For exiled activist Li Ying, it’s been a way to bankroll a pro-democracy community that’s challenging Chinese censorship and authoritarian rule.

Li, 32, is better known by his handle on the social media platform X: “Teacher Li is not your teacher.” He’s built a following of more than 2 million by posting news that Chinese authorities don’t want people to see.

Last December, he branched out to launch $Li, a form of cryptocurrency modeled after his own social media avatar — a hand-drawn tabby cat. The goal was to provide financial support for his initiatives to crowd-source data from inside China on social issues like overwork by students and laborers with an aim to promote change.

(li-dao.org)

But his move split the Chinese diaspora. While some supporters rallied behind Li, many activists and former supporters of Li condemned the launch as a fraud and an act of self-dealing.

On its debut, $Li reached a market capitalization in the tens of millions of U.S. dollars. But the price quickly plunged. As of the time of reporting, $Li’s market cap had dropped more than 80%, to less than $2 million.

Li concedes that his personal reputation took a beating, but he says that the coin’s launch has stimulated a debate about how cryptocurrency might be used to fund the activities of dissident groups beyond the reach of governments — not least the long arm of the Chinese Communist Party.

As an exiled influencer challenging Beijing’s censorship machine, Li said he has been facing threats and pressure from Chinese authorities.

Li said he lost his job in Italy, had his bank accounts in China frozen, and struggled to make a living through individual donations. In 2023, he publicly disclosed that his ad revenue from X averaged just €568 per month (about US$650) — well below the average monthly income in Italy.

“I had no choice but to launch a cryptocurrency,” Li told RFA.

(RFA)

According to a statement issued by Li on X, $Li had a total supply of 1 billion coins, with pricing left to market forces. A foundation was to be established to oversee the coin, with 19.5% of tokens held by the foundation and 2% held by Li himself.

Li said he froze the majority of his own holdings because he has no plans to sell. The remainder has been used for payments to staff involved in initiatives promoting democracy in China.

One of the managers of the foundation, Canada-based influencer “Toronto Squareface,” stated in a post on his X account that the use of funds would be determined through a democratic process. All transactions would be publicly recorded and transparent under the blockchain technology.

In a statement on X, Li said he plans to use the foundation to build community supporting initiatives that promote freedom of speech and press freedom in China. $Li will not hold any presale, meaning that there will be no early access sales to any investors, and the team has no authority to mint additional tokens.

According to the latest data from a trading platform GMGN, there are 6,283 holders of $Li.

今天我们很高兴的宣布，我们在Sol上发行了我们的迷因币 $LI ，以帮助我们的团队持续运营这个账号。 $LI 将以一个基金会架构, 后续会邀请更多业内人士作为基金会成员，通过多签钱包管理基金会的支出，确保基金会的去中心化，以完全公开透明的方式进行运作。… pic.twitter.com/prHOlWu9Lx

— Li (@Li_DAOmeme) December 18, 2024

Shortly after its launch, some platforms flagged $Li as a scam or high-risk token and banned its trading. Li explained to RFA that this was primarily because those platforms have Chinese ownership, such as the on-chain wallet OKX. He added that $Li was labeled a scam as part of a political attack by the Chinese authorities.

Despite the reassurances offered by Li about the management of $Li, many of his supporters turned against him after its launch, accusing him of betrayal and opportunism.

“He (Li) has changed under immense pressure and the temptation of money,” wrote Huang Yicheng, an organizer and exile who participated in China’s anti-Covid protests. He announced on X that he was cutting ties with Li.

Huang accused Li of leveraging public trust to enrich himself, which Li denies. Others claim that under the guise of promoting democracy in China, Li’s real goal was to exploit investors.

Some critics even drew comparisons to Guo Wengui, the self-styled Chinese dissident and vocal supporter of Donald Trump. Guo was convicted on multiple counts of fraud and money laundering for allegedly using his online influence to scam followers out of more than $1 billion, including through a fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme.

Li’s supporters, however, view the meme coin’s launch as an innovation in the civic movement.

“Li burst onto the scene like a disruptor no one expected,” said Jiangbu, who prefers to be identified by a pseudonym for security reasons. He’s a Paris-based non-governmental organization activist focusing on social issues in China.

Jiangbu, who once led overseas protests against China’s zero-covid policy, said he’s familiar with the slow grind of traditional non-profit work — securing grants, drafting reports, executing programs.

“What Li did was create money out of thin air,” said Jiangbu, who has served as a coordinator for one of the initiatives funded by $Li. “The project is efficient, and everyone gets a little reward and has a real sense of participation. It’s incredibly innovative.”

According to Aaron Zhang, a member of Li’s team who is also being identified by a pseudonym due to security concerns, staff chose $Li as a payment mechanism because of cryptocurrency’s anonymity. This has made it difficult for the Chinese government to trace transactions back to individual investors, thereby protecting their safety.

Despite the criticism Li has faced, he said he succeeded in building a cryptocurrency-based community capable of launching initiatives with real impact on China.

“Every time you come back from the brink,” Li said, “you come back stronger.”

Edited by Mat Pennington.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Baili Liu for RFA Mandarin.

“Media freedom is often a casualty of war, and Israel’s recent war with Iran is no exception. We have seen Israeli authorities use security fears to increase censorship, while extremist right-wing politicians have demonized the media, legitimizing attacks on journalists,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Despite hopes that we will see a ceasefire in Gaza this week, Israel’s government appears relentless in its determination to silence those who report critically on its military actions.”

After Haaretz newspaper published an interview with Israeli soldiers who said they were ordered to shoot at unarmed Gazans waiting for food aid, a mayor in southern Israel threatened to shut shops selling the popular liberal paper. This follows the government’s decision last year to stop advertising with Haaretz, accusing it of “incitement.”

Authorities are also pushing ahead with a bill to dismantle the public broadcaster, Kan, and shutter its news division, the country’s third-largest news channel. Meanwhile, government support has seen the right-wing Channel 14 grow in popularity.

The hostile climate fueled by Israel’s right-wing government has emboldened settler violence against journalists. On July 5, two Deutsche Welle (DW) reporters wearing press vests were attacked by Israeli settlers in Sinjil, West Bank — an incident condemned by Germany’s ambassador and the German Journalists’ Association, which called it “unacceptable that radical settlers are hunting down media professionals with impunity.” Reporters from AFP, The New York Times, and The Washington Post were also present. Palestinian journalists had to flee.

“War is a dangerous time for civil rights – rights that Netanyahu’s government is actively undermining as it moves toward dismantling democracy,” Haaretz Editor-in-Chief Aluf Benn told CPJ.

‘Broadcasts that serve the enemy’

During the Israel-Iran war of June 13 to 24, anti-press government actions included:

• A June 18 military order requiring army approval before broadcasting the aftermath of Iranian attacks on Israeli military sites. Haaretz reported that this order was illegal as it was not made public in the official government gazette or authorized by a parliamentary committee.

• On June 19, security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called on Israelis who see people watching “Al Jazeera broadcasts or reporters” to report their sightings to authorities. Israel shut down the Qatari-based outlet in May 2024, and six of its journalists have been killed while reporting on Israel’s war in Gaza. Many Arabs in Israel still watch Al Jazeera broadcasts, and former Israeli officials have appeared on the network since the shutdown. 

“These are broadcasts that serve the enemy,” Ben-Gvir said. 

• On June 20, Ben-Gvir and communications minister Shlomo Karhi issued a directive that broadcasting from impact sites without written permission would be a criminal offense.

When Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara demanded that the ministers explain the legal basis for their announcement, the ministers said she was “trying to thwart” their efforts to ensure that foreign media “don’t help the enemy target us.”

• On June 23, Haaretz reported that the police’s legal adviser issued an order giving officers sweeping powers to censor journalists reporting from the impact sites.

“This directive, which primarily targets foreign media and joins a wave of police and ministerial efforts to obstruct news coverage, is unlawful and infringes on basic rights,” Tal Hassin, an attorney with Israel’s biggest human rights group, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), told CPJ.

ACRI petitioned the Attorney General, arguing that the police adviser did not have the legal authority to issue such an order. It has not received a response.

Journalists censored, detained, and abused

CPJ subsequently documented at least four incidents involving journalists who were abused and blocked from reporting.

• On June 20, police stopped a live broadcast from Tel Aviv by Turkish state-owned broadcaster TRT’s correspondent Mücahit Aydemir, although he told the officers he had the required permits, including authorization from the military censor. For several days afterwards, Aydemir received “unsettling phone calls” from unknown Hebrew-speakers, he told CPJ.

• On June 21, privately owned Channel 13’s journalist Ali Mughrabi and a camera operator, who declined to be named, citing fear of reprisals, were expelled from a drone crash site in Beit She’an, northern Israel, despite showing their press accreditation. During a live broadcast, Deputy Mayor Oshrat Barel questioned their credentials, shoved the cameraperson, and ordered them to leave. She later apologized.

“What we’re experiencing isn’t just about the media — it’s about citizenship,” Mughrab, an Israeli citizen of Palestinian origin, told CPJ.

• On June 22, a civilian police volunteer squad, led by far-right activist and rapper Yoav Eliasi, known as “The Shadow,” detained three Jerusalem-based, Arab Israeli journalists and one international journalist, after separating them from their non-Arab colleagues outside a building in Tel Aviv that had been damaged by an Iranian strike.

Mustafa Kharouf and Amir Abed Rabbo from the Turkish state-owned Anadolu Agency, Ahmad Gharabli, with Agence France-Presse news agency, and another journalist who declined to be named, citing fear of reprisal, were held for three hours.  

Kharouf told CPJ, the unit asked them who was “Israeli” and allowed the non-Arab journalists to leave. 

“One officer accused us of working for Al Jazeera, even though we showed official press credentials,” said Kharouf.

“When I showed my ID, they told me I wasn’t allowed to film because I’m not Israeli – even though they treat us like Israelis when it comes to taxes,” Gharabli told CPJ.

Armed volunteer squads have rapidly grown from four before the October 2023 Hamas attack to around 900 new units, an expansion that “had negative effects on Arab-Jewish relations,” Dr. Ark Rudnitzky of Tel Aviv University told CPJ in an email. Squad members “tend to suspect an Arab solely because they are Arab,” he said.

“It was clear they targeted the journalists because they were Arab,” said Israeli journalist and witness Oren Ziv, who wrote about the incident.

The Central District Police told CPJ via email that the journalists were “evacuated from the building for security reasons related to their safety and were directed to alternative reporting locations.”

• On June 24,  Channel 13 correspondent Paz Robinson and a camera operator who declined to be named were reporting on a missile strike in southern Israel’s Be’er Sheva when a woman shouted that he was a “Nazi” and “Al Jazeera” and blocked him from filming, screaming, “You came to celebrate over dead bodies.”

“After I saw the woman wasn’t backing down, I decided to leave. I’m not here to fight with my own people. I’m not a politician. I came to cover events,” Robinson told CPJ.

Earlier in the war with Iran, CPJ documented eight incidents in which 14 journalists faced harassment, obstruction, equipment confiscation, incitement, or forced removal by the police.

The Israel Police Spokesperson’s Unit told CPJ via email that police “made significant efforts to facilitate safe, meaningful access for journalists” during the war with Iran.  “While isolated misunderstandings may occur…case was addressed promptly and professionally.”

CPJ’s emails to the Attorney General, Israel Defense Forces’ North America Media Desk, Ben-Gvir, and Shlomo requesting comment did not receive any replies. 

Kholod Massalha is a CPJ consultant on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory and a researcher with years of experience in press freedom and freedom of expression issues.

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

Expressing concerns over Congress’s perceived alignment with Turkey in light of recent geopolitical developments, especially since Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan openly supported Pakistan, Goswami called it an issue of national integrity. “A friend of the enemy is an enemy,” he said, urging viewers to boycott the Congress party and clamouring for a ban.

Calls to boycott Turkey have been on the rise in India after the recent conflict with Pakistan. The Indian armed forces explicitly said that Pakistan used weaponry supplied by China and Turkey to target military posts and civilian habitations in the recent conflict. Additionally, after India launched Operation Sindoor targeting terror bases in Pakistan in the aftermath of the Pahalgam massacre, where 26 civilians were shot dead, Turkey called the strikes “provocative”. Since then, Indians have cancelled trips en masse, travel businesses have stopped their offerings and institutions such as Jawaharlal Nehru University, IIT-Bombay and Jamia Millia Islamia have suspended their partnerships with Turkish universities.

Coming back to the Congress and their Turkey office, BJP’s IT cell chief Amit Malviya shared the Republic segment on May 17, asking Rahul Gandhi why it needed to make this “move.” (Archive)

Did you know that the Congress Party has a registered office in Turkey? Can Rahul Gandhi explain what necessitated this move? This is bizarre and inexplicable on multiple levels. India deserves to know.

Remember: the enemy’s friend is an enemy too. pic.twitter.com/lOnPrS5SpY

— Amit Malviya (@amitmalviya) May 17, 2025

Social media user Rishi Bagree (@rishibagree), shared the same video on X and questioned why the Congress felt the need to have an office there when only 300 Indians were living there. He added, “Is Erdogan the new Caliph of Congress, orchestrating its blatant Islamization?” (archive)

Even though the Indian population in Turkey is only around 300, the Congress party has an office there. What is the reason for this?

Is Erdogan the new Caliph of Congress, orchestrating its blatant Islamization?pic.twitter.com/jYRR1pltyv

— Rishi Bagree (@rishibagree) May 18, 2025

Another X user, Jaipur Dialogues (@JaipurDialogues), also shared the same video wondering why the party had an office in that country. (archive)

Why does Congress has a registered office in Turkey?pic.twitter.com/k3fpyWU6Ed

— The Jaipur Dialogues (@JaipurDialogues) May 18, 2025

Note that @JaipurDialogues has been fact checked by Alt News several times for amplifying misinformation.

Fact Check

The building shown in the Republic segment, which has been referred to as the registered office of the Indian National Congress in Turkey, is actually the Istanbul Congress Center. It is a convention centre located in the Harbiye neighbourhood of Sisli district in Istanbul, Turkey. It was inaugurated on October 17, 2009, and is owned by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality.

This Congress has nothing to do with the Indian National Congress, which is a political party.

However, in November 2019, the Indian National Congress had announced that it planned to establish an overseas office in Istanbul. According to the party’s statement, Mohammad Yusuf Khan was appointed to lead the Indian Overseas Congress (IOC) in Turkey. But since the announcement, there have been no updates on whether an actual office was set up because the IOC website mentions the countries where it has a presence, where Turkey is not featured.

The Indian Overseas Congress functions as a global network of Congress supporters and advocates, working to promote the party’s ideology and interests abroad. Sam Pitroda is the chairman of the Indian Overseas Congress. But this is nothing unusual because several parties do have units or centres overseas.

Malviya’s X post, in this context, seems unusual because even the BJP has a units outside of India, including in Turkey. The Overseas Friends of BJP (OFBJP) has established centres in the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands and other countries. Several news reports and articles indicate OFBJP has a presence in Turkey. These reports named a Dipankar Ganguly as the convenor from Turkey.

In August 2018, Vijay Jolly, then senior BJP leader and the global convener of OFBJP had even met Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Ankara and offered him a scarf with the BJP’s lotus symbol.

On May 20, news channel Republic issued a correction, admitting they used the wrong image to depict the Congress office in Turkey in their news segment.

Republic Corrigendum pic.twitter.com/dIkaH4Z6JE

— Republic (@republic) May 20, 2025

To sum up, the picture of the building that many called a Congress office in Istanbul is actually the Istanbul Convention Center, a property owned by a municipal body in Turkey. It is unrelated to the Congress party. And while the Congress did announce plans of having an office in Turkey in 2019, no news reports or information on their website corroborate that they actually established one. Also, having an international presence is not unusual for political parties to garner support and the BJP too has an overseas wing in Turkey.

The post Republic uses unrelated image of Istanbul Congress Center as Congress party’s Turkey office, stirs political storm appeared first on Alt News.

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

In the May 11 briefing, Pakistan claimed that it struck Indian military targets after India violated their airspace and air bases in early-morning strikes. For context, India had launched Operation Sindoor on the intervening night of May 6 and 7 as a series of military strikes to target terror bases in Pakistan. The Indian defence forces have repeatedly reiterated that the strikes were “measured”, “non-escalatory” and carried out with precision to only hit at sites of terror infrastructure; no civilians or military bases were targeted. However, shortly after, Pakistan hit back with heavy shelling along the Indian border areas, resulting in the deaths of civilians and damage to property.

However, in the May 11 briefing, Chaudhry explicitly said that the Pakistan armed forces engaged “military targets, along with facilities in India used to target Pakistani citizens and entities involved in fomenting terrorism in Pakistan”. To prove his point that only military posts and infrastructure were targeted and not civilians, Chaudhry used two clips from a May 10 briefing on Operation Sindoor by the Indian armed forces.

In the above clip, Indian Air Force Wing Commander Vyomika Singh gives a brief of the weaponry used by Pakistan in the shelling. While detailing the areas that suffered damage, she appears to say that Indian military posts were targeted. Her remarks do not mention civilians. Here’s what she said:

“Pakistani military continued with its provocations, carrying out aggressive actions employing multiple threat vectors all along the western border. Pakistan employed UCAV, drones, long-range weapons, loitering munitions and fighter aircrafts to target military infrastructure. Pakistan military also resorted to air intrusions using drones and firing of heavy-calibre weapons along the Line of Control… air intrusions and several harassment attacks were also attempted from Srinagar till Naliya at more than 26 locations… damage was sustained to equipment and personnel at Indian Air Force stations at Udhampur, Pathankot, Adampur and Bhuj. There were also several high-speed missile attacks noticed with heavy damages to other military stations in Kupwara, Baramulla, Poonch, Rajouri, and Akhnoor sectors continued. Indian Armed Forces reiterate their commitment to non-escalation, provided it is reciprocated by the Pakistan Military.”

Towards the end of the clip, Indian Army Colonel Sofiya Qureshi can be heard saying, “भारतीय सशस्त्र बल दोहराते हैं कि वे तनाव वृद्धि नहीं चाहते, बशर्ते पाकिस्तान भी ऐसा ही व्यवहार करे।” (Translation: The Indian Armed Forces reiterate that they do not want an escalation of tensions, provided Pakistan behaves similarly.)

After the above clip was shown, Chaudhry tells the press gathered there that even the Indian forces acknowledged that Pakistan only targeted military installations and nothing else, definitely not civilians.

“Did you find…from the Indian statements… did Pakistan attack anything other than military targets? No. Did any international media or even Indian media… what are they reporting? ‘Precise targeting of the military installations…posts.’ We told you that we don’t target civilians…our religion does not allow us, our culture does not allow us, our professionalism of the armed forces doesn’t allow us. We will never target civilians. They are even acknowledging that..” he said.

Below is the full video of the press conference.

Did IAF Wing Commander Vyomika Singh ‘Acknowledge’ Such a Thing?

The short answer is no. Alt News found that IAF Wing Commander Vyomika Singh’s full statements from the May 10 special briefing on Operation Sindoor had been clipped and edited to make it seem like she said what Chaudhry claimed. Vyomika Singh did not say that.

The May 10 briefing by the ministry of external affairs and defence forces was a formal update on Pakistan’s escalatory and provocative pattern of attack. Note that hours after this briefing, the two countries had agreed to a ceasefire.

The clip below shows exactly what Singh said in her update.

The IAF officer clearly says that the Pakistani military targeted civilian areas and military infrastructure. Throughout the briefing, she emphasised the Pakistan had targeted civilian infrastructure, including medicare centres and school premises, at the air bases of Srinagar, Awantipora and Udhampur. She further said that Pakistan attempted multiple air intrusions using drones and conducted shelling using heavy-calibre RT guns, targeting civilian infrastructure and killing civilians.

Her exact words were “Pakistan employed UCAV, drones, long-range weapons, loitering munitions and fighter aircrafts to target civilian areas and military infrastructure.” But in the May 11 briefing by Pakistan, the words “civilian areas” were dropped from her address to make it seem like she said: “Pakistan employed UCAV, drones, long-range weapons, loitering munitions and fighter aircrafts to target military infrastructure.”

Alt News also cross-checked this with a transcript of the briefing by the Indian ministry of external affairs.

Several of Singh’s Remarks Distorted

Surprisingly, this was not the only instance. Alt News found that several statements by Singh were taken out of context and shown to the press, creating misleading narratives regarding what the Indian side actually said.

For instance, the clip of Singh shown in the tri-services press conference on May 11 made it seem like she said that damage was sustained to equipment and personnel at Indian Air Force stations at Udhampur, Pathankot, Adampur and Bhuj.

However, what she actually said was that Indian armed forces were able to neutralise air intrusions and several harassment attacks that were attempted by Pakistani forces from Srinagar till Naliya at more than 26 locations and that limited damage was sustained to equipment and personnel at Indian Air Force stations at Udhampur, Pathankot, Adampur and Bhuj.

A third instance of manipulation was showing Singh as saying there were high-speed missile attacks that caused heavy damage to other military stations in Kupwara, Baramulla, Poonch, Rajouri, and Akhnoor sectors.

In reality, Singh said that high-speed missile attacks were noticed at air bases in Punjab. Before adding that there was heavy exchange of artillery mortars and small-arm fire in Kupwara, Baramulla, Poonch, Rajouri and Akhnoor sectors, she mentioned that Pakistan was targeting civilian infrastructure and killing civilians. The bit about civilians was conveniently removed.

Thus, statements attributed to IAF Wing Commander Vyomika Singh were selectively edited and presented to manipulate what she actually said; a likely bid to portray Pakistan in a positive light and claim that no Indian civilians were targeted or hurt.

The Targeting of Indian Civilians

The defence ministry has said that Pakistan tried to target multiple military installations along the West and at least 16 people, including three women and five children, have been killed due to firing by Pakistan. These figures were released on May 8, so the number of casualties may be higher now, considering that the border areas witnessed continued shelling. According to a report by BBC, at least 21 civilians have died since the launch of Operation Sindoor, while the armed forces lost five officers.

Among those killed were 12-year-old twins Zain Ali and Urwah Fatima. They died as shells were lobbed near the rented house in Pooch, Jammu and Kashmir.  Their father, Rameez Khan, 48, continues to fight for life. He was critically injured in the firing on May 7 after Pakistani shells tore through his home across the Line of Control.

Another victim of the shelling was Qari Mohammed Iqbal, a 47-year-old teacher who was wrongly labelled a terrorist by several mainstream media outlets.

Read: His name was Qari Mohammad Iqbal. He was not a terrorist.

Watch: Qari Mohammad Iqbal कौन है? | Republic | Zee News | ABP News | CNN-News18

A 45-year-old Kashmiri woman from Uri, two migrants from Bihar in Rajouri, a retired serviceman and a member of the Jammu and Kashmir administration also died in the shelling. The attacks claimed the lives of two-year-old Aisha Noor, seven-year-old Maryam Khatoon, and 13-year-old Vihaan Bhargav.

The post Pakistan uses edited clip of Indian wing commander Vyomika Singh in briefing to claim it ‘did not target civilians’ appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Shinjinee Majumder.

Since the earliest days of the post–October 7 US/Israeli genocide in Gaza, corporate media outlets have claimed that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields. Protocol 1 of the Geneva Convention characterizes the practice thusly:

The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations.

In other words, when civilians are used to shield military targets, attacking those targets can be legal under international law, but the attacker, as Al Jazeera (11/13/23) noted, still has to adhere to

the principles of distinction and proportionality: An army has the duty to target only the enemy, even if this means facing greater risks to minimize civilian casualties; and to weigh the military value of each attack against the civilian casualties that are likely to result from it.

Stunning assertion

Jewish Currents (7/17/24): “By casting all the protected sites and people it has bombed as “shields,” Israel thus seeks to shift the responsibility for its mass killings of civilians and sweeping destruction of civilian infrastructure onto Hamas—absolving itself of blame and legal accountability.”

Israel and its backers, however, have completely distorted this concept, in an apparent attempt to give their massacres in Gaza a veneer of legality. The scholars Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon (Jewish Currents, 7/17/24) explained how human shielding discourse has been misapplied to Gaza:

Parties alleging the use of human shields have typically restricted the charge to limited territorial areas; in contrast, Israel has cited Hamas’s underground tunnel system to cast every square inch of Gaza as a human shield. This apparently endless multiplication of the human shielding accusation has functioned to erase the possibility of Palestinian civilianness altogether.

This corruption of the meaning of “human shields” has distorted much of the corporate media coverage of the Gaza genocide. At the outset of the October 2023 escalation in Palestine, a Boston Globe article (10/8/23) asserted that Hamas “uses its own civilians as human shields against attacks. Israel warns civilians before it launches attacks and urges that they leave conflict zones.” This was a stunning assertion, given Israel’s prolific record of deliberately killing Palestinian noncombatants, which long predates October 7, 2023 (FAIR.org, 10/13/23).

The New York Times’ editorial board (10/16/23) flatly stated that “Hamas is using the people of Gaza as human shields against Israel’s bombing campaign,” without pointing to any source documenting a single instance of this practice.

The same was true of a piece that appeared a day later in the Wall Street Journal (10/17/23), which said that “Hamas uses the inhabitants of Gaza as human shields.” It described the group as employing a “human-shield strategy.”

Evidence on one side

Such claims have two major problems. One is the lack of evidence for them, and the other is the extensive evidence of Israel using Palestinian civilians as human shields.

Consider, for example, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) report on Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s US-backed 2008–09 assault on Gaza. The UN’s fact-finding mission

found no evidence to suggest that Palestinian armed groups either directed civilians to areas where attacks were being launched or forced civilians to remain within the vicinity of the attacks.

The mission did, however, find credible allegations that “Israeli troops used Palestinian men as human shields whilst conducting house searches.”

The UNHRC’s report on Israel’s 2014 offensive in Gaza, Operation Protective Edge, fell short of saying that Hamas used Palestinians as human shields. The commission said it was “disturbed by” a “report” that a Hamas spokesperson said people in Gaza should go on their roofs as a way of  “shielding their homes from attack.”

The document said that “although the call is directed to residents of Gaza, it can be seen and understood as an encouragement to Palestinian armed groups to use human shields.” That’s quite different from saying that Palestinian fighters actually did compel Palestinian civilians to act as human shields.

But the report said that that’s what Israel did:

The manner in which the Israeli soldiers forced Palestinian civilians to stand in windows, enter houses/underground areas and/or perform dangerous tasks of a military nature, constitutes a violation of the prohibition against the use of human shields.

An Amnesty International report (3/26/15) on Operation Protective Edge noted that

Israeli authorities have claimed that in a few incidents, the Hamas authorities or Palestinian fighters directed or physically coerced individual civilians in specific locations to shield combatants or military objectives. Amnesty International has not been able to corroborate the facts in any of these cases.

Another important context for the human shields issue comes from the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem (11/11/17). The organization says that, since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967,

Israeli security forces Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives. As part of this policy, soldiers have ordered Palestinian civilians to remove suspicious objects from roads, to tell people to come out of their homes so the military can arrest them, to stand in front of soldiers while the latter shoot from behind them, and more. The Palestinian civilians were chosen at random for these tasks, and could not refuse the demand placed on them by armed soldiers.

This use of civilians is not an independent initiative by soldiers in the field, but the result of a decision made by senior military authorities.

‘Hamas command bunker’

By describing a raid on a hospital as an effort to “root out Hamas,” the Wall Street Journal (11/10/23) gave credence to unsubstantiated Israeli claims.

Over the course of the genocide in Gaza, corporate media have frequently ignored this body of evidence. The human shields propaganda arguably reached its apotheosis in the run-up to Israel’s November 2023 attack on Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex at the time, and during and after the assault.

A Wall Street Journal article (11/10/23)  on the matter carried the headline “Israeli Forces Race to Root Out Hamas,” with the subhead “Israeli forces face one of their toughest challenges as they converge on strip’s largest hospital.” Taken together, these phrases imply that Al-Shifa has a Hamas presence that ought to be “rooted out.” The piece said that Israeli

troops have converged in the past day on the sprawling facility, which Israel contends holds a major Hamas command bunker underneath the complex, a claim Hamas has denied.

At no point did the authors mention that Israel had presented no credible evidence in support of these allegations (FAIR.org, 12/1/23).

A New York Times report (11/15/23) said that

Israel maintains that Hamas built a military command center at the hospital, using its patients and staff as human shields.

The seizure of Al-Shifa, along with whatever evidence the Israelis produce of Hamas’s military presence there, could affect international sentiment about the invasion, as well as the continuing negotiations to free the hostages captured by Hamas last month.

This passage suggests that the question is what type of evidence Israel will provide of Hamas’s supposed operations at Al-Shifa, rather than whether it has any convincing evidence at all. The piece opted to present the supposed command center as a “he said, she said” narrative, but Hamas reportedly said that they were “prepared for an international delegation to conduct a search of the hospitals and their grounds for evidence of such alleged underground tunnels and command centers” (Mondoweiss, 11/13/23).

‘A deadly lie’

Human Rights Watch (11/14/23) found that “no evidence put forward would justify depriving hospitals and ambulances of their protected status under international humanitarian law.”

Meanwhile, medical staff at the hospital denied that there was a Hamas command center under the facility (Guardian, 11/14/23). Human Rights Watch (11/14/23), for its part, said:

The Israeli military on October 27 claimed that “Hamas uses hospitals as terror infrastructures,” publishing footage alleging that Hamas was operating from Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa. Israel also alleged that Hamas was using the Indonesian Hospital to hide an underground command and control center and that they had deployed a rocket launchpad 75 meters from the hospital.

These claims are contested. Human Rights Watch has not been able to corroborate them, nor seen any information that would justify attacks on Gaza hospitals.

