 23, Kasaeizadeh, who runs the independent news website M-Azadi, was released on bail, the state-run news website Didbaniran.ir reported.

Kasaeizadeh said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that he was facing four separate lawsuits over his reporting.

Iran was the world’s worst jailer of journalists in 2022, with 62 imprisoned as of December 1 of that year, according to CPJ’s annual prison census.

CPJ emailed Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York requesting comment but did not receive any response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Mahmoud Abbas, the usually low-profile president of the Palestinian Authority, was widely condemned around the world this week, including by prominent Palestinian intellectuals, after making antisemitic comments about the Holocaust in a televised speech to his party last month. While Abbas’s words and actions rarely command significant international attention, the incident put a spotlight on his deep unpopularity among Palestinians, some 73 percent of whom want him gone, and their growing disillusionment with the PA.

Abbas, whose spokesperson disputed that his remarks were antisemitic, was one of the architects of the Oslo peace process, which commenced with a historic handshake between Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn 30 years ago this week. Oslo has long been dead to Palestinians, whose hopes in the statehood promised to them under the deal collapsed years ago.

Now, faced with the most far-right extremist Israeli government to date, escalating settler and military violence that have laid bare the PA’s inability to protect its people, and Abbas’s increasingly authoritarian rule, many Palestinians have also begun to question the future of Oslo’s most enduring legacy: the PA itself. As Palestinians look with growing concern to an unclear succession path following Abbas, who is 87 and has ruled since shortly Arafat died in 2004, they are also asking whether the institution itself can — or should — survive a political moment so profoundly distant from that of its establishment.

“There’s a very big question mark about the sustainability of the Palestinian Authority,” said Ammar Dwaik, director of the Independent Commission for Human Rights, Palestine’s official rights ombudsman.

It was a question I heard from many Palestinians across class, generation, and political allegiance during a trip to the occupied West Bank earlier this year.

“What’s the point of the PA?” asked Ehab Bseiso, a former minister of culture whom Abbas fired in 2021 after he publicly criticized Palestinian security forces’ killing of an outspoken critic of the PA. “What’s the point of having a PA if we still have expansion of settlements, incursions, killings, shootings, and so on? There’s nothing that the PA can offer. It’s been trapped in one function: maintaining order, condemning Israeli violations, addressing the international community. It doesn’t match the anger and frustration on the ground.”

Bseiso pointed to Abbas’s rule-by-decree governance, with no elections held in a generation and Parliament dissolved years ago. “The whole Palestinian political future is linked to, ‘What’s going to happen after Abbas is gone?’” Bseiso said. “That’s a failure in itself, because if we had institutions, this question wouldn’t have been emerging. In a healthy political system, one president goes and another comes. But we have no institutions, there is no Parliament, no elections for the last 18 years.”

The authority has become “irrelevant” to many Palestinians, echoed Mustafa Barghouti, a co-founder of the international boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement and secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, a third party aiming to overcome the split between Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, and Fatah, Abbas’s party.

Abbas Zaki, a veteran Fatah member, put it more bluntly. “The PA is over, they are finished,” Zaki said. “We need to reorganize ourselves.”

Israeli forces use gas bombs against protesters at a demonstration marking the 30th anniversary of the Oslo Accords signed between Palestine and Israel, Gaza City, Gaza, on Sept. 13, 2023.

Subcontractors for the Occupation

The Palestinian Authority was established as part of the Oslo agreements as a transitional body to administer the territories Israel has illegally occupied since 1967: the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement until the contours of a sovereign Palestinian nation could be finalized in negotiations. That, of course, never happened. Instead, Israel has spent the last 30 years seizing control of most of the territory that was intended to constitute the basis for a Palestinian state. In the five years that Oslo set aside for negotiations, the population of settlers in the occupied territories more than doubled, ballooning to some 700,000 today.  

With prospects of a two-state solution all but vanished, so has the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority itself. While Abbas is deeply unpopular, his potential successors fare hardly better, a clear sign that the institution, more than the man himself, is the problem.

Still, even the PA’s most outspoken critics stress that its failures must be understood in the context of an Israeli occupation of which the authority is but an extension. From the start, the PA had no real sovereignty or power. While a series of agreements technically gave it administrative and security control over 17 percent of the West Bank — the most densely populated areas known as Area A— Israeli forces frequently invade those lands, exposing the meaninglessness of those arrangements. Meanwhile, the PA has virtually no control over the majority of the West Bank, what’s known as Areas B and C.

The PA is charged with running the functions of local government — such as education, health care, trash collection, and policing — even though under international law, the occupying power is responsible for the care of the people under its control. Israel, meanwhile, controls all movements outside and within the West Bank, its natural resources, and its economy.

The Oslo agreements also resulted in one of the most fraught features of the authority’s existence: its obligation to a deeply controversial security coordination with Israel. While PA officials need to coordinate with their Israeli counterparts to administer a host of services, including policing, the security coordination also sets up Palestinian security forces, trained and funded largely by the United States and European countries, to work with the Israeli military to suppress Palestinian resistance. That, in addition to the PA’s inability to protect Palestinians against violence by the military and settlers, has deepened its delegitimization in the eyes of Palestinians.

