ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our Dispatches newsletter; sign up to receive notes from our journalists.

In the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term, I spent a few weeks observing Chicago’s immigration court to get a sense of how things were changing. One afternoon in March, the case of a 27-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker caught my attention.

Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra stared into the camera at his virtual bond hearing. He wore the orange shirt given to inmates at a jail in Laredo, Texas, and headphones to listen to the proceedings through an interpreter.

More than a year earlier, Rodríguez had been convicted of shoplifting in the Chicago suburbs. But since then he had seemed to get his life on track. He found a job at Wrigley Field, sent money home to his mom in Venezuela and went to the gym and church with his girlfriend. Then, in November, federal authorities detained him at his apartment on Chicago’s South Side and accused him of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

“Are any of your tattoos gang related?” his attorney asked at the hearing, going through the evidence laid out against him in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement report. “No,” said Rodríguez, whose tattoos include an angel holding a gun, a wolf and a rose. At one point, he lifted his shirt to show his parents’ names inked across his chest.

He was asked about a TikTok video that shows him dancing to an audio clip of someone shouting, “Te va agarrar el Tren de Aragua,” which means, “The Tren de Aragua is going to get you,” followed by a dance beat. That audio clip has been shared some 60,000 times on TikTok — it’s popular among Venezuelans ridiculing the stereotype that everyone from their country is a gangster. Rodríguez looked incredulous at the thought that this was the evidence against him.

That day, the judge didn’t address the gang allegations. But she denied Rodríguez bond, citing the misdemeanor shoplifting conviction. She reminded him that his final hearing was on March 20, just 10 days away. If she granted him asylum, he’d be a free man and could continue his life in the U.S.

I told my editors and colleagues about what I’d heard and made plans to attend the next hearing. I saw the potential for the kind of complicated narrative story that I like: Here was a young immigrant who, yes, had come into the country illegally, but he had turned himself in to border authorities to seek asylum. Yes, he had a criminal record, but it was for a nonviolent offense. And, yes, he had tattoos, but so do the nice, white American moms in my book club. I was certain there are members of Tren de Aragua in the U.S., but if this was the kind of evidence the government had, I found it hard to believe it was an “invasion” as Trump claimed. I asked Rodríguez’s attorney for an interview and began requesting police and court records.

Five days later, on March 15, the Trump administration expelled more than 230 Venezuelan men to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, a country many of them had never even set foot in. Trump called them all terrorists and gang members. It would be a few days before the men’s names would be made public. Perhaps naively, it didn’t occur to me that Rodríguez might be in that group. Then I logged into his final hearing and heard his attorney say he didn’t know where the government had taken him. The lawyer sounded tired and defeated. Later, he would tell me he had barely slept, afraid that Rodríguez might turn up dead. At the hearing, he begged a government lawyer for information: “For his family’s sake, would you happen to know what country he was sent to?” She told him she didn’t know, either.

I was astonished. I am familiar with the history of authoritarian leaders disappearing people they don’t like in Latin America, the part of the world that my family comes from. I wanted to think that doesn’t happen in this country. But what I had just witnessed felt uncomfortably similar.

As soon as the hearing ended, I got on a call with my colleagues Mica Rosenberg and Perla Trevizo, both of whom cover immigration and had recently written about how the U.S. government had sent other Venezuelan men to Guantanamo. We talked about what we should do with what I’d just heard. Mica contacted a source in the federal government who confirmed, almost immediately, that Rodríguez was among the men that our country had sent to El Salvador.

The news suddenly felt more real and intimate to me. One of the men sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador now had a name and a face and a story that I had heard from his own mouth. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

As a news organization, we decided to put significant resources into investigating who these men really are and what happened to them, bringing in many talented ProPublica journalists to help pull records, sift through social media accounts, analyze court data and find the men’s families. We teamed up with a group of Venezuelan journalists from the outlets Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News who were also starting to track down information about the men.

We spoke to the relatives and attorneys of more than 100 of the men and obtained internal government records that undercut the Trump administration’s claims that all the men are “monsters,” “sick criminals” and the “worst of the worst.” We also published a story about how, by and large, the men were not hiding from federal immigration authorities. They were in the system; many had open asylum cases like Rodríguez and were waiting for their day in court before they were taken away and imprisoned in Central America.

On July 18 — after I’d written the first draft of this note to you — we began to hear some chatter about a potential prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Venezuela. Later that same day, the men had been released. We’d been in the middle of working on a case-by-case accounting of the Venezuelan men who’d been held in El Salvador. Though they’d been released, documenting who they are and how they got caught up in this dragnet was still important, essential even, as was the impact of their incarceration.

The result is a database we published last week including profiles of 238 of the men Trump deported to a Salvadoran prison.

From the moment I heard about the men’s return to Venezuela, I thought about Rodríguez. He’d been on my mind since embarking on this project. I messaged with his mother for days as we waited for the men to be processed by the government of Nicolás Maduro and released to their families.

Finally, one morning last week, he went home. We spoke later that afternoon. He said he was relieved to be home with his family but felt traumatized. He told me he wants the world to know what happened to him in the Salvadoran prison — daily beatings, humiliation, psychological abuse. “There is no reason for what I went through,” he said. “I didn’t deserve that.”

The Salvadoran government has denied mistreating the Venezuelan prisoners.

We asked the Trump administration about its evidence against Rodríguez. This is the entirety of its statement: “Albert Jesús Rodriguez Parra is an illegal alien from Venezuela and Tren de Aragua gang member. He illegally crossed the border on April 22, 2023, under the Biden Administration.”

While Rodríguez was incarcerated in El Salvador and no one knew what would happen to him, the court kept delaying hearings for his asylum case. But after months of continuances, on Monday, Rodríguez logged into a virtual hearing from Venezuela. “Oh my gosh, I am so happy to see that,” said Judge Samia Naseem, clearly remembering what had happened in his case.

Rodríguez’s attorney said that his client had been tortured and abused in El Salvador. “I can’t even describe to this court what he went through,” he said. “He’s getting psychological help, and that's my priority.”

It was a brief hearing, perhaps five minutes. Rodríguez’s lawyer mentioned his involvement in an ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration over its use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans. The government lawyer said little, except to question whether Rodríguez was even allowed to appear virtually due to “security issues” in Venezuela.

Finally, the judge said she would administratively close the case while the litigation plays out. “If he should hopefully be able to come back to the U.S., we’ll calendar the case,” she said.

Naseem turned to Rodríguez, who was muted and looked serious. “You don’t have to worry about reappearing until this gets sorted out,” she told him. He nodded and soon logged off.

We plan to keep reporting on what happened and have another story coming soon about Rodríguez and the other men’s experiences inside the prison. Please reach out if you have information to share.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Melissa Sanchez.

More than a hundred aid organizations warned Wednesday that “mass starvation” is spreading in Gaza, as Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of Palestinians reaches an unspeakable turning point. As the crisis of humanity deepens, another Gaza Freedom Flotilla has set sail in the hopes of breaking Israel’s blockade and bringing life-saving supplies to the besieged Gaza Strip. Calling from the Handala ship while en route to Gaza, American labor organizer Chris Smalls, co-founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union, speaks with TRNN editor-in-chief Maximillian Alvarez about the threats and sabotage attempts the Freedom Flotilla has already faced on its journey—and why that won’t deter the crew from their humanitarian mission.

Additional resources:

• Chris Smalls X account and Instagram
• Gaza Freedom Flotilla linktree 
• Ann Wright, Common Dreams, “Despite 2 sabotage attempts, the Gaza Flotilla Ship Handala sails onward”
• Marium Ali, Al Jazeera, “Freedom Flotillas: A history of attempts to break Israel’s siege of Gaza”

Credits:

• Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
• Post-Production: David Hebden

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on July 17, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

Speaking about Palestine is speaking about resistance in the heart of horror. That is how Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, summed it up at an emergency conference in Bogotá, Colombia. The same Albanese who is currently facing sanctions imposed by the U.S. government for, according to them, making antisemitic remarks, after repeatedly denouncing the brutalities committed by Israel against the Palestinian people.

Despite these accusations, Albanese remains firm in her denunciations. She reiterated on several occasions that we must not allow these actions to distract us from what truly matters: the genocide that, for the past twenty months, has escalated against the people of Gaza, and the massive human rights violations taking place across Palestine, which have left more than 60,000 people dead, most of them women and children.

“The global majority [also known as the Global South] has been the driving force behind actions against Israel’s genocide, with South Africa and Colombia playing key roles in this process,” she told Mondoweiss during a press conference on the first day of the Emergency Conference for Gaza, convened by the governments of Colombia and South Africa. “These actions have led to the creation of spaces for sanctions and resistance. What we’ve been insisting on all along is that more and more countries must join these efforts.”

The Hague Group coordinated this Emergency Conference, which brought together representatives from over 30 states, including China, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Turkey, and Qatar. Initially formed by Colombia and South Africa, the group seeks to establish specific sanctions against Israel that, according to Colombia’s Vice Minister for Multilateral Affairs, Mauricio Jaramillo Jassir, aim to move beyond discourse and into action.

Heads of state and their representatives emphasized that these sanctions are not retaliatory but are in full compliance with international humanitarian law. They are part of the international community’s commitment to ending the genocide. One of the central calls made was for more nations to join this effort and uphold their duty to defend human rights.

All 30 participating states unanimously agreed that “the era of impunity must end— and that international law must be enforced.” To begin this effort, 12 states from across the world — Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Namibia, Nicaragua, Oman, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and South Africa — committed to implementing six key points:

1. Prevent the provision or transfer of arms, munitions, military fuel, related military equipment, and dual-use items to Israel, as appropriate, to ensure that our industry does not contribute the tools to enable or facilitate genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other violations of international law.

2. Prevent the transit, docking, and servicing of vessels at any port, if applicable, within our territorial jurisdiction, while being fully compliant with applicable international law, including UNCLOS, in all cases where there is a clear risk of the vessel being used to carry arms, munitions, military fuel, related military equipment, and dual-use items to Israel, to ensure that our territorial waters and ports do not serve as conduits for activities that enable or facilitate genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other violations of international law.

3. Prevent the carriage of arms, munitions, military fuel, related military equipment, and dual-use items to Israel on vessels bearing our flag, while being fully compliant with applicable international law, including UNCLOS, ensuring full accountability, including de-flagging, for non-compliance with this prohibition, not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

4. Commence an urgent review of all public contracts, in order to prevent public institutions and public funds, where applicable, from supporting Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian Territory which may entrench its unlawful presence in the territory, to ensure that our nationals, and companies and entities under our jurisdiction, as well as our authorities, do not act in any way that would entail recognition or provide aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

5. Comply with our obligations to ensure accountability for the most serious crimes under international law through robust, impartial and independent investigations and prosecutions at national or international levels, in compliance with our obligation to ensure justice for all victims and the prevention of future crimes.

6. Support universal jurisdiction mandates, as and where applicable in our legal constitutional frameworks and judiciaries, to ensure justice for all victims and the prevention of future crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Both Jaramillo and Zane Dangor, Director-General of South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation, emphasized that these actions must not be seen as reprisals, but rather as part of an international effort to break the global silence that has enabled atrocities in Palestine.

This decision is aligned with Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s renewed order to halt all coal exports from Colombia to Israel: “My government was betrayed, and that betrayal, among other things, cast doubt on my order to stop exporting coal to Israel. We are the world’s fifth-largest coal exporter, which means the country of life is helping to kill humanity. Colombian coal is still being shipped to Israel. We prohibited it, and yet we are being tricked into violating that decision. We cannot allow Colombian coal to be turned into bombs that help Israel kill children.”

In his closing speech, Petro reaffirmed that Colombia would break all arms trade relations with Israel and would continue to support the Palestinian people’s right to resist.

The legitimacy of the Hague Group and these decisions has also been backed by several multilateral organizations that have denounced the genocide. As Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla, Executive Secretary of the Hague Group, stated: “The International Criminal Court (ICC) has already clearly denounced the genocide. The United Nations has stated that Gaza is the hungriest place on Earth. What we lack now is not clarity, it’s courage. We need the bravery to take the necessary actions”.

These words were echoed by Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Mansour, who emphasized that, together with the Madrid Group (a coalition of over 20 European and Arab countries also taking action against Israel and led by Spain), they could be the key to breaking Israel’s siege of horror: “This will not be an exercise in theatrical politics. The time has come for concrete, effective action to stop the crimes and end the profiteering from genocide. We will defeat these crimes against humanity and give the children who are still alive in Palestine a future full of promise, independence, and dignity. Recognizing Palestine is not a symbolic gesture, it is a concrete act of resistance against colonial expansion”.

His statement was followed by that of Palestinian-American doctor Thaer Ahmad, who worked in Nasser Hospital in Gaza and left the territory two months ago. In his testimony, he said he is certain that official death tolls do not even come close to reality, that Gaza is currently hell on Earth, and that every day the genocide continues brings devastating consequences for Palestinian children: “How can we look ourselves in the mirror? When this ends, if it ends, what will we say? ‘Sorry, we did everything we could’? They can’t afford to keep waiting for vague responses. They are surviving genocide every day. So now, how do we ensure that the effort to erase Palestinians from history does not succeed?”

Although the agreed-upon actions are significant, even the attending delegations acknowledge that their efforts will not be enough. Broader and more forceful measures are required. Yet, one day earlier, standing at the podium of Colombia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Francesca Albanese reaffirmed the historic importance of this event. She stated it could be: “A historical turning point that ends, with concrete measures, the genocide-based economy that has sustained Israel. I came to this meeting believing that the narrative is shifting. Hope must be a discipline that we all preserve.”

Correction: The original version of this article said that all 30 countries participating in the gathering had endorsed the six action points. The article has been updated to make clear that only 12 of the participating countries have committed to implementing the measures at this time.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by María F. Fitzgerald.

Join us for this guided “virtual tour” around the Rainbow Warrior III in Auckland Harbour on the afternoon of 10 July 2025 — the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the original flagship.

The Rainbow Warrior is a special vessel — it’s one of three present-day Greenpeace ships.

The Rainbow Warrior works on the biggest issues affecting the future of our planet. It was the first ship in our fleet that was designed and built specifically for activism at sea.

Virtual tour of the Rainbow Warrior.        Video: Greenpeace

It also represents a continuation of the legacy of the previous two Rainbow Warriors.

On this anniversary day we explored the ship and talked to key people about the current campaign to protect the world’s oceans.

Programmes director Niamh O’Flynn presented the tour, starting on Halsey Wharf.

Thanks to third mate Adriana, oceans campaigner Ellie; author David Robie, who sailed on the original Rainbow Warrior on the 1985 Rongelap relocation mission and whose new anniversary edition of Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior is being launched tonight, radio engineer Neil and Captain Ali!

Watch the commemoration ceremony this morning on 10 July 2025.

More information and make donations.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

After being abducted from his New York apartment building by plainclothes agents and locked away in an ICE jail in Louisiana for over 100 days, Mahmoud Khalil has been freed and reunited with his family. A federal judge ruled that Khalil’s detention was unconstitutional and that he was neither a flight risk nor a threat to the public, and the Syrian-born Palestinian activist, husband, father, and former Columbia University graduate student was finally released on June 20, 2025. But the fight for Khalil’s freedom is not over, and we have by no means seen the last of the Trump administration’s authoritarian attacks on immigrants, universities, and the movement to stop Israel’s US-backed genocide of Palestinians. In this exclusive interview, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Amy Greer, an associate attorney at Dratel & Lewis and a member of Mahmoud Khalil’s legal team, about the epic legal battle to free Khalil.

Guest:

• Amy Greer is an associate attorney at Dratel & Lewis, and a member of Mahmoud Khalil’s legal team. Greer is a lawyer and archivist by training, and an advocate and storyteller by nature. As an attorney at Dratel & Lewis, she works on a variety of cases, including international extradition, RICO, terrorism, and drug trafficking. She previously served as an assistant public defender on a remote island in Alaska, defending people charged with misdemeanors, and as a research and writing attorney on capital habeas cases with clients who have been sentenced to death.

Additional resources:

• Mahmoud Khalil arrest video
• ACLU Press Release (June 20, 2025): Mahmoud Khalil to be freed from detention, reunite with wife and son as case proceeds
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “‘A tremendous chilling effect’: Columbia students describe dystopian reality on campus amid Trump attacks”

Credits:

• Studio Production / Post-Production: David Hebden

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

On Friday, June 13, after Israeli airstrikes struck Iran, Iran launched a retaliatory barrage of missiles at Israel, hitting targets in Tel Aviv. Palestinians watched Iran’s bombs fall on Israel from across the militarized border separating the Gaza Strip from Israel. The Real News Network spoke with Palestinians on the ground in Gaza, who continue to endure genocidal violence and forced starvation at the hands of Israel, about their reactions to Iran’s airstrikes.

Credits:
Producers: Belal Awad, Leo Erhardt
Videographers: Ruwaida Amer, Mahmoud Al Mashharawi
Video Editor: Leo Erhardt

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Belal Awad, Leo Erhadt, Ruwaida Amer and Mahmoud Al Mashharawi.

In an effort to fulfill the Trump administration’s daily immigration arrest “quotas,” federal agents and deputized local law enforcement are racially profiling and snatching people off the streets without due process. These arrests, carried out by armed and masked agents, are sowing terror and confusion in communities across the United States. Stephano Medina, a lawyer with the California Center for Movement Legal Services, shares how ICE regularly denies that it has taken people into custody, leading to family members scrambling for information about their loved ones. “It’s arrest now, ask questions later,” adds Dominique Boubion, an attorney representing Andrea Velez, a U.S. citizen who was taken by ICE last month in what Velez has since described as a “kidnapping.”

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

Doctors Sarah Lalonde, Rizwan Minhas, and Yipeng Ge have all recently returned to Canada from volunteer medical delegations in Gaza with a harrowing message for the rest of the world. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with all three doctors about what they saw and experienced attempting to provide medical care for patients in the midst of Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians.

Content Warning: This episode contains vivid descriptions of wartime conditions, genocide, violent physical injuries, and death.

Guest(s):

• Dr. Sarah LaLonde is an emergency and family physician specializing in community, rural, and remote emergency medicine, with a particular focus on Indigenous communities
• Dr. Rizwan Minhas is a Toronto-based physician specializing in sports and regenerative pain medicine, with extensive experience in emergency medicine.
• Dr. Yipeng Ge is a primary care physician and public health practitioner based on the traditional, unceded, and unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg in Ottawa, Canada.

Additional resources:

• CityNews, “Canadian doctors returning from Gaza detail eyewitness accounts: ‘We are telling the truth’”
• Global March to Gaza website

Credits:

• Studio Production: David Hebden
• Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. Today we’re going to talk with three physicians who’ve just returned from Gaza as we speak. The Israel’s war in Gaza is killed. At least 55,000. Palestinians wounded over 125,000 more. This war began when 1,130 Israelis were killed, who were held hostage. But now this war is out of control. Every day, hundreds and hundreds of people are being decimated, and as we begin this conversation, 36 more people, non-combatants were killed in Gaza. Our guests today have vast experience in war zones and in disasters. Dr. Rizwan Minhas is a Toronto-based physician. He specializes in sports and regenerative pain medicine, but his extensive experience across the globe and is deeply committed to global humanitarian medical efforts. Dr. Sarah LaLonde as an emergency and family physician who specializes in community, rural and remote emergency medicine, especially in indigenous communities. She’s worked in Albania, Togo, Chad, and fights against human trafficking in Quebec in Canada, and of course most recently came back from Gaza. Yipeng Ge is a primary care physician and public health practitioner based in Ottawa, Canada. He currently works and lives on the traditional Unseeded and Unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin on shop bag. He practices family medicine and refugee health and community health centers there and across the country.

So just once again, it’s a pleasure to have you all with us here. It’s also an honor for me to talk to the three of you who sacrificed so much to be on the front lines in Gaza to save lives. I mean, as we begin to record today, I was just getting texts from another friend in Gaza who just said another 50 people, mostly women and children have been killed as we were beginning this conversation right now. That’s just so important people to realize that. I’d like to just kind of step back for a minute, all three of you, and just, I’m really personally curious how and why you all ended up doing what you do, because it’s not as if you’re going into Gaza to come home and make thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars as a physician and you’re going into a war zone, you’re going into a place where you may not come back from. So I’m very curious about all of you, what motivated you, what happened to put you into gaze, into those front lines? And we can start with you, Sarah, please.

Dr. Sarah LaLonde:

Yeah, so my journey started in medical school. I had a lot of friends who were Jewish and I became quite interested in the country of Israel because they were talking about their experiences living there, and many had been or were going, and that got me thinking about Israel. At the end of my medical training, I decided to go to Israel. So I was there for about two weeks, and as the two weeks was finishing up, I had a really strong gut feeling that I should go on this tour that takes place in Hebron. So for those of us who are religious, that’s a place where Abraham, who’s the father of Islam, Christianity and Judaism buried his wife Sarah. And that town is in the West Bank and has a very specific history. And basically in Hebron at that time when I visited, there was I think a few hundred or a few thousand settlers.

There was I think about 3000 soldiers to guard the settlers. And there was about 200,000 Palestinians. And the settlers and the Palestinians are living quite closely, some even literally on top of each other in apartment buildings, et cetera. And while I was there, I was leaving the mosque, which is called the Ibrahim Mosque, and I saw that the border police was angry, so I decided to hide. And while I was hiding the Israeli border police killed a girl, a girl who was 17. She’s actually the same age as my brother, and that in Canada we’re not very accustomed to gun violence. So that really shook me up to be so close to a shooting. And then afterwards, because they closed the checkpoint, we were kind of stuck on the Palestinian side of Hebron and we went into a woman’s house and she was supposed to be feeding us lunch, but she was very shook up because there had just been a person killed outside her house.

And she was trying to manage her children who were behaving like normal children, playing with their bikes inside the house. And she was trying to feed us lunch, our guide saw the girl get shot, and he was also very shaken up. So when I had that experience, it helped me understand the type of fear that someone might have when they live under occupation. And that got me interested in thinking about what it might be like to live or to experience occupation living in the West Bank. And then that got me thinking about how I could contribute in the future as a physician. And one of those ways was by going to Gaza. So I was thinking of going to Gaza from 2016 until this year when I was honored to be able to go

Marc Steiner:

Yipeng?

Dr. Yipeng Ge:

Similar to Sarah, actually, I visited that mosque in Hebron, Abraham Mosque. I visited it back in March, 2023. I was with many other Harvard graduate and undergraduate students who were visiting Palestine to understand the context of historical and political context of Palestine. It was during that master’s that I was studying colonialism as a structural determinant of health. That’s actually been my own entry point into medicine and public health, learning about settler colonialism as it affects indigenous first nations, Inuit, Metis peoples in Canada or so-called Canada as a settler colonial state that has committed genocide of indigenous peoples on this land. And I didn’t choose to grow up in Canada. I came to Canada when I was four years old and learning about the history of indigenous peoples and the genocide of indigenous peoples on this land, I felt very compelled to do what I can to understand that more and to think about what does it look like to decolonize and to dismantle these systems of oppression here.

And that really led me to the field of study and learning about colonialism in other contexts and how it is so interconnected in how people experience health or poor health. And to understand that was actually just part of my public health studies. And during my own public health and preventive medicine training, I finished my family medicine training just two years ago, and it was during my public health and preventative medicine training that this increased violence in Gaza took place about 20 months ago. And my university that I was training at actually suspended me for social media posts related to Palestine. And it was actually just also photos from my own travels in Palestine just a few months before in that very year. And they later rescinded that suspension and then didn’t offer an apology. And I’ve been continuously thinking about ways to put my energy and put my time to places and spaces that deserve it, including going to Gaza and offering what I could to be a witness to genocide as a family doctor.

Marc Steiner:

That was ama.

Dr. Rizwan Minhas:

So you know what? I wish I studied this beforehand, but I’m talking about the conflict beforehand. Before I knew there was a conflict, I wasn’t aware how the conflict was, what phase it was taking, but the reason I went there was because from the fellow physicians that went there before me, they came back and they informed me of the stories that they were seeing, what they were seeing on the ground, that they were handing children with bullet wounds, they were handing children who needed amputations. There was no medical supply. But when I’m hearing these stories and when I was looking at the news, I was hearing something completely different. So then as a fellow colleague to these physicians who did go there prior to my travel in April of 2024, I said, this is true. I want to go see for myself and I want to be able to provide at least some aid because there’s no independent journalism there.

So I was trusting my fellow physicians. And when I got there, and I was shocked to see they were absolutely correct. So I went there just specifically to bring in some aid because at that time no aid was being allowed. And while traveling, I took a flight from here to Egypt, Cairo, and then I took a bus from Egypt, Rafa, and we crossed to the Palestinian side, to the Rafa Palestinian side. And when I was crossing, I saw exactly what they said was true. There were thousands of trucks lined up and not one was being allowed through. So then we and my fellow colleagues, we had about close to I think about a hundred thousand dollars of medications that we took along. So I went there just to provide some relief in regards to medical supplies and to provide relief to the doctors who are working tirelessly 24 7 and to give them a break. That was my main motivation for going there.

Marc Steiner:

I really want to give people a sense of what you all experienced, the things that I’ve watched you talk about and read about that you did. I mean, it has to be one of the most profoundly difficult things to do to be a physician, do the work you’re doing and working in a place that is just being slaughtered and destroyed. And you’re in the middle of all this trying to heal it and save as many lives as you can. And as I was reading about what you all did, it was almost difficult for me to comprehend in terms of what you experienced. I just would like you to all give a message to this world to make them really understand and hear and see how horrendous it is, what Godin’s lived through and what people are experiencing every day and the slaughter that is taking place. It’s almost unfathomable for me. I mean, it’s like a war beyond most wars that I’ve ever read about or experienced. And I know that it was all very emotional for all of you as well, despite the work you do. And I just like, let’s just rattle forth wan, you want to just begin?

Dr. Rizwan Minhas:

Absolutely. It is tough talking about it, especially when you see it. You can’t unsee it. I want the world to know that. Trust me when I say this, we want independent journalism to be there because now it’s our word against what the Israeli media or the army is trying to tell you. And trust me, the two opposite statements can’t be correct. I want them to know that all the doctors who’ve been there are seeing and are on the same page. This is a genocide happening, live streamed. And yes, you can see it online, you can see dead babies online, but we actually are holding those dead babies with our hands. We’re actually treating those babies with bullet wounds. We’re actually treating older folks who are dying because of a lack of medication that could easily be treated. I want them to know that this is not a battle of two religious sides or anything.

This is just a battle of humanity. I had a fellow physician, Dr. Mark Palmiter, who is, I believe he’s of Jewish faith, and he was working alongside with me over there, and our main focus was to save as many lives as you can. The thing is with doctors, we can’t stop a genocide. The political leaders around the world can. And I want the world to understand that yes, we may be able to provide aid, but you have to step up yourself and put pressure on your government and stand together with humanity and help stop this genocide. This is happening during our lifetime,

Marc Steiner:

What you just said, you can jump in here. It is our job at this moment, your job to tell your stories. Our job is to get your stories told so that we shine light into this darkness so we can do something to stop it. I mean, that’s part of what has to happen here.

Dr. Sarah LaLonde:

Yeah, there’s so much that we can say that people should know about it. I think that it’s important to know for people to understand the kind of visceral feeling that you have when you go into Gaza. Gaza is a post apocalyptic world. When you go into Gaza, you feel like you’re in some type of a post apocalyptic film. And I think that when we think about Gaza, we need to think about would we accept any of the things that we’re asking people in Gaza to accept. Like last week for example, we went to the Canadian parliament and there was a journalist there who asked us about tunnels being under the hospital.

Now, this is a question that’s been repeated to many physicians. You can watch many, many, many interviews on YouTube where they asked physicians if they saw tunnels underneath the hospital and we did not see tunnels. However, even if there were tunnels, does that justify the bombing of hospitals? Would we accept, let’s say my nephew was in the hospital and I find out my nephew was killed while he was in the hospital by a bomb, and someone said, oh, there was a tunnel underneath the hospital, so that’s why we bombed the hospital. Would we accept that? Would we accept that for our own children? Would we accept that for our indigenous people that we would bomb? I work up north in Cree nation and with the Inuit that we would accept that we would bomb the Cree Regional Hospital. And ironically, after we had that conversation, we discovered that there were tunnels underneath the building where we did the press conference.

We walked through them as we were going to another building. But do you think that as Canadians, we would accept that someone would bomb our parliament because there were tunnels underneath it? So I think that a lot of what we’re asking, what the world is asking Gaza to accept is not something we would accept for ourselves or our children. We have access to direct news because we’ve been to Gaza, we know people there, and a few times a week I receive videos of people being burnt alive more than once a week. Would we accept that our children in Canada would be burnt alive on a regular basis? I don’t think we would accept that. And I think when it comes to the land piece of it, after the world decided to create Israel, it was created after the Arab Israeli war, there was 22% of the land that was given to the Palestinian people.

And that’s the land where these crimes are being committed. And when we talk about forcible displacement, they’re asking those people to move off of their land. That would be like if Canada said to the Inuit people, oh, we don’t like having you here in Northern Quebec, so we’re going to put you on a train and we’re going to send you to America. Well, I don’t think there’s very many Canadians that would find that to be acceptable. So we have to think about, I mean, first of all, there’s international law and we can talk about what is okay and what is not okay according to law. But on a more visceral and gut and human feeling, we have to think about whether we would accept any of that for someone that we love.

Marc Steiner:

Yipeng?

Dr. Yipeng Ge:

I mean, reflecting on Sarah’s words, I think it’s really important that I think about the context and framework of settler colonialism because I agree with Sarah in all of these really important questions. And how has this happened to this extent? And to be able to see settler colonialism in its brutal, vicious, overt form of genocide is only possible because of this really pervasive dehumanization, not only through politic and rhetoric, but through very real actions on the Palestinian indigenous land and body. And we’ve seen that too in the context of Canada, right? That indigenous children have been starved in Canada by policies set by the first prime minister of this country, sir John A. McDonald, to be able to displace indigenous peoples off of their land into reservations. But I think it’s, at least for me, it’s different because I’ve learned about settler colonialism in almost this sterile academic environment.

And the ways in which it feels and acts in Canada and the US is still very pervasive, but is not this overt violence and brutality on a body. And we see it in resource grabs in decimating the land here, but to see it also for firsthand in Palestine, I’ve also seen it in the West Bank, the demolitions of homes and the displacement of people from their villages that they’ve lived for generations. But to see it in Gaza, it helps a sliver to understand that this is settler colonialism. But it does something I think to my soul, to our souls of seeing this, that this is what humans are capable of. And unfortunately, it’s a reminder of what humans have been capable of since time existed, perhaps because these atrocities in the form of holocaust and genocides have happened in the past and are actually happening in other parts of the world.

But I think the tagline for me is to know that Canada is so heavily complicit in what’s happening, and that’s what we tried to highlight last week. And it’s also something that a lot of parliamentarians and policymakers they don’t even think is true because they are being fed inaccurate information from the Minister of Foreign Affairs or minister of Industry now about how Canada is still heavily complicit. They canceled 30 permits for military technology that goes to Israel last year, but there’s still around 88% of existing permits of these technologies that go to Israel, including technology that goes from Canada to the us, such as engine sensors built in Ottawa, built in Ottawa, the only engine sensors that fit the F 35 fighter jets that are built in the US by Lockheed Martin. Those engine sensors are made by a company called Gas Stops in Ottawa. And those F 30 fives are the same fighter jets drop 2000 pound bombs on Palestinian children, women, men, and families, and they’re the ones that come into the hospitals sometimes dead on arrival. So to understand that complicity, I think it’s really compelling for us to know what is our responsibility, for example, as a Canadian, to push for ending this kind of complicity.

Marc Steiner:

I think that the work you’ve done, what you’ve written, what you have been interviewed about, what you’ve told people you’ve seen should be opening doors to just that idea at this moment. And all of you having grown up in a medical world, I know what you see every day is seeing people in deep pain lives in trouble, and you do your best to put your knowledge to work, to save lives. But I don’t think people really understand or get what the three of you saw, what the three of you experienced in Gaza, no matter what you’ve done before. I mean, when I interview people in Gaza, there’s one interviewee I’ve been desperately trying to get back to. I don’t know what happened to him, but we tried to follow his life. And to people that don’t really understand the depth of destruction and depravity that’s taking in places that you all just came back from, how do we begin to relate that to people in terms of your experiences?

Dr. Yipeng Ge:

I mean, I think it’s just so indescribable. I think we can sit here all day to kind of go through all the ways in which life has been completely and utterly decimated. If we think about all the conditions of life that are needed to sustain life in Gaza being targeted and destroyed, it becomes really, really hard for someone living on this side of the world to fully grasp that and understand that. I don’t think I can even grasp it in this moment because I go to work here and then I go home and I have food on the table. I can go buy stuff from the grocery store. All of those things have been fully broken and the ways in which people live their lives have been fully broken. I just want to share the things that I learned in medical school. I was hoping to use even a little bit in the clinics that I worked at in Rafah, but it was really incomparable to what was absolutely needed. What was needed was food. What was needed was water. What was needed was medicines. These were things that were not even available. And to be faced with starving children on the brink of death, severe malnutrition, we didn’t even learn about things in a comprehensive way in medical school about severe malnutrition or something like rickets disease where your bones don’t even develop properly because you have vitamin D deficiency. But these were the things that we were already seeing. And that was like a year ago in Gaza.

Marc Steiner:

Rizwan, you’re about to jump in. Please do.

Dr. Rizwan Minhas:

Yeah. You know what Dr. Yipeng said, it’s hard to put into words what you see that you can’t unsee, and it’s hard to even to put into words, but just for example, so I went to the European Gaza Hospital, and this is only one side of the story because then you have the rest of the population. There is some population that’s even more north. There’s some population that was in Rafah, and there’s some population that was around the European Gaza Hospital. Once you enter the hospital, people are trying to crowd themselves around the hospital just for safety because they think that they’ll be safe around the hospital setting, which has now found to be not true because they can target hospitals anytime they want to. When I was entering, actually what happened was there was the World Central Aid Kitchen trucks that were with us at the border, and they were a few minutes ahead of us while we were entering, and they were the first to be targeted.

And one of our fellow Canadian, Jacob Flickinger was in that van working with World Central Aid Kitchen. And when we found out about it, then we’re like, okay, so we’re entering now. Could be this could be us as well. So right from the start, you realize that your life is in their hands with the press of a button. When you enter the hospital setting, you realize this is a population with a 90% literacy rate, and now they’re out looking for food for their children. Every person that I saw, every third person I saw had yellow eyes that showed that they had jaundice, likely from a in contaminated hepatitis water. There’s no water, there’s no food, and there’s no aid. There’s nothing getting through to the borders. In regards to the medical side of things, there is a lack of supplies. We had to choose who we would give oxygen to, who we would give the last few IV antibiotics to.

We had two people, I wasn’t working in the ICU, but I would go to the ICU transfer patients to the ICU. There was a girl, there was a girl, which we did a newspaper on over there, and she was in the ICU and she was intubated, but because of the lack of pain medication, she was always in pain. She was just hurling around in bed all day for 24 hours and we had no IV set of antibodies, but we just didn’t want to lose hope. And then every day we used to go and check up on her, and she was always in pain, and you could tell she was in pain because she would try to extubate herself at the same time. She would be screaming in pain all night, and we had to make a decision, should we give her a chance? Should we wait?

Maybe some supplies might enter, maybe there’s the news that Israel is allowing aid to get through medical supplies, at least to get through. But that news never came. And the day I was leaving, it was also the last day that she actually, they could not survive without the pain medication or medical lack of medical supplies. And it hurts because in a situation like in Canada, that 4-year-old girl’s life could have been easily saved. And listen, there’s so many kids over there with no surviving family. So the only people that have is the nurses and the medical people around, and maybe they might be lucky to find a family friend that’s around them as well. So it’s a tough situation, hard to describe, and it’s not like it’s not known, and now it’s everywhere on the internet. But the problem, the thing with us is we’ve seen it firsthand.

Marc Steiner:

So I want you to jump in here, please. I just might just give a thought. It was hard to listen to that. People have to hear it. I think that the three of you are physicians who have seen some horrendous things in your lives working with patients, but they experienced the horror of that little girl you were just talking about, and that’s expanded 10, 20,000 times inside Gaza. I think people need to hear and understand the depth of that pain and what we’re allowing to happen. I didn’t mean to sit there and preach, just it grabbed me very deeply what you said, Sarah. I’ve seen doctors work on people who come out of accidents that happened in communities like ours where we all live, but what you all experienced and have seen is something way beyond that. And so it’s just your own kind of personal journey through that and what you came away with and how you survived it, how you survived it.

Dr. Sarah LaLonde:

Yeah. Well, of course, I could talk about many things. I was working at European Gaza Hospital when we received the Palestinian prisoners that were given in exchange during the month of February during the so-called ceasefire. And I could talk about the state of the prisoners. I could talk about all the patients that we saw who were affected by quadcopters or snipers or unexploded ordinances or missiles. I could also talk about the colleagues. But part of the conversation that I think is often missing is our experiences as international doctors in the hospital. And I think what really changed me when I went to Gaza was my experience of the kindness and the welcoming by the national staff. I remember that I was sad one day I went outside and I was standing, it was raining and I had eaten with most of the people in the department.

They all knew me. So the security guards or the people who do the welcoming of the patients and triaged, they saw me. They looked out the window and they saw me and they said, Dr. Sarah, are you okay? Are you okay? Let us pass you a chair. So they passed me a chair through the window. So then I sat on the chair. So then they said, are you okay? Are you okay? Can we give you some tea? So I said, okay, thanks for the tea. So they gave me tea. So then after that they said, well, if you’re having tea, you need to have some kind of chocolate with your tea. Can we give you a chocolate? So then they gave me a chocolate through the window. And I think that the profound kindness and welcoming and the treatment of guests was something that I was so touched by.

And as I think about what we’re often taught as children, I guess teaching in every family is different, but in my family, it was like that love is about putting the other person before yourself or that thinking about the good of the other or being attentive to what they might want or need in that moment. And that’s something that I experienced all the time there I was so touched at the end of my time there, I offered to extend, and I spoke with my boss about that. And you have to keep in mind that my boss was the only physician there during the mass casualty events last year. He was there with a bunch of medical students. He lived in the hospital and he sought every mass casualty event. So I asked him, do you need some help? Do you want me to stay longer? And he answered my question in a very polite but roundabout way. He said that he had experienced romantic love in his life, but that the romantic love that he experienced will never ever compare to the love that he has for his daughter. And then he said to me, your dad’s worried about you. You should go home.

So to think that my boss was caring about the feelings of another man that he’s never met while undergoing a genocide and being afraid for his children’s lives, having lost everything, displaced multiple times, huge financial loss, huge personal loss. The healthcare workers in Gaza, they’re experiencing the genocide on two levels. They go to work, they try to manage the mass casualty events. They try to save as many people. Some of my male colleagues admitted to me that they felt so hopeless after the mass casualty events that they were crying. And after all that, they go home and they experience the genocide in their own lives. They’re living, most of them are living in tents. They don’t have electricity, they don’t have access to water. They’ve experienced, they’ve lost friends, they’ve lost family members. And despite all of that, they’re coming to work and they’re taking great care of patients, and they’re treating us like guests, even though our country is directly involved in killing their friends. And I think that that’s something that really changed me.

Marc Steiner:

Before we become around this up a bit, I want closing thought from each one of you, but Yipeng, let me just ask, I understand you’re going back to Gaza soon, is that right?

Dr. Yipeng Ge:

The intention is not to go into Gaza. I’ll be with a global march to Gaza. So we have, I believe, over 50 country delegations now, and we are expecting thousands of people arriving in Egypt to go from Cairo to Alish, which is a few kilometers away from the Rafa border between Egypt and Gaza Palestine. And the goal will be to march and to protest at the Rafa border crossing to demand that the thousands of trucks that are still waiting at that border to be let in with food, water, fuel, medical aid, and supplies, that that needs to enter to end the genocide, to end the famine and the starvation. And I think we are at this pivotal moment where hundreds of thousands, if not the majority of the population facing extermination because of this months long blockade on top of an existing 18 year blockade of essential foods and supplies and medicines.

So people are on a razor thin thread of survival at this moment. And I think citizens and people of conscience around the world are really unsure what else there is to do, right? We have organized as best as we could in different parts of the world, especially the countries that are most complicit, like the uk, France, Canada, Australia, the us, and we’ve done our press conferences, we’ve done our letters, we’ve done our petitions, we’ve done it, and we’ve done direct actions, we’ve done it all. And I think this feels like a very pivotal moment where people are descending on the rough of border to say, enough is enough. We haven’t seen meaningful action from these most complicit parties to prevent and end this genocide and end this famine. And as people, we are going to try to do this on our own in the same way that the freedom Flotilla has tried multiple times, and now they are, I think, very close to reaching the beaches of Gaza. So I think it’s a reflection of nothing in this world, whether it be civil rights or equal human rights, if we can even call it that on this side of the world, nothing has been just granted to people. It has always been fought for by the people. And this is another example of that,

Marc Steiner:

Just when is that taking place?

Dr. Yipeng Ge:

The goal is to march the Rafah border crossing June 15th.

Marc Steiner:

So as we conclude this and let you all go back to your day, I know you’re busy. One of the things you said, Sarah, I was curious about, we hear about the resilience of the Palestinian people, and I wonder when you are there and reflect on it now, where you see the hope, where you see the possibility of this ending and how we end it and how we build something new and how not to give up hope.

Dr. Sarah LaLonde:

Well, first I’ll talk about resilience, then I’ll talk about hope. So I don’t think that we should be talking about resilience. While there are ongoing atrocities, I don’t think that resilience, I have a lot of resistance to the use of the word resilience when we’re talking about something that’s manmade

Because it takes the responsibility off of the perpetrator and puts it onto the victim. And this is not what the insurance companies call an act of God, right? This is a choice. We saw all the trucks outside of Gaza as we went in. It’s very easy to get water and food into Gaza. It’s easy. Like many of these problems could be solved within a few hours if there was the political will to do that. So I don’t want to focus on the Palestinian resilience. I want to focus on what we can do to come alongside people in need and to do that in a way that respects their sovereignty to say, how can we come along you? What do you want us to do for you or with you? And how can we help? And I think that that’s how we need to be responding.

When it comes to hope, I think that hope is a choice. So love is a choice, and hope is a choice. So as I come alongside my Palestinian colleagues, my patients, the nurses, and all the people of Palestine and of Gaza, I’ve taken a decision to clinging to hope, even at the darkest moments when I am receiving those videos of people being burnt alive. This week, I found out that one of my colleagues had his leg blown off at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution that happened. I found out that another friend of a friend was killed by missile when he went to go pick up his food at the Gaza, at the GHF distribution. And that type of grieving is hard for me, and I’m only experiencing 1000000th of what my Palestinian friends, colleagues, patients are experiencing. So to summarize, I am willing to choose hope. Even at times when hope is not saying that there is a probability that everything is going to go amazing, but for me, hope is a choice.

Marc Steiner:

There’s one you want to,

Dr. Rizwan Minhas:

Yeah, you know what? Yes. I would like to comment on two things Sarah mentioned about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation known as the GHF, and understand that this was backed by US and Israel only to distribute aid in to Gaza. It was a failed operation, which was marred by violence and mismanagement. And not many other humanitarian organizations even want to deal with them or collaborate with them because they knew it would fail. And it did fail. Not only did it fail, it actually led into violence and killing of more Palestinians who were just there to grab aid for their families. So it’s just tough to talk about this. Anyways, it was a failed operation. In regards to blockade. I know we kept talking about blockade of supplies, but there’s a blockade of medical personnel getting in. There’s a blockade of journalism getting in and the medical, we had three rejections by the head of Galia just informed us, who was Dr.

Dort. She had three rejections. And before that, there was another organization that had nine out of 10 people rejected from doctors coming into Gaza to provide medical relief in regards to hope. I don’t want to talk about the Palestine home like Sarah said, because they are a resilient group. That’s their faith. Their faith tells them that despair is a sign of disbelief and that hope is a hallmark of faith. So they’re never going to give up hope. And so for such people, you can never defeat them. In regards to from our standpoint, there’s always hope. Because if you don’t have hope, then you let injustice win. And what you see, what we’ve seen, you can never let that happen. There’s hope whenever they pull a child out of the rubble and he smiles back at you. Those images are tough to look at, but they’re there. And without hope, we let injustice one. So there will be hope until we succeed in having a free Palestinian state.

Marc Steiner:

I want to thank the three of you deeply for what you’ve done, what you’re doing, and for joining us today, and the stories and wisdom that you all have shared in this conversation. I hope we can all just stay in touch. I’m serious about that because this is something that we have to be unified together to stop. And I just really do want to thank you for the sacrifices you’ve made, putting your lives a line in danger and bringing back the stories that we need to hear and healing the people in the process. So thank you all very much for being here.

Dr. Sarah LaLonde:

It was an honor. Thank you for having us.

Marc Steiner:

Thank you once again. Let me thank our guests, doctors Sarah LaLonde, Yipeng Ge, and Rizwan Minhas for joining us and for all the work they do, putting their lives on the line, literally putting their lives on the line in Gaza to save people’s lives. And here in Baltimore, let’s say thanks to David Hebden for running the program today, our audio editor Alina Nehlich for working her magic, Rosette Sewali for producing the Marc Steiner show, and putting up with me and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com, and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to the three physicians that work for joining us here today on the Marc Steiner Show. So the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.

On June 7, 2025, Republic published an article titled ‘Lion Roams On Street, Sniffs Man And…: Terrifying Video Is Not A Movie Scene‘. “A chilling video has surfaced on social media, showing a fully grown wild lion walking on the streets and sniffing a man sleeping on the footpath,” it said. “While the location of the incident remains unclear, the video surely leaves us with goosebumps. The viral video also shows the thin line between survival and danger when faced with nature’s most fearsome predators,” the report added.

On the same day, News18 also published a report titled ‘Lion Spared Sleeping Man’s Life In Bizarre Street Encounter‘.

Local news outlet MaharashtraTV24 also shared the video on its YouTube channel. 

X users SilencedSirs (@SilentlySirs) and Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) also shared the purported video, claiming that a man sleeping by the road had a narrow escape. At the time of writing this, @SilentlySirs X post had over 2.5 million views.

X account Update News (@UpdateNews724), which claims in its bio that it serves global news and real-time updates, also shared and amplified the video, claiming an Indian man sleeping on the street survived a lion attack. The post had over 22.5 million views at the time of writing this.

Several other social media users shared the video with similar claims.

Fact Check

To verify the video, we watched it a few times. This revealed several discrepancies that raise doubts about whether the footage is of an actual incident. For instance, we noticed that the words appearing on the banner of the storefront near the sleeping man are gibberish; they look similar to the Devanagari script but do not form a word in Hindi or Gujarati. Also, the posture of the man lying on the ground seems unnatural; the placement of the leg is odd, and it folds near the thigh instead of the knee. We have highlighted these below.  

We then did a reverse image search on a few key frames from the video. This led us to a YouTube short, uploaded by a Brazilian channel named ‘The world of beasts’. The video caption roughly translates to, ‘Lion finds a man sleeping on the street in Gujarat’.

The video’s description explicitly says that the content is altered or synthetic. It reads: “Sound or visuals were significantly edited or digitally generated.”

The description of the YouTube channel also says that it shares content and designs that are generated using artificial intelligence.

We then analysed the video using an AI-detection tool, which claimed that it was 90% likely that the footage was generated using AI.

Also, note that both Republic and News18 later updated their articles. Republic updated its report to: ‘Lion Roams On Street, Sniffs Man And…: Chilling Video Surfaced On Social Media Is AI Generated?’ while the revised headline of the News18 report reads: ‘Lion Spared Sleeping Man’s Life In Bizarre Street Encounter? Video Goes Viral.‘ The latter also added that they were unable to verify the authenticity of the video independently.

To sum up, the widely circulated video of a lioness roaming the streets at night and sniffing a man sleeping on the roadside before walking away is AI-generated. It does not depict an actual incident that happened in India.

The post AI clip of man’s narrow escape from lioness viral as real incident; Republic, News18 misreport, later tweak story appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Ankita Mahalanobish.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on June 9, 2025. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

Israeli forces early Monday boarded the Madleen, a United Kingdom-flagged vessel carrying humanitarian aid, and detained its crew members as they sought to deliver food, children’s prosthetics, and other supplies to Gaza’s besieged and starving population.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition said in a statement that the Madleen was “unlawfully boarded, its unarmed civilian crew abducted, and its life-saving cargo—including baby formula, food, and medical supplies—confiscated.”

Huwaida Arraf, a human rights attorney and Freedom Flotilla organizer, said that “Israel has no legal authority to detain international volunteers aboard the Madleen” and argued that Israel’s naval blockade violates the International Court of Justice’s “binding orders requiring unimpeded humanitarian access to Gaza.”

“These volunteers are not subject to Israeli jurisdiction and cannot be criminalized for delivering aid or challenging an illegal blockade—their detention is arbitrary, unlawful, and must end immediately,” said Arraf.

Heidi Matthews, an assistant professor of law at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Canada, echoed Arraf, writing on social media that “the world is watching Israel attack a civilian boat carrying no weapons—only humanitarian aid—flying a U.K. flag in international waters and carrying humanitarians of many nationalities.”

“Israel has precisely zero authority to do so under any law,” Matthews added.

“If you see this video, we have been intercepted and kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli occupational forces, or forces that support Israel.”

The Israeli Foreign Ministry on Monday derided the Madleen as a “selfie yacht” and said the vessel is “safely making its way to the shores of Israel” after the country’s forces boarded the boat, which set sail from Sicily on June 1. The foreign ministry added that there are other “ways to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip”—but Israel’s military has been tightly restricting the flow of food and other assistance, pushing the enclave toward famine.

Among the vessel’s dozen passengers are Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament.

“If you see this video, we have been intercepted and kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli occupational forces, or forces that support Israel,” Thunberg said in a video posted online by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition. “I urge all my friends, family, and comrades to put pressure on the Swedish government to release me and the others as soon as possible.”

SOS! the volunteers on 'Madleen' have been kidnapped by Israeli forces.
Greta Thunberg is a Swedish citizen.
Pressure their foreign ministries and help us keep them safe!

Web: https://t.co/uCGmx8sn8j
X : @SweMFA
FB : @SweMFA
IG : swedishmfa#AllEyesOnMadeleen pic.twitter.com/76Myrg2Bnz

— Freedom Flotilla Coalition (@GazaFFlotilla) June 9, 2025

Zeteo‘s Prem Thakker reported that “before connection was lost, video from the vessel showed some form of white substance sprayed upon the vessel.”

“Passengers reported the unknown liquid came from drones flying overhead, while the ship’s radios began being jammed,” Thakker wrote.

Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called Israel’s seizure of the Madleen “a blatant act of international piracy and state terrorism.”

“We call on governments—especially western governments funding Israel’s genocide and Arab Muslim governments watching it happen—to show an iota of the courage demonstrated by those on the Madleen by using every tool at their disposal to force an end to the genocide,” said Awad.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, wrote that “while Madleen must be released immediately, every Mediterranean port should send boats with aid, solidarity, and humanity to Gaza.”

“Breaking the siege is a legal duty for states, and a moral imperative for all of us,” Albanese added.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Jake Johnson.

Caving to pressure from Zionist groups, Toronto’s City Council just passed a controversial new bylaw that will severely limit Canadians’ right to peacefully protest. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Toronto-based, award-winning journalist Samira Mohyeddin about the origins and effects of Toronto’s “bubble zone” bylaw and how it will provide a template for other jurisdictions across North America to undermine political dissent.

Guest(s):

• Samira Mohyeddin is an award winning producer and broadcaster based in Toronto. For nearly a decade she was a producer and host at Canada’s National Broadcaster, CBC Radio. She is the founder of On The Line Media and the 2024 / 2025 journalism fellow at the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto

Additional resources:

• Samira Mohyeddin, From the Desk, “Toronto passes Zionist bylaw”
• Adam Carter, CBC, “Toronto city council passes controversial ‘bubble zone’ protest bylaw”

Studio Production: David Hebden
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner and it’s good to have you all with us. And we once again, go to Israel Palestine, to Palestine, Israel and talk about what’s going on and the horrendous war and slaughter taking place in Gaza at this moment. And we’re once again joined by Samira Mohyeddin, who hosts From the Desk, which is an incredible program and welcome. Good to have you with us.

Samira Mohyeddin:

Always a pleasure to speak with you, Marc.

Marc Steiner:

And Samira is an award-winning producer and broadcaster for nearly a decade. She was producer and host of Canada’s National Broadcaster, CPC Radio. She’s the founder of the online media and a 20 24, 20 25 Journalism Fellow at the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. And Samir’s, always good to have you with us. And I really big sign. I mean, when we talked last, we focused on Palestine, Israel, but there’s something about this particular moment that is one of the worst in my 30, 40 years, 50 years. One of that’s been being involved in this from my time as a young Zionist to now. And one of the things I posited to a congregation, a synagogue a few weeks back was how can we be doing this after all that’s been done to us? And I just feel that we’re in a very dangerous moment worldwide because of all this. Well, let me let you jump in.

Samira Mohyeddin:

Yeah. The images that have been coming out, particularly in the last two weeks, children burned beyond recognition, sinned and charred bodies. We saw that young girl walking through a fiery inferno survival itself as a form of punishment. There’s 24,000 orphans now in Gaza, and it just keeps getting worse. And I’m sorry to have laughed at the start of the program, but when these images came out a couple of days ago of this Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and you saw Palestinians lined up in these cages, I mean, it’s just horrendous what we’re seeing. And yet you have these governments, the US government, Canada, uk, Germany, just not acting. It just begs the question, where is the red line? Is there even a red line for Israel?

Marc Steiner:

That’s an important question. One of the things, I had a conversation the other day with some friends from Israel, one of whom lives in Canada, another one family who lives here in the states, old friends who were part of the world of maam, which was the Marx Zionist party back in the day in Israel, and the left in Israel itself has gone. They’re in Germany, they’re in Canada, they’re in the United States, they’re in Mexico, they’re in Argentina, they’re not there. And you’re seeing this kind of really brutal Neofascist government.

Samira Mohyeddin:

Well, they’re under attack. They’re under attack in Israel, right? I mean, they are being brutalized, they’re being imprisoned, they’re being silenced, they’re being censored. So a Netanyahu Smote Rich and Ben Gere talk about Israel being on a fight on eight different fronts. And one of those fronts is the enemy from within. And that enemy for them is anyone who is speaking out, anyone who’s even saying ceasefire is being seen as an enemy.

Marc Steiner:

So I’m just curious, in your analysis, you’ve been doing this for so long and it’s so deep in your consciousness and your work, as I alluded to earlier, what’s happening this moment in Gaza is different than I’ve seen in a long time. And I wonder where you think this is taking us.

Samira Mohyeddin:

I mean, there are a couple of things. I think one of them is that I don’t think people were paying attention when October 7th first happened, and then October 8th and ninth came, this government particularly, I’m speaking about the Netanyahu government, was very clear about what they intended to do, right? They said, we’re going to cut off all food, cut off all water, cut off all electricity, and get rid of the seed of Amalek so that there was this sort of invoking of biblical stories, biblical language. And to kill the seed of Amalek means to kill the women. And children just wipe out the entire group. And that’s what we’re seeing happen.

Norman Finkelstein refers to the mowing of the lawn that Israel says it does once in a while in Gaza. This is the entire burning of the entire fields happening. I was talking to a friend about this. There are no battlefields that you can really speak of in Gaza, the UN report that came out six months ago noted that more than 80% of people killed in Gaza were killed inside their homes. So what does that tell you? That means that people are just being targeted in the middle of the night while they’re sleeping. Entire families have been wiped off the registry. So yeah, you’re very right, mark, when you say that we’ve never seen anything like this. And I just feel like Israel is at a point where Netanyahu and its government, smote, rich, Ben Vere, they know that this is the moment that if they don’t wipe out Gaza now, they’ll never get another chance. And also, this is something else that I keep impressing upon people, and it also gives me a little bit of hope when I think about the history. So this isn’t the first time that Israel has wanted to get rid of Palestinians in Gaza, Israel first invaded Gaza back in 1956.

And in 1976, Israel wanted to remove all Palestinians from Gaza into the Sinai and put them on basically reservations. They built all these homes and they wanted to move them in there. So I get a little bit of hope from that knowing that they’ve tried to do it before and it didn’t work. And I’m hoping that it won’t work this time either. But they have made the entire landscape uninhabitable. That’s the difference

Marc Steiner:

They have. I think that we’re seeing, I think to the last, as we started this conversation, I maybe even under not seeing the right number, but I was reading 56,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza.

Samira Mohyeddin:

Those are the ones that are confirmed,

Marc Steiner:

Right?

Samira Mohyeddin:

And when I spoke with doctors, I realized what that means. That means that a doctor saw you in a hospital and that you died before their eyes. And so they mark that down. But you and I both know there are tens of thousands of people under the rubble that we actually have seen Israeli bulldozers going in and leveling entire towns. All of Rafa has been leveled. There are people under that rubble,

Marc Steiner:

Which you said earlier when you raise the name Amalek from the Old Testament, the heightened danger here for me is watching fundamentalists in Israel, religious fundamentalists, taking over the country, taking over the argument, taking over the language being used, and the imagery, which says a lot about the destruction of your enemy, whoever they are. That’s why I think this moment is so dangerous.

Samira Mohyeddin:

I mean, mark, just to pick up on what you’re saying, just look at the way the star of David has been used, the way it’s been desecrated, the way it’s been spray painted on people’s homes that have been destroyed and occupied in Gaza. It’s so dangerous for Judaism. Really, this Israeli government has ruined Judaism is causing antisemitism a very real scourge in our society. Not only have they hollowed out the definition of antisemitism, because anyone who’s criticizing Israel now is antisemitic, but they are also desecrating the very iconography of the religion for nefarious purposes.

Marc Steiner:

I agree. I think that when you look at how Judaism is being used at this moment, antisemitism has always been there. It lurks beneath the surface all the time. People have hated Jews forever. And what this does is unleash it. You can see it all across America. You can see it across Europe. You can see it across everywhere. I had this argument the other day where I said, no, I’m not saying that Jews are causing that. We’re causing antisemitism. I’m saying the actions of Israel are unleashing the forces of antisemitism and I that those contradictions are just abound. Let’s take it back home for a moment. I’m going to talk a bit about where you live in Canada,

Samira Mohyeddin:

Toronto. Yeah,

Marc Steiner:

Toronto. And many of our listeners here who don’t live in Canada, have no idea what this whole bubble thing’s about. So tell us exactly what’s happening in Toronto with quashing down any anti-ISIS Israeli protests at the moment.

Samira Mohyeddin:

Yeah, so we just recently, when I say we, I mean the Toronto City Council just passed what’s called a bubble zone bylaw. And in order to explain this to you, I need to take you back to March, 2024. So in March, 2024, there were real estate blitzes throughout North America, including in the us. One of them was in Teaneck, New Jersey. And so inside synagogues, they were selling stolen Palestinian land. These are settlements. So settlement properties were being sold in synagogues. And so inside those synagogues were real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and lawyers ready to sell you homes within illegally occupied.

Marc Steiner:

It happened here in Baltimore,

Samira Mohyeddin:

Palestine. Oh, it did? I didn’t know that. Everywhere.

Marc Steiner:

Everywhere.

Samira Mohyeddin:

Okay. Yeah. So here in Canada, we had one in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and I’m not sure if there was one in Vancouver. But anyways, as a result of this, people went and were protesting outside of that, of those synagogues. And as a result of this, a lot of the pro-Israeli organizations here in Toronto and in Canada, were calling for what they’re calling bubble zone bylaws, which means if you can classify your place as a vulnerable institution, which the city of Toronto has, so places of worship are considered vulnerable institutions, schools, recreational areas like art galleries and blah, blah, blah, these places can be excluded from people protesting in front of them. And so in March of 24, people had these real estate blitzers here in Toronto, people had gone and protested. And in December of 2024, after so much pressure being put on the Toronto City Council, the solicitor, so city solicitor was tasked with coming up for a plan for a bylaw, which would protect these institutions and create these areas. So that’s 3000 places where in Toronto, where you potentially cannot protest any

Marc Steiner:

3000 places, you can’t set up a pig line.

Samira Mohyeddin:

3000 places. Yes. So what ended up happening was that the city started public consultations about this bylaw. Now, they had three public consultations, and the report that came out of those public consultations was that 77% of the public were against this bylaw. They did not want it. However, they still went ahead with a vote in Toronto City Council. So last week they had a vote, 16 of the counselors passed, the bylaw nine were against it. So ultimately it passed. Now, what was interesting in the back and forth on this bylaw was that there were motions that were introduced. So 20 meters, 50 meters, 100 meters. How far away do you have to be from one of these institutions to be able to protest? And so initially the bylaw had said 20 meters, but they passed a motion so that now it’s 50 meters, you have to be 50 meters away from a synagogue or wherever else that something is going on that you want to protest about. And so I made this joke to my friend. I said, if a protest happens in the forest and no one is around to hear it, is that even a protest? The whole point of a protest is to be disruptive.

So this is what we’re seeing. We’re seeing this throughout North America, in particular, old laws being broken, new laws being enacted also that people who want to support Israel during this genocide can do so comfortably.

Marc Steiner:

I mean, people look at Canada in places like Toronto as being politically progressive. So what’s the political dynamic that allows us to happen in Toronto that allows us 16 people to vote for this line to oppose it on the city council? What is a dynamic politically in Canada that’s allowing this to happen?

