Friday, September 6, 2024. Conditions become worse in Gaza, Amnesty
International documents War Crimes, Junior's campaign's in debt but he's
putting it further in debt as he promotes Donald Trump's campaign, Jill
Stein remains a predator, and much more.
Let's start in the US with the presidential election.
Oh, look, it's an advert: BRONZER, HOW NOT TO USE IT.
It's as though they're four-year-old little girls playing in Mommy's make up for the first time.
But who's paying for it?
Robert Kennedy Junior, you may remember, wanted to run for president. Even going so far as to run as an 'independent.'
Who's
paying the bills right now? Because my understanding is that Junior's
campaign had huge debts. So where did the money come from for yesterday
evening's e-mail "Who Bobby wants you to vote for"?
That's what the picture's from. That e-mail. Who's paying to produce this stuff?
I
don't think it's legal for Junior to use money donated to his campaign
to pimp another person's campaign. If people wanted to donate to Trump,
they would have done that. I don't understand the legality of someone
already in debt on their campaign using resources to go further in debt
in order to promote another candidate.
I don't understand it and
I'm not the only one confused here. Junior finally got a response
yesterday from various actual small donors who'd started the journey
with him. And they replied back to the shock of the campaign which had
no idea just how many people who gave money to Junior now hate him.
Actively loathe him. "F**k you" is how 42% of the e-mails basically
started.
Junior apparently did not realize how many people now
hate him. Not casual election observers, mind you, but people who
donated to his campaign. They feel betrayed -- and they should.
Speaking of betrayals, Jill Stein.
Karen
Hunter offers her take in the above. That's her take. I've offered
mine on this issue. I will add though that AOC is correct that Jill
Stein is a "predator."
She waits every four years and shows up to
prey on people, to lie to them and mislead them -- that is predator.
AOC is correct. Not a Ted Glick fan but we'll note this from his ZNET column:
In 2004 there were about 225 GP members who were in elected office,
almost all of them low-level offices like school board, water board,
etc. Today Jill Stein says there are 144. There are no GP members who
have been elected to a state house or senate seat and, of course, none
to Congress. It’s a pretty dismal record for 20 years of existence.
Those of us who took the “safe states” position were in a decided
minority then, and today, I am sure, anyone who advocated for it would
be very unpopular. The GP has become a narrow, tiny party of true
believers, destined to get at most 1% or so of the vote. Of course, that
would triple the vote total of their Presidential candidate, Howie
Hawkins, in 2020.
I remember when it was that I decided I had had it with the GP. I was
at a national People’s Summit conference in Chicago in the summer of
2016 organized by National Nurses United and many other progressive
groups and individuals who had come together after active involvement in
the historic Bernie Sanders Presidential campaign. I was one of those
people. On the second day of this event, attended by thousands, I looked
up onto a screen that was projecting tweets about the convention that
were being posted. I was shocked to see one from Jill Stein explicitly
calling out this event and those who organized it as being “sheepdogs
for the duopoly.” These supporters of independent socialist Bernie
Sanders were all about corralling progressives into the Democratic
Party, Stein was saying.
The GP, and others supporting them, don’t get it on mass politics.
They believe in ideological purty before anything else. Unless you’re
ideologically pure, they would say, you will never be able to bring
about the transformational, revolutionary changes needed. Purity comes
before anything else.
Twenty years of this approach have made it clear this is a losing
strategy. The national US Green Party is a failure because of its rigid
and narrow electoral approach.
The Democratic Party sent out a mailing yesterday.
The first early vote ballots will drop in the mail this week.
This is not a drill.
People are
voting not just for president, but in critical races that will impact
control of the House, the Senate, and races further down the ballot as
well.
That is why we are asking you to donate $3 to the Democratic Party today.
$3 because a donation today will go further than at any point later in the cycle.
$3 because control of the White House, Senate, House, and down-ballot races are on the line.
$3 because
the DNC is the best organization to ensure we have the infrastructure
and resources in the places that will matter most.
We know
you didn't wake up and think, “Today is the day I am donating to the
DNC,” but just think about the people about to fill out their ballots
and the impact your donation can make in reaching persuadable voters
before they do.
Today is the day. Donate here:
Can
Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and Democrats running for office everywhere
count on you to donate today -- especially today -- as ballots are being
mailed to voters in several states across the country?
The
election is in 59 days. People need to be watching registration
deadlines if they aren't already registered to vote. On that, we're
noting this from THIRD's "Roundtable" again:
Sabina and Francisco are doing great work in Texas and it's great to
talk to them and amplify them in any way possible. One thing not being
reported is that Texas has disabled online voter registration. If
you're planning to vote in Texas in November, the first thing you need to do is to check and make sure you weren't purged because Governor Greg Asshole has purged over a million people from the voter rolls.