A growing number of Palestinians have come to view the PA as an enabler to their oppression rather than a legitimate representative of their political aspirations.

At the same time, the authority’s role as civic administrator has made it indispensable to maintaining a modicum of normalcy and services for the population. Crucially, the donor-funded PA has become the primary economic engine in Palestine, employing at least 150,000 people in a bloated bureaucracy designed to inject liquidity in an otherwise strangled economy. (Some 942,000 Palestinians, a quarter of the population, are entirely dependent on PA salaries). But even those economic benefits are subject to Israel’s whims. Israel collects taxes and tariffs from Palestinians and transfers them to the PA, frequently withholding funds to apply political pressure and leaving tens of thousands of people without income.

Against that backdrop, a growing number of Palestinians have come to view the PA as an enabler to their oppression rather than a legitimate representative of their political aspirations. 

“The people look at it as a subcontractor,” said Shawan Jabarin, the director of the prominent Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, echoing a common refrain. “The PA, at the end of the day, is not an independent state, it’s still not a sovereign state. We don’t like to say that, for national reasons, not to harm them, but purely speaking, it is a subcontractor.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chairs a weekly cabinet meeting at his office in Jerusalem on Aug. 27, 2023

The End of the PA

In Ramallah, the authority’s de facto capital, foreign-sponsored ministry buildings bear the insignia and flags of a “State of Palestine.” That statehood was recognized by an overwhelming majority of the United Nations’ General Assembly in 2012, perhaps Abbas’s greatest political accomplishment, but it does not exist in practice.

In fact, mostly powerless at home, the PA’s leadership has staked its hopes in international forums and mechanisms, including bids to bring Israeli crimes before both the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. It’s a strategy that has slowly earned Palestinians global solidarity while also angering Israeli officials, who dubbed the efforts “diplomatic terrorism.” But it also put the fate of Palestinians in the hands of fickle global trends and left many of them feeling alienated by efforts that have no real impact on their daily lives.

“We cared more about the outside. We worked so hard in the international arena to get some recognition and support,” said Zaki, the Fatah veteran. “Now we’re shifting, we’re turning inside. We need a plan to protect our people and help people confront the settlers. We need to focus on national unity and reorganizing the Palestinian household.”

He and others pointed to the current moment in Israeli politics, with the country’s most extremist government to date — headed by third-time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in coalition with some of the country’s most far-right parties — attacking its institutions and enflaming internal divisions, as one of great danger but also of opportunity for Palestinians. “The big difference between the Israeli governments of the last 20, 30 years is that some of them were working under the table, and this one is working in front of the whole world,” Mousa Hadid, the former mayor of Ramallah, told me. “This government will take us to a place that the whole world must stop and start thinking about.”

Israeli leaders have relied on the PA for the last 30 years, understanding the strategic need for maintaining its administrative role and security cooperation. Yet the current Israeli government has shown little interest in its survival. Instead, the country’s leadership has made no secret of its disdain for the PA. Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, for instance, has called on Israel to “work towards its collapse.”

Whether that will happen or not, many Palestinians have already begun to think about a future not only after Abbas, but also with leadership and a political process that is more representative of their aspirations. With some 70 percent of the population younger than Oslo, many Palestinians are also pushing for different goals and frameworks than those laid out by the agreements.

“I do believe our goal as Palestinians should not only be fighting the occupation, I think we should call for ending and bringing down the whole system of apartheid and racial discrimination in the whole of Palestine,” said Barghouti, the Palestinian National Initiative secretary. “They’re killing the two-state solution? We can have a one-state solution. But we will not live as slaves in a system of apartheid.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Alice Speri.

• US calls China “aggressive”
• Suez Canal investments
• Multinational pharmaceuticals in China
• History of bicycles in China

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

At around 9 p.m. on Wednesday, May 24, between eight and 10 men—some wearing uniforms—detained Abraham, president and anchor of BOL News, while he was going home from the privately owned broadcaster’s office in the capital Islamabad, according to news reports and Raja Amir Abbas, the journalist’s lawyer, who spoke with CPJ by phone.

Abraham’s whereabouts remain unknown as of the evening of Thursday, May 25, Abbas said.

The whereabouts of BOL News anchor Imran Riaz Khan, who has been missing since May 11 following his arrest at Punjab’s Sialkot airport, also remain unknown as of Thursday evening, his lawyer Azhar Siddique told CPJ by phone. Earlier in the day, police failed to present the journalist at the Lahore High Court for a fourth time since his arrest, and a senior Lahore police official told the court that the journalist was not in the custody of the Inter-Services Intelligence or Military Intelligence agencies.

“We are deeply disturbed by the disappearances of journalists Sami Abraham and Imran Riaz Khan amid a worsening media crackdown in Pakistan,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “Authorities must respect the rule of law and either present Abraham and Khan in court or immediately release them.”

Journalists have been arrested, attacked, and surveilled after the May 9 arrest of former Prime Minister Imran Khan, also chair of the opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, which led to nationwide protests.