Nevertheless, a subsequent CNN (11/17/23) report took the “shrug and say, ‘gee, golly, we just don’t know’” approach:

Israel points to the hospital as an example of Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields.

Since launching an operation at Al-Shifa this week, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed it found a tunnel shaft and military equipment, but it has not yet shown proof of a large-scale command and control center. Hamas denies the allegations. CNN has not verified the claims of either Israel or Hamas.

CNN may not have been unable to verify either party’s claims, but they do their audience no favors by leaving out Human Right Watch’s remarks, or the following from Katrina Penney (Otago Daily Times, 11/16/23), a representative of MSF, which had personnel working at Al-Shifa:

We have seen no evidence that the hospital buildings or the compounds are being used by Hamas as a military base. In fact to the contrary; the hospital facilities have been trying to treat patients and trying to shelter civilians and their families at levels far beyond their capacity.

Excluding such testimonials gave Israel’s “command center” and “human shields” arguments unwarranted credibility. In contrast to CNN, Maureen Clare Murphy (Electronic Intifada, 11/15/23) offered a much sharper assessment of the available evidence, writing that

Israel’s own propaganda published in the aftermath of the raid shows that Netanyahu and the military’s longstanding accusation that Hamas uses Al-Shifa to shield its command center is a deadly lie.

But such honesty and precision is generally too much to ask of corporate media.

‘A sub-army of slaves’

To establish the “truth” that Hamas uses human shields, Washington Post columnist James Willick (11/14/23) quotes a Post editorial (11/5/23) criticizing Hamas for “provoking Israel militarily—while protecting its own leaders and fighters in tunnels.” By this logic, any non-suicidal military operation against Israel would involve “human shields.”

This dismal coverage of the human shields question was not limited to the reporting on Al-Shifa. Throughout the genocide, corporate media have often treated the idea that Hamas routinely uses Palestinian civilians as human shields as an established fact, while pretending that Israel doesn’t do exactly that.

Nor have media offered any proof of Hamas engaging in this practice in the post–October 7 US/Israeli rampage, as in an in-house Washington Post column (11/14/23) by Jason Willick, headlined “We Can’t Ignore the Truth That Hamas Uses Human Shields.” Hamas, he said, was “trying to increase” the number of dead Palestinian civilians.

A Newsweek op-ed (5/23/24) from Fordham University philosophy professor John Davenport referred to what he called “the stark fact” that Hamas uses “ordinary Palestinians as ‘human shields.’” While voluminous evidence of US/Israeli crimes throughout the genocide was readily available (Middle East Eye, 10/20/23, 5/16/24), Willick and Davenport failed to marshal a single report from the UN or an NGO that substantiated their claim that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields.

Meanwhile, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (7/1/24) said that, in the months since October 7, “the Israeli army’s use of Palestinian civilians as human shields has been documented on a large scale.” Haaretz (8/13/24) reported that “random Palestinians have been used by Israeli army units in the Gaza Strip for one purpose: to serve as human shields for soldiers during operations.”

Still, US media commentators like Bret Stephens (New York Times, 9/3/24) and the Journal’s editorial board (10/7/24) were more interested in making uncorroborated claims that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields than in discussing Israel’s widespread, confirmed use of the practice.

More recently, Haaretz (3/30/25) ran an article by an anonymous senior officer in the Israeli military detailing how “in Gaza, human shields are used by Israeli soldiers at least six times a day.” The officer explains how no infantry force in the Israeli military goes into a house in Gaza before a human shield clears it, which means “there are four [human shields] in a company, 12 in a battalion and at least 36 in a brigade. We operate a sub-army of slaves.”

Blaming Palestinians for their own deaths

Reuters (4/6/25) allowed a National Security Council spokesperson to claim without contradiction that aid workers killed by Israel were “human shields for terrorism.”

Even after Haaretz published this account, the New York Times ran an op-ed (4/6/25) asserting that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as “human shields,” as if it were Hamas that kept a slave army of Palestinians for this purpose.

Similarly, a Reuters report (4/6/25) on Israel’s March 23 massacre of 15 paramedics quoted US National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes, “Hamas uses ambulances and more broadly human shields for terrorism.” The piece didn’t bother pointing to the lack of proof for Hughes’ claim, nor did it inform readers that Israel uses Palestinians as human shields on a daily basis.

In the same vein, an NBC News piece (4/7/25) on the paramedics atrocity included the sentence, “The White House on Sunday said Trump held Hamas responsible for the incident because Hamas uses ambulances and ‘human shields.’” Nothing in the article cast doubt on this unsubstantiated assertion, or noted that a senior Israeli military officer had just acknowledged (Haaretz, 3/30/25) that

the highest-ranking personnel on the ground have known about the [Israeli military’s] use of [Palestinians as] human shields for more than a year, and no one has tried to stop it.

To suggest that a meaningful portion of the Palestinians killed in Gaza can be attributed to Hamas using them as human shields—lack of evidence be damned—is to blame Palestinians for their own deaths, while reducing US/Israeli responsibility for the slaughter.

The canard also demonizes Hamas, painting its leaders as brutal savages with no regard for any human life. That in turn rationalizes the US/Israeli assault on Gaza; the narrative suggests that Hamas are so brutal toward their own people that one should cheer for Israel to eradicate them, not only for Israel’s benefit, but ultimately for the Palestinians’—even at the cost of leveling Gaza and exterminating its people.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Gregory Shupak.

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 February, my colleague Ken Schwencke saw a post on the social media network Bluesky about a database released by Sen. Ted Cruz purporting to show more than 3,400 “woke” grants awarded by the National Science Foundation that “promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.”

Given that Schwencke is our senior editor for data and news apps, he downloaded the data, poked around and saw some grants that seemed far afield from what Cruz, a Texas Republican, called “the radical left’s woke nonsense.” The grants included what Schwencke thought was a “very cool sounding project” on the development of advanced mirror coatings for gravitational wave detectors at the University of Florida, his alma mater.

The grant description did, however, mention that the project “promotes education and diversity, providing research opportunities for students at different education levels and advancing the participation of women and underrepresented minorities.”

Schwencke thought it would be interesting to run the data through an AI large language model — one of those powering ChatGPT — to understand the kinds of grants that made Cruz’s list, as well as why they might have been flagged. He realized there was an accountability story to tell.

In that article, Agnel Philip and Lisa Song found that “Cruz’s dragnet had swept up numerous examples of scientific projects funded by the National Science Foundation that simply acknowledged social inequalities or were completely unrelated to the social or economic themes cited by his committee.”

Among them: a $470,000 grant to study the evolution of mint plants and how they spread across continents. As best Philip and Song could tell, the project was flagged because of two specific words used in its application to the NSF: “diversify,” referring to the biodiversity of plants, and “female,” where the application noted how the project would support a young female scientist on the research team.

Another involved developing a device that could treat severe bleeding. It included the words “victims” — as in gunshot victims — and “trauma.”

Neither Cruz’s office nor a spokesperson for Republicans on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation responded to our requests for comment for the article.

The story was a great example of how artificial intelligence can help reporters analyze large volumes of data and try to identify patterns.

First, we told the AI model to mimic an investigative journalist reading through each of these grants to identify whether they contained themes that someone looking for “wokeness” may have spotted. And crucially, we made sure to tell the model not to guess if it wasn’t sure. (AI models are known to hallucinate, and we wanted to guard against that.)

For newsrooms new to AI and readers who are curious how this worked in practice, here’s an excerpt of the actual prompt we used:

Background: We will be showing you grants from the national science foundation that have been targeted for cancellation because they contain themes as identified by Republican Senator Ted Cruz's office as involving woke ideology; diversity, equity, and inclusion; or pro-Marxist ideology. We are looking to analyze themes of the award descriptions in this list to determine what may have terms or themes that would be considered "woke" or related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). It is your task to determine whether or not the text contains these themes and tell me about what you've found. Only extract information from the NSF grant if it contains the information requested.

--

As an investigative journalist, I am looking for the following information

--

woke_description: A short description (at maximum a paragraph) on why this grant is being singled out for promoting "woke" ideology, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda. Leave this blank if it's unclear.

why_flagged: Look at the "STATUS", "SOCIAL JUSTICE CATEGORY", "RACE CATEGORY", "GENDER CATEGORY" and "ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE CATEGORY" fields. If it's filled out, it means that the author of this document believed the grant was promoting DEI ideology in that way. Analyze the "AWARD DESCRIPTIONS" field and see if you can figure out why the author may have flagged it in this way. Write it in a way that is thorough and easy to understand with only one description per type and award.

citation_for_flag: Extract a very concise text quoting the passage of "AWARDS DESCRIPTIONS" that backs up the "why_flagged" data.

Of course, members of our staff reviewed and confirmed every detail before we published our story, and we called all the named people and agencies seeking comment, which remains a must-do even in the world of AI.

Philip, one of the journalists who wrote the query above and the story, is excited about the potential new technologies hold but also is proceeding with caution, as our entire newsroom is.

“The tech holds a ton of promise in lead generation and pointing us in the right direction,” he told me. “But in my experience, it still needs a lot of human supervision and vetting. If used correctly, it can both really speed up the process of understanding large sets of information, and if you’re creative with your prompts and critically read the output, it can help uncover things that you may not have thought of.”

This was just the latest effort by ProPublica to experiment with using AI to help do our jobs better and faster, while also using it responsibly, in ways that aid our human journalists.

In 2023, in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune, a Local Reporting Network partner, we used AI to help uncover patterns of sexual misconduct among mental health professionals disciplined by Utah’s licensing agency. The investigation relied on a large collection of disciplinary reports, covering a wide range of potential violations.

To narrow in on the types of cases we were interested in, we prompted AI to review the documents and identify ones that were related to sexual misconduct. To help the bot do its work, we gave it examples of confirmed cases of sexual misconduct that we were already familiar with and specific keywords to look for. Each result was then reviewed by two reporters, who used licensing records to confirm it was categorized correctly.

In addition, during our reporting on the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune obtained a trove of unreleased raw materials collected during the state’s investigation. This included hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings, which were difficult to sift through. The footage wasn’t organized or clearly labeled, and some of it was incredibly graphic and disturbing for journalists to watch.

We used self-hosted open-source AI software to securely transcribe and help classify the material, which enabled reporters to match up related files and to reconstruct the day’s events, showing in painstaking detail how law enforcement’s lack of preparation contributed to delays in confronting the shooter.

We know full well that AI does not replicate the very time-intensive work we do. Our journalists write our stories, our newsletters, our headlines and the takeaways at the top of longer stories. We also know that there’s a lot about AI that needs to be investigated, including the companies that market their products, how they train them and the risks they pose.

But to us, there’s also potential to use AI as one of many reporting tools that enables us to examine data creatively and pursue the stories that help you understand the forces shaping our world.

Agnel Philip, Ken Schwencke, Hannah Fresques and Tyson Evans contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Charles Ornstein.

• Trump levies tariffs on America’s 3 largest trade partners, triggering retaliation in-kind from Canada, Mexico and China
• Trump threatens funding for schools that allow “illegal protests”, says agitators will be imprisoned or deported
• Federal employee union rallies to protest DOGE for mass firings, dismantling federal programs and agencies
• Local officials blast “No Bailout for Sanctuary Cities Act”, say Administration using fear to push Trump agenda
• Mexico lawsuit against US gunmakers reaches Supreme Court, alleges gunmakers cashing in on cartel violence
• CDC sends “disease detective” epidemiologists to respond to Texas measles epidemic, HHS Secretary Kennedy sends Vitamin A and recommends cod liver oil

The post Trump tariffs on 3 largest trading partners trigger retaliation from Canada, Mexico and China; local officials say No Bailout for Sanctuary Cities Act uses fear to push Trump agenda – March 4, 2025 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

Mishra can also be heard telling these people that the BJP is winning seats where Muslims are contesting. He is referring to the Delhi polls taking place on February 5.

He further claims that Muslim votes are getting split among three parties. The All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) led by Asaduddin Owaisi and the Congress party are cutting into the ruling Aam Aadmi Party’s vote share thus giving the BJP an edge. Towards the end of the video, Mishra rouses the audience by declaring that once Muslim votes are divided, the BJP’s victory will be guaranteed. “So, will you let off these Muslims then?… No, right? We must hoist the saffron flag in every corner of the city,” he says in Hindi.

X user @MeMdHaider, whose bio claims he is AAP’s zonal president posted the video, alleging that Kapil Mishra was promoting communal disharmony between Hindus and Muslims. (Archive)

कपिल मिश्रा बोल रहा है की दिल्ली में अगर भाजपा की सरकार बनी तो हिन्दू-मुस्लिम भाइयों से आपस में लड़ाकर यह फ़िर से दंगे करायेगा।

मेरी दिल्ली के सभी भाइयों से अपील है की एक भी वोट बटने ना दे, सोच समझकर वोट दे।

दिल्ली में भाजपा और नफ़रत को सिर्फ़ @ArvindKejriwal जी ही हरा सकते है। pic.twitter.com/6QYeB7DP2B

— Er. Md. Haider । محمد حیدر । मोo हैदर (@MeMdHaider) February 4, 2025

Facebook user Shakeelur Rahman also shared the video, which at the time of this article being written was viewed over 3,000 times.

Alt News received several requests on its WhatsApp Helpline (+917600011160) to authenticate the footage.

Fact Check

To begin with, we observed that Kapil Mishra’s voice and the ambient sound in the viral video appeared artificial. Upon closer examination, we noticed that the audio did not match Mishra’s lip movements either. This is clear towards the end of the viral clip, where he says, “… bhagwa lehraoge ki nahi….”

Next, we were able to find the full video from which the viral clip was extracted by going through the past live videos uploaded on Kapil Mishra’s official Facebook page. We found that the viral footage is part of a longer livestream uploaded on January 23.

The clipped bit begins at the 8:59-minute mark of this stream and goes on till 9:36 minutes. This bit does not show him making any such remarks as seen in the viral video. Mishra can be heard asking supporters rhetorically whether AAP ministers were of any help during communal disturbances in the area five years ago.

Around the 8:38-minute timestamp, Mishra requests for the audience’s votes , saying, “Yaad rakhna… jab hamaare ghari me aag lagaane ke liye bheed aayi thi, toh sadkon pe koi nahi aaya tha sirf Kapil Mishra nikla tha.” (Remember when they gave to torch your homes, nobody except Kapil Mishra went out on the streets.) He further goes on to say that he was neither a legislator nor had a senior post in the BJP at the time. “These people (AAP leaders) are now coming and telling you vote for AAP as locals, but did anyone come during that time?” he says, to which the crowd replies unitedly, “No”. The audience replying in negative is very clearly visible in the viral video.

Thus the viral video is morphed. Fake audio mimicking Mishra’s voice has been overlaid in an unrelated video to give the false impression that he made remarks on Muslim votes getting split. In reality, the viral clip is a small part of Mishra’s speech canvassing votes for the BJP and targeting AAP for doing nothing during the 2020 Northeast Delhi communal violence. Alt News was not able to conclusively determine whether the audio was AI-generated.

The post Video showing BJP’s Kapil Mishra making communal remarks is doctored, uses fake audio appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Prantik Ali.

Tunisia has reached a troubling milestone, with at least five journalists behind bars in CPJ’s December 1, 2024, prison census, the highest number since the organization began keeping track in 1992. Once hailed as a beacon of freedom in the Arab world after the 2011 revolution that sparked the Arab Spring, Tunisia is now erasing the gains it made as it stifles dissent and hampers the work of the press.

The government’s main tool against the media is Decree 54, a cybercrime law introduced by President Kais Saied in 2022 following his 2021 power grab in which he dissolved parliament, took control of the judiciary, and gave himself powers to rule by decree. The law makes it illegal to “to produce, spread, disseminate, send or write false news with the aim of infringing the rights of others, harming public safety or national defense or sowing terror among the population.” Today, four out of the five journalists imprisoned in Tunisia were convicted of violating the decree over their social media posts or commentary.

“Decree 54 has now turned every journalist into a suspect. It treats every journalist as if they are conditionally released from jail pending investigation, because they can be summoned for questioning at any time over anything they post online,” Ziad Debbar, president of local trade union the National Syndicate of Tunisian Journalists (SNJT), told CPJ.

Local journalists believe that authorities are using Decree 54 to quash investigative and critical journalism, and that many in the media are reverting to self-censorship.

“Decree 54 has been excessively applied to journalists, bloggers, and political commentators in the media,” Lofti Hajji, a founding member of SNJT, told CPJ. “This has led to a huge decline in political television and radio programs that once in abundance offered in-depth analysis of current political issues.” He said that journalists are loath to cover or speak out about the law, for fear that they will be charged under it.

Tunisian authorities stepped up prosecutions of journalists under the law ahead of last year’s October 6 elections, which Saied won by a landslide after jailing his opponents. On May 11, Tunisian authorities made three high profile media arrests. Sonia Dahmani, a lawyer and political commentator, was arrested when masked police officers raided the Tunisian bar association, where she had sought refuge after she sarcastically called Tunisia an “extraordinary country” attracting migrants on a television program. Dahmani was sentenced to one year in prison on false news charges under Decree 54. The sentence was later reduced to eight months on appeal, but she was subsequently sentenced to an additional two years in a separate conviction under the decree.

Dahmani’s colleagues, IFM radio journalists Mourad Zghidi and Borhen Bsaies, were arrested the same day last May. Bsaies was imprisoned under Decree 54 in connection with his television and radio commentary critical of the president and Zghidi over his social media posts in solidarity with journalist Mohamed Boughaleb. Both were sentenced to one year in prison after they were convicted of defamation and false news. Authorities have continued to pile on charges, investigating Zghidi and Bsaies for money laundering.

Prior to Saied’s 2021 power grab, journalists in Tunisia were protected by the press law, Decree 115, which abolished prison sentences for defamation and insult and enshrined protection of journalistic sources, and the 2014 constitution, which ensured freedom of expression. Local journalists say that journalists are vulnerable in new ways since the press law is no longer enforced and the freedom of expression clause of the constitution is not respected. Tunisia’s media regulator, the Independent High Authority for Audiovisual Communication, was hailed for its promotion of media independence, but  Saied’s government forced the authority’s president, Nouri Lajmi, into retirement and suspended its activities in 2023.

Without a media regulator, the Tunisian election monitor, the Independent High Authority for Elections has stepped into its place, hampering the work of the press seeking to cover politics. In August, the monitor revoked the press accreditation of journalist Khaoula Boukrim, editor-in-chief of independent news website Tumedia, over her online coverage of the elections. As of early 2025, Boukrim’s press accreditation was still revoked. The monitor also filed dozens of legal complaints against media organizations and bloggers, and prevented some journalists from covering a press conference in September announcing the final presidential candidates in the 2024 race.

“The [election monitor] functioning as a media regulator during the elections was just utter nonsense,” said Debbar. He said the monitor “referred many journalists [to authorities] to be prosecuted under Decree 54 to punish them for their coverage of the elections.”

In 2025, Tunisian journalists are having a hard time envisioning a future of press freedom under Saied’s new term. Zghidi’s sister, Mariam Zghidi, told CPJ that when she visited her brother in prison that he defended his work – even though it had come at an extraordinary price.

“During my first visit to Mourad in prison, he said to me; ‘I am not a political activist, I am a journalist. And my job entails that I will show public support regarding some topics, but it also entails that I will be critical regarding others, which is my right as a journalist’,” said Mariam. “This is why he is in prison, because he was doing his job.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program.

The agency also banned all consumer uses of the chemical perchloroethylene, or perc, which is used for dry cleaning and automotive care products. Perc has been linked to health harms, including damage to the kidneys, liver and the immune system.

“U.S. communities large and small have tap water with potentially harmful levels of TCE, and they may not be aware of this risk,” said Tasha Stoiber, Ph.D., senior scientist with the Environmental Working Group.

TCE is a volatile organic compound primarily used in commercial and industrial processes, including as a solvent for industrial cleaning and degreasing. More than 80 percent of TCE is used to manufacture refrigerants. The widespread industrial use of TCE has resulted in significant environmental releases, contaminating drinking water supplies.

“People can be exposed to this toxic solvent at home not just by drinking TCE-contaminated water but also by inhaling it when bathing and washing dishes. The EPA’s final rule will help to finally end most uses of this dangerous chemical,” added Stoiber.

In addition to being linked to cancer, TCE can cause developmental and reproductive harms. These risks are particularly high for workers in settings where the chemical is used. But people can be exposed at TCE-contaminated sites, as well as through drinking water and other water uses at home.

TCE contamination is a problem affecting community water systems serving at least 19 million people across the U.S., EWG has found.

“The Biden EPA should be applauded for taking another important step forward in protecting the health of workers and consumers from the risks of TCE,” said Scott Faber, EWG’s senior vice president for government affairs.

In 2023, the agency released its proposed version of the ban and invited public feedback on it. In July the EPA then sent the final version of the rule to the White House Office of Management and Budget for mandatory pre-publication review. Completing this review cleared the way for the final rule.

TCE’s toxic history

TCE has a notorious reputation and an infamous history. Many people learned about the risks of exposure to this chemical following the release of the 1995 blockbuster book and film “A Civil Action,” starring John Travolta. Together they tell the true story of a legal fight over companies contaminating an aquifer with TCE, harming the health of people living nearby.

The chemical is found in air, groundwater and soil near industrial facilities, hazardous waste sites and other locations where it was once used. People are exposed to TCE by breathing in its vapors or skin contact with it or with contaminated soil or water.

Americans concerned about the possibility of the chemical in their own drinking water can review EWG’s interactive map of TCE contamination, which is based on data from state drinking water agencies’ water system tests between 2017 and 2019. Or they can simply enter their ZIP code in EWG’s Tap Water Database.

People with TCE-contaminated drinking water can use a carbon-based filter to eliminate it, but costs vary, and some homes may need an expensive whole-house filter. Households relying on private well water should consider testing the water for contaminants to see whether it must be treated.

“Filtering water can often be a way for concerned families to reduce or remove TCE in their drinking water,” said Stoiber. “But people should not have to take on the costs of addressing years of pollution caused by industry.”

Pregnant people, infants and young children are among those most at risk from the dangers of TCE, especially decreased immune function. But the chemical has harmed people throughout the U.S., including servicemembers and their families who drank contaminated water at the military bases where they lived and worked. Former Marines have seen family members battle cancer – in some cases fatal – due to TCE exposure.

Camp Lejeune crisis

One of the worst TCE contamination cases on record in the U.S. is at North Carolina’s Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune. The solvent, and other chemicals, contaminated the base’s drinking water for decades, increasing cancer risks for civilian and military personnel. The pollution wrecked lives with health harms and even deaths.

Retired Marine Corps Master Sgt. Jerry Ensminger, who was stationed for many years at the base, lost his daughter Janey, in 1985, at the age of nine from leukemia after she was exposed to toxic chemicals while living there.

Ensminger since then has been an outspoken critic of the federal government’s slow response to contamination of drinking water sources with industrial chemicals, including TCE and the “forever chemicals” known as PFAS.

His campaigning resulted in Congress passing the Janey Ensminger Act, which former President Barack Obama signed in 2012. The law offers affected veterans and family members extended health care and medical services for disorders that may have been caused by exposure to toxic chemicals in Camp Lejeune drinking water.

Mike Partain, a son and grandson of Marine officers, was born at Camp Lejeune. He was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007 at the age of 39. Along with Ensminger, he has for years strongly criticized the federal government’s response to the TCE crisis at the base. He has also condemned its inadequate support for servicemembers and their families harmed by exposure to the chemical and other substances throughout the U.S.

In a statement, Ensminger said, “Mike and I welcome this ban on TCE by the EPA. This is proof that our fight for justice at Camp Lejeune was not in vain.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Nepal referred to Tibet as “Xizang” in a statement issued after its new Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli completed a four-day visit to Beijing this week, his first trip outside the country after his election -- not India, as is traditionally the case.

Xizang is a term promoted by Beijing, but Tibetan advocates say it is yet another attempt by China to erase their distinct cultural heritage.

Both moves highlight China’s growing influence in Nepal -- and its hopes to reap the economic benefits of closer ties to Beijing, experts and Tibetan advocates said.

“The joint declaration between Nepal and China in which the word ‘Xizang’ is used instead of Tibet shows the lengths to which Nepal is willing to go to appease China,” said Sriparna Pathak, an associate professor of China studies at the O.P. Jindal Global University in Haryana, India, and a former consultant at India’s foreign ministry.

“This is a complete disregard of the Tibetan cause, the struggle and the history,” she told Radio Free Asia.

“This does not augur well at all for Tibetans living in Nepal.”

China experts cite the promises of millions of dollars of Chinese investment as a reason for the Nepalese government restricting Tibetan activities in the country.

Oli’s extended visit, which ended Thursday, also included an agreement related to China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, a grand plan to boost global trade through infrastructure development.

In other signs of China’s influence, Nepali police regularly detain Tibetans in Kathmandu for “questioning” during high profile visits by Chinese officials.

Authorities also increase surveillance on Tibetan refugee settlements during cultural celebrations like the Tibetan New Year or the birthday of Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama.

Stalled BRI projects

In the joint statement issued this week by Nepal and China, the two sides emphasized the importance of “law enforcement cooperation.”

China said it is “willing to provide support for Nepal to the best of its capacity through capacity building, including trainings in the field of combating cyber crimes, and assistance of police supplies.”

Nepal signed an initial agreement to join the BRI in 2017, but highway construction and other projects have stalled since then.

Oli’s visit included the signing of a framework agreement to get those projects off the ground with feasibility studies.

China has previously promised to transform Nepal from a “landlocked nation into a land-linked hub.”

Nepal, in turn, has reaffirmed its allegiance to China, particularly on issues related to Taiwan and Tibet, with the use of Xizang in official documents as the latest example.

‘Serving Beijing’s agenda’

The term “Xizang” was first used in official Chinese government diplomatic documents in 2023. Chinese Communist Party scholars had advocated for the use of “Xizang,” which they have said would help promote China’s legitimate occupation and rule of Tibet.

In this week’s joint statement, Nepal “reiterated that Xizang affairs are internal affairs of China, and that it will never allow any separatist activities against China on Nepal’s soil.”

That was another example of China “using its power to make a smaller country serve its political agenda,” said Tencho Gyatso, president of Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet.

“Whatever name is used does not alter the fact that the Tibetan people are suffering under China’s misrule,” she told RFA.

Economic diplomacy

The previous prime minister, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, visited Beijing in September 2023.

The joint statement issued afterward only referred to Tibet – not Xizang – but it did state that Nepal would “never allow any separatist activities against China on Nepal’s soil.”

Similarly, just after Xi Jinping’s visit to Nepal in 2019, Nepal reiterated its “determination on not allowing any anti-China activities on its soil.”

“Over the years, the space for Tibetans in Nepal has continued to remain constrained,” said Manoj Kewalramani, a China Studies fellow at Bengaluru, India-based Takshashila Institution.

“I think this trend is likely to continue. Beijing has always used economic diplomacy to serve such political ends,” he said. “These are among the strings that come with Chinese money.”

RELATED STORIES

French museum blasted for using ‘Xizang’ in Tibet exhibits

Report: China is exporting digital control methods

10 years on, Belt and Road goals shift with China’s ambitions

Restrictions on Nepal’s Tibetan refugees likely to continue under new prime minister

The BRI framework cooperation agreement highlighted Nepal’s preference for grants instead of loans to fund the projects. That issue delayed the signing of the deal for a day, but both countries eventually agreed on Wednesday to a combination of grants and loans in the framework.

Critics have accused China of “debt diplomacy” – trapping nations with financial liabilities for major infrastructure projects they can ill-afford and which then could might be leveraged for Beijing’s political benefit.

Additional reporting by Dorjee Damdul, Abby Seiff, Tsering Namgyal and Dickey Kundol. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Tenzin Pema and Tenzin Norzom for RFA Tibetan.

A deliberate, man-made famine is underway in Gaza, according to many human rights experts. Starving Gaza is a new documentary by Al Jazeera English’s Fault Lines investigating how Israel has killed civilians seeking aid and attacked humanitarian networks. The harrowing film is based on the work of Palestinian reporters in Gaza who are suffering the same conditions as their subjects. “They’ve been displaced, they’ve been injured, they’ve watched their own children die in front of them, and yet they somehow conjure the professionalism to pick up a camera and record and tell other people’s trauma,” says journalist Hind Hassan. “They really will be remembered in history as the titans of journalists.”

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

Nauru’s President David Adeang declared in a speech to the United Nations that the international community must not let “fear and misinformation” block the exploitation of sea-bed minerals that could be critical to the global energy transition.

Adeang used Tuesday's address to the U.N. General Assembly to warn about the perils of inaction on deep-sea mining, which proponents say will help provide the essential ingredients for new electric vehicle batteries and other green technologies.

“The greatest risk we face is not the potential environmental impacts of mineral recovery, but the risk of inaction,” he said. “There is a risk of failing to seize the opportunity to transform to renewable energy and to decarbonize our planet. We cannot let fear and misinformation hold us back.” 

Adeang is the first of 12 Pacific leaders due to appear before the international body this week. The 79th session of the assembly is being held against a backdrop of several wars, growing geopolitical divisions and seemingly irreversible planet warming.

The Nauruan president opened and closed his speech with a call for sustainable use of resources on the ocean floor and issued a warning to “those who seek to block our efforts.”

“Do not dismiss the potential of deep sea minerals outright,” he said. “Do not ignore the science and the progress we have made. Instead, work with us to establish the robust regulations necessary for responsible mining.”

Nauru, a 21 square kilometer (8.1 square mile) island nation home to 10,000 people, is leading the push to kick start sea-bed mining in international waters that are administered by the U.N. affiliated International Seabed Authority, or ISA.