The next thing you need to know is that Greg Asshole has stopped online
voter registration. You will need to register by October 7th. That
may require you going to your local voter registration officials office.
If you're renewing your drivers license or getting a replacement for
it, you can register at the DMV. Fall means county fairs and there will
be people with booths and tables set up to register voters.. You can
also print up an application online and mail it in. You need to move quickly on that because October 7th is the deadline.
I'm not a TYT fan but they did cover what's going on in Texas so I'm noting their video today.
Turning to Gaza, THE NATIONAL reports,
"At least six Palestinians were killed in Israeli air strikes on the
city of Rafah, in southern Gaza, on Friday morning. The bodies were
taken to Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, the Wafa news agency
reported."the United Nations notes:
Víctor Aguayo, UNICEF Director of Child Nutrition, described the situation for children affected by severe malnutrition.
Briefing journalists at the UN Headquarters in New York, he described the situation in Gaza as one of the most severe food and nutrition crises in history.
“The
nutrition situation in Gaza is one of the most severe that we have ever
seen…it is important to remember that the nearly half of Gaza’s
population suffering from this devastation are children,” he said.
Having
returned from the enclave last week, he said that the impact of the war
and severe restrictions on humanitarian response have led to a
“complete collapse” of food, health and protection systems, with
catastrophic consequences.
“The fact is that the diets of
children in Gaza are extremely poor. It is estimated that over 90 per
cent of children are eating at best two types of food per day for weeks
or months, in the context of very severe…lack of access to safe water
and sanitation,” he said.
Estimates
suggest that more than 50,000 children need immediate treatment for
acute malnutrition, requiring medical professionals and nutrition
workers.
“I walked through markets and neighborhoods, or
what is left of markets and neighborhoods…there is no doubt in my mind
there is a famine and a large-scale nutrition crisis,” he emphasized,
calling for an immediate ceasefire and sustained humanitarian access.
Zack Beauchamp (VOX) reports:
This
weekend, Israeli soldiers in Gaza discovered the bodies of six hostages
executed by Hamas. The response was an outpouring of protests: Israelis
flooding the streets to call for a ceasefire that would bring all
hostages back and end the war, a demand that a majority of Israelis support. The Histadrut, Israel’s national labor union, called a (swiftly ended) general strike.
The
response from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was to double down on
war. In a Monday night press conference, he insisted that any ceasefire
would depend on Israeli control
over a stretch of territory in southwestern Gaza called the Philadelphi
Corridor — something Hamas is not prepared to give. Netanyahu’s presser
was so belligerent, in fact, that it may have single-handedly torpedoed ongoing ceasefire talks.
It’s clear that the Israeli public has no faith in Netanyahu’s handling of the war: Roughly 70 percent believe he should resign his position. Yet despite ongoing protests, it’s equally clear that the prime minister will not be changing course voluntarily.
And it looks like he’ll likely get away with it, at least for now.
His
government has weathered dismal polling on its war effort, as well as
sporadic protests, since the war began last October. And yet, as with
past demonstration flare-ups, there has been no evidence that this
weekend’s events have brought his government to the brink of collapse.
How can this be?
The
answer is brute power politics. The 2022 election gave right-wing
parties a clear majority in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), allowing
Netanyahu to build the most far-right government in Israeli history.
Though this coalition has since become extremely unpopular, there’s no
way for voters to kick it out on their own.
The government could only collapse if it faces defections from inside
the governing coalition. But at present, the greatest threat to
Netanyahu’s coalition comes from his extreme right flank, which wants
him to continue the war at all costs. And for that reason, he seems
intent on doing so.
That's a
little too much reality if your name is Debra Messing or Gweneth
Paltrow. Too much facts, too much truth, too much reality. Here's some more reality from Amnesty International:
International humanitarian law, which applies in situations of armed
conflict, including during military occupation, is comprised of rules
whose central purpose is to limit, to the maximum extent feasible, human
suffering in times of armed conflict.
The four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their two Additional
Protocols of 1977 are the principal instruments of international
humanitarian law. Many of these treaties’ rules are considered customary
international law, meaning that they bind all parties to an armed
conflict regardless of whether they have ratified particular treaties
and whether they are a state forces or a non-state armed group.
According to this customary norm, “the destruction or seizure of the
property of an adversary is prohibited, unless required by imperative
military necessity”. In addition, according to article 53 of the Fourth
Geneva Convention, which regulates the actions of Israel as the
occupying power in Gaza: “Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real
or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private
persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social
or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such
destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.”