Samira Mohyeddin:

I have to be honest, the Israeli lobby is very strong here. They put a lot of pressure on our lawmakers to act, and if they don’t, the accusations of antisemitism are sky high. And there is a real fear of being branded as antisemitic. And that’s really what it boils down to, because there is no reason why our lawmakers would sacrifice our charter of rights and freedoms, particularly the freedom of assembly, the freedom of expression, all of these freedoms in order to not allow people to protest in certain areas. Now, I will say for all the hoop law that this bylaw has caught, I was at a protest yesterday.

The former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations was being hosted here in Toronto by a pro-Israel organization inside one of Toronto’s landmarks. This is a public institution. And as you recall, GLA Adon, the former ambassador on his last day, said that he thinks the UN headquarters should be wiped off the face of the earth. So this is a man who was being hosted, and now people did go and protest and they didn’t care if there was a bylaw or no bylaw or so. People are really going to let bylaws be bylaws. I mean, no one’s going to care about this. They’re going to go protest. The only thing that this might do, and by the way, it’s cost taxpayers in this city, $2 million for this

Marc Steiner:

Bylaw. What do you mean cost $2 million?

Samira Mohyeddin:

It’s going to cost $2 million. The new bylaw officers, all the paperwork, all the bureaucracy that’s going to go into enforcing this thing, which is really unenforceable

Because what’s going to happen is it’s going to clog up our courts. People are going to bring so many charter rights infringements against this bylaw constitutional infringements. So it’s an absurd thing, but again, it’s an absurdity that goes to the times that we are living in right now, whereas it’s also a tragedy. There’s a lot of comedy involved in what you and I are seeing right now, mark, because we have the weight of history on our side. We’ve been here before, we’ve seen fascism before, and this is just another manifestation of it. And I really feel like people need to wake up and understand what’s happening around them.

Marc Steiner:

So I’m curious to pick up from the particular point about the growth of neo fascism all around us. We’re seeing in this country, in United States, Trump attacking Harvard and other universities threatening to take away their money, calling them Antisemites, which is just total bs. I mean, Harvard antisemitic. I mean, the percentage of Jewish kids at Harvard and the faculty. Give me a break. Anyway, so that’s happening and it’s also happening in Canada.

Samira Mohyeddin:

Yes.

Marc Steiner:

I’m curious about from your perspective, what is the political power and dynamic that’s pushing that it, it’s not just the Jewish community. I mean, it’s something beyond that. Something is happening here that’s pushing a very powerful Neofascist agenda across the globe.

Samira Mohyeddin:

I mean, it also has to do with money, right? It’s capitalism. Also, the University of Toronto, for instance, where I was a journalism fellow this year at the Women and Gender Studies Institute, you are seeing our professors at the University of Toronto being persecuted also, they’re being brought in to speak to the vice provost, the dean, et cetera, for things for, for social media posts, for literally just saying ceasefire or asking why their institutions aren’t divesting from Israeli genocide, asking why their pensions are going towards arms manufacturers. I mean, these are the basic things that people are being persecuted for, that they’re having their livelihoods put on the line. This is what we’re seeing. It’s not just in the us. I mean, it’s not to the extent that you’re seeing it in the United States, but there’s a lot of professors that are under a lot of threat here throughout Canada.

Marc Steiner:

So what is resistance to that? What’s the political dynamic taking place in Canada, let’s say, since we’re talking about your country at this moment, that resists that and builds a movement to stop it?

Samira Mohyeddin:

I mean, I can tell you one of the things that was a big victory at the University of Toronto is that the Professors Pension Federation Union voted to divest from weapons manufacturers. This was a big two.

Marc Steiner:

This is across Canada?

Samira Mohyeddin:

No, this is the University of Toronto.

Marc Steiner:

Toronto, okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Samira Mohyeddin:

So the University of Toronto did this, and then the week after Toronto Metropolitan University did the same. So you’re seeing this happen, and another big thing that happened was that yesterday the Toronto District School Board finally recognized that anti Palestinian racism is a thing because they had been denying it for years. And there are teachers now who are pushing to have the nakba taught in the school system. Now, there is a lot of pushback on this from pro-Israeli groups here, but they are slowly trying to get this within the curriculum. And I always say, if history, if you are afraid of history or history is not your friend, there’s something going on there. So they are saying that some of the students would feel uncomfortable with teaching about Palestinian history. Who would feel uncomfortable about that?

Marc Steiner:

Right. It’s like saying in Canada, United States, no, we are not going to teach you about what happened to indigenous people in America. It might make you uncomfortable that your ancestors wiped out entire people. Right,

Samira Mohyeddin:

Exactly. I mean, when I went to school here in Canada in the eighties, we never learned about what this government and what this country did to the indigenous population. It’s only in the last, oh, I would say decade or so that students are wearing orange shirts, that there’s the truth and reconciliation that people are learning.

Marc Steiner:

What’s an orange shirt mean?

Samira Mohyeddin:

Oh, sorry. Orange shirt day is for the marking, the indigenous indigenous day here, and what happened to young people that were stolen from their parents and taken to residential schools, and we know what happened inside those schools. So that’s only been happening in the last decade. So that’s really what teachers now here are pushing for, but there is a real pushback on it.

Marc Steiner:

So taking a step back to where we are with Israel Palestine and what’s happening, and we’re watching what’s happening in Gaza, I think that this is a very pivotal moment. It’s a piece I’m working on now that says it’s not since 1948 that the power of this moment, and we are in a very dangerous place. I think you’re seeing antisemitism rise up. You’re seeing Israel just mass murdering Palestinian children and families all across Kaza, more land being taken in what’s called the West Bank and New Israeli and the right winging just taking power there and across the globe. So I’m curious, you are in the midst of this all the time. You speak about this, you fight about it, you’re on the front line, and I’m curious where you think this takes the organizing and fight against both what’s happening in Israel at this moment with Palestinians and the larger question of the rise of this kind of neofascist movement and how you stop it.

Samira Mohyeddin:

One of the things I’ve noticed, and I’m sure you have also, is that within the last two weeks, there seems to be a bit of a shift, particularly in mainstream media. You’re seeing journalists start to do their jobs, which means when an IDF spokesperson comes on the air and says, there are no starving people in Gaza, there are no starving Palestinians. In Gaza, you’re seeing journalists actually say, well, wait a minute. We just saw this 9-year-old die. I saw the bodies. I’ve seen the bones. So there’s a lot of that happening right now. There’s a bit of a turn happening. Everyone is starting to do their jobs, what they’re supposed to do. There are also backtracks from institutions, writers, artists, people who did not feel comfortable speaking out a year ago are starting to speak out now. And I have to say to all those people, bless you. Try and encourage others to do it. I really think that having the courage to speak out right now is contagious. And so come out, come out wherever you are. That to me is the first thing. It’s not too late. Remember, the screenshots are not going to be kind. This stuff wasn’t around during apartheid South Africa. We know who spoke out

Now and who didn’t, and so it’s never too late to do that. The other thing that I’m seeing is that there are some murmurings within even governments like Germany’s saying, maybe our full support for Israel isn’t such a great thing. I mean, Canada, the UK and France put out a statement last week saying they might be moving towards sanctions or an arms embargo if Israel doesn’t curb its military activities. We didn’t see statements like this last year. So there is some movement happening, but it’s not enough. It’s not enough. And I really see Israel’s spiraling right now. I mean, there are a lot of people within Israel right now protesting on the streets too. Let’s not discount these people in Israel who are getting arrested. And I’m speaking about Israelis, Jewish Israelis,

Marc Steiner:

Right? Yes, right.

Samira Mohyeddin:

Who are being arrested. All of these people, they are on the streets and they’re calling it what it is. It’s a genocide. And that takes a lot of guts, and I think we need to encourage those people. Also,

Marc Steiner:

There’s stuff going on inside of Israel now among Jews and others, but among Jews in Israel at this moment who were protesting, it reminds me of what they’re facing, the danger they’re facing physically for saying, no, reminds me a great deal of what I experienced as a civil rights worker in the South. The absolute fear that you’re going to die from standing up to say, we have to end segregation. The same thing is happening, and I think it’s not being reported or talked about enough, which I’m going to try to do much more of, is getting those Jewish voices on from Israel, talking about why they’re standing up, and actually the huge numbers of people who are saying no. That’s really kind of an undercover story. I think.

Samira Mohyeddin:

I agree with you. I think we need to highlight the Jewish voices in particular who go to places like Mata and provide, put their bodies on the line that get in between these settlers, these rab settlers that are completely unhinged and have the support of the army at every turn. They’re putting their bodies on the line. There was actually a woman here in Canada, Anna Lipman, who just returned last week. She was doing what’s called protective presence within the occupied West Bank. She was there for months, has been arrested numerous times by the Israeli army. So I think it’s important to highlight those people also.

Marc Steiner:

So just as we wrap up, I’m going to come back to Canada here at the Bubble Law and talk a bit more about, so we can conclude with that, where this is going, who’s standing up to it, and where do you think what effect this is going to have?

Samira Mohyeddin:

The thing is that Toronto was one of the last areas to invoke this bubble legislation. So there was a suburb called Vaughn, which had it first. Then we have another sort of area called Brampton, which had it also, what was really interesting during the debates around this bubble legislation was that the counselors, the city counselors that were for it, were making comparisons to abortion clinics. So Canada had enacted bubble legislation for women’s reproductive health clinics so that women who were going in to have abortions wouldn’t need to look at fetuses torn up and all that stuff. And doctors who were performing these surgeries wouldn’t have people surround their homes and all this stuff. And so I think it’s a very churlish comparison because one act is against domestic and international law, the sale of occupied Palestinian lands. The other is about women’s reproductive health. But they sort of jumped on this and said, we’ve had bubble legislation before.

We need to have it for this. Now, there was a one particular counselor, her name was Diana Sacks, who was the only one that spoke the truth. Because what is really interesting about this mark is that no one ever talks about the root causes of why we even had this legislation come about. We had this legislation come about because people were selling stolen Palestinian land inside synagogues. People weren’t ever protesting in front of synagogues willy-nilly. There was no reason to. But when you make your synagogue into a place of crime, well then people are going to protest in front of it. So that is the real problem that I have, that the root causes are never talked about. But I really firmly believe that this bylaw is not going to stop anyone from protesting. It really won’t.

Marc Steiner:

So you’ll be out there.

Samira Mohyeddin:

I’ll be out there covering it. I mean, this was the 85th protest held in Toronto since October 8th.

Marc Steiner:

Around is Israel Palestine, you mean around boron? Gaza,

Samira Mohyeddin:

Yes. Toronto has had more protests than any other city in the whole of North America.

Marc Steiner:

Interesting.

Samira Mohyeddin:

And it really is, in a lot of ways, I think people need to pay more attention to this city. It is ground zero for what is going on in Israel Palestine.

Marc Steiner:

So what we’re going to do is pay more attention to you. So we can talk more about this since it’s ground zero and you’re in ground zero, so there’s so much more to talk about. But we’re going to link to your broadcast where you really, so people can hear what you have to say and what you’re saying. It’s called From the Desk, Samira Mohyeddin. It’s just an amazing, great program, very animated, very deep. You’ll enjoy it. And Samira, I want to thank you once again for joining us. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you despite the heaviness of what we have to face in our conversations. So we’ll keep up the fight and we’ll stay in touch.

Samira Mohyeddin:

Thank you so much, mark. It’s really great speaking with you all. Take care.

Marc Steiner:

And once again, I want to thank Samira Mohyeddin for joining us today. And we’ll be linking to her work so you can see it for yourself. It’s really intense and deeply intellectual and dives deep into subjects. Be a well worth a watch for you. And we’re going to bring you more updates from Samira, and we’re going to be talking to her again, as we said during the end of our conversation. And thanks to David Hebdon for running the program today, and Alina Nek for working her magic and editing and the titleless killer of our for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to our guests, mayor. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.

This story originally appeared in Truthout on May 29, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

As the death toll of Palestinians continues to rise and more than a half a million people in Gaza are on the brink of famine, U.S.-based Veterans For Peace and several allied organizations have launched a 40-day “Fast for Gaza.”

From May 22 to June 30, 600 people in the U.S. and abroad are fasting and demanding full humanitarian aid to Gaza under UN authority and an end to U.S. weapons shipments to Israel.

Mary Kelly Gardner, a teacher from Santa Cruz, California, told Truthout she joined the fast in memory of her late father, a service member in Vietnam who “staunchly opposed U.S. militarism.” He opposed “the so-called ‘war on terror’ and ongoing U.S. violence against Middle Eastern countries,” she said. Gardner is limiting herself to 250 calories for the first 10 days of the fast. “Then I will switch to fasting during daylight (as Muslims observing Ramadan do).”

Palestinians in Gaza are being forced to survive on 245 calories per day; 250 calories daily is considered a starvation diet, as the body breaks down muscle and other tissues. Prolonged fasting can cause dehydration, heart problems, kidney failure and even death.

Gardner is distressed because her “tax dollars are being used to fund this horrific violence” (which, she noted, constitutes genocide) “in the form of weapons shipments.” She feels the need to speak out. Gardner said her goals are to “get people’s attention with a meaningful action” and “engage in a practice that challenges me to be more personally present with the human suffering taking place in Gaza.” She is “intentionally causing myself some discomfort and inconvenience,” yet “not harming myself.”

For 11 weeks, using starvation as a weapon of war, Israel has blocked all food, medicine and other relief from entering the Gaza Strip, home to 2.1 million Palestinians. Now aid is trickling in under the auspices of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a delivery system established by the U.S. and Israel to bypass the UN, provide a fig leaf of aid and blunt global outrage at Israel’s starvation tactics. Risk of famine comes even as Israel intensifies its military campaign. On May 27, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported at least 54,056 people killed, including at least 17,400 children, and at least 123,129 people injured in Gaza since October 7, 2023.

On the sixth day of the fast, Kathy Kelly, board president of World BEYOND War, told Truthout:

On day 6 of the fast, limiting ourselves to 250 calories per day helps us focus on Gazans with no relief in sight. But Palestinians face intense risks of aerial attacks, sniper assaults, housing demolition, forcible displacement and genocidal threats from Israel and its allies to eradicate them.

On day 6 of the fast, I am wondering about Ron Feiner, the Israeli reservist sent to prison three days ago for refusal to go to Gaza. How is he faring? He told the judge who sentenced him to 20 days in prison that he couldn’t cooperate with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s sabotage of ceasefire agreements. We acutely need his witness. I’m hungry for solidarity.

On day 6 of the fast, we’re remembering the names and ages of Dr. Alaa al-Najjar’s children. Their charred corpses came to her as she worked a shift in the pediatric ward of Gaza’s Khan Younis hospital. Dr. Hamdi al-Najjar, her spouse, was gravely injured in the Israeli military attack on their home — an attack which left only one child surviving.

Kelly listed the names and ages of the al-Najjar children: Yahya, 12 years old; Rakan, 10 years old; Eve, 9 years old; Jubran, 8 years old; Ruslan, 7 years old; Reval, 5 years old; Sadin, 3 years old; Luqman, 2 years old; and Sidar, 6 months old. Eleven-year-old Adam, the sole surviving child, was critically injured in the Israeli bombing.

US and Israel Provide Gaza With a Mere Fig Leaf of Aid

The fast comes as the U.S. and Israel have launched a plan in concert with the GHF. The plan is to be carried out by ex-Marines, former CIA operatives, as well as mercenaries connected with Israeli intelligence. GHF has come under increasing criticism from the UN and dozens of international humanitarian organizations.

Ten people have been killed this week and at least 62 were wounded by the Israeli military as starving Palestinians gathered at a GHF aid distribution site in Rafah in southern Gaza. Although Israel says that 388 trucks entered Gaza during the past week, that number doesn’t come close to the requisite 500-600 trucks that entered daily before Israel cut off all aid on March 2.

In January, after spending months making unfounded accusations against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Israel banned it from operating in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. UNRWA is the agency that has provided food, health care and education to Palestinian refugees since 1949. UN Secretary General António Guterres has said that “UNRWA is indispensable in delivering essential services to Palestinians,” and “UNRWA is the backbone of the United Nations humanitarian relief operations” in Gaza.

Guterres slammed the GHF, saying the aid operation violates international law. In a joint statement, two dozen countries — including the U.K., several European Union member states, Canada, Australia and Japan — criticized the GHF model. They charged that it wouldn’t deliver aid effectively at the requisite scale and would tie aid to military and political objectives.

A leaked UN memo reportedly warned against UN involvement in the GHF, saying it could be “implicated in delivering a system that falls short of Israel’s legal responsibilities as an occupying power.” UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher called the scheme “a deliberate distraction” and “a fig leaf for further violence and displacement.”

The GHF was established after Israel charged that Hamas was looting aid trucks, a claim refuted by Cindy McCain, executive director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and widow of Republican Sen. John McCain.

“Right now, we have 500,000 people inside of Gaza that are extremely food insecure, and could be on the verge of famine if we don’t help bring them back from that. We need to get in, and we need to get in at scale, not just a few dribble [sic] of the trucks right now, as I said, it’s a drop in the bucket,” McCain said on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”

In a March 2025 report, the UN body that monitors famine found that 470,000 people in the Gaza Strip have reached “Phase 5: Catastrophe/Famine,” which means that households have an extreme lack of food and/or other basic needs. Moreover, 96 percent of Gaza’s population is experiencing “acute food insecurity,” and 22 percent of those in Gaza are suffering from “catastrophic levels” of food insecurity.

McCain said, “These people are desperate, and they see a World Food Programme truck coming in, and they run for it. This — this doesn’t have anything to do with Hamas or any kind of organized crime, or anything. It has simply to do with the fact these people are starving to death.”

GHF has a cynical purpose. It “aims to push northern residents to relocate southward in search of food — a step toward their displacement from Gaza altogether,” UNRWA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini said. “We used to have, before, 400 distribution places, centres in Gaza. With this new system, we are talking about three to four, maximum, distribution places. So it’s also a way to incite people to be forcibly displaced to get humanitarian assistance.”

Issam Abu Shaweesh, director of a WFP aid distribution center in western Gaza City, said the GHF aid packages don’t contain essential food items such as meat, eggs, vegetables, fruits and baby formula — evidence that the goal is just “to keep people from dying of hunger” instead of meeting basic nutritional needs.

The Government Media Office in Gaza issued a statement saying that, “The so-called ‘safe distribution sites’ are nothing but ‘racially isolated ghettos’ established under the supervision of the occupation, in exposed and isolated military areas, and are a forced model for the booby-trapped ‘humanitarian corridors’ that are used as a cover to advance the occupation’s security agendas.”

Two senior officials of GHF have resigned: Executive Director Jake Wood said the organization’s plans are inconsistent with the “humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.” CEO David Burke also resigned.

The resignations came days after Swiss authorities considered opening an investigation into GHF, which had been registered in Geneva. On May 29, Swiss authorities found the organization was violating Swiss law.

Fasters “Simply Have to Do More Than Hold a Sign at a Demonstration”

Meanwhile, the fasters continue to protest Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

“Having seen what war does, not just to people but all living things, I simply have to do more than hold a sign at a demonstration,” Mike Ferner, former national director of Veterans For Peace and co-organizer of the fast, told Truthout. “Many, many people feel the same way and that’s why in just five days, over 600 people in the U.S. and beyond have registered to participate,” he said, adding, “Until Americans actually run their government and direct our wealth to sustain life, we will have to protest in the strongest ways possible.”

“The Marine veteran who started the fast with me, Phil Tottenham, said this genocide pained him so much he wanted to do what Aaron Bushnell did but didn’t have the courage. ‘But what is the most we can do?,’ Tottenham asked,” Ferner said. Bushnell, a member of the U.S. Air Force, died after setting himself on fire outside the front gate of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. on February 25, 2024, in protest of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

“Watching hundreds of people maimed, burned, and killed every day just tears at my insides — too much like when I nursed hundreds of wounded from our war in Viet Nam,” Ferner said in a press release from the Institute for Public Accuracy. “I’m fasting to demand humanitarian aid resumption under UN authority and to stop U.S. weapons from fueling the genocide.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marjorie Cohn.

Once temples of learning where new generations of students sought to advance their futures, Gaza’s universities have all been destroyed by Israel’s genocidal annihilation of the Gaza Strip, and many students and faculty have been killed. In this on-the-ground report, TRNN speaks with displaced Palestinian students and parents about the systematic destruction of life and all institutions of learning in Gaza, and about their reactions to Palestine solidarity protests on campuses in the West and around the world.

Producer: Belal Awad, Leo Erhardt
Videographer: Ruwaida Amer, Mahmoud Al Mashharawi
Video Editor: Leo Erhardt

Transcript

CHANTINGS: 

Free free Palestine! 

HAY’A ADIL AGHA: 

I saw the protests at Columbia University. There were protests in solidarity with Gaza. The police arrested more than 100 students. They were in solidarity with the students of Gaza. They arrested many teachers and students. There was also a university in Atlanta where the head of the philosophy department was arrested. The police used tear gas and rubber bullets to suppress these protests and demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza. 

HAY’A ADIL AGHA: 

Of course, when we see all this, we feel a sense of pride and gratitude. We want to thank them for standing with us. We thank the free people of the world—professors and students—for standing with us. Who stood with the students of Gaza, despite the repression, despite the arrests they stood with us, and this has helped us a lot. 

I am Haya Adil Agha, 21 years old, a fourth-year student at the Islamic University in Gaza. The Department of Science and Technology, specializing in smart technologies. The technology club was like a second home to us. There was a club president, we had club members, My classmates and I used to spend most of our time at the university. We had different groups and organized events. We would come up with innovations and new ideas for students. I used to spend most of my time at university with friends. We would discuss projects, questions and assignments and study together. If the professors were available you could go and ask them questions. So I used to spend all my time at University and they were the best years of my life —the last two years before the war. Exactly three days before the war—two weeks into the first semester. My professor requested that I present on a subject. So I prepared a PowerPoint presentation and handed out a summary to the students. I got up and began presenting. I had no idea that this would be my last presentation at university. Three days later, the war began. It destroyed our dreams, destroyed our future, destroyed our aspirations. All our memories now have no meaning. The place is gone and nothing is left. 

UM MOHAMED AWADH: 

Our dreams and everything else we ever wanted was destroyed with our homes. Even our dreams were destroyed. Everything in our life was destroyed. It used to be a really good area. It used to be a place for the youth to study and pursue their dreams. Look at the extent of the destruction. I mean it’s just rubble. Even learning has been banned here. We’ve started to dream about the simplest of things. Just to eat. The dreams of our children have become as basic as filling a bottle of water. They dream of reaching a soup kitchen. These are simple things. They have been robbed of their right to education. Their right to healthcare. They have been robbed of a lot.

HAY’A ADIL AGHA: 

I lost contact with some of my friends because they were killed at the beginning of the war. Of course, this impacts me because every day, you hear that a classmate was killed, that a professor at your university was killed. This has a profound impact on us as students. Many professors were killed, too. I can’t list them all. And I lost contact with many others because it was the university that used to bring us together. The war has driven us apart, so I couldn’t stay in touch with them. We were constantly displaced, moving from place to place. There was no internet and no electricity. I was forced to take my laptop outside to charge it. This was a big risk because, as an IT student, my most important tool is my laptop. As well as this, there was no internet. I had to travel far to get to the closest spot with internet. to be able to download lectures and slides to be able to study. I came back to the university after seeing it from afar. I had planned to visit briefly and then leave. When I saw it, I got depressed. I had seen it in pictures, but I wasn’t expecting this level of destruction. When I first arrived, I was so upset and angry. Everywhere I looked, I remembered things: This is the building where I used to sit; this is the corner where my friends and I used to hang. This is the building where a certain professor used to be. We would always go to ask him questions, and he would respond. All of the memories came back—so it affected me really deeply. My university—the place where I used to dream, where I spent two years of my life, the best two years of my life—was gone. I had been counting down the years until graduation. And just like that, it disappeared in the blink of an eye. In one day, the university was gone without a trace. 

HANI ABDURAHIM MOHAMED AWADH: 

The suffering in our lives—lack of water, food, and drink—is unbearable. You can see, the children, they have been robbed of everything. In the whole of the Gaza strip, from one end to the other, there is no safe place. Here used to be students and a university, all the people of Gaza used to study here. Now: it’s become ruins. All of it is just ruins. There’s nothing to be happy about. No reason to be happy. 

HAY’A ADIL AGHA: 

People have been forced to burn books. Firstly, there’s no gas—the occupation has stopped gas from entering Gaza. But people still have to fulfill their daily needs. There’s no gas, but people still need to cook and heat water. And on top of that, people have lost their source of income. So people can’t afford to buy wood or paper. so in the end they have been forced to burn the university library books. Of course they have been forced to do this. You have to understand people’s circumstances. 

ALAA FARES AL BIS: 

I have been displaced about 18 times. We left under fire, under air strikes. I mean, we couldn’t take anything with us—we left running for our lives. With ourselves and our children. There’s no food, no drink, no water, no proper sleep, no proper shelter. We are living amidst rubble. We ask the whole world to have mercy on us and to bring a ceasefire in Gaza. 

CHANTINGS:

Free free Palestine!

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Belal Awad, Leo Erhadt, Ruwaida Amer and Mahmoud Al Mashharawi.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on May 26, 2025. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

Video footage of a young girl trying to flee an inferno caused by a Monday Israeli airstrike that killed dozens of Palestinians including her mother and siblings sparked global outrage and calls for an immediate cease-fire in what one former Israeli prime minister called a “war of extermination.”

Medical officials in Gaza said that at least 36 people were killed by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bombing of the Fahmi al-Jarjawi School in the al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City. The Gaza Government Media Office (GMO) said that 18 children were killed in the “brutal massacre.”

“The school was supposed to be a place of safety. Instead, it was turned into an inferno,” Gaza Civil Defense spokesperson Mahmoud Basal told reporters. “We heard desperate cries for help from people trapped alive inside the blaze, but the fire was too intense. We couldn’t get to them.”

From the flames of the massacre committed by the Israeli criminal occupation forces at Fahmi Al-Jarjawi School in Gaza City’s Al-Daraj neighborhood — a school that had become a refuge for displaced families — comes the image of a child: Ward Jalal Al-Sheikh Khalil, the only… pic.twitter.com/FMpXlFOMN9

— حسام شبات (@HossamShabat) May 26, 2025

Video recorded at the scene of the strike showed the silhouette of a young girl—identified as 7-year-old Ward al-Sheikh Khalil—moving against the infernal backdrop as she tried to escape the blaze. According to The National, paramedic Hussein Muhaysin rushed in to rescue the child, whom he said “was moments away from death.”

“When we pulled her out, she was in shock, silent, trembling, unable to comprehend what had just happened,” Muhaysin said. “We couldn’t bring ourselves to tell her that her entire family was killed in the bombing.”

The child’s mother and at least five siblings were reportedly killed in the bombing.

“Only her father survived, and he is now in critical condition,” said Muhaysin.

“We see tragedy every day, but holding a child who has lost everything, who doesn’t even know yet, that’s a kind of pain no one can explain,” he added.

The IDF admitted to the bombing—one of 200 it said it carried out Monday—and claimed it targeted “a Hamas and Islamic Jihad command and control center.” As usual, no evidence was provided to support the claim.

Meanwhile in the northern Gaza city of Jabalia, another predawn IDF strike reportedly killed 19 people—mostly women and children—sheltering in the Abdel Rabbo family home. Medical officials told reporters that recovery operations were still underway on Monday afternoon, with charred and mangled bodies being pulled from the rubble.

Moumen Abdel Rabbo, who rushed to the scene following the attack, told The National: “It was sudden. The house was completely flattened. Ambulances barely made it through to recover the wounded and the dead. Some bodies are still trapped under the rubble.”

Abdel Rabbo said that Israeli bombing continued nearby and drones buzzed overhead as first responders—who are often attacked and killed by Israeli “double-tap” strikes—dug through the ruins in search of survivors and victims.

“How can we search for survivors under fire?” he asked. “These were civilians; mothers, toddlers, elderly people. This wasn’t a military target. It was our home.”

The GMO said Monday that more than 2,200 Palestinian families have been entirely wiped out since October 2023.

The U.S.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a statement Monday condemning the school shelter bombing and Sunday’s “barbaric” killing of two Red Cross workers—weapon contamination officer Ibrahim Eid and hospital security guard Ahmad Abu Hilal—in an IDF airstrike on their home in Khan Younis. The weekend bombing followed the March 23 massacre of 15 Palestinian first responders including Red Crescent paramedics by Israeli ground troops in Rafah.

“How many more children, women, the elderly, journalists, healthcare workers, and first responders must [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu slaughter with American weapons before [U.S. President Donald] Trump forces him to accept a permanent cease-fire deal that ends the genocide for good and frees all captives?” asked CAIR national executive director Nihad Awad.

“Every hour that Israel’s genocidal crimes continue with impunity—and with our government’s complicity—adds more dishonor to a shameful period in the history of our nation and the world,” Awad added.

Hamas, which led the October 7, 2023 assault on Israel that left more than 1,100 Israelis and others dead—at least some of whom were killed by so-called ” friendly fire” and under the intentionally fratricidal Hannibal Directive—is believed to still be holding 23 living hostages of the 251 people it kidnapped during the attack.

On Monday, the Trump administration refuted reports that Hamas had agreed to a cease-fire proposal by Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff under which 10 hostages would be released in exchange for a 70-day truce.

Although Witkoff told CNN Monday that the “deal is on the table” and that “Israel will agree” to it, he subsequently walked back his claims. An unnamed Palestinian official told The Times of Israel that Witkoff changed his mind on the proposed deal. The envoy blamed Hamas for an unspecified “unacceptable” response to the proposal, which he also claimed he never proffered.

Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes including extermination and forced starvation in Gaza—said Monday evening that he hopes to be able to announce at least some progress toward a hostage release deal on Tuesday and that his government “will not give up on the release of our hostages, and if we do not achieve this in the coming days, we will achieve it later.”

Israeli forces are currently carrying out Operation Gideon’s Chariots, a campaign to conquer, indefinitely occupy, and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza to make way for possible Jewish recolonization.

Amid IDF attacks including a Friday airstrike on the Khan Younis home of Drs. Hamdi and Alaa al-Najjar that killed nine of the couple’s 10 children, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wrote that his country’s relentless obliteration of Gaza amounted to “war crimes.”

“What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination: indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal, and criminal killing of civilians,” said Olmert, who led Israel during the 2008-09 Operation Cast Lead war on Gaza. “We are doing this not because of an accidental loss of control in a particular sector, not because of a disproportionate outburst of fighters in some unit—but as a result of a policy dictated by the government, knowingly, intentionally, viciously, maliciously, recklessly.”

While Israel has nominally allowed a trickle of aid to enter Gaza—where officials say hundreds of people, mostly children and elderly, have starved to death in recent days—officials said Sunday that only around 100 of the 46,200 trucks scheduled to enter Gaza over the past 84 days have actually made it into the besieged enclave.

Hamas said Sunday that “the occupation orchestrates the crime of starvation in Gaza and uses it as a tool to establish a political and field reality, under the cover of misleading relief projects that have been rejected by the United Nations and international organizations, due to lack of transparency and minimal humanitarian standards.”

On Sunday, Jake Wood, who led the controversial U.S.- and Israel-backed organization established to distribute aid in Gaza, resigned, citing concerns that the mission would violate basic “humanitarian principles.”

The U.N.’s International Court of Justice is currently weighing a genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel that cites the “complete siege” among evidence of genocidal intent.

More than 190,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israel’s 598-day annihilation of Gaza, including at least 14,000 people who are missing and feared dead and buried beneath rubble, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. However, a peer-reviewed study published in January by the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet found Gaza fatalities were likely undercounted by 41%.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

At this very moment, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who have managed to survive Israel’s scorched-earth siege and bombing are being deliberately starved to death as a result of Israel’s 11-week blockade preventing food and aid from entering Gaza. As Jem Bartholemew writes at The Guardian, “The UN’s humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, told the BBC [Tuesday] morning that 14,000 babies could die in Gaza in 48 hours if aid did not reach them in time. Five aid trucks entered Gaza on Monday but Fletcher described this as a “drop in the ocean” and totally inadequate for the population’s needs.” In response to this dire humanitarian crisis, students at multiple university campuses in the US have launched hunger strikes in solidarity with the starving people of Gaza. In this urgent episode, we speak with four hunger strikers at the University of Oregon (UO), including: Cole, Sadie, and Efron, three undergraduate students who are all members of Jewish Voice for Peace – UO and who just completed a 60-hour solidarity hunger strike; and Phia, a Palestinian-American undergraduate student who has organized with JVP-UO on the hunger strike and who currently remains on hunger strike herself.

Additional links/info:

• UO Gaza Hunger Strike Instagram and TikTok
• UO Gaza Hunger Strike: Community Calls to Action!
• Press Release: University of Oregon Students, Faculty, and Staff Launch “UO Gaza Hunger Strike” Campaign Protesting Mass Starvation and Genocide
• Jewish Voice for Peace – UO Instagram
• Nathan Wilk, KLCC, “University of Oregon protesters begin hunger strike for Gaza”
• Michael Arria, Mondoweiss, “Students across the U.S. are going on hunger strike as Israeli-engineered famine takes hold in Gaza”
• Syma Mohammed, Middle East Eye, “US: UCLA student hospitalised during hunger strike for Gaza”
• Jem Bartholemew, The Guardian, “First Thing: UN says 14,000 babies could die in Gaza in next 48 hours under Israeli aid blockade”
• Ronen Bergman & Natan Odenheimer, The New York Times, “In private, some Israeli officers admit that Gaza is on the brink of starvation”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘The raids happened Wednesday, finals started Thursday’: FBI agents raid homes of pro-Palestine students at University of Michigan”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘A tremendous chilling effect’: Columbia students describe dystopian reality on campus amid Trump attacks”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘People are hiding in their apartments’: Inside Trump’s assault on universities” 
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “‘Worse’ than McCarthyism: Trump’s war on higher education, free speech, and political dissent”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got an urgent episode for y’all today. As you guys know, we’ve been covering the Trump administration’s authoritarian assault on higher education and the people who live, learn, and work there. We’ve been speaking with faculty members and graduate students on this show as this new terrifying McCarthy’s crackdown has been unfolding in real time. But today’s episode is a pointed reminder that this climate of intense fear and repression is not achieving its primary goal of forcing people to retreat, hide, and silence themselves on campuses around the country.

People continue to stand up, fight back, and speak out. As Michael Aria reports at Mondoweiss, “In recent weeks, students across multiple university campuses in the United States have launched hunger strikes in solidarity with the people of Gaza enduring famine. The protestors are also calling on their schools to cut ties with weapons manufacturers and other companies connected to Israel. More than two dozen California students began a fast on May 5th with more schools joining in the proceeding days. San Francisco State University students recently ended their strike after obtaining several commitments from their school. The administration said it would expand the implementation of the divestment policy and work toward a partnership with Palestinian universities. Six students at Sacramento State, which also previously adopted a divestment policy also recently ended their hunger strike at UCLA. Student activists Maya Abdullah was hospitalized on the ninth day of her hunger strike.

Students with the group Yalies4Palestine recently met with Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis amid an ongoing hunger strike at the school. The demonstrators are demanding that Yale divest from weapons manufacturers adopt a human rights based investment strategy and end its academic partnerships with Israel and grant amnesty for student protestors.” At the University of Oregon. Students also initiated a hunger strike this week as Nathan Wilk writes for KLCC, which is Oregon’s NPR affiliate, “Protestors at the University of Oregon began a hunger strike Monday in an effort to bring attention to starvation in Gaza. Around 470,000 people in Gaza are facing catastrophic hunger. According to a Unbacked report released last week in Eugene, some WO students and employees announced that they would stop eating starting Monday morning in order to pressure local leaders to respond to the crisis the protesters want you owe to divest from companies with ties to Israel and provide more protections for pro-Palestinian activists on campus.

Protesters are also asking the public to call Oregon’s elected leaders in congressional delegation demanding they speak out against Israel’s blockades. In an email to KLCC Monday, UO representative Eric Howald said The university respects students’ right to express their views, but advise caution about their methods. “We urge them to choose forms of expression that prioritize their health, safety, and overall wellbeing,” said Howald, “while adhering to UO freedom of speech guidelines.” Now as we speak, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who have somehow managed to survive Israel’s scorched earth siege and bombing are being deliberately starved to death. As Jem Bartholomew wrote on Tuesday at The Guardian, “The UN’s humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC this morning that 14,000 babies could die in Gaza in 48 hours if aid did not reach them in time. Five aid trucks entered Gaza on Monday, but Fletcher described this as a quote, drop in the ocean and totally inadequate for the population’s needs.”

It followed the director General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus saying yesterday that 2 million people were starving in the Gaza Strip while tons of food is blocked at the border by Israel. This is all happening now. As I read this, this is urgent, dire, unbearable and unconscionable, and that is why we are seeing students escalating their protest tactics and engaging in these hunger strikes. And on Wednesday night, May 21st, I spoke with four hunger strikers at the University of Oregon, including Cole, Sadie and Efron, all undergraduate students at the University of Oregon and members of Jewish Voice for Peace-UO and Phia, a Palestinian American undergraduate student at the University of Oregon who is organized with JVP on the hunger strike and is currently on hunger strike herself. Cole, Sadie, and Efron had just completed a two day solidarity hunger strike before we recorded our episode. Here’s my conversation with Phia, Cole, Sadie, and Efron recorded on May 21st.

Well, Phia, Cole, Sadie, Efron, thank you all so much for joining us today, especially with everything that you’ve got going on over there, everything that is going on in the world right now. It’s a crazy time, but y’all are out there putting yourselves and your bodies on the line standing up for what’s right, and our listeners want to know more about this, who you are, why you’re doing this, what it feels like and what they can do to help. So I want to just jump right in and ask if we could go around the table here and just introduce yourselves to folks listening to this right now. Can you tell us a bit more about who you are and why you’re doing this and what exactly it is that y’all are doing right now?

Phia:

Yeah, for sure. I’m Phia. I’m a Palestinian American student, as was mentioned, and it is the third day of my hunger strike where I’m just drinking water and taking electrolytes. So haven’t had food since 9:00 AM on Monday morning. And this is all to raise awareness around the blockade currently happening on the border of Gaza with Israel, refusing to let any aid in. So the motivation, the goal, all of it is to raise awareness for Gaza’s for the situation in Palestine and to stand in solidarity with students who are speaking up for the right thing.

Cole:

I’m Cole. I am a Jewish student here at UO and I just completed the first segment of our hunger strike and we’ll resume next week. Yeah, I mean, we’re doing this because our school is sending funds through their investments to the Israeli war machine, and that’s not acceptable how they’re using our money. So we have tried various tactics throughout the year. We’ve tried protests, we’ve tried showing up at board meetings, we’ve tried an encampment, we’ve tried a massive petition, and they won’t listen. So this is the next step and we just have to keep trying tactics until they listen. We did a 60 hour hunger strike and next week we will do an indefinite one if they haven’t listened by then and we just have to keep going.

Sadie:

Yeah, my name is Sadie. I’m also a Jewish student at the University of Oregon. Like Cole and Phia said, the seige on Gaza has continued, and right now it’s more crucial than ever that we do everything that we can to stop what is happening to Palestinians in Gaza. Also, as a Jewish person, it’s really important to leverage our identities since a lot of this is being committed in our name. And yeah, I think our university is continuously complicit and refuses to listen to us or to meet our demands, which is why we’re continuing to do this hunger strike.

Efron:

My name is Efron again. I’m also Jewish student. Why we’re doing this is once again, our university is complicit in this genocide. They specifically refuse to disclose and refuse to divest, yet they’re a public university and they have to uphold that. According to Oregon law, this is not us as organizers speaking, this is us speaking on behalf of we would like them to divest from this genocide, this ethnic cleansing and the continued starvation. And it is being done in our name. Why don’t we stand up for what’s right and stand in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and as I read in the introduction to this episode, right, I mean the United Nations has warned that nearly 500,000 people in Gaza are facing catastrophic hunger right now. And the latest report from yesterday was that the UN was warning that 14,000 babies could die in Gaza in the next 48 hours without aid let into Gaza, which Israel has had a total blockade on for months at this point. So I wanted to kind of connect that to what y’all are feeling right this second, fia, of course, the hunger strike that y’all have all engaged in and that FIA continues to engage in at this very moment. We’re recording this on Wednesday night, May 21st. As you guys said, you were doing this both in protest and in solidarity with our fellow human beings who are being starved to death, if not bombed to death among so many other catastrophic horrors. Could you just tell listeners a bit more about what it feels like, the hunger? I mean, what does your body go through and what is that, I guess, what do you want to communicate about that that is helping you at least understand a bit more what so many are going through in Gaza right now as we speak?

Phia:

Yeah, it’s been interesting. We’re only three days in which, or I’m only three days in, which is the average amount of time that people in Gaza go between meals, meals, so meals. What I am experiencing, I’ve been putting it in the context of this, has been people’s every day for months and it’s really unimaginable in the West. We don’t really have to contend with this type of hunger and starvation, especially used as a weapon in a lot of cases. We have the privilege to not have to experience that, but that doesn’t mean that the symptoms of hunger don’t exist. And I think that that’s what the purpose of this type of action is. I feel it in my body. I wake up and I’m tired every single mealtime because it’s ground into us or it’s drilled into us since we’re young, that morning is breakfast, afternoon is lunch, and nighttime is dinner, and something feels immensely off when there’s not that consistency.

And on top of that, out of culture has a very specific connection to food as it relates to hospitality. And I think that Israel’s starvation of Gaza is not only harming them physically, but it’s starving their souls in a way that is cultural erasure, not allowing them to participate in their food practices and culture while also just starving them to death. It is an erasure of people and an erasure of culture, but sorry, a little bit of a tangent on that, but physically, yeah, I have been experiencing headaches. I’ve noticed when I brush my hair, more of my hair falls out. I’ve noticed my voice is going a little bit. My whole body is responding to the lack of nutrients and yeah, I can’t imagine being in this state also under the constant home of drones, under the constant threat of bombing, with occupying soldiers constantly threatening to murder you in the streets. It’s truly just unimaginable.

Cole:

Yeah, I had an experience last night that I’d been thinking about where I was moving a trash can and I hit my ankle on it, not particularly hard, and it hurt so badly, not eating changed how I felt, the physical sensation. And I cannot imagine that pain from a trash can hitting your ankle. I cannot imagine being in an actual war zone with bombs flying and buildings crumbling and bullets flying. It’s genuinely unimaginable. So that’s been something I was thinking about. And then just functioning gets difficult. Thinking about things in detail. Making plans is hard. The brain fog sets in headaches were probably the most common thing all day headache and your muscles ache walking around. Your muscles hurt as if you had worked them out even though you’re just walking. And I mean, yeah, imagining running from something like that is just unbearable.

Sadie:

Yeah. There was another person who was organizing with us who was talking about a moment that they had while we were organizing the hunger strike and before we started about putting their groceries away and thinking about how food is so expensive and it’s so scarce. And I had a similar moment last night where I was feeding my cat and I got her food out of the fridge and I was looking at the groceries that I have, and I just got this kind of overwhelming wave of, I just felt very emotional, honestly, because I feel so lucky to have access to fresh food and nutrients and everything to keep me healthy. And I feel like that’s something that a lot of people take for granted and I don’t think we should because I think food also, it shouldn’t be a privilege. I think everybody should have access to fresh food and vegetables and anything. So yeah, I don’t know. That was just very emotional for me. And I think physically as well, I just felt a lot more sensitive in a lot of different ways physically and emotionally. Like Cole said, headaches were very consistent for me. And also sleeping too, going to sleep, it was really difficult, especially last night, which was the second night or third night? Second night, yeah, I was laying in my bed and my stomach hurt and I just was thinking, I also couldn’t imagine if there were bombs being dropped right now or if I was sleeping on rubble and things. So yeah, it was very eyeopening for me, for sure.

Efron:

For me, I have a specific moment of I was walking to school and I could feel it. I had a 20 minute walk from my house and every step I had super low energy, so my calves, specifically my calves, I’d feel it a lot and it felt super painful. And all I could think when I was walking was, oh my God, what would it feel like to be running to pick up the martyrs or transport them to the hospital or just trying to get food and flour? I could not imagine that pain. And then another time that was super transformative for me was sitting in my classes and everybody was super normal and talking, and my brain was completely out of it. I was like, I cannot sit and read for two minutes. It hurts. And psychologically speaking, not physically. And that was a defining moment for me, and I just was like, we got to do more. That is what I came to the conclusions of.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I mean you don’t want to trivialize it, but your brain, it reaches for the experiences that it can find that can help us understand and empathize with what our fellow human beings are going through. And everyone listening to this knows what it’s like to be hangry, right? I mean, yeah, you’ve missed a meal or here and there, or maybe there’s one day where you were just really burning a lot of calories and not eating many, and by the end of the day, your head’s pounding. You’re short with people. That is a drop in the goddamn bucket. Pardon my French. And we all understand that, but as you guys are all pointing out, we don’t know what it’s like for that to be our normal state and for that to be an imposed violently imposed state on us and everyone around us effectively trying to kill us.

I mean, I don’t know what that’s like. I do know what it’s like to not know where my next meal’s coming from and how I’m going to pay for it. And I think people listening to this show can also understand that because there’s a real psychological component with that as well. The feeling of fear, terror, anger, shame, all the things wrapped up in once when you don’t know how you’re going to get your next meal, let alone have you got children or other family members to try to provide for the mental load that puts on you compounds the physical exhaustion, and your body’s literally starting to eat itself after a while because that’s the only way it’s going to get energy. And I’m feeling so many things and thinking so many things, talking to y’all because what you’re saying is so powerful. What you’re doing is brave and dangerous.

I mean, it was just earlier this week that, what was it at UCLA, Maya Abdullah, one of the hunger strikers was hospitalized after nine days of hunger striking. And so Sophia and all of y’all, I got to imagine that’s also on your minds. This is not just a protest. This is putting your body on the line until something happens and really trying to force others to make something happen. I wanted to just ask in that vein where this goes, and if you could just say a little more about the demands, the hope that of what you can get the university to do by taking this drastic action and what you see happening here with hunger strikes occurring, not just on your campus, but on campuses increasingly around the country.

Phia:

Yeah, seeing other students go on hunger strike across the country has been absolutely inspiring, especially as it relates to food as a human right. And Palestine specifically has a long history of hunker striking prisoners. And Israeli prisons used to be called salt and water in Arabic because that’s what they would sustain on. So it’s been incredible to see this tactic specifically just take off among the student movement. And I think it also is for the reason of tactical, logistically, it is a good move because it allows us not only to talk to admin and negotiate with them on some of the things, at least on our campus, we’ve already achieved like scholarships, but it also allows us to leverage this power to connect our struggle and our movement and this action to our state representatives. So right now, one of our biggest demands is that we really, really want to meet with Val Hoyle, Merkley and Wyden, all Oregon State, sorry, state of Oregon representatives who do have the political power to put pressure in the right places to get an arms embargo and to get the blockade ended. So we are encouraging every single person that is in support of what we’re doing to reach out to Oregon representatives, your state representatives, any of your elected officials, and urge them to take action and use their political power.

Cole:

Yeah, I mean the interesting thing about this tactic in addition to its long, specifically Palestinian history, is I think sometimes it comes off as an emotional appeal. This is not an emotional appeal to administrators. They do not care if their students are hungry. They do not care if they call the police in riot deer on their students. What they care about is their bottom line and the publicity that the hunger strikes brings is what’s so essential to hurting that bottom line. And so that’s why this tactic now we hope will work. So far, they’ve agreed to meet, but only with administrators who do not have the power to meet our demands. So we’re in the process of forcing those upper level admin to come down from the ivory tower to meet with their students who they supposedly represent, supposedly care about and supposedly care about. And yeah, I mean it’s truly not an emotional appeal to them. It is a publicity and bottom line strategy, and that’s necessary because we’re asking them to change their finances, which is what they care about the most. We’re asking them to disclose their investments and to divest from the Israeli war machine, from these companies that are making and sending these bombs from these companies that are supporting the settlements. And they will not divest from that unless we can provide some counter pressure that hurts them more.

Sadie:

Yeah, definitely. Agreed. I think publicity is a big thing that they have made it clear that they don’t want on this, and I think it’s very telling how they’re responding to this and where in what ways they truly care about their students. In response to a lot of previous actions we’ve done, including the encampment or rallies and protests just in general, they often respond and say that they’re only in disagreement because they support students’ rights of free speech, but in the name of Jewish safety, this shouldn’t be something that we should allow on campus. And I feel like by using this tactic, it’s a good way to show them that this isn’t about Jewish safety. This is about them investing in the fact that, or investing in the genocide of so many Palestinians and also the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. And yeah, I think they really just care about their finances and publicity, and I think that’s a big reason why they were quick to respond to meet with us, but not with the right people. So

Efron:

Yeah, to bounce off of that, they say it’s in the name of Jewish safety. It’s not even a little bit, it’s the name of antisemitism. It’s not. So the board of trustees, they’re like the head of the ivory tower, I like to call them. They can continue to make their money, they can continue to profit off genocide. They can continue to profit off ethnic cleansing. I want to bring up a new target. We have, it’s called DUO Mobile. It’s directly connected to the apartheid system in Israel. The Cisco mobile helps, it uses ai, other things to promote settlements and under international law, this has been declared by the ICJ that is illegal, but our university continues to invest in that. They’ve already shown that we use Duo Mobile, this app every single day, all 20,000 students use this app. They have made their priorities very clear. So as a Jewish student, I say, this is not in the name of Jewish Safety. This is in the name for you to continue to profit off genocide, colonialism, imperialism.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I wanted to ask if we could maybe go back around the table, but in reverse order, let’s stick with Sadie Colon nephron for a second, and then Sophia, we’ll go back to you. But as we mentioned at the top, y’all are members of Jewish Voice for Peace. You were just touching on how you are doing this in opposition of the narrative that is coming all the way from the White House and beyond down that campuses are rife with antisemitism. I mean, we’ve been on this very show. I’ve been interviewing graduate students at Columbia where Mahmoud, Khalil and others were abducted by ICE under that premise where encampments were squashed and people beaten by tons of police under that premise to protect Jewish students and preserve Jewish safety and to stop antisemitism, right? I mean, there is a draconian McCarthyist crackdown on free speech across higher education and beyond right now, ostensibly in the name of fighting antisemitism and protecting the safety of Jewish students.

I interviewed one of the, if not the foremost scholar on McCarthyism, Ellen Schreker on the Real News podcast earlier this month, and I asked her, how does this compare to McCarthyism? She said, it’s worse, it’s way worse. It’s much broader than what McCarthyism was in the early fifties. And this is a top down effort coming from, like we said, the White House coming from university administrations themselves coming from lobbying groups like apac, I mean media that are facilitating this narrative and amplifying this narrative while suppressing coverage of protests like yours and voices like yours. I know we only got about 10 minutes here, but I really wanted to ask if we could address that question, and if you guys could speak to listeners out there who are hearing this stuff, who are being told this narrative about what’s going on on campuses, what would you as three Jewish undergraduates, members of Jewish Voice for Peace who just engaged in the solidarity hunger strike for Gaza, what would you want folks to know about what’s really happening on campus and what else they need to correct their thinking on here?

Cole:

Yeah, I mean, I get Unspeakably disgusted thinking about this and angry because this administration is the same administration that works with Elon Musk who did a Nazi salute on tv, and they want to use antisemitism as an excuse to crack down on protests that are fighting to end an ongoing genocide. They want to use antisemitism as an excuse to deport immigrants when Jewish Holocaust refugees were turned around at the US border. It’s disgusting. It has nothing to do with protecting Jews. It has everything to do with enshrining power and preventing protest and preventing free speech.

Sadie:

Completely agreed. I also find it really disgusting, and it’s also not reflective of all Jewish students on campus. They don’t listen to all Jewish students on campus. They pick and choose. They pick and choose. There are multiple Jewish organizations on campus, including Halel and Habad and Jewish Voice for Peace and Halel in particular, at least the University of Oregon. Halel often, I guess kind of works in tandem with the university and they, that’s where the university sources their reports from. But they don’t consider the fact that there is an organization on campus that is an anti-Zionist Jewish organization and they don’t listen from us or ask us or consider the fact that maybe not all Jewish people think that this protesting on campus in solidarity with Palestine is antisemitic.

Cole:

Can we add J Street there?

Sadie:

Oh, yeah.

Efron:

And J-Street, yes. I’m just going to repeat myself what they just said. I also find it disgusting because all Trump and this administration, and this includes Biden too. Biden has facilitated this genocide. He is not guilty. He is just as guilty as Trump. They use the guise of antisemitism to further their own power to further Christian Zionism, to further their idea that Jews must immigrate to Israel so the rapture can happen. These politicians genuinely believe this. This is factual also to continue on that Trump just wants to inherent power. He’s more than okay to use Jews as a ploy to use this to continue his fascism and white supremacy. This isn’t new. We saw this in his previous administration. He’s just using this as a way to continue. In my mind, I wish I was surprised by what I’m seeing, but I’m not. They’re obviously showing who they are. We should respond back to show who we are as Jews. I will not stand for this, and I have to put my body on the line. The rest of my fellow friends here, I will do that. If that’s what it takes for our universities to listen, then we’ll do that.

Sadie:

I think they also just weaponize any identity that seems to serve them in that moment. And that’s kind of, Trump is antisemitic. We’ve seen that multiple times. And Elon Musk and everybody who he works with, most of them have had very clear situations where they have been antisemitic openly, like the Nazi salute that Cole mentioned. So yeah, I think it’s just like whatever works to their advantage in that moment to uplift themselves.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Phia, I want to also give you a chance to hop in here as well. I mean, we’re literally all sitting here on a call with you, a Palestinian American, and with your three fellow students from Jewish Voice for Peace, all y’all engaging in a hunger strike. You guys have mentioned the student encampment, the organizing that you’ve been doing on campus together. What do you think that says, or what do you want that to say to folks out there who are pushing this narrative, that this movement in solidarity with Palestinians in opposition to the ongoing genocide and the violent occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, what do you want people to take away from this to counter that narrative? That this movement represents a threat to Jewish safety and identity and all the things that we’re hearing in the media right now?

Phia:

Yeah, I think I truly can’t say it better than my fellow students did, but I think that there’s a real danger in the conflation that we see right now between Zionism and Judaism, and it’s important to remember that Judaism has always been a part of Palestinian land as much as Islam, as much as Christianity. Jerusalem has always been a hub for all three of the Abrahamic religions. That was never an issue until Zionism. Zionism was the thing that fractured the diversity of religion that was working for generations. And I think that isolating Zionism as the root cause and identifying the ways that we can criticize Zionism for its use or its weaponization of Judaism as a shield and a weapon, the ways that we can criticize it for that are important for protecting our Jewish students sincerely.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And in that vein, with the last few minutes that I have you guys here, I wanted to just ask if we could zoom out here and again, put these hunger strikes, both the one that Phia continues to be involved in right now, the one that Sadie, Cole, and Ephron, unless the university makes some movement, are going to be engaging indefinitely in next week. Students around the country are engaging in hunger strikes as we speak. I wanted to ask with the last few minutes, if we could just again, place this in the context of the broader student movement that we’ve seen over the past year or two years, and if you had any final messages for folks out there, folks on your campus and beyond, what do you want to communicate to them about what they can do to help?

Sadie:

Yeah, I think in the broader picture, our primary goal by doing this hunger strike, yes, we do want the administration to meet with us, and we do want them to meet our demands, but our primary goal is that all who bear witness to our hunger strike also bear witness to the humanity of Palestinians who are being starved to death in Gaza, because that is something that has continued. And last year we had, after, during our encampment, there was so much energy and there were so many people, and I think one big problem over the past year is that people just stopped paying attention. And I think by doing this, it’s bringing that reality, not that it will ever match up to what is really happening and what Israel is doing to Palestinians, but bringing that into our own community so everybody can see how horrible it is, what Israel is doing, they’re intentionally starving people in Gaza, and they don’t seem to intend on stopping anytime soon, which I think is why it’s so important that people continue to pay attention. And if we have to sit at a table on our campus and not eat for multiple days up to weeks, then that’s what we’ll have to do. Because in the broader picture, this is all about Casa and our university is complicit in it, but we also have to continue to pay attention to what is happening.

Cole:

Yeah, I think nationally this shows the terrain of struggle has changed, and we need to continue to adapt our tactics to what works. And I think the effectiveness of the hunger strikes speaks to the success that Israel’s had with dehumanizing Palestinians because the outrage about college students not eating for a week is much larger than the outrage about hundreds of thousands of Palestinians not eating for days for over a year. And we need to, I mean, that’s just how it is, and we need to draw attention to that however we can. And if that’s by utilizing the fact that people care about college students here more, then that’s what we have to do. And people hopefully will take that and use it as a sign to keep going to join whatever group is near them. If it’s an SJP or a JVP, Palestinian Youth Movement, PYN, anything that is doing something about Palestine, then that’s what we need right now.

Efron:

Honestly, when I think about the national student movement and how these hunger strikes have occurred, the amount of cross student solidarity that I’ve seen is insane. People are reaching out to us. I never expected this, but then I thought, okay, this solidarity between us is amazing, but how can we create solidarity among people in the west because clearly they’re not paying attention and we need to bring it back to Palestine. I mean, as we’re speaking, the occupied West Bank is being annexed. It’s about Palestine and Gaza, and we really need to bring that back to the people of the west because clearly they’ve shut their ears and are like, I don’t want to hear about this. I don’t want to listen about this. They need to listen, and they need to act. And like my friends just said here, I think they should follow through and I cannot wait to hear what VS says.

Phia:

Yeah. Gosh, that’s hard to follow. I think I would finish with the reminder that we will never understand what it feels like to be under constant bombing, under constant threat of displacement and murder, but we can understand a fraction of what the hunger feels like, and we can echo the emptiness of their stomachs and use that as our power and our advocacy. And I’d also just encourage people not to look away. It is really, really difficult to be completely conscious and aware of what we are responsible for as Americans and what the United States of America is culpable for, especially in Gaza. But to look away is complicity, point blank. And yeah, it is our moral imperative to make sure that we are not abandoning our fellow humans while they are undergoing the crime of all crimes. I’d also say that Israel isn’t only the most dangerous state for Palestinians. It is also the most dangerous thing for Jewish safety. It is the most dangerous thing for Judaism is the most dangerous thing for international order, for international law, for humanitarian law. So Israel is culpable of atrocities no matter how you look at it. And I encourage people to advocate against it in every single way. So thank you.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And just last question, I know you guys got to go, but just in case any of y’all had a final message here, I want to ask for folks listening to this who are still afraid to do what you’re saying to people who are scrubbing their social media right now, people who are giving into the understandable fear that engaging in this kind of protest is going to put them in danger as young people who are taking that step and continuing to speak up for what you believe in and for what you know and believe to be right. Do you have any final messages for folks out there listening who are afraid right now?

Phia:

Yeah, I had the exact experience that you were referring to. I was like, should I scrub my social medias? Should I be more quiet? Am I making too much noise? And I consulted one of my icons in the community space that I really look up to, and they reminded me this is exactly what the administration, the Trump administration, what our government wants. They want us to be paralyzed. They want us to be afraid to want to step back and be like, maybe I shouldn’t take this risk. That is their goal. And I think that even just saying, no, I’m going to stand firmly in what I believe, even if it’s becoming more dangerous, that’s a powerful act of resistance in itself. And I think that if you’re struggling to find ways to show your solidarity and get involved, your voice is one of the most important things that you have. And we underestimate what silencing ourselves really does. So keep speaking up is what I would say.

Cole:

What I would say is if you feel like you need to scrub your social media, scrub your social media, but then go to a median, do what you need to do to protect yourself, but don’t let that be the end. You need to be proactive while being safe. Use signal, use these platforms that are safer. Do the most that you can to protect yourself while still doing something.

Sadie:

Yeah, I think there are a lot of different levels you can engage yourself into. If you’re kind of in one of those moments where you feel nervous or scared and you don’t really, I don’t know, you’re nervous for your own, I want to say the word safety, but I feel like that’s not the right word. I just continue to remind myself that this is like I have to keep doing this. I am in a position of privilege where I can use my identity especially, but also just the things I’ve access to the university. And that might not be true for everybody, but there are still ways to access getting involved, and that could be community based. But yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s, I don’t know. I get those moments a lot where I get nervous and I feel like I need to censor myself or my social media and things, but then I don’t know. That kind of brings me back to thinking about what is happening and how urgent it is. And I don’t know if that has to stop for any reason. I don’t know. I just couldn’t see myself doing that because it’s very just deeply important and necessary that I continue doing it.

Efron:

I would say, I mean, what all my people have said here is very good. I would say for me, I’ve had some moments where I’m like, oh God, I’m a little freaked out because some people will docs and we’ll do these things, but in retrospect, they’re doing that out of hate. They have so much hate. I’d rather do what I’m doing out of love and had rather look at this fucking fascist government and Israel and be like, no, I’m going to stand up to you. And I also think people can do that in different ways. If people are really good at art, please do art. We need art. Or if you’re really good at writing, we need journalism out there, guys, or I don’t know, whatever skill you have, it could be used in the movement and it could be as small as like, oh, I want to make a poster that changes so much.

You have no idea. Or, oh, I want to do a press release can change so much. So I think acts of resistance can be as small as I want to make a banner for this marcher rally that is still standing against this administration and Israel, even if it is really small, it is still something. And I think people should understand that, okay, this isn’t enough. It is enough. And as long as you continue, the administration will continue to have problems. And that’s okay with us because we’re going to keep going and going and going. So that’s what I would say. Whatever you can do is amazing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Phia, Cole, Sadie and Efron from the University of Oregon. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

This story originally appeared in Truthout on May 20, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

Thousands of babies in Gaza may die over the next two days if Israel does not lift its near-total humanitarian aid blockade and allow the entry of a flood of food and other basic necessities, the UN’s humanitarian chief warned on Tuesday.

“There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them,” said Tom Fletcher, the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, in an interview on the BBC.