In conjunction with Nasdaq-listed The Metals Company, Nauru’s government has been pressing the ISA to approve mining before its 169 member nations agree on regulations for the industry.

Adeang said deep-sea mining was “not just an economic opportunity, [but] an environmental imperative” that could help meet the challenges of climate change. 

Nauru’s position is supported by a small number of Pacific island nations, including Papua New Guinea where deep-sea mining exploration is underway in the Bismarck Sea, between New Ireland and New Britain.

But many are concerned that mining the potato-sized poly-metallic nodules on the seafloor could harm the environment and compromise the region’s moral authority when it comes to protection of the oceans.

Countries such as Vanuatu, Tuvalu and Palau say that more independent research needs to be conducted to ascertain the environmental consequences of mining. 

Climate action

While wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan are likely to headline discussions in New York this week, there will also be important talks on climate change and progress towards Sustainable Development Goals, a set of 17 targets to reduce poverty and protect the planet.

At a press conference on the margins of the general assembly, leaders from several Pacific islands nations were close to tears Tuesday as they pressed for a just transition to a low-carbon economy.

Lenora Qereqeretabua, Fiji’s deputy speaker of parliament, said that wealthy fossil-fuel producing countries needed to take the lead and honor their climate commitments. 

“For those of us whose homes, whose traditional lands, whose fisheries and whose stories are being inundated by seawater, this is our very existence,” she said, apologizing for becoming emotional.

Tina Stege, the Marshall Islands special envoy for climate, said climate financing needed to be made more accessible and equitable. Most funding came in the form of loans to developing countries that were exacerbating debt, she said. 

“That is directly relevant to the justice issue,” Stege said. “How is it that we are paying to solve a problem that we did not create? In doing so we are taking away from our capacity to develop; to do things like fund our schools and hospitals.”

The day before the general assembly began, leaders agreed on a “Pact for the Future,” a set of lofty commitments aimed at reinvigorating multilateralism and “turbocharging” implementation of development and climate goals.

The U.N. Security Council will also convene for a session on the existential threat posed by rising sea levels.

Low-lying Pacific islands are particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels and extreme weather events like cyclones, floods and marine heatwaves, which are projected to occur more frequently this century as a result of higher average global temperatures.

In the western Pacific, sea level rise is occurring at nearly twice the global rate, increasing approximately 10-15 cm between 1993-2023, according to a U.N. report released last month. In the central tropical Pacific, the sea level has risen approximately 5–10 cm over the same period. 

Developed nations must recognize their historical responsibility for emissions and honor obligations under the Paris Agreement, Nauru’s Adeang said. 

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Harry Pearl for BenarNews.

The Venezuelan right-wing had no real plan to win a democratic election, but instead prepared for a coup d’etat even before the polls closed. Working with the US government and corporate media, they allege President Maduro stole the July 28 presidential election, then committed human rights abuses to crush protests. This opposition declares it beat President Maduro 70% to 30% but refuses to present their “evidence” to the National Electoral Council (CNE) or Supreme Court. The opposition claimed fraud in every election during the 25-year period of Chavista rule – except twice, when they won.

The attempted coup bears much in common with recent US coup attempts in Nicaragua (2018), Bolivia (2019) and Venezuela (2013, 2014, 2017, 2019). If the US-backed candidates lose, the election is “fraudulent.” This scheme drove Evo Morales from power in Bolivia. The US even appointed its own president for Venezuela after its 2018 presidential election, and then proceeded to steal tens of billions of dollars of Venezuela’s resources held overseas.

US coup attempts use new tools besides the US-trained military as in the past

First, the US crushes a country with sanctions and economic blockades, causing scarcities and shortages, leading to discontent among the people over worsening living conditions. National Security gangster John Bolton said: “Sanctions are a means of repression and coercion between military warfare and diplomacy.” Richard Nephew, Treasury deputy secretary, adds: “Over the past decade, the most important tool for enforcing American power is the sanctions mechanism.” To justify sanctions, the US relies on its media, intellectuals, universities and think tanks, to make them seem humane to the public. In Venezuela, US sanctions caused government revenue to collapse by 99%, requiring dramatic cuts in the many social programs. The sanctions killed over 100,000 civilians, Venezuelans knew that voting for Nicolas Maduro would mean a worsening of the US-EU economic warfare they face.

Second, corporate media and social media now play a coup-making role similar to that of Pentagon-trained generals in the past. Supervised by the CIA, this media blanketed a targeted country and the world with disinformation against its government, seeking to foment a “regime change” mass movement.

Six corporations control over 90% of the US media and so own the news. They dominate the world media just as the US dollar dominates the world financial system. The all-important weapon, social media, which saturates billions of mobile phones, are in the hands of Elon Musk (X, formerly Twitter), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram). Working with the CIA, they can impose an alternative reality, seen in Nicaragua in 2018, Bolivia during the 2019 coup, and Venezuela today.

Corporate media describe the elected Maduro government – and the elected ones in Nicaragua and Cuba – as dictatorships.

Delegitimizing Venezuelan elections in advance followed a pattern used in Bolivia (2019) and Nicaragua (2021). The US created automated networks of thousands of fake social media accounts to swamp the public with fake news. These accounts generate streams of posts in a coordinated manner, creating the appearance of popular repudiation of Evo Morales, Nicolas Maduro, or Daniel Ortega.

Bots were used in a massive way against Evo’s government. The two main coup leaders created 95,000 twitter accounts before the coup to spread the election fraud story and call for violent protests. Over 68,000 false accounts were set up to legitimize the army’s overthrow of Morales and justify killing those protesting the coup.

US social media control in these countries drowns out pro-government and independent voices not just by saturating the online conversation, but by shutting them down. After the US annointed Juan Guaido the Venezuela president, Twitter closed thousands of Chavista accounts to foster the impression that most Venezuelans supported Guaido.

Governments in countries like Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia cannot respond effectively to the US media disinformation warfare against them any more than to the US blockades imposed on them. It takes them years to build up national media networks, and even then, their resources are minor compared to what the US commands.

Third, the US relies on cyberwarfare to incapacitate its opponents. In Bolivia in 2019 a cyberattack of the electoral system’s computers disrupted the vote count, preventing the authentic results being issued. The US-backed opposition then claimed Evo delayed the vote count because he was fixing it.

After the July 28 election, 126 digital platforms of the Venezuelan state suffered cyberattacks, the most significant being the CNE, the constitutional agency recording the vote. Hacked over 100 times that night, it could not operate normally, delaying for days the release of the results. Again, this was used to claim the vote totals were being fixed.

At times 30 million cyber attacks per minute occurred between July 28 and August 9th. Such an attack disables Venezuelan government computer systems and paralyzes operations. These large-scale cyberattacks generated hundreds of gigabytes per second (your laptop system memory may have 16 gb).

These attacks falsified IP links, duplicated links, reconfigured government portals and hijacked information. Names and addresses of government workers were released on social media to “comanditos” (opposition gangs), creating physical threats for those affected.

The US powerful media and cyber weapons, able to swamp a country’s airwaves with CIA concocted “news,” while disrupting the country’s response, open the door to violent protests against the government.

Fourth, having created the conditions for opposition leaders to assert the Maduro government stole the election, they then called people into the streets to protest and create chaos or guarimbas. “Comanditos” (small groups paid to instigate violence), caused destruction and violence, killed 25 and injured 192, burned buildings, sacked several regional CNE headquarters, blocked roads, attacked police and military, beat up people who “looked” Chavista, attacked local community leaders, food distribution centers, public schools, hospitals, offices, ransacked warehouses, the transportation system, the electrical grid, all to paralyze the country. The US media could portray to the world a picture of national chaos, inviting military intervention to restore order, meaning a US neo-colonial regime.

These protests (as in Bolivia in 2019 and Nicaragua in 2018, Cuba in 2021) are portrayed in the corporate media as peaceful democracy rallies. When police forces and mobilized Chavista organizations attempt to stop the violence, the corporate media charges democracy protests are being repressed. This has been a habitual corporate media scam in US regime change operations, yet people still fall for it. In fact, the strategy was first used in the coup against the democratic government of Iran in 1953.

National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez noted the comanditos were financed entirely by NGOs. “When the actions and financing of these groups were investigated, it was discovered that they were financed by organizations of dubious origin from Europe or by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)”

Eva Golinger wrote years ago, “Wherever a coup d’etat, a colored revolution or a regime change favorable to US interests occurs, USAID and its flow of dollars is there…The same agencies are always present, funding, training and advising: USAID, National Endowment for Democracy [NED], International Republican Institute [IRI], National Democratic Institute [NDI], Freedom House, Albert Einstein Institute [AEI], and International Center for Non-Violent Conflict [ICNC].”

Fifth, US coup attempts count on funding NGOs to carry out “regime change.” Besides the CIA-controlled USAID, NED, NDI, and IRI, NGOs receive millions from Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, and others. The US uses them to buy an internal opposition, similar to AIPAC in the US – except here AIPAC works to disenfranchise we the people.

NED funds NGOs worldwide to incite color revolutions against those the US empire finds not properly subservient. Between 2016-2019 1600 NGOs received NED grants, highlighting the value the US places on the NGO coup-making tool. Needless to say, the US does not tolerate foreign countries funding NGOs pressing for political change here.

From 2000-2020, the US spent $250 million funding “regime change” NGOs in Cuba. Tracey Eaton wrote, “An extensive network of groups financed by the US government sends cash to Cuba to thousands of ‘democracy activists,’ journalists and dissidents every year.” Since 1996, the US spent $20-$45 million dollars a year to fund these Cuban groups. These NGOs created the CIA Cuban social media ZunZuneo, and even infiltrated the Cuban hip-hop scene, laying the basis for the 2021 protests.

From 2017 through 2019, USAID admitted giving nearly $467 million to the Venezuelan opposition. USAID committed another $128 million to US appointed president Juan Guaidó. In 2006, Ambassador William Brownfield in 2006 revealed the goals of USAID funding: “1) Strengthening Democratic Institutions, 2) Penetrating Chavez’ Political Base, 3) Dividing Chavismo, 4) Protecting Vital U.S. business, and 5) Isolating Chavez internationally.” The NED disclosed in 2010 that agencies funded the opposition $40-50 million annually.

Similar US operations against Nicaragua are revealed in How Billion-Dollar Foundations Fund NGOs to Manipulate U.S. Foreign Policy, In 2018, in the US attempted coup, USAID spent $24.5 million and NED $4.1 million to train and support  the opposition movement, while the Soros Foundation gave $6.7 million to propagate fake news.

Venezuela and Nicaragua recently passed laws controlling NGOs – which the US painted as a sign of their dictatorial nature.

How Venezuela Defeated this Five-Pronged Coup Attempt

The Maduro government had campaigned for months educating and warning the people of opposition schemes to disrupt the election, refuse to recognize the results, create new guarimbas, and that united popular action could stop this. They succeeded. The violent coup attempt on July 29-30 failed; on July 31 the terrorists were being rounded up, and calm restored. On August 3, more than half a million Chavistas marched to support President Maduro and peace.

Internationally, the Maduro government benefited from the considerable prestige it had gained standing up to everything the US rulers threw at it. The US has likewise lost much credibility, especially over its full support for the endless massacres in Gaza. It could not even get the subservient OAS to condemn Maduro.

Venezuela, like Cuba, has developed a strong civic-military union supported by thousands of voluntary militias that has been a bastion against the war – economic, military, propaganda, and cyberwar – against the country. Moreover, the Venezuelan military command, like in Cuba and Nicaragua, is dedicated to defending the constitutional order, denying US coup-plotters an opening.  A people’s militia in Bolivia, which did not and still does not exist, could have maintained order in October 2019 after the police and military commands declared they would not stop right wing violence.

Besides the mass civic-military union, the Venezuelan government, like Cuba, relies on mobilizing the people. President Maduro’s closing campaign rally culminated in over a million marching on July 25th.  Right after the July 28 election, hundreds of thousands of Chavistas took to the streets of Caracas and other cities. This was an antidote to the coup attempt and violence, since these mobilizations vastly outnumbered the capacity of the opposition.

After 25 years of the US forcing the Chavista leadership live under pressure cooker conditions, it has been unable to divide them and overturn the revolution as it has so often elsewhere, such as Grenada, Burkina Faso, Algeria, the Soviet bloc, and now threatens Bolivia.

The Maduro government maintains broad popular support because of its commitment to the people. The oil industry was nationalized and its income, while curtailed due to the US blockade, benefits the people. Mass literacy campaigns ended illiteracy. Over 5.1 million homes have been built for the poor. Venezuela has become almost self-sufficient in food production. The CLAP program distributes discounted or free food to 7.5  million families every month. Free health care and education through university are provided to all. Venezuela is overcoming the US blockade with the economy expected to grow 10% in 2024, and has the lowest inflation rate in 14 years. In recognition, about one million Venezuelans have returned home.

Chavismo defeated this coup because of its organic connection with the people, because of the class consciousness that has matured in its citizens since Hugo Chavez initiated the Bolivarian process, and because of the political clarity and determination of the Chavista leadership. Their victory is one for the peoples of the world.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stansfield Smith.

Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s exchange on foreign policy in Thursday’s presidential debate revealed that “the two candidates are extreme militarists, and one of them, Donald Trump, is a proponent and expresser of fascistic politics,” says activist Norman Solomon. In the brief section on Gaza, Biden boasted of his support for Israel as it pummels the Gaza Strip, while Trump criticized Biden, saying Israel should be allowed to “finish the job,” and said Biden is “like a Palestinian.”

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

The official X (formerly Twitter) account of BJP West Bengal, @BJP4Bengal shared the poster with the same claim.

কর্মসংস্থান না বাড়লে কীভাবে ভারতের শহরে শহরে পৌঁছে গেল মেট্রো পরিষেবা?

কংগ্রেস বলবে, বিজেপি করবে! #Vote4BJP #PhirEkBaarModiSarkar pic.twitter.com/Jmmb9ngsfK

— BJP West Bengal (@BJP4Bengal) May 12, 2024

The official X handle of BJP Tripura (@BJP4Tripura) also amplified the poster.

কর্মসংস্থান না বাড়লে কীভাবে ভারতের শহরে-শহরে পৌঁছে গেল মেট্রো পরিষেবা ?
কংগ্রেস বলবে, বিজেপি করবে ! pic.twitter.com/SVZQUTq0Nu

— BJP Tripura (@BJP4Tripura) May 15, 2024

An unverified page on X (@BJPBarrackpore) also shared the poster.

কর্মসংস্থান না বাড়লে কীভাবে ভারতের শহরে শহরে পৌঁছে গেল মেট্রো পরিষেবা?

কংগ্রেস বলবে, বিজেপি করবে! #Vote4BJP #PhirEkBaarModiSarkar pic.twitter.com/9I82yVCbEY

— BJP Barrackpore (@BJPBarackpore) May 13, 2024

Facebook pages like ‘BJP 14-Badharghat Vidhansabha’, BJP Tripura, BJP West Bengal, BJP Tripura Khowai, 20 Boxanagar Vidhansabha, BJYM Tripura and BJP Khowai Mandal have also shared the poster.

Fact Check

Alt News ran a Google reverse image search with the image of the train shown in the poster and came across a similar image uploaded on the photo website ‘Unsplash‘ by a photographer named Shawn. The image titled, ‘white and red train on rail road during daytime’ was tagged under the labels of ‘Singapore’ and ‘Jurong East’.

A comparison between the image used in the BJP poster and the one clicked by Shawn reveals that both images have similar design patterns on the body of the train and there are several other elements common to both the pictures. For example, a pole, possibly a signal post, next to the tracks, the number 3 written on a yellow track-marker and the pattern of the rail-tracks in the surrounding area. In the BJP poster, the pole is partially hidden as PM Modi’s face has been placed over it.

We also contacted Shawn on Instagram, and he confirmed to us that the picture was from Jurong East station in Singapore. This confirms that the metro-railway image used in the BJP’s poster is from Singapore and not from India.

The picture of the metro railway tracks portrayed in the poster has been cropped out from the larger portrait-sized image clicked by Shawn, as shown below:

A closer look at the picture clicked by Shawn, from which the image in the BJP poster has been cropped,  reveals that there is a Samsung store on the left side of the metro railway tracks of Jurong East station.

Taking a cue from this, we geolocated the area on Google Maps. The first slide below depicts the 3D view of the area near the Samsung store located beside Jurong East MRT station. The second slide shows the terrain view of the same area. The 3D view of the area clearly depicts the Samsung store, Jurong East MRT station and the four railway tracks which can be seen in the image clicked by Shawn and the BJP poster.

We also came across a 2020 report by The Strait Times, a Singaporean media outlet. The report featured a similar image which was depicted in the BJP poster. The image description states, “Commuters were told to add about 20 minutes to their train journeys between Choa Chu Kang MRT and Jurong East MRT stations.” Choa Chu Kang and Jurong East are places in Singapore. 

To sum up, the metro railway train and elevated tracks shown in the BJP poster depicting PM Modi’s image are actually from Singapore and not from India.

Abira Das is an intern at Alt News.

The post ‘Metro services in 20 cities’: BJP’s Modi poster uses train photo from Singapore appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abira Das.

The post Morocco Uses Israeli Weaponry to Target Civilians in Western Sahara appeared first on Project Censored.

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

The shooting in Kansas City on Wednesday came on the sixth anniversary of the Parkland, Florida, school massacre that left 17 dead and injured 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. To mark the anniversary, gun control advocates have launched a project called “The Shotline,” which calls lawmakers with AI-generated audio messages that feature the voices of gun violence victims, pushing them to pass stricter gun control laws and prevent future tragedies. One of the victims featured is Parkland student Joaquin Oliver, who was just 17 years old when he was killed. We speak to Joaquin’s father, Manuel Oliver, a gun reform activist who worked on the “Shotline” project. He describes the project as the “result of more than six years being ignored” while “begging these politicians to pass laws,” and reacts to the news of the Super Bowl parade shooting in Kansas City.

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

The impacts of this shift have not gone unnoticed. From New York to Kentucky to Texas, crypto mining warehouses have vastly increased local electricity demand to power their 24/7 computing operations. Their power use has stressed local grids, raised electricity bills for nearby residents, and kept once-defunct fossil fuel plants running. Yet to date, no one knows exactly how much electricity the U.S. crypto mining industry uses. 

That’s about to change as federal officials launch the first comprehensive effort to collect data on cryptocurrency mining’s energy use. This week, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an energy statistics arm of the federal Department of Energy, is requiring 82 commercial crypto miners to report how much energy they’re consuming. It’s the first survey in a new program aiming to shed light on an opaque industry by leveraging the agency’s unique authority to mandate energy use disclosure from large companies.

“This is nonpartisan data that’s collected from the miners themselves that no one else has,” said Mandy DeRoche, deputy managing attorney in the clean energy program at the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice. “Understanding this data is the first step to understanding what we can do next.”

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin bypass the need for financial institutions by adding data to a public ledger, or “blockchain,” to verify all transactions. To win money, computers using energy-intensive mining software race to confirm additions to the blockchain. According to initial estimates published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration last week, cryptocurrency mining could account for between 0.6 percent and 2.3 percent of total annual U.S. electricity use. To put that into perspective, in 2022, the entire state of Utah consumed about 0.8 percent of electricity consumed in the U.S. The state of Washington, home to nearly 8 million people, consumed 2.3 percent. 

“It’s a tremendous amount of energy that we don’t have transparency into and that we don’t understand the details about,” DeRoche told Grist. One reason why it’s so difficult to track crypto mining’s energy use is the size of mining facilities, which can range from individual computers to giant warehouses. Smaller facilities are often exempt from local permitting requirements and frequently move to source cheaper electricity. Data on larger operations’ energy use is often hidden in private contracts with local utilities or tied up in litigation over individual facilities, said DeRoche. 

The Energy Information Administration, or EIA, is in an unusually powerful position to require greater transparency from crypto miners. Under federal law, the agency can require any company engaged in “major energy consumption” to provide information on its power use. In July 2022 and February 2023, Democratic members of Congress including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Rashida Tlaib sent letters to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, calling for the agencies to exercise that authority over crypto miners and “implement a mandatory disclosure regime as rapidly as possible.”

In late January, the EIA sent a letter to the White House Office of Management and Budget requesting emergency approval to survey crypto mining facilities, taking the first step in creating such a regime. The letter raised concerns that the price of bitcoin had increased 50 percent in the last three months, incentivizing more mining activity that could stress local power grids already under strain from cold weather and winter storms. 

“Given the emerging and rapidly changing nature of this issue and because we cannot quantitatively assess the likelihood of public harm, we feel a sense of urgency to generate credible data that would provide insight into this unfolding issue,” EIA Administrator Joseph DeCarolis wrote in the letter. The White House approved the survey on January 26. 

While its total electricity use is poorly understood, cryptocurrency mining’s impacts on utility bills and carbon pollution have been widely documented. A recent analysis by the energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie found that bitcoin mining in Texas has already raised electricity costs for residents by $1.8 billion per year. In the winter of 2018, utility bills for residents in Plattsburgh, New York, rose by up to $300 as nearby bitcoin miners gobbled up low-cost hydropower, forcing the city to buy more expensive electricity elsewhere. 

Crypto’s skyrocketing electricity demand has also revived previously shuttered fossil fuel power generators. Near Dresden, New York, the formerly shut-down Greenidge natural gas plant reopened in 2017 exclusively to power bitcoin mining. In Indiana, a coal-fired plant slated to power down in 2023 will now keep operating, and a crypto mining facility is setting up shop next door. AboutBit, the crypto mining startup that owns the facility, told the Indianapolis outlet IndyStar that the facility had nothing to do with the coal plant remaining open. DeRoche pointed to other gas plants in New York and Kentucky where crypto mining operations have created renewed demand for fossil fuels. 

In Texas, crypto miners are also paid by the state’s power grid operator to shut down during heat waves and other periods of high demand. Since 2020, five facilities in Texas have made at least $60 million from the program, according to The New York Times. Those subsidies come without much payoff or jobs for local residents, DeRoche said: Even large mining operations employ at most only a few dozen people, the Times reported. 

Bitcoin mining companies, however, maintain that they benefit local residents. Riot Platforms, one of the country’s biggest bitcoin mining firms, stated in a press release in September that the company “employs hundreds of Texans and is helping to revitalize communities that had experienced economic hardship.” Crypto mining businesses also dispute claims that they overuse energy resources. In a May 2022 letter to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Bitcoin Mining Council, a group representing bitcoin mining companies, made the dubious claim that “Bitcoin miners have no emissions whatsoever.” The group added, “Digital asset miners simply buy electricity that is made available to them on the open market, just the same as any industrial buyer.”

Policymakers are finally starting to catch up to the industry’s impacts on the climate and neighboring communities. In November 2022, the state of New York enacted a two-year moratorium on new crypto mining facilities that source power from fossil fuel plants. 

The EIA’s surveys of crypto mining companies beginning this week will identify “the sources of electricity used to meet cryptocurrency mining demand,” DeCarolis, the EIA administrator, said in a press release. The data will be published on the EIA’s website later this year. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Bitcoin mining uses a lot of energy. The US government is about to find out how much. on Feb 8, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Akielly Hu.

In the past, Godin would have replaced the broken screen on the spot with a working screen harvested from a dead phone, saving the customer from having to buy a brand new screen from Apple. But if Godin performs this simple procedure on one the latest models of iPhones, features such as True Tone, which adjusts screen brightness and color based on the ambient light conditions, won’t work anymore. What’s more, the phone will issue a repeated message warning the user that Apple cannot determine if the screen is genuine.

This is because many replacement iPhone parts, including screens, must now be “paired” with the phone using Apple’s proprietary software before they will function properly. And Apple’s “parts pairing” software will only recognize replacement parts purchased directly from Apple for that specific repair job — meaning an independent shop would have to order the part when the customer comes in, then potentially wait days for it to arrive. Meanwhile, the customer could go to an Apple Store and get their phone fixed with authorized parts on the spot. Godin says he’s losing business because of the hurdles a customer might face getting their iPhone fixed at his shop.

“It’s a lot of telling customers in advance, ‘We might run into this or that complication,’” Godin told Grist. “And the majority of the time, they don’t have us do the repair.”

As more and more states enact laws protecting consumers’ right to fix the devices they already have, or get them fixed at the repair shop of their choosing, tech titans are clashing over parts pairing. New York, Minnesota, and California all passed digital right-to-repair bills over the last two years, and repair advocates say Apple and trade associations it belongs to worked behind the scenes to weaken or block language that interfered with parts pairing. But while advocates expect Apple will fight new laws targeting the practice, Google came out in support of Oregon’s bill earlier this month — partly because of its ban on parts pairing. With tech giants now staking out opposing positions on parts pairing, repair advocates see a potential opportunity to gain ground.

Godin testified at a recent hearing of the Oregon Senate’s Energy and Environment Committee, which is considering a right-to-repair bill that explicitly bans parts pairing. If passed into law, the Oregon bill would represent the strongest legal rebuke yet of a practice that many independent repair shops see as an existential threat to their businesses, and that repair advocates say is fueling electronic waste and unnecessary resource consumption. 

Restricting parts pairing is “the next step that likely needs to happen for right to repair to really gain a lot more traction,” said Colorado state representative Brianna Titone, who is sponsoring a digital right-to-repair bill in her state for the fourth time this year.

The right-to-repair movement is premised on the idea that when consumers have access to the parts, tools, and information needed to repair the devices they own, they can use those devices for longer. This both saves consumers money and reduces the environmental downsides of technology, which include electronic waste and the greenhouse gas emissions and resource consumption associated with manufacturing new products.

But parts pairing threatens to undermine the benefits of repair. Parts pairing refers to when companies use software to track their parts and control how they are used. Companies can assign spare parts serial numbers and program those parts to work properly only after their installation has been authenticated using the manufacturer’s specialized software. The practice isn’t exactly new: For years, agricultural equipment maker John Deere has restricted access to the software tools needed to install replacement parts on its tractors, while some automakers have engaged in “VIN burning,” or using software to limit the installation of replacement parts to a single vehicle. But in the consumer technology realm, parts pairing is becoming a greater concern for independent repairers, largely due to Apple’s growing use of the practice for its iPhone and laptops.

Apple claims its pairing process using the company’s “System Configuration” software tool is important for calibrating parts after their installation to ensure the best performance. But this kind of technology also represents a powerful tool for restricting repair. A person whose iPhone 15 battery dies can still go to an independent shop to get it swapped for a new one, or do the repair on their own. But in order to receive battery health updates and avoid nagging warning messages that the phone contains an unrecognizable part, that shop or individual needs to purchase the new battery from Apple, then pair it using System Configuration. This can cause repairs to take more time, in addition to driving up costs (while ensuring that Apple gets a cut). 

Parts pairing is perhaps an even bigger problem for refurbishers, who use secondhand parts to keep costs down as they’re restoring old devices for resale. If a customer buys a refurbished laptop only to encounter warning messages about non-genuine parts, they may return it, said Marie Castelli, head of public affairs at the online refurbished device store Back Market. 

“We have clients opening [return] tickets because they are afraid of messages” alerting them that the device cannot recognize a part like the screen, Castelli told Grist. 

There’s an environmental cost to parts pairing, as well. When customers are steered away from used parts, those parts become e-waste. Meanwhile, demand for new parts rises, resulting in additional resource consumption and emissions tied to manufacturing. Right-to-repair is “about trying to keep things out of landfills; trying to reduce our dependence on all these minerals that go into all these parts,” Titone said. “And that’s really the big problem with parts pairing.”

The right-to-repair movement has made considerable progress forcing manufacturers to make spare parts, tools, and repair documentation available through a recently passed wave of state bills. But advocates say that Apple, and its trade association allies, have been largely successful in keeping bans on parts pairing out of the bills that have passed so far. 

In New York, language that would have interfered with Apple’s internet-based system for pairing replacement parts was removed from the state’s right-to-repair bill after the trade association TechNet — which Apple is a member of — requested its deletion. In California, a coalition of lawmakers, repair advocates, and industry representatives negotiating the text of the state’s new right-to-repair law reached an agreement with Apple on the bill text prior to its approval by the Senate, according to David Stammerjohan, chief of staff for California state senator and bill sponsor Susan Eggman. After that agreement was reached, some coalition members wanted to add language that explicitly addressed parts pairing.

“We discussed it with Apple, which indicated they wanted to stick to the terms of the agreement,” Stammerjohn told Grist in an email. “Like all major bill negotiations, there were things industry would have liked in the bill that did not get in and things we would have liked in the bill that did not get into the final agreement.” 

Minnesota’s new right-to-repair law does address parts pairing more explicitly. The law requires device manufacturers to make spare parts, tools, and documentation available to the public on fair and reasonable terms that cannot include any “requirement that a part be registered, paired with, or approved by the original equipment manufacturer or an authorized repair provider before the part is operational.” But while this may sound like a ban on parts pairing, Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the repair advocacy organization Repair.org, worries that the language isn’t airtight enough to deter a manufacturer from locking down certain functions using software and then arguing its case before the state’s attorney general if anyone complains.

“I don’t have to be a legal expert to tell you I would expect that,” Gordon-Byrne told Grist.

Repair.org has written a template right-to-repair bill that includes provisions its members would like to see incorporated into actual legislation. For the 2024 legislative cycle, the organization updated its template bill language to more explicitly define, and prohibit, parts pairing. Some of that stronger language made its way into the bill now under consideration in Oregon, which states that manufacturers cannot use parts pairing to reduce the functionality or performance of a device or cause the device to display “unnecessary or misleading alerts or warnings about unidentified parts.”