Abraham and Imran Riaz Khan, who is not related to the former prime minister, frequently host PTI supporters on their talk shows and post pro-PTI content on their YouTube channels. Two Pakistani journalists who spoke to CPJ on condition of anonymity – citing fear of reprisal – said they believe the two anchors were targeted as part of the larger crackdown on the party.

Before his disappearance, Abraham posted a series of video reports on his YouTube channel, which has 850,000 subscribers, in support of former Prime Minister Khan and critical of the country’s military establishment.

Abraham was returning home when four cars intercepted his vehicle, and the men forced Abraham out of the car and took him to an unknown location, according to Abbas and a police complaint by Ali Raza, Abraham’s brother. They took Abraham’s two mobile phones, car keys, and the driver’s phone, but did not detain the driver.

In his complaint filed at Islamabad’s Aabpara Police Station, Raza said the journalist had been “abducted.” As of Thursday evening, police have not filed a first information report to formally open an investigation into the complaint, Abbas said.

Pakistani newspaper Dawn reported that unnamed sources said police had arrested Abraham. However, Islamabad police issued a statement on Twitter claiming they would waste no time in searching for Abraham and would fully cooperate with the journalist’s family.

Also on Thursday, Abbas told CPJ that he had filed a petition at the Islamabad High Court requesting authorities present Abraham in court and divulge the grounds upon which he has been detained, adding that the next hearing will be held on Friday morning.

CPJ’s calls and messages to Islamabad Police Inspector-General Akbar Nasir Khan and Information Minister Maryam Aurangzeb received no replies.

Usman Anwar, inspector-general of the Punjab provincial police, told CPJ via messaging app that “all agencies were working on the case” of missing journalist Imran Riaz Khan and are “looking at all the angles.”

“If someone is hiding on his own, it’s quite difficult to find that person,” Anwar said.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

In this roundtable, Tareq Baconi, Yara Hawari, Alaa Tartir, and Tariq Kenney-Shawa offer incisive critiques of Palestinian leadership. Collectively, they make clear that Abbas has presided over the continuation of the status quo of Israeli occupation and apartheid, the criminalization of Palestinian resistance, the suppression of the democratic process, and the abandonment of a comprehensive vision for a decolonized Palestinian future. 

Leadership Without a Vision for Liberation

Tareq Baconi

In early June 2022, Mahmoud Abbas made a rare appearance in the streets of Ramallah and mingled with passersby to dispel rumors of a stroke. If it had been a more frequent occurrence, driven not by the need to prove longevity but by a desire to connect with his people, Abbas might have encountered the resentment and despair that Palestinians feel towards his authoritarian and defunct leadership, now well over a decade past its democratic mandate.

A key behind-the-scenes figure in the Oslo Accords, Abbas’s legacy is as the bureaucrat who sustained the architecture of the autonomy ushered in by those negotiations — a form of limited governance that perpetually falls short of self-determination or statehood. Lacking a vision for liberation or effective strategic capabilities, Abbas has excelled at facilitating the Israeli regime’s efforts to manage the status quo by remaining committed to an extensive infrastructure of security coordination — preventing all forms of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s continued domination — and entrenching Israel’s divide and rule policies between conflicting Palestinian factions in the West Bank and Gaza.

The ineptitude of Abbas’s leadership lies not only in undermining the Palestinian quest for liberation, but in doing so while expanding and fortifying authoritarian rule
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For Western counterparts, Abbas is often described as a man of peace, a figure who chooses stability over resistance, and an active player in a peacemaking industry widely understood to be aimed at sustaining Palestinian subjugation rather than delivering statehood. To many Palestinians, his formulation of peace translates into acquiescence to Israeli settler-colonial apartheid. Abbas has institutionalized this vision in the very vehicles of Palestinian liberation he chairs. Indeed, under his tenure, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has been effectively hollowed out and turned into an impotent organization. This has not only weakened the capacity of the sole representative of the Palestinian people to formulate an effective strategy for liberation, it has also further fragmented the Palestinian people. 

By subsuming the PLO into the offices of the PA, Abbas has effectively cut out the Palestinian diaspora, which forms the majority of the Palestinian people, and reduced this expansive and powerful representation of Palestinian peoplehood to an ineffective and divided bureaucracy in the West Bank and Gaza committed to self-governance under occupation. The ineptitude of Abbas’s leadership lies not only in undermining the Palestinian quest for liberation, but in doing so while expanding and fortifying authoritarian rule and undermining all forms of Palestinian democratic norms. 

His replacement, currently expected to be Hussein al-Sheikh, Secretary-General of the PLO’s Executive Committee, is likely to deepen Palestinian subservience to the Israeli regime through expanding the system of security coordination that remains dear to Abbas, and that sits at the heart of the Oslo Accords. Al-Sheikh will likely attempt to couch these policies in a discourse of defiance, resistance, and Palestinian rights, much like his predecessor. If he starts venturing out onto the streets beyond his halls of power, he will quickly learn how hollow his words ring. In this way, al-Sheikh’s rise to succession encapsulates Abbas’s legacy: the creation of a bureaucracy of Palestinian governance that lacks any vision for Palestinian liberation and that allows Israel’s system of apartheid to continue at very little cost. 