According to article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, “extensive
destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military
necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly” is a grave breach of
the Convention, and thus a war crime.
Where such destruction is carried out as collective punishment, it
also violates article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which provides:
“No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not
personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of
intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.”
Civilian property in armed conflict is also protected by the
principle of distinction, which requires that parties to the conflict at
all times, distinguish between “civilian objects” and “military
objectives” and direct their attacks only at military objectives.
According to customary international humanitarian law, civilian
objects are all objects which are not “military objectives”; and
military objectives are “limited to those objects which by their nature,
location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military
action and whose partial or total destruction, capture or
neutralisation, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a
definite military advantage”. Civilian objects are protected against
attack, unless and for such time as they become military objectives when
all of the criteria for a military objective are temporarily fulfilled
Protocol I requires that, in cases of doubt, parties to a conflict
should presume that the structure retains its civilian nature.
Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects is a war crime.
It's
a lengthy press release which is why we linked to the release itself
(normally on Amnesty, CCR, etc, we link to home page of the
organization). Brett Wilkins (COMMON DREAMS) reports:
Amnesty International said Thursday that the Israeli military
should be investigated for the "war crimes of wanton destruction and of
collective punishment" over its destruction of entire communities along
Gaza's border with Israel.
"Using bulldozers and manually laid explosives, the Israeli military
has unlawfully destroyed agricultural land and civilian buildings,
razing entire neighborhoods, including homes, schools, and mosques," the
London-based rights group
said in a new investigation.
Amnesty analyzed satellite imagery, as well as photos and videos posted
online by invading Israel Defense Forces troops between October and
May, and found that the IDF has cleared wide swathes of land up to 1.2
miles (1.8 km) wide along Gaza's eastern border.
"In some videos, Israeli soldiers are seen posing for pictures or
toasting in celebration as buildings are demolished in the background,"
the report states.
[. . .]
In the 335 days since October 7, Israeli forces have killed or maimed
more than 145,000 Palestinians in Gaza while forcibly displacing almost
all of the embattled strip's 2.3 million people and destroying hundreds
of thousands of homes and other structures, according to Palestinian and
international officials. Rebuilding after Israel's obliteration of
Gaza's civilian infrastructure is
expected to cost over $18.5 billion, or nearly Palestine's entire annual gross domestic product.
Israel is currently
on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Meanwhile, International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan has applied
for warrants to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leaders for alleged war
crimes including extermination.
"International humanitarian law, which applies in situations of armed
conflict, including during military occupation, is comprised of rules
whose central purpose is to limit, to the maximum extent feasible, human
suffering in times of armed conflict," Amnesty explained Thursday.
The group noted that under the Fourth Geneva Convention, "extensive
destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military
necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly," is a war crime.
Additionally, the treaty bans collective punishment of civilians,
stating that "no protected person may be punished for an offense he or
she has not personally committed."
Also covering the report is Sharon Zhang (TRUTHOUT):
According to an analysis by Amnesty International released Thursday,
Israel has cleared a strip of land ranging between 1 km and 1.8 km
wide. The buffer zone encompasses nearly the entirety of the Gaza side
of its border with Israel, covering 58 square kilometers, or about 22
square miles.
Satellite imagery from May shows that over 90 percent of the
buildings in this zone have been destroyed or severely damaged, the
rights group found, while the majority of agricultural land there is
also damaged.
Investigation by Amnesty International finds that Israeli forces
created the buffer zone merely because of its proximity to the border
fence, and for no supposed military necessity or tactical purpose.
Anything in the zone appears to have been eligible for destruction:
homes, schools, farms, mosques and cemeteries were all demolished.
“Around my family home we had a three dunam (0.7 acre)
orchard full of fruit trees. They were all destroyed. Only an apple tree
and a rose were left. I had bees and produced honey. All of it is gone
now,” Salem Qudeih told Amnesty International. Qudeih lived in Khuza’a,
situated near the border in Khan Yunis, which Israeli forces raided and nearly totally destroyed in December and January.
Again,
this is reality. It's not the deranged fantasy that a bunch of
self-deceiving idiots keep promoting to justify (and argue for it to
continue) the genocide. Devi Sridhar (GUARDIAN) notes:
The discovery of polio in Gaza reminds us that
it’s becoming increasingly difficult to assess the true cost of the war.