This language is a key reason Google, whose more recent Pixel smartphones and Chromebook laptops would be covered under the latest version of Oregon’s bill, chose to throw its support behind the legislation, according to Stephen Nickel, who heads up repair operations at the company. In an interview with Grist, Nickel said that Google liked the “comprehensive” nature of the bill.

“It considers all aspects of repairability, and particularly … the issue of parts pairing,” he said, adding that Google is prepared to comply with “any and all” of the bill’s requirements.

Google’s newfound opposition to parts pairing, Titone said, suggests that the closed-door negotiations between lawmakers and device manufacturers are now spilling out into a “turf war” among tech companies vying for customers “in a very competitive market.”

“I think there is a market strategy that Google is trying to exploit right now,” she said. “Having [Pixel smartphone] repairability be really high is an edge.” 

It remains to be seen whether Apple or others will fight the new Oregon bill or future ones that seek to restrict parts pairing. But all signs suggest a battle is brewing. Titone, the Colorado representative, said that when she spoke with Apple several months back concerning the right-to-repair bill she’s introducing this year, the company asked her to allow parts pairing in the text.

In response to Grist’s request for comment, an Apple spokesperson shared remarks that AppleCare VP Brian Nauman made at a White House repair event in October affirming the company’s commitment to a uniform federal repair law that “balances repairability with product integrity, usability, and physical safety.” The spokesperson declined to address criticisms of Apple’s parts pairing practices or share the company’s position on the anti-parts pairing provisions in the new Oregon bill or Minnesota’s recently passed law.

It isn’t just U.S. lawmakers seeking to limit parts pairing. The European Union is currently negotiating a new set of EU-wide rules on the right to repair that would make it easier and more cost-effective for consumers to repair devices versus replacing them. In November, the European Parliament adopted a draft version of the right-to-repair rules that, among other things, prohibits companies from using software to impede independent repair. The Parliament’s version of the rules must now be reconciled with draft versions proposed by the European Commission and European Council, with negotiations over the final text set to conclude in early February. But Castelli of Back Market, who is following the negotiations closely, said that “hopes are high in terms of what’s achievable” when it comes to parts pairing.

“Everyone wants to land on something and is open to negotiations,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Apple uses software to control how phones get fixed. Lawmakers are pushing back. on Jan 30, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Maddie Stone.

Image by Austin Chan.

Clairvoyance, or “sixth sense,” is a magical kind of intuition. It is the ability to tell the future, read someone’s mind or, as some people claim, communicate with dead people. I often wonder if clairvoyance could provide us with guidance in these troubling times.

I had an experience of clairvoyance traveling in train from Washington, D.C. to New York. I was sitting next to an attractive, middle-aged woman who told me that she worked in show business. I asked her what kind of business and she said she was a clairvoyant. I asked her, “Many people ask me when I’m going to write a book. Do you see a book in my future?” She said, “No, I don’t see a book in your future, but you are going to go to your country sooner than you expect.”

I found her response puzzling since I didn’t have any plans to go to Argentina, my native country. When I returned home, I was telling my wife about the encounter with this unusual woman when the phone rang. It was a call from Argentina offering me a short-term consultancy with the government. And I haven’t written a book.

Another unusual incident happened to a scientist friend of mine from New York. Because of a mix-up, when he was born the wrong date was written on his birth certificate, making him older than he was. When he applied for his passport, the document had the wrong date. During a trip to India for a medical convention, my friend was walking to a meeting when a homeless man approached him and asked for money. My friend obliged and as he was leaving, the man said, “I am sorry Sir, please don’t get angry at me but your passport has your wrong birth date.” Only my friend and his most immediate family knew this…

There is a relationship between clairvoyance and premonition. Although both are related to the ability to perceive events beyond our normal senses, while clairvoyance is the ability to see things that are not visible to the naked eye, premonition is the capacity to sense future events before they happen.

One example of premonition was that of Barret Naylor, a Wall Street executive who worked at the World Trade Center. On the two occasions that the World Trade Center was bombed (in 1993 and in 2001,) as he was going to work there in the morning, he had the feeling that something terrible was going to happen. On both occasions he decided to return home; his sense of foreboding, or premonition, saved his life.

Now, the jury hearing the case regarding E. Jean Carroll has ordered Mr. Donald Trump to pay her $83.3 million for defamation charges. This is an unusually large amount and one which tarnishes his legacy as president. These circumstances lead me to ponder this. Is it clairvoyance o premonition that led Walt Whitman, our greatest bard, to write the following lines in his poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in which he draws an almost perfect picture of our former president?

I am he who knew what it was to be evil,

I too knotted the old knot of contrariety,

Blabb’d, Blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,

Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,

Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,

The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,

The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not

wanting,

Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these

wanting…

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Cesar Chelala.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Akela Lacy.

Photograph Source: John Vachon – Public Domain

In the 1960s and 1970s, Big Tobacco and public health advocates were locked in a battle. The anti-smoking supporters were gaining ground as cities were innovating ways to reduce smoking and protect public health during this time. As former tobacco industry lobbyist Victor L. Crawford observed, you’d “put out a fire [in] one place, another one would pop up somewhere else.”

But in the mid-1980s, this momentum stopped. Big Tobacco had discovered a way to reverse local gains. According to a 2020 study in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH), the industry’s counteroffensive has led to more disturbing and enduring ramifications for public health—and our democracy—than previously understood.

The State Preemption Strategy

The strategy used by Big Tobacco is called state or “ceiling” preemption: promoting weaker state public health laws to override stronger local laws. Between 1986 and 1991, the tobacco industry rammed through seven state preemption laws.

The industry gained steam over the next five years, imposing 17 additional preemption policies on states. Laws restricting youth access to tobacco products would be reversed or never see the light of day. Laws establishing smoke-free environments were overridden. Tobacco tax increases were stalled. Restrictions on tobacco retail licensing were relaxed.

Perhaps the most concerning finding of the study published in the AJPH is that it takes an average of 11 years to repeal these laws—if they’re repealed at all. As of 2019, no preemption laws on youth access or tobacco marketing—and fewer than half of state preemption laws on smoke-free places—have been repealed.

The tobacco industry has a long-documented history of targeting people in low-income communities and communities of color with the very tactics—like children-targeted marketing—preemption laws sought to protect. Consider the costs to public health and progress—especially in Black communities and other communities of color—when scarce resources are bound up in undoing bad policies versus securing new public health protections.

Research indicates that smoking-related deaths accounted for around 15 percent of the decrease in the life expectancy gap between African-American men and white men at age 50 in 2019. Disproportionate childhood exposure to second-hand smokeand target marketing of products such as menthol are among the heightened risk factors for the Black community.

Preemption Harms Consumers—and Workers

As of 2018, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and the larger food and beverage industry have already seen the enactment of at least a dozen laws preempting local public health policies like soda taxes, product labeling, and restrictions on junk food marketing to kids.

This has allowed the industry to continue its racist marketing campaigns, targeting Black youth and other youth of color. Understanding these tactics is key to undoing and preventing further proliferation of the industry’s preemption push.

The four tobacco industry tactics outlined below are being modeled across industries, such as the food and beverage sector, disproportionately affecting communities of color and exacerbating diet-related disease crises.

Image: Internet Archive Book Images/Wikimedia Commons

Lobbying

First, to give Big Tobacco’s political agenda credibility, tobacco giants like R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company have invested heavily in trade associations and front groups to do their bidding, from so-called “smokers’ rights groups” to restaurant, hotel, and gaming associations.

Unsurprisingly, a similar cast—like state affiliates of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Restaurant Association (NRA)—is again the muscle behind state preemption pushes to block new soda taxes, as well as critical policies to assure food workers’ health and well-being, such as new paid sick leave requirements and minimum wage increases.

Examples include the Texas Supreme Court quashing city efforts to guarantee municipal paid sick leave in 2020 and the Minnesota Supreme Court ruling againstthe Minnesota Chamber of Commerce’s contention that Minneapolis’s paid sick leave requirements were preempted by state law during the same year.

The Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, a group of social justice organizations in Louisiana, has been mobilizing to undo what a spokesperson of the coalition—in a 2020 article in Scalawag—called, “yet another tool of white supremacy” and an example of the “plantation [mentality’s]” manifestation in state politics: state preemption of local minimum wage increases.

Campaign Contributions

Second, Big Tobacco lavished money on federal elections. In 1998 alone, the tobacco lobbies contributed more than $70 million. Predominantly, Republican candidates have received more than $50 million from the tobacco industry since 1990. In this same period, the NRA and its most prominent corporate members—like McDonald’s, Darden, and Yum! Brands—spent more than $60 million in disclosed federal contributions.

An analysis by my organization, Corporate Accountability, in partnership with Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, Food Chain Workers Alliance, Berkeley Media Studies Group, and Real Food Media, found a disturbing correspondence between NRA campaign contributions and the propensity of those receiving them—like Senator Mitch McConnell and Representative Kevin McCarthy, both Republicans—to oppose progressive policies such as improvements to food labeling, stronger worker protections, and minimum wage increases.

Local Preemption

Third, the industry obscured preemption through legislative channels. As if making an end-run around local democracy wasn’t bad enough, Big Tobacco slipped preemption into a wide array of bills—from property taxes to pesticides.

In 2006, the industry spent more than $100 million to fight tobacco control measures and funded an Ohio measure (“Smoke Less Ohio”) that would have rolled back local smoke-free laws and prevented their adoption in the future. Ohioans voted against the ballot measure.

Twelve years later, in 2018, Big Soda spent millions on a California ballot initiative that made it harder to impose soda taxes and increase any taxes. In exchange for dropping the ballot initiative, lawmakers and then-Governor Jerry Brown agreed to prohibit new taxes on grocery items—including sugar-sweetened beverages—until January 1, 2031, as part of a larger tax overhaul.

According to California state Senator Scott Wiener, a Democrat, the industry basically aimed “a nuclear weapon at [the] government in California and [said], ‘If you don’t do what we want, we’re going to pull the trigger, and you’re not going to be able to fund basic government services.’”

Legal Threats

Fourth, Big Tobacco issued legal threats. Despite being ineffective at overturning laws, the industry has pursued dozens of cases as a deterrent to the passage of new laws. In Michigan, Big Tobacco sponsored a Michigan Restaurant Association and Michigan Chamber of Commerce lawsuit attempting to strike down a local smoke-free policy in 1998.

The lawsuit tied up the town of Marquette in legal proceedings for about five years despite only succeeding in repealing a small part of the law.

But after years of being on the receiving end of the industry’s tactics, the public health community has regrouped. They generated media coverage that exposed Big Tobacco’s chicanery in advancing state preemption policies and—instead of putting out fires once preemption had been introduced or adopted—advocates implemented proactive lobbying approaches.

One of the earliest examples is from 1996 when the Indiana Campaign for Tobacco-Free Communities helped compel then-Governor Evan Bayh to veto a law preempting “virtually non-existent” local tobacco control laws.

Meanwhile, in 1994, a national preemption task force was formed by leading health organizations. It attracted prominent political figures like Hillary Clinton and former Representative Henry Waxman, a Democrat, and mobilized grassroots movements and more coherent counterstrategies. By 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advocated eliminating ceiling preemption laws.

The public health movement also helped expand legal networks. From coast to coast, states helped fund legal resource centers that worked with health departments in drafting tobacco control laws that could weather industry challenges.

But history is repeating itself. For example, e-cigarette maker Juul has worked tirelessly to ensure state increases in the minimum age to purchase tobacco products are paired with preemptions on local governments taking any further actions to regulate vaping (like flavor bans).

Business groups have filed lawsuits against Los Angeles County, Palmdale, California, and Edina, Minnesota, seeking to nix local prohibitions on flavored e-cigs, claiming these laws are preempted by federal law. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has compromised the respiratory health of its victims, does not seem to have caused this destructive industry one bit of pause.

It is critical for those taking on the food industry to get ahead of attempts at preemption.

We can scarcely afford more industry-driven policies denigrating public health and deepening already profound health inequities. There will be no shortage of bills and ballot initiatives intent on supplanting popular democracy with narrow corporate prerogatives. But we have the solutions because we’ve faced this problem before.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The post How the Food Industry Uses Big Tobacco’s Playbook appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Gigi Kellett .

Photograph Source: John Vachon – Public Domain

In the 1960s and 1970s, Big Tobacco and public health advocates were locked in a battle. The anti-smoking supporters were gaining ground as cities were innovating ways to reduce smoking and protect public health during this time. As former tobacco industry lobbyist Victor L. Crawford observed, you’d “put out a fire [in] one place, another one would pop up somewhere else.”

But in the mid-1980s, this momentum stopped. Big Tobacco had discovered a way to reverse local gains. According to a 2020 study in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH), the industry’s counteroffensive has led to more disturbing and enduring ramifications for public health—and our democracy—than previously understood.

The State Preemption Strategy

The strategy used by Big Tobacco is called state or “ceiling” preemption: promoting weaker state public health laws to override stronger local laws. Between 1986 and 1991, the tobacco industry rammed through seven state preemption laws.

The industry gained steam over the next five years, imposing 17 additional preemption policies on states. Laws restricting youth access to tobacco products would be reversed or never see the light of day. Laws establishing smoke-free environments were overridden. Tobacco tax increases were stalled. Restrictions on tobacco retail licensing were relaxed.

Perhaps the most concerning finding of the study published in the AJPH is that it takes an average of 11 years to repeal these laws—if they’re repealed at all. As of 2019, no preemption laws on youth access or tobacco marketing—and fewer than half of state preemption laws on smoke-free places—have been repealed.

The tobacco industry has a long-documented history of targeting people in low-income communities and communities of color with the very tactics—like children-targeted marketing—preemption laws sought to protect. Consider the costs to public health and progress—especially in Black communities and other communities of color—when scarce resources are bound up in undoing bad policies versus securing new public health protections.

Research indicates that smoking-related deaths accounted for around 15 percent of the decrease in the life expectancy gap between African-American men and white men at age 50 in 2019. Disproportionate childhood exposure to second-hand smokeand target marketing of products such as menthol are among the heightened risk factors for the Black community.

Preemption Harms Consumers—and Workers

As of 2018, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and the larger food and beverage industry have already seen the enactment of at least a dozen laws preempting local public health policies like soda taxes, product labeling, and restrictions on junk food marketing to kids.

This has allowed the industry to continue its racist marketing campaigns, targeting Black youth and other youth of color. Understanding these tactics is key to undoing and preventing further proliferation of the industry’s preemption push.

The four tobacco industry tactics outlined below are being modeled across industries, such as the food and beverage sector, disproportionately affecting communities of color and exacerbating diet-related disease crises.

Image: Internet Archive Book Images/Wikimedia Commons

Lobbying

First, to give Big Tobacco’s political agenda credibility, tobacco giants like R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company have invested heavily in trade associations and front groups to do their bidding, from so-called “smokers’ rights groups” to restaurant, hotel, and gaming associations.

Unsurprisingly, a similar cast—like state affiliates of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Restaurant Association (NRA)—is again the muscle behind state preemption pushes to block new soda taxes, as well as critical policies to assure food workers’ health and well-being, such as new paid sick leave requirements and minimum wage increases.

Examples include the Texas Supreme Court quashing city efforts to guarantee municipal paid sick leave in 2020 and the Minnesota Supreme Court ruling againstthe Minnesota Chamber of Commerce’s contention that Minneapolis’s paid sick leave requirements were preempted by state law during the same year.

The Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, a group of social justice organizations in Louisiana, has been mobilizing to undo what a spokesperson of the coalition—in a 2020 article in Scalawag—called, “yet another tool of white supremacy” and an example of the “plantation [mentality’s]” manifestation in state politics: state preemption of local minimum wage increases.

Campaign Contributions

Second, Big Tobacco lavished money on federal elections. In 1998 alone, the tobacco lobbies contributed more than $70 million. Predominantly, Republican candidates have received more than $50 million from the tobacco industry since 1990. In this same period, the NRA and its most prominent corporate members—like McDonald’s, Darden, and Yum! Brands—spent more than $60 million in disclosed federal contributions.

An analysis by my organization, Corporate Accountability, in partnership with Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, Food Chain Workers Alliance, Berkeley Media Studies Group, and Real Food Media, found a disturbing correspondence between NRA campaign contributions and the propensity of those receiving them—like Senator Mitch McConnell and Representative Kevin McCarthy, both Republicans—to oppose progressive policies such as improvements to food labeling, stronger worker protections, and minimum wage increases.

Local Preemption

Third, the industry obscured preemption through legislative channels. As if making an end-run around local democracy wasn’t bad enough, Big Tobacco slipped preemption into a wide array of bills—from property taxes to pesticides.

In 2006, the industry spent more than $100 million to fight tobacco control measures and funded an Ohio measure (“Smoke Less Ohio”) that would have rolled back local smoke-free laws and prevented their adoption in the future. Ohioans voted against the ballot measure.

Twelve years later, in 2018, Big Soda spent millions on a California ballot initiative that made it harder to impose soda taxes and increase any taxes. In exchange for dropping the ballot initiative, lawmakers and then-Governor Jerry Brown agreed to prohibit new taxes on grocery items—including sugar-sweetened beverages—until January 1, 2031, as part of a larger tax overhaul.

According to California state Senator Scott Wiener, a Democrat, the industry basically aimed “a nuclear weapon at [the] government in California and [said], ‘If you don’t do what we want, we’re going to pull the trigger, and you’re not going to be able to fund basic government services.’”

Legal Threats

Fourth, Big Tobacco issued legal threats. Despite being ineffective at overturning laws, the industry has pursued dozens of cases as a deterrent to the passage of new laws. In Michigan, Big Tobacco sponsored a Michigan Restaurant Association and Michigan Chamber of Commerce lawsuit attempting to strike down a local smoke-free policy in 1998.

The lawsuit tied up the town of Marquette in legal proceedings for about five years despite only succeeding in repealing a small part of the law.

But after years of being on the receiving end of the industry’s tactics, the public health community has regrouped. They generated media coverage that exposed Big Tobacco’s chicanery in advancing state preemption policies and—instead of putting out fires once preemption had been introduced or adopted—advocates implemented proactive lobbying approaches.

One of the earliest examples is from 1996 when the Indiana Campaign for Tobacco-Free Communities helped compel then-Governor Evan Bayh to veto a law preempting “virtually non-existent” local tobacco control laws.

Meanwhile, in 1994, a national preemption task force was formed by leading health organizations. It attracted prominent political figures like Hillary Clinton and former Representative Henry Waxman, a Democrat, and mobilized grassroots movements and more coherent counterstrategies. By 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advocated eliminating ceiling preemption laws.

The public health movement also helped expand legal networks. From coast to coast, states helped fund legal resource centers that worked with health departments in drafting tobacco control laws that could weather industry challenges.

But history is repeating itself. For example, e-cigarette maker Juul has worked tirelessly to ensure state increases in the minimum age to purchase tobacco products are paired with preemptions on local governments taking any further actions to regulate vaping (like flavor bans).

Business groups have filed lawsuits against Los Angeles County, Palmdale, California, and Edina, Minnesota, seeking to nix local prohibitions on flavored e-cigs, claiming these laws are preempted by federal law. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has compromised the respiratory health of its victims, does not seem to have caused this destructive industry one bit of pause.

It is critical for those taking on the food industry to get ahead of attempts at preemption.

We can scarcely afford more industry-driven policies denigrating public health and deepening already profound health inequities. There will be no shortage of bills and ballot initiatives intent on supplanting popular democracy with narrow corporate prerogatives. But we have the solutions because we’ve faced this problem before.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Gigi Kellett .

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

Zelenskiy met with his Lithuanian counterpart Gitanas Nauseda on January 10 to discuss military aid, training, and joint demining efforts during the previously unannounced trip, which will also take him to Estonia and Latvia.

“We have proven that Russia can be stopped, that deterrence is possible,” he said after talks with Nauseda on what is the Ukrainian leader's first foreign trip of 2024.

"Today, Gitanas Nauseda and I focused on frontline developments. Weapons, equipment, personnel training, and Lithuania's leadership in the demining coalition are all sources of strength for us," Zelenskiy later wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Lithuania has been a staunch ally of Ukraine since the start of Russia's unprovoked full-scale invasion, which will reach the two-year mark in February.

Nauseda said EU and NATO member Lithuania will continue to provide military, political, and economic support to Ukraine, and pointed to the Baltic country's approval last month of a 200-million-euro ($219 million) long-term military aid package for Ukraine.

Russia's invasion has turned Ukraine into one of the most mined countries in the world, generating one of the largest demining challenges since the end of World War II.

"Lithuania is forming a demining coalition to mobilize military support for Ukraine as efficiently and quickly as possible," Nauseda said.

"The Western world must understand that this is not just the struggle of Ukraine, it is the struggle of the whole of Europe and the democratic world for peace and freedom," Nauseda said.

Ukraine has pleaded with its allies to keep supplying it with weapons amid signs of donor fatigue in some countries.

There is continued disagreement between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress on continuing military aid for Kyiv, while a 50-billion-euro ($55 billion) aid package from the European Union remains blocked due to a Hungarian veto.

But a NATO allies meeting in Brussels on January 10 made it clear that they will continue to provide Ukraine with major military, economic, and humanitarian aid. NATO allies have outlined plans to provide "billions of euros of further capabilities" in 2024 to Ukraine, the alliance said in a statement.

Zelensky warned during the news conference with Nauseda that delays in Western aid to Kyiv would only embolden Moscow.

"He (Russian President Vladimir Putin) is not going to stop. He wants to occupy us completely," Zelenskiy said.

"And sometimes, the insecurity of partners regarding financial and military aid to Ukraine only increases Russia's courage and strength."

Since the start of the year, Ukraine has been subjected to several massive waves of Russian missile and drone strikes that have caused civilian deaths and material damage.

Zelenskiy said on January 10 that Ukraine badly needs advanced air defense systems.

"In recent days, Russia hit Ukraine with a total of 500 devices: we destroyed 70 percent of them," Zelenskiy said. "Air defense systems are the number one item that we lack."

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, an all-out air raid alert was declared on the morning of January 10, with authorities instructing citizens to take shelter due to an elevated danger of Russian missile strikes.

"Missile-strike danger throughout the territory of Ukraine! [Russian] MiG-31Ks taking off from Savasleika airfield [in Russia's Nizhny Novgorod region].

Don't ignore the air raid alert!' the Ukrainian Air Force said in its warning message on Telegram.

With reporting by AFP and Reuters

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

"Recent news from China has sent ripples of excitement and astonishment across the globe," gushes the voice-over on the China Charged YouTube channel. "This revolutionary breakthrough is more than a technological marvel; it is a game-changer that will redefine the global tech landscape."

"Prepare to have your mind blown," says another video, this time on the channel Unbelievable Projects. "Welcome to today's video, in which we'll discover why America remains behind China in infrastructure development."

These voices and their “good news” about China are evidence that the Chinese Communist Party and its overseas proxies are using artificial intelligence to flood YouTube with propaganda videos, according to a new report that describes a "coordinated inauthentic influence campaign" on the platform.

The videos are part of at least 30 channels identified by researchers as being part of the "Shadow Play" network promoting pro-China and anti-U.S. narratives, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

YouTube has taken down at least 19 of them.

The campaign used "entities and voice-overs generated by artificial intelligence" to put out content in line with the Chinese Communist Party's narratives across at least 30 YouTube channels, the institute said in its report titled "Shadow Play."

Aiming to Influence opinion

Starting in mid-2022, the propaganda campaign appears to be part of a bid to "shift English-speaking audiences’ views" of China, including Beijing's efforts to upgrade its technology despite U.S. sanctions, and has garnered nearly 120 million views and 730,000 subscribers so far, the report said.

"The campaign’s ability to amass and access such a large global audience – and its potential to covertly influence public opinion on these topics – should be cause for concern," the authors warned, adding that YouTube had responded to the report by taking down a number of channels for "coordinated inauthentic behavior" and for spam.

British artificial intelligence company Synthesia has also disabled the account of one of the channels for violating its media policies as of Dec. 14, according to the Institute.

"The operator of this network could be a commercial actor operating under some degree of state direction, funding or encouragement," the report said. "This could suggest that some patriotic companies increasingly operate China-linked campaigns alongside government actors."

State-directed campaign

Report author Jacinta Keast said researchers had traced much of the channels' content to stories that originated in China's heavily controlled news media in Chinese.

"A lot of those stories were often stories that only really appeared and most likely first appeared in the mainland Chinese media ecosystem," she said.

"We think at this stage that it's probably a Chinese state-directed and/or supported campaign that's being delivered by a corporate contractor or perhaps a patriotic Chinese company that's been encouraged to undertake this campaign," Keast told Radio Free Asia in a recent interview.

While one channel had partially monetized its content, the degree of monetization wasn't enough to suggest a commercial operation, she said.

"We would expect a purely commercial actor to really make more effort to fully monetize their operations," she said.

Some channels even had comments from viewers saying that the AI voices were "artificial," yet there had been little attempt to improve the quality of content to maximize revenue, Keast added.

The report also found that some of the YouTube content -- a report that Iran had switched on its China-provided BeiDou satellite system -- appeared on X, formerly Twitter, and other social media platforms, where it was gaining traction within a few hours of appearing on YouTube.

It called for greater information sharing about Chinese influence operations among Five Eyes nations and their allies, as well as tighter rules requiring social media users to disclose the use of generative AI in audio, video or image content.

‘Tell good stories about China’

U.S.-based political commentator Wu Jianmin said such channels are responding to Chinese leader Xi Jinping's call to "tell good stories about China,” and seek to “infiltrate the ideological systems of Western countries.”

Taiwan National Defense University doctoral researcher Gao Cheng-pu said similar content is used to target the democratic island of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory despite never having controlled it, through indirect channels that are hard to trace.

"Usually after Beijing gives an order, it will contact Taiwanese businesspeople via a cooperative businessperson in Hong Kong, and have them hire online public relations companies to run [the operation]," Gao told Radio Free Asia.

The use of AI saves time and money, while making it much harder to trace the source of the content or the intermediaries, he said.

'Poisoned'

Keast said social media companies need to get wise to such operations.

"It's important for social media platforms to care about this because users go online expecting to engage with other users who are genuine and they don't want to be influenced, they don't want to have the online space poisoned by foreign influence actors," she said.

"We'd like to see them continue the work we've done in this investigation and have a look at any other content on our network that matches the indicators we provided in this report and ... take those down promptly."

But she warned that AI technology is so sophisticated that it's often hard to detect in audio, video or text.

And social media platforms aren't always well-informed about Chinese influence.

In October, YouTube deleted a second channel that produced satirical videos featuring Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping, sparking renewed concerns over whether the Chinese government or its proxies are exploiting the social media giant’s copyright rules to censor satirical or dissident content.

Keast said greater transparency from governments would help.

"We need governments to come out and say this is what we're seeing, this is who's doing it to strengthen democratic resilience against this threat," she said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Qiao Qinen for RFA Mandarin.

As the largest-ever United Nations climate summit kicks off Thursday in Dubai, we look at how the COP28 president, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who is also CEO of the United Arab Emirates state oil company, has used climate summit meetings to lobby countries for oil and gas deals. The Centre for Climate Reporting obtained documents from meeting briefings that include Abu Dhabi National Oil Company talking points. The Centre’s Ben Stockton lays out how the oil boss was put in charge of the climate summit, and how the UAE also hopes to use COP28 to deflect from “a record of human rights abuses.” The new revelations “call into question the integrity of COP28,” he says. Democracy Now! will broadcast from COP28 in Dubai next week.

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

Junta forces abducted nearly 100 people, including monks, the elderly, children and pregnant women in Pauktaw to use as human shields.

The civilians were abducted on Nov. 16 when the Arakan Army captured Pauktaw’s police station, which was previously occupied by junta troops. In retaliation, the regime attacked the coastal area by firing weaponry from navy ships and aircraft. 

By the following week, the junta army and police had re-captured Pauktaw and were patrolling neighborhoods. 

The Arakan Army seized control of the city again on Tuesday and rescued the captured civilians, according to a statement the group released. It also stated the regime was frequently using heavy artillery and launching rockets from ships and by aircraft. 

The junta stated it had captured Pauktaw before Tuesday, but an announcement by junta spokesman Maj. Gen Zaw Min Tun in military-controlled newspapers did not say anything about the arrested people.

Fighting between the two groups is also affecting civilians in the state’s northeast. On Monday evening in Paletwa township on the Chin state border, eight civilians, including five children, were injured in a junta airstrike. 

Some of the children are in a critical condition after they were struck by bomb shrapnel while bathing in a creek, said a woman from Mee Zar village, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.

“The children were hit when they came back from bathing in the creek down from the village. The adults were hit when they went to pick things up,” she said.

“I heard that the injured are in a critical condition. At the moment, we’re hiding when we hear the sound of the plane. I am still afraid it will come again.”

All eight victims are currently receiving medical treatment at Mee Zar District Hospital.

RFA contacted Chin state’s junta spokesperson Kyaw Soe Win by phone regarding the aerial bombardment, but he did not respond by the time of publication.

Mee Zar village is about 10 kilometers (six miles) away from Paletwa township’s Hta Run Aing village, where another clash between the junta army and Arakan Army erupted, locals said.

On Monday evening, a Christian church in Matupi township’s Lalengpi town was destroyed during the junta’s airstrike, according to the locals.

Eleven residents, including eight children, were killed during an aerial bombardment on Vuilu village in Matupi township on the night of Nov. 15. 

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

Hamas used Iranian-made mortar rounds and North Korean rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) in its attack against Israel on Oct. 7, the Israeli military stated during an official media tour Thursday, as reported by AFP.

“I think about five to 10 percent of the weapons here [were] made in Iran,” an Israeli military official, who asked for the condition of anonymity, was cited as saying. “And 10% [are] North Korean. The rest of it was made inside the Gaza Strip.”