Cementing Authoritarianism and Destroying Democracy

Yara Hawari

Throughout his reign, Abbas has made numerous disingenuous calls for elections, the last of which was in January 2021, when he issued a presidential decree calling for legislative elections to be held the following May. While the PA took steps that indicated elections may indeed take place — going so far as to set up electronic voter registration — Abbas ultimately canceled them in April 2021, citing the Israeli regime’s refusal to allow Palestinians in East Jerusalem to participate. This was the closest the PA had come to holding elections since 2006, and the gesture temporarily satiated the international community's appetite for moves toward democratizing the PA — a body it has propped up for three decades.

Nonetheless, for Palestinians, the international community's demand for democratization remains dubious given its rejection of the 2006 democratic Palestinian election results and indifference to the Israeli regime’s subsequent siege on Gaza. Moreover, the West’s persistent reduction of a democratic society to the mere existence of democratic elections demonstrates its disingenuity. While elections may well be a product of a meaningful democratic process and culture, they can also take place in a society where other key elements of a democracy are lacking or entirely absent, and serve instead to reinforce the status quo. Such is the case in the West Bank and Gaza, where any elections would inevitably result in either a continuation of the existing power structures or simply reproduce another authoritarian leadership. 

Indeed, a more comprehensive understanding of democracy recognizes that elections have to be part of a package in which democracy exists across society and where political plurality is accepted and encouraged. This is far from the reality inside Palestinian political institutions in the West Bank, where Abbas has cemented a system that revolves around his leadership with little room for accountability or transparency. Senior positions are assigned based on patrimonialism and nepotism, forming an all-male echo chamber that reiterates the president’s positions. 

Moreover, Abbas has merged all three branches of government — the legislative, executive, and judiciary — so that there is no separation of, or checks to, power within Palestinian political institutions. His latest move in this regard was to create a High Judicial Council and appoint himself as head. Meanwhile, critical voices are pushed to the margins, with journalists and activists routinely arrested and threatened for criticizing Abbas on media and social media platforms. 

In Ramallah, the de facto capital of the PA, pictures of Abbas loom over employees in government buildings and over pupils in schools; they even adorn walls of private businesses. This is not to be mistaken for popularity, however, as a September 2022 poll found that at least 74% of Palestinians do not want Abbas to remain president. Furthermore, his inner circle is continuously compelled to stage press conferences or public appearances as a form of proof of life to quell rumors of his death. In this regard, he is well on his way to fitting the mold of a quintessential despotic Arab leader. 

But Abbas cannot be given all the credit; this kind of authoritarian rule is directly a product of the Israeli regime, which, in addition to propping up the PA, has also actively and consistently imposed repressive measures against Palestinian politics and democratic expressions. Indeed, an authoritarian and compliant Palestinian leadership serves the Israeli regime’s goals well. Yet authoritarianism is neither inherent to the Palestinian people nor is it an inevitable outcome of settler-colonial domination. Abbas may leave the Palestinian people with a legacy of entrenched authoritarianism, but they, too, have their own legacy: resistance and defiance against all odds.

Criminalizing Resistance and Entrenching Securitization 

Alaa Tartir

Under Abbas, the PA has managed to further deepen its security coordination with the Israeli regime, entrenching an institutional policy of governing with an iron fist. Indeed, in the last decade, the PA security establishment has consolidated power more than ever and received the largest portion of the PA budget, allowing it to solidify its authoritarian and repressive rule over the Palestinian people. As a result, a participatory, inclusive, and democratic political transition continues to be denied, and Palestinian resistance to Israeli oppression — armed and otherwise — is continuously repressed in order to prioritize security and the perpetuation of the status quo. 

Abbas may leave the Palestinian people with a legacy of entrenched authoritarianism, but they, too, have their own legacy: resistance and defiance against all odds
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These practices have become increasingly pervasive under Abbas, and are part and parcel of the architecture of governance in the West Bank and Gaza. As a result, it is more than likely that structural authoritarianism will continue after his reign ends. Indeed, after Abbas, a new Fatah leadership will neither be interested in nor able to deviate from the PA’s deeply entrenched practices over the past decades. Abbas’s possible successor, Hussein al-Sheikh, currently oversees security coordination with the Israeli regime — an arrangement Abbas has described as “sacred” — and shows no signs of altering the PA’s relationship with it. So long as this arrangement is in place, serving the interests of the Israeli regime and ruling Palestinian elite, hope for democratic change remains unattainable. 

Other senior members of Fatah and the PA security establishment describe security coordination as an “avenue for independence” and as “part and parcel of the liberation strategy.” Yet within the reality of settler colonialism, coordination can only be understood as domination. It is no wonder, then, that the vast majority of the Palestinian people reject security coordination; they correctly understand it as a further layer of denial of their basic human, civil, and political rights.   

The ruling elite seek no less than the continuation of the PA in order to preserve their illegitimate power and influence, entirely disregarding the popular will of Palestinians. After Abbas, authoritarianism will thus continue to be justified under the pretext of ensuring stability and preventing chaos. 