“This is not food that Hamas is going to steal,” Fletcher went on, contradicting Israel’s narrative about humanitarian aid. “We run the risk of looting, we run the risk of being hit as part of the Israeli military offensive, we run all sorts of risks trying to get that baby food to those mothers who cannot feed their children right now because they’re malnourished.”

The interview came after Israel allowed the entry of just five aid trucks into Gaza on Monday — a “drop in the ocean” of what Palestinians need. But any small measure of relief those supplies may bring is moot as even those trucks haven’t reached any Palestinians so far, Fletcher said.

“Let’s be clear, those five trucks are just sat on the other side of the border right now, they’ve not reached the communities they need to reach,” Fletcher said.

Meanwhile, the UN has said that there are thousands of trucks carrying crucial goods like baby food lined up and ready for entry at Gaza’s border, just miles away from the babies Israel is starving.

The UN said that Israel has cleared 100 trucks to enter Gaza on Tuesday — still a far cry from the hundreds of trucks per day that humanitarian groups say are needed to fulfill basic needs and relieve starvation for millions of Palestinians in the Strip.

Though the trucks have theoretically been approved for entry, Israel may still block the trucks from entering the region; indeed, though Fletcher said on Monday that Israel had approved the entry of nine trucks, only five were ultimately allowed in.

The starvation crisis in Gaza is dire, with food insecurity experts warning that the entire region is on the brink of or experiencing famine after nearly three months of Israel’s total aid blockade. It has been over a month since the UN said that its agencies had given out its last food stores in the region, with community kitchens forced to shutter their operations in recent weeks as a result.

Many Palestinians say that the starvation is even worse than Israel’s bombardments, having been starved by varying levels of Israel’s blockade for 19 months and with food costs constantly on the rise. The total aid blockade ushered in the worst conditions of the genocide so far; one Palestinian reporter said in March that children in the region are so hungry that they’re drawing pictures of food in the sand.

The World Food Programme has estimated that there are 14,000 children in Gaza with severe acute malnutrition, a deadly condition marked by a skeletal appearance and extreme weight loss, causing damage that can last a lifetime if untreated. According to an assessment by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, nearly 71,000 children are expected to experience acute malnutrition in the next year due to Israel’s blockade.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Sharon Zhang.

Alice Rothchild’s path to becoming an anti-Zionist Jew took many years, many hard conversations, and required a lot of critical self-reflection. But she is part of a growing, powerful chorus of Jewish voices around the world speaking out against Israel’s Occupation of Palestine and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians—and she is urging others to join that chorus. “The time is long overdue for liberal Zionists to find the courage to take a long hard look at their uncritical support for the actions of the Israeli state as it becomes increasingly indefensible and destabilizing, a pariah state that has lost its claim to be a so-called democracy (however flawed) that is endangering Jews in the country and abroad as well as Palestinians everywhere,” Rothchild writes in Common Dreams. In the latest installment of The Marc Steiner Show’s ongoing series “Not in Our Name,” Marc speaks with Rothchild about her path to anti-Zionism, the endgame of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, and the need to liberate Jewish identity from Zionist state of Israel.

Alice Rothchild is a physician, author, and filmmaker with an interest in human rights and social justice. She practiced ob-gyn for almost 40 years and served as Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Harvard Medical School. She is the author of numerous books, including: Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience; Condition Critical: Life and Death in Israel/Palestine; Old Enough to Know, a 2024 Arab American Book Award winner; and Inspired and Outraged: The Making of a Feminist Physician. Rothchild is a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council and a mentor-liaison for We Are Not Numbers.

Producer: Rosette Sewali
Studio Production: David Hebden
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. And today we’re going to talk with Dr. Alice Rothchild. She’s a physician and author of filmmaker, an activist for the rights of Palestinians. She was an OB GYN for almost 40 years and served as assistant professor of Obstetrics and gynecology at Harvard Medical School. She directed this incredibly amazing documentary called Voices Across the Divide. It’s about the struggles in Israel Palestine, and her books include a young adult novel finding Melody Sullivan, old enough to know broken promises, broken dreams, stories of Jewish and Palestinian trauma and resilience on the brink about her experiences in Gaza and the West Bank, and most recently inspired and outraged the making of a feminist physician. And Alice, welcome. It’s good to have you with us here on the Marc Steiner Show and our name. It’s really great to have you here. Thank you for joining us.

Alice Rothchild:

Well, Marc, it’s really great to be here.

Marc Steiner:

So let’s take a step backwards a bit. I’m always fascinated by the journey people take, growing up Jewish and then having this, it’s not to say a moment, but having a series of things happen that shift feeling inside. I can remember in the late sixties trying to volunteer for the Israeli army in 67 and then meeting Palestinians and left winged Israelis and things began to shift, I mean, dramatically shift and it was hard and painful. But tell us about your own story there.

Alice Rothchild:

Okay, so I am a second generation from Eastern European Jews that came over and lived in Brooklyn and worked in sweatshops in that whole era. So I grew up in a small New England town called Sharon, Massachusetts. My family went to a conservative temple. My parents were not orthodox like their parents, but moving outside of that, but not far enough for me. So I went to Hebrew school three days a week. I had a bat mitzvah. I went to Israel with my family when I was 14. It was like this magical trip. I have my diary, so I actually know how I felt

And I had, despite the fact that I had very liberal parents who were supporting the civil rights movement and all that kind of stuff, we actually had very racist attitudes towards Arabs. And I had no idea that we were racist towards Arabs. And so I was going along on that journey. And then I’m also a child of the sixties. So in college I got to be acquainted with political movements and fighting the Vietnam War, and then went to medical school and got more radicalized when I hit up against all the sexism and racism in the healthcare system. And so I was moving left, but I didn’t have the energy and insight to know what to do with my love of Israel. I was a big fan of Israeli dancing, that kind of thing. And so this continued, and then I was an obstetrician gynecologist, so I was a little busy and I had two children and all that was going on. And then in 1997 as a member of what was then called Workman’s Circle, that’s now called Workers Circle, which was a secular Jewish group. It was national, a hundred years old, was originally for immigrants, founded by people from the bun. Complicated but interesting. And we had created a school there for our kids so they would have a sense of Jewish identity but not have God and religion. So it was a complicated thing we were doing. And so we did these secular holidays. So after the Yom Kipper holiday, we were sitting by Jamaica Pond throwing in bread for the ducks and to get rid of whatever we were getting rid of. And we realized we needed to have a political focus for the year, and it was going to be the Israel 50th anniversary, and there was going to be a massive celebration in Boston with Israeli bands and face painting and fireworks. And we thought, well, we have, we’ll submit a suggestion to the Jewish Community Relations Council about having a peace forum, and they’ll say no, and then we’ll have a protest. And that was the total extent of our knowledge. So we put together this thing, and much to their credit, they said yes. But then we were stuck because we didn’t know anything. So we immediately went into high gear and started inviting Palestinians from the Boston area as well as lefty Israelis to come and just talk with us. And we had a very rapid education. And as I learned more and more, all the pieces of the puzzle began to fit together. I knew about colonialism and imperialism, I knew those concepts, but I had never applied it to Israel. So we actually pulled this off. 200 people came, Barney Frank was the speaker. I mean, it was just an amazing empowering experience. We had a children’s section with kids doing the flags for both

Countries, and we were so excited. We thought we need to have a grassroots organization to learn more and to teach our community. So we did that and we started having events and with the public library and an adult education and that kind of stuff. And within a couple of years, we were totally blacklisted. And so we were kind of frustrated and we thought, well, a bunch of us are doctors. Maybe we could approach this through health and human rights. So we started organizing health and human rights delegations to the region, first one mine in 2003. And so I went almost annually until Covid originally. There were about 15 years of doing this delegation. I went on a whole bunch of other delegations. My commitment, my understanding, my experience really deepened. I’ve been to Gaza four times. I was in Gaza in August of 2023. So siege, occupation, racism, Islamophobia are not theoretical concepts for me. And as we went through this journey, we really started struggling with the whole question of Zionism because we started out as nice two-state people, which was a very radical idea at the time

Marc Steiner:

It was.

Alice Rothchild:

And then I gradually began to understand that Zionism as a political ideology is actually based in British colonialism and imperialism concepts. And also that Zionism, the privileging of Jews over other folks in historic Palestine requires harm to Palestinians. And I’m into mutual liberation. And so Jewish supremacy didn’t kind of fit with that ideology. So really, I gradually became an anti Zionist. I began to understand the power of the boycott, divestment, sanction movement. All those things fell into place and it’s become an increasing commitment for me. And so I’ve always, my mother was a writer, and I always would never be a writer. So of course, I wrote a book in two, let’s see, was it 2013, broken Promises, broken Dreams, which really gave me a taste of the power of writing about my experiences. And I figured out that a lot of people couldn’t handle politics, but they could handle, I went here and I talked to this person, and guess what? I learned sort of the personal. And that was a way to get under people’s defenses. So that led to more books and a documentary film and a greater commitment to working on these issues.

Marc Steiner:

One of the things I’ve wrestled with a lot, and I’ve talked to some other people about this as well, is how the oppress can become the oppressor,

Alice Rothchild:

Right? It’s painful.

Marc Steiner:

It is painful. I mean, you grow up knowing that there’s a whole body of people who do not like you and hate you because you’re a Jew. And I experienced that a lot when I was young. But then what we in turn have done to the Palestinians, and I always use the word we because I can’t separate myself from it.

Alice Rothchild:

These are our people, right?

Marc Steiner:

Right. It’s my cousins, he’s my family. They’re there, em Jerusalem, they’re there. So the question, I mean, when you wrestle with this, and I know you’ve been wrestling with this a lot over your life, is how does that happen? How do we as a people who were oppressed, who identified, but where 70% of all the white civil rights workers in the Southwest were Jews that we’ve been fighting for human rights across the globe and against our own oppression. How do the oppress become the oppressor?

Alice Rothchild:

That’s like one of the core questions. So I think that first of all, Jews as a sort of community have psychopathology that we have not seriously dealt with around the issue of trauma and the Nazi Holocaust. And what happened was that this traumatic experience in our community after years of antisemitism has became kind of almost a religion. It became, “We are the supreme victims of the world, and our victimization gives us the right to do anything in order to survive.” And you see that happening, particularly in Israel where originally the Holocaust survivors were looked down upon. They were the weak need survivors. Who knows what they did, who knows how they cooperated, all sorts of horrific things. They did not do well in Israel, and they were not well funded and taken care of. So Israel was very into creating the new Jew, the muscular bronze tanned fighter, Jew and Holocaust survivors didn’t fit with that. But then it became useful to the Israeli propaganda machine to embrace the Holocaust as the reason why we can do whatever we want to do. And I think that’s what we’re seeing now, and it’s a real abuse of Holocaust memory. And people have written endless books and papers on this, but

I think it is a pathology in us as a community and something that until we work it out, we’re going to keep doing horrific things to people. And it’s almost like the abusive parent abuses the child. I mean, it’s all that kind of stuff, but it’s also sort of an othering. So everybody else is out to get us. Everybody else is demonizing us, and we are not responsible for what we’re doing to provoke that. And that’s a huge problem within the Jewish community. And more mainstream Jews don’t want to hear that because I grew up, the Jews are the good people. We are the people we’re chosen. My mother didn’t think we were religiously chosen, but we’re chosen to make the world a better place. So if you buy that and then we go do something, it really is not making the world a better place. It’s very hard to square that. And so that’s the struggle that’s going on. I think in one of the many struggles going on in the Jewish community, both in Israel and here and all over the world,

Marc Steiner:

I’ve been really shocked and happy to see the number of Jews who coming out to say no to what’s happening in Gaza. The demonstration has been huge and mostly Jewish. It’s been here in the city in New York, Baltimore, around, there’s a shift taking place. This internal battle is taking place. Increasingly, this means that Israel becomes a pariah over what’s happening in Gaza.

Alice Rothchild:

The other thing I’ve seen over the decades is that originally when I started doing this work, there were very few Palestinians out in the open,

And I think particularly Palestinians in the United States were mostly people who came here. They were anxious about being accepted in the United States. They were worried about being targeted or deported, and they kept their heads down. Their kids and their grandchildren aren’t doing that. They are out there on the front lines. And so what a lot of young Jews are doing is standing in solidarity with Palestinians and understanding that this is actually a Palestinian led liberation movement, and we need to embrace it as a liberation movement also for ourselves because we’re all trapped in the ways of our parents and our grandparents

Marc Steiner:

As we see all this unfolding around us. One of the things you wrote about I found really interesting that’s not getting a lot of press, is the number of people who wrote about, who have stopped serving in the Israeli army who refuse to go to Gaza. I’ve talked a bit about that because I really think it’s not covered in the times. It’s not covered in major papers. Nobody’s really talking about a hundred thousand Israel Jews saying, no, we’re not going.

Alice Rothchild:

So I mean, this is an interesting development. I think we need to understand. I mean, there are obviously Israeli Jews who are aware of the genocide and Gaza and are horrified. Most Israeli Jews who are against the war, are against the war because they want the hostages back and they want their soldiers to stop dying. Israeli Jews tend not to be that sympathetic to the fact that they’re committing genocide. That’s not what the headlines are about. The headlines are about we want our hostages back. And that’s fine. I mean, if we could stop the war, that would be great, and if enough refusers refuse, that will be more pressure on the government. But I don’t think we should delude ourselves into thinking that after decades and decades of incredible assaults and occupation and harm to Palestinians, that Israeli Jews of a progressive nature are suddenly waking up to this, they’re much more aware of their own pain, which is losing their sons and not having their hostages back.

Marc Steiner:

So your perspective and your analysis is that the majority of these Israeli Jews are saying, no, I’m not serving. They’re more concerned about the hostages coming back home Absolutely. Than they are about taking Palestinian lives or

Alice Rothchild:

Absolutely. And it’s also, it’s not good for the Israeli economy to have all these young men in combat. They’re pulled from their jobs and their tech and industries are also leaving like tech industries are leaving. So I think that there’s a lot of economic things going on as well that Israelis object to. But I don’t delude myself into thinking that there’s sudden awareness and consciousness of the horrible harms to Palestinians. That’s not part of the deal as far as I can

Marc Steiner:

Tell. I think what you’re describing is really important because when people hear people refusing to serve, it’s like for me, it was like going back to Vietnam going, no, I’m not going. I’m not going. Yeah,

Alice Rothchild:

It’s not a Vietnam situation.

Marc Steiner:

So this is a very different kind of dynamic, but a dynamic that could lead to things.

Alice Rothchild:

And I mean, Netanyahu and his right wing henchmen are a segment of the population that doesn’t represent the secular liberal Tel Aviv Jews who don’t espouse his right wing politics. So there’s a huge crisis going on in Israel right now politically.

Marc Steiner:

So I’m really curious to see your thoughts and analysis about where this takes us. I mean, we have this right wing government here in the United States. Trump a little madman at the helm who doesn’t really care about Jews that much, but loves the idea of Israel doing what it’s doing.

Alice Rothchild:

If Trump really cared about Jews, he wouldn’t have forgiven all the crazies who attacked at the time of the election. Those people are fanatical. He wouldn’t get rid of gun control. I mean, he’s unleashing all these forces that are intensely antisemitic. So it’s not that he doesn’t care much about Jews, he does not care about Jews. He cares about Trump. Just to clarify that,

Marc Steiner:

An important clarification.

Alice Rothchild:

Yes.

Marc Steiner:

In that and what we face here and the right wing government in Israel, I worry about several things. A, I worry about the future of the Palestinian people, what’s going to happen to them? We’re slaughtering people all through Gaza. I’m in touch with people in the West Bank more than I am in Gaza who are telling me these horrendous stories that are taking place. You have it also unleashes and antisemitic fervor that’s always bubbling below the surface. Not that antisemitism is our fault, but this is unleashing it. And the right is in control in many sectors of this country and across the globe. And I’m not a negative person by nature, but I’m looking at this and going, okay, so where do you think this takes us? Where does your organizing have to take place to turn this around?

Alice Rothchild:

So first of all, I don’t know where this takes us, but I am completely terrified early on in this war, I would say the goal of the Israeli government is to depopulate Gaza. And everybody go, oh, that’s too extreme. But the way it looks to me right now is that their goal is to completely devastate the Gaza Strip to push everybody south to starve people to death if they don’t kill them with bombs. And then at some point to open the gates and to have voluntary migration. And I think that’s the plan. And then the settlers will move in and they’ll clear everything up and they’ll get billions of dollars from US Jewish organizations. And it will continue the dispossession expulsion of Palestinians, which started way before 48. And then I think they’re going to do it in the West Bank. I mean, we talk about the gasification of the West Bank.

They’re bombing refugee camps. They’re displacing people. They’re killing people. I mean, they bombed hospitals. This is not new. This is like a continuation. And I really also am not shocked by this because if you look at the underlying goals of Zionism and Jewish supremacy, it is to get rid of the Palestinians as much as possible and to take as much land as possible. So in some ways, as horrible as this is, we are just having the fruition of all the dreams from founding the state and creating a state for Jews only. So I am completely terrified that that’s the direction we’re going in. And the United States in all of its mishegas is going to support this. I think that the Trump type people don’t like Jews, but they like strong governments. They like dictators and things like that. They hate Iran. They are Islamophobic. So here’s this little country that is doing the job for them.

And so it fits with this MAGA universe and the kind of things that they espouse. And it’s sort of ironic to me that it’s all being done in the name of protecting the Jews. It’s like, oh my God, because this is going to be really dangerous. And when it’s all done, said and done, people are going to blame the Jews. And we have seen this before. And so this is dangerous for Palestinians, and then it’s going to be dangerous for Jews, and it’s just a terrible, terrible idea. So in terms of trying to organize, I think I take a lot of hope from the organizing the Jewish Voice for Peace is doing, because it is the most rapidly growing Jewish organization in the country. It is anti-Zionist. It is pro boycott, divestment, sanction. It is big tent. Everybody’s invited. You don’t have to be a particular kind of person.

And they’re really being very thoughtful about the kinds of messaging that they give. And there’s a lot more visibility from Palestinians, which is really, really important because one of the things that helps people be less terrified and racist and all the things that people are is to meet a Palestinian and find out, oh, they’re human. How do you like that? They value education. They want to be doctors. Their children are growing up and are nice people. But that’s on the one-to-one basis really, really important. And then I think the other thing is that a lot of the catastrophes that have happened in the past were before social media. And because we have social media now for all of its bad things, it provides us with an unfiltered opportunity to hear the voices from the region. And that makes a real big difference because much of what Israeli military did for decades was just completely hidden unless you were looking for it from the public. And now it’s not hidden anymore. I work with, we Are Not Numbers, and we’re publishing two stories a day from young writers who are in Gaza writing about their experiences. So

It’s on social media, it’s on a website, it’s all out there. You just have to read it, which is very

Marc Steiner:

Different. What was the name of the group? Just

Alice Rothchild:

We Are Not Numbers.

Marc Steiner:

We Are Not Numbers.

Alice Rothchild:

You know that group?

Marc Steiner:

Yes, yes, yes. I didn’t hear. Yeah.

Alice Rothchild:

So I’m the mentor Liaison. So I’m the person who gets the writer’s essay after, goes through some stuff, and then finds a published English speaking writer and matches them, and then they work together on the essay. So there’s so much out there that wasn’t out there 20 years ago.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah, that’s really critically important. I feel like in some ways, historically we’re at this very strange moment, but when I saw the picture of the Israeli soldier holding the a Palestinian kid who had a cast in his arm and the fear in the little boy’s eyes, and then I thought about that famous picture from the Warsaw ghetto of the Nazi and this little 12-year-old boy and the terror in his eyes.

Alice Rothchild:

It’s not subtle.

Marc Steiner:

It’s not, and it’s not subtle at all. And you look at that, and I think about in some ways, when I look at JVP, the struggle inside the Jewish world now, I think of the struggle in the early part of the 20th century between the Zionists and the Bunes between the revolutionary Jews who were Bunes and the Zionists, many whom were willing to sell out their own people to get what they wanted, right?

Alice Rothchild:

And there were the Buber Zionists who wanted to buy national state. I mean, Zionism was highly controversial basically until the 67 War when it was propagandized that this was an existential struggle. And so Jews just got in line, and I had this famous conversation that a friend of mine was having with one of the Jewish in Boston, one of the Jewish leaders, and she was saying, why do you have to be a Zionist to be a Jew? And he said, you don’t understand Israel is the religion. And I think that that’s really the turning point in 67 is when that became the test and you had to be a Zionist to be a good Jew. And that’s when more reformed Jews got on the wagon. It just was a major turning point.

Marc Steiner:

I think that’s true. I think that I’m curious as to your analysis about the shift you’re seeing inside the Jewish.

Alice Rothchild:

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think what we’re seeing now in the United States at least, is that Jews are traditionally progressive people. They raise their children to think about civil rights and equality and blah, blah, blah. And then the kids look at what’s going on in Israel and they go, I can’t buy that. So I think this generation is really questioning the things that their parents and grandparents just accepted as the Bible, basically. And the younger generations don’t have Holocaust memory, don’t have the upswing of the 67 War and blah, blah, blah. So it’s like a fresh batch, and they’re really having trouble standing with Israel. I mean, they’re certainly ones that do. But as a group, it’s a whole different ballgame. And the majority of people in the United States support an arms embargo against Israel. That’s like revolutionary. I mean, it hasn’t penetrated to the people who sell the arms, but that’s a major, major shift.

Marc Steiner:

So in all the years that I’m trying to figure out for myself as well, talking to other people in our generation where the hope lives

That this ends, and how you organize the story and where you take it, when I see the kind of growth inside the Jewish world of alternative synagogues, it’s see the growth, even though I’m not a religious person when I see that, look at that, or when you watch what JVP is going and the eruption saying, no, not in our name taking over. And then you see this right wing surge as well. I mean, we are on this, it seems to be a political precipice at the moment, and it takes voices organizing to really shift it. And I was just curious in your own work, I mean, we’ve written these books, a physician, an activist, where you see the optimism, where you see the fight going at this moment.

Alice Rothchild:

So first of all, it is very hard for me to remain optimistic, but I’m really trying. I’m not a naturally optimistic person. I always say I’m pessimistically optimistic.

Marc Steiner:

I understand.

Alice Rothchild:

And I also feel like particularly having become a part of the feminist movement, you take two steps forward, one step back, then you get knocked on the head, then you get up again. So I’m not like starry-eyed about this. I am incredibly impressed right now with the assault on universities and the pushback from university students and their professors. This very much reminds me of the Vietnam War

Because there is this massive assault, both not only on Palestine, but on DEI and all the things that you know, and more and more universities, their students are getting out in those encampments. They’re putting up their protests, they’re organizing in their communities, they’re doing alternative conferences, they’re doing fasting for Gaza. I mean, there’s all sorts of things that young people are doing. And that for me is the most hopeful place. It is also the most dangerous place because the pushback against them is very powerful, very well funded. I mean, we should know who all the donors universities are who are pulling all these strings. And the right wing has been planning for this for decades. And if the right wing wins, they’re going to destroy universities as we know it, and they’re going to destroy a generation of young people, researchers, thinkers, professors, educated people, and that will be catastrophic. So my hope is with the younger generation and what they’re doing now, but also I see a tremendous amount of support from older people as well. And also that it’s intersectional, which is a new thing. When we started, we were like, will anyone actually be interested in this besides Jews and Palestinians? How could

Will anyone come to our meetings? And now people understand this is much more than the actual topic. This is about the remnants of colonialism. This is about fighting racism. This is about police brutality, this is about the military industrial complex, all the big things that run the universe. This is what this is about, and this is the test case. And I think we have to be clear on that and clear on how big the struggle is because the opposition is very, very well organized and has been planning this for decades.

Marc Steiner:

Well, I think the work you’ve been doing, the books you’ve written and your film, which we’ll be linking to so people can actually watch it, which your film is amazing.

Alice Rothchild:

Thank you.

Marc Steiner:

We can spend an hour just talking about the film itself, which we may do, because I think it’s a powerful piece, and I want to thank you for your work and not stopping the fight and the struggle both in terms of Palestinian rights and for a better society here. And I really appreciate taking the time out. It’s been really a great conversation.

Alice Rothchild:

Well, it’s been a pleasure, mark. Thank you so much.

Marc Steiner:

Once again, I want to thank Dr. Alice Rothchild for joining us today. And thanks to David Hebden for running the program and our audio editor, Alina Nelich, producer Rosette, for making it all happen behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making the show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me ats@therealnews.com, and I’ll get right back to you. And once again, thank you to Dr. Alice Rothchild for joining us today and for the incredible work she does. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.

We asked people in Gaza what their thoughts were on US President Donald Trump’s stated plans to “take over the Gaza Strip” and displace the Palestinian population there. This is what they told us…

Producer: Belal Awad, Leo Erhardt
Videographer: Ruwaida Amer, Mahmoud Al Mashharawi
Video Editor: Leo Erhardt

Transcript

Ahed Hisham Raffat Arif: 

Who is Trump? Who is this? Where did he appear from? This is a crazy, harmful person. We will not leave Gaza, even if it were the last moment of our lives. 

Donald Trump [CLIP]: 

The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a proper job with it. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, clear the rubble, and remove the destroyed buildings. We’ll level the area and initiate economic development that will provide unlimited jobs and housing for the people of the region.

Ibrahim Al Fayadh: 

Trump’s evacuation plans are nonsense. We will stay until the end. We are losing people daily, yet still we say: “Don’t despair, God is with us” and “be strong and it will end,” and we say to Trump: your words are empty, we in Gaza are steadfast and remain until the end. 

Abu Tha’ir: 

This plan is new and old. In 1948 they were working on the expulsion of all Palestine from the Gaza Strip and from Jaffa… and everyone knows this. But of course, they weren’t able to empty Gaza City entirely, or erase or remove Palestine. No one would accept this, because it is rejected by the whole world and by the people of Palestine in particular: we refuse it completely. When you pull out a tree by its roots, you kill it. You won’t benefit from it in the future. For a human, who is forced to leave his land, he is being sentenced to death. 

Mohamed El Kurdi: 

This is the land of our ancestors. We will remain as long as the thyme and olive trees grow, by the grace of God. 

Abu Tha’ir: 

To be present on the land in Palestine—this is your land—you are rooted here. It’s hard to leave it. Even under threat of death, with force. It’s hard. 

Mohamed El Kurdi: 

We reject any plan, whether it’s from Trump or Biden—many have tried! God willing, they will fail. They attempted plans with their generals and to evacuate areas, but they have all failed. 

Jamal Eid Qater:

We will not leave, because this land is ours. No one can buy or sell us. We are the people of this land. We will not allow anyone to buy or sell us. We won’t leave. Pharaoh himself could come—we won’t leave. 

Mohamed El Kurdi: 

What was destroyed will be rebuilt. We will rebuild it better, God willing. Abu Tha’ir: 

Some left to go to the South but others stayed under fire and death. This shows how strongly people cling to their land. To die and be buried in it is better than to be forced out. The whole world has heard and seen this reality. 

Ahed Hisham Raffat Arif: 

To us, Gaza is the best country—and the best city—in the world. Despite all the destruction and the blockade, look at Gaza. Gaza is my whole life. I will rebuild my home, my family, and every stone in Gaza. I will rebuild it. 

Ibrahim Al Fayadh: 

Gaza is my life. My blood. My veins, my breath, my soul. My eyes, my vision. Honourable Gaza. 

Abu Tha’ir: 

Gaza is the soul, the blood, the body, the breath. Without Gaza there is nothing. Mohamed El Kurdi: 

Gaza is the heart, is the soul. It’s the veins filled with blood. 

Jamal Eid Qater: 

Gaza means everything to me. It’s my mother, my father. She is the loving mother to us. Yes. We won’t leave her.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Ruwaida Amer, Leo Erhadt, Belal Awad and Mahmoud Al Mashharawi.

In the aftermath of a broken ceasefire, Palestinians in Gaza speak out about the trauma, loss, and fear they live with daily. Families recount the horrors of bombings, life in tents, and the silence of a world that watches but does not act. Through raw testimony and haunting imagery, this short film captures the reality of survival under siege—and the enduring dignity of a people who refuse to be erased.

Producers: Belal Awad, Leo Erhardt
Videographers: Ruwaida Amer, Mahmoud Al Mashharawi
Video Editor: Leo Erhardt

Transcript

MAMDOUH AHMED MORTAJA: 

More than 500 days have passed and this unjust world has watched our bodies being burned alive. 

SUHAILA HAMED SA’AD: 

A girl asleep. In a tent, also. An air strike hit, her brain spilled out—she died on her mattress. What did this girl do? What crime did she commit? 

MUKARAM SA’AD MUSTAFA HLIWA: 

Two billion Muslims. Two billion Muslims are watching us. They could do something, but they do nothing. Where is the Arab world? Where is the Islamic world? Where is the Western world? While we are being killed daily. 

MOHAMED DARWISH MUSTAFA SA’AD: 

Destruction, terror, fear, humiliation. Faith only in God. As for faith in the end of the war—sadly, we’re not hopeful. 

SUHAILA HAMED SA’AD: 

We were in the refugee camp, when we heard gunfire, bombs and the chaos that followed. We didn’t need anyone to tell us, at night, we woke up to gunfire and bombs. There were assassinations, and the whole world turned upside down. My feelings when the ceasefire happened: we were truly pleased, we thought it was over and thought we were going to go back to normal life, like everyone else. Or do we not have the right to live? After that, war returned, worse than before. Now our feelings are different from before. At first, when the ceasefire happened, we were happy and thought we could go back to our lives. But for the war to stop and then return? That’s terrifying and fills us with anxiety. We didn’t expect the war to start again, at all. We couldn’t even believe it when it ended. We were waiting for relief, supplies and aid. We heard the promises on the news, about trucks entering—we didn’t expect the war to return. 

MOHAMED DARWISH MUSTAFA SA’AD: 

For me? Yes, I expected it. I expected it. Because they are treacherous, they don’t want peace. We had almost finished the first stage, but at the beginning of the second phase, they turned everything around. They don’t want it to succeed. They don’t want it to succeed. It’s not possible for the war to end. It’s not possible. 

MAMDOUH AHMED MORTAJA: 

Rings of fire, flying body parts, surprise attacks, abductions—the stuff of nightmares is happening in this war, and now, the resumption of war has renewed our feelings of intense fear. Everyone’s only demand is an end to this war and this curse, so we can have safety,

and tranquility, so we can rest our heads on our pillows and know that we will wake up the next day without drones, bullets, or artillery strikes. 

Interviewer: 

– This is not normal, it’s really loud. 

MOHAMED DARWISH MUSTAFA SA’AD: 

– It’s like this 24/7. 

SUHAILA HAMED SA’AD: 

Of course, Gaza is used to wars, but not like this. It’s not a war; it’s genocide: the child, the young, the girl, the wealthy, the poor—everyone. I’ll tell you a story: Yesterday, a ten-year-old girl was sleeping in her bed when an airstrike hit and killed her. What did this girl do? She was only ten years old. A girl sleeping. Also, in a tent. An air strike hits, her brains spill out. She dies on her mattress. What did she do? What crime did she commit? It’s a scary thing. The person sitting in his tent is scared, the person in his house is scared. We feel complete exhaustion, there is no stability, and we are mentally drained. When we sleep, we don’t expect to wake up. With the jets and the strikes, no one expects to wake up. We are living day to day, when we sleep, we don’t think about waking up. Death has become normal. What can we do? 

MUKARAM SA’AD MUSTAFA HLIWA: 

To me, the war hasn’t stopped. We have been living in destruction since October 7, 2023. I was injured on October 11, 2023, and until now, there’s been complete ongoing destruction in the Gaza Strip. Martyrs, orphans—destruction, destruction, destruction, more than you can imagine. 

MOHAMED DARWISH MUSTAFA SA’AD: 

Unfortunately, we expected the war to end, but it didn’t. They don’t want to end it—they want to end us: completely. We don’t want wars, it’s enough. We’re exhasted. Displacement, displacement, displacement. I lost three homes, and I have lost family as martyrs. We’ve been humiliated as you can see, living in a refugee camp and the situation is miserable. A worn out tent, frankly the situation is not good. 

SUHAILA HAMED SA’AD: 

The children here, when they hear explosions, develop psychological problems. They wet themselves. If a glass falls, they panic—they’re psychologically broken. They’re still children. What do they know? Anything that moves, they think it’s an airstrike or tank fire. They’re living in fear. 

MUKARAM SA’AD MUSTAFA HLIWA:

One of my grandsons has a heart condition, we worry his heart will stop from terror. He screams and cries when he hears a rocket or an airstrike, or the quadcopter fire. The children can’t sleep because of what’s happening here in Gaza. 

MOHAMED DARWISH MUSTAFA SA’AD: 

The kids wet themselves. That’s one thing. The second? The fear and terror—like this child next to you. They are terrified and have no reassurance. The children roam the streets. There are no schools, no education. The Jews demolished the schools, they demolished kindergartens, the hospitals, the dispensaries, and the infrastructure. Buildings, houses: there is nothing left. The children are broken. The children? Childhood is over here. 

SUHAILA HAMED SA’AD: 

The future? It’s black and bleak. We have no future—our future is with God. What future? We live in tents, and they have followed us even here! The tent is everything—the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom, everything. At the same time, the tent is an oven—not a tent. Even here, they won’t let us stay. They won’t leave us alone. The tents, the fear, the airstrikes—everything is crushing us. 

MAMDOUH AHMED MORTAJA: 

More than 500 days have passed, and this unjust world has watched our bodies being burned alive. Today, more than 50,000 human beings killed, burned alive in front of the world, and no one lifts a finger. So it’s normal that we in Gaza feel we face a deaf, blind, unjust world that supports the executioner standing over us, the victims. 

MUKARAM SA’AD MUSTAFA HLIWA: 

After losing my son, after what’s happened to Gaza? No. There is no hope, none at all. Only God stands with us. Hope in any country? There is none. I don’t trust the international community. They haven’t helped us. On the contrary. They sit and discuss as they destroy us. They haven’t found a solution for Gaza. They are destroying us here and in the West Bank. No one has stopped the war. Why? Only God knows. The blame is on them. There is a conspiracy against the people of Gaza. 

MOHAMED DARWISH MUSTAFA SA’AD: 

Doesn’t the international community see the victims every day? Thirty, forty victims a day, while they watch. No. Only God is our hope. No one else. God will deliver us from this war. He who is capable of anything. As for the international community, the Arab world, the Muslim world? There are 56 Arab and Muslim nations, yet they do nothing. Two billion Muslims. Two billion Muslims are watching us. They could act, but they do nothing. Where is the Arab world? Where is the Islamic world? Where is the Western world? We are being killed daily. They could act, but they are complicit—their hearts side with Israel. In the end, we’re battling the U.S. We are not equals. And the entire world supports Israel. We’re

exhausted. We are seeing horrors, tragedies, and no one stands with us. The International Court of Justice ruled for us, but where’s the action? We’re alone. 

Interviewer 

– Do you think you will survive this war? 

SUHAILA HAMED SA’AD: 

– No. Zero chance. I told you: I sleep feeling like I won’t wake up. It’s normal. Thanks be to God. If He wills us to be martyrs, it’s better than this torture. Because, I’m telling you, we are not living—we are dead. These tents are graves above the earth. What’s the difference if we’re buried under it? Nothing. We’re being tortured, watching the explosions, the despair—it’s destroying us mentally and physically. 

MOHAMED DARWISH MUSTAFA SA’AD: 

Honestly, it’s difficult. We’ve faced death repeatedly. May God save us. I don’t expect to survive. I’m not optimistic. Destruction, terror, fear, humiliation. Only faith in God. As for faith in the war ending? Sadly, we’re not hopeful. 

SUHAILA HAMED SA’AD: 

Who can we have faith in? In whom? There’s no one. We’ve lost everything. Everything. Only our breath remains. And we wait, minute by minute, for it to leave us. 

MOHAMED DARWISH MUSTAFA SA’AD: 

Frankly, we are beyond exhausted. We lost our children, homes, livelihoods, work—Gaza has no life left. Life is over. I mean it. I’m 73. I’ve seen many wars, but never like this. This is genocide. 

MUKARAM SA’AD MUSTAFA HLIWA: 

I hope to walk again after my injury. I have a broken hip, I need a replacement. They approved my transfer, but I’m afraid if I leave, I’ll be exiled. They’re saying that those who leave can’t return. But why? I’m leaving for treatment—why exile me? I am from this land. I am Palestinian. I want my country. I want treatment, but I must return. I’m not leaving to emigrate. I don’t want to abandon my country. That’s what I fear.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Ruwaida Amer, Mahmoud Al Mashharawi, Belal Awad and Leo Erhadt.

At the 2025 National Membership Meeting of Jewish Voice for Peace in Baltimore, thousands of anti-Zionist Jews gathered to reaffirm their opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestine and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians—and to reject the antisemitic notion that the political ideology of Zionism represents all Jews. In this vital and wide-ranging discussion recorded during the JVP gathering in Baltimore, TRNN’s Marc Steiner sits down with self-identified Palestinian Jews Esther Farmer and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay to discuss the complexities of Jewish identity and belonging today, the historical origins of Israel, and “the way that Zionism destroyed both Palestine and the diverse modes of Jewish life” that predate and reject the Zionist project.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is a Palestinian Jew of African origins, film essayist, curator, and professor of modern culture and comparative literature at Brown University. She is the author of numerous books, including: Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism; The Civil Contract of Photography; and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950. Esther Farmer is a Palestinian Jew and native Brooklynite passionate about using theater as a tool for community development. She is former Ombudsman and Manager for the New York City Housing Authority, former United Nations representative for the International Association for Community Development and was an original founder of Teamsters for a Democratic Union. She is also a Jewish Voice for Peace NYC chapter leader and the director and playwright of “Wrestling with Zionism.”

Studio Production: Cameron Granadino, David Hebden
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s good to have you all with this. Jewish Voice for Peace is having their national convention right here in Baltimore, and the real news is there to bring you the story. Two of the leading participants in JVP are joining me in studio here at The Real News, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is Professor of modern culture and media and comparative literature, and a film essayist and curator of archives and exhibitions. Her books include Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism; Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography; The Civil Contract of Photography; and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950. Among her films: Un-Documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder, and Civil Alliance: Palestine 47-48. Among her exhibitions: “Errata” in Barcelona and HKW in Berlin; “Enough! The Natural Violence of the New World Order” that was done in Leipzig.

And we’re also joined by Esther Farmer, who is a Palestinian Jew, a native Brooklynite whose passion is using theater as a tool for community development. She’s the director of “Wrestling with Zionism,” a reader’s theater project in New York City, as well as the author of several published articles on theater and community development. Esther is an active member and part of the leadership team of Jewish Voice for Peace in New York City. And they join us here in studio. So welcome both of you. It’s good to have you here. I’m really happy you could take the time from the conference to join us here for a little bit. One of the things that fascinated me about the two of you as I was going through all of your work, not all of it, but going through your work, is that you both identify as Palestinian Jews. Can we talk about what that means? That’s a word You never hear that maybe in certain circles you do, but in the rest of the world you don’t hear that notion idea of Palestinian Jew and what that means and why. That’s the way you identify.

Esther Farmer:

So my father was born in Hebron, Palestine. My grandfather was a Turkish Jew who went to Palestine pretty much to avoid the draft from World War I. He was a draft dodger,

Marc Steiner:

Didn’t want to fight for the Turkish army.

Esther Farmer:

He was a progressive Jew, didn’t believe in war. I found out much later that the penalty for avoiding the draft was to be hung. So several Jews actually left, but he did not realize that since Palestine was a Turkish protector, he was drafted anyway, and that’s why they came to the United States. They came to New York. So this was way before the Nakba and way before 1948, my family was, they lived on the Lower East Side. They were very poor and they were very anti-Zionist. So my family’s existence gives the lie to all Jews loved Israel, and certainly Ariella’s work really ties into that, that before the Holocaust, most Jews were not Zionists. So what does it mean to be a Palestinian Jew is that there was a country called Palestine, and it was Muslim, Christian, and Jewish. It was very diverse, and the vast majority at that time, 80% were not Jewish. They were Muslim. So Israel was a creation of people who did not live there for their own interest.

Marc Steiner:

I want to get to that point because that’s really a critical point. People don’t get about it, what Israel is and why it is. Ariella?

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:

Yeah. So I think that first of all, we have to be reminded that the category of identity is a colonial category. And I was born into the Zionist colony in Palestine, and an identity was imposed on me at birth called Israeli identity. And this identity was fabricated in 14 years since, I mean 14 years before I was born, which means synthetic identity that was meant to cultivate or to create a factory of Israeli babies, that their identity is predicated on their opposition to other who lived in this country, who lived in this place, which were defined Palestinians. So when I’m speaking about these kind of human factories in the Zionist colony in Palestine, I’m speaking about the way that Zionism destroyed both Palestine and the diverse modes of Jewish life. Part of them took place in Palestine. My family moved to Palestine, my maternal from maternal side, they were expelled together with Muslims when the first white Christian state was created in Spain, when Jews and Muslims were expelled from Spain. So they moved from Spain to Portugal, France, Austria, Bulgaria, and then Palestine, way before the Zionist movement started to colonize or to aspire to colonize Palestine. So they were Palestinian Jews in the very factual way. They were part of Palestine. And this is not a colonial identity, this is a form of belonging. And when I’m saying that I’m a Palestinian Jew, it is a way of undoing, first of all, the identity that was imposed on me at birth, that I’m not recognizing myself in it, and all the other colonial identities that await for me like American or like French. So claiming that I am a Palestinian Jew is claiming a form of belonging. That was the form of belonging of my maternal ancestors. From my paternal side, we were Algerian Jews and both identities were destroyed. Both forms of belonging, sorry, not identities were destroyed through two colonial project, the French colonization of Algeria on the one hand and the Zionist colonization of Palestine. So being an Algerian Jew, a Palestinian Jew, a Muslim Jew is a mode of reclaiming my ancestral modes of belonging.

Marc Steiner:

I love that. Both of you really interesting stories, very powerful stories, and I want to dive back into that. But I was thinking as you were talking that, and I’ve wrestled this a lot and I’ve written about this, which is that if there had been no Holocaust there, there’d be no Israel. I mean, that’s the fundamental, most Jews were not interested in being Zionists. They were in this socialist movements here. They were doing whatever they were doing, whatever we were.

Esther Farmer:

I don’t know about that.

Marc Steiner:

Okay, please go ahead.

Esther Farmer:

I mean, I don’t know how we could know that, but there’s an assumption there that the imperialist powers at that time wouldn’t have. I mean, they certainly used the Holocaust and the sympathy of the world, or the Zionist claimed that they absolutely had to have Israel to, and it was seen as some kind of reparation or something. But as my father used to say, also, I love Avila’s work because it kind of puts a context to things that my family would say is that the Zionists love Israel and they hate Jews. And I think that says a lot. So I don’t know that the imperialists wouldn’t have created Israel one way or another. I don’t know. I just think it’s an assumption.

Marc Steiner:

Good.

Esther Farmer:

Yeah,

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:

Maybe I can complete it from a different perspective. Yeah, please. I think that we cannot say that if there will not, Holocaust won’t be the state of Israel. We have to ask ourself what is the continuity between the Holocaust and the state of Israel in order to reply that we have to go back in time because the Holocaust didn’t arrive from nowhere.

Okay, if it didn’t arrive from nowhere, we have to ask ourself what did Europe wanted from the Jews in order to have the Holocaust and then to force on the Jews all over the world to be represented by the Zionists that destroyed Palestine and created the state of Israel as the destiny of the Jewish people. For that, I invite in my book, the Jewelers of the Umai, have it here with me, a potential history of the Jewish Muslim world. What I invite people to look at is in the wake of the French Revolution, when the modern citizenship was invented, Jews who lived in France were not part of the citizenship they were given with this citizenship a few years after the French Revolution. But what interests me is not the fact that the Jews were naturalized in the wake of the French Revolution. What interests me is the price that they had to pay in order to become citizens.

They had to forget that they were Jews and forgetting that they were Jews. This was a European project. So eliminating the Jews either by assimilating them into the Christian world or assimilating them into what the Euro-American powers invented in the wake of World War II as the Judeo-Christian tradition, or eliminating the Jews through extermination. All these are part of the same project, what to do with the Jews. Europe invented the Jews as a question, as a problem. And at the same time that Europe invented the Jews as a problem, they also invented the solution with quotation mark to make out of diverse Jewish communities, a Jewish people with a destiny. This brings us to the beginning of the 19th century, the beginning of the 19th century. They invent Palestine as a question, and they invent the Jews as a question, and they merge both questions. Napoleon, Napoleonic Wars already saw the possibility of transferring the Jews to Palestine.

So this connection between Palestine and the Jews is something that Europe invented way before the Nakba. And the last point in time that I would like to bring to our conversation is in the wake of World War ii, after the Holocaust, Euro-American powers imposed what they called New World Order. They created the UN as the organ to facilitate their solutions to different people. The Jews were in displaced person camps in Europe from 45 to 48. The Zionist movement was a marginal movement in the life of Jews, worldwide marginalized movement. In the Jewish Muslim world, it has almost no presence. And Europe that was responsible for the extermination of the Jews add to innocent itself, making Europe innocent, making Europe, one of the liberating powers add to what was relied on the exceptional of the Nazi, which legitimized all the European colonies and the exceptional of the Jewish suffering, this double exceptional and the recognition of the Zionist as representative of the Jews, which means those who were mandated to destroy Jewish, a diverse Jewish life all over the world in Asia, in North Africa, in many other places. And the Zionists were mandated to destroy Palestine. This was part of Europe and your American powers part of their response, what to do with the Jews. So if we speak about the final solution by the Nazi as an extermination, the final, final solution or the post final solution was to impose on the Jews a state that will be for them at the price of Palestine, at the price of the destruction of diverse Jewish communities,

Esther Farmer:

Which is fascinating to me because it’s like it’s the way that Zionism is so deeply antisemitic. It is antisemitic, obviously by

Marc Steiner:

Homogenizing. Jump to that. Please go ahead.

Esther Farmer:

Well, just by homogenizing, and now it’s being used tangible form of Jewish life except the Zionist one, right? And it’s like this way of Jews being used. I mean, that was something that my family taught me very deeply in my DNA, that Jews are used by the imperialists for their own interests. And the creation of Israel was so much about that. And yet, we’re all supposed to say that as Jews, we all love Israel, which is the most antisemitic thing possible. And of course for me, as someone who comes from a very strong leftist Jewish background, what Israel is doing is a travesty. And back to that question of the Jews love the Zionists, love Israel and hate Jews. That incident that happened when it was a boatload of refugees and they were coming to the United States and they were turned away.

They weren’t interested in going to Israel. They wanted to come to the United States. And the United States turned them away, and the Zionists were fine with that as long as the United States supported Israel. So it’s just a perfect example in your face of how Jews in Israel is not the same thing, but we have been inundated with propaganda to make our identities. And I mean, Ella’s work is so fascinating to me because they’ve literally erased our memories and have just changed the narrative and the dialogue to the point where it’s unrecognizable as to who people are. And now Christian nationalists are telling us what it is to be a Jew, which the IRA definition says that you’re only a Jew if you support Zionism. So they’re literally erasing our memories and history.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:

Yeah, no, this goes back to Napoleonic Wars Napoleon, who codified what is Judaism, who invented the Jewish consi story, who created Jewish life as a pyramidal modes of being who are entangled being Jew with the state in a way that the state, the states, different states can tell us today, what does it mean to be Jew? And there are bad Jews, and good Jews and the anti-Zionists are being considered the bad Jews. And those are Christians who never reckoned with their antisemitism or anti Judaism with their racism toward many groups that are telling us what does it mean to be Jew? And I would like just to add that Europe, in order to innocent itself from its crimes against the Jews, first of all, imposed the state of Israel or imposed the Zionist as representative of the Jews, but also exchanged with the enemy of the Jews and created Palestinians, Arab and Muslims as the enemies of the Jews.

And these were never our enemies. If the Jews added systematic enemy, this was Europe. For centuries, Jews were expelled from one place to another in Europe. And it ended up with a project that is being called as a euphemistic term to describe. It was called the emancipation of the Jews in the 18th century, in the 19th century. What is this emancipation? This emancipation meant to kill the Jew within the Jew. I think that here in the us, we have to think about it as similar to the project of killing the indigenous within the indigenous, right? It’s like the boarding schools. So on a global scale, Europe killed the Jew within the Jew, and many of the members of what is being called here in a way that always surprise me, American Jewry, many of the members of this community don’t even remember that they belong to other communities that were destroyed by Europe, right? American Jewry is an invention, is an amalgamation, is another amalgamation that is built on the European amalgamation of the Jewish people in the 19th century. So we have to be reminded also that Zionism started as a Christian movement. The colonization of Palestine was a Christian ideology before it became a Zionist, a Jewish Zionist ideology.

Esther Farmer:

It’s interesting that I remember when Biden said, if we didn’t have Israel, we would have to invent

Marc Steiner:

It,

Esther Farmer:

Which is again, the most antisemitic thing in the world telling are you saying that Jews are not safe where they are? So we’re not safe here. So we have to create Israel. And you support that. I mean, you can’t get more antisemitic than that, but where are the Zionists? Where’s the outrage from the Zionist around that statement?

Marc Steiner:

You both have just said so much that we can stay here for hours, just pulling it all apart and really taking a deep dive here into all of it that you’ve said. I mean, what both of you have pointed out on one level, a number of levels you have on one level is how antisemitism drove Zionism in many ways to create Israel for the power of the West, as I put it once a long time ago, is to force refugees, to create refugees. And what you’ve all described, how do you take that and make it understood both politically and socially in this country? So some of the Zionist leaders will immediately call you and me self hating Jews. That’s the first thing they’ll say. But how do you take what you’ve just described and get people to really understand and put their hands around what it really means, how Israel, Israel created, what it stands for and what it’s done to us?

Esther Farmer:

Well, we are doing this conference now where we have 2000 anti-Zionist Jews in a womb 15 years ago. Be lucky if you got 15 anti-Zionist Jews in the room. So this is happening right now because the impact of what Zionism has done is war militarism and imperialism. And that’s being seen now throughout the whole world. So our job in JVP is to move Jews and everyone away from Zionism, and that’s happening. The issue is that the narrative, I mean, I’ve been doing this work for 50 years, and I have never seen the narrative the way it is right now. It has substantially changed, and that took a tremendous amount of work, and we’re proud of that work. So that’s happening. And yet the policies of the United States are still the same. So that says a lot about what so-called democracy is, when the majority of the country is with us pole after pole is saying they are not supporting what Israel is doing, but yet that’s still the policy. So I think these issues of identity and the relentless propaganda that has gone on since this Zionist, I dunno what you want to call it, experiment, has been both so destructive to Palestinians and to Jews, really, really destructive. And that’s why it’s so important for us to have this as Naomi Klein says it, Exodus away from Zionism.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah,

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:

No, I think that just maybe we have to remind ourselves that there is genocide going on. It’s almost two years, and there are some common ways to understand what is genocide, which is related to what was done by Lemkin and the convention against genocide. But I think that we have to maybe ask other questions about genocide rather than defining what is genocide. Understanding that settler colonial regimes are genocidal regimes, and the state of Israel is a genocidal regime that serve the west, serve the West to solve with quotation mark the Jewish question another time in its history and serve the West to have its mercenaries in the form of Israelis. And I think that it became very clear that since October, 2023, without the arms and the money and the propaganda machine all over the world, in the western world in what you called policies in state apparatuses, the persecution of voices that are denouncing the genocide without all these western power,

The genocide will not last more than 1, 2, 3 weeks. Israel does not have the power to have a genocide. Israel itself would not survive in 48 without the destruction of Jewish diverse communities without forcing the Jews in Europe, the survivors to go to Palestine rather than to rebuild their communities in Europe without inciting violence in the Jewish Muslim world and making the life of Jews in the Jewish Muslim world impossible in a way that they slowly, slowly, this world was dismantled and Jews had to leave. Most of them did not want to go to Palestine. The case of Algeria in 62, at the moment of the end of the War of Independence

Marc Steiner:

For Algeria

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:

Only 20% in Algeria, only 20% of the Jews were forced to leave Algeria because two colonial projects forced them to leave Algeria, only 20% went to the Zionist colony in Palestine. The rest of them went to Canada and France. So they were not Zionists. So we have to understand that the state of Israel was sustained with Western power. It was not an expression of a Jewish liberation project. It was a European project, Euro-American project to reorganize the entire world to create what they called the Jewish Judo Christian tradition, which never existed to remove the Jews from the Jewish Muslim world,

Marc Steiner:

Which did exist

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:

To create Palestine as allegedly a state for the Jews and to turn Palestinians into exterminate group. So when I relate to the term genocide, when I wrote several texts during the beginning of the genocide, I put aside the legal definition of genocide. And I am trying to reconstruct how the genocide against Palestinians started. And it started in the wake of World War ii when Western power through the mediation of the UN, decided that Palestinians are experiment for the sake of Zionist, for the sake of creating a Zionist state. So rather than speaking about genocide as an event, I speak about genocidal regime, I speak about genocidal technologies, and when you understand the genocidal regime, you understand that already the nakba was the beginning of the genocide because Palestinians were exter amenable. They had to pay the price, they could be exterminated because their presence, there was an obstacle for the imposition of the new world order with quota mark, which was a Euro-American project of enting Europe of its crimes against the Jews and of its crimes against other colonies. We have to be reminded that in 45 European powers, and we’re speaking about the British, the French, Spanish, they still had colonies in different places in the world. So by exceptionalizing, the Nazi, by exceptionalizing the suffering of the Jews, they actually continue to run the world and not to reckon with their crimes against the Jews and against other racialized communities.

Esther Farmer:

One of the things that gets me always is when people say, well, Israel has a right to exist as if the country was established by God. I mean countries are created by the that be for their own interests. When I was growing up, there was no Bosnia.

This was created generally not created by the people that live in these places. It’s created as Ariela was saying, by the western world for their imperialist interest. So I don’t know why this country of Israel has any more right to exist than anybody else. And I think there’s a difference between these countries and the people that live in them, but this idea that countries, that Israel has a right to exist, it’s just so interesting. It’s an example of how the assumptions and how we’ve been trained to think in these ways around nation states and the creation of these things that just has nothing to do with our actual lived experience and history.

Marc Steiner:

So you both have said so much and given such deep analysis about where this is in some ways, I think that is not heard very often and really original. I mean, it’s not the way people describe what is being faced at this moment. And as you were speaking, 10 things were going through my head. One was, how do you take the analytical description that you both have given us and popularize that message so people understand it so people can grasp it? Because the way you describe, it’s very simple, very clear about what created this, I’m sorry, go ahead.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:

No, no. It just occurred to me to think about it not as we would do this work. JVP does an incredible work, but it is not only about people doing this work, the genocide made it clear to millions

That this is a genocide and Israel is a genocidal regime. I can write this book and this book and you can do your work, et cetera. But people are not stupid. And there is a moment when people understand they cannot do an accelerated lessons that you take with someone who already did the work, but with the beginning of the genocide, millions went to the street, right, took it to the street to say, this is a genocide and they’re being persecuted constantly. All these draconian laws, all these draconian policies of the Trump administration is because there are millions who are saying that this is a genocidal regime. So the question is not how you bring these ideas. The question is maybe how we exit, as Nole said Zionism, but how we exit the structures that imperial powers created as benign structures. Museums, archives, nation, states, borders, naturalization, all these structures are against people.

So the questions are much bigger than how you transmit the lies of Zionism to other people. For me, the main question is outcome. That all the crimes that were committed against the Jews as if they never existed because the Jews were received with quota state or the Jews received a citizenship. The question is how to bring the Jews to participate in the anti-colonial, general global anti-colonial struggle to decolonize this world. So it’s not only how you convince your parents or your siblings, it’s about how we exit from those institutions that were normalized as benign institutions, but actually they are reproducing the destruction of the world.

Marc Steiner:

So one of the things I think about as you all describe where we are and why we’re here, I think about historically here in this country that 70% of all the civil rights workers in the South when I was a civil rights worker in the South as a young man were Jews. 70% of all the whites civil rights workers, civil rights workers in the south were Jews. And that we were the heart of the labor movement. We were the heart of the revolutionary movements. In Europe, there’s a different spirit I think that has to be grasped and put out there a different heritage and tradition of who we are as opposed to having it being defined by this kind of Zionist domination that was pushed and created by the imperial powers as you were talking about. So they have a beachhead in the Middle East and they figured out what to do with the Jews.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:

But the example that you bring is very interesting because Jews participated in the civil rights movement. They were in solidarity with the black.

They didn’t fight their own struggle as part of it. And I think that what JVP maybe today offer is how to think about the liberation aspirations of the Jews together with the liberation aspirations of other groups. And I think that what happened with the us, what happened with this kind of erasure of what Europe did to us, what Euro-American did to us is the removal of the Jews from the history of colonization in a way that the Jews from a long time did not have a project of decolonization while they were still colonized. To act only as a blank American citizen in the movement for the civil rights movement means not understanding how much Jews were still colonized. So they could act as blank citizens, but not as Jews who are affirming this as their own struggle. They struggle for black Americans. And I think that here there is a very interesting things for Jews to do in the US is to reclaim their histories outcome that they became American Jews outcome, that their history is a very short history, the history of their life in America.

Where is their history in Europe, what was taken from them? There are traditions, there are beliefs, there are many things were taken from them. There are possibility to live their life there. So I’m not speaking about in terms of returning to Europe, but I’m speaking about reclaiming their histories. If the Jews will reclaim their histories, they will not be blank citizens in empire only joining others struggles. And I think the JVPs that maybe the first time that there is a kind of broad Jewish movement in the US where Jews are speaking about what was taken from them and cementing Zionism as their identity is part of what was taken from them. But there is much more to that.

Esther Farmer:

I mean, I feel very personally angry at Zionism from my experience as a leftist Jew. My father was a union organizer, and I grew up with that history of, as you say, in the labor movement. And Jews and I have always felt, and I have seen this with my own eyes, how this Zionist project has moved Jews to the right in the way that you are describing has moved Jews in the direction where it’s unrecognizable. To me, that’s the other way in which I see Zionism as so antisemitic. The whole history of Jews being for justice, even in the biblical text and stuff, it’s just completely thrown away by only us only. My mother used to say, we are Jews for justice, not just us.

Marc Steiner:

And

Esther Farmer:

That was the history, what it meant to me to be a Jew. So I feel like Zionism was, and in Ella’s work, it’s like a deliberate attempt to erase an understanding of Jews as standing with the oppressed in the world. That’s interesting what you said about from my family, I did experience that connection between what happened to the Jews and other people, that solidarity. I did feel that, and I think that there were other people who did feel that, but I also think that there was a deliberate attempt to break that memory in some ways though I think that’s what’s so interesting about what we’re talking about.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah, I think the reason, I’m not usually at a loss for words how I make my living, but one of the things that really struck me about this conversation we’ve had so far is that it’s one that doesn’t take place in very many places where there’s an introspection about Jewish history and Jewish life and what it means in what we face today and how we’ve become sucked into this imperial world oppressing Palestinians. And when I was a kid, it was the fight against Jewish store owners in inner city neighborhoods that we used to boycott and go after because of what they were doing. But now that becomes, it becomes a prominent aspect of American jewelry at this moment. And I think the way you two describe this, the depth of which you describe, this is something I think that people need to wrestle with. Beyond JVP.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:

There are many initiatives. If we see millions in the street protesting against the genocide, many of them are organized in different collectives. Strike MoMA, making, munches, kohenet, so many collectives, smalls middle size that are reclaiming, they are Jewish heritage and reclaiming. They are Jewish heritage is saying, we are not white try to whiten us. This is what they’re saying. But Jews were never white. So while accepting as part of the Jewish identity in the us, it’s something that always strike me accepting this category that the Jews are white is accepting to erase their history. They were first racialized, their histories were destroyed in order to tell them, we give you the passage to passage white, but Jews are not white. So I think that we cannot see the millions in the street protesting against the genocide and believe that there is only JVP. JVP is very powerful, very broad because you have branches in different cities, but there are many, many initiatives all over to reclaim what was taken from the Jews and what was taken from the Jews.

Part of it is major part of it today. There are history as victims of genocide, and now the Zionists are perpetrating genocide that implicate the entire Jewish community because of a long history of conflating between Zionists and Jews. Because when the West recognized the Zionist as representing the Jewish people with no reason to recognize them, but it served the interest of the West, it created a kind of conflation. And this conflation took from the Jews many things that people are struggling to today to introduce a distance from them and from this identification or this false mode of being represented by the state of Israel and the Zionist without announcing the responsibility to continue the struggle against the genocidal regime.

Marc Steiner:

So as we conclude here, I was thinking about this kind of neofascist regime that exists in Israel and this neofascist regime that’s taking over the country that we live in here, and all the experience the two of you have had and the creative work you’ve done and the political work you’ve done, and where you see the hope and where we’re going, where you see the struggle going and what we face right now. I mean, seeing JVP grow as it has is amazing, and other groups are there, but the right is really on the rise. And in many ways, as almost as you were alluding to the right, often uses Jews and people get sucked into the right. So where do you both think this takes us all, after all your years of struggle and being parts of movements in your work,

Esther Farmer:

I mean, hits the horror and the hope every second.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah,

Esther Farmer:

Right. I mean, across the street you’ve got 2000 anti-Zionist. That’s the hope. And we have this fascistic things. Is this really happening right now? Again, I think it’s a really interesting moment when the majority of the country is with us, and yet we still have these policies now that contradiction is only going to grow. I think there’s so much grassroots organizing going on, not just from JVP in so many areas, and it’s really important. I think this concept of intersectionality and solidarity is extremely important. And that’s the hope is the solidarity and the intersectionality of our movements. And as Ariella was saying, it’s a worldwide thing. It’s not only about Israel, it’s not only about Palestine. It’s this whole way of understanding even how nation states are organized. I struggle with that myself because I come from a time when national liberation struggles were a very progressive thing and people wanted independence. And then there are these states that exist and have they helped the world? Have they not helped the world? What does that mean to have the world organized by these nation states? Is there a difference between anti-colonial and decolonial? These are interesting questions that are coming up right now for me anyway. So yeah, I think there is hope. There is organizing going on. People are moving and both sides are moving very fast. They are,

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:

Yeah. So if I may just pick on something that you said right now, I don’t think that these were a national liberation movement. These were anti-colonial movements that were intercepted by the colonizers to become national liberation movements. All the process of decolonization of Africa was intercepted by the West through the creation of the un. We have to be reminded that in 45 there were several 40, 45 states in the world. Today we have 200 states, which means that the decolonization of Africa, decolonization of Asia, rather than being decolonized from the imperial powers, the imperial powers created international organization that imposed that the only way to decolonize a place would be to create a nation state.