“I think the most surprising thing was the amount of weapons that they brought inside Israel,” the official added. 

Earlier this month, RFA reported on the potential use of North Korean weapons by Hamas militants. RFA’s thorough analysis was based on a video that displayed a man holding what seemed to be North Korean-made rocket launchers.

Following the report, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff confirmed the findings, with its intelligence indicating a military connection between North Korea and Hamas. 

The latest confirmation from Israel followed as Pyongyang has been issuing statements, blaming the United States in the Middle East conflict. The conflict was a “tragedy created entirely by the United States,” North Korea’s official Korea Central News Agency said on Monday, claiming that Washington “has turned a blind eye to Israel, its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, continuous armed assaults, civilian casualties, and the expansion of Jewish settlements.” 

The move is widely seen as the North’s attempt to bolster its anti-American coalition, which could potentially strengthen its leverage against the U.S. and its allies. Over the past few weeks, North Korea’s foreign policy has shown signs of a larger strategy at play. From supporting Hamas to bolstering ties with Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, Pyongyang appears keen on crafting a united front against Washington.

The strategy appears to bear results by aligning those opposed to U.S. policy. Last week, a portrait of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was displayed at an anti-U.S. protest in the West Bank, underscoring the deep sentiments of the Palestinian people against the U.S.

The Oct. 7 attack, in which North Korean and Iranian weapons are used, killed over 1,400 individuals in Israel, primarily civilians, according to an official figure. In response, Israel has launched airstrikes that have led to approximately 7,000 deaths from the Palestine side, with the majority also being civilians, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Casualties are anticipated to increase on both sides as Israel’s military announced on Thursday that it had conducted a ground operation in the Gaza Strip. The Israel Defense Forces reported that its tanks and infantry units “struck numerous terrorist cells, infrastructure and anti-tank missile launch posts” before withdrawing to Israeli territory.

Edited by Elaine Chan and Taejun Kang.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lee Jeong-Ho for RFA.

The group, formed in 2021 in the central Sagaing region’s town of Kale is led by comedian Nau Sing, who moonlights as a taekwondo coach. The short videos are posted on Nau Sing’s Facebook and YouTube accounts, both of which have tens of thousands of followers or subscribers.

Nau Sing told RFA’s Myanmar Service that the channel did not start out profitable, but now that it is, he continues to make them for charity.

“I have loved charity since I was young,” he said. “After three years of creating these videos, I started to get money, so now that I have income, I donate as much as I can.”

The comedy troupe lacks access to a computer, so all the editing is done on mobile phones, but recent trends have made short videos with minimal editing popular, and that has made the videos successful, the Nau Sing charity said.

Ma San San, one of the team members, told RFA that she is happy when the charity can make a difference in other people’s lives.

“When we … gave them a bag of rice, they burst into tears,” she said. “They said they had never been able to buy a whole bag of rice, rather they could buy only a few tins of here or beg for more there. They were in tears because they said a bag of rice would hold them over for a long time, and I was thrilled.

The group plans to donate to the needy once every month, said Ko Nau Sing, another member of the group.

“We have established a Nau Sing page [on social media],” said Ko Nau Sing. “We are planning to donate once a month as much as we can based on the income. But whether there are contributions or not, we plan to donate once a month.”

The charity donates food worth 100,000 kyats per month (US$48) for a family of five that is struggling to make ends meet, it said.

The charity also supports single mothers who struggle to take care of their children. 

One such mother, Ma Man Lan Nyaung, lives with her five children at a shelter inside a church. She told RFA that she and two of the older children had been begging on the streets to support the family.

“We were not shy anymore. We begged from every house that we thought had some food to spare,” she said. “At that time, the Nau Sing group donated rice, oil, salt and chickpeas. I am very grateful to them for their donations.”

Translated by Htin Aung Kyaw. Edited by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Reported by RFA Burmese.

A top adviser to Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health admitted that he used a personal email account in an apparent effort to evade the strictures of the Freedom of Information Act, according to records obtained by congressional investigators probing the origin of Covid-19. The official also expressed his intention to delete emails in order to avoid media scrutiny.

“As you know, I try to always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly,” wrote David M. Morens, a high-ranking NIH official, in a September 2021 email, one of a series of email exchanges that included many leading scientists involved in the bitter Covid origins debate. “Stuff sent to my gmail gets to my phone,” he added, “but not my NIH computer.”

After noting that his Gmail account had been hacked, however, he wrote to the group to say that he might have to use his NIH email account to communicate with them instead. “Don’t worry,” he wrote, “just send to any of my addresses, and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”

An email from David M. Morens, senior scientific adviser to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a position held by Anthony Fauci until his retirement last year.

Screenshot: The Intercept

Morens is a 25-year veteran of NIH who serves as a senior scientific adviser to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a position held by Fauci until his retirement late last year. Other scientists on the email exchanges include Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance; Robert Garry of Tulane University; Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney in Australia; Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research; and Angela Rasmussen, who works at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization in Canada. They have all been outspoken proponents of the natural origin theory of Covid’s emergence. Jason Gale, a journalist at Bloomberg, also participated in the email exchanges, which were first obtained by investigators from the Republican-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. 

The email Morens wrote concerning FOIA, which was sent from his Gmail account, contradicted a footer under his signature line: “IMPORTANT: For US-government related email,” it said, “please also reply to my NIAID address.” Morens did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Scott Amey, the general counsel at the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, said the conduct described in Morens’s email could potentially violate agency regulations, including the Department of Health and Human Services’s email records management policy, and potentially civil and criminal record retention laws.

“His comments in that email are certainly worth an investigation by the agency, the agency inspector general, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Department of Justice,” said Amey.

The email that contains Morens’s statements was part of a broader exchange in which Morens and his scientist correspondents denounced media coverage by The Intercept and other publications concerning the origins of Covid and harshly criticized those who take seriously the possibility that the virus emerged from a research accident in Wuhan, China. They also laid out their own arguments in favor of a natural origin for the virus.

“The lab leakers are already stirring up bullshit lines of attack that will bring more negative publicity our way — which is what this is about — a way to line up the [gain-of-function] attack on Fauci, or the ‘risky research’ attack on all of us,” wrote Daszak in one email on September 7.

“Do not rule out suing these assholes for slander,” wrote Morens in response.

In a separate email, Morens slammed scientists such as Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, calling them “harmful demagogues.” He also lamented the media’s platforming of such figures.

“They need to be called out. Because I am in government I can only fo [sic] this off the record, but I have done do [sic] again and again,” he wrote. “Some of them are knowingly promoting false equivalences [sic]. If they interviewed a Holocaust survivor, they would say they have to give equal time and space to a Nazi murderer. They have no shame.”

You can read the full set of documents here.

On Thursday, Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, the chair of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, sent a letter to Morens about the documents the subcommittee obtained.

Documents in the possession of the subcommittee, he wrote, “suggest that you may have used your personal e-mail to avoid transparency and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), potentially intentionally deleted federal records, and acted in your official capacity to disparage your fellow scientists, including by encouraging litigation against them.”

The committee also highlighted a July 2021 email sent by Morens in which he described getting approval from “Tony” — an apparent reference to Fauci — to give an interview to National Geographic about the origin of Covid.

“For many months, I have not been approved to talk about ‘origins’ on the record. But today, to my total surprise, my boss Tony actually ASKED me to speak to the National Geographic on the record about origins,” Morens wrote at the time. “I interpret this to mean that our government is lightening up but that Tony doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories.”

Chair Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, right, and ranking member Raul Ruiz, D-Calif., left, listen to witnesses during a House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing about the origins of Covid on April 18, 2023, at Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

The committee in its letter said that this email raises “concerns that you may have knowledge or information suggesting Dr. Anthony Fauci … wished to influence the COVID-19 origins narrative without his ‘fingerprints.’”

“This is all very troubling,” wrote Wenstrup in his letter to Morens, “and raises serious questions.” The select subcommittee has asked Morens to produce a variety of additional records, including from his personal email account, and to sit for an interview.

Ethics experts consulted by The Intercept also expressed concern about Morens’s comments on FOIA compliance.

“When you evade laws that are meant to make government more transparent and accountable, that is very bad,” said Delaney Marsco, the senior legal counsel for ethics at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “It is bad for public trust in government. It is bad for agency culture. The ethical implications are bad.”

This is a breaking story and will be updated as needed.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jimmy Tobias.

For example, actress Poe Kyar Phyu Khin recently posted a video entitled “Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (Our True Leader)” to the TikTok social media platform ahead of the jailed former state counselor’s June 19 birthday, prompting several users to post photos of themselves bedecked in flowers and express their best wishes.

Incensed by the post, supporters of the military junta – which took control of the country in a February 2021 coup – took toTelegram to demand that Phyu Khin and those who responded to her be arrested.

On the night of Suu Kyi’s birthday, junta security personnel showed up at the door of Phyu Khin’s home in Yangon and took her into custody. Pro-junta media reported the arrest and said that some 50 people had been detained that week alone for “sedition and incitement.”

This is the new reality in post-coup Myanmar, where backers of the military regime regularly scour the internet for any posts they deem critical of the junta before using Telegram to report them to the authorities, activists say.

Telegram has become a “form of military intelligence,” said Yangon-based protest leader Nang Lin.

“It may look like ordinary citizens are reporting people who oppose the military, but that’s not true,” he said. “It’s the work of their informers. It’s one of the junta’s intelligence mechanisms. In other words, it's just one of many attempts designed to instill fear in the people.”

‘Online weapon’

In a similar incident, rapper Byu Har was arrested on May 24, just days after being featured on pro-military Telegram channels for a video he published on social media in which he complained about electricity shortages and said that life was better under the democratically elected government that the military toppled.

Additionally, authorities arrested journalist Kyaw Min Swe, actress May Pa Chi, and other well-known personalities after pro-junta Telegram channels posted information about them changing their Facebook profiles to black to mourn the more than 170 people – including women and children – killed in a military airstrike on Sagaing region’s Pazi Gyi village in April.

“Military lobbyists and informers go through these comments and … report the owners of the accounts to Han Nyein Oo, who is a major pro-junta informer on Telegram,” said an activist in Yangon, who declined to be named out of fear of reprisal. “Then, because of a small comment, the poster and their families are in trouble.”

London-based rights group Fortify Rights also recently reported on the junta’s use of Telegram as an “online weapon” against its critics.

“We can say that they are increasingly using Telegram channels as an online weapon as one of various ways of instilling fear in the people so that they dare not speak out,” the group said in a statement.

RFA sought comment from Telegram’s press team but was forwarded to an automated answering system, which said that the company “respects users' personal information and freedom of speech, and protects human rights, such as the right to assembly.”

The answering system noted that Telegram “plays an important role in democratic movements around the world,” including in Iran, Russia, Belarus, Hong Kong and Myanmar.

The founder of the Telegram channel is Russian-born Pavel Durov. In 2014, he was forced to leave the country and move to Saint Kitts and Nevis, a small Caribbean island nation, because he refused to hand over the personal information of Ukrainian users to Russian security services during the Crimea crisis in Ukraine. 

Telegram headquarters is located in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Attempts by RFA to contact junta Deputy Information Minister Major Gen. Zaw Min Tun regarding the regime’s use of pro-military Telegram accounts to arrest people went unanswered Wednesday.

Arrests violate constitution

Thein Tun Oo, the executive director of the Thayninga Institute of Strategic Studies, which is made up of former military officers, told RFA that claims the junta uses Telegram to track down its critics are “delusional.”

“If you feel insecure about Telegram, just don’t use it,” he said, adding that “such problems” are part of the risk of using the app.

But a lawyer in Yangon, who spoke on condition of anonymity citing security concerns, told RFA that even if the junta isn’t gathering information about its opponents on Telegram, arresting and prosecuting someone for posting their opinions on social media is a blatant violation of the law in Myanmar.

“It’s not a crime to post birthday wishes for someone on Facebook, whether it’s for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi or anyone else,” he said. “These arrests are in violation of provisions protecting citizens' rights in the [military-drafted] 2008 constitution.”

Pro-junta newspapers often state that action will be taken against anyone who knowingly or unknowingly promotes or supports Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government, the Committee Representing the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw made up of deposed lawmakers, and any related organization under the country’s Counter-terrorism Act, Electronic Communications Law, and other legislation.

According to a list compiled by RFA based on junta reports, at least 1,100 people have been arrested and prosecuted for voicing criticism of the junta on social media or sharing such posts by others since the military’s Feb. 1, 2021, coup d’etat.

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

On 25 May 2023, the Biden administration released a 60 page plan for combating domestic antisemitism. Generally, antisemitism is but one, albeit an historically significant one, of many violent racial and ethnic biases. In recent decades there has been an outburst of such hate and bias that is doing harm to many groups worldwide. It appears to be part of a resurgent fascism which, in turn, appears to be a backlash against liberal trends. This reactionary process has hit the United States and no one should doubt the seriousness of the problem of ethic hatred here in the “land of the free.” Every minority group in the country suffers from it. Jewish Voice for Peace has correctly contextualized the struggle against antisemitism when it tells us that “at a time when the dangers of white nationalism, including racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia, are all too apparent, the need to build safety for all people has never been greater.” The safety of the Jews is linked to the safety of others.

Nonetheless, antisemitism in the U.S. has earned special attention from the federal government because (1) Jews can muster the horrors of the past along with the hate-filled outbursts of the present, and (2) bring to bear the political clout of a well-honed lobby—hence the recent report that calls for a full-court press against antisemitism at just about every level of society.

It may therefore come as a surprise that the main controversy flowing from the Biden plan is just how to define antisemitism. For instance, though addressing the issue in only one paragraph, the administration report acknowledges that the definition is in dispute. “There are several definitions of antisemitism ….The most prominent is the non-legally binding ‘working definition’ of antisemitism adopted in 2016 by the 31-member states of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which the United States has embraced. In addition, the Administration welcomes and appreciates the Nexus Document and notes other such efforts.”

To clarify the issue, the IHRA definition of antisemitism reads as follows: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” This is standard as far as it goes. Problems start to appear when the Alliance lists examples that it considers antisemitic—specifically, “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” Not coincidentally, most older, established Jewish organizations with close ties to Israel have latched on to this example and used it as a weapon against those critical of the policies and practices of the Zionist state toward non-Jewish citizens and subjects, particularly Palestinians.

Mentioning the IHRA document on antisemitism, much less calling it “the most prominent” and the one that the U.S. “has embraced” was a mistake on the part of the Biden administration. This is so for several reasons: (1) It immediately shifted attention from the report and its goals to the controversy over definition. (2) It confirmed that the government had taken sides in this controversy. (3) It complicated the fight against antisemitism by publicly announcing that the administration was willing to ignore the prima facie fact that Israel has been documented to in fact be “a racist endeavor.” Every well respected human rights organization in the West such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations Office of Human Rights, and B’Tselem, among many others, has laid out this indictment in detail.

It is probable that the Biden administration made this mistake with eyes wide-open. And, it is probably President Biden’s own self-confessed Zionism that dictated it doing so. Yet, as a bone thrown to those who own the facts, the administration also mentioned that there exists other definitions of antisemitism that it “welcomes and appreciates” such as the Nexus definition. This definition reads, “Antisemitism consists of anti-Jewish beliefs, attitudes, actions or systemic conditions. It includes negative beliefs and feelings about Jews, hostile behavior directed against Jews (because they are Jews), and conditions that discriminate against Jews and significantly impede their ability to participate as equals in political, religious, cultural, economic, or social life.” The Nexus document recognizes that those who hate Jews “because they are Jews” may well hate Israel too. However, it contains a list of actions which cannot be judged antisemitic. For instance, “criticism of Zionism and Israel, opposition to Israel’s policies, or nonviolent political action directed at the State of Israel and/or its policies should not, as such, be deemed antisemitic.” This approach is nuanced to fit well within U.S. principle of free speech and avoids the problem at the heart of the IHRA statement.

The IHRA’s Category Mistake

The controversy over definition has focused not on traditional sociopathic traits such as hatred of Jews. Everyone agrees that such an outlook and its associated behavior is antisemitic. Rather, the debate focuses on what is, in essence, a political question: whether there can be such a thing as legitimate criticism of Israel’s Zionist project. If you think this might reflect a category mistake, you are right.

Israel is a nationstate (one category) whose leaders have made an arbitrary claim to represent all the Jews worldwide (a qualitatively different category). For instance, the published aims of the Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations says it “represents the State of Israel, its citizens and the Jewish people on the global stage.” This claim cannot be substantiated for two reasons (1) there are tens of thousands (the number is growing all the time) of Jews outsider of Israel who do not want to be represented by that state. Many are neutral as regards Israel and many others are appalled by Israel’s Zionist ideology and the racist behavior it has generated, and (2) the claim of representation is called into question by the positions taken by the rabbinical officialdom controlling religious practices in Israel. These are orthodox and ultra-orthodox rabbis who believe that Jews who do not practice the religion as they do—which happens to be most Jews in the U.S. and Europe—are not real Jews. Thus, Israeli leaders are caught in a dilemma. They claim to represent a diaspora community of Jews, many of whom their “official” rabbis say are not really Jews.

Leaving aside the “who is a Jew” problem, Israel implements policies and practices that have produced institutional and legal discrimination against non-Jews. This is perhaps an inevitable result of designing a state for one group in territory awash with many groups. The effort has progressed so far that it is now factually accurate to call Israel an apartheid state. Is criticism of such policies and practices the same as antisemitism? Do those critical of Israel’s official racism hate Jews? Again, part of the problem with the Zionist argument  is that many of the critics are Jews (despite what antiquarian Rabbis might say). In response, the boosters of Israel, the descriptive term here is “political Zionists,” have, once more arbitrarily, invented a class of people they call the self-hating Jew—this is suppose to account for Jewish opposition to Zionist Israel.

The Case of Jonathan Greenblatt


One such political Zionist, who claims that he and his organization had a lot to do with the Biden Plan, is Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Greenblatt asserts that the administration’s effort draws “heavily from our plans and our recommendations. My team was collaborating actively with the interagency policy committee that staffed and led this.” This might be the case, for there has been no public recognition by the U.S. government of just how radical the ADL and most other traditional Jewish American organizations have become in defense of Israel. Thus, Greenblatt is convinced that the Biden administration is now fully on board with the IHRA definition of antisemitism. “The White House plan elevates and embraces IHRA as the preeminent definition that it is now using to understand antisemitism in all its forms.” He dismisses the Nexus paper as a “supplementary document.”

One should be very suspicious of Greenblatt’s ability to access, much less analyze, the rapidly evolving American culture and politics as regards Zionist Israel. As I noted in an earlier analysis (17 November 2022), he offers a remarkably inaccurate picture of Israel’s official ideology. He tells us “Zionism isn’t just a light for the Jewish people, it’s a liberation movement for all people. We should take strength in it, we should find inspiration in it, and we should share it with the world.” This same skewed argument was used by the Zionists in the mid-1940s— while they promoted a colonial-settler project during a period marked by decolonization. Somehow, Greenblatt has also got it into his head that “Palestinians should embrace Zionism.” As utterly delusional as this sounds, Greenblatt is again reviving an earlier ploy. The New York Times reported in early April of 1921 that Winston Churchill (then Colonial Secretary) had travelled to Jerusalem and met with local Palestinian leaders. He told them that creating a Jewish national home in Palestine would be “good for the Arabs dwelling in Palestine” because they would “share in the benefits and progress of Zionism.” At the time this was known as “the full-belly theory of imperialism.” In 1921, the real impact of Zionism in Palestine was in the future. Today, Greenblatt’s apparent disregard of that history is unforgivable.

Nonetheless, that ignorance, real or fabricated, is necessary if one is to adopt the IHRA statement as the “preeminent definition that is now used to understand antisemitism in all its forms.” What is the dark logic in all of this? The progressive Israeli news site +972 explains, “what the IHRA definition does is provide Israel and the wider hasbara apparatus with a highly effective tool for bashing Palestinians and the Palestinian liberation movement, and grant the global far right an equally effective tool for whitewashing its own antisemitism .… allowing antisemites to propose that the absence of criticism of Israel indicates a lack of animus toward Jews …. lobbying for the universal adoption of a definition of antisemitism based on this inner logic is terribly bad for Jews around the world.”

On 5 June 2023, the European Legal Support Center (ELSC) released a report on the impact of the IHRA definition of antisemitism on the rights of free speech and assembly in the European Union and United Kingdom. It came as no great surprise that this case-based assessment showed that the IHRA definition was quickly weaponized in order to stifle criticism of Zionist Israel. The ELSC report documents 53 such cases. All of them targeted groups or individuals expressing criticism of Israeli policies and practices toward Palestinians.

There can be little doubt that this weaponization of the IHRA definition is what Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL have in mind. Likewise, it is probably a safe bet that many in the Biden administration, including the president himself, will go along with this distorting practice unless they are confronted both in the streets and the courts to the point that they are publicly embarrassed by their own hypocrisy. It is only by ending this illegitimate misdirection that any real fight against antisemitism can progress. The struggle to do so is already ongoing.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lawrence Davidson.

On 25 May 2023, the Biden administration released a 60 page plan for combating domestic antisemitism. Generally, antisemitism is but one, albeit an historically significant one, of many violent racial and ethnic biases. In recent decades there has been an outburst of such hate and bias that is doing harm to many groups worldwide. It appears to be part of a resurgent fascism which, in turn, appears to be a backlash against liberal trends. This reactionary process has hit the United States and no one should doubt the seriousness of the problem of ethic hatred here in the “land of the free.” Every minority group in the country suffers from it. Jewish Voice for Peace has correctly contextualized the struggle against antisemitism when it tells us that “at a time when the dangers of white nationalism, including racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia, are all too apparent, the need to build safety for all people has never been greater.” The safety of the Jews is linked to the safety of others.

Nonetheless, antisemitism in the U.S. has earned special attention from the federal government because (1) Jews can muster the horrors of the past along with the hate-filled outbursts of the present, and (2) bring to bear the political clout of a well-honed lobby—hence the recent report that calls for a full-court press against antisemitism at just about every level of society.

It may therefore come as a surprise that the main controversy flowing from the Biden plan is just how to define antisemitism. For instance, though addressing the issue in only one paragraph, the administration report acknowledges that the definition is in dispute. “There are several definitions of antisemitism ….The most prominent is the non-legally binding ‘working definition’ of antisemitism adopted in 2016 by the 31-member states of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which the United States has embraced. In addition, the Administration welcomes and appreciates the Nexus Document and notes other such efforts.”

To clarify the issue, the IHRA definition of antisemitism reads as follows: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” This is standard as far as it goes. Problems start to appear when the Alliance lists examples that it considers antisemitic—specifically, “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” Not coincidentally, most older, established Jewish organizations with close ties to Israel have latched on to this example and used it as a weapon against those critical of the policies and practices of the Zionist state toward non-Jewish citizens and subjects, particularly Palestinians.

Mentioning the IHRA document on antisemitism, much less calling it “the most prominent” and the one that the U.S. “has embraced” was a mistake on the part of the Biden administration. This is so for several reasons: (1) It immediately shifted attention from the report and its goals to the controversy over definition. (2) It confirmed that the government had taken sides in this controversy. (3) It complicated the fight against antisemitism by publicly announcing that the administration was willing to ignore the prima facie fact that Israel has been documented to in fact be “a racist endeavor.” Every well respected human rights organization in the West such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations Office of Human Rights, and B’Tselem, among many others, has laid out this indictment in detail.

It is probable that the Biden administration made this mistake with eyes wide-open. And, it is probably President Biden’s own self-confessed Zionism that dictated it doing so. Yet, as a bone thrown to those who own the facts, the administration also mentioned that there exists other definitions of antisemitism that it “welcomes and appreciates” such as the Nexus definition. This definition reads, “Antisemitism consists of anti-Jewish beliefs, attitudes, actions or systemic conditions. It includes negative beliefs and feelings about Jews, hostile behavior directed against Jews (because they are Jews), and conditions that discriminate against Jews and significantly impede their ability to participate as equals in political, religious, cultural, economic, or social life.” The Nexus document recognizes that those who hate Jews “because they are Jews” may well hate Israel too. However, it contains a list of actions which cannot be judged antisemitic. For instance, “criticism of Zionism and Israel, opposition to Israel’s policies, or nonviolent political action directed at the State of Israel and/or its policies should not, as such, be deemed antisemitic.” This approach is nuanced to fit well within U.S. principle of free speech and avoids the problem at the heart of the IHRA statement.

The IHRA’s Category Mistake

The controversy over definition has focused not on traditional sociopathic traits such as hatred of Jews. Everyone agrees that such an outlook and its associated behavior is antisemitic. Rather, the debate focuses on what is, in essence, a political question: whether there can be such a thing as legitimate criticism of Israel’s Zionist project. If you think this might reflect a category mistake, you are right.

Israel is a nationstate (one category) whose leaders have made an arbitrary claim to represent all the Jews worldwide (a qualitatively different category). For instance, the published aims of the Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations says it “represents the State of Israel, its citizens and the Jewish people on the global stage.” This claim cannot be substantiated for two reasons (1) there are tens of thousands (the number is growing all the time) of Jews outsider of Israel who do not want to be represented by that state. Many are neutral as regards Israel and many others are appalled by Israel’s Zionist ideology and the racist behavior it has generated, and (2) the claim of representation is called into question by the positions taken by the rabbinical officialdom controlling religious practices in Israel. These are orthodox and ultra-orthodox rabbis who believe that Jews who do not practice the religion as they do—which happens to be most Jews in the U.S. and Europe—are not real Jews. Thus, Israeli leaders are caught in a dilemma. They claim to represent a diaspora community of Jews, many of whom their “official” rabbis say are not really Jews.

Leaving aside the “who is a Jew” problem, Israel implements policies and practices that have produced institutional and legal discrimination against non-Jews. This is perhaps an inevitable result of designing a state for one group in territory awash with many groups. The effort has progressed so far that it is now factually accurate to call Israel an apartheid state. Is criticism of such policies and practices the same as antisemitism? Do those critical of Israel’s official racism hate Jews? Again, part of the problem with the Zionist argument  is that many of the critics are Jews (despite what antiquarian Rabbis might say). In response, the boosters of Israel, the descriptive term here is “political Zionists,” have, once more arbitrarily, invented a class of people they call the self-hating Jew—this is suppose to account for Jewish opposition to Zionist Israel.

The Case of Jonathan Greenblatt


One such political Zionist, who claims that he and his organization had a lot to do with the Biden Plan, is Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Greenblatt asserts that the administration’s effort draws “heavily from our plans and our recommendations. My team was collaborating actively with the interagency policy committee that staffed and led this.” This might be the case, for there has been no public recognition by the U.S. government of just how radical the ADL and most other traditional Jewish American organizations have become in defense of Israel. Thus, Greenblatt is convinced that the Biden administration is now fully on board with the IHRA definition of antisemitism. “The White House plan elevates and embraces IHRA as the preeminent definition that it is now using to understand antisemitism in all its forms.” He dismisses the Nexus paper as a “supplementary document.”

One should be very suspicious of Greenblatt’s ability to access, much less analyze, the rapidly evolving American culture and politics as regards Zionist Israel. As I noted in an earlier analysis (17 November 2022), he offers a remarkably inaccurate picture of Israel’s official ideology. He tells us “Zionism isn’t just a light for the Jewish people, it’s a liberation movement for all people. We should take strength in it, we should find inspiration in it, and we should share it with the world.” This same skewed argument was used by the Zionists in the mid-1940s— while they promoted a colonial-settler project during a period marked by decolonization. Somehow, Greenblatt has also got it into his head that “Palestinians should embrace Zionism.” As utterly delusional as this sounds, Greenblatt is again reviving an earlier ploy. The New York Times reported in early April of 1921 that Winston Churchill (then Colonial Secretary) had travelled to Jerusalem and met with local Palestinian leaders. He told them that creating a Jewish national home in Palestine would be “good for the Arabs dwelling in Palestine” because they would “share in the benefits and progress of Zionism.” At the time this was known as “the full-belly theory of imperialism.” In 1921, the real impact of Zionism in Palestine was in the future. Today, Greenblatt’s apparent disregard of that history is unforgivable.

Nonetheless, that ignorance, real or fabricated, is necessary if one is to adopt the IHRA statement as the “preeminent definition that is now used to understand antisemitism in all its forms.” What is the dark logic in all of this? The progressive Israeli news site +972 explains, “what the IHRA definition does is provide Israel and the wider hasbara apparatus with a highly effective tool for bashing Palestinians and the Palestinian liberation movement, and grant the global far right an equally effective tool for whitewashing its own antisemitism .… allowing antisemites to propose that the absence of criticism of Israel indicates a lack of animus toward Jews …. lobbying for the universal adoption of a definition of antisemitism based on this inner logic is terribly bad for Jews around the world.”

On 5 June 2023, the European Legal Support Center (ELSC) released a report on the impact of the IHRA definition of antisemitism on the rights of free speech and assembly in the European Union and United Kingdom. It came as no great surprise that this case-based assessment showed that the IHRA definition was quickly weaponized in order to stifle criticism of Zionist Israel. The ELSC report documents 53 such cases. All of them targeted groups or individuals expressing criticism of Israeli policies and practices toward Palestinians.

There can be little doubt that this weaponization of the IHRA definition is what Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL have in mind. Likewise, it is probably a safe bet that many in the Biden administration, including the president himself, will go along with this distorting practice unless they are confronted both in the streets and the courts to the point that they are publicly embarrassed by their own hypocrisy. It is only by ending this illegitimate misdirection that any real fight against antisemitism can progress. The struggle to do so is already ongoing.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lawrence Davidson.