This reality is not new to the Palestinians who have lived it with each of Abbas’s successive and undemocratic terms over the past 14 years. In this way, his most lasting legacy will be the continuation of the authoritarian status quo he created — one that deliberately refuses to center the people in the political project through building accountable, legitimate, democratic, and representative institutions. 

Centering the Palestinian people and ensuring their right to resist under settler-colonial occupation, as well as empowering them to unify under a national project in spite of forced fragmentation, are the key pillars to breaking away from the status quo. However, thanks to Abbas, any “new” leadership of the PA after his departure will perceive these pillars as threats to their authoritarian rule, and will therefore utilize all available resources and avenues to deny and suppress them. In other words, these pillars are not temporary or circumstantial to Abbas’s rule; rather, his legacy will be their ongoing suppression as part of a strategic and fundamental component of governance, leaving the Palestinians increasingly at odds with their leadership. 

A Leader Committed to Dependence 

Tariq Kenney-Shawa

As president of the PA, Abbas has presided over the entrenchment of Israeli occupation and apartheid, a deepening of internal corruption, and the effective death of the two-state solution. However, despite his ineptitude, it would be inaccurate to blame Abbas entirely for the dire situation in which Palestinians find themselves. Even that would be giving him too much recognition. Arguably, any leader who is entirely dependent on foreign aid and lacks control of their own borders is doomed to fail.   

It is through the lens of dependence that Abbas’s legacy should be understood. In his increasingly paranoid quest to maintain power within the fragmented bantustans allotted to him by the Israeli regime, Abbas has remained loyal to the US-sponsored “peace process.” He has hoped that through negotiations and appeasement, he would gain the trust of Israeli leaders and their US backers; the survival of his party and his political vision continue to depend on it. In doing so, his forces have silenced anyone who has dared to propose alternative visions, suppressed Palestinian civil society, and ultimately served as subcontractors of the Israeli occupation. 

Even in his rare attempts to stand up to the Israeli regime and its US benefactors, for example, by promoting Palestinian membership in the UN and threatening to push for investigations into Israeli war crimes at the International Criminal Court, Abbas has repeatedly faltered in the face of Israeli and US pressure. His most recent attempts to show his frustration with US intransigency appear as increasingly desperate throes. Meanwhile, his inarticulate outbursts have made it more difficult for the Palestinian diaspora to translate growing international support for Palestinians into actual policy change.  

It is unclear what will happen after Abbas, or what will become of a leadership that has neither a mandate nor a vision for a liberated future. And with no official process for elections, the wheels have been set in motion to secure his replacement. The current candidate most likely to succeed him, Hussein al-Sheikh, would represent a continuation of Abbas’s dismal legacy, but many also fear further political repression by Israeli occupation forces. 

Regardless of who succeeds Abbas, the US will likely relish the opportunity to symbolically bolster relations with the PA in what will be billed as an effort to revive the two-state solution and maintain the status quo, predicated on prioritizing Israel’s interests over Palestinian rights. Indeed, the US will reiterate support for a PA that is capable of maintaining internal stability, while not strong enough to challenge the Israeli regime. The US may even increase financial support to the PA as a gesture of goodwill and an incentive for further cooperation. In light of the Israeli regime’s new far-right, extremist government, the US approach will continue to be one of “conflict management” and maintaining security while Israel tightens its grip on the Palestinians. 

In truth, it matters little who emerges at the helm of the PA. The very nature of its relationship with the Israeli regime and the US is what ensures its undoing. As long as Palestinian leadership remains committed to dependence and subservient to the Israeli regime and donor community, it will never seek liberation and the Palestinian people will continue to take resistance into their own hands. 

The post The Legacy of Mahmoud Abbas appeared first on Al-Shabaka.

This content originally appeared on Al-Shabaka and was authored by Tareq Baconi.

Not knowing the question was being used to provoke and use him to publicize apartheid Israel as a constant victim, President Abbas responded, “From 1947 to the present day, Israel has committed 50 massacres in Palestinian villages and cities, in Deir Yassin, Tantura, Kafr Qasim and many others, 50 massacres, 50 Holocausts.” Nothing incorrect in what he was saying and in using holocaust as a metaphor, stressing that, to those who have been massacred, a holocaust has no limits in size. Nor did his words diminish the Word war II holocaust.

President Abbas failed to realize he was faced by a provocateur, who wanted to be provoked so he could raise the stakes, and that he was surrounded by racists who are determined to have the word holocaust reserved for their own use — Zionists, who daily convince the world that the World War II atrocities have a unique presence among all other atrocities and the German Federal Republic that subordinates other atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. The contrived uniqueness gives Zionists the right to cripple anyone who bothers them and enables Germany to claim superior morality by atoning for the sins of vanquished antecedents.

A more astute political leader would have responded to this “Why do you beat your wife?” type of question by stating the question had no relevance to the present meeting and neither he nor the Palestinian government condoned or had any role in the event.