Esther Farmer:

That’s very interesting.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:

So I don’t think that these were national liberation struggles. These were anticolonial liberation struggle that were intercepted by the West in Algeria. It’s very typical. It was an anticolonial struggle and it ended up with an independent state from where the Jews, Algerian Jews had to live because this was the model that is built on the purification of the body politic from elements that do not fit there. So the Jews didn’t fit here, and the Jews didn’t fit there, and the Jews didn’t fit there and others didn’t fit there. And we got the new World order. One comment about what you said, I don’t think that in Israel it is a neo fascist regime. Israel is, as I said earlier, a genocidal regime to begin with. The fact that Netanya ran this genocide cannot make us forget that the genocide against Palestinians started in 48. The destruction of Palestine, the destruction of the Palestinian society didn’t start with Netanya.

And this phase of the genocide is horrible and is the highest in terms of casualties, but it is not the highest in terms of the destruction of the Palestinian society. And when you ask about hope, if there is hope is in a global decolonial transformation of the world, because all these structures that enabled in 45 to impose another settler colonial state as a liberation project for the Jews, while it was a project of liberation of Europe from its crimes to appear in the world as the liberator. So I think that the fact that those organs continue to exist as benign organs, museums, for example, that looted so much of ancestral worlds of black, of Jews, of Muslims, and impose themselves as the guardians of this culture while they participated in the decimation of the material culture of so many people. So I think that there is a lot of work to be done in order to undo imperial planter, to undo the imperial organization of the world, and not only to speak about throwing away this or that government, it’s about stopping the genocidal regimes that are still being recognized as benign democratic regime with an accident with side project that should be reformed.

Israel cannot be reformed. Israel is a genocidal regime and Israeli state apparatuses should be dismantled in order to allow the return of Palestine in which Jews will also be part of it as one of the minority groups and not as the governor, the masters of the land.

Marc Steiner:

I want to say that this has been one of the best conversations I’ve had in a long time, and mostly because I didn’t do much talking at all, but which is great. I think you both brought a very profound and different analysis to this conversation that’s not often heard, and I wish we could sit here for the next three hours, but we can’t. And I just want to say thank you to Ariel Zuli and to you both farmer for being here today and being part of this conversation.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay:

Thank you for inviting us. It was a pleasure. Yes. Thank you so much for having us to share the flow with you.

Marc Steiner:

I deeply appreciate it. Really the joke from my friends that were listening, mark, you didn’t say anything. It’s okay. Because what came out of this, I think was something that people have to really wrestle with about where our future is going, not just as Jews, not just as Israel Palestine, but in terms of where the world is going and why this is so central to all of that.

Esther Farmer:

And there’s something very liberating about thinking about the world without nation states or thinking about the world without borders. Can we have those imaginations? Can we think beyond what they’ve given us, that we have to think that way? Can we think beyond that? And now maybe is a moment the horror and the hope where we can think in different ways.

Marc Steiner:

We have to thank you both so much for taking all this time.

Esther Farmer:

Thank you. Thank you.

Marc Steiner:

See you back at the JVP conference. Once again, thank you to Ariella, Aisha Azule and Esther Farmer for joining us today. And thanks to David Hebdon and Cameron Grino for running the program and audio editor, Alida Nek and producer for always working for Magic behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today and what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Ella Aisha Azule and Esther Farmer for being our guest today here on the Mark Steiner Show on the Real News. And remember, we can’t do this without you, so please share, join our community by clicking on the subscribe button right below here and support the Real News Network. Do it now. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Mark Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.

The post Lessons from Kent State, 55 Years Later and the Power of Truth-telling and Resisting Censorship appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on Apr. 30, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi is free on bail after a federal judge in Vermont ordered his release.

It’s the first order mandating the release of a student detained by the Trump administration. The New York Times called his release “a defeat” for the administration’s “widening crackdown against student protesters.”

“The two weeks of detention so far demonstrate great harm to a person who has been charged with no crime,” said Judge Geoffrey Crawford at an April 30 hearing. “Mr. Mahdawi, I will order you released.”

Crawford also compared Trump’s crackdown to the Red Scare and said that period of history wasn’t one that people should be proud of.

“For anybody who is doubting justice, this is a light of hope and faith in the justice system in America,” Mahdawi told a crowd outside the courthouse after his release. “We are witnessing the fight for justice in America, which means a true democracy, and the fight for justice for Palestinians, which means that both liberation are interconnected, because no one of us is free unless we all are.”

“I am saying it clear and loud,” he added. “To President Trump and his cabinet: I am not afraid of you.”

“Today’s victory cannot be overstated. It is a victory for Mohsen who gets to walk free today out of this court,” said Shezza Abboushi Dallal, one of Mahdawi’s lawyers. “And it is also a victory for everyone else in this country invested in the very ability to dissent, who want to be able to speak out for the causes that they feel a moral imperative to lend their voices to and want to do that without fear that they will be abducted by masked men.”

Mahdawi, a permanent U.S. resident and green card holder for the past decade, was arrested by immigration officials on April 14 during his naturalization interview to become a United States citizen.

According to a recent legal brief from Mahdawi’s attorneys, the citizenship appointment had been a trap, as ICE agents intended to ambush the Columbia student and send him to a detention facility in Louisiana, where the Trump administration is holding Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk.

A judge blocked Trump from transferring Mahdawi out Vermont before agents could transport him.

A court filing submitted in the case by the Justice Department included a letter from Secretary of State Marco Rubio claiming that Mahdawi’s presence in the United States could “potentially undermine” the Middle East peace process.

Earlier this month, Vermont Senator Peter Welch (D-VT) visited Mahdawi at the ICE detention center where he was being held.

“I am centered, I am clear, I am grounded, and I don’t want you to worry about me,” Mahdawi told Welch. “I want you to continue working for the democracy of this country and for humanity. The war must stop.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Arria.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In an unusual move, the administration of President Donald Trump has canceled a $3.8 billion contract to build an immigrant detention camp in Fort Bliss, Texas, just days after issuing it.

That doesn’t mean the job won’t go forward. Sources told ProPublica the administration still intends to move ahead with the plan to build a tent detention camp at Fort Bliss. A site visit for interested contractors took place on Wednesday.

The job promises to be highly sought after as Trump officials plan to pour billions of dollars into building detention facilities as part of the president’s push to deport more immigrants.

Why the contract was posted and then canceled is unclear.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded the contract on April 10 to Deployed Resources, a privately held company, according to data posted on a federal procurement website.

ProPublica published a profile of the company on April 11, describing its ascension from running facilities at music festivals into a government contracting juggernaut that, like other vendors, is pursuing billions of dollars in detention contracts planned under Trump. Company executives, ProPublica found, had hired more than a dozen former government insiders as it built its business over the years. Recent hires included some high-ranking former officials from ICE, the agency that would be tasked with carrying out Trump’s promises of mass deportation.

Then, on April 13, the administration reversed course and terminated the contract with Deployed Resources “for convenience,” according to data posted to the federal contracting site.

An ICE spokesperson confirmed that the award was made and then canceled, and that “a revised procurement action for Fort Bliss is currently active and ongoing.” The agency did not answer questions about why it reversed course.

Deployed Resources has not responded to requests for comment. On its website, the company says it is “dedicated to safely and efficiently providing transparent facility support and logistical services, anytime, anywhere.”

The awarding and cancellation of such a large contract to a company in such a short time is extremely unusual, according to a ProPublica review of contracting data going back a decade.

In solicitation documents, the government said it needs a facility with the capacity to hold thousands of immigrants before they are deported.

It’s possible, but not yet clear, that Deployed Resources could win the contract following a subsequent round of bidding. It likely is not the only bidder interested in the job, which could be broken up into two pieces.

Since mid-March ICE has housed detainees at a tent facility in El Paso, Texas, operated by Deployed Resources, that was previously used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The Department of Defense awarded Deployed Resources a contract to run the site for ICE, an ICE spokesperson told ProPublica.

Current and former agency officials said holding ICE detainees in tent facilities — which in the past have generally held people for shorter periods of time — raises significant concerns about potential health and safety risks. An ICE official at a recent border security conference said Deployed Resources was adding more rigid structures within its tents, which could address such concerns.

Trump, upon returning to office in January, signed a series of executive orders declaring an emergency at the border and enlisting the military to help with immigration enforcement. In early April, the administration issued a request for bids on new detention facilities across the country that could be worth up to $45 billion.

The rush of immigration contracts comes as the Trump administration guts federal programs and fires thousands of workers in other wings of the government.

Joel Jacobs contributed data analysis.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jeff Ernsthausen, Mica Rosenberg and Avi Asher-Schapiro.

We’ll have to see.

You’ve written a lot about late bloomers and what it takes to find success creatively and professionally later in life. If you had to give one piece advice on how to become a late bloomer, what would you say?

Whatever it is that you’re going to do, you’ve already done something that’s relevant. You need to work out what that is and turn it into something productive.

How does one choose?

I’m always tempted to say that you shouldn’t have to choose. Also, people often conflate two things, motivation and success. I joked that I’m not a late bloomer yet because I haven’t bloomed. But clearly I am in the sense that I wanted to be a writer and I’m doing it, whether or not I become rich or acclaimed in the New York Times. That’s not what it’s about. I have motivation. I’m following the motivation. I’m doing the thing. I earn money by writing. That’s what I wanted to do. I’m not Malcolm Gladwell. That’s a separate point.

People often ask, “How do I find the thing where I’m going to be successful?” And it’s like, what does successful mean? Doing what you’re motivated to do? Or does it mean meeting certain external measures? If you’ve bundled these two things together, that may be a mistake.

What would you say to people who might ask, “Why focus on late blooming? Why not just focus on acceptance of current circumstances?”

Clearly plenty of people don’t accept their current circumstances. To me, it’s obviously inherent to a certain type of person to not accept your circumstances. That’s why people crossed oceans and founded new places. I think that’s an essential part of being human.

You’ve written about moments of crisis being important moments for people to change their lives and blossom. Is a logical conclusion that we should all be having life crises at age 20 and then again at 40 and 60?

I don’t think everyone should be doing this, but there’s a prevailing idea that a crisis when you’re young is an opportunity to rethink, explore, and do new things. But a crisis when you’re middle aged is generally seen as, well, don’t screw it up. You know what I mean? You’ve got to get through that. I think a lot of that is now becoming psychologized. This thing that gets called therapy talk and “doing the work.” It sounds like what people are doing is trying to turn the crisis to some kind of new state. But I suspect that a lot of the time, it doesn’t really lead to very much actual change in your life. It may lead to reorganization of how you think about some personal relationships. But I think there should be more of a sense that if someone has a midlife crisis, sometimes that is a signal that you should make some changes.

A midlife crisis might be less dramatic than the way it happens in the movies—new cars, divorces, all this stuff—but maybe it’s a good old-fashioned feeling of, “My life has lost all sense of purpose. What am I going to do?”

Obviously it’s not simple to actually then undertake those changes. But not all crises are crises that you can analyze your way out of.

There’s long been debate over whether suffering is necessary for art. How do crises fit into that? You have kids and theoretically you want them to be able to find something meaningful in their lives, without going through a crisis or suffering. How do you get them there?

I don’t want them to suffer. But your children will suffer, you will suffer. The people you know have suffered, your parents have suffered. It’s really unpleasant when your children are really sad about something. But it’s also how they grow up, how they learn. It gives you very good opportunities to talk to them about the way things are or what you know. I’m not convinced most parenting talk makes much difference. But sometimes when they’re really upset about something and you just say one thing, it can make a little bit of difference. So you have to learn to live with their suffering sometimes. It can be very sad. But that’s not their fault. That’s not their problem. That’s my problem.

Did you have a life crisis that inspired you to write this book?

In a very small way—and this is what I mean about small crises—I was just bored. I think boredom is genuinely bad for people. I was so bored, I was on the edge of tears. It was just so dull. And I was convinced I’d need a different job. And I had cancer about seven years ago. I didn’t think that was one of those turning moments. The doctor said to me, “You’re going to come to me afterwards and say this is the best thing that ever happened to you. You’ll write your book.” I said, “Just tell me what time to get here and how bad I’m going to feel. I’m not going to have a spiritual moment.” But I did start blogging while I was having my treatment, again out of boredom more than anything else. So I wasn’t having dark nights of the soul or whatever. It’s very hard to make a movie about someone going through a crisis of boredom, but I think it’s happening a lot and it’s absolutely corrosive.

It’s all too easy to treat boredom with stimulation. Social media, YouTube, TV, what have you.

But also, chatting in the pub.

So how did you avoid those usual drawbacks?

Who’s saying I avoided them? The biggest thing was the confluence of factors. I wanted to change my career. I was incredibly bored. I’d started blogging. I’ve written in my book about nuns. There is a moment when they’ve discovered their vocation, but either before or after that moment, there’s a prolonged period of becoming. The vocation coming to be true or coming to be real. It’s not, “I woke up one day and found God, so now I’m a nun.” It’s instead, “I realized my thing. Now it’s going to take quite a long time to work through that.”

Do you have to fall in love with struggle or the challenge?

I think you have to have motivation. I interviewed the economist Robin Hansen, and he told me motivation is the closest thing we have to magic. I come back to that a lot. If you have motivation, the struggle is not really a problem. A lot of what people complain about at work is that usually you like something about your job, something motivates you, but it’s encrusted with all sorts of other stuff to do, bureaucratic, administrative, making your laptop work. You have zero motivation for these tasks. So you can feel miserable in a job that you love. It’s more about getting the balance right between doing things you’re motivated to do with the things you’re not. I don’t think you can learn to love the struggle as such.

How young were you when you started writing?

I don’t really know. I’m not one of these people who knows a lot about their childhood. Some people can be like, “I wrote my first story when I was 4, and it was about a caterpillar in Wellingtons.” And I’m like, how do you know? I don’t remember.

You might have written that.

Yeah, I probably could have done, but I have no idea. I don’t understand how people know these things. What I really was and am is a reader. I think that’s the essential thing. I think what I’m doing is being a public reader more than anything else.

Do you think that reading can be a creative act?

Some people would say so, but I think what they really mean is that your response to the book is the creative act. I think creativity means you make something. And I think reading isn’t quite like that. If you have an idea about what you’ve read and you tell that idea to someone, that’s creative.

You’ve quoted Samuel Johnson as saying that all young men should read five hours a day. Do you read five hours a day? Did you ever read five hours a day?

I may even read more now than when I was young. In a good week I read for 20 or 30 hours or more. I can go to the library and do seven hours of reading and that is actually a sensible use of my day.

What is your usual daily schedule between writing and reading and other things?

I am very messy. I see all this advice about getting a schedule and habits and I’m the polar opposite of all this. I just do whatever is most worrying me on the to-do list. A lot of times the to-do list is not that urgent. So I go to the library and read and write and do whatever I want. I like to have screen free time in the library. No phone, no laptop. Other days, like today, I owe a lot of people a lot of things. I’m going to have to scramble through my list.

You’ve written that expertise can lead sometimes to illusions of competence. Do you ever worry about your own illusion of competence?

All the time. Well, that’s why I try to read so much. I don’t think someone writing criticism should stop learning.

So reading is the way to counteract that.

It depends on what you read. For literature, what I try to do is keep following footnotes and keep reading people whose work I’m unfamiliar with, whose ideas I might not like. I try to understand other ways of thinking.

Does anything come to mind of a writer or idea that you were skeptical of at first, but then came to appreciate?

Modernism. I hated modernism. I thought the whole thing was just a terrible mistake. Now I quite like it. I’m still fundamentally very different to a lot of the post-modernists and the literary theory people, but I do try and learn from them. I don’t do a good job. Substack is good for this because I have a lot of people reading me now who have a wide range of literary views and they’ll leave comments or disagree with me on Notes. And I think that’s very useful. That’s what I like about it. The other day I said to someone, “I really liked your review.” And they were like, “But I thought you hated that. I thought you loved that book. And my review said that I hated the book.” And I was like, “Yes, I did love the book, but it’s good to read a review that’s like, no, this is trash.”

You’ve also written about the importance of connecting different areas of thought. Like how Michelangelo started by painting bodies and then becoming an architect. Do you have any strategies to diversify your areas of thought and intelligence and keep it fresh?

I don’t need strategies for my own interests, but I do need to find other ways of writing about them. I helped to write the Progress studies Wikipedia page last year, and that whole area is kind of absent from my work because I’ve become a bit more focused and specialized. I used to write more about those things. I might have a piece coming out soon about related topics. Also, I’m quite interested in AI and a lot of literary people aren’t, so I might be writing more about that as well, but I don’t know. Some people hate me for that.

What is your take on AI and the opportunities that it presents?

My take is basically, it’s here, it’s not going away, and it’s not just slop. You’d be insane to just ignore it or think that it’s only a lot of scams. But I am seeing literary people saying this, and I’m like, guys, they’re trying to cure cancer with this. What are you talking about? Give me a break. How it applies to literature, I think there are two ways. The first is that literary culture was changed hugely by things like photography, radio, the movies, and television. And literature always incorporated that and responded to that, even if it was hostile to it. With the internet, though, the novel has not done a good job of writing about the internet. And if it keeps doing that with AI, that will be a mistake. But sometimes it takes novelists some time. In Charles Dickens, famously, the first train to appear in his work is in Dombey and Sons in the late 1840s, quite late compared to how long trains had been around.

I’m not saying writers have to turn around and say AI is amazing. But I don’t really see how we have a viable literature if it’s all set in 1974, technologically. That’s just weird, isn’t it?

If you had to reinvent yourself right now, and take on a completely new vocation or passion, what would it be?

Well, because of AI, I might have to. I would quite like to be a gardener. I used to do a lot of gardening, and my wife is very talented at it. So I’d be the helper. She’d be the thinker. I don’t know if I’d be good, but I’d enjoy it very much.

What do you like about gardening?

I like the arrangement of shape and color, and I love growing things. I love being with the soil. Robert Frost, one of my favorite poets, wrote a lot about soil. Writers today, they don’t understand that stuff at all. The earth, plants, all that kind of thing. We have a very urban literature. But it would be good for them to get a new pastoral tradition.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Denise S. Robbins.

Even before the end of the ceasefire in Gaza, Israeli attacks on the West Bank were escalating in 2025. By Feb. 5, 70 Palestinians were reported killed this year alone. Anna Lippman, a member of Independent Jewish Voices, has traveled on numerous occasions to the West Bank from her home in Toronto, Canada, to stand with Palestinians defending their land from attacks by Israeli soldiers and armed settlers.

Most recently, Lippman was in the Masafer Yatta community in the occupied West Bank as Hamdan Ballal, Oscar-winning Palestinian director of the film No Other Land, was detained by Israeli forces after being attacked by armed Israeli settlers in that same community. Lippman joins The Marc Steiner Show for an in-depth discussion on her experiences on the ground in the West Bank, where attempted land grabs and expulsions of Palestinians are growing by the day.

Producer: Rosette Sewali
Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. It’s good to have you all with us as we continue to cover Palestine and Israel and hear from people throughout that struggle, and continue our series Not in Our Name — Jewish voices that oppose the occupation of Palestine and the oppression and repression of Palestinians by Israelis.

On March 24, co-director of the film No Other Land, Hamdan Ballal, was attacked by Israeli settlers and was badly injured — And while in the ambulance, he was attacked again. The Israeli police took him to an unknown location and, following an international outcry, he was released the next day.

Toronto resident Anna Lippman was in the area known as Masafer Yatta on the West Bank. While she was providing protective presence to Palestinians, Lippman, whois Jewish, was also attacked — Though not as severely — By Israeli settlers, and also was not arrested. Lippman spoke afterwards to the online media where she said what brings you back here is the people, meeting the people here, the children, the elders, the activists, the mothers, all of them, seeing the way that they continue to resist — Not just writing articles, but sharing their story through their everyday acts of resistance, continuing to be on their land, continuing their careers, their family lives, and the joy they find on their land and with their families, with their communities. It’s so beautiful. The hospitality they gave me as a Jewish person whose taxes and identity are used to kill their cousins, they welcome me into their home and feed me even though they have almost nothing.

Today we are joined by Anna Lippman. She’s a Toronto member of Independent Jewish Voices, and has long been showing up in solidarity with Palestinian people in opposition to Israel’s campaign of violence and displacement. And she opposes deeply, which we’ll talk about today, the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Now, she went to the West Bank to protect Palestinians and showed huge heart and courage in her time there. She’s the daughter of a Holocaust surviving family and takes that into her heart as well when it comes to fighting and supporting liberation of Palestinian people.

Anna, welcome. It’s good to have you with us.

Anna Lippman:

Thanks for having me.

Marc Steiner:

So many places to start, but let me just begin, if you could just talk a bit about your time on the West Bank: A, was that the first time you’ve been there? And B, how did that affect you? You went there already opposed to the occupation, but I’m very curious how that affected you when you were there.

Anna Lippman:

Yeah, so I’m actually currently in the West Bank.

Marc Steiner:

At this moment?

Anna Lippman:

At this moment, which is why my internet is still terrible. So I’ve been here for two months, and I’ll be here for another month. It’s actually my fourth time here doing protective presence work, using both my international and my Jewish privilege to try to mitigate the violence and the ethnic cleansing.

As a kid, I went to Israel a lot of times, but I had never been to the occupied Palestinian territories, the West Bank. And so going for my first time and seeing it, even though I had been doing this work for so long, it really made my resolve so much stronger because the things that you see here, it’s impossible to imagine. And the relationships that you make with the people here and then the violence that you witness upon them, it just breaks your heart.

Marc Steiner:

So let me jump into some things you just said because I think it’s important. For people listening to us today, where are you on the West Bank? Who are you staying with?

Anna Lippman:

I am in the region of Masafer Yatta, the South Hebron Hills, and I’m in the village of Susya, most famous for being the home of Academy Award-winning director Hamdan Bilal.

Marc Steiner:

So I assume then, if you’re there, you’re staying with Palestinian families?

Anna Lippman:

They’re hosting us in the village. They have basically a guest house in the middle of the village where we sleep and where basically, when we’re not sleeping, children either are playing with us [Steiner laughs] or people are coming to get us to respond to attacks.

Marc Steiner:

And who is the we?

Anna Lippman:

So I’m actually here with seven other Jewish activists. We’re part of the Center for Jewish Nonviolence. There’s also several other non-Jewish activists. But for myself and for the people in this group, it’s really important for us to show up as Jews because, not [inaudible] show the world what it means to oppose the state and Zionism, but also so many Palestinians here have never met a Jew that doesn’t want to harm them. And so this, in many ways, is the work of doing that cultural exchange and helping people understand that this is a terrible thing that is happening, but it doesn’t represent all Jews.

Marc Steiner:

One thing you said, just to explore briefly for a moment together about the pain and terror the Jews and Israelis are foisting on Palestinians in this occupation and more. And I was reading about your work and who you are, and the idea that Jews, who suffered so much over thousands of years, who survived — And my family survived the Holocaust, the Cossack repressions in Eastern Poland, the inquisitions that took place. Everything that has happened to us as a people over the millennia, that we could then turn and do what we’re doing in Israel.

Anna Lippman:

Yes, I agree with you. And on the inside, I wonder the same way. Especially, like you, I’m the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. She was in Auschwitz. To understand the way that that which happened before I was born impacts my life, I could never want to do this to someone else. But also, it’s the plain and sad truth that hurt people hurt people. And if Jews, we don’t deal with our trauma, if we’re able to let others exploit it for their imperial goals, then of course we’re seeing what’s happening in Israel.

Marc Steiner:

So I’m very curious what the response has been to you, first from the Israelis, but then the Palestinians. What has been your experience in what we might call Israel proper, for the moment, in terms of what you experience when people know who you are and why you’re there?

Anna Lippman:

To be honest, I don’t tell people within Israel proper who I am and why I’m there [Steiner laughs].

Marc Steiner:

I get it.

Anna Lippman:

[Crosstalk] I fear for my life.

Marc Steiner:

Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes.

Anna Lippman:

And even in the West Bank, we have to be a little careful who we talk to about what we’re doing because there are many ways that these names get back to the Israeli government. It’s despicably easy for me to get away with this within Israel because I look very Ashkenazi. I look like everyone else. No one looks at me and blinks twice. And that’s why the Jews come to do this work is because we have these privileges and we might as well exploit them for something good.

Marc Steiner:

So let’s explore for a moment what that work is. When you say, we’ve said a number of times, you’re there doing this work, talk to people listening to us today about what this work is that you’re doing.

Anna Lippman:

So a lot of what we’re doing is documentation and accompaniment work. So, especially in Masafer Yatta, most of the people here are farmers and shepherds. They very much rely on the land. And so a key way for them to be able to remain here is to be able to take their flocks out, is to be able to harvest their crops. And so we literally just accompany them on their shepherding shifts, as they go to the grocery store, what have you, not only because Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals understand that you don’t want to act the same towards Palestinians in private that you do in front of an international. Because I’m getting this interview and Palestinians are not, so they don’t want us to tell the world what they’re doing to the Palestinians, what’s happening. And this is what we do when we bring our privilege here is we’re able to share it back out.

Marc Steiner:

In the process of your work over there, what has been your interaction with Israelis, with Jewish Israelis, about what you’re doing?

Anna Lippman:

Yeah, it’s been terrible. When the army comes, they give us quite a hard time despite us being Jewish. They call us anarchists. They say we are making chaos. A soldier told me the other day that I was here to make problems for the Jewish. And the settlers themselves, they’re even worse. The army will call us traitors, self-hating Jews, but the settlers will yell all kinds of profanities at us. They’ll chase us. I’ve been in multiple rock attacks.

Marc Steiner:

What does that mean?

Anna Lippman:

Groups of young settlers coming to throw rocks at the villages, the Palestinians, basically a stoning.

Marc Steiner:

In their minds a biblical stoning.

Anna Lippman:

Yes, of course.

Marc Steiner:

The vast majority of settlers in the West Bank are right-wing extremist, Orthodox Jews, is that right?

Anna Lippman:

Yeah. And the thing is that on the front lines of these more extremist settlements are mostly young men, like 15- to 20-year-olds that are sometimes called the Hilltop Youth, who are taken from bad homes, off the street, and brought to these settlements that are run by really right-wing fascist people that tell them, this is your land. You must protect it. You must shepherd. And if you see Palestinians, attack them before they attack you. And so who we mostly see is teenage boys, and that makes it a difficult dynamic to hate them.

Marc Steiner:

I understand. Let me take a step backwards here with you for just a minute because this is literally, I’ve been involved in this, in covering this, my entire life, almost. But what you’re describing now, what you just said about Israeli boys on these settlements attacking you and the Palestinians were brought there, were in trouble and brought to these… Talk a bit about that. Who are these kids? Where they come from? What do you mean they were in trouble? It sounds like what — And I hate saying this — It sounds like what fascists did in Germany and Italy, taking youths off the street and turning them into stormtroopers.

Anna Lippman:

Yes, exactly. And it’s very similar here. Sometimes it’s rabbis, sometimes it’s just agricultural entrepreneurs. And they’ll go to places like Tel Aviv, like Jerusalem, like Be’er Sheva, places within 48, and they’ll tout their programs as helping at-risk youth and providing rehabilitation centers for at-risk youth. So these previously street youth are now productive members of society. They’re learning how to farm, they’re going to school.

And actually, because they’re touted this way, they get a lot of funding from places like the JNF that funds social service projects, from places like the Israeli government that funds rehabilitation for at-risk youth. But at the same time, there’s enough of a distance that the Israeli government can blame these youth for an attack. And then, through keeping an arm’s distance to them, they’re both supporting the youth to be there to do this ethnic cleansing, and they can blame the youth and say it’s not part of the state, it’s extrastate actors.

Marc Steiner:

So would it be fair to say, just to explore this for a moment — Then we can go on something else — But is it fair to say that these kids that are taken to these settlements, who are in trouble from the stuff they did in the streets, are kids who are what we call Mizrahim, that there are kids who are from Arab African descent in Israel. Would that be about right?

Anna Lippman:

Mostly not. Mostly they’re Ashkenazi. Sometimes they’re Mizrahi, but the vast majority of them are Ashkenazi. A lot of them are from places like Europe and Ukraine. A lot of them are just born and raised in Israel.

Marc Steiner:

That’s a pretty horrendous description. I think the world is not aware of what you’re describing at this moment. I think most people, I wasn’t, are not aware, and I stay on top of this. It’s something that is almost, it’s a frightening Orwellian step.

Anna Lippman:

It definitely is. And it’s been happening for quite a while. And not only is it terrible for the Palestinians, but it’s so exploitative [of] these young men.

Marc Steiner:

Yes, absolutely. I’m also curious, I’ve not been to the West Bank, but as a young person — I was a very young person — I was a Freedom Rider, and I was [on the] Eastern shore Maryland, Mississippi, Alabama. And it was terrifying. But you did it because it had to be done.

Anna Lippman:

Exactly.

Marc Steiner:

So I want to talk about you in that regard. What it’s like for you to live on the edge of that violence, protecting the human rights and liberation of Palestinians as a Jewish woman?

Anna Lippman:

It’s a lot. It’s very scary, and it’s not comfortable. I think a lot of times I feel like I’m on a three-month firefighting shift. You can never really put your guard completely down because things could go off at any minute and you’ll have to run out of the house and go stop this fire. And it really impacts the activists here because it’s a lot on your body, on your mind.

And then I see the Palestinians who live this every day, and I remember that I will go home to Netflix and Uber Eats, and they will not. This is where they live. And so I think, just like you said, this is what has to be done, even though it’s not my favorite thing to do, for sure.

Marc Steiner:

All right. So I guess you’ve been aware of all the crackdowns taking place in Canada, in Germany, across the globe, against Palestinians.

Anna Lippman:

Absolutely.

Marc Steiner:

So just to hear your thoughts and analysis of what all that means, this literally international crackdown, and it’s going to begin to happen in larger ways here in the United States as well with Donald Trump back in the White House.

Anna Lippman:

Absolutely, yeah. No, I totally agree. And Canada is not that far off from Trump. We don’t know who’s going to win this next election, and Canada is going quite right itself. And I think one thing I’ve always learned about Palestine is it’s sort of the moral center of the world. Everything that Israel does in Palestine, their militarization, their technology, their AI, they export it to the rest of the world. Police, [armies] from all over the world, go train with the IDF.

And so to me, [it’s] surprising to see the ways that this extreme crackdown is going global and is starting to impact people that perhaps thought they were a bit more safe. And I think that’s why everyone who feels strongly about this, who feels strongly about the right to speak up for what you believe in, needs to be saying no, needs to be standing up. Because if we don’t say this is too much, what student are they going to snatch off the streets next?

Marc Steiner:

And it sounds like, what I’ve seen written before and what you’re describing, people don’t realize this Western American and Israeli cooperation in testing out weaponry and more is a test run for oppression universally.

Anna Lippman:

Exactly, yes. And Israel does it very well. And other imperial settler colonial countries like Canada, they pay attention. They want to do it well too.

Marc Steiner:

So tell me a bit, for people listening to us in the time we have left, a bit about what your daily life and work is like there, what you’re experiencing firsthand as a young Jewish woman in the West Bank living with Palestinians and staring down right-wing settlers and the Israeli army.

Anna Lippman:

I think what, to me, is most noticeable about my day-to-day experience here is it’s so unpredictable that it’s impossible to plan a month ahead, and very difficult to plan two days ahead.

Marc Steiner:

Wow.

Anna Lippman:

We’ll wake up, we’ll go shepherding, we’ll be having a lovely time, and then suddenly a settler will come in their truck, try to run us over, and we’re taking footage of this, talking to lawyers, taking people to the police station to give testimony. And that’s your whole day. And sometimes we can be very lucky and we’ll just have a morning where things are great and we’ll get to hang out with the families and just chill. But even in those quiet times, there’s still tension because it’s so unpredictable that you never know what is coming or when. And every time that you continue to stay in your land, that you continue to call settlers out, they seek revenge. So just like the Palestinians here, I can’t really give you a day-to-day because the settlers don’t let us have that regularity and schedule.

Marc Steiner:

What do you mean by that?

Anna Lippman:

They keep us on our toes by intentionally being unpredictable, by telling us they’ll come back tonight, then not, but coming to attack three days later. So it’s very hard.

Marc Steiner:

As an activist in the midst of this, and more in the middle of it than most people are who might oppose what’s happening, becausre you’re there, physically there, putting your life on the line, how do you see it unfolding in the future? And where are the possibilities that we can actually find a road to peace where Israelis and Palestinians, Muslims, Christians, and Jews live in that place together? Because in the end, for me, I have this poster on my wall — I’ve said this before on other shows — I have this poster on my wall that I got in Cuba in 1968, and it’s a map of all of Palestine, and it has a Palestinian flag on one side and an Israeli flag on the other side, and it says “One state, two people, three faiths”. And that’s kind of been my mantra for a long time. So I’m asking you that question in that spirit because it almost feels impossible to attain.

Anna Lippman:

Yeah, I think that it has been really grim for the last two or so years, and it’s been really difficult to find hope. I think where I find hope is the fact that so many more people know about Palestine than they did in 2014, than they did in 2021. So for me, this gives me hope when I see a random person that’s not Jewish, that’s not Arab, who knows about Palestine and cares about the injustice there. I think the more we speak up, the more we ask our governments to hold the Israeli government accountable, the more that we will find actual peace.

But it’s also important to recognize that peace, true peace, means equality, humanity, and dignity for everyone from the river to the sea. And so we cannot have a state, two states, 12 states, I don’t care [Steiner laughs]. But if Palestinians don’t have the right to live in their land, to return to their ancestral land, to be as much of a society as an Israeli citizen is, there will never be peace because peace is not built on oppression.

Marc Steiner:

Anna Lippman, a couple of things here. First of all, I do want to say this to you, and I want everyone listening to us here at The Real News to know it, what you and others like you are doing at this moment takes, and the Yiddish word is chutzpah, takes a lot of heart and strength and bravery to stand up for what you’re doing. It’s not just carrying a placard around an embassy. You’re in the midst of it, saying, no, not in our name, this has to end.

And I do want to thank you for what you’re doing. I think your voice and the voices of others around you, along with Palestinians, is what we want to continue to hear more [of] on this program. And for one, I want to stay in touch, and I want to help work to bring more voices like yours on, but also to expand those voices and give people the opportunity and chance to do exactly what you are doing.

Anna Lippman:

Yes, I love that.

Marc Steiner:

That will change it.

Anna Lippman:

I think so. We gotta have hope, right?

Marc Steiner:

Yes, we do. Look, I’ll say this one last thing. I say this often. One of the scariest things for people in the South during Civil Rights, which you see all the white freedom workers, and among those, the majority of the white people who put their lives on the line in Civil Rights were Jews.

Anna Lippman:

Yes. This is our history, right?

Marc Steiner:

Yes. Right. So you’re carrying on a tradition, and you’re a brave human being, a brave woman. Let’s do stay in touch, and whatever stories we can tell together about your experience and others’ experiences and the experiences of the Palestinian lives that you touch and live with, we want to put on the air and do that.

Anna Lippman:

Yeah. That’s so great. Thank you so much for having me, and, really, for everything.

Marc Steiner:

Please stay safe and stay strong. Thank you.

Anna Lippman:

Thank you.

Marc Steiner:

Thank you once again to Anna Lippman for joining us today. And I want to reiterate what I said during our conversation. The bravery she and other young Jews are showing in Israel Palestine, living with Palestinians to say, we, as Jews, say not in our name, is literally putting their lives on the line, just as people did to end racial segregation in America. We will, I will, continue to highlight their work, and we’ll be hearing more from Anna Lippman, and other Anna Lippmans as well, as the voices of the Palestinians they work with put their lives on the line, and they’re there to stand with them.

Once again, thank you to Anna Lippman for joining us today. Thanks to David Hebden for running the program today, our audio editor, Alina Nehlich, and producer, Rosette Sewali, for making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible.

Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you, Anna Lippman, for all the work you do and for joining us today. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.

Fatma Hassona, the 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist and subject of the upcoming documentary film Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, was killed with her family Wednesday by an Israeli missile that targeted her building in northern Gaza. The strike occurred just one day after she learned that the film centered around her life and work had been selected to premiere at the ACID Cannes 2025 film festival. Director Sepideh Farsi remembers Hassona for her talent, integrity and hope. “I can’t tell you how devastated I am,” says Farsi. She shares that Hassona had joyfully accepted the invitation to Cannes but had emphasized her desire to return to Gaza and remain on her family’s land. Farsi adds that there is a chance that Hassona’s building had been targeted, “given the high number of journalists and photographers in Gaza who have been killed by the Israeli army.” In tribute to Hassona’s work, we play the trailer to Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk and share a selection of her photography and poetry.

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

Birju Dattani’s tenure as Canada’s chief human rights commissioner was short-lived. After holding the post for less than a year, Dattani was forced to resign by a smear campaign targeting him for his social media posts criticizing Israel. Now, Dattani is suing his critics, and joins The Marc Steiner Show to discuss his case and the wider implications for human rights and free speech in countries backing Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.

Links:

• Read the Statement of Claim: https://www.stlbarristers.ca/for-media
• Support Birju Dattani’s legal fund: https://gogetfunding.com/help-birju-dattani-put-cija-lantsmann-and-levant-on-trial/

Production: David Hebden, Rosette Sewali
Post-production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. Great to have y’all with us, and we continue covering issues around the globe with people under attack from the right, and there’s a war going on. We know that war is happening in this country, United States, in Canada, across the globe, where the right is seizing power in one country after the other. And we are all here in that battle for the future. And we’re talking today to Birju Dattani. He was the executive director of the Yukon Human Rights Commission that’s in Canada, but for a very short while. That’s what we’re going to talk about. And he works as Director of Human Rights and Conflict Resolution at Centennial College, assistant regional director of the Alberta Human Rights Commission, and has been an activist and a lawyer and keeps on fighting despite the fact that he was pushed out by right male elements in the Jewish community and in the parliament that went after him and forced him to resign, which he did. The battle continues in court in other places. And vi welcome. Good to have you with us.

Birju Dattani:

Thank you, Marc. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Marc Steiner:

Let me just, for folks who don’t know Canada that well, our American listeners or European listeners may not know a lot about what’s going on. What is the climate, the political climate that allowed you to be pushed out of a human rights commission to be attacked? What is the politics going on there?

Birju Dattani:

Well, I think the climate here in some ways is from where I sit worse than it is, or was, I should say, worse than it was in the United States. I think with this current regime that you have in the United States, all bets are off, of course. But I think that in a lot of ways historically and in a post October 7th world, the environment in Canada did not admit and has not admitted a diversity of voices on this issue or a diversity of perspectives on this issue. So in that sense, the space for discussion of things such as Israeli policy has been extraordinarily narrow, narrowly narrow. And that I think in the months following October 7th became narrower still. So for instance, and some of this you may have heard, but for the benefit of your audience, university students who would sign open letters in support or in solidarity with Palestinians would be boycotted from the legal profession if they were law students. Not only the students signing those letters, but the entirety of law schools would be boycotted by prominent law firms, thereby barring the participation to the legal profession, often from law students who are from historically marginalized backgrounds.

Marc Steiner:

That’s what’s happening at this moment.

Birju Dattani:

So in the aftermath of October 7th, so I’m going back to

November, December, 2023 letters were issued, the healthcare workers, educators who had shared a critical perspective would be canceled, many of them fired, run out of employment broadcasters, same thing and very little politically. I know that in the United States, you have voices like Rashida tb, you have Ellan Omar, you have a larger aggregate of voices, I think, on the left than we do in Canada. I mean, we do have some voices. Heather McPherson, for instance, of the NDP has been quite good on this issue. Nikki Ashton, Charlie Angus, but I think smaller country, those voices are in the aggregate, smaller and power is often concentrated in the hands of people who are a lot more, not only to the right, but even the center. And the center left positions on this issue are indistinguishable in some cases.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah. Quick digression, then jump right back in. I mean, you mentioned a new Democratic party, the left party in Canada. I remember when we all were excited at one point that they were actually potentially had some power, but I mean, it says a lot about where our two countries are. So let’s really step back for a moment and really explore what happened to you in the first place as a Muslim, the first Muslim in that kind of position and the battles it took place and the attack the place as soon as you got this job, as soon as you were being appointed to this commission, the attacks came from people in Parliament and other folks in Canada accusing you of being pro Hamas, being a terrorist, hating Jews being an antisemite. Tell us a bit about how that unfurled.

Birju Dattani:

Well, I think that the way that it unfurled is something that was never a secret in an employment situation. I mean, I have a resume like anybody else does. And when I was a PhD student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, I was a member of the Center for Palestine Studies among other academic institutions based out of that university. That was of course, on my resume, not a secret, certainly not a secret that I’ve kept. Some of my scholarship is available publicly, some of it isn’t. And just the way that it works. I’ve been on so many panels on international law, much of it on Israel Palestine, some of it not, some of it being on other issues that was being dredged up, and it was a lot of innuendos. So it would be something along the lines of you lectured during Israel apartheid week. That’s it. No one really knew what I had said.

So oftentimes it would be a guilt by association, paint by numbers type of a thing. So for instance, I shared a podium with Ben White who’s authored a number of books, who’s a journalist. His articles have appeared in the Independent, the Guardian, et cetera. So someone would go searching through Ben White’s books to find something that looked objectionable from a certain standpoint. And I thought, okay, well those are Ben White’s views and Ben White is entitled to his views. Being on a panel is not a team sport. I mean, my views are my views, but a lot of what I was doing during Israel Apartheid week was to explain what apartheid is, an international law, for example, or having shared a panel with Moba who was a Guantanamo Bay detainee, the same sort of horror stories. At some point he’s released from Guantanamo Bay, he’s given a settlement by the British government.

It was omitted that while I did share a panel with him, and I’ve always been against torture. I also, on that panel, I shared a platform with someone from Breitbart News. Of course, they put the thumbs over the words that would indicate that the person sitting right next to me was from Breitbart News or number of panels where I shared a platform with someone who was aboard the Mafia Marmara, which I didn’t know at the time, and it doesn’t really matter to me that he was aboard the Mafia Marmara. But at a lot of these panels, there’d be also members of the Zionist Federation of the United Kingdom, members of the pro-Israel lobby in Britain who were also on that panel. So there was in omission or selective rendering of this in a way that you would have to go out of your way to omit those facts.

And so this started to take on a life of its own in some ways. But I sat there thinking, at any point is someone going to attribute a view to me that they find objectionable? Which eventually did come in, again, a sentence taken out of context from part of my dissertation, which talked about or aligned, that suggested that terrorism as a strategy can be rational. And of course that isn’t a controversial proposition in the academic literature, but that was used to make it seem as though I was someone who glorified terrorism, the bad faith illusion that was taking place. I think that prompted almost a dozen academics in Canada to then speak publicly to the fact that number one, I wasn’t justifying terrorism number two, that’s basic international relations 1 0 1 stuff. And lastly that this seemed to be a bad faith smear job because they weren’t actually checking in with experts in the field.

Marc Steiner:

So I want to talk a bit about what the political dynamics are right now in Canada that even allowed this attack on you personally to take place. And the present conflict with Israel and Gaza. Israel and Palestinians has really gripped the world and people are really divided over it in deep ways. And I just want to know what the dynamic is in Canada and around you that allowed this to happen. Why did it happen?

Birju Dattani:

Sure. So I think that activism from pro-Israel law groups, I think around me and around this issue and related issues have focused really on two things. The first is to push to adopt the highly controversial IRA definition or our IHRA definition on antisemitism IRA standing for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance,

Which conflates criticism of Israel in a lot of cases with antisemitism. And second, this attempt to suppress any concept of anti Palestinian racism as being recognized as a bonafide and legitimate type of racism. So adding to that context, there was a proposed piece of legislation called Bill C 63, also known as the Online Harms bill, where the liberal government was seeking to reintroduce a provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which would prescribe hate speech among other things. So there are criminal law dimensions to that, which would have nothing to do with the Canadian Human Rights Commission or the Canadian Human Rights Act, but there was a provision which would resurrect something that existed in that act before, which is to make hate speech actionable under Canadian human rights legislation. So a lot of these groups likely looked at the fact that given those twin efforts, calling on the adoption of the IRA definition of antisemitism on the one hand, and trying to suppress any notion of anti Palestinian racism as a legitimate racism on the other, I’m sure that if the person proposed for my position was a technocrat that really didn’t know very much about these issues, it’s easier than to direct your lobbying efforts in a way that that person might take your position.

I think that that would be harder with me given my academic background on these issues, but also and don’t want to lose sight of the fact that the conniption over my personal identity as someone who identifies as a Muslim who’s a person of color, those two things or those consolation of factors led to these efforts and the alacrity with which they were pursued.

Marc Steiner:

So in Canada at this moment, I mean Jews are minority in Canada. I have cousins in Canada, they all flipped from Poland. They came here, they went to Canada, they went to Palestine, they went all over Uruguay. But so I have cousins from Montreal and Toronto, and they are a minority community. And so what I was shocked about when I read what happened to you was that that was allowed to happen in terms of using antisemitism. The more they use and abuse antisemitism, the more it loses its meaning because it has lots of depth. It’s all over the place. So I’m very curious about the political dynamic in Canada at this moment that allows you and people like you to be attacked and where that comes from and what kind of movement is growing to fight it.

Birju Dattani:

And that’s a really interesting question mark. So I think what this looks like is, in some respects, Canada isn’t all that different in terms of the approaches and the views on this from the United States, from Europe, from the Anglosphere in terms of Jewish communities and in particular Jewish institutions as distinct from Jewish communities. So whether or not the institutions are an accurate reflection of the constituencies that they represent, I think is very much being called into question. But again, that doesn’t always play out in a way that’s reflective. So you’ve probably often heard it said, particularly in the American context, that most members of Jewish communities favor a two state solution. They are against the increase of settlements. They are typically voters. They vote for the Democratic party.

But that doesn’t come out when you look at the institutions that purport to speak to their names. So you wouldn’t know that by seeing what organizations like APAC or the A DL are doing or saying relative to those positions. So I’m reminded of Ron Dermer when he was the ambassador to Israel in the last Trump administration. He very famously said, we should stop dedicating our attentions on American Jews who are disproportionately among our critics. Let’s focus instead on evangelical Christians implying that there are more reliable ally. I think those dynamics play out in a similar way in Canada where the views of Jewish communities are not always reflected in the institutions that purport to speak out in their name. So there’s been wider efforts on those members of the Jewish community who do see this as problematic and who have been more vocal in speaking out. So the group independent Jewish voices, for instance, has been among my most strident supporters. I think they’ve issued multiple statements. They join me at the Deus during my press conference. They have posted a lot of my story on social media. I I actually attended a Shabbat dinner on Purim with members of the United Jewish People’s Order of Canada, independent Jewish voices and other members of the progressive Jewish community who have been very vocal. So

Marc Steiner:

In terms of what’s happening to you right now, you attacked online in a pretty vicious manner by Bene Brith and this woman, doya Kurtz, who refers to you as Ew hater, talking about how you were a terrorist supporter. I’ve looked at, I spent some time looking at what you write, looking at things you put out, nothing I saw in any of that that can be construed as antisemitic, as hating Jews. So what is the political dynamic in Canada that allows that to happen now? And what about the movement building to defend you? It seems like a lot of places that you would think but naturally come around and say, this is outrageous. We can’t let this happen. It’s not happening. So I want to hear about those two things. If you could lay those out for us.

Birju Dattani:

Yeah. I think that to put it this way, the way that these attacks took place has less to do with what I’ve actually said or written. And again, as I’ve mentioned before, part of the frustrating things was there have been very few opinions or positions attributed to me, it’s almost, there is the plugging in of buzzwords, right? So when you plug in words like apartheid, when you plug in words like occupation, that seems to elicit an emotive response, not a rational one. And again, political Zionism is a type of nationalism. Nationalism is emotional. So there’s an emotive response that doesn’t focus on what I’ve actually said. But then when you combine that with the fact that I’m Muslim and have three names biju, so again, the scrutiny of my middle name and what it could mean, the harnessing of fear did a really effective job. And so it becomes more what I’m capable of. So it’s basically suggesting that here is a person who’s a Muslim who has written about not just Israel-Palestine, but who’s written a lot about critically about terrorism, those national security type discussions.

What is he capable of? It really didn’t matter what I said at that point. It’s harnessing the imagination for people to really think or let their imaginations run wild in terms of, well, what is he capable of? Do you trust him to be in this sort of position? And again, as Churchill has said, I’m not in the habit of quoting him. I’m going to make an exception here, but a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has had an opportunity to put its pants on. And so I think the efforts then to come to my defense, the Yukon Human Rights Commission was one of the first out of the gate, and they made two public statements, which I’m very grateful for, and which were really powerful to say that in the time that he served as our executive director, we’ve known him to be intelligent, thoughtful, innovative, fair, and he has never been biased. He believes in human rights for all people. And we are all too familiar with the sorts of attacks that target human rights defenders. I’m paraphrasing that, but it is really rare for your former employer in that climate to put their necks out on the line publicly unless they’re very sure that this is just all a big smear campaign.

Some other organizations did defend me. Some of the defenses were run the spectrum of conservative tepid defenses to a lot more strident and fiery ones. But you are right to the extent that your question implies that there hasn’t been the same level of defense from the places that you’d typically expect it from, or at least to match the volume and the strided of the attacks, your guess is as good as mine. Although I would imagine that whenever one throws out the term or the smear where it’s false, antisemitism is something that sticks and it’s something that people are terrified about. So to even attempt a defense, if you’re an institution or a public body, you run the risk of conscripting yourself into that smear. And I think that the fear that comes with that is very hard to underestimate sometimes.

Marc Steiner:

It seems what’s happening to you at this moment being pushed out of a very prestigious, important position is the tip of the iceberg of what’s happening. It means there’s a dynamic happening at this moment here in the United States and in Canada and happening across the globe that centers so many things. One of those centers is the struggle inside of Israel Palestine right now. And if you don’t take the establishment position, you can have your career damaged. And so it seems to me that what happened to you in Canada could just be the beginning of something much larger,

Birju Dattani:

Perhaps. And I think that, and I should point out here, that there are some independent journalists that have kept a running tally of all of the people that have lost their jobs, right? From jobs that are prominent in the public eye to those which are maybe more, for lack of a better way of putting it, garden variety. For example, mark Haven, professor Mark Haven writing in Canadian Dimension has maintained a tally in every sector of people that have lost their jobs. And it’s staggering that list. I would imagine at this point, and this is just an estimate, but it’s probably approaching 55 0 documented cases. So in some ways, mine is one of the more public stories. It was a role that is a very important public office. But there are a number of doctors, educators, lawyers, et cetera, public servants that have lost their jobs or who have been investigated, and it’s found that these smears are actually

Marc Steiner:

Lost their jobs because of what,

Birju Dattani:

So let me clarify that for speaking about Israel Palestine. So for posts that they’re making on social media for conversations that they’re having around this, and so their social media posts will be highlighted where it’s in solidarity with Palestinians, or that’s critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza.

Marc Steiner:

And you’re saying that Pia can use that to fire somebody to move them from their jobs?

Birju Dattani:

Oh, yeah. It is been attempted. So what they’ll do is they’ll use this provision of bringing the employer into disrepute. So there’s a lawyer, brilliant lawyer here, Jackie Mond, at a firm called Cavazos who’s talked about this, about how employers will use certain vague social media policies in the workplace to fire people in unionized environments. It’s harder to do, and there’s a lot of times where those investigations discover that the allegations don’t have any merit. So that also does happen. But in places where there are no union protections, for example, that is a lot easier to do and has happened

Marc Steiner:

In other conversations with some of the people you mentioned. We should have those to show the extent of how this is happening in Canada and where it’s going. I think it’s important for all of us to understand that this is a very dangerous trend, a frightening trend, actually. And so in your particular case at this moment, talk a bit about where, I know you can’t get into specifics. You are suing the Canadian government?

Birju Dattani:

No. So I’m suing certain groups and personalities. So for example, Ben Iri, the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs.

Marc Steiner:

That’s right, I’m sorry. Yeah, yeah,

Birju Dattani:

Yeah. Ezra Event, who is the founder of Rebel Media, which is sort of our version of Alex Jones, to put it that way.

Marc Steiner:

No, I watched him and I watched him attack you. And he is, I mean, he very typical of the very right wing hosts that you become your raw meat for them.

Birju Dattani:

And of course, I’ve never been particularly interested in this show, so I steer clear of that. But yeah, he’s something akin to an Alex Jones here in Canada. That’s sort of how he’s regarded. Dalia Kurtz, whom you mentioned, who’s something of a social media influencer. I, again, don’t really know all that much more about her. And Melissa Lansman, who’s a conservative member of parliament here, who I think, again, just in terms of sheer volume, there’s a lot that’s come from her in terms of attacks. So that’s who we are pursuing in this litigation.

Marc Steiner:

I mean, yeah, she literally came out and said that you were a supporter of terrorism.

Birju Dattani:

Yes, that’s correct.

Marc Steiner:

So talk a bit about before we have to leave the movement growing around this and the support you’re getting and where that’s coming from.

Birju Dattani:

So I think that the movement around me is growing. I think one of the things that I did do is it’s easier now for me to talk about this than I was at the height of this. So before I stepped down, I was walking on eggshells. And so now not being encumbered in the same way, I am able to speak more about my experiences, what happened, the fact that I’m launching a lawsuit. And I think a lot of people are looking at that and saying it’s about time. It is high time that people who smear other people falsely as being antisemitic when there’s no basis in fact of that, of being terrorism, adjacent terrorism, glor supporter, et cetera, that a lot of people are rallying around this because a lot of people are exhausted and tired and fed up by all of this, especially what’s happened in the last 18 months and how frequent and shameless a lot of this was and has been for other people. And a lot of these people are members of the Jewish community who are rallying around me, which to a certain extent, I mean Jewish communities, like any community are non monolithic. But I think there have been so many members of the Jewish community and Israelis as well who have rallied to this because I think there’s also a struggle for who defines identity. And we’re sort of in this bizarre place where parliamentarians, those that are not Jewish, are dictating to members of the Jewish community, their Jewish identity,

That this is what it means to be Jewish in our eyes. And I think that they look at that with anger, with frustration, and to say, no, no one has bequeathed unto you the ability to tell us as those who identify as Jewish, that we are Jewish any more than. And again, some of these institutions, it’s the same thing. So in terms of the suppression of dissent among their ranks. And so there has been a movement that believes that to combat racism, you have to do that in solidarity with marginalized groups that face discrimination rather than treating these things as discreet disparate phenomenon. Really that’s what this is beginning to represent from what I can see. So that movement is growing, it is encompassing and countenance saying increasingly prominent figures. To give you an example, there is a member of Montreal City Council who has now publicly come out with his own lawsuit against the mayor of a town in Ontario, Hampton, Ontario, who was attacking him as an antisemite in ways that are very reminiscent of what happened to me. And so I reposted his statement that he’s suing Mayor Jeremy Levy on my LinkedIn. And this city councilor Alex Norris, publicly supported my lawsuit and I amplified his. So we may have led a spark. And so more of this may happen. And so now the courts become a forum potentially to conduct this struggle. And it looks like more people may be doing that.

Marc Steiner:

I think what’s happening to you is a critical story because it’s one of those things that happens. It’s a tip of an iceberg. It’s the beginning of something that could become an avalanche. You just said 50 more people are facing these kinds of discrimination and attacks throughout Canada. And so I think that we want to stay in touch with you as this fight unfolds, and also talk to some of the other folks in Canada who are also fighting and what that portends for Canadian democracy and the battle around for people who really believe that peace has to come to Israel Palestine. And I think what’s happening to you is nothing short of obscenity. And so we want to give you all the room you need here to get that story out and keep it out to make people understand what’s going on around us.

Birju Dattani:

Thank you so much, mark. I’m so grateful for that. And

Marc Steiner:

I appreciate you standing up, Biju, Biju, Ani. We’re going to link to all the stuff here on our site about the struggle he’s going through. You can read it yourself from different publications, see what he’s doing, and we will stay on top of this so that we can expose the power of the right here in this country and across the globe, taking away our rights to speak as we wish. And good luck and let’s stay in touch.

Birju Dattani:

Absolutely, mark and such a pleasure. And thank you for everything you’re doing to highlight some of these stories that are not getting airing in a more mainstream or wide stream forum. So thank you so much for everything you’re doing in terms of highlighting these stories.

Marc Steiner:

We won’t let them win.

Birju Dattani:

Absolutely hear here.

Marc Steiner:

Once again, let me thank Birju Dattani for joining us today, and thanks to David Hebden for running the program today and audio editor Alina Nehlich for working her audio magic Rosette Sewali for producing the Marc Steiner show and the Titleless Taylor rra for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at marc@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.

As Israel resumes its genocide in Gaza with the full support of the Trump administration, the movement in solidarity with Palestine has returned to Washington, DC, in a mass mobilization on April 5. The Real News reports from the ground in the nation’s capital.

Videography / Production: Jaisal Noor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Jaisal Noor:

On April 5th, thousands joined anti-Trump protests across the US, including multiple rallies in Washington, DC.

Roua:

I am here to demand an end to the genocide. I am here to demand an arms embargo, and I am here to demand an end to the deportations and repression against the Palestine movement.

Jaisal Noor:

The Hands-Off 2025 protests criticized the Trump administration’s assault on basic democratic rights, while a large pro-Palestine rally demanded an end to US-backed violence and Gaza and growing repression.

Miriam:

I think it’s really important for everyone to come out and protest what’s happening with the Trump administration. These cuts to public benefits, to public housing, it’s really, really destructive to working-class people everywhere. It’s also important, as we’re showing here today, that Gaza be at the front of this.

Jaisal Noor:

Critics claim, these protests are anti-Semitic and support Hamas. We got a response from participants.

Miriam:

No. This is a narrative that is being parroted by all of these politicians, pulled forward by what is ultimately a right-wing white supremacist administration. And what it’s trying to do is demonize any kind of political dissent right now. It’s trying to paint the movement for Palestine as something that it’s not. What we’re really out here for is an end to genocide. An end to the war machine that has been murdering tens of thousands of people for the last year and a half.

Jaisal Noor:

Recent Gallup polls show a historic low in US public support for Israel, yet only 15 US senators supported Bernie Sanders’ recent bill to block 8.8 billion in arms sales to the close US ally.

Eugene Puryear:

I think what we’re hoping to achieve with protests like this is like the abolitionists years ago with the longterm campaigns of petitioning and other forms of pressuring the government, and their own forms of demonstrations and others is to help build a stronger moral conscious movement in this country in solidarity with the Palestinian people and to end this genocide. And we know this country is so undemocratic, it’s so gerrymandered, it’s so difficult to get the voices of the people, even when they’re in the majority, represented inside of Congress. And so we’re here to crystallize our position, to show people they’re not alone, to encourage them to stand up in their own localities, to keep building a movement that cannot be denied.

Jaisal Noor:

Protesters also highlighted the Trump administration’s crackdown on student activists, including revoking 300 student visas and detaining Mahmoud Khalil under a controversial Cold War-era law that permits deporting non-citizens deemed a threat to US foreign policy.

Roua:

The repression against the Palestine movement speaks to the power of the Palestine movement. You have the president of the country with one of the strongest militaries in the entire world, and at the forefront of his agenda is revoking the visas of anti-genocide student protesters. That is how effective our movement, the Palestine movement, has been in exposing Israel’s crimes. And that is how strong we are. And I think that gives me hope. That gives me the power and the inspiration to know that what we are doing is working and what we are doing must continue to be done.

Jaisal Noor:

For The Real News, this is Jaisal Noor in Washington, DC.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Jaisal Noor.

On March 18 Israel broke the Gaza ceasefire and recommenced its full scale assault, siege, and bombing of Gaza. Since then, over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed and the humanitarian situation is as desperate as ever. Watching mainstream media, however, one would hardly notice. 

While US media outlets continue to report below the fold on the daily airstrikes, they are no longer treated as major stories meriting emphasis and urgency. This is especially true for the New York Times and TV broadcast news, which have all but forgotten there’s an unprecedented humanitarian crisis ongoing in Gaza–still funded and armed by the US government. 

The paper of record, the New York Times, ran a front page story March 19, the day after Israel broke the ceasefire and killed hundreds in one day, but didn’t run a front page story on Israel’s bombing and siege of Gaza in the 13 days since. (They ran a front page story on April 3 that centered Israel’s military “tactics” in Gaza but didn’t mention civilian death totals.) The Times did find room on March 27 for a front page image of anti-Hamas protests in Gaza which, of course, are a favorite media topic for the pro-genocide crowd as they see it as evidence their “war on Hamas” is both morally justified and, somehow, endorsed by Palestinians themselves. 