On 25 May 2023, the Biden administration released a 60 page plan for combating domestic antisemitism. Generally, antisemitism is but one, albeit an historically significant one, of many violent racial and ethnic biases. In recent decades there has been an outburst of such hate and bias that is doing harm to many groups worldwide. It appears to be part of a resurgent fascism which, in turn, appears to be a backlash against liberal trends. This reactionary process has hit the United States and no one should doubt the seriousness of the problem of ethic hatred here in the “land of the free.” Every minority group in the country suffers from it. Jewish Voice for Peace has correctly contextualized the struggle against antisemitism when it tells us that “at a time when the dangers of white nationalism, including racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia, are all too apparent, the need to build safety for all people has never been greater.” The safety of the Jews is linked to the safety of others.

Nonetheless, antisemitism in the U.S. has earned special attention from the federal government because (1) Jews can muster the horrors of the past along with the hate-filled outbursts of the present, and (2) bring to bear the political clout of a well-honed lobby—hence the recent report that calls for a full-court press against antisemitism at just about every level of society.

It may therefore come as a surprise that the main controversy flowing from the Biden plan is just how to define antisemitism. For instance, though addressing the issue in only one paragraph, the administration report acknowledges that the definition is in dispute. “There are several definitions of antisemitism ….The most prominent is the non-legally binding ‘working definition’ of antisemitism adopted in 2016 by the 31-member states of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which the United States has embraced. In addition, the Administration welcomes and appreciates the Nexus Document and notes other such efforts.”

To clarify the issue, the IHRA definition of antisemitism reads as follows: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” This is standard as far as it goes. Problems start to appear when the Alliance lists examples that it considers antisemitic—specifically, “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” Not coincidentally, most older, established Jewish organizations with close ties to Israel have latched on to this example and used it as a weapon against those critical of the policies and practices of the Zionist state toward non-Jewish citizens and subjects, particularly Palestinians.

Mentioning the IHRA document on antisemitism, much less calling it “the most prominent” and the one that the U.S. “has embraced” was a mistake on the part of the Biden administration. This is so for several reasons: (1) It immediately shifted attention from the report and its goals to the controversy over definition. (2) It confirmed that the government had taken sides in this controversy. (3) It complicated the fight against antisemitism by publicly announcing that the administration was willing to ignore the prima facie fact that Israel has been documented to in fact be “a racist endeavor.” Every well respected human rights organization in the West such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations Office of Human Rights, and B’Tselem, among many others, has laid out this indictment in detail.

It is probable that the Biden administration made this mistake with eyes wide-open. And, it is probably President Biden’s own self-confessed Zionism that dictated it doing so. Yet, as a bone thrown to those who own the facts, the administration also mentioned that there exists other definitions of antisemitism that it “welcomes and appreciates” such as the Nexus definition. This definition reads, “Antisemitism consists of anti-Jewish beliefs, attitudes, actions or systemic conditions. It includes negative beliefs and feelings about Jews, hostile behavior directed against Jews (because they are Jews), and conditions that discriminate against Jews and significantly impede their ability to participate as equals in political, religious, cultural, economic, or social life.” The Nexus document recognizes that those who hate Jews “because they are Jews” may well hate Israel too. However, it contains a list of actions which cannot be judged antisemitic. For instance, “criticism of Zionism and Israel, opposition to Israel’s policies, or nonviolent political action directed at the State of Israel and/or its policies should not, as such, be deemed antisemitic.” This approach is nuanced to fit well within U.S. principle of free speech and avoids the problem at the heart of the IHRA statement.

The IHRA’s Category Mistake

The controversy over definition has focused not on traditional sociopathic traits such as hatred of Jews. Everyone agrees that such an outlook and its associated behavior is antisemitic. Rather, the debate focuses on what is, in essence, a political question: whether there can be such a thing as legitimate criticism of Israel’s Zionist project. If you think this might reflect a category mistake, you are right.

Israel is a nationstate (one category) whose leaders have made an arbitrary claim to represent all the Jews worldwide (a qualitatively different category). For instance, the published aims of the Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations says it “represents the State of Israel, its citizens and the Jewish people on the global stage.” This claim cannot be substantiated for two reasons (1) there are tens of thousands (the number is growing all the time) of Jews outsider of Israel who do not want to be represented by that state. Many are neutral as regards Israel and many others are appalled by Israel’s Zionist ideology and the racist behavior it has generated, and (2) the claim of representation is called into question by the positions taken by the rabbinical officialdom controlling religious practices in Israel. These are orthodox and ultra-orthodox rabbis who believe that Jews who do not practice the religion as they do—which happens to be most Jews in the U.S. and Europe—are not real Jews. Thus, Israeli leaders are caught in a dilemma. They claim to represent a diaspora community of Jews, many of whom their “official” rabbis say are not really Jews.

Leaving aside the “who is a Jew” problem, Israel implements policies and practices that have produced institutional and legal discrimination against non-Jews. This is perhaps an inevitable result of designing a state for one group in territory awash with many groups. The effort has progressed so far that it is now factually accurate to call Israel an apartheid state. Is criticism of such policies and practices the same as antisemitism? Do those critical of Israel’s official racism hate Jews? Again, part of the problem with the Zionist argument  is that many of the critics are Jews (despite what antiquarian Rabbis might say). In response, the boosters of Israel, the descriptive term here is “political Zionists,” have, once more arbitrarily, invented a class of people they call the self-hating Jew—this is suppose to account for Jewish opposition to Zionist Israel.

The Case of Jonathan Greenblatt


One such political Zionist, who claims that he and his organization had a lot to do with the Biden Plan, is Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Greenblatt asserts that the administration’s effort draws “heavily from our plans and our recommendations. My team was collaborating actively with the interagency policy committee that staffed and led this.” This might be the case, for there has been no public recognition by the U.S. government of just how radical the ADL and most other traditional Jewish American organizations have become in defense of Israel. Thus, Greenblatt is convinced that the Biden administration is now fully on board with the IHRA definition of antisemitism. “The White House plan elevates and embraces IHRA as the preeminent definition that it is now using to understand antisemitism in all its forms.” He dismisses the Nexus paper as a “supplementary document.”

One should be very suspicious of Greenblatt’s ability to access, much less analyze, the rapidly evolving American culture and politics as regards Zionist Israel. As I noted in an earlier analysis (17 November 2022), he offers a remarkably inaccurate picture of Israel’s official ideology. He tells us “Zionism isn’t just a light for the Jewish people, it’s a liberation movement for all people. We should take strength in it, we should find inspiration in it, and we should share it with the world.” This same skewed argument was used by the Zionists in the mid-1940s— while they promoted a colonial-settler project during a period marked by decolonization. Somehow, Greenblatt has also got it into his head that “Palestinians should embrace Zionism.” As utterly delusional as this sounds, Greenblatt is again reviving an earlier ploy. The New York Times reported in early April of 1921 that Winston Churchill (then Colonial Secretary) had travelled to Jerusalem and met with local Palestinian leaders. He told them that creating a Jewish national home in Palestine would be “good for the Arabs dwelling in Palestine” because they would “share in the benefits and progress of Zionism.” At the time this was known as “the full-belly theory of imperialism.” In 1921, the real impact of Zionism in Palestine was in the future. Today, Greenblatt’s apparent disregard of that history is unforgivable.

Nonetheless, that ignorance, real or fabricated, is necessary if one is to adopt the IHRA statement as the “preeminent definition that is now used to understand antisemitism in all its forms.” What is the dark logic in all of this? The progressive Israeli news site +972 explains, “what the IHRA definition does is provide Israel and the wider hasbara apparatus with a highly effective tool for bashing Palestinians and the Palestinian liberation movement, and grant the global far right an equally effective tool for whitewashing its own antisemitism .… allowing antisemites to propose that the absence of criticism of Israel indicates a lack of animus toward Jews …. lobbying for the universal adoption of a definition of antisemitism based on this inner logic is terribly bad for Jews around the world.”

On 5 June 2023, the European Legal Support Center (ELSC) released a report on the impact of the IHRA definition of antisemitism on the rights of free speech and assembly in the European Union and United Kingdom. It came as no great surprise that this case-based assessment showed that the IHRA definition was quickly weaponized in order to stifle criticism of Zionist Israel. The ELSC report documents 53 such cases. All of them targeted groups or individuals expressing criticism of Israeli policies and practices toward Palestinians.

There can be little doubt that this weaponization of the IHRA definition is what Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL have in mind. Likewise, it is probably a safe bet that many in the Biden administration, including the president himself, will go along with this distorting practice unless they are confronted both in the streets and the courts to the point that they are publicly embarrassed by their own hypocrisy. It is only by ending this illegitimate misdirection that any real fight against antisemitism can progress. The struggle to do so is already ongoing.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lawrence Davidson.

On 25 May 2023, the Biden administration released a 60 page plan for combating domestic antisemitism. Generally, antisemitism is but one, albeit an historically significant one, of many violent racial and ethnic biases. In recent decades there has been an outburst of such hate and bias that is doing harm to many groups worldwide. It appears to be part of a resurgent fascism which, in turn, appears to be a backlash against liberal trends. This reactionary process has hit the United States and no one should doubt the seriousness of the problem of ethic hatred here in the “land of the free.” Every minority group in the country suffers from it. Jewish Voice for Peace has correctly contextualized the struggle against antisemitism when it tells us that “at a time when the dangers of white nationalism, including racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia, are all too apparent, the need to build safety for all people has never been greater.” The safety of the Jews is linked to the safety of others.

Nonetheless, antisemitism in the U.S. has earned special attention from the federal government because (1) Jews can muster the horrors of the past along with the hate-filled outbursts of the present, and (2) bring to bear the political clout of a well-honed lobby—hence the recent report that calls for a full-court press against antisemitism at just about every level of society.

It may therefore come as a surprise that the main controversy flowing from the Biden plan is just how to define antisemitism. For instance, though addressing the issue in only one paragraph, the administration report acknowledges that the definition is in dispute. “There are several definitions of antisemitism ….The most prominent is the non-legally binding ‘working definition’ of antisemitism adopted in 2016 by the 31-member states of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which the United States has embraced. In addition, the Administration welcomes and appreciates the Nexus Document and notes other such efforts.”

To clarify the issue, the IHRA definition of antisemitism reads as follows: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” This is standard as far as it goes. Problems start to appear when the Alliance lists examples that it considers antisemitic—specifically, “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” Not coincidentally, most older, established Jewish organizations with close ties to Israel have latched on to this example and used it as a weapon against those critical of the policies and practices of the Zionist state toward non-Jewish citizens and subjects, particularly Palestinians.

Mentioning the IHRA document on antisemitism, much less calling it “the most prominent” and the one that the U.S. “has embraced” was a mistake on the part of the Biden administration. This is so for several reasons: (1) It immediately shifted attention from the report and its goals to the controversy over definition. (2) It confirmed that the government had taken sides in this controversy. (3) It complicated the fight against antisemitism by publicly announcing that the administration was willing to ignore the prima facie fact that Israel has been documented to in fact be “a racist endeavor.” Every well respected human rights organization in the West such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations Office of Human Rights, and B’Tselem, among many others, has laid out this indictment in detail.

It is probable that the Biden administration made this mistake with eyes wide-open. And, it is probably President Biden’s own self-confessed Zionism that dictated it doing so. Yet, as a bone thrown to those who own the facts, the administration also mentioned that there exists other definitions of antisemitism that it “welcomes and appreciates” such as the Nexus definition. This definition reads, “Antisemitism consists of anti-Jewish beliefs, attitudes, actions or systemic conditions. It includes negative beliefs and feelings about Jews, hostile behavior directed against Jews (because they are Jews), and conditions that discriminate against Jews and significantly impede their ability to participate as equals in political, religious, cultural, economic, or social life.” The Nexus document recognizes that those who hate Jews “because they are Jews” may well hate Israel too. However, it contains a list of actions which cannot be judged antisemitic. For instance, “criticism of Zionism and Israel, opposition to Israel’s policies, or nonviolent political action directed at the State of Israel and/or its policies should not, as such, be deemed antisemitic.” This approach is nuanced to fit well within U.S. principle of free speech and avoids the problem at the heart of the IHRA statement.

The IHRA’s Category Mistake

The controversy over definition has focused not on traditional sociopathic traits such as hatred of Jews. Everyone agrees that such an outlook and its associated behavior is antisemitic. Rather, the debate focuses on what is, in essence, a political question: whether there can be such a thing as legitimate criticism of Israel’s Zionist project. If you think this might reflect a category mistake, you are right.

Israel is a nationstate (one category) whose leaders have made an arbitrary claim to represent all the Jews worldwide (a qualitatively different category). For instance, the published aims of the Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations says it “represents the State of Israel, its citizens and the Jewish people on the global stage.” This claim cannot be substantiated for two reasons (1) there are tens of thousands (the number is growing all the time) of Jews outsider of Israel who do not want to be represented by that state. Many are neutral as regards Israel and many others are appalled by Israel’s Zionist ideology and the racist behavior it has generated, and (2) the claim of representation is called into question by the positions taken by the rabbinical officialdom controlling religious practices in Israel. These are orthodox and ultra-orthodox rabbis who believe that Jews who do not practice the religion as they do—which happens to be most Jews in the U.S. and Europe—are not real Jews. Thus, Israeli leaders are caught in a dilemma. They claim to represent a diaspora community of Jews, many of whom their “official” rabbis say are not really Jews.

Leaving aside the “who is a Jew” problem, Israel implements policies and practices that have produced institutional and legal discrimination against non-Jews. This is perhaps an inevitable result of designing a state for one group in territory awash with many groups. The effort has progressed so far that it is now factually accurate to call Israel an apartheid state. Is criticism of such policies and practices the same as antisemitism? Do those critical of Israel’s official racism hate Jews? Again, part of the problem with the Zionist argument  is that many of the critics are Jews (despite what antiquarian Rabbis might say). In response, the boosters of Israel, the descriptive term here is “political Zionists,” have, once more arbitrarily, invented a class of people they call the self-hating Jew—this is suppose to account for Jewish opposition to Zionist Israel.

The Case of Jonathan Greenblatt


One such political Zionist, who claims that he and his organization had a lot to do with the Biden Plan, is Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Greenblatt asserts that the administration’s effort draws “heavily from our plans and our recommendations. My team was collaborating actively with the interagency policy committee that staffed and led this.” This might be the case, for there has been no public recognition by the U.S. government of just how radical the ADL and most other traditional Jewish American organizations have become in defense of Israel. Thus, Greenblatt is convinced that the Biden administration is now fully on board with the IHRA definition of antisemitism. “The White House plan elevates and embraces IHRA as the preeminent definition that it is now using to understand antisemitism in all its forms.” He dismisses the Nexus paper as a “supplementary document.”

One should be very suspicious of Greenblatt’s ability to access, much less analyze, the rapidly evolving American culture and politics as regards Zionist Israel. As I noted in an earlier analysis (17 November 2022), he offers a remarkably inaccurate picture of Israel’s official ideology. He tells us “Zionism isn’t just a light for the Jewish people, it’s a liberation movement for all people. We should take strength in it, we should find inspiration in it, and we should share it with the world.” This same skewed argument was used by the Zionists in the mid-1940s— while they promoted a colonial-settler project during a period marked by decolonization. Somehow, Greenblatt has also got it into his head that “Palestinians should embrace Zionism.” As utterly delusional as this sounds, Greenblatt is again reviving an earlier ploy. The New York Times reported in early April of 1921 that Winston Churchill (then Colonial Secretary) had travelled to Jerusalem and met with local Palestinian leaders. He told them that creating a Jewish national home in Palestine would be “good for the Arabs dwelling in Palestine” because they would “share in the benefits and progress of Zionism.” At the time this was known as “the full-belly theory of imperialism.” In 1921, the real impact of Zionism in Palestine was in the future. Today, Greenblatt’s apparent disregard of that history is unforgivable.

Nonetheless, that ignorance, real or fabricated, is necessary if one is to adopt the IHRA statement as the “preeminent definition that is now used to understand antisemitism in all its forms.” What is the dark logic in all of this? The progressive Israeli news site +972 explains, “what the IHRA definition does is provide Israel and the wider hasbara apparatus with a highly effective tool for bashing Palestinians and the Palestinian liberation movement, and grant the global far right an equally effective tool for whitewashing its own antisemitism .… allowing antisemites to propose that the absence of criticism of Israel indicates a lack of animus toward Jews …. lobbying for the universal adoption of a definition of antisemitism based on this inner logic is terribly bad for Jews around the world.”

On 5 June 2023, the European Legal Support Center (ELSC) released a report on the impact of the IHRA definition of antisemitism on the rights of free speech and assembly in the European Union and United Kingdom. It came as no great surprise that this case-based assessment showed that the IHRA definition was quickly weaponized in order to stifle criticism of Zionist Israel. The ELSC report documents 53 such cases. All of them targeted groups or individuals expressing criticism of Israeli policies and practices toward Palestinians.

There can be little doubt that this weaponization of the IHRA definition is what Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL have in mind. Likewise, it is probably a safe bet that many in the Biden administration, including the president himself, will go along with this distorting practice unless they are confronted both in the streets and the courts to the point that they are publicly embarrassed by their own hypocrisy. It is only by ending this illegitimate misdirection that any real fight against antisemitism can progress. The struggle to do so is already ongoing.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lawrence Davidson.

The post Plutocracy Uses Technology to Clobber the Poor appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eve Ottenberg.

A new report by Amnesty International documents how the Israeli government is using an experimental facial recognition system to track Palestinians and control their movements. The findings are part of “Automated Apartheid,” which reveals an ever-growing surveillance network of cameras in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron and in East Jerusalem — two places in the Occupied Territories where Israeli settlements are expanding within Palestinian areas. “Surveillance has been ramping up as illegal settler activity has also been ramping up,” says Amnesty researcher Matt Mahmoudi, who adds that the surveillance technology is part of an overall coercive structure used against Palestinians by Israel. “Effectively, facial recognition is augmenting, reinforcing, entrenching aspects of apartheid.”

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

In the 1983 movie “WarGames,” a young hacker played by Matthew Broderick inadvertently accesses a fictional supercomputer belonging to the U.S. military. Before realizing he has found a system the North American Aerospace Defense Command uses for war simulations, he searches for computer games. The list he gets back starts with classic games like checkers and bridge, but to his surprise, it also includes games called “Guerrilla Engagement” and “Theaterwide Biotoxic and Chemical Warfare.”

Turns out the Department of Defense likes to play computer games in real life too.

More than 40 “security awareness” games are available for anyone to play on the website of the Center for Development of Security Excellence, or CDSE, a directorate within the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, the largest security agency within the U.S. government. The DCSA, which refers to itself as “America’s Gatekeeper,” specializes in security of government personnel and infrastructure as well as counterintelligence and insider threat detection. (The Defense Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The Department of Defense’s “Who Is the Risk?” game.

Screenshot: The Intercept

The opening screen for the “Whodunit” game.

Screenshot: The Intercept

The Special Access Program hidden object game.

Screenshot: The Intercept

A Department of Defense poster advising against submitting confidential news tips.

Screenshot: The Intercept

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Nikita Mazurov.

They lop off people’s heads and mutilate bodies to instill terror. They torture victims to death.

They seem fearless in battle, surging forward when under fire. 

Officially, they make up part of the 99th Light Infantry Battalion of the Myanmar military. But to most people, they are known as the “Ogre” column, a unit of killers notorious for their cruelty in a military already known for its brutality.

And they have been criss-crossing Myanmar’s heartland, killing rebel fighters and massacring villagers believed to be supporting them, terrorizing everyone in their path.

“What makes this column different is that they are specially trained to kill people,” said Nway Oo, a member of a resistance group in Myaung township. “They chop off the heads and ears of victims in cold blood.”

“They appear ghostly in battles, too,” he said. “They move forward in battles no matter how risky the situation is or how much they are under attack.”

Myanmar’s military has faced stiff resistance from ordinary men and women who have taken up arms to form People’s Defense Force bands to fight junta troops since the military’s coup two years ago. 

The Ogres’ atrocities are meant to terrorize their foes, who often have little combat training and aren’t usually well-armed.

It’s all part of psychological warfare that was developed by the country’s generals known as “Sit Oo Bi Lu,” the “First wave of brutal attack,” or “Yakkha Byu Har” – “The Ogre Strategy,” a former military captain who defected to the rebel side since the junta’s takeover.

“Brutal acts by the junta troops, such as beheading people and burning down civilian properties, are intended to frighten the people,” said the captain, who goes by Nat Thar.

“This is a psychological tactic to scare the people into thinking that they don’t want to be the one beheaded when the junta’s 99th Division enters their village, to make them fear head-on conflict, although they belong to a population of tens of thousands,” he said.

Battleground Sagaing

Some of the fiercest resistance against the military has been in the northern Sagaing region, and in recent weeks the “Ogre” battalion has been attacking dozens of villages and rebel bases there in townships such as Ye-U, Khin-U, Taze, Myinmu and Myaung.

On March 30, the column raided a PDF base under the command of Capt. Bo Sin Yine near the village of Swae Lwe Oh.

The junta troops soon overwhelmed the rebel fighters, and soldiers then took Bo Sin Yine, a 31-year-old former corporal in the township’s Fire Brigade, and his fighters captive.

Footage taken by a drone operated by the Civilian’s Defense and Security Organization of Myaung, CDSOM, captured a junta soldier beheading Bo Sin Yine, whose name means “wild elephant,” and carrying his head away on his shoulder.

A few days later, Bo Sin Yine’s wife and a team of villagers discovered his body abandoned near the jungle. In addition to beheading him, junta soldiers had lopped off his arms and legs.

“They beheaded him and took away his head, but it wasn't just him. They took away the heads of many people in other townships, too,” she said of her husband, who became the deputy battalion commander of the PDF No.1 in Sagaing.

Prior to entering Myaung township, the column raided Myinmu’s Let Ka Pin village, where it killed 10 civilians and disemboweled local PDF leader Kyaw Zaw before chopping off his head and limbs, residents said. The column also killed 16 civilians it had taken as human shields to protect against landmines after raiding Sagaing township’s Tar Tai village.

Among the column’s members are soldiers the CDSOM has identified as Capt. Aung Hein Oo, Lt. Capt. Zaw Naing, Sgts. Zaw Set Win, Myint Zaw, Maung Naing, Soe Hlaing, Tun Zaw Myo, and Thein Tun; Lt. Sgts. Ye Yint Paing and Thiha Soe; Engineer Trooper Nay Lin, and Troopers Pyae Sone Aung, Min Thu, and Thant Zin.

‘They told us to pass a message’

In mid-March, the “Ogre” column crossed the Chindwin River from Sagaing into Magway region and made its way south to Yesagyo township, one of several areas under martial law as a hotbed of anti-junta resistance.

Early on the morning of March 19, the unit blocked all of the exits from Mee Laung Kyung Ywar Thit village and arrested some 140 residents who didn’t have time to flee.

By the end of the day, Ogre fighters had shot and killed a man in his 50s named Han, who worked as a cook feeding refugees of conflict, tortured a 47-year-old mentally disabled man named Sandra to death, and wounded a 16-year-old boy as he tried to escape, villagers told RFA.

Around 200 women were divided into two groups and held at the Taung Kuang Monastery on the outskirts of Mee Laung Kyun village, while another group of 40 men and teenage boys were placed under guard in civilian homes, sources who escaped the unit said.

A man who escaped after three days said that Ogre fighters confiscated his jewelry and interrogated him about the local PDF, claiming they had already crushed more than 20 of the group’s bases.

“We didn’t know if they would take us to the battlefront and force us to step on landmines or kill us before they left the village,” said the man, who declined to be named out of fear of reprisal.

“They told us to pass a message to our relatives to give up fighting, bury their weapons, and end their support for the PDF. But despite their threats, we will continue to fight against the regime until the end.”

Attempts to reach Aye Hlaing, the junta’s spokesman for Sagaing region, and junta Deputy Information Minister Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun for comment on the reported actions of the Ogre column went unanswered, as did efforts to contact the junta’s information team.

Than Soe Naing, a political analyst, told RFA that the tactics of the Ogre column represent the “next level” in the junta’s violence against the people of Myanmar and must be stopped.

“Such inhumane actions against individuals can be regarded as international war crimes,” he said, suggesting that the perpetrators should be held accountable by an international court of law.

Seeking justice for victims

Kyaw Win, executive director of the U.K.-based Myanmar Human Rights Network, said his organization is systematically documenting the junta’s atrocities for just such a case.

“The junta is committing horrible and disheartening war crimes, in violation of existing … laws,” he said.

“Before long, we will be able to prosecute the perpetrators, who are officials at all levels in the military.”

In the meantime, the wife of Bo Sin Yine, who was decapitated by the Ogre column in Myaung township last month, said that she will not be able to rest until her husband and other victims receive justice.

“I need justice for him – the crime they committed was cruel and savage,” she said. “These days, the whole country knows about the atrocious brutality of [junta chief] Min Aung Hlaing.”

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

The tragedy is numbingly added to an endless list of school shootings like Stoneman Douglas, Uvalde, Columbine and Sandy Hook. Every time one of these heartbreaking incidents hits the news, some of us have a small hope that this might make America realize that it needs to love its children more than it loves its guns.

But we are living in an age where Republicans have swapped the American flag for an AR-15 as the ultimate nationalistic symbol (Time, 2/7/23). A dream of a disarmed America seems out of reach. The Onion has reused its infamous “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens,” 31 times since 2014 (most recently 3/27/23).

And this time around, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is using Hale’s transgender identity to ratchet up its campaign against transgender people.

Cashing in on bias

The New York Post (3/28/23) does not seem to have ever used the phrase “cisgender killer.”

The cover of the New York Post (3/28/23) couldn’t have been clearer. It featured a photograph of the Nashville killer juxtaposed against the image of a terrified child in a school bus, with the blaring headline “Transgender Killer Targets Christian School.” The Post (3/27/23) reported some speculation that Hale “may have been driven to kill by ‘resentment’” for having to attend a Christian school. While reporting in a separate story on Hale’s access to guns—which, in the case of any mass shooting, should be a primary focus of news coverage—the Post (3/28/23) again reminded readers that the shooter was trans in the headline.

Reducing a crime suspect to their gender identity in a headline is irresponsible journalism—just as identifying a suspect by their race, religion or sexual orientation, which is why you don’t see headlines talking about an “Asian killer,” a “Mormon killer” or a “bisexual killer.” Such shorthand inevitably holds an entire group responsible for the action of an individual, and, in the case of a group that faces widespread prejudice, puts many people in danger.

Given that nearly all school shooters are cisgender, there is simply no rational reason for the Post to highlight the shooter’s gender identity other than to cash in on readers’ biases.

Hale did, in fact, belong to a demographic group that is responsible for a wildly disproportionate number of mass shootings: He was male. As FAIR’s Julie Hollar and Olivia Riggio (6/30/22) have noted, media outlets often fail to report on how misogyny and masculinity play a role in many mass shootings.

Hallucinating a ‘pattern’

Laura Ingraham (Fox, 3/28/23) claimed that Hale’s identity “didn’t quite match the preferred criteria of the media.”

Murdoch’s Fox News (3/28/23) reported that “a radical transgender group said the transgender Nashville shooter felt ‘no other effective way to be seen’” adding that “the Trans Resistance Network (TRN), a far-left transgender ‘collective,’ released an inflammatory statement” that Hale resorted to violence because Hale had “no other effective way to be seen,” while still saying the action was tragic. (The obscure group appears to have gotten no media coverage at all prior to March 27, according to a search of the Nexis database.)

Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley told the network (3/29/23) that the incident should be investigated as an anti-Christian hate crime. “We’ve seen a lot of language directed at the Christian community with regard to particularly trans issues, calling them hateful,” the senator said. “That kind of rhetoric is dangerous, and we’re seeing its effects right now.”

(That hateful speech can have consequences seems like a new position for the senator, who responded to Attorney General Merrick Garland warning about “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence” against educators from people people opposed to masks and Critical Race Theory, Hawley charged that this was “a deliberate attempt to chill parents” who wanted to “express concerns”—American Independent, 10/5/21.)

Fox (3/28/23) also said the incident “is part of a pattern of mass shooters having ‘sexual identity dysfunctions’ and psychological confusion that must be addressed,” according to Jonathan Gilliam, a former Navy SEAL and FBI special agent. Gilliam said that “the majority of school shooters and mass shooters that we’ve had in the recent history of this nation are all people who have sexual identity dysfunctions.” (Mother Jones‘ Abby Vesoulis—3/29/23—based on the magazine’s long-running database mass shooters, assesses that three out of 141 mass shooters over the last four decades may have been trans or nonbinary, what Fox means when say “dysfunctions.”)

Fox host Laura Ingraham (3/28/23), with a frame of Hale in the background carrying the words “A TRANS KILLER,” said the “killer’s identity didn’t quite match the preferred criteria of the media, which is usually white male.” In fact, Hale was a white male—and Fox is part of “the media.” Ingraham noted that Hale “referred to herself [sic] as he/him and was reportedly in the midst of a so-called transition process,” going on to insinuate that Hale’s medical treatments may have been a factor in the shooting.

Christianity’s ‘natural enemy’

Fox‘s Tucker Carlson (3/28/23): “We seem to be watching the rise of trans terrorism.”

But Tucker Carlson (3/28/23), Fox News’ top-rated host, stole the show in a segment that warned about “the rise of trans terrorism.” First, he downplayed the general problems trans people face every day, saying that they have an easy time getting into Harvard. From there, Carlson launched into a declaration of war:

The people in charge despise working-class whites, but they venerate the trans community. People are just responding to incentives. It’s rational in a way…. Why are some transpeople so angry, and why do they seem to be mad specifically at traditional Christians? We can’t think of any trans person who’s ever been murdered by a pastor. As far as we know, that has never happened. So, it’s not an actual threat of violence from Christians that’s inspiring some trans people to buy an AR-15. No, it’s got to be more fundamental than that, and it is. The trans movement is the mirror image of Christianity, and therefore its natural enemy…. Christianity and transgender orthodoxy are wholly incompatible theologies. They can never be reconciled.