We don’t have a sense of how widespread disease and starvation are – so
called “indirect deaths” – and we are in the dark in terms of total
number of deaths. Usually, data is collected from hospitals and morgues,
which certify each death and notify the health ministry. Yet these
civil registration systems have broken down in Gaza, meaning there is no
accurate data on how many deaths have occurred. The health ministry has
been trying to put together figures using media reports, which isn’t a
reliable way to capture the full picture. It is estimated
that there are more than 10,000 bodies buried under rubble still
(meaning they can’t be counted), as well as a rising number of
unidentifiable bodies.
Gaza remains under assault. Day 335 of the assault in the wave that began in October. Binoy Kampmark (DISSIDENT VOICE) points out, "Bloodletting as form; murder as fashion. The ongoing campaign in Gaza
by Israel’s Defence Forces continues without stalling and restriction.
But the burgeoning number of corpses is starting to become a challenge
for the propaganda outlets: How to justify it? Fortunately for Israel,
the United States, its unqualified defender, is happy to provide cover
for murder covered in the sheath of self-defence." CNN has explained, "The Gaza Strip is 'the most dangerous place' in the world to be a child, according to the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund." ABC NEWS quotes UNICEF's December 9th statement, ""The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.
Scores of children are reportedly being killed and injured on a daily
basis. Entire neighborhoods, where children used to play and go to
school have been turned into stacks of rubble, with no life in them." NBC NEWS notes, "Strong majorities of all voters in the U.S. disapprove of President Joe
Biden’s handling of foreign policy and the Israel-Hamas war, according to the latest national NBC News poll.
The erosion is most pronounced among Democrats, a majority of whom
believe Israel has gone too far in its military action in Gaza." The
slaughter continues. It has displaced over 1 million people per the US
Congressional Research Service. THE NATIONAL notes, "Gaza death toll rises to 40,861, with 94,398 injured." Early on,
Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) pointed out, "Academics and legal experts around the world, including Holocaust scholars, have
condemned
the six-week Israeli assault of Gaza as genocide." Months ago,
United Nations Women noted,
"More than
1.9 million people -- 85 per cent of the total population of Gaza --
have
been displaced, including what UN Women estimates to be nearly 1 million
women and girls. The entire population of Gaza -- roughly 2.2 million
people -- are in crisis levels of
of acute food insecurity or worse." Months
ago,
AP noted, "About 4,000 people are reported missing."
February 7th, Jeremy Scahill explained
on DEMOCRACY NOW! that "there’s an estimated 7,000 or 8,000
Palestinians missing, many of them in graves that are the rubble of
their former home." February 5th, the United Nations' Phillipe
Lazzarini Tweeted:
April 11th, Sharon Zhang (TRUTHOUT) reported, "In addition to the over 34,000 Palestinians who have been counted as
killed in Israel’s genocidal assault so far, there are 13,000
Palestinians in Gaza who are missing, a humanitarian aid group has
estimated, either buried in rubble or mass graves or disappeared into
Israeli prisons. In a report released Thursday, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
said that the estimate is based on initial reports and that the actual number of people missing is likely even higher."
AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring into this conversation another professor, Natasha Lennard, columnist at The Intercept,
associate director of the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism
Program at The New School, not far from Columbia University. Her most
recent piece,
“College Administrators Spent Summer Break Dreaming Up Ways to Squash
Gaza Protests.” Can you put Professor Thrasher and Professor Franke’s
experience in a broader context of the universities from here in New
York, NYU, to other universities around the country?
NATASHA LENNARD:
Absolutely. And thank you. It’s lovely to be back. And I firstly want
to say thank you to Professor Franke and Professor Thrasher for being
among the professors who refuse to be silenced in this moment of what is
widely being called a “new McCarthyism.” And I think that’s an accurate
description.
Their cases are not unusual, and it is indeed sad, and it is indeed
disappointing, indeed no less than ghoulish. We are having, both de
facto and through policy, both in terms of new regulations and student
conduct guides coming through for this semester, as well as punitive
actions against students and professors, a real reification of the claim
that Israel critical speech and pro-Palestinian speech should count
under violations of Title VI nondiscrimination law and regulations and
policy in universities. What that does is align university policy with
the right-wing agenda of Congress and right-wing lawmakers who follow in
the footsteps of a right-wing Israeli-U.S. consensus.
And I think if a university is not a place where that can be
critically challenged, especially at a time of genocide, when there are
no universities left standing in Gaza — which we cannot forget — and the
concerns of our academy is the speech of professors speaking out for
academic freedom and speaking out for the liberation of an occupied
people, we’re in very dark times indeed.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Natasha Lennard, you write in your piece in The Intercept that, quote, “Tucked into a document purportedly offering clarification on school policy, the new NYU”
— New York University — “guidelines introduce an unprecedented
expansion of protected classes to include 'Zionists' and ’Zionism’”?