German Chancellor, Olaf Schulz, the real culprit in this situation, demonstrated the continuous German obsequious attitude to the Zionist cause with inflammatory remarks. He wrote on Twitter, “The (Palestinian) leader would have gained sympathy if he had apologized for the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics 1972. Accusing Israel of ‘50 Holocausts’ instead is the most disgusting speech ever heard in the German Chancellery.”

By not immediately intervening to prevent further ugly conversation and not shielding his guest from insults, the German Chancellor permitted the Zionists to twist everything to their advantage while he heightened the attack with careless remarks. Olaf Schulz’s remarks may be among the most disgusting ever uttered by a world leader. Demonstrations before German embassies should demand his immediate replacement. Off to a nursing home for this crippled politician.

The calculated controversy demonstrates the clever strategy that Israel has used to perpetrate its genocide on the Palestinians, distinguishing harm to Jewish people, no matter how insignificant, from all other harms and, by use of the unique words anti-Semitism and holocaust, giving that harm more significance. Constant repetition of these words provokes a Pavlovian response in a significant number of numbed people, whose “knee-jerk” reaction is. “We must protect the defenseless Israeli Jews from these vile attacks.”

Combatting the weaponiziation of these words — anti-Semitism and holocaust — is a necessary challenge for combatting apartheid Israel’s horrific oppression of the Palestinian people. Due to the lightning rod attributes of the words, the approach has been unduly careful and, by this manner, has achieved nothing. Time to shout out the truths: “Anti-Semitism is a manufactured word that has no context; anti-Judaism is the preferred word. Until the World War II atrocities, Jews suffered much less discrimination than other minorities, many of whom, such as the Cathars, Carthaginians, Hereros, Aborigines, and hundreds of tribes in the Americas, Africa and Asia have been almost completely wiped out and are not available to testify to the discrimination. Much of what is labelled as “anti-Semitism “ is the frequent discrimination against a minority (Jews in this case) provoked by economic, cultural, and social rivalries, religious intolerance, suspicions, or just being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. The recently contrived and infantile labeling of discrimination of Jews as “the world’s oldest and ongoing discrimination,” as if that is a contest and is important, is contradicted by the continuous prejudice against women, homosexuals, Armenians, Assyrians, Samaritans, Nubians, and others, only a few of mass brutalities, from ancient times until today. Jews suffered minimal discrimination in the United States, magnitudes less than other groups, and today, much, much less than Arabs, Muslims, and Asians. Three quarters of the Anti-Defamation League statistics on anti-Semitism are vandalism —tumbling of graveyard monuments, telephone calls of intended bombings, and depictions of Swastikas by teen-aged juvenile delinquents, who are not expressing anything against others and are only expressing frustration with their lives. Serious crimes against Jews cannot be underestimated and need attention but are infinitesimal compared to the wanton destruction of Palestinian life and property by Israel’s Jewish settlers and magnitudes less than the Islamophobic hate crimes committed annually against Arabs and Muslims in the United States.

Are the three years of the World War II holocaust more horrific and unique than the centuries of slaughter of the native tribes in the western hemisphere and the unendurable slavery of the African peoples, and not just in the United States, but throughout the world? The excessive attention to discrimination of Jews and to the World War II holocaust is due to one word ─ racism. The irony of the constant attention to the holocaust is that it is a racist expression, singling out one ethnicity in deference to others, while posing as anti-racist.

Israel cannot be defeated on the battlefield and its ultimate success in stealing all Palestinian lands and reducing the Palestinians to vassalage depends on convincing the world that it is a protector of the Jews, who are in constant danger, continually subjected to anti-Semitism and another possible holocaust. After each serious Israeli transgression on Palestinian life, Zionist followers bring to life the departed of the holocaust and resurrect age-old anti-Semitism charges, which are reinforced by new charges of antipathy to Jewish progress and endangerment of their lives. This manipulation shifts the talk from the Israeli destructive action against the Palestinians to a construct of spurious actions by a hostile world against Zionism. Capturing each generation to sympathize with the Zionist apartheid and oppressive causes is a constant objective of the Zionist agenda. Centuries-old harms, irrelevant to today, are presented as happenings of a close yesterday.

Oppression of the Palestinians will not be halted before the public relations stunts, which disgustingly use the dead from the holocaust and the sufferings of those subjected to criminal anti-Jewish criminal actions to cloak the oppression, are exposed and have no effect. Bringing Israel to task for its crimes demands revealing the nefarious use of the holocaust and spurious charges of anti-Semitism that attempt (and succeed) to shield Israel from criticism. Before the exposure is accomplished, nothing else will succeed in liberating the Palestinians from Israel’s genocidal actions.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

The post Investigating the Victim: On Abbas’ ‘Holocaust’ and the Depravity of Israeli Hasbara appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

The unwarranted conclusion by Haaretz, other Israeli media and, ultimately, numerous western outlets was not the outcome of a thorough investigation carried out by an independent commission of inquiry. In fact, on April 9, a UN convoy was prevented by Israel from reaching the Jenin camp and, on April 30, Israel officially blocked a United Nations inquiry into the killings. Haaretz’s seemingly conclusive statement was the outcome of two types of arbitrary evidence: the Israeli army’s own claim that it did not commit a massacre in Jenin, and the fact that the number of Palestinian victims was downgraded from an estimated hundreds of dead to scores of dead.