Like the New York Times, the nightly news shows–CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and ABC World News Tonight–covered the initial bombing and breaking of the ceasefire the day after (ABC News’s lede after Israel killed 400+ in under 24 hours: “What does this mean for the hostages?”), but have subsequently ignored Gaza entirely, with one notable exception. CBS Evening News did a 4-minute segment on March 26 on “allegations” Israel was using Palestinians, and Palestinian children in particular, as human shields and even this was front loaded with bizarre denunciations of Hamas “using human shields”:

Most conspicuous of all was the total erasure of Gaza from the “agenda-setting” Sunday news programs that are designed to tell elites in Washington what they should care about. Gaza wasn’t mentioned once on any of the Sunday news shows–ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation and NBC’s Meet the Press, and CNN’s State of the Union–for the weeks of March 23 and March 30. Despite Israel breaking the ceasefire on Tuesday March 18 and killing more than 400 Palestinians–including over 200 women and children–in less than 24 hours, none of the Sunday morning news programs that have aired since have covered Gaza at all. 

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said yesterday that at least 322 children had been killed and 609 injured since Israel broke the ceasefire on March 18. 

Whereas the media approach during the Biden years was to spin, obfuscate, blame Hamas, and help distance the White House from the images of carnage emanating from Gaza by propping up fake “ceasefire talks,” the media approach now that Trump is doubling down on Biden’s strategy of unfettered support for genocide appears to be to largely ignore it. 

All indications are that Israeli officials were banking on US news outlets normalizing the ongoing genocide of Gaza, assuming–correctly, as it turns out–that the death and despair would become so routine it would take on a “dog bites man” element. Combined with the nonstop “flood the zone” strategy of the Trump White House as it attacks dozens of perceived enemies at once, the US-backed genocide in Gaza is now both cliche and low priority. 

By way of comparison, the Sunday shows, nightly news shows, and the front page of the New York Times ran wall-to-wall coverage of the Yemen-Signal group chat controversy. Obviously, administration officials using unsecured channels to discuss war plans is a news story (though not nearly as important as the war crimes casually being discussed) but the fact that Israel recommenced its bombing, siege, and starvation strategy on an already decimated population is, objectively, a more urgent story with much higher human stakes. 

Indeed, Palestinians reporting from Gaza say the situation is as dire as it’s ever been. Israel cut off all aid on March 2 and the bombings have been as relentless and brutal as any time period pre-ceasefire. Meanwhile, with Trump openly endorsing ethnic cleansing, “debates” around how best to facilitate this ethnic cleansing are presented as sober, practical foreign policy discussions–not the open planning of a crime against humanity. “You mentioned Gaza,” Margaret Brennan casually said to Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, the last time Gaza was mentioned on CBS’s Face the Nation, March 16. “I want to ask you what specifics you are looking at when it comes to relocating the two million Palestinians in Gaza. In the past, you’ve mentioned Egypt. You’ve mentioned Jordan. Are you talking to other countries at this point about resettling?” 

Witkoff would go on to say Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza would “lead to a better life for Gazans,” to which Brennan politely nodded, thanked him and moved on. Watching this exchange one would hardly know that was being discussed–mass forceable population transfer–is a textbook war crime. Recent revelations by the UN that aid workers had been found in a mass grave have also been ignored by broadcast news. 15 Palestinian rescue workers, including at least one United Nations employee, were killed by Israeli forces “one by one,” according to the UN humanitarian affairs office (OCHA) and the Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS). This story has not been covered on-air by ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, MSNBC, or CNN. 

The ongoing suffering in Gaza, still very much armed and funded by the White House, continues to fade into the background. It’s become routine, banal, and not something that can drive a wedge into the Democratic coalition. This dynamic, combined with US media’s general pro-Israel bias, means the daily starvation and death is not going to be making major headlines anytime soon. It’s now, after 18 months of genocide, just another boring “foreign policy” story. 

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Adam Johnson.

The ceasefire in Gaza has shattered, and Israel’s military has resumed the genocide. Simultaneously, organizations and activists in the US are sounding the alarm over Trump’s persecution of Mahmoud Khalil and other student activists. Palestinian American lawyer and activist Huwaida Arraf joins The Marc Steiner Show to discuss the situation in Gaza, and the urgency of ramping up the solidarity movement with Palestine to combat genocide and the rise of fascism.

Production: David Hebden, Rosette Sewali
Post-production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here in The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. We’re talking today with Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian woman, a lawyer born in Israel, an international renowned human rights lawyer, trilingual and English, Arabic, and Hebrew. A nonviolent activist who co-founded International Solidarity Network fighting for Palestinian rights and nationhood. She ran for Congress in Michigan’s 10th congressional district writes extensively and which her mind, body, literally, and spirit on the line for Palestinian freedom and Hu to welcome. Good to have you with us.

Huwaida Arraf:

It’s good to be with you, Marc. Thank you.

Marc Steiner:

You have been, I mean, doing this for a while.

Huwaida Arraf:

Yeah, I had hoped it wouldn’t be this long, but the fight goes on.

Marc Steiner:

As we had this conversation today, I was looking at the news before I walked into the studio and Israel has resumed their operations in central and South Gaza. They’ve started their airstrikes, 20 Palestinians were killed. Almost all of them health workers for a hundred Palestinians were killed in airstrikes. Since the beginning is conflict. I mean, what’s happening in Gaza is almost unbelievable. I think it’s hard for people to fathom the extent of death and destruction that’s taking place. This is not simply a war.

Huwaida Arraf:

Absolutely. I don’t like to use that term at all because war implies you have two equal sites and that’s absolutely not what you have here. Have a population that has been oppressed and colonized for nearly eight decades and for the past almost two decades in Gaza specifically really has been caged and cut off from essentials. And you take that and over the years also every few years Israel bombs decimate the society, the infrastructure. You have a medieval siege that’s imposed on the entire civilian population that really leaves people not able to control even their daily lives. I mean, forget about just being able to leave the Gaza Strip to go get what you need to go to school, to visit family, to get the medical attention that you need, what you might be able to find food that day is completely determined by what Israel allows in and what doesn’t allow in.

And for the past two and a half weeks before it restarted, this barbaric bombardment of Gaza has been cutting off all food and medical aid and then just cut off also electricity, which means they can’t desalinate water. I mean people have nothing. It is truly a caged, beleaguered star population that Israel has also restarted viciously bombing from the air. So just in the past couple of days, nearly 500 killed so many children. At least the last number, and I don’t even like to say numbers because it changes by the minute, but over 180 children, babies, infants, and no one seems to be able to stop Israel. No one is willing to do it. And the reports are that the United States, the White House has given the green light. They were briefed on it, and the slaughter continues. It really, I am unable to find words these days to describe to the evil that we went missing.

Marc Steiner:

And you mentioned the United States. I mean the kind of lack of political will in the Biden administration to intervene and stop it. And now we’re faced with a government in this country which actively supports Israel in its destruction of Palestinians and the murder of Palestinians. It is really time for, I think those of us in America to step up and really heighten the protests and the confrontations with our own government to say, no, this can’t take place. So I’m curious as an activist here, where you see that going, where you see what our role is here in the United States to stop this kind of genocide taking place in Gaza.

Huwaida Arraf:

Absolutely, and that is the question, right? Because I worked for a long time volunteering in the occupied Palestinian territory and welcoming people from around the world to come see what’s actually happening in Palestine. And Palestinians would be so grateful for the international solidarity and for people leaving the comforts of their own home to travel to stand with them. But what we would hear over and over again from Palestinians is just please go back to your countries, especially the United States, and change the policies there because it is the policies of especially the Western countries led by the United States that’s enabling Israel. And so what we do here in the United States really, really matters. I mean, it’s not adequate to just say it’s not our problem, it’s not happening here. It’s thousands of miles away because we are so actively involved and complicit. It’s our tax dollars.

It is our elected representatives that are making these choices to continuously fund Israel’s genocide. So it comes down to us to create that political will to change policy. Now, how do we do that? It seems to be really overwhelming. A lot of it really comes down to educating people because for decades we have been programmed here in the United States by the mainstream media, by popular culture to dehumanize Palestinians and to think that Israel is the victim here. So there’s a lot of education that goes into it, opening people’s eyes in terms of what has really been happening and then changing that act or moving that education into mobilization and really pushing our elected representatives to make the right choices to stop funding genocide and colonialism and apartheid. And so that requires us making our voices heard, whether in the streets, in protests, to going to town halls, making appointments with our elected representatives, calling them, writing to them every day and letting them know that this is an issue that matters, that we care about, that we will vote on.

Yes, there are other issues that affect our daily lives, but this is also an issue that affects life, that affects life, and it affects our daily lives because it is not just about being what happens in Palestine. Yes, that’s horrible, but I have other concerns. What happens in Palestine and the extent in which the United States is funding and enabling what Israel is doing comes back here to affect us. If we look at the billions and billions of dollars that this government and the previous government and for decades, the United States has been giving of our tax dollars to Israel, that money can be spent in our own communities. I mean, $3.8 billion, that’s just yearly without all of the extra packages that Israel has gotten, which is now in the last 16, 17 months, has topped I think 30 billion. Billion. So yearly is 3.8 billion of our tax dollars.

And on top of that, the United States has authorized more and more money and weapon shipments to Israel that can be used in our own communities. Then when we talk about our own civil liberties here, the extent to which there is a crackdown on freedom of speech and on education, and that people are being doxed and fired from their jobs and silenced if they dare to criticize Israel. That affects our own civil liberties here. And I am involved in cases to defend students’ rights who have been persecuted, who have been kicked out of school. Their organizations suspended because they advocate for Palestinian rights. So if it’s not our tax dollars in our own communities and life in Palestine, it is our own ability to speak out and to exercise our freedom of speech that is being curtailed and actually really threatened all to protect a country that is committing a genocide.

It is really shameful. And I think that when we look back at this time, and I firmly believe there will come a time where we will look back and truly feel ashamed that we allowed this to happen. Those who were silent or those who advocated for this policy of supporting this genocide, it will be seen as a stain on US history. And I think what I keep saying is to everyone around me, this is happening in our lifetime on our watch. What are we going to say we did to stop it? And if we think about that every day, we will find our place what we can do. It could be joining a protest. I’m heading to a protest today, but it could be talking to your neighbor. It could be picking up the phone to talk to your member of Congress. Each one of us have a role to play.

And I think that if we understand that we can’t always be the top, we can’t always be at the front of those demonstrations, but if you do what you can from where you are and we each do that, it will build up. It will create that critical mass that we need to change policy. And I do believe that things have, in all of the years that you mentioned, I have been doing this, but we need to keep pushing. We need to keep pushing until we reach that tipping point. And I just seeing all the carnage, you just have to wonder how many more lives destroyed until we get to that tipping point where policy has changed. I mean, that motivates me every single day, and I hope we can all find it in ourselves to realize that there is something we can do about it.

Marc Steiner:

I hope so too. And I think that from your work, from helping to found a free gaze in 2006 with your co-founding international solidarity, the non-violent movement to fight for Palestinian rights, that we seem to be an precipice of the moment though, given what’s happening in Gaza, given the crackdown in this country on Palestinians who are standing up and given the crackdowns taking place inside Israel at this moment, people I’ve talked to who are both Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis are talking about the intense pressure that they’re under every day. Some even being arrested because they’re standing up to the government saying, no, I don’t think people just really get and understand the depth of the repression that’s taking place on the West Bank in Gaza and in Israel itself.

Huwaida Arraf:

Yep, absolutely. I have family. So my family is partially from the West Bank and the other part is from inside 48, what is now Israel. And so,

Marc Steiner:

And you’re an Israeli citizen as well, or was were right,

Huwaida Arraf:

An Israeli citizen. Yes, of course. I mean, I always say I’m not the kind of citizen that Israel wants. Unfortunately, I’m considered a demographic threat because of, again, Israel’s project of really colonization. And when we call it apartheid, it’s not just throwing out words. It really is a government and a regime that wants to create a society and the state with specific rights for certain people based on your religion. So even though my village and my family was there before the state of Israel was created, we are not equal citizens. And the last time I talked to my family, I mean, they’re terrified. They can’t say anything in their place of work. If they like a Facebook post, they could be arrested, right? And they have Israeli citizens that are walking around armed, coming into their place of business, whether it is their clinics or their shops.

And you don’t know if what you’re going to say is going to get you injured, killed, arrested. And those are Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, who Israel likes to say are equal or have more rights than they would have anywhere else, which is just not true at all. And then when you talk about Israeli citizens, I mean, yeah, there are protests. People are not happy with Netanyahu, and there is, especially the families of the hostages and other people who are worried about the hostages are protesting and are getting arrested for these protests. And there is a crackdown. I wish I had something a little bit better or more hopeful to say about Israeli society because I spent so many years in the occupied territories and worked with some wonderful Israelis, Israelis who put their safety and their lives on the line and firmly believe in true equality and spend their time in Palestinian villages and standing up to their own soldiers.

But those numbers are so, so few, the polls are showing that a vast majority of Israelis support what their government has been doing in Gaza. If they didn’t have hostages in Gaza, they wouldn’t care at all about the Palestinian civilians there and what’s happening to them. And that’s really frightening. I mean, that’s frightening, just from a humanitarian perspective, that’s frightening when you think about any society to be supportive of such ruthless violence. And if it wasn’t for having some of your own people there wouldn’t care at all what happens to the population that your government is occupying, oppressing and killing. And so that is scary. And what we have been seeing in Israeli society is this decline, this decline towards more isolationism, fascism, violence. And it’s not good for anybody, certainly not good for Israeli society. And even the future where I say, I’ve always said that we need to live together in what we’re working to create.

We’re working to end Israeli colonialism and apartheid so that there can be a future where anybody and everybody who wants to live in historic Palestine in this land can do so as equals. Right. And what we have been seeing, again on the enormous violence unleashed on Palestinians and the almost complete disregard by Israelis except for where it concerns their own population, it means that it’s going to be very, very, very difficult to rebuild a lot of that. And this is, we’re talking about it because we don’t have too much time, but we shouldn’t just gloss over the amount of violence being used. And that’s not just in Gaza, that’s not just when we come to the death and dismemberment and amputations and the starvations, but the torture, the deliberate killings, the humiliation, the people, children who have seen their parents killed dismembered, the humiliated, what kind of psychological effect this has on people is really hard, really hard to fathom.

And especially when we’re looking at Gaza, but also the West Bank, this is all Palestinians have known most Palestinians for their entire lives is this kind of violence, is this kind of complete disregard by the international community and the rest of the world. And just this overwhelming oppression and this attempt really to get rid of you. You’re an undesirable, your life doesn’t matter. That’s all Palestinians have known. And despite this, they try to continue, they try to insist on, but what kind of psychological effect this has on people is really hard to know as of like 20 years ago, 20 years ago, before these massive bombing started in Gaza, there’s, it’s a Gaza community mental health program that was saying over 90% of Gaza’s children are traumatized. And that is back in 2006, you have seen at least five massive bombing campaigns since then and now an act of full-blown genocide if over 90% of Gaza’s children were traumatized before all this, what do we say now? So it is really, really dismal. But that doesn’t mean we give up. We have no choice but to keep going and fighting because we are fighting for the rights of people to live.

Marc Steiner:

It’s true. And those children now you talk about are now in their twenties and thirties and trying to survive.

Huwaida Arraf:

Yeah, trying to survive, probably trying to keep their children alive, probably trying to find a way to keep their children safe to find food. And these are children that have been traumatized themselves. In 2009, after Israel’s first major bombing campaign operation cast led on Gaza, this was 2008, 2009, I went in with a delegation of US attorneys to try to document and report on US weapons that were used in Operation Castlight to commit war crimes. And we did produce a report after that, but some of the stories that we heard, I mean one home that was bombed and Israel did not allow the Red Crescent or any rescue services to get to the home for three days. And when they got to the home, found a number, most of the adults in that home killed

And number of children who were still alive, injured, and forced to stay with the relatives, with the bodies of their dead parents for three days without food or water. Those children, that was 2008, 2009, if those children even survived, what they’re trying to do now in keeping their, they probably hope that their children wouldn’t have to endure the same. But not only are they doing the same, it’s so much worse now. It’s as bad as it has ever been. And that doesn’t even come remotely close to describing it. There’s a report that just came out from the un, and I’m almost, I’ve read the bullet points, but I can’t even bring myself to read it because even though the summary is so bad, it is so bad about the kind of torture, what people have been subjected to things that humans should never, ever do to each other. I can’t, as a human rights attorney, I’m almost embarrassed to admit I just can’t even bring myself to read it.

Marc Steiner:

What’s the name of the report?

Huwaida Arraf:

It was done by the, there’s a un fact finding patient. It’s an independent commission that is investigating what Israel is doing in the occupied policy and territory and in Gaza. And they came out, I’d have to pull up the report, but one of their findings is that Israel is committing genocidal acts. Israel has deliberately targeted the maternal wards, the ability of Palestinian, Palestinian women to reproduce in various ways. But part of that also covers the torture that Palestinian hostages also have endured in Israeli captivity and some of the torture tactics and the rape that is described is just horrific. And that’s just the summary. So I can pull the exact name of the report for you, but it was done by an independent fact finding commission.

Marc Steiner:

Well, we’ll add that just so people can access that, because I think that’s important. I mean, as you describe the reality that Palestinians face, and I mean, just think about you personally. I’ve been reading all the things you’ve been writing and I’ve been reading about you and the bravery you showed on the Flotillas and other, the places in the face of Israeli violence standing up to it, putting your life on the line. And you’re married to a Jewish man who’s thrown out of Israel because he stood up. I mean, this is something people have to understand. I think for us to get beyond this and to find this path to peace, and there are over one and a half to 2 billion Israelis who no longer live in Israel and live in Europe and live in the United States. Most of ’em would be the people who oppose this government that’s taking place in Israel at this moment.

Huwaida Arraf:

I mean, that’s what we’re hearing. And then the large number of Israelis who are leaving would be the more moderate ones, leaving the Israelis, more the ideological. This land was given to us by God. It’s only our land and everybody else needs to be kicked out, are the ones that are remaining. And we see the government that is now in power is a right wing fascist government. And that is the, as I said earlier, that the Israeli society where it has going and the fact that it’s become so extreme, it doesn’t bode well for anyone. But how do we break that? And for a lot of the work that I’ve done originally when I went over to Palestine in shortly after college, it was in the year 2000, it was to work for a conflict resolution organization that was bringing Palestinian and Israeli youth together.

Marc Steiner:

Seeds of peace.

Huwaida Arraf:

Yes, yes.

Marc Steiner:

Right.

Huwaida Arraf:

And I quickly realized the problem with these organizations, because they don’t actually get to the heart of the matter, they don’t do the work that needs to be done to dismantle the racist structures or the structures of oppression that tear people apart. And it’s more about getting to know each other and doing these normalization projects. Becoming friends is great. Obviously we lifelong friends, but when you don’t actually, or when you avoid the work that needs to be done to dismantle the structures of oppression, then you are just normalizing oppression, right? So I don’t necessarily support these organizations, but I went on, even in founding the International Solidarity Movement, it was bringing internationals, but also bringing Israelis and bringing everybody irrespective of religion, of ethnicity, of nationality. I mean, we are all humans and we are all standing for freedom and for equality and for dignity, for everybody.

And there is this attempt to also reach Israelis with the actions that we were doing. A lot of the protests I was face to face with Israeli soldiers and trying to say, look, what are you doing? You are here shooting at children. You are invading these people’s villages, maybe getting them to think about what role they’re playing in this violence. And then I think that we are so far from that right now. People just have been so siloed, I feel, and so hard. There’s those that are hardened and just don’t want to hear anything that has to do with Palestinian humanity. And then there are those, the ideological Israelis that are bent on having this Jewish state that was promised to them by God. And everybody else needs to either agree to be subservient or they can be killed or they can get out. And that is really what we are fighting here. We are fighting this idea that there can be any kind of religious or ethno religious supremacy for anybody. And we are fighting for a world, a region, a country, I mean everywhere, certainly in Israel, Palestine, but around the world where everyone is respected in everyone is equal. And we seem to be so far away from that. But I say this because there is this idea, and you probably know well, anytime that we in the United States or in other places speak up for Palestinian rights, we are automatically labeled as antisemites

Marc Steiner:

Or self-hating Jews

Huwaida Arraf:

Or yourself Jews, my husband celebrating Jews all the time. And we seem to just lost this ability to look at each other as humans. And it doesn’t bode well for where we are in this moment in time. It is very dangerous what is happening, certainly in the region. But then what is happening here, and I mentioned, we started talking also about the restrictions on our civil liberties here.

We know that we are creating certainly Trump’s policy, cracking down even more on those who speak up for Palestinian rights. But one thing that I want to say there is that it didn’t start with Trump, right? It has been US policy. And certainly I blame the previous administration, the Biden administration, for laying the groundwork for where we are now. For 15 months we were protesting trying to get the Biden Harris administration to put an arms embargo on Israel to stop the genocide. And they gaslit the American people in that Israel has a right to defend itself. That’s what we always hear. But Israel is not defending itself. Israel is fighting for a land that is free of the indigenous Palestinian population. And the United States has been supporting that. But what is positive, I don’t want to be all negative. What is positive is that so many people like yourself, mark, but so many also younger American Jews, and even when we started the International Solidarity Movement, so many of those who came to join us were young American or European Jews.

We look at the protests on college campuses, so many of them Jewish students who reject this notion that what Israel is doing and what the US is doing in cracking down on protesters in any way serves Jewish safety. Certainly not Jewish Americans. And where I am in Michigan, the University of Michigan, we have 12 protesters that are being prosecuted actually by the Attorney General in a shameful, really prosecution. But about half of those protesters being prosecuted for protesting in the encampments and for Palestinian rights are Jewish. So on one hand, there are those who are really pushing really hard to label all advocates of Palestinian rights as antisemitic and supporting this kind of crackdown, whether what Israel’s doing or what this administration is doing as fighting antisemitism or protecting the Jewish people when it’s just the opposite. And it’s heartening to see that so many young Jews, but also of all ages that are, I have a good friend who is well into her eighties Jewish activist, and she’s just so feisty and that I really consider my family, my family, and these are the kind of people that I always want to stand side by side with and fighting for everybody’s rights.

Marc Steiner:

So before we end, a couple of things. One is I’m curious, in your life now, you’ve been through a lot facing violence in the Israeli Army, Navy violence, dealing on flotillas, the work you’ve done over there, the work you’re doing here, educating your life to this, what are you in the midst of now? Where is the struggle taking you? Now,

Huwaida Arraf:

That is a good question because I feel like I’m torn in so many different ways because there’s so much work to be done, and I want to always do as much as I can. One of my most important roles right now, although my kids would probably beg to differ, is raising the next generation. But I frequently hear from them that I’m always busy and I’m always doing something for Palestine or some other social justice issues. So I might be not doing as well as I should be in that arena, but raising the next generation, my kids are 10 and 11, and if I impart anything on them, I want it to be a strong belief in their ability and their obligation to do something when they see that something is wrong, whether it is in their elementary classroom, if somebody is being racist or somebody is being bullied to stand up to, if it’s the president of the United States, you can get out and protest when something’s happening that is not right.

You are able to, and you should do something about it. If I impart anything on them, I want it to be that. So that is one of my most important jobs. But I am also an attorney and I’m also working with other attorneys both to defensive liberties here at home. So I am one helping with the defense of students who are being persecuted for standing up for Palestinian rights and also suing the University of Michigan for violating the constitutional rights of these students by treating them differently, by curtailing the First Amendment rights. Because these institutions and these state power that is cracking down on our students, on protestors, on citizens should not be allowed to get away with this. So it’s defense and offense there and activism. We are still trying to support people to go to the occupied Palestinian territory, to volunteer with the international Solidarity movement if they are able to.

And if somebody can, unfortunately we cannot get into Gaza, but people are still able to get into Jerusalem and the West Bank and the international solidarity movement there is trying as much as possible to be a presence, to witness, to document, to stand in solidarity with the people there who are being terrorized by settlers and soldiers. Just in the past month, over 40,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from their refugee camps in and in Janine. So in these Palestinian cities, Israeli soldiers would come through and literally blow up their homes or demolish their homes. And those that are still in their villages are being attacked by settlers, supported by soldiers. So having people there to witness to try to deter some of the violence by saying to the state of Israel, like, Hey, we’re here and we see what we’re doing can help deter violence sometimes and can help let Palestinians know that they’re not alone.

So I encourage anyone who is able to travel to look up the international solidarity movement and see about volunteering there. At the same time, we are trying to stop the atrocities in Gaza in a variety of ways. I am still involved with the Freedom Flotilla and the Freedom Flotilla Coalition and that we have been trying for years to break Israel’s illegal siege on Gaza. We started, as you mentioned, I mean the first time we got into Gaza with two small fishing boats in 2008. And that was a deliberate action to challenge, to confront, to try to break Israel’s stranglehold and its naval blockade on Gaza. We were able to get through a few times, but then Israel started lethally attacking our ships, but we did not give up. And we, as of last year also, were pulling together if flotilla, unfortunately, some states sabotaged our mission, but again, we are not giving up.

We are readying ships to try to sail again. And we are encouraging these organizations that are being blocked from entering Gaza and from rendering aid to people to join us, to put their aid on these ships and directly confront Israel’s policy. Because Israel’s policy is illegal. A siege on an entire civilian population is illegal, and it is part of a larger genocide, a crime against humanity. But what is infuriating is that these organizations and world governments only talk, they do not do anything to actively confront Israel’s policy. So effectively, you have every single government in the world that is respecting Israel’s control over Gaza. They are complicit. They are complicit in the starvation and the genocide of the Palestinian people. I mean, the government of Turkey held back three of our ships that were supposed to sail to confront Israel’s blockade. Why isn’t Turkey itself sailing?

Why isn’t Greece sailing? Why aren’t these Arab countries sailing and daring Israel to confront them and to insist that we are getting to the people that you are trying to annihilate in Gaza. So we are still trying to do that as a civilian initiative and hopefully within the next few weeks or months, I hope it’s not longer, your listeners will hear about and are able to support the Freedom Flotilla coalition and try to break through this blockade. And here at home. Aside from the legal front, there’s also the political front and continuing to push our elected representatives and continuing to encourage people that really represent our ideals and our principles, our vision of human rights and inequality for everybody to run for office. I am trying to encourage young people, the Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, to actually get involved. And so our voices are represented and we are heard. So it’s a lot of work on a lot of different friends. Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to be in too many spaces and not doing anything particularly relevant. Well, we continue to try to do what we can. I think that that’s important just as continue to do what we can and there’s a space for everyone.

Marc Steiner:

I want to first say thank you, hued our off. You’re doing amazing work. I want to stay in touch with you to see how this Portilla gathering is growing and what the next moves are, so we can then support to that and bring those voices to the people in this country and across the globe. So I appreciate the work you’re doing, and thank you so much for being here today.

Huwaida Arraf:

Thank you for having me, and please continue to speak out because as we know, our freedom of speech is really being threatened right now. And I encourage your listeners to really follow the case of il, who is the government is trying to set an example by deporting him illegally for speaking out for Palestinian rights. And they’re again, trying to not only make an example of him, but silence speech by sending this chill through the communities, the pro-Palestinian community or anyone would dare to speak out. And it is, like I say again, the extent to which our own civil liberties, our right to the first amendment, our right to due process are really at stake right now is really hard to overemphasize. We need everybody to be watching, to be speaking out, and to be letting our elected representatives know that we will not stand for this and that they need to fight. So thank you for doing your part in continuing to speak out and bring voices of protests, of dissent to your listeners, and I would love to stay in touch.

Marc Steiner:

We will stay in touch. Thank you very much.

Huwaida Arraf:

Thank you.

Marc Steiner:

Once again, thank you to Huda Araf for joining us today. And thanks for David Hebdon for running the program and audio editor Alina Neek and producer Roset Sole for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Huwaida Arraf for joining us today and for the work that she does. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.

He stood up against genocide. 

And for this, he was ambushed at his home, abducted, and arrested. Arrested without cause. Arrested without a warrant. By plainclothes officers who refused to give their names.

Just handcuffed and shoved into the back of a car, while his wife — eight months pregnant — watches and tries to understand what’s happening.

This is not a scene from some dark chapter of a distant past filled with black-and-white photos of bygone dictatorships. This happened here, in the United States of America, in March of this year. It’s happening here right now. 

Mahmoud Khalil was a graduate student at Columbia University last year when he led protests against Israel’s US-backed Occupation of historic Palestine and genocidal slaughter of Palestinians. 

But now, speaking out carries a high price.

And free speech is no longer so free.

Mahmoud Khalil is a U.S. resident, born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. But Trump officials say they’ve striped him of his Green Card, and they’re holding him in an ICE jail in Louisiana… far from his home in New York. Far from his wife. Unable to communicate with his lawyers or the outside world for days after his illegal abduction.

But Mahmoud Khalil is, still, not silent.

And he is not alone. 

As he stood up for the Palestinians facing Israeli bombs and the barrels of their guns, others are standing up for Khalil. People have rallied for his freedom. Hundreds. Thousands.

From New York City to Boston. Phoenix to Miami. North Carolina to Oklahoma City. Jewish peace activists protested inside Trump Tower. The people will not be silent as the powerful try to silence the people’s freedom to speak.

To be willingly silent now will mean more unwilling silence later. 

Because, as we’re already seeing, Mahmoud Khalil is only the first of many. The first of many to be detained. The first of many to be silenced. For themselves standing against occupation and violence. Or even standing next to those who do.

But the people will not be quiet.

Not in the 1960s, denouncing the war in Vietnam.

Not in the 1980s, against the war in Nicaragua.

Not in the 2020s, against the war in Palestine.

And not now… 

In defense of those standing up for what’s right and for their rights.

In defense of the people’s inalienable right to speak up and speak freely.

In defense of life and those who fight for peace. 

In defense of Mahmoud Khalil. 

On March 8, 2025, ICE agents detained, without a warrant, Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil at his home in New York City. Khalil is a US resident, but Trump officials said they’d stripped him of his green card. His crime? Standing up and speaking out against the US-backed Israeli attack on Palestine. As a graduate student at Columbia University last year, he helped to lead protests against Israeli genocide in Gaza.

And just as he stood up for the Palestinians, others are standing up for Khalil. People have rallied for his freedom across the country.

Folksinger David Rovics latest song is called Mahmoud Khalil, you can listen to it here. You can check out and subscribe to Rovics’ Substack, here, and sign up for his podcast on Spotify. 

This is episode 13 of Stories of Resistance—a new podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

You can see his exclusive pictures of many of the episodes and support Stories of Resistance at www.patreon.com/mfox.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Michael Fox.

This story originally appeared in Truthout on Mar. 26, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk was abducted by federal agents on Tuesday and has reportedly had her visa revoked, the university says, in what seems to be the latest instance of the Trump administration targeting and detaining an immigrant for their pro-Palestine advocacy.

Ozturk, who hails from Turkey, is in the U.S. on a valid F-1 student visa, according to her lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai. She is a doctoral candidate in the university’s Child Study and Human Development department and formerly attended Columbia University as a Fulbright Scholar, according to The Tufts Daily.

Video of Ozturk’s arrest captured by a home security camera shows the student being apprehended by a group of six people in plain clothes whose faces are covered by masks and hats. A man first approaches and apprehends her, then grabs her wrists as the others convene from different directions. She asks if she can call the police for help, and they tell her, “we are the police.”

The group takes her backpack and handcuffs her before escorting her to an unmarked car parked nearby. The arrest and abduction take place in the course of less than two minutes.

Khanbabai says that the PhD candidate was on her way to meet friends for iftar, when those observing Ramadan break their fast, when she was apprehended by and detained by Department of Homeland Security agents.

Officials initially did not specify where Ozturk had been taken, and Khanbabai was unable to reach her. Later on Wednesday, Khanbabai said in a motion that she was informed by a senator’s office that the student was transferred to Louisiana. DHS agents also sent Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil to Louisiana, where he is being held in an immigration jail notorious for its abuses.

The transfer is despite the fact that a judge approved a petition barring Ozturk from being removed from Massachusetts without advance notice filed by Khanbabai on Tuesday. The Trump administration has been openly flouting court orders when it comes to its anti-immigrant onslaught; earlier this month, for instance, immigration officials deported Brown University assistant professor and doctor Rasha Alawieh to Lebanon, despite a judge having ordered the visa holder not to be removed.

Ozturk’s abduction comes just days after she was doxxed by Zionist vigilante group Canary Mission, advocates for Palestinian rights said. The group cited her activism against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, including an op-ed published in Tufts Daily last year demanding that university leadership divest from Israel and condemn its slaughter of Palestinians.

Pro-Palestine activist groups have organized a rally in solidarity with Ozturk on Wednesday to demand her release. This is the first known instance of a student being targeted by immigration officials for their pro-Palestine activism in Boston.

Ozturk is the latest campus activist involved in the student movement against Israel’s genocide to be targeted by ICE in recent weeks. Recent Columbia University graduate and leader of student protests Khalil was abducted by ICE earlier this month and had his green card revoked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Trump officials openly admitted that Khalil was targeted for his activism, in what legal experts say is a clear violation of free speech rights.

Columbia student Yunseo Chung has also been targeted by the Trump administration for her participation in student protests. Immigration officials are seeking to deport Chung, a legal permanent resident who moved to the U.S. when she was 7 years old, according to a lawsuit filed by Chung against the administration this week.

Note: This story has been updated to reflect new information about Ozturk’s location.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Sharon Zhang.

Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist at Columbia University, is currently in ICE detention facing deportation proceedings—and the future of free speech in America hangs on the outcome of his case. Khalil, who has permanent resident status, was illegally abducted by ICE agents in front of his pregnant wife on March 8, sparking national and international outrage and raising alarms about what his extrajudicial abduction and imprisonment means for the present and future of civil liberties in Trump’s America. Michael Arria, a reporter with Mondoweiss, joins The Marc Steiner Show to discuss the current status of Khalil’s case and the rapid escalation of Trump’s crackdown on political dissent and the movement for Palestine.

Production: David Hebden, Rosette Sewali
Post-production: Alina Nehlich

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have y’all with us. Mahmoud Khalil is in the news. 11 days ago, this father to Tobe was a student, a leading voice at Columbia University to end the war on Gaza and for the rights of Palestinian people. He’s Palestinian. Then all of a sudden, 11 days ago, federal agents burst into his apartment, taking him away, threatening him with deportation. His wife is about to give birth to their first child. Other Palestinian students have been targeted by the federal government and Trump has told Columbia he’ll withdraw $400 million of federal support. If you don’t ban masks, empower campus cops and put the school department of Middle East, south Asian, and African studies under academic receivership, which would mean they’re no longer controlled by the university or the faculty among other things. And Mahmoud Khalil languishes now in a federal lockup in Louisiana. And we’re about to have a conversation with a man who’s been covering this. Michael Arria has been covering this from Mondoweiss where he’s a US correspondent and he’s the author of Medium Blue, the Politics of MSNBC. And Michael, welcome, good to have you with us.

Michael Arria:

Thanks for having me.

Marc Steiner:

So this story, I remember when I first watched this happening, saw this happening. I was just incredulous. Lemme just take a step backwards with you for a moment and for a broader overview before we jump into this specific story and what this is emblematic for, what’s happening to our country at this moment, colleges around the country being threatened, Palestinian people, I have Palestinian friends who feel now that they’re under threat of deportation. Talk a bit about your analysis of where we think we are and what’s happening to us right now.

Michael Arria:

It’s an interesting question. I think obviously these things don’t occur in a vacuum. Unfortunately, Khalil’s detention, it was not altogether shocking. I think we all expected the Trump administration to act in some capacity. He’s been very upfront, even dating back to the campaign trail, the Washington Post reported last May that he had told a group of pro-Israel donors that if they helped elect him, he would crack down on the Palestine movement and set it back decades.

And he specifically outlined how he would do that, which is to deport students. He repeated that line throughout the campaign as did members of the new administration. Upon arriving at the White House, we saw executive orders shortly after he arrived at the White House, obviously also targeting student protestors. But I think you bring up an interesting point because some of these college investigations actually began under the Biden administration and something we cover at the site every week, especially me as the US correspondent, is this kind of war that’s been waged against the US Palestine movement domestically particularly strengthened and amplified I think in the wake of the October 7th attack, but really was going on long before that through legal means in the courts, pro-Israel organizations, pro-Israel, lawmakers criminalizing BDS attempting to adopt the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, which essentially classifies some criticisms of Israel as antisemitic.

So this has been a real push and it has to be said, although Trump is kind of amping it up to a level we have yet to see, it has largely been a bipartisan affair. We have seen these kind of attacks on the Palestine movement in the US for quite some time, and this is kind of, I think in many ways a culmination of these kind of actions that we’ve seen kind of over the past decade really since BDS emerged as a forest, we’ve really seen this attempt to criminalize descent and a lot of these Israel groups really see the campus as the terrain where that battle is going to be fought. And they’ve really fought to kind of blur the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. They’ve really fought for pro-Israel students to kind of be regarded as a civil right classification unto themself. You see this a lot with Alec where they find somebody who claims that the fact they had to join a union and fringes upon their freedom of speech or something, and then you see these big right-wing right to work groups kind of support them. And that’s kind of happened in this situation too. You’ve seen some of these pro-ISIS Israel groups like the Brandeis Center back, these pro-Israel students and try to get this stuff on the books and change the legal definition for what you can and can’t do as it relates to Palestine protests. So that’s kind of a little backstory I’d say in terms of what leads up to this arrest that we saw on March 8th.

Marc Steiner:

If the United States government uses a leverage that is using against Columbia now saying, we’re going to take away $400 million from the university if you don’t do what we tell you, if you don’t stop these anti-Israeli protests and more, I mean they could do this across the country. I mean this signals, this is kind of a bellwether for a real kind of dangerous, almost fascistic policies being instituted by Trump against higher education.

Michael Arria:

Yeah, I completely agree with that. And it’s interesting, this is obviously there’s some big picture stories here, like a big picture stories obviously Trump’s deportation plans as anti-immigrant designs are not limited to student protestors or Palestinians. So that’s one big picture story. I think another big picture story is what we just discussed. This is a long time coming in terms of this blurring of what is considered antisemitism versus what is considered legitimate pro-Palestine protest. But I think the third issue is the one you bring up, which is this issue of what does the institutions of higher education, what do they stand for in the United States in the year 2025? I think shortly before the election I interviewed Mara Finkelstein, who I think you’ve had on your show. She was

The first tenured professor to lose her job over pro-Palestine speech. It had an Instagram post where she criticized Zionism and lost her job. And she said something very interesting to me when we spoke last October where she really connected this to the decades of policies that we’ve seen, education policy that we’ve seen in the United States, this neoliberal model that we’ve seen kind of emerge where we’ve seen the rolling back of federal funding of higher education. And this is another thing Trump has amped up obviously as we’ve seen in recent weeks, and we kind of have seen that replaced with a donor model, right? Schools essentially a marketplace in that regard. And I think you tap into this, Trump sent this letter to Columbia University saying that $400 million is potentially on the line. We might revisit this and give it back to you if you do the following things. And basically laid out a kind of crackdown on pro-Palestine protestors. And one of those demands was also, it’s everything you mentioned, but in addition to that was Trump administration was calling for the suspension of a number of student activists who were involved in the occupation of Hamilton Hall last April. This is a hall at Columbia that was occupied by a number of students drawing attention to what was happening, the genocidal assault

Marc Steiner:

And was occupied during the anti-war demonstrations in Vietnam as well. Exactly right.

Michael Arria:

And it should be pointed out, Columbia, we’ve seen so much news in the last week, it’s hard to keep up I realize. But something that happened is that the other day Columbia announced that they were suspending expelling and potentially taking degrees away from a number of the people who were connected to that protest. So I think part of the story here is obviously the Trump administration. The other part is how these universities have kind of either complied or just been straight up complicit in the designs of the Trump administration, presumably because they do not want to see their endowments threatened in any capacity. And now you have an announcement from Linda McMahon, the new head of Department of Education, sending out this announcement that 60 schools which have been investigated for alleged antisemitism are potentially on the verge of facing disciplinary action. Presumably similar to what happened with Columbia, where they’ll have their federal contracts and grants pulled and are put in a position where they’re really between a rock and a hard place, so to speak, and what they want to do.

And I think when it comes down to it, I mean that’s what Mara Finkelstein told me. She said, I don’t have to have sympathy for the people who fired me to acknowledge the fact that my school was put in this position where they could either get rid of an anthropology professor or have their endowment threatened. And to them it probably wasn’t a big decision. So I think that’s something that we have to keep in mind here. This isn’t only a story about immigration or Trump or McCarthyism. It also is a story about kind of what the face of higher education looks like in the United States, especially a place like Columbia, which is a private university and therefore technically isn’t beholden by the First Amendment in the same way that other places are. There’s legitimate questions here. What kind of responsibility do they have to their faculty? What kind of responsibility do they have to their students? And it’s all this stuff about freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry, all this kind of stuff that you see in the mission statements of universities like Columbia and Harvard. Does that mean anything or do these actions just kind of prove that it’s all just words that they don’t really take seriously?

Marc Steiner:

I mean this is what happened. Columbia, as I said earlier, I think is just a tip of the iceberg. This was, I think in some ways attest for the Trump administration and the right wing to see how far they could go, where they could begin this process, how they could clamp down on protest. And I think that this whole issue of antisemitism, lemme take a step back for a second. I’m Jewish. I grew up in a family of pogrom and Holocaust survivors and I’ve been involved in the movement against the occupation since the late sixties, and I think they used this bogus move to call protests against the occupation as antisemitic. I mean, I think antisemitic is there, antisemites are everywhere, but the protest movements and the movement itself is not antisemitic. And I think this is an excuse they use also to divide America and to be able to justify their clamping down on campuses and Columbia was a place they started. Before we jump back into that, let me ask you a bit more about Mahmoud, Khalil and what you know now, what you know about what his situation is, what is happening legally and where he is.

Michael Arria:

Sure. So as we mentioned at the top, Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by ice agents on March 8th. These are ice agents that were in plain clothes agents who followed him into his home alongside his wife, who as you mentioned is eight months pregnant. They did not initially produce a warrant. There had been reporting initially that the ice agents themselves were a little confused because we should point out Mahmoud A is a permanent resident with a active green card. So

When his wife produced the green card, reportedly the ICE agents had called presumably their supervisor or the office and had basically said this might be some sort of mistake. He has a green card and were told that the state department had revoked the green card as well as his student visa. So he is taken into custody by the ICE agents. There was a period of about 24 hours where nobody including his attorneys were able to figure out where he was. I should point out that sadly that is not altogether shocking when you look at ice, how they operate in the history of our immigration detention system, but it is nonetheless very concerning. They couldn’t get in touch with him. A judge in New York, we eventually figured out that he was in a detention facility in Louisiana. So he’s moved thousands of miles away from his family to this detention facility.

A judge in New York blocks the deportation order that was issued by the Trump administration and calls everybody into court. This is last Wednesday. And the Trump administration, the Trump lawyers were trying to get this thrown out of the New York court. They’re essentially arguing that it has no jurisdiction, that everything should go to Louisiana where Mahmoud is being held. At that hearing, we found out that his lawyers had still had no communication with him. They had no way to get in touch with him. So the judge actually some news shortly before we got on this call today, the judge ruled that the proceedings continue, will happen, will occur in New Jersey.

Marc Steiner:

And that hasn’t happened yet.

Michael Arria:

That hasn’t happened yet. It was just announced. And the lawyers, some of his attorneys put out statements that basically said, this isn’t necessarily a cause to celebrate, but it is something of a small victory because it is a setback for the Trump administration, which is trying to have this moved. So that’s kind of where we’re at now. And as you point out, this is just the first, I mean Trump has said as soon as it happened, he celebrated on social media and said that there were many more to come. There has since been more than one Columbia, additional Columbia students that have been one who was detained, who we know very little about detained in, similar in Newark and ended up in, is currently at a facility in Texas, a detention facility. And then there’s another Indian student who actually a doctoral student architect from India who is actually set to finish a doctoral program in urban planning this May of Columbia and learned that she was being targeted by the Department of Homeland Security, so actually fled the country trying to escape this targeting by the Trump administration. So his arrest has really kicked off, I think further arrest. We’ve seen it at Columbia, but unfortunately I have no reason to believe he won’t start seeing it at other places and the administration’s being very explicit about the fact that these will continue, that this is not an isolated incident.

Marc Steiner:

You mentioned, just to put their names out there, Leqaa Kordia is the Palestinian student, the woman who was from the West Bank, and the other is Ranjani Srinivasan, the Indian National who was targeted. And you’re right, I mean because Trump now has this kind of rhetoric and history of ignoring the courts saying he can do what he wants to do.

Michael Arria:

Yes.

Marc Steiner:

It’s almost difficult to kind of put your hands around this in terms of what the potential is for the strengthening of this neofascist kind of regime in Washington, because if they win this battle, they don’t stop there, they’ll continue.

Michael Arria:

Right, that’s absolutely true. I think when Mahmoud was first attained, I think there was a belief from many people that the Trump administration would be relying on some of the anti-terrorism measures that came out of the Bush administration. For those of us who remember the immediate aftermath after nine 11, things like the Patriot Act, like many situations, and I just talked about how Biden kind of paved the way a lot of the war on terror legislation, some of the groundwork had really been done in previous administration. So the anti-terrorism bill that Bill Clinton passed in 1995 had a provision in it about material support for terrorist groups. It’s interesting that legislation came in response to the Oklahoma City bombing, and he was pressured by pro-Israel groups to really include this provision in it in order to go after Palestinian organizations. I think a lot of people, when Mahmoud was originally arrested, a lot of people assumed this was going to be the root of the Trump administration. They were going to try to prove in some capacity, although it still seemed like a legally shaky argument that student protestors had somehow supported Hamas. Hamas is of course regarded as a terrorist group by the United States government.

What we learned pretty quickly through the court documents and some people connected to this case that had spoken to places like the New York Times is that they are not relying on that type of framework. They’re relying on a provision from the Immigration and Nationality Act from back in 1952. The dark irony of this is, as you say, they’re invoking this issue of antisemitism. The last time this provision was wielded was the height of the red scare, and it was used to target Holocaust survivors who were suspected of being Soviet agents.

So it was actually used to go to target Jewish people in the United States, and there’s a provision in there that basically says if you’re an alien whose presence or activities create reasonable grounds to believe that they would potentially seriously impact the foreign policy objectives of the United States, then you can be deported. And that is very troubling. I think this is potentially a scary thing. I think that even goes beyond some of the stuff we saw on the War on Terror because in the War on Terror, we really saw these esteemed legal minds in the Bush administration kind of pour over the Constitution and try to find these little loopholes or reinterpret it in a way where they could justify all these kind of draconian measures or unconstitutional measures. In this case, the Trump administration is not even pretending that Mahmoud committed a crime. They’re not pointing to anything. We had this one comment from the White House press Atory where she said she had some photos in her office that showed he had handed out literature that was Pearl Hamas. They’ve never returned to this, which makes me think it doesn’t exist.

Marc Steiner:

Doesn’t exist.

Michael Arria:

It doesn’t exist. And even if it did, we should point out that is not illegal. It’s not grounds for Mahmoud still has protections of the First Amendment regardless of whether or not he had the green card. So we’ve seen nothing in terms of the administration coming out and claiming that he actually committed a crime. And that’s very, I think, terrifying for people who are looking at this case because it basically sets up a situation where people can be targeted and deported much in a similar way that they were during periods of time like the red scare, without having to prove that they committed any sort of crime whatsoever. It really opens up, as you say, a very dangerous can of worms going forward, and I think what happens here will potentially have massive repercussions for the next three years.

Marc Steiner:

You quote a friend of mine who I’ve done work in the media with before Jelani Cobb, who’s now the dean of journalism at Columbia saying, nobody can protect you. These are dangerous times. I mean, when I read that knowing Jelani Cobb, who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, who’s not easily intimidated, who’s got great analysis to say something like that is something that America should listen to understand what it is we face.

Michael Arria:

Yeah, absolutely. That is a quote from a New York Times article that ran about a week and a half ago.

It was in response to the fact that another professor, an adjunct professor, Stuart Carl, had basically told a group of students, stop posting on your social media about the Middle East. If you have a social media page, make sure it doesn’t have commentary about the Middle East. And a Palestinian student had basically objected to that and brought up the fact that the school was promoting censorship and kind of bowing to the Trump administration. And that’s when Cobb made the statement that you said allegedly or was reported to the times, nobody can protect you. He said, these are dangerous times. So yeah, I think it’s very ominous. I mean, to hear this kind of stuff from this institution, I think it’s worth pointing out. Also, shortly before Mahmoud was apprehended by ICE agents, the administration of Columbia sent out a statement to faculty and staff notifying them that their protocol as it relates to ICE had shifted.

And prior to that point, they had been regarded as what’s a sanctuary university, which is similar to a sanctuary city. Basically it said, ICE shows up on campus, we’re not going to assist them. They had modified that to basically say, in some circumstances we have to let ice on campus without a warrant. So we see that. We see, as I mentioned before, the suspensions of the students. Again, this is not happening in a vacuum. We’re seeing it across the university in many ways. We’re seeing this inability to, not just inability to stand up to the Trump administration, but also we see them aligned with them when it comes to this type of behavior. The in interim president Trina Armstrong had sent out an email when ICE agents showed up at campus the other day saying she was heartbroken that this had occurred, but she wanted to inform everybody. I think it’s really hard for students probably who are engaged in these protests to take those sentiments seriously when they look at the sequence of events here and they look at how Columbia and other higher education institutions have acted over the past few months.

Marc Steiner:

I’m going to read another quote here and come back to Mahmoud before we have to go. You have a quote here from Halal D’S attorney who was a scholar, international law at Yale, was placed administrative leave. And the quote is this from Eric Lee, his attorney, future Historians will treat the role of American universities as an example of collaboration, like we review the Vichy government today, the role played by the vast majority of professors is absolutely shameful. I mean, I want to talk about that for a minute before we go back to Mahmoud because I think we’re on a very dangerous precipice if this is allowed to happen. If they’re allowed to go into universities, arrest Palestinian students, arrest students who are protesting anything threatening universities with lack of taking away their federal dollars. I mean either universities find backbone and join the fight or they actually get what they want. I mean, I’m talking about the Trump government.

Michael Arria:

Yeah, it’s a very scary situation. The lawyer that you quote there, Eric Lee, he’s actually the attorney for a student at Yale Law School who has also caught up in a similar situation where she was placed on administrative leave following an AI generated article, falsely accusing her of terrorist connections. Rubio had kind of announced this was going to happen,

Marc Steiner:

Which is insane describing that for that moment. I mean, alleged not even proven.

Michael Arria:

Yeah, we are in a real dystopian, I think with some of the stuff situation, this announcement from the Trump administration that they’re going to use AI in order to determine whether or not students support Hamas. It’s really incredible. But to your point, we’re seeing this across all kinds of universities, not just Columbia. I think all eyes are on Columbia for very obvious reasons, but I think I mentioned that piece. Swarthmore College just suspended student for their involvement in the Gaza protest. They handed out 25 violations of code conduct as a result of those protests. The student who got suspended was suspended for using a bullhorn indoors, which is the first time somebody has ever been suspended for this nationally. So we’re seeing schools cracked down on this kind of dissent and stifle criticism of Israel supportive Gaza alongside this push for the Trump administration. As you say.

Before we get off this topic, I should quickly mention there are a couple lawsuits. One is a couple graduate students and a Cornell professor are actually suing the Trump administration over its push to deport students. One of those students was actually almost deported last year after he was suspended for participating in a pro-Palestine protest. The other lawsuit I think is important here is Khalil and seven other current Columbia students are suing the school and Republican out of Michigan, representative Tim Wahlberg to prevent their private disciplinary records from being handed over to the House Committee on Education and Workforce. And people probably remember this is the committee that has consistently tried to bring university presidents before Congress and really grill them on their alleged inability to crack down on antisemitism. And this’s an important part of this. I think it’s hard to know where one group begins in the other ends, but there is definitely this, you see this collaboration that precisely Eric Lee’s point in your quote, this kind of collaboration with the government pro-Israel lawmakers and these schools. And I think it’s a really important point. We’re really going to learn a lot I think, in the coming weeks and months about how that breaks down and how people are going to be able to battle against it and fight against it.

Marc Steiner:

So lemme ask you this. What have you learned since your article about Mahmoud kil and his legal situation where he is? I know you’ll probably stay on top of this. I just want to get an update from you on what’s happening to him, to Mahmoud.

Michael Arria:

Yeah, as I mentioned, so he’s hypothetically supposed to be heading back to the East Coast. I think today was obviously, as I said, something of a victory for his legal team and for him, I mean, his wife put out a statement today basically saying First step, we need to, this is a good first step, but we need to continue to demand justice from a mood. Because he was unlawfully and unjustly detained and she basically said, we’re not going to stop fighting until he is home. Your listeners have probably seen there’s been protests all across the United States in regards to this. There’s actually been a number of, I’d say pro-Israel voices even who have come out and kind of said, this violates the First Amendment. Whether or not you agree with the Palestine protestors, this should still be opposed. I think it’s a very dire situation for everyone in this country who cares about the First Amendment or anyone who wants to exercise their right to free speech.

And I think his current situation, we’ll see what happens, but as it stands, this is going to continue to progress in court. Now it’s supposed to take place in the East coast and we’ll kind of be able to see how that goes. Yesterday we saw the first statement from him. His lawyers released a statement from him where he basically explained his situation and provided some disturbing details. He wasn’t given a blanket, for instance, the first night he spent on sleeping on the cold ground and just kind of his ordeal and it detailed what he’s thinking, but it also kind of highlighted the fact that he’s committed to liberation of the Palestinian people as many people are, and they’re going to continue to fight. And Columbia has targeted him for his views. And really when you read his statement, which I encouraged people to check out, they can check it out on ccrs website

Marc Steiner:

And we will link to it

Michael Arria:

And we actually ran it on our site as well. When you read this, you really start thinking of Dr. Martin Luther King’s letter from the Birmingham Jail. This is a political prisoner. This man is being held with no charges, no crime has been identified by the administration. I think quite obviously for the simple reason that he has advocated for Gaza and he has advocated for Palestine, and he has consistently criticized the genocidal assault that has been unleashed on those people by Israel with the support of the United States the entire way through. So that’s kind of the situation we’re in right now. I’d say

Marc Steiner:

You took the words out of my brain as I read it just a little bit ago, thinking about King’s letter from the Birmingham Jail that I think that he’s this eloquent spokesman, stuck in jail wife about to give birth, and we’re going to stay on top of what happened to Mahmoud Khalil and we’ll stay on top of that and keep abreast of what’s happened to him and what you can do to support his release and his freedom and to keep that going. This is a very dangerous moment we’re living in and we have to be really aware, careful, and on top of these issues. So we fight for our democracy and keep this alive. And Michael, want to thank you so much for your work and your writing, and we’re going to link to your article and your other work as well. Thank you so much for joining us today and let’s keep in contact and keep this conversation going and free Mahmoud.

Michael Arria:

Of course. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Marc Steiner:

Thank you. Once again, thank you to Michael Arria for joining us today. And thanks to David Hebden for the program and audio editor, Alina Nehlich and producer Rosette Sewali for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Michael Arria for joining us today. And so for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Marc Steiner.

This story originally appeared in Truthout on Mar. 24, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

Israeli forces killed two Palestinian journalists in Gaza on Monday in separate strikes, bringing the total number of Palestinian journalists killed to at least 208 since October 7, 2023, according to a count by Gaza officials.

Mohammad Mansour, a correspondent for Palestine Today, was killed along with his wife and child when Israel struck his home in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza. Al Jazeera reported that Israel deliberately targeted Mansour in the attack.

Shortly after, Israeli forces killed Hossam Shabat with a targeted airstrike while he was driving his car in Beit Lahiya, local sources reported. Shabat, who was 23 years old, had become well-known for his reports from northern Gaza amid Israel’s total siege on the region. He was a contributor to U.S. outlet Drop Site News and a reporter for Al Jazeera Mubasher.

Shabat’s friends posted a message written by the young journalist that he requested to be published on social media in the event of his death.

“If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed — most likely targeted — by the Israeli occupation forces,” he said. “When this all began, I was only 21 years old — a college student with dreams like anyone else. For the past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury.”

“By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to report the truth, and now, I am finally at rest — something I haven’t known in the past 18 months,” he wrote. “I did all this because I believe in the Palestinian cause. I believe this land is ours, and it has been the highest honor of my life to die defending it and serving its people.”

Drop Site condemned the attack in a statement. “Drop Site News holds Israel and the U.S. responsible for killing Hossam,” the outlet said. “More than 200 of our Palestinian media colleagues have been killed by Israel — supplied with weapons and given blanket impunity by most Western governments — over the past seventeen months.”

Fellow journalists in Gaza mourned Shabat’s death. “I no longer have words,” said Gaza journalist Abubaker Abed, who was a colleague of Shabat at Drop Site. “This is just an incalculable loss. This is unbearable.”

Shabat, like Abed and many other young people in Gaza, became a war journalist when the genocide began despite having other aspirations. Last year, he thanked university students across the world for protesting for Gaza, noting that he was in his third year in college when the genocide began on October 7, 2023.

“I’ll never be able to finish my studies because Israeli occupation forces bombed my university and every other university in Gaza,” he wrote.

His life was upended as he went out to report on Israel’s genocide, separating from his family in order to show the world the barbarity of the killings.

In October 2024, Israeli authorities issued a list of journalists it was seemingly targeting for assassination, accusing them, without evidence, as being affiliated with “Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist” groups. Shabat, who was one of the only journalists left in north Gaza at the time, was on that list. He had already survived another targeted attack in November, when Israeli forces injured him in an apparent “double tap” strike on a house in northern Gaza.

Despite the November attack and concerns he was being hunted by Israeli forces for his work, Shabat pledged to continue reporting.

Just a month ago, amid the ceasefire, Shabat posted a video of him and his mother being reunited after 492 days, having been separated due to Israel’s evacuation orders.

"Time now is measured not in minutes, but in lifetimes of pain and tears. With every passing moment the anxiety and tension of the people here grows, as they wonder whether they will stay alive long enough for the fire to cease," wrote Hossam Shabat in one of his stories for us.

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) March 24, 2025

Last week, shortly after Israeli authorities resumed their heavy bombing of Gaza despite the ceasefire agreement, Shabat posted a video of him once again putting on his flak jacket and helmet marked “press.”

“I thought it was over and I’d finally get some rest, but the genocide is back in full force, and I’m back on the front lines,” he said.

Shabat had continually pleaded for the world to intervene and end the genocide.

“On October 17th, 2023, Israel bombed Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza,” Shabat wrote in his final Instagram reel. “Israel denied it. Western media believed it. And the bombing continued as ‘Israel investigated itself.’ UN and NGO investigations proved that Israel indeed did it. No government acted. No condemnations.”

“So Israel continued bombing, besieging and targeting EVERY SINGLE HOSPITAL in Gaza,” he continued. “Eighteen months of genocide and impunity meant that they didn’t have to deny bombing hospitals anymore. No one cares… They say the magic H word and war crimes are justified.”

Even posthumously, Shabat pled for Palestinian rights.

“I ask you now: do not stop speaking about Gaza,” the journalist wrote in his final message. “Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting, keep telling our stories — until Palestine is free.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Sharon Zhang.

Israel shattered the ceasefire in Gaza in the early hours of March 18 with a massive series of airstrikes targeting Palestinian civilians living in tents inside the designated “safe zones” of the strip. In a single night, more than 400 people were killed, and cities across the world have responded with a new wave of protests. Amid this calamity, Chuck Schumer has quietly cancelled the tour for his newest book, Antisemitism in America: A Warning. In spite of this, Baltimore-based organizers with Jewish Voice for Peace went ahead with a planned protest of Schumer’s cancelled event in their city, raising up a message of Jewish solidarity with Palestinians and a rejection of Zionism. Jaisal Noor reports from Baltimore.

Pre/Post-production: Jaisal Noor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Jaisal Noor:

Jewish peace activists and their allies rallied in Baltimore on March 17th, just hours after New York Senator Chuck Schumer abruptly canceled his book talk amid planned protests. The demonstration led by the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace was meant to challenge the top Senate Democrat stance on Israel and assert that criticizing Israel’s genocide in Gaza is not anti-Semitic.

Nikki Morse:

As it turns out, Chuck Schumer canceled the event, but we didn’t feel like we should cancel ours because the information we wanted to share with each other, with our community, it’s still relevant. It was relevant decades ago, and it is relevant right now because we have to understand what anti-Semitism is and what it isn’t, if we’re going to stop it, and if we’re going to fight other forms of oppression.

Zackary Berger:

The right wing is trying to drive a wedge into the Jewish community and trying to use charges of anti-Semitism to cover up its anti-democratic and frankly, fascistic tendencies. And the fact that Senator Schumer is aligning with those groups, even implicitly, is very disappointing.

Jaisal Noor:

Schumer’s also facing amounting backlash for voting for the Republican budget bill instead of doing more to fight the GOP’s cuts on vital government services.

Nikki Morse:

We’re a group of people that include LGBTQ folks, trans folks, queer folks, people of color, people of low income, unhoused folks. We have people who are undocumented, who are threatened by deportation. These are all the things that we need our leaders to be fighting

Jaisal Noor:

Many voiced support for Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student and spokesperson for the pro-Palestine protest on campus who is facing deportation by the Trump administration despite being a green card holder and not being charged with a crime. Activists call it a blatant attempt to silence dissent.

Nikki Morse:

In Jewish Voice for Peace, we see that as a sign of the threat to all of us. The chant that we’ve been saying tonight is “Come for one, face us all. Free Mahmoud, free us all,” because we see our fates as intimately intertwined with the fate of someone like Mahmoud Khalil.

Jaisal Noor:

For The Real News, I’m Jaisal Noor in Baltimore.

Son of Nun [singing]:

From the IDF for divest.

Divest.

Divest.

Divest.

Divest and let’s lay apartheid to rest.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Jaisal Noor.

My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.

Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn’t the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn’t the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing.

Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities.