Carlson wasn’t done. The next day (3/29/23), he hosted Federalist CEO Sean Davis, who told (Federalist, 3/29/23) Carlson “this murder, this massacre of children was done by someone because of this evil transgender ideology.” Both Davis and Carlson agreed that the killer’s transgender identity, and the imagined idea that the government and media are a part of some kind of transgender agenda, represents a “spiritual war” against Christians.

FAIR (1/6/23, 3/9/23) has shown repeatedly how conservative media, especially Murdoch’s media, have elevated incitement against transgender people, while Republicans push measures in several states to criminalize gender-affirming care. And of course the Murdoch framing here turns the so-called war involving trans people upside-down. While the religious right has escalated its attacks on the trans community (American Civil Liberties Union, 9/16/16; Southern Poverty Law Center, 10/23/17; Miami Herald, 6/9/21; MSNBC, 1/16/23), UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute (3/23/21) found that “transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to experience violent victimization, including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault.”

And a Human Rights Campaign statement (ABC, 3/28/23) issued after the incident noted, “Every study available shows that transgender and non-binary people are much more likely to be victims of violence, rather than the perpetrator of it.”

Spreading transphobia

Fox (3/29/23) went after NBC (3/28/23) for suggesting that trans people might be in danger in the wake of transphobic media coverage like that coming from Fox.

But just as 9/11 was an opportunity to spread Islamophobia (FAIR.org, 3/1/11), Fox and the Post are exploiting this moment to raise the temperature against the trans community. According to the Murdoch press and some figures within the Republican Party, trans people are an active existential threat to God-fearing Americans. Indeed, NBC (3/28/23) reported:

Within 10 minutes of police saying that the suspect was transgender, the hashtag #TransTerrorism trended on Twitter. Around the same time, Republican lawmakers — including Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and conservative firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.—insinuated in social media posts that the shooter’s gender identity played a role in the shooting. And by Tuesday morning, the cover of the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post read: “Transgender Killer Targets Christian School.”

“We are terrified for the LGBTQ community here,” Kim Spoon, a trans activist based in Knoxville, Tennessee, said. “More blood’s going to be shed, and it’s not going to be shed in a school.”

However, Fox (3/29/23) pounced on this report, saying “NBC News raised eyebrows on Tuesday for a report suggesting the Tennessee transgender community was under threat following the mass shooting.” Fox added that NBC “appeared to frame the perpetrator as among the victims.” NBC did not frame Hale as the victim, as Fox’s evidence for this was NBC’s “headline ‘Fear Pervades Tennessee’s Trans Community Amid Focus on Nashville Shooter’s Gender Identity.’”

This response is sadly to be expected for media who have latched on to the anti-trans moral panic, as a way to both attract a right-wing audience and to bolster the cultural platform of the contemporary Republican Party. But just because it’s not surprising doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

The post Murdoch Uses Nashville to Stoke Anti-Trans Hate appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

The locals were captured during a battle Thursday between junta forces and pro-democracy militias in Madaya township. Locals told RFA half were released, many of them elderly, but the rest are still being detained.

A column of around 30 junta troops was attacked by People's Defense Forces and the Kaung Kin militia Thursday morning.

Another 70-member military column came to support the junta forces using civilians as human shields, according to a People’s Defense Force member, who didn’t want to be named.

“When the junta column arrived at Po Wa North village, we attacked,” he told RFA.

“After they were severely hit, more reinforcements came in.

"The column that came to reinforce them had around 40 civilians with it, divided into groups of about three or four, mixed with the soldiers.

"We prepared to resist with guns and artillery but we had to retreat because they had civilians with them.” 

The militia member said the troops had not yet left the township but are camping in villages about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) away.

Locals said troops shelled the area Thursday, injuring a 50-year-old woman and destroying three buildings in Sin Kone village.

Local People’s Defense Forces say they killed 13 troops in Thursday’s battle but RFA has not been able to confirm their claims.

Calls to Mandalay region’s junta spokesman, Thein Htay, went unanswered Friday.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

The Uyghur Human Rights Project analyzed Chinese state media, policy documents, government sanctioned marriage testimonials, as well as accounts from women in the Uyghur diaspora, that government incentivizes and coercion to boost interethnic marriages has increased since 2014.

“The Chinese Party-State is actively involved in carrying out a campaign of forcefully assimilating Uyghurs into Han Chinese society by means of mixed marriages,” said the report.

The findings on forced marriage by Washington, DC-based NGO come as Western governments and the United Nations have recognized that Chinese policies in Xinjiang amount to or may amount to genocide or crimes against humanity. Forced labor, incarceration camps and other aspects of China's rule in Xinjiang have drawn sanctions from Britain, Canada, the European Union and the United States.

The study, “Forced Marriage of Uyghur Women: State Policies for Interethnic Marriage in East Turkistan,” draws on state media propaganda films, state-approved online accounts of interethnic marriages and weddings, state-approved personal online testimonials from individuals in interethnic marriages, as well as government statements and policy directives.

“The Party-State has actively encouraged and incentivized ‘interethnic’ Uyghur-Han intermarriage since at least May 2014,” the Uyghur Human Rights Project says in the report, released on Nov. 16.

Interethnic marriage policies gained momentum after Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a “new era” at the Xinjiang Work Forum in 2014, touting a policy of strengthening interethnic “contact, exchange, and mingling,” the report said.

“Uyghur-Han intermarriage has been increasing over the past several years since the Chinese state has been actively promoting intermarriage,” said Nuzigum Setiwaldi a co-author of the report.

“The Chinese government always talks about how interethnic marriages promote ‘ethnic unity’ and ‘social stability,’ but these actually are euphemisms for assimilation,” she told RFA Uyghur.

“The Chinese government is incentivizing and promoting intermarriage as a way to assimilate Uyghurs into Han society and culture.

Carrots include cash payments, help with housing, medical care, government jobs, and tuition waivers.

When it comes to sticks, “young Uyghur women and/or their parents face an ever-present threat of punishment if the women decline to marry a Han ‘suitor,’” the report said, citing experiences of Uyghur women now living in exile.

“Videos and testimonies have also raised concerns that Uyghur women are being pressured and forced into marrying Han men,” said Setiwaldi.

The report cites an informal marriage guide for male Han party officials published in 2019, titled “How to Win the Heart of a Uyghur Girl.”

Han men who want to marry Uyghur women are told that the woman they love “must love the Motherland, love the Party, and she must have unrivaled passion for socialist Xinjiang,” it said.

Commenting on the report, scholar Adrian Zenz said the Chinese Communist Party’s “policy of incentivizing Han and coercing Uyghurs into interethnic marriages is part of a strategy of breaking down and dismantling Uyghur culture.”

Zenz, a senior fellow in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, D.C., was the first outside expert to document the network of mass internment camp for Uyghurs launched in Xinjiang in 2017 and he has analyzed China’s Uyghur population policies.

The intermarriage strategy serves the goal of “optimizing the ethnic population structure, breaking the ‘dominance’ of concentrated Uyghur populations in southern Xinjiang as part of a slowly unfolding genocidal policy,” he told RFA.

“It’s important that people pay attention to the different forms of human rights abuses that are taking place in the Uyghur region, particularly those that are underreported, like forced marriages,” said Setiwaldi. 

“People can raise awareness and push their governments to hold the Chinese government accountable.”

China had no immediate comment on the report.

Last month, a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement dismissed U.S. efforts to debate the U.N. report, saying, “the human rights of people of all ethnic backgrounds in Xinjiang are protected like never before” and “the ultimate motive of the U.S. and some other Western countries behind their Xinjiang narrative is to contain China.”

Written by Paul Eckert for RFA.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Nuriman Abdureshid for RFA Uyghur.

The post Another COPOut: Kerry Uses “Last Chance” Climate Summit to Push Nuclear Power appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Linda Pentz Gunter.

Fatafta is the Middle East-North Africa policy manager at the digital rights group Access Now and a policy analyst at the think tank Al-Shabaka which seeks to “educate and foster public debate on Palestinian human rights and self-determination.” Coda Story spoke with her to learn more about Israel’s use of surveillance technology in Palestine. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You wrote on Twitter recently that Palestine is a surveillance testing laboratory. Could you elaborate on what you meant by that?

Most, if not all, of the surveillance technologies that are developed and exported by the Israeli authorities stem from the occupied territories. It’s either the Israeli army that has been prototyping and testing these technologies or private companies that are set up by former Israeli intelligence and military forces. Israel doesn’t acknowledge that its obligations to protect human rights under international law extend to the territories they occupy. And at the same time, they see in the occupied territories a lucrative opportunity to prototype, deploy, test and enhance all sorts of weapons and surveillance technologies.

In the last few weeks we’ve seen internet shutdowns in response to widespread protests in Iran. Despite the state of their diplomatic relations, how much do Israel and Iran learn from each other in terms of building a surveillance state?

I think regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum, authoritarian governments and oppressive regimes use the same tactics. They all have the same oppressive handbook. They know that flow of information is important. It’s important for organizing. It’s important for documentation, it’s important for accountability. And that’s why the Internet becomes an enemy of the state. For them, the moment there are protests or dissent on the ground, the number one rule is to stop the information from flowing, whether it be reporting to Meta to take down content as the Israeli government does, or shutting down the Internet or throttling the services like the Iranian regime does.

What can people do to resist?

For one, documentation. I think the bigger point here, though, is that it is not up to ordinary citizens. It is actually up to the international community to hold the Israeli government accountable for all of these violations. Often governments, especially the European governments and the U.S., when it comes to surveillance technologies, they don’t see the supply chain. They don’t understand that when technology is being used on an oppressed, occupied community it will soon be deployed somewhere else. And I think it’s important for people not only in Palestine but elsewhere, to understand how surveillance supply chains work, especially in the Palestinian context. Of course, Palestinians on the ground can protest. But we need to understand what’s driving this economy. It’s the demand from abroad and there are of course happy suppliers.

The post Israel uses Palestine as a lab to test surveillance tech appeared first on Al-Shabaka.

This content originally appeared on Al-Shabaka and was authored by Marwa Fatafta.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Thomas Rowley, Serhiy Guz.

The findings, released Friday, come as Democratic lawmakers are calling for regulation and cryptominers are increasingly under fire for straining the electrical grid and raising electricity prices for consumers.

In a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, a group of Democratic lawmakers led by Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, revealed that the seven companies have the capacity to use as much as 1,045 megawatts of power, or enough to power all of the homes in Houston, a city of more than 2 million people. 

“The results of our investigation, which gathered data from just seven companies, are disturbing, with this limited data alone revealing that cryptominers are large energy users that account for a significant – and rapidly growing – amount of carbon emissions,” the lawmakers wrote.

They also urged federal agencies to develop rules requiring that cryptomining companies report their power usage and greenhouse gas emissions — a first step towards understanding the scope of the problem and crafting regulation.

The cryptomining industry has been undergoing explosive growth in the U.S. In 2021, China banned mining and the U.S. quickly became the world’s hub. Roughly a quarter of American mining operations are located in Texas, where the state’s electrical grid is notoriously fragile.

Mining for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin — a process that requires specialized computers to solve complex math problems in exchange for new tokens — requires a large amount of computing power and is energy-intensive. Earlier this week, as a heatwave swept across Texas, state regulators had to ask Bitcoin miners to voluntarily shut down their operations to avoid overloading the grid.

More troubles lie ahead. According to The Verge, by 2026 cryptocurrency miners plan to increase demand on Texas’s grid by 27 gigawatts, or by roughly a third of the grid’s current capacity.

Cryptocurrency advocates say mining will spur the building of more renewable energy, but so far it hasn’t been enough. Bitcoin mining emits as much greenhouse gasses as entire countries; one recent estimate said as much as the Czech Republic.

The load that cryptominers place on the grid is driving up prices for other consumers, too. Last year a study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago found that cryptocurrency mining in upstate New York raised electricity costs for households in the region by a total of $165 million each year.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Cryptomining uses a ‘disturbing’ amount of energy, lawmakers find on Jul 18, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Julia Kane.

Chinese broadcaster CGTN said the new high-definition deep-space active observation facility code-named "China Fuyan," or “Facetted Eye” for its resemblance to an insect’s eye, is being built in Chongqing Municipality.

The radar system would help “better safeguard Earth” by boosting “the country's defense capabilities against near-Earth asteroids as well as its sensing capability for the Earth-Moon system,” the state-run broadcaster said.

The Fuyan will have distributed radars with over 20 large antennas, capable of carrying out high-definition observation of asteroids within 150 million kilometers of Earth, according to CGTN.

“If the radar is designed to observe asteroids, it would generally possess the basic capabilities for space surveillance, meaning, the ability to distinguish objects detected in space, and hence track them,” said Collin Koh, Research Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

“Where it comes to space, the lines between civilian and military applications can be blurred,” Koh said, adding that, given China's predilection these days to go with civil-military fusion, “it'll be of no surprise that the radar possesses both intended civilian and military applications.”

Civil-military fusion

The project is led by a team from the Beijing Institute of Technology (BTI), in cooperation with China's National Astronomical Observatories under the China Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University and Peking University.

A China’s Defense Universities Tracker released by the International Cyber Policy Center at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in 2019 listed the BTI as “one of the ‘Seven Sons of National Defence’,” and “a leading centre of military research and one of only fourteen institutions accredited to award doctorates in weapons science.”

It is categorized as “very high risk” and “top secret,” with 34 designated defense research areas including missile technology, radar and weapon systems.

Both Tsinghua University and Peking University are also listed in the Tracker as “very high risk” and “high risk”, respectively. 

Long Teng, President of the Beijing Institute of Technology, was quoted by Chinese media as saying the Fuyan program will have three phases of construction and by the end of Phase 3 China will have “the world's first deep-space radar with the capability to carry out 3D imaging and dynamic monitoring as well as active observation of celestial bodies throughout the inner solar system.”

The first two radars are expected to become operational by September this year in Chongqing.

Asian defense analyst Collin Koh said the project will add new weight to China-U.S. rivalry in space.

“When we consider the current context, while there's no overt clarion call for China to embark on a space militarization race with the West, especially the U.S., since it has a publicly-professed line of not engaging in one, it is nonetheless very much into the game,” he said.

“And all the more so, given the broader military rivalry with the U.S., which has extended into cyber and space domains.”

The U.S. established a Space Force in 2019, creating the first new branch of the armed services in 73 years. It resulted from what the Force said was "a widespread recognition that Space was a national security imperative."

China has been actively engaged in radar development projects. The commercial satellite imagery company Maxar Technologies released a satellite photo in February, believed to be of a new long-range, early-warning radar that can be used to detect ballistic missiles from thousands of miles away.

The Large Phased Array Radar (LPAR) in Yiyuan County, Shandong Province, can cover Taiwan and all of Japan, according to U.S.-based Defense News.

The paper said China also has other radar facilities enabling early warning coverage of the Korean Peninsula and India.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.

Small teams of U.S. Special Operations forces are involved in a low-profile proxy war program on a far greater scale than previously known, according to exclusive documents and interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials.

While The Intercept and other outlets have previously reported on the Pentagon’s use of the secretive 127e authority in multiple African countries, a new document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act offers the first official confirmation that at least 14 127e programs were also active in the greater Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region as recently as 2020. In total, between 2017 and 2020, U.S. commandos conducted at least 23 separate 127e programs across the world.

Separately, Joseph Votel, a retired four-star Army general who headed both Special Operations Command and Central Command, which oversees U.S. military efforts in the Middle East, confirmed the existence of previously unrevealed 127e “counterterrorism” efforts in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.

“If someone were to call a 127-echo program a proxy operation, it would be hard to argue with them.”

Source: Pentagon documents and former officials.Graphics: Soohee Cho for The Intercept

Related

▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​▄​

A U.S. Army Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha team soldier, likely on a 127e mission, according to journalist Wes Morgan, is seen along with Nigerien counterparts at a Nigerien Army range on Sept. 11, 2017.

Photo: Richard Bumgardner, SOCFWD-NWA Public Affairs

General Joseph L. Votel, U.S. Central Command Commander, meets members of the Lebanese Armed Forces during his visit to the Amchit military base August 23, 2016.

Photo: U.S. Embassy Beirut

A heavily redacted memorandum on the 127e program obtained via FOIA.

Screenshot: The Intercept

“There are legitimate issues with the U.S. partnering with some units of the Egyptian military.”

U.S. Army Gen. Richard D. Clarke, center, takes command of the U.S. Special Operations Command from U.S. Army Gen. Raymond A. Thomas III, right, during a ceremony in Tampa, Fla., on March 29, 2019.

Photo: Lisa Ferdinando/DoD

“DOD views this as a small, tiny program that doesn’t have foreign policy implications, so, ‘Let’s just do it. The less people get in our way, the easier.’”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Nick Turse.

The 63-page report entitled “Genocide by Attrition: The Role of Identity Documents in the Holocaust and the Genocides of Rwanda and Myanmar” and published Tuesday by the Southeast Asian rights group Fortify Rights, details how the junta is forcing Rohingya to obtain National Verification Cards (NVCs) that its authors say effectively strip them of access to full citizenship rights and protections.

It also draws on case studies from the Holocaust and Rwandan genocides to demonstrate how authoritarian regimes use such documents to “systematically identify, persecute, and kill targeted populations on a widespread and massive scale.”

“Perpetrators have long used identification documents in the commission of genocide,” said Ken MacLean, co-author of the report, senior advisor to Fortify Rights, and Clark University Professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, in a statement accompanying the release of the report.

“Evidence from the Holocaust and Rwandan genocides show striking similarities with the ongoing erasure of the Rohingya identity in Myanmar by the junta.”

The report found that identification cards such as those used during the Holocaust and Rwandan genocides contributed to “genocide by attrition,” which it defined as “the gradual destruction of a protected group by reducing their strength through sustained, indirect methods of destruction.”

Such policies have long been in use in Myanmar and continue to play a role in the ongoing genocide of the Rohingyas, the report said, citing interviews with more than 20 Rohingya-genocide survivors, leaked junta documents, and a media analysis of junta-backed news outlets since the military’s Feb. 1, 2021 coup.

It said that Rohingya in Western Myanmar’s Rakhine state described how the junta forces them to carry NVCs to prevent them from identifying as “Rohingya,” restrict their movement, and curtail their ability to earn a living, “creating conditions of life designed to be destructive.” Instead, they are made to identify as “Bengali” immigrants from Bangladesh in what the report said is a bid by authorities to exclude them from citizenship and ethnicity within Myanmar.

The report cited the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention’s findings that increased politicization of identity and discriminatory measures targeting protected groups are indicators in creating “an environment conducive to the commission of atrocity crimes,” noting that similar legal and administrative tools were used to facilitate the destruction of the Jewish and Tutsi populations, and are now being used against the Rohingya.

“Rohingya continue to face existential threats under the military junta, an illegitimate regime responsible for far-reaching atrocities,” said John Quinley, senior human rights specialist at Fortify Rights and co-author of the report.

“The ongoing denial of Rohingya ethnicity and citizenship are indicators of genocide. The [shadow] National Unity Government has committed to ensuring Rohingya citizenship and inclusion. The junta, however, is still using coercive measures to force Rohingya to identify as foreigners, erasing records of their existence.”

Fortify Rights said that while the connection between identification documents and international crimes is well-recognized, some U.N. officials, embassies, and others in Myanmar have failed to condemn the use of NVCs in targeting Rohingya. In some cases, the group said, they have even endorsed the documents as a solution to the group’s “statelessness.”

The report’s findings demonstrate links between the NVC process and acts of genocide and should be a focus of investigations and legal proceedings, Fortify Rights said.

The violations documented in Genocide by Attrition demonstrate links between the NVC process and genocidal acts and should be a focus of ongoing investigations and legal proceedings, said Fortify Rights.

It called on U.N. member states to cut Myanmar’s junta off from access to arms, finances, and political legitimacy, and urged the U.N. Security Council to refer the situation in the country to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

“The Myanmar military junta poses an undeniable threat to international peace and security,” said Fortify’s Quinley.

“U.N. member states must wake up and act now to deny the junta the resources it craves and to hold it accountable for all of its crimes including genocide.”

In 2016, a military crackdown forced some 90,000 Rohingya to flee Rakhine state and cross into neighboring Bangladesh, while a larger one in 2017 in response to insurgent attacks, killed thousands of members of the ethnic minority and led to an exodus of more than 740,000 across the border. 

Human rights groups have produced a trove of credible reports based on commercial satellite imagery and extensive interviews with Rohingya about the operations in Rakhine state in 2017, including arbitrary killings, torture, and mass rape.

Gambia has accused Myanmar’s military leadership of violating the 1948 Genocide Convention in Rohingya areas in a case it brought to the Hague-based International Court of Justice. The court is holding hearings to determine whether it has jurisdiction to judge if atrocities committed there constituted a genocide.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Joshua Lipes.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has delivered the highly regarded Harvard Commencement address, calling out social media as a threat to modern day democracy.

She was also awarded an honorary doctorate from the university.

The Commencement is steeped in history with Ardern’s predecessors including Winston Churchill, JFK, Angela Merkel — and topically for today’s speech — Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

• READ MORE: Other reports on Ardern’s US visit

Capping off her day, Ardern confirmed to media afterwards that she would meet US President Joe Biden at the White House on Tuesday (Wednesday NZ time).

She invoked the memory of the late Benazir Bhutto, the first woman to head a democratic government in a Muslim country, and to give birth while in office with Ardern being the second.

Seven months after the two women met Bhutto was assassinated, Ardern said.

‘Path carved still relevant’
“The path she carved as a woman feels as relevant today as it was decades ago, and so too is the message she shared here.

“She said part way through her speech in 1989 the following: ‘We must realise that democracy… can be fragile’.

“… while the reasons that gave rise for her words then were vastly different, they still ring true. Democracy can be fragile.”

Ardern told her audience of thousands that because of the speed of social media, disinformation is creating an ever increasing risk.

Watch the address

The Harvard Commencement address.    Video: RNZ News

“Social media platforms were born offering the promise of connection and reconnection. We logged on in our billions, forming tribes and subtribes.”

While it started as a place to experience “new ways of thinking and to celebrate our difference” it was now often used for neither of those things, she said.

However, just two days after the massacre in a school in Texas that saw 19 students and two teachers killed, the biggest response she got from the audience was when she referred to changes to firearms law.

Standing ovation over guns stance
She received a standing ovation when she said the government had succeeded in banning military style semi-automatics and assault rifles, in the wake of the Christchurch mosque attacks.

“On the 15th of March 2019, 51 people were killed in a terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The entire brutal act was livestreamed on social media. The royal commission that followed found that the terrorist responsible was radicalised online,” she said.

“In the aftermath of New Zealand’s experience, we felt a sense of responsibility. We knew we needed significant gun reform, and so that is what we did.”

She went on to say that if genuine solutions were to be found to the issue of violent extremism online, “it would take government, civil society and the tech companies themselves to change the landscape. The result was the Christchurch Call to Action.

“And while much has changed as a result, important things haven’t.”

Ardern called on social media companies to recognise their power and act on it and acknowledge the role they play in shaping online environments.

“That algorithmic processes make choices and decisions for us — what we see and where we are directed — and that at best this means the user experience is personalised and at worst it means it can be radicalised.

‘Pressing and urgent need’
“It means, that there is a pressing and urgent need for responsible algorithm development and deployment.”

She said the forums were available for the tech companies to work alongside society and governments to find solutions to the issues.

She encouraged her audience to realise that their individual actions were also important.

“In a disinformation age, we need to learn to analyse and critique information. That doesn’t mean teaching ‘mistrust’, but rather as my old history teacher, Mr Fountain extolled: ‘to understand the limitations of a single piece of information, and that there is always a range of perspectives on events and decisions’.”

While the prime minister’s US trip was planned around the Harvard Commencement, there is a trade and tourism focus, but also a chance to check in with some of the tech giants at whom she delivered her message, in particular around the Christchurch Call, during the next few days.

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.

Photograph Source: Steam Pipe Trunk Distribution – CC BY 2.0

Allies of Tucker Carlson are working hard to distract the public from the Fox News host’s culpability in spreading racist conspiracy theories, adopting the same tactics they sneer at from liberals.

In the wake of the Buffalo massacre, where white supremacist Payton Gendron murdered 10 people in a racist attack, Carlson has come under fire for hyping the same Great Replacement conspiracy theory the shooter cited in his manifesto. The two men used nearly identical language to describe the topic, putting Carlson in the hot seat.

Where were they radicalized? pic.twitter.com/Zwi5alvg47

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) May 19, 2022

Now, five days after the shooting, a competing narrative is being pushed. According to certain figures in the fringe post-left conservative movement, the issue is not that Carlson referred to the conspiracy—it’s that he did so in response to Democrats and other liberals bringing it up first.

Their argument claims that because Democrats and liberals have noted in the past that a changing demographic electorate could pay dividends for the party, Carlson’s racist rhetoric around immigration and warnings of racial replacement are simply reactive. It’s a deceitful argument and blame-shifting that allows Carlson and his right-wing allies to sail above the controversy, and has one goal: changing the conversation from Carlson to the dishonest semantics of “who started it.”

Social media influencer Glenn Greenwald was, perhaps unsurprisingly, among the first to deploy the tactic. “The Democrats and their leading strategics for years have been arguing that immigration will change the demographic make-up of the country—by replacing conservative voters with more liberals ones,” he tweeted, “and that this will benefit them politically.” Conspiracy theorist Jimmy Dore told his audience that the Great Replacement has been pushed by the Clintons, not Carlson. And The Hill’s Briahna Joy Gray said that Carlson, who is “fastidiously race neutral” with his language, was right about the fundamentals of the conspiracy with respect to the Democratic embrace of demographic change.

This is like when MSNBC libs rewrite the history Bush administration.

pic.twitter.com/YBCT8O3Gtc

— ℮oin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) May 19, 2022

Their aim is clear—to thoroughly water down and whitewash the reality of the American right. If it sounds familiar, it should, because it’s exactly what liberal media figures, primarily on MSNBC, have been doing for George W. Bush for years.

A real accounting of Bush’s time in office would make the former president a pariah, at least in left-of-center circles (one hopes). But liberal commentators like Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O’Donnell instead did the opposite, making Bush out to be a cuddly statesman type. The Trump era provided the opportunity for folding the right-wing pundits who hyped up the war and the officials who waged it back into polite society. Just look at MSNBC superstar Nicolle Wallace, who served in the Bush White House press office.

It all gets a bit confusing for the average viewer. With no one there to remember exactly what was done and when—by, in other words, taking the same obfuscation strategy used by Carlson’s ally to confuse the issue—liberals made sure that the former president’s image was ready for rehab. It’s worked, today Democrats love Bush and look back on him fondly.

Comparing the post left with their liberal counterparts is antagonistic, to be sure. There are few people they hate more. But the right-wing laundering approach is virtually indistinguishable. All that’s changed is who’s in power on the right, and who on the liberal-left are willing to help conservatives dissemble about their real beliefs and sell themselves as respectable, serious commentators. Same old story.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eoin Higgins.

The U.S. has hit a record number of apprehensions at the border shared with Mexico, arresting over 1 million asylum seekers in the past six months alone. We speak with immigration attorney Erika Pinheiro about the Biden administration’s unequal treatment of different nationalities, as refugees from countries like Haiti, Cuba and Cameroon face harsh restrictions on asylum, but Ukrainian refugees seem to be receiving special treatment and even exemption from Title 42. “Asylum is supposed to be a universal standard protecting individuals fleeing persecution from any country, but in practice it’s always been a political tool wielded by the United States to favor those fleeing regimes that the United States opposes,” says Pinheiro.

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

The post How the United States Uses and Abuses Migration from Cuba and Elsewhere appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by W. T. Whitney.

“This has had a huge impact,” said Carlos Correa, director of the Caracas-based press freedom group Espacio Público and editor of Crónica Uno. Internet blocks “can easily reduce your traffic by half.”

Since Venezuela began cracking down on independent media in 2007, most internet blockages have been conducted by CANTV, the state-run ISP that now provides two-thirds of residential connections. But journalists and internet experts told CPJ that President Nicolás Maduro’s government is increasingly forcing private ISPs, which dominate the mobile phone market, to carry out press censorship by blocking Venezuela’s few remaining independent news websites.

The flurry of blockages in February stood out because, along with CANTV, they were carried out by the country’s main private sector ISPs: Spanish-owned Movistar and locally owned Digitel, Inter, NetUno, and Supercable, according to Venezuela Sin Filtro, a watchdog project that monitors internet censorship. Besides Crónica Uno, these ISPs blocked the influential news websites Efecto Cocuyo and El Nacional, along with streaming station EVTV Miami.

During the regional elections last November, private ISPs blocked 35 independent news websites, prompting criticism from the U.S.-based Carter Center and the European Union, both of which sent teams to Venezuela to monitor the fairness of the electoral process.

“While government-aligned news websites…were constantly accessible during the campaign in every state and through any Internet provider, websites of independent online media…were very difficult or impossible to access in 16 of the 23 states,” the EU observers wrote in their post-election report.

Venezuelan news organizations have responded by setting up replicas of their original domains, known as mirror websites; distributing written and recorded-voice news dispatches on WhatsApp, Telegram, and other social media platforms; and urging their audiences to set up virtual private networks (VPNs) to circumvent the blocks.