In Israel itself, “many feared that Jenin would be added to the black list of massacres that have shocked the world,” Haaretz reported with obvious relief. Though Israel has committed numerous crimes and massacres against Palestinians prior to April 2002, and many more after that date, Israelis remain comforted by their persisting illusion that they are still on the right side of history.

Those who insisted on the use of the phrase ‘Jenin massacre’ were attacked and smeared, not only by Israeli media and officials, but by western media as well. Accusing Israel of massacring Palestinians was equated with the ever-predictable label of ‘antisemitism’.

This accusation was the same label unleashed against those who accused Israel of responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacres, which killed thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese in September 1982. Commenting on the horrific bloodbath in the South Lebanon refugee camps, Israeli Prime Minister at the time, Menachem Begin, retorted, “Goyim kill goyim, and they come to hang the Jews.”

Though it was Begin who ordered the invasion of Lebanon which killed an estimated 17,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, he still felt completely innocent, and that the supposedly unfounded accusations were yet another antisemitic trope, not only targeting Israel, but all Jews, everywhere. Ironically, the official Israeli Kahan Commission found Israeli Defense Minister at the time, General Ariel Sharon, “indirectly responsible for the massacre”. Tellingly, Sharon later became the Prime Minister of Israel.

The recent frenzy generated against Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for using the word ‘Holocaust’ in describing Israeli crimes against Palestinians should, therefore, be placed within the above context, not in the word itself.

Indeed, many Israelis are fully familiar with the use of the word ‘holocaust’ in Arabic media, as various pro-Israeli organizations monitor Arab and Palestinian media as a matter of course. They must have already encountered many similar references to the ‘Syrian holocaust,’ the ‘Iraqi holocaust’, the ‘Palestinian holocaust’, and so on.

In Arabic usage, the word ‘holocaust’ came to represent something equivalent to a horrific massacre, or many massacres. Unlike ‘mathbaha’, meaning ‘massacre’, holocaust carries a deeper and more heart-wrenching meaning. If anything, the usage of the word further accentuates the growing understanding that Arabs feel towards the mass killing of the Jews and other vulnerable minorities by German Nazis during World War II. It neither negates, dismisses nor attempts to replace the reference to Adolf Hitler’s despicable crimes.

In fact, a simple discourse analysis of Abbas’ reference is enough to clarify his intentions. Speaking in Arabic, the Palestinian leader said, “From 1947 to the present day, Israel has committed 50 massacres in Palestinian villages and cities … 50 massacres, 50 holocausts and until today, and every day there are casualties killed by the Israeli military.”

It is doubtful that Abbas was referencing 50 specific massacres because, frankly, if he was, then he is certainly wrong, as many more massacres were committed in the period he specified. The Nakba, Jenin, and many such mass killings aside, the Israeli wars on Gaza in 2008-9 and 2014 alone witnessed the combined killings of almost 3,600 Palestinians, mostly civilians. Whole families in Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun, Rafah, Khan Younis, Zeitun, Buraij, and elsewhere perished in these one-sided ‘wars’ against a besieged population.

Abbas was simply illustrating that Israeli crimes against Palestinians are many, and are yet to end. His (Abbas’) remarks, uttered at a press conference in Berlin with German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz were a response to a strange question by a German journalist on whether Abbas was ready to apologize for the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games.

The question was strange because the group which carried out the attack then was a fringe Palestinian group that did not represent the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the Palestinian leadership in exile at the time. But also because, a week or so before the Abbas-Scholz meeting was held, Israel had killed 49 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including 17 children in its latest unprovoked war on Gaza.

It would have been more apt for the inquisitive journalist to ask Abbas if he had received an Israeli apology for killing Palestinian civilians; or, perhaps, ask Scholz if Berlin is ready to apologize to the Palestinian people for its blind military and political support of Tel Aviv. None of that, of course. Instead, it was Abbas who was attacked and shamed for daring to use the term ‘holocaust’, especially in the presence of the German leader who, in turn, was also chastised by Israeli media and officials for not responding to Abbas there and then.

To stave off a political crisis with Israel, Scholz tweeted the following day, of how “disgusted” he was by the “outrageous remarks” made by Abbas. He condemned the Palestinian leader for the “attempt to deny the crime of the Holocaust”, and so on.

Expectedly, Israeli leaders relished the moment. Instead of being held accountable for the killing of Palestinian civilians, they found themselves in a position where they supposedly had the moral high ground. Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid raged against Abbas’ “moral disgrace” and “monstrous lie”. Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz joined in, describing Abbas’ words as “despicable”. US State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, Deborah E. Lipstadt, also jumped into the fray, accusing Abbas of “Holocaust distortion” that “fuels antisemitism”.

Despite Abbas’ quick apology, the Germans continued to escalate, as Berlin police have reportedly “opened a preliminary investigation” against Abbas for his use of the term “50 Holocausts”. The repercussions of these comments are still ongoing.