On March 8, I was taken by DHS agents who refused to provide a warrant, and accosted my wife and me as we returned from dinner. By now, the footage of that night has been made public. Before I knew what was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into an unmarked car. At that moment, my only concern was for Noor’s safety. I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side. DHS would not tell me anything for hours — I did not know the cause of my arrest or if I was facing immediate deportation. At 26 Federal Plaza, I slept on the cold floor. In the early morning hours, agents transported me to another facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, I slept on the ground and was refused a blanket despite my request.

My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night. With January’s ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.

I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba. I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland. But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel’s use of administrative detention — imprisonment without trial or charge — to strip Palestinians of their rights. I think of our friend Omar Khatib, who was incarcerated without charge or trial by Israel as he returned home from travel. I think of Gaza hospital director and pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who was taken captive by the Israeli military on December 27 and remains in an Israeli torture camp today. For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace.

I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear. My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the U.S. has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention. For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand U.S. laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities. That is precisely why I am being targeted.

While I await legal decisions that hold the futures of my wife and child in the balance, those who enabled my targeting remain comfortably at Columbia University. Presidents Shafik, Armstrong, and Dean Yarhi-Milo laid the groundwork for the U.S. government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns — based on racism and disinformation — to go unchecked.Columbia targeted me for my activism, creating a new authoritarian disciplinary office to bypass due process and silence students criticizing Israel. Columbia surrendered to federal pressure by disclosing student records to Congress and yielding to the Trump administration’s latest threats. My arrest, the expulsion or suspension of at least 22 Columbia students — some stripped of their B.A. degrees just weeks before graduation — and the expulsion of SWC President Grant Miner on the eve of contract negotiations, are clear examples.

If anything, my detention is a testament to the strength of the student movement in shifting public opinion toward Palestinian liberation. Students have long been at the forefront of change — leading the charge against the Vietnam War, standing on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, and driving the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Today, too, even if the public has yet to fully grasp it, it is students who steer us toward truth and justice.

The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs. In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.

Knowing fully that this moment transcends my individual circumstances, I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Mahmoud Khalil.

This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on Mar. 18, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

Israel resumed heavy airstrikes across the Gaza Strip after two weeks of systematic Israeli violations of the terms of the ceasefire and the stalling of negotiations over the agreement’s second phase. The Israeli army began bombing numerous targets in the Gaza Strip early on Tuesday past midnight, including civilian homes and tents for the displaced. As of the time of writing, the Ministry of Health in Gaza reports that over 404 people have been killed in Gaza and 562 were injured in multiple massacres carried out by Israeli forces since the early morning hours. According to the Health Ministry, among the slain are 174 children, 89 women, and 32 seniors.

After nearly two months of relative calm, the airstrikes resumed overnight without prior warning or evacuation orders, with local sources reporting that bombs dropped over Gaza City, northern Gaza, Khan Younis, Rafah, al-Bureij, and several other parts of the Strip.

Familiar scenes of mass killing returned to Gaza as hundreds of families gathered at hospitals throughout the Strip, carrying the remains of their loved ones.

“We were sleeping when suddenly a volcano descended on my children’s heads,” Muhammad al-Sakani, 42, told Mondoweiss in front of the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, standing over the bodies of his two slain children. “This is the bank of targets of Netanyahu, Trump, and all the other cowards.” 

“They are not to blame,” he added. “Their only crime is that our enemy is a criminal who assassinates children and women as they sleep.”

The Israeli military announced that it had carried out extensive strikes on Hamas targets in Gaza, adding that it was “prepared to continue attacks against Hamas leaders and infrastructure in Gaza for as long as necessary.” The army said that the attack would expand beyond airstrikes, signaling the likelihood of the return of a ground invasion. After the airstrikes had already begun and claimed hundreds of casualties, the Israeli military spokesperson warned several areas, such as Beit Hanoun and the Khuza’a and Abasan areas in Khan Younis, that they needed to be evacuated.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Office announced in a statement that the Prime Minister had instructed the army to “take strong action” against Hamas and that Israel would act “with increased military might from now on.” 

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said the resumed fighting was due to  “Hamas’s refusal” to release Israeli captives and “its threats to harm” Israeli soldiers and communities near Gaza. Katz added that Israel would not stop fighting until all captives were returned and “all the war’s aims” were achieved.

In an interview with Fox News, White House spokesperson Caroline Leavitt said that “the Trump administration and the White House were consulted by the Israelis on their attacks in Gaza tonight.” 

“President Trump has made it absolutely clear that Hamas, the Houthis, Iran, and all those who seek to spread terror, not only against Israel but also against the United States, will pay a price for their actions,” Leavitt added.

Hamas remains committed to implementing ceasefire

Despite the Israeli aggression, Hamas continues to call on the international community to intervene and put an end to the bombing taking place in Gaza, reaffirming the movement’s commitment to completing the ceasefire deal.

Hamas spokesperson Abdul Latif al-Qanou told Mondoweiss that Israel was “resuming its war of genocide and committing dozens of massacres against our people,” adding that Israel’s “prior coordination with the American administration confirms [U.S.] partnership in the war of extermination against our people.”

Al-Qanou stressed that Netanyahu resumed the war on Gaza to escape his internal crises and impose new negotiating conditions on the Palestinian resistance, referencing Netanyahu’s battle against corruption charges and his attempts to revive his right-wing government coalition. Qanou pointed out that Hamas adhered to all the terms of the ceasefire agreement and remains keen on moving on to its second phase.

“All the mediators are aware of Hamas’s commitment to the terms of the agreement, despite Netanyahu’s procrastination,” Qanou added. “His reversal requires them to reveal this to the world.”

The Israeli raids have killed several Hamas leaders across Gaza, including those holding civilian positions, such as Ayman Abu Teir, director of the nutrition department at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, who was assassinated by Israel in his home in Khan Younis along with 13 members of his family. 

Hamas mourned several of its leaders, including Issam al-Da’alis, head of Government Operations in the Gaza Strip, Ahmad al-Hatta, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Justice, Major General Mahmoud Abu Watfa, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Interior, and Major General Bahjat Abu Sultan, Director-General of the Internal Security Service.

Local media sources affiliated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) also revealed that the military spokesperson of the PIJ’s armed wing, the al-Quds Brigades, was killed in an Israeli airstrike. Known by his nom de guerre, “Abu Hamza,” the spokesperson’s real name was revealed to be Naji Abu Saif, according to media reports. The PIJ did not officially confirm the news as of the time of writing. 

Systematic Israeli ceasefire violations

Since the signing of the ceasefire agreement on January 17, which stipulated three consecutive 42-day phases under Egyptian, Qatari, and American sponsorship, Hamas has largely adhered to the terms of the first phase, while Israel has systematically violated it by suspending the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza and progressively resuming the targeting and killing of civilians in Gaza’s border areas.

Hamas released 33 Israeli captives during the first phase as stipulated in the agreement, but Israel did not comply with its end of the deal, including the delay or prevention of the entry of reconstruction material, tents, and prefabricated mobile homes. More importantly, Israel has consistently attempted to walk back its commitments to engage in talks over the permanent end of the war and the full withdrawal of its forces from Gaza. Israel was supposed to withdraw from the Philadelphi corridor along the Egyptian border during the first phase of the ceasefire. It was also supposed to have entered into talks over the second phase of the deal in mid-February, ahead of the end of the first phase. Israel did neither, instead shifting the goalposts for the agreement by insisting that Hamas continue to release more Israeli captives without entering into negotiations over withdrawing or ending the war.

In early March, Israeli officials threatened to completely close the crossings and prevent food, medicine, water, and electricity from reaching Gaza if more Israeli captives weren’t released. It implemented these threats during the past two weeks. Moreover, without announcing the resumption of the war, Israel resumed bombarding various areas throughout Gaza starting in March, resulting in the death of dozens of Palestinian civilians. In the two days before the official resumption of the war, Israeli airstrikes killed more than 15 people across Gaza.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Tareq S. Hajjaj.

This story originally appeared in Truthout on Mar. 11, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

A group of over a dozen lawmakers is demanding the “immediate” release of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil after his likely illegal arrest and threat of deportation by the Trump administration this week.

The House members, led by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), raised alarm about the threat to free speech raised by Khalil’s detention, saying that his arrest violates immigration laws and effectively criminalizes protest.

“Mahmoud Khalil must be freed from DHS custody immediately. He is a political prisoner, wrongfully and unlawfully detained, who deserves to be at home in New York preparing for the birth of his first child,” the lawmakers wrote. “Universities throughout the country must protect their students from this vile assault on free thought and expression, and [the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)] must immediately refrain from any further illegal arrests targeting constitutionally protected speech and activity.”

The arrest violated Khalil’s constitutional rights to freedom of speech and due process, the lawmakers said.

The letter was signed by 14 Democrats in the House: Representatives André Carson (Indiana) Jasmine Crockett (Texas), Al Green (Texas), Summer Lee (Pennsylvania), Jim McGovern (Massachusetts), Gwen Moore (Wisconsin), Ilhan Omar (Minnesota), Mark Pocan (Wisconsin), Ayanna Pressley (Massachusetts), Lateefah Simon (California), Delia Ramirez (Illinois), Nydia Velázquez (New York) and Nikema Williams (Georgia).

The case has been met with silence by other Democratic leaders like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who represents the state where the arrest happened and is a fervent Zionist. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, also from New York, has also refused to denounce the arrest.

On Saturday night, DHS officers detained Khalil at his home in Columbia University student housing, citing his role in organizing pro-Palestine protests at the university last year. The Trump administration has threatened to revoke Khalil’s green card and deport him for his activism — which experts say is illegal and a major overstep of the administration’s power.

Federal agents seemingly covertly transported Khalil, who is Palestinian, to a private jail in Louisiana without telling his wife, who is eight months pregnant. On Monday night, a federal judge temporarily blocked the planned deportation of the activist, pending more legal action.

“Khalil has not been charged or convicted of any crime,” the lawmakers said. “As the Trump administration proudly admits, he was targeted solely for his activism and organizing as a student leader and negotiator for the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on Columbia University campus, protesting the Israeli government’s brutal assault on the Palestinian people in Gaza and his university’s complicity in this oppression.”

“We must be extremely clear: this is an attempt to criminalize political protest and is a direct assault on the freedom of speech of everyone in this country,” they went on. “Khalil’s arrest is an act of anti-Palestinian racism intended to silence the Palestine solidarity movement in this country, but this lawless abuse of power and political repression is a threat to all Americans.”

Khalil’s detention has been widely denounced by advocates for Palestinian rights and civil society organizations.

“This arrest is unprecedented, illegal, and un-American. The federal government is claiming the authority to deport people with deep ties to the U.S. and revoke their green cards for advocating positions that the government opposes,” said Ben Wizner, who heads the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “To be clear: The First Amendment protects everyone in the U.S. The government’s actions are obviously intended to intimidate and chill speech on one side of a public debate.”

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Sharon Zhang.

This article was produced for ProPublica's Local Reporting Network in partnership with KYUK and NPR's Station Investigations Team, which supports local investigative journalism. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Nearly two dozen children in the tiny village of Sleetmute, Alaska, arrive for school each morning to a small brown building that is on the verge of collapse.

Every year for the past 19 years, the local school district has asked the state for money to help repair a leaky roof. But again and again, the state said no. Over time, water ran down into the building, causing the supporting beams to rot. A windowpane cracked under pressure as heavy snow and ice built up on the roof each winter. Eventually, an entire wall started to buckle, leaving a gaping hole in the exterior siding.

In 2021, an architect concluded that the school, which primarily serves Alaska Native students, “should be condemned as it is unsafe for occupancy.”

The following year, Taylor Hayden, a resident who helps with school maintenance, opened a hatch in the floor to fix a heating problem and discovered a pool of water under the building, where years of rain and snowmelt had reduced several concrete footings to rubble.

“Just like someone took a jackhammer to it,” Hayden said.

The Sleetmute school, nestled on the upper reaches of the Kuskokwim River, amid the spruce and birch forest of Alaska’s Interior, has few options. Like many schools in Alaska, it’s owned by the state, which is required by law to pay for construction and maintenance projects.

Yet over the past 25 years, state officials have largely ignored hundreds of requests by rural school districts to fix the problems that have left public schools across Alaska crumbling, according to an investigation by KYUK and ProPublica.

Local school districts are generally responsible for building and maintaining public schools in the United States and largely pay for those projects with property taxes. But in Alaska, the state owns just under half of the 128 schools in its rural districts, a KYUK and ProPublica review of deeds and other documents found. These sparsely populated areas rely almost entirely on the state to finance school facilities because they serve unincorporated communities that have no tax base.

To get help for repairs, school districts are required to apply for funding each year, and then the state compiles a priority list. Since 1998, at least 135 rural school projects have waited for state funding for five years or more, an analysis of data from Alaska’s Department of Education and Early Development shows. Thirty-three of those projects have languished on the state’s funding list for more than a decade.

The state’s Indigenous children suffer the greatest consequences because most rural school districts are predominantly Alaska Native — a population that was long forced to attend separate and unequal schools.

State education Commissioner Deena Bishop acknowledged that the state’s capital improvement program isn’t working. But she said her department is limited by state lawmakers’ funding decisions.

Rep. Bryce Edgmon, an Alaska Native and speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives, also said the program isn’t working.

“I think the evidence speaks for itself,” he said after touring the Sleetmute school in October. “These bright young children show up every morning to go to school in a building that’s not fit for even anything but being ready to be demolished.”

Edgmon, who co-chaired the House Finance Committee for the past two years, conceded he and other lawmakers could have done more and promised to “raise some Cain” in the state Capitol. This year’s legislative session has seen a lot of debate about education funding. Alaska has no statewide income or sales tax and instead relies on oil revenue, which has declined in recent years.

As rural school districts wait for funding, the buildings continue to deteriorate, posing public health and safety risks to students, teachers and staff. Over the past year, KYUK and ProPublica crawled under buildings and climbed into attics in schools across the state and found black mold, bat guano and a pool of raw sewage — health hazards that can cause respiratory problems, headaches and fatigue. The conditions exacerbate the risks for Alaska Natives, who already face some of the highest rates of chronic illness in the nation.

In Venetie, a village 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle, exposed electrical wiring hangs close to flammable insulation. Thorne Bay, on an island in Southeast Alaska, has requested money to replace the fire sprinklers 17 times, without success. And in the Bering Sea coastal village of Newtok, the school’s pipes froze and broke, so for most of the last school year, kids rode a four-wheeler, known as the “bathroom bus,” twice a day to relieve themselves at home.

After Hayden’s discovery in Sleetmute, the portion of the building that posed the most serious safety risk, which includes the wood shop, the boys’ bathroom and the gym, was closed. Now, kids ranging in age from 4 to 17 are confined to three classrooms and an atrium lined with portraits of the community’s Yup’ik and Athabascan elders.

“There’s not much we can do anymore,” said Neal Sanford, 17, who misses playing basketball and learning carpentry and woodworking. He left the village of fewer than 100 people after his sophomore year last spring to attend a state-run boarding school more than 800 miles away.

In October, it was quiet outside the Jack Egnaty Sr. School in Sleetmute, save for a dog that barked now and then and the distant revving of a four-wheeler. The air smelled of wood smoke and two-stroke engine exhaust. Without a gym to play in, the kids bundled up for recess as temperatures dipped below freezing.

“Cold hands,” said fourth grader Loretta Sakar, as she shook out her fingers after crossing the monkey bars. Her squeals and giggles echoed across the playground while other kids played soccer or spun on a tire swing.

Watch video ➜

Andrea John, a single mom whose three kids, including Loretta, go to the Sleetmute school, said the state wouldn’t treat Alaska’s urban kids this way.

“They should have helped us when we needed help in the beginning, not wait 20 years,” she said. “They are choosing to look the other way and say the hell with us.”

When Alaska became a state in 1959, its constitution promised a public school system “open to all children of the State.” But for decades, it was far from that. Many Indigenous children attended schools owned and operated by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Alaska’s plan was to eventually take over those schools, but the state repeatedly argued it didn’t have enough money to pay for them. The development of Alaska’s oil industry, starting in the 1960s, brought in revenue for education, but state officials noted that BIA schools were in bad shape and insisted the federal government fix them before the state assumed responsibility.

Many Alaska children “go to school in buildings that should be condemned as fire traps or unsafe dwellings,” then-U.S. Sen. Mike Gravel said during a 1971 congressional hearing. It wasn’t until well into the 1980s that all BIA schools were transferred to the state.

Yet even as the state began to take over, education remained inequitable for Alaska Natives. Many small villages didn’t have high schools, so students had to attend boarding schools or receive and submit assignments by mail. A group of those students sued the state in the 1970s to change that. Known as the Molly Hootch case, the suit resulted in a consent decree that forced the state to build 126 new schools in rural communities.

In the early 1990s, the Alaska Legislature started a program to fund school construction and major maintenance projects. Schools districts would apply for grants, and the state education department would rank projects based on need. But the Legislature provided little money for the need-based program. Instead, a small group of powerful lawmakers allocated funding to projects in their own districts, favoring urban areas.

In 1997, a group of Alaska Native parents sued the state, arguing that the funding system violated Alaska’s constitution and the federal Civil Rights Act. State Superior Court Judge John Reese agreed.

“Because of the funding system, rural schools are not getting the money they need to maintain their schools,” he wrote in a 1999 order. “Deficiencies include roofs falling in, no drinkable water, sewage backing up, and enrollment up to 187% of capacity. Some rural schools have been at the top of the priority list for a number of years, yet have received no funding.”

In another order, he called the state’s system “arbitrary, inadequate and racially discriminatory,” and said the state had a responsibility to provide education to Alaska Native children “even if it costs more in the rural areas.”

A 2011 consent decree and settlement required the state to build five new rural schools, and the Legislature passed a bill that was supposed to more equitably allocate funds to rural districts.

Yet more than a decade later, the problems pointed out by Reese persist. Every year, rural school districts make more than 100 requests, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. But the Legislature funds only a tiny fraction of those projects. In five of the last 11 years, it has approved fewer than five requests.

An analysis by KYUK and ProPublica shows that Alaska’s education department has received 1,789 funding proposals from rural school districts since 1998. But only 14% of them have received funding. This year, requests from rural school districts to the state’s construction and maintenance program stand at $478 million.

Edgmon acknowledged that the Legislature’s funding decisions don’t come close to meeting the needs of Alaska’s rural public schools. “We have not upheld our constitutional duty to provide that quality of education that the courts have said time and again we’re bound to be providing,” he said.

When pressed on why funding is so hard to secure, state education commissioner Bishop told KYUK last year that rural schools were good for the community. “But, at the same token, it’s unsustainable to have $50 million go to 10 students,” she said. “I mean, think about the unsustainability of that in the long run.”

Allowing projects to sit on a waitlist for years also means they can become more expensive over time. The Kuspuk School District’s first request to repair Sleetmute’s school was for just over $411,000 in 2007. By 2024, the request had climbed to $1.6 million — more than twice the original cost, even after adjusting for inflation.

“To me that’s neglectful,” Kuspuk Superintendent Madeline Aguillard said. “Our cries for help haven’t been heard.”

Roughly 200 miles southwest, the coastal village of Quinhagak waited 15 years for a renovation and addition to its Kuinerrarmiut Elitnaurviat School that would allow it to meet the state’s space requirements. The school serves 200 students, more than twice the number it was designed for.

In addition to its fire sprinklers, Thorne Bay in the Southeast Island School District has asked the state 18 times to replace a pair of aging underground heating-fuel tanks that the district worries could start to leak. Superintendent Rod Morrison, whose district spans an area of Alaska’s southern archipelago that’s roughly the size of Connecticut, said his district’s list of maintenance needs is seemingly endless.

“Education is supposed to be the big equalizer,” said Morrison. “It is not equal in the state of Alaska.”

Rural school district officials say, given their scarce resources, the state’s construction and maintenance program creates burdens. The application for funding comes with a 37-page guidance document, loaded with references to state statute and administrative code. It also requires districts to include a six-year capital improvement plan. Meeting these requirements can be challenging in rural school districts, where administrative turnover is high and staffing is limited.

To increase the likelihood that a project gets funded, some rural superintendents say they feel pressure to provide engineering inspections or site condition surveys with their applications.

“There’s only a few needles that you can move,” said David Landis of the Southeast Regional Resource Center, a nonprofit that, among other things, helps school districts compile their applications for a fee.

Landis said inspections and surveys are likely to increase the ranking for a project proposal, but “those documents are really foundational and expensive. They might very well be over $100,000.”

The Kuspuk School District has spent more than $200,000 since 2021 to beef up its applications for the Sleetmute school, Aguillard said. It’s also paid tens of thousands of dollars to a lobbyist to persuade legislators to increase maintenance funding for schools the state itself owns.

Some school districts said they simply can’t afford such costs. “We don’t have that ability,” said Morrison of the Southeast Island School District. “We’d have to cut a teacher or two to make that happen.”

Last summer, Sleetmute got some good news. After ignoring 19 requests, the state had finally approved its roof repair after Alaska legislators passed a bill that boosted school maintenance and construction funding to its highest level in more than a decade.

But it’s “too little, too late,” Aguillard said. The building’s condition has deteriorated so much that Sleetmute now needs a new school.

As a result, the district has asked if it could use the roof repair money to shore up the school to prevent a collapse, to bring in modular classrooms or to have school in another community building. But, Aguillard said, Alaska’s education department has been reluctant to approve any of those options. Instead, she said, the department made a baffling request: It asked for proof that the state had never paid to repair Sleetmute’s leaking roof — something clearly outlined in state records — and that the neglect had caused the additional damage.

In an email, the education department wrote, “This step was taken to ensure proper use of funds and to understand the full scope of work required.”

Watch video ➜

A KYUK and ProPublica analysis found that in at least 20 cases, funding requests waited for so long that cheaper repairs morphed into proposals to tear down and replace schools. Those schools that were rebuilt cost the state tens of millions of dollars more than the initial estimates.

The Auntie Mary Nicoli Elementary School project in Aniak, about 100 miles downriver from Sleetmute, started as a $9.5 million renovation in 2007. But after waiting 11 years, the state spent $18.6 million to replace it in 2018.

A few districts are still waiting for schools they say need to be replaced. The first request for the Johnnie John Sr. School project in Crooked Creek, 40 miles downriver from Sleetmute, in 1998 was for a $4.8 million addition. But by 2009, the district was asking for a $19 million replacement. The Legislature failed to fund the project even after the district pared down its request. Unable to secure funding for a new school, the district is now trying to stretch $1.9 million it received from the state last year to make the most necessary repairs: upgrades to heating and electrical systems and the removal of hazardous materials.

In most of Alaska’s rural communities, life often requires making do with what’s available: People keep piles of old machinery in their yards to mine for parts. In villages that aren’t on the road system, almost everything is either shipped in by barge or delivered by air. In Sleetmute, a 24-pack of soda costs $54 — about four times the price in the Lower 48.

Watch video ➜

This is also why construction projects are extremely expensive: Skilled workers have to be flown in, housed and fed. Heavy equipment has to zigzag up the Kuskokwim River, which is frozen for half the year. The school district was hoping to reduce costs by sharing machinery with a project to upgrade the community’s runway. But when that project wrapped up this fall, the state transportation department shipped its equipment out of Sleetmute.

So the school is left to make do. Everyone has to share one bathroom. A manila folder hangs from a pink thread on the door. It reads “Boys” on one side and “Girls” on the other to indicate whose turn it is.

Sleetmute’s school is also full of black mold that covers the buckling wall in the wood shop, a gear closet in the gym and a huge section of drywall in the ceiling just above the door to the kitchen.

This fall the community discovered another problem. Sheree Smith, who has taught in Sleetmute for 12 years, found herself swinging a tennis racket at a bat that swooped through her classroom as her middle and high school students sat reading quietly. The bats live above the gym bleachers in a small utility closet, where the floor is covered in guano.

Without a gym, students miss out on events that connect the school to both the community and the outside world. Every year, the Sleetmute school would host basketball tournaments and movie nights to raise money for field trips to places like Anchorage and Washington, D.C. — a luxury for many families in Sleetmute and other rural communities in Alaska. The students “feel the pain of that, like just not having the extra opportunities,” said Angela Hayden, Sleetmute’s lead teacher.

Over the holiday break, the school district reinforced the back end of the building with floor-to-ceiling supports to keep the woodshop from collapsing.

But it’s only a temporary fix. The roof has been leaking since Hayden started teaching there 17 years ago.

“When I come in the building, especially after a lot of rain or a lot of snow,” she said, “I just think, ‘OK, what am I going to have to deal with before I can deal with my classroom?’”

If you have information about school conditions in Alaska, contact Emily Schwing at emilyschwing@gmail.com.

Emily Schwing reported this story while participating in the University of Southern California, Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship. She also received support from the Center’s Fund for Reporting on Child Well-being and its Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Emily Schwing, KYUK.

As a fragile ceasefire falters in Gaza, millions of displaced Palestinians are still without adequate shelter. Exposure and hypothermia now present grave threats to people’s survival. The Real News reports from the Gaza Strip.

Producer: Belal Awad, Leo Erhardt
Videographer: Ruwaida Amer, Mahmoud Al Mashharawi
Video Editor: Leo Erhardt

Transcript

RANIA HAMD AL-HISI 

The cold. What can I say? The situation is dire. 

It’s very cold. Look, we’re living on the street. We’re living on a street. This entire campsite is suffering from the cold. Me? I am not a child, and I’m suffering from the cold. I’m not a child. God help the children. 

In the morning I try to wash, clean, or do something, and I can’t because of the severity of the cold. We’re literally living on a street. What is protecting us? A sheet. 

The children are exhausted, and we’re also exhausted. There is no immunity. We have no immune defenses at all. No nutrition, no heating, nothing. We’re exhausted. 

The whole camp is suffering; they have no electricity. No blankets, no sheets. Nothing to keep the children warm. This little girl is always wheezing from the intense cold. We’ve taken her to the doctor a hundred times since we moved to the tents. They don’t know what’s wrong. Her stomach hurts. Every time she eats, her stomach hurts her. From what? The cold. 

We’re not handling the cold, so how can the children? I witnessed something with our neighbor that I still can’t process. The sight of him holding his daughter and she’s dead. The whole camp now fears for the children. 

She’s a child. Our neighbors have a small child who’s seven months old. My niece is a child, my granddaughter is a child. We’re scared for them. My granddaughter developed a respiratory illness. This one is wheezing. Our neighbor, Um Wissam, had an attack. I have developed chest pains. I swear to you, I’ve been suffering for two months with chest and back pains. 

And our neighbor’s daughter, Sila… She died from the cold. We heard her mother. I carried her when she was dead. The girl, she was like ice. Ice. When I found her father carrying her, and her mother was on the floor… I carried the girl, I was the first to get to them, I found blood coming from her mouth. It was as if she had come out of a freezer. Frozen solid. I told them, “This girl has died from the cold.” 

MAHMOOD AL-FASIHI 

The night that Sila died was extremely cold. We’re living on the coast. At night it’s unnaturally cold. We adults couldn’t tolerate the cold that night when Sila died. Sila was perfectly normal. She didn’t suffer from any health problems. She breastfed three times that night. The final feeding was at 3:00 a.m. When we tried to wake her at 7:00 a.m. to feed her, we found her blue from the severity of the cold, and her heart had stopped. 

AFFAF HUSAIN ABU-AWILI 

Most of the cases we’re getting right now are called ‘cold injury.’ They are the result of severe cold and the change of season. These cases are usually less than a month old, a week, or two days old. The child arrives already frozen. We call it ‘cold injury’—it means a

deceased child. Of course, all of this is a result of the weather and the cold. Some can’t tolerate the cold. This environment causes respiratory problems. 

The scene is very difficult, the father carrying the body, people screaming. A terrible situation, it’s indescribable. A small child, loved by his family, and the mum awakes and finds him like that, dead. I mean, a terrible situation that defies description. 

Honestly, the situation is getting worse. Especially when it comes to respiratory inflammation in children and these sudden deaths, it’s increased a lot. Of course, it’s a result of the way people are living. Living in tents, lack of medicine, lack of warm clothing. 

MAHMOOD AL-FASIHI 

I have to collect plastic from the street to make a fire for my children. I don’t have gas, I don’t have anything. No basics of life, no heating. At night when it’s cold, my children have to huddle together from the cold. As much as I wrap my children, they’re still cold because of the severity of the cold. And nothing is available, the necessities of life are zero here. 

The severe cold and lack of nutrition have created a lot of problems for the children. They’ve developed skin problems, they’ve developed a lot of things. My children wake up in the middle of the night scared of bombs. Of the terror we are living in. We’re living in terror. We adults have developed mental health issues from the extreme pressure we’re experiencing. We have developed… what can I say? We’re exhausted. Seriously. We’re exhausted from the war. 

RANIA HAMD AL-HISI 

When it rains, the whole place swims. When it rained last time, everyone had to leave. Look, you can see. There are no covers, or anything, and no one has given us anything. I have a sister, Um Ahmed, who recently gave birth. Where does the baby sleep? She’s made a bed for him from cardboard. On cardboard! Fearing that he falls into the water. The boy is two months old. 

I swear to God, the thing that scares me the most. When it’s nighttime, I start praying: “Oh God, Oh God.” “Oh God please let us get through this night. God, don’t let it rain, please God.” God, please don’t let the people drown from the rain. 

All night and the morning too, we can’t sleep because of the bombs. And the rain. The night that it rained, I swear to God I suffered. When the rain comes, it’s not about me—I can tolerate it. It’s the children. I can tolerate it. But the children? 

Where’s the world? Where are the Arab people to see us? Would they like their kids to go through this? Now our children wake up from sleep, they’re thinking about water, they collect pieces of paper to help their moms make a fire, they’re thinking about the soup kitchen. That’s it. That’s our children. 

I swear to God, what is happening to us—I hope happens to everyone who isn’t seeing or hearing us. I swear to God, I’m talking to you and my fingers are frayed from the cold. So

what about the children? What about the kids, what should they do? I swear to God all they think about is the soup kitchen: “The soup kitchen is here! The soup kitchen is gone!” 

This girl, I’m telling you, she’s wheezing the whole night. I wake up and even to make her a herbal tea, we struggle. We don’t have gas or anything. I swear to God, you suffer so much just to make a fire.

This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Belal Awad, Leo Erhadt and Ruwaida Amer.

Israel’s security cabinet has approved a long-awaited ceasefire deal with Hamas. If finalized, the ceasefire is expected to go into effect on Sunday. “The main challenge will be the second phase, and here there are many, many problems on the horizon,” says Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who stresses the importance of also freeing the thousands of Palestinians held by Israel. “Again and again, Israelis always think that they are the only victims.” The announcement comes in the final week of U.S. President Joe Biden’s term as Israel prepares for the incoming Trump administration. “The only reason that Israel did not agree to this text until this week is because it didn’t have to worry about U.S. pressure,” says Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani, who explains why the limited agreement will not shift politics in Israel and Palestine. “I believe Netanyahu will do everything possible, with the collusion of certain Trump officials, to try to scuttle it after the first phase.”

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

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

• South Korean President declares martial law, but later rescinds it after Parliament blocks him and protests emerge.
• A New York jury begins deliberations in the case of a military veteran who choked a homeless mentally ill man to death on the subway.
• Biden Administration looks to phase out program allowing companies to pay disabled workers below minimum wage.
• Santa Clara Supervisors introduce a measure to fund legal help for communities expected to be targeted by Trump.
• A San Francisco Supervisor faces a recall over support for a ban on cars on sections of the Great Highway.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – December 3, 2024 South Korean President declares martial law, but later rescinds it after Parliament blocks him and protests emerge. appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

The prediction made one year ago of a man-made famine is about to be realised, though in truth, Gazans have suffered food insecurity for decades. Despite a heavy dependency on international agencies for humanitarian assistance, access to food and safe water supplies has repeatedly been denied due to blockades imposed by Israel. As is the trend in such crises, women and children are particularly affected by malnutrition. Anaemia and other manifestations of nutrient deficiency have led to adverse effects on maternal and foetal health. Miscarriage and birth defect rates are high. Suboptimal nutritional status also impairs immune function and the ability of mother and child to recover from disease.

This dire baseline has only amplified the number of civilian losses caused by violence. The proportion of deaths in Gaza attributed to trauma-related injury versus that from malnutrition is hard to define; in many cases, it’s part of the same story. Malnutrition significantly affects the ability to recover from internal injuries, limb loss, and surgery, thereby increasing the risk of infection, sepsis and death.

Obtaining accurate quantitative information on injury, disease and deaths is essential. It draws global attention, and allows humanitarian organisations to focus their resources. The tricky bit of course is that over- or under-inflation of rates can occur for political gain. Regardless, even Israeli officials admit that the Palestinian Ministry of Health are the only governmental body actively collating decent morbidity and mortality data. There are pro-Israel lobbyists who are still quick to dismiss those figures, citing that a third of the 38,000 deaths declared earlier this summer were unverifiable. However, the reality of real-time assessment in this war zone is that many of the dead are still buried under rubble. Formal ID is impossible: collected statistics unavoidably include household losses reported by family members. Any remaining deniers of data coming out of Gaza should consider satellite image analysis performed by the City University of New York and Oregon State University. Almost 100,000 buildings had been destroyed in the first two months of the current crisis, most of which were in densely populated residential areas. The World Health Organisation and United Nations have also found mortality rates quoted by the Palestinian Ministry of Health to be reliable during earlier critical periods in Gaza’s history.

Malnutrition prevalence from (neutral) aid agency field and clinic data also paints a progressively disturbing picture. In March, nutrition monitoring by UNICEF and others highlighted that around 1 in 20 children attending health centres and in shelters were at a life-threatening stage of severe wasting. In addition, over 30 percent of children under 2 years of age were classified as acutely malnourished; double that of three months earlier. By June, major nutritional concerns were no longer primarily restricted to the north. Almost 3,000 children in southern Gaza were in need of intervention to manage the effects of moderate to severe malnutrition, yet were prevented from attending clinics due to ongoing conflict. Spring and late summer saw some alleviation of food insecurity, as more convoys were able to cross the border and distribute supplies. Then September marked the month with the lowest cross-border transfer and distribution of food and bottled water.

The UN continues to monitor the situation closely. Is Gaza now ‘officially’ in famine? To meet the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) definition, at least 20 percent of the population should have significant lack of access to food; acute malnutrition prevalence should be at least 30 percent; and mortality should be at or above 2 deaths per 10,000 people daily. At the time of writing, forty-three thousand are dead. The vast majority of the surviving population are now displaced, and one in five are facing “catastrophic levels of denied access to nutrition” (another IPC classification). Three-quarters of all crop fields have been destroyed. Access to food and safe water supplies, medical care and the availability of proper sanitation continues to be impossible in most situations. As the UN have stressed, Gaza sits on the very brink of famine. Without an immediate ceasefire, this will be a forgone conclusion.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by E. Mark Windle.

The report authored by journalist Mehtab Uddin Ahmed was tweeted by the X handle of India Today NE at 2.48 pm with a caption that read, “#Bangladesh: Amidst the chaos, reports confirmed that Prime Minister #SheikhHasina was airlifted from here residence in Dhaka. Her current whereabouts remain unknown.”

Both the report, and the tweet were, however, soon deleted. An archived version of the story can be read here.

Readers should note that this is an updated version of the report and the update was saved close to three hours after the original story was tweeted.

Several users on social media shared the India Today NE report and subsequently deleted their posts as the report got retracted. Some of the posts are still live. (Facebook, X)

False Report by India Today

As the report of Sheikh Hasina being airlifted or leaving the country amid the ongoing crisis caused ripples, Alt News noticed that the language in the updated version of the report was self-contradictory in nature. It said, “reports confirmed that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was allegedly airlifted from her residence in Dhaka.” To have ‘confirmed reports’ on something and then to say that it had ‘allegedly’ happened was inexplicable.

We also noticed that no other media outlet had reported the Bangladesh PM being airlifted. Had it been true, it would certainly have been a major headline across publications. It also appeared strange that the point about Hasina being airlifted was buried in the fourth paragraph of the story under several less important points. The 6-minute video that was embedded in the story did not mention anything about it either.

Next, we tried to look for details about Sheikh Hasina’s schedule on Sunday and found that she had chaired a meeting with the Army top brass on July 21. This was reported by the international media with photos. For example, in its live blog on developments in the country, VoA Bangla published a photo of the said meeting and reported, “প্রধানমন্ত্রী শেখ হাসিনা রবিবার (২১ জুলাই ২০২৪) প্রধানমন্ত্রীর নিরাপত্তা উপদেষ্টা, তিন বাহিনীর প্রধান, মন্ত্রিপরিষদ সচিব ও সশস্ত্রবাহিনী বিভাগের প্রিন্সিপাল স্টাফ অফিসারের সঙ্গে বৈঠক করেছেন। প্রধানমন্ত্রীর কার্যালয় সূত্রে জানা গেছে, তিনি দেশের সামগ্রিক নিরাপত্তা পরিস্থিতির ব্যাপারে তাদের নির্দেশনা দেন।”

[Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Sunday (21 July 2024) held a meeting with the prime minister’s security adviser, the chiefs of the three forces, the cabinet secretary and the principal staff officer of the armed forces. According to sources in the Prime Minister’s office, she gave them instructions regarding the overall security situation of the country.”]

The US-based media outlet’s Bengali arm posted this on its Facebook page as well. The Facebook post contained two photos and it was clearly mentioned that these were from a meeting Sheikh Hasina chaired on Sunday in Dhaka.

Indian digital media outlet The Wall, too, reported that Hasina chaired a meeting at her official residence in Dhaka on Sunday.

On July 21, Alt News reached out to its sources in the Bangladesh deputy high commission in Kolkata, which refuted the report. “India Today itself withdrew the story. And there are reports by the international media which confirm Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s presence in Dhaka. That is enough to show that the report was false,” the source told Alt News on condition of anonymity.

On July 22, The Bangladesh high commission in India officially refuted the report. In a letter to India Today, the high commission said, “…the misinformation on the status of the Government of Bangladesh went viral within a short span of time and triggered huge confusion and anxiety among people at home and abroad. On behalf of the High Commission of Bangladesh, I express my sheer disappointment at the aforesaid erroneous article and post.”

“This kind of misinformation and reporting based on rumour at the time of such critical moment of any country may misguide the people and even add fuel to the crisis and turn the situation into more chaotic. Moreover, such kind of reporting, without gauging the sensitivity, does not only affect the people and the society in large negatively, but also questions the credibility of any news outlet. We request all the news outlets, including the India Today NE, to remain vigil and ensure objective and balanced reporting taking account of the sensitivity of the issue,” it added.

India Today NE published a story on its website on July 22 ‘apologizing’ for the ‘unintentional error’ and attributed it to a “confidential source that could not be immediately verified.”

The post India Today NE falsely reports Sheikh Hasina airlifted from Dhaka, withdraws story later appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Indradeep Bhattacharyya.

Sergio Olmos, an investigative reporter for the nonprofit news site CalMatters, reported that his phone was knocked to the ground and subsequently stolen while he was documenting clashes between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protesters in Los Angeles, California, on June 23, 2024. At least nine journalists were assaulted while covering the violence that day.

The conflict began after the Southern California chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement called for demonstrators to meet at noon outside the Adas Torah synagogue in the heavily Jewish Pico-Robertson neighborhood in west LA to protest the alleged sale of occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Multiple journalists told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that scuffles, brawls and exchanges of pepper spray broke out in the streets nearby between the protesters and counterprotesters.

Individuals from both sides — including a rabbi and security volunteers from the Jewish community — attempted to intervene and prevent the violence from escalating. CNN reported that Los Angeles Police Department officers established a perimeter around the synagogue.

Olmos wrote on the social media platform X that he was filming an attack on a pro-Palestinian protester when a man drove a truck toward the crowd, nearly ramming people. “At that moment a pro-israeli demonstrator knocked my phone out of my hands to stop me from filming it,” Olmos wrote.

Independent videographer Sean Beckner-Carmitchel told the Tracker that the phone was later returned. Olmos declined to comment further when reached by the Tracker.

In a second post, Olmos wrote that later that day a different demonstrator stole his phone and, when he held up his press credentials, the man told him, “You shouldn’t be there.” The robbery can be seen at 0:47 in footage captured by Beckner-Carmitchel. Of the phone, Olmos wrote: “its gone.”

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

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It was 2022 when pediatrician Tom Herr realized just how many babies on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota were already infected with syphilis when they took their first breaths. He was seeing more and more patients who’d spent their first weeks in a tangle of tubes that pumped antibiotics into their tiny bodies. Some had died in the womb.

With growing alarm, Herr and other health officials spread the word, appealing to bosses at the federal Indian Health Service and tribal health authorities, writing op-eds and talking to reporters. But as the months ticked by, the crisis mounted.

By 2023, an astonishing 3% of all Native American babies born in South Dakota were infected.

Now, according to tribal leaders, the syphilis rate among American Indians and Alaska Natives in the Great Plains surpasses any recorded rate in the United States since 1941, when it was discovered that penicillin could treat the infection.

On a map of rising syphilis cases nationwide, some reservations stand out like a red alert.

Desperate for help, in late February of this year tribal leaders from four Great Plains states took the extreme step of asking U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to declare a public health emergency. The Great Plains Tribal Leaders’ Health Board asked the secretary to deploy commissioned officers from the U.S. Public Health Service to help diagnose and treat people for syphilis, and to provide emergency funding for the tribes to improve their response capabilities.

More than 10 weeks later, Becerra has not responded.

“We need to free up resources so we can take extraordinary measures to respond to these extraordinary circumstances,” said Meghan Curry O’Connell, chief public health officer for the tribal health board.

Syphilis, which is transmitted primarily through sexual intercourse, is easily treatable. But the disease is life-threatening when left unchecked. Babies infected in the womb can be born in excruciating pain, with deformed bones, brain damage or other serious complications. They can even die.

The emergency declaration may be the only way to get money in time to prevent more babies from getting sick or dying. The typical funding processes — which go through the federal budget or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — can lead to a delay of a year or more before money trickles down to communities.

In response to questions from ProPublica about why Becerra hasn’t replied to the emergency request, an HHS spokesperson wrote that “HHS has received the request and will respond directly” to the Great Plains tribes, but did not provide a time frame for doing so.

ProPublica also sent questions about the outbreak to Dr. Natalie Holt, chief medical officer for the Indian Health Service’s Great Plains office. In response, IHS provided written answers from both Holt and HHS.

The rise of syphilis cases among Native American communities, particularly in some Great Plains states, is “especially concerning,” Holt said. She said that Great Plains IHS is working with the South Dakota Department of Health and tribal partners to “maximize syphilis case identification, contract tracing and treatment efforts.”

HHS wrote that it was “taking action to slow the spread with a focus on those most significantly impacted,” noting that it had held a workshop for tribes and created a national task force to “leverage federal resources.” It also pointed to guidelines IHS had released in October 2023 about how to respond to the outbreak.

Syphilis has been on the rise nationwide for a decade, and the country has repeatedly run low on penicillin, the medicine used to cure it. But amid a shortage of health care providers and money the disease was spreading faster on reservations.

Because syphilis is treatable and can be so devastating to a baby, even one case of an infected infant is a sign that a health system is failing.

Alarms about health care in the area have been ringing for years, in large part due to neglect from various arms of the federal government, including chronic underfunding from Congress for the health care system for Native Americans.

Now, the silence from HHS is threatening to perpetuate what health workers say is a preventable outbreak that endangers the lives of children.

“The more you delay, the harder it is to contain. More people infected, more infant deaths,” O’Connell said.

The U.S. government is obligated to provide health care to many tribes, including several in the Great Plains, under a variety of treaties. It does so largely through the Indian Health Service, a series of clinics and hospitals on reservations and in cities primarily in the western United States.

Unlike other major health programs like Medicare, IHS funding is determined by a congressional vote each year. It has always fallen far short of the $50 billion tribes say is needed. The IHS spends a little over one-third of what the Veterans Health Administration spends per patient and half of what the government spends on health care for federal prisoners, according to the most recent data available.

When infectious diseases inevitably arrive, as they do in every community, the Indian Health Service is often ill equipped to respond, according to current and former employees. Those existing shortfalls have made the syphilis outbreak even more challenging.

Holt, the chief medical officer at IHS Great Plains, wrote, “Public health initiatives are chronically underfunded.” Responding to infectious diseases requires “substantial ‘boots-on-the-ground,’” she said, noting that the U.S. is experiencing a national health care staff shortage, including a dearth of nurses, providers and other support personnel.

At the end of 2020, HHS released a national strategic plan to tackle sexually transmitted infections, including syphilis. The report noted concerning rates of syphilis in Native American babies across the country, which by then were already three times higher than in the population as a whole. Officials set a goal to bring the rate down by more than 15% by 2025.

Instead, over the next two years, the rate of syphilis among Indigenous people in the Great Plains soared by 1,865%. Around 80% of the cases in South Dakota in recent years have been among Native people, who represent less than 10% of the state population.

At Rosebud, Herr started spending his weekends at work, poring over patient charts. He made a list, tracking those who had tested positive but gone untreated. He shared the list with colleagues and tried to figure out how to get people their penicillin.

“We just did this with COVID,” he thought. “We know what to do.”

Herr set up an alert in the electronic medical record system to flag patients who needed treatment. On the walls of reservation hospitals and clinics, staff hung colorful posters featuring pregnant bellies, encouraging people to get tested.

The more you delay, the harder it is to contain. More people infected, more infant deaths.

Nurses held a few testing events in the community, diagnosing several people. The tribal health board held testing events in Rapid City.

Other Native American reservations were struggling as well. Jessica Leston, then a director for the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board, was tracking infectious disease data throughout the West when she noticed a cluster of new syphilis cases at a reservation in Montana. In a community of under 10,000 people, a dozen patients had been diagnosed in one week. She alerted colleagues at Indian Health Service headquarters, and they learned that three of the cases were stillborn babies.

The Montana outbreak was detailed in the Indian Health Service’s budget justification to Congress last year. In 2023, the president’s budget proposal called for $9.3 billion for IHS, a modest increase from the previous year, with additional increases over the next decade. Congress approved $6.9 billion for the system that serves 2.6 million people.

“People always say we care about babies,” Leston said. “Now we aren’t even caring about babies.”

Last year, the tribal health board called in the CDC through a program that deploys the agency’s experts for one to three weeks during outbreaks. CDC staff concluded, as Vox reported last year, that there isn’t enough prenatal care in the area and that patients lack transportation to the few available clinics. CDC disease investigators provided care to 14 people during their visit, noting that all but one would have gone untreated without their help.

The CDC recommended that tribes test and treat people outside of clinics, transport patients to appointments and hire additional workers to find the sexual partners of those who’ve tested positive so that they can be treated as well. The officials also suggested the tribes consider the use of rapid tests, which can return results in time for a patient to be treated before they leave the clinic.

All of those suggestions are nearly impossible to implement, tribal health officials told ProPublica.

Prenatal care used to be more readily available at the Indian Health Service facilities across the Pine Ridge, Rosebud and Cheyenne River reservations, which span nearly 5 million acres, an area approximately the size of New Jersey.

Over the last two years, many staff left and weren’t replaced. Across the three reservations, only Pine Ridge had an obstetrician for much of the last year, according to several people with direct knowledge of the situation. Holt said that the IHS is working to hire more providers and that there is now an additional part-time obstetrician at Pine Ridge and another working two days a week at Cheyenne River.

People with any kind of pregnancy risk factor — including a patient over 34 and another with high blood pressure — have said they were told to drive up to three hours to Rapid City.

Tribal health officials lack the staff or money for mobile clinics and more testing events to find new cases.

They also struggle to track existing cases because three states and the Indian Health Service have refused to share contact information for patients who test positive. South Dakota recently began sharing this crucial information with the tribal health board, but the Indian Health Service and Iowa, North Dakota and Nebraska still do not. Health departments in Iowa, North Dakota and Nebraska did not respond to questions about data sharing.

As for the rapid tests, the Indian Health Service nationally recommends their use. But current and former staff in South Dakota said that area managers have denied their requests for these tests. Instead, providers said, they must use a test that has to be sent out to a lab and wait three to seven days for results. By that time, it can be hard to locate patients for treatment.

Holt said that the IHS “supports data sharing in the interest of improving population health” and that tribes must follow an established policy to request and receive the data. Regarding rapid tests, she wrote that the Great Plains IHS prefers to do the lab-based testing because “we feel this approach improves speedy access to treatment.”

The CDC also urged the tribes to research how punitive policies stop people from seeking medical care. In South Dakota and on several reservations, a pregnant person with illegal substances in their system can be charged with a felony. And providers are required to contact child protective services if they know a person has used drugs during pregnancy. Doctors described patients being screened for drug use at hospitals, with or without their consent, and then taken to jail. People in the area know this risk and sometimes avoid medical visits as a result, women and providers said.

The South Dakota tribes and state officials have shown no indication they are considering changing these policies.

Immediately after the CDC visit last summer, the tribes put in a formal request to the agency for more help. A few CDC staffers returned to the area in April to help find and treat patients who have tested positive. It’s an important step, O’Connell said. But given how far syphilis has reached into the community, a few days of help at few reservations is not enough to stop babies from dying.

The tribes also worry about the damage that’s already been done. In addition to asking for help preventing new infections, leaders asked for a longer-term plan to make sure that children born with syphilis get the care they need in years to come.

Herr remains haunted by one patient file from Rosebud. It belongs to a young woman who came to the hospital in labor and delivered a stillborn baby. A week later, when the patient was long gone, test results came back showing she had syphilis.

Hospital staff tried a few times to follow up to no avail. The woman returned to the hospital months later, this time in the midst of a miscarriage. Based on her medical records, Herr believes she lost both pregnancies due to untreated syphilis.

When Herr retired from IHS in January of this year, the woman still hadn’t been treated.

We plan to continue reporting on Native American health care and are looking for experts and sources. Help us make sure our journalism is responsible and focused on the right issues. We’d especially like to hear from tribal members about their experiences, along with employees of the Indian Health Service, and tribal leaders and elders. If this is you, please fill out the form below or reach out to reporter Anna Barry-Jester at anna.barryjester@propublica.org.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Anna Maria Barry-Jester.

At the edge of Saginaw Street, a hand-painted sign is etched into a deserted storefront. “Please help, God. Clean-up Flint.”

Behind it, the block tells the story of a city 10 years removed from the start of one of the nation’s largest environmental crises. 

Empty lot. Charred two-story home. Empty lot. Abandoned house with the message “All Copper GONE,” across boarded-up windows. 

John Ishmael Taylor, 44, was born in this ZIP code, 48503, and he’s seen firsthand the neglect of the place he loves, one he hopes will be reborn for his young children. 

“The water crisis, no more jobs, the violence,” Taylor said, has left Flint like a “ghost town — a ghost town with a whole bunch of people still here.” 

Over the past decade, Flint’s water crisis has revealed how government failures at every level could effectively kill a city while opening the country’s eyes to how an environmental crisis could wreak havoc on all facets of life, make people sick, destroy a public school system, and kill jobs. 

Four years after Flint residents reached the largest civil settlement agreement in Michigan history, Taylor and tens of thousands of other victims still haven’t received a penny from the $626.25 million pot. The only money doled out has gone to lawyers involved in the case, not those who’ve been haunted by the crisis’s true impacts. Still, even when residents ultimately receive the funding, most expressed doubts that the payouts will have any true benefits for their life.

In many ways, Taylor’s life shows the violent and widespread nature of America’s water crisis. After being born in Flint, he’d spent his preteen years living outside Jackson, Mississippi, where brown water has flowed through Black homes for decades. 

Taylor, a single father, moved back to Flint permanently in January 2014. Within a year, lead levels in the drinking water of three of every four homes in his ZIP code were well above federal standards.

His youngest son, Jalen, was born 52 days before the start of the water crisis, which is recognized as April 25, 2014, the day the city infamously switched its water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River. 

The rashes started immediately for baby Jalen, speckling the inside of his legs with coarse, red blotches. Within a few years, he was diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and a form of autism spectrum disorder; both ailments are associated with lead poisoning. 

Taylor says he has battled with anxiety in the aftermath as 20 percent of the city’s residents and hundreds of businesses packed up and left. Flint’s unemployment rate is now 1.5 times higher than the national average as 70 percent of children grow up in poverty. 

He wonders what that means for his children. 

“I always wonder how they’re gonna do because this is a long-term effect — we’re talking about lead poisoning. This is going to be with them for most of their life. It’s depressing,” he said, and he’s felt no restitution. He believes it has led to a citywide mental health crisis. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 out of 5 Flint residents reported having poor mental health, which is nearly 40 percent higher than the U.S. average. 

Angela Welch, who has lived in Flint for four decades, understands the health implications intimately.  She recently tested for lead levels in her blood at 6.5 micrograms per deciliter. Anything above 5 micrograms is considered extremely dangerous for your health. 

Since the start of the crisis, Welch has developed chronic skin and cardiac issues, had multiple surgeries, and lost part of her leg to amputation. Her brother Mac showed Capital B the scars along his body from water-induced rashes.

Welch questions what repair looks like for her family. “We gotta be dead to get our money? They want us dead to receive anything from the crisis.” 

The federal Environmental Protection Agency and officials with Flint’s mayor’s and city attorney’s offices did not respond to multiple requests from Capital B for comment.

Residents argue that even though they’ve brought the country’s water woes to the forefront, they’re in a worse position today despite hundreds of millions of dollars of investment — and they want you to know that your city can be next. 

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“We’re seeing it happen to Jackson,” said Nayyirah Shariff, a community activist, whose water is still testing for lead at levels three times higher than federal limits. 

“It’s like they have the same playbook to decimate a city.”

What Flint tells us about the nation’s water crises 

Flint opened the nation’s eyes to a brewing water affordability and infrastructure crisis, ultimately leading to billions of dollars invested in cleaning the country’s drinking water, improving water plants and roads, and building climate resilience. 

There are roughly 9 million lead pipes in service across the U.S., and they’re everywhere, from the oldest cities across Massachusetts to Florida, which leads the country in lead pipes but where infrastructure and the average home is among the nation’s youngest. In November, the Biden administration outlined a plan to replace all 9 million within the next decade, making 50 percent of the $30 billion price tag available from the federal government.  

Yet Flint residents and experts told Capital B that the main flaws of the federal government’s plan have been realized in the city over the past decade: It is complicated, time-consuming, and costly to identify and replace water lines. Not to mention, as Shariff explained, replacing lead water lines is not the “magical silver bullet” to eradicate the issue. The lead service line in her home was replaced in 2017, yet her water is still filled with more lead than federal limits allow. 

As officials have claimed that the use of water filters and replacement of lead water lines has solved the crisis, including an infamous declaration by former President Barack Obama in 2016, some residents in Flint have felt confused about the true safety of their water. 

When approached by Capital B in April, James Johnson explained how a state-conducted test for lead in his drinking water in 2023 returned a clean bill of health. However, public records show Johnson’s property’s lead results were actually 19 parts per billion. The federal limit is 15.

“I don’t know what to think [about the water,]” Johnson said after Capital B explained the results. “We just use filters. We have been since ’14, but they said it’s all clean.”

Flint officials did not respond to Capital B’s request for data related to the status of its water line identification and replacement work. This month, a federal judge found the city in contempt of court for missing deadlines for lead water line replacement and related work in the aftermath of the water crisis.

In addition, as the nation focuses on drinking water, lead lines have created another crisis that rarely gets attention: how lead contamination has torn through kitchens and bathrooms. Flint residents told Capital B that since the crisis began, they’ve had corroded toilets fall through floors, and their shower heads turn black from buildup every few months. 

“Dirty water doesn’t just impact service lives,” explained Claire McClinton, a Flint resident and former autoworker. “It’s very naive to think that was the only thing that was impacted, and people do not have the money or support to fix these things.” 

All the while, Flint has had amongst the most expensive water bills in the country. A 2016 analysis revealed that the average household was paying more than $850 annually for water services, making it the most expensive average bill in the country. Today, the average bill is $1,200 annually.

McClinton is afraid that as the country chugs on with its focus on drinking water, Black communities will be harmed by efforts to cut costs, or worse, boxed out of their access to publicly run water systems. More than 20 percent of Americans now rely on private companies for drinking water, a substantial increase compared to 2019, according to the National Association of Water Companies. On average, private water utilities charge families 59 percent more on their water bills than public utilities. 

“We don’t want corporations to benefit from all this spending — we should want to keep our water public,” McClinton said. 

Still, public water systems have their challenges supporting Black communities as well. Failing public water systems are 40 percent more likely to serve people of color, and they take longer than systems in white communities to come back into compliance. Funding to reach these communities remains faulty despite the Biden administration’s goal of spending 40 percent of funds on “disadvantaged communities.” 

A Capital B analysis found that 27 percent of drinking water funds from the bipartisan infrastructure law went to “disadvantaged communities” in 2022, and the two states that received the most funds characterized for “disadvantaged communities” were Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, where less than 10 percent of residents are Black. 

McClinton said it’s bittersweet to watch Flint purportedly influence the nation for the better while things remain “broken” for Black communities.  

“The system has failed us. We did all the things you’re supposed to do; we participated in water studies, and our water is still dirty, and our health is still bad,” she said. “There’s this thing where they say every generation lives better than the next generation, but all of that is turned upside down right now, and the water crisis is just a manifestation of it.” 

‘The start of the second civil war’

In a stream of whiteness, Confederate flags, and Make America Great Again signs, the 60 miles between Detroit and Flint tell the story of Black life in Michigan, Welch said. “Because we are a majority here and have conquered [Flint and Detroit], they want to get back at us,” she said. 

Over the past decade, as Detroit’s financial crisis peaked and Flint’s water crisis began, far-right white-led groups have surged and a white-led militia plotted to abduct the state’s governor.

“It feels like the start of the second civil war,” Welch said, all while Flint is “left behind.”  

It’s seeing this shift intensify that has led some residents to see deeper racial undertones in not only Flint’s battle over water affordability and rights, but also the nation’s.

“The power structure is coalescing over water,” McClinton said. 

Flint’s issues began primarily because of a plan that was concocted to save the city money during its water-delivery process. Similar situations are happening outside of Chicago in a majority Black and Latino town, and in Baltimore. 

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Not to mention the glaring similarities between Jackson and Flint, both majority-Black cities where local Black leadership was overridden by white leaders at the federal and state levels. In Jackson, after an EPA lawsuit against the city allowed the federal government to take control of the water, residents are still fighting to be included in the process. 

The attack on Black life has also widened the racial gap within the city, Shariff said. 

In a commemorative event headlined by a public health researcher from Michigan State University and attended by roughly 50 people the week before the 10-year-anniversary, just five attendees were Black.

It’s events like these, Shariff says, that highlight the disconnect between local leaders, academic researchers, and those directly impacted by the crisis. “All this money these places are spending feels like for nothing,” she said. “People marching in the streets weren’t asking for book talks or community health assessments. We asked for reparations and resources for Black self-determination.”

The crisis is a chronic illness

For some residents, like Taylor, there is still hope that the settlement checks will hit their bank accounts and improve their lives. Children affected by the water crisis are expected to receive 80 percent of the record settlement.

As Flint schools have crumbled in the aftermath of the crises, in addition to experiencing an 8 percent increase in the number of students with special needs, especially among school-age boys, Taylor hopes to use the money to better their educational opportunities and put them through college.

However, for others, including Welch and Shariff, the expected payout of $2,000 to $3,000 for adults feels like a slap in the face. There is also a lot of confusion around the settlement process, with two residents telling Capital B they thought the money was already gone, which stopped them from attempting to be a part of the process. 

In a lot of ways, although harder to find, opportunities have reached the city in recent years, including through a guaranteed income program for every pregnant person and infant in the city. The new program “prescribes” a one-time $1,500 payment after 20 weeks of pregnancy, and $500 a month during the infant’s first year. 

Yet, it still remains challenging to remain confident in change. 

“With all the experiences we’ve had over the 10 years, our hopes have been dashed,” explained McClinton, who every April 25 helps to organize a day of commemoration for Flint residents.  As Capital B has reported, the water issues afflicting Black communities are violent in many ways, and it trickles down into increasing situations of despair around housing, mental and physical health, and communal violence. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic widened the racial death gap in Flint, Black residents’ death rate climbed at a rate that was more than twice the city’s death rate between 2014 and 2019, according to Capital B’s analysis of state data.

Several Flint residents explained how the mental health strain caused by the water crisis created a cycle of “disunity” and the inability to trust not just the government or the water flowing out of their pipes, but also the people around them. 

“Everyone is just on edge,” Taylor said, “and that has everything to do with the water.” 

In the city’s Black areas, it’s hard to find a block without an abandoned home or grassy field full of trash and plastic water bottles. Taylor said it’s depressing to drive through your neighborhood to see your former schools empty, graffitied, and boarded up, or parks closed and desolate.

As job opportunities have become harder to find, so has housing. Nearly all of the dozen residents Capital B spoke to for this story said they experienced housing insecurity at times over the past decade. 

Due to a lack of affordable housing options, the average stay at the city’s housing shelter has increased from less than two months to over five. The public housing waitlist has ballooned to two years, even as some public housing buildings still have high levels of lead in the water, including the Richert Manor homes where Welch lived for many years at the height of the water situation. 

In the meantime, as race, namely being Black in America, stands as the biggest risk factor for lead poisoning, more so than even poverty or poor housing, Flint residents say their home serves as a warning to other Black communities. 

Nationwide, Black children have the highest blood lead levels. As such, even as billions are pumped into fixing the issues, the next generation of Black Americans will remain altered by the impacts of lead poisoning. 

As Shariff said: “The water crisis is like having a chronic illness — I mean, it gave me a chronic illness — but it is basically like you’re dealing with it, and it never goes away.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A decade later, Flint’s water crisis continues on Apr 28, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Adam Mahoney, Capital B.