Even with these measures, the blockages make it much harder for Venezuelans to stay informed and hurt the ability of news websites to build their brand and secure funding through advertising and donations, said César Batiz, editor of the Venezuelan independent news website El Pitazo.

He told CPJ that for the past five years El Pitazo has suffered on and off blockages from both CANTV and private ISPs. When the website was first blocked in 2017, El Pitazo’s traffic fell from 115,000 daily page views to 11,000. El Pitazo gradually recovered its audience thanks, in part, to the growing number of Venezuelans living abroad.

Batiz accuses private ISPs of doing the government’s dirty work and says they should be forced to pay damages to affected websites. He and other journalists are especially disappointed in Spain’s Movistar, the only international ISP in Venezuela. They say that Movistar, which dominates the market for mobile phone service, has more resources than Venezuelan companies and therefore more room to maneuver and resist government pressure.

“What I can’t understand is how a company with corporate governance and an ethics code that operates under the European Union principles of free expression is doing what it’s doing in Venezuela,” said Batiz, who in 2019 led a protest at Movistar’s Caracas headquarters.

Luz Mely Reyes, the top editor of Efecto Cocuyo, which is scrambling to recover readers after Movistar and other ISPs blocked the website in February, added: “Movistar should not serve as a tool for a government that doesn’t respect democratic norms.”

CPJs calls to the Caracas offices of Movistar, Digitel, Inter, NetUno, and Supercable were not answered. CPJ emailed the press department of Telefónica, Movistar’s Madrid-based parent company, but received no response. Pedro Marín, president of the Chamber of Telecommunication Service Companies, an industry group that represents Venezuelan ISPs, told CPJ via a spokesperson that he was too busy to talk.

Luis Carlos Díaz, president of the Venezuelan chapter of Internet Society, a global advocacy group that promotes unrestricted access to the internet, said it would be a mistake to come down too hard on private ISPs. He told CPJ that, like the news websites they block, these companies are also victims of government repression.

Rather than a formal judicial process, Díaz said private ISPs receive orders from the National Telecommunications Commission, known as CONATEL, to block websites. He described these orders as arbitrary administrative decisions with no legal recourse and noted that ISPs could face stiff fines, expropriation, or worse for ignoring them.

Over the past two decades, Venezuelan authorities have forced dozens of independent radio and TV stations off the air for criticizing the government, Díaz said. Last year, government officials seized the assets, including the printing press, of the independent newspaper El Nacional. In 2020, AT&T’s DIRECTV pulled out of Venezuela after it was ordered to carry two pro-government TV stations as part of its service and three of its sales executives were jailed for two months on charges of fraud and trying to destabilize the economy.

Private ISPs, Díaz said, “have a gun to their heads.”

CONATEL did not respond to CPJ’s phone calls and an email seeking comment. One industry insider, who was not authorized to talk to CPJ about censorship and therefore requested anonymity, said CONATEL nearly always relays its blockage orders to private ISPs over the phone to avoid leaving a written record.

“The companies want people to have access to all internet websites but if they receive a government order, they have to follow it,” the source said.

In 2019, El Pitazo gained access to an email in which CONATEL ordered the blocking of its domain. The Carter Center report on the November elections stated: “CONATEL has issued directives to black out and censor digital media.”

The only time the Venezuelan government has publicly acknowledged internet censorship came during a 2015 meeting with the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva. William Castillo, who was then director of CONATEL, said that it had ordered the blockage of 1,060 web pages, including news websites, to “protect society.”

Andrés Azpúrua, coordinator of Venezuela Sin Filtro, told CPJ that private ISPs should be more transparent about why they are blocking websites, like the way Google notes when material is removed from its YouTube platform for copyright infringement. Instead, he said many Venezuelans remain in the dark about censorship, blaming the country’s notoriously slow internet speeds for their inability to access the news.

Díaz, of Internet Society, says the U.S. and other governments should consider sanctioning CONATEL officials, as he and other experts point out that there’s only so much private ISPs, which have struggled to survive amid Venezuela’s ongoing economic crisis, can do by themselves. If private ISPs take a bold public stand for free expression by defying government orders, they say, it almost certainly guarantees their shutdown – and less internet access for Venezuelans.

In the words of Azpúrua: “It’s better to have a censored internet than nothing at all.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by John Otis/CPJ Andes Correspondent.

On Thursday, 10 March 2022, thousands of Papuan people in the Lapago Wamena Cultural Area took to the streets to paralyse Wamena city. They occupied Wamena City. They rejected the Indonesian colonial plan to expand Papua province.

Remember: The voice of the people is the voice of God. The Papuan people, people and leaders of Indonesia, Melanesia, Pacific, Africa, European Union. USA, Australia, listen to the voices of the two million Melanesian people in West Papua who are currently on their way to being annihilated due to Indonesia’s systemic racist politics.

The expansion of Papua provinces, Special Autonomy Volume 2 and military operations in six regencies in Papua is not a solution for West Papua. Only one order — give us the right of self-determination for the political rights of the Papuan nation in West Papua.
Our greetings and prayers from Wamena, the heart of Papua.

Waaa … waaa … waaa.

SPECIAL REPORT: By Yamin Kogoya

The above text was written by Markus Haluk, director of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) on Thursday, March 10. The text encapsulates the sentiments of Papuans protesting across West Papua and Indonesia, calling for Jakarta to stop the creation of new provinces.

Haluk’s words were written amid escalating protests in various parts of West Papua’s customary lands and across Indonesia over Jakarta’s plans to create six new provinces under the unilaterally renewed — and unpopular — Special Autonomy Law 21/2001.

15/3/22 Yahukimo, West Papua

Indonesian forces shot dead Yakub Meklok (39) and Herson Wisapla (21) during forced dispersal of thousands of people protesting against Jakarta’s plan to create new provinces.

At least ten others were shot including LK (21), SK (21), and AI (23). pic.twitter.com/rFQEVkthd2

— Veronica Koman 許愛茜 (@VeronicaKoman) March 15, 2022

Here is an overview of the breadth and depth of protests against this repression, with reports that at least two people have been shot dead:

8/3/22 Jayapura, West Papua

Fully armed police and soldiers forcibly dispersing peaceful protestors against Jakarta’s plan to create new provinces. pic.twitter.com/jmz0u6K3C8

— Veronica Koman 許愛茜 (@VeronicaKoman) March 8, 2022

Jayapura – Mamta customary land
Tuesday, March 8: Hundreds of students and communities clashed with Indonesian security forces at university campuses in Waena and Abepura cities, protesting against the expansion. The protest coordinator, Alfa Hisage, stated that this demonstration was to reject the creation of a new province altogether.

Wamena – La Pago customary land
Thursday, March 10: Doni Tabuni, the coordinator of the demonstration in the highlands of Wamena (the location that Markus Haluk refers to in his text) warned on March 10 that the expansion would wipe out Papuans. Protesters declared: “We will stop all government office activities in the Lapago region if the central government does not stop the expansion,” reported CNN Indonesia (10 March 2022).

“The expansion will not bring prosperity to Papuans; it will only serve to benefit the elites, bring more migrants, and create more opportunities for military and human rights violations,” said Doni Tabuni.

14/3/22 Paniai, West Papua

Hundreds of West Papuans protested against Jakarta’s plan to create new provinces – which will lead to further dispossession and militarisation.

The protests this month are the largest since the 2019 West Papua Uprising. pic.twitter.com/vydPsIj2bP

— Veronica Koman 許愛茜 (@VeronicaKoman) March 14, 2022

Paniai – Meepago customary land
Monday, March 14: thousands of residents of Paniai took to the streets to demonstrate against the expansion of the “New Autonomous Region”, also known as “Daerah Otonomy Baru” (DOB). The demonstrators repeatedly shouted against the new proposal and do not want to join the province of Central Papua, which would become a new autonomous region.

Petrus Yeimo, a member of the Paniai Regency Legislative Council (DPRD), said that communities are not involved in the formation of this new region.

“That’s why we Paniai people firmly reject the expansion,” said Petrus, when he was met by the mass in front of the DPRD office (innews.id).

West Papuan women against the creation of new provinces by Jakarta that will cause further dispossession and militarisation.

Manokwari, 8/3/22#IWD2022 pic.twitter.com/OdAyPdXl3L

— Veronica Koman 許愛茜 (@VeronicaKoman) March 8, 2022

Manokwari – Domberai customary land
Tuesday, March 8: The same message also echoed in Manokwari city — a coastal town popularly known as a “city of the gospel” for its historical significance of the landing of the first two German missionaries (C.W. Ottow and J.G. Geissler) for the “Christianisation” project in the mid-1800s.

17/3/22 Sorong, West Papua

Another big protest against Jakarta’s plan to create new provinces.

Protestors: “Papua! Freedom!” pic.twitter.com/95WJoIyf8P

— Veronica Koman 許愛茜 (@VeronicaKoman) March 17, 2022

Sorong – Domberai customary land
Monday, March 21: A series of protests has also taken place in Sorong city, at the Western tip of West Papua, involving sections of Papuan society, including students and communities.

“The expansion of new autonomous region depletes our forests, depriving us of our land rights. The goal of our meeting is to convince the mayor, who is also the head of the creation of the new Southwest Papua province that we Papuans all over Sorong Raya oppose the expansion,” said action coordinator Sepnat Yewen on Monday. But they were disappointed that they were unable to see the mayor twice (Compass.com, 21 March 2022).

11/3/22 Jakarta

102 West Papuan students were forcibly dispersed and arrested during a protest. They reject Jakarta’s plan to create new provinces in West Papua that would lead to further dispossession.

(Soldiers that many at a protest is not common.) pic.twitter.com/OeIpQhHuCh

— Veronica Koman 許愛茜 (@VeronicaKoman) March 11, 2022

Jakarta – the heartland of the colonial powerhouse
Tuesday, March 11: Papuan students held protests in central Jakarta, calling on Jakarta to stop the colonial expansion of their homeland, during which one police officer, Ferikson Tampubolon, was injured on the head (Detiknews, 12 March 2022).

South Sulawesi – an Indonesian island
In Kendari city of South Sulawesi, the Papuan Student Association declared that the newly created provinces would not benefit Papuans. Kiminma Gwijangge, the group coordinator, said that this was a game of the political elites and rulers who control the public service in Papua and ignoring the rights and wishes of Papuans. These Papuan students demanded that the Papuan elites, who eat money and expand on behalf of Papua, be stopped immediately.

15/3/22 Yahukimo, West Papua

Earlier today, speaker: “people reject expansion, people want independence”.

Series of protest this month are the largest since the 2019 West Papua Uprising. https://t.co/wlJZRrFM4F pic.twitter.com/HBCnpuCH0e

— Veronica Koman 許愛茜 (@VeronicaKoman) March 15, 2022

Yahukimo – La Pago customary land
Tuesday, March 15: Tragically, a peaceful demonstration for the same cause in the Yahukimo region did not go well. Two young men, Yakop Deal, 30, and Erson Weipsa, 22, have been martyred for this cause by the Indonesian police — the cause for which Papuan men and women courageously risked their lives to fight against fully armed, western-backed, modern security forces with advanced mechanical weapons.

Two young Papuans gunned down and a dozen wounded
Witness accounts of the Yahukimo tragedy stated that the protest initially went ahead safely and peacefully. However, provocation by police intelligence officers posing as journalists in the midst of the protest led to the shooting.

It is alleged that an unidentified Indonesian person flew a drone camera during the demonstration. Seeing that action, protesters warned the Indonesian man not to use drones to record the protest, creating fear.

The protestors also asked for his identity and whether or not he was a journalist, but he failed to respond. The crowd protested against his action. He then ran for cover towards hidden police officers who had been on standby with weapons. Immediately, members of the police fired tear gas at the crowd without asking for the person responsible for the peaceful demonstration. Soon after, police opened fire on the crowd.

Papuan Police public relations chief Kombes Pol Ahmad Musthofa Kamal confirmed that two protesters had died, and others suffered gunshot wounds (Suara.com).

OPM and civil society groups
The Free Papua Movement, also known as Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM), and their military wing, The West Papua National Liberation Army, which was launched in the 1960s to protest against the Indonesian invasion, are opposed to the new expansion of provinces.
Sebby Sambon, the group spokesperson released a statement that threatened to shoot Papuan elites who imposed Jakarta’s agenda onto Papuans (tribunnews.com, 12 February 2022)

More than 700,000 people have also signed the Papuan People’s Petition which represents 111 organisations opposing Special Autonomy.

These protests are not the first and they will not be the last. Papuans will continue to resist any policy introduced by Jakarta that threatens their lives, cultural identities, and lands.

This is an existential war, not a political one — it is a war of survival and resisting extinction.

The genesis of these recent protests
Those protests are not simply a reaction against the new expansion, but a part of a movement against the Indonesian invasion that began when Papuans’ independent state was seized by the Western governments and given to Indonesia by the United Nations in 1963.

This is a conflict between two states — the state of Papua and the state of Indonesia.
Having the big picture is vital to prevent misrepresentation of these protesters as just another angry mob on the street demanding equal pay in Indonesia.

However, the protests that cost those two men their lives in Yahukimo had a specific genesis. It began in 1999 when 100 Papuan delegates went to then-President Habibie and demanded independence after the collapse of Suharto’s 31-year New Order regime.

Habibie and his cabinet were shocked by this demand, as people whom they thought were members of his family suddenly told him they no longer wanted to be part of the great Indonesian family.

Having been shocked by this unexpected news, Habibie and his cabinet told the Papuan delegation to go home and think it over in case it had been a mistake. But this was not a mistake. It was the deepest desire of Papuans being communicated directly in a dignified manner to the country’s highest presidential palace.

This occurred during a time of great turmoil in Indonesia’s history. Strongman national father figure Suharto, once considered immortal, no longer was. His empire had crumbled.

Suddenly, across the archipelago, a cacophony of demonstrators unleashed more than 30 years of dormant human desires for freedom, frustrations, and fear, combined with the ravages of the Asian economic collapse.

If there was a time when the Papuans could escape the tormented house, this was it. One hundred Papuan delegates marching to Habibie indeed made their mark in that respect.

At this momentous time, the man who understood this deepest desire and would help Papuans escape was President Abdurrahman Wahid, better known as Gus Dur. He lives on in the memories of Papuans because of his valiant acts.

President Gus Dur – a political messianic figure
On 30 December 1999, or exactly two months and 10 days after being inaugurated as the 4th President, Gus Dur visited Irian Jaya (as it was known back then) with two purposes — to listen to Papuan people during the congress, which he funded, and to see the first millennium sunrise on January 1, 2000. On this day, a significant moment in human history, he chose to stand with Papuans and for Papuans.

During his stay, he changed the region’s name from Irian Jaya to Papua and allowed the banned Papuan Morning Star flag to be flown alongside Indonesia’s red and white flag.

Changing the name was significant for Papuans because these changes marked a significant shift in how the region would be governed. The former name symbolised Indonesia’s victory and the latter symbolized Papuan victory.

Prior to these historical occurrences, the region was known as Netherlands New Guinea during Dutch rule, then as West Papua during a short-lived, Dutch-supported Papuan rule in 1961, then from Irian Barat to Irian Jaya when Indonesia annexed it in May 1963.

Just as their island has been dissected and tortured by European and Asian colonial powers, so too have Papuans, being tortured with all manner of racism and violence in the name of the civilisation project.

The messianic Gus Dur’s spark of hope instilled in the hearts of Papuans was short-lived. In July 2001, he was forced out of office after being accused of encouraging Indonesia’s disintegration. Gus Dur’s window of opportunity for Papuans to escape the tortured house was closed. The new chapter that Gus Dur wrote in Indonesia-Papua’s tale of horror was ripped out of his hands during the most pivotal year of human history — the new millennium 2000.

The demand for independence conveyed to President Habibie a year earlier by one hundred Papuan delegates was discarded. Instead, Jakarta offered a special gift for Papuans — gift the Special Autonomy Law 21/2001.

There was a belief among foreign observers, and Papua and Jakarta elites that this would lead to something special. It reflects Jakarta’s ability in terms of its semantic structure and highly curated selection used in law.

Rod McGibbon, an analyst and writer on Southeast Asian politics in Jakarta, noted in a Wall Street Journal article on 14 August 2001 that despite the challenges Jakarta faces in its dealings with Irian Jaya (Papua), the Special Autonomy approach represents the best opportunity for Jakarta to begin meaningful dialogue with provincial leaders. He also predicted that if Jakarta fails special autonomy, the province will suffer further ethnic and regional conflicts in the future.

He was right, 20 years later Special Autonomy turned out to be a big mess.

The law consisted of 79 articles, most of which were designed to give Papuans greater control over their fate — to safeguard their land and culture.

Furthermore, under this law, one important institution, the Papuan People’s Assembly (Majelis Rakyat Papua-MRP), together with provincial governments and the Papuan People’s Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Papua-DPRP), was given the authority to deal with matters that are most important to them, such as land, population control, cultural identity, and symbols.

Section B in the introduction part of the Special Autonomy law reads as follows: “That the Papua community as God’s creation and is a part of a civilised people, who hold high human rights, religious values, democracy, law and cultural values in the adat (customary) law community and who have the right to fairly enjoy the results of development”

Assassination of prominent Papuan leader and Papuan chief
Three weeks after the law was passed, popular independence leader Theys H. Eluay was killed by Indonesian special forces (Kopassus). Ryamizard Ryacudu, then-army chief of staff, who in 2014 became Jokowi’s first Defence Minister, later called the killers “heroes” (Tempo.co, August 19, 2003).

In 2003, the Megawati Soekarnoputri government divided the province into two. She was violating a provision of the Special Autonomy Law, which was based on the idea that Papua remains a single territory. As prescribed by law, any division would need to be approved by the Papuan provincial legislature and MRP.

Governor Lukas Enembe – Melanesian chief
On August 22, 2019, Narasi (central Jakarta’s TV programme) invited Papua provincial Governor Lukas Enembe and others (both Papuans and Indonesians) to discuss mass demonstrations that erupted across West Papua and Indonesia after Papuan students were racially attacked in Surabaya.

The programme host, Najwa Shihab, was shocked to hear the governor’s response. When asked about his opinion about the situation, the governor said that Papuans already had their own concept to address problems in West Papua, but they needed an agreement/treaty under international auspices — or something of the sort — because no Jakarta-made law would work in Papua.

The host then asked, “you are a governor, but why don’t you believe the authority of Special Autonomy Law?” Governor Enembe replied, “The Special Autonomy Law 21/2001 has not worked until now.”

The governor stressed that Papuans do not have political power or free will to make any meaningful decision.

“We are supposed to make our own law under this Special Autonomy, but Jakarta refuses to allow it. Jakarta only gives money under this law, that’s all.”

The statements come from Papua’s number one man and not from someone on the street. The ruling elites in Jakarta are not fazed about breaking their own laws, showing their disrespect of the Papuan people and their integrity as a nation.

The governor is not the only official in the country’s highest office who lacks faith in the central government. Otopianus Tebai, a young Papuan senator who represents Papua in the central government said in a response to this new expansion plan that most Papuans reject the divisions (Suara.com, March 18, 2022). Divisions of which Papuans are being coerced into by the old special autonomy law renewal, which Governor Enembe declared as a total failure.

The MRP, Papua’s highest institution established under the special autonomy law to safeguard cultural identities, no longer has the power to act as intended. This institution has been stripped of its power, as well as other things, as a result of the 2021 amendment to the law which was passed two decades ago.

Timotius Murib, the chairman of this institution, said that the plan to create an autonomous region did not reflect the wishes of the people of Papua and would probably create more problems if Papuans were divided over it.

The chairman emphasised the law was designed for Papuans to have specific authority to implement local laws pertaining to our affairs, but the central government removed that authority by destroying any legal or government mechanism that materialised this authority.

Adding to these statements from the highest offices, more than 700,000 people have signed the Papuan People’s Petition, which represents 111 organisations opposing Special Autonomy.

Deep psychological war against Papuans – ‘divide and rule’ tactic
Despite overwhelming opposition from many segments of Papuan society, the Indonesian government persists in imposing its will upon Papuans. It is precisely this action that is causing protests and havoc in recent weeks.

But not all Papuans are against it. Several regents (mostly Papuans) are supporting this expansion with their cronies and supporters, in conjunction with the Indonesian government, a few Papuan elites in Jakarta, and other misfits and opportunists.

The issue has caused division among indigenous Papuans. Among the Papuans, it plays directly into identity politics, as many tribes speak different languages, live in different ancestral and customary lands, and even practise different religions.

A protracted horizontal conflict between these languages, cultural, and geographical lines was already being created by the creation of more regencies and districts in the past. Adding three new provinces would lead to more regencies, which means more districts, which means more security forces and settlers and more problems.

In the midst of this drama, Jakarta is setting traps for Papuans by forcing them to face each other and preventing them from collectively confronting the system that is tearing them apart. The creation of more provinces and regions is leading to such traps since this will divide the people — which is clearly Indonesia’s ultimate goal.

If Papuans are too busy fighting one another, then the atrocities of the elites will fly under the radar, unopposed. What West Papua needs is unity, which has been demonstrated in recent protests. Together, Papuans will always be stronger than apart in their cause, and Jakarta will stop it with all its tricks.

If you are an imperial strategist or scammer in an empirical office somewhere in London, Canberra, Washington DC, or Jakarta, you might think that this is the best way to control and destroy a nation.

But history shows that, all dead ancient empires and the current dying Anglo-American led Western empires use this little magical trick “divide and rule” over others until it collapses from its wicked pathological and hypocritical weights from within.

Imperial planners in Jakarta should be focusing on overcoming their own internal weaknesses that would eventually bring them down rather than chasing after the monster they created out of West Papua.

In this frame of mind, any vestige of hope for Papua’s restoration and unity, whether contained within or outside the law, is a threat that will be undermined at any cost.
The term autonomy is also defined differently in Papua’s affairs because Jakarta does not intend to empower Papuans to stand on their own two feet.

There is no real intention for Jakarta to give Papuans a chance to have some level of self-rule, which is exactly what being autonomous means in essence.

Papua’s autonomous status seems to be all part of the settler-colonial regime: occupation, expansion, and extermination. Papuans have been told that West Papua is special, but Jakarta is undermining and paralysing any mechanism it agrees upon to convince them that that is truly not the case.

In other words, Jakarta introduces a law, but it is Jakarta that violates it. The situation is analogous to students having a teacher who is not just negligent but hypocritical; everything the teacher believes in, they teach, not taking time to critically analyse their actions and how it all contradicts itself.

Under the whole scheme, Indonesia is presented as a self-appointed head of the class that they are holding hostage. They believe they are the only ones capable of teaching the stupid Papuans, of civilising the naked cave men, of saving the wild beasts, and developing the underdeveloped people.

But under the guise of the pathological civilisational myths, Jakarta poisons and destroy Papuans with food, alcohol, drugs, pornography, gambling, diseases and the ammunition which is used against them.

Rulers in Jakarta act as narcissistic sociopaths — they promise development, happiness, or even heaven while committing genocidal and homicidal acts against Papuans.
They portray themselves as the “civilised” and the Papuans as the “uncivilised” – a psychological manipulation that allows them to avoid accountability for their crimes. Jakarta makes Papuans sick, then prescribes medication to cure the very same illness it caused.

A deep psychological game is being played to convince themselves (colonisers), and the Papuans (colonised) that Indonesia exists so that West Papua can be saved, improved, and developed. This pathological game is then embedded into the psyche of Papuans through all the colonial development products Jakarta sells to Papuans through education and indoctrination.

This programming is evident in the way that a few Papuans (with Jakarta acting as the puppeteer) fool their own people by telling them that Indonesian rule will bring salvation and prosperity.

Even the mental work of most Indonesians is being reprogrammed to view West Papua with that lens – they believe that Indonesia is saving and improving West Papua. Unbeknownst to them, this entity called “Indonesia” annihilates Papuans.

Local Papuan elites legitimize their power by saying that their own people also have serious problems (backwardness, stupidity, poverty) and that they have solutions to solve these problems. However, the solution is Jakarta-made, not Papuan-made, and that is the problem.

When governor Enembe said we need an international solution rather than a national one, he was conscious of these games being played against his people in his homeland.
The Indonesian government exterminates Papuans by controlling both poison and antidote, but there is no antidote to begin with. It is all poison; the only difference is the label.

Markus Haluk’s words
Markus Haluk’s words make a desperate plea for help as they face what he terms “annihilation” due to Indonesia’s racism, responding to mass demonstration in his own homeland.

His words highlight that the only viable solution is to grant the people the right to self-determination to establish their nation-state and declare that the people’s voice is the voice of God.

As tragic and ironic as it is, it is highly unlikely that Haluk’s words “the voice of the people is the voice of God” will mean anything to the ruling class in Jakarta since in the past 20 years all the attacks, betrayals, torture, racism, and killings have been committed after these words were written on the Special Autonomy Law No 21/2001.

Section B in the Introduction part of the law reads: “That the Papua community as God’s creation and is part of a civilized people, who hold high Human Rights, religious values, democracy, law and cultural values in the adat (customary) law community and who have the right to fairly enjoy the results of development.”

It seems that these words are merely part of the theatrics — the drama of cruelty, torture and death.

The full English text of the law can be accessed here: Refworld | Indonesia: Law No. 21 of 2001, On Special Autonomy for the Papua Province

Settler-colony – the logic of ‘destroy to replace’
Indonesia’s occupation in West Papua is not temporary — they are not simply taking resources and going home. The Indonesians want to make West Papua their permanent home.

This is a permanent population resettlement colonial project based on the logic of destroy to replace. Papuans are being destroyed — and even worse, they are being replaced by Indonesian settlers. They are powerless to stop the annihilation and perversion of their ancestral homelands.

To occupy and own the land is the ultimate goal of settlers. Settler states aim to eradicate Indigenous societies through what an Australian historian and scholar, Patrick Wolfe, refers to as a the “logic of elimination” in his paper, Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native (2006).

Colonialism through population resettlement is the most destructive form of colonial project underpinned by self-righteous, pathological rationality which exterminates the original inhabitants as a moral requirement to justify the process of replacing itself.

In this pathological project, genocide is not considered evil but a necessity to achieve its exterminating objective. That is why the assassination of Theys H. Eluay just three weeks after the passing of the Special Autonomy Law was perhaps seen as a necessary evil to satisfy this colonial project.

West Papua: not just another one of Indonesia’s provinces
Over the past 60 years, virtually all literature ever produced on West Papua failed to refer to it as a settler colony. The region is still treated as if it were just another province of Indonesia, and Jakarta insist on creating more provinces as if they have legal and moral rights. This is misleading and illegal considering Indonesia’s genocidal actions and the circumstances in which the region was incorporated into Indonesia in the 1960s.

Indonesia did not merely incorporate West Papua; it invaded an independent state by military force supported by Western governments by manipulating the UN’s system.
Our continued use of West Papua as a part of Indonesia has distorted our understanding of the nature of the Indonesianisation programme being carried out there.

We need to scrutinise Jakarta’s activities on West Papua’s soil with a settler-colonial lens. This will help us frame our questions and structure our languages differently regarding Indonesian activities in West Papua.

It will also help us to see how West Papua is being destroyed under settler colony, similar to how European colonisation destroyed Indigenous people in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada.

We need to frame any administration centres of any type, whether religious, political, cultural, educational, legal, social or security forces established on West Papuan soil with a settler-colonial lens.

This will allow us to see how Jakarta created these parasitic colonial spaces camouflaged as province and regency to occupy, expand, and eventually exterminate its original inhabitants.

The settler-colonial system is a structure that facilitates this whole extermination project. Replacing one landscape for another, one people for another, one language for another, one system for another.

In light of this, it would appear that any law, policy, decree, regulation, or project enacted and enforced by Jakarta serves the purpose of eradicating the Papuan population from the land and replacing them with Indonesian settlers.

This has been done in Australia, America, Canada, and New Zealand, and now these Western powers are aiding Indonesia to do the same in West Papua.

Physically and psychologically, these new provinces (whether materialised or not) have become new battlefields in the war on Papuans. Indeed, Papuans are being forced onto these battle grounds, as in Rome’s Colosseums, to fight for their lives.

The most tragic outcome for Papuans is going to be Jakarta pitting brother against brother and sister against sister in Indonesian’s controlled colosseum of vile games. The blood of these young Papuans that was shed in Yahukimo during the recent demonstration, shows how Papuans are paying the ultimate price in this theatre of killing.

A way forward
Let the same mechanism of the UN that was used to betray West Papua 60 years ago be used to deliver overdue justice for the Papuan people.

United States of America, the Netherlands, Indonesia and their allies of all kinds — thieves, criminals, thugs, militias and multinational bandits who betrayed the Papuan people and continue to drain them of their natural resources must take responsibility for their crimes against Papuans.

Countless of Resolutions on West Papuan human rights issues that have been written on paper in the offices of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), African, Caribbean, and Pacific States (ACP), UN Human Rights Council (UNHC), and European Union (EU) must be materialised to end this tragic and unjust war Papuans are forced to face on their own.

These institutions need to unite and put their words into actions if they place any value on human life.

If no action is taken in these resolutions, their words only serve the imperial purposes, such as these meaningless words used in the Law 21/2001 on Special Autonomy, providing false hope to deceive people whose lives and lands are already at stake.

Remember what Markus Haluk wrote on March 10 — reproduced in the introduction to this article — calling on the world’s humanity to listen to the voices of two million Papuans and to intervene.

Yamin Kogoya is a West Papuan academic who has a Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development from the Australian National University and who contributes to Asia Pacific Report. From the Lani tribe in the Papuan Highlands, he is currently living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

• Other Yamin Kogoya articles

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

The post If There’s To Be A World: Voluntary Austerity, and the Uses of Resentment appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kim C. Domenico.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Robert Mackey.