In truth, Palestinians – officials, academics, or journalists – do not deny the Holocaust, but rather use the term to underscore their ongoing suffering at the hands of Israel. Unlike the West’s true Holocaust deniers, Palestinians see affinity between their victims and those of Nazi Germany. In that, there is no crime to investigate.

What truly requires urgent investigation and condemnation is Israel’s continued exploitation and denigration of the memory of the Holocaust to score cheap political points against Palestinians, to silence critics and to hide the true extent of its numerous massacres, criminal military occupation and racist apartheid regime.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ramzy Baroud.

On April 20, the Chadian gendarmerie, a military police force, arrested Memnguidé, a correspondent for the privately owned radio station Oxygène, as he covered unrest in the southwestern town of Donia in the Logone Occidental region, according to the journalist and Abbas Mahamoud, the chairman of the Union of Journalists of Chad (UJT). They both spoke to CPJ by phone and email.

Memnguidé and Mahamoud said the gendarmerie seized the journalist’s cell phone and took him to their office in the nearby Moundou city, where he was accused of rebellion, held for five days, and then released after the local prosecutor intervened. The gendarmerie informed Memnguidé on his release that he should be ready because they might still prosecute him, he told CPJ, adding that as of May 12, his cell phone had yet to be returned.

“Chadian authorities should cease their harassment of Radio Oxygène journalist Olivier Memnguidé and ensure he can work freely and without fear of another arbitrary arrest or prosecution,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in New York. “Covering unrest is dangerous enough for journalists without worrying about an arrest on spurious anti-state allegations.”

Memnguidé was arrested at the same time as several young adults from Donia “who were rioting in response to the detention of another youth who had been charged for allegedly stealing a motorcycle,” Mahamoud told CPJ.

“I went to the field to get a feel for the situation and to scout around. When I was about to meet [and interview] the authorities, the brigade commander who was following me, stopped me and took me to Moundou, the provincial capital,” Memnguidé told the CPJ. The journalist said he did not behave in any way that would justify him being accused of rebellion.

Five days later, on April 25, Memnguidé was presented to the prosecutor’s office in Moundou, where the deputy prosecutor ordered his release over because the court there did not have jurisdiction to proceed with the case, the journalist told CPJ. Since then, Memnguidé has not returned to his home in Goré, another nearby town, because he is fearful that he will be rearrested.

CPJ called Ahmed Saleh, a commandant with the local gendarmerie, but the line disconnected after CPJ told him the call was about Memnguidé’s arrest.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

In 2002, Mohsin Abbas was a reporter at the Daily Pakistan when he said he was arrested and abused during then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s campaign of surveillance and harassment of the press. (Abbas did not share further details out of concerns for the security of family members who remain in the country.)

He fled Pakistan for Canada, where he continued to work in journalism, including for the BBC. Fast forward 20 years, and Abbas took on a new journalistic project this year as publisher of the Tilbury Times, a Tilbury, Ontario, newspaper that was closed in 2020 after its parent company shed several publications due to COVID-19 revenue woes.

The 136-year-old newspaper, which Abbas transformed from a print weekly to a news site, publishes local crime and business news, and international news with a local angle, such as a recent interview with a Canadian family with ties to Ukraine. 

“If newspapers disappear, the well-being of the community decreases,” Mohsin, 47, said. 

In addition to the Tilbury Times, Abbas has also relaunched two other local Canadian news publications that shuttered in recent years: the LaSalle Post Reporter, previously the LaSalle Post, and Lakeshore News Reporter, previously Lakeshore News.

In a phone interview, Abbas spoke to CPJ about restarting the Tilbury Times and the importance of community reporting. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you decide to restart the Tilbury Times? 

I heard a program on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation [CBC] about a local newspaper going out of circulation. I felt a [kindred spirit] with the people in the community who wanted their stories to be told. It reminded me of when I was a child in Pakistan and didn’t see my own community reflected in stories from larger publications. Local stories were being lost and so I decided to step in and try to help.

How did you go about reopening it and hiring a staff?

When I first came up with the idea, it felt like nobody believed it would work out: an outsider coming into a small community to revive a paper. We started from scratch. I remortgaged my home to pay for startup costs. I also connected with local non-profits that archived all the previous editions of the Tilbury Times, so we have a sense of legacy. After the CBC published an article about my efforts, more people began reaching out to help: former employees, people from across Canada, and even people overseas.

Have Tilbury residents been welcoming of your initiative?

People have been very supportive. The more we publish, the more engagement we get from locals. People want to see their stories, their concerns reflected in their local paper. I’m learning so many things I never knew— for example, I never realized what a big issue internet connectivity is in rural areas. If we want to stay a strong democracy, we need to have local newspapers. Local news is an important pillar of society.

It’s about telling people’s stories. We’re not making a lot of money, but we’re making an impact. We’re able to inform people outside of Tilbury about the town. We’re getting clicks on the newspaper’s website from people in Toronto and the United States. We’re opening people’s eyes about the town and new opportunities in it. The local community has also [rallied behind] the paper. The more we publish, the more locals who are writing in with questions and things they want us to look into. It’s very satisfying experience.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Katherine Jacobsen/CPJ U.S. and Canada Program Coordinator.