Rwanda is holding a week of commemorations to mark the 30th anniversary of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, a period of around 100 days in which up to 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutu militias while powerful countries, including the United States, stood by and refused to stop the mass killings. Shortly after the genocide, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame took power and has since ruled Rwanda with an iron fist, leading a harsh crackdown on the press and opposition groups. We look back at the 1994 genocide and discuss the country’s trajectory since then with two guests: Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch and now a visiting professor at Princeton, and Noël Zihabamwe, a survivor of the genocide whose parents were killed during the violence in 1994 and whose brothers were disappeared by the Kagame regime in 2019. Zihabamwe now lives in Australia and runs the African Australian Advocacy Center.

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

Photograph Source: All-Pro Reels – CC BY-SA 2.0

In a political campaign that, on one side, already features an adjudicated rapist, financial fraudster, and potential felon and, on the other, a candidate that walks and talks like a robot powered by artificial intelligence of the lesser kind, get ready for a third party that might well put forth a recovered drug addict and anti-vaxxer paired with a quarterback for the endlessly-hopeless New York Jets, on the off chance that all spectrums of craziness are not yet on the ballot.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Matthew Stevenson.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capitol News Illinois. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Kaleigh Rogers was in crisis when she checked into a state-run institution on Illinois’ northern border two years ago. Rogers, who has cerebral palsy, had a mental health breakdown during the pandemic and was acting aggressively toward herself and others.

Before COVID-19, she had been living in a small group home; she had been taking college classes online and enjoyed going out with friends, volunteering and going to church. But when her aggression escalated, she needed more medical help than her community setting could provide.

With few viable options for intervention, she moved into Kiley Developmental Center in Waukegan, a much larger facility. There, she says she has fewer freedoms and almost nothing to do, and was placed in a unit with six other residents, all of whom are unable to speak. Although the stay was meant to be short term, she’s been there for two years.

The predicament facing Rogers and others like her is proof, advocates say, that the state is failing to live up to the promise it made in a 13-year-old federal consent decree to serve people in the community.

Rogers, 26, said she has lost so much at Kiley: her privacy, her autonomy and her purpose. During dark times, she cries on the phone to her mom, who has reduced the frequency of her visits because it is so upsetting for Rogers when her mom has to leave.

The 220-bed developmental center about an hour north of Chicago is one of seven in the state that have been plagued by allegations of abuse and other staff misconduct. The facilities have been the subject of a monthslong investigation by Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica about the state’s failures to correct poor conditions for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The news organizations uncovered instances of staff who had beaten, choked, thrown, dragged and humiliated residents inside the state-run facilities.

Advocates hoped the state would become less reliant on large institutions like these when they filed a lawsuit in 2005, alleging that Illinois’ failure to adequately fund community living options ended up segregating people with intellectual and developmental disabilities from society by forcing them to live in institutions. The suit claimed Illinois was in direct violation of a 1999 U.S. Supreme Court decision in another case, which found that states had to serve people in the most integrated setting of their choosing.

Negotiations resulted in a consent decree, a court-supervised improvement plan. The state agreed to find and fund community placements and services for individuals covered by the consent decree, thousands of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities across Illinois who have put their names on waiting lists to receive them.

Now, the state has asked a judge to consider ending the consent decree, citing significant increases in the number of people receiving community-based services. In a court filing in December, Illinois argued that while its system is “not and never will be perfect,” it is “much more than legally adequate.”

But advocates say the consent decree should not be considered fulfilled as long as people with disabilities continue to live without the services and choices that the state promised.

Across the country, states have significantly downsized or closed their large-scale institutions for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities in favor of smaller, more integrated and more homelike settings.

But in Illinois, a national outlier, such efforts have foundered. Efforts to close state-operated developmental centers have been met with strong opposition from labor unions, the communities where the centers are located, local politicians and some parents.

U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman in Chicago is scheduled in late summer to decide whether the state has made enough progress in building up community supports to end the court’s oversight.

For some individuals like Rogers, who are in crisis or have higher medical or behavioral challenges, the state itself acknowledges that it has struggled to serve them in community settings. Rogers said she’d like to send this message on behalf of those in state-operated developmental centers: “Please, please get us out once and for all.”

Without a robust system of community-based resources and living arrangements to intervene during a crisis, state-operated developmental centers become a last resort for people with disabilities. But under the consent decree agreement, the state, Equip for Equality argues, is expected to offer sufficient alternative crisis supports to keep people who want them out of these institutions.

In a written response to questions, Rachel Otwell, a spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Human Services, said the state has sought to expand the menu of services it offers people experiencing a crisis, in an effort to keep them from going into institutions. But Andrea Rizor, a lawyer with Equip for Equality, said, “They just don’t have enough to meet the demand.”

For example, the state offers stabilization homes where people can live for 90 days while they receive more intensive support from staff serving the homes, including medication reviews and behavioral interventions. But there are only 32 placements available — only four of them for women — and the beds are always full, Rizor said.

Too many people, she said, enter a state-run institution for short-term treatment and end up stuck there for years for various reasons, including shortcomings with the state’s discharge planning and concerns from providers who may assume those residents to be disruptive or difficult to serve without adequate resources.

That’s what happened to Rogers. Interruptions to her routine and isolation during the pandemic sent her anxiety and aggressive behaviors into overdrive. The staff at her community group home in Machesney Park, unsure of what to do when she acted out, had called the police on several occasions.

Doctors also tried to intervene, but the cocktail of medications she was prescribed turned her into a “zombie,” Rogers said. Stacey Rogers, her mom and legal guardian, said she didn’t know where else to turn for help. Kiley, she said, “was pretty much the last resort for us,” but she never intended for her daughter to be there for this long. She’s helped her daughter apply to dozens of group homes over the past year. A few put her on waitlists; most have turned her down.

“Right now, all she’s doing is living inside a box,” Stacey Rogers said.

Although Rogers gave the news organizations permission to ask about her situation, IDHS declined to comment, citing privacy restrictions. In general, the IDHS spokesperson said that timelines for leaving institutions are “specific to each individual” and their unique preferences, such as where they want to live and speciality services they may require in a group home.

Equip for Equality points to people like Rogers to argue that the consent decree has not been sufficiently fulfilled. She’s one of several hundred in that predicament, the organization said.

“If the state doesn’t have capacity to serve folks in the community, then the time is not right to terminate this consent decree, which requires community capacity,” Rizor said.

Equip for Equality has said that ongoing safety issues in these facilities make it even more important that people covered by the consent decree not be placed in state-run institutions. In an October court brief, citing the news organizations’ reporting, Equip for Equality said that individuals with disabilities who were transferred from community to institutional care in crisis have “died, been raped, and been physically and mentally abused.”

Over the summer, an independent court monitor assigned to provide expert opinions in the consent decree, in a memo to the court, asked a judge to bar the state from admitting those individuals into its institutions.

In its December court filing, the state acknowledged that there are some safety concerns inside its state-run centers, “which the state is diligently working on,” as well as conditions inside privately operated facilities and group homes “that need to be addressed.” But it also argued that conditions inside its facilities are outside the scope of the consent decree. The lawsuit and consent decree specifically aimed to help people who wanted to move out of large private institutions, but plaintiffs’ attorneys argue that the consent decree prohibits the state from using state-run institutions as backup crisis centers.

In arguing to end the consent decree, the state pointed to significant increases in the number of people served since it went into effect. There were about 13,500 people receiving home- and community-based services in 2011 compared with more than 23,000 in 2023, it told the court.

The state also said it has significantly increased funding that is earmarked to pay front-line direct support professionals who assist individuals with daily living needs in the community, such as eating and grooming.

In a statement to reporters, the human services department called these and other improvements to the system “extraordinary.”

Lawyers for the state argued that those improvements are enough to end court oversight.

“The systemic barriers that were in place in 2011 no longer exist,” the state’s court filing said.

Among those who were able to find homes in the community is Stanley Ligas, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that led to the consent decree. When it was filed in 2005, he was living in a roughly 100-bed private facility but wanted to move into a community home closer to his sister. The state refused to fund his move.

Today, the 56-year-old lives in Oswego with three roommates in a house they rent. All of them receive services to help their daily living needs through a nonprofit, and Ligas has held jobs in the community: He previously worked in a bowling alley and is now paid to make public appearances to advocate for others with disabilities. He lives near his sister, says he goes on family beach vacations and enjoys watching professional wrestling with friends. During an interview with reporters, Ligas hugged his caregiver and said he’s “very happy” and hopes others can receive the same opportunities he’s been given.

While much of that progress has come only in recent years, under Gov. JB Pritzker’s administration, it has proven to be vulnerable to political and economic changes. After a prolonged budget stalemate, the court in 2017 found Illinois out of compliance with the Ligas consent decree.

At the time, late and insufficient payments from the state had resulted in a staffing crisis inside community group homes, leading to escalating claims of abuse and neglect and failures to provide routine services that residents relied on, such as help getting to work, social engagements and medical appointments in the community. Advocates worry about what could happen under a different administration, or this one, if Illinois’ finances continue to decline as projected.

“I acknowledge the commitments that this administration has made. However, because we had so far to come, we still have far to go,” said Kathy Carmody, chief executive of The Institute on Public Policy for People with Disabilities, which represents providers.

While the wait for services is significantly shorter than it was when the consent decree went into effect in 2011, there are still more than 5,000 adults who have told the state they want community services but have yet to receive them, most of them in a family home. Most people spend about five years waiting to get the services they request. And Illinois continues to rank near the bottom in terms of the investment it makes in community-based services, according to a University of Kansas analysis of states’ spending on services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Advocates who believe the consent decree has not been fulfilled contend that Illinois’ continued reliance on congregate settings has tied up funds that could go into building up more community living options. Each year, Illinois spends about $347,000 per person to care for those in state-run institutions compared with roughly $91,000 per person spent to support those living in the community.

For Rogers, the days inside Kiley are long, tedious and sometimes chaotic. It can be stressful, but Rogers told reporters that she uses soothing self-talk to calm herself when she feels sad or anxious.

“I tell myself: ‘You are doing good. You are doing great. You have people outside of here that care about you and cherish you.’”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Molly Parker and Beth Hundsdorfer, Capitol News Illinois.

After ruling that federal prosecutors withheld key evidence resulting in a defendant’s wrongful imprisonment, D.C.’s top court took nearly a decade to decide on an appropriate sanction. In December, after extensive hearings, the D.C. Court of Appeals gave two prosecutors a year of probation plus a stern warning not to commit any further misconduct, or they would be suspended from practicing law for six months.

Both prosecutors, Mary Chris Dobbie and Reagan Taylor, still work for the Justice Department, according to media reports and other records. One of their former supervisors, Jeffrey Ragsdale, currently leads the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which oversees investigations into alleged prosecutorial misconduct.

Under the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland, prosecutors have a constitutional obligation to disclose exculpatory evidence to defense attorneys. At the trial for two defendants accused of assaulting an officer during a jailhouse brawl, Dobbie and Taylor withheld unequivocal evidence that their lead witness, a corrections officer, had a history of filing false reports. Based on the officer’s testimony, one defendant was imprisoned for more than four years before his conviction was reversed.

In 2021, the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility, a disciplinary panel appointed by the appeals court, unanimously recommended a six-month suspension for Dobbie and Taylor. But in a divided opinion, the court ratcheted down the sanction to probation based on “one overriding mitigating circumstance”: the “deficient conduct” of Ragsdale and another supervisor, John Roth, who later served as inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security. There were no ethics charges or misconduct findings for either supervisor.

Reached by phone, Roth declined to comment, saying that he was not aware of the decision. Attorneys for Dobbie and Taylor did not respond to multiple requests for comment, nor did Ragsdale. The Justice Department also failed to respond.

The dissenting judge, Joshua Deahl, argued that Dobbie and Taylor “should face real consequences for their actions.”

“The board comes to us — despite innumerable favorable inferences drawn in respondents’ favor — with the rare recommendation of an actual suspension that at least comes close to reflecting the gravity of this serious prosecutorial misconduct,” Deahl wrote. “Yet this court balks.”

Deahl noted a dissonance between how courts treat prosecutors’ ethical violations versus misconduct by private attorneys, who are routinely disbarred or suspended for actions like dipping into client funds.

“That is too harsh a result, the majority concludes, when prosecutors intentionally suppress evidence in violation of the Constitution and thereby secure felony convictions resulting in years of unjust imprisonment,” wrote Deahl, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2019 and served as a public defender before joining the bench.

Even this relatively lenient sanction is a rarity for federal prosecutors. And the protracted timeline — a year of probation more than 14 years after the violation — illustrates systemic shortcomings in current accountability mechanisms.

“The dramatic delay is all the more troubling,” Bruce Green, a Fordham Law School professor who studies prosecutorial ethics, told The Intercept, because “the disciplinary process is the principal way of holding prosecutors publicly accountable for misconduct.”

In Green’s view, the court appeared to be grasping for reasons not to suspend Dobbie and Taylor. He read the majority’s opinion as “looking for something to say to mitigate the sanction, and the best they could do was to put some of the blame on inadequate supervision.”

A “Faxing Mishap”

By the prosecutors’ account, the constitutional violations could largely be blamed on an uncooperative fax machine.

In 2009, weeks before two defendants went on trial for assaults at a D.C. jail, the line prosecutors, Dobbie and Taylor, learned that their “lead identification witness” had a serious credibility issue: Officer Angelo Childs had recently been demoted after he maced a man in custody who was already restrained. Childs then submitted a false incident report suggesting that the man was acting violently, as well as a false disciplinary report charging the man with assaulting an officer and a K9. Security footage contradicted both reports.

Dobbie and Taylor received a 10-page report from the corrections department about Childs’s discipline, including a findings section on the final page. They had a clear constitutional obligation to disclose this information to the defendants, which “should not have been a hard call for the government,” the appeals court ruled in 2014.

The report was “powerfully impeaching,” the court noted. “It did not simply establish that Officer Childs had a track record for untruthfulness. It established that he was willing to make false reports implicating inmates in assaults on law enforcement agents — the precise context of this case.”

“This is a witness we intend to call at trial who now has a veracity issue.”

Instead of promptly disclosing the report, the prosecutors sought their supervisors’ guidance. They first consulted Ragsdale, then chief of the felony major crimes section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. Ragsdale passed the request to his supervisor, John Roth, who at the time headed a committee that advised on whether to call law enforcement officers to the stand when their credibility was in question. “This is a witness we intend to call at trial who now has a veracity issue,” Ragsdale wrote in an email to Roth.

Less than two weeks before trial, Roth and Ragsdale provided instructions to the line prosecutors that the appeals court majority called “inaccurate,” “regrettable,” and “deficient.”

Roth “cavalierly” questioned the corrections department’s findings that Childs had lied, a disciplinary committee later found. “Not sure that the DOC conclusion that he lied is supported by the record, but I will leave it to you folks to hash out,” Roth, who did not consult any underlying evidence, wrote in an email. Still, he directed the prosecutors to “disclose the report” and “litigate its admissibility” at trial. While this represented an antagonistic approach to handling evidence of dishonesty by the government’s key witness, at least it would have given the defense the opportunity to argue in favor of sharing the information with jurors.

This is where Ragsdale “played a role in this case going awry,” according to the appeals court majority. He directed Dobbie and Taylor to file the report under seal with the court, instead of disclosing it to the defense directly, along with a motion arguing that the defendants should not be allowed to ask the officer about it on the stand.

Five days before trial, the prosecutors filed a “misleading and factually incomplete motion,” the appeals court ruled, along with a sealed copy of the first five pages of the report. The most damning information about Childs started on the sixth page, and the findings were at the very end.

The motion noted that the corrections department “may” have made “potentially adverse credibility findings” about Childs’s incident report, but it entirely omitted the fact that the officer had been demoted, used excessive force, and filed a false disciplinary report. Echoing Roth, the prosecutors expressed unfounded skepticism about the report’s accuracy.

When the judge sought confirmation that the version the prosecutors filed was complete, Dobbie answered that the copy she brought to court was also just five pages. Taylor, meanwhile, had a copy of the full 10-page report with her but said nothing. Based on the prosecutors’ assurances that they had accurately summarized the contents, the judge repeatedly denied the defendants access to the report itself.

The D.C. court majority attributed this omission to an unintentional faxing error, which the dissenting judge called “far from the most natural inference.” The disciplinary committee “cut Dobbie and Taylor repeated breaks,” Deahl wrote, “crediting their testimony that their actions were mistakes, despite strong evidence to the contrary.”

Based on the officer’s testimony at trial, both defendants were convicted and sentenced to more than five years in prison. They obtained the damning report three months after they were convicted, but it took another four years for the D.C. Court of Appeals to rule that the prosecutors unconstitutionally withheld it. The court reversed the conviction of one defendant; the other acknowledged that he had been correctly identified.

The court was “left with many questions about the government’s behavior,” the judges wrote. How could the prosecutors fail to realize that half the report was missing, “particularly when the trial court specifically asked if the five-page copy it had in hand was the complete report?”

A view of the D.C. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 18, 2020.

Watered-Down Discipline

The court’s scathing reversal in 2014 set off two disciplinary investigations.

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility opened an investigation, the results of which have not been made public. For decades, OPR, now led by Ragsdale, has faced intense criticism over its abysmal transparency. Green, the expert in prosecutorial ethics, called the office “the roach motel of the Justice Department,” while a former U.S. attorney for D.C. said it was “known as the Bermuda Triangle of complaints against prosecutors.”

The D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel, which serves as the chief prosecutor for attorney disciplinary matters in D.C., launched a separate, more transparent inquiry soon after the court’s reversal. Five years later, the office filed a disciplinary petition against the line prosecutors with the Board on Professional Responsibility. Dobbie and Taylor expressed remorse for not turning over the report but argued that their actions constituted mistakes of inexperience rather than ethical violations. At the time of the trial, Dobbie had been a federal prosecutor for a few years and Taylor for a little over a year.

In January 2021, after a disciplinary committee agreed that Dobbie and Taylor had committed misconduct by withholding the report, the full Board on Professional Responsibility recommended a six-month suspension.

The appeals court, however, shifted the blame and watered down the discipline. The divided court ruled in December that the errors of Roth and Ragsdale, who were not themselves at risk of professional penalty, weighed against the line prosecutors’ suspension. Dobbie and Reagan “should not, and probably do not, shoulder full responsibility,” Judge Loren AliKhan wrote for the majority.

The Justice Department “could hold its prosecutors publicly accountable if it wanted to.”

In a brief supporting the line prosecutors, the Justice Department argued that any sanction at all was “unwarranted,” urging the court not to “blink away” the supervisors’ role. The Justice Department did not answer questions from The Intercept about OPR’s inquiry into the case or how the court’s decision reflected on Ragsdale’s fitness to oversee misconduct investigations for all federal prosecutors.

Michael P. Heiskell, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told The Intercept that “deficient conduct of experienced supervisors deserves much harsher condemnation” than the appeals court gave.

“I’m happy there’s a sanction,” said Shawn Armbrust, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, which filed a brief urging the court to impose the six-month suspension. “There are a lot of jurisdictions that wouldn’t even do that.”

This decadelong disciplinary saga brought Green back to his central critique: We have very little insight into how the Justice Department itself is policing federal prosecutors. The department “could hold its prosecutors publicly accountable if it wanted to” through OPR, Green said, “but it doesn’t.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Shawn Musgrave.

The United States continued to expressed outrage and vow a response to the deaths of American service members in Jordan following a drone attack it blamed on Iranian-backed militias, while Washington and London in a separate move stepped up pressure on Tehran with a new set of coordinated sanctions.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on January 29 doubled down on earlier vows by President Joe Biden to hold responsible those behind the drone attack, which also injured dozens of personnel, many of whom are being treated for traumatic brain injuries, according to the Pentagon.

"Let me start with my outrage and sorrow [for] the deaths of three brave U.S. troops in Jordan and for the other troops who were wounded," Austin told a Pentagon briefing.

"The president and I will not tolerate attacks on U.S. forces and we will take all necessary actions to defend the U.S. and our troops."

Later, White House national-security spokesman John Kirby told reporters that "we are not looking for a war with Iran."

He added, though, that drone attack "was escalatory, make no mistake about it, and it requires a response."

A day earlier, Biden said U.S. officials had assessed that one of several Iranian-backed groups was responsible for the attack and vowed to respond at a time of Washington’s choosing.

"While we are still gathering the facts of this attack, we know it was carried out by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq," Biden said.

"We will carry on their commitment to fight terrorism. And have no doubt -- we will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner of our choosing," Biden said in a separate statement.

Details of the attack remained unclear on January 29, but a U.S. official said the enemy drone may have been confused with a U.S.-launched drone returning to the military site near the Syrian border and was therefore not shot down.

The official, who requested anonymity, said preliminary reports indicate the enemy drone was flying at a low level at the same time a U.S. drone was returning to the base, known as Tower 22.

Iran on January 29 denied it had any link with the attack, with the Foreign Ministry in Tehran calling the accusations "baseless."

Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani said that "resistance groups" in the region do not take orders from Tehran, though Western nations accuse the country of helping arm, train, and fund such groups.

Earlier, Iran's Permanent Mission to the United Nations said, "Iran had no connection and had nothing to do with the attack on the U.S. base."

Jordan condemned what it called a "terrorist attack" on a military site, saying it was cooperating with the United States to fortify its border defenses.

The attacks are certain to intensify political pressure in the United States on Biden -- who is in an election year -- to retaliate against Iranian interests in the region, possibly in Iraq or Syria, analysts say.

Gregory Brew, a historian and an analyst with the geopolitical risk firm Eurasia Group, told RFE/RL’s Radio Farda that the attack in Jordan represented a "major escalation -- and the U.S. is bound to respond forcefully and promptly."

"The response is likely to come through more intense U.S. action against Iran-backed militias in either Syria or Iraq. It's unclear if this was an intentional escalation by Iran and its allies, but the genie is out of the bottle," he added.

Republican Senator Tom Cotton, a vocal critic of Biden, a Democrat, on January 28 said the "only answer to these attacks must be devastating military retaliation against Iran’s terrorist forces.... Anything less will confirm Joe Biden as a coward."

Many observers have expressed fears of a widening conflict in the Middle East after war broke out in Gaza following the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, which has been deemed a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union. At least 1,200 were killed in those assaults, leading to Israel's retaliatory actions that, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza, have killed more than 26,000 Palestinians.

Because of its support for Israel, U.S. forces have been the target of Islamist groups in the Middle East, including Iranian-backed Huthi rebels based in Yemen and militia groups in Iraq who are also supported by Tehran.

In another incident that will likely intensify such fears of a wider conflict, the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights -- which has extensive contacts inside Syria -- said an Israeli air strike against an Iranian-linked site in Damascus killed seven people, including fighters of Tehran-backed militias.

The Tasnim news agency, which is close to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), attributed the attack to Israel, writing that "two civilians" had been killed, while Syrian state television said "a number of Iranian advisers" had been killed at the "Iranian Advisory Center" in Damascus.

However, Iran’s ambassador to Syria, Hossein Akbari, denied the Iranian center had been targeted or that "any Iranian citizens or advisers" had been killed.

Meanwhile, the United States and Britain announced a set of coordinated sanctions against 11 officials with the IRGC for alleged connections to a criminal network that has targeted foreign dissidents and Iranian regime opponents for "numerous assassinations and kidnapping" at the behest of the Iranian Intelligence and Security Ministry.

A statement by the British Foreign Office said the sanctions are designed "to tackle the domestic threat posed by the Iranian regime, which seeks to export repression, harassment, and coercion against journalists and human rights defenders" in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere.

British Foreign Secretary David Cameron said the latest sanctions packages "exposes the roles of the Iranian officials and gangs involved in activity aimed to undermine, silence, and disrupt the democratic freedoms we value in the U.K."

"The U.K. and U.S. have sent a clear message: We will not tolerate this threat," he added.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Radio Farda, Reuters, and AP

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Illinois-based blog Edgar County Watchdogs was subpoenaed on Nov. 28, 2023, for testimony and communications about the parties to a civil defamation case, but the subpoena was subsequently withdrawn on Dec. 20.

The subpoena had been filed with the 20th Circuit Court in St. Clair County by Gerard Scott Jr., the plaintiff in the defamation case. It ordered a representative from the Edgar County Watchdogs, which is based in St. Clair County outside St. Louis, to testify on Jan. 3, 2024, and to bring all written correspondence related to the suit to the hearing.

Edgar County Watchdogs reported that Scott, a Village of Caseyville employee and St. Clair County board member, filed the suit against researcher and blogger Bradley VanHoose.

VanHoose had sought information about an invoice paid by the village for an automobile repair via Freedom of Information Act requests and by asking questions of local officials. VanHoose later informed Edgar County Watchdogs that he believed an employee of the village had used taxpayer funds for repairs on a privately owned vehicle, according to the blog.

Edgar County Watchdogs co-founder and reporter John Kraft initially told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that it would seek to quash the subpoena under the Illinois Reporter’s Privilege Act, which protects reporters’ sources from compelled disclosure.

Before that motion could be filed, the two parties agreed that the subpoena would be withdrawn, Kraft and the plaintiff’s attorney, Douglas Stewart, told the Tracker. Stewart, in an email to Kraft, wrote, “I believe that the information that I seek is readily available from others.”

The subpoena was withdrawn during a Dec. 20 hearing, the blog reported.

The Tracker has documented multiple other subpoenas against Edgar County Watchdogs, most recently in 2020.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

Illinois-based blog Edgar County Watchdogs was subpoenaed on Nov. 28, 2023, for testimony and communications about the parties to a civil defamation case, but the subpoena was subsequently withdrawn on Dec. 20.

The subpoena had been filed with the 20th Circuit Court in St. Clair County by Gerard Scott Jr., the plaintiff in the defamation case. It ordered a representative from the Edgar County Watchdogs, which is based in St. Clair County outside St. Louis, to testify on Jan. 3, 2024, and to bring all written correspondence related to the suit to the hearing.

Edgar County Watchdogs reported that Scott, a Village of Caseyville employee and St. Clair County board member, filed the suit against researcher and blogger Bradley VanHoose.

VanHoose had sought information about an invoice paid by the village for an automobile repair via Freedom of Information Act requests and by asking questions of local officials. VanHoose later informed Edgar County Watchdogs that he believed an employee of the village had used taxpayer funds for repairs on a privately owned vehicle, according to the blog.

Edgar County Watchdogs co-founder and reporter John Kraft initially told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that it would seek to quash the subpoena under the Illinois Reporter’s Privilege Act, which protects reporters’ sources from compelled disclosure.

Before that motion could be filed, the two parties agreed that the subpoena would be withdrawn, Kraft and the plaintiff’s attorney, Douglas Stewart, told the Tracker. Stewart, in an email to Kraft, wrote, “I believe that the information that I seek is readily available from others.”

The subpoena was withdrawn during a Dec. 20 hearing, the blog reported.

The Tracker has documented multiple other subpoenas against Edgar County Watchdogs, most recently in 2020.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

The fire broke out at a high-rise residential building in the city’s Tianshan district just before 8 p.m. on Nov. 24, 2022, according to state media. Among the dead were Qemernisa Abdurahman, 48, and her four youngest children.

The deaths, widely blamed on COVID-19 restrictions, prompted an outpouring of public grief as many Chinese poured in the streets in several cities in what came to be called the “white paper” protests that tapped into pent-up frustrations of millions of Chinese who had endured nearly three years of repeated lockdowns, travel bans, quarantines and various other restrictions to their lives. 

On Friday, a group of around a dozen people held a vigil for the victims of the fire outside of the Chinese Embassy in London, led by World Uyghur Congress, or WUC, U.K. Director Rahima Mahmut. During the event supporters called for an end to Beijing’s persecution of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang.

A similar gathering was held in Istanbul, Turkey, to mark the anniversary, while rights groups and global leaders slammed China for censoring information about the tragedy and called on the international community to hold Beijing accountable.

“Over 40 Uyghurs were killed in this fire, but the true number was censored by the CCP,” Canadian lawmaker Garnett Genius wrote in a tweet, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. “Today we grieve and remember the innocent lives lost in this tragedy of oppression, and we stand with those who continue to resist [Chinese President] Xi Jinping's communist regime.”

In a statement, the WUC suggested that Chinese authorities were to blame for the deaths, noting that the Uyghur community estimates that “the number of victims is higher” than the official toll.

“The complete disregard for Uyghur lives, which we have seen during the [Urumqi] fire, is characteristic of the Chinese regime’s repressive measures against Uyghurs,” WUC President Dolkun Isa said.

No follow-up report

Reports from inside Xinjiang indicate that more could have been done to prevent the loss of life during the incident.

Sources in Urumqi have said that firefighters arrived three hours after the fire began, despite their close proximity to the predominantly Uyghur-inhabited building, and that residents were barred from evacuating due to strict COVID-19 lockdown measures.

At the time of the incident, RFA Uyghur spoke with residents who confirmed that assistance was hampered by blocked doors and fire exits, despite claims by authorities that the building was not locked and that victims died because they did not adhere to safety measures during the blaze.

RFA also spoke with a hospital staff member at the time who said that there were “more than 40 people who died in the fire.”

Over the weekend, RFA contacted authorities in Urumqi for further information about the death toll, what happened to the remains of the victims, and whether their relatives were able to attend their funerals.

Several officers with the Urumqi City Police responded that they had no new information to divulge about the fire, in part because higher-level authorities “did not publish a detailed report” on the tragedy beyond what was stated in an official statement at the time.

However, an officer at the Ghalibiyet Yoli, or Shengli Road, police station told RFA that while he hadn’t seen the number of deaths listed in the official report, “rescue team members told me the number is 44.”

Furthermore, RFA learned that not only did authorities withhold detailed information about the fire from the public, but also from the families of victims.

The son and nephew of victim Qemernisa Abdurahman, who live in Turkey and Belgium, said this weekend that they had yet to receive any official notification about the handling of her remains or those of her four children.

They also expressed anger over the ongoing persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, where the ethnic group’s 12 million members have been subject to harsh government campaigns that China says are necessary to fight extremism and terrorism. Among the campaigns is a mass incarceration program that has affected as many as 1.8 million people, including two of their relatives.

“We don’t have any information about this,” said one of the relatives, who spoke to RFA on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal. “We don’t know where our family members are, who is alive, who is dead, or any other information on them.”

‘White paper’ detentions

In the meantime, Chinese authorities have not only ignored calls from the European Parliament and others to provide a detailed account of the Urumqi fire and hold those responsible for the tragedy to account, but instead have arrested dozens of activists associated with the “white paper” protests that were prompted by the blaze.

In December 2022, authorities in Atush, the capital of Xinjiang’s Kizilsu Kirghiz Autonomous Prefecture, detained Kamile Wayit, a 19-year-old preschool education major at a university in China’s Henan province, after she posted a video about the protests.

In addition to frustration over authorities’ handling of the Urumqi fire, the demonstrators also opposed the rolling lockdowns, mass surveillance and compulsory testing under China’s zero-COVID policy, with some holding up blank sheets of printer paper and others calling on President Xi Jinping to step down.

Over the weekend, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, or UHRP, called for accountability “for the deaths of dozens of Uyghurs” and for the release of those detained for participation in the “white paper” protests that followed in a separate statement released on the anniversary of the fire.

“Uyghurs were very moved to see so much sympathy for what happened following the [Urumqi] fire,” said UHRP Executive Director Omer Kanat. “The Chinese government must release all those detained during the protests and guarantee freedom of assembly.”

UHRP said that the deaths resulting from the fire “are deeply intertwined with broader repression faced by Uyghurs across the region.”

“Strict control over Uyghur movement, especially during Covid-19 lockdowns, exacerbated repressive policies that amount to crimes against humanity and genocide,” the group said.

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Shohret Hoshur for RFA Uyghur.

The 2016-2017 protests brought prolonged, international attention to the Standing Rock reservation, and the Nation’s fight to protect its sacred sites and drinking water. Yet despite months of protests, the project eventually went through with the support of then-President Donald Trump. By June 2017, oil was flowing and today, up to 750,000 barrels of petroleum pass through the pipeline, which stretches from western North Dakota to southern Illinois. 

But the story continued. In 2020, a federal court ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers had not done a thorough enough analysis of the project’s impacts, noting that the pipeline’s “effects on the quality of the human environment are likely to be highly controversial.” The court ordered the Army Corps to produce a full environmental impact statement on the section of the pipeline that crosses underneath Lake Oahe and stop the flow of oil. A higher court later determined that the pipeline could continue operating, but agreed that a more extensive environmental analysis needed to be completed. 

That analysis is happening now, and Steven Wolf, chief of the public affairs office in the Omaha branch of the Army Corps, said the current public comment period is an opportunity for the public to weigh in on whether the draft environmental impact statement is adequate — essentially serving as a quality control check on the agency’s revised analysis.

“This is a way for the public to say, ‘Yes, you studied this thoroughly or no, we think you need to look at some more information,’” he said. “Public input will actually help us to do better analysis and also to ultimately reach a better decision.”

The Army Corps’ new draft environmental impact statement says there haven’t been any leaks from the pipeline since it began operating, although there have been some spills at aboveground facilities where the oil has been recovered. The draft analysis describes the possibility of an oil spill underneath Lake Oahe as “remote to very unlikely,” and concluded that oil would be more likely to spill if it were transported via car or train.

While the draft environmental impact statement acknowledges that the water in the Missouri River corridor is considered sacred to Indigenous peoples, Janet Alkire, chairwoman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, is worried about the possibility of a petroleum spill that could contaminate her community’s water source. “Am I going to be the tribal chair that has to deal with a disaster? A pipeline that breaks? Am I going to be in that position?” she asked Army Corps officials at a meeting earlier this month. 

The company behind the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Wolf says it’s important to remember that the public comment period deals strictly with the half-mile stretch of the pipeline under Lake Oahe. He added that the Army Corps only regulates land used by the company and has no authority to regulate the pipeline itself. “We don’t build pipelines,” said Wolf. “We don’t operate pipelines. We don’t regulate pipelines.” Wolf added that regulatory responsibility sits with the U.S. Department of Transportation.      

Still, that authority is consequential. If Army Corps denies the easement, that could force Energy Transfer Partners to reroute the pipeline further away from the Standing Rock reservation.

One option is to move the pipeline 50 miles north of where it is currently, crossing nearly nine miles north of Bismarck, North Dakota. Energy Transfer Partners analyzed a similar route prior to building the pipeline. In its 2016 environmental assessment, the Army Corps supported avoiding that route, noting its proximity to municipal water supplies. Jade Begay, director of policy and advocacy at NDN Collective, said that the Army Corps’ decision to approve the pipeline’s placement near the reservation rather than the majority-white city of Bismarck was problematic. 

“That crossing was really why so many people showed up because this was a symbol of blatant environmental injustice and environmental racism,” she said. 

Steven Wolf says so far the Army Corps has already received tens of thousands of comments. However, many of them are form letters, which the Corps considers a single comment even if it is sent in by thousands of people. Wolf said the agency will respond to every unique issue raised. He estimated a final environmental impact statement on the section in question will take at least a year to complete. 

Begay said the public comment period open now is an important opportunity for people to hold the federal government accountable.

“These laws that protect our landscapes, our water, our biodiversity, are really the things keeping us from seeing total destruction and disregard for our clean water and for environmental justice,” she said. “We have to keep the pressure on.” 
The Army Corps is accepting comments until December 13.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Still concerned about the Dakota Access pipeline? The feds are asking for comment, 7 years later. on Nov 21, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Anita Hofschneider.

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In July 2015, Wisconsin’s Supreme Court shielded Gov. Scott Walker, then a rising Republican star with aspirations to the presidency, from a criminal investigation.

The court’s conservative majority halted the probe into what prosecutors suspected were campaign finance violations. One of the deciding votes was cast by Justice David Prosser, a conservative who had won reelection a few years earlier in a heavily contested race. During the race, a state GOP operative said if their party lost Prosser, “The Walker agenda is toast,” according to an email included in a trove of documents the Guardian surfaced. Another vote for Walker came from Michael Gableman, a justice who had also waged a contentious campaign for his Wisconsin Supreme Court seat.

The high court, determining the prosecutors had overreached, ordered the investigation’s documents destroyed. But not before the Guardian got its hands on a copy. And buried in the 1,500 pages was a reference to a key figure in propelling both Prosser and Gableman to victory: the co-chair of the right-leaning legal group the Federalist Society, organizer of dark money groups and conservative strategist Leonard Leo.

The Prosser and Gableman races were crucial skirmishes in Leo’s decadeslong, ambitious effort to shape American law from the ground up. It’s a project whose full dimensions are only now becoming clear. ProPublica detailed the arc of Leo’s activism in a recent story and podcast with “On The Media.”

If Leo’s name sparks a note of recognition, it’s usually because he was Donald Trump’s judge whisperer and a leading figure in helping create the 6-3 conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court. Leo realized decades ago it was not enough to have a majority of Supreme Court justices; he would have to approach the legal system holistically if he wanted to bring lasting change. To undo landmark rulings like Roe v. Wade, Leo understood that he needed to make sure the court heard the right cases brought by the right people and heard by the right lower court judges.

Leo built a machine to achieve that goal. He helped ensure the nominations of justices from Clarence Thomas to Amy Coney Barrett. He used his closeness to the justices to attract donors to support his larger effort. He then used those donations to build a network of dark money groups supporting his candidates and causes across the U.S. And he helped elect or appoint state Supreme Court justices who were predisposed to push American jurisprudence to the right.

Wisconsin was where Leo honed his strategy. In 2008, in a racially charged challenge to the state’s first Black Supreme Court justice, Leo himself raised money for Gableman, according to a person familiar with the campaign. Leo passed along a list of wealthy donors with the instructions to “tell them Leonard told you to call,” this person said. All those people gave the maximum. Gableman won, the first time an incumbent was unseated in Wisconsin in 40 years. (Leo declined to comment to us on his role in that race.)

Then in 2011, state GOP operatives turned to Leo to boost Prosser. They hoped he would help them raise $200,000 for “a coalition to maintain the Court,” the emails show. Prosser won, by half a percentage point. (When the emails mentioning his race surfaced, Prosser defended his independence.)

In 2016, Leo got involved again. Walker had a vacancy to fill and had three people on his shortlist: two Court of Appeals justices and the former attorney for an anti-abortion group and Federalist Society chapter head, Dan Kelly. “Leo stepped in and said it’s going to be Dan Kelly,” a person familiar with the selection told us. Walker denied speaking to Leo, who said he didn’t remember. From 2016 until the present, a group called the Judicial Crisis Network (which is now known as the Concord Fund), was a regular donor to state judicial races. Leo has no official role at the JCN, which as a dark money group does not have to disclose its donors. But he helped create and raise money for it, and JCN often works toward the same goals as the Federalist Society.

JCN was a crucial financial supporter of the public campaigns to win support for Supreme Court nominees backed by Leo, from Chief Justice John Roberts to Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett. In Wisconsin, JCN sent increasing amounts of money to judicial races through circuitous routes. Sometimes the contribution flowed through a national political organization like the Republican State Leadership Committee. Other times, the money was sent to Wisconsin-based outfits.

Wisconsin is not the only state that Leo focused on. North Carolina shows the effects of more than a decade’s worth of big-dollar funding from his network and a torrent of negative ads questioning the integrity of the judiciary.

In 2022, after years of sustained campaign spending by the Judicial Crisis Network and allied groups, North Carolina’s high court flipped from a 4-3 Democratic majority to a 5-2 Republican majority. Months later, the court did something extraordinary: It reinstated a voter ID law that the same court, in its Democratic-led iteration, had found discriminated against Black voters. It also overturned a newly court-approved elections map that had produced an electoral outcome reflecting the state’s partisan split.

In Wisconsin, the battles over the high court continue to be fierce. In April, Kelly, Leo’s chosen candidate, ran to maintain a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. It was the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, with both sides spending at least $51 million. But Democrats were activated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe and by election maps that had maintained Republican dominance in the Legislature in a state evenly divided along partisan lines. Their candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, won resoundingly.

But that hasn’t stopped Republicans from trying to regain control. In September, there was talk of impeaching Protasiewicz because of comments she made during the campaign about “rigged” election maps. That effort has subsided — for now.

Leo’s candidate lost in Wisconsin — but his efforts over the years have succeeded in something else: transforming seats on state Supreme Courts into political prizes. In many states, such judges are no longer viewed as independent arbiters from a branch of government that operates outside partisanship but as a kind of super-legislator. “That’s bad for the system,” Robert Orr, a former Republican North Carolina justice, told us. “It’s bad for democracy. It’s a very dangerous path to tread down.”

In a written statement, Leo said state courts “are more independent and impartial today than they were when trial lawyers and unions dominated state judicial races without any counter.”

The stakes for democracy are stark. Already, a University of Washington study ranking the health of democracies in states found North Carolina and Wisconsin have plummeted from two of the highest-scoring states to scraping the bottom.

One result of this project is clear. Today, the practice of deploying every weapon in the American political arsenal, from nasty campaign ads to spending by groups whose donors are hidden, is now a routine aspect of campaigns for the judges who rule on state laws and, in 2024, might well decide the outcome of elections in battleground states.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Andrea Bernstein and Andy Kroll.

Also, of interest, Google: “France’s Global Warming Predicament,” which discusses nuclear energy’s vulnerability in a global warming world.

Beyond Nuclear International recently published an article about the status of Fukushima as well as an exposé of how the nuclear industry gets away with responsibility for radiation-caused (1) deaths (2) chronic conditions like cancer (3) genetic deformities: A Strategy of Concealment, September 24, 2023, by Kolin Kobayashi, who is a Tokyo-born France-based anti-nuclear activist journalist also serving as president of Echo-Exchange. “How Agencies That Promote Nuclear Power Are Quietly Managing Its Disaster Narrative.”

The following synopsis, including editorial license that adds important death details which defy the nuclear industry’s bogus claims about nuclear safety, opens closed pathways to what’s really going on.

After thirteen years, the declaration of a State of Emergency for Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant still cannot be lifted because of many unknowns, as well as ubiquitous deadly radiation levels. The destroyed reactors are tinderboxes of highly radioactive spent fuel rods that contain more cesium-137 than eighty-five (85) Chernobyls. Cesium-137 in or near a human body erupts into a series of maladies, one after another in short order, depending upon level of exposure: (1) nausea (2) vomiting (3) diarrhea (4) bleeding (5) coma leading to death.

The spent fuel rods at the Fukushima nuclear reactor site are stored in pools of water on the top floor of compromised reactor buildings 100 feet above ground level, except for Unit 3 which completed removal of its spent fuel rods in 2019, an extremely slow, laborious process that’s highly dangerous.

Stored spent fuel rods in open pools of water are the epitome of high-risk. “If the 440 tonne vessel collapses, it could hit the storage pool next to it. If this pool is damaged, even partially, another major disaster could occur.” (Kobayashi) In that regard, there’s significant risk of collapse in the event of a strong earthquake. And Japan is one of the most earthquake prone countries in the world. “The city (Tokyo) government’s experts reckon there is a 70% chance of a magnitude 7, or higher, quake hitting the capital within the next 30 years.” (“Japan is Preparing for a Massive Earthquake,” The Economist, August 31, 2023)

If exposed to open air, spent fuel rods erupt into a sizzling zirconium fire followed by massive radiation bursts of the most toxic material on the planet. It can upend an entire countryside and force evacuation of major cities. According to the widely recognized nuclear expert Paul Blanch: “Continual storage in spent fuel pools is the most unsafe thing you could do.” Paul Blanch, registered professional engineer, US Navy Reactor Operator & Instructor with 55 years of experience with nuclear engineering and regulatory agencies, is widely recognized as one of America’s leading experts on nuclear power.

Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Plant will remain a high-risk explosive scenario for decades ahead. After all, a program for future decommissioning is unclear and overall radiation guesstimates are formidable. All the structures where decommissioning will take place are highly radioactive and as such nearly impossible for the dangers to worker exposure.

TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) does not yet know the true extent of damage nor the complete dispersion of corium (molten magma from melted nuclear fuel rods in the core of the reactors). Although engineers believe they’ve located the corium in all three crippled units.  For example, when unit 1 was surveyed by a robot, images showed many parts of the concrete foundation supporting the pressure vessel severely damaged by intense heat from corium. Corium, which is the product of the meltdown of fuel rods in the core of the reactor, is so hot that “corium lava can melt upwards of 30cm (12 inches) of concrete in 1 hour.” (Source: “The Most Dangerous (Man-Made) Lava Flow,” Wired, April 10, 2013)

Furthermore, on specific point: Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory created corium at 2000°C in an experiment. The experiment demonstrated that “cooling with water may not be sufficient” to halt damaging aspects of corium to concrete. According to the Argonne experiment: “One thing to remember — much of the melting of concrete during a meltdown occurs within minutes to hours, so keeping the core cool is vital for stopping the corium from breaching that containment vessel.”

In the case of Fukushima, TEPCO claims the corium did not breach the outer wall of the containment vessels, “although there is a healthy debate about this,” Ibid.  Still, an open question remains. The crippled reactors are so hot with radiation that it’s nearly impossible to fully know what’s happening. Dangers of corium: “Long after the meltdown, the lava constituting the corium will remain highly dangerously radioactive for decades-to-centuries.” (Wired)

Regarding the decision to start releasing radioactive water from storage tanks at Fukushima, which water accumulates daily for purposes of keeping the hot stuff from igniting into an indeterminate fireball, the decision to release was approved by the International Atomic Energy Agency: “The IAEA does not have the scientific authority to make reference to the ecological impact of this water discharge, nor has it carried out such a long-term assessment. It is more of a political decision than a scientific one.” (Kobayashi)

Radiation Risks to Society

According to the World Nuclear Association, there were no fatalities due to radiation exposure at Fukushima. And as recently as 2021, Forbes magazine reported “No one Died From Radiation At Fukushima: IAEA Boss.” It is believed this is a lie and part of a massive coverup.

According to Green Cross (founded in 1993 by Mikhail Gorbachev, who repeatedly spoke out about interrelated threats humanity and our Earth confront from nuclear arms, chemical weapons, unsustainable development, and the human-induced decimation of the planet’s ecology): “Approximately 32 million people in Japan are affected by the radioactive fallout from the nuclear disaster in Fukushima… This includes people who were exposed to radiation and other stress factors resulting from the accident and who are consequently at potential risk from both long and short-term consequences… As with the Chernobyl nuclear accident, which impacted 10 million people, Japan is expected to see increased cancer risk and neuropsychological long-term health consequences.”

With nuclear radiation, the damage to humans shows up years later as cancer and/or deformity of newborns second/third generation. For example, only recently, the truth has come to surface about Chernobyl-related deaths, child deformities, and cancer 30+ years after the event. For example:

* A BBC Future Planet article on July 25, 2019, “The True Toll of the Chernobyl Disaster”:

According to the official, internationally recognized death toll, just 31 people died as an immediate result of Chernobyl while the UN estimates that only 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the disaster. In 2005, it predicted a further 4,000 might eventually die as a result of the radiation exposure… Brown’s research, however, suggests Chernobyl has cast a far longer shadow.

* “The number of deaths in subsequent decades remains in dispute. The lowest estimates are 4,000; others 90,000 and up to 200,000.” (Janata Weekly: “Cuba and the Children of Chernobyl,” May 7, 2023)

* According to an article in USA Today February 24, 2022, “What Happened at Chernobyl? What to Know About Nuclear Disaster“: “At least 28 people were killed by the disaster, but thousands more have died from cancer as a result of radiation that spread after the explosion and fire. The effects of radiation on the environment and humans is still being studied.”

According to Chernobyl Children International, 6,000 newborns are born every year in Ukraine with congenital heart defects called “Chernobyl Heart.”

Fukushima Report: The stress-related effects of Fukushima evacuation and subsequent relocation are also a concern. The evacuation involved a total of over 400,000 individuals, 160,000 of them from within 20km of Fukushima. The number of deaths from the nuclear disaster attributed to stress, fatigue and the hardship of living as evacuees is estimated to be around 1,700 so far. (“Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant Disaster: How Many People Were Affected? 2015 Report,” Reliefweb, March 9, 2015.

The Fukushima Report was prepared under the direction of Prof. Jonathan M. Samet, Director of the Institute for Global Health at the University of Southern California (USC), as a Green Cross initiative. Green Cross International: GCI is an independent non-profit and nongovernmental organization founded in 1993 by Nobel Peace Laureate Mikhail Gorbachev.

Over time, Japan is expected to see increased cancer risks and neuropsychological long-term health consequences. “The lives of approximately 42 million people have been permanently affected by radioactive contamination caused by the accidents in the Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants. Continued exposure to low-level radiation, entering the human body on a daily basis through food intake, is of particular consequence,” Ibid.

Fukushima Deaths

The cocksure pro-nuclear crowd has trumpeted Fukushima as an example of Mother Nature taking lives because of an earthquake and tsunami; whereas the power plant accident proves nuclear power can withstand the worst without unnecessary death and illness. According to nuclear industry reports, all the deaths (16,000) were the fault of Mother Nature, not radiation.

But people in the streets and on the ground in Japan tell a different story about the risks of radiation. They talk about illnesses and death. TEPCO itself has reported few radiation illnesses and no radiation-caused deaths but what if it’s not their responsibility in the first instance, as layers of contractors and subcontractors employ workers to cleanup the toxic mess. If “subcontractor workers die” from radiation exposure, so what? It’s not TEPCO’s responsibility to report worker deaths of subcontractors, and the subcontractors are not motivated to report deaths, which are not reported.

According to credible sources in Japan, death is in the air, to wit: “The ashes of half a dozen unidentified laborers ended up at a Buddhist temple in this town just north of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Some of the dead men had no papers, others left no emergency contacts. Their names could not be confirmed, and no family members had been tracked down to claim their remains. They were simply labeled ‘decontamination troops’ — unknown soldiers in Japan’s massive cleanup campaign to make Fukushima livable again five years after radiation poisoned the fertile countryside… Hideaki Kinoshita, a Buddhist monk… keeps the unidentified laborers’ ashes at his temple, in wooden boxes and wrapped in white cloth.” (Mari Yamaguchi, Fukushima, “‘Decontamination Troops’ Often Exploited, Shunned,” AP & ABC News, Minamisoma, Japan, Mar 10, 2016)

“The men were among the 26,000 workers — many in their 50s and 60s from the margins of society with no special skills or close family ties — tasked with removing the contaminated topsoil and stuffing it into tens of thousands of black bags lining the fields and roads. They wipe off roofs, clean out gutters and chop down trees in a seemingly endless routine… Coming from across Japan to do a dirty, risky and undesirable job, the workers make up the very bottom of the nation’s murky, caste-like subcontractor system long criticized for labor violations,” Ibid.

The following is part of an interview with Katsutaka Idogawa, former mayor of Futaba, Fukushima Prefecture. (“Fukushima Disaster: Tokyo Hides Truth as Children Die, Become Ill from Radiation” – Ex-Mayor, RT, April 21, 2014):

SS (question): The United Nations report on the radiation fallout from Fukushima says no radiation-related deaths or acute diseases have been observed among the workers and general public exposed – so it’s not that dangerous after all? Or is there not enough information available to make proper assessments? What do you think?

Katslutaka Idogawa’s response: “This report is completely false. The report was made by a representative of Japan – Professor Hayano. Representing Japan, he lied to the whole world. When I was mayor, I knew many people who died from a heart attack, and then there were many people in Fukushima who died suddenly, even among young people. It’s a real shame that the authorities hide the truth from the whole world, from the UN. We need to admit that actually many people are dying. We are not allowed to say that, but TEPCO employees also are dying. But they keep mum about it.”

Mako Oshidori, interviewed in Germany, director of Free Press Corporation/Japan, investigated several unreported worker deaths, and interviewed a former nurse who quit TEPCO: “I would like to talk about my interview of a nurse who used to work at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) after the accident… He quit his job with TEPCO in 2013, and that’s when I interviewed him… As of now, there are multiple NPP workers that have died, but only the ones who died on the job are reported publicly. Some of them have died suddenly while off work, for instance, during the weekend or in their sleep, but none of their deaths are reported.” (Oshidori)

“Not only that, but they are also not included in the worker death count. For example, there are some workers who quit the job after a lot of radiation exposure… and end up dying a month later, but none of these deaths are either reported, or included in the death toll. This is the reality of the NPP workers.” (Oshidori)

During her interview, Ms. Oshidori commented, “There is one thing that really surprised me here in Europe. It’s the fact that people here think Japan is a very democratic and free country.”

Mako’s full interview “The Hidden Truth about Fukushima”

Alas, two hundred U.S. sailors of the USS Ronald Reagan filed a lawsuit against TEPCO, claiming that they experienced leukemia, ulcers, gall bladder removals, brain cancer, brain tumors, testicular cancer, dysfunctional uterine bleeding, thyroid illness, stomach ailments and other complaints extremely unusual in such young adults. One sailor died from radiation complications. Among the plaintiffs was a sailor who was pregnant during the mission. Her baby was born with multiple genetic mutations.

The sailors that filed the suit participated in “Operation Tomodachi,” providing humanitarian relief after the March 11th, 2011 Fukushima disaster based upon assurances that radiation levels were okay. But that was a lie.

Ultimately, and unsurprisingly, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the sailors’ appeal.

In summation, the final word is left to Kolin Kobaryashi: “The international nuclear lobby, which represents only a minority, has the influence and money to dominate the world’s population with immense power and has now united the world’s minority nuclear community into one big galaxy. Many of the citizens who have experienced the world’s three most serious civil nuclear accidents have clearly realized that nuclear energy is too dangerous. These citizens are so divided and conflicted that they feel like a helpless minority.”

“Former prime ministers Junichiro Koizumi and Naoto Kan called on the European Union on Thursday to pursue a path toward zero nuclear power, with the bloc planning to designate it as a form of “green” energy in achieving net-zero emissions by midcentury.” (“Ex-Prime Ministers Koizumi and Kan Demand EU Choose Zero Nuclear Power Path,” Japan Times, Jan. 27, 2022)

Five former Japanese prime ministers issued declarations that Japan should break with nuclear power generation on March 11, the 10th anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami that triggered a nuclear disaster in Fukushima Prefecture… Former prime ministers Morihiro Hosokawa, Tomiichi Murayama, Junichiro Koizumi, Yukio Hatoyama and Naoto Kan signed and released their declarations during the conference. Among them, Koizumi, Hatoyama and Kan took to the podium and shook hands… In his declaration titled ‘Don’t hold back on reversing a mistake: A zero-carbon emission society can be achieved without nuclear power plants,’ Koizumi said, ‘When it comes to the nuclear power plant issue, there is no ruling party or opposition party. Nuclear power plants expose many people’s lives to danger, bring financial ruin, and cause impossible-to-solve nuclear waste problems. We have no choice but to abolish them. (“5 ex-Japan PMs Call for Country to End Nuclear Power Use on Fukushima 10th Anniversary,” Mainichi, March 12, 2021)

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

Fukushima nuclear accident. (2023, October 11).

The world is turning to nuclear power as a solution to global warming, but it is postulated herein that it is a huge mistake that endangers society. One nuclear meltdown causes as much damage over the long-term as a major war. Moreover, according to Dr. Paul Dorfman, chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group, former secretary to the UK Scientific Advisory Committee on Internal Radiation: “It’s important to understand that nuclear is very likely to be a significant climate casualty.”

Also, of interest: France’s Global Warming Predicament discusses nuclear energy’s vulnerability in a global warming world.

Beyond Nuclear International recently published an article about the status of Fukushima as well as an exposé of how the nuclear industry gets away with responsibility for radiation-caused (1) deaths (2) chronic conditions like cancer (3) genetic deformities: A Strategy of Concealment, September 24, 2023, by Kolin Kobayashi, who is a Tokyo-born France-based anti-nuclear activist journalist also serving as president of Echo-Exchange. Kobayashi’s work was posted by CounterPunch under the title: How Agencies That Promote Nuclear Power Are Quietly Managing Its Disaster Narrative.

The following synopsis, including editorial license that adds important death details which defy the nuclear industry’s bogus claims about nuclear safety, opens closed pathways to what’s really going on.

After thirteen years, the declaration of a State of Emergency for Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant still cannot be lifted because of many unknowns, as well as ubiquitous deadly radiation levels. The destroyed reactors are tinderboxes of highly radioactive spent fuel rods that contain more cesium-137 than eighty-five (85) Chernobyls. Cesium-137 in or near a human body erupts into a series of maladies, one after another in short order, depending upon level of exposure: (1) nausea (2) vomiting (3) diarrhea (4) bleeding (5) coma leading to death.

The spent fuel rods at the Fukushima nuclear reactor site are stored in pools of water on the top floor of compromised reactor buildings 100 feet above ground level, except for Unit 3 which completed removal of its spent fuel rods in 2019, an extremely slow, laborious process that’s highly dangerous.

Stored spent fuel rods in open pools of water are the epitome of high-risk. “If the 440 tonne vessel collapses, it could hit the storage pool next to it. If this pool is damaged, even partially, another major disaster could occur.” (Kobayashi) In that regard, there’s significant risk of collapse in the event of a strong earthquake. And Japan is one of the most earthquake prone countries in the world. “The city (Tokyo) government’s experts reckon there is a 70% chance of a magnitude 7, or higher, quake hitting the capital within the next 30 years.” (Source: Japan is Preparing for a Massive Earthquake, The Economist, August 31, 2023)

If exposed to open air, spent fuel rods erupt into a sizzling zirconium fire followed by massive radiation bursts of the most toxic material on the planet. It can upend an entire countryside and force evacuation of major cities. According to the widely recognized nuclear expert Paul Blanch: “Continual storage in spent fuel pools is the most unsafe thing you could do.” Paul Blanch, registered professional engineer, US Navy Reactor Operator & Instructor with 55 years of experience with nuclear engineering and regulatory agencies, is widely recognized as one of America’s leading experts on nuclear power.

Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Plant will remain a high-risk explosive scenario for decades ahead. After all, a program for future decommissioning is unclear and overall radiation guesstimates are formidable. All the structures where decommissioning will take place are highly radioactive and as such nearly impossible for the dangers to worker exposure.

TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) does not yet know the true extent of damage nor the complete dispersion of corium (molten magma from melted nuclear fuel rods in the core of the reactors). Although engineers believe they’ve located the corium in all three crippled units. For example, when unit 1 was surveyed by a robot, images showed many parts of the concrete foundation supporting the pressure vessel severely damaged by intense heat from corium. Corium, which is the product of the meltdown of fuel rods in the core of the reactor, is so hot that “corium lava can melt upwards of 30cm (12 inches) of concrete in 1 hour.” (Source: The Most Dangerous (Man-Made) Lava Flow, Wired, April 10, 2013)

Furthermore, on specific point: Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory created corium at 2000°C in an experiment. The experiment demonstrated that “cooling with water may not be sufficient” to halt damaging aspects of corium to concrete. According to the Argonne experiment: “One thing to remember — much of the melting of concrete during a meltdown occurs within minutes to hours, so keeping the core cool is vital for stopping the corium from breaching that containment vessel.”

In the case of Fukushima, TEPCO claims the corium did not breach the outer wall of the containment vessels, “although there is a healthy debate about this,” Ibid. Still, an open question remains. The crippled reactors are so hot with radiation that it’s nearly impossible to fully know what’s happening. Dangers of corium: “Long after the meltdown, the lava constituting the corium will remain highly dangerously radioactive for decades-to-centuries.” (Wired)

Regarding the decision to start releasing radioactive water from storage tanks at Fukushima, which water accumulates daily for purposes of keeping the hot stuff from igniting into an indeterminate fireball, the decision to release was approved by the International Atomic Energy Agency: “The IAEA does not have the scientific authority to make reference to the ecological impact of this water discharge, nor has it carried out such a long-term assessment. It is more of a political decision than a scientific one.” (Kobayashi)

Radiation Risks to Society

According to the World Nuclear Association, there were no fatalities due to radiation exposure at Fukushima. And as recently as 2021, Forbes magazine reported No one Died From Radiation At Fukushima: IAEA Boss. It is believed this is a lie and part of a massive coverup.

According to Green Cross (founded in 1993 by Mikhail Gorbachev, who repeatedly spoke out about interrelated threats humanity and our Earth confront from nuclear arms, chemical weapons, unsustainable development, and the human-induced decimation of the planet’s ecology): “Approximately 32 million people in Japan are affected by the radioactive fallout from the nuclear disaster in Fukushima… This includes people who were exposed to radiation and other stress factors resulting from the accident and who are consequently at potential risk from both long and short-term consequences… As with the Chernobyl nuclear accident, which impacted 10 million people, Japan is expected to see increased cancer risk and neuropsychological long-term health consequences.”

With nuclear radiation, the damage to humans shows up years later as cancer and/or deformity of newborns second/third generation. For example, only recently, the truth has come to surface about Chernobyl-related deaths, child deformities, and cancer 30+ years after the event. For example:

* A BBC Future Planet article d/d July 25, 2019, The True Toll of the Chernobyl Disaster: “According to the official, internationally recognized death toll, just 31 people died as an immediate result of Chernobyl while the UN estimates that only 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the disaster. In 2005, it predicted a further 4,000 might eventually die as a result of the radiation exposure… Brown’s research, however, suggests Chernobyl has cast a far longer shadow.”

* “The number of deaths in subsequent decades remains in dispute. The lowest estimates are 4,000; others 90,000 and up to 200,000.” (Source: Janata Weekly: Cuba and the Children of Chernobyl, May 7, 2023)

* According to an article in USA Today d/d February 24, 2022, What Happened at Chernobyl? What to Know About Nuclear Disaster: “At least 28 people were killed by the disaster, but thousands more have died from cancer as a result of radiation that spread after the explosion and fire. The effects of radiation on the environment and humans is still being studied.”

According to Chernobyl Children International, 6,000 newborns are born every year in Ukraine with congenital heart defects called “Chernobyl Heart.”

Fukushima Report: The stress-related effects of Fukushima evacuation and subsequent relocation are also a concern. The evacuation involved a total of over 400,000 individuals, 160,000 of them from within 20km of Fukushima. The number of deaths from the nuclear disaster attributed to stress, fatigue and the hardship of living as evacuees is estimated to be around 1,700 so far. (Source; Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant Disaster: How Many People Were Affected? 2015 Report, Reliefweb, March 9, 2015.

The Fukushima Report was prepared under the direction of Prof. Jonathan M. Samet, Director of the Institute for Global Health at the University of Southern California (USC), as a Green Cross initiative. Green Cross International: GCI is an independent non-profit and nongovernmental organization founded in 1993 by Nobel Peace Laureate Mikhail Gorbachev.

Over time, Japan is expected to see increased cancer risks and neuropsychological long-term health consequences. “The lives of approximately 42 million people have been permanently affected by radioactive contamination caused by the accidents in the Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants. Continued exposure to low-level radiation, entering the human body on a daily basis through food intake, is of particular consequence,” Ibid.

Fukushima Deaths

The cocksure pro-nuclear crowd has trumpeted Fukushima as an example of Mother Nature taking lives because of an earthquake and tsunami; whereas the power plant accident proves nuclear power can withstand the worst without unnecessary death and illness. According to nuclear industry reports, all the deaths (16,000) were the fault of Mother Nature, not radiation.

But people in the streets and on the ground in Japan tell a different story about the risks of radiation. They talk about illnesses and death. TEPCO itself has reported few radiation illnesses and no radiation-caused deaths but what if it’s not their responsibility in the first instance, as layers of contractors and subcontractors employ workers to cleanup the toxic mess. If “subcontractor workers die” from radiation exposure, so what? It’s not TEPCO’s responsibility to report worker deaths of subcontractors, and the subcontractors are not motivated to report deaths, which are not reported.

According to credible sources in Japan, death is in the air, to wit: “The ashes of half a dozen unidentified laborers ended up at a Buddhist temple in this town just north of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Some of the dead men had no papers, others left no emergency contacts. Their names could not be confirmed, and no family members had been tracked down to claim their remains. They were simply labeled ‘decontamination troops’ — unknown soldiers in Japan’s massive cleanup campaign to make Fukushima livable again five years after radiation poisoned the fertile countryside… Hideaki Kinoshita, a Buddhist monk… keeps the unidentified laborers’ ashes at his temple, in wooden boxes and wrapped in white cloth.” (Source: Mari Yamaguchi, Fukushima ‘Decontamination Troops’ Often Exploited, Shunned, AP & ABC News, Minamisoma, Japan, Mar 10, 2016)

“The men were among the 26,000 workers — many in their 50s and 60s from the margins of society with no special skills or close family ties — tasked with removing the contaminated topsoil and stuffing it into tens of thousands of black bags lining the fields and roads. They wipe off roofs, clean out gutters and chop down trees in a seemingly endless routine… Coming from across Japan to do a dirty, risky and undesirable job, the workers make up the very bottom of the nation’s murky, caste-like subcontractor system long criticized for labor violations,” Ibid.

The following is part of an interview with Katsutaka Idogawa, former mayor of Futaba, Fukushima Prefecture. (Source: Fukushima Disaster: Tokyo Hides Truth as Children Die, Become Ill from Radiation – Ex-Mayor, RT, April 21, 2014):

SS (question): The United Nations report on the radiation fallout from Fukushima says no radiation-related deaths or acute diseases have been observed among the workers and general public exposed – so it’s not that dangerous after all? Or is there not enough information available to make proper assessments? What do you think?

Katslutaka Idogawa’s response: “This report is completely false. The report was made by a representative of Japan – Professor Hayano. Representing Japan, he lied to the whole world. When I was mayor, I knew many people who died from a heart attack, and then there were many people in Fukushima who died suddenly, even among young people. It’s a real shame that the authorities hide the truth from the whole world, from the UN. We need to admit that actually many people are dying. We are not allowed to say that, but TEPCO employees also are dying. But they keep mum about it.”

Mako Oshidori, interviewed in Germany, director of Free Press Corporation/Japan, investigated several unreported worker deaths, and interviewed a former nurse who quit TEPCO: “I would like to talk about my interview of a nurse who used to work at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) after the accident… He quit his job with TEPCO in 2013, and that’s when I interviewed him… As of now, there are multiple NPP workers that have died, but only the ones who died on the job are reported publicly. Some of them have died suddenly while off work, for instance, during the weekend or in their sleep, but none of their deaths are reported.” (Oshidori)

“Not only that, but they are also not included in the worker death count. For example, there are some workers who quit the job after a lot of radiation exposure… and end up dying a month later, but none of these deaths are either reported, or included in the death toll. This is the reality of the NPP workers.” (Oshidori)

During her interview, Ms. Oshidori commented, “There is one thing that really surprised me here in Europe. It’s the fact that people here think Japan is a very democratic and free country.”

Mako’s full interview “The Hidden Truth about Fukushima”

Alas, two hundred U.S. sailors of the USS Ronald Reagan filed a lawsuit against TEPCO, claiming that they experienced leukemia, ulcers, gall bladder removals, brain cancer, brain tumors, testicular cancer, dysfunctional uterine bleeding, thyroid illness, stomach ailments and other complaints extremely unusual in such young adults. One sailor died from radiation complications. Among the plaintiffs was a sailor who was pregnant during the mission. Her baby was born with multiple genetic mutations.

The sailors that filed the suit participated in “Operation Tomodachi,” providing humanitarian relief after the March 11th, 2011 Fukushima disaster based upon assurances that radiation levels were okay. But that was a lie.

Ultimately, and unsurprisingly, the 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the sailors’ appeal.

In summation, the final word is left to Kolin Kobaryashi: “The international nuclear lobby, which represents only a minority, has the influence and money to dominate the world’s population with immense power and has now united the world’s minority nuclear community into one big galaxy. Many of the citizens who have experienced the world’s three most serious civil nuclear accidents have clearly realized that nuclear energy is too dangerous. These citizens are so divided and conflicted that they feel like a helpless minority.”

“Former prime ministers Junichiro Koizumi and Naoto Kan called on the European Union on Thursday to pursue a path toward zero nuclear power, with the bloc planning to designate it as a form of “green” energy in achieving net-zero emissions by midcentury.” (Source: Ex-Prime Ministers Koizumi and Kan Demand EU Choose Zero Nuclear Power Path, The Japan Times, Jan. 27, 2022)

“Five former Japanese prime ministers issued declarations that Japan should break with nuclear power generation on March 11, the 10th anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami that triggered a nuclear disaster in Fukushima Prefecture… Former prime ministers Morihiro Hosokawa, Tomiichi Murayama, Junichiro Koizumi, Yukio Hatoyama and Naoto Kan signed and released their declarations during the conference. Among them, Koizumi, Hatoyama and Kan took to the podium and shook hands… In his declaration titled ‘Don’t hold back on reversing a mistake: A zero-carbon emission society can be achieved without nuclear power plants,’ Koizumi said, ‘When it comes to the nuclear power plant issue, there is no ruling party or opposition party. Nuclear power plants expose many people’s lives to danger, bring financial ruin, and cause impossible-to-solve nuclear waste problems. We have no choice but to abolish them.” (Source: 5 ex-Japan PMs Call for Country to End Nuclear Power Use on Fukushima 10^th Anniversary, The Mainichi, March 12, 2021)

Japan PM Kishida Orders New Nuclear Power Plant Construction, Nikkei Asia, August 24, 2022.

The post Fukushima Up Close, 13 Years Later appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by W. T. Whitney.

The post Cuba’s Worsening Food Crisis Means US Blockade Must End Now, Not Later appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by W. T. Whitney.

The Nagasaki Prefecture Report on the bombing characterized Nagasaki as “like a graveyard with not a tombstone standing.” Image by Cpl. Lynn P. Walker, Jr.

August 9 marks the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. The nuclear fuel for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki was produced at Hanford, in eastern Washington state, which is now the most toxic site in the Western Hemisphere, and the most expensive clean-up in world history. Today the site is laced with billions of gallons of chemical sewage and 56 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste. The following is an excerpt from Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, which investigates the Cold War’s toxic legacy and the looming nuclear dangers of the Hanford project.

+++

The United States’ decision to drop nuclear bombs on Japan was not without precedent. In the winter of 1945, the United States firebombed both Dresden, Germany, killing forty-five thousand people, and Tokyo, Japan, killing more than three hundred thousand people. Some believe these estimates to be low. “I was on the island of Guam … in March of 1945. In that single night, we burned to death one hundred thousand Japanese civilians in Tokyo: men, women, and children,” recalled Robert McNamara, who later served as secretary of defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. In all, the United States firebombed sixty-seven Japanese cities over the course of that bloody year. While not all—particularly US secretary of war Henry Stimson—enjoyed the targeting of civilians, no complaints were officially raised within the US government about the firebombing’s legal or ethical implications. Most officials believed these horrible bombings would help bring the war to an end, forcing the Japanese and Germans to surrender.

Nonetheless, with UK approval, President Truman ordered a nuclear bomb to be dropped over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, less than one month after the test run at Trinity. The United States alerted Japanese citizens, dropping leaflets that warned their towns would “fall to ashes.” The bombing inflicted catastrophic damage. Temperatures on the ground topped 4,000°C. Birds dropped from the sky. Radioactive rain poured down on the city. The uranium bomb nicknamed “Little Boy,” which exploded over Hiroshima destroyed 70 percent of the entire city. Nearly all of the city’s medical staff were killed, and ultimately a staggering 140,000 deaths were recorded in the months and years that followed.

The United States argued that Hiroshima and its military headquarters were legitimate targets, and conveyed little concern about the previous decision to firebomb tens of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians in Tokyo. Professor Alex Wallerstein argues that before the bombing Truman was unaware that Hiroshima was an actual city, and not simply a military outpost. In fact, Wallerstein notes, Truman was more intent on avoiding massive innocent casualties and was simply taking the lead from Stimson, albeit a misinformed one. “Truman’s confusion on this issue,” writes Wallerstein, “came out of his discussions with Secretary of War Henry Stimson about the relative merits of Kyoto versus Hiroshima as a target: Stimson emphasized the civilian nature of Kyoto and paired it against the military-status of Hiroshima, and Truman read more into the contrast than was actually true.”

“The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold. And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form, these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development,” President Harry Truman read in a statement following the bombing of Hiroshima. “It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”

The United States wasn’t done yet. In the early morning hours of August 9, a B-29 named Box Car, outfitted with the plutonium bomb nicknamed Fat Man, took off from Tinian Airfield in the Mariana Islands, over 1,400 miles southeast of Nagasaki. Box Car was commanded by Major Charles W. Sweeney. The original target of the second bombing was not initially Nagasaki but a military cache located in Kokura. Weather, however, was not cooperating over Kokura. A haze obscured the plane’s target and anti-aircraft fire proved frustrating, so Major Sweeney changed course and headed to the secondary target, of Nagasaki. Jacob Beser, an aircraft crewman, later recalled that they abandoned Kokura and headed to Nagasaki because “there was no sense dragging the bomb home or dropping it in the ocean.”

As the plane neared Nagasaki, the visibility was equally as bad as over Kokura, but through a brief break in the clouds, Captain Kermit K. Beahan was able to spot the city’s stadium. The plane circled back, and at 11:02 a.m. on August 9, 1945, the United States dropped the “Fat Man” bomb on Nagasaki. The bomb caused an explosion 40 percent larger than the Little Boy bombing of Hiroshima. The bomb’s plutonium fuel was produced at Hanford.

“I have no regrets. I think we did right, and we couldn’t have done it differently. Yeah, I know it has been suggested the second bomb, Nagasaki, was not necessary,” said project physicist Leona Marshall Libby later, defending the bombing. “The guys who cry on shoulders. When you are in a war, to the death, I don’t think you stand around and ask, ‘Is it right?’”

The nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unlike anything the world had ever experienced. More than two hundred thousand people died in the fiery blasts and from acute radiation poisoning in the hours and days following the explosions. Bodies were vaporized, structures melted from extreme heat, and the radiation pulsated spherically from the bombs’ hypocenters. Unlike the Trinity test in New Mexico, where the warhead exploded on the ground, both of the bombs dropped on Japan were detonated six hundred meters in the air above the cities. If there was any good news for the Japanese, this would be it. Had the bomb exploded on the ground the results would have been even more horrific.

For survivors of the bombings, most of whom have now passed on, cancer rates remained astronomically higher than in populations unexposed to the same amount of radiation. According to the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, the risk of leukemia, or blood cancer, was 46 percent higher among bombing victims. For people in utero at the time, risk of physical impairment, such as small head size or mental disability, was even more significant.

Studies of the survivors later revealed what scientists had suspected even before the 1945 blasts—that radiation can mutate DNA and in turn cause different forms of cancer, blood cancer in particular. Among Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims, the rate of leukemia rose sharply in the 1950s. Their damaged cells were more susceptible to developing cancers. The Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), a joint US and Japanese research effort that evolved from the 1946 Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, has revealed startling findings in its lifespan study of ninety-four thousand bomb survivors, which followed their lives from 1958 to 1998. The more radiation a person received, the greater was their risk of developing cancer.32 In fact, according to the RERF study, the relationship between radiation levels and cancer likelihood was linear. As radiation levels doubled, incidents of cancer doubled. Leukemia, however, proved to be exponentially correlated: as higher levels of radiation doubled, the risk of leukemia quadrupled. Had the bombs exploded closer to the ground, scientists believe that higher radiation levels would have led to more cancers, and ultimately, more deaths.

“I was three years old at the time of the [Nagasaki] bombing. I don’t remember much, but I do recall that my surroundings turned blindingly white, like a million camera flashes going off at once. Then, pitch darkness,” reflected bombing victim Yasujiro Tanaka.

I was buried alive under the house, I’ve been told. When my uncle finally found me and pulled my tiny three-year-old body out from under the debris, I was unconscious. My face was misshapen. He was certain that I was dead. Tankfully, I survived. But since that day, mysterious scabs began to form all over my body. I lost hearing in my left ear, probably due to the air blast. More than a decade after the bombing, my mother began to notice glass shards growing out of her skin—debris from the day of the bombing, presumably. My younger sister suffers from chronic muscle cramps to this day, on top of kidney issues that has her on dialysis three times a week. “What did I do to the Americans?” she would often say, “Why did they do this to me?”

A number of historians, including the late Howard Zinn, argue the nuclear bombing of Japan was not only criminal, it was unnecessary:

The principal justification for obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that it “saved lives” because otherwise a planned US invasion of Japan would have been necessary, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Truman at one point used the figure “a half million lives,” and Churchill “a million lives,” but these were figures pulled out of the air to calm troubled consciences; even official projections for the number of casualties in an invasion did not go beyond 46,000. In fact, the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not forestall an invasion of Japan because no invasion was necessary. The Japanese were on the verge of surrender, and American military leaders knew that. General Eisenhower, briefed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson on the imminent use of the bomb, told him that “Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joshua Frank.

The post Decades Later, the U.S. Government Called Hiroshima and Nagasaki ‘Nuclear Tests’ appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Norman Solomon.

The post 70 Years Later, the Korean War Must End appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Cathi Choi.

(CC photo: Ted Eytan )

This week on CounterSpin: The US public’s belief in and support for the Supreme Court has plummeted with the appointment of hyper-partisan justices whose unwillingness to answer basic questions, or answer them respectfully, would make them unqualified to work at many a Wendy’s, and the obviously outcome-determinative nature of their jurisprudence. Key to that drop in public support was last year’s Dobbs ruling, overturning something Americans overwhelmingly support and had come to see as a fundamental right—that of people to make their own decisions about when or whether to carry a pregnancy or to have a child. The impacts of that ruling are still reverberating, as is the organized pushback that we can learn about and support. We hear from Taryn Abbassian, associate research director at NARAL.

Also on the show: Meaningful, lasting response to Dobbs requires more than “vote blue no matter who,” but actually understanding and addressing the differences and disparities of abortion rights and access before Dobbs, which requires an expansive understanding of reproductive justice. CounterSpin has listened many times over the years to advocates and authors working on this issue. We hear a little this week from FAIR’s Julie Hollar; from Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of the group URGE: Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity; and from URGE’s policy director, Preston Mitchum.

The post Taryn Abbassian and Others on Dobbs One Year Later appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

The post Roe V. Wade One year Later appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Chloe Atkinson.

Fifty years ago 242 men left New Zealand on a mission to Moruroa Atoll in French Polynesia.

The crew of HMNZS Otago, and later the frigate Canterbury, were sent there to protest against French nuclear testing.

Little did they know that the fallout from the mission would continue decades later, with health problems and worries about the effects on their children and future generations.

• READ MORE: France has underestimated impact of nuclear tests iin French Polynesia, research finds
• Other French nuclear testing reports

Prime Minister Norman Kirk farewelled the Otago on 28 June 1973.

Twenty-year-old sailor Tony Cox was on board.

“I was standing on the deck along with a lot of other guys, and Norman Kirk was with the skipper, talking to various members of the crew.

“He said to me, ‘Don’t worry about anything, son. Nothing’s going to happen, but if it does, we will look after you’.”

Witnessed atmospheric test
A month later the Otago witnessed an atmospheric test just over 20 miles away.

The crew initially sheltered below deck.

“As soon as the flash had gone they said we could go up and have a look, so [we went] up the ladder and opened the door and out we went,” Cox said.

“It was a bit disappointing. It wasn’t like the movies. It was almost a straight line to start with, then it started to form into a mushroom. It had a pinky, grey colour to it.”

Fellow Otago crewman Ant Kennedy turned 20 at Moruroa.

“I got married at Honolulu. I didn’t know I was going to be married then. We were on the way to southeast Asia to be part of New Zealand’s deployment there.

“Then we were called back and it was jokingly called Norm’s Mystery Tour.”

Labour government opposed
France started nuclear tests in the Pacific in the 1960s and Kirk’s Labour government was staunchly opposed.

Cabinet Minister Fraser Colman travelled there on the Otago, and transferred to the HMNZS Canterbury when it took over protest duties.

Aboard the Canterbury, Gavin Smith also witnessed a test.

“We were inside a gas-tight citadel for the explosion. We never thought about the consequences of it until much later, and then people started dying and getting crook.

“We realised that the seawater around there was contaminated. The seawater was used on board for washing vegetables. We washed in it, bathed in it.”

The water was desalinated, but that didn’t remove radiation, as Cox recalls.

“The water around us was contaminated. We didn’t know that,” he said.

‘No fish, no seabirds’
“There were no fish there, so that was a waste of time. There were no sea birds anywhere. They were well dead, gone. It was totally different to all the different oceans I’ve been through over the years.”

Kennedy said his health was okay, but he knew he was one of the lucky ones.

He remembers one fellow sailor needing surgery.

“He had this bad cancerous stuff on his face. And a guy called Cloggs. He was a signalman on Canterbury. He was at one of our reunions, and basically he came to that and that was that.

“He was younger than me.

“I thought, holy hell. This seems to be a bit out of the ordinary. You’d expect fit, young sailors to live into their 80s.”

About 20 years ago Cox’s oncologist told him he had a rare form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Excessive doses of radiation
“[He said], ‘The only time you get this type of cancer is from excessive doses of radiation. Where would you have got that from?’

“I said, ‘I did go to a nuclear bomb test,’ and he said, ‘That’ll do it’.”

Veterans’ costs are covered for sickness arising from service.

But as Smith, the president of the Moruroa Nuclear Veterans group, said, there was concern about subsequent generations.

The group, formed in 2013, is active in trying to get recognition for possible effects on their families.

“Our children and grandchildren have oddball illnesses and we would like to know if that was a result of our service at Moruroa,” Smith said.

“Are we passing on bad genes or are we not?

Asking for DNA testing
“All we ask is for DNA testing to be done and when science can prove that fact one way or another we have an answer.

“If science does prove we have passed on bad genes we would simply like our children and grandchildren and the next generations to be looked after if they have an illness that’s related to our service.”

So far, that has not happened, despite regular lobbying of officials and ministers.

For Donna Weir, whose father Allan Hamilton was aboard the Canterbury, that concern was real.

Hamilton died in 2021 from aggressive cancer.

“I have had fertility problems, multiple miscarriages and things like that. We have kids who have problems that nobody can explain, if that makes sense.”

That included stomach and vision problems.

So much trouble
Weir said one older sister, who was conceived before 1973, had no such trouble.

The nuclear test veterans deserved greater recognition for their service, she said.

“They’re some of New Zealand’s most forgotten heroes, I think.

“I asked Dad if he knew then what we now know, would you have gone. His answer was quite simply, ‘I signed up to serve my country and that’s what I did.'”

French nuclear tests in the Pacific went underground from 1974, but continued until 1996. France conducted a total of 193 nuclear tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls in the Pacific, 41 of them atmospheric.

Veterans’ Affairs has been approached for comment.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

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

The conservative justice insisted there was nothing untoward about the private jet flight to Alaska; his stay at a commercial fishing lodge owned by Robin Arkley II, a donor to the right-wing legal movement; or his decision not to disclose them. Alito wrote that he was "invited shortly before" the fishing trip—without mentioning by whom—and "was asked whether I would like to fly there in a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant."

Notably, Alito also omitted the detail that Leonard Leo, co-chair of the conservative Federalist Society and a key figure in the decades-long effort to pull the U.S. judiciary to the right, helped organize the Alaska trip. A. Raymond Randolph, a conservative appellate judge, also attended.

According to ProPublica, Leo "invited Singer to join" and asked the hedge fund tycoon "if he and Alito could fly on the billionaire's jet."

"Leo had recently played an important role in the justice's confirmation to the court," ProPublica reported. "Singer and the lodge owner were both major donors to Leo's political groups."

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a longtime critic of the Supreme Court's complete lack of binding ethical standards, argued in a series of tweets late Tuesday that Alito's attempted prebuttal of ProPublica's reporting is riddled with holes.

"He just happened to be flying to Alaska and there just happened to be a private jet going to Alaska with an empty seat, and he just happened to find that out, like on some weird billionaire shared-ride Uber?" Whitehouse asked. "Oh, and would that 'empty seat' trick fly with legislative or executive ethics disclosures? (Hint: no.) And how about with the Financial Disclosure Committee? (Right, you didn't ask.)"

"This just keeps getting worse," the senator added.

ProPublica's reporting on Alito—who authored the 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade—comes weeks after the outlet revealed that another right-wing justice, Clarence Thomas, has been taking billionaire-funded trips for decades without disclosing them.

A common thread in the reporting about the two high court judges is Leo, who five years ago attended a vacation with Thomas at billionaire Harlan Crow's lakeside resort in upstate New York.

In a statement to ProPublica, Leo declared that he would "never presume to tell" the conservative judges "what to do, and no objective and well-informed observer of the judiciary honestly could believe that they decide cases in order to cull favor with friends, or in return for a free plane seat or fishing trip."

ProPublica reported Tuesday that Singer "has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes."

The outlet detailed the most prominent example:

His hedge fund, Elliott Management, is best known for making investments that promise handsome returns but could require bruising legal battles...

Singer's most famous gamble eventually made its way to the Supreme Court. In 2001, Argentina was in a devastating economic depression... Unemployment skyrocketed and deadly riots broke out in the street. The day after Christmas, the government finally went into default. For Singer, the crisis was an opportunity. As other investors fled, his fund purchased Argentine government debt at a steep discount.

Within several years, as the Argentine economy recovered, most creditors settled with the government and accepted a fraction of what the debt was originally worth. But Singer's fund, an arm of Elliott called NML Capital, held out. Soon, they were at war: a midtown Manhattan-based hedge fund trying to impose its will on a sovereign nation thousands of miles away.

The fight played out on familiar turf for Singer: the U.S. courts. He launched an aggressive legal campaign to force Argentina to pay in full, and his personal involvement in the case attracted widespreadmediaattention.

In 2007, for the first but not the last time, Singer's fund asked the Supreme Court to intervene. A lower court had stopped Singer and another fund from seizing Argentine central bank funds held in the U.S. The investors appealed, but that October, the Supreme Court declined to take up the case.

In 2014, years after the Alaska fishing trip, "the Supreme Court finally agreed to hear a case on the matter," specifically "how much protection Argentina could claim as a sovereign nation against the hedge fund's legal maneuvers in U.S. courts," ProPublica reported.

Judicial Crisis Network, a right-wing group with connections to Leo, filed a brief in support of Singer's fund.

"The court ruled in Singer's favor 7-1 with Alito joining the majority," ProPublica reported. "The justice did not recuse himself from the case or from any of the other petitions involving Singer."

In his Journal op-ed, Alito claimed he wasn't aware of Singer's connection to the case, even though his role was well publicized.

Singer also has connections to a high-profile Supreme Court fight involving the Biden administration's plan to cancel student debt for many borrowers.

The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that Singer chairs, has filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging justices to block the debt relief plan, ProPublica reported.

"If the Supreme Court kills student debt cancellation nobody can pretend the court has an ounce of legitimacy," the Debt Collective tweeted Wednesday. "Singer became a billionaire buying debts for pennies on the dollar and then weaponizing the courts to collect the full amount from the poorest people. Alito must recuse."

MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan added that "in any just world, and in any world in which Dems could do politics, there would be calls tonight for both Alito and Thomas to resign from the Supreme Court—and calls for impeachment if they refused to do so."

"But in our real world," Hasan lamented, "they won't even be subpoenaed by the Senate."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The conservative justice insisted there was nothing untoward about the private jet flight to Alaska; his stay at a commercial fishing lodge owned by Robin Arkley II, a donor to the right-wing legal movement; or his decision not to disclose them. Alito wrote that he was "invited shortly before" the fishing trip—without mentioning by whom—and "was asked whether I would like to fly there in a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant."

Notably, Alito also omitted the detail that Leonard Leo, co-chair of the conservative Federalist Society and a key figure in the decades-long effort to pull the U.S. judiciary to the right, helped organize the Alaska trip. A. Raymond Randolph, a conservative appellate judge, also attended.

According to ProPublica, Leo "invited Singer to join" and asked the hedge fund tycoon "if he and Alito could fly on the billionaire's jet."

"Leo had recently played an important role in the justice's confirmation to the court," ProPublica reported. "Singer and the lodge owner were both major donors to Leo's political groups."

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a longtime critic of the Supreme Court's complete lack of binding ethical standards, argued in a series of tweets late Tuesday that Alito's attempted prebuttal of ProPublica's reporting is riddled with holes.

"He just happened to be flying to Alaska and there just happened to be a private jet going to Alaska with an empty seat, and he just happened to find that out, like on some weird billionaire shared-ride Uber?" Whitehouse asked. "Oh, and would that 'empty seat' trick fly with legislative or executive ethics disclosures? (Hint: no.) And how about with the Financial Disclosure Committee? (Right, you didn't ask.)"

"This just keeps getting worse," the senator added.

ProPublica's reporting on Alito—who authored the 2022 ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade—comes weeks after the outlet revealed that another right-wing justice, Clarence Thomas, has been taking billionaire-funded trips for decades without disclosing them.

A common thread in the reporting about the two high court judges is Leo, who five years ago attended a vacation with Thomas at billionaire Harlan Crow's lakeside resort in upstate New York.

In a statement to ProPublica, Leo declared that he would "never presume to tell" the conservative judges "what to do, and no objective and well-informed observer of the judiciary honestly could believe that they decide cases in order to cull favor with friends, or in return for a free plane seat or fishing trip."

ProPublica reported Tuesday that Singer "has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes."

The outlet detailed the most prominent example:

His hedge fund, Elliott Management, is best known for making investments that promise handsome returns but could require bruising legal battles...

Singer's most famous gamble eventually made its way to the Supreme Court. In 2001, Argentina was in a devastating economic depression... Unemployment skyrocketed and deadly riots broke out in the street. The day after Christmas, the government finally went into default. For Singer, the crisis was an opportunity. As other investors fled, his fund purchased Argentine government debt at a steep discount.

Within several years, as the Argentine economy recovered, most creditors settled with the government and accepted a fraction of what the debt was originally worth. But Singer's fund, an arm of Elliott called NML Capital, held out. Soon, they were at war: a midtown Manhattan-based hedge fund trying to impose its will on a sovereign nation thousands of miles away.

The fight played out on familiar turf for Singer: the U.S. courts. He launched an aggressive legal campaign to force Argentina to pay in full, and his personal involvement in the case attracted widespreadmediaattention.

In 2007, for the first but not the last time, Singer's fund asked the Supreme Court to intervene. A lower court had stopped Singer and another fund from seizing Argentine central bank funds held in the U.S. The investors appealed, but that October, the Supreme Court declined to take up the case.

In 2014, years after the Alaska fishing trip, "the Supreme Court finally agreed to hear a case on the matter," specifically "how much protection Argentina could claim as a sovereign nation against the hedge fund's legal maneuvers in U.S. courts," ProPublica reported.

Judicial Crisis Network, a right-wing group with connections to Leo, filed a brief in support of Singer's fund.

"The court ruled in Singer's favor 7-1 with Alito joining the majority," ProPublica reported. "The justice did not recuse himself from the case or from any of the other petitions involving Singer."

In his Journal op-ed, Alito claimed he wasn't aware of Singer's connection to the case, even though his role was well publicized.

Singer also has connections to a high-profile Supreme Court fight involving the Biden administration's plan to cancel student debt for many borrowers.

The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that Singer chairs, has filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging justices to block the debt relief plan, ProPublica reported.

"If the Supreme Court kills student debt cancellation nobody can pretend the court has an ounce of legitimacy," the Debt Collective tweeted Wednesday. "Singer became a billionaire buying debts for pennies on the dollar and then weaponizing the courts to collect the full amount from the poorest people. Alito must recuse."

MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan added that "in any just world, and in any world in which Dems could do politics, there would be calls tonight for both Alito and Thomas to resign from the Supreme Court—and calls for impeachment if they refused to do so."

"But in our real world," Hasan lamented, "they won't even be subpoenaed by the Senate."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In early July 2008, Samuel Alito stood on a riverbank in a remote corner of Alaska. The Supreme Court justice was on vacation at a luxury fishing lodge that charged more than $1,000 a day, and after catching a king salmon nearly the size of his leg, Alito posed for a picture. To his left, a man stood beaming: Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire who has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes.

Singer was more than a fellow angler. He flew Alito to Alaska on a private jet. If the justice chartered the plane himself, the cost could have exceeded $100,000 one way.

In the years that followed, Singer’s hedge fund came before the court at least 10 times in cases where his role was often covered by the legal press and mainstream media. In 2014, the court agreed to resolve a key issue in a decade-long battle between Singer’s hedge fund and the nation of Argentina. Alito did not recuse himself from the case and voted with the 7-1 majority in Singer’s favor. The hedge fund was ultimately paid $2.4 billion.

Alito did not report the 2008 fishing trip on his annual financial disclosures. By failing to disclose the private jet flight Singer provided, Alito appears to have violated a federal law that requires justices to disclose most gifts, according to ethics law experts.

Experts said they could not identify an instance of a justice ruling on a case after receiving an expensive gift paid for by one of the parties.

“If you were good friends, what were you doing ruling on his case?” said Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor and leading expert on recusals. “And if you weren’t good friends, what were you doing accepting this?” referring to the flight on the private jet.

Justices are almost entirely left to police themselves on ethical issues, with few restrictions on what gifts they can accept. When a potential conflict arises, the sole arbiter of whether a justice should step away from a case is the justice him or herself.

ProPublica’s investigation sheds new light on how luxury travel has given prominent political donors — including one who has had cases before the Supreme Court — intimate access to the most powerful judges in the country. Another wealthy businessman provided expensive vacations to two members of the high court, ProPublica found. On his Alaska trip, Alito stayed at a commercial fishing lodge owned by this businessman, who was also a major conservative donor. Three years before, that same businessman flew Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, on a private jet to Alaska and paid the bill for his stay.

Such trips would be unheard of for the vast majority of federal workers, who are generally barred from taking even modest gifts.

Leonard Leo, the longtime leader of the conservative Federalist Society, attended and helped organize the Alaska fishing vacation. Leo invited Singer to join, according to a person familiar with the trip, and asked Singer if he and Alito could fly on the billionaire’s jet. Leo had recently played an important role in the justice’s confirmation to the court. Singer and the lodge owner were both major donors to Leo’s political groups.

ProPublica’s examination of Alito’s and Scalia’s travel drew on trip planning emails, Alaska fishing licenses, and interviews with dozens of people including private jet pilots, fishing guides, former high-level employees of both Singer and the lodge owner, and other guests on the trips.

ProPublica sent Alito a list of detailed questions last week, and on Tuesday, the Supreme Court’s head spokeswoman told ProPublica that Alito would not be commenting. Several hours later, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Alito responding to ProPublica’s questions about the trip.

Alito said that when Singer’s companies came before the court, the justice was unaware of the billionaire’s connection to the cases. He said he recalled speaking to Singer on “no more than a handful of occasions,” and they never discussed Singer’s business or issues before the court.

Alito said that he was invited to fly on Singer’s plane shortly before the trip and that the seat “​​would have otherwise been vacant.” He defended his failure to report the trip to the public, writing that justices “commonly interpreted” the disclosure requirements to not include “accommodations and transportation for social events.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Singer told ProPublica that Singer didn’t organize the trip and that he wasn’t aware Alito would be attending when he accepted the invitation. Singer “never discussed his business interests” with the justice, the spokesperson said, adding that at the time of trip, neither Singer nor his companies had “any pending matters before the Supreme Court, nor could Mr. Singer have anticipated in 2008 that a subsequent matter would arise that would merit Supreme Court review.”

Leo did not respond to questions about his organizing the trip but said in a statement that he “would never presume to tell” Alito and Scalia “what to do.”

This spring, ProPublica reported that Justice Clarence Thomas received decades of luxury travel from another Republican megadonor, Dallas real estate magnate Harlan Crow. In a statement, Thomas defended the undisclosed trips, saying unnamed colleagues advised him that he didn’t need to report such gifts to the public. Crow also gave Thomas money in an undisclosed real estate deal and paid private school tuition for his grandnephew, who Thomas was raising as a son. Thomas reported neither transaction on his disclosure forms.

The undisclosed gifts have prompted lawmakers to launch investigations and call for ethics reform. Recent bills would impose tighter rules for justices’ recusals, require the Supreme Court to adopt a binding code of conduct and create an ethics body, which would investigate complaints. Neither a code nor an ethics office currently exists.

“We wouldn’t tolerate this from a city council member or an alderman,” Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said of Thomas in a recent hearing. “And yet the Supreme Court won’t even acknowledge it’s a problem.”

So far, the court has chafed at the prospect of such reforms. Though the court recently laid out its ethics practices in a statement signed by all nine justices, Chief Justice John Roberts has not directly addressed the recent revelations. In fact, he has repeatedly suggested Congress might not have the power to regulate the court at all.

In the 1960s in his first year at Harvard Law School, Singer was listening to a lecture by a famed liberal professor when, he later recalled, he had an epiphany: “My goodness. They’re making it up as they go along.”

It was a common sentiment among conservative lawyers, who often accuse liberal judges of activist overreach. While Singer’s career as an attorney was short-lived, his convictions about the law stayed with him for decades. After starting a hedge fund that eventually made him one of the richest people in the country, he began directing huge sums to causes on the right. That included groups, like the Federalist Society, dedicated to fostering the conservative legal movement and putting its followers on the bench.

In the last decade, Singer has contributed over $80 million to Republican political groups. He has also given millions to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank where he has served as chairman since 2008. The institute regularly files friend-of-the-court briefs with the Supreme Court — at least 15 this term, including one asking the court to block student loan relief.

Singer’s interest in the courts is more than ideological. His hedge fund, Elliott Management, is best known for making investments that promise handsome returns but could require bruising legal battles. Singer has said he’s drawn to positions where you “control your own destiny, not just riding up and down with the waves of financial markets.” That can mean pressuring corporate boards to fire a CEO, brawling with creditors over the remains of a bankrupt company and suing opponents.

The fund now manages more than $50 billion in assets. “The investments are extremely shrewdly litigation-driven,” a person familiar with Singer’s fund told ProPublica. “That’s why he’s a billionaire.”

Singer’s most famous gamble eventually made its way to the Supreme Court.

In 2001, Argentina was in a devastating economic depression. Unemployment skyrocketed and deadly riots broke out in the street. The day after Christmas, the government finally went into default. For Singer, the crisis was an opportunity. As other investors fled, his fund purchased Argentine government debt at a steep discount.

Within several years, as the Argentine economy recovered, most creditors settled with the government and accepted a fraction of what the debt was originally worth. But Singer’s fund, an arm of Elliott called NML Capital, held out. Soon, they were at war: a midtown Manhattan-based hedge fund trying to impose its will on a sovereign nation thousands of miles away.

The fight played out on familiar turf for Singer: the U.S. courts. He launched an aggressive legal campaign to force Argentina to pay in full, and his personal involvement in the case attracted widespread media attention. Over 13 years of litigation, the arguments spanned what rights foreign governments have in the U.S. and whether Argentina could pay off debts to others before Singer settled his claim.

If Singer succeeded, he stood to make a fortune.

In 2007, for the first but not the last time, Singer’s fund asked the Supreme Court to intervene. A lower court had stopped Singer and another fund from seizing Argentine central bank funds held in the U.S. The investors appealed, but that October, the Supreme Court declined to take up the case.

On July 8 of the following year, Singer took Alito to Alaska on the private jet, according to emails, flight data from the Federal Aviation Administration and people familiar with the trip.

The group flew across the country to the town of King Salmon on the Alaska peninsula. They returned to the East Coast three days later.

In Alaska, they stayed at the King Salmon Lodge, a luxury fishing resort that drew celebrities, wealthy businessmen and sports stars. On July 9, one of the lodge’s pilots flew Alito and other guests around 70 miles to the west to fish the Nushagak River, known for one of the best salmon runs in the world. Snapshots from the trip show Alito in waders and an Indianapolis Grand Prix hat, smiling broadly as he holds his catch.

“Sam Alito is in the red jacket there,” one lodge worker said, as he narrated an amateur video of the justice on the water. “We take good care of him because he makes all the rules.”

Other guests on the trip included Leo, the Federalist Society leader, and Judge A. Raymond Randolph, a prominent conservative appellate judge for whom Leo had clerked, according to fishing licenses and interviews with lodge staff.

On another day, the group flew on one of the lodge’s bush planes to a waterfall in Katmai National Park, where bears snatch salmon from the water with their teeth. At night, the lodge’s chefs served multicourse meals of Alaskan king crab legs or Kobe filet. On the last evening, a member of Alito’s group bragged that the wine they were drinking cost $1,000 a bottle, one of the lodge’s fishing guides told ProPublica.

In his op-ed, Alito described the lodge as a “comfortable but rustic facility.” The justice said he does not remember if he was served wine, but if he was, it didn’t cost $1,000 a bottle. (Alito also pointed readers to the lodge’s website. The lodge has been sold since 2008 and is now a more downscale accommodation.)

The justice’s stay was provided free of charge by another major donor to the conservative legal movement: Robin Arkley II, the owner of a mortgage company then based in California. Arkley had recently acquired the fishing lodge, which catered to affluent tourists seeking a luxury experience in the Alaskan wilderness. A planning document prepared by lodge staff describes Alito as a guest of Arkley. Another guest on the trip told ProPublica the trip was a gift from Arkley, and two lodge employees said they were told that Alito wasn’t paying.

Arkley, who does not appear to have been involved in any cases before the court, did not respond to detailed questions for this story.

Alito did not disclose the flight or the stay at the fishing lodge in his annual financial disclosures. A federal law passed after Watergate requires federal officials including Supreme Court justices to publicly report most gifts. (The year before, Alito reported getting $500 of Italian food and wine from a friend, noting that his friend was unlikely to “appear before this Court.”)

The law has a “personal hospitality” exemption: If someone hosts a justice on their own property, free “food, lodging, or entertainment” don’t always have to be disclosed. But the law clearly requires disclosure for gifts of private jet flights, according to seven ethics law experts, and Alito appears to have violated it. The typical interpretation of the law required disclosure for his stay at the lodge too, experts said, since it was a commercial property rather than a vacation home. The judiciary’s regulations did not make that explicit until they were updated earlier this year.

In his op-ed, Alito said that justices “commonly interpreted” the law’s exception for hospitality “to mean that accommodations and transportation for social events were not reportable gifts.”

His op-ed pointed to language in the judiciary’s filing instructions and cited definitions from Black’s Law Dictionary and Webster’s. But he did not make reference to the judiciary’s regulations or the law itself, which experts said both clearly required disclosure for gifts of travel. ProPublica found at least six examples of other federal judges disclosing gifts of private jet travel in recent years.

“The exception only covers food, lodging and entertainment,” said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer now at the watchdog group CREW. “He’s trying to move away from the plain language of the statute and the regulation.”

The Alaska vacation was the first time Singer and Alito met, according to a person familiar with the trip. After the trip, the two appeared together at public events. When Alito spoke at the annual dinner of the Federalist Society lawyers convention the following year, the billionaire introduced him. The justice told a story about having an encounter with bears during a fishing trip with Singer, according to the legal blog Above the Law. He recalled asking himself: “Do you really want to go down in history as the first Supreme Court justice to be devoured by a bear?”

The year after that, in 2010, Alito delivered the keynote speech at a dinner for donors to the Manhattan Institute. Once again, Singer delivered a flattering introduction. “He and his small band of like-minded justices are a critical and much-appreciated bulwark of our freedom,” Singer told the crowd. “Samuel Alito is a model Supreme Court justice.”

Meanwhile, Singer and Argentina kept asking the Supreme Court to intervene in their legal fight. His fund enlisted Ted Olson, the famed appellate lawyer who represented George W. Bush in the Bush v. Gore case during the 2000 presidential election.

In January 2010, a year and a half after the Alaska vacation, the fund once again asked the high court to take up an aspect of the dispute. The court declined. In total, parties asked the court to hear appeals in the litigation eight times in the six years after the trip. In most instances, it was Singer’s adversaries filing an appeal, with Singer’s fund successfully arguing for the justices to decline the case and let stand a lower court ruling.

The Supreme Court hears a tiny portion of the many cases it’s asked to rule on each year. Under the court’s rules, cases are only accepted when at least four of the nine justices vote to take it up. The deliberations on whether to take a case are shrouded in secrecy and happen at meetings attended only by the justices. These decisions are a fundamental way the court wields power. The justices’ votes are not typically made public, so it is unclear how Alito voted on the petitions involving Singer.

As Singer’s battle with Argentina intensified, his hedge fund launched an expansive public relations and lobbying campaign. In 2012, the hedge fund even attempted to seize an Argentine navy ship docked in Ghana to secure payment from the country. (The effort was thwarted by a ruling from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.) Argentina’s president labeled Singer and his fellow investors “vultures” attempting extortion; Singer complained the country was scapegoating him.

In 2014, the Supreme Court finally agreed to hear a case on the matter. It centered on an important issue: how much protection Argentina could claim as a sovereign nation against the hedge fund’s legal maneuvers in U.S. courts. The U.S. government filed a brief on Argentina’s side, warning that the case raised “extraordinarily sensitive foreign policy concerns.”

The case featured an unusual intervention by the Judicial Crisis Network, a group affiliated with Leo known for spending millions on judicial confirmation fights. The group filed a brief supporting Singer, which appears to be the only Supreme Court friend-of-the-court brief in the organization’s history.

The court ruled in Singer’s favor 7-1 with Alito joining the majority. The justice did not recuse himself from the case or from any of the other petitions involving Singer.

“The tide turned” thanks to that “decisive” ruling and another from the court, as Singer’s law firm described it. After the legal setbacks and the election of a new president in Argentina, the country finally capitulated in 2016. Singer’s fund walked away with a $2.4 billion payout, a spectacular return.

Abbe Smith, a law professor at Georgetown who co-wrote a textbook on legal and judicial ethics, said that Alito should have recused himself. If she were representing a client and learned the judge had taken a gift from the party on the other side, Smith said, she would immediately move for recusal. “If I found out after the fact, I’d be outraged on behalf of my client,” she said. “And, frankly, I’d be outraged on behalf of the legal system.”

The law that governs when justices must recuse themselves from a case sets a high but subjective standard. It requires justices to withdraw from any case when their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” But the court allows individual justices to interpret that requirement for themselves. Historically, they’ve almost never explained why they are or are not recusing themselves, and unlike lower court judges, their decisions cannot be appealed.

Alito articulated his own standard during his Senate confirmation process, writing that he believed in stepping away from cases when “any possible question might arise.”

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Alito wrote of his failure to recuse himself from Singer’s cases at the court: “It was and is my judgment that these facts would not cause a reasonable and unbiased person to doubt my ability to decide the matters in question impartially.”

Critics have long assailed the Supreme Court’s practices on this issue as both opaque and inconsistent. “The idea ‘just trust us to do the right thing’ while remaining in total secrecy is unworkable,” said Amanda Frost, a judicial ethics expert at the University of Virginia School of Law.

For Singer, appeals to the Supreme Court are an almost unavoidable result of his business model. Since the Argentina case, Singer’s funds were named parties in at least two other cases that were appealed to the court, both stemming from battles with Fortune 500 companies. One of the petitions is currently pending.

The month after Singer got home from the 2008 fishing trip, he realized he had a problem. He was supposed to receive a shipment of frozen salmon from the Alaska lodge. But the fish hadn’t arrived. So the billionaire emailed an unlikely person to get to the bottom of it: Leo, the powerful Federalist Society executive.

“They've escaped!!” Singer wrote. Leo then sent an email to Arkley, the lodge owner, to track down the missing seafood.

The only clear thread connecting the prominent guests on the trip is that they all had a relationship with Leo. Leo is now a giant in judicial politics who helped handpick Donald Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees and recently received a $1.6 billion donation to further his political interests. Leo’s network of political groups was in its early days, however, when he traveled with Alito to Alaska. It had run an advertising campaign supporting Alito in his confirmation fight, and Leo was reportedly part of the team that prepared Alito for his Senate hearings.

Singer and Arkley, the businessmen who provided the trip to the justice, were both significant donors to Leo’s groups at the time, according to public records and reporting by The Daily Beast. Arkley also sometimes provided Leo with one of his private planes to travel to business meetings, according to a former pilot of Arkley’s.

In his statement, Leo did not address detailed questions about the trip, but he said “no objective and well-informed observer of the judiciary honestly could believe that they decide cases in order to cull favor with friends, or in return for a free plane seat or fishing trip.”

He added that the public should wonder whether ProPublica’s coverage is “bait for reeling in more dark money from woke billionaires who want to damage this Supreme Court and remake it into one that will disregard the law by rubber stamping their disordered and highly unpopular cultural preferences.”

Arkley is a fixture in local politics in his hometown of Eureka, California, known for lashing out at city officials and for once starting his own newspaper reportedly out of disdain for the local press. By the early 2000s, he’d made a fortune buying and servicing distressed mortgages and also become a significant donor in national GOP politics.

As his political profile rose, Arkley bragged to friends that he’d gotten to know one-third of the sitting Supreme Court justices. He told friends he had a relationship with Clarence Thomas, according to two people who were close with Arkley. And the Alito trip was not Arkley’s first time covering a Supreme Court justice’s travel to Alaska.

In June 2005, Arkley flew Scalia on his private jet to Kodiak Island, Alaska, two of Arkley’s former pilots told ProPublica. Arkley had paid to rent out a remote fishing lodge that cost $3,200 a week per person, according to the lodge’s owner, Martha Sikes.

Snapshots from the trip, found in the justice’s papers at Harvard Law School, capture Scalia knee-deep in a river as he fights to reel in a fish. Randolph, the appellate judge who was also on the later trip, joined Scalia and Arkley on the vacation, flying on the businessman’s jet.

Scalia did not report the trip on his annual filing, another apparent violation of the law, according to ethics law experts. Scalia’s travels briefly drew scrutiny in 2016 after he died while staying at the hunting ranch of a Texas businessman. Scalia had a pattern of disclosing trips to deliver lectures while not mentioning hunting excursions he took to nearby locales hosted by local attorneys and businessmen, according to a research paper published after his death.

Randolph, now a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, did not disclose the trip. (Nor did he disclose the later trip with Alito.) Randolph told ProPublica that when he was preparing his form for 2005, he called the judiciary’s financial disclosure office to ask about disclosing the trip. He shared his notes from the call with a staffer, which say “don’t have to report trip to Alaska with Rob Arkley & others / private jet / lodge.” Kathleen Clark, an ethics law expert at Washington University in St. Louis, said, “I don’t understand how the staff member came to that conclusion based on the language in the statute.”

On June 9, Arkley’s group chartered a boat, the Happy Hooker IV, to tour Yakutat Bay. On the way over, Scalia and Arkley discussed whether Senate Republicans, then in a contentious fight over judicial confirmations, should abolish the filibuster to move forward, according to a person traveling with them.

A photo captures Arkley and Scalia later that day gazing off the side of the boat at the famed Hubbard Glacier. At one point, a guide chiseled chunks off an iceberg and passed them to Scalia. The justice then mixed martinis from Grey Goose vodka and glacier ice.

It remains unclear how Scalia ended up in Alaska with Arkley. But the justice’s archives at Harvard Law School offer a tantalizing clue. Immediately before the fishing trip, Scalia gave a speech for the Federalist Society in Napa, California. The next day, Arkley’s plane flew from Napa to Alaska. Scalia’s papers contain a folder labeled “Federalist Society, Napa and Alaska, 2005 June 3-10,” suggesting a possible connection between the conservative organization and the fishing trip.

The contents of that folder are currently sealed, however. They will be opened to the public in 2036.

Do you have any tips on the Supreme Court? Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240. Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, Alex Mierjeski.

The post Ten Years Later, Snowden’s Heroism Shines Ever Brighter appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by James Bovard.

Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center’s Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare is an extremely comprehensive extravaganza unfolding the historic injustice of the motion picture purge from roughly 1947-1960, when conservative cancel culture embodied by a vicious Congressional Committee collaborating with greedy, cowardly movie moguls persecuted about 300 filmmakers of conscience and consciousness for their allegedly subversive “thought crimes.” Through a wide-ranging exhibition in ample gallery space the stunning show visualizes what screenwriter Alvah Bessie called the “Inquisition in Eden” with stunning photo murals, illuminating explanatory wall texts, displays of 100-plus Blacklist artifacts, newsreels of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC) hearings, an animated clip and much more. The do-not-miss exhibit, which runs through Sept. 3, also includes screenings of feature films and documentaries by and about blacklisted artists.

More

The post The Hollywood Red Scare, 75 Years Later appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ed Rampell.

Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush landed in a twin-engine Navy jet on an aircraft carrier, strode across the deck in a bulky flight suit and proceeded to give a televised victory speech under a huge red-white-and-blue banner announcing “Mission Accomplished.” For Bush, the optics on May 1, 2003 could hardly have been more triumphant. From the USS Abraham Lincoln, he delivered a stirring coda, proclaiming that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” just six weeks after the United States led the invasion of that country.

But Bush’s jubilant claim unraveled as combat escalated between Iraqi insurgents and occupying forces. During the next nine years, the official death toll among U.S. troops went from under 200 to more than 4,400, while the deaths of Iraqi people surged into the hundreds of thousands. The physical wounds were even more numerous, the emotional injuries incalculable.

The “Mission Accomplished” banner and Bush’s speech going with it have become notorious. But focusing only on his faulty claim that the war was over ignores other key untruths in the oratory.

“We have fought for the cause of liberty,” Bush declared. He did not mention the cause of oil.

A few months before the invasion, a soft-spoken Iraqi man who was my driver in Baghdad waited until we were alone at a picnic table in a park before saying that he wished Iraq had no oil — because then there would be no reason to fear an invasion. Years later, some U.S. authorities were candid about Iraq’s massive oil reserves as an incentive for the war.

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan wrote in his 2007 memoir. That same year, a former head of the U.S. Central Command in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid, had this to say: “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that.” And Sen. Chuck Hagel, who later became Defense Secretary, commented: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”

While touting the war effort as entirely noble, Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech credited the Pentagon’s “new tactics and precision weapons” for avoiding “violence against civilians.” The president added that “it is a great moral advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent.”

Such soothing words masked brutal realities. Civilian deaths accounted for 40 percent of “people killed directly in the violence of the U.S. post-9/11 wars,” according to the Costs of War project at Brown University. In fact, a large majority of the casualties of those wars have been civilians. “Several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars — because, for example, of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and war-related disease.”

By dodging inconvenient truths about the impacts of U.S. warfare on “the innocent,” Bush was reasserting the usual pretenses of presidents who elide the actual human toll of their wars while predicting successful outcomes.

On May 1, 2012, exactly nine years after Bush’s speech on the aircraft carrier, President Barack Obama spoke to the American people from Bagram Air Base north of Kabul. With U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan near a peak of 100,000, Obama expressed confidence that “we will complete our mission and end the war in Afghanistan.”

Both Bush and Obama would later be widely faulted for voicing undue optimism about fulfilling a war’s “mission.” But the critiques have rarely devoted much attention to scrutinizing the assumptions that propelled support for the missions.

The U.S. government’s inherent prerogative to intervene militarily in other countries has seldom been directly challenged in America’s mainstream media and official discourse. Instead, debates have routinely revolved around whether, where, when and how intervention is prudent and likely to prevail.

But we might want to ask ourselves: What if Bush had been correct in May 2003 — and U.S. forces really were at the end of major combat operations in Iraq? What if Obama had been correct in May 2012 — and U.S. forces were able to “complete our mission” in Afghanistan? In each case, conventional wisdom would have gauged success in terms of military victory rather than such matters as adherence to international law or regard for human life.

Today, it’s a wonder to behold the fully justified denunciations of Russia’s horrific invasion of Ukraine from some of the same U.S. government leaders who avidly supported the horrific invasion of Iraq. The concept that might makes right doesn’t sound good, but in practice it has repeatedly been the basis of U.S. policy. Wayne Morse, the senator from Oregon who opposed the Vietnam War from the outset, was cogent when he said: “I don’t know why we think, just because we’re mighty, that we have the right to try to substitute might for right.”

George W. Bush’s performance with the “Mission Accomplished” banner — a rhetorical victory lap that came before protracted bloodshed — deserves all of its notoriety 20 years later. His claims of success for the Iraq war mission are now easy grounds for derision. But the more difficult truths to plow through have to do with why the mission should never have been attempted in the first place.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Norman Solomon.

Park, who had resettled in the South several years ago, had heard only sporadically from her family north of the border in the past three years since the COVID-19 pandemic struck. As news of food shortages, starvation and rumblings of another famine trickled out of the North, she could only hope for the best, so she was crushed when she learned of her loved one’s passing.

“A lot of times, we find out about deaths a long time after they happened,” Park – a pseudonym to protect her identity – told RFA’s Korean Service. "I couldn't believe the news. I still feel like it was not real."

Most of the time, such news comes via a North Korean broker who owns a Chinese cell phone and can make calls close to the border by using Chinese relay towers. 

But recently, a clampdown by authorities on such cell phone brokers has led to reduced communication and long periods of silence, said Ji Seong-ho, an escapee who resettled in the South and was elected a lawmaker in 2020.

“It is not easy to get news of a death right away because of the situation” in North Korea, Ji said. “So, when you find out … six months or a year later, the heart breaks and it hurts more.”

Over the past year, many escapees who live in the South have been getting belated news that their relatives in the North have passed away, Seo Jae-Pyoung, secretary general of the Seoul-based Association of the North Korean Defectors, told RFA.

“Parents came to South Korea and settled here, but there are many cases in which their children died in North Korea,” said Seo. “The number of deaths has increased by two or three per neighborhood watch unit,” the typical community-level unit that meets once per week in North Korea. 

“There are many people who could not prepare firewood during the winter, so their bodies became cold and their immunity decreased because they also were not eating well,” Seo said. “They were so vulnerable.”

Many North Korean escapees fall into depression upon learning of their family members’ death, Kim Dan Geum, another escapee who settled in the South, told RFA.

“I see many North Korean defectors suffering from depression, thinking about their families they left behind in North Korea,” said Kim. “They hear the news that their family members have died of starvation.” 

Sending money – and fraud

The pandemic and crackdown on cell phone brokers has also made it difficult to send money to struggling family members in the North. 

Brokers can arrange for money sent from South Korea to an intermediary in China to be delivered to intended recipients in North Korea, after taking a percentage for their services.

Authorities have increased punishments not only on the families of escapees who try to contact their family members in the South, they are also punishing brokers.

With each broker that the government punishes, families who had been using that particular broker lose contact with their escapee family members. They will have to find new brokers to try to get in contact with their relatives.

Another problem that has risen out of the crackdown  is that sometimes escapees in the South are contacted by people posing as brokers, saying they have a message from the family requesting money.

“They say, ‘The family will starve to death if you don’t send the money.’ But we can’t confirm whether that’s true or not. There is no way to confirm,” said Kim.

She said that brokers try to emotionally manipulate escapees in the South by describing hardships suffered by North Koreans, but when they send money, there is no way to know if it was delivered or if the broker kept it for himself. 

“One lady I know said she keeps sending money, and the broker plays for her the recorded voices of the family saying ‘I got the money,’ or ‘I did not get the money,’” said Kim.

Seo said that there are frequent cases of brokers exploiting the situation in which direct communication with family members is impossible.

“Border control is now strict, so people from other provinces cannot get near the border. Still, brokers tell you to send money because they can deliver it,” he said. 

“I myself got a call yesterday. The broker said my nephew’s name and told me to send money for him,” Seo said. "I can’t connect with my nephew so I can’t just keep sending money. I can’t even check whether the money I sent actually got to him or not.”

Seo said that the defectors association has posted warnings on its website urging escapees to be careful when trying to remit money to their relatives in the North, because of the large number of reported fraud cases since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.

“Remittance brokers are using various fraudulent methods to scam senders by pretending that money has been delivered to their families, taking advantage of the difficulty of access to border areas due to the recent coronavirus crisis,” the warning read.

The inability to discern between actual requests for money and fraudulent ones can be deadly for people living in the North, Seo said.

“A defector I know had a younger brother living in Hyeryong, who called her in April last year requesting money, so she sent it to him. Two months later he called again … saying he had [liver disease],” said Seo. 

“The sister said, ‘You don’t even drink alcohol. Don’t lie,’ and she hung up on him. A few months later news came that her younger brother had died. She began to wail, because what her brother said was true.”

Translated by Claire Shinyoung Oh Lee. Written in English by Eugene Whong. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Soram Cheon for RFA Korean.

More than halfway through President Biden’s term, there remain numerous critical appointed positions across the executive branch that remain empty. My colleagues have writtenextensivelyabout the scope of this confirmation crisis. Some notable remaining vacancies include a seat on the Federal Communications Commission, around two dozen US Attorneys, and a seat on the National Transportation Safety Board. While much of this is due to obstruction by Senate Republicans, the importance of advancing good nominees remains. The fixes to the procedural delays are beyond Biden’s control (though not necessarily beyond Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s). But fighting to get the right people into positions of authority is still a top priority. As the mantra goes: personnel is policy.

But there is one critical, if low-profile, position that has not had a nominee at all: administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration (PHMSA). Interestingly, despite all of the media attention on the horrible February derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, OH — including increased coverage of the response effort from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Department of Transportation (DOT) — there has been little attention on PHMSA itself.

PHMSA is an administration within DOT and is directly responsible for regulating dangerous trains. The weakened rule around high-hazard flammable trains is the work of Trump’s PHMSA. New rules addressing those shortcomings will also fall on its plate. And PHMSA’s authority extends well beyond just those rules, as it is responsible for regulating the safety (as its name implies) of pipelines and a litany of other transportation issues around moving dangerous materials. This includes flammable fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal, as well as radioactive substances and dangerous chemicals such as ammonium nitrate-based fertilizer. It’s a small and obscure agency, but undoubtedly a very important one.

The fact that such an important post as the PHMSA administrator has been purposefully left vacant is telling. It shows a lack of recognition around the post’s seriousness. And while the blame ultimately goes all the way to the White House, we would be remiss to absolve Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Presidents are famously busy and rely on input from their cabinet to determine what personnel decisions need to be prioritized. This is especially the case with technical offices, where the President depends on the subject matter expertise of their cabinet secretaries.

Additionally, President Biden, by not naming a nominee, has entrusted Buttigieg with deciding leadership at PHMSA. Unlike other administrations within DOT, the deputy administrator of PHMSA is appointed by the Secretary of Transportation without any need for presidential consultation or approval.

Tristan Brown, PHMSA’s deputy administrator, was handpicked by Buttigieg. That means that even more than is the case with other DOT administrations, the successes and failures of PHMSA ultimately go back to Buttigieg. As an aside, entrusting the deputy administrator with the full workload of the administrator here is a departure from Secretary Buttigieg’s handling of a similar vacancy at the FAA, where the deputy was bypassed for acting administrator, despite federal statute stating he should have gotten the job. PHMSA has no such explicit statutory language for its deputy. Also unlike PHMSA, the Transportation Secretary does not appoint the deputy FAA administrator — the President does.

While there have been encouraging signs lately of Buttigieg leaning more into his role of a regulator, including blocking the proposed Spirit-JetBlue merger, he still has a lot of work to do. Seeing Buttigieg talk about the rail industry obfuscating regulation and publicly pressuring airlines to get rid of junk fees shows he can take on the corporations he oversees. But for two years now, he has spent much of his term as an administration spokesperson on TV while allowing critical DOT business, like banning those junk fees, recovering billions of dollars owed to consumers, and improving rail brake regulations, to slip through the cracks.

Buttigieg is good with the media, including Fox News, and that has value to the administration, but the technocratic processes he oversees cannot come at the expense of a good media hit. The post he signed up for is a notoriously low profile one, partly because of how down in the weeds it can get. It’s fine for Buttigieg to have a higher media presence, but he cannot choose cameras over his unique legal obligations to regulate avaricious transportation companies.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Dylan Gyauch-Lewis.