NATASHA LENNARD: Yes, this is a very exemplary, in the worst of ways, document that was just released by the administration at NYU.
It is a new updated guide of student conduct about nondiscrimination
and harassment. It goes further than any document I have seen in
asserting that Zionism, when used critically, should or at least readily
can be understood as — and I quote the document — a “code word.” It
doesn’t say that occasionally by antisemites that Zionism is used as a
code word. It takes that as a given.
So, that is — to clarify, that is a student conduct guide, very
poorly written, very open to misuse, that is asserting that the
political ideology founded in the 19th century of the ethnostate of
Israel being a Zionist project, that that should be considered part of
the protected class of Jewish identity, religion and ethnic and shared
ancestry. That is what we’re seeing in attempts of statehouses
nationwide to attach Zionism, the political ideology, to the protected
class of Jewish identity. It’s extremely dangerous. It performs de facto
apologia for Israel. And to have that put into writing by a university
so clearly is just open for further abuses and an escalation of the sort
of repression we’ve already seen.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Franke?
KATHERINE FRANKE:
Well, I teach a class on citizenship and nationality in Israel and
Palestine. And we begin with a critical look at the concept of Zionism.
Of course, it was advanced as a place, as an idea, about the safety of
the Jewish people being located in Mandate Palestine, but there were
plenty of Jewish people at the time who said, “This is actually a
horrible idea from the perspective of the safety of Jewish people,
because what it says is the Jews all belong in Israel and nowhere else,
not in Europe, not in the United States, nowhere else. And so this will
lead to more violence, more expulsions, more antisemitic pogroms, if we
lean in too much to the idea that Jews belong primarily and especially
in Israel.” And those were critiques coming from Jews, again,
themselves.
So, if we are not allowed to talk about that anymore in universities,
what we’ve done is surrendered the very idea of the university itself.
And that is so much what troubled us about Minouche Shafik, our
president — former president of Columbia’s testimony in Congress, and
some of those other presidents who came, who were called before
Congress, is they not only did not put up a robust defense of the idea
of a university where we teach students how to be critical thinkers in
such a critical time, but they actually joined in to the criticism of
the university. My president did not stand up for any one of us, nor did
Professor Thrasher’s at Northwestern.
And this is part of what concerns me, is that our universities are
places now where we could not have a protest and say things that are now
being said in Tel Aviv by Israelis. The protests that are happening
there this week, if they took place on Columbia’s campus, our students
would be expelled or charged with very serious disciplinary violations.
This is where we’ve come. It’s impossible to talk about the kinds of
things that, Amy, in your setup, of the just horrible things that are
happening right this week in Jenin, in Gaza — we can’t talk about that
at Columbia. That’s part of what concerns me is, is that we don’t know
our history, and these new policies are keeping us from learning it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And,
Natasha Lennard, we just have about 30 seconds, but you’ve noted that
universities are not only facing attacks from Congress, they’re also
being subjected to lawsuits all around the country. Could you talk about
that briefly?
NATASHA LENNARD: Yes, we’ve seen a series of litigation, including at NYU, Columbia, Harvard, UCLA,
brought by often unnamed students and faculty, often very frivolous
suits that universities are forced to answer to nonetheless, and then,
through settlements and often nonpublic agreements, are then forced to
change policy, often leading to the conflation of anti-Zionism and
antisemitism.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but we’re going to continue this discussion over time. We’ll link your piece,
Natasha Lennard, “College Administrators Spent Summer Break Dreaming Up
Ways to Squash Gaza Protests.” She’s at The New School. Columbia Law
professor Katherine Franke, Kathleen Peratis, civil rights lawyer, and
Steven Thrasher. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
Nada AlTaher and Nagham Mohanna (THE NATIONAL) report:
Towering piles
of rubbish, widespread destruction and tents spread out as far as the
eye could see greeted UN workers and medical teams as they arrived at Gaza's southern city of Khan Younis for the second stage of a polio vaccination campaign.
The scale of destruction after several Israeli assaults, and the squalid conditions thousands of Palestinians
are living in, shocked even local Gazans such as Dr Fady Abed, from the
US-based NGO MedGlobal. He was among those who travelled from the
central areas of the enclave to carry out the southern phase of the
campaign.
"I saw kids playing among piles of garbage taller than the bus we were in," Dr Abed told The National on Friday.
Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Texas' Failure To Launch Boyz" went up yesterday. The following sites updated:
